[Review of "Credentialed to Destroy: How and Why Education Became a Weapon"]

Ideally, everyone would read this book, especially those hoping to stop the continued degradation of the public school system.

I think it's fair to call Robin Eubanks the nation's foremost education intellectual. She explains the decline of the public schools thoroughly and at deeper levels than you will typically find. She is an attorney and her book can be regarded as a lawsuit brought by The People against a reckless and destructive Education Establishment. In short, she takes on the extremists plotting to make the country dumb and dumber.

"Credentialed to Destroy" is not light reading. It is a serious book about the serious parasitic infestation we now live with. I found something on almost every page worth marking for future use. The rest of this review consists of a few dozen typical quotes, so everyone can quickly have a sense of this important book:

"When you pay your property taxes to finance the local schools or when you write that large college tuition check, do you ever imagine you are sending your kids away so someone can limit their ability to think? Restrict what they can do? Fundamentally alter their beliefs and values and attitudes and dispositions? All intended to make them malleable in the hands of those with either political power or connections to it?"

"We just did not know that the destruction to the ability to think well or read or know much was intentional. If not by the actual teacher or principal, then by the education professors who taught and credentialed them to push destructive theories in the classroom actually designed to prevent fluent reading. To impair logical thought. To reach inside the student's psychological makeup to alter the values and beliefs and attitudes. Even feelings. If you think that sounds dramatic, it is. It's why I wrote this book."

"All these plans to imagine new societies have a terrible track record in history. With a high body count. Incentives matter to everyone and at all times. When the public sector dominates the economy and calls the shots instead of just enforcing the rules, the results have always been misery for the masses. And legalized theft for the politically influential."

"I have often wondered if colleges of education taught their students that it was possible for people to fly and laid out the steps, how many children would have to hit the pavement before the `professionals' would reconsider what they were told."

"You can see now why we are getting increasingly poor results from our schools while spending more money. It is no accident. It is the planned result of the nature of the current college of education degree programs and the standards for accreditation of anything connected to education."

"What is being marketed as the Common Core national standards and accompanying ed reforms is actually a planned, centrally coordinated, interrelated, complete reorganization of American education. Designed to change students from the inside-out so they will lobby for social change now. And vote for it later. These so-called `reforms' eliminate practices, like the transmission curriculum, that evolved because they worked and created prosperous practices and useful, marketable knowledge and skills. And a spirit of individualism that has created great innovations."

"Reengineering complex social systems, like education or an economy with lots of people and parts, from the top down has a known, consistently disastrous, history. Common Core would be a bad idea if the intentions of its planners were for the best. But they are not."

"[Consider] Linda Darling-Hammond's oft-expressed view of the role of schools as creating citizens capable of accessing government agencies and their programs."

"For now though we should best view education as a re-imagined means for an international political class and their business cronies to obtain the same type of riches and control as what the nomenklatura sought globally under Communism."

"Now you understand the need to both nationalize Radical Ed Reform and internationalize it. No more outlaw schools, public or private, districts, states, or countries determined to still create well-informed fluent readers with solid math and science knowledge and skills...The idea is for there to be no way out, even in private schools."

"Plus, it is important to appreciate that most academic Marxists are not running around in a Che Guevara t-shirt carrying a `Viva la Revolution!' sign. They are receiving great salaries from our tax money while they invent various schemes to obscure their insistence on moving our schools away from academic knowledge and skills..."

"There is a belief among Educrats that if the course names sound academic and the grades are fine, no one will ever notice what is really going on. Another planned `hide in plain sight' strategy is to make high school courses largely vocational while keeping academic sounding course names."

"You will find few people less interested in free markets than a businessman or woman running an established large business. They want to preserve their current market share and revenue. Innovation with its potential for a better competing product or a lower price or both is the enemy of their current business."

"{Higher education's] primary function in the last 25 years seems to have been sculpting a mindset or worldview to see the government as a dispenser of all that is good in society. Too many colleges and universities no longer make any attempt to make sure graduates appreciate the importance of the individual to Western thought and the unprecedented economic prosperity of the West."

"[L]et's pause for a moment to think of the absurdity of using Karl Marx's thoughts for an education model....Marxian political ideology has proven to be positively murderous with the body count in the tens of millions if not more. His economic ideology results in stagnation at a minimum and frequently declines in overall economic activity. Basically a permanent state of recession or depression. Sound familiar? Pushing his education idea simply means a loss of collective knowledge and innovation."

"In a state meeting I attended a few years ago, I listened while a high school math director of one of the largest school districts in the state told his audience that the district would be disciplining any principal or teacher caught offering `sequential methods for solving math problems.'"

"When you really learn Marxist political ideology and how his education theories are designed to obtain that political and economic control and desired social transformation, it is striking just how similar they are to the reimagined progressive society and new type of human being John Dewey believed were desirable. And how both men saw educational practices that minimized the intellect and cultivated the emotional aspects of personality as critical to their social vision....Linda Darling-Hammond, a primary architect of Radical education reform here and internationally, was quoted as saying basically that with the Common Core national standards we will finally be achieving John Dewey's vision for education."

"In tracking both the reading wars and the math wars, it became undeniably clear that there was a consistent conscious pattern to reject what had been proven to work well for most students."

"[T]he invention of print and symbol systems to store information ranks right up there with agriculture in literally changing what people can become. So, yes, for 100 years many parts of education have been formally dedicated to mind arson. Because the mind is the private domain that fuels individualism and creative innovations.... As the 20th century dawned, just like the 21st now, there was an organized, coordinated move afoot to prevent more surprises without permission...Think of it as the people currently at the table of economic and political power deciding in unison: `That will be enough now. Future changes might not benefit us.'"

"I am telling you that the research lays out an organized desire to limit access to print. Why? Because of the known intrinsic boost to personal reasoning and analytical power that flows automatically from the ability to decipher print fluently. The so-called reading wars and attempts to make dyslexia a widespread physiological problem came from the need to cover the tracks that there was intentional psychological manipulation going on in classrooms...Sight-reading keeps that toolbox both relatively empty and filled only with the word tools someone has deliberately placed there...What the printing press and newspapers and Bibles in English instead of Latin gave the masses is now essentially being taken deliberately away."

"We either have to confront what is really going on in American and global education directly and stop this nonsense once and for all, or it will destroy us."

"Think of the most annoying loud sound that will always get your attention - gong, buzzer, screech from someone annoying. Every time the IRA or NCTM or NCTE or National Commission for the Social Studies (NCSS), etc. advocates for something, hear that sound in your head. And remember that it will really be about diminishing academic knowledge and skills."

"[Louise Rosenblatt] did not want a reading technique or practice that would reinforce self-sufficiency. And now you know another unacceptable reason why the phonetic nature of English or any other language must not be expressly inefficiently taught. Teaching the phonetic basis of English language might foster or reinforce a sense of individuality."

"The damage done to our economy from poor reading practices is multiplied in the case of math and science which are much more critical to the cutting edge of what is possible and lucrative in technology and the discovery of new, beneficial knowledge."

"So, between the political and social usefulness and the entrenched current big business titans wanting to hold onto their turf, we now get a lot of demand for learning theories that actually torpedo genuine learning in the sense of knowledge acquisition. And these mind arson theories are precisely what the ed schools teach and the accreditors require in the classroom."

"So at the height of the Cold War numerous people all over the West went to great trouble to import and translate Soviet psychological methods and research. That was expressly created and conducted to develop the perfect socialist citizen with the appropriate mindset desired by state officials. Totalitarian state officials. Just what you and I would believe neither American or global education needed at that time. Or in our time."

"I mean how much history, British murder mysteries, and Shakespeare has to be ignored or unknown not to appreciate that people who want to get or keep something like economic or political power, or achieve social change with themselves in charge, will lie about what they are really doing? If it is illegal, or would be politically unpopular, or honesty would make success unlikely, you lie. [QED: of course there's a conspiracy.]"

"[Vladimir] Turchenko also repeatedly stated that education was seen by the Soviets as their primary means of prevailing over the US in the Cold War. Let me repeat that one more time. The Soviet Union explicitly saw education, both K-12 and higher ed, `as the most powerful political and ideological weapon.' Instead of education in the traditional sense of acquiring knowledge, the Turchenko / Soviet model by the mid-1970s was `functionally geared to shaping personality.' This Turchenko model for socialist education that was to be the model for other countries to emulate in the future was designed explicitly to assure `mastery of values, skills, and norms of behavior.'"

"The Soviets did know by the mid-1980s they could not continue with the existing form of communism. They, with help from sympathizers in the social and economic planning set in the West who were never going to learn to love free markets and individual choices, came up with a different international template for social, political, and economic control."

"Talented commentators like Lynne Munson, Ed Hirsch, Dan Willingham, and others wrote detailed, persuasive articles on how skills cannot be mastered without a fact rich diet. `Teaching content is teaching reading' is a good summary of this point."

"We have been unknowingly granting and funding a level of intrusion in education now that is greater than any tyrannical aspiration we went to war against in the 20th century....Genuine evil is afoot now all over the world and it is gaining hold through our schools and colleges and universities. And the only way to stop it is widespread understanding of why and how."

"The important thing from now on for every parent, taxpayer, and politician, from local, state or Congress to recognize is that educational practices and all educational spending are not necessarily a public good. As Stalin said: `Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hand and at whom it is aimed.' It is aimed at us, dear reader. Our children. Our economy. Our society. Our political system, values, and future genuine independence and autonomy."

"The schemes all had a common feature - the best minds are prevented from becoming what they were capable of."

"In the American Common Core classroom any skill, concept, or activity must be accessible to all or most, including the disabled, disinterested, and those with poor English language skills. Or it is not permissible for anyone. Abstract thought is not an ability that has been fairly distribute so it is off limits for everyone in the Common Core classroom of the future. How convenient for anyone with aspirations toward gaining quiet control over masses of people..."

This is, all in all, a dreadful sad story, a slow-motion reprise of what the Communists did to the Russian people, and now the same sort of fanatics would like to do to the American people. It's a major theme in this book that the Russians did not lose when the Berlin Wall came down. They shifted to Plan B. That's the one where they infect our public schools with all kinds of ruinous ideas, and thus achieve culturally what they could not achieve militarily. The Evil Empire lives on, in PS 1.

That's my review as it appears on Amazon. There are eight other reviews at this time.]

Providing youth with ability to acquire knowledge and understanding of their Creator-endowed rights and the means whereby they might be preserved was the Founders' purpose for education in America.

Sadly, since the early and middle decades of the 20th Century, self-identified "liberals" (now calling themselves "progressives") have commandeered bureaucracies and institutions of what is called "public education" in America and have "transformed" it from its original purpose to conform youth to an ideology which is foreign to principles and ideas of their Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

The following is excerpted from a series entitled, "Lessons on Liberty," by a Co-Editor of "Our Ageless Constitution" & "Rediscovering the Ideas of Liberty." It contrasts the Ideas of Liberty America's Founders wished to be taught to rising generations in order to enlighten their minds and preserve their liberty, with the Counterfeit Ideas being promoted in the so-called "public schools" of America for decades.

IDEAS OF LIBERTY:

(from America’s Founders and Presidents)

“The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.” (Jefferson - 1774)

“Statesmen may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone which can establish the principles upon which Freedom can securely stand.” (John Adams - 1775)

“The Sacred Rights of Mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the Hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.” (Alexander Hamilton)

“Without God, there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life. Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first and the most basic expression of Americanism. Thus the founding fathers saw it, and thus, with God’s help, it will continue to be.” (Dwight Eisenhower)

“The same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe, the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” (John F. Kennedy - 1961 Inaugural)

“…it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly implore His protection and favor….”(George Washington)

“Now the virtue which had been infused into the Constitution…and was to give it…the stability and duration to which it was destined, was no other than…those abstract principles…proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence—namely, the self-evident truths of the…unalienable rights of man…the…sovereignty of the people, always subordinate to a rule of right and wrong, and always responsible to the Supreme Ruler of the universe for the rightful exercise of that sovereign…power.” (John Quincy Adams, on the occasion of The Jubilee of the Constitution - 1839)

"Today, across our nation, we see consequences of decades of gross neglect and outright censorship of the Founders’ ideas from textbooks and from our public discourse. We have allowed counterfeit ideas to dominate the public square, and the Founders’ principles have been crowded out.

"Unwittingly, perhaps, many teachers and other unknowing officials have participated in the agenda of an unelected mind-controlling elite whose tyrannical actions have robbed generations of Americans from reading or studying the ideas that made America free. Like termites, they have eroded our foundations as effectively as if they had burned the books. Yet, not once have they been willing to call it by its rightful name—censorship. Once, in America, stifling ideas about the Creator and Creator-endowed liberty was considered unthinkable. . . .

"The ideas of liberty must be passed on from generation to generation if liberty is to survive. These ideas, when they are allowed to be examined freely, will prevail, because their appeal is to reason and to the love for liberty that is deep in the human heart. John Adams warned: “The people of America now have the best opportunity and the greatest trust in their hands, that Providence ever committed to so small a number…if they betray their trust, their guilt will merit even greater punishment than other nations have suffered, and the indignation of Heaven.”

COUNTERFEIT IDEAS:

(from some of those whose views have dominated national educational policy)

“The idea of God is the keystone of a perverted society. The true root of liberty, equality and culture is atheism.” (Karl Marx)

Our thinking is enlightened “in the degree in which we cease to depend upon belief in the supernatural.” (John Dewey, father of ‘progressive education’ and 1st President of American Humanist Society)

“…democracy is a human faith and movement, unencumbered by supernatural preconceptions.” (John Childs, a protégé of John Dewey at Columbia)

“…the majority of our youth still hold the values of their parents, and if we do not alter this pattern, if we do not resocialize ourselves to accept change, our society may decay.” (John Goodlad, 1971 Report to President, Schooling for the Future)

“As in 1933, humanists still believe that traditional theism, especially a faith in the prayer-hearing God, who is assumed to love and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith.” (Humanist Manifesto II, 1973)

“…the most important factor moving us toward a secular society has been the educational factor. Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is sixteen tends to lead toward elimination of religious superstition.” (Paul Blanshard, The Humanist, March-April, 1976)

“It [the Nat’l. Education Association’s publication list] includes the delegitimizing of all authority save that of the state, the degradation of traditional morality and the encouragement of citizens in general and children in particular to despise the rules and customs that make their society a functional democracy. The NEA is drifting into exceedingly dangerous waters, and probably carrying more than a few teachers and pupils with it.” (Chester E. Finn, Jr., Ass’t. Sec. Of Education & Prof. Of Education & Public Policy, Vanderbilt Univ., 1982)

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“Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines which conflict with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence…let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountains whose waters spring close to the blood of the Revolution.” (Abraham Lincoln)

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