Publisher

John F. McManus
M
ost Americans realize that some-
thing is seriously wrong with
the American public school sys-
tem. It is no secret that scores on standard-
ized tests have declined precipitously in
recent decades ; that violence in the schools
has escalated; that the growing emphasis on
sex education, AIDS education, death edu-
cation, environmentalism, political correct-
ness, and multiculturalism has crowded out
the teaching of fundamentals ; that God and
His eternal truths have been expelled from
the classroom; that free love and free living
have too often replaced self-discipline and
respect for God, family , and country; and
that "Johnny" oftentimes does not know
how to read and write, how to add and sub-
tract, how to apply his mind, how to com-
municate effectively, or how to tell right
from wrong.
The Way Things Were
But few Americans realize that the public
school system responsible for this devasta-
tion is alien to our form of government and
to the American way of life. Well into the
19th century, education in this country was
conducted in an atmosphere of free enter-
prise, based on the preferences of the par-
ents. Public schools did not even exist
except for a handful of "common schools"
in New England. Tutors and private school s
- supported by the parents or by churches
or charitable organizations - flourished.
This system of free enterprise education
worked far better than the government
school system in place today, and for far less
money. John Adams remarked in 1765, "A
native of America who cannot read or write
is as rare an appearance . . . as a comet or an
earthquake." The Federalist Papers of 1787
and 1788, originally written as a series of 85
newspaper columns to "sell" the proposed
Constitution to the man on the street, today
offers a reading challenge even to many of
our college graduates.
But the colonial and post-colonial gen-
erations of Americans knew much more
than how to read and write; they also pos-
sessed values that are under attack today -
self-reliance, diligence, respect for author-
ity, perseverance, honesty . But how could it
have been otherwise? Because the parents
controlled the education of their children,
they were able to transmit to their offspring
the same biblically based values they had
grown up with. Those values , and the limi-
tations that were placed on government, en-
abled our forefathers to make Amer ica the
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
greatest experiment in liberty the world has
ever seen.
The Slippery Slope
It was not until 1837, with the establish-
ment of a state board of education in Massa-
chusetts, that public education first became
entrenched on a statewide level. Gradually
the concept of government education spread
through the rest of the United States .
Thus began the slippery slope that has re-
sulted in today's morally and academically
bankrupt public school system. The govern-
ment, after all, cannot teach the religious be-
liefs that provide the foundation for morality
because the government cannot use the
money of all taxpayers to propagate a par-
ticular set of beliefs . Moreover, the govern-
ment will always have a natural tendency to
promote itself - not God, not the family -
as the answer to all of society 's woes.
But today 's perilous situation is exacer-
bated by the fact that conspiratorial forces
recognize in a state-run school system an
opportunity to remold the thinking of gen-
erations of Americans, and they are attempt-
ing to harness that potential to usher in their
new world order.
In this issue of THE NEW AMERICAN, we
take a hard look at what is happening to edu-
cation in America and why. We also look
beyond the classroom to the attack on the
family in general and parental rights in par-
ticular. In the final analysis , state control of
education raises not only the question of
who shall teach but who shall have steward-
ship over the child - the parents or the
state. Make no mistake about it: Unless fed-
eral encroachments are reversed and the
Constitution restored, the state will eventu-
ally replace the family as the most important
institution in the heart and mind of the child.
This issue also points the way to correct
the damage that is being done to our youth
- and that is to separate school from state.
Just imag ine the academic and moral re-
newal that could be achieved simply by al-
lowing parents to spend on private education
the money that is now being squandered on
government schooling. Imagine what could
be accomplished simply by getting the fed-
eral government out of education, a field
where it does not constitutionally belong.
But let's not simply imagine it -let's do
it! To help bring that day closer, we encour-
age you to order extra copies of this issue
(see the cards between pages 54 and 55) and
distribute them widely.
- GARY BENOIT
Editor
Gary Benoit
Managing Editor
David W. Bohon
Senior Editor
William F. Jasper
Washington Editor
William P. Hoar
Contributors
Hilaire du Berrier
Samuel L. Blumenfeld
James J. Drummey
Joseph Farah
G. Edward Griffin
William Norman Grigg
Jane H. Ingraham
Mark D. Isaacs
Robert W. Lee
Neland D. Nobel
Charles E. Rice
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Fr. James Thornton
Art Director
Scott J. Alberts
Typesetting
Steven J. DuBord
Advertising/Circulation
Julie DuFrane, Mgr.
Deborah Paltzer
Research
Thomas R. Eddlem, Dir.
Blythe Weber
NEWAMERICAN
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(ISSN 0885-6540)
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Volume 10, Number 16
NEllfiAMERlCAN
August 8, 1994
What went wrong with education in America? (p. 5)
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR . 1
OVERVIEW 5
It is no secret that public educat ion has been a
miserable failure for years - but why?
EDUCATION
ATTACK ON MORALITY 11
The conspicuous absence of Judeo-Christian values
in our public schools has left the door wide open to
every imaginable perversion
RELIGION 15
While biblical faith is not welcome in the government
classroom, that doesn't mean religion is not taught
ENVIRONMENTAL INDOCTRINATION 17
Militant environmentalists want to conscript our
nation's youth as foot soldiers of the green gestapo
HISTORY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 19
In the early 1900s, a small group of education elites
determined how history is now taught in our public
schools
Cover: Archive Photos
READING23
Whole language teaching methods are depriving
millions of American children the joy of reading
PERSPECTIVE ON THE PAST 25
American educat ion's sad state can be traced to
early progressive colleges and elitist professors
NATIONAL EDUCA TION ASSOCIATION . 27
This largest union in the country seems to take
an active interest in everything except students
OUTCOME-BASED EDUCA TION . 31
The ultimate objective of the architects of aBE is
a dumbed-down, easily managed global workforce
GOALS 2000 . 35
President Clinton's "Educate America Act" is nothing
less than a blueprint to control all education in the U.S.
Johnny can 't read for a very good reason (p. 23)
Should your kids follow this man? (p. 45)
THE FAMILY
CONTROL OF THE FAMIL Y . 37
The welfare state's steady advance has undermined
generatio nal ties crucial to a stable society
THE STATE AS FAMILY 43
Your benevolent government keeps adding "helpful"
programs to get their hands on your children
International childcare (p. 49)
LOYALTY TO THE STATE 45
Educational programs that mobilize students in social
causes have characteristics alarmingly similar to
Hitler's youth programs
INTERNATIONAL CONTROL . 49
Our government is working hand-in-hand with the
United Nations to hand control of our children to that
godless organization
Alternatives to the federal nightmare (p. 55)
THE SOLUTION
EDUCATION AND FREEDOM . 53
For Amer ica to survive, education must become the
domain of family and church, acting together to shape
young men and women who resemble our forbears
PRIVATE AND HOME SCHOOLING . 55
In the midst of the American public education
disaster exists a wonderfully simple alternat ive
EDUCATION RESOURCES . 59
Private and home schoolers have access to an
amazing wealth of resources
HOW THEY VOTED . 65
Our tabulation shows how every U.S. representative
and senator voted on several key education issues
PUBLISHER'S PAGE . 68
If one thing has been demonstrated by our public
schools, it is that government has no business being
involved in education
OVERVIEW William F. Jasper
The State of Our Decline
A postmortem on public education
were used with an ulterior moti ve. The
subtitle of A Nation at Risk was The Im-
perative for Educational Reform, and
the Commission, as well as the educa-
tional establishment that supported it,
had their "reform" agenda all laid out
and ready to offer the newly awakened
American public. Those "reforms" have
been worki ng their way into the schools
for the past decade and are respo nsible
for much of the continuing chaos and
decline. In many cases they have exac-
erbated it.
Nevertheless, A Nation at Risk did
shine a much needed spotlight on the
"dimensions of risk before us." Among
the Commission's findings were these
bleak facts :
"International comparisons of stu-
dent achievement . .. reveal that on 19
academic tests American students were
never first or second and . . . were last
seven times."
"Average achievement of high
school students on most standardized
tests is now lower than 26 years ago
when Sputnik was launched."
"Between 1975 and 1980, remedial
mathematics courses in public 4-year
colleges increased by 72 percent and
NOBODY SHOULD BE SINGLED
OUT BECAUSE OF ~
~ D E M \ PERFORMANCE.
IT'S VERY DAMAGING TO
SELF ESTEEM WE NEED 10
REFORM THE SYSTEM!!
A Look at the Score
Most surveys of the state of Ameri-
can education begin with a genuflection
to A Nation at Risk, the 1983 report of
the National Commission on Excellence
in Education that shocked many Ameri-
cans from complacency with its claim
that "the educational foundations of our
society are being eroded by a rising tide
of mediocrity that threatens our very fu-
ture as a nation and a people." The
claim was true. However, it, and the
repor t's facts that supported that claim,
with all areas of our society that it
threatens to drag our whole civilization
down into the grave with it.
Any honest appraisal of the precipi-
tous academic, social, and moral decline
of our schools over just the past three
decades must admit that this unparal-
leled plunge has been a horrendous di-
saster and one that we cannot sustai n.
Yet if we look at all the current indica-
tors and proj ect the lines down the road
even a couple of years, a nightmare
looms. It is certain that a continuation of
the present course will bring an immi-
nent dissolution and overthrow of our
entire society.
Irreversible Decline
"Education is the most important ex-
penditure we can make in this country,"
says Riley. "I used to say in my state
that whatever we spe nd on it, it's the
right thing to do. But you don' t want to
waste money, you don't want to have
fraud, you don't want to have waste of
any kind."
Is Riley dreaming or living on an-
other planet? Waste and fraud are syn-
onymous with the public education
system, and have been for a long time.
And not just waste and fraud involving
economic resources, but more impor-
tantly, waste and fraud involving - to
use a favorite term of the educationists
- "human resources," i.e. students.
Public education, says Myron Lieber-
man, a nationally prominent educator
who has spent decades in the system
teaching and consulting at all level s, "is
in irreversible and terminal decline."
Unfortunately, the public school system
has become so exte nsively intertwined
"This country, I think, ha s
been plagued with negativ-
ism about education long
enough," U.S. Secretary of Education
Richard Riley declared at a February II ,
1994 news conference after addressing
the annual meeting of the American As-
sociation of School Administrators. "I
think what we can do is get positive
about education - that's number one."
To Riley, "getting positive" appears
to mean ignoring the accelerating im-
plosion of the government school sys-
tem. To Mr. Riley, the former governor
of South Carolina, and his boss, the
former governor of Arkansas, "positive"
appears to mean aggressively and un-
constitutionally expanding the reach
and control of federal bureaucrats over
all aspects of education. "Positive"
means more legi slation, more statist
no strums, and more education fads
marching under the shop-worn banner
of "reform." And, of course, "positive"
means more money - always more
money.
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994 5
I now constitute one-quarter of all math-
ematics courses taught in those institu-
tions. "
"Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT)
demonstrate a virtually unbroken de-
cline from 1963 to 1980."
"Business and military leaders
complain that they are required to spend
millions of dollars on costly remedial
education . . . in such basic skills as read-
ing, writing, spelling, and computation."
Academic Nose Dive
So, after a decade of "reform" in
which a couple trillion more dollars
were "invested" in our schools, where
do we stand academically? According
to test scores and a host of report s, we
were snookered again. By every con-
ceivable measure - academic , socia l,
moral, spiritual, economic - the public
school system remains a colossal di -
saster. Let ' s look at some of the key
"indicators":
Ninety million American adults
cannot write a letter complaining about
a billing error, figure out departure or
arrival times on a bus schedule, fill out
a bank deposit slip, or comprehend in-
structions given to prospective jurors.
Twenty-six percent of U.S. public
school students are in special education
classes . In other countries just one to
three percent are unable to learn in regu-
lar classes.
SAT scores made minuscule gains
but are still barely above record- low
levels, and substantially below scores of
the 1960s. A newly revised (and dumbed-
down) SAT will make future compari-
sons impos sible.
American students spend only
about 41 percent of their school day on
core academic subjects (math, science,
history, Engli sh) and the majority of
their school time on subjects relat ing to
AIDS, environment, driver' s training,
multiculturali sm, consumer affairs, and
family life.
Thirty percent of all college fresh-
men in 1989-90 enrolled in at least one
remedial cour se: 21 percent in remedial
mat h, 16 percent in remedial writing,
and 16 percent in remedial reading.
A 1990 survey of 200 major corpo-
rations found that 22 percent of compa-
nies were teaching reading, 41 percent
were teaching writing, and 31 percent
were teaching computation to their
employees.
Over 25 percent of students drop
6
out of high school and fail to graduate.
The litany of horror stories goes on
and on. Of this much we can be sure: As
a nation, we have been on a nose-dive,
dumb-down course for 30 years; we
cannot continue on this course without
soon becoming "brain dead." Far from
reversing thi s trend, the vaunted "re-
forms, " as we shall see, have usually ac-
celerated the decline.
Social Chaos
As important as academic achieve-
ment is, it is far from being the only -
or even primary - index of school per-
formance. The public schools, goes a
perennial cliche, provide an essential
"s ocializing" function and a cultural
glue that hold us together as a nation .
The facts speak otherwise:
In a national survey of school vio-
lence by the American School Health
Association, 8.8 percent of eighth and
tenth grade students reported being
robbed at school, 19 percent reported
being threatened, and 9.5 percent said
they were attacked.
According to a U.S. Justice Depart-
ment study, 500,000 violent incidents
occurred every month in public second-
ary schools in 1988.
Thousands of public schools have
become prisons, with metal detectors,
their own huge police forces, and drug-
sniffing dogs . Still, thousands of guns,
knives, and other weapons find their
way into schools each year.
Public schools are the "market"
where many kids buy their drugs . Ac-
cording to one survey, 57 percent of
high school drug users said they bought
their illegal substances at school.
Forget simple rules of courtesy and
civility: Foul language, disruptive be-
havior , vandalism, graffiti , littering, and
ignoring or talking back to teachers are
the order of the day in many schools.
However, the chaos is not confi ned to
the school grounds, but spill s out into
society, too. Deaths from suicide in per-
sons aged 15 to 19 more than tripled be-
tween 1960 and 1988, from 3.6 to 11.3
per 100,000. Deaths from homicide in
the same age cohort nearly tripled dur-
ing that period, from 4.0 to 11.7 per
100,000. The number of pregnancies
per thousand girls aged 15 to 19 rose
from 12.6 in 1950 to 31.6 in 1985. The
number of abortions for the same age
group jumped from 15.7 in 1972 to 30.8
in 1985.
In his 1982 book The Disappearance
of Childhood, Neal Postman reminds us
that as recently as 1950 "in all of Amer-
ica, only 170 persons under the age of
15 were arrested for what the FBI calls
serious crime s (such as murder, forcible
rapes, robbery, and aggravated assault)."
That was one in every 250,000, or .0004
percent of the pre- 15-year-olds in the
country. "Between 1950 and 1979 the
rate of serious crime committed by chil-
dren increased 11,000 percent! " Arrests
of juveniles under 18 years of age for
violent offenses increased more than 57
percent between 1983 and 1992 - and
conti nues to skyrocket. From 1983 to
1992, weapons violations among juve-
niles jumped 117 percent, while those
charged with murder or non-negligent
manslaughter rose by 128 percent.
Criminal Educat ion
Still another sad indicator of our de-
scent into anarchy was demon strated in
a Wall Street Journal article of June 16,
1994, "Police Teach Getting Arrested
Safely 101." According to the article, a
high school in Prince George' s County,
Maryland is now having police officers
teach students how to behave when be-
ing arrested. Well, why not? The schools
pass out condoms based on the premise
that students cannot learn to control
their hormones and therefore must learn
to fornicate "safely" whenever the urge
strikes . Obviously one can't "moralize"
to students about avoiding criminal as-
sociations and behavior likely to get
them into trouble; just teach them how
to "safely" comply with police proce -
dures when being arrested for the be-
havior the schools expect of them.
"For well over a cent ury, supporters
of public education in the United States
and the United Kingdom have asserted
that it would reduce crime ," notes My-
ron Lieberman in Public Education: An
Autopsy (1993). '''Open a school, close
a jail' - thi s was a prominent mid-
19th-century rationale for education. "
" In fact ," Lieberman writes, "crime
rates have increased along with the pro-
portion of children educated in public
schools and the duration of their educa-
tion." Further, he observes that "the one
serious effort to study the issue con-
cluded that public education leads to
higher crime rates. " The effort he refers
to, a 1987 study by economist John R.
Lott Jr. for the International Review of
Law and Economics, also found that
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
School Days : They're not quite like you remembered them
"higher levels of totalit ariani sm are as-
sociated with increased expenditures for
schoo ling." Lott not ed that "these re-
sults strongly challenge the presumed
public goods re la t io ns hi p bet ween
schooling and democracy."
Th e positi ve rel ationship bet we en
govern me nt sc hools and increa sing
crime rates has been known for some
time. In 1886, Zachary Montgomery,
who was nominated for U.S. Attorney
General , point ed out that the govern-
I ment school sys tems of the New En-
gla nd sta tes were proving fa ls e the
anti-crime promi ses of
the public school advo-
cates like Horace Mann.
In hi s book, Poi son
Drops in the Federa l
Senate: The School Ques-
tionfrom a Parental and
Non- Secta ria n St and-
point, Montgomery noted
that the 1860 cens us fig-
ures showe d Massachu-
setts, home of Horace
Mann and cradle of the
public school movement,
to have one criminal to
every 649 inhabitants,
wh ile Virgini a, where
education had been left
under parental control ,
had only one criminal to
every 6,566 inhabitants.
Su icide was also mor e
common in the six northeastern states
than in the six mid-Atl antic and south-
ern coastal states - one to every 13,285
versus one to every 56,584. Montgom-
ery attributed the striking differences to
the state-controlled school systems of
the northeast ern states whi ch under-
mined parent al authorit y and famil y in-
fluence while neglecting religious and
moral trainin g.
The publ ic schools are also failing
miserably in their suppose d function of
transmitting to the next generation the
knowledge and understanding requi site
for the survival of the American politi-
cal -economic system. As one example,
Shiller, Boycko, and Korobov reported
in the June 1991 American Economic
Review that acco rding to a survey they
conducted in Moscow and New York
City in 1990, at ti t udes toward free
market sys tems ami principles were re-
ma rk abl y simila r in both co untries.
Unfortunately, the attitudes were not fa-
vorable toward markets in either coun-
THE NEWAMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
try. In his 1989 study of Ameri can vot-
ing habit s (The Unchanging American
Voter), Eri c R.A.N. Smith concl uded:
"The growth of education in the United
States . .. may have done many things,
but it did not contribute much to the
public' s under st anding of politics. In
sum, education is not the key to the
public' s understanding of politics."
Moral Depravity
If the frightful so cial path ol ogies
ramp ant in our schools and society give
cause for alarm, however , the shock ing
moral and spiritual decay should even
more so. Nothing more clearl y shows
the utter depravity of the public educa-
tion system than the unrelenting and in-
cre as ingly militant campaign by it s
leading lights to de-Chri stianize the
schools and purge from them any men-
tion of moral absolut es and eternal veri-
ties . Step by ste p the ca mpaign has
proceeded: prayer , the Bibl e, Christmas
carols, Chri stian holidays, any mention
of God - all have been evicted from
public schoo ls. Our Christian heritage
has been stricken from the textbooks.
But, as we know, nature abhors a
vacuum; and once cleansed of Chri stian
influences, the schools could not possi-
bl y remain neutral. Far from it. They
have been converted almost completely
into temples of humani sm and New Age
pagani sm.
Do we exaggerate? Not in the least .
Even ten years ago, no force on earth
could have, all at once, imposed on our
schools the kinds of vile curricul a and
programs that abound in today' s class-
rooms. Parent s would have revolted and
teac hers would have been arrested for
corrupting the young. But patient gradu-
alism has had its way ; like a cancer, the
most hideous vices have crept into the
schools and spread their mali gnant in-
fluence everywhere.
Consider the following:
Condom di stribution has become
widespread, together with "responsible
sex" programs, whic h are reaching to
eve r lower grades with ever more ex-
plici t and perverse material.
Homosexu ali ty, at
first barely broached in
co nne ction with AIDS
education, is now increas-
ingly pre sented as a le-
gitimate (even preferable)
alternative "lifestyle," or
natural "orienta tion,"
with adult homosexual
ac tivi sts bein g allowed
to pro sel yti ze in the
classroom.
School-based clin-
ics disp en se not only
contraceptives but abor-
tion-referral information.
'" Widespread "values
clarification" and situa-
tf.
tion ethics programs and
psych ol ogical surveys

attempt to undermine the

moral and spiri tual val-
ues taught in the home.
In passing the Northwest Ordinance
of 1787, the American Founding Fathers
pro vided that "religion, moralit y, and
knowl ed ge be ing necessar y to goo d
government and the happ iness of man-
kind , schools and the means of educa-
tion sha ll for ever be enco uraged." It
goes wi thout sayi ng that they would be
aghast at the abominations we have al-
lowed into our schools under the guise
of "education."
Economic Insanity
To add bitt er insult to grave injury,
the financial cost for thi s di sgraceful
mi seducati on co ntinues to rocket into
the stratosphere. Educati on spending ac-
counted for 29 percent of the combined
state and local government expenditures
in the 1991 fisca l year, according to a
recent report by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The study, Government Finances: 1990-
91, revealed that state and local govern-
ments spent a record $ 1.06 trillion in
7
fiscal 1991, an increase of nine percent
over the previous year. Education was
far and away the largest area of spend-
ing, at $309 billion, followed by welfare
at $130 billion , health care at $81 bil-
lion, law enforcement and public safety
at $80 billion , highways at $65 billion,
debt service at $52 billion, and admin-
istration at $48 billion.
University of Rochester economist
Eric Hanushek estimates that annual per
pupil expenditures, adjusted for infla-
tion, rose from about $2,700 to $4,900
from 1965 to 1989. During the same pe-
riod, Peter Passell pointed out in the
New York Times for March 20, 1994,
"Average class size fell from 25 to 18,
while the proportion of teachers with a
master's degree rose from a quarter to
half and median teacher experience
went from 8 to 15 years." Teacher sala-
ries rose steadily between 1982-83 and
1989-90, increasing by an average of
$765 per year above inflation.
But , typical of most government op-
erations, the lion's share of the massive
sums spent on public education never
reaches the classroom; it is eaten up by
the droves of administrative jackals,
who continue to multiply faster than
rabbits. A 1990 study by Fordham Uni-
versity researchers found only 32.3 per-
cent of the $6,107 spent per pupil in
New York City schools actually made it
to the classroom. Likewise, a study of
110 Wisconsin schools by the Wiscon-
sin Policy Research Institute found only
1951
8
33.5 percent of education dollars made
it to the classroom.
New York City has more school su-
pervisors than does the country of
France, and the state of New York has
more than the whole of Europe. Of
course, a huge lobbying force of profes-
sional, full-time leeches has grown up in
Washington and in state capitals to per-
petuate and expand all education pro-
grams. The Committee for Education
Funding (CEF) is a perfect example. A
massive lobbying coalition made up of
dozens of universities and education or-
ganizations - AFL-CIO, American
Federation of Teachers (AFT), Ameri-
can Association of School Administra-
tors , American Council on Education,
Council of Chief State School Officers,
International Reading Association, Na-
tional Education Association, National
Association of Elementary School Prin-
cipals, National School Boards Associa-
tion, etc. - swamps Congress with
"experts" who testify in favor of in-
creased spending.
Economist James L. Payne's study of
testimony before Congress on spending
programs yielded some startling in-
sights . Among his findings were that the
ratio of witnesses in favor to witnesses
opposed to spending programs was 145
to I. Very likely, the same ratio holds
true for education spending, where the
miseducation lobby is always lavishly
represented, but where parents, stu-
dents, and taxpayers seldom are.
Who Killed Education?
By now it should be obvious that the
public education system is totally bank-
rupt - economically, academically, so-
cially, morally, and spiritually. In fact,
it is dead. It is a rotting corpse that
should have been buried long ago. Yet,
like the "living dead" in a grade B hor-
ror movie, it refuses to die, refuses to be
buried. Why? Because a huge self-inter-
ested horde of educrats who profit hand-
somely from the corpse have convinced
a gullible public to keep it on a life-sup-
port system fueled with our tax dollars
and our children.
The education lobby tells us that
great, wondrous changes are in the off-
ing. "Restructuring" and "reform" are in
the air. But the promises are as empty
and deceitful as those that have gone
before. All of the fatuous bromides be-
ing offered - national goals, national
standards, merit pay, magnet schools,
"choice," site-based management, vouch-
ers, outcome-based education, charter
schools, business partnerships, peer re-
view, total quality management - are
pathetic attempts to hide the stinking
corpse. And they are being offered by
the same hucksters who have conned us
so many times before.
The 1983 Nation at Risk report stated:
"If an unfriendly foreign power had at-
tempted to impose on America the me-
diocre educational performance that
exists today, we might well have viewed
it as an act of war. As it stands, we have
allowed this to happen to ourselves.... We
have, in effect , been committing an act
of unthinking, unilateral disarmament."
While it is true that no "foreign
power" has "imposed" our educational
disaster upon us, it is not altogether true
that we have done this to ourselves. A
close examination of the "reforms" of
decades past that produced our present
catastrophe shows that the individuals
and organizations most responsible do
indeed constitute a power "foreign" to
our republic and to Christian civilization.
From its very beginnings in the last
century, the public education movement
was a subversive enterprise lead and
guided by humanists, atheists, socialists,
and utopian communists. Transported
. here from Britain by Robert Owen, the
"father of modern socialism," in the
early 1800s, the idea of state-controlled
schools soon took root among the lib-
eral Unitarians who had seized control
of Harvard. One of the Owenite leaders
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
liThe foundation world is a coordinated,
well-directed system, the purpose of
which is to ensure that the wealth of our
country shall be used to divorce it from
the ideas which brought it into being_"
of the day was the influential writer-edi-
tor-intellectual, Orestes Brownson, who
lat er converted to Catholi ci sm and
turned against the plans of his erstwhile
comrades. According to Brownson:
The great object was to get rid of
Christianity, and to convert our
churches into halls of science. The
plan was not to make open attacks
on religion, although we might be-
labor the cl er gy and bring them
into contempt where we could; but
to est abli sh a system of state - we
sa id national - scho ols, fro m
which all reli gi on was to be ex-
cluded, in which nothing was to be
taught but such
knowledge as is veri-
fiable by the senses,
and to which all par-
ents were to be
compelled by law to
send their children....
Man y years later, in
1932 , the he ad of the
Communi st Part y, USA,
William Z. Fo ster,
would announce that his organization
was committed to the same evil plan. In
his book, Toward a Soviet America, he
stated: " Among the elementary mea-
sures the Ameri can Soviet government
will adopt to further the cultural revolu-
tion are the following: the schools, col-
leges and uni versiti es will be
coordinated and grouped under the Na-
tional Department of Education and its
state and loc al branches. The studies
will be revolutionized, being cleansed
of religious, patriotic, and other features
of the bourgeoi sie ideology. The stu-
dents will be taught on the basi s of
Marxian diale ctical materi alism, inter-
nationali sm, and the general ethics of
the new socialist society."
Thi s communist vision for education
was shared by many of the leading edu-
cationists of the day. Like Foster and
Owen, John Dewey, the "Father of Pro-
gressive Education, " deplored Chri s-
tianity ' s division of humanity into the
saved and unsaved. "I cannot und er -
stand," wrote Dewey in A Common
Faith, "how any realization of the demo-
cratic ideal as a vital moral and spiritual
ideal in human affairs is possible with-
out surrender of the concepti on of the
basic di vis ion to which superna tura l
Christianity is committed."
THE NEWAMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
Dewey' s Fabi an Soci alist colleague
at Columbia University' s Teachers Col-
lege, George S. Counts, wrote in Dare
the Schools Build a New Social Order
( 1932) that "teac hers should deliber-
ately reach for power and then make the
most of their conquest." Toward what
end? They must "influence the social at-
titudes, ideal s and behavior of the com-
ing generation. " "The growth of the
science and technology," said Counts,
"has carri ed us into a new age where ig-
norance must be repl aced by kno wl-
edge, competition by cooperation, trust
in Providence by careful plannin g, and
pri vate capitali sm by some form of so-
cialized economy."
Foundation Funding
But this radical scheme for our schools
could not have been popularized with-
out the aid of some of America 's great
fortunes. The big tax-exempt founda-
tions - Carnegi e, Rockefell er , Ford,
and others - have played a maj or role
in advancing virtually every major sub-
versive influence in educa tion in thi s
century. In 1902, John D. Rockefeller
Jr. set up his General Education Board
(GEB), a pri vate institution funded by
the Rockefeller Foundation, that would
have immense impact on American edu-
cation. What was Rockefell er trying to
accomplish through the GEB? Accord-
ing to the GEB ' s memori al histor y, it
was the "goal of soc ial cont rol. " And
the GEB left no doubt as to who it ex-
pected to be exercising the "social con-
trol. " In the Board' s Occasional Letter,
No.1, GEB Chairman Frederick Gat es
remarked:
In our dreams, we have limitless
resources, and the people yield
themselves with perfect docil ity to
our molding hand. The present edu-
cational conventions fade from our
minds; and, unhampered by tradition,
we work our own good will upon a
grateful and responsive rural folk.
These foundations lavished so much
money onto communist and soc ialist
cau ses that demands were made for
Congress to invest igat e. In 1953, the
Congressional Special Committee to In-
vestigate the Tax-Exempt Foundation s
was establi shed. Norman Dodd was ap-
pointed staff director of the committee.
His extensive investigations led him to
charge: "The foundation world is a co-
ordinated, well -directed sys te m, the
purpose of which is to ensure that the
wealth of our country shall be used to
divorce it from the ideas which brought
it into being. The foundati ons are the big-
gest, single influence in collecti vism."
In a person al intervie w with Ford
Foundation President H.
Rowan Gaither , Dodd
was shocked when Gaith-
er admitted that he oper-
ated the foundation under
directives "to the effect
that we should make ev-
ery effort to so alter life
in the United Stat es as to
make possibl e a com-
fortable merger with the
Soviet Union." Dodd was
equally shocked by revelations in the
minutes of the Carnegie Foundation.
According to the minutes, Carnegie' s
board of trustees determined soon after
World War I that "we must control edu-
cation in the United States."
Th e Carnegi e pl otters, sa id Dodd,
recognized that the task "was too big for
them alone, so they approached the
Rockefeller Foundation with a sugges-
tion that the portion of education which
could be considered domestic be handled
by the Rockefeller Foundation and that
porti on which is internation al should be
handled by the [Carnegie] Endowment. "
The deal was struc k and Ameri can
education has been ravaged by founda-
ti on-financed subversi on ev er since:
evolution, removal of prayer and the
Bible, school consolidat ion, removal of
phonics, sex education, global educa-
tion, textbook subvers ion, teacher
unioni zation, forced busing, and on and
on. And today the same Carnegie-Rock-
efeller-Ford revoluti onaries are promot-
ing fal se solutions - national goal s,
national certification, choice, vouchers,
charter schoo ls, etc. - to "solve" the
cris is they have created. If adopted,
these "solut ions" will compl ete the
revoluti on for the "new soci ali st soci -
ety" envi sioned by Comr ade Foster.
9
ATTACK ON MORALITY
Mind Pollution
D
r. Thomas Sowell , a senior fel-
low at St anford Uni ver sity' s
Hoover Institution, claims that
government schools in America toda y
are carrying on "unrelenting guerrilla
warfare against the traditi onal values of
society and agai nst the ve ry role of
families in making deci sions about their
own children." Sowell is not exaggerat-
ing. More than a deca de ago, The Hu-
manist maga zin e (Janua ry/ Fe bruary
1983) ran an art icle in whi ch John J.
Dunphy, summa CUlII laude graduate of
the Uni versity of Illinoi s-Edwardsville,
bluntly declared that " the battle for
humankind' s future must be waged
and won in the publ ic school class-
room by teachers who correctly per-
ceive their role as the proselytizers of
a new faith." Such teachers, Dunphy
stated, will be "utilizing a class room
instead of a pulpit to convey humanist
values in whatever subject they teach ,
regardless of the educational level -
preschool day care or large state uni-
ver sity. " Classro oms, Dunphy main-
tained, "must and will become an arena
of conflict between the old and the new
- the rottin g corpse of Chri stianity . . .
and the new faith of humani sm...."
Humanism in Action
Educ ati on anal yst Samuel Blumen-
feld contends that school programs sup-
posedly intended to assi st students in
"clarifying" their values are instead en-
ticing stude nts "to di scard the values
and religious beli efs of their families
and create new sets of values reflecting
their own personal desires and leanings,
particul arly those rega rdi ng sex." Many
youngsters, for exa mple, have "been en-
couraged by values clarification to re-
j ect the tr aditi on al Judeo-Chri sti an
prohibitions against sexual per version
and adopt an open and assertive homo-
sexual lifestyle."
Values clarification, Blumenfeld as-
serts, "is humanism in action." One of
its exercises, the lifeboat survival game,
has students decide who must die on an
overcrowded lifeboat so that the others
might li ve. In hi s book The Leaning
Tower of Babel, Richard Mitchell ex-
plains that "the verdict must be ' rel-
THE NEWAMERICAN I AUGUST 8, 1994
evant,' conduci ve to ' the greatest good
for the greatest number,' '' and focus on
"accepted notions of 's ocial useful-
ness. ' . . ." Which mean s that the "chil-
dr en who 'pl ay ' the ga me usuall y
decide to dump an old clergyman , a
man who is supposed to be prepared for
that sor t of thing," whereas a "young
co unt ry-weste rn si nger will be pr e-
served. She has many long years ahead
of her in which to maximi ze her poten-
tial and serve the greatest good by en-
tert aining the greatest number."
Another scenar io, de scribed by
Homosexual activists begin their
indoctrination at the earliest grades
Blumenfeld, has 15 persons alone in a
bomb shelter after a nuclear holocaust.
They have food and other supplies suf-
ficie nt to keep only seve n alive until it
is safe to emerge from the shelter. Each
is delineated by age, race, religion, edu-
cation, profession, and lifest yle , after
'which students are required to deter-
mine which seven deserve to live.
A process that pres sures impression-
able youngsters to make such decisions
based solely on the socia l utility of
those invol ved is trul y Hitleri an in its
impli cations. It tends to bolster support
for such lethal real-world pol ici es as
abortion and eutha nas ia, two of the
stated objectives (along with the "right"
to suicide) of major humanist declara-
tions and manife stos.
Desensitized to Death
Menninger Foundation se nior psy-
chiatrist Dr. Harold M. Voth has noted
the abundance of evidence suggesting
that "children are being scarred" by val-
ues clari fication exercises "that spread
pessimi sm, depression, and a hatred of
life." Likewise, many are being harmed
by instruction in "death education ." As
explained by Samuel Blumenfeld in The
Blumenfeld Education Letter for June
1990, "the purpose of death education is
to ' desensitize' children to death - to
remove or reduce that reason able, ratio-
nal, and useful antipathy to death that
helps us preserve our lives. It is when
children begin to see death as ' friendly'
and unthreatenin g that they begin to
be dr awn into death ' s orbi t and
lured to self-destruction."
Virtuall y every school subj ect is
vulnerable to such death condition-
ing, from readin g and math to shop
and art (where children draw death-re-
lated pictures). Blumenfeld notes that
typicall y, components of the death edu-
cation curri culum entail "questionnaires
del ving into the child's view of death
and dyin g; the wr iti ng of obituaries,
eulogies, epitaphs, and will s; planning
funerals; visits to cemeteries and mor-
tuari es; readin g stories and books about
death; and discussing abortion, euthana-
sia, and suicide. The whys and hows of
suicide are discussed, and suicide notes
are written. In some visits to funeral
homes, children try out coffins; in math
they measure each other for coffins, and
in shop they build model coffi ns. Chil-
dren also st udy the death custo ms of
other cultures and develop a death vo-
cabul ary. In one second grade class in
Lowell , Ma ssachusetts, the children
used the information in an obituary to
work out arithmetic problems. Some
death education exercises include fant a-
sizing about dying."
On June 15, 1994 the Gallup Organi-
zation released a poll indicating that five
percent of American teenagers say they
have attempted suicide and 12 percent
say they have come close to trying it.
The report ed suicide rate for adoles -
11
cent s has tripled since 1950. In Decem-
ber 1991, the Journal of the American
Medical Association reported that school
suicide prevention programs, suppos-
edl y intended to help teens, were instead
increasing depression in teens who had
tried to commit suicide, some of whom
told researchers that "talking about sui-
cide makes some kids more likel y to try
to kill themsel ves."
Rabid envi ronmentalism may also be
contributing to the probl em. Begi nning
in the earliest grades, schoolchildren in
many schools are bein g indoctrinat ed
about the supposed dangers of asbestos
(unsafe classrooms), radon (unsafe base-
ment s at home ), cancer-causing chemi-
cal s (unsafe food), lead (unsafe water) ,
ground-level ozone and carbon monox-
ide (usafe air), etc. Many scientific stud-
ies have confirmed that stress resulting
from continuous, gnawing fear not only
generates the sort of emotional prob-
lems often associated with suicide, but
also erodes the immune system in a way
that opens the door to serious physical
health probl ems as well. Environment al
fear mo ngering ma y be doing more
long-term damage to the physical and
emotional well-being of our schoolc hil-
dren than any alleged environment al
threat s could do.
"Safe Sex"
In their 1968 book The Lessons of
Hi st ory , hi st orians Will and Ar ie l
Durant warned, "No man, however bril-
liant or well-informed, can come in one
lifetime to such fullne ss of understand -
ing as to safely judge and dismi ss the
customs or institutions of his society,
for these are the wisdom of generations
after centuries of experiment in the
laboratory of history. A youth boiling
with hormones will wonder why he
sho uld not gi ve full fr eedom to hi s
sexual desires; and if he is unchecked
by custom, morals or laws, he may ruin
his life before he matures sufficiently to
understand that sex is a river of fire that
must be banked and cooled by a hun-
dred restraints if it is not to consume in
chaos both the individual and the group."
Concerns about teen pregnancy and
AIDS have served as the cat alyst for an
explosion of "s afe sex" cour ses that are
ignoring that crucial lesson of history
and loosening the few restraints that still
exit. They are predicated on the ethi-
cally obtuse propo sition that , whil e it is
best not to rob banks, those who just
12
can't resist should pull ski masks over
their head s to reduce the chance of get-
ting caught. Such courses not onl y con-
done, but in many instances serve to
encourage, premarital sex, homosexual -
ity, and other sex ual experi mentation
and aberration.
The award-winning video Sex, Drugs,
and AIDS, narrat ed by ac t ress Rae
Dawn Chong , has been used in many
junior and senior high schools. Its cen-
tral message is that premari tal sex is
"cool," even expected of adolescents,
Elders has suggested t hat condoms
be given t o children as young as eight
but that "hip" teens will "play it safe"
by using condoms. An emotional inter-
view with a young man whose homo-
sexual younger brother is dying of
AIDS underscor es the point that homo-
sexuality should be viewed as an ac-
cept able alternat ive lifestyle.
So devoted are some public school
sys tems to promot ing homosexualit y
that "National Coming-Out Day" is cel-
ebrated with as much enthus ias m as
graduation day. In Febru ary 1993, the
Massachusetts "Governor's Commi ssion
on Gay and Lesbi an Youth" produced a
report recommendin g, "Learning about
gay and lesbian peopl e, including their
experiences and contributions to soci-
ety, should be integrat ed into all subject
areas" including "lit erature, history, the
arts, and family life."
In New York and Massachusett s,
public school programs supposedly in-
tended to promote "tolerance" for ho-
mosexuality are actually designed to re-
educate children and wrest them away
from the values taught by thei r parent s.
Typical of such efforts was the contro-
versial "Children of the Rainbow" cur -
riculum, which (like the Massachusetts
pro gram) sought to indoctrinate chil-
dren in the "gay ri ghts" ideology by
saturating classroom subjects with pro-
homosexualit y messages. New York
Assembl ywoman Deborah Gli ck , a
open lesbi an who supported the Rain-
bow curriculum, explained, "I think that
the realit y is that most of the parents
themsel ves have tremendous prejudice
and bigotry that have been passed on for
generation s And the reality is that we
as a society must provide a counter-
balance to what kids are obviously
learning at home."
Reaping the Harvest
In 1970, prior to the sex education
and condom craze instigated by the
AIDS scare, two-thirds of all births to
teens between 15 and 19 were within
the confines of marri age. By 1988, the
ratio was reversed, with two-thi rds born
outsi de wedloc k. Ac cording to on e
study, girls using birth control devices
under the guida nce of a Los Angeles
clinic incr ea sed the number of their
sexual encounters by 50 percent. Simi-
larly, psycholo gist Dr. William R. Coul -
son, director of the Research Council on
Ethnopsychology, reported that students
exposed to public school sex_education
programs are 50 percent more sexually
invol ved than students who are not. Ac-
cording to Coul son , the "experienced
kids started teaching the inexperienced.
It never flows from the virgin to the
non-vir gin."
Publi c schools in the District of Co-
lumbia were first in the nation to impl e-
ment kindergarten-through-12th-grade
sex education progr ams beginning in
the late 1950s. They were so "s uccess-
ful" that by 1975 DC became the first
major city in the country to have more
abo rtio ns than li ve births and more
births outside wedlock than within. And
when Dr. Joseph Zanga, chairman of the
Di vi sion of Gen er al Ped iat ric s and
Emergency Care at the Medical College
of Virgini a, surveyed the results of "safe
sex" programs around the country, he
too concluded that they encourage,
rather than prevent , teenage sexual ac-
tivit y. Californi a, for example, intro-
duc ed a "safe sex" curriculum in the
THE NEWAMERICAN I AUGUST 8, 1994
, I
1970s, after which the state's teen preg-
nancy rate soared from close to the na-
tional average to 30 percent above, and
teen abortions tripled. In contrast, teen
pregnancy rate s fell in such states as
South Dakota and Utah after "modern"
sex education classes were replaced
with more traditional tutelage.
In 1986, then-Surgeon General Dr. C.
Everett Koop issued his enormously in-
fluential (and error-laden) report on
AIDS in which, after assuring readers
that "value judgements are absent ," he
urged that sex education begin in "the
lowest grade possible" and include in-
formation on "homosexual rel ati on-
ships." He also fa vor ed ad verti sing
condoms on network television. It has
all come to pass, and current Sur geon
General Joycelyn Elders is now carry-
ing the message to American youth that
sex is a "healthy part of our being,
whether it is homosexual or hetero-
sexual," and has sugges ted that con-
doms be given to children as young as
ei ght. Indeed , the New York Tim es
Magazine for January 30, 1994 reported
that Dr. Elders has a "safe sex" bouquet
(condoms in floral arrangement)
proudly di splayed on her desk , and
claims, in response to critics who have
labeled her the "Condom Queen ," that
if she could "get every young per son
who is engaged in sex to use a condom
in the United State s," she "would wear
a crown with a condom on it!" Yet, as
noted by a 1992 minority report of the
House Select Committee on Children,
Youth and Familie s, condoms not only
"do not change the behavior which put s
teens at risk," but "the evidence shows
that when condoms are used by teenag-
ers the failure rate is higher than in the
general population - as high as 30%."
Condom Conduits
School-based and school-linked health
clinics have also generated their share
of controversy and opposition through-
out the country, primarily because they
serve as conduits for the distribution of
condoms and other birth control de-
vices, abortion referr al information, les-
sons in "safe" sex, and other aspects of
the humanistic agenda favored by such
groups as Planned Parenthood, the most
aggressive advocate of such clinics.
Many such clini cs also undermine pa-
rental rights and responsibility by refus-
ing to let parents know when services
are requested by, and rendered to, their
THE NEWAMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
minor charges. In 1992, for instance,
Di strict of Columbi a Public Health
Commi ssioner Mohammed Akht er an-
nounced that all publi c high school stu-
dent s would be el igible to rec ei ve
condoms fro m school nurses, even
should parent s object by sending a note
from home, and that parent s would not
be notified should one of their children
request a condom. School Superinten-
dent Franklin Smith had initially ruled
that parent al wishes would be honored,
but he was overruled by Commi ssioner
Akhter, who asse rted: "Dr. Smith has
the responsibility for the administration
of the school system, and the principals
and teachers are responsible for the edu-
cation of the children. But we are the
ones responsibl e for the health car e
needs of the children. These are my
clinics. When a child crosses the door
and enters into the nur se' s suite, any
communication between the child and
the nur se is confidenti al. " Which led
syndicated columnist Don Feder to ob-
serve th at it appa rently mean s that
"when a child enters a school clini c, he
sheds parental authority at the door. "
As solutions for the many probl ems
associated with teen pr omi scuity and
sexually transmitted di seases, school
sex education, school-based clinics, and
school-sanctioned condom crusades are
equivalent to fighting fires with blasts
of oxygen.
"Responsible" Drug Abuse
Many school drug programs also ap-
pear to be aggravating, rather than ame-
liorating , the problem they are supposed
to solve. As far back as 1979, education
writer Barbara Morri s documented the
case against school anti-drug programs
which refuse to take a fir m moral
sta nce, but inst ead se rve mainl y to
stimulate curiosity while advertising the
pl easures associa ted with "getti ng
high." One National Institute of Mental
Health publ ication cit ed by Morri s in
her best-selling book, Change Agents in
the Schools, was entitled How to Plan a
Drug Abuse Workshop fo r Teachers.
Used as a model for training teachers, it
asserted that at all grades "a nonmoral-
izin g pr esentati on is essential" and
urged that only "open minded indi vidu-
als, as opposed to those known to have
fi xed or hostil e positi on s [aga inst
drugs], would preferabl y be selected [as
drug education teache rs] except where
inservice training might change an atti-
tude or where an individual is included
as a foil demonstrating the disadvantage
of inflexibilit y."
In the November 1987 Reader 's Di -
gest, Peggy Mann, author of Marijuan a
Alert , reported that the "drug-education
courses offered in our nation ' s schools
too often carry this incredible message:
If yo u do drugs ' res pons ibly,' it ' s
okay." Note that it is the same siren
song sung by the sex educators. One
"educational" filmstrip cited by Mann
extoll ed the medical qualiti es of mari-
juana and the "euphoric feeling of relax-
ation , contentment, inner satisfaction;
the sensations of floatin g beyond real -
ity" induced by the weed. And one of
the three books on dru g abuse most
commonly found in school libraries,
Licit and Illicit Drugs, by Edward M.
Brecher, asserts that those who use mes-
caline (a hallucinatory drug) have found
that its "most spectacular pha se com-
prises the kaleidoscopic play of visual
hallucinations in indescribabl y rich col-
ors ... the ' seeing' of music in color s or
the 'hearing' of a painting in music."
Which led Mann to ask rhetoricall y,
"What adve nturous youngs ter would
not want to try mescaline or LSD" after
reading that?
A quarter-century ago, writing in the
August 1969 issue of Chal cedon Re-
port , noted theologian and scholar Dr.
Rousas 1. Rushdoony observed, in words
as pert inent now as then, "We are get-
ting today what we have paid for: our
public schools are delivering preci sely
the produc t of humanistic education that
they have been asked to deliver. To
deny Chri stian faith a place in educa-
tion, to convert schools into statist agen-
cies, and then to expect anything other
than what we have, is the mark of a
fool."
- R OBERT W. L EE
THE NEW AMERICAN
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13
RELIGION
Suppressing the Faith
1 I
D
r. John Eidsmoe has observed
that "over the past three de-
cades, the U.S. Supreme Court
has interpreted the Establishment Clause
of the First Amendment as prohibiting
various Christian practices in the public
schools. For example, the Court has
prohibited organized prayer led by
teachers at the opening of each class pe-
riod, the reading of the Bible as a daily
classroom devotional exercise, and the
posting of the Ten Commandments in a
public school building."
In the 1971 Lemon v. Kurtzman deci-
sion, the Court created a three-part test
designed to enforce the fallacious con-
cept of "separation of church and state."
That test holds that government policies
must advance a "legitimate secular pur-
pose," must avoid either advancing or
inhibiting religion, and must avoid ex-
cessive "entanglement" of government
and religion. The Lemon case remains
the controlling precedent in matters of
religion in public schools, and the test de-
vised by the court has been used to sup-
press any tremor of religious expression
in public school classrooms and events.
Prayer Police
Raymond Raines, a fourth grade stu-
dent in St. Louis, Missouri, has learned
that even unspoken religious sentiments
are forbidden in some public schools. A
devout Christian, Raymond says a pri-
vate prayer over his lunch every day in
school. On three separate occasions dur-
ing the 1992-93 school year, school of-
ficials warned Raymond to stop his
prayers; on each occasion, the young
"thought criminal" was taken to the
principal's office and placed in deten-
tion for extended periods of time.
On June 27th, the Supreme Court in-
augurated an even more aggressive
campaign against religion in public
schools. In the decision Board of Edu-
cation of Kiryas Joel Village School
District v. Grumet, the Court declared
unconstitutional a special school district
which had been created by the state of
New York on behalf of a village of
Satmar Hasidic Jews. The Satmars are a
devoutly religious sect which avoids
contact with the modern world; children
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
are educated in private, single-sex, reli-
gious schools. However, those schools
have been required by federal law to
provide special services to its handi-
capped students. In 1989, the New York
legislature granted the village its own
school district, which operated a special
school for handicapped children.
This arrangement was ruled unconsti-
tutional by the Supreme Court, which
held that the state legislature had im-
properly conferred a "special favor"
upon the Satmar village by creating the
school district. As dissenting justice
Antonin Scalia observed, the Kiryas
Joel case represents an escalation of the
Court's campaign against religion in the
classroom, as the dispute involved "no
public funding, however slight, to pri-
vate religious schools .... This is unprec-
edented - except that it continues, and
takes to new extremes, a recent tendency
of this Court to turn the Establishment
Clause into a repealer of our Nation's
tradition of religious toleration."
As Dr. Eidsmoe points out, the dis-
abilities inflicted upon religion by the
Supreme Court are not distributed equi-
tably: "Traditional, theistic religions
like Christianity, Orthodox Judaism,
and Islam are very much restricted in
the public arena; but naturalistic reli -
gions like the New Age movement,
witchcraft, Hinduism, paganism, and the
. occult are given much more freedom."
This double standard is sometimes re-
flected in school libraries. Berit Kjos,
author of Your Child and the New Age,
reports, "A California middle school la-
beled an entire library section Witch-
craft. Another section, entitled Religion,
contained books on Buddhism, Hindu-
ism, Native American Spiritism, etc.,
but none on genuine Christianity. Two
books showed how witches supposedly
saved England from Nazi invasion dur-
ing World War II: a coven of witches
'cast a circle' on the coast, raised a 'cone
of power' with their thoughts, then pro-
jected those thoughts against Hitler."
Shamans in the Classroom
Secularist and liberal groups such as
People for the American Way and the
Anti-Defamation League have accused
religious conservatives of conducting
"stealth campaigns" - that is, running
for public office (particularly school
board positions) without disclosing per-
sonal religious beliefs. Leaving aside
the fact that this accusation is a veiled
demand for an unconstitutional reli-
. gious test, the reality is that the stealth
activists of the New Age movement are
much better organized and immeasur-
ably more influential than the forces of
the "religious right."
Scores of activists - including teach-
ers, social workers, and others who
practice various forms of social inter-
vention - attended the Ninth Summer
Institute in the Human Services, held in
July 1993 at the University of Utah
Graduate School of Social Work. Among
the classes offered at that event was a
course entitled "Thinking Like a Moun-
tain: Introduction to Transpersonal Ecol-
ogy." Part lecture, part ritual, the
session was designed to illustrate the
"interconnectedness of nature and all
beings." After reviewing sacred texts,
such as the writings of Norwegian Deep
Ecology author Arne Naess, "Partici-
pants [met] in a natural setting to join
in a ritual fromthe Council of All Beings,
an experimental process being conducted
worldwide, to deepen compassion and
awaken a new global consciousness."
According to the class outline, "Deep
Ecology tells us that the earth is a living
organism whose 'selfness' includes all
species, all systems, whether wind or
mountain, deer or human, tree or stone.
What we do to the earth, we do to our-
selves...." Attendees were promised that
by "listening to our inner voices [as well
as through] movement and ritual," they
could "hear the sounds of the earth cry-
ing." For those with a slightly different
taste in mysticism, the Institute offered
a course entitled "Walking the Sha-
man's Path."
By extending its mandate to include
"conflict resolution," self-esteem pro-
grams, environmental education, and
other areas of affective "learning," the
public school monopoly is expanding
the influence of the shamans in the
classroom.
WILLIAM NORMAN GRIGG
15
ENVIRONMENTAL INDOCTRINATION
Advance of the Gaia Gestapo
D
espite its inadequacies as an
educational institution, the
government (public) school sys-
tem is of great value to those who wish
to mobilize American youth as political
activists. Because foot soldiers are indoc-
trinated rather than educated, programs
designed to conscript youth on behalf of
political causes focus on collective "em-
powerment" rather than on the develop-
ment of the individual intellect. No form
of student activism illustrates this better
than environmental "education."
In 1990, President George Bush signed
into law the National Environmental
Educati on Act, which created the EPA' s
Office of Environmental Education and
appropriated $65 million for five years
of green education programs. In short
order, environmental classes sprouted
across the countryside, many of them
mobilizing youth in preparation for the
1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
That event produced the "Rio Declara-
tion," a porti on of which states, "The
creativity, ideal s and courage of the
youth of the world should be mobil ized
to forge a global partnership in order to
achieve sustainable development.. .."
The phrase "s ustainable de velop-
ment ," which comes so readily to the
lips of UN offi cials, refer s to a regime
in which all human activities are placed
under the scrutiny of global supervisors.
Agenda 2J, the UN blueprint for global
eco-socialism, instructs political leaders
to " mobilize communities through
schools and local health centres so that
children and their parents become effec-
ti ve focal points for sensitization of
communities to environmental issues."
EcoVigilantes
According to the April 30, 1992 issue
of the Wall St ree t Journal , "Public
schools have been addressing polluti on,
recycling and ecology issues ever since
the firs t Earth Day in 1970. But for
nearly two decades, the curriculum gen-
erally remai ned remote.... Much of the
learning was abstract and passive."
Those who were converted in that
firs t wave of eco-indoctrination have
avoided the pitfalls of "passive" educa-
tion, preferring instead to instill in youth
THE NEWAMERICAN I AUGUST 8, 1994
a sense of panic regarding environmen-
tal "cr ises" and a corrosive sense of
moral superiori ty to their less environ-
mentall y correct par ents. Notes the
Journal, "Some children have come to
think of themsel ves as eco-smart and
their parents as eco-idiots."
Writing in the Jul y 11, 1991 New
York Times, journalist Suzanne Slessin
observed, "These vociferous children
are harassing their parents to save water,
forget about the diet soda, keep away
from red meat , abandon fur coats, stop
smoking and shut off the lights." Such
habits are the result of long, careful cul-
ti vation by acnvi sts, notes Slessin:
"Starting in nursery school - and con-
tinuing through high school - children
learn the ways and means of environ-
mental politic s. They get into the habit
of rounding up soda cans and all sorts
of materials into artwork. As soon as
they can read, they sit up in bed at night
and pore through ' Fifty Simple Things
Kids Can Do To Save The Earth.' ...
And thei r science projects focus on sav-
ing the rain forests, rather than discov-
ering the mysteries of electrici ty."
Once impressionabl e students be-
come converted to radical environmen-
talism, many of them become impatient
to share the "good news" with their par-
ents. Writing in the October 1991 issue
of Reason, Thomas Harve y Holt de-
scribes the experience of a Los Angel es
parent whose grade school son had been
recruited into the "Gaia Gestapo. " The
child told his parents that he wanted his
lunch to be packed in reu sable Tup-
perware rather than "wasteful" plastic
and paper bags. After the student' s father
patientl y explained the trade-offs asso-
ciated with reusable packaging (for in-
stance, plastic and paper bags require
less disposal space than tupperware), the
child reconsidered his decision. His eco-
activist teacher was not as reasonable.
According to Holt, "When the teacher
wanted to know why [the student] hadn't
followed her suggestions, he recounted
the conversation with his father. When
the father went to pick up the boy that
afternoon, the teacher told him, ' I heard
what you told [your son]. I really wish
you wouldn 't interfere. We're trying to
make the children more environmen-
tall y sensitive .' The father explained
that he thought the way his son's lunch
was packed was in fact environmentall y
sensitive and that the teacher' s facts
[abo ut di sposabl e pack aging] we re
wrong. ' That may well be,' she said.
' But it' s what we are teaching them, and
I wish you wouldn't interfere.' ''
Emotional Appeal
In large part because of its emotional
appeal , eco-pagani sm is readil y ab-
sorbed by many schoolchildren. One il-
lustration of thi s can be found in the
newsletter Bearing the Earth, which
was written and distributed by the ecol -
ogy club of the Lawerence Central High
School in Indianapoli s, Indiana. The
publication informed students, " It will
take time, it will challenge the bound-
aries of your soul, to work with dili-
gence and persistence [sic] to save our
environment, our lives, our future, our
mother earth."
The last page of the publication of-
fered the now-famili ar alloy of alarm-
ism and pagan spirituality: "We are the
onl y ones who can control our rate of
self-destruction. We are our only sav-
iours. There will never be some super-
man or superhero to do our job for us,
so stop wishing our problem will go
away.. ." (emphasis added). "Empow-
ered" by the Gospel of Gaia, these stu-
dent s have enlisted as foot soldiers in a
pagan Children' s Crusade.
WILLIAM N ORMAN GRIGG
17
HISTORY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
Training for Global Merger
For decades social sciences curricula in government schools
have been designed to reflect a socialist , globalist philosophy
B
eginning in the 1950s, a succes-
sion of books highl y critical of
the direction in which American
education was headed began to sketch a
disturbing picture of per vasive subver-
sion in our schools and colleges. The
Turn ing of the Tides (1953) by Paul
Shafer and John Howland Snow, The
Diminished Mind: A Study of Planned
Medio crity in Our Public
Schools (1954) by Mortimer
Smith, Why Johnny Can 't
Read (1955) by Rudolph
Flesch, Bending the Twig:
The Revolution in Educa-
tion and Its Effect on Our
Children ( 1957) by Augus-
tin G. Rudd, Collectivism on
Campus ( 1955) and Brain-
washing in the High Schools
( 1958) by E. Merrill Root,
and other educational ex-
poses touched off a heated
national conflict over who
will control the mind and
soul of public education.
Quest ion of Character
Perhaps the most influ-
enti al of the bl ast s at the
educational establishment
was Professor Root' s Brain-
washing in the High Schools.
He began hi s book with
quotes from an interview
with Major William E.
Mayer, a United States Army psychia-
trist and a leading expert on brainwash-
ing. Mayer pointed out that in Korea,
for the first time in American history,
one-third of all Americ an soldiers made
prisoner succumbed to brainwashing by
the enemy. The problem, according to
Major Mayer , was that "they became
something called ' progressives.' By the
Communists' own definition, this meant
that a man was either a Communist
sympathizer or a collaborator - or both
- during his stay in a prison camp ."
Military weakness was not involved
here . "No," Major Mayer sai d, "it is
something more than that. It goes deeper.
The beh avior of man y Americans in
Korean prison camps appears to rai se
serious questions about American char-
THE NEWAMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
acter, and about the education ofAmeri-
cans " (emphasis added). When asked
why , he answer ed : "Because, in my
opinion , the behavior of too many of our
soldiers in pri son fell far short of the
historic al American standards of honor,
character, loyalty, courage, and personal
integrity." Having received little or no
fundamental facts and no enduring prin-
cipl es from their "formal education,"
they were easy victims for the commu-
nist brainwashing experts.
Professor Root then proceeded to in-
vestigate how extensive this educational
deficit had become by a meticulous ex-
amination of 11 of the most widely used
high school history textbooks.
His revelations shocked the nation .
The texts systematically denigrated pa-
trioti sm, American heroes, and the prin-
ciples and institutions of the American
system of gove rnment. Soci ali sm and
communism were presented favorably,
while communist leaders were praised.
American textbooks were filled with
anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-cap-
italist, pro-communist propaganda.
Yet for all the furor that Root (and the
many other authors who followed after
him) created, and in spite of all the
promi ses by the educationists to rectify
the matter , very little was done to cor-
rect the outrageous slant of the nation ' s
textbooks and other curricul ar material s.
In the 1970s and' 80s textbook review-
ers Mel and Norma Gabl er were still
documenti ng an overwhelming bias in
the text s. New York Uni-
versity Professor Paul C.
Vit z, in his 1986 study of
90 elementary and high
school texts used in an esti-
mated 70 to 87 percent of
the publi c schoo l class-
rooms, found an extraordi-
nar y degree of bi as
especiall y directed against
Chri stianity and tradition al
morality. In the portion of
the study dealing with el-
ementary social studies
texts, for instance, he found
that "not one of the forty
books totaling ten thousand
pages had one text refer-
ence to a primary religious
j activity occurring in repre-
fi. sentative contemporary life."
Ol
g Numerous studies have
E demonstr ated the cumula-

I ti ve "dumbing down " ef-
fect of such deficient
curricula. Ravitch and Finn,
in their 1987 study What
Do Our 17-Year Olds Know?, stated:
One student in five (20.8 per-
cent), for example, does not know
that George Wa shingt on com-
manded the American army during
the Revolution; almost one in three
(32 percent ) doesn't know that Lin-
coln wrote the Emancipation Proc-
lamation. Nearly a quarter (22.6
percent) fail to name Richard Nixon
as the president whose resignation
resulted from Watergate.
An Evil Plan
The nagging question returns again
and again: Why? Why have all efforts
to restore a sane perspecti ve, honest re-
gard for objective facts, and a patriotic
19
appreciation of American virtues and
contributions of Christianity failed?
Much of the answer to that question is
to be found in the testimony of Norman
Dodd, the staff director of the 1953
Congressional Special Committee to In-
vestigate the Tax-Exempt Foundations.
The committee's investigation of the
minutes of the Carnegie Foundation
showed that the Foundation's trustees
determined soon after World War I that
they "must control education in the
United States. " Working together with
the Rockefeller Foundation, they de-
vised a plan to dominate both domestic
and international education.
The Carnegie-Rockefeller elitists de-
termined they must build their own
"stable of historians," said Dodd in an
interview. So they
approach the Gugenheim Founda-
tion which specializes in fellow-
ships and say, "When we find young
men in the process of studying for
doctorates in the field of American
history and we feel that they are the
right caliber, will you grant them
fellowships on our say so?" And
the answer is, "Yes ."
So, under the condition they as-
semble 20. And they take this 20
potential teachers of American His-
tory to London and there they are
briefed into what is expected of
them when, as, and if they secure
appointments in keeping with the
doctorates they will have earned.
And that group of 20 historians ul-
timately becomes the nucleus of the
American Historical Association.
And then toward the end of the
1920s, the [Carnegie] endowment
grants to the American Historical
Association $400,000 for the study
of our history in a manner which
points to - what can this country
look forward to in the future.... And
the essence of the last volume is the
future of this country belongs to
collecti vism administered with
characteristic American efficiency.
How did these plans progress? Very
rapidly and effectively. Working hand
in glove with the foundations was the
internationalist Council on Foreign Re-
lations (CFR), the organization widely
recognized as America's shadow gov-
ernment. Indeed, most of the top officers
and directors of the major foundations
20
have been and are CFR members. Inthe
Council's Survey of American Foreign
Relations: 1928, CFR director of re-
search Charles P. Howland reported:
University courses dealing with
international affairs have trebled in
number since the war; there has
been an outpouring of books on
foreign relations, diplomatic history,
and international law; periodicals
such as Foreign Affairs, Current
History, and the American Journal
of International Law, and the in-
formation service of the Foreign
Policy Association are supplying
materials for a sound background;
and associations and organizations
devoted to an impartial discussion
of international relations and the
supplying of authentic information
have sprung up in almost every
great city. As yet, however, these
agencies for furnishing adequate
standards of judgement and accu-
rate current information have not
penetrated very far down in society.
In the CFR' s globalist vernacular
"sound, "impartial," "authentic" and
"accurate" meant information and per-
spective that advanced the CFR's goals
of submerging the United States in a so-
cialist world government. The Special
Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt
Foundations reported in 1954 that the
CFR's "productions are not objective
but are directed overwhelmingly at pro-
moting the globalist concept." More-
over, the Council had become "in
essence an agency of the United States
Government ... carrying its interna-
tional bias with it."
An Education Mafia
Concerning the problem of getting
their propaganda to "penetrate very far
down in society," the CFR-foundation
elites also had ambitious schemes under
way. Due to the vast sums they had lav-
ished on educational institutions, they
held enormous influence at Harvard,
Columbia, the University of Chicago,
and other prestigious universities where
the nation's teachers were trained.
One of those who most effectively
advanced the CFR-foundation collectiv-
ist agenda was Fabian Socialist philoso-
pher/educator John Dewey. Dewey left
the University of Chicago in 1904, tak-
ing a professorship at Columbia and its
affiliated Teachers College, where he
remained until his death in 1952. Among
the influential alumni of Teachers Col-
lege were Elwood P. Cubberly, George
D. Strayer, George H. Betts, Edward C.
Elliott, Walter A. Jessup, William Heard
Kilpatrick, Bruce R. Payne, David S.
Snedden, and Lotus D. Coffman. In his
important expose of the National Edu-
cation Association, NEA: Trojan Horse
in American Education, Samuel Blumen-
feld explained the significance of this
"educational mafia" :
Cubberly became dean of the
School of Education at Stanford;
Strayer, professor at Teachers Col-
lege and president of the NEA in
1918-19; Betts, professor of educa-
tion at Northwestern; Elliott, presi-
dent of Purdue; Jessup, president of
the University of Iowa and presi-
dent of the Carnegie Foundation
for the Advancement of Teaching;
Kilpatrick, professor at Teachers
College and a founder of Benning-
ton College; Payne, president of
George Peabody College in Nash-
ville; Snedden, Massachusetts State
Commissioner of Education; Coff-
man, dean of the College of Educa-
tion at the University of Minnesota,
and later the university's president.
In their revealing 1982 study, Man-
agers of Virtue, David Tyack and
Elizabeth Hansot note that this edu-
cation mafia or network exercised
incredible power throughout the educa-
tion establishment:
. .. it is one of the best known se-
crets in the fraternity of male ad-
ministrators, a frequent topic of
higher gossip at meetings though
hardly ever discussed in print , that
there were "placement barons,"
usually professors of educational
administration in universities such
as Teachers College, Harvard, Uni-
versity of Chicago, or Stanford
who had an inside track in plac-
ing their graduates in important
positions .
According to Tyack and Hansot , the
network "controlled important resources:
money, the creation of reputations, the
placement of students and friends , the
training of subordinates and future lead-
ers, the influences over professional as-
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
sociations and public and administrative
bodies." Not sur prisingly, then, "The
network of obligations linked local su-
perintendents more to their spons ors
than to their local patrons and cli ent s."
Which is why those "local patrons and
client s" (taxpayers and parents) have al-
ways come out on the short side of ev-
ery education "reform."
How extensive was the clout of these
networkers? From A History of Teach-
ers College, by Establishment historian
Lawrence A. Cremin, we gain some ap-
preci ation of the per vasive influence of
Dewey and associa tes at Columbi a
alone. According to Cremin, writing in
1953, "the single most powerful educa-
tion force in the world is at 120th Street
and Broadway in New York City . Your
children's teachers go there for ad-
vanced training." "With one hundred
thousand alumni," continued Cremin,
"Teachers College has managed to seat
about one-third of the presidents and
dean s now in office at accredited U.S.
teacher training schools. Its gr aduates
make up about twenty percent of all our
public school teachers. Over a fourth of
the superintende nts of schools in the
one hundred and sixty-eight U.S. cities
with at least fif ty thousand population
are Teachers College-trained. "
The educat ion mafi a did not deal
kindl y with those who challenged its de-
signs. Professor Charles Austi n Beard is
a case in point. Beard began his profes-
sorship at Columbia in 1904 , the same
year as Dewey. A militant soc ialist, he
qui ckl y became the darling of the edu-
cational establishment and one of Amer-
ica' s most famous historians. However ,
he was thoroughl y oppose d to the bla-
tantly di shonest de signs of the CFR-
New Deal-FDR gang in the White House
to drag America into World War II. His
masterful expose of those machinations,
President Roosevelt and the Coming of
the War, 1941 made him a persona non
grata in academe and the obj ect of vi-
cious attacks in the major media and
professional journals.
In 1947, Beard bl asted the CFR cabal
in the Saturday Evening Post, charging
that the CFR and the Rockefell er Foun-
dation "do not want journalists or any
other persons to examine too closel y
and criticize too freely the official pro-
paganda and official statements rel ative
to ' our basic aims and acti vitie s' durin g
World War II. In short, they hope that,
amo ng other things, the poli cies and
measures of Franklin D. Roosevelt will
escape in the coming years the critical
analysis , evaluation and exposition that
befell th e poli cies and me asures of
Woodrow Wil son and the Entente Al-
lies after World War I."
Beard was not making acc usations
without substance. In its 1946 Annual
Report, the Rockefeller Foundati on
frankly admitted to subsidizing a corps
of court historians to frustrate the devel-
opment of any debunking of the CFR
Establishment' s internationalist official
historiography. And history has proven
Dr. Beard ri ght: The CFR-Carnegi e-
Rockefeller court histori ans have been
given a virtual monopol y on research
access and on the writing and teachin g
of history in the United States.
- W ILLIAM F. J ASPER
An American Deception
M
ay 17, 1994 marked a major milestone in the long
campaign to nationalize American education: the
40th anni versary of Brown v. Topeka Board of Edu-
cation. On that date, the radical Warren Supreme Court cited a
book written by communists and sociali sts as authority for its
decision to put the federal government in charge
of the nation' s schools.
The book that launched the revolution was An
American Dilemma, supposedly written by promi-
nent Swedi sh socialist Gunnar Myrdal. Actually,
it was written by a pack of revolutionaries from
the Soci al Science Research Council , the Car-
negie Corporation, and the Russell Sage Founda-
tion; Myrdal merely served as prestigious window
dressing. How the book came about and how
Myrdal came to be associated with it deserves a
brief retelling, since it illustrates the pattern of de-
ception employed by the foundation elitists.
In 1937, Myrdal was invited by Frederick
Keppel (CFR), president of the Carnegie Corpo-
ration, to come to America to direct "a comprehensive study of
the Negro in the United States." "Upon his arriv al in New
York," records Zygmund Dobbs in The Great Deceit, "Myrdal
was handed an outl ine of the broad aims of the forthcoming
study written by Donald Young, head of both the Social Sci-
ence Research Council and the Russell Sage Foundation ." In a
confidential note to Keppel , Myrdal admitted his incompetence
to the task, complaining that his background in economi cs had
not prepared him for this planned foray into sociological experi-
THE NEWAMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
mentation. This "expert," who would be cited by the Supreme
Court and presented to the world as the ultimate authority on
U.S. race issues, told Keppel , "one reason for these initial diffi-
culties is that the race problem as such is new to me." More-
over, he said, "I have, thus, to acquire a working knowledge of
American history, geography, culture, politics and
institutional set-up before I can even place the Ne-
gro in the right position in the national scene."
Not to worry, the Carnegie claque had every-
thing planned. Socialist academics and activists
like Arthur M. Schlesinger, Otto Klineberg, Gor-
don Allport, Franz Boaz, Ruth Benedict, Melville
J. Herskovitz, M.F. Ashley-Mont agu, and Ralph
Bunche would be brought on board to do most of
the actual writing. Top communi sts would also
have a hand. "Doxie Wilkerson, a member of the
National Committee of the Communi st Party and
James E. Jackson, Jr., who later became president
of the Communi st Party, were paid with Carnegie
funds to help fashion An American Dilemma,"
noted Zygmund Dobbs. "Myrdal was handed a total of 15,000
typewritten pages of manuscript, which he and his staff con-
densed into 1,500 pages for An American Dilemma. "
In this celebrated tome, Myrdal and company attacked the
U.S. Constitution and its limited governmental design as "a plot
against the common people ," and said it "was dominated by
property consciousness and designed as a defense against the
democrati c spirit let loose during the Revolution."
- W.FJ.
21
READING
The Whole-Word Hoax
Implementing the Plan
Here was, indeed, a master plan, in-
volving the entire progressive education
community, to create a new socialist
curricul um for the schools of America,
a plan, based on the new psychology,
that was indeed carried out and imple-
mented. For example, the first "authori-
tative" book on the new way to teach
reading, The Psychology and Pedagogy
Dewey argued that it is important for
the child to experience life through class-
room activities, projects, and social in-
teraction before learning to read about
them. This kind of education would pre-
pare the child for a socialist society, for
the aim of Dewey and his colleagues
was to change America from a
capitalist, indi vidualistic society
into a socialist, collectivist one.
Dewey the master strategist
then set forth what must be done:
write his own language. If we add to
this the lea rni ng of a certain
amount of numerical combi nations,
we have the pivot about which pri-
mary education swings....
It does not follow, however, that
because this course was once wise
it is so any longer.. .. My proposi-
tion is, that conditions - social,
industrial, and intellectual - have
undergone such a radical change,
that the time has come for a thor-
oughgoing examination of the em-
phasis put upon linguistic work in
elementary instruction....
The plea for the predominance
of learning to read in early school
life because of the great importance
attaching to literature seems to me
a perversion.
eign language, but of English; not
in higher, but in primary education.
It is almost an unquestioned assump-
tion, of educational theory and prac-
tice both, that the first three years of
a child' s school life shall be mainly
taken up with learning to read and
Change must come gradu-
ally. To force it undul y would
compromise its final success
by favoring a violent reaction.
Wh at is needed in the firs t
place is that there should be a
full and frank statement of
conviction with regard to the
matter from physiologists and
psychologists and from those
school admini strator s who are
conscious of the evil s of the
present regime.... There are al-
ready in existence a consider-
able number of education
"experimental stations," which
represent the outpost s of edu-
cational pr ogress. If the se
(:!. schools can be adequately sup-
Abandoning phonics for the whole-word approach ported for a number of years
to teaching reading has brought disastrous results they will perform a great vi-
carious serv ice . Aft er such
schools have worked out carefully
and definitely the subject-matter of
a new curricul um, - finding the
rig ht place for language-studies
and placing them in their right per-
spective, - the problem of the
more genera l educational reform
will be immensely simplified and
facilitated.
There is . . . a false educational
god whose idolators are legion, and
whose cult influences the entire
educational system. This is lan-
guage study - the study not of for-
What's the Difference?
A child cannot learn to read
English well using a holistic for-
mula, because in such an effort
he typically will develop a holis-
tic reflex which creates a block
against his seeing words phoneti-
cally. Since an alphabet system is
by nature a phonetic (sound-sym-
bol) system, a block against seeing the
pr inted word phonet icall y pro duce s
what is termed "dyslexia." To become a
proficient reader, a child must develop
a phonetic reflex, not a holistic one.
Unfortunately, the battle between
phonics and the whole-word approach is
not merely over reading instruction
methods. It is a battle over worldviews
and political agendas. A defining point
of this conflict was John Dewey' s attack
on the tradi tional primary school cur-
riculum in his essay, "The Primary Edu-
cation Fetich." Dewey wrote:
I
t has bee n nearly 40 years since
Rudolf Fles ch descended on the
American education scene with his
blockbuster, Why Johnny Can't Read.
The book created a sensation in 1955,
explaining to a nation of puzzled par-
ents why their chi ldren were having
such a difficult time learning to
read. After all, the parents had all
learned to read in the same schools
without any great trouble .
Flesch revealed how the pro-
fessors of education changed the
way reading is taught in Ameri -
can schools, throwing out the al-
phabetic phoni cs method - the
proper, time-tested way to teach
children to read an alphabetic
writing system - and replacing
it with a new whole-word - or
sight-word method - which
teaches children to read English
as if it were an ideographic writ-
ing system like Chinese, Japa-
nese, or ancient hieroglyphics.
THE NEWAMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994 23
ofReading, was written by psychologist
Edmund Burke Huey and published in
1908. In it Huey wrote:
It is not indeed necessary that the
child should be able to pronounce
correctly or pronounce at all , at
first, the new words that appear in
his reading, any more than that he
should spell or write all the new
words that he hears spoken. If he
grasps, approximately, the total
meaning of the sentence in which
the new word stands, he has read
the sentence. Usually thi s total
meaning will suggest what to call
the new word, and the word ' s cur-
rent articulation will usuall y have
been learned in conversation, if the
proper amount of oral practice shall
have preceded reading. And even if
the child substitutes words of hi s
own for some that are on the page ,
provided th at these express the
meaning, it is an encouraging sign
that the reading has been real, and
recognition of detai ls will come as
it is needed. The shock that such a
statement will give to many a prac -
tical teacher of reading is but an ac-
curate measure of the hold that a
false ideal has taken of us, viz., that
to read is to say just what is upon
the page, instead of to think, each
in his own way, the meaning that
the page suggests.
. .. Until the insidious thought of
reading as word-pronouncing is
well worked out of our heads, it is
well to place the emphasis strongly
where it belongs, on reading as
thought-getting independently of
expression.
So there you have the genesis of the
look-say method. Indeed, man y look-
I say primers were published and used
experimentally in both private and pub-
lic schools. But it wasn 't until the pub-
lication of the "Dick and Jane" reading
program in 1930 that entire school sys-
tems began to adopt the methodology.
Of course, many of the older teachers
continued to teach phonics in conjunc-
tion with "Dick and Jane," but eventually
they were replaced by younger teachers
not sullied by phonics methodology.
The educators who engineered all of
thi s knew, of course, that the Dewey-in-
spired method of teaching re ading
would in time lower the literacy skills
24
of the nation. If they didn 't know it from
the reading di fficulties chi ldren were
having in Ameri ca, they cert ainl y knew
it in 1932 when the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union threw out the Dewey
methods, which had been in use in So-
viet schools since the revolution, and
went back to an inten si ve phonics
method of teaching readin g.
New Label, Same Disaster
Today in America look-say is now
called whole language, and is suppos-
edl y based on a new the or y of what
reading is. Here is how several whole-
language professor s, writing in Whole
Lan gua ge: What 's the Diff er ence ?
(Heinemann, 1991), describe what they
mean by the "new" approach:
From a whole language perspec-
tive, reading (and language use in
general) is a process of generating
hypotheses in a meaning-making
transaction in a sociohistorical con-
text. As a transactional process . . .
reading is not a matter of "getting
the meaning" from text , as if that
meaning were in the text waiting to
be decoded by the reader. Rather,
reading is a matter of readers using
the cues print provide and the
knowledge they bring with them .. .
to construct a unique interpretation.
Moreover, that interpretation is situ-
ated: readers' creations (not re-
trievals) of meaning with the text
vary , depending on their purposes
for reading and the expect ation s of
others in the rea ding event. This
view of reading implies that there
is no singl e "correct" me aning
for a given text, onl y pl au sible
meanings.
The whol e language advocates have
gone well beyond Edmund Burke Huey,
seeing reading as "creating meaning,"
not decoding accurately the message of
the writer. Thi s is the definition of read-
ing now used in Kentucky' s outcome-
based education program: constructing
meaning. One might say that this "new"
view of re ading is a product of the
deconst ruct ioni st view of text. Web-
ster 's New World Dictionary (1988) de-
fines deconstruction as "a method of
litera ry analysis .. . based on a theory
that , by the very nature of language and
usage, no text can have a fixed, coher-
ent meaning." And, as the advocates of
whol e language argue, "In a transac-
tional model , words do not have static
meanings. Rath er they have meaning
potentials and the capacity to commu-
nicate multiple meanings."
Thi s is what children are up against
in American primary schools today:
whole-language theories about reading.
Doesn't it make more sense to teach the
children to read by time -tested methods
based on over 2,000 years of experience
than to subject them to experiments
whi ch produce disabled readers?
I deol ogical War
What the public doesn't realize is that
thi s is more of a war over ideologies
than one over teaching methods. It is a
war by the educational elite to impose
its rule over the American people. De-
stroying resistance to their collectivist
plan s by dumbing down Americans is
an essential part of their strategy. To do
thi s, they must convince the American
people that "traditional literacy" is no
longer desirable. In fact , Professor An-
thony Oettinger of Harvard University
told an audience of corporate executives
in 1988:
The present " traditional" con-
cept of literacy has to do with the
ability to read and write. But the
real question that confronts us to-
day is: How do we help citizens
function well in their society?
. . . Do we, for example, really
want to teach people to do a lot of
sums or wri te in "a fine round
hand" when they have a five-dollar
hand-held calculator or a word pro-
ces sor to work with ? Or do we re-
ally have to have everybody literate
- writing and reading in the tradi-
tional sense - when we have the
means through our technology to
achieve a new flowering of oral
communication?
The tradition al concept of literacy
means teaching children to read by in-
tensive, systematic phonics so that they
can read with accuracy an fluency. It is
eas ier and le ss co stly to teach than
whole language, so that even from a
practical standpoint it makes more sense
to teach reading using phonics than to
use faulty methods that permanently de-
prive millions of children of the ability
to master the written word .
- SAMUEL L. B LUMENFELD
THE NEWAMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
PERSPECTIVE ON THE PAST
Down the Slippery Slope
T
he story of how American edu-
cation has become the awful
mess it is today is a long one,
with many important characters imple-
menting crucial changes in pedagogical
theory , ideologies, and worldviews. But
if one wanted to reduce the story to a
simple summation, one could say that
the history of American education is re-
ally the history of a war between those
who believe in traditional biblically
based values, and those who don't.
From Fait h to Faithlessness
This ongoing war, which is being
more intensely waged today than ever
before, can be divided into three peri-
ods. The first - from America' s colonial
times to the I840s - saw the domi-
nance of the biblical world view as seen
through a Calvinist perspective: God ' s
sovereignty was the central reality of
man 's existence, and the purpose of
man's life was to glorify God. Biblical
literacy was considered the overriding
spiritual and moral function of educa-
tion, for man was considered sinful and
in need of God' s law as the guide to a
long, healthful , and productive life.
Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were studied
because they were the original languages
of the Bible and of theological literature.
This period was characterized by a high
standard of literacy. It was also the pe-
riod which birthed our Declaration of
Independence and our Constitution.
The second period, lasting from the
1840s until about World War I, was
dominated by the stati st-idealist phi-
losophy of Germany's G.F. Hegel , a
philosophy which spread throughout the
Western world like a malignant spiritual
disease, undermining Calvinist founda -
tions . It was largely brought to thi s
country by the Unitarian professors at
Harvard who had studied in Ger many
and admired this new worldview. In
Hegel's pantheistic scheme the purpose
of life was to glorify man, and the in-
strument through which man 's collec-
tive power could be exercised was the
state. Hegel wrote, "The State is the di-
vine idea as it exists on earth. " To this
the Unitari ans who predominated at
Harvard added their own ideas about the
THE NEW AMERI CAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
perfectible nature of man.
This was the period of Horace Mann,
the consolidation of the public school
movement, the centralization of control
by a state education bureaucracy, the in-
stitution of compulsory school atten-
dance, and the founding of the National
Education Association in 1857. In the
Dewey' s Godless ideology set stage f or
present-day education establishment
aftermath of the War Between the States,
the interpretation of the Constitution
shifted to reflect the new power of the
federal government over the states.
During this Unitarian-Hegelian pe-
riod in America, the state replaced God
as sovereign over the people and the
schools became increasingly secular-
ized. But since Hegel considered man' s
mind to be the highest manifestation of
God on earth, discipline, high academic
standards, and achievement were the
hallmarks of the public schools.
The third period, which began around
World War I and has continued to the
present , saw the rise of the progessives,
members of the Protestant academic
elite who no longer belie ved in the reli-
gion of their father s. They put their new
faith in science, evolution, and psychol-
ogy . Science explained the material
world, evolution explained the origin of
living matter, and psychology offered
the scientific means to study man's na-
ture and to control his behavior.
These elites were also socialis ts.
Why? Because they had to deal with the
problem of evil. They had to answer the
que stion of why men do the horrible
things they do. Why do they rob, rape,
and murder? They rejected the biblical
view of man as innately depraved and
sinful, deciding instead that the causes
of evil were ignorance, poverty, and so-
cial injustice. And what was the chief
cause of social injustice? It was this hor-
rible capitalistic system with its selfish
individualism and superstitious religion .
Their solution: get rid of capitalism, in-
dividualism, and religion and replace
them with socialism, collectivism, and
humanism. Socialism had to be brought
about if they were to prove that they
were right and traditional biblical values
were wrong . For if it turned out that the
Bible was right and they were wrong,
they knew where they' d spend the rest
of eternity. Therefore, they were quite
confident that socialism was the answer.
But how was this socialism to be
brought about? The only way was by
the slow permeation method adopted by
the Fabians in Britain and by a gradual
takeover of the education system,
through which children would be edu-
cated to become socialists.
Early Leadership
It was during the first two decades of
this century that the progressive educa-
tion establi shment took shape. John
Dewey emerged as the progressives'
chief idealogue, with Charles Judd of
the University of Chicago engineering
"a detailed reorganization of the materi-
als of instruction in schools of all
grades." Judd' s protege, William Scott
Gray, produced the "Dick and Jane"
readi ng program, and organized the In-
ternational Reading Association to con-
trol the teachers of reading.
Several occurrences in the early days
of the progressive movement helped to
establish the direction of American edu-
cation: I ) educational research and
pedagogy were co-opted by behavioral
psychologists; 2) graduate schools of
25
education were established for the in-
doctrination of teachers and the creation
of doctors of education; 3) the National
Education Association was transformed
into a teacher membership organization
for the purpose of controlling the class-
room teacher and organizing teacher po-
li tical acti vi ty; and 4) large
philanthropic foundations such as Rock-
efeller and Carnegie were taken over by
progressives, who proceeded to fund
progressive education programs.
The 1920s and ' 30s were devoted to
a transformation of the public school
curriculum. Charles Judd told a meeting
of the American Political Science Asso-
ciation in 1931 that the entire organized
profession was now engaged in the pro-
cess of promoting "a movement to bring
to full realization the project of social-
izing the whole body of instructional
material in schools and colleges."
The work, in fact, was being done so
vigorously that a reporter attending the
1
1932 meeting of the NEA's school su-
perintendents department - held in
Washington, DC and attended by John
I Dewey, Charles Judd, and other pro-
gressives - wrote: "Here, in the very
I citadel of capitalism . .. this group of
I outstanding spokesmen of American
I education talked a remarkably strong
brand of socialism."
Even the American Historical Asso-
ciation got into the act of preparing
America for socialism. In 1934, fi -
nanced by the Carnegie Foundation, its
Commission on the Social Studies re-
ported:
... two social philosophies are
now struggling for supremacy: indi-
vidualism, with its attending capital-
ism and classism, and collectivism,
with planned economy and mass
rights. Believing that present trends
indicate the victory of the latter the
Commission on the Social Studies
offers a comprehensive blueprint
by which education may prepare to
meet the demands of a collectivist
social order without submerging
the individual as a helpless victim
of bureaucratic control.
During the 1930s many refugees from
Hitler's Germany came to America.
One of them was social psychologist
Kurt Lewin, whose work was to have a
profound effect on American education.
I Lewin founded the Research Center for
26
Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (it later moved
to the University of Michigan). Lewin is
credited with inventing sensitivity train-
ing, which became the inspiration for
the encounter movement. Shortly before
his death in 1947, Lewin established the
National Training Laboratory at Bethel,
Maine, under the sponsorship of the Na-
tional Education Association.
Lewin's work in group dynamics
spurred the development of Third Force
psychology by humanists Abraham
Maslow, Carl Rogers, Sidney Simon,
and others who attempted to interject an
emotional and spiritual component in
behavioral psychology. Since the goal
of education had now been reidentified
as "self-actualization," the emphasis
was now on the development of the af-
fective domain through such programs
as values clarification, sensitivity train-
ing, situational ethics, multiculturalism,
pluralism, and human sexuality.
Global Education
Another theme promoted in public
education since the end of World War
II has been that of world government. In
December 1942, NEA Journal editor
Joy Elmer Morgan wrote an editorial
entitled "The United Peoples of the
World," announcing the NEA's support
for world government:
World organization may well
have four branches which in prac-
tice have proved indispensable:
The legislature, thejudicial, the ex-
ecutive, and the educational. In
addition to the framework of gov-
ernment the world needs certain
tools of cooperation: A world sys-
tem of money and credit; a uniform
system of weights and measures;
a revised calendar; and a basic
language.
Morgan also called for a world police
force and a world board of education
(which came in 1945 as UNESCO). For
the NEA, the United Nations became
the hope of the world . In January 1946,
Morgan wrote in the NEA Journal:
In the struggle to establish an ad-
equate world government, the
teacher has many parts to play. He
must begin with his own attitude
and knowledge and purpose. He
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 orga-
nized profession.
A New Enemy
Of course, as anyone can see, there is
no place for traditional biblical faith in
such an educational scheme. In fact, the
war against God in the public schools
still rages for one very unforeseen rea-
son: the resurgence of Judeo-Christian
faith in millions of Americans. And
therefore the new enemy of the NEA is
the "religious right." Hardly an issue of
NEA Today is published without an ar-
ticle about the war against "religious ex-
tremism." An d every day more and
more Christians are removing their chil-
dren from the public schools and edu-
cating them at home or enrolling them
in private schools.
At present, public education is in its
final stage of eliminating every vestige
of traditional education from its system.
With outcome-based education using
Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Ob-
jectives as its guide, the public schools
have become for all practical purposes
Unitarian parochial schools. And with
the widespread use of whole language
in the primary schools, the process of
dumbing down Americans now has the
complete backing of the federal and
state governments.
If the United States is to survive as a
free country, under a Constitution that
guarantees the protection of the citizens'
unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness, the American
people must recognize the threat that
government-controlled education poses
to their future as a free, independent
people. Americans must wake up and
recognize the progressive-socialist
agenda for what it is, and reject it en-
tirely. As long as America's education
is controlled by the present psycho-
socialist mafia, there is no possibility
that it can be reformed to resemble any-
thing that sane Americans consider
acceptable.
- SAMUEL L. BLUMENFELD
Mr. Blumenfeld is a contributor to THE NEW AMERI-
CAN and author ofNEA: Trojan Horse in American
Education. Is Public Education Necessary? and
many other books. He publish es the monthl y Blumen-
feld Education Letter. and lectures on education to
audi ences nati onwide.
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8. 1994
NATIONAL EDUCATlON ASSOCIATlON
Monopolizing Teachers
MY SMEL.t..SD
ORANGIE ON MY

her stopped." The NEA Journal for Sep-
tember 1965 reiterated: "We've got it
started. The Elementary and Secondary
Education Act of 1965 is only the be-
ginning.... NEA hopes that President
Johnson was correct in his estimation
that, once started, federal aid to educa-
tion will never be stopped."
Controls followed into the tent as
surely as did the rest of the proverbial
camel's body. In the current Congress,
reauthorization of the ESEA includes
provisions that predicate receipt of fed-
eral monies for Chapter I funding (os-
tensibly for the disadvantaged) on the
acceptance of federal mandates and far-
reaching liberal programs found in
President Clinton's Goals 2000.
Some 80 percent of ESEA funding,
reports Human Events, "is used to ful-
fill the Chapter I requirement and fully
90% of all the nation's school districts
are dependent on ESEA grants to keep
their Chapter I programs afloat." What
is in the wings, as a result, is the pros-
pect of a national curriculum and fed-
eral dictates on local schools - to the
point of Washington's directing how
children should be taught and tested.
This direction would come, under the
Goals 2000 National Educational Stan-
Federal Aid, Then Control
Those with an agenda to run the
world must, of course, be patient. It took
a while even to get federal aid for
education in the U.S. But in LBJ's
Great Society days, the NEA personnel
and consultants were right in the midst
of the battle , not only lobbying Con-
gress, but also preparing speeches for
congressmen to use, and even helping
to write the legislation itself. The result
of this effort was the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of
1965.
When passage of the bill was immi-
nent, LBJ boasted: "We are going to get
it started, but we are never going to get
NEWS '18M: 1'fAeHSRS UNION 6cHt:arrSI.tMeAUGMtfDNSQR

and the extension of social security."

WorId government also became a
favorite hobbyhorse for the NEA to
ride. Such a government would include,
in the words of the NEA Journal, "world
agencies of administration such as: A
police force ; a board of education; a
board of health...." The pro-United Na-
tions propaganda emanating from the
public schools even to this day is not an
accident. It is part of a long-term cam-
paign in which NEA leasership has
played a major role.
A Look Back
Consider the 1934 report of the NEA
by its executive secretary, Willard Giv-
ens, which grounded the achievement of
the union's goals on "many drastic
changes." In particular: "A dying
laissez-faire must be completely de-
stroyed and all of us, including the
'owners,' must be subjected to a large
degree of social control."
Social control is exactly what was in
mind. The man credited with coining
the phrase "New Deal," Stuart Chase,
was the economist who appeared often
in the pages of the NEA Journal during
the '30s and '40s. In the March 1936 is-
sue of the Journal, Chase described the
"minimum program" necessary for U.S.
social and economic planning, propos-
ing "the nationalization of banking and
credit; the use of the income tax to re-
distribute income and purchasing power,
so that savings will be spent; the use of
government credit to create vast new in-
dustries in the sector of public works
and services; the progressive control by
government of natural monopolies; the
collective control of agriculture; wage
and hour controls; consumer protection;
T
he largest, most politicized union
in the country has once more
shown it s priorities. The Na-
tional Education Association (NEA)
placed learning on the back burner as
its convention's managers voted in
July to boycott Florida orange juice
if that state' s Citrus Commission
chooses to renew an advertising con-
tract with conservative talk show per-
sonality Rush Limbaugh. Meanwhile,
by most measures, the charges of the
unionized teachers - that is, the pu-
pils - continue to show deteriorating
performances.
But, then, it has been a long time
since teaching students was paramount
to the NEA leaders, with its largely cap-
tive membership of 2.2 million. Though
its roots are long (the NEA was founded
in 1857), it took a while for the organi-
zation to gather its clout. Regardless of
its size, however, the guiding goals of
the NEA have included statism and
socialism.
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8. 1994 27
dards and Improvement Council, from a
board of 19 members appointed by the
President. The council would be com-
posed of "professional educators" and
"members of teachers unions," as well
as five members from "advocacy, civil
rights and disability groups."
It becomes immediately clear what
kind of "progressive" nonsense these
groups favor. Indeed, the language in
the Senate bill contends that it is a
"disproven theory that children must
first learn basic skills before engaging
in more complex tasks"; eschewed
should be "repetitive drill practice" in
favor of what is dubbed "context rich
instruction."
This "federalization," said Allyson
Tucker, manager of the Center for Edu-
cation Policy at the Heritage Founda-
tion, is going to be "disastrous." Rather
than real standards or improvements,
she pointed out, this is "a way to impose
a utopian and idealistic view of educa-
tion on the curriculum. On the whole,
[the ESEA and Goals 2000 proposals]
will serve to do much more harm to our
schools than good."
Radical Resolutions
Over the years, the resolutions backed
by delegates to the NEA's convention
have proven that more recent concerns
have certainly kept up with the radical-
ism and class warfare of earlier days . To
get a sense of the direction NEA leader-
ship leans, one need merely look at a
representative sampling of resolutions
the organization has passed of late. (We
do stress NEA "leadership," because
many NEA teachers are as aghast at the
direction of their union as are parents.)
In 1989, for example, the NEA op-
posed homeschooling - which they ar-
gued should be permitted only by
"persons who are licensed by the appro-
priate state education licensure agency"
and who use a "curriculum approved by
the state department of education."
There should be sex education in public
schools, the union resolved, including
instruction on birth control, "diversity
of sexual orientation," and incest. Also,
the NEA came out against testing
school personnel for narcotics, alcohol,
or AIDS - further demanding that any
personnel with AIDS "shall not be fired,
nonrenewed, suspended, transferred, or
subjected to any other adverse employ-
ment action."
At its 1991 annual meeting, the NEA
rubber stamped left-wing positions on
nuclear weapons, immigration, environ-
mentalism, and "development of renew-
able energy resources. " These matters
do find their way into the classroom, as
Professor Thomas Sowell has noted in
Inside American Education, with chil-
dren being assigned to write to govern-
ment leaders promoting " a certain
policy on nuclear weapons, or to de-
mand that state legi slators appropriate
more money for education."
The 1992 NEA convention - which
endorsed Bill Clinton by a margin of 88
percent to 12 percent - floated a simi-
lar raft of radicalism. The union came
out for "unrestricted, universal acces s"
to health care for all , including illegal
aliens; it supported abortion rights while
opposing parental notification if their
minor children wanted an abortion; and
it endorsed a convention that would, in
essence, attack Western Civilization on
the SOOth anniversary of Christopher
Columbus ' historic di scovery. The
NEA, with its Gay and Lesbian Caucus,
resolved to "develop a training program
for local elected leaders to improve their
awareness and sensitivity to the issues
and concerns of gay and lesbian educa-
tion employees."
Last year' s conclave had more of the
same. Delegates approved such propos-
als as "multicultural/global education,"
"comprehensive school-based clinics,"
and "earl y childhood education pro-
grams in the public schools for children
from birth through age eight. " They
were predictable on South Africa, the
ozone layer , and a nuclear freeze. How-
ever, not everything was approved: The
convention wouldn't encourage pupils
to restrict sexual intercourse to a hetero-
sexual marriage.
More Politics
In return for the NEA' s support, can-
didate Bill Clinton endorsed virtually all
of its agenda. That has become a Demo-
crat tradition in a party where in 1992
about one in eight Democratic conven-
tion members belonged to the NEA. "If
I become President, you'll be my part-
ners. I won't forget who brought me to
the White House," Mr. Clinton said to
the NEA's candidate screening panel in
1991. Similarly, Jimmy Cartertraded an
NEA endorsement for his creation of a
federal Department of Education.
Overshadowed by the anti-Limbaugh
move at this year's New Orleans conven-
tion was the NEA' s unabashed stance
against standardized testing, which
might be used to measure how well
teachers and students are actually doing.
So-called "high-stakes" testing was
dubbed "wrong" and should be "elimi-
nated," said the subcommittee chairman
responsible for the resolution opposing
such exams, a move adopted without
debate on the convention floor. Such
tests , explained the Washington Times'
Carol Innerst, have "consequences, such
as promotion to the next grade, qualify-
ing for a high-school diploma, getting
into a gifted-and-talented program, or
getting into college. Some schools use
test scores as a measure of a teacher's
ability and to make determinations
about programs and resources."
More Centralization?
There have been ongoing discussions
of a merger between the NEA and the
American Federation of Teachers (AFT),
which falls under the AFL-CIO um-
brella. The 800,000-member AFT, which
seems moderate only in comparison
with the NEA, does have some policy
differences, although the two groups did
merge their international affiliates last
year in Stockholm. The result, Educa-
tion International , forms an agglomera-
tion with 240 unions and over 20
million members.
However, the possible consummation
of domestic centralization between the
AFT and NEA has been put off for at
least another year, according to NEA
President Keith Geiger. One sticking
point is a difference between the NEA
and AFT on "high-stakes. " Without
these, says AFT President Albert
Shanker, "you can throw out Goals
2000 standards." Don't misunderstand
these disputes; they're reminiscent of
the pact and falling out between Hitler
and Stalin. The unions, you see , dis-
agree on the way education should be
nationalized and who gets to be the
power brokers.
Will an outright merger between the
AFT and NEA be achieved? In a way,
the point is moot. Their current status
did not prevent the two groups from
sharing a telephone bank in a mutual ef-
fort to get Bill Clinton elected. With a
war chest estimated at $750 million a
year, the NEA has proven fully capable
of creating more than enough havoc on
its own.
- WILLIAM P. HOAR
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
OUTCOMEBASED EDUCATION
The OBE Attack
The computer, with its potential for immediate reinforce-
ment, is a valuable tool in Skinnerian/OBE programs
a. Excellence is defined by ob-
jective standards, not by peer com-
parison. Systems are set up in the
classroom for frequent and consis-
tent rewards to students for aca-
demic achievement and excellent
behavior.
b. Rewards are appropriate to the
supported aBE mastery learning with
grants to develop and implement it
nationwide.
Why? Because the bottom line, as
usual , is global profits and global con-
trol for the globali sts of the planned new
world order. Because to those imbued
with the current collectivist!humanist!
behaviorist zeitgeist there is
no more effecti ve way to
"train" workers than using
mastery learning/programed
learning, which is based on
the Russian psych ologist
Ivan Pavlov's animal experi -
mentation and the late Har-
vard Professor B.F. Skinner's
behavior modification tech-
niques. That is, it is based on
the operant conditioning,
stimulus-response techniques
used in rat, dog and pigeon
training laboratories: "Sit,
Fido, sit."; Fido sits - "Good
dog, Fido." Pop a biscuit into
Fido's mouth and move on to
the next skill. If Fido doesn 't
sit, he may be puni shed with
a shock before being re-
cycled through the exerci se
l again (and again) until he ex-
1? hibits the desired behavior.
9
(j)
1:'
e
"Stimulus, Response"
This is the kind of condi-
tioning that is outlined in the
aBE manual entitled Effec-
ti ve Schooling Pra cti ces: A Research
Synthesis , 1990 Update. Developed and
published by the Northwest Regional
Educational Laboratory in Portland Or-
egon, thi s document is in use in hun-
dreds of schools. Under it s section
entitled "Incentives and Rewards," Ef-
f ective Schooling Practices states the
following:
Teachers union, in his widely circulated
newspaper column, "Outrageous Out -
comes," of September 12, 1993), out-
comes in the values domain - which
have been bad for as long as this author
can recall - can always be changed to
suit the whims or expediencies of the
moment. As is about to happen - if
Spady, Simonds, et al. come to some
sort of a "compromise" on a BE. What
the social engineers will not allow to
be compromi sed, however, is the mas-
tery learning/O'BE method to which
UNESCO and the U.S. Department of
Education have heen committed for at
least 25 years. Education Secretaries
Terrel Bell , William Bennett, Lamar
Alexander, and Richard Riley have all
oncile the positions held by the two op-
posing sides .
Alarm bells should be going off across
the nation. There can be no compromise
on this issue. As outrageous as the out-
comes are (to quote no less an education
"authority" than Al Shanker, president
of the radical American Federation of
Spady and members of
his High Success Network
consulting firm met earlier
this month in Denver with
Bob Simonds, national
president of Citizens for
Excellence in Education, a
traditionalist Christian or-
ganization.
Also present were repre-
sentatives of Focus on the
Fa mi ly, a national reli -
gious group based in Colo-
rado Springs, and the Independence
Institute, a conservative think tank
from Golden .
No Compromise Possible
According to the Post, "Spady says
he's willing to talk about aBE ' choice,'
which would put stress on letting par-
ents in their own communities decide on
the type of outcomes they want."
Simonds is quoted as being "interested
in talking about ' enhanced aBE,' which
is content-based - strong on math, sci-
ence, English, but not concerned with
' attitudes, values.'" Amy Stephens, rep-
resenting James Dobson' s Focus on the
Family, wisely reserved judgment on
what, if any, steps could be taken to rec-
W
hen key sociologist-educrats
invite their opposition to
dialogue over so-called "edu-
cational controversies," you can be sure
something is not quite right. Recently,
according to an article in the May 17th
issue of the Den ver Post, "some of the
most outspoken national opponents and
proponents of outcome-
based education have already
met informally in Denver to
identify common concerns."
The article described a recent
meeting involving Dr. Will-
iam Spady, an education con-
sultant widely recognized as
the high priest of outcome-
based education (a BE), the
controversial philosophy that
has stirred fierce battles in
school district s and state
houses nationwide. The Post
article continued:
, I
I
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994 3 1
developmental level of students
and may include symbolic, token,
tangible, or activity rewards.
c. All students know about the
rewards and what they need to do
to get them. Rewards are chosen
because they appeal to students ....
e. Some rewards are presented
publicly; some are immediately
presented, while others are delayed
to teach persistence.
f. Students earn some rewards
individually; others are earned by
groups of students, as in some co-
operative learning structures.
To those unfamiliar with behaviorist
psychology, the above excerpt may
sound innocuous. But to those ac-
quainted with B.P. Skinner's behavior-
ist pseudo-science the document is
easily recognizable as a program for
conditioning students as if they were
I animals. Unfortunately, this document
is far from being unique; hundreds of
similar training manuals, teacher guides,
curriculum frameworks, etc., produced
I with federal and state tax dollars, have
flooded our schools.
What kind of human beings do the
government schools wish to produce
with these programs? After 12 years of
systematic "rewards" (and penalties),
will your children ever do something
just for the intrinsic value of doing
something they consider to be neces-
sary, good, or simply beautiful? Or will
there be anyone left willing to take an
unpopular or controversial stand in
opposition to the prevailing, politically
correct sentiment if no reward is forth-
coming and punishment is certain? Such
training is highl y suitable to training a
docile workforce, but hardly conducive
to preparing children for responsible
citizenship in a free society.
The Computer Age
Ironically, the same modern com-
puter technology that offers such won-
derful potential for genuine learning is
being hijacked by the educational be-
haviorists to subvert education. Dr.
Skinner said, "I could make a pigeon a
high achiever by reinforcing it on a
I proper schedule. " The computer, with
its built-in, immediate Skinnerian rein-
forcement, in conjunction ' wi th indi-
vidual education plans and management
information systems (management by
objectives, or MBa), is the perfect tool
32
for monitoring and reinforcing behavior
"on a proper schedule."
A major stumbling block to efficient
implementation of Skinnerian-based
mastery Iearning/ObE programs in the
past has been the practical problem of
expecting a single teacher/trainer effec-
tively and continuously to monitor and
reinforce the behaviors of a classroom
full of students. But computer trends are
solving that problem: Falling computer
costs, together with accelerating com-
puter operational speeds and increas-
ingly sophisticated software, are making
Skinner's atheist-humanist philosophy
is the foundation for present-day aBE
automated monitoring and reinforce-
ment of individualized instruction (read
conditioning) a classroom reality. Hence
the big push by the education establish-
ment to equip classrooms with comput-
ers for each child - even as the same
classrooms tum out record numbers of
illiterates .
For the utopian behaviorists, the com-
puter is the indispensable instrument for
attitudinal adjustment and global work-
force training. Thomas Sticht , president
of Applied Behavioral and Cognitive
Sciences, Inc. in San Diego, California
and a member of the U.S. Department
of Labor 's SCANS (Secretary's Com-
mission on Achieving Necessary Skills),
referred to such training when he said in
1987:
Many companies have moved
operations to places with cheap,
relatively poorly educated labor.
What may be crucial , they say, is
the dependability of a labor force
and how well it can be managed
and trained - not its general edu-
cational level , although a small
cadre of highly educated creative
people is essential to innovation
and growth.
Of particular interest is the fact that
Thomas Sticht and William Spady,
while working at the National Institute
of Education, U.S. Department of Edu-
cation, in 1977, served as consultants to
the Washington, DC public school sys-
tem when it implemented mastery learn-
ing. The August 1, 1977 Washington
Post quoted DC's Associate Superinten-
dent of Schools James Guines as saying
that "the new curriculum was based on
the work in behavioral psychology of
Harvard University's B.F. Skinner,
who developed teaching machines and
even trained pigeons during World War
II to pilot and detonate bombs and tor-
pedoes ." The Washington, DC program
has been an enormous disaster by ev-
ery academic, economic, and social
measure.
Inner.City Failure
Instead of meeting with Bill Spady
and Marjorie Ledell to discuss outra-
geous outcomes, the conservatives op-
posed to aBE should have met with
officials in the U.S. Department of Edu-
cation and demanded of them norm-ref-
erenced test scores of children in the
inner cities who have been subjected to
this dehumanizing, manipulative condi-
tioning. Education Week reported on
August 28, 1985 that Professor James
Block, very influential in international
and national mastery learning circles,
said "he did not know of any major ur-
ban school system in the United States
that had not adopted some kind of mas-
tery-learning program."
At a 1983 mastery learning confer-
ence in Maine (which this writer at-
tended), Dr. S. Alan Cohen, associate
director of the Center for Outcomes-
Based Education at the University of
San Francisco, said: "In 1976 Block and
Burns published in AERA [American
Educational Research Association] re-
search from around the world on mas-
tery learning. UNESCO committed to
mastery learning all over the world....
We have evaluated data worldwide."
THE NEW AMERI CAN I AUGUST 8, 1994
The real desired outcome of the aBE
elitists is a deliberately dumbed-down,
easily managed and controlled global
workforce of compliant automatons.
-I
I
I
1 I
I
If, as we ar e being told , ma st ery
learning has been successful where
implemented, why has there been such
a silence regarding the test scores of in-
ner-city children ? The Chicago mastery
learning program, which resulted in al-
most one-half of 39,500 students in the
1980 freshman class failing to graduate,
was just the tip of the iceberg. The press
coverage of the Chicago mastery learn-
ing disaster was so devastating to the
behavi ori st s' plans that the medi a,
which has been overwhelmingly support-
ive of OBE schemes, ceased publicizing
result s from all the other major urban
school sys tems that adopted mastery
learning .
In the meantime, the
social engineers wisely
chan ged the mast ery
learning label to out-
come-based edu cation
(OBE). Although "ac-
countabili ty" is one of
their pet buzzwords, the
name change was made
precisely to avoid being
held accountable for
their failed experiments. And their ex-
periments have been far from inconse-
quenti al. The Summary of the National
Evaluation of the Follow Through Find-
ings, 1970-1976, an extensive survey of
mastery-learning programs, states:
Gary McDaniels, who designed
the final Follow Through evalua-
tion pl an for the U.S. Office of
Education, characterized Follow
Through, which involves 180 co-
operating communities, as the larg-
est and most expensive social
experiment ever launched [empha-
sis added] .
That ' s pretty big. Yet, an examination
of the Follow Through Findings on pro-
grams which used mastery learning in-
dicates that they did not improve
inner-city children ' s ac ademic te st
scores. In fact, they had a devastatingly
negative impact. Additional proof of the
failure of ML/OBE programs can be
found in the pro-OBE report Models of
Instructional Organization: A Casebook
on Mast ery Learning and Outcome-
Based Edu cation (April 1987), com-
piled by Robert Burns, project director
of the Far West Laboratory for Educa-
tional Research and Development. The
conclusion of the Casebook states, in
THE NEWAMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
part: "The four models of instructional
organization outlined in this casebook
are difficult programs to impl ement.
The pra cti ces of the ten schools de-
scribed in the case studies are indeed
commendabl e. Yet we do not offer these
ten case studies as exemplary schools
deserving emulation" (emphasis added).
And for good reason: These "commend-
able" schools have been embarrassi ng
debacl es.
Missing the Main Point
Why then is the U.S. Department of
Edu cation recommending the use of
outcome-based education when its own
resear ch sugges ts that the most well-
known OBE/mastery learning schools
do not deserve emulation? How many
school board members, teachers, or par-
ents are aware of the research detailing
the colossal failures of mastery learn-
ing? Had they been informed about this
year s ago, OBE indoctrination would
not have swept the nation as it unfortu-
nately has. And if parents understood
the truly insidious nature of OBE, they
.would make no compromi ses what so-
ever with its devious practitioners and
promoters.
What most opponents of OBE have
focused on are the "outrageous out -
comes" typical of so many OBE pro-
grams. For religious parents that usually
means those areas of the curriculum and
testing in the "affective domain" that
challenge eternal verities, promote moral
relativism, and advance the sexual revo-
lution (premarital and extra-marital sex,
homosexuality, abortion, etc.) while un-
dermining parental authority, the fam-
ily, and patriotism. They are upset, and
rightly so, by mandat ed outcomes like
thi s one for Okl ahoma stude nts in
grades 9- I2: "The student will develop
communication skills, including being
able to talk with one's actual or poten-
tial partner about sexual behavior." Oth-
ers are equally troubled by the aBE
"cognitive domain" emphasis on group
learning activities, non-graded classes,
and mushy, fuzzy academic objectives
(outcomes) at the expense of traditional
subj ect matter and basic reading, writ-
ing, and computing skills. This Pennsyl-
vania OBE out come is typical: "All
students will make environmentall y
sound decisions in their per sonal and
civic lives."
However, parents and conservative
leader s who think they are winning a
great victory by getting OBE leaders
like Spady and Ledell to "enhance "
OBE and remove obj ectionable out-
comes will one day rue their naivete.*
The OBE educrats will grudgingly con-
cede to temporarily change the content-
as long the process, the
method, and the system
are not affected.
Unfortunatel y, most
aBE opponents see
onl y the obviously ob-
j ectionable content and
ignore the more subtly
sinister Skinneri an pro-
cess. Some are aware
that Dr. Skinner was a
militant atheist-humanist (a signer of
the Humanist Manifesto and a winner of
the "Humanist of the Year" award) and
that he made some astonishingly totali-
tarian statements. What they don't seem
to realize is that his whole philosophy
and epi st emology, which undergird
OBE, are profoundl y totalit arian in ori-
entation and irredeemably hostile to
Chri stian morality and individual lib-
erty.
The real desired outcome of the OBE
elitist s is a deliberately dumbed-down,
easily managed and controlled global
workforce of compli ant automatons.
Any compromise with these totalit arian
mind controllers is a bargain with evil
and a sellout of our children's birthri ght
of freedom.
- C HARLOTIE T. ISERBYT
* Like Ski nner , Dr. Spady sees "religious ortho-
doxy." "fundamentali sm, " and "co nserva tism" as
the great evils in the world today. In his report for
the Department of Defense, "Ensuring the Success
of All students Today for Tomorrow' s Changing
World," Spady writes: "Despite the historical trend
toward intellectual enlightenment and cultural plu-
ralism, there has been a major rise in religious and
politi cal orthodoxy, intolerance, fundamentalism,
and conservativi sm with which young peopl e will
have to be prepared to deal." Those whom Spady
views as representative s of "orthodxoy, intoler-
ance , fundame ntalism, and conservativism" would
do well to consider that the "olive branch" being
exte nded to them may conceal a dagger.
33
GOALS 2000
The Federal School Master
R
ecently we asked the computer
to spit out a listing of all the
current federal legislation con-
cerning educ ation. Talk about ruinin g
your day! When the computer' s on-l ine
bill tracking service finished download-
ing, we had 80 pages of fine print list-
ing 1,097 bills, from #1, the Goals 2000:
Educate America Act (H. R. 1804) to
#1097, the Worker Protection Warnings
Act (H.R. 1808). In between were such
legislati ve efforts as: #52 , the World
Summit for Children Implementation
Act (H.R. 2501) ; #438, a bill to estab-
lish a National Center for Sleep Disorders
Research (S. 104); #643, the Midni ght
Basketball League Training and Part -
nership Act (H.R. 2230); .#7 16, the
Sweet Potato Research and Production
Improvement Act (S. 1910); #848, the
National Immunization Act; and #1,027,
the National Gr andparent Resource
Center Act (H.R. 1223).
Just where our esteemed members of
Congress would point to in the U.S.
Constitution for legal authority or in ex-
perience for experti se to legislate con-
cern ing kiddi e summits, insomniac
investi gati on, witching hour B-ball ,
spud research, shots for tots, granny
resourcing, or any of the hundreds of
other areas covered in those 1,097 bills
is a good question. The answer is they
wouldn't, because: 1) Even though they
take an oath to uphold the Constitution
- including the Tenth Amendment,
which precludes federal involvement in
education - they would never let trivial
things like oaths or the Constitution get
in the way of their grand social engi-
neering plans; and 2) The hi story of
government intervention in education
has been the history of our nation ' s ac-
celerating education nightmare.
With some of these bills running into
hundreds of pages of legalese, naturally,
it's impossibl e for anyone to keep up
with the legislative flood. Out of that
entire deluge, only a very few titl es,
such as #250, the Education Bureau-
cracy Reduction Act (H.R. 3725), even
appeared to merit any congr essional
consider ation. Bureaucracy reduction is
alway s commendable, though when it
comes to fedgov education policy, elirni-
THE NEWAMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
EDUCATION PROGRAMS
OF Tt OFFICE OF
EDUCATION
I
nation and terminati on should be the
operative words. State and local bureau-
cracies for the government schools are
bad enough, but the feds - they give
bureaucracy a whole new meaning.
To get some idea of what we mean,
consider the above flow chart of educa-
tion programs administered by the U.S.
Office of Educati on, a document that
accompanied the 1978 federal budget.
Its illustration of the hopelessly confus-
ing tangle of agencies caused the federal
educrats such embarrassment and sub-
jected them to such public scorn that we
have not seen another attempt at picto-
graphic representation of the fed-ed
j uggernaut since. Of course, in the inter-
vening years the mess has grown far
worse, with education now being elevated
to cabinet level and commanding a much
larger budget with which to administer a
much larger profusion of programs.
A Federal Blueprint
The Goals 2000: Educate America Act,
signed into law by President Clint on on
March 31st of this year, represents one
of the most ominous encroachments
since the feds entered into education in
a big way with the 1965 Elementary and
Secondary Education Act. Indeed, ac-
cording to Al Shanker, president of the
-+.
radical American Federation of Teach-
ers, "this is the most significant piece of
education legislation we've ever had."
Goals 2000 sets in motion the final
stages of the process for nati onali zing
education; and unless massi ve, orga-
nized, persevering action (together with
a great deal of prayer) is mounted, the
feder al master will inexorabl y usurp the
powers to dictate national curriculum
development, textbooks , cour se content,
teacher training and certification, parent
education, testing, achievement stan-
dards, and a great deal more - for pub-
lic, private, and home schools.
Under Goal s 2000, the New York
Times report ed, "the nation will for the
fir st time have a federal blueprint to
educate its children." A "federal blue-
print to educate"? From the same all-
knowing federal government that can't
balance the budget, deli ver the mail, or
make a dent in welfare fraud? The same
feds who have given us the billion dol-
lar debacles in HUD, social security,
HHS, Medicare, savings and loans, etc.?
But Goals 2000 goes far beyond the
prosaic boundaries of public education
as we have traditionall y thought of it,
i.e., the normal K-12 school experience.
According to Education Secretary Rich-
ard Riley, the new legi slati on aims at
35
To those familiar with the deceptive
rhet oric of outcome-based education,
the whole Goals 2000 package is one
huge aBE scheme poised to rapidly
engulf our entire educational system.
"creating a comprehensive approach to
education that will improve learning at
every single level , early childhood all
the way to and through adulthood" (em-
phasis added). Goal s 2000 "is just the
beginning of this process," says Presi-
dent Clint on. "It will only work, if, year
in and year out, the Congre ss continues
to support the effort, only work if we
continue to provide good pre-school op-
portunities until every child is in a good
Head Start program or another pro-
gram like it " (emphasis added). Please
note, the President said "every child,"
not "every public school child."
"Voluntary" Mandates
To those familiar with the deceptive
rhetoric of outcome-based education, the
whole Goal s 2000 pack-
age is one huge OBE
scheme poised to rapidly
engulf our entire educa-
tional sys tem. Thi s is
clear from the Six Na-
tional Educ ati on Goal s
developed by Bush, Clin-
ton, Riley, and company
and now carved in stone
by Goal s 2000. Those
goals read:
By the year 2000, all children in
America will start school ready to
learn.
By the year 2000, the high school
graduation rate will increase to at
least 90 percent.
By the year 2000, American
students will leave grades four ,
eight, and twelve having demon-
strated competency in ... Engli sh,
mathematics, science, history, and
geography; and every school in
America will ensure that all stu-
dent s learn to use their minds well ,
so they may be prepared for re-
sponsible citi zenship, further learn-
ing, and produc tive employment in
our modem economy.
By the year 2000, U.S. students
will be first in the world in science
and mathematics achievement.
By the yea r 2000, every adult
American will possess the knowl-
edge and skills necessary to com-
pete in a globa l economy and
exercise the rights and responsibili-
ties of citizenship.
By the year 2000, every school
in America will be free of drugs
1
36
and violence and will offer a disci-
plined environment to learning .
During the legislative process, Con-
gress added two additional goals:
By the Year 2000, the Nation' s
teaching force will have access to
pr ograms for the co ntinued im-
pr ovement of their professi onal
skills....
By the year 2000, every school
will promote partnerships that will
increase parent al invol vement.. ..
Note the law says "all children," "every
school" and "every adult," and that it uses
the imperative "will" throughout.
These words seem to beli e the re-
peated promi ses that eve rything in the
law is "voluntary" and that there abso-
lutely will be no federal mandates. As
former Assistant Secret ary of Education
Diane Ravitch noted in the New York
Times on May 26, 1993, even though
the Clinton .Goals 2000 "describes the
Federal 'opportunity to learn ' standards
as 'voluntary,' litigation would quickly
turn them into mandates." That is not
onl y a probability, but a virtual cer-
taint y. And anyone who says otherwise
is asking us to forget completely the
record of litigated mandates of the past
several decades.
One person who recogni zes the enor-
mous "sea change" that Goals 2000 rep-
resents is Ernest L. Boyer, president of
the Carnegie Foundation for the Ad-
vancement of Teaching and the last
commissioner of education before Con-
gress elevated the job to cabinet status.
Boyer, a leading advocate of the fedgov
nanny state, expressed his j oy over the
progress symbolized by enactment of
the Goal s 2000 package in a New York
Times article on March 30th. " If I had
ever whi spered national standards, I
think I would have lost my job," Boyer
said. "We bent over backwards 15 years
ago so that no one would think we were
interfering. Within a decade, we have
gone from this preoccupation of local
control to national standards. There is
no turning back." The same Times article
tells us that "Education Secretary Richard
W. Riley, who calls the legislation a guid-
ing North Star, and other national educa-
tion officials did much to di spe l the
notion that the Federal Government was
assuming the mantle of Big Brother." But
dispelling the notion and dispelling the
reality are different matters entirely. It
is impossibl e obj ec tively to evaluate
this "North Star" without acknowledging
that it leads unswervingly to the fatal
shores of a completely nationalized edu-
cation system dictated by a federal Min-
istry of Truth, Knowledge, and Wisdom
in Washington, DC.
Ambitious Agenda
Besides codifying the
National Goal s into law,
Goals 2000also: 1) trans-
forms the private Na-
tional Education Goals
Panel into a federal bu-
reaucracy; 2) establishes
an app ointed National
Education St andards
and Impro vement Council ; 3) creates a
National Skill s Standard Board to facili-
tate "industry partnerships" that will help
formul ate "standards" for the skills that
federal planners determine will be needed
in the planned workforce and workplace
of the future ; 4) authorizes $647 million
this year, including $400 million in
grants to states and local schools that re-
form their systems to meet the national
education goals.
But here 's the rub: The vague, feel-
good Nation al Goal s are awaiting de-
velopment of specific "standards" or
outcomes in each subject area. You see,
in passing Goals 2000, Congress saddled
the states with "accountability" as de-
fined by the as-yet unseen "standards,"
to be developed by the unaccountable
federal panels. And this, the education-
ist elite s tell us in .one of the more bla-
tant examples of Orwellian newspeak, is
"empowe rment" for parent s and teach-
ers over local education.
- C HARLOlTE T. ISERBYT
Mrs. lserbyt served as Senior Policy Advi sor in
the U.S. Department of Education' s Office of Edu-
cational Research and Improvement. She is the au-
thor of Back to Basics Reform Or ... Skinneri an
International Curriculum? and numerous articles on
education.
THE NEW AMERICAN I AUGUST 8, 1994
CONTROL OF THE FAM'LY
In Loco Parentis
Cultivated Destruction
Government can create neither wealth
nor liberty, but it has an unparalleled
ability to create work for itself. Not hing
illustrates this fact better than the wel-
fare state's effect upon the family. Allan
Carlson of the Rockford Institute has
written, "The rise of the welfare state
can be written as the steady transfer of
the dependency function from the fam-
ily to the state; from persons tied by
blood , marriage or adoption to persons
Smothers, embattled parents are desper-
ate for any help they can find: "Feeling
thwarted in trying to rear their chi ldren
and enforce standards of behavior that
at one time seemed clear and universal,
parents are increasingly reaching out for
help and welcoming any help that is
volunteered. Many appear willing to
subcontract a portion of their role to
government, schools and whatever com-
munal vestiges remain in a mobile and
complex society."
Many analysts ascribe these develop-
ments to the supposedly inexorable laws
of social development. However, as the
late historian Christopher Lasch ob-
s served, "The family did not simply
evolve in response to social and eco-
nomic influences; it was deliberately
transformed by the intervention of pIan-
. ners and policy makers [who] sought to
remove children from the influence of
their families . .. and to place them un-
der the benign influence of the state and
school."
On April 11th, the Carnegie Corpora-
tion publi shed Starting Points: Meeting
the Needs of Our Youngest Children , a
report calling for greater government in-
volvement in the lives of children in the
years from birth to age three . That re-
port was timed to generate support for a
substantial expansion of the Head Start
program; it has also achieved quasi-
scriptural status for those who support
even more extensive regu lation of the
family by the state . But the evidence is
conclusive that government entangle-
ment in family affairs has created or
abetted the majority of the problems
that provide fodder for think-tank policy
wonks.
Children of the "Republic"
The concept that the state should con-
trol the development of children argu-
ably began with Plato, who made the
government of his totalitarian "repub-
lic" the custodian of "its" children. The
Jacobin government of revolutionary
France, which sought to create a totali -
tarian "republic," systematically sub-
verted family connections. Bertrand
Barere, a member of the revolutionary
Committee on Public Safety, taught that
the "principles that ought to guide par-
The crucial bond between generations has been steadily undermined by the state
G
K. Chesterton wrote, "The ents are that children belong to the gen-
ideal for which the family eral fami ly, to the republic, before they
stands is liberty . It is the only belong to particular families .. . the
institution that is at once necessary and spirit of private families must disappear
voluntary. It is the only check on the when the great family calls .... You are
state that is bound to renew itself as born for the republic and not for the
eternally as the state, and more naturally pride and despotism of familie s."
than the state ." The Soviet revolution, a lineal de-
For this reason, dictators and despots scendant of the French Revolution, traf-
of all varieties have sought throughout ficked in nearly identical concepts. A.S.
history to corrupt the conventional fam- Makarenko, the Stalin-era family theo-
ily, appropriate its functions, and re- rist who became known as the "Dr.
move the individual from the shelter of Spock of the socialist world ," wrote in
the home. Accordingly , those con- the Handbook for Soviet Families that
cerned about individual liberty should the state had "handed over a certain
become suspicious whenever they hear measure of social authority" to indi-
a politician or bureaucrat refer to "our" vidual families . According to Maka-
children. renko, "[The Soviet] family is not a
closed-in, collective body, like the bour-
geois family . It is an organic part of So-
viet society, and every attempt it makes
to build up its own experience indepen-
dently of the mora l dema nds of society
is bound to result in a disproportion, dis-
cordant as an alarm bell."
Unfortunately, the drive to collectiv-
ize the American family proceeds with
little opposition. As the November 14,
1993 New York Times reported, "Bit by
bit , the country's urge for collective
child-rearing is becoming more visible."
Accordi ng to Times reporter Ronald
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994 37
lIThe rise of the welfare state can
be written as the steady transfer
of the dependency function from
the family to the state; from persons
tied by blood, marriage or adoption
to persons tied to public employees."
I tied to public employees." Carlson has
II pointed out that what he calls "the col-
lapse of family structure" in America
began in earnest in 1965 - about the
same time that the "Great Society" wel-
fare state was inaugurated.
However, by the time the Great Soci-
ety began, Social Security - arguably
the most disruptive social program ever
devised - was well entrenched. By
making the state the broker of social in-
surance, Social Security has disrupted
the bonds between generations and
sewn discord between them. As family
therapist Michael Bettinger observes,
"in the 'old' days, before Social Secu-
rity, people had to rely on others more
than they do today.... If
people did not build and
mai ntain relationships
with fami ly and friends,
they might fi nd them-
selves in need of help,
but there would be no
one there to help them.
People could not easily
write off their families
after a minor dispute."
However, "Most of this
changed with introduc-
tion of Social Security."
According to Bettinger, Social Security
has abetted family disruption: "As a
family therapist, I have seen too many
individuals cut off from their families
for the slimmest of reasons .. .. They
know when they get old or ill, Social
Security will take care of them. They
believe they do not need each other."
The tax burden created, in large mea-
sure, by Social Sec urity and various
welfare state "e ntitle ment" programs
has been sorely felt by fami lies . In
1950, a family of four paid about two
percent of its adjusted gross income in
federal income tax; in 1993, a similar
family paid about 24 percent. Between
1946 and 1993, the standard deduction
for children increased from $600 to
$2,500; however, to keep pace with in-
flation, that deduction should have been
at least $7,800. Accordingly, every fam-
ily with a combined household income
of less than $32,000 should have been
relieved entirely of payroll or income
taxes.
The state's appropriation of fami ly
functions creates a feedback loop. "En-
titlement" programs consume tax dol-
lars from fami lies; the increased tax
Iburden forces both parents into the work
1
38
force; parental absence cult ivates new
social problems - resulting in a new
"need" for entitlement programs. In this
fashion, families become knitted to the
government in a state of enervating
dependency.
The Kansas Case
Some advocates of the traditional
family have sought to protect parental
authority through the passage of state-
level "parental rights" amendments.
Pro-family activists in Kansas recently
proposed the following amendment to
their state constitution: "Parents shall
retain the fundamental right to exercise
primary control over the care and up-
bringing of their children." After being
modified to include "the state 's tradi -
tional responsibility to protect the
health, safety and welfare of children,"
the measure was defeated by the state
legislature.
Jim McDavitt, director of the Kansas
Education Watch (KEW) network, la-
ments, "Wi th the defeat of the Parent al
Rights Amendment on March 29th, ev-
ery parent in Kansas was told by over
half the legislators that they are not the
primary decision makers in the lives of
their children. They are, however, as a
group at large, considered capable and
likely of criminal child abuse." Recalled
McDavitt, "During the floor debate,
House members, both Republican and
Democrat, described how giving parents
primary control would result in whole-
sale child abuse and injury to the
children."
Opposition to the parental rights
amendment included State Representa-
tive Denise Everhart, who declared, "I
have a thousand stories of child abuse
that I will recite on the House floor one
at a time if I have to in order to keep this
amendment from passing. " But none of
the measure's critics was more dema-
gogic than State Representative Rochell
Chronister, who declared that "every
time I see this amendme nt, I cannot help
but think of those children that were
burned alive by David Koresh in Waco,
Texas." (More perceptive people under-
stand that the Waco Massacre illustrates
the dangers of government involvement
in child "protection" issues.) This piece
of rhetorical dishonesty was seized
upon by the measure's critics, who re-
peatedly referred to the proposed amend-
ment as the "David Koresh amendment."
Supporters of the parental rights mea-
sure were not acting out of whimsical or
alarmist impulses; rather, they were re-
acting to an ominous expansion of the
state governme nt ' s
power over individual
families. In an August
20, 1991 story bearing
the head lin e "Bigger
State Role Proposed in
Children' s Lives," the
Wichita Eagle reported,
"Kansas must change its
tradition of leaving the
responsibility of rearing
children strictly to par-
ents if its youth are to be
adequately prepared for
life, members of a legislative student
committee were told...." A measure in-
troduced in the state legislature in 1992
(House Bill 3113) stated: "The legisla-
ture hereby declares that the state is ul-
timately responsi ble for meeting the
educational, health, mental health, and
welfare needs for every child and every
adolesce nt in the state."
Pro-family act ivis ts in Kansas fear
that the defeat of the parental rights
amendment may set the stage for a new
escalation in the war upon the family.
KEW's McDavitt reports that "during
the testimony in the House Judiciary
hearing one conferee testified about a
book by Hugh LaFollette entitled Li -
censing Parents ... and its argument
that parents should not be allowed to
parent unless they have been fully li-
censed by the state."
Ready to Act
The readiness of "child protection"
authorities to pounce upon "abusive"
parents was recently illustrated by an in-
cident in Woodstock, Georgia. A gro-
cery store employee saw 35-year-old
Lynn Kivi discipline her nine-year-old
son after the youngster misbehaved. The
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
Children deemed by the state to be "at risk" could be taken from their parents
employee called the police, who quickly
arrived and asked the boy if his mother
had ever hit him before. The child guile-
lessly replied, "I get smacked when I
am bad." Mrs. Kivi also admitted to
police that she had struck the child. The
police slapped handcuffs on the mother
and took her to jail. At the time of this
writing, Mrs. Kivi is free on $22,050
bail, but she faces a charge of "cruelty
to children" - and a possible prison
term of 20 years - for the "crime" of
disciplining her own child. But the only
cruelty inflicted upon the boy resulted
from the state' s seizure of his mother.
Since his mother's arrest, the child has
been tormented by nightmares in which
he is permanently separated from his
parents .
Phillip Jenkins of the Administration
of Justice Department at Pennsylvania
State University points out that "child
abuse cases have served as a massive
bridgehead for the notion of the 'objec-
tive expert,' the neutral professional
who is seeking to protect the child and
the community in the face of all the ob-
stacles posed by outmoded legalism."
The infiltration of such "experts" into
the lives of families is a dominant ob-
jective of federal educational and social
policies.
Federal "Solutions"
Attorney General Janet Reno, who
was described by Florida Senator Bob
Graham as "part crime fighter, part so-
cial worker," insists that because of the
social failures that have been abetted by
statist social policies - or summoned
into existence by deliberate design -
children should be considered within
the federal government's primary juris-
diction: ". . . when we talk about access
to legal services, our traditional re-
sponse has been to say parents will rep-
resent their children's interests. [But]
there are too many children in America
for whom the fabric of society has liter-
ally fallen away and have no one to
speak out and to advocate for them. And
we have a great challenge to devise a
system that can do that."
In Janet Reno:Doing the Right Thing,
reporter Paul Anderson writes: "Reno's
agenda for children is ambitious, to say
the least: Every pregnant woman should
have prenatal care.... Every child should
be immunized. Every child age zero to
three should have ' either proper paren-
tal supervision' or ' safe, good, construe-
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
tive, thoughtful 'educare' that blends
into Head Start.. .. From kindergarten
through high school, students should be
offered creative activities in the after-
noons: computer instruction, art, music,
and drama as well as athletics."
According to Reno, "We" '-- mean-
ing the federal government - "[have]
got to make sure that parents are old
enough, wise enough, and financially
able enough to take care of their chil-
dren, and that they are taught parenting
skills that enable them to be responsible
parents." Of course, "parenting skills"
were quite effectively taught long be-
fore the federal government was de-
vised . Like the Carnegie Foundation,
Janet Reno insists that the government
must especially focus its efforts on chil-
dren "in the critical years between birth
and age three" - essentially that the
state must take over the basic task of
molding early childhood habits and
attitudes.
According to the April 4th issue of
U.S. News and World Report , Janet
Reno's Justice Department has en-
dorsed "federal backing for ' home visi-
tation,' citing the example of Hawaii,
which encourages parents in families
where authorities suspect a risk of child
abuse to allow outside counsellors into
their homes as early as during preg-
nancy." The Hawaiian program so
warmly endorsed by the Justice Depart-
ment, which is entitled "Healthy Start,"
was the subject of a two -segment
"American Agenda" profile on ABC
television in March 1993. According to
ABC reporter Rebecca Chase, "Every
time a baby is born [in Hawaii] , work-
ers screen the mother' s chart , looking
for signs that families are under stress....
If they find warning signs, they inter-
view the parents to determine what kind
of support system is in place [and]
whether there is a family history of
abuse. Parents who seem under stress
are offered help." For those who accept
the "help," weekly visits from Healthy
Start workers begin.
Although the program was sold as a
solution for the problems of low-income
families, over 50 percent of Hawaiian
familie s with young children are now
enrolled in Healthy Start. Furthermore,
despite the program's putative emphasis
on early childhood development, state
supervision does not end after infancy.
According to Chase, "Home visits con-
tinue as necessary as the baby grows up
and the problems change." Furthermore,
the "services" provided extend to things
other than child abuse prevention: ''The
program is also proving to be an effec-
tive way to link families with other ser-
vices - birth control, medical care, and
preschool, for example."
Another Hawaiian program, "Open
Doors," offers a state subsidy to parents
and advice regarding the choice of child
care programs. According to Chase,
"Ultimately, Hawaii 's goal is to provide
not just day care, but early education to
39
all children to make sure they are ready
to learn when they start school." The
ABC program displayed a couple who
endorsed the program: "We're really
confident and at peace with them being
there [in state-administered child care
centers] .... We can just do our jobs and
do it well, instead of stressing out and
worrying what's happening to them."
The implicit message is that all Ameri-
can parents should be able to surrender
their children to the state with similar
equanimity.
Children "At Risk"
A measure before the California leg-
islature would create a similar program
in that state. The bill, AB 3345, would
allocate federal grant money for the cre-
ation of "neonatal and early childhood
home-based prevention services for
families at risk of child abuse and ne-
glect. "
The problem with this concept, ac-
cording to Roy M. Hanson of the Cali-
fornia Child and Family Protection
Association, is that "There is no legal
statutory definition of 'at risk.' Use of
the term 'at risk' amounts to a blank
check for intervention in the home by
the therapeutic state." As a result , ob-
serves Hanson, "You can be a good and
innocent mother of several children
with no history of abuse or crime and
still be considered at risk of being an
abuser under this program."
The assumption that all families are
"at risk" of child abuse is confirmed by
Barbara F. Meltz of the Boston Globe.
Summarizing the perspectives of "the
large network of professionals who deal
with child abuse ," Meltz urges that par-
ents should enroll in "parent education"
courses before the birth of their child.
I Notes Meltz, "these programs help only
parents who can be identified as being
I at risk. The truth, experts say, is that
anyone is capable of hurting their
child." This would seem to simplify the
task of identifying "at risk" parents: ap-
parently all parents are "at risk. "
The Goals 2000 Act represents a pro-
found enrichment of the idea that par-
ents are little more than administrative
agents of the state. According to a sum-
mary of the act, "every school will pro-
mote partnerships that will increase
I
parental involvement and participation
in promoting the social, emotional, and
academic growth of children." When
read with sobriety, this is an implicit
I
1
40
claim that it is the state - not the par-
ents - which has primary responsibil-
ity for the "social , emotional , and
academic growth of children"; through
the program, the state will condescend
to permit parents a larger role, but that
role must be compatible with the state's
designs. To help dictate those designs to
parents, Title IV of Goals 2000 will cre-
ate "Parent Information and Resource
Centers" which will "help provide par-
ents with knowledge and skills needed
to participate effectively in their child 's
education."
Under Goals 2000, parents will have
to create the proper environment of
"readiness to learn" as that environment
is defined by a National Education
Goals Panel. As an Education Depart-
ment backgrounder points out, "Experts
differ on just what constitutes 'readi-
ness,' so communities need to consider
what aspects are most important to them
and then design a strategy that fits their
needs." Once again, the locus of control
would be removed from the home and
assigned to "experts" who would act in
the name of "community needs. "
Redefining Family
Perhaps the most effective means to
collectivize the family is to hasten its
destruction through social re-definition.
Every successful society has been predi-
cated upon the conventional "nuclear"
family, which is organized around a
man and a woman who are joined in le-
gal wedlock. However, powerful inter-
ests seek to institutionalize "alternative"
models of the family.
The UN's International Year of the
Family (IYF) is, among other disrepu-
table things, a campaign to redefine the
family. According to an IYF profile
published in the March 1994 UN Chron-
icle , " ... the nuclear family itself is
changing. Non-traditional family types
are becoming more common, such as
cohabitation, same-gender relation-
ships, [and] single-parent families ...."
Michael Stewart, the Utah official who
presides over the IYF-linked "Patron
Cities" program, observes that IYF ma-
terials avoid a standard definition of the
family because "that definition is
changing."
On April 15th, the Cleveland-based
Federation for Community Planning
held an IYF-related conference entitled
"Families: Redefining, Reinforcing and
Revitalizing." According to the event's
prospectus, "We [the event's planning
committee] began by discussing 'the
family.' We came to realize, though,
that no one 'family' structure typifies
today's society. Rather, today's families
come in a vast array of shapes, sizes and
forms . As a result , the [Federation] rec-
ognizes the definition prepared by Fam-
ily Service America: 'A family consists
of two people, whether living together
or apart, related by blood, marriage, or
commitment to care for one another,"
By this definition, a "family" might
consist of nearly any imaginable com-
bination of people. An even more radi -
cal definition comes from a booklet
prepared by the Utah Center for Fami-
lies in Education: "Let's be clear about
the meaning of 'family.' It means a
child and an adult responsible for that
child's upbringing." Under this formula,
a "same-sex couple" given custody of a
child would be considered a "family,"
as would a dyad composed of a child
and his state-appointed custodian.
In a speech given at the University of
Chicago on November 15,1991, Donna
Shalala - who now presides over the
Department of Health and Human Ser-
vices, an agency which dwarfs the Pen-
tagon - predicted the society that would
greet "Renata," a fictional four-year-old
kindergarten student, in 2004: "Renata
doesn't know any moms who don't
work, but she knows lots of moms who
are single. She knows some children who
only live with their dads, and children
who have two dads, or live with their
mothers and their grandmothers. In her
school books, there are lots of different
kinds of friends and families...."
After school , Renata would not go
home, but rather to a publicly funded
day care center where she and her fel-
low inmates would be further weaned
from "patriarchal" culture by playing
gender-neutral games. According to
Shalala, Renata is a true World Citizen
- she "will think of herself as part of
the world - not just her town or the
United States."
Shalala told her audience that the
world she envisioned would not come
into existence by accident, but rather
"because we made it our top priority in
our communities and in Congress. "
Americans devoted to the traditional
family - and the liberties it represents
- had best become aggressive in the
defense of their priorities.
- WILLIAM NORMAN GRIGG
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
THE STATE AS FAMILY
Supplanting Mom and Dad
H
ave you heard about the na-
tional program that is supposed
to help both needy and other
families for the common good? It is so
impressive that even those one might
expect to be suspicious have promoted
it. As a prominent professor from one of
the world's most prestigious universi-
ties described it, the plan's chief pur-
pose is to provide a nationwide "service
of advice, instruction and help for
young mothers and for children, espe-
cially those below school age."
The professor goes on to explain,
"Recuperation homes are made avail-
able for mothers after child-birth, nurs-
eries and kindergartens have been
provided, in particular in country dis-
tricts, for looking after the young chil-
dren during harvest time when the
mothers are in the fields, and a network
of advisory health centres has been es-
tablished all over [the nation]. In gen-
eral the aim is to diminish infant and
child mortality, to raise the standard of
health in the early years of child life,
and to emphasise the importance of pre-
ventative and remedial measures as a
means of diminishing poverty."
History Repeats
Is thi s panacea a program of the
Children's Defense Fund? Or Goals
2000, as pushed by the Clinton Admin-
istration? Or perhaps it is a description
of that newly nationalized program
called Parents as Teachers to help moth-
ers and fathers raise their own children?
No, it was not written about a plan en-
dorsed by one of the above. But it could
just as easily refer to such "new" liberal
schemes that are as old as the "benign"
totalitariani sm pushed by Plato.
For the record, the quoted material is
by C.W. Guillebaud, a Fellow of St.
John 's College, University of Cam-
bridge, and is taken from his 1941 book
The Social Policy ofNazi Germany. Mr.
Guillebaud was referring to Hitler' s Na-
tional Sociali st Welfare Organization
which set up the institution called Mut-
ter und Kind, or Mother and Child.
This writer has found it instructive to
review this little book, which was pub-
lished in wartime England, as an indi-
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
cation of how statists, be they national
socialists or otherwise, are inevitably
enamored of centralized power.
Children are constantly being made
into targets of reform by the modern-
day educrats. Compulsory education,
starting at age six or so, isn't enough,
though as psychologist Irving Berkovitz
has demurely pointed out, public schools
are "the places where the behavior and
feelings of the majority of children first
come to the close attention of profes-
sionally trained adults outside the
nuclear family." As bluntly translated
by Dr. Allan Carlson of the Rockford
Institute, this means the places "where
the experts get their turn at the expense
of Mom and Dad."
The experiments keep getting moved
earlier in life. The government-run
Head Start program is one prominent
example; this often-cited success (of
which more later) isn't sufficient for the
behaviorists. They have now come up
with pre-Head Start programs, such as a
pilot program that began in Missouri
called Parents as Teachers (PAT). Fed-
eral funding for PAT, contained in the
Goal s 2000: Edu cat e America Act ,
seems sure to make this a more fashion-
able standard. "Trained educators,"
stress proponents, will visit homes to
provide instruction to parents "to en-
courage their child's intellectual devel-
opment," as one wire service story put
it, and prepare the infant s for school.
But that is not the whole story. Integral
to the plan is introduction of the family
into a network of "social services," cap-
turing both child and parent s into de-
pendence on the state right from the
start.
Education researcher Laura Rogers,
who has studied PAT extensively, pro-
vided a clearer picture of the program in
Chronicles:
Simply put, the program pivots
on assigning to all parents and chil-
dren a "certified parent educator. "
This state employee evaluates the
child (under the guise of educ a-
tional screening), assigns the child
a computer code classification, and
initiates a computer file that the
state will use to track the child for
the rest of his or her life. All of the
computer code designations label
the child to some degree "at risk,"
and there is no classification for
"normal."
The state agent conducts peri-
odic home and school visits to
check on the child and the family,
dispersing gratis such things as nu-
tritional counseling, mental-health
services, and even food. Schools
under the PAT program provide
free day- and overnight-care. The
"certified parent" might forbid the
biological parents to spank their
child, and might prescribe, if the
child is deemed "unhappy," psy-
chological counseling or a drug
such as Ritalin. If the parents
refuse the recommended services
or drugs, the state may remove the
child from the home, place him in
a residential treatment center, and
force the parents to enroll in fam-
ily counseling for an indefinite
period.
When conservatives raised objections
concerning the PAT program, liberals
reacted typicall y - with ridicule. For
example, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in-
timated that next the "far right" would
be attacking Barney the PBS dragon
with a baseball bat. Programs such as
PAT, of course, don't spring up spon-
taneously from the grass-roots; in the
case of PAT, the national replication
and "franchis ing" of the plan was
boosted by a hefty grant from the Ford
Foundation.
Head Start Expands
Foundations and major indu stries
have long backed programs that rely on
government spending and "interdepen-
dence" with other nations through outfits
such as the Committee for Economic
Development (CEO). Educational pro-
grams are in the forefront of these. One
recent CEO study, Why Child Care
Matters. is typical - pointing with ap-
proval to Edward Ziglar, a founder of
Head Start, and how Dr. Ziglar wants to
set up public schools as a hub for child
43
Clinton's national service program for America's youth is
alarmingly similar to that implemented in Nazi Germany
care in general. With the opening pro-
vided by Head Start, Ziglar is pushing a
program called the School of the 21st
Century, which is already being imple-
mented in a number of states.
Ziglar, a Yale psychology professor,
has claimed that "child care in this
country is put to shame" by other na-
tions. And who are these exemplars?
They include, he has said, Sweden and
then-communist Hungary - both with
majorities of preschoolers in govern-
ment centers. Also, "In [the People's
Republic of] China, nurseries
are available for virtually all
children from the age of 56
days on. Cuba offers care for
children as young as 45 days
old as part of a national child
care system: the goal for the
next decade is to provide day
care for all mothers who
want it."
Such designs feed off of
the Head Start program,
which has acquired an unde-
served reputation as a suc-
cessful federal program. In
truth, even Dr. Ziglar has ad-
mitted that only 40 percent of
Head Start centers are of
"high quality" and that clos-
ing 30 percent "would be of
I no great loss." Time maga-
zine has acknowledged that President
Clinton's excessive praise for Head
Start, and the money supposedly saved
by it in the long run, "reflects the suc-
cess of one non-Head Start project at the
Perry Preschool in Ypsilanti, Michi-
I gan." What educational improvements
have been seen, and they are minimal,
have proven temporary. To bureaucrats,
this means that more money is needed
over a longer period of time. And Head
Start is, in fact, being expanded un-
der the Clinton Education Department
with more funding and with related
programs.
These are also favored by the Chil-
dren's Defense Fund (CDF), where
I Hillary Clinton and Donna Shalala (now
Secretary of Health and Human Ser-
vices) served on the board. The Car-
negie Task Force on Meeting the Needs
of Young Children bemoans the fact
that only one in 20 eligible for Head
Start under age three participates.
Among CDF-approved programs to
help fill in the gaps - and make our
children even more captive to the state
44
- are such plans as "A Healthy Start"
as part of a nationalized health scheme,
an expanded "Head Start," and a "Fair
Start" through economic incentives.
The CDF also favors such ideas as
federal gun control and family-leave leg-
islation. To get to such objectives, statists
must start with the seemingly salutary and
non-controversial. Spending more on
"free" childhood vaccinations - which
are already available but underutilized
in many cities - is intended to be fuel
for further statist programs.
Branching Out
There has hardly been a missed op-
portunity for the state to transmit the
fact that it - not parents - should be
seen as the provider. The role of the
school has been expanded accordingly
through such ploys as school-based
clinics, more sex education taught out-
side the home, school breakfasts, a push
for longer hours and more days in
school, extra activities in school build-
ings, etc. Another scheme waiting in the
wings is the brainchild of Jane Roland,
philosophy professor at the University
of Massachusetts-Boston. Roland is
proposing a "new kind of school" to
which "youngsters of all ages, many of
them dragging a parent along," would
come to have the state meet their needs.
Many items have already found their
way into Bill Clinton's budget - in-
cluding the Family Medical and Leave
Act, more free vaccinations, more funds
for Head Start, the Child Care and De-
velopment Block Grant, and the Women,
Infants and Children (WIC) nutritional
program - which already touches four
in ten babies born in the United States.
There are federal funds for the Sum-
mer Youth and Training Program, the
Independent Living program (for so-
called transitional support for foster
children who "age out" of the foster
care system), and the deceptively named
Family Preservation and Support pro-
gram to teach families with "at risk"
children how to go about bringing up
their child in a government-approved
way. One popular feature of many of
these "innovative" plans is "interagency
collaboration," coordinating
programs to put services in
and around schools - so that
health, educational, and social
services bureaucrats can get
maximum impact. This ap-
proach is part of the focus of
the National Education Goals,
and is viewed with favor by
the National Governors' As-
sociation.
National service, a state
version of which is manda-
tory for graduation from pub-
lic high school in Maryland,
falls into this framework as
well. Again, there is little
new under the sun. Here was
an analogous law in Nazi
Germany: "National Labor
Service is a service of honor
to the German Reich . All young people
of both sexes are obliged to serve their
country in the National Labor Service.
The function of the Service is to incul-
cate in the German youth a community
spirit and a true concept of the dignity
of work, and above all, a proper respect
for manual labor. To the National Labor
Service is allotted the task of carrying
out work for the good of the whole
community."
President Clinton's views are alarm-
ingly similar. National Service, he em-
phasizes, "will harness the energy of our
youth and attack the problems of our
time. It literally has the potential to
revolutionize the way young people all
across America look at their country
and feel about themselves...." Hillary
Clinton last year told the National Sum-
mit on Children and Families, "We
would like the government to be an
enabler, more than a regulator."
Yes, indeed, much more. Starting from,
at the very least, the womb - the ulti-
mate goal is a federal Nanny State .
- WILLIAM P. HOAR
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
LOYALTY TO THE STATE
Der Staat Uber Alles
Hit ler boasted that Ger many's children were hi s
T
he Book of Matthew warns of a
time in which "the children shall
rise up against their parents, and
cause them to be put to death." Where
those governed by biblical principles
seek to "tum the hearts of the fathers to
their children, and the hearts of the chil-
dren to their fathers" (Malachi 4:6), to-
talitarians seek to tum the heart s of the
children to the state by indoctrinating
them and deploying them as agents of
the state within their own homes.
Undermining Parents
Educational elites in contem-
porary America have no com-
punctions about mobili zing
schoolchildren on behalf of politi -
calor social agendas, nor do they
see anything amiss in using chil-
dren as informants. Outcome-
ba sed education programs and
relate d initiatives almost invari-
ably require schoolchildren to fill
out detailed and intrusive ques -
tionnaires dealing with their lives
at home. Child abuse "preven-
tion" programs encourage chil-
dren to report incidents of abuse
to teachers or other authorities -
and those same programs define "abuse"
to include nearly any act of discipline or
any parental decision a child doesn't
like.
Disrespect for pare ntal aut hority can
be cleverly cultivated in some appar-
ent ly commendable programs. In hi s
book Lost Rights: The Destruction of
American Liberty, James Bovard ex-
plains that drug pre vention education
has been used to teach children to act as
informants against their parents. This is
ironic, as Bovard points out , because
"while school s attempt to indoctrinate
children with an almost unlimited fear
of ill ici t drugs, sc hoo ls routinely ar -
range to have kids drugged for the
teachers ' benefit" - particularly with
the drug Ritalin. According to Bovard,
"Since 1990, the number of schoolchil-
dren in Massachusetts being adminis-
tered Ritalin has doubled. The Boston
Globe noted that ' some specialists say
that schoolchildren are being diagnosed
and medicated for [hyperactivity] in too
THE NEWAMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
cavalier a fashion' in part because of
' i ncreased pressure on fin anci ally
troubled schools to provide a quick fix
for disrupti ve children. ' Apparently
drugs are bad - except when they are
adminis tered for th e benefit of the
State."
The issues of child abuse and drug
abuse may soon be woven together.
During recent months, Surgeon General
Joycel yn Elders and FDA Administrator
David Kessler have expressed a desire
to eradicate smoking, essentiall y con-
tending that tobacco should be regulated
as a dangerous narcotic. At the same
time, some "child welfare" activ ists in-
sist that parents who smoke at home are
committing child abuse. Legal activist
John F. Banzhaff III maintain s that
"parents exposing their children to sec-
ond-hand smoke is the most common
form of child abuse in Ameri ca."
Soviet, Nazi Cont rol
In their study Utopia in Power, Rus-
sian hi storians Mikhail Heller and
Aleksandr Nekrich summarized the So-
viet perspective on famil y obligations:
"The subordination of the family to the
int erests of the state was a constant
theme in liter ature, the cinema, and ev-
ery form of art. The family is an impor-
tant collective, so the argument ran. but
the state is an incomparabl y more im-
portant one .... [The] call for betrayal of
one' s kin was direct ed to all famil y
members without distinction; in that re-
spect full equality reigned."
Pavl ik Morozov was the Soviet re-
gime's poster child. As a 12-year-old in
the Stalin-era Soviet Union, Morozov
betrayed his father to state authorities,
accus ing him of being a "kul ak" (a
wealthy peasant farmer) . The young
quisling was exalted by Stalin and his
sycophants as the model Soviet youth.
As Heller and Nekrich recall, " [Maxim]
Gorky called on Soviet writers to
glorify this adolescent who , 'by
overcomi ng bloo d kins hip, di s-
covered spiritual kinship .' ''
Morozov was commended as a
role model to members of the
Komsomol - the " All - Union
Leni ni st Communist Union of
Youth." Participation in the
Komsomol was mandatory for all
Soviet youth between the ages of
14 and 28. Peter Gumbel of the
Wall Street Journal described the
Komsomol as "a cross between
Big Brother and the Scouts, a gi-
ant organization that rammed Com-
muni st theory down the throats of
Soviet youngsters while monopo-
lizing all their group acti vities."
No tot alit arian organi zation worked
more aggressively to conscript children
than Hitler' s National Socialist move-
ment. As G.K. Chesterton observed dur-
ing the year s of Hitler' s rise to power,
"Hitler's way of defe ndi ng the indepen-
dence of the family is to make every
famil y dependent upon him and hi s
semi-socialist state, and to preserve the
authority of parent s by authoritatively
telling all the parents what to do.... He
appears to interfere with family life
more even than the Bolshevists do, and
to do it in the name of the sacredness of
the family."
In his book Nazi Culture: Intellectual,
Cultural and Social Life in the Third
Reich, historian George L. Mosse ob-
serves, "Nazism, like any revolutionary
movement, atte mpted to capture the
new gener ation and rally it to the
cause." According to Mosse, "The Na-
zis did make changes in the school sys-
tem, though the federal structure of the
[pre-Hitler] Reich made this difficult at
45
As parental opposition to ideological
instruction escalated, Nazi public school
officials began to tell schoolchildren
they would soon be required to enroll in
the indoctrination courses. Shortly there-
after, 50 father s were summoned to the
local town hall, presented with a pre-
printed application, and told that "ideo-
logical instruction was bound to come
anyhow and it would therefore be better
to sign now."
Recalled Bishop Wurm, "The event
produced tremendous agitation in the
community.. .. Again and again one
heard the question whether mothers no
longer had any rights over their chi ldren
and whether the FUhrer's assurance that
everyone could seek salvation in hi s
own fashion was still valid."
In other communities, wrote Wurm,
"recruitment for the
ideological instruction
was carried out under
especially overt pressure
and threats ." Teachers
told recalcitrant children
that their parents would
suffer. One student was
asked by his teacher,
"What does your father
do?" When the chi ld responded that his
father was a mail-carrier, the teacher de-
clared, "If he doesn't sign [the indoc tri-
nation form], he 'll see wh at will
happen; he'll have to become a street-
sweeper."
Wurm recall s that amid all the con-
flict, the National Socialist state used its
youth auxiliaries to recruit schoolchil-
dren and pressure their families: "In a
number of municipalities, standard-
bearers of the Hitler Youth ordered their
subordinates to see to it that relati ves of
Hitler Youth members withdrew from
religious instruction classes and applied
for ideological instruction within three
weeks. By such procedures, a matter
that is one of the inalienable rights of
parents is withdrawn from the free deci-
sion of parent s and propelled toward an
anti-Christian solution, despite all offi-
cial utterances to the contrary."
In a free society, an individual's loy-
alties are to God, family, and country-
in that order. In a totalitarian society,
obedience to the state eclipses all other
allegiances. American parents must
jealously gu ard their rights and obliga-
tions, lest they suffer the fate of the par-
ent s of Wurtt emberg.
- WILLIAM NORMAN GRIGG
illustration of the role played by the
Hitler Youth in enforcing the New
Order. The parents ofWurttemberg con-
fronted what was essentially the Nazi
Party 's equivalent of outcome-based
education. Students in secondary schools
were offered a choice between religious
instruct ion and National Soci alist "ideo-
logical instruction." Rec alled Bi shop
Wurm, "though the parents were openl y
solicited . .. the overwhelming majority
of [them] clung tenaciously to their
right to Evangelical or Catholic instruc-
tion for their children."
Confronted with the resi st ance of
what is now called the "religious right,"
the Nazi publ ic education system be-
came more insistent. Many of the par-
ents received a "request" that their
children be regi stered for ideological
instruction and enrolled in special "rec-
reation camps." Elementary school chil -
dren were soon required to choose
between religious instruction and ideo-
logi cal instruction, but warned that
"only ideological instruction would be
entered in their annual progress reports"
and that their access to continued gov-
ernment education would depend upon
their performance in ideological exami-
nations.
Hitler's OBE
An angui shed letter written on June
19, 1939 by Theophil Wurm, the Prot -
estant bishop of Wurttemberg, offers an
By 1938, 7,728,259 youngsters had
joined the Nazi Youth program. In
1939, Hitler's government enacted a
law requiring that all German youth be
enrolled in the Hitler Youth program.
As leftist historian William Shirer
points out, "Recalcitrant parents were
warned that their children would be
taken from them and put into orphan-
ages unless they enrolled" in the Hitler
Youth organization. Once the chi ldren
had been seized by the state and prop-
erly indoctrinated, they were sent forth
to battle their friends and relatives who
had not accepted the Nazi gospel.
IIWhen an opponent declares, II will not
come over to your side,' I calmly say,
IYour child belongs to us already'"
- Adolf Hitler
fir st. Until the individual states were
abolished, Prussia was the laboratory
for much of this change." Once the so-
cial engineering schemes developed in
Prussia were ready, writes Mosse, "The
Nazis attempted to unify the school sys-
tem, as they ' meshed the gear s' of all
other activities in the Third Reich."
The National Sociali st educational
elite sought to eradicate the "bourgeois"
values instilled in German youth by
their parents. The National Socialist
educational system heavily emphasized
"character" and "values" training. How-
ever, notes Mosse, "'Character' did not
mean self-reliance and independence,
but a steeling of oneself for service and
obedience in the name of the Volk and
the FUhrer.... To inculcate service and
obedience, the individualism and the en-
thusiasm of the school-
boy had to be controlled
by instilling within him
a sense of community."
Accordingly, Nazi edu-
cation was a war upon
traditional values and
individuali sm - and
the youth were forcibly
conscripted as foot sol-
diers to prosecute that war.
In 1932, 107,956 youngsters were en-
listed in the Hitler Youth organization,
as compared with the more than ten mil-
lion youth enrolled in such apolitical en-
tities as the Boy Scouts. In an ess ay
published in 1934, National Socialist
leader Baldur Von Schirach sought to
allay parental concerns about the Hitler
Youth organi zation by testifying of the
Nazi Party' s "pro-family" sentiments:
"The family is the smallest and at the
same time the most important unit of
our Volk community. It can never be the
task of the [Hitl er Youth] to interfere
with the life of the family and with the
I work of the parent s in bringing up their
children. But neither should the paren-
tal home interfere with the work of the
[Hitler Youth]."
Howe ver, a year before Schirach as-
sured Germans that the state would
never usurp parental authority, Hitler
decl ared in a speech: "When an oppo-
nent declares, ' I will not come over to
your side,' I calmly say, ' Your child be-
long s to us already.... What are you?
You will pass on. Your desc endants,
however, now stand in the new camp. In
a short time they will know nothing else
but this new community.:"
46
THE NEWAMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
INTERNATIONAL CONTROL
UN Takeover of the Child
Granted by Government
With the concept of rights thus dis-
torted, the second "principle" that
emerges is that all "rights" are granted
by government under the caring direc-
tion and control of UN experts of "high
moral standing." This framework is key
to the real intent of the Convention: that
islation and societal structure.
What are these "principles" that the
UN rightly claims will have a "revolu-
tionary impact on the lives of children"?
The first "principle" that emerges from
the fine rhetoric is the perversion of the
definition of true rights into a meaning-
less smorgasbord of "rights" such as
"dignity," "tolerance," "solidarity,"
"special safeguards," and "full partici-
pation in all social, cultural, educational
and other endeavors necessary for the
child's growth and well-being." To pre-
tend for one moment that such an ideal
state of being could, or should, be de-
livered by government edict is gross
demagoguery and deception of peoples
(including many Americans) who are
sucked into a naive belief in the "good-
ness" and "noble intentions" of the UN.
into force" after having been ratified by
the necessary 20 nations. This meant
that the Convention became part of in-
ternational law, setting international le-
gal standards binding upon all ratifying
nations. Only a few months later, 62
U.S. senators approved a resolution ask-
ing President Bush to forward the Con-
vention to the Senate for ratification.
Although George Bush approved the
Convention, he never took this fateful
step for the simple reason that as an in-
ternational treaty, the Convention re-
quired a two-thirds vote (67 members)
of the Senate for passage; this was never
forthcoming during Bush's term.
Once the Convention had "entered
into force," a committee of "ten experts
of high moral standing and recognized
competence" was established with its
own "secretariat" (UN-speak for bu-
reaucracy) to monitor "the way the rati-
fying nations translate the principles of
the Convention into national law and
practice." Each nation is required to
submit regular reports to the Committee
of Ten, which holds them accountable
for the "proper translation" of the Con-
vention's principles into their own leg-
A "Simple Idea"
By late 1989 the UN
General Assembly was
ready to erase all this mis-
ery with a "simple idea"; it
unanimously adopted a
Convention on the Rights
of the Child. Nine months
later, in September 1990,
the Convention "entered Over 70 heads of state signed declaration at 1990 UN World Summit for Children
W
hen the United Nations sets
out to protect, develop, edu-
cate, nourish, and speak for
the children of the world - watch out.
The UN bureaucrats, the great majority
of whom come from socialist or com-
munist countries where children suffer
enormous economic, health, educa-
tional, and cultural deprivations, have
appointed themselves experts for telling
the rest of us what is to be done or not
done for, to, by, or with all children, in
utter disregard of the vital responsibili-
ties of parents.
This astounding international take-
over of the control of children has been
in the works since at least 1978 when
the communist government of Poland
launched a "new way of thinking about
children, their needs and rights." A
Working Group was set up by the UN
General Assembly to prepare a draft of
the "new thinking," which soon discov-
ered that children have "inalienable
civil, political, and economic rights" of
their own, quite apart from, and prima-
rily in opposition to, those of their par-
ents. Developing and propagandizing
this pernicious idea of child autonomy
provided jobs worldwide
for thousands of UN bu-
reaucrats throughout the
decade of the 1980s, when
massive yearly reports on
the state of the world's
children set the trap with
endless examples of the
poverty, neglect, ill health,
and lack of education of the
world's children, with never
a mention of the causal role
of authoritarian govern-
ments in creating these
conditions.
THE NEW AMERICAN I AUGUST 8, 1994 49
is, to restructure societal arrangements
according to Insider UN mandates .
Gone is the extraordinary idea of God-
given rights that made Americans the
most blessed people in all of human his-
tory. Far from using the Bill of Rights '
unequivocal negative wording (Con-
gress shall make no law . . .), the UN
globalists "proclaim," "affirm," "state,"
"recognize," and "ensure" their phony
"rights" that demolish parents' author-
ity over their own children.
A third "principle" of this ominous
document is that , like the Constitution
of the former Soviet Union, it grants
fine-sounding freedoms in one breath,
only to nullify them in the next. For in-
stance, "Freedom to manifest one's re-
ligion or beliefs may be subject only to
such limitations as are prescribed by
law and are necessary to protect public
safety, order, health, or morals or the
fundamental rights and freedoms of oth-
ers." Freedom of expression, informa-
tion, and association? Well, certainly -
except for "certain restrictions as pro-
vided by law and are necessary for the
protection of national security or of pub-
lic order or of pubic health or morals."
Wrapping these "freedoms" in totali -
tarian controls is only one of the hooks
in these carefully laid traps that prepos-
terously put children on a par with
adults . What the UN is really saying is
that children (anyone under 18) have the
"right" to refuse to attend the church of
their parents' choice, or the "right" to
refuse religious training of any kind, or
the "right" to join any type of cult or oc-
cult group passing as a "religion," or the
"right" to defy their parents' belief that
associating with druggies or street
gangs is bad for them, or the "right" to
read or view debasing or pornographic
material, etc.
Contrary to the kind of repulsive to-
talitarianism accompanying the above
"freedoms" is the straightforward word-
ing of certain other "rights," such as the
"right" of the child to privacy. No fears
here about "public health, morals or or-
der." Instead, children have a "right to
the protection of the law against arbi-
trary interference" with this "right" (pri-
vacy) which was the operative word
used by the Court in Roe v. Wade to cre-
ate the legal "right" to abortion. This
UN-sanctioned privacy seemingly means
to establish the child's "right" to obtain
an abortion without parental knowledge,
the "right" to purchase and use contra-
ceptives, and the "right" to heterosexual
or homosexual promiscuity.
Under the "children' s rights" Con-
vention, the only "right" that is assured
is the "freedom" to rebel against paren-
tal authority. Although parental author-
ity is sharply limited by the document,
government power is absolute. Thus,
the effect of the Convention is to entice
children out of the protective shelter of
the home and leave them exposed to the
full force of the global state.
"Appropriate Assistance"
Although the Covenant states that
"parents have the primary responsibility
for the upbringing and development of
the child," this is laughable window-
dressing in the face of the thrust of the
entire document as well as the very next
paragraph: "For the purpose ofguaran -
teeing and promoting the rights set forth
in this Convention, [ratifying] govern-
ments shall render appropriate assis-
tance to parents" (emphasis added). To
make it perfectly clear that parents
. UNESCO: A Budding
50
I
n February of this year, the U.S. State Department issued an
appeal to reinstate American membership in the United Na-
tions Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO). UNESCO's long and unambiguous history of anti-
American rhetoric and socialistic scheming demonstrates that re-
joining the United Nations agency is one of the worst things this
country can do to its educational system.
After the ratification of its 1945 charter, UNESCO immedi-
ately began making detailed recommendations about how to run
the schools of the world. A ten-part series for teachers, published
in 1949 under the heading Toward World Understanding, laid out
the UNESCO blueprint for a global dumbing-down of education.
The second section in the series, entitled "The Education and
Training of Teachers," called for "a shift in emphasis from sub-
ject teaching to the needs of the child, " which could be accom-
plished by a number of means, including a "greater freedom of
choice of subjects" and a "substantial reduction in the number of
subjects in the curriculum." Instead of academic subjects, pupils
would be given "increased 'free time' to allow students to work
on projects." There would also be an "allocation of working time
for student clubs," and "a tendency to abandon rule from above
[in the classroom] in favor of democratic cooperation between
staff and students." The 1949 study concluded with a statement
that bears striking resemblance to much of the outcome-based
educational rhetoric of today: "The old, academic, subject-domi-
nated type of training [of teachers] is rapidly being replaced by a
training aimed at the personal as well as professional develop-
ment of the teacher and effective citizen."
Among the subjects recommended by UNESCO in Toward
World Understanding was "The Influence of Home and Commu-
nity on Children Under Thirteen Years of Age." Notes the
UNESCO study, "One of the chief aims of education today
should be to prepare boys and girls to take an active part in the
creation of a world society.. .." But love of country must be
stamped out by the government schools: "As long as the child
breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-
mindedness can produce only rather precarious results. As we
have pointed out, it is frequently the family that infects the child
with extreme nationalism. The school should therefore use the
means described earlier to combat family attitudes that favor jin-
goism." This global citizenry propaganda must begin early: "The
kindergarten or infant school has a significant part to play in a
child's education. Not only can it correct many of the errors of
home training, but it can prepare the child for membership .. . in
the world society."
It is due in no small measure to UNESCO's pernicious, anti-
family, totalitarian influence over the past 40 years that so many
outrageous programs and curricular materials marching under the
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8. 1994
count for nothing, the UN masterminds
inform us that children are to be " brought
up in the spi rit of the ideal s ens hrine d in
the Charter of the United Nations. " That
is, centrali zation of all power in a one-
worl d socia lis t govern ment.
Why would the govern ments of the
worl d agree to the loss of sovere ignty
impl ici t in the Conventi on? An answer
is fo und in the World Summit for Chil-
dren, held in 1990 under the aus pices of
the Un it ed Natio ns Internat ional Chil-
d ren' s Emergency Fund ( UNICEF).
With tremendous medi a fanfare, 71
heads of s tate (i ncl udi ng Pre sident
Bush ) and representati ves from ano ther
86 countri es unanimousl y ado pte d a
World Declaration on the Survi val , Pro-
tection and Development of Children.
Called by the gus hing media "a mile-
stone in humanit y' s tr eatment of chil-
dren," at firs t gla nce thi s declaration
seems to be a curious repetiti on of the
previous Convention. How many more
" r ig h t s " t o ed ucat i o n, nutriti on, o r
health can you have? But the decl ara-
tion gets down to the nitt y gritty in its
di scussi on of " resources" - th at is ,
ho w much all these " rig hts" will cost
and who will pay.
We soon di scover that the game be-
ing hatched - under the subterfuge of
helping suffe r ing child re n - is that
Western creditor nati ons should forgi ve
the international debts owed by Third
World govern ments . UNICEF practi -
call y wept in cl aiming that in order to
meet debt-servi ce payments, countr ies
had to "harshly cut back" in socia l ser-
vices, so that "the poorest and most vul-
nerable childre n paid the Third World' s
debt" with their lac k of health and edu-
cation. Since Third World countries will
have to spend $20 billi on per year to
meet " basic goa ls f or children," and
since their debt-service outflows to the
rich nations are about $40 billion per
year, what could be more reasonable
than that the debts of Africa should be
written off and those of Latin America
greatl y reduced?
Fund-Raising Scam
This line of UNICEF that creditors in
affl ue nt countries are kill ing babies in
the Third World is effecti ve propaganda
but paints an entire ly fa lse pi cture. The
truth is that the net transfer of ai d funds
to the Thi rd World from the West has
been far hi gh er than any outflow during
the p as t dec ade; between 19 83 and
1987, fo r example, the " deve loping"
countries enjoyed a net transfer from
abroad of more than $ 130 billion. Inad-
dition, fa r from cutting back harshl y,
f ig ures show th at th e se governments
spent more during the past dec ade than
previ ousl y.
Inother words, what UNICEF' s sum-
mit was all about was a decepti ve fund-
rai ser fo r th e UN Conventi on on th e
Ri ghts of the Child.
When Ge orge Bush s igned thi s
shameful document, he let us know that
the In siders ' drive for a New Interna-
tional Economic Order (the global re-
distribution of our wealth in preparation
for world merger) is alive and well and
operating under the UN umbrella. Un-
le ss we stop them, these conspirators
will destroy the greatest experiment in
freedom th e wor ld has e ver known,
force us to fi na nce the destruction out of
our own pocket s, take over the minds of
our childre n, and absorb them into the
new worl d order.
- J ANE H. I NGRAHAM
Global School Board
ensigns of "multiculturalism," "global education," "gender equity,"
and "diversity" have flooded our schools. But we are headed for
much worse. In 1990, UNESCO launched a new global educa-
tion initiative called the World Conference on Education for All
(WCEFA), which brought together representatives from 150
countries. The American branch ofWCEFA is the U.S. Coalition
for Education for All (USCEFA), a collectivist claque sponsored
by the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education
Association, the U.S. Department of Education, Apple Computer,
IBM, and other public and private internationalist entities.
Out of the 1990 WCEFA summit in Jorntien, Thailand came
two documents: The World Declaration on Education for All, and
The Framework for Action to Meet Basic Learning Needs. Oddly
enough, the Framework lists six goal areas that almost exactly
parallel those put forth in the Goals 2000 legislation enacted by
Congress and signed by President Clinton this spring. American
education policies are being simultaneously nationalized and in-
ternationalized in a concerted effort to "harmonize" all education
according to a global plan.
From the WCEFA-USCEFA nexus has flowed a continuous
procession of conferences, summits, and confabs on such
globalist agenda items as: "Basic Education for Democracy, Cul-
tural Identity and Environment"; "Children and Adolescents in
Conflict With the Law"; "Technologies for Learning for All";
THE NEWAMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
"Distance Learning"; "Population and Development"; etc. Pri-
vate, state, and national education organizations have gotten the
globaloney "bug" too, dramatically stepping up their international
networking and summiteering in the past couple of years. This
July, for instance, the Education Commission of the States (ECS)
held an Asia-Pacific Conference in Honolulu, featuring educa-
tion elites from China, Russia, Japan, Korea, Australia, Mexico,
and more than 50 other nations. ECS is a high-powered compact
of governors, state legislators, and state education officials - the
folks in charge of American education.
Even though these conferences routinely involve people from
the far-flung corners of the planet representing dozens of differ-
ent language groups, the participants all seem to speak the same
dialect: edu-babble. They all mouth the same inane utterances
concerning "interdependence," "empowerment," "transforma-
tion," "holistic approaches," "globalization," "comprehensive in-
tegration of schools and social services," "developmental needs,"
and "community," as if collectively intoning the sacred doxol-
ogy of a global Cult of the World Mind. They all hum the mantra
of UNESCO's universal humanist faith. Small wonder then that
almost identical education programs and policies are springing
up "spontaneously" in Tokyo, Dallas, Kiev, Toronto, Berlin, Se-
attle, Seoul, New Delhi, Cairo, and Oslo.
- THOMAS R. EOOLEM
5 1
EDUCATION AND FREEDOM
The Basis of Sound Learning
T
hose who see k to overthrow a
way of life often begin by sub-
verting the meanings of words.
Education is a case in point. From the
time of the ancie nt Greeks until rela-
tivel y recentl y, education was defined
as the process through which a nation or
culture passes on its traditi ons to its
young. By way of contrast, the so-called
progressive theory of educ ation, formu-
lated by pragmatist John Dewey, reject s
notions such as enduring traditi on and
truth, thereby inverting the meanin g of
education and overturning its purpose.
Far from preserving time-honored truths,
it aims at systematically undermining
the values, institutions, cultural patterns,
and belief structures of the past. Its in-
tent is thus revolut ionary and destruc-
tive and in achieving its objec tives it has
been (quite literall y) a smashing suc-
cess, from the primar y grade s to the
post-graduate educational levels. Most
of the chaos that is modern education is
the result of the ideas of Dewey and his
followers.
No Substitute
Today, because of the activi ties of
men like Dewey, education is often con-
fuse d with job training, wherein stu-
dent s learn cert ain technical or scientific
skills . While there is nothing wrong
with such specialized knowledge, it is
not a substitute for genuine education
for it does not give answers to man's
eternal questions - Who am I? Whenc e
do I come? How should I live? The old
liberal arts education sought to produce
cultivated men and intelligent, upstand-
ing citizens, whereas the modern system
produ ce s narrow- gauge mind s, inca -
pable of critical thought and inept at any
but the most primitive modes of expres-
sion. No wonder that our great institu-
tions of learning, formerly repositories
of the wisdom of the ages, have been
transformed int o quack fac tories. No
wonder, too, that cla ssrooms are now
echo chambers for garrulous barbarians
spewing out streams of inanities and cul-
tural treason.
There is, of course, a direct link be-
tween educati on and freedom. In hi s
magnificent volume, The Roots ofAmeri-
THE NEWAMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
can Order, the late Russell Kirk shows
that the American sys tem of govern-
ment and way of life are rooted in an-
cient Greek philosophy and the Roman
co ncepts of virt ue , orde r, and law.
The se element s were purified by bibli-
cal anthropology and Chri sti an mor al
and social teaching, and finally fused in
the crucible of Chri stian humanism.
And so we see that American liberty
did not spring forth from nothingness,
but developed slowly over the centuries.
An uneducated people is afflicted with
historical amnesia. Remaining unaware
of the struggles and sacrifices of its an-
cestors and of the mi stakes and tri -
umphs of past cultures, it fecklessly
sells its heritage in exchange for plati-
tudes and promi ses. Lacking any con-
nection to its hi story, such a peopl e
becomes an amorphous mass, a rabble
ruled by swindlers and hoodwinked by
hucksters, a money-obsessed herd with-
out past, without future, without faith,
without morality, without digni ty, with-
out will.
Ignorance and Tyranny
A childi sh aphorism claims that "ig-
norance is bliss." In the realm of politi-
cal and social life, however, ignorance
is tyranny and history records no ex-
ception to this iron principle. With ig-
norance as pervasive as it is today,
tyranny's rank breath can already be felt
on the backs of our necks. A poll con-
ducted in the bicentennial year of the
U.S. Constitution by the Hear st Corpo-
ration revealed that 45 percent of those
asked believed that the Marxist slogan,
"from each according to his ability, to
each according to his need," is part of
the U.S. Constitution and that 59 per-
cent could not correctly identify the Bill
of Right s as the first ten amendments to
that Constituti on. When knowledge of
elementary civics is that abysmal, to say
that we are in trouble is the greatest of
understatement s.
Some percepti on of how far we have
traveled downward may be gained if we
consider the crypto-Marxist lout now
living in the Whit e House, his boori sh
spouse, and the uncouth specimens oc-
cupying powerful positions in the presi-
dential cabinet. We can only reflect that
earlier generations of Americans would
never have suffered so coarse a crew
guiding the ship of state of the greatest
nati on on ea rth. The Scotti sh jurist,
Lord Brougham, wrote over ISO years
ago that "education makes a people easy
to lead, but difficult to dri ve; easy to
govern, but impossible to enslave."
Clearly, the degradation of American
freedom is the result of the disintegra-
tion of American education.
According to the Hearst Corporation
study previously cited, 75 percent of
Americans believe that they have a
"right" to a free, government-sponsored
education, though not one of the Found-
ing Fathers ever expressed his belief
that such a right exi sts . Unlike many
contemporary Americans, the Founders
were deepl y suspicious of any needless
government involvement in the lives of
indi vidual citizens. If government is re-
sponsible for fulfilling basic needs such
as food, shelter, clothin g, medical care,
and educat ion, then there can be no ef-
fective barri er to comprehensive gov-
ern me nt co ntrol of our li ve s, since
indi vidual s, in such a system, become
wholly dependent on government. In the
earl y Ameri can Republic, education
was not the concern of government but
of churches, and for that rea son the
conviction was universal among the
Founders that religion constitutes the
basis of sound education.
Government control of education is
deadl y. Our ideological enemy, seeing
government-sponsored education as our
Achill es' heel, began its painstaking
plan of subversion long ago. Such is the
nature of modem America that govern-
ment cannot be trusted in any way in the
development of the minds of future citi-
zens. Education must again become the
domain of famil y and church, acting in
concert to shape the sorts of young men
and women who resemble our Ameri-
can fore bears : self-rel ia nt, morally
strong, honorable, spiritually developed,
knowledgeable about their history and
tradition s, and passionately devoted to
freedom and to the independence of
their country.
FR. JAMES THORNTON
53
PRIVATE AND HOME SCHOOLING
Flourishing Alternatives
The private and home school alternatives allow parents an
abundance of involvement with their children's educations
I
! r
I
n 1982, in the little town of Loui s-
ville, Nebraska, seven fathers, known
as the "Louisville Seven," and their
pastor sat in jail, their church padlocked
and their wive s and children fugiti ves in
other states. Their crime: Refu sing to
license their school with the state of Ne-
braska and accept the Nebraska require-
ment that their school use
only state-certified teachers.
Educational quality was
not at issue : The state
never alleged that the chil -
dren were not receiving a
good ed ucation. The real
issue was control: Who
would control the educa-
tion of children - parents
or the state? If a Chri stian
school was a mini stry of a
church, could the state regu-
late that mini stry by requir-
ing that it be licensed?
Public reaction varied.
Some denounced the Lou-
isvi lle Seven as criminals;
others lauded them as mar-
tyr s. Even con servati ve
Chri stians were di vided,
wei ghin g the dut y to stand
firm in the faith again st the
duty to obey the law. Thi s
fact remains: In the dozen
years since the Louisville
Seven took their stand, the
legal and political climate
for home and private
schools has improved markedly. In state
after state officials have consistentl y ex-
pressed a desire to accommodate private
and home schools. Repeatedl y they
have confessed, "We don't want another
Loui sville , Nebraska situation here! "
Changing Climate
The laws of a couple of decades ago,
requiring pri vate schools to be licen sed
by the state and to hire only state-certi-
fied teachers, have largely been elimi -
nated. North Dakota and Iowa were
among the last states to eliminate such
restrictions. In Michigan the certifica-
tion requirement still exi sts but is sel-
dom enforced.
In other states the laws vary. Some,
THE NEWAMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
like Illinoi s and Oklahoma, leave pri-
vate and home schools largely unregu-
lated. Other states give local sc hool
officials the authority to impose testi ng
or other re strictions on pri vate and
home schools. Sometimes these restric -
tions are reasonable and are related to
legitimate educa tional aims ; at other
times, however, they are conspicuously
burdensome and inconvenient. In nearly
all part s of the nati on, however, home
and pri vat e schoo l pers onnel can live
with the rules even if they don't particu-
larly like them.
Along with the improved legal cli-
mate for pri vate and home schools has
come greater public acceptance for this
form of education. Several factors ac-
count for this .
With few exceptions, home schools
and private schools have done an excel-
lent job of providing qualit y education
for children. Study after study has dem-
onstrated that home and private school
children outperform their public school
peer s on standardized tests. Such supe-
rior performance cannot be explained
away by calling the se teaching si tua-
tions "elitist," catering only to "ric h
kid s" and rejecting the less affluent.
Some affl uent private schools do exist,
but most private education institutions
are composed of children from famili es
of modest means.
The success of pri vate
and home schools is ex-
plained, rather, by the fact
that they stress discipline,
basic skills, and basic val-
ues, and that they invol ve
parents in the educational
process. After all, the par-
ent wh o shells out thou-
sands of dollars for tuition
is going to make sure he
get s his money' s worth -
especi ally when a "free"
alternative exist s in the
government schools!
Private school success
stand s in stark contrast to
government school fai lure:
declining literacy rates,
plunging SAT scores, and
'" soaring crime rat es, drug
1l abuse rates, and prorni scu-
ft ity rates. Many parents have
Ol
g realized that government
school s promote a value
system diametrically op-
posed to theirs. Others have
placed their chi ldren in pri-
vate religious schools, not
necessarily because they agre e with the
school' s religious viewpoint, but simply
because they beli eve their children will
recei ve a good education, or recei ve bet-
ter discipline, or will simply be "safer"
there than in a government school.
Not Just a Fad
There is a growing recognitio n that
private and home schooling are not con-
temporary aberrations. Throughout hu-
man hi story the home, church, and
synagogue have been the primary cen-
ters for the education of children. This
was particularly true when the United
States was founded. As Justice Felix
Frankfurter observed in McCollum v.
Board of Educati on ( 1948):
55
Traditionally, organized educa-
tion in the Western world was
Christian education. It could hardly
be otherwise when the education of
children was primarily study of the
Word and the ways of God. Even
in the Protestant countries, where
there was a less close identification
of Church and State, the basis of
education was largely the Bible,
and its chief purpose inculcation of
piety. To the extent that the State
intervened, it used its authority to
further aims of the Church.
The immigrants who came to
these shores brought this view of
education with them. Colonial
schools certainly started with a re-
ligious orientation. When the com-
mon problems of the early settlers
of the Massachusetts Colony re-
vealed the need for common
schools, the object was the defeat
of "one chief project of the old de-
luder , Satan, to keep men from the
knowledge of the Scriptures."
The term "public school," as used
historically, had a much different mean-
ing than it does today: It meant a school
that was open to the general public
rather than to one specific church or
group. As the French observer Alexis de
Tocqueville wrote in the l830s:
The general principle in the mat-
ter of public education is that any-
one is free to found a public school
and to direct it as he pleases. It 's an
industry like other industries, the
consumers being the judges and the
state taking no hand whatever....
Rather than being the "traditional" or
"American" way of education, govern-
ment schools are a unique feature of the
19th and 20th centuries. Partly because
of their failure, parents are turning once
again to private and home schools.
Present Threats
But before we proclaim the 1990s a
"golden age" of private and home
schooling, there is a need to examine
several threats that loom on the horizon.
The constitutional protection for al-
ternative schooling has been based upon
well-established principles of the First
Amendment free exercise of religion
and parental rights as set forth in a se-
ries of Supreme Court cases, including
Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), Pierce v. So-
ciety of Sisters (1925), and Wisconsin v.
Yoder (1972). Yoder, a case involving
Amish alternative education, estab-
lished that the state may not substan-
tially burden one's free exercise of
religion unless the state has a compel-
ling interest that cannot be achieved by
less restrictive means.
But in 1990 the Supreme Court se-
verely curtailed this right. In Oregon v.
Smith, a case involving the right of Na-
tive American Church members to use
the drug peyote in religious services, the
Court declared that the compelling state
interest/less restrictive means test ap-
plies only to state regulations directly
aimed at religion. Those which only in-
The Voucher Trap: What Gove
56
O
ver the past decade, the accelerating deterioration of the
public school system has fueled a significant upswing
in parental preference for private education . A 1991 poll
conducted for the National Association of Independent Schools
found over half (51 percent) of Americans using the public
schools systems would prefer to send their children to private
schools if money were no object. With the increasing desire to
flee the government school ghettos has come a concomitant in-
crease in support for voucher initiatives that allow use of educa-
tional vouchers at private as well as public schools .
It would be especially tragic if now, when the American people
are finally awakening to the horrible condition of public educa-
tion - when they are perhaps more nearly ready than ever be-
fore to make the kind of daring break with the corrupt
government school system that is needed; when the private
school and home school movement is making such rapid growth
and progress - if at this critical point in history the private
schools surrender their independence to the government to gain a
government subsidy. That is the very real and present danger with
the voucher movement now sweeping the country .
In Wickard v. Filburn (1942) the U.S. Supreme Court ruled,
"It is hardly lack of due process for the Government to regulate
that which it subsidizes." There is little question that state (or fed-
eral) vouchers would be held by the courts to be subsidies and
that, therefore, the schools receiving them should be subject to
certain regulations. Voucher advocates claim that legislative
"firewalls" can be built around voucher proposals that will allow
only "minimal" regulation by the government.
The legislative and judicial history of the past three decades
suggests such hopes are naive. In the 1960s, when federal aid to
students in higher education was launched, Congress assured col-
leges and universities that there would be no strings attached to
the aid to jeopardize their freedom and autonomy. Then came the
affirmative action legislation that held schools to be guilty of ra-
cial discrimination unless their enrollment and hiring practices
reflected the race quotas set by government bureaucrats . Hillsdale
College , which had an exemplary nondiscrimination policy, it
may be recalled, was forced, at great expense, to either fight the
unjust government edicts or knuckle under and sacrifice its very
soul. It fought all the way to the Supreme Court - and lost.
More recently, we have the case of Liberty University (LU),
founded by the Reverend Jerry Falwell. In 1992 the Virginia State
Council of Higher Education ruled that LU students would still
qualify for state tuition-assistance grants provided the school
implemented "significant" policy changes regarding religion. The
State Council's ruling included: I) elimination of the requirement
that students and faculty sign a statement of faith; 2) elimination
of mandatory attendance at religious worship services; 3) provid-
ing of proof by LU of academic freedom of faculty to publish
papers disagreeing with the school 's religious views. At the time,
about 1,000 LU students received the $1,300 state grants, which
in 1992 totaled $1.2 million for the Falwell school. Ladened with
debt and dependent upon the grants, LU rolled over and accepted
the anti-religious dictates of the state . "Liberty has basically
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
cidentaIly affect religion, like Oregon ' s
drug laws, require only a ration al rela-
tionship to a legitimate state purpose.
In reality, few government regula-
tions are directly aimed at reli gion.
Most rules, like licensing and teacher
cer tification laws, apply to society gen-
eraIly and those with religious objec-
tions just happen to get caught in the
net. If thi s rationale prev ails, laws re-
stricting pri vate and home schools will
be much eas ier to sustain in the courts.
While the danger of the Smith rationale
may have been partially alleviated by the
Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it is
not at all cl ear that an act pas sed by
Congress can limit the Supreme Court' s
interpretation of the First Amendment.
Open att acks on private and home
schools are unl ikely in the near future.
Backdoor tacti cs are more likel y, in-
cluding:
Vaguel y worded child abuse stat-
utes which empower social workers to
label as child abuse practicaIly anything
that is not according to their taste, in-
eluding discipl ine, religious indoctrina-
tion, or shielding a child from the social
"benefi ts" of government schools.
Child custody di spute s, in which a
judge makes a decision based not upon
the legality of home schooling, but upon
a contrived "best interest of the child" -
which can be whatever the judge decides.
The parent who wants to teach his child
at home sometimes risks losing custody.
Out come-based educati on, whi ch
may be used to restri ct from high school
graduation those students who do not
di spl ay the "outcomes" de sired by
school officials.
Federal attempts at control, like
House Resolution 6 which, if passed in
original form, would have required all
teachers of all children to possess teacher
certification in all subjects they teach, and
would have set federal standa rds for
such certification. Many awakened to
the danger, and Congress amended the
bill to exempt pri vate and home schools
from its provi sions - for now.
Americans must remain on guard for
future attempts at federal cont rol- per-
haps accompanied by the threat to with-
draw fede ral funds if state and local
authorities don't "crack down " on pri-
vate and home schools.
Local and parental control of the edu-
cati on of our childre n is a bulwark
against federal tyranny. One reason we
remain a free nation today is that we
don't all think alike and aren' t all edu-
cated alike. America's di versit y is part
of America' s strength. Federal control
of education is federal control over the
minds and souls of future generations.
That is why today's high priestesses of
pol iti cal cor rect ness - First Lad y
HiIlary Clinton, Secr etary of Health and
Human Services Donna Shalala, Attor-
ney General Janet Reno, and Surgeon
General Joycelyn Elders - want con-
trol of your chi ldren today.
- D R. JOHN EIDSMOE
Dr. Eidsmoe is a professor at Jones School of Law.
Faulkner University, Montg omery, Alabama, and the
author of many books, including God and Cae sar and
Christianit y and the Constitut ion.
nment Subsidizes It Controls!
agreed to exchange its unique religious character for a govern-
ment handout," gloated Barry Lynn, executive director of Ameri -
cans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) . It was AU
which had requested the inquiry into Liberty's state aid. And AU,
the ACLU, People for the American Way, the American Human-
ist Association, and dozens of other organizations are ready and
waiting to launch similar actions against all Christian schools that
accept vouchers.
It is worth remembering that the Fabian Socialists in Great
Britain long ago promoted subsidies as an ingenious trap to de-
stroy the private schools. Leading Fabian George Bernard Shaw
was especially keen on the scheme. In a letter to H.J . Tozer in
December 1903, Shaw wrote : "Long before the present Act was
ever thought of, I urged that since more than half the children in
the country were in voluntary schools and could not be got out of
them, these voluntary schools should be fully financed by the
State, and brought under its contro!." A couple of months later,
he wrote to T.P. Whittaker, expressing the opinion that "we
should from the first have undertaken a national system of edu-
cation and superseded the voluntary schools without counting the
cost.. .." For, he noted, "Those who pay the piper generally call
the tune in the long run." In September 1910, Shaw wrote to
Julius Bab arguing that "the real way to obtain popular control of
the Church schools was to subsidize them and make conditions
of efficiency." It is also worth remembering that the Fabians
adopted as two of their symbols the turtle and the wolf in sheep's
clothing, which appropriately represented two of the organization's
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
most notable character traits: patience and deceitfulness.
More than a little suspicion should be aroused by the fact that
key individuals, organizations, and institutions - which have
been responsible for promoting most of the disastrous trends in
education and for promoting the programs aimed at socializing
American society - are in the forefront of the voucher move-
ment: the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the
Brookings Institution, leading members of the Council on For-
eign Relations, and the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies.
A leading champion of the "choice"-voucher movement is
Chester Finn, who was one of the main architects of President
Bush 's plan to nationalize education. He certainly is aware that
vouchers will lead to government contro!. How do we know? In
1982 Finn wrote the following in the bulletin of the National As-
sociation of Secondary School Principals:
Some, to be sure, like to think they can have it both ways;
i.e., can obtain aid without saddling themselves with unac-
ceptable forms of regulation. But most acknowledge the gen-
eral applicability of the old adage that he who pays the piper
call s the tune, and are more or less resigned to amalgamat-
ing or choosing between assistance and autonomy.
If the voucher concept is accepted at the grassroots, the educa-
tion monopolists may well be able to accomplish through the
backdoor what they could not accomplish through the front.
- WILLIAM F. JASPER
57
EDUCATION RESOURCES
The Right Stuff
There is no shortage of resources for private and home school educators
, I
T
he late Professor Medford Ev-
an s, former chief of security
training for the Atomic Energy
Commission and a Yale PhD, once said
of our government school system:
"Never has so much been spent to teach
so many so little ." An increasing num-
ber of parents, disenchanted with the
many pitfalls of stati st education, are
turning to non-government alternatives.
Though the number of private schools
appears to have stabilized over the past
decade at about 25,000 schools and 2.5
million students, it is estimated that
home schooling is surging at an annual
rate of 20 percent to 40 percent, with
nearly one million children now learn-
ing their ABCs and values from their
parents during the school day. This
flight from public schools has been ac-
companied by an expanding market for
information and resources to enhance
the teaching talents of both parents and
private-school educators.
Background Materials
As a first step, however, it is essen-
tial to understand the cause of our
present discontents. Education special-
ist Samuel Blumenfeld, in his important
work Is Publi c Education Necessary?,*
explains in di sturbing detail how and
why Americans were enticed to surren-
der educational freedom for educational
statism. Blumenfeld notes that of the
117 men who signed the Declaration of
Independence, Articles of Confedera-
tion, and Constitution, only one-fourth
attended college, while George Wash-
ington was educated by his father, Ben-
jamin Franklin by hi s father and a
private school, and Thomas Jefferson by
a tutor.
Blumenfeld' s NEA: Trojan Horse in
American Education exposes the leftist
political activities and radical social
policies of the National Education As-
sociation, and documents the significant
contribution which the nation's largest
teachers union has made to illiteracy,
crime, sexual promiscuity, drug abuse,
and declining academic performance.
* For information on obtaining many of the materi-
als and services mentioned in this article. see the
box on page 62.
THE NEWAMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
Other works by Blumenfeld focu s on
solutions to the education debacle, in-
cluding How to Start Your Own School
- and Why You Need One, which helped
launch the blossoming home school
movement; The New Illiterates - and
How to Keep Your Child from Becom-
ing One, a detailed guide to systematic
phonics instruction; and How to Tutor ,
which explains how virtually any parent
who can read can adequately teach the
3 Rs. The Blumenfeld Education Letter,
published monthly, keeps subscribers
current on the pros and cons of educa-
tional trends.
Legal Aid
The obvious threat which pri vate
schools pose to the government system
has resulted in many, varied attempts by
the latter to snuff out or gain control of
the former. Competent legal assistance
for private and home schoolers has
therefore been an imperative. The Vir-
ginia-based Home School Legal De-
fense Association (HSLDA) was founded
in 1983 to unite a large number of home
schooling families so that each could
have a source of quality legal assi stance
at low cost. The nonprofit organization
presently has approximately 30,000
member families. While most legal
threats to its members are re solved
amicably out of court, when litigation
becomes necessary the Association pro-
vides full representation at each stage of
the legal proceedings without cost to the
family .
HSLDA's senior counsel, Christo-
pher J. Klicka, who has successfully
represented over 2,000 home school
families in legal conflicts, is author of
Home Schooling in the United States: A
Legal Analysis , which describes in de-
tail the legal atmosphere for home
schooling in each state. It is updated an-
nually. His most recent book, The Right
Choi ce: The Incredible Failure of Pub-
lic Education and the Rising Hope of
Home Schooling, is a comprehensive
overview of the benefits and biblical ba-
sis of home schooling, its hi storical
heritage, and its academic success.
The HSLDA was a plaintiff in a re-
cent case in which the Texas Supreme
Court ruled unanimously on June 15,
1994 that a home school enjoys the
same legal status as a private school in
Texas as long as it has a written curricu-
lum and provides instruction in spelling,
grammar, reading, math, and good citi-
zenship. Here are a few other cases from
the lengthy list in which HSLDA has
been involved:
59
Mel and Norma Gabler regularly expose numerous errors in
textbooks slated for adoption by school districts nationwide
When two fami lies in North Dakota
were tried and convicted for the "crime"
of home schooling, HSLDA appea led to
the North Dakota Supreme Court, which
ruled in favor of the families and re-
versed their truancy convictions.
HSLDA filed a federal civil rights
action on behalf of nine home schooling
families against sundry school districts in
Pennsylvania that had attempted to
compel the parents to abide an oppres-
sive tutorial provision of the state ' s
compulsory attendance law. A U.S. dis-
trict court judge ruled that the provision
was "unconstitutionally vague" and un-
enforceable, and as a result
more than 20 court cases
against HSLDA member
fami lies were eit her won
by HSLDA or were dis-
missed .
In February of this
year, HSLDA was instru-
mental in triggering mas-
sive nationwide opposition
to a dangerous amendment
that had quietly been
slipped into H.R. 6, the
House bill to reauthorize
the Elementary and Sec-
ondary Education Act of
1965. The amendment,
proposed by liberal Repre-
sentative George Miller
(D-CA), would have effectively re-
quired state certification of all teachers,
including home schooling parents. The
massive cascade of phone calls, tele-
grams, and letters persuaded the House
to scrap the amendment on February
24th by a start ling 424 to I margi n (only
Representative Miller stood firm), then
approve (374 to 53) an amendment of-
fered by conservative Representative
Dick Armey (R-TX) stating that nothing
contained in the rest of the act "shall be
construed to affect home school s."
(Both votes are shown on pages 66-67.)
De Libris
Alpha Omega Publications, head-
quartered in Tempe, Arizona, was es-
tablished in 1982 by J. Richard Fugate,
who is today its chief executive officer.
A longtime activist in the Chri stian
school movement, Fugate earlier founded,
and served as principal of, a private
school. In 1971 , disturbed at the extent
to whic h humanism and its attendant
evils had permeated the curriculum of
the government schools which their
60
children were attending, Fugate and his
wife placed the youngsters in Christian
schools. But those, Fugate recalls, "were
not any better. They used public school
textbooks with the same kind of stuff in
them, United Nations preaching and all
that," so "we started teaching the kids at
home ."
Alpha Omega supplies textbooks and
other materials in the areas of language,
the Bible, mathematics, and social sci-
ence. Fugate explains that they "were
written by some 200 authors throughout
the country, all with at least master's de-
grees and five years of teaching in their
fields." At present the company's texts
are not used in government schools, but
a recently published mathematics book
cou ld help "shore up" that subject in
statist schools.
While the number of private schools
has leveled off in rece nt years, Fugate
is encouraged by the substantial growth
in committed home school families . The
response to H.R. 6, he believes, let the
country see in a dramatic way the level
of commitment that has been apparent
from within the movement for some
time. He estimates that home schooling
"is increasing 50 percent each year," but
loses perhaps one-half of those parents
who start up the year before only to find
the task too trying. In speeches, he
warns parents that "if you lack self-dis-
cipline, and you lack personal organiza-
tion, and you lack the ability to control
your own child, you 're probably going
to fail. " As the movement continues to
grow and mature, and parents become
more knowledgeable and proficient at
the start , that attrition rate will undoubt-
edly decline.
Watchdogs
The inaccuracy and humanist bias of
many textbooks used in government
schools has been a scandal for decades.
In 1961, 16-year-old Jim Gabler asked
his dad to scrutinize troubling passages
in his high school history text. Mel
Gabler, too, was disturbed by what he
read, from the text's enthusiastic sup-
port of constitutionally questionable
federal programs to the omission of cru-
cial aspects of U.S. history. The experi-
ence led Mel and his wife Norma to
peruse other textbooks used by their
children; they found so many outrageous
examples of immorality,
obscenity, soc ialism, and
anti-Christian, anti-Ameri-
can bias that they decided
to register a complaint with
the Texas State Board of
Ed ucation's Text book
Committee. Initially, they
were viewed as mere
troublemakers, but as the
Gablers delved further into
the matter and meticu-
lously documented their
case (they have compiled
thousands of detailed text-
book reviews which run
from a few to as many as
146 pages), other con-
cerned parents, educators,
and the news media began taking them
seriously. And as their tenacious influ-
ence grew, textbook publishers and the
state textbook committee began heeding
their pleas for more emphasis on basic
academic skills and less space for im-
moral ity, profanity and other objection-
able material.
Beginning in 1988, the Gablers began
concentrating primarily on the factual
errors in texts rather than questions of
philosophy or ideology. Though they are
more concerned about the latter, the
fact-focused approach has made it more
difficult for the textbook publishers and
school officials to avoid making correc-
tions, and has tended to convince an in-
creasing number of print and electronic
journalists that what they have been
claiming all along is true.
In the spring of 1991, they revealed a
shocking number of factual errors in
textbooks slated for state adoption. One
Macmillan/McGraw-Hill text claimed,
for instance, that Sputnik was "the first
successful intercontinental ballistic mis-
sile launched by the Sovie t Union," and
THE NEW AMERICAN I AUGUST 8, 1994
that it "carr ied a nuclear warhead ."
Actuall y, it was a space satellite sans
warhead. And a Scott , Foresman and
Company text claimed that the Korean
War began in 1959, and that "the United
Stat es eas ily settled the conflict by us-
ing the bomb." In fact, the war (or "po-
lice action" as it was euphemistically
terme d) began in 1950, was settled un-
easily after 33,65 1 American troops
were kill ed and ano ther 103,284
wounded, and the U.S. never "nuked"
the enemy as impli ed.
In the month s after the Gablers began
their sea rch, publi sher s made nearl y
8,000 changes in the texts. As reported
in THE NEW AMERICAN for Ma y 18,
1992, on "December 16th [1991] , the
publi shers resubmitted the text s, along
with signed affida vits guaranteeing that
the books were error free. But on Janu -
ary 9th, the Gablers submitted a list of
another 187 factual errors that they and
Dr . Neal Frey, a former history profes-
sor, had found in the ' corrected' texts.
The red-faced publ ishers made another
1,669 changes and returne d with the
new ' error-free' vers ions. This time the
Gabl er s and Frey found an additional
112 fact ual errors."
Mel Gabler laments that "our nation
has become exactly what has been
taught to the kids. Thi rty-three yea rs
ago when we started we predicted the
situat ion now. Not that we were smart;
we just looked at what the kids were be-
ing taught... ." One of the probl ems, he
advises, is that "nearly everybody that
fight s these problems - whether it is
abortion, or pornography, or socialism,
or what ever it is - they generally, if
you even mention education, put it as
one of the spokes on a wheel. Well , ac-
tuall y, education is the hub, because
your ACLU-type lawyers and your left-
wing pol itici ans, all of those, they're
victims of their education."
Big Book Series
On e of the most compreh en si ve
so urces of informat io n about home
schooling has been the Big Book series
by Mary Pride which, beginning in 1986
with publi cation of The Big Book of
Home Learning: The Complete Guide to
Everything Educational fo r You and
Your Children, has cat alogued and
evaluated vario us home sc hool cur-
ri cul a, textbook s, records, cassette
tapes, childrens' magazines, foreign lan-
guage courses , games, maps, laboratory
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
equipment, computer programs, charts,
tests, tool s, flash cards, models, and on
and on.
Mrs. Pride also addresses the key is-
sues corre lated wit h educational de-
cline, from Keynesi an economics and
feminist propaganda to secular human-
ism and look-say reading. Th er e are
four volumes in the Big Book series, and
they will soon be "bundled" with a CO-
RaM, as a single basic book acco mpa-
nied by a computer storehouse of the
addi tional information . Mrs. Pride, who
Iserbyt has monitored aBE advance
throughout education establishment
hold s a bachel or of science degree in
electrical engineering and a master ' s de-
gree in computer science, is heavily in-
vol ved in the effo rt to bring home
schooling into the high-tech age . She
has writte n Pride 's Guide to Educa-
tional Soft war e, which reviews some
750 educatio nal co mputer programs,
and is devel opin g pl ans to launch her
own bull et in board sys tem. Her new
magazine, Practical Homeschool ing;
includes a high-t ech section which, she
speculates, will eve ntually spin off into
a magazi ne all its own.
In the Fi eld
The Reverend Paul Lindstrom oper-
ates what may be the nati on' s largest
combined private and home school pro-
gram. He has been an activist in com-
mendabl e cau ses for dec ad es, fi rs t
achieving nati onal prominence in the
late 1960s after North Korea captured
the U.S.S. Pueblo in Janu ary 1968. He
fo unde d the Remember the Puebl o
Committee to ass ure that Commander
Lloyd M. Bucher and his crew were not
flushed down the memory hole - as
has so often happened with Americans
held captive by the communists. Com-
mander Bucher and his crew were re-
leased in December 1968.
There are presently some 600 students
enrolle d at Reverend Lindstr om ' s
Christian Liberty Academy in Prospect
Height s, llIinois. The school-aff iliated
Christian Liberty Press publi shes about
100 titles for use in the curricula, but
also utilizes materi al from other Chris-
ti an-ori ented outl et s, such as Alpha
Omega and Bob Jones University Press.
The off-campus CLA Satellite Schools
(CLASS) have some 30,000 enrollees
(K- 12) in all 50 states and 59 forei gn
countri es, mo stl y home schools for
Americans based overseas (military per-
sonnel, dipl omats, mi ssion ari es, etc),
but in some instances on-campus (i.e.,
Japan, Surin ame , and Russia).
The current Russian (former Soviet)
ambas sador to Suriname enro lled his
daught er in the Chri stian Libert y Acad-
emy of Paramaribo (the capital) in the
late 1980s. On one occas ion when the
ambassador was called to Moscow, his
daught er , who had by then completed
second grade, was inter viewed by So-
viet authorities who, as recalled by Rev-
erend Lindstrom, "brought up so me
matters that were very evolutionary in
nature, and she told them, ' No, that ' s
not right. God made everything. ' So the
handl ers of the children, 1 guess, were
taken aback by that , and wondered,
' Well, where in the world is this girl go-
ing to school?' But the father got a kick
out of it. He would tell the story, and
he'd laugh ... and he was so proud of
his daughter. He was not upset in any
way, shape or form that she challenged
the educational masters back there in
Moscow who were qui zzing her. He
thought that was great."
Staff personnel from other embassies,
including that of Red Chin a, also send
their children to the Paramaribo school,
where enrollment now exceeds 300. In-
deed , Reverend Lindstrom says , the
embassy of one Asian country "has des-
ign at ed the sc hool as the sc hoo l of
choice for any of their embassy person-
nel that are interested in being educated
in the English language."
In Russia, Reverend Lind strom has
6 1
Some Education Resources
Three of Samuel Blumenfeld's books are available fromAmericanOpinion Book
Services (see advertisement on page 63). The Blumenfeld Education Letter is
available from: P.O. Box 45161, Boise, Idaho 83711.
The Home School Legal Defense Association, P.O. Box 159, Paeonian Springs,
VA 22129.
Alpha Omega Publications, P.O. Box 3153, Tempe AZ 85281.
The Mel Gablers, Education Research Analysts, Inc. P.O. Box 7518, Longview,
TX 75607.
worked with former Soviet dissidents
to establish six on-campus schools to
date. Reverend Lindstrom's experience
clearly confirms the worldwide nature of
the private and home school phenom-
enon.
Some Statistics
Brian D. Ray , PhD, is an associate
professor of science and education at
Western Baptist College in Salem, Or-
egon. He also heads the National Home
Education Research Institute which, as
the name implies, specializes in the col-
lection, analysis, and reporting of sta-
tistical data relating to home schooling.
Such data are used to help initiate legis-
lation related to home schooling and
family issues and to bolster the position
of home schoolers who become in-
volved in court cases. The Institute also
publishes the quarterly journal Home
School Researcher to keep subscribers
abreast of the ever-growing body of re-
search in the area of home education.
Dr. Ray , a father of six children, pegs
home school enrollment at between
450,000 and 820,000 nationally, indi-
cating an increase in recent years of
between 20 percent and 40 percent an-
nually. A nationwide study which he
conducted of 1,516 families found home
educated students to be scoring, on av-
erage, above the 80th percentile in all
areas of standardized achievement tests,
compared to a national average at the
50th percentile.
Other studies have found that home
educators are adequately addressing the
socialization needs of their children;
that the children have "significantl y
lower problem behavior scores" than
their government school peers; and that
(happily) home educators and their
families do not, in general, "have a
strong desire for access to tax-funded
resources."
ing investigation triggered in 1981
when her children began showing signs
of emotional di stress after being sub-
jected to privacy-invading school ques-
tionnaires, death education conditioning,
and other traumatic happenings. The re-
markable story of Mrs. Hoge's subse-
quent probe was recounted in the 1991
book Education for the New World Or-
der, by Beverly K. Eakman. In her own
recent book, A New Managed Economy:
School of Tomorrow, and in an audiotape
of one of her speeches (accompanied by
printed documentation supporting her
allegations) entitled Talking Pap ers,
Mrs. Hoge sheds additional light on
such concerns as outcome-based edu-
cation (OBE), the drive to redefine the
term " family," the carefully orches-
trated process of creating human capi-
tal (intellectually hamstrung and
subservient workers conditioned to do
the bidding of supposed superiors), and
plans to collect, computerize, and cen-
tralize the most minute and intimate de-
tails about every American, from cradle
to grave.
Dennis L. Cuddy, PhD, has been a
government school and university
teacher, and from 1982-88 served as a
senior associate with the U.S. Depart-
ment of Education. Dr. Cuddy appears
frequently as a guest columnist in USA
Today and is author of two books rei at-
ing to education: The Grab for Power:
A Chronology of the NEA, which takes
the reader through the history and influ-
ence of the nation's largest teachers
union, and A Chronology of Education
With Quotable Quotes, which excerpts
the speeches and writings of key Insid-
ers of the humanist education establish-
ment.
From 1981 to 1983, Charlotte Iser-
byt was a special assistant in the U.S.
Department of Education's Office of
Educational Research and Improve-
ment. Her 1985 book Back to Basics
Reform ... or Skinnerian International
Curri culum, was among the first to ex-
pose the dangers of OBE and provide
convincing evidence that federal and
state governments, in collusion with so-
cial engineers in the major tax-exempt
foundations, were scheming " to ma-
nipulate and control Americans from
birth to death using the educational sys-
tem as the primary vehicle for bringing
about planned social, political, and eco-
nomic change. " This important book
was reprinted last year. Mrs. Iserbyt has
also compiled a weighty research pack-
age which she refers to as her "3-D
proof packet." Entitled Deliberate Dumb
Down, it contains the extensive docu-
mentation which she has compiled
about OBE over the years.
- ROBERT W. LEE
Unsung Heroes
Some of the most important sources
of information regarding education re-
lated issues are the books and other re-
search materials compiled by largely
unheralded individuals who stumble
across or otherwise become interested
in a topic and investigate largely on
their own . For example:
PennsyIvania mother and home-
maker Anita Hoge has become one of
the country's best-informed activists on
education issues as a result of an ongo-
62
Mary Pride's Big Book series, her Practical Homeschooling magazine, and other
resources are available from Home Life, 1720-EWest Park Center, Fenton, MO
63026. Telephone: (800) 346-6322.
Christian Liberty Academy Satellite Schools, 502 W. Euclid Avenue, Arlington
Heights, IL 60004.
National Home Education Research Institute, 5000 Deer Park Drive, SE, Salem,
OR 97301.
Dennis L. Cuddy's book A Chronology of Education With Quotable Quotes is
available fromPro FamilyForum, Inc., P.O. Box 1059, HighlandCity, FL33846.
Charlotte T. Iserbyt, 1062Washington Street, Bath, Maine 04530.
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
How They Voted
Key votes on education and the family
Following are six Senate votes and seven House votes which
relate to education and fa mily issues. Each of these votes involve
either traditional f amily values orfe deral control over education
or the fami ly. In the index, a "Y" indicates that a congressman
voted yea, an "N" indicates that he voted "nay," and a "? " that
he did not vote.
We encourage you to evaluate each issue caref ully, to com-
mend your legislators fo r votes which keep the f ederal govern-
ment out of the schoolroom and away fro m the fami ly, and to
urge improv ement where needed.
Senate Votes
(1) Federal Cont rol of Local School Cur riculum, Amen d-
ment to S. 1150. Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) offered this amend-
ment to eliminate the "opportunity to learn standards" from the
pending Goals 2000 education bill because this provision "fun-
damentally undermines ... local control over education.... [The
standards] affect almost all functions of education." (Rejected 42-
52 on February 2, 1994, Roll Call #20.)
(2) Voluntary Prayer in Public Schools, Amendment to S.
1150. Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) offered this amendment to
withhold the distribution of federal funds under the pending
Goals 2000 bill to local or state schools which ban voluntary stu-
dent prayer. Senator Helms asked, "When our government for-
bids reading from the Bible, but pays for the distributi on of
condoms in the schools, what kind of message does the combi na-
tion of those two governmental actions send?" (Adopted 75-22
on February 3, 1994, Roll Call #22.)
(3) Condom Distribution Wit hout Parental Approval,
Amendme nt to S. 1150. Senator Jesse Hel ms offered this
amendment which would have banned the federal subsidy of the
distribution of condoms, contraceptives, or drugs to unmarried
children under 18 years of age without the written consent of a
parent or legal guardian. (Rejected 34-59 on February 8, 1994,
Roll Call #28.)
(4) Goals 2000 Legi slation, H.R. 1804. This bill would write
into law eight broadly defined national education goals and es-
tablish a federal agency - in effect a national school board -
charged with fulfilling these standards. (Passed 71-25 on Febru-
ary 8, 1994, Roll Call #34.)
(5) Goals 2000 Legislati on, Confer ence Report on H.R.
1804. The final version of this legislation would (among other
authorizations) dole out $400 million annually in federal largesse
to encourage local compliance with the "voluntary" standards set
by the 19-member National Education Standards and Improvement
Council (NESIC), in essence a national school board, which this
bill establishes. (Adopted 63-22 on March 25, 1994, Roll Call #86.)
(6) Head Sta r t Reauthorization, Conference Report on S.
2000. This conference report would reauthorize "such sums as
may be necessary" for the $3.3 billion per year Head Start pro-
gram through fiscal 1998 and $2.6 billion in fiscal 1995 for three
low income and child abuse prevention programs. (Adopted 98- 1
on May II , 1994, Roll Call #109.)
THE NEWAMERICAN I AUGUST 8, 1994
123456
I I I I I I
ALABAMA
HeflinH(D) ..Y Y Y Y Y Y
Shelby R(D) Y Y Y Y Y ?
ALASKA
Stevens T(R) ? ? N Y ? Y
Murkowski F(R) Y Y Y N ? Y
ARIZONA
DeConcini 0 (D) N Y N Y Y Y
McCainJ (R) . .. ? ? Y N ? Y
ARKANSAS
Bumpers 0 (D) .. N Y N Y Y Y
Pryor0 (D) ? Y N Y Y Y
CALIFORNIA
Feinstein 0 (D) ... N N N Y Y Y
Boxer B(D) ... N N N Y Y Y
COLORAOO
BrownH(R) . Y Y Y N N Y
Campbell B(D) . Y Y N Y Y Y
CONNECTICUT
DoddC(D) N Y N Y Y Y
LiebermanJ (D) N Y N Y ? Y
DELAWARE
Roth W(R) Y Y Y Y Y Y
BidenJ (D) ? Y N Y Y Y
FLORIDA
Graham B(D) N Y N Y Y Y
Mack C(R) Y Y Y N N Y
GEORGIA
Nunn S(D) N Y N Y Y Y
Coverdell P(R) Y Y Y N N Y
HAWAII
Inouye0 (D) N N N Y Y Y
Akaka 0 (D) N Y N Y Y Y
IDAHO
CraigL (R) . Y Y Y N N Y
Kempthorne0 (R) Y Y Y N N Y
ILLINOIS
SimonP(D) . N N N Y Y Y
MoseleyBraun C(D) N Y ? ? Y Y
INDIANA
Lugar R(R) Y Y N N N Y
Coats 0 (R) Y Y Y N N Y
IDWA
Grassley C(R) . Y Y Y N N Y
HarkinT(D) N N N Y Y Y
KANSAS
DoleB(R) Y Y Y N N Y
Kassebaum N(R) Y N Y Y N Y
KENTUCKY
FordW(D) N Y Y Y Y Y
McConnell M(R) Y Y Y N N Y
LOUISIANA
Johnston J (D) . NY ? ? Y Y
Breaux J (D) .. Y Y ? Y Y Y
MAINE
CohenW(R) Y Y N Y ? Y
Mitchell G(D) N Y N Y Y Y
MARYLAND
Sarbanes P(D) N Y N Y Y Y
Mikulski B(D) N Y N Y Y Y
MASSACHUSETIS
Kennedy E(D) N Y N Y Y Y
Kerry J (D) N Y N Y Y Y
MICHIGAN
Riegle0 (D) N N N Y Y Y
Levin C(D) N N N Y Y Y
MINNESOTA
Durenberger 0 (R) . ? Y N Y Y Y
Wellstone P(D) N N N Y Y Y
MISSISSIPPI
CochranT(R) Y Y Y Y N Y
Lott T(R) . Y Y Y N ? Y
MtSSOURI
DanforthJ (R) Y N N Y N Y
Bond C(R) . Y Y N Y Y Y
123456
II I I I I
MONTANA
Baucus M(D) N Y N Y Y Y
BurnsC(R) Y Y Y N N Y
NEBRASKA
ExonJ (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y
Kerrey B(D) N Y N Y Y Y
NEVADA
Reid H(D) N Y N Y Y Y
Bryan R(D) N N N Y Y Y
NEW HAMPSHIRE
Smith R(R) Y Y Y N ? Y
GreggJ (R) Y Y N N ? Y
NEWJERSEY
Bradley B(D) N Y N Y Y Y
Lautenberg F(D) N Y N Y Y Y
NEWMEXICO
Domenici P(R) Y Y Y Y Y Y
BingamanJ (D) N Y N Y Y Y
NEW YORK
Moynihan 0 (D) N N N Y Y Y
D'Amato A(R) Y Y Y N N Y
NORTH CAROLINA
Helms J (R) Y Y Y N ? N
Faircloth L(R) Y Y Y N ? Y
NORTHDAKOTA
Conrad K(D) N Y N Y Y Y
Dorgan B(D) . N Y N Y Y Y
OHIO
GlennJ (D) . N N N Y Y Y
MetzenbaumH(D) N N N Y Y Y
OKLAHOMA
Boren0 (D) N Y N Y Y Y
Nickles 0 (R) ? ? Y N N Y
OREGON
HatfieldM(R) N N N Y Y Y
Packwood B(R) Y Y N Y Y Y
PENNSYLVANIA
Specter A(R) N N N Y Y Y
WoffordH(D) N Y N Y Y Y
RHOOE ISLANO
Pell C(D) N N N Y Y Y
Chafee J (R) N N ? Y Y Y
SOUTH CAROLINA
ThurmondS(R) Y Y Y Y N Y
HollingsE(D) N Y N Y ? Y
SOUTH DAKOTA
Pressler L(R) Y Y Y N N Y
DaschleT(D) N Y N Y Y Y
TENNESSEE
Sasser J (D) N Y Y Y Y Y
MathewsH(D) N Y Y Y Y Y
TEXAS
GrammP(R) Y Y ? ? ? Y
HutchisonK(R) Y Y ? ? N Y
UTAH
Hatch0 (R) Y Y Y N N Y
Bennett R(R) Y Y Y N ? Y
VERMONT
LeahyP(D) N N N Y Y Y
JeffordsJ (R) N N N Y Y Y
VIRGINIA
Warner J (R) . Y Y N N N Y
RobbC(D) N Y N Y Y Y
WASHINGTON
GortonS(R) Y Y N Y Y Y
Murray P(D) N N N Y Y Y
WEST VIRGINIA
Byrd R(D) Y Y Y Y N Y
Rockefeller J (D) N Y ? Y Y Y
WISCONSIN
Kohl H(D) N Y N Y Y Y
Feingold R(D) N N N Y Y Y
WYOMING
WallopM(R). . Y Y Y N ? Y
SimpsonA(R) . Y Y NY? Y
65
House Votes
(1) De Facto Ban on Home Schooling, Amendment to H.R.
6. This amendment would remove language that Representative
George Miller (D-CA) had inserted in the education bill requir-
ing state certification of teachers - in the subject area they teach
- in all districts applying for funds under this $12.7 billion leg-
islation by 1998. Because home educators often teach a dozen
subjects , state certification in all subjects would be virtually im-
possible. (Adopted 424-1 on February 24, 1994, Roll Call #31.)
(2) Regulating Private Schools, Amendment to H.R. 6. Rep-
resentative Richard Armey (R-TX) introduced this amendment
to prohibit any federal interference in private, religious, or home
schools while at the same time allowing such schools to take ad-
vantage of some of the programs under this bill. Representative
Cliff Stearns (R-FL) argued, "If we do not adopt the Armey
amendment, the possibility exists that provisions similar to the
Miller amendment [see vote #1 above] may be found in this 900-
page bill and be interpreted so as to interfere with the operations
of our private schools." (Adopted 374-53 on February 24, 1994
Roll Call #32.)
(3) Voluntary Prayer in Public Schools, Amendment to
H.R. 6. Representative Sam Johnson (R-TX) offered this amend-
ment to deny federal funds under the pending Elementary and
Secondary Education reauthorization bill to schools that ban vol-
untary student prayer. (Adopted 345-64 on March 21, 1994, Roll
Call #75.)
(4) Goals 2000 Legislation, Conference Report on H.R.
1804. Thi s conference report would (among other authorizations)
dole out $400 million annually in federal largesse to encourage
local compliance with the "voluntary" standards set by the 19-
member National Education Standards and Improvement Council
(NESIC), in essence a national school board, which this bill es-
tablishes. (Adopted 306-121 on March 23,1994, Roll Call #86.)
(5) Federal Promotion of Homosexuality, Amendment to
H.R. 6. Represent ative Melt on Hanc ock (R-MO) offered an
amendment to deny the distribution of federal funds under the
pending education bill ($12.7 billion) to local educational agen-
cies which encourage homosexuality "as a positive lifestyle al-
ternative." During consideration of the Hancock amendment,
Repr esentative Jolene Unsoe ld (D-WA) offe red a substitute
amendment that effectively gutted the Hancock amendment by
merely prohibiting the use of funds under the bill for distributi on
of "obscene" materi als to minors. (Unsoeld amendment was
adopted 224-194 on March 24, 1994, Roll Call #91.)
(6) Elementary and Secondary Education Reauthorization,
H.R. 6. This legislation would authorize $12.7 billion during fis-
cal year 1995 for a variety of federal educational "ass istance"
programs which Representat ive Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) described
as "a dramatic move toward greater federal control and man-
dates...." (Passed 289- 128 on March 24, 1994, Roll Call #95.)
(7) Head Start Reauthorization, Conference Report on S.
2000. Thi s conference report would reauthorize "such sums as
may be necessary" for the $3.3 billion per year Head Start pro-
gram through fiscal 1998 and $2.6 billion in fiscal 1995 for three
low income and child abuse prevention programs. (Adopted 393-
20 on May 12, 1994, Roll Call #170.)
123 4567
I I I I I I I
ALABAMA
1 Callahan S(R) Y Y Y N N N N
2 EverellT(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
3 BrowderG(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
4 Bevill T(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
5 Cramer R(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
6 Bachus S(R) Y Y ? N N N Y
7 HilliardE(D) Y N Y Y Y Y Y
ALASKA
YoungD(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
ARIZDNA
1 CoppersmithS(D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
2 Pastor E(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
3 StumpB(R) Y Y Y N N N N
4 Kyl J (R) Y Y Y N Y N Y
5 KolbeJ (R) Y Y Y Y Y N Y
6 English K(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
ARKANSAS
1 Lambert B(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
2 ThorntonR(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
3 Hutchinson T(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
4 Dickey J (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
CALIFORNIA
1 Hamburg D(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
2 Herger W(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
3 FazioV(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
4 DoolittleJ (R) Y Y Y N N N N
5 Matsui R(D) Y N Y Y Y Y Y
6 Wool sey L(D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
7 Miller G(D) N N N Y Y Y Y
8 Pelosi N(D).. . Y Y N Y Y Y Y
9 Dellums R(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
10 BakerB(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
11 Pombo R(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
12 Lantos T(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
13 Stark P( D) Y N NY Y Y Y
14 EshooA(D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
15 Mineta N(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
16 EdwardsD (D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
17 Farr S(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
18 ConditG(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
19 Lehman R(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
20 Dooley C(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
21 Thomas B(R).. ... Y Y Y Y Y Y ?
22 HuffingtonM(R) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
23 Gallegly E(R) . Y Y Y Y ? ? ?
24 BeilensonA(D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
25 McKeon H(R) Y Y Y Y N N Y
26 Berman H(D) Y Y N Y ? Y Y
27 Moorhead C(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
28 Dreier D(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
29 Waxman H(D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
30 BecerraX(D) Y N N Y Y Y ?
31 MartinezM(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
32 DixonJ (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
33 Roybal-Allard L (D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
34 Torres E(D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
35 Waters M(D) ? N N Y Y Y Y
36 HarmanJ (D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
37 TuckerW(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
38 HornS(R) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
39 RoyceE(R) Y Y Y N N N N
40 LewisJ (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
41 KimJ(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
42 BrownG(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
43 Calvert K(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
44 McCandless A(R) Y Y Y N Y N Y
45 Rohrabacher D(R) Y Y Y N Y N N
46 DornanR(R) Y Y Y N N N N
47 Cox C(R) Y Y ? N N N ?
48 Packard R(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
49 SchenkL (D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
50 Filner B(D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
51 CunninghamR(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
52 Hunter D(R) Y Y Y N N N N
COLORAOO
1 Schroeder P(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
2 Skaggs D(D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
3 McinnisS(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
4 Allard W(R) Y Y Y N N N N
5 Hefley J (R) Y Y Y N N N ?
6 Schaefer D(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
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I I I I I I I
CONNECTICUT
1 Kennelly B(D) ? ? Y Y Y Y Y
2 Gejdenson S(D) ? ? Y Y Y Y Y
3 DeLauroR(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
4 Shays C(R) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
5 Franks G(R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
6 JohnsonN(R) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
OELAWARE
CastleM(R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
FLORIDA
1 Harte E(D) Y Y Y N NY ?
2 Peterson P(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
3 Brown C(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
4 Fowler T(R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
5 Thurman K(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
6 Stearns C(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
7 MicaJ (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
8 McCollumB(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
9 Biliraki s M(R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
10 YoungC(R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
11 GibbonsS(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
12 CanadyC(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
13 MillerD(R) Y Y Y N N N N
14 Goss P(R) YYY N N NY
15 Bacchus J (D) Y Y ? Y Y Y Y
16 Lewis T(R) Y Y Y N ? ? Y
17 Meek C(D) Y N ? Y Y Y Y
18 Ros-Lehtinen I (R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
19 JohnstonH(D) Y N ? Y Y Y Y
20 Deutsch P(D) Y Y ? Y Y Y Y
21 Diaz-Balart L (R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
22 ShawE(R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
23 HastingsA(D) ? ? ? Y Y Y ?
GEORGIA
1 KingstonJ (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
2 BishopS(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
3 CollinsM(R) Y Y Y N N N N
4 Linder J (R) . Y Y Y N N N Y
5 Lewis J (D) Y N N Y Y Y ?
6 Gingrich N(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
7 Darden G(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
8 RowlandJ (D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
9 Deal N(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
10 Johnson D(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
11 McKinney C(D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
HAWAII
1 AbercrombieN(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
2 Mink P(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
IDAHO
1 LaRocco L (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
2 Crapo M(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
ILLINOIS
1 Rush B(D) Y ? N Y Y Y Y
2 ReynoldsM(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
3 Lipinski W(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
4 Gutierrez L (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y ?
5 Rostenkowski D(D) Y Y ? Y Y Y Y
6 Hyde H(R) . . Y Y Y N N N Y
7 CollinsC(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
8 CraneP(R) Y Y Y N N N N
9 Yates S(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
10 PorterJ (R) Y Y Y N N Y Y
11 Sangmeister G(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
12 CostelloJ (D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
13 Fawell H(R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
14 Hastert D(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
15 EwingT(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
16 ManzulloD(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
17 Evans L (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
18 MichelR(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
19 Poshard G(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
20 DurbinR(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
INDIANA
1 Visclosky P(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
2 Sharp P(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y ?
3 Roemer T(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
4 LongJ (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
5 BuyerS(R) Y Y ? N N N Y
6 BurtonD(R) Y Y Y N N N N
7 MyersJ (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
8 McCloskey F(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
9 HamiltonL (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
66
THE NEWAMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994
1234567
I I I I I I I I
10 Jacobs A(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
IOWA
1 LeachJ (R) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
2 NussleJ (R) Y Y ? Y N N Y
3 Lightfoot J (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
4 Smith N(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
5 GrandyF(R) Y Y ? Y ? ? ?
KANSAS
1 Roberts P(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
2 SlatteryJ (D) Y Y ? Y Y Y Y
3 MeyersJ (R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
4 Glickman 0 (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
KENTUCKY
1 BarlowT(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
2 NatcherW(D) Y N ? ? ? ? ?
3 Mazzoli R(D) Y Y Y ? Y Y Y
4 BunningJ (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
5 Rogers H(R) Y Y Y Y N N Y
6 Baesler S(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
LOUISIANA
1 Livingston R(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
2 JeffersonW(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
3 Tauzin W(D) Y Y Y Y N N Y
4 Fields C(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
5 McCreryJ (R) Y Y Y N Y N Y
6 Baker R(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
7 Hayes J (D) Y Y Y Y N N Y
MAINE
1 AndrewsT(D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
2 Snowe 0 (R) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
MARYLANO
1 Gilchrest W(R) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
2 Bentl ey H(R) Y Y Y Y ? Y Y
3 Cardin B(D) Y Y N Y ? ? Y
4 WynnA(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
5 Hoyer S(D) Y Y ? Y Y Y Y
6 Bartlett R(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
7 MfumeK(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
8 MorellaC(R) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
MASSACHUSETTS
1 Olver J (D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
2 Neal R(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
3 BluteP(R) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
4 Frank B(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
5 Meehan M(D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
6 TorkildsenP(R) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
7 MarkeyE(D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
8 Kennedy J (D) ? ? Y ? Y Y Y
9 Moakley J (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
10 StuddsG(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
MICHI GAN
1 StupakB(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
2 Hoekstra P(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
3 Ehlers V(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
4 Camp 0 (R) Y Y Y Y N N Y
5 BarciaJ (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
6 UptonF(R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
7 Smith N(R) Y Y Y Y N N Y
8 Carr B(D) Y N Y Y Y Y Y
9 Kildee 0 (D) Y N Y Y Y Y Y
10 Bonior 0 (D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
11 KnollenbergJ (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
12 LevinS(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
13 FordW(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
14 ConyersJ (D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
15 CollinsB(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
16 Dingell J (D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
MINNESOTA
1 Penny T(D) Y Y Y N Y Y Y
2 Minge0 (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
3 RamstadJ (R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
4 Vento B(D) . Y N N Y Y Y Y
5 SaboM(D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
6 GramsR(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
7 PetersonC(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
8 OberstarJ (D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
MISSISSIPPI
1 WhittenJ (D) Y Y Y Y N ? Y
2 Thompson B(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
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I I I I I I I
3 MontgomeryG(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
4 Parker M(D) . .. Y Y Y Y N Y ?
5 Taylor G(D) Y Y Y N N Y Y
MISSOURI
1 Clay W(D) Y N ? Y Y Y Y
2 Talent J (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
3 Gephardt R(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
4 Skelton I (D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
5 Wheat A(D) Y Y ? Y Y Y Y
6 Danner P(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
7 HancockM(R) Y Y Y N N N N
8 Emerson B(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
9 Volkmer H(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
MONTANA
Williams P(D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
NEBRASKA
1 Bereuter 0 (R) Y Y Y Y Y N Y
2 Hoagland P(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y ?
3 Barrett B(R) Y Y Y Y N N Y
NEVAOA
1 Bilbray J (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
2 VucanovichB(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
NEW HAMPSHIRE
1 Zeliff B(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
2 Swett 0 (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
NEW JERSEY
1 Andrews R(D) Y Y Y Y ? Y Y
2 Hughes W(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
3 SaxtonH(R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
4 SmithC(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
5 RoukemaM(R) Y Y Y N N Y Y
6 PalloneF(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
7 Franks B(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
8 Klein H(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
9 Torricelli R(D) Y Y Y Y ? ? Y
10 Payne0 (D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
11 Gallo0 (R) Y Y ? ? ? ? Y
12 Zimmer 0 (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
13 MenendezR(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
NEW MEXICO
1 Schiff S(R) Y Y Y Y N N Y
2 SkeenJ (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
3 Richardson B(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
NEW YORK
1 Hochbrueckner G(D) .. Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
2 Lazio R(R) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
3 King P(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
4 Levy0 (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
5 AckermanG(D) Y N ? Y Y Y Y
6 FlakeF(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y ?
7 Manton T(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
8 NadlerJ (D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
9 SchumerC(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
10 TownsE(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
11 Owens M(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
12 Velazquez N(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
13 Molinari S(R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
14 Maloney C(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
15 Rangel C(D) Y N Y Y Y Y Y
16 Serrano J (D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
17 Engel E(D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
18 Lowey N(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
19 FishH (R) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
20 GilmanB(R) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
21 McNul ty M(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
22 SolomonG(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
23 Boehlert S(R) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
24 McHughJ (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
25 WalshJ (R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
26 Hinchey M(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
27 Paxon B(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
28 Slaughter L (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
29 LaFalceJ (D) Y Y Y Y N ? Y
30 QuinnJ (R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
31 HoughtonA(R) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
NORTH CAROLINA
1 ClaytonE(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
2 ValentineT(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
3 Lancaster H(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
4 Price0 (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
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I I I I I I I
5 Neal S(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y ?
6 CobleH(R) Y Y Y N N N N
7 RoseC(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
8 HefnerW(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
9 McMillanA(R) Y Y Y Y ? ? Y
10 Ballenger C(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
11 Taylor C(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
12 Watt M(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
NORTH OAKOTA
PomeroyE(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
OHIO
1 Mann 0 (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
2 Portman R(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
3 Hall T(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
4 Oxley M(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
5 Gillmor P(R) Y Y? Y N Y Y
6 StricklandT(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
7 Hobson 0 (R) Y Y Y Y Y N Y
8 Boehner J (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
9 Kaptur M(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
10 HokeM(R) Y Y ? N Y N Y
11 Stokes L(D) Y N Y Y Y Y Y
12 KasichJ (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
13 BrownS (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
14 Sawyer T(D) Y N Y Y Y Y Y
15 Pryce0 (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
16 RegulaR(R) Y Y Y Y N N Y
17 TrafieantJ (D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
18 Applegate0 (D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
19 Fingerhut E(D) Y Y N N Y Y Y
OKLAHOMA
1 InhofeJ (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
2 SynarM(D) ? ? N Y Y Y Y
3 Brewster B(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
4 McCurdy0 (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
5 Istook E(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
OREGON
1 Furse E(D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
2 SmithB(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
3 Wyden R(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
4 DeFazio P(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
5 Kopetski M(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
PENNSYLVANIA
1 FogliettaT(D) Y N Y Y Y Y Y
2 Blackwell L (D) Y N Y Y ? Y ?
3 Borski R(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
4 KlinkR(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
5 Clinger W(R) Y Y Y Y N N Y
6 HoldenT(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
7 WeldonC(R) Y Y Y Y ? Y Y
8 GreenwoodJ (R) Y Y Y Y ? Y Y
9 Shuster B(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
10 McDade J (R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
11 Kanjorski P(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
12 MurthaJ (D) Y ? Y Y Y Y Y
13 Margolies-Mezv M(D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
14 CoyneW(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
15 McHaleP(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
16 Walker R(R) Y Y Y N N N N
17 Gekas G(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
18 SantorumR(R) Y Y ? Y N N ?
19 Goodli ngB(R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
20 Murphy A(D) Y Y ? Y N Y Y
21 RidgeT(R) Y Y ? ? N N ?
RHOOEISLANO
1 Machtley R(R) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
2 ReedJ (D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
SOUTH CAROLINA
1 Ravenel A(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
2 Spence F(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
3 Derrick B(D) Y Y Y Y ? ? Y
4 Inglis B(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
5 Spratt J (D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
6 ClyburnJ (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
SOUTHOAKOTA
JohnsonT(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
TENNESSEE
1 QuillenJ (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
2 DuncanJ (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
3 Lloyd M(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
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I I i I I I I
4 Cooper J (D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
5 Clement B(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
6 GordonB(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
7 Sundquist 0 (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
8 TannerJ (D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
9 FordH(D) Y Y Y Y ? ? Y
TEXAS
1 ChapmanJ (D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
2 WilsonC(D) ? ? Y Y N Y Y
3 JohnsonS(R) Y Y Y N N N N
4 Hall R(D) Y Y Y Y N N Y
5 Bryant J (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
6 BartonJ (R) Y Y Y N N ? Y
7 Archer B(R) Y Y Y N N N N
8 FieldsJ (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
9 Brooks J (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
10 PickleJ (D) Y Y ? ? ? ? Y
11 Edwards C(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
12 Geren P(D) Y Y Y N N Y Y
13 SarpaliusB(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
14 LaughlinG(D) Y ? Y Y N Y Y
15 delaGarza E(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
16 Coleman R(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
17 Stenhol mC(D) Y Y Y N N N Y
18 WashingtonC(D) ? ? ? Y Y ? Y
19 Combest L (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
20 GonzalezH(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
21 Smith L (R) Y Y Y N ? ? Y
22 DeLay T (R) Y Y Y N N N N
23 BonillaH(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
24 Frost M(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
25 Andrews M(D) ? ? Y Y N Y Y
26 Armey 0 (R) Y Y Y N N N N
27 Ortiz S(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
28 TejedaF(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
29 Green G(D) ? ? Y Y Y Y ?
30 Johnson E(D) Y Y ? Y Y Y Y
UTAH
1 HansenJ (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
2 Shepherd K(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
3 Orton B(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
VERMONT
Sanders B(I) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
VIRGINIA
1 BatemanH(R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
2 Pickett 0 (D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
3 Scott R(D) Y Y N Y Y Y Y
4 Sisisky N(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
5 PayneL (D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
6 GoodlatteR(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
7 Bliley T(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
8 MoranJ (D) Y N Y Y Y Y Y
9 Boucher R(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
10 Wolf F(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
11 ByrneL (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
WASHINGTON
1 Cantwell M(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
2 Swift A(D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
3 UnsoeldJ (D) Y N N Y Y Y Y
4 InsleeJ (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
5 Foley T(D) ? Y ? ? ? ? ?
6 Dicks N(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
7 McDermott J (D) ? N Y Y Y Y Y
8 DunnJ (R) Y Y Y N N N Y
9 Krei dlerM(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
WESTVIRGINIA
1 MollohanA(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
2 WiseB(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
3 Rahall N(D) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
WISCONSIN
1 BarcaP(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
2 Klug S(R) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
3 GundersonS(R) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
4. KleczkaG(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
5 Barrett T(D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
6 Petri T(R) Y Y Y Y N Y Y
7 Obey0 (D) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
8 RothT(R) Y Y Y N N N Y
9 Sensenbrenner F(R) Y Y Y N N N N
WYOMING
Thomas C(R) Y Y Y N ? N Y
THE NEWAMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994 67
PAGE John F.
Separating School From State
Americans may still recapture education's simple joy
W
hat ought to be obvious isn't:
Education without a spiritual
foundation is an absurdity.
While it may be true that a person can
be taught to be a good plumber or a fine
electrician without any spiritual under-
pinnings, anything resembling a complete
education has to include instruction in
moral absolutes. Such absolutes have to
be based on an awareness of
God and His laws.
In the absence of absolutes,
rules set by man take over. If
one man can establish his rule
of conduct, another can reject
that and create another. Moral
anarchy is the certain result of
ignoring God. Why is today's
society ravaged by broken
families, escalating crime rates,
the refusal to accept the re-
sponsibilities of one's actions,
etc.? The answer is that hard
and fast truths have come to be
recognized as a form of oppres-
sion rather than a guide to
sound living.
In the place of absolutes,
America has adopted a moral relativism,
with the complete absence of God-cen-
tered moral principles. In his book The
Closing of the American Mind, Allan
Bloom claimed of our nation that rela-
tivism is "the only virtue . . . which all
primary education for more than fifty
years has dedicated itself to inculcating."
How did this happen, you ask? The
answer is that the entry of government
into the field of education made it inevi-
table. Taxing a person to propagate a re-
ligious belief to which he is opposed is
wrong, and the relativists among us
have seized upon that inequity to have
anything resembling religion out lawed
in the classrooms. The problem isn't
only that the all-pervasive state has de-
creed that state-run schools must be de-
void of prayer, Bible reading, and even
the Ten Commandments; the problem
stems from the very existence of state-
run schools and the compulsory funding
associated with them. That problem was
compounded when the federal govern-
ment began its unconstitutional invasion
of the schools. Separate school from
68
state and the problem will be on its way
to solution.
George Washington told the Ameri-
can people in his Farewell Address:
"And let us with caution indulge the
supposition that morality can be main-
tained without religion." No religion in
the schools results in either undermin-
ing or destroying morality for students
and for the nation. And no religion ulti-
mately means no nation.
Paying attention to God's absolutes
might be considered old-hat by many,
but the fruits of not doing so are all
around us. We should be thinking about
the enormously beneficial change that
would occur if Americans would once
again champion immutable truths.
What About the Schools?
There is only one way to reverse the
educational morass existing in this nation.
It is to adopt the very simple and purely
American process of terminating com-
pulsory funding of state-run schools. Let
those who want prayer and Bible-read-
ing support their types of schools; and let
those who do not want such teaching
support theirs. In like manner, choice
should prevail among those who want
phonics or look-say reading, creation-
ism or evolution, old math or new math.
If this kind of freedom prevailed, the
$300 billion squandered annually on
government schools would be left with
the people for privately run education,
and for their churches and charitable in-
stitutions to help the poor. Along with
the proliferation of private schooling,
competition in schooling would return
and bring with it a dramatic increase in
academic excellence and public morality.
Whatever education is imparted in
today's public schools amounts merely
to training young people to adapt to
conditions around them, with
no absolutes allowed. Many
come out of these institutions
unable to read, write, and com-
pute, but they are well -
schooled in foul language,
promiscuity, and street-smart-
ness. It's well past the time for
somet hing different.
If compulsory taxation for
education were terminated, the
teaching of eternal truths would

2 again become commonplace.

f Parents would demand it. Amer-
O>
e ica should reestablish freedom
Vi
E in education. Our nation wasn't

I created and built by the gov-

ernment-educated; it grew
from the efforts of those who
were taught moral absolutes at home or
in church schools. And our nation can
once again become the place where very
little law is needed among people who
guide their actions according to rules set
down by the Almighty.
Remove t he I njustice
In the past, many Americans felt that
public education was a national asset,
and that our nation as a whole benefited
from it. No one in his right mind holds
that view today. How few realize that a
call for "free education for all children
in public schools" happens to be a part
of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto .
One of history's greatest haters, he was
a determined foe of religion, the abso-
lutes it imparts, and even home schooling.
The process of improving education
must start by getting the federa l invad-
ers out of education and by removing the
injustice of forcing everyone to subsidize
the wretched government-run system.
Anything else amounts to spinning
wheels and watching the nation sink
further into mediocrity and decay .
THE NEW AMERICAN / AUGUST 8, 1994