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| G. Edward Griffin: The Future is Calling - The Future is Calling Part One |
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| Commentary/Politics - Guest Commentaries | |||
| Written by G. Edward Griffin | |||
| Tuesday, 12 May 2009 14:20 | |||
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Page 4 of 10
THE BIRTH OF PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION Under the orchestrating baton of Nicholas Butler, President of Columbia University and President of the Carnegie Endowment, an organization was formed in 1884 called The American Historical Association. This then created a series of controlled groups, called Committees, each of which focused on a particular segment of the overall educational mission. After these had published their recommendations, the Carnegie Fund created another controlled group in 1929 called The Commission on the Social Studies, which attracted to its membership an impressive list of academic personalities, including the Superintendant of Schools in Washington, D.C., the Director of the American Geological Society of New York, the President of Radcliff College, the Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Minnesota, the head of the Institute for the Study of Law at John Hopkins University, and eleven professors of history at such prestigious institutions as Columbia University and the Universities of Chicago, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Other institutions that provided staff services or facilitated its work in other ways included Harvard, Stanford, Smith College, and the Universities of Iowa, North Carolina and West Virginia. The Commission was funding by a $340,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation – at a time when $5,000 was an excellent annual salary for a college professor. The Commission on the Social Studies is remembered today for its role in launching what has come to be known as progressive education. The self-admitted goal of progressive educators was – and is – to de-emphasize academic excellence in favor of awareness of social and political issues. That’s the first half. The second half is that those issues must be presented so as to promote three concepts: (1) National sovereignty is the cause of war and must be replaced by world government; (2) Personal property should be eliminated because it leads to selfishness, and (3) people will not assist or cooperate with each other in freedom so they must be forced to do so by the state. Since those are key features of collectivism, the unspoken lesson that students learn is that collectivism is good and is the wave of the future. One of the better known members of the Commission on the Social Studies was George Counts, Professor of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Counts travelled to the Soviet Union to witness Communism first hand and returned with the conviction that the Soviet model was the ideal social system. After the war, when Stalin’s brutality against his own people became widely known and when Russia resumed an aggressive stance against Western nations, Counts became a critic of the Soviet regime. His objection, however, was with Stalin’s actions and policies, not his adherence to collectivism, which Counts continued to advocate. His 1932 book, Dare the School Build a New Social Order,1 not only expressed his personal views, it was a popularized version of what the Commission hoped to instill into the educational system. He wrote: If property rights are to be diffused in industrial society, natural resources and all important forms of capital will have to be collectively owned. ... This clearly means that, if democracy is to survive in the United States, it must abandon its individualistic affiliations in the sphere of economics. ... Within these limits, as I see it, our democratic tradition must of necessity evolve and gradually assume an essentially collectivistic pattern. The important point is that fundamental changes in the economic system are imperative. Whatever service historic capitalism may have rendered in the past, and they have been many, its days are numbered. With its dedication to the principles of selfishness, its exaltation of the profit motive, its reliance on the forces of competition, and its placing of property above human rights,1 it will either have to be displaced altogether or changed so radically in form and spirit that its identity will become completely lost. 1 (New York: John Day Co., 1932)
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