By Richard W Hawkins, Lt Col, USAF (ret)
“Biblical methodology with Biblical content results in a Christian worldview and Dialectic methodology, even with Biblical content, leads to good little socialists.”
— Dr Marlene McMillan, whylibertymatters.com
Discussions ensue regarding whether conservatives or Christians should run for local school boards with the belief that government-controlled K-12 schooling can be reformed at the local level. The focus is generally on altering or replacing the curricula content but ignores the methodologies employed by the credentialed teachers.
Teaching methods are not value-neutral and can never be value-neutral. They are based on a worldview philosophy to produce a specified outcome to conform to that worldview. If you hear that this or that method is the latest “age-appropriate, innovative, evidence-based” teaching tool, then you need to ask, “To produce what outcome?” That outcome will let you know the worldview involved and allow you to determine if that is what you want.
In other words, when discussing K-12 education, both the curriculum content and teaching method have to be addressed. The curricula and Dialectic teaching method[1] found in all public schools are designed for a Marxist outcome. God, on the other hand, has ordained only the parents and church, not the state, to educate (i.e., disciple) in a Biblical worldview. To accomplish this, education should be based on a Biblical worldview using the Principle Approach[2] or Classical Christian Education. In this case, credentialed teachers will have to be deprogrammed from their Dialectic methods and reprogrammed into the Principle Approach or Socratic methods.
The following discussion about the PEERS test will illustrate the different outcomes of education philosophies based on curriculum and teaching methods. Nehemiah Institute has conducted the PEERS test for over 30 years now and has tested well over 125,000 high school students from Christian homes. The following PEERS Trend Chart illustrates the differences between different curriculums and methodologies.[3]
PEERS stands for Politics, Economics, Education, Religious, and Social Issues. These are key issues of the day and determine how a worldview impacts test-taker responses. The chart shows that over a 32-year span, the average worldview for both public-schooled Christians and those attending the traditional Christian schools has steadily declined from moderate Christian (syncretized Christianity) worldview to the cultural Marxist worldview.
Those students who attend a Christian Worldview school are educated with an American Classical Christian curriculum and the Principle Approach method. If the teachers were credentialed, they had to be deprogrammed from the Dialectic method they learned and retrained to the Principle Approach or Socratic method. The one is at polar opposite with the others.
Now compare the outcome of the Biblical Worldview-schooled students with those that attend public schools. The Biblical Theist category is equivalent to a Biblical worldview. The Secularism category fits the cultural Marxist worldview, which is the prevailing worldview found in every public school system. The Socialism category ranges from cultural Marxism into Marxism as the scores reach towards -100. Both the curriculum and Dialectic methodology are based on cultural Marxism and aspects of Marxism.
You may be asking why such poor outcomes from the traditional Christian schools? There are five key factors that impact the performance of these students worldview. 1.) The false doctrine of Pietism found in many churches turns a blind eye to the culture and American society.[4] 2.) Most Christian schools use the same or similar curricula as the public schools. 3.) The secular teaching methodologies are the same as those used in the public schools as the teachers come from the same cultural Marxist teachers’ training. 4.) Recent research has demonstrated that a significant number of Christian teachers are syncretized with a cultural Marxist worldview due to their secular education and teacher training. 5.) The students are compromised by their environment outside of the schoolhouse.
The homeschool parent generally wasn’t educated and trained in either the Principle Approach or the Dialectic method and uses some form of Christian curriculum. It’s obvious they are much more successful at inculcating a Biblical worldview in their child vs the traditional Christian schooled counterpart. The Principle Approach method found in the Biblical Worldview school is the primary cause for the difference with the homeschooled counterparts.
Teachers are trained change agents to influence the affective domain and alter a student’s conscience. The goal is to inculcate the cultural Marxist worldview. David French discusses academic bias by illustrating from the University of Alabama College of Education’s “Conceptual Framework”:
The College of Education conceptualizes the promotion of social justice in an education setting as an issue…..
The College of Education is committed to preparing individuals to promote social justice, to be change agents, and to recognize individual and institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism (Abelove, 1993; Fine, 1993; Fordham, 1996; Post, 1998). It includes educating individuals to break silences about these issues, propose solutions, provide leadership, and develop anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexist community and alliances. [5] [emphasis added]
Attorney and author Robin Eubanks writes:
The fascinating, tragic, and dangerous aspect of the nature of pedagogy is that it turns the obedient degree holder [credentialed teacher] into a revolutionary Social Change Agent whether that [teacher] understands that agenda or not. You can be a Tea Partier with the American flag emblem proudly affixed to the back of your pick-up truck, but if your classroom is based on activity theory or reader response or learning tasks, the students will be affected whatever your personal wishes or intentions. [6]
Anita Hoge, a powerful watchman-on-the-wall who monitors the Education Establishments’ numerous attempts over the past 30 years to conduct psychological testing and conditioning of students without parental consent, states:
Schools in the United States have been used in experimental research in the area of the affective domain including the spiritual aspect of a child’s being, the heart. The teaching method is called the “whole child.” This has been the area where values, attitudes, beliefs, and dispositions have been the focus for behavioral conditioning and value change. United States citizens must have their individualist qualities, their freedom-loving values, and their individualistic competitive personalities changed. Change in America is a must to conform the U.S. into a socialistic country, including globalcompromise. Americans must become global citizens. [7]
In 2006, journalist John Leo wrote:
NCATE [National Council for Accreditation of Teachers Education] vehemently denies that it is imposing groupthink, but the [teacher’s colleges], essentially a liberal monoculture, use dispositions theory to require support for diversity and a culturally left [cultural Marxist] agenda, including opposition to what the schools sometimes call “institutional racism, classism, and heterosexism.” [8]
In 1970, an editorial in NEA’s Today’s Education stated,
“The change-agent teacher… is part of an association of colleagues in his local schools system, in his state and across the country that makes up an interlocking system of change-agent organizations. This kind of system is necessary because changing our society through the evolutionary educational process requires simultaneous action on three power levels.” [9]
What educators call critical thinking or higher-order thinking skills is actually an application of the cultural Marxist Critical Theory, a form of deconstruction used to criticize the traditional social order. The Hegelian Dialectic (a.k.a. Delphi Technique) consensus-building process shuns absolute truth and relies on feelings, opinions, and compromise. This inculcates moral relativism, which also builds collectivist habits by destroying individualism and personal responsibility. Another outcome is to foster the democratic process applicable for all situations that end up deconstructing the parents’ and supervisor’s superior-subordinate authority by changing the relationship to an equalized democracy between superior and subordinate.
The highly influential education theorist, psychologist, and cultural Marxist Benjamin Bloom wrote:
…a student attains ‘higher order thinking’ when he no longer believes in right or wrong. A large part of what we call good teaching is a teacher´s ability to obtain affective objectives by challenging the student’s fixed beliefs. …a large part of what we call teaching is that the teacher should be able to use education to reorganize a child’s thoughts, attitudes, and feelings. [10]
Likewise, in 1968, Warren Bennis and Philip Slater wrote in The Temporary Society:
One cannot permit submission to parental authority if one wishes to bring about profound social change….In order to effect rapid changes, any such centralized regime must mount a vigorous attack on the family lest the traditions of present generations be preserved. It is necessary, in other words, artificially to create an experiential chasm between parents and children to insulate the latter in order that they can more easily be indoctrinated with new ideas. The desire may be to cause an even more total submission to the state, but if one wishes to mold children in order to achieve some future goal, one must begin to view them as superior, inasmuch as they are closer to this future goal. One must also study their needs with care in order to achieve this difficult preparation for the future. One must teach them not to respect their tradition-bound elders, who are tied to the past and know only what is irrelevant. [11]
Brock Chisholm (1959 Humanist of the Year) was at one time head of the World Health Organization, and in the February 1946 issue of PSYCHIATRY he wrote,
To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family tradition, national patriotism, and religious dogmas….We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests….The reinterpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong, which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for faith in the certainties of old people, these are the belated objectives…for charting the changes in human behavior. [12]
It is the conscience that is the target for this indoctrination. That area of conscience is known as the affective domain. That is the domain Chisholm, Bloom, Bennis, and Slater are aiming at with their higher order thinking skills.
Another method of changing a student’s conscience without him or his parents being made aware is through BF Skinner’s Operant Conditioning process, designed into computer-based instruction known as Integrated Learning System. This is a one-on-one system between the student and an Education Establishment corporation using a tablet and the Internet. In certain instances, neither the parent nor the teacher has access to the student’s material. This process is now expanding into the most invasive program yet, known as Social Emotional Learning. [13] [14]
This is one of the most insidious aspects of our government-controlled education system, with credentialed teachers as change agents: the war on the individual’s conscience, a stealth invasion of our inalienable rights of property. Founding Father James Madison summed this up best in his “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments (1785):”
The religion, then, of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature, an unalienable right. It is unalienable because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds, cannot follow the dictates of other men: It is unalienable also, because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator. [15]
And Gerald R. Thompson of the LONANG Institute states:
We must take care not to force an interpretation which puts anyone in the position of violating either their own conscience, or the conscience of another. If the conscience is truly sacred, then the last thing God would ever call anyone to do is to violate anyone’s conscience, including their own. [16]
Recall that the goal of the Hegelian Dialectic is to abandon absolute truth, adopt moral relativism, and reach consensus through compromise. Does this not require each participant to compromise their incoming conscience of values, beliefs and attitudes to play by the dialectic rules for consensus? You bet it does.
The decision to run and serve on a school board is a very profound decision with many personal and public implications. However, one must understand that the local school board will have minimal impact on the students’ worldview outcomes as the curricula and teaching methods are too entrenched in cultural Marxism. Nevertheless, the local school board can affect some policies and be a watchman on the wall for parents and taxpayers.
[1] I have conflated the cultural Marxist pedagogy [teaching approach] techniques into the term Dialectic method. Besides the Hegelian dialectic process there is BF Skinner’s Operant Conditioning, Social-Emotional Learning, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Dewey’s corroboration and inquiry, etc
[2] https://face.net/why-the-principle-approach/
[3] https://www.nehemiahinstitute.com/index.php
[4] Trewhella, Matt, The Destructive Influence of Pietism in American Society http://www.mercyseat.net/pdfs/destructivepietism.pdf
[5] French, David, “Re: Where Academic Bias Really Is,” National Review, May 4, 2006 https://www.nationalreview.com/phi-beta-cons/re-where-academic-bias-really-david-french/
[6] Eubanks, Robin (2013-10-12). Credentialed to Destroy: How and Why Education Became a Weapon (p. 214).
[7] Hoge, Anita, “A Wake-Up Call For Every Family and Church In The United States,” Newswithviews, http://newswithviews.com/a-wake-up-call-for-every-family-and-church-in-the-united-stares/, (May 28, 2019)
[8] Leo, J. (2005, October 24). Class(room) Warriors. U.S. News and World Report. Retrieved 11/13/06 from http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/articles/051024/24john.htm
[9] The Socialist Vision and Global Connections of the NEA, http://www.crossroad.to/Excerpts/chronologies/nea.htm
[10] Gotcher, “Benjamin Bloom and his Taxonomies (“modernized” by Marzano and Webb) compared to Karl Marx”
[11] https://sagaciousnewsnetwork.com/humanity-under-attack-the-tactics-of-social-engineering/
[12] Ibid
[13] This is a mind control, obedience training, and brainwashing operation that the globalists …began implementing it at full speed in 2016. This is about the psychological culling of the population to bring everyone into the 2030 Agenda … that is tracked, controlled, and being scored, and it’s all being disguised as a PreK-12 school “embedded” program that includes the parents’ involvement …all under the new “global citizenship,” including adults. Even more disturbing is a second agenda that integrates with this one, based in their version of “spirituality” in an attempt to bring a whole new belief system drenched in dark practices and disguised as love and acceptance of all religions.
[14] https://rumble.com/vvo3si-social-emotional-learning-public-school-exit-rhonda-thomas.html
[15] https://www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/memorial-and-remonstrance-against-religious-assessments.html
[16] Thompson, Gerald R., “Self-Government, Conscience & True Liberty: The Law of Conscience,” https://lonang.com/commentaries/foundation/self-government-law-of-conscience/