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.
