The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy (29 page)

Some observers believed that multitasking actually made participants’ minds sharper with increased mental activity. However, Mark Bauerlein noted that buried in the Kaiser report was a disturbing statistic: “While eight to eighteen-year-olds with high and low grades differed by only one minute in TV time (186 to 187 minutes), they differed in reading time by 17 minutes, 46-to-29—a huge discrepancy in relative terms…that suggests TV doesn’t have nearly the intellectual consequences that reading does.”

Bauerlein noted that years of TV and computer screen watching prime younger Americans for multitasking and interactivity at a deep cognitive level. “Perhaps we should call this a certain kind of intelligence, a novel screen literacy,” stated Bauerline. “It improves their visual acuity, their mental readiness for rushing images and updated information. At the same time, however, screen intelligence doesn’t transfer well to non-screen experiences, especially the kinds that build knowledge and verbal skills. It conditions minds against quiet, concerted study, against imagination unassisted by visuals, against linear, sequential analysis of texts, against an idle afternoon with a detective story and nothing else. This explains why teenagers and 20-year-olds appear at the same time so mentally agile and culturally ignorant.”

The market trend of consumers resorting to audiovisuals for entertainment rather than books is evidenced in the large chain bookstores where shelf space for books is losing out to DVDs and audiotapes. A 2004 report from the National Endowment for the Arts showed a significant decline in book reading from previous generations. Amazing as it may seem to older citizens, there are those among the younger generations who take pride in the fact that they have never read a book.

“Today’s rising generation thinks…highly of its lesser traits,” wrote Bauerlein. “It wears anti-intellectualism on its sleeve, pronouncing book-reading an old-fashioned custom, and it snaps at people who rebuke them for it.” After noting a number of surveys on knowledge before an audience of students in 2004, Bauerlein stated, “You are six times more likely to know who the latest American Idol is than you are to know who the Speaker of the House is.” His taunting remark prompted a cry from the audience, “American Idol is more important!”

“She was right,” acknowledged Bauerlein. “In her world, stars count more than the most powerful world leaders. Knowing the names and ranks of politicians gets her nowhere in her social set, and reading a book about the Roman Empire earns nothing but teasing. More than just dull and nerdish, reading is counterproductive…. The middle school hallways can be as competitive and pitiless as a Wall Street trading floor or an episode of
Survivor
. To know a little more about popular music and malls, to sport the right fashions and host a teen blog, is a matter of survival.”

DANGEROUS TEACHING

T
HE CURRENT EDUCATION SYSTEM
seems to have forgotten about developing students’ critical thinking. John Taylor Gatto, who taught school in New York City for more than two decades, summed up this fact of modern life in his 1992 book
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.
After teaching for some years, Gatto grew to understand that the education system does not exist to increase students’ knowledge and power, but to diminish it. “Bit by bit, I began to devise guerrilla exercises to allow the kids I taught—as many as I was able—the raw material people have always used to educate themselves: privacy, choice, freedom from surveillance, and as broad a range of situations and human associations as my limited power and resources could manage.”

“What we are seeing…is the psychologization of American education,” stated an article in the April 1993 edition of
Atlantic Monthly.
“A growing proportion of many school budgets is devoted to counseling and other psychological services. The curriculum is becoming more therapeutic: children are taking courses in self-esteem, conflict resolution, and aggression management. Parental advisory groups are conscientiously debating alternative approaches to traditional school discipline, ranging from teacher training in mediation to the introduction of metal detectors and security guards in the schools. Schools are increasingly becoming emergency rooms of the emotions, devoted…to repairing hearts.”

According to Gatto, real teaching can be dangerous. Government monopoly of schools has evolved in such a way that the premise of teaching students to think for themselves jeopardizes the total institution should it spread. The occasional teacher who attempts to instill critical thinking is merely an annoyance to the chain of command.

However, should what Gatto considers the central but false assumptions underlying modern education—such as the idea that it is difficult to learn to read, or that kids resist learning, and many more—be exposed, the ramifications could be extreme. “[T]he very stability of our economy is threatened by any form of education that might change the nature of the human product schools turn out; the economy schoolchildren currently expect to live under and serve would not survive a generation of young people trained, for example, to think critically,” Gatto predicted.

“Over the years, I have come to see that whatever I thought I was doing as a teacher, most of which I actually was doing was teaching an invisible curriculum that reinforced the myths of the school institution and those of an economy based on caste,” he added.

An overview of the current educational system provoked the questions: Do younger people just wake up one morning and decide they are not interested in history, politics, or world events? Or does popular culture draw them away from classical education and critical thinking? Also, what is the “invisible curriculum” referred to by Gatto and where did it come from?

Perhaps a quick review of education history in America can provide the answer.

WORKERS NOT THINKERS

S
ERIOUS ATTENTION TO EDUCATION
as a means of social control began in Europe and with the same minds whose philosophies led to Communist and Nazi totalitarianism.

“Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished,” proclaimed Johann Gottlieb Fichte in 1810. Fichte, a teacher of philosophy and psychology at Prussian University in Berlin, was a great influence on Georg Hegel and other thinkers of the period. “When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”

One major influence on both Adolf Hitler and Karl Marx, as well as the modern globalists, was Georg W. F. Hegel, whose words and works have often been appropriated to justify the means of the powerful. Hegel once wrote, “The State is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State.” Hegel is also most noted for his “Hegelian Dialect”—thesis, antithesis, synthesis, also known as problem, reaction, solution. The globalists, however, have bastardized Hegel’s mere philosophical diagram of human interaction. Rather than wait for a problem to deal with, they create the problem, then offer a draconian solution. After compromise and negotiation, they still have advanced their agenda without the opposition realizing their design.

So, could it be the case that Rockefeller’s contributions to education were really part of a secret agenda to create solutions for problems that didn’t exist? Any serious study may find that the American education establishment has been created and guided for many years by the same Hegel-inspired globalist elite who created both Russian communism and German national socialism. (See Jim Marrs’s
Rule by Secrecy
for further details.) The oil magnate John D. Rockefeller Sr., whose dominant oil empire was initially funded by the Rothschild-controlled National Bank of Cleveland, created the General Education Board (GEB) in 1903 to dispense Rockefeller donations to education. By 1960, it had ceased operating as a separate entity, and its programs were rolled into the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1917, the GEB made a $6 million grant to Columbia University to create the New Lincoln School, a private experimental coeducational school in New York City. According to school literature, the facility’s “predecessor was founded as Lincoln School in 1917 by the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board as ‘a pioneer experimental school for newer educational methods,’ under the aegis of Columbia University’s Teachers College.”

According to the late Eustace Mullins, the authorized biographer of poet Ezra Pound, who in 1948 encouraged Mullins to research globalist control in finances, health, and education: “From this school descended the national network of progressive educators and social scientists, whose pernicious influence closely paralleled the goals of the Communist Party, another favorite recipient of the Rockefeller millions. From its outset, the Lincoln School was described frankly as a revolutionary school for the primary and secondary schools of the entire United States. It immediately discarded all theories of education which were based on formal and well-established disciplines, that is the McGuffey Reader type of education which worked by teaching such subjects as Latin and algebra, thus teaching children to think logically about problems.”

Another institution of higher learning long funded by the Rockefellers is the University of Chicago and closely connected to it is the English world’s most accepted authority on everything—Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. In 1943, advertising executive William Benton purchased the encyclopedia and operated it as a charity for the University of Chicago, eventually contributing more than $125 million to the school. From 1945 to 1953, Benton served as a senator from Connecticut after defeating Prescott Bush (the grandfather of former president George W. Bush) and was active in global affairs. Given Benton’s power and influence, it is no stretch to think that his globalist beliefs could have easily permeated those things that received his benefaction.

Today, the William Benton Foundation also owns Compton’s Encyclopedia and Merriam-Webster Inc., one of the world’s leading publishers of dictionaries and thesauri. Reflecting the rise of the Internet coupled with a general decrease in reading today, Britannica’s encyclopedia sales have precipitously dropped in recent years, yet it is still regarded as one of the most credible sources of information in the Western world.

The linchpin of Rockefeller’s attempt to shape American education was his formation of the General Education Board and his continuing support of the University of Chicago. “The creation and funding of the University of Chicago had done much to enhance Rockefeller’s public relations profile among Baptists and educators…. The only difficulty was that education, on the whole, wasn’t in bad shape,” explained Paolo Lionni, author of
The Leipzig Connection
. Lionni’s 1993 book traced the deleterious effects of experimental psychology on the education system back to German professor of philosophy Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology. “The indigenous American educational system was deeply rooted in the beliefs and practices of the Puritan Fathers, the Quakers, the early American patriots and philosophers. Jefferson had maintained that in order to preserve liberty in the new nation, it was essential that its citizenry be educated, whatever their income. Throughout the country, schools were established almost immediately after the colonization of new areas.”

Lionni noted, “Educational results far exceeded those of modern schools. One has only to read old debates in the
Congressional Record
or scan the books published in the 1800’s to realize that our ancestors of a century ago commanded a use of the language far superior to our own. Students learned how to read not comic books, but the essays of Burke, Webster, Lincoln, Horace, Cicero. Their difficulties with grammar were overcome long before they graduated from school, and any review of a typical elementary school arithmetic textbook printed before 1910 shows dramatically that students were learning mathematical skills that few of our current high school graduates know anything about. The high school graduate of 1900 was an educated person, fluent in his language, history, and culture, possessing the skills he needed in order to succeed.”

According to author William H. Watkins, John D. Rockefeller Sr. was more concerned with shaping a new industrial social order than providing a useful education. “The Rockefeller group demonstrated how gift giving could shape education and public policy,” commented Watkins. Rockefeller’s agenda for dumbing down the population through new education led by his GEB shows itself in a letter written by Frederick T. Gates, Rockefeller’s choice to head the board. Gates wrote, “In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply.

“The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops and on the farm.”