Federal Molding of the Minds of Children
Federal Molding of the Minds of Children
by James Owens (1999)
Most Americans have forgotten a tale from their childhood – or never understood the somber warning in the classic, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” While entertaining to tots, the tale slyly embeds a very adult and profound insight about human nature: people in structured hierarchies believe whatever higher authorities parade forth as “official” truth (for fear of their safety, jobs and livelihood – all dependent on loyal adherence to the core beliefs powering the massive hierarchy from top to bottom). At some subconscious level, their minds blot out all obvious “negative” evidence and autopilot into a protective state of denial. Emotional forces blind the mind and ingrain unquestioning belief in what they, deep down, want or need to believe.
Here’s an abbreviated version of the tale: Once upon a time, a great emperor hired tailors to make fine clothes for his annual public parade. Word spread from his palace that only competent and loyal citizens would be able to see and enjoy his finery. They all, dependent on his government for their jobs and food, believed everything he said. So, when the emperor appeared at his parade, his new clothes not completed and wearing only his underwear, citizens lining both sides of the street nevertheless loudly cheered the emperor’s new clothes. As they all outdid each other in wildly praising the new clothes, a child in the crowd blurted out “but the emperor has no clothes!“
Kids laugh when told the hilarious ending. But all the small child did was to say honestly what was obvious for all to see – if they chose to or could. Freedom-minded adults, keenly aware of the history of totalitarian governments, will recognize the ominous human flaw deftly satirized in the tale. Throughout history, successful rulers (of both state and church) systematically mold and intimidate their people early in life into an approved doctrine of uniform beliefs, an Orwellian “group-think” that refuses to see wrong-thinking or evil in their rulers, no matter how obvious or absurd. Currently, in the U.S. and Europe, it’s called liberal or global “political correctness.” Citizens, in a mass group-think which pervades schools, the media and other institutions, express competence and loyalty by lock-step yea-saying to their powerful central authorities. Very few ever dare blurt out today’s equivalent of “the emperor has no clothes.”
In a recent incident, baseball pitcher (and “child”) John Rocker did – and was severely punished with a 72-day suspension from baseball, a $20,000 fine and enforced psychological testing for “mental problems” (anyone speaking out against a core government doctrine is automatically branded as “mentally disturbed”). He blurted aloud, in a magazine interview, what millions of Euro-white Americans think - but dare not say. He remarked that he disliked New York subways, having to sit next to purple-headed “queers” and people speaking non-English. He added that he walked the streets of the city and never heard a word of English. He didn’t like it - and (unfortunately for him) said so.
However, governments prefer to silence the Rockers within their midst much earlier in life, by “education” rather than force. They first target the minds of the young, to mold them, get control of all schools, orchestrate what is taught and thus grow politically correct adults. This is the critical function of our federal Department of Education (DOE) with its annual spending of a gigantic $34 billion dollars which insures a firm federal control nationwide over teachers’ unions, liberal/left mind-training in K-12 public-school teaching and textbooks – and much of college curricula. Their core mission is to tear down (“deconstruct”) the Western civilization of European whites and replace these values with multicultural egalitarianism, both national and global. (A most recent example of this “New-World-Order” mission is the current condemnation and ostracizing of Austria’s anti-immigration Freedom Party by a unified, and punishing, coalition of the European Union, the U.N. and the U.S.) Thoroughly indoctrinated by DOE-controlled and racially integrated schools, brainwashed adults reinforce politically correct orthodoxy and, even in a democracy, vote to sustain the same central totalitarian system which trained them. (This more sophisticated form of socialism has recently been dubbed “democratic totalitarianism,” a far more insidious, creeping and enduring form of total centralized socialism than the original versions of Marxism.)
American Education – the Propaganda Machine
Nothing more exactly matches the metaphor of the “new clothes” in the Emperor’s tale than its counterpart mantra chanted prayerfully by today’s liberals: the sacred word, “education.” Today’s DOE-mandated “education” is as blindly worshiped as the Emperor’s “new clothes” - and equally non-existent. Real clothes have content – and so, once, did American real education (namely, solid mastery of basic reading, writing, math and factual history). Like the Orwellian world where “newspeak” (reconstructed meanings of traditional words) replaced “oldspeak” (traditional meanings), today’s “education” is a massive propaganda trick, merely “newspeak” for wholesale brainwashing designed by leftist social engineers to integrate the races, mold minds into rejection of the Euro-white values of Western civilization and total acceptance of multicultural “political correctness.” DOE’s main immediate mission is the racial integration of all schools, no matter the consequences in dumbing down their students.
As the multiculturalists confront “glitches” in the system (students scoring worse and worse in national basic-skills testing), their politicians get reelected by promising “more money for education.” But, while naive Americans think this means more real education content, the billions spent go mainly for more DOE staff, social engineering, bussing and DOE’s nationwide propaganda machine. For example, in 1994, fewer than 50% of the personnel employed by U.S. public schools were actually teachers. Most of the others run the propaganda arsenal from textbook-monitoring to “sensitivity” programs.
America’s children, for decades, have been propagandized, not given real education. The results in uneducated Americans are a monstrous scandal of government deception. Federal mind-molding has, indeed, crammed the national mentality into full-blown craven leftist uniformity but driven the nation into a system of utterly dumbed-down schools. A sampling of the sad facts of American education paints an ugly landscape.
The Dismal State of American Education
Item: A few decades ago, by no-nonsense and rigorous real education, no high-school student graduated unless fully competent in basic skills. Today 20% of high-school grads can not read well enough to handle simple delivery jobs. Unemployable, they sink into welfare, drugs or worse.
Item: Between 1960 and 1995, average per-student “education” spending in public schools rose 200% in inflation-adjusted dollars, the student-teacher ratio fell from 26 students for every teacher to only 17, teachers’ salaries rose by 45% in inflation-adjusted dollars – and yet the doubling of money thrown at “education” and the tiny class sizes have accomplished only a drastic decline in real education of our young.
Item: American 12th-graders rank 19th out of 21 industrialized nations in math and 16th out of 21 in science.
Item: A Libertarian Party research study reports that, since 1983, approximately 25 million students have reached the 12th grade not knowing the basics of American history. More than 20 million of these about-to-graduate high-schoolers were unable to do basic math, and 10 million could not read at a basic level. The report concludes: “Look at the track record.” It’s a total failure.
Item: Under extreme pressure by New York authorities to raise scores on standardized tests, the schools’ teachers and administrators actually gave students the answers or otherwise conspired to help them cheat their way to higher scores. U.S. News & World reported (“Cheating 101,” Dec. 20, 1999) that 52 school personnel in 32 different schools were suspended. New York’s Governor Pataki also charged systemic “attendance fraud” in NYC schools, thousands of students being marked “present” and even given grades although they were in private schools, in jail or dead. (Since the schools are funded based on attendance figures, the fraud bilked taxpayers of as much as $100 million per year.) New York is hardly the only state under similar and failing federal testing pressures.
Item: At the college level, in a recent year, about 30% of entering freshmen had to enroll in one or more remedial (“bonehead”) courses to try to learn basics not mastered in high school.
Item: In late 1999, DOE issued new nationwide “guidelines” (i.e. rules which, if violated, cut off federal money) about how states can use standardized tests of basic skills. If any use of tests controlling promotion to a next grade or graduation or admission to a college results in a “disparate impact“ on a minority student, such testing will be regarded as illegal discrimination and a violation of the civil rights laws. Again, “social promotion” of students, regardless of basic skills learned, is mandated. DOE’s core purpose is racial integration and the social engineering of a multicultural society; not basic education.
Item: The nation’s university Schools of Education, dominated by DOE’s multicultural agenda and the teachers’ unions and which train our teachers, are a national joke, dubbed the “bonehead” major on every campus. Many of its graduates fail tests on basic content (English, math, etc.) in the very subjects they are teaching in the schools. But DOE’s “disparate impact” doctrine rules this Orwellian world as well.
Item: In Virginia, the Board of Education conceded that it must abandon their minimum-achievement rule requiring every public school to achieve merely a 70% student pass record on standardized tests by 2007 or face the loss of accreditation. School officials complained this was impossible. Their “catch-22″ or “damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t” dilemma is obvious and torturing: if they enforce “social promotion” of unqualified students to obey DOE’s anti-discrimination laws, they can’t hope to meet Virginia’s 70% pass record requirement; if they enforce real test standards and promote only truly qualified students, they will violate DOE’s “disparate impact” rules and thus civil-rights laws.
Item: The federal Department of Education now has so much money flowing through its bureaucracy that its accounting is saturated with “irregular and incomplete record keeping” (according to the General Accounting Office). Congress was told that a proper audit of 116 billion under DOE’s control was not possible. DOE has apologized for the missing or misplaced records.
The list of education failures by federal social engineering of our children’s minds is endless and nationwide – and only sampled in the few items above. But when you flesh out the consequences of these itemized realities upon millions of children’s daily lives across the 50 states, the failure to educate is a massive national tragedy. Federal “education,” stripped of its “new clothes” right down to its “underwear,” is blatant propaganda, the fanatic manipulation of young minds into uniform political correctness. It is not real education at all. It amounts to a virtual crime against our children’s minds and futures, especially Euro-whites taught by teachers and slanted textbooks that “patriotism” is really wicked “xenophobia,” that “racial separatism” of races into groups of their own kind and culture is “racial supremacism,” that any spoken word in favor of preservation of the white race or the original Constitution’s freedom of association is “racism.” DOE-dominated public schools propagandize our kids and make them ashamed to be Euro-whites instead of educating them into strong basic skills and pride in their tradition. As a pundit once remarked, “if you let me write your history textbooks, I can make your children believe whatever I want them to believe.”
For two decades DOE has orchestrated an ever more tightening strangle-hold over the nation’s schools. With its mission mainly federal propaganda instead of traditional education, millions of our children enter adult life uneducated, a sure path to poverty, frustration, welfare dependency and even to drugs and crime. This national scandal will not be purged until enough tradition-minded Americans muster the political will to abolish the Department of Education entirely and restore control of our schools to the states and our local communities.
Dr. Owens is a B-school professor and director of Executive Publications at: owensva@ix.netcom.com.
