On June 27, 1993, there appeared in the London Telegraph a lengthy article about Britain’s secret education establishment. It was revealed that since 1941 this shadowy association, known as the All-Souls Group and representing some of the most powerful people in the world of British education, has been meeting three times a year in an oak-paneled room at Oxford University. The article stated:
Many believe it is here, rather than at the Department of Education that crucial questions about schools are raised. One member, who did not want to be named, said that the group had caused frustration to successive Education Secretaries.
“One of the reasons why Margaret Thatcher got so infuriated with the educational establishment was that it seemed to have a private core which she couldn’t get her teeth into, and half her civil servants seem to be involved,” he said.
Anyone who discloses details of who was present or what was said risks being blackballed. No minutes are kept, no papers or public statements ever emerge, and the membership list has never before been published…. They are protected by Chatham House Rules, which dictate proceedings are off the record….
Membership is by invitation and the criteria are shrouded in mystery…. There are about 50 active members and, once in, few leave.
Does such an exclusive, secretive education establishment exist in the United States?
It does. And that is why President Reagan could not abolish the Department of Education, and why conservatives in the department were pressured out of their positions the moment they started to do anything threatening to the establishment. Who are they in that top controlling group that formulates national educational policy? The top foundation heads such as Ernest Boyer, top professors of education such as John Goodlad, William Spady, and Terrel Bell, and top educational operatives in the state and federal governments. They, and their disciples, are the ones who decide on policy and coordinate its implementation throughout the United States and provide funding for it.
Otherwise, how does one explain the implementation of Outcome-Based Education in state after state as if orchestrated by a central control? How does one explain the widespread use of Whole Language in teaching reading when we know that it produces crippled readers? How does one explain the orchestrated hostility against intensive phonics among educators?
As for the actual formation of an education establishment in America, it seems to have started with a confidential meeting called the Cleveland Conference organized in 1915 by Prof. Charles Judd, head of the University of Chicago School of Education. Judd, who got his Ph.D. at Leipzig under Prof. Wilhelm Wundt, was spearheading the movement to reform education in the psycho-progressive mold. David Tyack, in his book Managers of Virtue writes:
[Judd] had a vision that both the structure of the schools and the curriculum needed radical revision, but that change would take place “in the haphazard fashion that has characterized our school history unless some group gets together and undertakes, in a cooperative way, to coordinate reforms.”
Judd urged the members of the Cleveland Conference to jump into the breach and undertake “the positive and aggressive task of … a detailed reorganization of the materials of instruction in schools of all grades.” One of the most important reforms promoted by Judd was in the teaching of reading. It was his protégé William Scott Gray who produced the Dick and Jane look-say, whole-word reading program that began America’s downward slide into illiteracy.
Among the 19 members who attended the first Cleveland Conference were James R. Angell, a Leipzig alumnus who became president of the University of Chicago and later president of Yale; Leonard Ayres, director of the Russell Sage Foundation; Abraham Flexner of the Rockefeller Foundation; Paul Hanus, director of the Harvard Graduate School of Education; Paul Monroe, founder of the World Federation of Education Associations; Edward L. Thorndike, father of educational psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University; and Ellwood P. Cubberly of Stanford University’s School of Education.
Among others who joined in later years were Lyman Bryson of CBS; John Gardner of the Carnegie Corporation; James Bryant Conant of Harvard; and Ralph Tyler of Stanford, whose pioneering work in psychological testing helped Prof. Benjamin Bloom design outcome-based education. In fact, Bloom’s famous Taxonomy, which is read in all colleges of education, is dedicated to Tyler. David Tyack writes:
Having no constitution, no minutes, no officers save a “factotum,” no by-laws, no “public life,” the conference was described in 1949 as a club whose “sole object is to make it possible for forty or fifty men to meet once a year and talk about whatever they are interested in for ten or a dozen hours in session and an unpredictable number of hours in lobbies and bedrooms.” Members had a chance … to share information about new educational programs or jobs or foundation grants or new government programs or regulations.
And now we know why the education establishment is so unresponsive to parental wishes and why the only realistic recourse for parents is to get their children out of the government schools and educate them at home or in good private schools of their choice.
Incidentally, the Chatham House Rules refer to Chatham House, the home of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the British counterpart to our Council on Foreign Relations. And it was at Oxford where Bill Clinton studied on his Rhodes Scholarship. The scholarships were founded by Cecil Rhodes, who made his fortune in gold and diamond mining in South Africa in the 1880s and formed a secret society in 1891 with an elite membership to promote a world government run by the Anglo-Saxons.
Professor Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton’s mentor at Georgetown University in Washington, wrote a book about that secret society, entitled The Anglo-American Establishment, in which he explained,
The Rhodes Scholarships, established by the terms of Cecil Rhodes’s seventh will, are known to everyone. What is not so widely known is that Rhodes in five previous wills left his fortune to form a secret society, which was to devote itself to the preservation and expansion of the British Empire…. The scholarships were merely a façade to conceal the secret society, or, more accurately, they were to be one of the instruments by which the members of the secret society could carry out his purpose.
The group Rhodes founded was largely instrumental in changing the British Empire into the British Commonwealth of Nations, a forerunner of the New World Order. Rhodes died in 1902, and the country of Rhodesia, named after him, became Zimbabwe.
Meanwhile, many Rhodes scholars in America have managed to achieve high positions in our government. They include J. William Fulbright (1925), U.S. Senator from Arkansas; Daniel J. Boorstin (1934), Librarian of Congress; Walt W. Rostow (1936), National Security Adviser; Byron R. White (1938), Supreme Court Justice; Nicholas Katzenbach (1947), U.S. Attorney General; Stansfield Turner (1947), director of the CIA; Guido Calebresi (1953), dean of Yale Law School; Neil Rudenstine (1956), president of Harvard; Jonathan Kozol (1958), left-wing author and admirer of Fidel Castro; Lester Thurow (1960), liberal economist and Dean of Sloan School at MIT; David Souter (1961), liberal Supreme Court Justice; Richard Lugar (1954), U.S. Senator; Bill Bradley (1965), U.S. Senator; Robert Reich (1968), U.S. Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration; and George Stephanopoulos (1984), Clinton’s White House spokesman.
It would take a book to list all of the Rhodes scholars who have become influential in American society. And that is why we’ve had this unstoppable drift toward the New World Order. Professor Quigley, in his book Tragedy and Hope, explained how both political parties are controlled by the powers that be. That is why Republicans never repeal Democratic liberal programs, and that is why the constitutionalists today are upsetting the schemers at the top. That is why they will pour their venom on those who would limit the government to what our Founders intended. What these constitutionalists represent is what the powers that be fear most: a return to our constitutional Republic.
