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FedEd: Education for Global Government
Allen Quist, FedEd:
The New Federal Curriculum and How It’s Enforced. St.
Paul, MN: Maple River Education Coalition, 2002. Pp. 153.
Suppose
your aim is to obtain power over an entire society. You’ve decided that violent revolution is not the way
to go. It’s disruptive, and if history is any guide, you might
get your own nose bloodied a time or two. What do you do? This
question has been asked – and answered – more than once. The Italian
Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s answer – undertaking a "long march
through the institutions" to infiltrate and "capture
the culture" by stealth – is perhaps the best known. Gramsci
wasn’t the first to come up with this idea, though. An earlier
version already existed. It involved capturing the minds of the
young. Moreover, if the job of transmitting a civilization’s aggregate
knowledge and cultural heritage is entrusted to a single network
of institutions, then so much the better.
We’ve had such a network for well over a hundred
years. It’s called the public education system. We have Horace
Mann and his Harvard Unitarians to thank for doing more than anyone
else to get it started back in the 1840s. Mann studied the "Prussian
model" in Europe and returned home to found the first such
schools in this country. This model involves the state raising
children to meet the needs of the state. This model gave us the
word kindergarten, the product of an analogy between raising
children (kinder) and growing vegetables in a garden (garten).
I’ve
long considered the phrase public education a
misnomer. It implies an institution that serves the public. It
has been quite a while since government schools served the public,
however. The slow decline in their capacity to educate since embracing
Deweyan "progressive education" early in the last century
is so well documented I need not repeat it here. Nor need I discuss
more recent fads like OBE. But in the 1990s we went from the frying
pan into the fire. As literacy levels plummeted to embarrassing
lows, the feds began the largest power grab over education in U.S.
history – in a move intended to pull in private schools and home
schooling parents as well, eventually. At this point we come to
the latest attempt to expose what the feds are doing to American
children and why: Professor Allen Quist’s FedEd: The New Federal
Curriculum and How It’s Enforced. Quist is imminently qualified
to write it. An author and political scientist who also has a divinity
degree, he was in the Minnesota House of Representatives in the
1980s, where he served on the House Education Committee and was
influential in legalizing home schooling in that state. He has
been involved with school boards. He currently teaches political
science at Bethany Lutheran College in Mankato, Minnesota.
FedEd is a slim volume packs a colossal wallop. If there were any remaining
doubts how much of the decline of government
schools can be explained in terms of stealth social engineering,
Quist’s study should lay them to rest. In certain respects, FedEd picks
up where Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt’s the deliberate dumbing
down of america leaves off. Her account was historical, going
back over a hundred years, and literally overwhelms you with original
documentation. Quist’s book is a much shorter and more succinct
account of where we are now. Unlike Iserbyt’s encyclopedic tome
it can be read in one or two sittings. Quist lays out the reasons
for the anti-academic and anti-cognitive biases in government schools
that are producing graduates who cannot walk up to a map of the
world and find the United States – much less grasp our founding
principles. In a sense, given their aims, government schools
have to be regarded as spectacular successes rather than dismal
failures. The evidence all points in a single direction: their intent has
been to dumb down the citizenry of this country and produce a "new
serfdom" – a global workforce totally subservient to the needs
of omnipotent world government and its internationalist corporate
partners.
In 1994 alone, this effort received three major
boosts, in the form of the Goals 2000 Educate America Act, the
School-To-Work Opportunities Act (STW), and a bill known simply
as HR6, a funding appropriations bill for most federal education
programs. Bill Clinton signed all three. (More recently, of course,
George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which
we are led to believe superceded STW.) Taken together, these bills
hand control over curricular content to federal educrats, resulting
in the New Federal Curriculum: FedEd, for short. Quist identifies
seven themes running through FedEd (p. 43, p. 100, pp. 131-32,
etc.):
- Undermining national sovereignty (moving us
toward world government under the auspices of the United Nations).
- Redefining natural rights (substituting for
the American view a Marxist and internationalist view justifying
massive redistribution of wealth).
- Minimizing natural law (essentially by neglect).
- Promoting environmentalism (emphasizing the
global nature of environmental issues, including promoting
the pagan pseudo-religion of Gaia, Mother Earth).
- Requiring multiculturalism (including acceptance
of homosexuality).
- Restructuring
government (toward the idea that we live in a "global village," defining
citizenship in global terms).
- Redefining
education as job skills (preparing "human
resources" for the global workforce).
He names names and organizations (p. 13). Some
will be quite familiar; others have been operating behind the scenes
for years:
- The Clintons,
obviously. ("It takes a village," remember?)
- Marc Tucker, Director of the National Center
for Education and the Economy, author of a certain letter addressed
to Hillary Clinton you may read here.
- Lauren Resnick, Co-director of the New Standards
Project.
- Charles Quigley, Director of the Center for
Civic Education (CCE). (No relation to Carroll Quigley
I know of.)
- Margaret Stimmon Branson, Associate Director
of the CCE.
- Shirley McCune, a federal education researcher.
Others
deeply involved in this broad based effort include the National
Education Association and, of course, numerous
multiculturalist and environmentalist groups who stand to extend
their own turf. The overriding purpose, however, is a world in
which the majority of people are Information Age serfs ruled over
by a global elite, their minds enslaved to such notions as celebrating
diversity, embracing tolerance, and worshipping Mother Earth. They
will know how to "multitask," but will have no grasp
of economics or Constitutional principles, any significant knowledge
or their historical origins or even much knowledge of basic math
(they will have calculators, after all). One of the most pertinent
prior developments was the UN’s World Declaration on Education
for All (1990). The idea sounds good. It involves weighty
phrases like "world class standards" (p. 91). But in
practice, it threatens to impose an educational agenda that, once
in place, would be enforced at an international level by a global
government – the chief long-term goal of FedEd’s masterminds.
None of this is possible, of course, with a citizenry
that knows something of its roots. It is not compatible with a
political philosophy that limits government to a few carefully
defined functions, and who see rights as anteceding government
instead of created by it. An agenda such as FedEd would not be
possible among those who understand enough economics and enough
history to know that open-ended, market-based economies tend to
deliver prosperity while micromanaged, command-driven systems eventually
deliver poverty and de facto slavery (it may just take a
while). There are still too many educated citizens around for central
planners to operate openly. Their agenda would not "play in
Peoria," even today. Hence the stealth measures aimed at obtaining
entry into the minds of small children. The guiding theme behind
FedEd is a certain philosophy of education. It might be called
statist-vocationalism. The purpose of education, according to this
philosophy, is not to graduate citizens who can think independently
of the group or of authority, are suited for entrepreneurship and
peaceful trade with their neighbors, are informed, and can participate
responsibly in a Constitutional republic. It is rather to produce subjects who
will be cognitively dependent: on government, on an employer, and
on groupthink – a socialized mass, that is. According to the American
tradition, education aims to give individuals knowledge and tools
to find their own ways of flourishing in the world. According to
FedEd, in accordance with the basic thrust of its Prussian ancestor,
education is subordinate to the purposes of the state and business
in "public-private partnerships" or other arrangements,
to raise a population fit for life and work in the global-socialist
new world order in the making.
Above we listed seven themes Quist identifies
running through the New Federal Curriculum. The word theme is
very important. In the New World Edubabble, a theme is not an academic
subject. Traditional academic subjects such as mathematics, literature,
history, geography and so on, emphasized content. Themes emphasize
attitudes, values and beliefs in what educrats call the affective
domain (cf. p. 42). They aim not at communicating information and
real cognitive skills but inculcating the right attitudes and values.
They aim, where necessary, at changing students’ minds – indoctrinating,
in other words, instead of educating. Cognitive content
is subordinate to this purpose. Quist provides a revealing example,
penned by Shirley McCune:
All learning begins with the affective [attitudes
and values]. A major task of education is to extend the worldview of
the child; this should include a view of careers, of the
community, our nation and our global community (quoted
on p. 25; emphases Quist’s).
So
in teaching the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (for example),
the New Federal Curriculum does not offer
a comprehensive account of what the documents say. Rather it carefully
selects, emphasizing what serves FedEd’s goals and ignoring what
doesn’t. For example, National
Standards for Civics and Government,
one of the key texts of FedEd, makes 81 references to the First
Amendment but none to the Second Amendment. This is unsurprising;
the goal, after all, is not merely dumbed down subjects but disarmed
ones as well, a people encouraged to fear guns. This part of
the agenda already has the full cooperation of national media that
consistently portray guns as evil and dangerous, and gun owners
and their defenders as backward rednecks or potentially violent
extremists. The Tenth Amendment also disappears. It would suggest
to thoughtful readers that the entire federal-educratic edifice
is unconstitutional. Out of sight, out of mind.
In
providing a framework for "civic education" FedEd
presents the following "fundamental values": (1) the
public good, (2) individual rights, (3) justice, (4) equality,
(5) diversity, (6) truth and (7) patriotism. One may note that
some of these are not compatible with others unless they are radically
redefined. But debasing the language is part of FedEd’s indoctrination
process; by using familiar terms in new ways it can change students’ attitudes
while seeming to be educating them. Quist outlines how FedEd substitutes
a collectivist and internationalist conception of rights, the one
drawn from the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for
the one we inherited from the classical liberal tradition and incorporated
into our Declaration of Independence (see pp. 56-59). For any concept
of individual rights with teeth in it is going to undermine equality,
for example, understood here not as equality under the law but
equality of condition. Truth and patriotism, finally, are
redefined. Truth means consensus (in accordance with
the postmodernist idea that truth is a "social construct," not
correspondence to reality – cf. p. 80); patriotism is unconditional
loyalty to government and its agents, not to a set of ideals government
is expected to live up to. Indeed, as we have said, the indoctrination
process sets out to prepare students for a global workforce in
an emerging world government.
Thus Quist can mine out of National Standards this
discussion of sovereignty:
The world is divided into nation-states that claim
sovereignty over a defined territory and jurisdiction over everyone
within it (quoted on p. 47).
He
then undertakes some very good linguistic analysis (the sort
of thing professional analytic philosophers ought to
be doing but aren’t). Note the phrase divided into, tacitly
implying that a unified world is, or should be, the primary
political unit with nations as secondary units. Wouldn’t a more
accurate wording be, "The world consists of nation-states … " And
do these nation-states merely claim sovereignty? If so,
from whom? This way of putting the matter drops the subtle implication
that the claim is not really legitimate – or at best, that
its legitimacy is conditional on the approval of a transnational
power left unidentified. How about: "The world consists of
sovereign nation-states." That would be a neutral, non-agenda-driven
account of the true state of affairs. Quist observes that the wording
in official documents driving the New Federal Curriculum is chosen
with great care, to achieve very specific effects on students when
repeated throughout their "educations" from early childhood
into their impressionable teen years.
Internationalism, likewise, is consistently viewed
not just as desirable but inevitable:
… the
issues confronting American citizens are increasingly international [textbook’s
emphasis]. Issues of economic competition, the environment, and
the movement of peoples
around the world require an awareness of political associations
that are larger than the nation state [emphasis added … ] (quoted
on p. 94).
The
international organization the author has in mind, of course,
is the UN or some successor organization. Some
readers might wonder at this point, "Isn’t business going
global?" or "Isn’t there a great deal of movement across
national borders, including ours?" Fair enough, but much of
this activity – whether of business or of populations – is spurred
on by internationalist organizations who see it as a means of engendering
control, particularly over cultures such as that of Western born
whites with strong traditions of freedom and individualism. For
world government to work, such peoples must be diluted and their
influence nullified, so that a new generation, fully accepting
of "diversity" and focused on global issues, thinks of
citizenship in global, not in local, regional or national terms.
A major FedEd text, We the People: the Citizen and the Constitution,
invites students to consider the question, "Do you think world
citizenship will be possible in your lifetime?" World citizenship
makes little sense without world government.
Thus
the multiculturalism and environmentalism that permeate FedEd.
Let’s consider both briefly. National Standards makes
42 references to multiculturalism / diversity (p. 46) and 17 to
the environment. Multiculturalism has become (part of) the official
ideology of this country’s dominant intellectual class, which includes
its educratic class. Now multicultural education in the sense of
education about other cultures could be a legitimate goal wherever
members of different cultures find themselves coming into contact,
and this has been going on spontaneously for centuries. But multicultural
education in this sense is not the goal of the multiculturalism evidenced
in FedEd. Multiculturalism portrays a single culture, that
of straight white Western males and their Christian and "bourgeois" values,
in as hostile a light as possible (pp. 77-78).
Likewise
with environmentalism. Quist emphasizes that he is not opposed
to teaching students about environmental
issues (p. 65). However, he does question the brand of environmentalism
incorporated into FedEd. He observes (p. 66) that this brand of
environmentalism (1) is exaggerated in comparison with other concerns;
(2) includes identifiable religious content, not just respecting
but actually worshipping Mother Earth, sometimes called Gaia in
the literature of radical "deep ecology"; and (3) as
part of the larger agenda of consolidating power and centralized
economic planning, with the aim of eventually bringing all political
and economic activity under the one central authority. It should
be noted that the global environmentalist movement is far
better funded by a wide array of enormously wealthy tax-exempt
foundations than most Americans realize. It has become powerful
enough to have generated its own "scientific" orthodoxy,
so that visible dissident scientists face efforts to destroy their
reputations – as Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, author of The
Skeptical Environmentalist, recently discovered.
Among
the chief goals of FedEd is to turn out "global
villagers." A major tool here is the reinterpretation of education
as job skills. Now it is true that we are heirs of a national mythology
holding that everyone should go to college. We should get over
whatever disdain exists for people who work with their hands. But
again, these are not the goals of FedEd. Its goals would impose
a purely vocational model on children, with vocational choices
imparted via "career clusters" as early as eighth grade.
This is long before many children are ready to make a serious vocational
choice. (Readers, did you know what you wanted to be when
you grew up when you were in the eighth grade? If I remember right,
I wanted to be an astronaut!) And by the way, people who work with
their hands are more than capable of understanding when agents
of government are stepping on their Constitutional rights – if
they are taught Constitutional government in the eighth grade!
This effort, involving stealthy devaluation of
the autonomous individual, has been underway for some time. It
is reflected in such apparently innocent changes in terminology
such as from personnel to human resources (cf. p.
98). The former, to my ears anyway, implies autonomous persons
applying for work, being hired, paid, etc. The latter suggests,
again to my ears, the comparability of human beings to inanimate
natural resources such as land, water, oil and so on. Persons have
autonomy and rights – are ends in themselves. Resources are
objects to be manipulated – are means to the ends of those in power.
This essentially how FedEd looks at students (future members of
the global workforce) – hearkening back to the Prussian model and
its growing children as if in a garden. It is likely not coincidental
that during the 1990s we also saw abominations such as NAFTA, which
has destroyed much of our manufacturing base, and that unchecked
immigration ran out of control, not just eroding national borders
but ensuring a steady supply of low-wage workers who, not assimilating,
will also remain unfamiliar with Constitutional principles.
We
should say a word about the view of business implicit in FedEd.
Many so-called education reforms are promoted
as "good for business," and this is often enough to gain
the support of business and business organizations such as the
local branch of the Chamber of Commerce. FedEd paints a rosy picture
of "reformed" public schools turning out loyal, technology-savvy
and business-savvy employees. Businesspeople cannot necessarily
be faulted for failing to see through the smokescreen of deceptive
language – although an inability to find employees who can read
and understand instruction manuals should clue them in that something
is wrong. A key is the phrase public-private partnership that
has been seen more and more often during the past decade. This
means close ties between government and business. What results
is not capitalism but corporatism – in
which corporations and government cooperate both to discourage
the open competition characteristic of genuine capitalism in favor
of policy that is established and administered jointly, with each
side doing favors with the other (e.g., "tax incentives" for
business; support going to certain candidates for political office
from business). This method is clearly a species of central planning.
It may be used to establish what kinds of vocations and jobs are
desirable and available in a given region – to the point of laying
out actual job descriptions (sometimes doing it badly – cf. pp
86-89). "Education" then sets out to train students for
these specific vocations and jobs. On the surface, corporatism
sounds very pro-business, and no doubt there are established business
leaders who like it very much. But its overall view of society
is statist and collectivist – and, of course, authoritarian. The
New Federal Curriculum sets out to indoctrinate and train individuals
to meet the needs of the state and its corporate partners. At one
time, this kind of system was known as fascism. Both Nazis
and Communists employed purely vocational models of education,
so that students would learn what they needed to serve the state,
and no more. Excessive intellectual curiosity was discouraged.
It wasted time and resources (and might lead to students asking
too many of the wrong kinds of questions). FedEd takes this model
and modifies it for the new world order being quietly constructed,
with each successive UN confab laying new girders onto the scaffolding.
How is all this to be enforced?
Aside from the fact that much of the public does not even know
about it, the
first thing to note is that the New Federal Curriculum is, for
all practical purposes, federal law. It is perfect for an educational
environment where money is tight, with state education departments
and local school districts having grown dependent on federal dollars.
Thus even though the exact wording of bills like Goals 2000 described
them as "voluntary," in the postmodernist-Orwellian universe
of FedEd where nothing means what it says, and where HR 6 stipulates
that the U.S. Department of education can simply withhold federal
money from any state not signing on to the new program (pp. 92-93),
states won’t choose autonomy. Surprise, surprise; "voluntary" or
not, all 50 states eventually signed on. After all, school districts
were already dependent on federal money, and every federal dollar
comes with strings attached. They had no choice except to introduce
the official textbooks of FedEd, such as the above-mentioned We
the People: The Citizen and the Constitution. Despite the title,
this text portrays the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights
as superior to the U.S. Constitution.
Another
means of enforcement is through gaining control of early childhood
education, including infant education.
It is interesting to compare such statements with one of the slogans
thrown around back in the 1990s, associated with both Goals 2000
and STW: "All children will begin school ready to learn." Ready
to learn how, by what means, and in what respect? What this statement
is really promoting is not families’ beginning educating very small
children but rather "arrangements involving families, communities,
or institutional programmes, as appropriate…" (quoted on p.
107). A logical mind will want to know: what kinds of arrangements,
what kinds of "programmes," and who decides what is "appropriate"?
But if there is anything FedEd is not about, it is logic.
The phrase again comes from the UN; it is part of the 1990 World
Declaration on Education For All. It is more about attempting to
instill affective loyalty to such ideas as multiculturalism and
universal tolerance, including for homosexuality, into children
before they can grasp them cognitively. It has long been known
that a great deal of cognitive development occurs in the first
few years of a child’s life; hence the enormous effort to gain
control of early childhood education and even care of newborn infants.
Groups of children so "educated" will be vulnerable to
the rewriting of history already underway (pp. 115-21). FedEd takes
a dim view of the teaching of history either as an ordered collection
of events or facts but focuses on "perspectives and values." This
kind of rewriting ultimately allows for the enormous oversimplification
of events that make it possible to inculcate into students, e.g.,
the idea that the War Between the States was exclusively about
slavery or that phrases such as states’ rights – although
implied in the vanquished Tenth Amendment – are code words for
racism and bigotry. Such students, educated this way practically
from infancy, might even embrace the new world order, never having
been exposed to anything else.
Perhaps
the most significant method of enforcement, however, is requiring
standardized tests that reflect the preoccupations
and values of FedEd. Students who for whatever reason have not
adopted the desired attitudes will simply not do well on the test.
One such test is the National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP): referred to euphemistically in educratic circles as "the
nation’s report card" (p. 123). The most recent federal education
funding bill, HR1, passed just last year, requires that all fifty
states administer this test. This will lead to the redesigning
of earlier tests such as the SAT. Quist reports on the focus of
the NAEP: key terms relating to environmentalism: 14. Terms relating
to multiculturalism: 18. Terms related to vocationalism: 39. Terms
involving geography: 0. Terms involving history (apart from the
history of government-designated victim groups): 0. Terms referring
to national sovereignty, natural law or natural rights: 0.
Through such means as the NAEP, FedEd proposes
to pull private schools and home schooling parents under its umbrella
of control. Its rules speak of all students, not just students
in government schools. It has been known for some time that home
schooled children are usually years ahead of their government-schooled
counterparts. Reliance on such tests as the NAEP could create an
illusion that home schooling doesn’t work after all, because home
schooled students will not have adopted the "attitudes and
values" necessary to do well on such a test. The test, meanwhile,
will have become necessary for admission to a good college or university
or finding good employment. Let’s make no mistake about it: FedEd
endangers the largest and most successful independent educational
movement in the country of the past few years!
What should we do? The first step, obviously,
is to become aware of the problem. Authors such as Quist and organizations
such as the Maple River Education
Coalition (MREC) are doing their part. We now have at our disposal
extensive arguments that although the idea wasn’t new, of course,
the legal scaffolding necessary for integrating the American federal
government into a world government advanced rapidly during the
1990s under Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s watch, although in
fairness, the two Bushes are hardly free of the globalist temptation.
During the past decade, "partnerships" arose aplenty
and fostered large-scale interdependence – we even saw the appearance
of a (UN-sponsored) Declaration
of Interdependence! The relationships are triangular: from
the federal government to the educratic elites to corporations
(MREC has a very good diagram on their home
page). Corporations have fallen hook, line and sinker for such
movements as diversity engineering. In accordance with the multiculturalism
that has swept the nation, they have begun offering job benefits
packages that include homosexual partners, something almost unheard
of before the Clinton era.
Those who believe they can escape this problem
merely by sending their children to private schools or home schooling
them need to see that this is not the case. FedEd sports
an introduction by Phyllis Schafly, who unfortunately came out
in favor of vouchers. In fact, schools accepting vouchered students
will be easily pulled in. I’ve argued elsewhere that
vouchers are a bad idea: a Trojan horse rendering private schools
vulnerable to control by those holding the purse strings. State
governments may dole out vouchers that seem to give choice to parents,
but participating schools must follow "voluntary" federal
guidelines or they don’t get the money. I’ll say it again (maybe
those pro-voucher libertarians who launched superficial criticisms
of my initial
article on the subject or sent me angry email last year will
get the point this time): every federal dollar comes with strings
attached.
Once we are aware of the problem and recognize
that movements like vouchers offer only traps for the unwary, what
is the next step? Allen Quist raises this query in his concluding
chapter:
What
if ten percent of the public knew what was happening and were
committed to rescuing our nation? Would that
be enough to turn around this attack against our nation? It would
be more than enough. It takes less than ten percent to decide most
elections. Most lawmakers will do whatever a committed ten percent
wants them to do, especially when the other 90 percent doesn’t
know and / or doesn’t care (pp. 136-37).
This
challenge to launch a nationwide movement aimed at taking back
the entire educational system is worth thinking
about. Real leadership in a society does come from an often unheralded
but dedicated minority. It might be up to this "remnant" to
save education and, in so doing, save this civilization if it still
can be saved. If they act in time, and it is not already too late!
It
is worthwhile, however, for this "remnant" to
be aware of what it will confront. Its resources will invariably
be limited. Many educational fads that paved the way for FedEd
came about through the ongoing support of huge tax-exempt organizations
such as the Rockefeller Foundation or Carnegie Corporation. There
is no Rockefeller Foundation or Carnegie Corporation bankrolling
any movement to free education from federal dominance. Most works
such as Quist’s are published and distributed by small, private
publishers operating on shoestring budgets, as are many private
schools. Home schooling parents sometimes have to sacrifice mightily
to make the effort work. It is clear that the major media solidly
back government involvement in education as "good for business." Moreover,
the "facilitators" are often extremely well trained in
such methods for achieving an appearance of public consensus as
the Delphi
Technique, and even though the fact that such methods are used
is better known that it used to be, parent groups who lack the
training will be at a disadvantage. It is unlikely, finally, that
a movement to "take back the schools" will even be reported
(except on the Internet, of course) – or, if it is, will be relegated
to Sunday supplements and late night talk shows as a "fringe" movement.
All this is part of the price paid by those who have chosen to
resist an increasingly dominant paradigm, which in our case is
now one of centralization, economic micromanagement and political
correctness (and secular materialism). Thus it is unlikely that
the "remnant" will have the resources available to those
doing the bidding of the educrats. My fear, therefore, is that
going to the voting booths will not be sufficient – candidates
who would turn back the tide of federal control will invariably
find their resources drying up while money, including corporate
dollars, flows into the coffers of those who promise cooperation.
The bottom line, here, is the longstanding inability of so many
people, including many in business as well as education, to refuse
easy money.
Another
solution worth considering is for the "remnant" to
abandon this system and embrace parallel institutions – working
toward financial independence for as many such institutions as
possible as quickly as possible. Paul Weyrich used this term a
few years ago in his
call to Christians in particular to secede from the dominant culture,
in the wake of the failure of Republicans to remove Bill Clinton
from office for lying under oath and obstructing justice following
the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He recommended building up new institutions
and eventually a whole new infrastructure, existing alongside (parallel
to) the dominant one but independent of it: culturally, educationally,
economically. No parallel institution would take federal money
under any circumstances. Its entanglements with the feds would
be kept to an absolute minimum. These would be its primary distinguishing
characteristics. Weyrich did not recommend a ceasefire in the
culture war. That is not a live option, because if movements such
as FedEd are not publicly opposed those behind them will eventually
be strong enough to come after anyone seen as a threat. Total separation,
that is, is neither possible nor desirable. This means allocating "remnant" resources
on two different fronts: building up parallel institutions, and
exposing the motivations of those behind the dominant ones. The
first will preserve and transmit our heritage of limited government,
study markets and outline reasons for the success of market-based
systems as well as why command-driven ones fail, and preserve academically-focused
education in addition to vocational training of the sort that leads
individuals into entrepreneurial career paths. Education conceived
this way will provide the perfect backdrop for exposes such as
Quist’s. We all need to be entrepreneurs, whether of ideas, educational
programs or in other arenas if we are to survive – because although
he doesn’t raise the issue openly, Quist’s document leaves little
doubt that making it as difficult as possible for dissidents to
earn a living legally in the world empire to come is an unstated
consequence – and possibly a goal – of global-village ideology.
In the meantime, both I and others have
argued extensively for getting one’s children out of government
schools as fast as possible – whether in favor of private schools
or home schooling – while joining organizations of others doing
the same and preparing for what could be a nasty donnybrook somewhere
down the road. Evangelical Christians have long taken the lead
here, although there is nothing stopping non-Christians who sense
the danger from getting involved. The information in FedEd makes
action imperative. If no one acts, we shall shortly see the emergence
into adulthood of an "STW generation" or that can "multitask" and
respects "diversity" but has no knowledge of its Constitutional
heritage – and sees nothing inherently wrong with world government.
Copies
of Allen Quist’s FedEd: The New Federal
Curriculum and How It’s Enforced can be ordered from the Maple
River Education Coalition, 1402 Concordia Avenue, St. Paul, MN
55104.
February
22, 2003
Steven
Yates [send him mail] has
a PhD in philosophy and is a Margaret "Peg" Rowley Fellow at
the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
He is the author of Civil
Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (ICS Press,
1994), and numerous articles and reviews. His new book In
Defense of Logic will be completed shortly. He is beginning work
on a new book to be entitled The Twilight of Materialism,
and is also at work on a sci-fi novel tentatively entitled Skywatcher’s
World.
Copyright
© 2003 LewRockwell.com
Steven
Yates Archives
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