Discover more from Frederick R. Smith Speaks
Nauseating NEA
People exposed to the public education system see a deplorable, almost indescribable situation. Horror stories abound.
If we truly accept that today’s child must grow [up] to be a cosmopolite and “planetary citizen,” we face major problems. How do you get a child to see that the whole world is his province when every day on television he sees people who can’t live next door to their neighbors, who argue about things like busing?... Before the horizon I think the major problem to be solved in America if we are to enable people to grow as super-generalists and “planetary citizens” is the elimination of racism. Paradoxically, both the two chief deterrents and the two chief facilitators to this goal are the public school system and the mass media.... Early childhood specialists have a staggering responsibility but an unrivaled importance in producing “planetary citizens” whose geographic and intellectual provinces are as limitless as their all-embracing humanity.
Dr. Chester M. Pierce, M.D. of Harvard University “Becoming Planetary Citizens: A Quest for Meaning,” November 1972 issue of Childhood Education.
My intuition was that our purpose in life seems to have become not just to be consumers of, but to be consumed by, monsters of our making. Our raison d’etre now seems to be not only to serve, but be served up to, our satanic systems. We have become the food and feedstock of the egregors (non-physical entities that arise from the collective thoughts and acts of groups of people) of our evil.
Gary Sharpe
Foreword
This essay is a repost of my August 1, 2020, write-up. As an expanded edition, readers will find the new in-depth history of the education system a mind-opening experience. You will see how the “education” system, under the tutelage of the National Education Association and its cohorts, made it so easy for the “New Normal” to rule our lives.
Introduction
People with an independent mind exposed to the public education system see a deplorable, almost indescribable situation. Horror stories abound. Un-woke folk with no children in public schools also know of the trouble in our “learning” centers. Falling grades and the violence committed by the darlings tell the story. Sad to say, even many of the private schools have the infection - radical collectivist philosophies. To hide the facts, the Marxists in control of the school system insist that things are “acceptable” and that more money will make things “better.” The reality – money goes up, and learning goes down.
But remember, through it all, it is about the common-ist good!
Public Education History
In the 1870s, before forced schooling, a movement away from true egalitarian ideals occurred. F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) alludes to this in his outstanding literary work, The Great Gatsby. Nevertheless, schools were doing well back then, and virtually all students graduated literate. Today, the literacy rate has plummeted, and those who now “graduate” would have failed back then. The deplorable condition of our schools is not just about enough money to instruct the students. It is about power and manipulation. So, when did our ride down the well-lubricated sliding board start? Long ago.
Birthed in 1857 as the National Teachers Association in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, it became the National Education Association (NEA). It also absorbed the National Association of School Superintendents and the American Normal School Association. Today, NEA is the most prominent teacher’s union in the Nation, and in some areas, it has a virtual monopoly on representation. In 1908, the NEA accomplice John Dewey (1859-1952) wrote:
Our schools ... are performing an infinitely significant religious work. They are promoting the social unity out of which in the end genuine religious unity must grow. ...dogmatic beliefs... we see.. disappearing... It is the part of men to... work for the transformation of all practical instrumentalities of education till they are in harmony with these ideas.
Later 1916, Dewey, the recognized leader of the “progressive educators,” pontificated:
There is always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual... It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone--an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remedial suffering of the world.
In 1932, the NEA named Dewey their honorary president. In 1933, he co-authored the first Humanist Manifesto, which called for the “synthesizing of all religions and a socialized and cooperative economic order.” By the 1950s, the “progressive” educators had infiltrated the ranks at education colleges. They occupied the offices of school superintendents and principals. In the 1952 Congressional Record, Senator William Jenners wrote:
This war against our Constitution ... is being fought here... in our schools... colleges... churches... women’s clubs. It is being fought with our money, channeled through the State Department. It is being fought 24 hours a day.... while we remain asleep.... The United Nations is at work... every day and night, changing the teachers, changing the teaching materials, changing the very words and tones--changing all the essential ideas which we imagine our schools are teaching to our young folks.
So, what are some of the tenants of Dewey’s (read NEA) program? How about each student “governing themselves” and teachers serving as “guides.” If that is not enough, what about declaring that “Scientific study of each pupil’s development, physical, mental, social and spiritual, is essential to the intelligent direction of his development.” Today it includes sexual education (pseudo-porno). Let us call it what that is: indoctrination into deviant sexual behavior for children in grade school. At NEA’s 1935 annual meeting, Willard Givens declared:
...many drastic changes must be made …. a dying ‘laissez-faire’ must be completely destroyed and all of us, including the ‘owners,’ must be subjected to a large degree of social control.... The major function of the school is the social orientation of the individual. It must seek to give him understanding of the transition to a new social order.
On April 11, 1933, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Max Mason (1877-1961), announced a national program. With the foundation’s help, Mason’s program would “control human behavior.” Of course, schools comprised the core of this program. Hermann Joseph Muller (1890-1967) inspired the Rockefeller Foundation. Muller used X-rays to override customary genetic laws, including mutations in fruit flies. Mutation appeared to open the magical door to the scientific control of life. We can claim that if alive today, both Mason and Mueller would find joy in the scientific age of Covid and the NEA’s dopy desire to face-mask students.
In Muller’s mind, like Charles Darwin (1809-1882) before him, the planned breeding of human beings was the key to Shangri-la. Great scientists and powerful economic interests endorsed Muller. After winning the Nobel Prize, he reduced his scheme to a 1,500-word Geneticists’ Manifesto. Twenty-two “distinguished” American and British biologists signed the Manifesto. This “noble” work advocated the government separate the “worthwhile” (pliable) students from the “rest.” A few months before the Manifesto began circulating, NEA declared allegiance. It would “accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force.”
The NEA and its accomplices canceled the positive egalitarianism work of Horace Mann (1796-1859). That is, the classical school notion that all levels of society would mix in the classroom to create social harmony. The NEA’s endorsement of Willful Order Killing Entrepreneurship (WOKE) and Diversity Inclusion Equity (DIE) gives lip service to social harmony. Specifically, under the WOKE & DIE™ psychological operation, independent and truly free thinkers face a tortuous blame game for society’s ills.
For us baby boomers, we recall a more subtle form of anti-egalitarianism under the educational “track one, two, three” teaching system. Smart kids faced segregation from the dopes. And it is a lot worse today. It’s not just a joke anymore: They’re claiming math is racist. Along those lines, sheet music is a racist construct. Therefore, to independently excel in math or music gets turned on its head and becomes a means to divide people. That massive mound of manure, WOKE & DIE™, is nothing more than “projection” whereby those who accuse you are the actual perpetrator. It is an old Marxist trick. Rather than learn from past sins and build on the good parts of history, it’s full steam ahead to divide and control.
Schools shall no longer focus on the education of students but on socializing them into the crummy collective hive. Affirming this concept in 1953 was the Dewey disciple B.F. Skinner (1904-1990). In his treatise Science and Human Behavior, Skinner wrote, “…. Operant conditioning shapes behavior as a sculptor shapes a lump of clay.” That sounds like the “living, breathing constitution” practitioners have taken some clues from the Skinner playbook.
It is important to note that the NEA has an infatuation with the United Nations (UN) and their educational (what a laugh) organ, the United Nations Education and Scientific Organization (UNESCO). In 1946, NEA pontificated that UNESCO was “the culmination of a movement for the creation of an international agency of education… each member nation... has a duty to see to it that nothing in its curriculum... is contrary to UNESCO’s aims.” The report “Education for International Understanding in American Schools,” published in 1948, stated:
The idea has become established that the preservation of international peace and order may require force to compel a nation to conduct its affairs within the framework of an established world system. The most modern expression of this doctrine and collective security in the United Nations Charter.
Meanwhile, NEA says nothing about the precepts in our founding documents, such as the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. The collectivist beat continues. Therefore, the creepy collectivist creed titled 1619 Project gets top billing along with Adam and Steve over Adam and Eve.
IN THEIR GRAB FOR POWER, George S. Counts (1889-1974) and his fellow “Frontier Thinkers” gained the prestige of the most prominent teachers’ organization. They captured the top jobs and control of the NEA at its 72nd annual meeting in Washington, D.C., in July 1934. There, Dr. Willard Givens, then a California school superintendent, in a report entitled, Education for a New America, said:
We are convinced that we stand today at the verge of a great culture...But to achieve these things many drastic changes must be made. A dying laissez-faire must be completely destroyed, and all of us, including the owners, must be sub- jected to a large degree of social control.
In 1956, Counts organized educators to study changes to the curricula, textbooks, etc., through the Commission on Social Studies of the American Historical Association. In 1958 this “commission” recommended that:
... separate courses in history, economics, civics, and geography be abandoned - or, rather, all combined into one course to be called ‘social studies,’ with emphasis on ‘social’ or ‘conflict of masses’ ideas. ... Cumulative evidence supports the conclusion, that, in the United States as in other countries, the age of individualism and laissez-faire in economy and government is closing and that a new age of collectivism is emerging …
Chester Pierce (1924-2016), Professor of Education and Psychiatry at Harvard, told the Association for Childhood Education International in 1970 that “every child in American entering schools at the age of five is insane because he comes to schools with certain allegiances toward our founding father, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity...” The operative word is “insane,” but that is the NEA.
Does this sound familiar under the Romper Room-1984 classroom environment of today? Hint - WOKE & DIE™ promotion under the NEA’s insertion of Critical Race conspiracy Theory into lesson plans.
Did you have a good and special day today?
1976, Pivotal Year
October 24, 1975, the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia issued “A Declaration of Interdependence,” written by well-known historian and uber-collectivist think tank Aspen Institute board member Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998). This alarming document called to mind President Kennedy’s July 4, 1962, speech called for a “Declaration of Interdependence.” It was written as a contribution to our Nation’s celebration of its 200th birthday and signed by 125 U.S. House and Senate members.
WHEN IN THE COURSE OF HISTORY the threat of extinction confronts mankind, it is necessary for the people of The United States to declare their interdependence with the people of all nations and to embrace those principles and build those institutions which will enable mankind to survive and civilization to flourish....
Two centuries ago our forefathers brought forth a new nation; now we must join with others to bring forth a new world order....
WE AFFIRM that the economy of all nations is a seamless web, and that no one nation can any longer effectively maintain its processes of production and monetary systems without recognizing the necessity for collaborative regulation by international authorities.
The following year (our bicentennial), NEA produced a social studies curriculum entitled A Declaration of Interdependence: Education for a Global Community. Congresswoman Marjorie Holt (R.-MD) described it as “an atrocious betrayal of American independence.” Nevertheless, the population stubbornly held onto their love for their country until the 1980s and 1990s. That is when the relationship between “interdependence” or “New World Order” and America’s education of children became prominent in outcomes in each state. Interdependence is also a foundational concept in global education. And, of course, in the 2020s, to love your country, following the fundamental tenants of the Constitution, makes you a “Fascist Nationalist.”
But wait, there is more. In June 1976, again in the cradle of our Nation, with a poke in the eye of liberty, 85 top-level members of the educational elite and an assortment of influential change agents attended a symposium. They met at an invitation-only conference and drafted recommendations on how to put “Moral/Citizenship Education” programs in every school in the country—public, private, and parochial. Conference participants included Humanist values educators Lawrence Kohlberg (1927-1987) and Howard Kirschenbaum (1944-) and representatives of the federal government, foundations, PTA, NEA, and the Nefarious National Council of Churches. The recommendations resulted from that conference sponsored by a Pennsylvania organization called Research for Better Schools (RBS) [a federally funded education laboratory in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]. They submitted their “findings” to the now seemly defunct National Institute of Education, with whom RBS had a contract to research, develop and disseminate moral/citizenship education programs.
Also, in 1976, NEA president John Ryor said his organization constitutes “the foremost political power in the nation.” The Duplicitous Demagogues Club includes the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). NEA and AFT traditionally decried “big business” lobbying while promoting their own “political power.” But we now know we live under the Environment Social Governance (ESG) big-business ecosystem (super WOKE). NEA and AFT now have a symbiotic relationship with such big businesses. It is becoming difficult to determine where the private sector ends, and government begins. Public-private partnerships under the contemptible ESG banner are the true definition of what Antifa rallies against. That bunch of loony anarchists from a confused gang. But thank you, Jerry Nadler, for pointing out that Antifa is a myth; I feel better.
Goose stepping with the above cadre of snobs, in 1981, The Project on Alternatives in Education (PAE) proposed a “Broad-Gauged Research/Reform Plan for Secondary Education—in the Tradition of the Eight-Year Study.” PAE submitted its plan of consideration and received funding from the U.S. Department of Education and the NEA. The project was conducted by leading American change agents, including Ronald S. Brandt, Mario D. Fantini, John Goodlad, Mary Ann Raywid, Ralph Tyler, and Herbert J. Walberg. An explanatory cover sheet of the grant proposal was printed on “The John Dewey Society” letterhead. PAE called for publicly funded choice schools using “effective school [outcome-based education] research” and principles of the Eight-Year Study. These called for, among others, the “inculcation of social attitudes, development of effective methods of thinking, social sensitivity, better personal-social adjustment, acquisition of important information, consistent and philosophy of life.”
Digestive Tract Training No. 218.SSH9
Today the “morality” birthed by the above nefarious cadre of snobs has blossomed to their liking with such things as classroom instruction about digestive tract copulation. For your reading (dis)pleasure, the copulation depravity locates on page 34 of the 2020 New Jersey Student Learning Standards - Comprehensive Health and Physical Education document. [Note: a PDF copy is embedded below just in case authorities remove it from the web.] Look for New Jersey Department of Education (NJDE) element No. 218.SSH9. By the end of 8th grade, New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) teachers will have to define vaginal, oral, and anal sex to their students. NEA - no objection. Thus, NJEA leads the way with instruction.
Astonishingly, reading the above NJDE codified crapola aloud at a school board meeting will place you on a domestic terrorist watch list. Even privately, expressing the slightest concern about NJDE’s “very own” codified and endorsed digestive tract copulation instruction triggers the collectivist Pavlovan mantra - “whatever phobia.”
Sadly, NJ, like many stupid states, is firmly in the collectivist depravity camp. Key takeaway: plastic morality makes it easy to turn an independent citizenry into obedient socialist serfs under a Nasty New World Order.
Deplorable Desired Result
No conspiracy here; it is all out in plain sight for those who are no longer looking through rose-colored spectacles (un-woke folk). The Dewey/Skinner/NEA creed replaced trust in God, family, and limited government (in that order). Schools receiving government money shall not mention God in a Judeo-Christian context. Christianity is out; Satanism is in.
The ever-powerful leviathan government and its surrogate, the educational (what a laugh) system, with NEA operatives, have become the new parents for the children. It is brilliant; the NEA, with its allies such as the Supreme Court, has done a collectivist “admirable” job. They make the students illiterate and morally fuzzy. There is no other explanation, as it fits the agenda well. It assures more money for increasing programs. Thus, NEA will pretend to repair their created problems. The desired result; is more teachers, money, bureaucrats, control, and power.
Has this vile system been successful in eradicating religion from schools? It depends on the definition of “religion.” With classic Christianity virtually extinct in the public sphere, we find a homogenized pseudo-religion. That includes new-age thinking, myths, symbols, and earth worship (climate change). The NEA and its willing partners have a zealous attitude about their program. This pseudo-religion is more significant in their warped minds than any mainstream religious order. They want humans to worship their notion of a worldwide socialist governing entity. The NEA is at the forefront for sure.
In the beginning, the NEA advanced the cause of education and professional advancement. The NEA transformed from a home office of federated state educational organizations into a militant union. It now spends the most significant part of its resources on political activities. The NEA is now one of the most prominent political lobbying organizations.
It doesn’t just lobby for more money for education. NEA’s annual conventions pass a host of non-education, culture-transforming resolutions supporting abortion, WOKE & DIE™ nonsense, and other dreaded collectivist programs.
Choices and Partners
The only other choice (for lack of a better word) for an “education” union is the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The AFT is not as radical as the NEA. However, NEA’s three million members and AFT’s one million push the same Marxist line. Together, they contributed about $32.5 million to the 2016 elections. It is easy to guess who got most of these funds. Democratic Party receives the prize. Remember, businesses that lobby similarly face demonization by the same ilk that reaps the $32.5 million harvest. Will “campaign finance reform” take care of this problem? Do not look for CNN to expose this fleecing of America.
It is a shameful reality that people believe that the NEA’s most zealot cohort, the Democratic Party, together form a worthy partnership. The Republican Party presents the same ever-present danger, but for distinct reasons (e.g., No Child Left Behind).
Evil Empire
The minions of the evil empire, otherwise known as the education, news, and entertainment establishment, will demonize what they do not like. They call it “controversial.” That is right, controversial, but the plain truth shows us that it is only a problem for those who do not want the real agenda exposed. The moral of the story—when the legacy establishment calls something controversial, it typically is a good thing.
Enter the Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests™ of 2020. A clear-thinking person can see the reality of looting and rioting. Young adults show their inculcated ignorance by destroying statues of historical figures that fought for the very thing they clamored about. Secondary education is the pinnacle of NEA and AFT Marxist indoctrination. Defund education and academia!
Afterword
Despite all the corruption, depravity, and psychological operations, this section pays tribute to those teachers who have not lost their minds. Several friends retired from teaching positions before the WOKE & DIE™ mind meld total control became the new normal. As we have seen by the history described above and confirmed by my friends, the cloning of the American mind goes back many decades. Godspeed goes to my friends that escaped with an un-woke mind.
Good try NEA; you did not Fool Us (FU).
Sources
The following books were the primary sources for the information in this essay:
The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America: A Chronological Paper Trail
by Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt, 462 pages, 3D Research Co; (September 1999).Cloning of the American Mind: Eradicating Morality through Education by B. K. Eakman, 608 pages, Huntington House Pub; (August 1998)
None Dare Call It Education: What’s Happening to Our Schools & Our Children? by John Stormer, 224 pages, Liberty Bell Press; (October 1998)
The Public Orphanage: How Public Schools Are Usurping Control of Our Children by Eric Buehrer, 244 pages, Word Publishing; (July 1995)
Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas
by Thomas Sowell, 384 pages, Free Press; (September 1992)The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education by Peter Brimelow, 320 pages, HarperCollins, (February 2003)
Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto, 240 pages, New Society Publishers; (April 2010)
How we protect our schools vs how we protect Drag Queen Story Time:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fh-wZqVXgAIsg8h?format=jpg&name=small
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fh-wZqTWQAEUmdM?format=jpg&name=medium
A great flic exposing WOKE & DIE https://youtu.be/wChCmiyl8r8