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.