Liberty Sentinel founder Alex Newman is doing a series on education for the Epoch Times, America’s fastest-growing newspaper. In the first segment, he highlights the role of Robert Owen, a pre-Marx communist who created a (failed) commune based on communism in Indiana and inspired the Prussian dictatorship to create government schools. Read part of the first piece in the series below, and follow the link for the rest.
Standardized tests show Americans are getting dumber and dumber with each passing year. And polls now consistently show that over half of young Americans today prefer socialism over freedom. This is obviously not sustainable—at least if the United States is going to survive as a free society. It’s also not an accident.
To solve this crisis, it’s essential to have an understanding of where public schools came from and what existed prior to their establishment. After all, before the proliferation of government schools, Americans were the best-educated people on the planet—just consider the Founding Fathers, and the “Federalist Papers,” to get a sense of the level of education that once prevailed in America.
The history of how the government was able to take over—and the characters behind that effort—is almost incredible. Much of that shadowy story, though, is barely known today, even among educational experts. That’s a problem, and potentially an existential threat.
When examined honestly, the history of public education—and a study of the key men who laid the foundations for the system that now exists—reveals a long-term plan by Utopians to totally re-shape humanity and civilization along collectivist lines. This agenda has been remarkably successful thus far, as the polling data show.
Everybody involved in education knows about John Dewey and Horace Mann, of course. These two socialist luminaries are almost universally credited with having created the modern public education system in the United States. Their backgrounds and views will be addressed in upcoming articles in this series on education.
But the true story of government schools has its origins long before Mann became the first education commissioner of Massachusetts, with his radical plan to have the government take over education using the Prussian model.
New Harmony
Much of the earlier history of public schools—before Mann picked up the baton—remains not just obscure, but practically unknown. Were it not for the meticulous research of the late Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld, a passionate educator who devoted six decades of his life to studying education and the science of reading, it might still be awaiting discovery in dusty old libraries and university archives in the United States and Europe.
The real story of government education can be traced to a long-forgotten communist commune in Indiana called “New Harmony,” and its eccentric founder. Established in the 1820s by Robert Owen, a Welsh Utopian who rejected Christianity and private property, the idea behind the settlement was to show the world that collectivism was actually superior to individualism.
To read the rest of this piece, go here: The Genesis of Public Schools: Collectivism and Failure
