Faith, Family & Freedom: Part 6‏ of 21

Good day friends!

Welcome back.
In the next nine segments we will investigate the third of the four humanistic institutions and its radical ideas that are waging war against America: The educational establishment.
Conservatives and liberals have argued for years over the need and constitutionality of a national student proficiency test that would be administered by the federal government. Some conservatives have even argued in favor of national testing. Throughout the debate, I have maintained that a mandated national test is unconstitutional because the tenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution makes it clear that the federal government has the right to be involved only in certain areas of our lives, and education is not one of them. A national test would lay the groundwork for the infringement of student rights, parental authority, and religious and political freedoms. 

Today we will learn about the father of "modern" American education, his Outcome-Based philosophy of teaching, and the anti-God mindset that so often accompanies this all too critical professional discipline...

"Faith, Family & Freedom: Our American Values Under Fire"

John Dewey

(1859-1952)

One would hope that the person dubbed “the father of modern American education” would craft a system to preserve the high ideals of Jefferson, Washington, Adams, and other Founding Fathers in the hearts and minds of American children for generations to come. One would hope that. But one would be grievously disappointed.

The most influential education guru in American history was a Fabian Socialist, signer of the Humanist Manifesto I, founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and the president of the League for Industrial Democracy- the American counterpart of the British Fabian Society. As all of the above, John Dewey has wounded America to a degree that few other people have.

Dewey worked hard to refine his socialist pedigree. In 1928, he traveled to Russia to help implement the Karl Marx system of education and then returned to teach at Columbia University as the head of that university’s department of education. Dewey supported the upstart Socialist Society in America while also being an honorary president of the National Education Association. He promoted Secular Humanism in his book, A Common Faith, and was the leading force behind bringing a group of German intellectuals from the “Frankfort School” to America.

The Frankfort School (more on this next week) promulgated the worldview of Friedrich Nietzsche, and with the arrival of the school’s “Pilgrims” in 1933, they set about to implement cultural Marxism in every area of American life under the disguise of political correctness. (I use the term “Pilgrims” to reflect the irony that our original Thanksgiving Pilgrims attempted a form of socialism that resulted in the deaths of so many of their community that they abandoned the idea in deference to pure capitalism after their first year in the New World.) The Frankfort goal was the destruction of Christianity, the creation of chaos, and then the transition from cultural Marxism to traditional Marxism, i.e., socialism/communism.

In his research paper "Political Correctness in Higher Education," T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr., outlines the problem among us:

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Politically Correct assault on the curriculum is that it has occurred at many of America's elite universities. Take, for example, the case of Stanford University, an institution that has long played a leadership role in American higher education. Stanford eliminated its long-standing Western civilization requirement in 1988 and replaced it with a multicultural program known as "Culture, Ideas and Vales." Under this new program, freshman at Stanford can just as easily study Marxist revolutionaries in Central America as they can Plato, Shakespeare or Newton. Because elite institutions such as Stanford set an example for the rest of American higher education, other universities eagerly adopt these devastating assaults on the curriculum. This "trickle-down" effect will have a long-lasting impact on the way future generations of Americans will be educated. One distinguished scholar recently lamented that "higher education is increasingly about acquiring attitudes and opinions that one puts on like a uniform." 

One of Dewey’s most famous quotations sums up his philosophy, now prevalent in America’s education system and curriculum:

There is no God and no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable (unchangeable) truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law, or permanent moral absolutes.

Can you say, “Postmodernism”? The cross-pollination of ideas shared by the radical influencers in this series is obvious.

John Dewey, Karl Marx, Aldous Huxley, B. F. Skinner, and Benjamin Bloom were interested in a student’s academic achievement only if it would in some way benefit the state.  Before a student’s cognitive knowledge could be used to its full potential, the student’s attitudes, values, feelings, and beliefs must conform to that of the state. In his book, My Pedagogic Creed, John Dewey explains:

I believe the true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child’s social activities… I believe that the school is primarily a social institution… The teacher’s business is simply to determine, on the basis of the larger experience and riper wisdom, how the discipline of life shall come to the child… All these questions of the grading of the child and his promotion should be determined by reference to the same standard. Examinations are of use only so far as they test the child’s fitness for social life.

John Dewey and company were interested only in knowing where to place students in the social and economic hierarchy. Tests were to determine a child’s worldview weakness. Once the area of "weakness" is determined, the child’s attitudes, values, feelings and emotions that don’t fit the State’s desired worldview are changed via the curriculum- as Bloom said; to change the student’s fixed beliefs. Those who do not conform are punished by being channeled into dead-end, low-income jobs.

Today's Outcome-Based Education test is used to determine a child's area of weakness, and what the Deweyites (i.e., liberals) wanted, they have successfully accomplished with the help of legislators and liberal judges. As Dr. David Noebel explains in his book, Clergy in the Classroom, humanists have ushered Christianity out the front door and the humanism of John Dewey in through the back door. So if you like where America’s education system is headed, you can thank John Dewey.

Sources:

Henry T. Edmondson III, John Dewey and the Decline of American Education: How the Patron Saint of Schools Has Corrupted Teaching and Learning (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006)

John Dewey, The New Republic, December 5, 1928

William S. Lind, Further Readings on the Frankfort School, Chapter VI (Free Congress Foundation)

Brannon Howse, Grave Influence (Worldview Publishing, 2009)

But if you refuse to serve the Lord, then decide today whom you will serve...  But as for me and my family, we will serve the Lord - Joshua 24:15

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