Socialist War on God Continues
By Steve Farrell (09/20/05)
So the courts have struck down The Pledge of Allegiance in three Sacramento, California elementary schools. So what else is new?
A little history as to how this hostility toward God in our schools began begs our review.
In 1932, it was Communist Party USA founder, William Z. Foster, in his book, Toward Soviet America, who outlined “the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution.”
His target: America’s schools. His strategy:
[S]tudies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and the general ethics of the new Socialist society. Present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy. (1)
There is much to behold in that 1932 statement, and it has all come to pass – religion and patriotism replaced with materialism, internationalism, the ethics of socialism, and the scientific pedagogy – can anyone doubt it?
But let’s not stop there. As to those “other features of the bourgeois ideology” that were to be ‘cleansed,’ the traditional family was at the top of the list.
Recall, if you will, Communist Founder Karl Marx bragged that he and his fellow communists would “Abolish the family!” Why? Because the traditional family was the transmission belt of Christian and Capitalist values. Plain and simple. The traditional family had to go – and with it, home schools, private schools, and old styled public schools (where parents were the employers, the curriculum chiefs, the bosses over the neighborhood school). (2)
“The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child …[is] disgusting,” Marx wrote. His plan? “We destroy the most hallowed of relations when we replace home education with social.” (3)
To make this a reality, confusion as to who really pays teachers had to be created. Thus in plank 10 of the Communist Manifesto, Marx called for “Free education for all children in public schools.” (4) This was a ploy – the beginning of a propaganda war in favor of the nonsense that the government, not the parents who are taxed by the government, pays the bill.
To strengthen their nonsensical case, the communists and their fellow travelers then worked unceasingly to centralize, wherever and whenever possible, the paymaster, curriculum, testing, teacher education, and teacher licensing laws. To help bring this about, Communist Party Chief Foster envisioned the day when all “the schools, colleges, and universities [would be] coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education.” (5) Why? Because he recognized, as all dedicated Marxists must, the more things appear to flow from the center, the more teachers and principals will look away from parents and towards Big Brother – and likewise, the more parents feel disenfranchised, the more parents will tend to shy away from involvement in the public school system.
It’s only natural. It was destined to work – and it did.
The U.S. Department of Education came into being in 1980, under President Jimmy Carter, but movement toward a fully empowered, department level agency began in earnest during World War II, under President’s Roosevelt and Truman, with the 1941 Lanham Act, the 1944 G.I. Bill, the 1946 George-Barden Act, and the 1950 Impact Aid laws. Thus, with the institution of federal funds for education on a massive scale, and federal agencies to administer those funds, the Supreme Court was by 1961 ready to start playing God over parent and child. Classroom prayer had to go, they ruled. The rationale, “that which the federal government subsidizes, it has the right to control.” (6)
The removal of prayer was followed by the removal of God from every textbook and the replacement of the Judeo-Christian viewpoint with the humanistic, ‘progressive’ ideology of Karl Marx, and John Dewey, a viewpoint that would, step by step, tolerate everything and anything in the classroom, anything and everything but Judeo-Christian values.
Needless to say, Communist Party USA founder, William Z. Foster, called for that hypocritical and hostile approach, as well. “Freedom will be established for anti-religious propaganda,” (7) he wrote.
That’s where we are today. ‘Christians and Jews shut up! – All you atheists, agnostics, communists, humanists, adulterers, homosexuals, and abortionists – your speech is protected! Your take on religion and morality will be in the textbooks, and shouted from the house tops. Criticism of your perspective will be prosecuted as hate speech!’
And so it has.
Private Christian schools are next. Wrote Foster, “The churches will remain free to continue their services, but their special tax and other privileges will be liquidated. Their buildings will revert to the State. Religious schools will be abolished and organized religious training for minors prohibited.” (8)
One thinks of the University of California’s rejection of high school credit from schools that study history, literature, and science from a Christian perspective (presently before the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles). (9) One thinks of the N.E.A’s opposition to school vouchers because “85 percent of private schools are religious,” and because, such a groundswell of students turning to religion “would only encourage economic, racial, ethnic, and religious stratification in our society.” (10) That’s right, the N.E.A., the largest teacher union in America, would strongly suggest that the Churches parents take their kids to, are divisive enemies of the state.
Only fully trained, dutifully certified, under-Big-Brother’s-thumb public school teachers can unify and bring peace on earth.
A far cry from the educational goal Horace Mann expressed in a speech published by the N.E.A. in their 1941 “American Citizens Handbook,” wherein Mann called for “an order of teachers, wise, benevolent, [and] filled with Christian enthusiasm.” (11)
More on Mann’s speech next time.
NewsMax pundit Steve Farrell is associate professor of political economy at George Wythe College, press agent for Defend Marriage (a project of United Families International), and author of the highly praised, inspirational novel, “Dark Rose” (available at amazon.com).
Footnotes
1. Foster, William Z. Toward Soviet America, Elgin Publications, Balboa Island, California. 1961 (originally International Publishers, New York, 1932), p. 316.
2. Marx, Karl. Communist Manifesto.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Foster, p. 316.
6. First enunciated in Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111, 131. “It is hardly lack of due process for the Government to regulate that which it subsidizes.”
7. Foster, p. 316.
8. Ibid.
9. See www.courthousenews.com/jump.Aug.29.htm
10. See www.nea.org/vouchers/index.html under the subheadings “The Social Case Against Vouchers,” and “The Legal Case Against Vouchers.”
11. Morgan, Jay Elmer. The American Citizens Handbook, The National Education Association, Washington D.C., 1941, p. 254
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