C. S. Lewis: “So, finding in the soul an appetite for such things, and knowing no appetite is made by God in vain, Lewis concludes that the pursuit of the liberal arts is pleasing to God and is possibly, for some, a God-given vocation… …Truly, we ignore the liberal arts only at our peril. Without them we will find ourselves increasingly unable to preserve a civilized society, to escape from the errors and prejudices of our day, and to struggle in the arena of ideas to the glory of God.” (Scroll down to bottom for complete Lewis quote)
Education Week
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HISTORY OF PLANNED CHANGE FROM CAPITALIST ECONOMIC SYSTEM TO COMMUNIST/SOCIALIST/FASCIST PLANNED ECONOMY WITH NO ELECTED SCHOOL BOARDS (TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION!)
3D, page 17:
PROFESSOR GEORGE COUNTS OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY TEACHERS COLLEGE WROTE DARE the School Build a New Social Order? (John Day Company: New York, 1932). He and many other American educators traveling back and forth to Russia became completely convinced that the Soviet Communist system was the ultimate system. Counts was deeply involved in, and a member of, the Carnegie Foundation-financed Commission on the Social Studies which produced the American Historical Association’s Conclusions and Recommendations: Report of the Commission on the Social Studies in 1934. He was also the author of The American Road to Culture series (Quinn and Broden, Co., Inc.: Rahway, N.J., 1930–1934) and The Soviet Challenge to America (John Day Co.: New York, 1931). Excerpts from this entry’s major focus, Counts’s Dare the School Build a New Social Order?, follow: 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 services historic capitalism may have rendered in the past, and they have been many, its days are numbered. With its dedication [to] the principle of selfishness, its exaltation of the profit motive, its reliance upon the forces of competition, and its placing of property above human rights, it will either have to be displaced altogether or changed so radically in form and spirit that its identity will be completely lost.
3D, page 265
Many quotes in this book point toward implementation of radical restructuring of the nation’s schools in “The Noxious Nineties.” The one entry this writer believes best illustrates this plan and how it would be implemented throughout the remainder of the 20th century and into the 21st century is taken from Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies (Charles Scribner’s Sons: N.Y., 1934). This study was funded to the tune of $340,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, quite a sum of money in 1934 dollars! Professor Harold Laski, the philosopher of British socialism, said of this report: “At bottom, and stripped of its carefully neutral phrases, the Report is an educational program for a Socialist America.” An important and revealing excerpt from Conclusions and Recommendations follows: The Commission was also driven to this broader conception of its task by the obvious fact that American civilization, in common with Western civilization, is passing through one of the great critical ages of history, is modifying its traditional faith in economic individualism [free enterprise], and is embarking upon vast experiments in social planning and control which call for large-scale cooperation on the part of the people… (pp.1–2)
…Cumulative evidence supports the conclusion that in the United States and in other countries the age of “laissez faire” in economy and government is closing and that a new age of collectivism is emerging. (p. 16)
View the full text of “Conclusions and Recommendations…”
3D, page 328:
The following quote from an article in the May 14, 1984 issue of The Washington Post entitled “Industrial Policy Urged for GOP” sheds some light on behind-the-scenes activities which have led to acceptance of corporate-fascist workforce training necessary for a planned economy:
A conservative study group founded by supporters of President Reagan is about to issue a report that advocates Republicans shed some of their deep-rooted antipathy to a planned economy. The “Industrial Policy Debate” is to be issued today by the Institute for Contemporary Studies, a think tank founded by Presidential Counselor Edwin Meese, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and other Reagan supporters. It should also be pointed out that Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger served as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Nixon Administration in 1973, and that he oversaw the development and publication of the Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Evaluation Systems (PPB[E]S) State Educational Records and Reports Series handbooks which document the establishment of the central planning system for the USA. One of the handbooks included in this series entitled Financial Accounting: Classifications and Standard Terminology for Local and State School Systems stated in its preface: Another project funded by the Office of Education from 1968 to 1971 was the development of a program, planning, budgeting, and evaluation conceptual design under the sponsorship of the Association of School Business Officials’ Research Corporation…. The emphasis in this project is on the development of a goal-oriented system for evaluating programs. 34 [Ed. Note: One can’t resist asking the politically incorrect questions: When were the American people asked if they wanted to exchange our free enterprise system for the socialist school-to-work system identified with European countries? When was the decision made, and by whom, that the United States would benefit from a planned economy, when this nation has served as the lighthouse for the world, beckoning millions to its shores to benefit from the upward mobility provided by the free enterprise system? By this time the reader should seriously question the legitimacy of the “lead organizations” for the Comparative Learning Teams Project—organizations that this book has documented to be involved in “the deliberate dumbing down” of America.]
3D, p. 297:
TEXAS RESEARCHER BILLY LYON WROTE CONNECTIONS AND CONFLICTS OF INTEREST (OR, There Ought To Be an Investigation!) This extraordinary piece of research, which discusses in detail the private, for-profit design team projects selected by the New American School Development Corporation (NASDC) and the connections of those involved, also presented new information on vouchers (educational “choice”). The preface is presented below in its entirety:
PREFACE
This paper began as a revision and update of the original article, “$$$ ‘Choice’ For Profit? $$$,” about the Edison Project. Since writing that article, however, the eleven “Design Teams” have been selected by the New American School Development Corporation and the released embargoes received, giving more fodder for grist. To be perfectly honest, some of the connections were just too irresistible to ignore. Each one led to another and this paper has grown like over-leavened dough. The “Design Teams,” new information from America 2000, proposed legislation, and a little digging in some old files, provided further insight into the voucher proposals. This paper is about vouchers (educational “choice”) as much as anything, but from a different perspective. The Design Teams give you an idea of what kind of “private schools” the vouchers may eventually be used for. For those who received the earlier “Choice for Profit?” article, Appendix A contains additional information on Time-Warner, Benno C. Schmidt and Chester Finn, Jr. The material on James S. Coleman in Appendix B is especially significant. By no means, does this paper cover all connections, or even all the “Design Teams.” We’re sure that those who are left out will not be offended. A chart is enclosed which, hopefully, will help you see some of these connections. As you read this paper, keep in mind that in the beginning of talks on education reform/restructuring, all that citizens were demanding was a return to traditional basics. They wanted their children to be able to read! This writer has, with much difficulty, selected only a few important quotes from Billy Lyon’s report. “With much difficulty” due to the report’s containing nothing but vital information and documentation on a subject which has everything to do with our children’s futures and that of our nation—”choice.” Excerpts from this fine report follow:
THE EDISON PROJECT, TIME-WARNER & WHITTLE COMMUNICATIONS
Chris Whittle’s Edison Project is an initiative to build a national, private, for-profit school system. Time-Warner has been not only a full partner in the Edison Project, but owned 50% of Whittle’s principal company, Whittle Communications LP. Other initial Edison Project partners and financiers were Phillips Electronics and Associated Newspapers Holdings, which agreed to spend up to $60 million for the three-year study. Team members of The Edison Project include: Yale University President Benno C. Schmidt, Jr.; Lee Eisenberg, former editor- in-chief of Esquire (Whittle was once co-owner); Dominique Browning, former assistant managing editor of Newsweek Magazine; Vanderbilt University professor and former assistant secretary of education in the Reagan Administration Chester E. Finn, Jr.; and John Chubb of the liberal Brookings Institution and Center for Education Innovation….
NASDC DESIGN TEAMS
NASDC is the private, non-profit corporation set up by American business leaders at the request of President Bush to develop a new generation of American schools by contracting with and supporting the most promising “break the mold,” “start from scratch,” curricula design teams. Even though NASDC is non-profit, the eleven winning design teams are “for profit.” NASDC is part of America 2000, President Bush’s education restructuring strategy…. Clinton Administration Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley calls NASDC and Goals 2000 (Educate America Act), a powerful combination for “change and improvement.” NASDC Executive Management Council Chairman Kearns says the two working in partnership “will provide systemic change in education.” (“NASDC FACTS,” New American Schools Development Corp., no date, received 9/13/93)
In a Wall Street Journal (6/5/92) article Benno Schmidt, president of the Edison Project, discussing what is wrong with present schools and how projects such as the Edison Project might improve things, claims that “schools have wavered from liberal educational purposes… leav[ing] little room for the free play of young people’s curiosity… and the cultivation of the imagination….” He asked, “What might result if children came to school as toddlers or even earlier, rather than as five- or six-year-olds? What if parents were systematically involved and actually worked regularly in schools? What if students taught other students much more? What if schools were open 12 hours a day, 12 months a year? What if… a school system across the nation was completely tied together technologically, and could take advantage of systemwide experimentation?…” [What if we just taught students how to read and write well and compute 2 plus 2 without a calculator? B. Lyon]
3D, page 296C.
IN THE SEPTEMBER 1976 ISSUE OF PHI DELTA KAPPAN, “AMERICA’S NEXT TWENTY-FIVE Years: Some Implications for Education,” Harold Shane described his version of the “new and additional basic skills” as follows: “Certainly, cross-cultural understanding and empathy have become fundamental skills, as have the skills of human relations and intercultural rapport… the arts of compromise and reconciliation, of consensus building, and of planning for interdependence become basic… As young people mature we must help them develop… a service ethic which is geared toward the real world… the global servant concept in which we will educate our young for planetary service and eventually for some form of world citizenship… Implicit within the “global servant” concept are the moral insights that will help us live with the regulated freedom we must eventually impose upon ourselves.”
C.S. Lewis: 3D, page 140:
[Ed. Note: The writer would like to contrast Harold Shane’s comments with those of C.S. Lewis
as compiled in an article “C.S. Lewis on Liberal Arts Education” by Gregory Dunn which was
published in the newsletter On Principle from the John M. Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs
(April 1999, Vol. VII, No. 2). Excerpts from Dunn’s article follow:
The first reason we study the liberal arts has to do with freedom. That freedom is an integral part of the liberal arts is borne out of [C.S.] Lewis’s observation that “liberal comes of course from the Latin, liber, and means free.” 11 Such an education makes one free, according to Lewis, because it transforms the pupil from “an unregenerate little bundle of appetites” into “the good man and the good citizen.” 12
We act most human when we are reasonable, both in thought and deed. Animals, on the other hand, act wholly out of appetite. When hungry, they eat; when tired, they rest. Man is different. Rather than follow our appetites blindly we can be deliberate about what we do and when we do it. The ability to rule ourselves frees us from the tyranny of our appetites, and the liberal arts disciplines this self-rule. In other words, this sort of education teaches us to be most fully human and thereby, to fulfill our human duties, both public and private.
Lewis contrasts liberal arts education with what he calls “vocational training,” the sort that prepares one for employment. Such training, he writes, “aims at making not a good man but a good banker, a good electrician… or a good surgeon.” Lewis does admit the importance of such training—for we cannot do without bankers and electricians and surgeons—but the danger, as he sees it, is the pursuit of training at the expense of education. “If education is beaten by training, civilization dies,” he writes, for the “lesson of history” is that “civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost.” 13 It is the liberal arts, not vocational training, that preserves civilization by producing reasonable men and responsible citizens…
A third reason we study the liberal arts is because it is simply our nature and duty. Man has a natural thirst for knowledge of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and men and women of the past have made great sacrifices to pursue it in spite of the fact that, as Lewis puts it, “human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.” In his words, “they propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds.” So, finding in the soul an appetite for such things, and knowing no appetite is made by God in vain, Lewis concludes that the pursuit of the liberal arts is pleasing to God and is possibly, for some, a God-given vocation. 14 …Truly, we ignore the liberal arts only at our peril. Without them we will find ourselves increasingly unable to preserve a civilized society, to escape from the errors and prejudices of our day, and to struggle in the arena of ideas to the glory of God.]