Ep 4 | The Progressive 'Experts' Who Radicalized US Education | The Beck Story

This episode explores how progressive educational philosophies and policies have influenced and transformed the U.S. education system, with a focus on the impact of radical ideas and the ideological shifts in American educational institutions.

1. The shift from classical education to progressive ideologies has deeply influenced the U.S. education system.
2. John Dewey and other progressive educators have played a significant role in promoting educational philosophies that prioritize social reform over traditional learning.
3. The implementation of progressive educational policies has contributed to what some see as a decline in academic rigor and a rise in ideological indoctrination.
4. The episode discusses the broader societal implications of these educational changes, including the potential long-term effects on American democracy and civic engagement.
5. It calls for a critical examination of current educational practices and their alignment with broader societal goals.

1: The Roots of Progressive Education

Explores the early 20th-century origins of progressive education in America, emphasizing the influence of philosophers like John Dewey. Glenn Beck: "The roots of our current educational system can be traced back to the ideas of John Dewey and his followers, who fundamentally changed the goals of public education."

2: The Rise of Ideological Education

Discusses how U.S. education shifted towards embracing progressive ideals, particularly during the mid-20th century. Expert 1: "As educational institutions adopted progressive ideologies, there was a noticeable shift away from traditional academic content."

3: Current State and Criticisms

Analyzes the current state of American education, highlighting criticisms of decreased academic standards and increased focus on social justice issues. Glenn Beck: "Today's educational environment often prioritizes ideological conformity over critical thinking and learning."

• Encourage diverse viewpoints in educational settings to foster critical thinking.
• Advocate for educational policies that balance traditional learning with modern educational needs.
• Support initiatives that promote academic rigor and standards in schools.
• Engage in community and school board meetings to influence educational content and standards.
• Educate yourself and others about the history and impacts of educational policies to better understand their effects on society.

America’s founders knew the success of the new republic depended on having educated, engaged citizens. But they could not have imagined how U.S. public education would morph from emphasizing reading, writing, arithmetic, and biblical values to a progressive-dominated system today with its hyper focus on identity politics and a radical left-wing agenda. How did we get to this point? Progressive education experts, inspired for over a century by their philosopher-king — an early 1900s college professor named John Dewey.


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Speaker A
Never again.

That slogan was widely accepted in western societies in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

In April 1945, when american troops liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp, jewish survivors put up handmade signs declaring never again in various languages.

Three years later, the United nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the genocide convention.

It was the international community vowing to never again allow the atrocities that they had just witnessed in world War two.

Maybe the world was finally turning over a new leaf when it came to antisemitism. Maybe humanity had finally learned its lesson.

Then again, maybe not.

Never again quickly became mostly an empty slogan, because over the next half century, genocide happened repeatedly around the world against people groups in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and many more.

And then, on October 7, 2023, Israel.

Speaker B
Declares it is at war with Hamas.

Speaker C
Israel has declared a state of war and striking targets in the Gaza Strip.

Speaker B
That follows an unprecedented attack into Israel today.

Speaker C
The militant group Hamas carried out a combined attack early this morning.

Speaker A
This was a massive, unprecedented attack where you had Hamas terrorists, roughly 1000 of.

Speaker D
Them, crossing over that 37 miles border.

Speaker A
Between Gaza and the state of Israel.

The Iran backed terrorist group Hamas murdered over 1200 jewish men, women, children and babies. It was the deadliest terrorist attack on Israel since it was reestablished as a nation in 1948.

To rational observers, the barbaric rape, torture, mutilation, and murder perpetrated by Hamas was utterly and yet some tried to justify, even celebrate, this new genocide.

And for months after the attack, the loudest, most persistent anti Israel voices in America were found on our college campuses.

Speaker E
Say it clear, play it out that's.

Speaker B
How you make us crowd that's how you make us crowd that's how, that's how you are right within our lifetime within our lifetime.

Speaker A
Two months after the October 7 attack on Israel, an extensive poll by Harvard's center for American Political Studies, in conjunction with the Harris poll, found that when registered voters were asked who they sided with, more in the Israel Hamas conflict, 95% of voters aged 65 and older said Israel, while only 5% said Hamas. But in the 1824 year old age range, 52% said Israel, while 48% said Hamas.

Another of the polls questions asked if a student calls for the genocide of Jews, should that student be told that they are free to call for genocide, or should such students face actions for violating university rules?

53% of the 18 to 24 year old age group answered that the student should be told that they are free to call for genocide.

In the 65 and older category, only 8% agreed with that.

In the 18 to 24 year old age group, 79% agree with the ideology that white people are oppressors.

The polling highlights a stunning generation gap and confirms how prominent true progressive ideology of oppression has become.

How is this blatant antisemitism possible, after all, diversity, equity, and inclusion DEi that was first spliced together in America's higher ed laboratories.

University campuses have entire offices dedicated to sniffing out and punishing so called microaggressions.

How could a major aggression like antisemitism thrive in such a controlled environment where even using a wrong pronoun is considered cardinal sin?

The same Dei madness now also permeates America's public school system. In Seattle public schools, students as young as 13 can receive so called gender affirming medications, hormone therapy, even with referrals for sex change surgeries without notifying the student's parents.

On an overnight school trip in 2023, an eleven year old girl from Colorado was assigned to share a local hotel room and a bed with a boy who identifies as a girl. The girls parents were not notified ahead of time.

What's going on?

The truth and general order that provided the bedrock of civilized society for generations has been systematically co opted by powerful forces striving to transform the order into chaos.

In November 2023, one month after the savage attack on Israel, journalist and author Barry Weiss gave a speech at the Federalist Society that she titled the last line of defense. The whole speech is worth your time, but I want to share just a couple of excerpts.

Speaker C
When anti Semitism moves from this shameful fringe into the public square, it is not about Jews. It is never about Jews. It is about everyone else.

It is about the society or the culture or the country where it is being allowed to proliferate.

Anti Semitism is a warning system.

It is a sign that the society itself is breaking down, that it is dying.

It is a symptom of a much deeper crisis, one that explains how, in the span of a little over 20 years, since September 11, educated people now respond to an act of savagery, not with a defense of civilization, but with a defense of barbarism.

At first, the things I encountered, like postmodernism and postcolonialism and post nationalism, seemed like wordplay or intellectual little puzzles to see how you could deconstruct just about anything.

But what I came to see over time was that it wasn't going to remain an academic sideshow, and that it sought nothing less than the deconstruction of our society from within.

This ideology seeks to upend the very ideas of right and wrong, the takeover of core american institutions by this ideology is so comprehensive that it's hard sometimes for people to even notice it, because it's everywhere.

This is the ideology of vandalism in the true sense of the word. The vandals sacked Rome. It is the ideology of nihilism. It knows nothing about how to build. It only knows how to tear down and destroy.

Speaker A
Her diagnosis is absolutely spot on.

But how could this ideology develop and propagate in America? The land of the free?

Ever wonder why things are the way they are in America?

Welcome to the Beck story. My podcast on how our past informs our present charts our future.

How did we get here?

The first season is about the cult of expertise developed in America, how it permeated our government, how this allegiance to so called expertise has far reaching implications for our nation right now, a remarkably consistent through line extends from the original progressive movement right through to the actions of left wing elites today.

When America took its first steps as a nation, we were mostly an educational backwater. Schooling, if it was available at all, was almost entirely a local matter.

When the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, the average American had only gone to school a total of 82 days in their life. And when they were able to go to school, they were crammed into one room shacks, often with terrible lighting, no desks, few books, and ill equipped teachers.

In true rugged american style, a young Connecticut teacher named Noah Webster decided he was going to try to improve things post revolutionary war. Noah Webster did not think american children should still be learning from british books. So in 1783, he wrote an American one, a textbook titled a Grammatical Institute of the English Language.

Thanks to its blue cover, it became much better known by its nickname, the blue backed Speller.

For the next century, Webster's books taught countless american children how to read and spell. It sold an estimated 50 million copies. The most popular american book of the erade. It took Webster five years to write his first dictionary, which included 37,000 words and definitions.

He is the one who standardized the american spelling and pronunciation of words, making many of them distinct from their british versions. It took him 22 years more to compile the second version, his American Dictionary of the English Language, which was published in 1828 and included 70,000 words and definitions. By then, Webster was 70 years old.

Noah Webster is a great example of the positive, innovative expertise. He saw an educational need, and he got to work on a solution. But he didn't leverage his expertise to wield power like some national education czar. If he had an agenda, it was just to help make Americans more illiterate, which he thought would encourage national and cultural unity.

Unfortunately, Webster's brand of expertise would not last in american education.

The US Constitution does not mention tax supported schools, but the founders knew that the success of the new republic depended on educated, engaged citizens. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were among those in favor of creating a formal system of publicly funded schools. Jefferson said, self government is not possible unless the citizens are educated sufficiently to enable them to exercise oversight. It is therefore imperative that the nation see to it that a suitable education is provided for all of its citizens.

By the time of the Revolutionary War, several communities in the northeast were experimenting with tax supported schools. In 1785 and 1787, federal ordinances were passed giving large tracts of lands to new states entering the union, with the requirement that portions of the land be reserved to establish public schools. The idea was that schools would help create stable communities in these remote territories.

In 1830, around 55% of the children ages five to 14 were enrolled in one of these public schools. But most did not stay in school once they became teenagers. In 1870, still less than 2% of Americans had a high school diploma. But the second industrial revolution, coupled with the immigration boom of the late 18 hundreds, transformed the american public school landscape. Between 1890 and 1920, an average of one high school per day was built in the United States. Public schools became the primary means of teaching immigrants english and assimilating them into the american way of life. By 1950, over 75% of Americans were high school graduates.

Today, the US has over 13,000 public school districts with over 98,000 individual schools. Around 47% of school funding comes from the state level, 45 from the local level, and about 8% from the federal government.

For a very long time, going to school, whether it be public, private, or home, school has not been optional for american kids, with about 90% of them attending public schools. And whom do we have to thank for compulsory schooling? Well, it's a 19th century reformer named Horace Mann.

Horace Mann. He's known as the father of american education.

As a Massachusetts state senator, Mann was instrumental in establishing the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1837. He was then appointed as the board's first secretary of education. The Massachusetts governor tasked Mann with writing an annual report on the state's schools.

Over the next six years, Mann visited 1000 schools, and his reports became the basic public school standards that were adopted all across the nation. Through his research and his site visits, Mann developed some core beliefs about american education.

First, that every child should have an equal opportunity to obtain basic common knowledge free of charge through state funded public schools. Mann called these common schools and wanted them to emphasize the three r's, reading, writing, and arithmetic, plus history, geography, grammar, and rhetoric.

He emphasized the importance of teaching civic virtues and basic moral instruction based on what he considered universal christian principles.

Mann was big on keeping the common schools non sectarian, which was controversial at the time, as critics thought it made the schools too secular.

In one of his reports, Mann insisted that the common school quote earnestly inculcates all christian morals, but that the school should not act as an umpire between hostile religious opinions, end quote.

Incorporating basic christian principles in a public school was much easier in Man's day, when those principles were widely accepted by society. But his non sectarian standard ultimately eroded to the point that a pair of Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 63 outlawed prayer and Bible reading in public school classrooms. The upside down world that resulted means that today bringing a book titled Gender Queer into middle school classrooms is brave and virtuous. But bringing, in the words of Jesus, well, that's just too far dangerous.

Horace Mann fervently believed that public investment in his vision of common schools would benefit the whole nation, producing illiterate moral people and promoting good citizenship. Maybe Mann genuinely believed all that in the pure sense. But whether he realized it or not, he kicked open the door for a never ending line of experts eager to seize the common school as a means of indoctrination and control.

In 1807, Germany was recovering from the bitter defeat of the war with France.

The german government had made sweeping reforms across society with education at its core of these reforms, the leader of this german educational reform movement was a man named Johann Fichte.

He believed that to build a robust nation, state schools should be designed to indoctrinate children early on to mold them into loyal, compliant citizens. In speaking about the proper way for teachers to instruct students, he said, quote, if you want to influence him at all, you must do more than just merely talk to him. You must fashion him. Fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will.

End quote.

In 1843, Horace Mann went to another fact finding mission, this time to Europe. He wanted to see how the Europeans ran their national school system. As he recorded in one of his annual reports for the Massachusetts board of Education, he was most inspired by the schools in Prussia with their compulsory model. He liked the way Prussia trained its teachers at national institutes. He liked how they had a national curriculum for each grade and a national testing system.

When he got back to America, he preached the virtues of creating a national education system and warned about the calamities which will result from leaving this most important of all the functions of a government to chance, end quote.

Other states could risk those calamities with their disjointed hodgepodge of school if they wanted to, but not on Mann's watch.

He made Massachusetts a model for state funded schools and teacher training. New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut soon followed Mann's model. Then Massachusetts passed the very first compulsory attendance laws in America. By the end of the 18 hundreds, 34 states had laws requiring kids to attend school. By 1918, every state had them.

Another german educational innovation that was imported by american reformers is kindergarten.

Noah Webster probably would have tried to come up with a good american name for kindergarten, which means garden of children in German.

But the earliest adopters were so enthralled with the german concept that they just kept calling it kindergarten. And 150 years after the first public kindergarten started in America, we still call it by its german name.

A Massachusetts teacher named Elizabeth Palmer Peabody first read about the kindergarten concept in 1856. She later traveled to Germany to observe the kindergartens and study under their founders.

Enthralled with all she learned, Peabody returned to America and opened the nation's first english language kindergarten.

She ran the school with her sister, who happened to be married to Horace Mann. Peabody became a national advocate for kindergarten, determined to spread it across the nation.

Thats when a woman named Susan Blow stepped in. She also studied kindergartens in Germany before convincing her school board in St. Louis, Missouri, to open Americas first public school kindergarten in 1873.

The concept dovetailed perfectly with the burgeoning progressive movement. By 1880, there were over 400 kindergartens across the 30 states.

Inherent in the german name is the idea that it's a garden, it's being cultivated, pruned, and nourishing for young children.

All children need those things, of course.

But the seismic shift was the determination by a handful of experts in Germany and later America that this cultivating should happen in a classroom environment at the hand of trained professionals rather than a child's parent.

Just behind Horace Mann in his passion for government driven education was a Connecticut state representative named Henry Bernard.

He said no one at all familiar with the deficient household arrangements and deranged machinery of domestic life, of the extreme poor and the ignorant, to say nothing of the intemperate, of the examples of rude manners, impure and profane language, and all of the vicious habits of the low bred idleness, can doubt that it is better for children to be removed as early and as long as possible. From such scenes and such examples in these comments, you can detect the early seeds of progressivism that would eventually come down to dominate education.

The late historian Michael Katz wrote, the crusade for our educational reform led by Horace Mann was not the symbol unambiguous good that it had long been taken to be.

The central aim of the movement was to establish more efficient mechanisms of social control, and its chief legacy was the principle that education was something that the better part of the community did to the others to make them orderly, moral, and tractable.

When Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton University, he once told an audience that when it came to the students, the goal is, quote Ize to make them as unlike their fathers as we can in achieving that goal. No one would have a greater impact than an old classmate of Woodrow Wilson's, a progressive icon named John Dewey.

Speaker F
Wouldn't it be nice if you lived in a country where you didn't have to constantly worry that your government was lying to you, a country where you could take it for granted that they weren't making decisions based on what they think is in your best interest and not what you think is? History shows us, unfortunately, that the more bloated a government gets, the more this happens. I make it a point to make critical decisions for myself and my family, and you should, too. You should get a Jace case. It is a personalized emergency kit that contains essential antibiotics and medications that treat the most common and deadly bacterial infections. It provides five life saving antibiotics for emergency use, and all you have to do is fill out a simple form online and you'll have it in case you need it. There are also add on options like EpiPens and ivermectin jace medical. They encourage you to take your family's.

Speaker A
Health into your own hands.

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Speaker A
Historically, the nature of western education was classical. Essentially, it taught that there is objective truth in the world and there is such a thing as moral law.

It was concerned with critical thinking and morality, knowledge of the facts in math and science, grammar, rhetoric, classical literature, and history.

A classical education was like passing down the greatest hits collection from the best of western civilization.

In the Horace Mann era of american public education, the classical model was still the default. While many private schools and charter schools still use the classical model, today with excellent results, it is largely absent from the american public education system.

No one influenced this sea change more than John Dewey.

Born in Vermont, 1859, Dewey grew up in a modest household, the second oldest of four boys. His father was a merchant and his mother was a devout evangelical who made sure her boys were always in church and Sunday school.

With John Dewey, at least the religious devotion did not stick.

When he eventually had his own children, his mother complained to him that he did not send them to Sunday school.

He replied that he had gone to Sunday school more than enough to make up for his kids lack of attendance.

After graduating from the University of Vermont in 1879, Dewey taught high school in Oil City, Pennsylvania, for two years.

After that, he tried teaching elementary school in a Vermont town for one year before giving up and returning to academia.

One of his former students later recalled that Dewey was unable to control the unruly boys in his classes.

In his long career as a college professor, students struggled to stay awake during his lectures despite his apparent lack of charisma in the classroom. In his 1897 book, my Pedagogic Creed, Dewey wrote, the teacher always is the.

Speaker G
Prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.

Speaker A
He was no longer personally religious, but his use of Judeo Christian language to describe the teacher's role shows the intensity of his zeal for the profession and what it could do.

Dewey went to Johns Hopkins University, where he earned his PhD in philosophy and psychology. Johns Hopkins was the first german style research university in America. It was there that Dewey and a young Woodrow Wilson studied under a professor named Herbert Baxter Adams, who had earned his PhD in Germany.

Adams helped invent the new american field of political science, fitting right in with the blossoming progressive culture of the time. American graduate schools would train new quote unquote, experts in the social sciences to reform and run government.

It was all part of the progressive philosophy that all aspects of society should be scientifically managed. John Dewey soon set his reformer sights on the field of education.

In the summer of 1894, John Dewey accepted a teaching position at the new University of Chicago. It was there that he started developing his overall philosophy that schools should not pass on the time tested western body of knowledge as much as they should be, places where students developed and pursued their own interests. Chicago was a hotbed of progressive and socialist activity, and Dewey quickly got swept up in the fervor. He grew convinced that education needed to be overhauled in order to overhaul society.

Speaker G
He said, I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.

Speaker A
At the University of Chicago, Dewey developed the university elementary school, sometimes known as the experimental school, where students were taught. According to Dewey's new educational philosophy.

Some parents of these students complained that they still had to teach their children how to read and write because of the emphasis at Dewey's laboratory school on play, student collaboration, and field trips.

Five years into his education experiment at the University of Chicago, Dewey published a pamphlet that made him famous. Titled the School and Society.

Speaker G
He the school must represent present life.

Speaker A
In 1897, as part of his pedagogic.

Speaker G
Creed, Dewey education must begin with a psychological insight into the child's capacities, interests, and habits. It must be controlled at every point by reference to these same considerations.

Speaker A
Today you still see the Dewey philosophy in action with things like differentiated instruction.

It's this Dewy idea of catering to the interest and ability of the individual child. So, for example, an english class might not have a set novel that the whole class studies. Students would instead pick their own book to read. You wouldn't want to stifle a student with core knowledge in some aspect of western civilization because it might prevent them from finding their truth and discovering their authentic selves.

Dewey engineered this split between student centered and subject centered education, as former educator and author Daniel Buck describes it. Quote, Dewey went so far as to say that no content had inherent value in learning, rather what interests the child ought to lead. The way education came to focus on the self in the 1950s, one historian wrote that Dewey led progressive education movement found its essential meaning in creative self expression.

In Dewey's system, helping students express themselves did not involve teaching them religious or moral values. Progressive socialist values? Oh, yeah, absolutely. But he thought religious beliefs were a sign of unintelligence. He believed truth is at best provisional, that truths change over time.

In 1904, after falling out with the president of the University of Chicago, John Dewey moved to Columbia University, where he would help develop Columbias teachers college into an epicenter of progressive education.

He remained at Columbia for the rest of his career. One contemporary of Dewey said, believing that public school is the chief remedy for the ills of society, Dewey has tried to change the work of the school so as to make it a miniature of society itself.

What better way to accomplish that goal than to train teachers to be agents of change?

Train them to use american classrooms to condition students to want the progressive vision for society? Train teachers to do what Johann Fichte had espoused in Germany a century before, to fashion a student in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will.

Dewey went on to train 35,000 students through Columbia's teachers college. Because of that massive influence, it was estimated that by 1970, every certified teacher in America had been trained by a disciple of John Dewey. As more and more universities began establishing teacher training programs, Dewey's opinions about education became the cutting edge expertise in the field.

The result of Dewey's drive to make teachers into change agents for society is still felt in things like a Seattle middle school teacher who in 2023 had her students write letters to the parental right group, Moms for Liberty. The group received a package of letters from the teacher's students accusing moms of Liberty, quote, of bullying LGBTQ youth. The accusation was presumedly because the group's work opposing hyper sexualized content in schools.

The social studies teacher, who is also a coordinator of the gay Straight alliance at Jane Addams Middle School in Seattle, included a letter that said, dear moms for Liberty, please read the enclosed cards from concerned middle school students in Seattle, Washington. One of the student letters said, Gay is Slaydeh, stop being a rat.

What Seattle public schools said the letters were, quote, an independent activity, not part of the school curriculum. Well, maybe it wasnt part of the official curriculum, but according to Deweys philosophy of the teachers proper role, these students are learning exactly what theyre supposed to. When the Bolshevik Revolution brought Russia a communist regime in 1918, one of the first orders of business was establishing early childhood education centers all across the nation.

The Soviets opened 5000 preschools and kindergartens during 1920. By 1931, the New York Times reported that there were more day nurseries in the Soviet Union than anywhere else in the world.

In 1924, an american nurse and progressive activist named Lillian Walden accepted an invitation from the soviet government to visit the USSR. She toured the Soviets early childhood experimental schools and was thrilled with the results.

She reported back to John Dewey that his educational philosophy was being implemented, quote, not less than 150%.

Like so many of his fellow progressives, Dewey was enamored with the new Soviet Union, all the socialist possibilities that it represented for the scientific management of society.

Dewey was a self described democratic socialist. He was a longtime supporter of Eugene Debs, who ran for president multiple times as the Socialist Party of America candidate. Dewey was against the laissez faire capitalism and for redistribution of income, he advocated organize social planning. But he was also smart enough to understand that socialism was an anathema to most average Americans. In the 1930s, he even tried to convince the Socialist Party of America to get rid of the socialist part of their name.

All of this helps to explain why Dewey went on his own tour of the Soviet Union in 1928. In short, he was very impressed by what he saw.

Dewey wrote in a series of articles about the Soviet Union for the New republic, which was the most influential progressive publication in the US at the time.

In these articles, Dewey praised the Soviet Union and said it was difficult not to feel envious of the soviet intellectuals. And naturally, Dewey loved what he saw about soviet education.

Speaker G
He said, I have never seen anywhere in the world such a large proportion of intelligent, happy, and intelligently occupied children.

Speaker A
He said their teachers were some of.

Speaker G
The wisest and most devoted men and women it has ever been my fortune to meet.

Speaker A
Dewey eventually turned his glowing review into a book titled Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World.

Dewey and hundreds of his fellow american progressives who also made pilgrimages to the Soviet Union, thought they were finally seeing their dreams in action.

This is what could be accomplished when the experts were put in charge.

By the time of John Dewey's death in 1952, he was almost universally viewed as the most influential educator in american history. The New York Times obituary referred to Dewey as America's philosopher. In the same obituary, one historian called Dewey, quote, the guide, the mentor, and the conscience of the american people. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that for a generation, no major issue was clarified until Dewey had spoken in 1960. Another historian said, where the philosophy of John Dewey has been applied in practice, it has improved the quality of american education more than the work or ideas of any other single american, living or dead.

Now, not everybody bought into the Dewey hype. One critic in the Atlantic the year after Dewey's death said, the parents must understand Dewey's basic philosophic beliefs because, quote, only then will they really understand what evil influences are at work in our modern classrooms.

The late historian Richard Hofstadter said, quote, the effect of Dewey's philosophy on the design of curricular systems was devastating, end quote.

But Dewey's progressive disciples far outnumbered his critics, and his brand of progressive education was entrenched. Dewey wrote 37 books and 766 articles over his career. He was the founder and president of the Progressive Education association. He founded the American association of University Professors. He co founded the American Federation of Teachers, which today is the second largest teachers union in America. His imprint was all over american education and still is.

In his 1935 book, Liberalism and Social.

Speaker G
Action, Dewey in Short, liberalism must now become radical.

The cause of liberalism will be lost for a considerable period if it is not prepared to go further.

Speaker A
Oh, he need not worry. There were more than enough progressive experts prepared to take his liberalism much, much further.

Speaker F
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Speaker A
In the summer of 1962, a group of disillusioned socialist college students assembled in Port Huron, Michigan, where they created an activist group called students for a democratic society.

Their first president, Tom Hayden, wrote most of their manifesto, called the Port Huron statement.

After dozens of pages of grievances came a section titled the University and social change.

This section spelled out the progressive socialist marxist plan to take over american education. Essentially, John Dewey and his fellow progressive elites had already been taking control of the universities for half a century. But Dewey himself had said in the 1930s, liberalism now must become radical.

So the Port Huron statement represented the radicals stepping up to the plate.

Here are a few excerpts from their statement.

Speaker D
From where else can power and vision be summoned? We believe that the universities are an overlooked seat of influence. Its educational function makes it indispensable and automatically makes it a crucial institution in the formation of social attitudes.

To turn these possibilities into realities will involve national efforts at university reform by an alliance of students and faculty.

They must wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy. They must import major public issues into the curriculum. They must consciously build a base for their assault upon the low sea of power.

Speaker A
It's safe to say this radical takeover, the american university, has been quite successful.

Part of John Dewey's educational philosophy was that classrooms should be training grounds to change society. Well, college professors in the 1960s put that concept on steroids. One prominent example, the brazilian marxist educator Paolo Freire.

He viewed schools in the classroom as true centers for social action.

Here, it's not much about abcs as it is about advocacy. He was the pioneer of what was known as critical pedagogy.

Essentially, it's a politicized theory of education that is the dominant theory taught in the teacher education programs of colleges across America.

Critical pedagogy is all about instilling students with a worldview of oppression and political activism as the highest response to that oppression.

This movement's sacred texts is a 1968 book called Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Somehow, Paolo's book has sold millions of copies and continues to be celebrated in preeminent teacher education programs.

Basically, Freire took marxist theory of the oppressor versus the oppressed and applied it to the relationship between teacher and student.

As you can probably guess, in Freire's conception, the student is the oppressed. Through Freire's education revolution, student and teacher became equal partners in political activism.

From this base, many streams of oppressed and oppressor flow, including perhaps the largest and most influential stream in recent years, critical race theory.

Gender, race, sexuality. The grid expands from Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed, and now that grid acts as a lens, a sort of decoder ring for understanding and undermining american society.

Through this grid, there is only oppression. The only question is where you fit on the grid.

Ultimately, critical pedagogy leads students to criticize everything. So even something like reading a classic novel in english class or solving math problems becomes exercises in identifying oppression.

Critical pedagogy has long been the state of the art in teaching or the expert science in the field. At Columbia University, where John Dewey built the teachers college that is still renowned today, course offerings include classes titled child development and intersectional identities, black Latina and transnational feminisms, anti racist curriculum, pedagogy, leadership and policy, race, gender, and education.

The list goes on.

In 2019, Jay Shalen conducted a study for the James G. Martin center for Academic Renewal.

It looked at the required readings for all education courses at three leading teacher colleges, the University of Wisconsin, University of Michigan, and the University of North Carolina.

The study found that the top three authors that education students at those schools are required to read are Gloria Ladson Billings, a critical race theorist who has been pushing CRT since the 1990s Linda Darling Hammond, a top education advisor to President Obama and the author of Civil Rights Road to deeper learning, five essentials for equity, and in third place was Paolo Ferre.

By the way, John Dewey still ranked as the fifth most frequently assigned author in the study. Jay Shalen writes, quote, teacher education has become one of the most politicized corners of academia, an institution that's already out of step with the rest of the country. Politically, education schools are leading the change to transform the nation. And that transformation is not leading us to a better, freer, more prosperous, more humane society. Politics is now so ingrained in the education schools, it seems almost impossible for reform to occur.

End quote.

Even the once radical takeover of college campuses was complete. The experts continue finding new ways to apply oppression grid to everything.

Students at the University of Florida can take a course called black hair politics. There's ecofeminism at the University of South Carolina at Swarthmore College, there's queering God, feminist and queer theology. Or Middlebury college keeps things simple with a class called white people.

An extensive 2020 study by the foundation for Individual Rights in Education showed that 50% of us college students consider themselves progressives, while 26% are conservatives. In 2018, a group of professors from separate universities studied a sample of over 7000 students from 120 colleges. Their results showed the students demonstrated an increase in appreciative attitudes towards progressives after just one year in college.

A 2023 study by two professors at West Virginia University found that agents of higher education institutions hold a preference for progressively minded individuals.

So how did they reach that conclusion?

Well, by sending emails to admission counselors at 500 us colleges. Some of the emails included their pronoun in the signature line. Their study found that the omission counselors gave preferential treatment to the emails with the signature line pronouns. They even found that the counselors responses to those using pronouns were much friendlier, including a heightened use of exclamation marks and emojis. End quote.

In 1989, the Higher Education Research Institute conducted their first survey on political ideology among college professors. They found 42% identified as being on the left, 40% were moderate, 18% conservative.

The same survey in 2017 found 60% on the left and just 12% conservative. So in less than three decades, the ratio of left wing faculty to conservative more than doubled.

Overwhelmingly progressive faculty teaching overwhelmingly progressive students equals a disproportionate amount of confirmation bias.

It's easy to see how this feedback loop results in students and professors alike thinking left wing ideology is simply the default way that smart people think.

Remember that part of the Port Huron statement that I read? Their aim was to wrest control of the education process from the administrative bureaucracy.

That mission has been thoroughly accomplished. According to a study done by Samuel J. Abrams, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, 71% of college administrators identify as progressive, versus just 6% who are willing to admit they're conservative.

Abrams study yielded a remarkable that 54% of college administrators have an education degree. That means those the most powerful in the most influential positions in our colleges have been trained in critical pedagogy and believe in it the most. As Abrams put it, America's education programs are dangerous for higher education because they adhere to the pedagogy that transforms their graduates into activists.

Activists.

Their training teaches future administrations to disconstruct the society in which they live and promote their views at work, in dining halls, dormitories, and throughout campus. End quote.

This is how you get the college presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology answering the way they did before Congress. When asked about antisemitism on their campuses in December of 2023. Here's New York Representative Elise Stefanik questioning Liz McGill and Claudine Gay.

Representative Elise Stefanik
Miss McGill at Penn. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's rules or code of conduct? Yes or no?

Speaker B
If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment? Yes.

Representative Elise Stefanik
I am asking specifically calling for the genocide of Jews. Does that constitute bullying or harassment?

Speaker B
If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment.

Representative Elise Stefanik
So the answer is yes.

Speaker B
It is a context dependent decision. Congresswoman.

Representative Elise Stefanik
It's a context dependent decision. That's your testimony today? Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context, that is not bullying or harassment? This is the easiest question to answer, yes, Miss McGillenne.

So is your testimony that you will not answer?

Speaker B
Yes if it is. If the speech.

Representative Elise Stefanik
Yes or no?

Speaker B
If the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment? Yes.

Representative Elise Stefanik
Conduct meaning committing the act of genocide.

Doctor Gay at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?

Speaker E
It can be dependent, depending on the context.

Representative Elise Stefanik
What's the context?

Speaker E
Targeted as an individual. Targeted at an individual.

Representative Elise Stefanik
It's targeted at jewish students. Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them. Do you understand that dehumanization is part of antisemitism?

I will ask you one more time.

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violent Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?

Speaker E
Antisemitic rhetoric when it comes to.

Representative Elise Stefanik
And is it anti semitic rhetoric?

Speaker E
Anti semitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation, that is actionable conduct, and we do take action.

Representative Elise Stefanik
So the answer is yes. That calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard code of conduct? Correct.

Speaker E
Again. It depends on the context.

Representative Elise Stefanik
It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes, and this is why you should resign. These are unacceptable answers across the board.

Speaker A
Shortly after, both Liz McGill and Claudine Gay resigned as presidents of Penn and Harvard, social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt wrote an insightful article, why anti Semitism sprouted so quickly on campus.

He says the students have learned a new morality that trained them to view everyone either as an oppressor or a victim. Students were taught to use identity as the primary lens through which everything is to be understood, not just in their coursework, but in their personal and political lives. When students are taught to use a single lens for everything, their education is harming them rather than improving their ability to think critically. This new morality is what drove universities off a cliff.

Before 1963, the state of Pennsylvania required by law that its public students begin each day of class with the pledge of a allegiance and a reading from the Bible.

In 1956, a suburban Philadelphia high school junior named Ellery Shemp decided he'd had enough of school day, starting with Bible verses. He thought it was discriminatory, so he pulled up a chair to his dad's typewriter and tapped out the following letter.

Speaker E
To the ACLU as a student in my junior year, I'd very greatly appreciate any information you might send regarding action and or aid in testing the constitutionality of a Pennsylvania law, which arbitrarily and seemingly unrighteously and unconstitutionally compels the Bible to be read in our public school system.

I thank you for any help you might offer in freeing american youth in Pennsylvania from this gross violation.

Speaker A
A district court ruled in Shemp's favor and struck down the new law requiring that public school days begin with the reading from the Bible. However, Shemp's school district appealed the decision, and the Pennsylvania legislature amended its law to allow students who objected to be exempt from the Bible reading. But that exemption was not good enough for Shemp and his family, who continued their lawsuit.

Ultimately, in 1963, the US Supreme Court ruled in Abington School District v. Shemp that school sponsored Bible reading is government endorsed of a particular religion. Therefore, in the opinion of eight judges to one, this violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

Fast forward now. 2023. Pennsylvania Democrat Karen Smith sworn in as the new president of the Central Bucks District School board. Instead of using a Bible for her ceremony, Smith placed her hand on a stack of sexually explicit books, some of which had been banned from school libraries by the district she now leads. Smith explained, quote, the Bible doesn't hold any significant meaning for me. And given everything that has occurred in the last couple of years, the banned books, they do mean something to me at this point.

The books she used for her swearing in included one titled All Boys Aren't Blue, about a young black gay man. The book contains sexually extremely explicit passages, which Smith told the Philadelphia Inquirer are, quote, intense.

Other titles include Flamer, a graphic novel with illustration of nude teenage boys showering and masturbating, and beyond Magenta and Lillian Duncan, both stories about transgender teenagers.

In 60 years, America went from classroom starting the day with a reading from the Bible to a school board president being sworn in on a stack of sexually explicit books.

The progressive drive continues to be protecting these kinds of books from any objections by parents. In September 2023, the Biden administration hired a new deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Civil Rights. The new hire is dedicated to monitoring efforts to keep certain books out of the public school library, the Department of Education official told reporters.

Across the country, communities are seeing a rise in efforts to ban books, efforts that are often designed to empty libraries and classrooms of literature about lgbtq people, people of color, people of faith, key historical events, and so much more.

Clearly, the oppression grid now takes precedence over the well being of students. Its a little wonder that a 2023 Gallup poll found that public schools are now trusted by only 26% of Americans, the same percentage of people that trust banks, large technology companies, and the presidency.

The progressive education expertise is not producing better educated Americans. A century of deweyism and a half century of the pedagogy of the oppressed has resulted in things like the Oregon Department of Education announcing in 2023 that it is removing proficiency in reading and writing as a requirement for students to graduate. In a statement, the department called the standards, quote, burdensome to teachers and students.

In Baltimore, the city's public school system lowered its math standards multiple times through the 2010s. By 2023, the city had 13 high schools in which zero students scored proficient in math on the state test, zero in the Olympia school District in Washington state, the school board voted in 2023 to eliminate fourth and fifth grade band and orchestra classes in the district. According to the school board director, the district is, quote, entrenched in and surrounded by white supremacy culture.

He went on to explain that music classes were not necessarily white supremacist, but they have the potential to perpetuate racist culture in the district. An Evanston, Illinois high school now has segregated classes as options for both black and hispanic students only. Theyre called affinity classes, and theyre taught by non white teachers. No white students are allowed in the affinity classes. The theory is that black and hispanic students will perform better academically if theyre separated from white students.

And then theres the elementary school near San Francisco that spent $250,000 to hire an organization called Woke Kindergarten. The money came in from federal funds earmarked to help improve the nations worst performing schools. Woke kindergarten describes itself as, quote, a global abolitionist early childhood ecosystem and visionary creative portal supporting children, families, educators and organizations in their commitment to abolitionist, early education and pro black and queer and trans liberation.

Here's a clip from one of their videos of the students. It's entitled identities are dope. What are some of yours?

Speaker E
After watching my first video, you might be wondering is key a boy, boy, girl? I have a lot of identities, but boy or girl isn't one of them. I'm just Keith, and I feel most free being me.

Speaker A
How did we get from the blue back speller to woke kindergarten? Far too much time, money and trust in false expertise.

In 1892, a 37 year old New Yorker named Francis Bellamy wrote the Pledge of Allegiance as an assignment for a popular magazine called the Youth's Companion.

Why do students today still recite the Pledge of Allegiance each morning at school?

Because Bellamy enlisted the largest teachers union, the National Education association, to incorporate the pledge as part of the daily classroom routine.

To talk about patriotism in the schools is not enough, he said to NEA members at their annual meeting in 1892. And then Bellamy made a profound statement to the crowd.

Surely nobody has ever dreamed how right it would turn out to be, he said.

The schoolmaster, after all, holds the future of american politics.