The Unseen Hand - Ralph Epperson




Education

Education is an important tool for training children in the knowledge of the past. The Bible, in Proverbs 22:6, tells why this is so: "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it."

The Communist Party has also decided that education is important to the furthering of their philosophy. Education became one of their concerns in the United States when they adopted the following as a party slogan in 1919: "Give us one generation of small children to train to manhood and womanhood and we will set up the Bolshevist form of the Soviet Government."

Even Hitler of the National Socialist Party in Germany sensed the importance of education. In a speech delivered in 1939, he proclaimed: "When an opponent declares: 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already. What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'"

Earlier, in 1937, he told the German people: "This New Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing."

This dedication to the training of the young in the ways of the collectivist was confirmed in 1932 when William Z. Foster, then National Chairman of the Communist Party, U.S.A., wrote a book entitled Toward a Soviet America in which he observed: "Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following: the schools, colleges and universities will be coordinated and grouped under a National Department of Education and its state and local branches. The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of bourgeois ideology."

Foster had aligned himself with the teachings of Karl Marx who wrote this plank in the Communist Manifesto to assist the Communists in communizing the "most advanced countries:"

10. Free education for all

Marx, like Hitler, Lenin, and the Communist Party, U.S.A., realized that, if they could control the education of the young, they could control the economic and social life the young would live under, and if all believed the same things, there would be no opposition to the state.

This was confirmed by Bertrand Russell who wrote about an educator, Johann Fichte, who, Russell claimed: "laid down that education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable . . . of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished."

Russell went on to explain elsewhere: "Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine from a very early age to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves to be happy, because the government will tell them that it is so."

The new pattern of using the schools to mold the character the government wants has been furthered by a national union of school teachers, the National Education Association, (the NEA.) In one of their reports, entitled "Education for the 70's," the NEA wrote:

"Schools will become clinics whose purpose is to provide individualized, psycho-social treatment for the student, and teachers must become psycho-social therapists.

"This will include biochemical and psychological mediation of learning, as drugs are introduced experimentally to improve in the learner such qualities as personality, concentration and memory.

"Children are to become the objects of experimentation."

Such "experimentation" on children today includes the use of the drug Ritalin to improve the behavior of certain of the students.

But it wasn't always this way.

The Americans did not turn their children over to the state to be educated by them in the beginning.

In fact, the original schools in America were private, basically Christian schools where the children were taught by the parents or by teachers hired by the parents. The original textbook was the Bible, and all expenses were paid for by the parents who wished their children to be taught as the parents wished.

Even America's founding fathers feared for the safety of their children by keeping the original government from the education of the young.

James Madison, for one, voiced his opposition to the use of government to teach children: "If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare. . . they may appoint teachers in every State. . . . The powers of Congress would subvert the very foundation, the very nature of the limited government established by the people of America."

But even then there were forces at work designing state or national educational plans for the American people. The first law of such a nature was passed in 1642 by the Massachusetts legislature which required parents to teach their children to read the English language and to teach the principles of religion.

This law was followed by another in 1647 requiring cities of over 50 householders in population to teach chilren to read and write. Those communities with over 100 families or householders had to set up a grammar school, the first public schools in the United States.

Thomas Jefferson, certainly a man of mixed principles, submitted a bill to the Virginia legislature in 1779 that would have established a compulsory statewide public school system, but the Virginians were not accepting his proposal and refused to vote for the bill.

But the remainder of the states, with the exception of Massachusetts, continued allowing the parents to teach their children without laws and public schools.

There were those who persisted in their efforts to involve the federal (or state) government in the process of educating the children of the nation. One of these was the "father of modem socialism," Robert Owen.

Mr. Owen, a supporter of the voluntary method of proving that socialism would work, started a special school for the children of the mill workers at his socialist experiment known as New Lanark, Scotland. He started the education of these children at the age of one, but his attempts to teach socialism to the children of his workers failed when his socialist experiment failed.

Mr. Owen came to the United States and in 1825 started another socialist experiment, this time in New Harmony, Indiana. He called it "the focus of enlightened atheism."

Owen, who believed that man's character had been "deformed by religious brainwashing," once again started his school for the children of the millworkers, and once again, in 1826, the experiment failed.

The great lesson learned by Owens and his followers was that education had to precede the creation of a socialist society. In other words, the American people were not yet ready to accept socialism, and from that moment on, they decided that they would promote national public education as the preliminary step to socialism. The Owenites realized that the children had to be separated from their parents so that they could be taught the merits of the socialist system. The educational process started as soon as possible—age two was suggested—after they were removed from their parents. Owen realized that the parents were the primary force in teaching children the values of the society, and this practice had to cease if socialism was to succeed in the United States.

In 1829, one of Owens' supporters stated: "The great object was to get rid of Christianity and to convert our churches into halls of science. The plan was to establish. . .national schools from which all religion was to be excluded, in which nothing was to be taught but such knowledge as is verifiable by the senses, and to which all parents were to be compelled by law to send their children "

It was in 1829 that the "Owenites went underground and organized their activities nationwide in the form of a secret society in order to attain their goal of universal public education."

Whether or not it was due to the efforts of the Owenite supporters or because of the efforts of others, the state of Massachusetts created the Board of Education and appointed Horace Mann as the first Secretary of the Board in 1837, only eight years later.

Mr. Mann toured the state, continuously preaching the need for public education. His efforts were successful, so successful that he became known as the "father of American public education."

Mann wrote: "What the church has been for medieval man, the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God would be replaced by the concept of the public good."

In March of 1840, a bill was introduced in the Massachusetts legislature to abolish the Board of Education. One of the supporters of the legislation told his fellow legislators:

"The idea of the State controlling education. . . seems . . . a dangerous precedent [that] is greatly to be feared, that any attempt to force all of our schools and all our teachers upon one model would destroy all competition, all emulation, and even the spirit of improvement itself."

The bill was defeated.

Today the critics of public education are saying things like: "The aim of education is no longer to impart facts and knowledge The aim . . . is to change the social values of the child away from values that have traditionally been considered fixed, permanent or absolute."

John Dewey agreed with this assessment when he said that the schools: "Take an active part in determining the social order of the future as the teachers align themselves with the forces making for social control of economic forces."

Dewey started his educational career in 1894 when he was hired at the University of Chicago. It was here that he started his "experimental or laboratory school." He worked here until 1904, when he resigned and moved to the Teacher's College at Columbia University. It was here that he was to have his greatest impact on the field of education.

Dewey apparently never taught the young student himself but concentrated on teaching the teachers. Today, twenty percent of all American school superintendents and forty percent of all teacher college heads have advanced degrees from Columbia where Dewey spent many years as the Department head.

Dewey had the pleasure of teaching four of the five Rockefeller brothers, including David and Nelson. David also went to the University of Chicago to obtain a doctorate degree.

Their grandfather, John D. Rockefeller, started the General Education Board, the forerunner to today's Rockefeller Foundation, as a means of introducing the world of education to the wealthy. The Board's chairman, Frederick T. Gates, wrote: "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 good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. . . . "

Dewey's personal philosophy about atheism, socialism, and evolution had their effect upon the entire campus of Columbia, not just through the school of Education. One student at Columbia, Whittaker Chambers, who later became a member of the Communist Party, wrote this about his student days at the school: "When I entered, I was conservative in my view of life and politics, and I was undergoing a religious experience. By the time I left, entirely by my own choice, I was no longer a conservative and I had no religion."

Dewey's commitment to socialism and communism became more real when, in 1905, the British Fabian Society opened an American branch known as the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. John Dewey was one of its founders. In 1921, the Society changed its name to the League for Industrial Democracy, and announced its purpose as "education for a new social order based on production for use and not for profit." Dewey later became the organization's president.

Later, in the late 1920's, Dewey went to Russia to help organize a Marxist educational system. But even the Russian Communist dictator Joseph Stalin couldn't tolerate Dewey's "progressive education," and Dewey had to return to the United States. Dewey's students in Russia were not so lucky, however, as Stalin banished all of them to Siberia.

Dewey's ideas have been accepted by the American government, however, for in 1969, the Commission of Mental Health and Children issued a report which stated: "The school as the major socializing agency in the community must assume a direct responsibility for the attitudes and values of child development."

In the United States, the family or the church has been the traditional agency for the teaching of the values to the child. It was apparent that the family unit and religious teaching had to be destroyed so that the school could become the new teacher of the values to the child. The Communist Party in 1968 stated the problem precisely: "In carrying the burden of tending for the children, individual mothers bear a responsibility that properly falls on society and government."

The problem for the planners then became one of removing the mother from the home so that the child could be taught by the state. One of the greatest tools that the planners have is inflation, which causes the husband to ask his wife to join in the money-making endeavors of the family. This then poses the additional problem for the parents: how do they tend for the child who is now at home without the mother?

The government then steps forward with the solution to the problem that it created: it offers the struggling family a day care center for the child. And the child becomes the ward of the state at an even earlier age than before.

Others assist the destruction of the family by encouraging the mother to leave the home. The new move to "liberate" the wife from the tedious tasks of homemaking are intended to leave the young child at home without parental supervision. The "women's liberation" movement is sometimes even unwittingly supporting the intentional movement of the wife out of the home.

In addition, the planners also put pressure on those parents who decide to place their children in private schools which do not teach atheism, humanism or evolution. These parents cause the planners many problems, one of which was pointed out by former Harvard University President James B. Conant, who stated:

"I do believe, however, there is some reason to fear lest a dual system of secondary education may in some states, at least, come to threaten the democratic unity provided by our public schools.

"I refer to the desire of some people to increase the scope and number of private schools . . . .

"To my mind, our schools serve all creeds. The greater the portion of our youth who attend independent schools, the greater the threat to our democratic unity."

Mr. Conant apparently didn't explain how the public schools could serve all creeds when in America's public schools today one party has the right to have the schools exclude something that they feel is in violation of their religious or non-religious beliefs. Take, for instance, the deletion of prayer in schools because it offended the atheist Madlyn Murray O'Hair.

The situation that allows someone to remove a teaching from the schools because it offends the values or a religious belief of either the family or an individual was written about by a minister named A.A. Hodge, in 1887:

"It is capable of exact demonstration that, if every party in the state has the right of excluding from the public whatever he does not believe to be true, then he that believes most must give way to him that believes least, and then he that believes least must give way to him that believes absolutely nothing, no matter how small a minority the atheists or the agnostics may be.

"It is self-evident that on this scheme, if it is consistently and persistently carried out in all parts of the country, the United States system of national popular education will be the most efficient and wide instrument for the propagation of Atheism which the world has ever seen."

The government is assisting those who wish to eliminate the option that remains to the objecting parents: the private school. For instance, on May 20, 1979, the Supreme Court struck down legislation that gave parents a tax break should they opt to send their children to a private school, hence requiring those parents to pay for their children's education twice: once to the public schools and then again to the private school.

The next problem for the planners is to decide just when the education of the child should begin.

In 1974, N.E.A. President James Harris urged in an editorial that "money now spent. . . must be quadrupled in order . . . to provide for public education at the age of 3."

The N.E.A.'s Forecast for the 70's indicated that the age that education should start should be moved to an earlier date. They stated: "As non-school, pre-school programs begin to operate, educators will assume a formal responsibility for children when they reach the age of two."

Dr. Robert C. Wood, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the President of the University of Massachusetts, urged that the age be moved even lower: "The state educational system [must] expand its teaching to children between the ages of one and five, because the family is failing to perform its function. Wood said that the family is continuing to fail in its responsibility to prepare children for schools and urged more early nursery schools and day care programs."

Not wishing to be outdone, President Richard Nixon moved the date even further. He "declared the first five years of a child's life to be a period of special and specific federal concern."

It could very well be that those who wish to get the children away from their parents will use the discoveries of an organization called the Educational Resource Services Center. They have concluded that children between the ages of four to six months can learn to read before they can talk or walk.

Parents who believe that their children belong to them had best be concerned about this information before the educators decide that they should start teaching young children to read by taking them away from their parents at the age of four months.

The question of what happens to the parents who refuse to send their children to schools that teach values other than those that they want taught is the next logical question that must be asked.

In the fall of 1970, six children were removed from their parents and placed in a foster home because the parents refused to send them to a public school teaching "sex education" in conflict with their religious beliefs.

In 1972, a father lost his daughter when he refused to allow her to be bussed into what he perceived was a high crime area. The judge fined the father.

And recently, in August of 1981, a pastor's children were forced to go back to the school he had taken them out of because he felt the school was exposing his children to homosexuality and drugs in violation of his religious beliefs.

These actions seem to be in accord with the position taken by German White, an official with the U.S. Office of Child Development who said: "Parents don't mean to be incompetent but they are, and the remedy is federal establishment of acceptable standards of child-raising."

If the parents are thought to be incompetent they then are not capable of bringing up the children, and the state must replace them with state approved parents.

These new parents are called teachers.

These state-approved parents also have two unions. They are called the National Education Association (the NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (the AFT).

The NEA's Executive Secretary for almost twenty years, from 1935, was Willard Givens who publicly stated: "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 [the free-enterprise system] must be completely destroyed, and all of us, including the owners, must be subjected to a large degree of social control."

This union has taken many strong positions in the past, some of which are listed here:

  1. Educate the youth for a global community;
  2. Promote a stronger United Nations;
  3. Promote the Declaration of Interdependence;
  4. Oppose tuition tax credits;
  5. Supports a National Health Plan (socialized medicine);
  6. Opposes any legislation to benefit private schools;
  7. The basics (3 r's, history, civics and geography) should not occupy more than '4th of student's time;
  8. Population control;
  9. Secular Humanism;
  10. Federal day-care centers; and
  11. Increased federal aid and control of education.

In addition to supporting controversial positions, the N.E.A. has opposed the following, amongst others:

  1. Local control of public schools;
  2. Local financing of public schools;
  3. Parental supervision of textbooks;
  4. Taxation programs that remove the obligation for payment of taxes from the homeowner; and
  5. Tuition tax credits for parents who pay for both a public and private education.

In addition, N.E.A. officials take positions that are made public through their various publications. A former N.E.A. president, Katherine Barrett, has said that "the teacher will be the conveyor of values, a philosopher. Teachers no longer will be victims of change; we will be agents of change."

Lenin certainly agreed with this position when he said: "Only by radically remolding the teaching, organization and training of the youth shall we be able to ensure that the efforts of the younger generation will result in the creation of a society that will be unlike the old society, i.e., in the creation of a communist society."

The N.E.A. has an answer for the teachers who figure this out and try to stay within the system to change things. This is the advice for these teachers: "Teachers who conform to the mode are out of place. They might find fulfillment as tap-dance instructors . . . but they damage teaching, children, and themselves by staying in the classroom."

The other teachers' union is called the American Federation of Teachers (the A.F.T.).

This organization received early support from the Communist Party of the United States in May, 1937: "It can be seen from this how important it is to build the American Federation of Teachers," and again: "The task of the Communist Party must be first and foremost to arouse the teachers to class-consciousness and to organize them into the American Federation of Teachers. . . The American Federation of Teachers must concern itself primarily with the immediate problems of the teacher (salary, tenure, academic freedom, etc.) . . . The American Federation of Teachers is now launching a broad legislative campaign for federal aid to education [in 1937]."

The total essence of education and its connection with Humanism was summarized by Charles Francis Potter in his book Humanism, a New Religion: "Education is thus a most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday-schools, meeting for an hour once a week and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching.".

But there is even a more sinister purpose behind education today. This was detailed by Dr. Medford Evans, who wrote that ". . . government schools make it a matter of policy to spend as much money as possible, and impart as little knowledge as possible since spending demonstrates power while keeping the scholars ignorant monopolizes power in the hands of the government insiders.".