The U.S. public school system was collectivist from the start, as this ongoing series on government education has extensively documented. But as the feds got involved, it quickly went from bad to worse, with the slow and steady decline in education turning into a precipitous collapse.
The U.S. government bears a big part of the blame. And there should be no doubt that it was deliberate, experts and former insiders tell The Epoch Times.
Because the U.S. Constitution delegated absolutely no power over education to the federal government—and because the 10th Amendment specifically reserves all non-delegated powers to the states or the people—it wasn’t easy for the federal camel’s nose to get under the tent. Indeed, it took almost two centuries for Washington to get seriously involved in public schools.
But communists worked diligently toward that goal for decades. In his 1932 book, “Toward Soviet America,” Communist Party USA leader William Z. Foster boldly outlined the agenda for his fellow revolutionaries. The goal: A U.S. Department of Education that would eventually replace patriotism and Christianity in school with communism and globalism.
“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 the National Department of Education and its state and local branches,” Foster declared, an idea that was almost unthinkable to Americans of the day.
He also outlined what this anticipated U.S. Department of Education would do once in charge of schools.
“The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology,” he said. “The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism, and the general ethics of the new Socialist society.”
Federal Involvement Begins
Aside from a few insignificant offices to collect statistics over the years, and Congress recommending Bibles printed by Robert Aitken of Philadelphia “for use in the schools” in the late 1700s, the feds played virtually no role whatsoever in education in America.Indeed, it wasn’t until the 1960s, long after the government school system created by collectivists had started destroying traditional education, that the federal government took its first major steps into education.
Well-educated Americans would have instantly recognized the absurdity of the ruling. After all, when the First Amendment was written and ratified, most of the states had established churches. The idea that this amendment, designed to prevent a national religion, was supposed to prohibit states and communities from having prayer or Bibles in schools, would have been laughed at even in the 1940s or ‘50s.
But by the ‘60s, public education had already been in place for generations, dumbing down Americans and erasing their understanding of history to the point that such an outlandish anti-constitutional ruling became feasible.
Not long after that rogue court ruling, Congress—almost certainly emboldened by the high court’s flagrant constitutional intrusions into state and local education—launched the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson under the guise of “helping” states to “educate” all “disadvantaged” students, this statute opened up the floodgates of federal funding to K-12 public schools.
As the old cliché goes, with federal funding comes federal control. And in exchange for federal taxpayer money, first released under ESEA, schools were forced to accept a growing array of federal regulations. At this point, the feds have effectively nationalized the public school system; globalizing it is the next frontier.
Once the camel’s nose was under the tent, it didn’t take long for the entire smelly beast to shove its way in. The relatively new U.S. Department of Education, which has centralized control over education in an unprecedented manner, has also played a crucial role in weaponizing America’s public education system against individual liberty.
With the birth of the actual department, it sealed the deal.
By the time the U.S. Department of Education was established, Congress’s investigative committees charged with exposing communists and preventing infiltration of the federal government had long since been disbanded. As such, it’s difficult to determine how many actual communists worked within the department.
Whistleblower From Belly of the Beast
From the start, using grants and other means, this unconstitutional behemoth began working to bring all education in the United States under federal control. Worse than that, it worked to systematically dumb down the American people and transform the values of children, according to whistleblower Charlotte Iserbyt, who served as a senior policy adviser on education in the Reagan administration.All of it was in line with what the mass-murdering Soviet regime was doing. Indeed, from its earliest days, the U.S. Department of Education was involved in helping to “sovietize” the American public school system, Iserbyt told The Epoch Times in an interview. This agenda has been extremely successful in facilitating the disaster now unfolding in America, she explained.
“When I was there, what I saw, I realized in retrospect, ‘The Nation at Risk’ report was very important,” Iserbyt said, referring to a government report commissioned by Reagan arguing that the U.S. education system threatened America’s future. “They needed that to convince America that we had terrible schools so they could bring in the reforms they wanted.”
Pointing to the Soviet education system and the forces that worked to bring similar schemes to America, Iserbyt is also convinced that communism was the goal. U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel Bell “wanted to put in the communist system,” Iserbyt argued. “I believe he was a communist. If you read in my book the things he said, there is no way to come up with any other conclusion.”
Among other schemes, Iserbyt said Bell was the one responsible for bringing in the methods of “education” advocated by anti-Christian behaviorist B.F. Skinner and Soviet “psychologist” Ivan Pavlov to American schools.
“These Pavlovian and Skinnerian methods destroy free will by treating people like animals to be trained and to give reflexive responses to stimuli,” said Iserbyt. “This is animal training, not education. This is what was being used in communist countries to train and brainwash their populations, not educate them.”
Because of the Department of Education, it’s being used all over America, too.
“The political appointees—most of them were rotten,” said Iserbyt.
To impose the radical “reforms” on America, Iserbyt said she witnessed the Department of Education handing out all manner of enormous grants to fund dangerous quackery, data-gathering, and “efforts to transform the values of children away from traditional Americanism” through education.
The Extremism Continues
Today, even with a Republican president in the White House, the Department of Education remains firmly under collectivist control. During the 2016 presidential election, for example, an analysis by The Hill revealed that 99.7 percent of all political spending by Department of Education bureaucrats went to Hillary Clinton—the highest of any federal department.Among other absurdities, Du Bois claimed the USSR, led by one of the most brutal and murderous regimes in human history, was the “most hopeful country on earth.” During the darkest depths of the “Great Leap Forward,” Du Bois even held multiple meetings with mass-murdering communist Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, and the two were always pictured with smiles on their faces.
These are some of the people who control U.S. education. Under the previous administration, the department, using “stimulus” money to bribe states into compliance, even imposed Obama-backed national standards on the nation—standards that are aligned with international schemes, too. Common Core will be dealt with in a future article in this series.
With around 4,000 employees, the Education Department’s budget has been ballooning since it was created. And that’s despite President Ronald Reagan promising to abolish it, and President Donald Trump saying on the campaign trail, “If we don’t eliminate it completely, we certainly need to cut its power and reach.”
“The left understands that this is where you win or lose—in the schools and in the teaching of the children,” the Kentucky congressman continued.
Massie also noted that under the current administration, there’s a tremendous opportunity to make abolishing the department a bipartisan endeavor. Liberals and progressives, of course, don’t want Trump in charge of their children’s education, any more than conservatives want Obama or Biden running it.
“Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development,” Massie said. “States and local communities are best positioned to shape curricula that meet the needs of their students.”
The group U.S. Parents Involved in Education (USPIE) is working to end all federal involvement in education, too.
“Although this experiment with federal control of local public schools has gone on for half a century now, it has failed,” USPIE President Sheri Few told The Epoch Times. “The U.S. Department of Education has existed because it is about control and not about children.
“We need to stop treating children like guinea pigs in some social engineering laboratory.”
The U.S. Constitution and common sense both demand that the federal government gets out of education. That would be a great step forward. However, as this series has documented, the government education system has been controlled by collectivists from the very beginning. That means getting the feds out, by itself, won’t solve the systemic problems plaguing education in the United States today.
Still, ending all “Fed Ed” may be a decent place to start. And with Trump in the White House, perhaps both sides of the aisle could work together on this, as a first step to much more far-reaching reforms.
