And if so, it must be, it can only be that that education is initiated, financed, and controlled by parents, not by Karl Marx and the Almighty State; no, nor by anyone far removed from our home, our values, our input, and our right to say, “You’re fired!”
Of course, Marx, and every godless statist there ever was and is, knew the road to their Godless tyranny was lined with schools, colleges, and universities created, funded, and controlled by the state … and the more centralized that control the better.
He also recognized the absolute necessity of an ongoing propaganda and legal campaign against parent controlled models like home schools, church schools, private schools, and small locally funded-locally controlled public schools; and this too: against any and all curricula that defends or promotes God, eternal truth, moral responsibility, the traditional family, limited government, the United States Constitution, the Free Enterprise System, and of course, private property. In short, an ongoing war against the very foundation, tools, weapons, and inspiration of free men.
A Brief Review From the Mouth of Marx and Co.
In 1932 Communist Party USA founder, William Z. Foster, outline in his book Toward Soviet America “the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution.” His target was America’s schools. His strategy:
[S]tudies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and the general ethics of the new Socialist society. Present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy. (2)
There is much to behold in that 1932 statement; and it has all come to pass. Religion and patriotism has been replaced with materialism, internationalism, the ethics of socialism, and the scientific pedagogy. Can anyone doubt it? Certainly John Dewey would concur.
But Foster didn’t stop there. As to those “other features of the bourgeois ideology” that were to be ‘cleansed’ the traditional family topped the list. Recall, if you will, communism founder Karl Marx bragging that he and his comrades would “Abolish the family!” Why? Because the traditional family was the transmission belt of christian and capitalist values. Plain and simple. The traditional family had to go; and with it home schools, private schools, and old-styled public schools where parents were the employers, the curriculum chiefs, the bosses over the neighborhood school. (3)
“The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child … [is] disgusting,” Marx wrote. Marx’s plan? “We destroy the most hallowed of relations when we replace home education with social.” (4)
To help make this a reality, confusion as to who really pays teachers had to be created. Thus in plank ten of the Communist Manifesto Marx called for “Free education for all children in public schools.” (5) This was a ploy – the beginning of a propaganda war in favor of the nonsense that the government, not the parents who are taxed by the government, pays the bill.
To strengthen their nonsensical case the communists and their fellow travelers then worked unceasingly to centralize wherever and whenever possible the paymaster, curriculum, testing, teacher education, and teacher licensing laws. To help bring this about Communist Party Chief Foster envisioned the day when all “the schools, colleges, and universities [would be] coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education.” (6) Why? Because he recognized, as all dedicated Marxists must, the more things appear to flow from the center, the more teachers and principals will look away from parents and toward Big Brother. Likewise, the more parents feel disenfranchised, the more they will tend to shy away from involvement in the public school system.
It’s only natural. It was destined to work. It did.
The U.S. Department of Education came into being in 1980 under President Jimmy Carter. But movement toward a fully empowered department level agency began four decades earlier under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman with the 1941 Lanham Act, the 1944 G.I. Bill, the 1946 George-Barden Act, and the 1950 Impact Aid laws.
With federal education funds now flowing into state, county, and local school district coffers, and federal agencies set up and empowered to administer those funds, the Supreme Court was by 1961 ready to start playing God over parent and child. Classroom prayer had to go, they ruled. The rationale: “that which the federal government subsidizes, it has the right to control.” (7)
The removal of prayer was followed by the removal of God from every textbook and the replacement of the Judeo-Christian ethic with the humanistic, ‘progressive’ ideology of Karl Marx and John Dewey, a viewpoint that would step-by-step tolerate everything and anything in the classroom — anything and everything, that is, but Judeo-Christian values. Needless to say, Communist Party USA founder William Z. Foster called for that hypocritical and hostile approach as well. “Freedom will be established for anti-religious propaganda,” (8) he wrote.
Which brings us up to date. “Christians and Jews: Shut up!” However, “Atheists, agnostics, communists, humanists, adulterers, homosexuals, abortionists, and new to the list, practitioners of Islam: Say whatever you please! Your take on religion and morality — or against them rather — will be in the textbooks and shouted from the house tops! Say Hallelujah! … And, oh, by the way, if any of those old school religious fanatics and constitutionalists criticize anything you have to say or anything that you do, anything mind you, just let us know; we”ll have them prosecuted for hate speech!’
And so it is.
Private christian schools are next. Wrote Foster, “The churches will remain free to continue their services, but their special tax and other privileges will be liquidated. Their buildings will revert to the State. Religious schools will be abolished and organized religious training for minors prohibited.” (9)
One thinks of the University of California’s recent rejection of high school credit from schools that study history, literature and science from a christian perspective. One thinks of the N.E.A’s opposition to school vouchers because “85 percent of private schools are religious” and because such a groundswell of students turning to religion “would only encourage economic, racial, ethnic, and religious stratification in our society.” (10) You see, only fully trained, dutifully certified, under-Big-Brother’s-thumb public school teachers can unify and bring peace on earth!
A far cry from the educational goal Horace Mann expressed in a speech published by the N.E.A. in its 1941 “American Citizens Handbook,” wherein Mann called for “an order of teachers, wise, benevolent, [and] filled with Christian enthusiasm.” (11) But then again, Mann was a European socialist too who was smart enough to soften his often vicious antagonism for homeschools, church schools, and private schools, by appealing to and promising to uphold the Judeo-Christian values then prevalent in America, by offering, I suppose, a heaven on earth, and this to get that socialist camel’s nose in the door. He and his camel got their way. We all know what happened next.
But what of tomorrow? If we wish to save our kids, and our country, it’s time to reclaim the tent, kick out the camel, and return the schooling of our children to where God and Nature assigned it: to us, to the parents, whether to ingenious little homeschools and private mentors, or to the next best thing, those schools most responsive to us as parents, namely: to church, private, and locally funded and controlled public schools.
It worked before. It can work again.
Steve Farrell is one of the original pundits at Silver Eddy Award Winner, NewsMax.com (1999–2008), associate professor of political economy at George Wythe University, the author of the highly praised inspirational novel “Dark Rose,” and editor in chief of The Moral Liberal.
Footnotes
1. An oft repeated line of John Birch Society founder Robert Welch.
2. Foster, William Z. “Toward Soviet America,” Elgin Publications, Balboa Island, California. 1961 (originally International Publishers, New York, 1932), p. 316.
3. Marx, Karl. Communist Manifesto.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Foster, p. 316.
7. First enunciated in Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111, 131. “It is hardly lack of due process for the Government to regulate that which it subsidizes.”
8. Foster, p. 316.
9. Ibid.
10. See www.nea.org/vouchers/index.html under the subheadings “The Social Case Against Vouchers” and “The Legal Case Against Vouchers.”
11. Morgan, Jay Elmer. The American Citizens Handbook, The National Education Association, Washington, D.C., 1941, p. 254.
