dana

http://oregonfamilyrights.com/books/none_dare/chapter3.html
USING AMERICA'S SCHOOLS TO CREATE "A NEW SOCIAL ORDER"


The philosophy of the classroom in this generation will be the philosophy of
politics, government and life in the next. -Abraham Lincoln

UNDERSTANDING what is happening today in America's schools would be
impossible without a knowledge of what radical educators proposed over sixty
years ago. Without a comprehensive overview of how they planned to change
the nation's way of life and culture, few will believe that the "horrible
examples" described and documented in this book could actually be happening.
The goal, which the radical educators spelled out in their writings and
speeches, was using the schools to create "a new social order." By 1934,
they had enough clout and influence to control most teacher training
institutions, the rewriting of many textbooks and the largest organization
of teachers, the National Education Association.
Implementation of their plans in the 60 years since has dramatically changed
America's culture and ways of living and the lives of several generations of
young Americans, many of whom are not now so young.
Known as "progressivists," or "Frontier Thinkers," the reformers were
disciples of John Dewey, head of the prestigious Teachers College at
Columbia University in New York. He was the nation's most influential
educator in the first half of the 20th Century. By the 1950s fully 20% of
all American school superintendents and 40% of all teacher college heads had
received advanced degrees under Dewey at Columbia. As an atheist and
socialist, Dewey co-authored the revolutionary, anti-God, Humanist Manifesto
I in 1934.
In the forefront of Dewey's "Frontier Thinkers," as the group called
themselves, were Dr. George Counts, professor of education at Columbia, and
Dr. Harold Rugg. Dewey's theories had been concerned chiefly with teaching
methods. Counts and Rugg, known as "hard progressivists" added the concept
of using the schools as an instrument for "building a new social order."
Harold Rugg concentrated on training teachers and writing teaching materials


A new public mind is to be created. How? Only by creating tens of millions
of new individual minds and welding them into a new social mind. Old
stereotypes must be broken up and new "climates of opinion" formed in the
neighborhoods of America.1
Later in his book, Rugg defined how the schools were to be used to transform
American political and economic institutions and create the new "public
mind" which would accept complete government control of the individual:
....through the schools of the world we shall disseminate a new conception of
government-one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men;
one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of
economic activities in the interest of all people.2
Note that Rugg did not say "a new type of government" but a "new conception
of government." Rugg was proposing that while the outward forms of
government would stay the same its functions and powers would be transformed
and expanded. This could be accomplished, he said, in three ways:
First and foremost, the development of a new philosophy of life and
education which will be fully appropriate to the new social order; second,
the building of an adequate plan for the production of a new race of
educational workers; third, the making of new activities and materials for
the curriculum. 3
He cooperated with George Counts on the first and second phases of the
program while he played a major role in the rewriting of textbooks and
curriculum materials to produce the "new philosophy of life and education."
A CONTROLLED ECONOMY
Dr. Counts made clear that the changes he envisioned would result in:
.... a coordinated, planned and socialized economy.8
Accomplishing such a drastic remaking of America would involve many changes,
Counts admitted. He said:
Changes in our economic system will, of course, require changes in our
ideals.9
Counts saw no wrong in abandoning even the traditional concepts of morality
to achieve his goals. He pointed out in his book, The Soviet Challenge To
America that even in Russia...
....new principles of right and wrong are being forged.10
TEACHERS CHALLENGED TO SEIZE POWER
To achieve the "new social order," Counts, in 1932, called for teachers of
the nation to provide the impetus. In his monograph, Dare the School Build a
New Social Order? Counts wrote:
That the teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most
of their conquest is my firm conviction. To the extent that they are
permitted to fashion the curriculum and procedures of the school they will
definitely and positively influence the social attitudes, ideals and
behavior of the coming generation.13
Counts published his Dare the School Build a New Social Order? in 1932. Some
would say, "That's an interesting bit of ancient history. We're living over
65 years later." That's true, of course, but Counts' monograph is still used
in training teachers and administrators today. For example, the widely used
philosophy of education text, Philosophical Foundations Of Education, by
Howard Ozman and Samuel Craver reprints key parts of Counts' monograph
including the call for teachers to reach for power quoted above. 14
GET CONTROL OF THE NEA TEACHERS UNION
In "reaching for power" the "Frontier Thinkers" moved in two directions as
Rugg and Counts advocated. They rewrote the textbooks and in his call for
teachers to grab for power, Counts said:
Through powerful organizations they might at last reach the public
conscience and come to exercise a larger measure of control over the schools
than hitherto.
Counts and his fellow "Frontier Thinkers" in their grab for power gained the
prestige of the largest professional teachers organization. They captured
the top jobs and control of the National Education Association. At the 72nd
annual meeting of the NEA in Washington, D.C. in July 1934, Dr. Willard
Givens, then a California school superintendent, in a report entitled,
Education for a New America, said:
We are convinced that we stand today at the verge of a great culture...But
to achieve these things many drastic changes must be made. A dying
laissez-faire must be completely destroyed, and all of us, including the
owners, must be subjected to a large degree of social control.15
A year after delivering this call for destruction of free enterprise and
individual freedom (laissez-faire), Givens was named executive secretary of
the NEA, a position he held for 17 years until his retirement in 1952. As
will be detailed in Chapter 11, the NEA has become possibly the nation's
most powerful lobbying organization. It doesn't just lobby for more money
for education. In the past decade NEA conventions annually pass a host of
non-education, culture-transforming resolutions supporting abortion,
homosexuality, radical feminism, nuclear disarmament, world government,
etc.16
In the process of using America's schools to create "a new social order,"
John Dewey's progressivist "Frontier Thinkers" also significantly dumbed
down the basic education given to America's young people-the fruits of which
were seen in Chapter 1. By the late 1950s, many voices of alarm were being
heard. One of the most influential was Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of
the nuclear submarine and our modern nuclear Navy. In the late 1950s, just
25 years after the Dewey's "Frontier Thinker" disciples moved to take
control of America's schools, Rickover spoke out, saying:
America is reaping the consequences of the destruction of traditional
education by the Dewey-Kilpatrick experimentalist philosophy...Dewey's ideas
have led to elimination of many academic subjects on the ground that they
would not be useful in life...The student thus receives neither intellectual
training nor the factual knowledge which will help him understand the world
he lives in, or to make well-reasoned decisions in his private life or as a
responsible citizen.17
WHAT DID JOHN DEWEY REALLY BELIEVE?
Who was this man, Dewey, who is so roundly criticized by the renowned Hyman
Rickover, the "father" of the nuclear submarine? Dewey was identified
briefly in the introduction to this chapter. The detrimental impact he had
on American education warrants a further examination of the man and his
philosophies.
John Dewey was an educational philosopher. His experimental philosophies of
education were first tried in a model school at the University of Chicago
before 1900. They were dismal failures. Children learned nothing.
Undismayed, Dewey left Chicago in 1904 and went to Teachers College,
Columbia University, where with the support of major "charitable
foundations," he became the dominant figure and the most influential man in
American education.
Dewey's disciples, under the pretext of improving teaching methods, changed
what was taught to American children.
A CONFIRMED ATHEIST AND SOCIALIST
What did Dewey believe? As an atheist and a socialist, Dewey co-authored the
revolutionary Humanist Manifesto I in 1934. Key points included:
Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not
created....Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has
emerged as a result of a continuous [evolutionary] process....We are
convinced that the time has passed for theism, deism, modernism, and the
several varieties of "new thought"....It follows that there will be no
uniquely religious emotions and attitudes of the kind hitherto associated
with belief in the supernatural.18
Implementing the anti-God principles of humanism in his writing and
teaching, Dewey rejected fixed moral laws and eternal truths and principles.
He adopted pragmatic, evolutionist, relativistic concepts as his guiding
philosophy. Dewey believed that because man's environment is constantly
changing, man also changes constantly. Therefore, Dewey concluded, teaching
children any of the absolutes of morals, government, or ethics was a waste
of time.
He saw the destruction of a child's individualistic traits as the primary
goal of education. Once this was accomplished the youngster would conform or
adjust to whatever society in which he found himself. Ability to "get along
with the group" became the prime measuring stick of a child's educational
"progress." 20Dewey summarized his theories, saying:
Education, therefore, is a process for living and not a preparation for
future living. 21
THE END OF TRADITIONAL EDUCATION
Dewey laid the foundation for the future "destruction of traditional
education" decried by Admiral Rickover when he said:
We violate the child's nature and render difficult the best ethical results
by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of
reading, writing, geography, etc. out of relation to his social life...the
true center of correlation of the school subjects is not science, nor
literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social
activities. 22
INTO THE TEXTBOOKS
The introduction of a 1960s first grade "social studies" curriculum guide
prepared by the Contra Costa County, California schools shows how Dewey's
theories were implemented. It told teachers:
No longer can history, geography and civics, taught separately as in the
recent past, be considered adequate preparation for effective citizenship.
23
Some would ask, "Why not?"
LEVELING DOWN TO THE GROUP'S LEVEL
The group is the nucleus of the progressive system. The long-established
Washington newsletter, Human Events, revealed that to elevate and promote
the "group," Dewey had to destroy individualism and the thinking which
encourages it. The publication quoted Dewey as saying:
Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the
collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent.25
No child is permitted to forge ahead of another. This would hurt the group.
Automatic "social promotions" become the norm. Nobody is left behind because
of poor work. This would disrupt the group. Grading and graded report cards
showing actual percentages earned are frowned upon. Grading promotes
competition. Competition breeds rivalry and encourages students to excel and
rise above the group.
In the 1990s, Dewey's emphasis on the group has resulted in schools adopting
the practice of "cooperative learning."
Rosalie Gordon wrote What's Happened to Our Schools? It was widely
circulated in the early 1960s and said of Dewey's progressive education:
The progressive system has reached all the way down to the lowest grades to
prepare the children of America for their role as the collectivists of the
future...The group-not the individual child-is the quintessence of
progressivism. The child must always be made to feel part of the group. He
must indulge in group thinking, in group activity.26
She explains Dewey's obsession with the group and group activity by saying:
You can't make socialists out of individualists. 27
Dewey was a socialist. 28 At the climax of his career in 1950, he became
honorary national chairman of the League for Industrial Democracy, the
American counterpart of the socialist British Fabian Society. 29 Fabians
believed socialism could be achieved by a process of gradualism rather than
Karl Marx's call for a violent revolution.
CUTTING A CULTURE'S TIES TO THE PAST
Dewey and his disciples wanted to create "a new social order." The first
step in doing so was rewriting textbooks to prevent an upcoming generation
from learning of the traditions, values, heroes and glorious accomplishments
of their nation. The next chapter shows how it has been done.
It was in the area of new materials, textbooks, and teaching aids, that
Dewey disciple Harold Rugg achieved greatest influence. He concentrated on
the job of indoctrinating teachers and preparing teaching materials designed
to "influence the social attitudes, ideals, and behavior of coming
generations."
Completely new textbooks were needed. Rugg wrote them. They were called
"social studies." All traditional presentations of subject matter was
scrapped, and a variety of economic, political, historical, sociological,
and geographical data was lumped into one textbook. With such a
conglomeration of material in one book, the deletion or slanted presentation
of key events, basic truths, facts and theories was not so evident.
MILLIONS DEPRIVED OF THEIR HERITAGE
Five million school children "learned" American political and economic
history and structure in the 1930s from 14 social studies textbooks Rugg
authored.30 He also produced the corresponding teachers' guides, course
outlines, and student workbooks.
So blatant was the downgrading of American heroes and the U.S. Constitution,
so pronounced was the anti-religious bias, so open was the propaganda for
socialistic control of men's lives in Rugg's textbooks that the public
rebelled.31
Rugg's textbooks went too far, too fast for complete public acceptance.
Thus, in 1940, the National Education Association began promoting a set of
"social studies" texts known as the Building America series.33 They were
replacements for the discredited Rugg series. They were widely adopted but a
few years later the Senate Investigating Committee on Education of the
California legislature condemned the NEA-spon-sored series for subtly
playing up Marxism and destroying American traditions.34 The Senate
committee report...
....found among other things that 113 Communist-front organizations had to do
with some of the material in the books and that 50 Communist-front authors
were connected with it. Among the authors are Beatrice and Sidney Webb,
identified with the Fabian Socialist movement in Great Britain.35
Rugg's efforts and the efforts of others who followed his lead had an
effect. A dozen years later young Americans went to Korea to fight. They had
grown up on the books produced by Rugg and others with similar goals.
Thousands of them became POW's. Unlike wars before or since, nearly
one-third collaborated with the communist enemy. In their early months of
captivity nearly four out of every ten died from a new disease Army
psychiatrists called, "Give-Up-Itis."
A very unflattering professional evaluation of the typical American was
written by the Chief of the Chinese Peoples Volunteer Army during the Korean
War. Prepared for his superior in Beijing, it fell into American hands. It
said:
The American soldier has weak loyalty to his family, his community, his
country, his religion, and to his fellow soldier. His concepts of right and
wrong are hazy and ill-formed. Opportunism is easy for him. By himself he
feels frightened and insecure. He underestimates his own worth, his own
strength, and his ability to survive.
There is little understanding of American political history and philosophy,
the federal, state, and community organizations, state and civil rights,
freedom safeguards, checks and balances and how these things allegedly
operate within his own system.
He fails to appreciate the meaning of and the necessity for military or any
other form of organization. 36
It would be easy and reassuring to pass this capsule indictment off as
Communist propaganda. However, without use of physical torture, drugs,
intensive psychological treatment, coercion, or any of the other tactics
usually associated with brainwashing, the Chinese Communists made
collaborators of one-third of all American POWs who fell into their hands
during the Korean War.37
This shocking record so astonished and concerned military authorities that a
full-scale inquiry was conducted. The report of the Presidential Commission
which made the study said pointedly:
The uninformed POW's were up against it. They couldn't answer arguments in
favor of communism with arguments in favor of Americanism because they knew
so little about America.
Fifteen years after Korea many from another generation of poorly schooled
young Americans, including a future President of the United States, ran off
to Canada or used other methods for avoiding service in the U.S. Armed
Forces. They refused to fight communism in Viet Nam.
A NEW GENERATION WORKS IN EVERY AREA
Dewey, Counts, Rugg and most of the other "progres-sivist" culture-changers
are long gone. But now, 65 years later, students shaped and influenced by
the "new education" of Dewey and his "progressivists" control most of the
basic culture-shaping institutions in our society. The press, the radio and
TV and the entertainment industry and the government and its bureaucracy
with trillion dollar budgets no longer promote and uphold traditional
American values. Even many mainline churches, which should be defending
traditional Bible-based values, have broken their ties to an authoritative
Bible and support abortion, radical feminism, ordination of homosexuals,
world government, etc.
Dewey is history, but a new generation of "reformers" is carrying on the war
for a new society-a new way of life. (Their identity, words, and work will
be discussed in Chapters 6-9.) These so-called "reformers" are using Goals
2000, School-to-Work and Outcome-Based Education to create a new way of
living-a new culture for the upcoming generation. They are building on the
"new foundations" Dewey and his followers laid as they used schools and
textbooks to destroy the solid foundations on which America grew great. The
next chapter documents how Dewey and his followers used the schools and
textbooks in the transforming of America- in the creation of "a new social
order."

--
"The Declaration of Independence... [is the] declaratory charter of our
rights, and the rights of man."
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd President of the United States
(1801-1809)

dana

http://oregonfamilyrights.com/books/none_dare/chapter3.html
USING AMERICA'S SCHOOLS TO CREATE "A NEW SOCIAL ORDER"


The philosophy of the classroom in this generation will be the philosophy of
politics, government and life in the next. -Abraham Lincoln

UNDERSTANDING what is happening today in America's schools would be
impossible without a knowledge of what radical educators proposed over sixty
years ago. Without a comprehensive overview of how they planned to change
the nation's way of life and culture, few will believe that the "horrible
examples" described and documented in this book could actually be happening.
The goal, which the radical educators spelled out in their writings and
speeches, was using the schools to create "a new social order." By 1934,
they had enough clout and influence to control most teacher training
institutions, the rewriting of many textbooks and the largest organization
of teachers, the National Education Association.
Implementation of their plans in the 60 years since has dramatically changed
America's culture and ways of living and the lives of several generations of
young Americans, many of whom are not now so young.
Known as "progressivists," or "Frontier Thinkers," the reformers were
disciples of John Dewey, head of the prestigious Teachers College at
Columbia University in New York. He was the nation's most influential
educator in the first half of the 20th Century. By the 1950s fully 20% of
all American school superintendents and 40% of all teacher college heads had
received advanced degrees under Dewey at Columbia. As an atheist and
socialist, Dewey co-authored the revolutionary, anti-God, Humanist Manifesto
I in 1934.
In the forefront of Dewey's "Frontier Thinkers," as the group called
themselves, were Dr. George Counts, professor of education at Columbia, and
Dr. Harold Rugg. Dewey's theories had been concerned chiefly with teaching
methods. Counts and Rugg, known as "hard progressivists" added the concept
of using the schools as an instrument for "building a new social order."
Harold Rugg concentrated on training teachers and writing teaching materials


A new public mind is to be created. How? Only by creating tens of millions
of new individual minds and welding them into a new social mind. Old
stereotypes must be broken up and new "climates of opinion" formed in the
neighborhoods of America.1
Later in his book, Rugg defined how the schools were to be used to transform
American political and economic institutions and create the new "public
mind" which would accept complete government control of the individual:
....through the schools of the world we shall disseminate a new conception of
government-one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men;
one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of
economic activities in the interest of all people.2
Note that Rugg did not say "a new type of government" but a "new conception
of government." Rugg was proposing that while the outward forms of
government would stay the same its functions and powers would be transformed
and expanded. This could be accomplished, he said, in three ways:
First and foremost, the development of a new philosophy of life and
education which will be fully appropriate to the new social order; second,
the building of an adequate plan for the production of a new race of
educational workers; third, the making of new activities and materials for
the curriculum. 3
He cooperated with George Counts on the first and second phases of the
program while he played a major role in the rewriting of textbooks and
curriculum materials to produce the "new philosophy of life and education."
A CONTROLLED ECONOMY
Dr. Counts made clear that the changes he envisioned would result in:
.... a coordinated, planned and socialized economy.8
Accomplishing such a drastic remaking of America would involve many changes,
Counts admitted. He said:
Changes in our economic system will, of course, require changes in our
ideals.9
Counts saw no wrong in abandoning even the traditional concepts of morality
to achieve his goals. He pointed out in his book, The Soviet Challenge To
America that even in Russia...
....new principles of right and wrong are being forged.10
TEACHERS CHALLENGED TO SEIZE POWER
To achieve the "new social order," Counts, in 1932, called for teachers of
the nation to provide the impetus. In his monograph, Dare the School Build a
New Social Order? Counts wrote:
That the teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most
of their conquest is my firm conviction. To the extent that they are
permitted to fashion the curriculum and procedures of the school they will
definitely and positively influence the social attitudes, ideals and
behavior of the coming generation.13
Counts published his Dare the School Build a New Social Order? in 1932. Some
would say, "That's an interesting bit of ancient history. We're living over
65 years later." That's true, of course, but Counts' monograph is still used
in training teachers and administrators today. For example, the widely used
philosophy of education text, Philosophical Foundations Of Education, by
Howard Ozman and Samuel Craver reprints key parts of Counts' monograph
including the call for teachers to reach for power quoted above. 14
GET CONTROL OF THE NEA TEACHERS UNION
In "reaching for power" the "Frontier Thinkers" moved in two directions as
Rugg and Counts advocated. They rewrote the textbooks and in his call for
teachers to grab for power, Counts said:
Through powerful organizations they might at last reach the public
conscience and come to exercise a larger measure of control over the schools
than hitherto.
Counts and his fellow "Frontier Thinkers" in their grab for power gained the
prestige of the largest professional teachers organization. They captured
the top jobs and control of the National Education Association. At the 72nd
annual meeting of the NEA in Washington, D.C. in July 1934, Dr. Willard
Givens, then a California school superintendent, in a report entitled,
Education for a New America, said:
We are convinced that we stand today at the verge of a great culture...But
to achieve these things many drastic changes must be made. A dying
laissez-faire must be completely destroyed, and all of us, including the
owners, must be subjected to a large degree of social control.15
A year after delivering this call for destruction of free enterprise and
individual freedom (laissez-faire), Givens was named executive secretary of
the NEA, a position he held for 17 years until his retirement in 1952. As
will be detailed in Chapter 11, the NEA has become possibly the nation's
most powerful lobbying organization. It doesn't just lobby for more money
for education. In the past decade NEA conventions annually pass a host of
non-education, culture-transforming resolutions supporting abortion,
homosexuality, radical feminism, nuclear disarmament, world government,
etc.16
In the process of using America's schools to create "a new social order,"
John Dewey's progressivist "Frontier Thinkers" also significantly dumbed
down the basic education given to America's young people-the fruits of which
were seen in Chapter 1. By the late 1950s, many voices of alarm were being
heard. One of the most influential was Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of
the nuclear submarine and our modern nuclear Navy. In the late 1950s, just
25 years after the Dewey's "Frontier Thinker" disciples moved to take
control of America's schools, Rickover spoke out, saying:
America is reaping the consequences of the destruction of traditional
education by the Dewey-Kilpatrick experimentalist philosophy...Dewey's ideas
have led to elimination of many academic subjects on the ground that they
would not be useful in life...The student thus receives neither intellectual
training nor the factual knowledge which will help him understand the world
he lives in, or to make well-reasoned decisions in his private life or as a
responsible citizen.17
WHAT DID JOHN DEWEY REALLY BELIEVE?
Who was this man, Dewey, who is so roundly criticized by the renowned Hyman
Rickover, the "father" of the nuclear submarine? Dewey was identified
briefly in the introduction to this chapter. The detrimental impact he had
on American education warrants a further examination of the man and his
philosophies.
John Dewey was an educational philosopher. His experimental philosophies of
education were first tried in a model school at the University of Chicago
before 1900. They were dismal failures. Children learned nothing.
Undismayed, Dewey left Chicago in 1904 and went to Teachers College,
Columbia University, where with the support of major "charitable
foundations," he became the dominant figure and the most influential man in
American education.
Dewey's disciples, under the pretext of improving teaching methods, changed
what was taught to American children.
A CONFIRMED ATHEIST AND SOCIALIST
What did Dewey believe? As an atheist and a socialist, Dewey co-authored the
revolutionary Humanist Manifesto I in 1934. Key points included:
Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not
created....Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has
emerged as a result of a continuous [evolutionary] process....We are
convinced that the time has passed for theism, deism, modernism, and the
several varieties of "new thought"....It follows that there will be no
uniquely religious emotions and attitudes of the kind hitherto associated
with belief in the supernatural.18
Implementing the anti-God principles of humanism in his writing and
teaching, Dewey rejected fixed moral laws and eternal truths and principles.
He adopted pragmatic, evolutionist, relativistic concepts as his guiding
philosophy. Dewey believed that because man's environment is constantly
changing, man also changes constantly. Therefore, Dewey concluded, teaching
children any of the absolutes of morals, government, or ethics was a waste
of time.
He saw the destruction of a child's individualistic traits as the primary
goal of education. Once this was accomplished the youngster would conform or
adjust to whatever society in which he found himself. Ability to "get along
with the group" became the prime measuring stick of a child's educational
"progress." 20Dewey summarized his theories, saying:
Education, therefore, is a process for living and not a preparation for
future living. 21
THE END OF TRADITIONAL EDUCATION
Dewey laid the foundation for the future "destruction of traditional
education" decried by Admiral Rickover when he said:
We violate the child's nature and render difficult the best ethical results
by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of
reading, writing, geography, etc. out of relation to his social life...the
true center of correlation of the school subjects is not science, nor
literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social
activities. 22
INTO THE TEXTBOOKS
The introduction of a 1960s first grade "social studies" curriculum guide
prepared by the Contra Costa County, California schools shows how Dewey's
theories were implemented. It told teachers:
No longer can history, geography and civics, taught separately as in the
recent past, be considered adequate preparation for effective citizenship.
23
Some would ask, "Why not?"
LEVELING DOWN TO THE GROUP'S LEVEL
The group is the nucleus of the progressive system. The long-established
Washington newsletter, Human Events, revealed that to elevate and promote
the "group," Dewey had to destroy individualism and the thinking which
encourages it. The publication quoted Dewey as saying:
Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the
collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent.25
No child is permitted to forge ahead of another. This would hurt the group.
Automatic "social promotions" become the norm. Nobody is left behind because
of poor work. This would disrupt the group. Grading and graded report cards
showing actual percentages earned are frowned upon. Grading promotes
competition. Competition breeds rivalry and encourages students to excel and
rise above the group.
In the 1990s, Dewey's emphasis on the group has resulted in schools adopting
the practice of "cooperative learning."
Rosalie Gordon wrote What's Happened to Our Schools? It was widely
circulated in the early 1960s and said of Dewey's progressive education:
The progressive system has reached all the way down to the lowest grades to
prepare the children of America for their role as the collectivists of the
future...The group-not the individual child-is the quintessence of
progressivism. The child must always be made to feel part of the group. He
must indulge in group thinking, in group activity.26
She explains Dewey's obsession with the group and group activity by saying:
You can't make socialists out of individualists. 27
Dewey was a socialist. 28 At the climax of his career in 1950, he became
honorary national chairman of the League for Industrial Democracy, the
American counterpart of the socialist British Fabian Society. 29 Fabians
believed socialism could be achieved by a process of gradualism rather than
Karl Marx's call for a violent revolution.
CUTTING A CULTURE'S TIES TO THE PAST
Dewey and his disciples wanted to create "a new social order." The first
step in doing so was rewriting textbooks to prevent an upcoming generation
from learning of the traditions, values, heroes and glorious accomplishments
of their nation. The next chapter shows how it has been done.
It was in the area of new materials, textbooks, and teaching aids, that
Dewey disciple Harold Rugg achieved greatest influence. He concentrated on
the job of indoctrinating teachers and preparing teaching materials designed
to "influence the social attitudes, ideals, and behavior of coming
generations."
Completely new textbooks were needed. Rugg wrote them. They were called
"social studies." All traditional presentations of subject matter was
scrapped, and a variety of economic, political, historical, sociological,
and geographical data was lumped into one textbook. With such a
conglomeration of material in one book, the deletion or slanted presentation
of key events, basic truths, facts and theories was not so evident.
MILLIONS DEPRIVED OF THEIR HERITAGE
Five million school children "learned" American political and economic
history and structure in the 1930s from 14 social studies textbooks Rugg
authored.30 He also produced the corresponding teachers' guides, course
outlines, and student workbooks.
So blatant was the downgrading of American heroes and the U.S. Constitution,
so pronounced was the anti-religious bias, so open was the propaganda for
socialistic control of men's lives in Rugg's textbooks that the public
rebelled.31
Rugg's textbooks went too far, too fast for complete public acceptance.
Thus, in 1940, the National Education Association began promoting a set of
"social studies" texts known as the Building America series.33 They were
replacements for the discredited Rugg series. They were widely adopted but a
few years later the Senate Investigating Committee on Education of the
California legislature condemned the NEA-spon-sored series for subtly
playing up Marxism and destroying American traditions.34 The Senate
committee report...
....found among other things that 113 Communist-front organizations had to do
with some of the material in the books and that 50 Communist-front authors
were connected with it. Among the authors are Beatrice and Sidney Webb,
identified with the Fabian Socialist movement in Great Britain.35
Rugg's efforts and the efforts of others who followed his lead had an
effect. A dozen years later young Americans went to Korea to fight. They had
grown up on the books produced by Rugg and others with similar goals.
Thousands of them became POW's. Unlike wars before or since, nearly
one-third collaborated with the communist enemy. In their early months of
captivity nearly four out of every ten died from a new disease Army
psychiatrists called, "Give-Up-Itis."
A very unflattering professional evaluation of the typical American was
written by the Chief of the Chinese Peoples Volunteer Army during the Korean
War. Prepared for his superior in Beijing, it fell into American hands. It
said:
The American soldier has weak loyalty to his family, his community, his
country, his religion, and to his fellow soldier. His concepts of right and
wrong are hazy and ill-formed. Opportunism is easy for him. By himself he
feels frightened and insecure. He underestimates his own worth, his own
strength, and his ability to survive.
There is little understanding of American political history and philosophy,
the federal, state, and community organizations, state and civil rights,
freedom safeguards, checks and balances and how these things allegedly
operate within his own system.
He fails to appreciate the meaning of and the necessity for military or any
other form of organization. 36
It would be easy and reassuring to pass this capsule indictment off as
Communist propaganda. However, without use of physical torture, drugs,
intensive psychological treatment, coercion, or any of the other tactics
usually associated with brainwashing, the Chinese Communists made
collaborators of one-third of all American POWs who fell into their hands
during the Korean War.37
This shocking record so astonished and concerned military authorities that a
full-scale inquiry was conducted. The report of the Presidential Commission
which made the study said pointedly:
The uninformed POW's were up against it. They couldn't answer arguments in
favor of communism with arguments in favor of Americanism because they knew
so little about America.
Fifteen years after Korea many from another generation of poorly schooled
young Americans, including a future President of the United States, ran off
to Canada or used other methods for avoiding service in the U.S. Armed
Forces. They refused to fight communism in Viet Nam.
A NEW GENERATION WORKS IN EVERY AREA
Dewey, Counts, Rugg and most of the other "progres-sivist" culture-changers
are long gone. But now, 65 years later, students shaped and influenced by
the "new education" of Dewey and his "progressivists" control most of the
basic culture-shaping institutions in our society. The press, the radio and
TV and the entertainment industry and the government and its bureaucracy
with trillion dollar budgets no longer promote and uphold traditional
American values. Even many mainline churches, which should be defending
traditional Bible-based values, have broken their ties to an authoritative
Bible and support abortion, radical feminism, ordination of homosexuals,
world government, etc.
Dewey is history, but a new generation of "reformers" is carrying on the war
for a new society-a new way of life. (Their identity, words, and work will
be discussed in Chapters 6-9.) These so-called "reformers" are using Goals
2000, School-to-Work and Outcome-Based Education to create a new way of
living-a new culture for the upcoming generation. They are building on the
"new foundations" Dewey and his followers laid as they used schools and
textbooks to destroy the solid foundations on which America grew great. The
next chapter documents how Dewey and his followers used the schools and
textbooks in the transforming of America- in the creation of "a new social
order."

--
"The Declaration of Independence... [is the] declaratory charter of our
rights, and the rights of man."
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd President of the United States
(1801-1809)

dana

http://oregonfamilyrights.com/books/none_dare/chapter3.html
USING AMERICA'S SCHOOLS TO CREATE "A NEW SOCIAL ORDER"


The philosophy of the classroom in this generation will be the philosophy of
politics, government and life in the next. -Abraham Lincoln

UNDERSTANDING what is happening today in America's schools would be
impossible without a knowledge of what radical educators proposed over sixty
years ago. Without a comprehensive overview of how they planned to change
the nation's way of life and culture, few will believe that the "horrible
examples" described and documented in this book could actually be happening.
The goal, which the radical educators spelled out in their writings and
speeches, was using the schools to create "a new social order." By 1934,
they had enough clout and influence to control most teacher training
institutions, the rewriting of many textbooks and the largest organization
of teachers, the National Education Association.
Implementation of their plans in the 60 years since has dramatically changed
America's culture and ways of living and the lives of several generations of
young Americans, many of whom are not now so young.
Known as "progressivists," or "Frontier Thinkers," the reformers were
disciples of John Dewey, head of the prestigious Teachers College at
Columbia University in New York. He was the nation's most influential
educator in the first half of the 20th Century. By the 1950s fully 20% of
all American school superintendents and 40% of all teacher college heads had
received advanced degrees under Dewey at Columbia. As an atheist and
socialist, Dewey co-authored the revolutionary, anti-God, Humanist Manifesto
I in 1934.
In the forefront of Dewey's "Frontier Thinkers," as the group called
themselves, were Dr. George Counts, professor of education at Columbia, and
Dr. Harold Rugg. Dewey's theories had been concerned chiefly with teaching
methods. Counts and Rugg, known as "hard progressivists" added the concept
of using the schools as an instrument for "building a new social order."
Harold Rugg concentrated on training teachers and writing teaching materials


A new public mind is to be created. How? Only by creating tens of millions
of new individual minds and welding them into a new social mind. Old
stereotypes must be broken up and new "climates of opinion" formed in the
neighborhoods of America.1
Later in his book, Rugg defined how the schools were to be used to transform
American political and economic institutions and create the new "public
mind" which would accept complete government control of the individual:
....through the schools of the world we shall disseminate a new conception of
government-one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men;
one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of
economic activities in the interest of all people.2
Note that Rugg did not say "a new type of government" but a "new conception
of government." Rugg was proposing that while the outward forms of
government would stay the same its functions and powers would be transformed
and expanded. This could be accomplished, he said, in three ways:
First and foremost, the development of a new philosophy of life and
education which will be fully appropriate to the new social order; second,
the building of an adequate plan for the production of a new race of
educational workers; third, the making of new activities and materials for
the curriculum. 3
He cooperated with George Counts on the first and second phases of the
program while he played a major role in the rewriting of textbooks and
curriculum materials to produce the "new philosophy of life and education."
A CONTROLLED ECONOMY
Dr. Counts made clear that the changes he envisioned would result in:
.... a coordinated, planned and socialized economy.8
Accomplishing such a drastic remaking of America would involve many changes,
Counts admitted. He said:
Changes in our economic system will, of course, require changes in our
ideals.9
Counts saw no wrong in abandoning even the traditional concepts of morality
to achieve his goals. He pointed out in his book, The Soviet Challenge To
America that even in Russia...
....new principles of right and wrong are being forged.10
TEACHERS CHALLENGED TO SEIZE POWER
To achieve the "new social order," Counts, in 1932, called for teachers of
the nation to provide the impetus. In his monograph, Dare the School Build a
New Social Order? Counts wrote:
That the teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most
of their conquest is my firm conviction. To the extent that they are
permitted to fashion the curriculum and procedures of the school they will
definitely and positively influence the social attitudes, ideals and
behavior of the coming generation.13
Counts published his Dare the School Build a New Social Order? in 1932. Some
would say, "That's an interesting bit of ancient history. We're living over
65 years later." That's true, of course, but Counts' monograph is still used
in training teachers and administrators today. For example, the widely used
philosophy of education text, Philosophical Foundations Of Education, by
Howard Ozman and Samuel Craver reprints key parts of Counts' monograph
including the call for teachers to reach for power quoted above. 14
GET CONTROL OF THE NEA TEACHERS UNION
In "reaching for power" the "Frontier Thinkers" moved in two directions as
Rugg and Counts advocated. They rewrote the textbooks and in his call for
teachers to grab for power, Counts said:
Through powerful organizations they might at last reach the public
conscience and come to exercise a larger measure of control over the schools
than hitherto.
Counts and his fellow "Frontier Thinkers" in their grab for power gained the
prestige of the largest professional teachers organization. They captured
the top jobs and control of the National Education Association. At the 72nd
annual meeting of the NEA in Washington, D.C. in July 1934, Dr. Willard
Givens, then a California school superintendent, in a report entitled,
Education for a New America, said:
We are convinced that we stand today at the verge of a great culture...But
to achieve these things many drastic changes must be made. A dying
laissez-faire must be completely destroyed, and all of us, including the
owners, must be subjected to a large degree of social control.15
A year after delivering this call for destruction of free enterprise and
individual freedom (laissez-faire), Givens was named executive secretary of
the NEA, a position he held for 17 years until his retirement in 1952. As
will be detailed in Chapter 11, the NEA has become possibly the nation's
most powerful lobbying organization. It doesn't just lobby for more money
for education. In the past decade NEA conventions annually pass a host of
non-education, culture-transforming resolutions supporting abortion,
homosexuality, radical feminism, nuclear disarmament, world government,
etc.16
In the process of using America's schools to create "a new social order,"
John Dewey's progressivist "Frontier Thinkers" also significantly dumbed
down the basic education given to America's young people-the fruits of which
were seen in Chapter 1. By the late 1950s, many voices of alarm were being
heard. One of the most influential was Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of
the nuclear submarine and our modern nuclear Navy. In the late 1950s, just
25 years after the Dewey's "Frontier Thinker" disciples moved to take
control of America's schools, Rickover spoke out, saying:
America is reaping the consequences of the destruction of traditional
education by the Dewey-Kilpatrick experimentalist philosophy...Dewey's ideas
have led to elimination of many academic subjects on the ground that they
would not be useful in life...The student thus receives neither intellectual
training nor the factual knowledge which will help him understand the world
he lives in, or to make well-reasoned decisions in his private life or as a
responsible citizen.17
WHAT DID JOHN DEWEY REALLY BELIEVE?
Who was this man, Dewey, who is so roundly criticized by the renowned Hyman
Rickover, the "father" of the nuclear submarine? Dewey was identified
briefly in the introduction to this chapter. The detrimental impact he had
on American education warrants a further examination of the man and his
philosophies.
John Dewey was an educational philosopher. His experimental philosophies of
education were first tried in a model school at the University of Chicago
before 1900. They were dismal failures. Children learned nothing.
Undismayed, Dewey left Chicago in 1904 and went to Teachers College,
Columbia University, where with the support of major "charitable
foundations," he became the dominant figure and the most influential man in
American education.
Dewey's disciples, under the pretext of improving teaching methods, changed
what was taught to American children.
A CONFIRMED ATHEIST AND SOCIALIST
What did Dewey believe? As an atheist and a socialist, Dewey co-authored the
revolutionary Humanist Manifesto I in 1934. Key points included:
Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not
created....Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has
emerged as a result of a continuous [evolutionary] process....We are
convinced that the time has passed for theism, deism, modernism, and the
several varieties of "new thought"....It follows that there will be no
uniquely religious emotions and attitudes of the kind hitherto associated
with belief in the supernatural.18
Implementing the anti-God principles of humanism in his writing and
teaching, Dewey rejected fixed moral laws and eternal truths and principles.
He adopted pragmatic, evolutionist, relativistic concepts as his guiding
philosophy. Dewey believed that because man's environment is constantly
changing, man also changes constantly. Therefore, Dewey concluded, teaching
children any of the absolutes of morals, government, or ethics was a waste
of time.
He saw the destruction of a child's individualistic traits as the primary
goal of education. Once this was accomplished the youngster would conform or
adjust to whatever society in which he found himself. Ability to "get along
with the group" became the prime measuring stick of a child's educational
"progress." 20Dewey summarized his theories, saying:
Education, therefore, is a process for living and not a preparation for
future living. 21
THE END OF TRADITIONAL EDUCATION
Dewey laid the foundation for the future "destruction of traditional
education" decried by Admiral Rickover when he said:
We violate the child's nature and render difficult the best ethical results
by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of
reading, writing, geography, etc. out of relation to his social life...the
true center of correlation of the school subjects is not science, nor
literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social
activities. 22
INTO THE TEXTBOOKS
The introduction of a 1960s first grade "social studies" curriculum guide
prepared by the Contra Costa County, California schools shows how Dewey's
theories were implemented. It told teachers:
No longer can history, geography and civics, taught separately as in the
recent past, be considered adequate preparation for effective citizenship.
23
Some would ask, "Why not?"
LEVELING DOWN TO THE GROUP'S LEVEL
The group is the nucleus of the progressive system. The long-established
Washington newsletter, Human Events, revealed that to elevate and promote
the "group," Dewey had to destroy individualism and the thinking which
encourages it. The publication quoted Dewey as saying:
Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the
collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent.25
No child is permitted to forge ahead of another. This would hurt the group.
Automatic "social promotions" become the norm. Nobody is left behind because
of poor work. This would disrupt the group. Grading and graded report cards
showing actual percentages earned are frowned upon. Grading promotes
competition. Competition breeds rivalry and encourages students to excel and
rise above the group.
In the 1990s, Dewey's emphasis on the group has resulted in schools adopting
the practice of "cooperative learning."
Rosalie Gordon wrote What's Happened to Our Schools? It was widely
circulated in the early 1960s and said of Dewey's progressive education:
The progressive system has reached all the way down to the lowest grades to
prepare the children of America for their role as the collectivists of the
future...The group-not the individual child-is the quintessence of
progressivism. The child must always be made to feel part of the group. He
must indulge in group thinking, in group activity.26
She explains Dewey's obsession with the group and group activity by saying:
You can't make socialists out of individualists. 27
Dewey was a socialist. 28 At the climax of his career in 1950, he became
honorary national chairman of the League for Industrial Democracy, the
American counterpart of the socialist British Fabian Society. 29 Fabians
believed socialism could be achieved by a process of gradualism rather than
Karl Marx's call for a violent revolution.
CUTTING A CULTURE'S TIES TO THE PAST
Dewey and his disciples wanted to create "a new social order." The first
step in doing so was rewriting textbooks to prevent an upcoming generation
from learning of the traditions, values, heroes and glorious accomplishments
of their nation. The next chapter shows how it has been done.
It was in the area of new materials, textbooks, and teaching aids, that
Dewey disciple Harold Rugg achieved greatest influence. He concentrated on
the job of indoctrinating teachers and preparing teaching materials designed
to "influence the social attitudes, ideals, and behavior of coming
generations."
Completely new textbooks were needed. Rugg wrote them. They were called
"social studies." All traditional presentations of subject matter was
scrapped, and a variety of economic, political, historical, sociological,
and geographical data was lumped into one textbook. With such a
conglomeration of material in one book, the deletion or slanted presentation
of key events, basic truths, facts and theories was not so evident.
MILLIONS DEPRIVED OF THEIR HERITAGE
Five million school children "learned" American political and economic
history and structure in the 1930s from 14 social studies textbooks Rugg
authored.30 He also produced the corresponding teachers' guides, course
outlines, and student workbooks.
So blatant was the downgrading of American heroes and the U.S. Constitution,
so pronounced was the anti-religious bias, so open was the propaganda for
socialistic control of men's lives in Rugg's textbooks that the public
rebelled.31
Rugg's textbooks went too far, too fast for complete public acceptance.
Thus, in 1940, the National Education Association began promoting a set of
"social studies" texts known as the Building America series.33 They were
replacements for the discredited Rugg series. They were widely adopted but a
few years later the Senate Investigating Committee on Education of the
California legislature condemned the NEA-spon-sored series for subtly
playing up Marxism and destroying American traditions.34 The Senate
committee report...
....found among other things that 113 Communist-front organizations had to do
with some of the material in the books and that 50 Communist-front authors
were connected with it. Among the authors are Beatrice and Sidney Webb,
identified with the Fabian Socialist movement in Great Britain.35
Rugg's efforts and the efforts of others who followed his lead had an
effect. A dozen years later young Americans went to Korea to fight. They had
grown up on the books produced by Rugg and others with similar goals.
Thousands of them became POW's. Unlike wars before or since, nearly
one-third collaborated with the communist enemy. In their early months of
captivity nearly four out of every ten died from a new disease Army
psychiatrists called, "Give-Up-Itis."
A very unflattering professional evaluation of the typical American was
written by the Chief of the Chinese Peoples Volunteer Army during the Korean
War. Prepared for his superior in Beijing, it fell into American hands. It
said:
The American soldier has weak loyalty to his family, his community, his
country, his religion, and to his fellow soldier. His concepts of right and
wrong are hazy and ill-formed. Opportunism is easy for him. By himself he
feels frightened and insecure. He underestimates his own worth, his own
strength, and his ability to survive.
There is little understanding of American political history and philosophy,
the federal, state, and community organizations, state and civil rights,
freedom safeguards, checks and balances and how these things allegedly
operate within his own system.
He fails to appreciate the meaning of and the necessity for military or any
other form of organization. 36
It would be easy and reassuring to pass this capsule indictment off as
Communist propaganda. However, without use of physical torture, drugs,
intensive psychological treatment, coercion, or any of the other tactics
usually associated with brainwashing, the Chinese Communists made
collaborators of one-third of all American POWs who fell into their hands
during the Korean War.37
This shocking record so astonished and concerned military authorities that a
full-scale inquiry was conducted. The report of the Presidential Commission
which made the study said pointedly:
The uninformed POW's were up against it. They couldn't answer arguments in
favor of communism with arguments in favor of Americanism because they knew
so little about America.
Fifteen years after Korea many from another generation of poorly schooled
young Americans, including a future President of the United States, ran off
to Canada or used other methods for avoiding service in the U.S. Armed
Forces. They refused to fight communism in Viet Nam.
A NEW GENERATION WORKS IN EVERY AREA
Dewey, Counts, Rugg and most of the other "progres-sivist" culture-changers
are long gone. But now, 65 years later, students shaped and influenced by
the "new education" of Dewey and his "progressivists" control most of the
basic culture-shaping institutions in our society. The press, the radio and
TV and the entertainment industry and the government and its bureaucracy
with trillion dollar budgets no longer promote and uphold traditional
American values. Even many mainline churches, which should be defending
traditional Bible-based values, have broken their ties to an authoritative
Bible and support abortion, radical feminism, ordination of homosexuals,
world government, etc.
Dewey is history, but a new generation of "reformers" is carrying on the war
for a new society-a new way of life. (Their identity, words, and work will
be discussed in Chapters 6-9.) These so-called "reformers" are using Goals
2000, School-to-Work and Outcome-Based Education to create a new way of
living-a new culture for the upcoming generation. They are building on the
"new foundations" Dewey and his followers laid as they used schools and
textbooks to destroy the solid foundations on which America grew great. The
next chapter documents how Dewey and his followers used the schools and
textbooks in the transforming of America- in the creation of "a new social
order."

--
"The Declaration of Independence... [is the] declaratory charter of our
rights, and the rights of man."
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd President of the United States
(1801-1809)