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The Corrupting Of Education In America


"In our dreams we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers of mental learning or of science. We have not to raise from among them authors, editors, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen of whom we have ample supply. " The Country School of Tomorrow Page 6 by Frederick Taylor Gates, John D Rockefeller's Advisor and member of the General Education Board Founded by John D Rockefeller after pledging an additional 180 million after an initial 1 million in 1902

"I should reply that the very recognition Of, and reliance upon, free will in the pupil is the first mistake of the old system and the clear confession of its impotence and futility… The new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the

decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible" Johann Fichte, Addresses To The German Nation Page 20

"Fichte laid it out best when he said education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished" Bertrand Russell, The Impact Of Science On Society Page 66

"Moreover, compulsory military service, too, will thereby be ended, because those who are thus educated are all equally willing to bear arms for their Fatherland" Johann Fichte, Addresses To The German Nation Page 196

"Our constitutions will be made for us ; our alliances and the employment of our fighting forces will be prescribed to us ; a code of law will be given to us ; even justice and judgment and their administration will sometimes be taken from us. For the immediate future we shall be spared the trouble of these matters. It is only of education that no one has thought ; if we are looking for an occupation, let us seize this!" Johann Fichte, Addresses To The German Nation Page 192

"Early discipline is a guarantee against the need in later years of reformation and penal discipline, which are very doubtful, measures, while in a nation so trained there are no poor at all" Johann Fichte, Addresses To The German Nation Page 192

"Hitherto the State has had to do a great deal, and yet has never been able to do enough, for law and police institutions. Convict prisons and reformatories have caused it expense. Finally, the more that was spent on poor-houses, the more they required ; indeed, under the prevailing circumstances, they seemed to be institutions for making people poor. In a State which makes the new education universal, the former will be greatly reduced, the latter will vanish entirely." Johann Fichte, Addresses To The German Nation Page 191

"First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective..... It is for a future scientist to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black… Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the

governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were

generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen" Bertrand Russell, The Impact Of Science On Society Page 65-66

"Not until a generation has passed through the new education can the question be considered, as to what part of the national education shall be entrusted to the home." Johann Fichte, Addresses To The German Nation Page 164

"Mr. Morris: Dr. Dodd, how recently have you been associated with the Communist

Party?

Mrs. Dodd: June 1949.

Mr. Morris: Do you mean you severed your connection with the Communist Party

at that time?

Mrs. Dodd: They severed their connection with me. I had previously tried to find my way out of the Communist Party. In 1949 they formally issued a resolution of expulsion....

Mr. Morris: Dr. Dodd, will you tell us what relationship you bore to the Communist

Party organization while you were the legislative representative for the Teachers’

Union?

Mrs. Dodd: Well, I soon got to know the majority of the people in the top leadership of the Teachers’ Union were Communists, or, at least, were influenced by the Communist organization in the city.

Sen. Homer Ferguson (Mich.): In other words, the steering committee, as I take your testimony, was used for the purpose of steering the teachers along the line that communism desired?

Mrs. Dodd: On political questions, yes.... I would say also on certain educational questions. You take, for instance, the whole question of theory of education, whether it should be progressive education or whether it should be the more formal education. The Communist Party as a whole adopted a line of being for progressive education. And that would be carried on through the steering committee and into the union" Subversive Influence In The Educational Process: Hearings Before The Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary Page 2, 5, 7

"This board [the General Education Board] was authorized to do almost every conceivable

thing which is anywise related to education, from opening a kitchen to establishing a

university, and its power to connect itself with the work of every sort of educational

plant or enterprise conceivable will be especially observed. This power to project its

influence over other corporations is at once the greatest and most dangerous power

it has." The 1917 Congressional Record Of The 64th congress of the United States Vol LIV Published the Following excerpt from a booklet containing articles by Bishop Warren A. Candler, Chancellor of Emory University in Atlanta Page 2831

"In my last article it was suggested that certain astute men, backed by millions of money, were making an effort to capture and control the colleges and universities of the country, especially the South. The movement to which reference is intended is called“ The General Education Board" The 1917 Congressional Record Of The 64th congress of the United States Vol LIV Published the Following excerpt from a booklet containing articles by Bishop Warren A. Candler, Chancellor of Emory University in Atlanta Page 2831

"Even now the Carnegie Corporation is facing protests from parents whose children are exposed to the textbooks financed by the foundation under its “Project Read.” This project provides programmed textbooks for schools, particularly in “culturally deprived areas.”... This writer has gone over these textbooks in the “Reading” series financed by the Carnegie Corporation and authored by M.W. Sullivan, a linguist. These foundation-funded books reveal a fire pattern that amounts to an incitement to the sort of arson and guerilla warfare that took place in Watts, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. On one page in the series we find a torch next to a white porch. The caption reads invitingly, “a torch, a porch.” Further along there is a picture of a man smiling while he holds a torch aloft. The caption beneath it reads: “This man has a t_rch in his hand.” The children are required as an exercise to insert the missing letter to fill in the word torch. The next picture shows the burning torch touching the porch, with a caption, “a torch on a porch.” Thus, the children are led in stages to the final act that suggests itself quite naturally. The picture in the series shows a hand moving the hands of a clock to twenty-five minutes past one, while this same shack is being devoured by flames. The message is plain: an example of a man who deliberately commits the criminal act of setting a home on fire. Tragically, these young children are being indoctrinated with a pattern of anti-social ideas that will completely and violently alienate them from the mainstream of American middle-class values.... Other pictures in the Carnegie-funded supposedly educational texts include a comparison of a flag with a rag, the ransoming of an American soldier in a Chinese prison, a picture that shows people kneeling in a church to say their prayers beside a picture of a horse being taught to kneel in the same way, a reference to a candidate elected to public office as a “ruler,” a picture of a boy stealing a girl’s purse, and another boy throwing pointed darts at a companion whom he uses as target practice. Understandably, the Carnegie-financed books are causing concern to local law-enforcement officials, many of whom have to cope with riot or near-riot conditions. Ellen Morphonios, prosecutor for Florida in its attorney’s office, and a chief of its Criminal Court Division, said recently: “It’s a slap in the face and an insult to every member of the Negro community, saying that the only way to communicate with Negro children is to show a robber or violence. It’s like subliminal advertising. If this isn’t subversive and deliberately done as part of a master plan.… Only a sick mind could have produced it.” Repeated instances of this type of anti-social activity obviously constitute a strong argument for removing the tax-exempt status of these educational foundations, and for curbing their activities by Federal regulations and Congressional oversight." Edith Roosevelt, The Foundation Machine

"And the builder of this new world must be education. Education alone can lay the foundations on which the building is to rest. On this point a kind of consensus has been reached by those who trust the future of international co-operation and those who refuse to believe in it. When the latter go about repeating that to succeed in such a task one would have to change human nature, they do but exaggerate the acknowledged need for a gradual and patient reshaping of the public mind. There is a great work to be achieved, and no men can forward it but those who are well informed as to the conditions and needs of our times, in as much as all countries and all races are concerned. Even the efforts of such men would be in vain unless, in a world of democracy, they were backed by a body of opinion ever growing more enlightened and more powerful. How can a well-prepared élite be raised throughout the world to spread its influence over the masses, who can then support them in their turn? Here we encounter the real problem, and it is essentially a problem of education." John Harley Paul Mantoux foreword to international understanding Page IX

"If you want to influence him at all, you must do more than merely talk to him ; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will." Johann Fichte, Addresses To The German Nation Page 21

The implications for education are clear and imperative: (a) the efficient functioning

of the emerging economy and the full utilization of its potentialities require profound

changes in the attitudes and outlook of the American people, especially the rising

generation—a complete and frank recognition that the old order is passing, that the new

order is emerging" The American Historical Association “Investigation of the Social Studies in the Schools,” 1934 Page 34-35

"During the last decade of the nineteenth century, in England, a group of men devoted to the study of economic questions endeavored to prepare the public mind for broad changes which, in their view, must be effected if social peace is to be preserved. To this end they founded the London School of Economics and Political Science, which today ranks among the most famous institutions of education." John Harley Paul Mantoux foreword to international understanding Page X

"By means of the new education we want to mould the Germans into a corporate body, which shall be stimulated and animated in all its individual members by the same interest." Johann Fichte, Addresses To The German Nation Page 15

"the new education must be able surely and infallibly to mould and determine according to rules the real vital impulses and actions of its pupils." Johann Fichte, Addresses To The German Nation Page 20

"That power to create spontaneously images, which are not simply copies of reality, but can become its prototypes, should be the starting-point for the moulding of the race by means of the new education" Johann Fichte, Addresses To The German Nation Page 24

"The essential feature of the proposed new education, so far as it was described in the last address, consisted in this, that it is the sure and deliberate art of training the pupil to pure morality." Johann Fichte, Addresses To The German Nation Page 36

"Now, of the changes which have been indicated, the first, the change of home, is quite unimportant. Man easily makes himself at home under any sky, and the national characteristic , far from being changed by the place of abode, dominates and changes the latter after its own pattern." Johann Fichte, Addresses To The German Nation Page 54

"The German art of the State understands that it cannot create this spirit by reprimanding adults who are already spoilt by neglect, but only by educating the young, who are still unspoilt" Johann Fichte, Addresses To The German Nation Page 116

"One reason is that all who get through only the universal national education are intended for the working classes, and training them to be good workmen is undoubtedly part of their education." Johann Fichte, Addresses To The German Nation Page 181

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