The Secret History of Western Education: the Scientific Destruction of Minds

More than $500 billion is spent annually on public education in the United States (state and local spending for kindergarten through 12th grade education more than doubled since 1990). According to New America Foundation: "The federal government contributes about 8 percent of direct funding for elementary and secondary schools nationally (through the U.S. Department of Education, the federal government provides more than $40 billion a year on primary and secondary education programs). The two biggest federal programs are No Child Left Behind Title I Grants to local school districts ($14.5 billion in fiscal year 2009) and IDEA Special Education State Grants ($11.5 billion in fiscal year 2009). States rely primarily on income and sales taxes to fund elementary and secondary education. Property taxes support most of the funding that local government provides for education."

Today, students are indoctrinated by a massive education system largely run by liberals, leftists and Marxists promoting their agenda through the union — misrepresenting their intentions, rewriting history through the textbooks, and gravitating toward the radicals. Collective Utopian-promises replaced God in the classroom, and we sat by, silent. Students should learn life's lessons through trial, failure and success. Individualism, the driving force that made America great, has to be shown to our young people. Good teachers who agree are shackled by the state. The others are protected by the union. If this president is not a destroyer, he's been greatly misinformed by this educational system. - James A. Skeldon, Leftist public schools indoctrinate students, Watertown Daily Times, May 17, 2011



"Both the Republican National Committee and the White House resorted to stopping me from continuing this investigation in the direction Carroll Reece had personally asked me to go. That direction was to utilize this investigation to uncover the fact that this country had been the victim of a conspiracy. That was Mr. Reece's conviction. I eventually agreed to carry out that direction.

"I explained to Mr. Reece that his own Counsel wouldn't go in that direction. He gave me permission to disregard our own Counsel and to set up an aspect of the investigation outside of our office — more or less secretly. The Republican National Committee got wind of what I was doing, and they did everything they could to stop me. They appealed to Counsel to stop me. Finally, they resorted to the White House.

"[Their] objection was, as they put it, my devotion to what they called "anti-Semitism." That was a cooked-up idea. In other words, it wasn't true at all. But, any way, that's the way they expressed it. Then they made it stick. They had to have something in the way of a rationalization of their decision to do everything they could to stop completion of this investigation, given the direction that it was moving. That direction would have been exposure of this Carnegie Endowment story, and the Ford Foundation, and the Guggenheim, and the Rockefeller Foundation — all working in harmony toward the control of education in the United States."

- Norman Dodd, Chief Investigator in 1953 for the Reece Committee on Tax Exempt Foundations

Exclusive: Charlotte Iserbyt Reveals Skull & Bones and the Destruction of America

“Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.” - Joseph Stalin in an interview with H.G. Wells, 1934

Anything coming out of Washington is a total Marxist brainwash, and Marxism is the world of the future unless we stop it right now. - Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, former head of policy at the U.S. Department of Education under Ronald Reagan (approximately 33 minutes into the second video)

By Aaron Dykes, Infowars.com
January 6, 2012

DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPT: Charlotte Iserbyt: America’s Road to Ruin

Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt served as the head of policy at the Department of Education during the first administration of President Reagan, and has since become a treasure trove for a wealth of information on the secret agendas working against America -- not the least of which is the secret society Skull and Bones -- as well as a coordinated plan to undermine education, eradicate individualism and brainwash the masses to create a subservient population ruled by the super-elite.

Last year, Infowars researchers conducted many hours of exclusive interviews with Charlotte Iserbyt at her home in Maine, including a thorough examination of many archive documents never before seen by the public, forgotten books with important hidden history and other relics, and even the official membership lists from Yale’s Skull & Bones rosters -- which Iserbyt herself leaked to the public through author Antony Sutton. Infowars then released two video presentations, both of which have been among the most detailed, researched and significant that this website has released -- the first on the Secret History of Western Education, and the second, Secrets of Skull & Bones Revealed.

Charlotte Iserbyt: Secrets Of Skull & Bones Blown Wide Open

IN PARTS ON THEALEXJONES CHANNEL:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Video production by Alex Jones (PrisonPlanet.com and InfoWars.com) October 2011, Length 58:01

Charlotte & her team took the time and effort to release of a full transcript of the first of those interviews, here re-titled America’s Road to Ruin and available for free download via PDF (Download PDF). Together, with the exclusive PrisonPlanet.tv interview, it is the ultimate research companion to share with friends, family, colleagues and contacts so they can understand the truth about our world.

Now, Charlotte Iserbyt has re-issued and revised her seminal work, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, a book replete with a lifetime of study aimed at behind the scenes manipulation of America’s schools -- aimed at re-engineering the future of the United States. With the hope of putting that information in the hands of all patriotic Americans, Iserbyt has worked long hours from retirement to condense that information and re-print this essential work in a presentable format that anyone can read. Psychological techniques of domination. Secret mergers with the Soviet Union. A plan to dumb down the people and destroy the U.S. economy. It’s all documented, but it’s something you were never told in the classroom, on television, or in the political arena.

Transcript of Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt speaking on the Secret History of Western Education: the Scientific Destruction of Minds

DOWNLOAD PDF TRANSCRIPT HERE

IN PARTS ON THEALEXJONESCHANNEL: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Video production by Alex Jones (PrisonPlanet.com and InfoWars.com)
May 2011; Length 1:14:50.

The Secret History of Western Education: The Scientific Destruction of Minds

By Aaron Dykes, Infowars.com
January 6, 2012

Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt served as the head of policy at the Department of Education during the first administration of [President] Ronald Reagan. While working there she discovered a long-term strategic plan by the tax-free foundations to transform America from a nation of rugged individualists and problem solvers to a country of servile, brainwashed minions who simply regurgitate whatever they are told. We now present to you the 'Secret History of Western Education: the Scientific Destruction of Minds.'

Onscreen text: On November 25, 1910, Andrew Carnegie established a 10 million dollar endowment to “hasten the abolition of international war, the foulest blot upon our civilization.”

He selected a board of 28 trustees and directed them to use, “the widest discretion as to measures and policies they shall from time to time adopt,” in carrying out the purpose of the fund.

In the early 1950s, the Reece Commission led by Norman Dodd, uncovered minutes from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace dated 1910.

Charlotte Iserbyt [reading from Lines of Credit: Ropes of Bondage by Robert H. Goldsborough (Washington Dateline Publishers, Baltimore, Maryland, 1989)]:

The minutes reveal that in 1910 the Carnegie trustees asked themselves this question:

“Is there any way known to man more effective than war to so alter the life of an entire people?”

For a year the trustees sought an effective “peaceful” method to “alter the life of an entire people”; but ultimately, they concluded that war was the most effective way to change people.

Charlotte Iserbyt: The Miseducation of America [A MUST SEE VIDEO!]


Iserbyt: World War I — horrible [15 million deaths and 20 million wounded] — made every other war look like nothing!… They sent a confidential message to President Wilson insisting that the war not be ended too quickly. After the war the Carnegie Endowment trustees reasoned if they could get control of education in the United States, they would be able to prevent a return to the way of life as it had been prior to the war; and they recruited the Rockefeller Foundation to assist in such a monumental task.

Iserbyt: [reading quote from Bertrand Russell’s The Impact of Science on Society (Columbia U. Press, 1951)]:

“Education should aim at destroying free will so that pupils thus schooled will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished ... Influences of the home are obstructive; and in order to condition students, verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective ... It is for a future scientist to make these maxims precise and to discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”

Onscreen clip of a 1930s era instructor lecturing teachers:

“Young people cannot be trusted to form their own opinion. It’s our job to tell them!”

I had never intended to become involved in the battle that all of us are involved in. I had no idea anything was wrong with the way the country was going as I was growing up. Even during my foreign service experience [I was basically unaware of the strange direction in which our nation was being directed] I found myself mysteriously — (I would say the good Lord works in wondrous ways) — being put in spots, around the world or in my country, where extraordinary things were taking place under the guise of “change.” We’ve all heard that so much; from the Obama administration, Bill Clinton — he was the first one to mention “change agents,” etc. For some reason I was plucked out. I found myself being sort of pushed.

My name is Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt. My maiden name is Thomson. My husband, who I want to give great credit to at this point, was Belgian, from the Flemish part of Belgium. I met him — I’ll explain that later — in Europe when I was working at the Embassy in Brussels. Without my late husband’s help throughout the last [40] years, certainly when we came back to Maine [in 1970], my work never would have happened . . . He had been highly educated in Europe and he understood the whole plan! In fact, about five years after we had come back to the United States someone gave me Gary Allen’s book None Dare Call It Conspiracy. I was on the school board [in Camden, Maine] and this lady called me. She loved the work I was doing on the school board

Read Full TRANSCRIPT in PDF HERE.

ORIGINAL, UNABRIDGED VERSION FREE PDF DOWNLOAD AT:
http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/

AND THOUSANDS OF OTHER IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS IN FREE PDF AT:
http://americandeception.com/

REVISED & REPRINTED: THE DELIBERATE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA

The revised and abridged edition of the deliberate dumbing down of america is the updated and smaller version of Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt’s original, now out of print, masterpiece about the American education system. This revised and abridged edition is Internet interactive and allows you to access the abridged material online. Most importantly, it includes a new “Update” chapter which covers the long-planned institutionalization of three new activities that have occurred since the publication of the original book in 1999.

Author Charlotte Iserbyt is the ultimate whistle blower. As former Senior Policy Advisor in the U.S. Department of Education, she blew the whistle in the `80s on government activities withheld from the public. Her inside knowledge will help you protect your children from controversial educational methods and programs.

This book is organized as a chronological history of the past 100+ years of education reform. Each chapter takes a period of history and recounts the significant events, including important geopolitical and societal contextual information. Citations from government plans, policy documents, and key writings by leading reformers record the rise of the modern education reform movement. Americans of all ages will welcome this riveting expose of what really happened to what was once the finest education system in the world.

The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America: Revised and Abridged Edition exposes how American social engineers have systematically gone about destroying the intellect of millions of American children for the purpose of leading the American people into a socialist world government controlled by behavioral and social scientists. It documents the gradual decline of our once academically successful education system into one devoted to training compliant children to be used by government and industry. The successful implementation of this fascist-socialist philosophy of education will spell the end of the American dream of individual freedom and opportunity.

This powerful book will change forever the way you look at your child’s education.

Norman Dodd and the Reece Commission: Tax-exempt Foundations Changed History and the U.S. Education System (Excerpt)

Canada Free Press
December 16, 2010

Norman Dodd (June 29, 1899 - January 1987) was a banker/bank manager, financial advisor, and chief investigator in 1953 for U.S. Congressman B. Carroll Reece's Special Committee on Tax Exempt Foundations (commonly referred to as the Reece Committee).

Dodd learned that the major tax-exempt foundations (Carnegie Endowment, Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others) had been operating since at least 1945 to promote an agenda that has little to do with charity, good works or philanthropy, but with controlling the education system in the United States and altering the teaching of American History and building their own stable of historians.A group of twenty historians ultimately became the nucleus of the American Historical Association, receiving a grant of $400,000 from the Carnegie Endowment in the late 1920’s which provided funding for revisionist research that produced a 7 volume study of our history, presented in a manner consistent with the way the Endowment wished it to be taught here in the future. This policy diverted away from support of the “out dated” and “no longer practical” principles and “self evident truths” embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and insinuated instead one of “collectivism” (communism), the so called wave of the future, and how this country should be, as they wished to have it be.

The real objectives include the creation of a world-wide collectivist state which is to be ruled from behind the scenes by the same elite who control the foundations. His allegations stem from reviewing the minutes of the Carnegie Institute and their explicitly stated plans listed therein. [Other Sources: Wikipedia and Reality Zone]



Google Video of 1982 Interview of Norman Dodd by G. Edward Griffin
Transcript of 1982 Interview of Norman Dodd by G. Edward Griffin

"Alan Gaither was, at that time, President of the Ford Foundation. Mr. Gaither had sent for me when I found it convenient to be in New York, asked me to call upon him at his office, which I did. On arrival, after a few amenities, Mr. Gaither said, 'Mr. Dodd, we have asked you to come up here today because we thought that, possibly, off the record, you would tell us why the Congress is interested in the activities of foundations such as ourselves.' Before I could think of how I would reply to that statement, Mr. Gaither then went on to say, 'Mr. Dodd, all of us who have a hand in the making of policies here, have had experience operating under directives, the substance of which is, that we use our grant-making power so as to alter life in the United States that it can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union'." - Norman Dodd

Is there a connection between federal education aid and the inflation rate in higher education? Increased availability of student loans should theoretically make college more affordable, but research has proven government lending to be grossly counterproductive. Though these programs attempt to make school more accessible to people of low income, they have defeated their intended purpose by driving tuition costs up exponentially. Initially, banks refused to offer loans to college students, because young adults typically lack any substantial assets or collateral. The abnormal nature of this market eventually led to government involvement in funding of higher education, but with many unintended consequences. Universities race to absorb the greatest portion of federal funding by raising tuition costs. This research builds upon the Bennett Hypothesis, an idea circulated in the 1980s by U.S. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett. Many factors play a role in the convoluted issue of spiked tuition costs, but a strong case can be made for the Bennett Hypothesis. - Federal funding directs tuition, The Daily Evergreen, September 28, 2010

The Triumph of Socialism

By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., LewRockwell.com
November 12, 2009

Do you think ideas don't matter, that what people believe about themselves and their world has no real consequence? If so, the following will not bug you in the slightest.

A new BBC poll finds that only 11 percent of people questioned around the world — and 29,000 people were asked their opinions — think that free-market capitalism is a good thing. The rest believe in more government regulation.

Only a small percentage of the world's population believes that capitalism works well and that more regulation will reduce efficiency. One quarter of those asked said that capitalism is "fatally flawed." In France, 43% believe this. In Mexico, it is 38%.

A majority believes that government should rob the rich to give money to poor countries. In only one country, Turkey, did a majority say that less government is better.

It gets even worse. While most Europeans and Americans think it was a good thing for the Soviet Union to disintegrate, people in India, Indonesia, Ukraine, Pakistan, Russia, and Egypt mostly think it was a bad thing. Yes, you read that right: millions freed from socialist slavery — bad thing.

That news must lift the heart of every would-be despot the world over. And it comes as something of a shock twenty years after the collapse of socialism in Russia and Eastern Europe revealed what this system had created: backward societies with citizens who lived short and miserable lives.

Then there is the China case, a country rescued from bloody barbarism under communism and transformed into a modern and prosperous country by capitalism.

Capitalism is tailored to individual initiative rather than groupthink or community initiative. Nearly all inventions that have furthered the capitalistic enterprise and blessed humanity in the process have been the result of individual initiative rather than committee, group or government activity (compare previous centuries to the accelerated rate of inventions since America gained its independence in 1776). - Dr. David Noebel, The Socialization of America, The August Review, March 27, 2009

What can we learn? Far from not having learned anything, people have largely forgotten the experience and have developed a love for the ancient fairy tale that all things can be fixed through collectivism and central planning.

As to those who would despair at this poll, consider that it might have been much worse were it not for the efforts of a relative handful of intellectuals who have fought against socialist theory for more than a century. It might have been 99% in support of socialist tyranny. So there is no sense in saying that these intellectual efforts are wasted.

Ideas also have a life of their own. They can lie in wait for decades or centuries and then one day, the whole of history turns on a dime. Especially these days, no effort goes to waste. Publications and essays, or any form of education, is immortalized, ready for the taking by a desperate world.

As for the opinion poll, we have no idea just how intensely these views are held or even what they mean. What, for example, is capitalism? Do people even know? Michael Moore doesn't know, else he wouldn't be calling bailouts for elite, Fed-connected financial firms a form of capitalism. Many other people reduce the term capitalism to "the system of economics in the United States." It is no more complicated than that. This is despite the reality that the United States has a comprehensive planning apparatus in place that is directly responsible for all our current economic troubles.

Now, let's take this further. Among the many people around the world who do not like the US empire, many believe they don't like capitalism either. If the US economy drags the world down into recession, that is a prime example of capitalism's failure. Even more preposterous, if you didn't like George W. Bush, his ways, and his cronies, and Obama is something of a relief, then you don't like capitalism and you do like socialism.

Another point of view misunderstands the idea of capitalism itself. It is not about creating economic structures that benefit capital at the expense of labor or culture or religion. It is about a system that protects the rights of everyone and serves the common good. Capitalism is just the name that happened to be identified with this system. If you want to call freedom a banana, fine, what matters is not words but ideas.

I do know that none of these messed-up definitions of capitalism follow. You know this too. But for the world at large, serious ideological analytics are not the animating force of daily life. Many people attach themselves to vague slogans.

Further, as Rothbard has forcefully argued, free-market capitalism serves no more than a symbolic purpose for the Republican Party and for conservatives. Economic liberty is the utopia that they keep promising to bring us, pending the higher priority of blowing up foreign peoples, jailing political dissidents, crushing the left wing on campus, and routing the Democrats.

Once all of this is done, they say, then they will get to the instituting of a free-market economic system. Of course, that day never arrives, and it is not supposed to. Capitalism serves the Republicans the way Communism served Stalin: a symbolic distraction to keep you hoping, voting, and coughing up money.

All of which leaves true capitalism — a product of the voluntary society and the sum total of all the exchanges and cooperative acts of people all over the world — with few actual intellectual defenders. They are growing, but the educational work we need to do is daunting, and we are facing the most powerful forces in the world.

There is nothing new in this. In the history of the world, freedom is the exception, not the rule. It must be fought for anew in every generation. Its enemies are everywhere, but the leading enemy is ignorance. For this reason, the main weapon we have at our disposal is education.

One task assigned to the investigators of the 1953 Reese Commission, was "to educate them as to the effect on the country, as a whole, of the activities of large, endowed foundations over the then past forty years. That affect was to orient our educational system away from support of the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence, and implemented in the Constitution; and to educate them over to the idea that the task now was to effect an orientation of education away from these briefly stated principles and self-evident truths. And, that’s what had been the effect of the wealth which constituted the endowments of those foundations — foundations that had been in existence over the largest portion of the span of fifty years — and holding them responsible for this change. What we were able to bring forward was — what we had uncovered was — the determination of these large endowed foundations, through their trustees, actually to get control over the content of American education." - Norman Dodd, 1982 Interview by G. Edward Griffin

Education includes explaining that socialism is an unworkable idea. There is nothing better than Ludwig von Mises's 1922 book Socialism, a comprehensive presentation of the fallacy of the socialist idea. Another essential work is the Black Book of Communism. Here we have a wake-up call that shows that the dream of socialism is actually a bloody nightmare.

Then there is the issue of the positive case for capitalism. One can do no better than Mises's own Human Action, which is not likely to ever be surpassed as a treatise on the free economy. True, it is not for everyone. And that's fine. There are many primers out there too.

The fashion for socialism and the opposition to capitalism should alarm every lover of freedom the world over. We have our jobs cut out for us, but with numbers this bad, it is not difficult to make a difference. Every blow you can land for free markets helps protect freedom from its enemies.

'Think Tanks' of the Elite Guiding U.S. Policy

There are powerful men seeking to destroy the basic foundations of our liberty. They have been quite successful in their plans so far. They are disrupting the family, corrupting our governments, destroying morality, and attacking religious faith and religious freedom. Their objective is to "eliminate liberty -- economic, political and religious -- and establish in its place the most widespread and complete totalitarian system ever to oppress mankind... With enough study, it is possible to learn the goals of these power brokers from their own documents. Their goal is worldwide control with themselves in charge. They fully intend to control all governments, control the money, control the military, control the courts, destroy all religions except those that actually teach evil rather than good, and control access to food and medicine. - Liberty Lost, F. Gregory Anderson, Circa 1993

Sen. Jay Rockefeller Quips About World Domination, Bilderberg (Clip Aired on C-SPAN on October 19, 1991):

As documented in Understanding Unalienable Rights, the dictionary meaning of unalienable rights has been corrupted. School children are no longer instructed about this most basic element of the Declaration of Independence. Leading liberty-minded legal and "think tank" organizations often fronting the freedom movement, treat or label the seeking of unalienable rights protections as outdated. They argue a system of "civil rights" as the appropriate man-made replacement. Think tanks of most stripes quietly argue that the idea of unalienable rights is flawed and indefensible. Correspondingly, the idea has been largely abandoned by academia and intellectuals. The question then becomes: Can the American experiment in freedom continue without a foundation predicated on the notion that each person possesses a life that is their own? I conclude that without the political recognition of unalienable rights it cannot be assured that the political system will recognize that your life belongs to you. This is not a moot issue. At the root of the globalist movement is Agenda 21 Sustainable Development. This worldwide program agreed upon by 178 nations, including the United States, reveals the directive that human population is to be decreased by 85% (United Nations; Global Biodiversity Assessment Report, page 773). This policy has appealed to many who argue "overpopulation." Accordingly, says the consensus, everyone's "right to life" must be discarded in order to achieve globalist objectives.- Michael Shaw, Globalism Versus Unalienable Rights, NewsWithViews.com, June 15, 2010

Clinton Turns to Naked Corporate-Fascism

JP Morgan, Exxon, Boeing, Among State Department's New Advisers

By Tony Cartalucci, Land Destroyer
December 6, 2011

The Washington Post has recently reported in an article titled, "Hillary Clinton turns to think tankers for new Foreign Affairs Policy Board," that the US State Department will from now on depend on permanent advisory drawn from the ranks of what it calls "think tank scholars." The article also notes that this move is similar to the already existing Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon, and that this is an effort to make the US State Department more like the Defense Department -- however, in which way the author is not clear.

Since the US State Department literally is directing armies of protesters and their armed counterparts in the streets from Tunisia to Syria, from Belarus to Moscow, and from Myanmar to Bangkok and Malaysia, it would indeed make sense to reconfigure it into something more suitable to oversee warfare rather than diplomacy. It is the US State Department from which organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy and its myriad of sedition-sowing NGOs stem from and go forth manipulating foreign governments rather than dealing with them as equal sovereign states, a long-running theme pursued throughout the upper echelons of the "globocratic" elite.

The board the Washington Post describes contains 25 members led by Brookings Institution president Strobe Talbott, former-US Deputy Secretary of State and Rhodes Scholar. The Washington Post then lists 10 other members drawn from these think-tanks, including:

Nina Hachigian, Center for American Progress
Jane Harman, Woodrow Wilson Center
Robert Kagan, Brookings
Stephen Krasner, Hoover Institution
Ellen Laipson, Stimson Center
Vali Nasr, Brookings
Tom Pickering, Brookings

John Podesta, Center for American Progress
James Steinberg, Brookings
Laura Tyson, Center for American Progress

What Does it Mean? Corporate Fascism

Should it alarm Americans to see "think-tank scholars" guiding US policy officially? Considering that these think-tanks have literally written America's destiny for decades, regardless of who was in office and what political ideology they claimed to profess, Clinton's move to fold them into a permanent, official advisory board is but a formality. The Washington Post's presentation most likely makes the average American believe their future and their nation's foreign policy are in capable "scholarly" hands. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

The Brookings Institution, Hoover Institution, Center for American Progress, the Stimson Center, and the Woodrow Wilson Center are all funded by and represent the interests of the largest corporate-financiers on earth, some like BAE (British Aerospace Engineering), not even American firms. This alarming convergence of government and corporations has a name: corporate fascism.

A centralized, increasingly authoritarian autocratic oligarchy constituted of corporations, their policy think-tanks, and even their own directors holding positions both within the government and throughout its various private sector peripheries, not only represents the death of America's Constitutional Republic, but the same alarming threat to the world it faced with the rise of European fascism in Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and Benito Mussolini's Italy.

Brookings Institution
www.brookings.edu

Background: Within the library of the Brookings Institution you will find the blueprints for nearly every conflict the West has been involved with in recent memory. What's more is that while the public seems to think these crises spring up like wildfires, those following the Brookings' corporate-funded studies and publications see these crises coming years in advance. These are premeditated, meticulously planned conflicts that are triggered to usher in premeditated, meticulously planned solutions to advance Brookings' corporate supporters, who are numerous.

The ongoing operations against Iran, including US-backed color revolutions, US-trained and backed terrorists inside Iran, and crippling sanctions were all spelled out in excruciating detail in the Brookings Institution report, "Which Path to Persia?" The more recent UN Security Council resolution 1973 regarding Libya uncannily resembles Kenneth Pollack's March 9, 2011 Brookings report titled "The Real Military Options in Libya."

Notable Brookings  
Board Members:

Dominic Barton: McKinsey & Company, Inc.
Alan R. Batkin: Eton Park Capital Management
Richard C. Blum: Blum Capital Partners, LP
Abby Joseph Cohen: Goldman, Sachs & Co.
Suzanne Nora Johnson: Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.
Richard A. Kimball Jr.: Goldman, Sachs & Co.
Tracy R. Wolstencroft: Goldman, Sachs & Co.
Paul Desmarais Jr.: Power Corporation of Canada
Kenneth M. Duberstein: The Duberstein Group, Inc.
Benjamin R. Jacobs: The JBG Companies
Nemir Kirdar: Investcorp
Klaus Kleinfeld: Alcoa, Inc.
Philip H. Knight: Nike, Inc.
David M. Rubenstein: Co-Founder of The Carlyle Group
Sheryl K. Sandberg: Facebook
Larry D. Thompson: PepsiCo, Inc.
Michael L. Tipsord: State Farm Insurance Companies
Andrew H. Tisch: Loews Corporation

Some Brookings Experts:
(click on names to see a list of recent writings.)

Kenneth Pollack
Daniel L. Byman
Martin Indyk
Suzanne Maloney
Michael E. O'Hanlon
Bruce Riedel
Shadi Hamid

Notable Brookings
Foundation & Corporate Support:

Foundations & Governments

Ford Foundation
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation
Government of the United Arab Emirates
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Rockefeller Brothers Fund

Banking & Finance

Bank of America
Citi
Goldman Sachs
H&R Block
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.
Jacob Rothschild
Nathaniel Rothschild
Standard Chartered Bank
Temasek Holdings Limited
Visa Inc.

Big Oil

Exxon Mobil Corporation
Chevron
Shell Oil Company

Military Industrial Complex & Industry

Daimler
General Dynamics Corporation
Lockheed Martin Corporation
Northrop Grumman Corporation
Siemens Corporation
The Boeing Company
General Electric Company
Westinghouse Electric Corporation
Raytheon Co.
Hitachi, Ltd.
Toyota

Telecommunications & Technology

AT&T
Google Corporation
Hewlett-Packard
Microsoft Corporation
Panasonic Corporation
Verizon Communications
Xerox Corporation
Skype

Media & Perception Management

McKinsey & Company, Inc.
News Corporation (Fox News)

Consumer Goods & Pharmaceutical

GlaxoSmithKline
Target
PepsiCo, Inc.
The Coca-Cola Company

Woodrow Wilson Center
wilsoncenter.org

Background: How would you feel if someone told you a well-known American news anchor served as president of an unelected corporate-funded think-tank insidiously steering American policy? It would indeed be a a troubling indicator of the incestuous relationship between not only government and big business, but also the media's role in selling their collective agenda to the public. Sure enough, ABC News anchor Sam Donaldson is the president of the Woodrow Wilson Center which hosts a staggering number of corporate sponsors and serves as host for a multitude of forums and conferences where business and government can come together and freely conspire - all of which can be found in their 2009-2010 annual report.

Global Sponsors p.33

AT&T
BAE Systems
BlackRock
Chevron Corporation
CIBC
Exxon Mobil Corporation
Gale International
Grupo EBX
LG Electronics
Morgan Stanley
United Airlines, Inc.

National Sponsors p.33 (partial list)

Best Buy Co., Inc.
BNSF
The Boeing Company
Cisco Systems
The Coca-Cola Company
General Mills, Inc.
Google
Marathon Oil Company
Hyatt Hotels
JPMorgan Chase
Kraft Foods
Motorola, Inc.
National Basketball Association
Procter & Gamble
Scotiabank
Shell Oil Company
Siemens Corporation
Target Corporation
Western Union

Contributions, Gifts, & Grants p.36 (partial list)

Carnegie Corporation of New York
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
U.S. Department of State
Ford Foundation
Open Society Institute (of George Soros)
Smith Richardson Foundation
US Institute of Peace

Center for American Progress
americanprogress.org

Background: The Center for American Progress holds transparency in contempt, refusing to reveal on its website or in its annual report, exactly who is paying the bills. While "right-wing-styled" institutes are generally more proud to show off their corporate sponsors -- a sign that they are for the "free market," allegedly left-leaning organizations attempt to portray their efforts as subsidized on goodwill alone. We saw this earlier this year when the self-proclaimed "independent" Prachatai, a "liberal news website" according to the BBC, which was exposed to be funded millions of Thai baht a year by the Neo-Conservative lined National Endowment for Democracy. Likewise, just beneath the surface of "American Progress" are billionaire bankers, corporate-lobbyists, and everyone else one would consider corporate-fascist.

The New York Times exposes the center's backers in an article titled, "John Podesta, Shepherd of a Government in Exile." And while the New York Times attempts to portray the center as "liberal," and its the lack of transparency as "normal," what we find is yet another corporate infested organization of unelected policy makers, producing reports and bills on behalf of the planet's monied elite, that are passed to Congress for rubber stamping, while their connections throughout the corporate-media ensure that the policy is promoted, sold to, and accepted by the public.

The New York Times reveals George Soros as a donor, as well as Peter Lewis of Progressive, a Fortune 500 insurance company, and Herb Sanders, formally of World Savings Bank, who made billions in the "mortgage industry." The center itself is headed by John Podesta, whose colorful career within the United States government is elaborated at length within his bio featured on the center's website. And despite the New York Times' long, ranting history of Podesta's ties to the Democratic party, what is never mentioned by either, is that he also heads a Washington lobbying firm, the Podesta Group representing corporate-financier interests including Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and British Petroleum.

A long and self-incriminating "record" of their past work can be found on their website. Despite the colorful pictures and adjectives used to describe Podesta's work, what is essentially representing corporate-special interests in Washington, we may see the clearest example yet of what and of whom these think-tanks are really made of -- hardly "scholars." Lobbying firms like Podesta are literally the glue that holds this un-Constitutional, corporate-fascist system together. While bills like the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation shut down small, start up competitors, Podesta was busy "convincing" Congress that its client didn't need to be regulated - resulting in a system that is literally stacked against the people, in favor of the Fortune 500 -- Wall Street and London.

Podesta even brags about its ability to use the media to manipulate public opinion on behalf of their clients. Ed Rothschild's biography on Podesta's site claims:

Chairing the Podesta Group’s energy and environment practice, Ed crafts and executes government relations and public relations strategy for many of the firm’s clients, including companies, trade associations and advocacy groups. With his deep Rolodex of media contacts and communications savvy, Ed provides messaging guidance and media training, and opens doors to media outlets for clients.

Under a section of the Podesta Group's website titled, "International," is a breathtaking admission of how lobbying groups drive foreign policy for "clients," be they foreign governments or international corporations.

Some consider international policy and Washington politics to be separate entities - we know better. Whether the client is a foreign government, international corporation or interest group, our team of experts is a favorite for international entities with regulatory, legislative and communications needs in Washington. Our strategists have worked in senior positions in the offices of Washington’s foremost decision makers, with international law firms and think tanks. They have experience at the highest levels of journalism, and have worked abroad, affording a global perspective necessary to crafting successful strategies here in the US. Routine tactics for many complex projects rarely work. Our international team understands the unique needs of global interests and in developing and executing customized strategies that are effective in any political environment.

On the same page, beneath the category, "PG at Work" and "PG in the News," we see links that lead off to the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor featuring Podesta's employees literally writing editorials and articles, the vast majority of them calling for or defending war with nations across the planet. Podesta employee Stephen Rademaker is even featured in an article declaring that he is now a "foreign policy adviser" for presidential hopeful Mitt Romney.

Clearly Mr. John Podesta is as compromised as any man can be in Washington, and clearly in bed with corporate-financier interests while heading a "think-tank" policy front simply dressing up his lobbying work with a certain air of "scholarly" credibility. Now, and hopefully to the alarm of all Americans, these lobbyists will be directly advising the US State Department.

The Stimson Center

Background: Another case of "more of the same," the Stimson Center purports to be "a nonprofit, nonpartisan institution devoted to enhancing international peace and security through a unique combination of rigorous analysis and outreach." In reality it is yet another tangled web of special interests guiding policy that ultimately shows up before a Congress full of bought and paid for by lobbyists and sometimes even advised by lobbyists, as Johan Podesta, Stephen Rademaker, and their colleagues of the above mentioned Podesta Group prove. As with the other think-tanks already mentioned, a mainstay of mega-corporations, corporate-funded foundations, and contrived international institutions likewise fund the Stimson Center.

The board of directors features amongst its members, Robert Boorstin of Google, Carroll Wetzel formally of Dillon Read, Smith Barney, and Chemical/Chase banks, Alton Frye of the Council on Foreign Relations, RAND Corporation, and even a fellow at the above mentioned Woodrow Wilson Center, and Thomas Pickering, formally of Boeing.

Donors

Arbre Group
Holdings Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi
Bipartisan Policy Center
Boeing Company
Canada, Government of
Carnegie Corporation of NY
Center for Global Partnership
Chino Cienega Foundation
Compton Foundation
Connect US Fund
Una Chapman Cox Foundation
Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund
ExxonMobil Corporation
Finland, Government of
Folke Bernadotte Academy
Fourth Freedom Forum
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
General Dynamics
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
Hills and Company
Humanity United
ITOCHU Corporation
Japan External Trade Organization
Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
New-Land Foundation
Ploughshares Fund
Prospect Hill Foundation
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Summersault Foundation
Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office
United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations
United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS
United States Department of Energy
United States Department of State
United States Institute of Peace
United States National Intelligence Council
John C. Whitehead Foundation

The Hoover Institution
hoover.org

Background: At first glance, the Hoover Institution belongs nowhere amongst a left-leaning liberal Democratic Secretary of State's foreign policy advisory board. The Hoover Institution claims in its missions statement that:

The principles of individual, economic, and political freedom; private enterprise; and representative government were fundamental to the vision of the Institution's founder. By collecting knowledge, generating ideas, and disseminating both, the Institution seeks to secure and safeguard peace, improve the human condition, and limit government intrusion into the lives of individuals.

Clearly the Hoover Institute is playing the part of a right-wing "think-tank." However, this superficial difference in political ideologies is once again dwarfed by the common denominator of ties to globalist big-business corporate-financier interests.

Taken from the 2010 Annual Report, listed as fellows include, Condoleezza Rice (a Cheveron board member), James Woolsey, and George Shultz (formally of Betchel). Neo-Conservative warmonger and Islamophobia-peddler Daniel Pipes is listed as a "Distinguished Visiting Fellow." Hoover also cultivates an impressive stable of "Media Fellows" drawn from every TV network, newspaper, magazine, and website imaginable.

The Hoover Institute, like the Center for American Progress, obfuscates entirely its funding on both its website and throughout its annual reports. It merely mentions that, "the Hoover Institution is supported by donations from individuals, foundations, corporations, and partnerships." However, the regular suspects, upon viewing their annual reports, are seen to be making donations to the institute. These include the Bradely Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation (which also funds the above mentioned Brookings Institution).

Conclusion

Clearly these organizations have crossed the line and America's policy has been long since dictated by corporate-financier interests. A media machine has been assembled, the likes of which no man has seen before, to sell us this policy. The reason why nothing ever changes, and why we feel political activism is so futile is because it is. Everyone, in every position of power within this corporate-fascist system hears us, but simply couldn't care less. They already have their agenda laid out, their interests outlined within their slick annual reports, the only thing left to do is convince you that it is in your best interest too.

As the article, "Naming Names: Your Real Government" started out:

This is your real government; they transcend elected administrations, they permeate every political party, and they are responsible for nearly every aspect of the average American and European's way of life. When the 'left' is carrying the torch for two 'Neo-Con' wars, starting yet another based on the same lies, peddled by the same media outlets that told of Iraqi WMD's, the world has no choice, beyond profound cognitive dissonance, but to realize something is wrong.

What's wrong is a system completely controlled by a corporate-financier oligarchy with financial, media, and industrial empires that span the globe. If we do not change the fact that we are helplessly dependent on these corporations that regulate every aspect of our nation politically, and every aspect of our lives personally, nothing else will ever change.

And finished appropriately with this:

These organizations represent the collective interests of the largest corporations on earth. They not only retain armies of policy wonks and researchers to articulate their agenda and form a consensus internally, but also use their massive accumulation of unwarranted influence in media, industry, and finance to manufacture a self-serving consensus internationally.

To believe that this corporate-financier oligarchy would subject their agenda and fate to the whims of the voting masses is naive at best. They have painstakingly ensured that no matter who gets into office, in whatever country, the guns, the oil, the wealth and the power keep flowing perpetually into their own hands. Nothing vindicates this poorly hidden reality better than a 'liberal' Nobel Peace Prize wearing president, dutifully towing forward a myriad of 'Neo-Con' wars, while starting yet another war in Libya.

Likewise, no matter how bloody your revolution is, if the above equation remains unchanged, and the corporate bottom lines left unscathed, nothing but the most superficial changes will have been made, and as is the case in Egypt with International Crisis Group stooge Mohamed ElBaradei worming his way into power, things may become substantially worse.

The real revolution will commence when we identify the above equation as the true brokers of power and when we begin systematically removing our dependence on them, and their influence on us from our daily lives. The global corporate-financier oligarchy needs us, we do not need them, independence from them is the key to our freedom.

We Are Information-age Serfs Ruled Over by a Global Elite, Our Minds Enslaved to Celebrating Diversity, Embracing Tolerance, and Worshipping Mother Earth

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: Education for Global Government

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.):

1. Undermining national sovereignty (moving us toward world government under the auspices of the United Nations).
2. Redefining natural rights (substituting for the American view a Marxist and internationalist view justifying massive redistribution of wealth).
3. Minimizing natural law (essentially by neglect).
4. Promoting environmentalism (emphasizing the global nature of environmental issues, including promoting the pagan pseudo-religion of Gaia, Mother Earth).
5. Requiring multiculturalism (including acceptance of homosexuality).
6. Restructuring government (toward the idea that we live in a "global village," defining citizenship in global terms).
7. 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:

1. The Clintons, obviously. ("It takes a village," remember?)
2. 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.
3. Lauren Resnick, Co-director of the New Standards Project.
4. Charles Quigley, Director of the Center for Civic Education (CCE). (No relation to Carroll Quigley I know of.)
5. Margaret Stimmon Branson, Associate Director of the CCE.
6. 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:

1. is exaggerated in comparison with other concerns;
   
2. includes identifiable religious content, not just respecting but actually worshipping Mother Earth, sometimes called Gaia in the literature of radical "deep ecology"; and
   
3. 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.