FOUNDATIONS FUNDING FAILURE-THE 3 F'S REPLACE THE 3 R'S

Foundations Funding Failure – the 3 F’s Replace the 3 R's

Back to the Education: Big Government or Free Market Page

NewsMax.com

July 26, 2001
Diane Alden

The bad news first: There is no good news. Public education and government schools are a mess. If it were a business it would be in receivership. If it were mentally ill it would be in a padded cell on heavy doses of lithium and Prozac. Nevertheless, after Social Security, public education is the secondary third rail of American life and politics – it isn't supposed to be touched. It is THE sacred cow of modern times.

Listening to the National Education Association, Congress or almost any politician, each of them has the latest nostrum for fixing education. Count on the fix amounting to billions more dollars year in and year out.

The result of the avoidance of the truth will be that our children and grandchildren will face a future looking up from the bottom of the international scholastic heap in every crucial subject area. Why else are we having to import computer engineers, analysts and scientists from the Far East?

By the Numbers Ye Shall Know Them

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, there are approximately 52 million elementary and secondary school students in the U.S. Forty-six million are in government schools, 5.9 million in private, and 1.7 million in home schooling, which is growing by the day. Class sizes have decreased since 1970 from 24 and 20 elementary and secondary students per teacher, respectively, to 18 and 14 elementary and secondary students per teacher today. Fifty-two percent of schools are operating below capacity, 26 percent at capacity and 22 percent are overcrowded.

Ninety-eight percent of schools have Internet access.

Education expenditures climbed to $647 billion for the 1999-2000 school year. Sixty percent of that spending was for elementary and secondary schools. An unbelievable 7 percent of our gross domestic product was spent on education.

What do we get for all those big bucks? The 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that 68 percent of fourth-grade students in the U.S. are reading below proficient level. Sixty-three percent of African-American students, 58 percent of Hispanic students, and 47 percent of children in urban schools are reading below basic level, which is a step below the proficient level. Additionally, African-American and Hispanic children slip farther behind from year to year.

It gets worse. At the post-secondary level, ALL two-year institutions have to offer remedial courses in reading, writing and math, while 81 percent of four-year institutions and 63 percent of private four-year institutions must do so. That means freshmen are taking courses in English and math and reading that they already should have had firmly planted in their mental database.

They aren't getting the basics in government schools, but they sure do know about recycling. They don't know the correct answers to basic questions, but they sure do feel good about themselves. This predicament is not exactly a bargain for the nearly $700 billion we spend on education per year. Imagine if that money were parceled out to families what they could accomplish with their own educational dollars.

American high school seniors came in 19th out of 21 countries in math and dead last in advanced placement math.

Nearly 60 percent of children watch three to four hours of TV per day, and of those 12 percent watch six or more hours per day.

Fourth-grade students who reported teachers using the phonics approach as opposed to whole word scored significantly higher in reading than students who didn't have this help.

For all the money we spend, the General Accounting Office states that "federally funded programs have historically placed a low priority on results and accountability." From 1984 to 1997 there was an additional $78 billion heaped on education with no results of any note – except that things got worse.

Foundations are not a big help in improving education and they have NEVER been much help. They give billions to badly conceived fads and teaching techniques or physical arrangements that have no earthly benefit in educating children. From open campuses to environmental mis-education, from values clarification to multiculturalism, some foundation has funded every single fad, foolish policy and pointless teachers program that has come over the educational horizon.

A Philanthropy magazine investigation found that "… total philanthropic giving for all causes in 1999 was $190.2 billion, according to the AAFRC Trust for Philanthropy report titled ‘Giving USA 2000.’ Of that amount, $27.5 billion (14.4 percent) went to education. Giving to education is the largest category of philanthropy spending after religion (individuals give the most to religion) and its annual increase in recent years has averaged around 10 percent."

Yet the fact is most grants go to the officials in the failed school systems with the worst performance. Big bucks given to places where there is no oversight of what happens to that money. As Philanthropy states, "a review of the Foundation Center’s database of about 10,000 grantmakers and 100,000 sample grants is instructive. Of the 50 largest grants described as funding elementary and secondary school reform, 24 went directly to public school systems or public school funding entities. Another 19 went to nonprofit organizations, some of them closely identified with the education establishment like the Education Commission of the States. None of the grants was for reform of public, private or parochial schools."

Past as Prologue

The major foundations were founded primarily by what is now known as the Eastern American establishment. They were and are the ruling class, the big money changers, movers and shakers. Hardly anyone in high office has gotten there without help from some of them. In America there are exceptions to that rule, but I would bet every president in the last hundred years has had assistance from that establishment or he wouldn't have become president.

An establishment figure himself, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in 1965, "… the New York financial and legal community was the heart of the American establishment … its front organizations were the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie Foundations."

In his seminal work on foundations, "Foundations: Their Power and Influence," Dr. Rene Wormser maintains that they are an interlocking monopoly of power. These temporal monuments to the captains and the kings have churned out the social engineers and teaching establishment and its intellectual underpinnings for nearly every generation of the last hundred years. These days, they consider educational policies for creating the new world citizen. To do this, Wormser believes, they have deliberately attacked Judeo-Christian morality and replaced the Enlightenment man with the socially engineered citizen of the coming corporate world order.

Well, shades of conspiracy theory, tin foil helmets and black helicopters. Conspiracy or no, the foundations invariably defend what they do. They offer a huge network of support, grants and perks which they use as the vehicle for promoting and creating progressive policies. In America's case progressive policies mean statist, collectivist, socialist, or some combination thereof.

There has always been a control-freak factor among the elite, a bias and a desire to create the perfect corporate citizen of the perfect state. That is what modern elites must do in order to maintain control. But if the citizens are well trained in their duties and have amusements along with some hope of attaining material goods, they don't seem to be aware of the overarching controlling forces under the surface. They pay little attention to the liberties and choices they are losing. Our citizenry is being trained rather than educated.

History indicates foundations usually provide the funding for terrible ideas. All one has to do is look at how much foundation money has gone into the work of bioethicist Dr. Peter Singer to see how outrageous some of these endeavors are. Singer, if you recall, theorizes that parents should be allowed to euthanize their children from newborn up to 2 years old. He also believes there is no difference between people and animals. Singer teaches in a major American university funded by several foundation grants.

Part of his funding came from the Rockefeller family. They have been the kingpins in promoting goofball ideas. That is bad enough, but they have been major funders of some real 20th century horrors as well. It is well known that the Rockefeller Foundation was the original moneybags for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Weimar Germany. That institute served up eugenics and Hitler's racial policies. The Rockefellers ended the funding in 1936, too late to stop the worst of the practices from being put into eventual operation. The Institute gave the world everything from Liebensborn to the science used for the "final solution."

The Scholars Who Trace the Educational Establishment

There are several books on what has happened to American education. In previous articles, I have mentioned these studies. They include "The Cloning of the American Mind" by Beverly Eakman, "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America" by Charlotte Iserbyt, and "The Underground History of American Education" by John Taylor Gatto.

A recent book by scholar Diane Ravitch is titled "Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reform." Ravitch's book traces the failures of public education back 100 years. The educational ideas she delineates in her book came to public education courtesy of the major universities and Eastern establishment foundations.

Ravitch states: "[C]onventional wisdom decreed that subject matter and academic curriculum were outmoded, that the curriculum should never be prescribed by city or state officials but jointly planned by teachers and pupils, that it should be based on students’ interests and needs, not on the logical organization of subjects, that experiences and activities were more valuable to students than reading and study, that schools should offer different programs to different groups of students … that students should be promoted every year, regardless of performance, and that professional educators should think of themselves as social engineers, empowered to decide what was best for the students and the rest of society."

She relates that one of the progressive-minded pedagogues was a man named G. Stanley Hall, America's first Ph.D. in psychology. Edward Everett was America's first Ph.D., and both men had an enormous impact on public education. Both were elitists in that neither had any faith or belief in the average American's ability to learn.

Hall's beliefs may be summed up in this statement: "We must overcome the fetishism of the alphabet, of the multiplication tables, of grammars, of scales, and of bibliolatry … it would be no serious loss if a child never learned to read."

Hall looked on American children for the most part as a "great army of incapables, shading down to those who should be in schools for dullards or subnormal children, for those whose mental development heredity decrees a slow pace and an early arrest." Apparently Dr. Hall would fit in well with the current thinking behind public education today.

That thinking also reflected the belief system of the Rockefellers and Fords toward the lower classes. Henry Ford just wanted a person who could follow directions and put the screws and parts in the right places. Rockefeller sought a pliant workforce as well. It is mighty odd that capitalists and socialists combined forces to stomp American education into the ground.

Public schools grew out of the mid-19th century philanthropic giving. Historian Robert Seybolt states that even BEFORE public education, literacy was on the rise among both men and women. Up to 98 percent were literate before the establishment of public schools. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that it was rare to find a New Englander who had not received elementary education and who was not "well-versed in the history and Constitution of the United States."

It was during the great waves of immigration that began in the mid-nineteenth century that the 'free school' notion took hold. Ironically, it was the education subcommittee of the Massachusetts Legislature that warned about institutionalizing education:

"The establishment of the Board of Education seems to be the commencement of a system of centralization and monopoly of power in a few hands, contrary, in every respect, to the true spirit of democratic institutions; and which, unless speedily checked, may lead to unlooked for and dangerous results."

Horace Mann dismissed such critics as "vandals and bigots," and ultimately he prevailed. He became the first secretary of the first state board of education in Massachusetts. During his reign he introduced the first state-run system in 1852. Within 30 years, every Northern state had followed suit, and while only two states had mandatory attendance laws before the Civil War, most others passed such laws after Reconstruction.

In a convergence of historical events the great tides of history melded into policy.

During the great immigration to the U.S. from Ireland and southern and central Europe, historical trends collided with one another. The great capital empires being built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries joined forces with the ideas cooking in America's intellectual class. That class was beginning to feel its power as it took control of the institutions of higher learning. This was an intellectual class that adopted many of its forms and ideas from Germany's Hegel and Marx. Their intellectual arguments regarding the nature of man and his relationship to the state were set in place by our Eastern intellectual class.

Out of that lethal combination came the theory that the average (non-elite) child should become more of an automaton to be trained than an individual to be educated. In that early era as it is today, a truly educated person is a critical person, a citizen who does not go along merely because the new elite demands it. When government entered the mix, education was doomed.

In any case, at the turn of the 20th century the principal capitalists were taking the heat for being successful and had to endure the jealousy and envy that went along with success. This is a partial reason why they became philanthropists. Soak-the-rich schemes led to the 16th Amendment and the income tax. Of course, the soaking has been done to the middle class as well as the rich ever since.

In response to criticism, Rockefeller, Carnegie and others looked for places to put their excess fortunes. J.D. Rockefeller jumped into the educational arena in 1902. That is when his family began funding New York's Columbia Teachers College. It was the "progressive" ideas and causes at the Teachers College which caught their fancy. The worst of those ideas haunt us to this day.

Psychology, eugenics, environmentalism and a host of progressive notions and really bad educational ideas got their sustenance from America's fortunate sons. The ideas behind the new theories came from Europe, especially from the Hegelian German school of thought.

While it is obvious that America divorced Europe with the Revolution, its intellectual class ended up adopting the worst of European ideas. Then came the capitalists. Heaven forbid these great entrepreneurs should be considered anti-progressive or, even worse, very "American." The worst thing the intellectual class did to America and to its capitalists was to deny what was righteous and best about the American character and accompanying philosophy.

The intellectual class despised the ideas that created the American experiment and republican government in the first place. Since the American character had been honed on ideas born in the Enlightenment and in Judeo-Christian thought and tradition, something had to replace it. European theories of the organic state and the primacy of the state over the individual was that replacement.

So our pointy-heads embraced, with a characteristic blindness, the worst that Europe had to offer. Unfortunately, they got the innovators to go along for the ride.

In addition, the intellectual class depended on the guilt and bigotry of the capitalists in order to create the new man.

Primary Education and Teacher Training

"The ultimate problem of all education is to coordinate the psychological and the social factors. ... The coordination demands that the child be capable of expressing himself, but in such a way as to realize social ends.” – John Dewey.

John Dewey, father of progressive education, was a disciple of Hegel. Dewey stated that literacy was the greatest obstacle to socialism. He was funded in no small part by American foundations – in particular, the Rockefeller Foundation.

The Rockefeller reasons for doing so were altruistic. Old J.D. Rockefeller stated: "I believe the power to make money is a gift from God – just as are the instincts for art, music, literature, the doctor's talent, yours to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind. Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow-man according to the dictates of my conscience." Unfortunately, he did not choose wisely in distributing those funds.

John Jr. gave the first funds to Columbia Teachers College in 1902 as a promise to God because he and his family were saved from a fire that destroyed their family home in Pocantico Hills, New York.

"The Leipzig Connection" by Paolo Lionni says that the Rockefeller General Education Board set Columbia Teachers College financially on its feet. Not long after that, the first volume on educational psychology, written by Thorndike, was published.

Lionni writes: "That same year, after a decade in Chicago experimenting with children, John Dewey joined the faculty of Columbia University as a member of the departments of philosophy and education, in a unique position to influence advanced students in Teachers College. With Russell, Cattell, Thorndike, and the other Wundtians, Dewey set the ball rolling for an amalgam of "educational" psychology and socialism. It became known as "Progressive Education" and, emanating from Columbia's Teachers College for the next half-century, it slowly but surely became commonplace in every school in the country."

Columbia Teachers College invented educational psychology and maintained a monopoly for years. It hired German-educated Wundtian psychologists instituting destructive theories and practices based on "opinion parading as science and German racist ideas (genetics, eugenics), invalid notions of ‘man’ and how to ‘control’ him."

Since men like Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie were also bigots, as were most WASPs of the era, they viewed the incoming flood of Catholic immigrants as a serious reason to get involved in society, population control, and education. More likely they were frightened of losing control and so concentrated on manipulating society rather than educating it. It was only one step from adopting the ideas of the intellectual class and using them as tools for training individuals as a working force. Foundations since their inception have been the leading promoters and boosters of Hegelian manipulative fads and pseudo-science.

The Best-laid Plans

The free schools of the mid-1800s were geared to teaching the compliant and barely competent immigrant child as a future worker. In Massachusetts, men like Edward Everett took the ideas of the Prussian school of thought and transplanted them to the U.S. According to these theories, children were to be removed from their parents as early as possible and placed in "kindergartens" to be weaned from loyalty to parents and churches, and trained rather than educated. Thus, children became wards of the state in a sense, to be molded for whatever ends the state saw fitting.

Does that sound familiar? It should, because we are dealing with the worst of it today.

Recently the educrats in D.C. maintained that it would be best if children as young as 2 were placed in a school setting. Take away the kid from the parent and train him in the way of the state. Since they don't believe in teaching basic core subjects any longer, they must be training them for some purpose. My guess is they seek to develop the person best fitted to become a functionary of the corporate state. The thought of a free and independent person with unalienable rights given to them by God scares the heck out of the educrats.

But in the early days of the 20th century, the progressive education plans of the WASP establishment were spoiled to some extent.

It was the upstart Catholic and private schools movement, which grew out of necessity, that upset the elite apple cart. As the century unfolded, the establishment, capitalists, foundations and government were loathe to give tax breaks to Catholic or other private schools. They clung to their monopoly using the First Amendment in such a twisted way it took the best lawyers in the country to change the establishment of religion clause to something it was not. BUT it was a very fortunate thing for those private schools. Today they are better off because they did not have foundation or government money with the hooks and strings attached to what could be taught and how they could teach it.

Unfortunately, in the modern era, however, even some of the parochial schools have given in to weird educational theories served off the plate of the corporate state and funded in no small part by American foundations. John Dewey is alive and well, and he and Maslow and Rogers are living in a couple of Catholic schools and definitely in all government schools. That is a pity for America's children.

Still, enough of these independent schools have the good sense to teach basic reading and math so that kids learn and succeed. Children from the inner city who are taught in Catholic schools shine in comparison with their public school contemporaries. A former bishop of New York City accepted the challenge of taking the poorest kids from the worst schools and educating them to a far higher standard than the education they received in the public schools. Their success galls the establishment. After repeated failures, that establishment still insists on engineering a child to be full of self-esteem but no learning – a "processed" child with few critical thinking skills and almost no self-discipline.

One of the most hopeful signs of the 21st century is the home-schooling movement. It may be THE fly in the eye of our current crop of masters of the universe. These government stooges and the plutocrats from the temples of wealth and power will do their utmost to make it as hard as possible for home school practitioners to thrive and survive. But they will survive, and they will continue to outperform the government product by light years. That is what makes them so dangerous to the powers that be.

It is hoped that private schools and home schooling will grow exponentially. For without that independence, American education would be worse off than it is. Aside from Sam Walton and perhaps one or two others, American foundations do not offer grants to home-schooled children or to private schools for poor children. That is too bad. It is also short-sighted and unfair, because the best things in education today are the various independent educational efforts by private groups and individuals.

(In my next piece find out how ideas such as whole word versus phonics and no-error math got started. Why is educational psychology used as a sledgehammer to kill learning? These "progressive" ideas did not appear out of thin air. They grew out of hothouse educational theories funded by … guess who? Learn about "the process” (a term of experimental psychology) and "applying the process” to the profession of teaching. Now these groups want to spread educational failure worldwide, but other countries are having none of it.)

Please check out www.aldenchronicles.com and sign the anti-CARA and Klamath petitions. Also listen to me Monday and Friday mornings with Steve Myers on the Liberty Works Network out of Washington, D.C.

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Diane Alden is a research analyst with a background in political science and economics. Her work has appeared in the Washington Times as well as NewsMax.com, Etherzone, Enterstageright, American Partisan and many other online publications. She also does occasional radio commentaries for Georgia Radio Inc. Her e-mail address is wulfric8@bellsouth.net.