Why use "but" here, as if there were any contradiction. All evil begins with the indifference of the otherwise good people. Where were the patriots to allow an initially small number of Progressives to infiltrate?
You picture, I am afraid, is also too simplistic. The "progressive" movement began at the end of 1800s. Marx had published his Das Capital just a couple of decades earlier, and socialism was in the air, seducing many. The patriots, the proponents of freedom did not act firmly enough and allowed the ignorant to get used to those seductive ideas. We have elected the "progressive" Wilson long before out schools were infiltrated. We have elected an outright socialist and dictator FDR and reelected him multiple times.
It seems to me that this march of the left is over a century old, and we have nobody to blame but ourselves. People who don't care how their children are raised get the children and country they deserve.
I do agree with you that the transformation started originally with the post-modern German philosophers whose influx into Columbia U. and Harvard in the 1880’s was the start of the paradigm shift from a dominant Christian philosophy in the US to the atheist-relativism that now is so obvious by the election of zero and the corruption in Congress. (Documented by Bloom in “The Closing of the American Mind.”
1880’s was the start of the infiltration which consisted of the elites in our Universities from Frankfurt, Germany. With their “comrades” in positions of power which encompassed the publishing companies and media, books by their darlings, like Carl Becker and Charles Beard, etc. were published in 1913 and glorified, of course, and put into curricula (Founders were evil white oppressors who only wanted wealth and power).
This way of thinking was alien to most people but the gradual indoctrination started seriously with the Progressive John Dewey who had enormous influence in American education. Facts were twisted and revisionism started earnestly and put into children’s heads.
http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/dewey/d_e/chapter02.html
My point is that the ideas of the Progressives were seductive and the average, hardworking people were raised to trust people and believe in what they say. That a handshake meant the world to a man.
I am a very attentive parent and when good people were explaining their curricula in the 70’s, I could not figure out why it was evil at that time. It sounded so good but I was bothered by the terms like “Situational Ethics” “Values Clarification”, Multiculteralism and Tolerance. They sounded so Christian. Yet, like social Darwinism, it destroys revelation and Christianity by invalidating Moral Absolutes.
The teachers promoting the curricula were good people also and loved the children. The curricula was designed by the likes of people like Ayers and Dewey so the “conditioning” (Skinner) started to lull adults into a false sense of security and unless you had the time to do research (which they could NOT very easily do because of no internet, nor did they have the time) because the media controlled the “right way to think” and had a monopoly on it. They filtered all the information just like Hitler did in the 1930’s.
“Witness” by Chambers explains this “fight” for the minds of people in 1950’s. Chambers explained it as a battle between Man and God. “....that man without God is just what Communism said he was: the most intelligent of the animals, that man without God is a beast, never more beastly than when he is most intelligent about his beastliness.”
"We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for the purpose makes a great difference. And any environment is a chance environment so far as its educative influence is concerned unless it has been deliberately regulated with reference to its educative effect. An intelligent home differs from an unintelligent one chiefly in that the habits of life and intercourse which prevail are chosen, or at least colored, by the thought of their bearing upon the development of children. But schools remain, of course, the typical instance of environments framed with express reference to influencing the mental and moral disposition of their members."
(My emphasis added).
[All evil begins with the indifference of the otherwise good people.]
The otherwise “good” people? LOL.
Original sin not on the menu at your cafeteria, bishop?
Where did the pathological behavior manifested in Chuckie Manson & Company originate?