-Caveat Lector- "I pledge Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the REPUBLIC for which it stands, one Nation under God,indivisible,with liberty and justice for all."
visit my web site at http://www.voicenet.com/~wbacon My ICQ# is 79071904 for a precise list of the powers of the Federal Government linkto: http://www.voicenet.com/~wbacon/Enumerated.html ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 15:49:46 PST From: carl william spitzer iv <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [JBirch] WS>>(1)FedEd: Education for Global Government by Steven Yates Allen Quist, FedEd: The New Federal Curriculum and How It's Enforced. St. Paul, MN: Maple River Education Coali- tion, 2002. Pp. 153. 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 undertak- ing 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 cul- tural heritage is entrusted to a single network of institu- tions, 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 govern- ment 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 suc- cesses 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 omnipo- tent 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 feder- al 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 curricu- lar content to federal educrats, resulting in the New Feder- al 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 Ameri- can 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," remem- ber?) 2. Marc Tucker, Director of the National Center for Educa- tion and the Economy, author of a certain letter ad- dressed to Hillary Clinton you may read here. 3. Lauren Resnick, Co-director of the New Standards Pro- ject. 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 Decla- ration 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 interna- tional 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 anteced- ing 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 cen- tral 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 depend- ent: on government, on an employer, and on groupthink a socialized mass, that is. According to the American tradi- tion, education aims to give individuals knowledge and tools to find their own ways of flourishing in the world. Accord- ing 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 be 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 poten- tially violent extremists. The Tenth Amendment also disap- pears. 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 Indepen- dence (see pp. 56-59). For any concept of individual rights with teeth in it is going to undermine equality, for exam- ple, 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 uncondi- tional 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 govern- ment. 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 jurisdic- tion 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 =85 " 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 condi- tional on the approval of a transnational power left uniden- tified. 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 word- ing 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: =85 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 =85 ] (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 Stan- dards 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 centu- ries. But multicultural education in this sense is not the goal of the multiculturalism evidenced in FedEd. Multicul- turalism 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). ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! 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