By Nancy Thorner and Elizabeth Clarke -
In an Education Reporter article published July 2007, William A. Borst wrote:
The public schools have become the new Marxist laboratories for social engineering. The average public schools is mired in a sociological swamp of pornographic sex education, declining test score, violence and speech codes. . . They have created what David Kupelian calls [in his book, "The Marketing of Evil"] an "Alice in Wonderland environment." where small boys are dosed with Ritalin to contain their natural restlessness while others are suspended for playing Cowboys and Indians. . . One of the greatest casualties of progressive education has been literacy. The progressives abandoned traditional phonics, the sounding out of words, which necessitates the memorization of each individual word.
Phyllis Schlafly in her Eagle Forum article of November 15, 2006, Public Schools Define American Culture, relates the significance of Sidney Simon's 1972 book "Values Clarification." Simon's book sold nearly a million copies and was widely used to teach students to "clarify" their values, such as casting off their parents' values and making their own choices based on situation ethics. This was followed by the public schools welcoming Kinsey-trained sexperts that espoused diversity to sex-in-marriage.
Few will dispute that public schools guide the morals, attitude, knowledge and decision-making of most American children. The countless billions spent every year, which are forcibly taken from us in taxes, are spent by the public school establishment under what amount to a thin veneer of accountability to school board members elected in government-run elections.
Those who attended public schools prior to the 1960's did quite well. Teachers accepted their role in defining the culture of the children under their supervision. Some of you might remember using a McGuffey-Reader-style curriculum through which children learned not only the basics but also values such as honesty and patriotism, while immigrant children assimilated into the American culture by learning our language and culture.
How then did schools become, as described by William Borst, "new Marxist laboratories for social engineering?" The origin can be traced back to Karl Marx and his theories developed in association with philosopher Friedrich Engels, which include:
- All historical change was caused by a series of class struggles between the bourgeoisie "haves" and the proletariat "have nots."
- Capitalism was the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie." Like previous socioeconomic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system:socialism.
NEXT John Dewey's role at Columbia University.............. http://illinoisreview.typ...
