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America is suffering from an educational crisis. In fact, it is so bad that even the leftist Center for American Progress, started by far-left-wing billionaire George Soros, acknowledges that “a large percentage of students land a high school diploma that is essentially meaningless. The document might indicate that the students are ready for college, but in reality, the students simply do not have the necessary skills or knowledge.”

If you are going to attack America’s foundations, the place to start, as all demagogues and dictators have discovered, is with the youth. The youth are malleable and easy to influence because their minds have yet to develop the critical thinking skills needed to discern truth from error. They are often emotionally, rather than intellectually, driven, and ripe for conversion to leftist causes. Every totalitarian regime, from the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany, has focused on recruiting the youth to achieve its aims.

As I write in my new book on the political and cultural fallout of the 1960s, it was the radical changes in American education that occurred during that decade that resulted in the youth carrying the water for leftists set on advancing their own agenda. These radical changes also led to the dumbing down of the American populace, which is no longer equipped with the skills to determine truth from error or to be contributing members of society.

But leftists, starting with John Dewey, a self-proclaimed humanist and “democratic socialist,” created our public education system with this exact outcome in mind. Since Dewey rejected Christianity and the existence of God, his new social order rejected moral absolutes and focused on creating a new collective morality to replace faith-based morality.

In a 1933 speech to the Teachers College at Columbia University, Dewey said learning should be de-emphasized and replaced with the creation of attitudes as a way of accomplishing social change. He would add in 1935, “Organized social planning … is now the sole method of social action by which liberalism can realize its professed aims.”

In his 1916 work, Democracy and Education, Dewey wrote that the education regime he hoped to implement would be “the process through which the needed transformation may be accomplished.” And before that, in 1898, Dewey stated in his work “The Primary-Education Fetish” that the educational system should no longer emphasize reading, writing, and arithmetic during the early part of a child’s education but instead should focus on socialization and collectivism.

Thus, Dewey and his followers saw education as a sociological tool for shaping individuals to fit into society in a certain way. Given this mindset, leftist activists saw public education as a venue to treat children more like test animals to experiment on rather than actual human beings.

While the efforts of these activists moved slowly — because of the common cultural understanding we held as a nation up until the 1960s — the radical changes of that decade enabled them to move hard left and hasten the transition from indoctrination to education.

School administrators fully trained in Dewey’s vision introduced new teaching methods for math, reading, and writing in the 1960s — discarding those that had worked quite well for the first half of the 20th century and replacing them with ones that used children as pawns to advance leftist agendas.

This focus on indoctrination rather than education has been tragic. Without a proper education, many are now trapped in generational poverty. For instance, according to the website ProLiteracy.org, more than 48 million adults in the United States cannot read above the third-grade level.

The National Bureau of Economic Research reports that children whose parents have low literacy rates have a 72 percent chance of being at the lowest reading levels themselves — resulting in poor grades, behavioral problems, repeating grades, and even dropping out of school.

Thus, we now have a populace with 48 million people with limited or nonexistent reading and writing skills, stuck in a death spiral of generational poverty as poorly educated Americans beget more poorly educated Americans, creating a society that is easily swayed to accept emotional rather than intellectual arguments.

The work of Dewey and subsequent leftists to transform American educational institutions into social laboratories instead of places of learning has impacted all aspects of our society. That is why we, as concerned Americans and parents, must take education back from radical leftists and return it to its original purpose — to train and equip future generations to flourish and thrive as individuals and citizens.

To do this, we must be involved in educational policy, starting at the local level. Leftists knew that real change happens at that level, and that is why they targeted the takeover of education in the late 1960s. This is not going to be easy because leftists will fight tooth and nail to preserve their control over America’s children.

But if we are to reverse this course, we must act before our nation hits the inevitable dead end ahead that will result from an illiterate and ill-equipped populace that is easily swayed to do the bidding of the left. That is why we must look back at the past to understand how we got to where we are so we can re-orient ourselves and get back on a path that provides hope rather than despair.

Timothy S. Goeglein is the author of Stumbling Toward Utopia: How the 1960s Turned into a National Nightmare and How We Can Revive the American Dream (Fidelis 2024).