Historians believe America did more in its first two hundred years than had been achieved in the previous six thousand years of recorded history. The American Republic was to ensure a just and “level playing field” for production and commerce and to allow people to provide for themselves with their own initiative and resourcefulness. This worked better than any economy in world history until the crash of 1929.

Until the 1930s, the American federal government never had a mandate to provide for individual needs. In the American Republic, the government was designed for a strong and resourceful people, not a dependent one. It was the people’s servant, existing to defend them, their rights, and property, not to make them dependent on the government for their provisions.

In contrast, under Marxism, the government is the people’s god whom they must trust and give allegiance to for all their provisions and needs. Karl Marx identified America as the chief enemy of Marxism. He believed socialism could not prevail until America and all Western-style republics were destroyed. At the time, America was by no means the most powerful nation. Yet Marx especially focused on the American Republic because he perceived it to be the source of increasing human freedom and an increasingly powerful free-market economy, which Marxism could not compete with.

When you study the history of impoverished nations, you are going to find a Marxist-communistic restrictive and oppressive government system. The governments we live under have a vital role in the freedoms we enjoy.

That’s why countries that have Marxist-communistic governments that deny people the right to be human, and the freedom to make choices and don’t value human life are deeply impoverished nations. Marxism imposes a unity of conformity where individual expression becomes a threat to the state, which can bring swift and severe punishment and, of course, silence all creativity and innovation. These are spiritual governments people live under and they all operate under the kingdom of darkness which holds them in slavery to a life that lacks opportunity.

A mirror from the past indicates nations and empires have “life cycles.” Many historians have studied this throughout the years, and all have come to the same conclusion: a lifetime of about two centuries.

America developed into thirteen colonies, then into the strong 50 states she is today. When the thirteen colonies were still part of England, Professor Alexander Tytler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburg, wrote about the fall of the Athenian republic some 1000 years ago and he reportedly said:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote for money from the public treasure. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, followed by a dictatorship.

The authenticity of this quote is often disputed and cannot be verified, but the words of the original author are still relevant to what is going on in America the West today.

The author noted that the average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years (the comparative data cannot prove this span of years).

During those 200 years, however, these nations have always progressed

• From bondage to spiritual faith;
• From spiritual faith to great courage;
• From courage to liberty;
• From liberty to abundance;
• From abundance to complacency;
• From complacency to apathy;
• From apathy two dependence;
• From dependence back into bondage.

This progression can be seen throughout the historical books of the Bible, as well as in Greece, Persia, Babylon, and in Rome. Each of these Empires passed through the above series of stages from their inception to their decline. Where are we today on the scale?

Today we have a deteriorating form of government, no matter what party is elected or who is president. Politicians criticize each other, but most of them play for the same team; the losers are always the people who vote for them.

In 1776 America supposedly came out of bondage with faith, understanding, and courage. Even against great odds, and with much bloodshed, they battled their way to achieve liberty.

Liberty is that delicate area between the force of government and the free will of man.

Liberty brings freedom of choice to work, to trade, to go and live wherever one wishes. In fact, liberty leads to abundance.

Abundance, if made an end in itself, will result in complacency, which in turn leads to apathy.

Apathy is the “let someone do it” philosophy that always brings dependency. If you ask an average person, what is the biggest problem in the West or America? They usually respond, I don’t know, and I don’t care! Remember, for a period of time, dependents are often not aware they are in fact dependent.

Rather, they delude themselves by thinking that they are still free—“We can still vote, can’t we?” they ask themselves.

Eventually, abundance diminishes and dependency becomes bondage once again.

We’re right now in the “apathy” stage, and we’ve possibly moved beyond the “dependence” stage, but apathy and indifference are perhaps the most negative traits of mankind.

If man had the knowledge, he could see which timeline his future was headed down and reverse it before it was too late. America wake up! History shouldn’t repeat itself!

A fascinating piece appeared in The Wall Street Journal concerning the skill levels of new hires. Or, rather, the lack of skills, even in fields such as engineering.

Firms are taking in new graduates only to discover that while they might know much, they can’t actually do anything, not even basic things that every engineer is supposed to know. The reason is that most of these kids have only done Zoom classes. They have no practical experience.

Think of this. The freshman class of 2020 got hit with virus mania in the spring, and in-person classes ended. Their sophomore year was awful, just staring at a screen. When they came back, if they did, they had to wear masks and get jabbed and jabbed again. Their junior year was more of the same nonsense, with off-and-on classes but seriously truncated experiences. Then they graduated.

So much for college. So much for the six figures of debt they accumulated in these years. And so much for learning by doing.

It all serves as a reminder. Skills come from what we do, including screw-ups, failures, adaptations, and gradually getting better at something, anything, whatever it is. Without hands-on experience, the only skill you learn is rote memorization and gaming the system. To be sure, today’s college graduates are very good at that, but their skills are severely lacking in many practical areas of life.

What are young people prepared for? Maybe a Zoom job pretending to work in a management position—exactly the sort that’s vanishing as major corporations are desperately cutting labor costs by purging management of its outrageous excesses. It goes on daily. When CVS announced huge layoffs, it made it clear that there would be no losses among the people who are “customer facing.” Those people remain in huge demand.

But how many of today’s college graduates are even prepared to stand behind a checkout counter and speak coherently to people, much less handle money or deal with scanning codes and the like? Not many.

I’m sure you have noticed this in general since the onset of the digital age, when everyone was tempted by the idea that we would migrate to the cloud and dispense with the burdens of physical reality. It turns out to be one of the greatest lies ever told. The costs are huge.

Real skills are what make the world work. We’ve got an entire generation, or maybe two, that simply lacks skills we once took for granted.

Let’s just consider one example: ironing clothes. It so happens that I’m a real expert in this skill, at least as compared with most other people I know. This is because I worked in clothing stores for years and learned under real experts. I developed the skill myself and now do all that’s involved without thinking about it.

But, yesterday, I was ironing a white cotton shirt and began to think through all that could go wrong but didn’t go wrong. There are so many variables. Steam or not? Starch and, if so, how much? What’s the right temperature setting? How does one know if the fabric is getting too hot and on the verge of being scorched?

Should the sleeve have a crease? And what of the cuffs? And do both sides need to be ironed or only one? What’s the best way to navigate around buttons without accidentally popping them off? How can a collar be positioned on the ironing board in a way that’s most effective and efficient? How long should ironing a shirt take—5 minutes or 25 minutes—and what’s the reasonable expectation?

It might all seem easy by description, but it simply isn’t. I’ve spent years screwing up every aspect of this process. I’ve scorched collars, broken buttons, creased cuffs, and clumped up the starch. My skills improved gradually over time by virtue of making errors. And this is with only one type of clothing. Taking on a wool suit introduces a full range of other problems.

Honestly, I can’t think of anyone I know under the age of 30 who knows how to do any of this. As a result, most people don’t iron at all. They just mill around with rumpled clothing or only wear stuff that requires no ironing at all. The skill itself has experienced a cultural atrophy, so far as I can tell.

But that’s just the beginning of it. Real expertise takes years and stakes that are much higher. Engineering is an obvious case, but there are less obvious ones. There’s a butcher in town of whom I’m in complete awe. He runs a bone-cutting machine that’s the meanest and most potentially vicious thing I’ve ever seen. Someone will order a rack of ribs, and he grabs a big carcass from the refrigerator. He throws it on the machine and shoves it this way and that, moving the bones and meat with incredible expertise.

I watch him because it’s at once terrifying and wildly impressive. It seems like he’s hardly paying attention and moves like lightning through all meats: chickens, goats, lambs, or anything. It’s awesome. And consider: one wrong move, and he would be missing a finger, a hand, or an arm. Just observing his work makes one’s heart race. It’s utterly beautiful.

You think you’ll never need this skill because others have them. Fine. But real skills are needed in everyday life. Cooking is an example. Just making a burger in a skillet isn’t as easy as people think. You have to know how to shape the meat, and it depends on how lean the mince is because that determines how it will respond to the heat.

You need to know how hot the skillet should be. You need to know when to deglaze the pan so that the sugars in the fat will adhere to the meat and become more delicious. You need to know when to take the burger out of the pan with knowledge that it will continue to cook as it cools.

None of this knowledge comes from ebooks or screens. It’s simply not possible to learn to cook this way. Even recipe books are of limited value. You can’t just follow a list of ingredients and cause a dish to magically appear.

For years, I baked bread. I started in college to use the resulting loaves as a tool in bartering for services. I did this because I was poor. It mostly worked. More importantly, I gained a life skill. Perhaps, I followed a recipe early on but gave it up quickly. I haven’t looked at a recipe in many years. I’ve taught others to bake bread, but only by showing and doing. It isn’t possible to learn how to knead dough by reading about it. It’s something that one has to do.

The loss of skills is having a profound effect on our lives. Sales of older homes are taking a dramatic dive simply because there are no workers available to do the necessary repairs. The few people out there who know plaster repair, wiring, or roofing are too expensive, and the wait is too long. Instead, people are buying new or just renting.

It’s true in car repair, too, which is why you have to wait a week or longer to get even the simplest task done. The loss of skills is even affecting the vaunted transition to green energy. If there aren’t enough engineers who can do things, it simply can’t happen.

And, yet, the economic transition away from bloated management structures back to doing actual work is happening very quickly, leaving an entire generation raised on TikTok and Zoom at a loss. We somehow managed to rob millions of the ability to be useful to others. This is true regardless of how many degrees they carry.

From 2020 to the present, people without actual medical skills, but rather only theories plus force, took over public health in most parts of the world. Look at the mess they made! This is what happens when abstract knowledge overrides real experience. You can destroy the world this way.

How to repair the problem? Start small. Iron a shirt. Make a hamburger. Clean a bathroom. It doesn’t matter what it is precisely. Just be useful, and see just how hard it truly is.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Watchman Research Media

Copyright © 2023 Jeffrey A. Tucker Author

Why Your Son/Daughter Should Reconsider College

A young friend of mine is in his last year of high school and asking the age-old “what do I do with my life” question. Most average high school seniors would be settling on their final liberal arts college choice right now—more concerned about the climbing wall in the student centre and the cafeteria entrees than the degree in sociology that they’re about to fork out tens of thousands of dollars for. But not this young man. He is almost certain that he will be going to trade school next year at the Minnesota-based Dunwoody College of Technology.

“Oh,” I can almost hear you say in a dejected tone. “What’s his problem? Isn’t he smart enough to get into real college?”

Au contraire! This young man is very intelligent, polite, and capable—he could have easily chosen to attend a prestigious college. But I would contend that his trade school choice shows that he’s smarter than most kids his age, for he knows which way the wind is blowing, and has decided that trade school is the best way to get his feet solidly under him while he’s still in his young twenties.

So why is trade school looking like an increasingly smart idea for young men like my friend to choose over college? Several possibilities come to mind.

For starters, trade school offers various securities, the most obvious being financial. If my young friend were to graduate from Dunwoody today, he would likely start a job with an average salary of almost $54,000. That average has risen by $5,000 in the last year alone. Contrast this with the average starting salary for a Minnesota college graduate. That number stands at just over $37,000 according to ZipRecruiter. 

Perhaps the reason for such a higher average salary is the increasing demand for those who labour with their hands. The Baby Boomer generation has long filled the electrician, plumber, welder, and other traditional trade jobs, but with their accelerating retirement comes a dearth of blue-collar workers. “For every one person that enters the trades, five retire,” Industrial Safety & Hygiene News reported in 2019. That statistic promises a lot of job security to young people just starting out.

Those who enter trade school also have a good shot at an independent life. Depending on the trade they learn, graduates may easily be able to start their own company. Being your own boss these days means avoiding such things as vaccine mandates threatened for big businesses. It also means you’re less likely to be canceled in our crazed, politically correct world of white-collar jobs where diversity and inclusion seminars are standard fare and where holding a door for a woman could get you labeled a sexist.

Trade school also gives students a good foundation for life. Because it often takes less time to complete than traditional college, and because hard skills are in such demand, students who choose trade school can jump into the workforce at a young age, accumulate reasonable savings, and even choose to attend college a while down the road, when their few extra years of maturity and financial stability will help them succeed.

Lastly, there’s another advantage to trade school that many prefer not to mention: it’s a form of higher education monopolized by males. This is unpopular because today’s culture is all about gender balance. Females are disadvantaged and we must give women extra help to break through the glass ceiling, the thinking goes.

But this quest seems to have hurt males immensely. In the fall of 2021, The Wall Street Journal ran a feature-length article on the rapid decline in male college enrollment. “I just feel lost,” the headline ran, a listless-looking young white male with lavender fingernail polish gracing the feature image. Reading between the lines, one can guess that in the politically correct quest to fixate on women and policies such as “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” colleges have lost men, and are only realizing it too late.

Men who see through this charade of learning recognize that at least for now, trade school is less likely to handicap them right out of the gate. And for those who might sound the sexist siren, I would suggest that such a scenario is also beneficial for women, for when men are able to succeed, then they are able to lead and provide in a family setting.

People often wonder what they can do to fight against an eroding culture. I’m starting to think that sending our nation’s sons to trade school might be one positive thing that parents can do. Financially secure, independent, mature, and capable men like those who graduate from trade schools are the ones ready to lead their communities and settle down with families… and strong families and communities will go a long way toward restoring our decaying society.

© 2022 Originally published by Intellectual Takeout where the featured image was sourced-All rights reserved

Marxism is now filling the void of religion in America, with its fervent belief in man as the “new god.” A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that Christianity is rapidly evaporating in the United States, only 65% of Americans now describing themselves as Christian.

This is a shockingly rapid decline, considering that the number was well over 90% believers in God just a few years ago.

As Marxist atheism is now preached as a new gospel – with its hatred toward traditional values – the mainstream media, schools, universities and popular groups such as Black Lives Matter set the tone for a new phenomenon: Marxist America, the new Soviet Union.

As Dmitry Orlov recently stated: The United States is walking along the path of the Soviet Union. Orlov first made the point 16 years ago, upon returning to the United States after watching the collapse of the atheist, Communist USSR: “There are ominous rumblings on the horizon (for the U.S.). The collapse of the United States seems about as unlikely now as the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed in 1985.”

He then adds: “Since then, I have focused on what I saw as the main causes of collapse in both the Soviet and in the American case: exorbitant debt, problems in the energy sector and unreformable political systems mired in corruption, their elites delusional in their feelings of omnipotence.”

The Soviet Union was Russia leaving its traditional, historical Orthodox values and implementing modern state atheism in a Communist-Marxist system. Controlled by a small, ruthless elite who came to power through a bloody coup d’etat, traditional values were brutally scrapped. A particularly interesting trait is that “the people” were hailed in speeches, but in reality their role was to strictly obey the totalitarian Communist rulers. With remarkably little personal freedom, free speech was non-existent. Whoever protested, lost their jobs, their standing in society, were sent to the Gulag concentration camps or killed.

The Russian writer, philosopher and Nobel laureate Alexandr Solzhenitsyn described the Soviet experience this way: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

Yet, still – remarkably enough – just a few years after the Communist Soviet total collapse, America still chooses to walk down the same path. Even when knowing where the totalitarian Soviet experience ended, the Big Tech billionaires with friends who steer the wheel still push for Sovietism. It is completely baffling and strengthens Solzhenitsyn’s description of what happens when darkness clouds the mind of rulers.

This religion-hating ideology aims at creating a utopian world where God is dead and mankind rules itself without any interference from spiritual powers. Man becomes god in Marxism. The ideal is that “the Marxist class” will install an atheist utopia.

The philosopher Paul Tillich defined religion as “that which is man’s true concern.” Whatever is most important to man becomes his religion, his passion – his everything. In the “Large Catechism,” Martin Luther summed it up by stating that whatever your heart clings to and confides in, is really your God, the foundation upon which you rest your life.

Marxism is definitively the new religion in America, hailed as the solution to the problems of society, its leaders enforcing totalitarian mind control.

Copyright 2021-The Herland Report

When you review the education system we currently have in the West and around the world, you find that there are three choices available to college students after they’ve finished elementary and high school. The first option is a private university.

Those who attend private universities are considered to be the smartest and these are mostly individuals who consider themselves the world’s gift to mankind. These are the elite, the illumined ones who know what is best for the peasants of the world.

The second, just below these private universities are public universities, not as expensive as private but still require students to have a certain level of educational achievement. Lastly, we have colleges, some technical and other vocational. These don’t cost as much as the first two.

In his book, The Underground History of American Education, John Taylor Gatto gives us a preview of the Prussian system of education and how similar it is to the Western system. To make it easier for the reader, I have underlined these three types of schools:

The familiar three-tier system of education emerged in the Napoleonic era, one private tier, two government ones. At the top, one-half of 1 percent of the students attended Akadamiensschulen, where, as future policy makers, they learned to think strategically, contextually, in wholes; they learned complex processes, and useful knowledge, studied history, wrote copiously, argued often, read deeply, and mastered tasks of command.

The next level, Realsschulen, was intended mostly as a manufactory for the professional proletariat of engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, career civil servants, and such other assistants as policy thinkers at times would require.

From 5 to 7.5 percent of all students attended these “real schools,” learning in a superficial fashion how to think in context, but mostly learning how to manage materials, men, and situations—to be problem solvers. This group would also staff the various policing functions of the state, bringing order to the domain.

Finally, at the bottom of the pile, a group between 92 and 94 percent of the population attended “people’s schools” where they learned obedience, cooperation and correct attitudes, along with rudiments of literacy and official state myths of history.

The Prussians wanted a completely controlled society that could be used to bring both material and military prosperity to the country. An astounding statement came from George Fischer, NEA union past president, speaking at the 1970 NEA convention.  He said that they had been working for 113 years to reach the point where they could control who practiced which profession.

A model Professional Practices Act has been developed, and work has begun to secure passage of the Act in each state where such legislation is needed. With these new laws, we will finally realize our 113-year-old dream of controlling who enters, who stays, and who leaves the profession. Once this is done, we can also control the teacher training institutions which would require another whole speech to describe—but don’t worry, we’ll get there too.

This was the same goal that Prussia had during the 1800s. This form of education was brought to the West, most notably in America during the 1800 and early 1900s by American citizens who went to Germany to attend their universities. According to John Gatto:

Throughout nineteenth-century Prussia, its new form of education seemed to make that warlike nation prosper materially and militarily. While German science, philosophy, and military success seduced the whole world, thousands of prominent young Americans made the pilgrimage to Germany to study in its network of research universities, places where teaching and learning were always subordinate to investigations done on behalf of business and the state.

Returning home with the coveted German Ph.D., those so degreed became university presidents and department heads, took over private industrial research bureaus, government offices, and the administrative professions. The men they subsequently hired for responsibility were those who found it morally agreeable to offer obeisance to the Prussian outlook, too; in this leveraged fashion the gradual takeover of American mental life managed itself.

These students who were educated according to the Prussian worldview had to bring their socialist Nazi indoctrination home to the United States. From there, it spread to the universities, government and businesses to eliminate individualism and liberty.

The School Factories

The Western education system, according to some analysts still adheres to the industrial-age factory model of education of creating subjects and factory workers. John Taylor Gatto in his book, Weapons of Mass Instruction adds another interesting and chilling narrative to this system of public schooling.

The function of teaching, he writes, “is to render the common population manageable so that young people could be conditioned to rely upon experts and remain divided from natural alliances. They must at all costs be discouraged from developing self-reliance and independence.”

It’s another argument voiced by David Brooks of the New York Times in 2012: “The American education model….was actually copied from the 18th-century Prussian model designed to create “docile subjects and factory workers.”

Alvin Toffler is another writer who condemned the “school factories” in his book, Future Shock:

Mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed…..A world of repetitive indoor toil, smoke, noise, machines, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a world in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the factory whistle and the clock.

The solution was an educational system that, in its very structure, simulated this new world. This system did not emerge instantly…..Yet the whole idea of assembling masses of students (raw material) to be processed by teachers (workers) in a centrally located school (factory) was a stroke of industrial genius.

The whole administrative hierarchy of education….The very organization of knowledge into permanent disciplines was grounded on industrial assumptions. Children marched from place to place and sat in assigned stations. Bells rang to announce changes of time.

The most criticized features of education today – the regimentation, lack of individualization, the rigid systems of seating, grouping, grading and marking, the authoritarian role of the teacher – are precisely those that made mass public education so effective an instrument of adaptation for its place and time.

Hundreds of students in one massive classroom with one teacher…Students were grouped (30 or so together) not by age but by reading proficiency, with more advanced students “monitors” assigned to tutor and train the others.

In 1820 another English journalist William Cobbett had condemned the dangerous idea inspired by the French Revolution that sons of working men and common labourers should be exposed to bookish education courtesy of the national government.

He argued that “some people must remain to labour; all men cannot attain to eminence in the world; and, therefore that which laudable in individuals is, to say the least foolish upon a national scale.

Surprisingly, another liberal English philosopher and political economist, John Stuart Mill also had serious reservations about public education offered free of charge by the state.

He argued that a state-operated school system inevitably becomes “a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another…in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.”

John Mill was convinced that universal and compulsory education undertaken by the state would inevitably lead not only to a despotism over the mind, but ultimately to a cultural totalitarianism that mandated conformity of conduct as well as conformity of thought.

He did not want the education of the masses to be concentrated in the hands of the state. He insisted that people be taught to think for themselves and not to parrot the opinions of their intellectual superiors.

He said, “How do you teach people to think independently? Certainly not by telling them what to think…. It requires the wider scope of experiential opportunity provided by the rough-and-tumble interactions with the real world school of hard knocks.

Like many progressives of his time, Mill concluded that if the government would make up its mind to require a good education for every child, it might save itself the trouble of providing one:

A general state education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly the same: as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government.

Another Greek scholar and theologian J. Gresham Machen had also much to say about the public school system. In his book, Christianity and Liberalism Machen wrote:

A public school system, in itself, is indeed of enormous benefit to the race. But it is of benefit only if it is kept healthy at every moment by the absolutely free possibility of the competition of private schools.

A public-school system, if it means providing of free education for those who desire it, is a noteworthy and beneficial achievement of modern times; but when once it becomes monopolistic it is the most perfect instrument of tyranny which has yet been devised.

Freedom of thought in the Middle Ages was combatted by the Inquisition, but the modern method is far more effective. Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the ultimate control of experts appointed by the State, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist.

Such a tyranny, supported as it is by a perverse technique used as the instrument in destroying human souls, is certainly far more dangerous than the crude tyrannies of the past, which despite their weapons of fire and sword, permitted thought at least to be free.

Although Machen’s book was written in 1924, his warnings of the dangers of the public school system are as relevant today as they were the day he first issued them. Machen died in 1937 and did not live to observe the rapid changes in the Western educational system.

He did not live to see all of Hitler’s laws. In that same year, one of Hitler’s first legislative acts on taking office was to establish the Reich Ministry of Education and give it the control of all schools, including the private schools.

Every person in the teaching profession, from kindergarten through the universities, was compelled to join the National Socialist Teacher’s League, which, by law, was held “responsible for the execution of the ideological and political coordination of all teachers in the accordance with National Socialist doctrine.”

Nobody was to have the right to teach children from a different point of view than the state.

Prior to 1933 the German public schools had been under the jurisdiction of the local authorities and the universities under that of the individual states. Now all were brought under iron rule of the Reich Minister of Education.

He declared that public education was compulsory and that children could not be educated at home. There would be no right to teach from a distinctively religious point of view, especially as he said on May 1, 1937:

The Youth of today is ever the people of tomorrow. For this reason we have set before ourselves the task of inoculating our youth with the spirit of this community of the people at a very early age when human beings are still unperverted and therefore unspoiled. This Reich stands, and it is building itself up for the future, upon its youth. And this new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.

It is important to remember that the law was on Hitler’s side. He told the parents, “Your child belongs to us already…who are you? You will pass on. Your descendants now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”

Hitler believed that parents had the responsibility of raising the child’s body, but the Reich would educate the child’s soul. Private or denominational schools were closed in Germany due to increased taxes and excessive regulations. In the end, educational options for parents were squeezed out.

Waking Up Americans

This is the rationale behind the Common core education system. This system has now drifted away from its founding narratives of biblical education and individual freedoms, and has been replaced by the narratives of economic utility and the “factory of model of education.” And it is the same communist indoctrination according to one Chinese immigrant mother, Lily Tang Williams that she experienced in China.

On the Freedom Works website Williams, wrote a piece waking up Americans because she believes this country is “the Shining City on the Hill” and this is what drew her to America.

Common Core, in my eyes, is the same as the Communist core I once saw in China. I grew up under Mao’s regime and we had the Communist-dominated education — nationalized testing, nationalized curriculum, and nationalized indoctrination. I came to this country for freedom and I cannot believe this is happening all over again in this country. I don’t know what happened to America, the Shining City on the Hill for freedom.

She also warned against Americans comparing their children and their “education” to those being indoctrinated in China.

I am telling you, Chinese children are not trained to be independent thinkers. They are trained to be massive skilled workers for corporations. And they have no idea what happened in Tienanmen Square in 1989 where government ordered soldiers to shoot its own 1,000 students.

She exposed the encroachment of the federal government and corporations in the area of education by pointing out that the Chinese indoctrination education system is to make slaves of men, and cheap workers who lack the ability to think critically.

Federal government holds the stick. International corporations hold the money….Individual liberty. That’s what I came to this country for. Do you just want our kids to be test machines? Workers – cheap workers for corporations? America is great.

Don’t compare yourselves to China. That’s why lots of Chinese are trying to come here — to try to be free. And they all tell you ‘Do not go after the Chinese Communist education. I was brainwashed so bad it took me ten years in this country to get out of it.

Her conclusion is very chilling:

From the NSA keeping records on us in massive databases to Common Core nationalization of exams and curriculum; what is happening now is very unlike the America I came to find. The worst, I fear, is that Common-Core could be used by the government and corporations to do data collection and data mining on our children. What else could come to take away more of our rights and privacy?

Our freedom is very precious and we must fight to keep it. Without freedom, you are just a slave, no matter how much money you have.”Trust me to say this because I have lived under tyranny before and will never want to live in it again. I took a long journey from tyranny to liberty. I don’t want to go back into tyranny.

Since the early 1900s Western Christians have been sending their children to mandatory state schools. From there, they were told to pay any price for their children to get a college degree, and that is why you can see the transformation of society which has had devastating consequences for many Christian families, the Body of Christ, and ultimately, the nations.

Unlike former times, in which only a few professions required further training in order to find work, today everyone will have to be exposed to the government’s education to find a job. And that’s not education and neither is it “educational choice.” It’s secular communist indoctrination.

Goddard College’s recent decision to have its students addressed from prison by a convicted cop killer is just one of many unbelievably irresponsible self-indulgences by “educators” in our schools and colleges. Such “educators” teach minorities born with an incredibly valuable windfall gain — American citizenship — that they are victims who have a grievance against people today who have done nothing to them, because of what other people did in other times.

If those individuals who feel aggrieved could sell their American citizenship to eager buyers from around the world and leave, everybody would probably be better off. Those who leave would get not only a substantial sum of money — probably $100,000 or more — they would also get a valuable dose of reality elsewhere.

Nothing is easier than to prove that America, or any other society of human beings, is far from being the perfect gem that any of us can conjure up in our imagination. But, when you look around the world today or look back through history, you can get a very painfully sobering sense of what a challenge it can be in the real world to maintain even common decency among human beings.

Living just one year in the Middle East would be an education in reality that could obliterate years of indoctrination in grievances that passes for education in too many of our schools, colleges and universities. You could go on to get a postgraduate education in reality in some place like North Korea.

If you prefer to get your education in the comfort of a library, rather than in person amid the horrors, you might study the history of the sadistic massacres of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire or the heart-wrenching story of Stalin’s man-made 1930s famine in the Soviet Union that killed as many millions of people as Hitler’s Holocaust did in the 1940s.

Mao’s man-made famine in China killed more people than the Soviet famine and the Nazi Holocaust combined. And we should not deny their rightful place in history’s chamber of horrors to the 1970s Cambodian dehumanization and slaughters that killed off at least a quarter of the entire population of that country.

The Real History of Slavery

What about slavery? Slavery certainly has its place among the horrors of humanity. But our “educators” today, along with the media, present a highly edited segment of the history of slavery. Those who have been through our schools and colleges, or who have seen our movies or television miniseries, may well come away thinking that slavery means white people enslaving black people. But slavery was a worldwide curse for thousands of years, as far back as recorded history goes.

Overall that expanse of time and space, it is very unlikely that most slaves, or most slave owners, were either black or white. Slavery was common among the vast populations in Asia. Slavery was also common among the Polynesians, and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere enslaved other indigenous peoples before anyone on this side of the Atlantic had ever seen a European.

More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, decades after blacks were freed in the United States.

What does all this mean?

In addition to the chilling picture that it paints of human nature, it means that Americans today — all Americans — are among the luckiest people who have ever inhabited this planet. Most Americans living in officially defined poverty today have such things as central air-conditioning, cable television, a microwave oven and a motor vehicle.

A scholar who spent years studying Latin America said that what is defined as poverty in the United States today is upper middle class in Mexico. Do we still need to do better? Yes! Human beings all over the world are not even close to running out of room for improvement. There is so much knowledge and skills that need to be transmitted to the young that turning schools and colleges into indoctrination centres is a major and reckless disservice to them and to American society, which is vulnerable as all human societies have always been, especially those that are decent.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page.

Copyright © 2014, Thomas Sowell  LewRockwell.com

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If you can’t handle one little arbitrary political abduction at the hands of secret government police, socialism may not be for you.

Socialists protesting in Portland are learning that “The worst thing that can happen to a socialist is to have his country ruled by socialists who are not his friends.” -Ludwig von Mises

See, you might not realize it, but the USA is already heavily influenced by the socialist/ communist philosophy of Karl Marx.

Socialism is more of an umbrella term, meaning centralized control of the means of production– like factories and farming– in the hands of the state.

Communism is more extreme, with complete abolishment of private property, and a dictatorial government that allegedly attempts to distribute wealth “to each according to his need,” and extract labor “from each according to his ability.”

The two are related enough to use them interchangeably for our purposes.

Karl Marx was born over 200 years ago. And despite the utter failure of his communist philosophy in practice, the cult lives on. Still people want to try again… this time they will get it right.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels originally published The Communist Manifesto in 1848. It laid out the beliefs and action plan of the Communist Party. The goal was to get communists of every nationality to rise up and unite to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors.”

Little did they know their words would be used by the likes of Stalin and Mao as justification for over 100 million murders all in the name of a great leap forward for society.

In America, the goals of the communists have crept their way into society with little fanfare. Many people have no idea that public schools, the graduated income tax, and even a central state-controlled bank (like the Federal Reserve) were tenets of the Communist Manifesto.

In one section The Communist Manifesto boils down to a list of ten main goals.

Here are those goals, in Marx and Engels’ own words, followed by some discussion about of how deeply they have seeped into the United States government.

“1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.”

Also known as property taxes.

Can you really say you own land if you must pay the government every year in order to keep it? Fail to pay your rent, and they will eventually confiscate “your” land. This money is then used for “public purposes” like public schools (just wait for #10) and police, who will remove you from the government’s land if you fail to pay your rent.

And if the local government can fine you for keeping a front yard garden, or backyard chickens, do you really own the land anyway? The proletariat simply trades capitalist oppressors for government oppressors.

The federal government owns outright 28% of all land in the United States, 640 million acres. This includes the Bureau of Land Management’s 248 million-acre turf used to control and oppress political dissidents like Cliven Bundy.

“The BLM is also responsible for subsurface mineral resources in areas totaling 700 million acres.” That means they control almost three times as much land as they own.

Each state government owns an average of 8.7% of its state’s land. Another source claims the feds own over 31% of the U.S. landmass, which brings the combined state and federal total ownership to almost 40% of all land in the USA.

And let’s not forget about eminent domain, where the government can just take your land for “public use” (or public benefit) with “just compensation.”

If you don’t feel that the compensation was fair, simply take the most powerful government on Earth to court– courts that they own. I’m sure you will be treated fairly.

“2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.”

Even after the latest tax cuts, the federal income tax rates range from 10% to 37%. You pay more if you earn more. That’s what a graduated income tax means.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the top 20% of income earners in the U.S. paid 87% of all income taxes in 2018. These people who earn $150,000 or more account for 52% of the income earned in the USA, but will pay almost all of the income taxes.

The top 1% of earners– the evil bourgeoisie making over $730,000 per year–actually paid over 43% of all income taxes in 2018.

So 1% of earners who make 16% of the country’s total income will pay 43% of the total income tax.

It sounds like way more than their “fair share” to me. But the communists won’t be satisfied until everything is owned by the state.

“3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.”

They want to fleece the rich one more time when they die, even though all that wealth was taxed already as income or capital gains.

There is a hefty exemption to the estate tax (AKA death tax)–the first $11 million or so is not taxed. But every dollar over that is taxed at 40%. (State-level estate taxes add additional costs, often with lower exemptions.)

When you think about it, $11 million is not so much money when you are talking about a business that might be passed down through inheritance.

If a business is worth $15 million, the family of the deceased would owe $1.4 million. If they don’t have $1.4 million in cash hanging around, they could have to dismantle the business in order to pay the taxes. That could mean a loss of good proletariat jobs and a hit to the economy.

The same could happen to a piece of land or estate that has been in the family for generations.

The socialists would say, “Aww boo-hoo, screw the rich,” because they are hateful and greedy for other people’s wealth. But understand that they never stop with the rich.

Eventually the middle-class is gutted by the socialists, when they realize all the confiscated wealth of the rich won’t last a year in government spending.

“4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.”

Let’s start with the Exit Tax.

Why don’t you just move out of America if you don’t like the taxes?

Well, America taxes its citizens worldwide, even if they do not live or work in the USA.

Why not renounce your citizenship then?

That is one option. But it’s actually not free. In fact, the U.S. confiscates a serious percentage of property from emigrants.

It is called the Exit Tax. It gets complicated, but basically, the government is going to tax you on your net worth, as if you just sold all your assets.

If you don’t have the liquid cash to cover that, you would actually have to start selling assets–property, stocks, etc.–in order to pay the Exit Tax. Of course, you would be taxed on the income or capital gains first, and then have to pay the exit tax with what is left over.

But again, a big part of being a communist is hating rich people. People with a net worth of less than $2 million are much less affected by the exit tax, and only have to pay a few thousand dollars to divorce Uncle Sam.

So let’s turn to confiscation of rebels’ property that affects the poorest proletariat… civil asset forfeiture.

This is often used against poor people who cannot afford to defend themselves in court. The police simply steal property or cash that they “suspect” was involved in some type of crime, without having to prove anything.

They don’t even have to charge you with a crime, let alone convict you. And you have to prove your innocence if you want your car, house, or cash back.

For example, police seized over $50,000 from a Christian Rock band that had collected donations for an orphanage, because they couldn’t prove they got the money through legal means.

Between 2001 and 2016, “more than $2.5 billion in cash seizures had occurred on the nation’s highways without either a search warrant or an indictment.”

And that’s not even counting the more than $3.2 billion the DEA has seized since 2007 without filing civil or criminal charges.

Just having cash is a pretty low bar to be considered a rebel. Then again, what should we expect from a communist doctrine?

“5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.”

I wonder if today’s communists are aware of this one. They can’t possibly think the Federal Reserve helps the proletariat, yet that is exactly what the manifesto describes.

Some people might disagree that the Federal Reserve is state-owned. Technically it has a private board, although board members are appointed by politicians.

But the government granted the Federal Reserve dictatorial control over the economy. The government refuses to audit it, and the government protects its monopoly. It is without a doubt a feature of a centralized state.

The Fed sets the interest rates, prints money, and finances much of the debt of the United States government.

It centralizes capital, and lets the government decide how to use it. They usually use it to bail out banks, wage wars, and steal more value from the people through inflation.

The Federal Reserve also makes it easier for the state to confiscate rebel property. With a government monopoly, it can simply freeze accounts at home, and bully banks abroad into accepting the will of the US government.

“6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.”

FCC, FTC, DOT, FAA, TSA, CBP–oh it’s an alphabet soup of communications and transport regulators.

They regulate the phone lines, the roadways, air traffic, rails, mail and package delivery.

This is nothing new.

Around the same time Karl Marx was writing The Communist Manifesto, Lysander Spooner was doing something productive with his time.

Spooner started the American Letter Mail Company to compete with the U.S. Postal Service. He undercut their prices and provided better customer service, but was fined and cited for breaking laws which protected the government monopoly. He was forced out of business in 1851.

The government doesn’t quite have control over the internet, but they did create the conditions to allow a handful of companies to control access to the internet.

The NSA monitors every communication. Customs and Border Protection performs unconstitutional searches at the border, whether you are an American or foreign.

There is even a bill in Congress that would outlaw encrypted communications, so the government could know absolutely everything you communicate via text, call, or online messaging.

And of course, you can’t go out in public without running the risk of being harassed by local, state, and federal police. You don’t have the right to travel without justifying every action to a police officer.

“7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.”

The state has certainly dabbled in factory ownership, like the GM bailout. They control utilities like water and power. And they have certainly subsidized their fair share of business from oil and solar panels to sugar and corn.

We can refer back to #1 to see how much land the government controls, often under the auspices of improving soil and protecting wastelands.

Then there are plenty of government contractors which are basically the same thing as a government-owned company. If 100% of their revenue comes from the government, they are not a private company. This is especially prominent in the defense industry, which is where the term military-industrial-complex comes from.

The government spends about 34% of the GDP every year— in 2020 it will be closer to 50%. That is a significant percentage of the economy which the government owns or controls.

And let’s not forget about everyone’s favorite socialist, Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority did just this.

Of course this power means sometimes the government poisons an entire river for thousands of miles, like the EPA did to the Colorado River in 2015.

“8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.”

Yes, the Communist Manifesto proposes enslaving all those unwilling to work.

Now, it might not seem like the U.S. government forces people to work. But you have to make money just to park your ass on a plot of land. Local governments want property taxes, which means you must make a certain amount of money just to have a place to live.

People bitch about landlords, but at least they are providing a place to live. Try building yourself a little cottage on government land and they’ll throw you in prison. (So in that sense, they will provide a home to anyone.)

Without the socialist government, you could settle an unused a piece of land, and make your own way in the world.

And the fact that the government claims the authority to tax you on everything you earn basically means you have a liability to labor for the government if you want to labor at all.

This is the antithesis of right to the pursuit of happiness the founders of the USA talked about. That was synonymous with property rights, because working, building, and creating is how most people pursue a fulfilled life.

In fact, they are required for life itself. You can’t stay alive without someone working to feed you, for example.

Therefore, most of us cannot go through life without earning something to pay for necessities. But we can’t just earn what we need, we must earn way more than we need because the government will take a huge chunk of our income.

We tend to think about taxes as a percentage of our income. But what about as a percentage of our time?

The government forces you to work as its slave from about January through April every year. In a typical career, you will spend in total more than 14 full years working as a slave for the government.

“9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.”

The government helped create factory farming by regulating all the small-scale producers out of business.

Reason reports that USDA regulations have forced small slaughterhouses to close in favor of large factory-style slaughterhouses. This might sound like a good idea at first. But consider that when one infected animal makes its way to a slaughterhouse, it can contaminate so much more meat.

Having many slaughterhouses distributed across the U.S. meant that any infections were localized, and affected far fewer people. Plus when the slaughterhouse is local, it is easier to know the owners and see the conditions for yourself.

The animals are raised closer to home, requiring less logistics and a more secure supply chain from farm to table.

The U.S. government has long subsidized large crop producers centralizing them, and making it that much harder for small farms to compete.

It started with the Farm Bill in 1933 and continues to this day.

What we get is cheap, but unhealthy products. And even though the products on the shelf look cheap, we already paid for them with our tax dollars through subsidies.

You may not want to buy unhealthy foods loaded with high fructose corn syrup. But your money will pay for that crap whether you like it or not.

As for the second part, the US federal government does all it can to destroy the autonomy of towns and states across the USA. It does this with the carrot– giving money to governments that do its bidding; and the stick– using federal money and agents to enforce its laws, however unjust.

“10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.”

This may be tenth on the list, but it is number one in ensuring all the rest fall into place.

American communists got this goal in place just four years after the Communist Manifesto was published, with Massachusetts enacting the first compulsory public education law in 1852. After that, it was only a matter of time until the population was indoctrinated to believe whatever the government taught them.

The book Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families from the Torment of Adolescence delves in depth into the history and injustice of compulsory schooling.

It was designed so that the state and corporations could work together to train an obedient workforce, with the public footing the bill.

The point was not open minds and a desire to learn. The aim of the education was setting students up for whatever mediocre to low paying jobs the industrialists wanted them to fill.

The communists succeeded in getting exactly what they wanted out of American schools. And today we see the growing gap between what people learn in school, and what skills they actually need for good jobs. The communists have got the American education system stuck in a stagnant philosophy of industrial labor.

Of course, they did it with supposedly the best intentions. Sounds like a good idea to save kids from dangerous work. But in the process, they also robbed children and young adults of their autonomy and choice. They forced kids against their will into a government institution and set the course for their entire lives.

With childhood education infiltrated by the communists, it was only a matter of time until the US became a socialist country.

And I’d say we are basically there.

That’s why it is so absurd that people think “socialism” would be a radical change for the US. It would be more of the same, a doubling down on every failure you can think of from the last century.

What the socialists being arrested in Portland by other socialists might not realize is that Obama signed the NDAA which is now being used by Trump/ federal troops to kidnap protesters in Portland.

The Republicans and Democrats are different heads of the same beast, just like Socialists versus the National Socialists. The labels hardly matter.

They are authoritarians first, and then break down into factions of communist, socialist, fascist, etc. Each grows the power of the federal government, and hands that power off to the next faction when the tides turn.

A truly radical experiment would actually be trying a real free market for once.

The introduction of Darwinism weakened the strong influence of Christian education in America and Britain. The early 1900s was the first era in which Darwin and his ideas had infiltrated the educational system in the West.

Who was Charles Darwin (1809–1882)? He was a British scientist whose theories about evolution and natural selection became the foundation of our modern biology.

The idea of evolution wasn’t new with Darwin. It was first conceived by Aristotle (384–322 BC). In modern days it was Erasmus Darwin, Charles’ grandfather, who first propounded it in the 1790s. But it was Charles Darwin who presented evolution in a more convincing way through a process he termed “natural selection.”

He wrote a book in 1859 entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. In this book, he wrote about the evolution of animals, and later in 1871, he applied his same ideas to humans in his book, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex.

He believed that when animals compete in this life and struggle for food, the strongest survive and the weak are eliminated, which has been termed as “survival of the fittest.”

According to his theory, the natural breeding process works by selecting the best and letting others die out, resulting in a slow but steady evolution. Darwin’s ideas had huge consequences for intelligent design.

His theory of evolution assumed that various living creatures developed over millions of years, but the Bible says that “God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good (suitable, pleasant) and He approved it completely. And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day” (Genesis 1:31 AMP).

So Darwin’s theory of natural selection disregards God’s creative order according to the Holy Scriptures.

Racial Heritage

All of Darwin’s followers in the early twentieth century believed that the greatest achievement of the evolutionary process was the white race. They believed that intelligence could be measured on a sliding scale or an innate ability rather a set of abilities a child develops under supervision and training.

For example, Lothrop Stoddard believed that millions of years of evolution were at stake and that the work of evolution could be lost if the racial heritage of the intelligent people was lost.

By their understanding of the process, if whites were the best, then it was acceptable to ignore the welfare of non-whites, or even hasten their extinction. By measuring intelligence, it puts everyone on a sliding scale of measurable value and makes it tempting to encourage those with I.Qs while setting aside—and even phasing out—those with lower I.Qs.

Darwin’s theories encouraged racism, and which contributed to slavery. They allowed scientists and biologists to ignore intelligent design and to apply absolutely no value to other human beings they deemed undesirables.

This led to a theory decried by most, but sticking in the back of people’s minds, that black people are inherently inferior, intellectually, with white people. I.Q. tests, so the theory goes, indicates that blacks simply don’t have the necessary brain power with which to compete with other races.

We are all made in God’s image and there is no hint, in the Bible, that God created one race to be inferior to another. We see tens of thousands of very intelligent, very productive black people. Countless number of them have risen from very humble beginnings to tremendous success.

Black people are exactly like white or any other group of people in the area of natural intelligence—some very bright, some of ordinary good intelligence, some slightly or below average. Besides your real intelligence or I.Q, regardless of your race, is not studied; it is discerned.

When man lost his relationship with God, he became a victim of education. He began to look to books and the affirmation of others-what he can see, hear, taste, feel and touch to gain knowledge. When satan destroyed our relationship with God, he capped our real intelligence and life potential, we then looked outside ourselves to find knowledge.

That’s why the Darwinists believe that only the fittest survive. Regardless of whether their philosophy is mainstream or not, the genetic implication of Darwinism is that there must be a master race, and thus inferior ones.

The Famous Scopes Trial

For example, the racism associated with evolution was exposed during the famous 1925 Scopes Trial: The State of Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes. It is perhaps better known by its other name, “the monkey trial.”

It was about a teacher who broke the state’s law against teaching the theory of evolution in a public school. The main debate about the trial was the relationship between faith and science in the United States.

The book that John Scopes was using to teach the theory of evolution was A Civic Biology written by George William Hunter. In that book, he talked about the evolution of man and how there once lived races of men who were much lower in their mental organization than the present inhabitants.

Excerpts from the book give the author’s views about white supremacy, eugenics, contempt for people with disabilities, and impatience with charity.

Improvement of Man. ~If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women on the earth might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection…. These are personal hygiene, selection of healthy mates, and the betterment of the environment.

Eugenics. ~When people marry there are certain things that the individual, as well as the race, should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring…. The science of being well born is called eugenics.

Parasitism and its Cost to Society. ~ Hundreds of families such as those described above exist today, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe…. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them, the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.

The Remedy. ~ If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with some success in this country.

In regards to the races of men, the trial spoke of five races: “At present there exist upon the earth five races of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure.

These are the Ethiopian or Negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.”

George William Hunter, therefore, concluded that the Caucasians are the “highest type of all.” Every individual’s thought process was changed and virtually all people believed that we all came from natural selection, this simply means the survival of those most suited to their environment.

Nazi Racial Ideology

Darwin’s theories encouraged racism, slavery, and Nazism which eventually gave us the bloodiest war in the history of mankind. In his book, When A Nation Forgets God, Dr. Erwin Lutzer says,

When we think of Nazi Germany, we immediately think of the Holocaust, the brutal murder of millions of Jews and other “undesirables….But we need to realize that there were circumstances and widely accepted ideas that enabled the population to become part of an evil that was greater than any individual.

Viktor Frankl a Holocaust survivor said:

The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment—or as the Nazis liked to say, “of blood and soil.” I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other of Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.

Similarly, Social Darwinism was used as a justification for American imperialism in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, as many adherents of imperialism argued that it was the duty of white Americans to bring civilization to “backward” peoples.

It is said that after God dies in the nineteenth century, man died in the twentieth. For when God is dead, man becomes an untamed beast. Indeed as Richard Wurmbrand once said,

If you believe you were created by God, you will try to become Godlike. If you believe you sprang from apes, you are in danger of turning into a beast.

Two Opposing Accounts

Many well-meaning people have unconditionally accepted that the theory of evolution as taught in schools and colleges must be scientifically true. If it is true, then the Bible’s account of creation as recorded in the book of Genesis must be false and nothing more than a myth. These opposing accounts cannot co-exist together. Either creation or the theory of evolution is correct—not both.

Millions of Christians in our generation who believe that evolution has been proven scientifically to be true have tremendously weakened their faith in Christ, whether or not they talk about that logical contradiction or even think about it.

Many Westerners are unaware of the fact that Darwinism can easily be incorporated into the education system and you would not blame the average Christian parent for misunderstanding what is happening today.

Most of us believe in evolution is because we’ve been taught it from our childhood, and we’ve never taken the time to study and discern the real situation, and few pastors or prophets are sounding the alarm.

At some point, Christians place their faith and trust for their salvation and eternity in the truthfulness of the teachings, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as recorded in the New Testament.

But if they have been taught that the Bible’s statements about God’s creation in Genesis are false, then how can they logically and confidently place their faith and trust for salvation and eternity in heaven upon the authority of Christ’s promises of salvation as recorded in the Holy Scriptures?

Few Westerners, when they see news reports of the poverty, suffering in Asia and Africa, take time to stop and ask why the East or Africa is bound into an endless cycle of suffering while the Western nations are (or were) so blessed.

Secular humanists, evolutionists, and Darwinists are quick to reel out many historic and scientific reasons for the disparity, because they are unwilling to face the truth.

But the real reason is simple: The Christian heritage of Europe and America had brought the favor of God, because Christians believe we are all created in God’s image, and therefore we all have value; while false Eastern religions which includes Darwinism believe in the “survival of the fittest” and this is what has been taught in public schools.

We don’t expect that history will repeat itself, but unfortunately, the same values that destroyed Germany are being taught in many of our centers of learning today.

In our time, we have seen the tide shifting for Africa and Asia. The ground is never too hardened. Africa did not yield a harvest for almost two centuries, although the finest of God’s servants sowed the seed of God’s Word on the Continent.

So if the Lord can have mercy on Africa and other nations, then there is hope for Europe because where sin abounded, grace abounded much more, so that as sin reigned in death, even so, grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord (Romans 5:20-21).

American history shows that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, parents were the primary teachers of their children. Education was not the responsibility of the government, but primarily placed upon the fathers.

Moral values, reading, writing, and eventually some sort of vocational training were the main educational tools in the early American home schools. The Bible was the primary textbook in most homes and served as the motivation for acquiring literacy skills and children were exposed to a variety of subjects and given the gift of time, space and opportunity to do more where their interests lied.

Young people were introduced to skilled trades, engineering disciplines, entrepreneurship, invention, and encouraged to work with their hands and their minds so that they would experience the joy of self reliance. We’ve now lost the true meaning of being educated. So the question is:

What is an Education?

To educate means to bring out, to develop the intellectual, moral, and religious faculties of the soul. Charlotte Mason (1842–1923) was a British educator who invested her life in improving the quality of the educational system in England in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Her educational methods, which are widely used among homeschoolers, are centered on the idea that education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life.

By suggesting that education is an atmosphere, Charlotte meant the atmosphere of the surroundings in which the child grows up. A child absorbs a lot from his or her home environment, and that atmosphere makes up one-third of a child’s education. She knew that the child breathes the atmosphere emanating from their parents, which eventually rules their own lives.

By discipline Charlotte meant the discipline of good habits and especially habits of character in a child’s life, which make up another third of his or her education.

She compared good habits to railroad tracks that parents lay down and upon which the child may travel with ease into their adult life. It rests with the parent to consider well the tracks over which the child should travel with profit and pleasure.

Lastly, by a describing it as life, she believed that we should give children living thoughts and ideas, instead of dry, factual concepts. For example, her students used living books rather than dry textbooks.

She preferred books written with a passion for the topic, books that were alive, engaging, and a beautiful literary style while communicating great ideas rather than mere facts.

She believed the size of the book not as important as the content and style. She emphasized the priority Bible lessons should have in our curriculum: “Their Bible lessons should help them realize in early days that the knowledge of God is the principal knowledge, and, therefore, that their Bible lessons are their chief lessons.

She also emphasized treating each child uniquely as a person—a human being not a human doing or as a container into which information is dumped.

Charlotte believed that all children should receive a broad education, which she compared to spreading a feast of great ideas before them.

Susan Schaeffer Macaulay, another mentor of the modern homeschool movement, expressed a strong disapproval of the modern approach to education, noting:

How colorfully and scientifically our generation talks down to the little child! What insipid, stupid, dull stories are trotted out! And we don’t stop there. We don’t respect the children’s thinking or let them come to any conclusions themselves!

We ply them with endless questions, the ones we’ve thought up, instead of being silent and letting the child’s questions bubble up with interest. We tire them with workbooks that would squeeze out the last drop of anybody’s patience.

We remove interesting books and squander time on “reading skill testing,” using idiotic isolated paragraphs which no one would dream of taking home to read.

Dr. Ruth Beechick, a former teacher and professor of education, in her book, You Can Teach Your Child Successfully, pointed out that presenting our students with information that is “predigested, pre-thought, pre-analyzed, and pre-synthesized…deprives children of the joy of original thought.”

And Neil Postman asserted in his book, The End of Education that “knowledge is often presented as the accumulation of facts, dates, times, places—trivializing the pursuit of knowledge to the extent that “there is no sense of the frailty or ambiguity of human judgment, no hint of the possibilities of error. Knowledge is presented as a commodity to be acquired, never as a human struggle to understand, to overcome falsity, to stumble toward truth.”

Macaulay and Charlotte both believed “Boys and girls must have time to invent episodes, carry on adventures, live heroic lives, lay sieges and carry forts, even if the fortress be an old armchair; and in these affairs the elders must neither meddle nor make.” As John Ratzenberger rightly said, “We built this nation guided by our imaginations and the skills we learned from our elders.”In his testimony to Congress House Committee on small business, he said,

Manufacturing is the Backbone of Western Civilization

This great country of ours, this land we call the United States of America was founded and nurtured on 2 basic guiding principles: Freedom and the Ability to use that freedom to build the finest civilization yet seen on earth.

We built this nation guided by our imaginations and the skills we learned from our elders…. There are close to a million jobs available right now in small businesses around the country that rely on people with mechanical common sense skills that we’ve stopped offering in our public schools three generations ago.

The fate of Western Civilization rests entirely on our ability to make things. The world would get along just fine without actors, reality stars, musicians and sports celebrities……Think, however, what would happen if all the skilled trades people from carpenters and plumbers to farmers and truck drivers decided not to show up for work tomorrow. We, the entire nation, would instantly grind to a halt causing problems that would take generations to overcome.

So why then have we stopped teaching our children the joys of crafting something out of nothing? About fifteen years ago while visiting a number of factories and filming the different ways companies make things for my TV show “John Ratzenberger’s Made in America”, I realized that there were hardly any workers under the age of forty in any of the facilities.

After talking with dozens of CEOs and plant foremen in every state, I was made aware of the fact that nationwide, the manual arts, that is: wood shop, metal shop, auto repair shop and even home economics were taken out of the middle and high school curriculums about 35 years ago.

Not only did that result in a dropout rate back then of 30 percent instantly but it left us with a skilled essential workforce whose average age today is 58 years old.

The most repeated complaint today from potential employers is that it’s impossible to train someone for any of the jobs available when they graduate from high schools everywhere without the ability to even read inches and fractions from a simple ruler.

The big worrisome question then is this: How do we reinstate the necessary programs in our schools to give our children a familiarity of the tools that built and maintain our civilization and way of life?

If the average age of the people that keep our nation and the nation’s infrastructure working is 58 years old, then how long do we have before it all stops?”

I also submit that we do away with the term “blue collar worker” and replace it with “essential worker,” because that’s exactly what they are… We had better get busy introducing our youngsters to the vital art of using tools and the joy of self reliance.

Ratzenberger’s sombre view of American education is echoed by Mike Rowe who also gave his Testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, about the failures of the American school system:

In high schools, the vocational arts have all but vanished. We’ve elevated the importance of “higher education” to such a lofty perch that all other forms of knowledge are now labelled “alternative.”

Millions of parents and kids see apprenticeships and on-the-job-training opportunities as “vocational consolation prizes,” best suited for those not cut out for a four-year degree…..

In a hundred different ways, we have slowly marginalized an entire category of critical professions, reshaping our expectations of a “good job” into something that no longer looks like work.

Greek Work Philosophy

This negative attitude towards manual labour came from Greek philosophy, and it is no wonder that the apostle Paul‘s message to the Greeks was plagued with numerous problems.

For instance, Acts 17:21-30 describes a sermon preached by Paul on Mars Hill auditorium, the famous place of discussion of the judges and learned men of Athens.

Athens was the principle city of that part of Greece, which was at that time a commonwealth of its own. It was one of the most noted places in the whole world for learning, philosophy, and human wisdom.

It continued for so many years until the Romans conquered Greece, when its reputation began to diminish. Rome borrowed the learning of science and the arts. However, at the time of Christ and the apostles, it was still a place where the most wise and learned men in the world gathered for debate.

When Paul started preaching, he was called a babbler, for preaching Christ crucified which was foolishness to the Greeks (1 Corinthians 1:23).

Paul had all the credentials to debate with these philosophers; he was an educated rabbi taught by the finest scholar of his day, Gamaliel. He probably excited their curiosity because they loved discussing new intellectual ideas.

In spite of his great learning, Paul was taught a trade, as every good Jewish boy was. His trade was manufacturing tents in addition to being an evangelist, preacher, and church planter.

In 2 Thessalonians 3, Paul says when he did this work of tent-making; he was serving as a model of the disciplined lifestyle that should characterize Christians. In fact, he strongly commands certain sluggards in the church “to work in quietness with their hands, and earn their own food and other necessities.” (2 Thessalonians 3:12)

Again in his letter to Titus, he again reiterates this admonition, “And let our own people really learn to apply themselves to good deeds (to honest labour and honourable employment), so that they may be able to meet necessary demands whenever the occasion may require and not be living idle and uncultivated and unfruitful lives.” (Titus 3:12 AMP)

However, in Greek society, if you worked with your hands you were lower down the social scale than those who worked with their heads and were ‘pen-pushers’-an attitude that, sadly, the West has inherited.

Since Western civilization is based on Greek and Roman thinking, it also explains much about the education system today. But in the Bible jobs such as tent-making and fishing were well respected. So the Bible attaches dignity to manual labour. After all, the Lord Jesus Himself had worked as a carpenter.

In his book, The Closing of the American Mind, Alan Bloom decries the deterioration of our schools, particularly as it applies to the solid content of education.  In the U.K morals have faded and are now being replaced by a feeble attempt at creating “British Values.”

Another writer by the names of John Chancellor had this to say about the education system in America:

If the United States runs out of scientists and engineers by the turn of the century, who will replace them? Today’s thirteen year-olds? Hardly. The Department of Education in 1989 helped fund a study of the mathematics and science skills of thirteen year-olds in several countries. The American children came in dead last, with lower scores than the Spanish, British, Irish, Canadian and South Korean children.

South Korean thirteen-year olds were first. The comparison was devastating. South Korea is a developing country, nearly destroyed by war in the 1950’s with a population that was mainly poor farmers a few decades ago.

The United States is an economic giant, but suffering from a softening of the brain. The Council on Competitiveness estimates that sixty thousand mathematics and science teachers in our high schools are not fully qualified to do their jobs. 

Again in 1989, Chancellor reports,

The Secretary of Education, Lauro F. Cavazos, reported that since 1985, American high school students had flat or declining scores on college entrance examinations and an unchanged dropout rate. One out of every four high school students does not finish school—close to one million young people.

Another fourth-another million—who are graduated are functionally illiterate when they get their diplomas. Half the eighteen-year-olds in this country today have failed to master basic language, mathematics, and analytical skills. A million dropouts here, a million functional illiterates there, every year.

Can these attitudes voiced by writers almost two decades ago be thought of as isolated prejudices by those who don’t want to accept the facts?

Ann Herzer reports that “the teachers who dare to object are accused of being negative, non-cooperative, not innovative, and eventually fired or driven out of the programmed system.” Leading her to conclude that:

Unless the objectives of modern education change, they may be concisely and accurately described as the ultimate destruction of the human individual as a person; the eradication of all the traditions, ideals, and moral concepts learned from home and church; the destruction of the family as a constructive unit in society; and a complete transformation of the individual from a self-reliant-independent, and one with individual initiative, to just another number in the master record book.

The individual will have been bred, reared, and taught by every deceitful device possible to deny and reject responsibility for himself, and to transfer that responsibility to the group, that is, the State. This is the state of modern education under the deceitful, Utopian, One-World plan known by several names, but today titled “Common-Core.”

And what is Common-Core? The Lord willing,  in our next post we shall talk about the history of the public school system and how this modern concept called Common-Core has been introduced into the education system.