In anticipation of Earth Day 2011, The Goddard School in Urbana, Maryland (educating children from the ages of 6 weeks to 5 years) joined World Wildlife Fund’s Earth Hour 2011 with nearly 400 Goddard Schools nationwide to help spread the message of working together to make a positive impact toward a sustainable future. Children designed invitations asking parents and neighbors to join them in Earth Hour, decorated a banner with only recycled materials to present to Maryland Sen. Ron Young, and paraded wearing outfits created out of recycled materials. “We are proud to incorporate this in school so children will go home and do it with their families,” said the school's director Traci Keyes. “As time goes on, we create more pollutants in the air. Our Earth is fragile, so this is an opportunity to teach students how we can keep the environment clean for future generations by throwing our trash away,” said John Pelicano, co-owner of the school. Since its inception, Earth Hour has become a global initiative with over 1 billion people in 4,100 cities, 87 countries and seven continents participating by turning off their electricity for an hour. “Children are like little sponges. They will take what they learn with them as they grow older,” said Keyes. - Urbana Preschoolers ‘Step Up’ for Environment, The Town Courier, March 30, 2011
The modern division of labor consists of a ruling class (top 1%) that control about 40% of all financial assets, a managerial class ( the top 2%-10%) who control about 35% of all assets, with the other 90% of the working masses dividing up the 25% that’s left. The pyramid is organized by a complex and highly specialized division of labor, state-run education, massive corporations, government bureaucracy, the judiciary, intelligence organizations, mediatic propaganda machines and mainstream religion. Those rare few that actually wake up and see the zombie world are quickly diagnosed by the DSM-5 and given anti-depressants. There are two things everyone wants all the time, and one of them is money. Control of the money is the magic wand that rules the world. All the other religious, patriotic and historical paraphernalia are directly related to allowing the 1% to control the creation of money. Take that away, and they are nothing but media hacks. The current era which began with the creation of the Federal Reserve and the involvement of the United States in WWI is coming to an end. The great mistake most “awake” people make is believing redemption is at hand while underestimating the ruling class. The masters of propaganda and finance and are much more in control then they will ever reveal through their own channels. Their imaginations are immense and their capacity to orchestrate drama has no limits. They are the voice of reason while the dissenters are “diagnosed” with a collection of ailments that quickly marginalize them. - Robert Bonomo, What QE3 Will Look Like, Activist Post, August 12, 2011
FedEd: The New Federal Curriculum and How It’s Enforced. St. Paul, MN: Maple River Education Coalition, 2002. Pp. 153. By Steven Yates, LewRockwell.com
February 22, 2003
Suppose your aim is to obtain power over an entire society. You’ve decided that violent revolution is not the way to go. It’s disruptive, and if history is any guide, you might get your own nose bloodied a time or two. What do you do? This question has been asked — and answered — more than once.
The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s answer — undertaking a "long march through the institutions" to infiltrate and "capture the culture" by stealth — is perhaps the best known. Gramsci wasn’t the first to come up with this idea, though. An earlier version already existed. It involved capturing the minds of the young. Moreover, if the job of transmitting a civilization’s aggregate knowledge and cultural heritage is entrusted to a single network of institutions, then so much the better.
We’ve had such a network for well over a hundred years. It’s called the public education system. We have Horace Mann and his Harvard Unitarians to thank for doing more than anyone else to get it started back in the 1840s. Mann studied the "Prussian model" in Europe and returned home to found the first such schools in this country. This model involves the state raising children to meet the needs of the state. This model gave us the word kindergarten, the product of an analogy between raising children (kinder) and growing vegetables in a garden (garten).
I’ve long considered the phrase public education a misnomer. It implies an institution that serves the public. It has been quite a while since government schools served the public, however. The slow decline in their capacity to educate since embracing Deweyan "progressive education" early in the last century is so well documented I need not repeat it here. Nor need I discuss more recent fads like OBE.
But in the 1990s we went from the frying pan into the fire. As literacy levels plummeted to embarrassing lows, the feds began the largest power grab over education in U.S. history — in a move intended to pull in private schools and home schooling parents as well, eventually. At this point we come to the latest attempt to expose what the feds are doing to American children and why: Professor Allen Quist’s FedEd: The New Federal Curriculum and How It’s Enforced. Quist is imminently qualified to write it. An author and political scientist who also has a divinity degree, he was in the Minnesota House of Representatives in the 1980s, where he served on the House Education Committee and was influential in legalizing home schooling in that state. He has been involved with school boards. He currently teaches political science at Bethany Lutheran College in Mankato, Minnesota.
FedEd is a slim volume packs a colossal wallop. If there were any remaining doubts how much of the decline of government schools can be explained in terms of stealth social engineering, Quist’s study should lay them to rest.
In certain respects, FedEd picks up where Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt’s the deliberate dumbing down of america leaves off. Her account was historical, going back over a hundred years, and literally overwhelms you with original documentation. Quist’s book is a much shorter and more succinct account of where we are now. Unlike Iserbyt’s encyclopedic tome it can be read in one or two sittings. Quist lays out the reasons for the anti-academic and anti-cognitive biases in government schools that are producing graduates who cannot walk up to a map of the world and find the United States — much less grasp our founding principles.
In a sense, given their aims, government schools have to be regarded as spectacular successes rather than dismal failures. The evidence all points in a single direction: their intent has been to dumb down the citizenry of this country and produce a "new serfdom" — a global workforce totally subservient to the needs of omnipotent world government and its internationalist corporate partners.
In 1994 alone, this effort received three major boosts, in the form of the Goals 2000 Educate America Act, the School-To-Work Opportunities Act (STW), and a bill known simply as HR6, a funding appropriations bill for most federal education programs. Bill Clinton signed all three. (More recently, of course, George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which we are led to believe superceded STW.)
Taken together, these bills hand control over curricular content to federal educrats, resulting in the New Federal Curriculum: FedEd, for short. Quist identifies seven themes running through FedEd (p. 43, p. 100, pp. 131-32, etc.):
- Undermining national sovereignty (moving us toward world government under the auspices of the United Nations).
- Redefining natural rights (substituting for the American view a Marxist and internationalist view justifying massive redistribution of wealth).
- Minimizing natural law (essentially by neglect).
- Promoting environmentalism (emphasizing the global nature of environmental issues, including promoting the pagan pseudo-religion of Gaia, Mother Earth).
- Requiring multiculturalism (including acceptance of homosexuality).
- Restructuring government (toward the idea that we live in a "global village," defining citizenship in global terms).
- Redefining education as job skills (preparing "human resources" for the global workforce).
He names names and organizations (p. 13). Some will be quite familiar; others have been operating behind the scenes for years:
- The Clintons, obviously. ("It takes a village," remember?)
- Marc Tucker, Director of the National Center for Education and the Economy, author of a certain letter addressed to Hillary Clinton you may read here.
- Lauren Resnick, Co-director of the New Standards Project.
- Charles Quigley, Director of the Center for Civic Education (CCE). (No relation to Carroll Quigley I know of.)
- Margaret Stimmon Branson, Associate Director of the CCE.
- Shirley McCune, a federal education researcher.
Others deeply involved in this broad based effort include the National Education Association and, of course, numerous multiculturalist and environmentalist groups who stand to extend their own turf.
The overriding purpose, however, is a world in which the majority of people are Information Age serfs ruled over by a global elite, their minds enslaved to such notions as celebrating diversity, embracing tolerance, and worshipping Mother Earth. They will know how to "multitask," but will have no grasp of economics or Constitutional principles, any significant knowledge or their historical origins or even much knowledge of basic math (they will have calculators, after all).
One of the most pertinent prior developments was the UN’s World Declaration on Education for All (1990). The idea sounds good. It involves weighty phrases like "world class standards" (p. 91). But in practice, it threatens to impose an educational agenda that, once in place, would be enforced at an international level by a global government — the chief long-term goal of FedEd’s masterminds.
None of this is possible, of course, with a citizenry that knows something of its roots. It is not compatible with a political philosophy that limits government to a few carefully defined functions, and who see rights as anteceding government instead of created by it.
An agenda such as FedEd would not be possible among those who understand enough economics and enough history to know that open-ended, market-based economies tend to deliver prosperity while micromanaged, command-driven systems eventually deliver poverty and de facto slavery (it may just take a while).
There are still too many educated citizens around for central planners to operate openly. Their agenda would not "play in Peoria," even today. Hence the stealth measures aimed at obtaining entry into the minds of small children. The guiding theme behind FedEd is a certain philosophy of education. It might be called statist-vocationalism.
The purpose of education, according to this philosophy, is not to graduate citizens who can think independently of the group or of authority, are suited for entrepreneurship and peaceful trade with their neighbors, are informed, and can participate responsibly in a Constitutional republic. It is rather to produce subjects who will be cognitively dependent: on government, on an employer, and on groupthink — a socialized mass, that is.
According to the American tradition, education aims to give individuals knowledge and tools to find their own ways of flourishing in the world. According to FedEd, in accordance with the basic thrust of its Prussian ancestor, education is subordinate to the purposes of the state and business in "public-private partnerships" or other arrangements, to raise a population fit for life and work in the global-socialist new world order in the making.
Above we listed seven themes Quist identifies running through the New Federal Curriculum. The word theme is very important. In the New World Edubabble, a theme is not an academic subject. Traditional academic subjects such as mathematics, literature, history, geography and so on, emphasized content. Themes emphasize attitudes, values and beliefs in what educrats call the affective domain (cf. p. 42). They aim not at communicating information and real cognitive skills but inculcating the right attitudes and values. They aim, where necessary, at changing students’ minds — indoctrinating, in other words, instead of educating. Cognitive content is subordinate to this purpose. Quist provides a revealing example, penned by Shirley McCune:
All learning begins with the affective [attitudes and values]. A major task of education is to extend the worldview of the child; this should include a view of careers, of the community, our nation and our global community (quoted on p. 25; emphases Quist’s).
So in teaching the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (for example), the New Federal Curriculum does not offer a comprehensive account of what the documents say. Rather it carefully selects, emphasizing what serves FedEd’s goals and ignoring what doesn’t.
For example, National Standards for Civics and Government, one of the key texts of FedEd, makes 81 references to the First Amendment but none to the Second Amendment. This is unsurprising; the goal, after all, is not merely dumbed down subjects but disarmed ones as well, a people encouraged to fear guns.
This part of the agenda already has the full cooperation of national media that consistently portray guns as evil and dangerous, and gun owners and their defenders as backward rednecks or potentially violent extremists. The Tenth Amendment also disappears. It would suggest to thoughtful readers that the entire federal-educratic edifice is unconstitutional. Out of sight, out of mind.
In providing a framework for "civic education" FedEd presents the following "fundamental values": (1) the public good, (2) individual rights, (3) justice, (4) equality, (5) diversity, (6) truth and (7) patriotism. One may note that some of these are not compatible with others unless they are radically redefined. But debasing the language is part of FedEd’s indoctrination process; by using familiar terms in new ways it can change students’ attitudes while seeming to be educating them.
Quist outlines how FedEd substitutes a collectivist and internationalist conception of rights, the one drawn from the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for the one we inherited from the classical liberal tradition and incorporated into our Declaration of Independence (see pp. 56-59).
For any concept of individual rights with teeth in it is going to undermine equality, for example, understood here not as equality under the law but equality of condition. Truth and patriotism, finally, are redefined. Truth means consensus (in accordance with the postmodernist idea that truth is a "social construct," not correspondence to reality — cf. p. 80); patriotism is unconditional loyalty to government and its agents, not to a set of ideals government is expected to live up to. Indeed, as we have said, the indoctrination process sets out to prepare students for a global workforce in an emerging world government.
Thus Quist can mine out of National Standards this discussion of sovereignty:
The world is divided into nation-states that claim sovereignty over a defined territory and jurisdiction over everyone within it (quoted on p. 47).
He then undertakes some very good linguistic analysis (the sort of thing professional analytic philosophers ought to be doing but aren’t). Note the phrase divided into, tacitly implying that a unified world is, or should be, the primary political unit with nations as secondary units. Wouldn’t a more accurate wording be, "The world consists of nation-states … " And do these nation-states merely claim sovereignty? If so, from whom? This way of putting the matter drops the subtle implication that the claim is not really legitimate — or at best, that its legitimacy is conditional on the approval of a transnational power left unidentified. How about: "The world consists of sovereign nation-states." That would be a neutral, non-agenda-driven account of the true state of affairs.
Quist observes that the wording in official documents driving the New Federal Curriculum is chosen with great care, to achieve very specific effects on students when repeated throughout their "educations" from early childhood into their impressionable teen years.
Internationalism, likewise, is consistently viewed not just as desirable but inevitable:
… the issues confronting American citizens are increasingly international [textbook’s emphasis]. Issues of economic competition, the environment, and the movement of peoples around the world require an awareness of political associations that are larger than the nation state [emphasis added … ] (quoted on p. 94).
The international organization the author has in mind, of course, is the UN or some successor organization. Some readers might wonder at this point, "Isn’t business going global?" or "Isn’t there a great deal of movement across national borders, including ours?" Fair enough, but much of this activity — whether of business or of populations — is spurred on by internationalist organizations who see it as a means of engendering control, particularly over cultures such as that of Western born whites with strong traditions of freedom and individualism.
For world government to work, such peoples must be diluted and their influence nullified, so that a new generation, fully accepting of "diversity" and focused on global issues, thinks of citizenship in global, not in local, regional or national terms. A major FedEd text, We the People: the Citizen and the Constitution, invites students to consider the question, "Do you think world citizenship will be possible in your lifetime?" World citizenship makes little sense without world government.
Thus the multiculturalism and environmentalism that permeate FedEd. Let’s consider both briefly. National Standards makes 42 references to multiculturalism / diversity (p. 46) and 17 to the environment. Multiculturalism has become (part of) the official ideology of this country’s dominant intellectual class, which includes its educratic class. Now multicultural education in the sense of education about other cultures could be a legitimate goal wherever members of different cultures find themselves coming into contact, and this has been going on spontaneously for centuries. But multicultural education in this sense is not the goal of the multiculturalism evidenced in FedEd. Multiculturalism portrays a single culture, that of straight white Western males and their Christian and "bourgeois" values, in as hostile a light as possible (pp. 77-78).
Likewise with environmentalism. Quist emphasizes that he is not opposed to teaching students about environmental issues (p. 65). However, he does question the brand of environmentalism incorporated into FedEd. He observes (p. 66) that this brand of environmentalism:
- is exaggerated in comparison with other concerns;
- includes identifiable religious content, not just respecting but actually worshipping Mother Earth, sometimes called Gaia in the literature of radical "deep ecology"; and
- as part of the larger agenda of consolidating power and centralized economic planning, with the aim of eventually bringing all political and economic activity under the one central authority.
It should be noted that the global environmentalist movement is far better funded by a wide array of enormously wealthy tax-exempt foundations than most Americans realize. It has become powerful enough to have generated its own "scientific" orthodoxy, so that visible dissident scientists face efforts to destroy their reputations — as Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, recently discovered.
Among the chief goals of FedEd is to turn out "global villagers." A major tool here is the reinterpretation of education as job skills. Now it is true that we are heirs of a national mythology holding that everyone should go to college. We should get over whatever disdain exists for people who work with their hands. But again, these are not the goals of FedEd. Its goals would impose a purely vocational model on children, with vocational choices imparted via "career clusters" as early as eighth grade. This is long before many children are ready to make a serious vocational choice. (Readers, did you know what you wanted to be when you grew up when you were in the eighth grade? If I remember right, I wanted to be an astronaut!) And by the way, people who work with their hands are more than capable of understanding when agents of government are stepping on their Constitutional rights — if they are taught Constitutional government in the eighth grade!
This effort, involving stealthy devaluation of the autonomous individual, has been underway for some time. It is reflected in such apparently innocent changes in terminology such as from personnel to human resources (cf. p. 98). The former, to my ears anyway, implies autonomous persons applying for work, being hired, paid, etc. The latter suggests, again to my ears, the comparability of human beings to inanimate natural resources such as land, water, oil and so on.
Persons have autonomy and rights — are ends in themselves. Resources are objects to be manipulated — are means to the ends of those in power. This essentially how FedEd looks at students (future members of the global workforce) — hearkening back to the Prussian model and its growing children as if in a garden. It is likely not coincidental that during the 1990s we also saw abominations such as NAFTA, which has destroyed much of our manufacturing base, and that unchecked immigration ran out of control, not just eroding national borders but ensuring a steady supply of low-wage workers who, not assimilating, will also remain unfamiliar with Constitutional principles.
We should say a word about the view of business implicit in FedEd. Many so-called education reforms are promoted as "good for business," and this is often enough to gain the support of business and business organizations such as the local branch of the Chamber of Commerce. FedEd paints a rosy picture of "reformed" public schools turning out loyal, technology-savvy and business-savvy employees. Businesspeople cannot necessarily be faulted for failing to see through the smokescreen of deceptive language — although an inability to find employees who can read and understand instruction manuals should clue them in that something is wrong.
A key is the phrase public-private partnership that has been seen more and more often during the past decade. This means close ties between government and business. What results is not capitalism but corporatism — in which corporations and government cooperate both to discourage the open competition characteristic of genuine capitalism in favor of policy that is established and administered jointly, with each side doing favors with the other (e.g., "tax incentives" for business; support going to certain candidates for political office from business).
This method is clearly a species of central planning. It may be used to establish what kinds of vocations and jobs are desirable and available in a given region — to the point of laying out actual job descriptions (sometimes doing it badly — cf. pp 86-89). "Education" then sets out to train students for these specific vocations and jobs.
On the surface, corporatism sounds very pro-business, and no doubt there are established business leaders who like it very much. But its overall view of society is statist and collectivist — and, of course, authoritarian. The New Federal Curriculum sets out to indoctrinate and train individuals to meet the needs of the state and its corporate partners.
At one time, this kind of system was known as fascism. Both Nazis and Communists employed purely vocational models of education, so that students would learn what they needed to serve the state, and no more. Excessive intellectual curiosity was discouraged. It wasted time and resources (and might lead to students asking too many of the wrong kinds of questions). FedEd takes this model and modifies it for the new world order being quietly constructed, with each successive UN confab laying new girders onto the scaffolding.
How is all this to be enforced? Aside from the fact that much of the public does not even know about it, the first thing to note is that the New Federal Curriculum is, for all practical purposes, federal law. It is perfect for an educational environment where money is tight, with state education departments and local school districts having grown dependent on federal dollars.
Thus even though the exact wording of bills like Goals 2000 described them as "voluntary," in the postmodernist-Orwellian universe of FedEd where nothing means what it says, and where HR 6 stipulates that the U.S. Department of education can simply withhold federal money from any state not signing on to the new program (pp. 92-93), states won’t choose autonomy.
Surprise, surprise; "voluntary" or not, all 50 states eventually signed on. After all, school districts were already dependent on federal money, and every federal dollar comes with strings attached. They had no choice except to introduce the official textbooks of FedEd, such as the above-mentioned We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution. Despite the title, this text portrays the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights as superior to the U.S. Constitution.
Another means of enforcement is through gaining control of early childhood education, including infant education. It is interesting to compare such statements with one of the slogans thrown around back in the 1990s, associated with both Goals 2000 and STW: "All children will begin school ready to learn." Ready to learn how, by what means, and in what respect?
What this statement is really promoting is not families’ beginning educating very small children but rather "arrangements involving families, communities, or institutional programmes, as appropriate…" (quoted on p. 107). A logical mind will want to know: what kinds of arrangements, what kinds of "programmes," and who decides what is "appropriate"? But if there is anything FedEd is not about, it is logic.
The phrase again comes from the UN; it is part of the 1990 World Declaration on Education For All. It is more about attempting to instill affective loyalty to such ideas as multiculturalism and universal tolerance, including for homosexuality, into children before they can grasp them cognitively.
It has long been known that a great deal of cognitive development occurs in the first few years of a child’s life; hence the enormous effort to gain control of early childhood education and even care of newborn infants. Groups of children so "educated" will be vulnerable to the rewriting of history already underway (pp. 115-21).
FedEd takes a dim view of the teaching of history either as an ordered collection of events or facts but focuses on "perspectives and values." This kind of rewriting ultimately allows for the enormous oversimplification of events that make it possible to inculcate into students, e.g., the idea that the War Between the States was exclusively about slavery or that phrases such as states’ rights — although implied in the vanquished Tenth Amendment — are code words for racism and bigotry. Such students, educated this way practically from infancy, might even embrace the new world order, never having been exposed to anything else.
Perhaps the most significant method of enforcement, however, is requiring standardized tests that reflect the preoccupations and values of FedEd. Students who for whatever reason have not adopted the desired attitudes will simply not do well on the test. One such test is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP): referred to euphemistically in educratic circles as "the nation’s report card" (p. 123).
The most recent federal education funding bill, HR1, passed just last year, requires that all fifty states administer this test. This will lead to the redesigning of earlier tests such as the SAT. Quist reports on the focus of the NAEP: key terms relating to environmentalism: 14. Terms relating to multiculturalism: 18. Terms related to vocationalism: 39. Terms involving geography: 0. Terms involving history (apart from the history of government-designated victim groups): 0. Terms referring to national sovereignty, natural law or natural rights: 0.
Through such means as the NAEP, FedEd proposes to pull private schools and home schooling parents under its umbrella of control. Its rules speak of all students, not just students in government schools.
It has been known for some time that home schooled children are usually years ahead of their government-schooled counterparts. Reliance on such tests as the NAEP could create an illusion that home schooling doesn’t work after all, because home schooled students will not have adopted the "attitudes and values" necessary to do well on such a test. The test, meanwhile, will have become necessary for admission to a good college or university or finding good employment.
Let’s make no mistake about it: FedEd endangers the largest and most successful independent educational movement in the country of the past few years!
What should we do? The first step, obviously, is to become aware of the problem. Authors such as Quist and organizations such as the Maple River Education Coalition (MREC) are doing their part. We now have at our disposal extensive arguments that although the idea wasn’t new, of course, the legal scaffolding necessary for integrating the American federal government into a world government advanced rapidly during the 1990s under Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s watch, although in fairness, the two Bushes are hardly free of the globalist temptation.
During the past decade, "partnerships" arose aplenty and fostered large-scale interdependence — we even saw the appearance of a (UN-sponsored) Declaration of Interdependence! The relationships are triangular: from the federal government to the educratic elites to corporations (MREC has a very good diagram on their home page). Corporations have fallen hook, line and sinker for such movements as diversity engineering. In accordance with the multiculturalism that has swept the nation, they have begun offering job benefits packages that include homosexual partners, something almost unheard of before the Clinton era.
Those who believe they can escape this problem merely by sending their children to private schools or home schooling them need to see that this is not the case. FedEd sports an introduction by Phyllis Schafly, who unfortunately came out in favor of vouchers. In fact, schools accepting vouchered students will be easily pulled in.
I’ve argued elsewhere that vouchers are a bad idea: a Trojan horse rendering private schools vulnerable to control by those holding the purse strings. State governments may dole out vouchers that seem to give choice to parents, but participating schools must follow "voluntary" federal guidelines or they don’t get the money.
I’ll say it again (maybe those pro-voucher libertarians who launched superficial criticisms of my initial article on the subject or sent me angry email last year will get the point this time): every federal dollar comes with strings attached.
Once we are aware of the problem and recognize that movements like vouchers offer only traps for the unwary, what is the next step? Allen Quist raises this query in his concluding chapter:
What if ten percent of the public knew what was happening and were committed to rescuing our nation? Would that be enough to turn around this attack against our nation? It would be more than enough. It takes less than ten percent to decide most elections. Most lawmakers will do whatever a committed ten percent wants them to do, especially when the other 90 percent doesn’t know and / or doesn’t care (pp. 136-37).
This challenge to launch a nationwide movement aimed at taking back the entire educational system is worth thinking about. Real leadership in a society does come from an often unheralded but dedicated minority. It might be up to this "remnant" to save education and, in so doing, save this civilization if it still can be saved. If they act in time, and it is not already too late!
It is worthwhile, however, for this "remnant" to be aware of what it will confront. Its resources will invariably be limited. Many educational fads that paved the way for FedEd came about through the ongoing support of huge tax-exempt organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation or Carnegie Corporation. There is no Rockefeller Foundation or Carnegie Corporation bankrolling any movement to free education from federal dominance.
Most works such as Quist’s are published and distributed by small, private publishers operating on shoestring budgets, as are many private schools. Home schooling parents sometimes have to sacrifice mightily to make the effort work. It is clear that the major media solidly back government involvement in education as "good for business." Moreover, the "facilitators" are often extremely well trained in such methods for achieving an appearance of public consensus as the Delphi Technique, and even though the fact that such methods are used is better known that it used to be, parent groups who lack the training will be at a disadvantage.
It is unlikely, finally, that a movement to "take back the schools" will even be reported (except on the Internet, of course) — or, if it is, will be relegated to Sunday supplements and late night talk shows as a "fringe" movement. All this is part of the price paid by those who have chosen to resist an increasingly dominant paradigm, which in our case is now one of centralization, economic micromanagement and political correctness (and secular materialism). Thus it is unlikely that the "remnant" will have the resources available to those doing the bidding of the educrats.
My fear, therefore, is that going to the voting booths will not be sufficient — candidates who would turn back the tide of federal control will invariably find their resources drying up while money, including corporate dollars, flows into the coffers of those who promise cooperation. The bottom line, here, is the longstanding inability of so many people, including many in business as well as education, to refuse easy money.
Another solution worth considering is for the "remnant" to abandon this system and embrace parallel institutions — working toward financial independence for as many such institutions as possible as quickly as possible. Paul Weyrich used this term a few years ago in his call to Christians in particular to secede from the dominant culture, in the wake of the failure of Republicans to remove Bill Clinton from office for lying under oath and obstructing justice following the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
He recommended building up new institutions and eventually a whole new infrastructure, existing alongside (parallel to) the dominant one but independent of it: culturally, educationally, economically. No parallel institution would take federal money under any circumstances. Its entanglements with the feds would be kept to an absolute minimum. These would be its primary distinguishing characteristics.
Weyrich did not recommend a ceasefire in the culture war. That is not a live option, because if movements such as FedEd are not publicly opposed those behind them will eventually be strong enough to come after anyone seen as a threat.
Total separation, that is, is neither possible nor desirable. This means allocating "remnant" resources on two different fronts: building up parallel institutions, and exposing the motivations of those behind the dominant ones. The first will preserve and transmit our heritage of limited government, study markets and outline reasons for the success of market-based systems as well as why command-driven ones fail, and preserve academically-focused education in addition to vocational training of the sort that leads individuals into entrepreneurial career paths. Education conceived this way will provide the perfect backdrop for exposes such as Quist’s.
We all need to be entrepreneurs, whether of ideas, educational programs or in other arenas if we are to survive — because although he doesn’t raise the issue openly, Quist’s document leaves little doubt that making it as difficult as possible for dissidents to earn a living legally in the world empire to come is an unstated consequence — and possibly a goal — of global-village ideology.
In the meantime, both I and others have argued extensively for getting one’s children out of government schools as fast as possible — whether in favor of private schools or home schooling — while joining organizations of others doing the same and preparing for what could be a nasty donnybrook somewhere down the road. Evangelical Christians have long taken the lead here, although there is nothing stopping non-Christians who sense the danger from getting involved.
The information in FedEd makes action imperative. If no one acts, we shall shortly see the emergence into adulthood of an "STW generation" or that can "multitask" and respects "diversity" but has no knowledge of its Constitutional heritage — and sees nothing inherently wrong with world government.
Copies of Allen Quist’s FedEd: The New Federal Curriculum and How It’s Enforced can be ordered from the Maple River Education Coalition, 1402 Concordia Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55104.
Steven Yates [send him mail] has a PhD in philosophy and is a Margaret "Peg" Rowley Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (ICS Press, 1994), and numerous articles and reviews. His new book In Defense of Logic will be completed shortly. He is beginning work on a new book to be entitled The Twilight of Materialism, and is also at work on a sci-fi novel tentatively entitled Skywatcher’s World.
