It isn’t necessary to explain that Hitler’s Nazi regime amounted to extreme totalitarianism. The leaders of the so-called “Master Race” considered huge numbers of human beings unworthy, even unworthy of life itself. But not all were to be exterminated. Some were needed as workers to produce goods and some were forced to become servants for the Nazi leaders.
In 1959, journalist William Shirer authored The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a monumental 1,200-page study detailing much about Europe’s experience with the Third Reich. Shirer laid out the attitude of Hitler and his chiefs about virtually everything in his remarkable work. He, of course, pointed to several varieties of horror practiced by the regime, and what he reported about education is especially revealing.
Hitler’s right-hand man, Martin Bormann, explained the Nazi thinking with regard to the already conquered Slavs in a 1942 letter sent to a fellow Party member. In part, it stated: “Education is dangerous. It is enough if they can count up to 100…. Every educated person is a future enemy.” Heinrich Himmler, the dreaded leader of the secret police, wrote that half of the conquered Czechs would be forced to become “workers.” Those from the educated class were “intellectuals” and they were to be “eliminated.”
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As for the conquered Poles, Hitler himself stated that they were “born for low labor…. There can be no question of improvement for them. It is necessary to keep the standard of life low in Poland and it must not be permitted to rise.” Addressing the potential problem of Polish priests, Hitler stated, “… they will preach what we want them to preach. If any priest reacts differently, we shall make short work of him. The task of the priest is to keep the Poles quiet, stupid and dull-witted.”
Why bring this up in 2015? Simply because the education being supplied to America’s youth parallels what was given to the people conquered by Nazi Germany, even what many living in Germany were provided.
In December 2013, statistics compiled by the 34 member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranked America’s teenagers as follows: 31st in math; 24th in science; and 21st in reading. Each of these rankings was worse than it had been over the preceding three years. Each continues to sink.
So what have the nation’s educrats done to address the continuing slide? They gave America’s students Race to the Top, Outcome Based Education, Goals 2000, and No Child Left Behind. None of those programs helped to reverse the downward trend. Now they have produced Common Core, which is being resisted by many because it, too, will not bring improvement. It will lead even more surely to the kind of uneducated worker bees sought in years past by the Nazi regime.
Education actually is dangerous for utopians or tyrants. An educated individual is a “future enemy” to a would-be totalitarian. On the other hand, he or she poses no threat to free people living in a free country.
To learn more about how America’s education system became such a failure, we recommend reading Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children. Veteran educator Samuel Blumenfeld teamed up with journalist Alex Newman to warn all Americans, especially American parents, about the need for radical change in teaching the young. Without radical change, including removing federal involvement from education (where it has no constitutional authorization), the ratings will sink further and the students coming out of the system will be ill-prepared to revitalize what was once the finest educational system in the entire world.
If you want your children or grandchildren to receive a classical education similar to our Founding Fathers, we highly recommend FreedomProject Education (FPE). An affiliate of The John Birch Society, FPE provides a full Kindergarten to 12th Grade curriculum from top teachers via the Internet. The best part? It’s 100% free of Common Core!
John F. McManus is president of The John Birch Society and publisher of The New American. This column appeared originally at the insideJBS blog and is reprinted here with permission.
