Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D.
April 13, 2015
Four years after the look-say "Dick and Jane" basal reading series was introduced, in 1934 CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS (the last of a 17-volume study concerning American education) of the Commission on Social Studies of the American Historical association was published. The work of the Commission was financed ($340,000) by the Carnegie Corporation. Commenting on the document in THE NEW REPUBLIC article "A New Education for A New America" (July 29, 1936), British Socialist Professor Harold Laski remarked that the volume contained "a content of teaching which frankly admits that the age of government control has arrived....For, at bottom, and stripped of its carefully neutral phrases, the report is an educational program for a socialist America."
Two years after Laski wrote this, on March 1, 1938, according to George Mosse's NAZI CULTURE in the chapter "The Key: Education of Youth," under the Nazis (National Socialists), "the textbooks were increasingly National Socialist, the teachers were regimented....The individual states were abolished....The Nazis attempted to unify the school system, as they 'meshed the gears' of all other activities in the Third Reich....Changes in the curriculum brought all schools closer together....Social pressures aided the Nazis in getting rid of the influence of the older generation...." Under Common Core, assessments drive curricula to unify nationally education in America, and school systems' teachers become to a certain extent regimented in preparing students for the assessments (getting correct answers is not enough, but also knowing how), whether in individual classrooms or for the College Boards.
"Getting rid of the influence of the older generation" in the United States was also important for the power elite. And the way to do this was through "critical thinking." Three years after the Nazis began the educational program mentioned above, Edward Glaser authored AN EXPERIMENT IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CRITICAL THINKING (1941). It was one the first books on the subject and followed the psychodrama and sociometry work of Rumanian psychiatrist Jacob Moreno in the early part of the 20th century.
Critical thinking developed into critiquing, which in turn developed into criticizing the values of "the older generation." The purpose was to establish a "generation gap," with the new generation adopting more humanistic than Biblical values.
By the end of World War II, the National Education Association (NEA) was promoting world government. In the NEA JOURNAL (January 1946), Joy Elmer Morgan (editor of the NEA JOURNAL, 1921-1955) wrote "The Teacher and World Government," in which he proclaimed: "In the struggle to establish an adequate world government, the teacher...can do much to prepare the hearts and minds of children for global understanding and cooperation....At the very top of all the agencies which will assure the coming of world government must stand the school, the teacher, and the organized profession."
Similarly two years later, Sir Julian Huxley (first director-general of UNESCO) authored UNESCO: ITS PURPOSE AND ITS PHILOSOPHY (1948), in which he wrote of UNESCO's educational program that it could "stress the ultimate need for world political unity and familiarize all peoples with the implications of the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a world organization...political unification in some sort of world government will be required...."
Of course, if there were to be a world government, something would have to be done to bring capitalist and communist governments together. In 1953 Ford Foundation president H. Rowan Gaither told Norman Dodd (research director for the Congressional Reece Committee) that the foundation was operating under directives from the White House "to the effect that we should make every effort to so alter life in the United States as to make possible a comfortable merger with the Soviet Union."
As mentioned earlier, "Father of Progressive Education" John Dewey very much admired what the Soviets (remember that the second S in USSR stands for Socialist) were doing. He taught at Columbia University from 1905 to 1930, and by the early 1950s, the Deweyites had taken control of Columbia's Teachers College. In A HISTORY OF TEACHERS COLLEGE: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY (1954), Lawrence Cremin et al explained that "the single most powerful education force in the world is at 120th Street and Broadway in New York City. Your children's teachers go there for advanced training....With one hundred thousand alumni, TC has managed to seat about one-third of the presidents and deans now (1953) in office at accredited U.S. teaching training schools. Its graduates make up about twenty percent of all our public school teachers. Over a fourth of the superintendents of schools in the one-hundred sixty-eight U.S. cities with at least fifty thousand population are TC-trained."
� 2015 Dennis Cuddy - All Rights Reserved