The Merging of Education and Labor Must be Opposed

While many Americans find themselves enthralled with the Trump vs. the left charade, steadily fed to them as a distraction; a surreptitious, leftist agenda drives on.  While campaigning President Trump promised to eliminate the Department of Education, an over bloated government agency that works to brainwash our kids against our values more than anything else. Trump has stated that education should be governed at the local level and even tweeted his intent to get rid of common core. The promise to eliminate the Department of Education has been replaced with an initiative to merge it with the Department of Labor. While many people may initially see this as a good move, one that would effectively prepare students to enter the work force, they fail to realize that this is the fulfillment of a socialist agenda.

During the early 1900's, (Americas progressive era,) educators became convinced that the Soviet model of education was superior to America's. Instrumental players like John Dewey, who is considered by the left to be the father of modern education, worked to turn America's education system into one where students were trained to be socially acceptable members of a democratic society as opposed to free thinkers able to exercise their own free will. Schools were designed to create the ideal citizen as opposed to the next great inventor, or entrepreneur. Dewey believed that the school system was to take over the functions of old, crumbling institutions within a failing society. Institutions like the church and the family that once rooted children in a system of traditional values were replaced with a system that taught social, collective values. Dewey also believed a system that encouraged individual thought and free thinking would stand in the way of the ideal society, contributing to independence and individuality. In Democracy and Education, he wrote the following concerning his thoughts on individualism.

When the social quality of individualized mental operations is denied, it becomes a problem to find connections which will unite an individual with his fellows. Moral individualism is set up by the conscious separation of different centers of life.  It has its roots in the notion that the consciousness of each person is wholly private, a self-enclosed continent, intrinsically independent of the ideas, wishes, purposes of everybody else.

He also writes-

A being whose activities are associated with others has a social environment. What he does and what he can do depend upon the expectations, demands, approvals, and condemnations of others. A being connected with other beings cannot perform his own activities without taking the activities of others into account. For they are the indispensable conditions of the realization of his tendencies.

What he is saying in these two paragraphs is that a society based on individualism is detrimental to a social state where societal needs are bound together by common experiences of those sharing the same environment. By merging the Departments of Education and Labor, where a school to work pipeline would undoubtedly be created, Dewey’s vision of a collective social state is being fulfilled as people would be trained to fit the needs of society as opposed to being taught to think for themselves and make their own path.

America was founded as a nation where the individual was sovereign to government power and free to pursue their own ambitions. It is inevitable that the merging of these two over-bloated bureaucracies will lead to the impairment of the free-willed pursuit of happiness as the needs of society will unavoidably dictate which career choices a student can pursue. When a student is taught how to think they can adapt to changing environments and are able to tend to their own needs. Contrarily, when they are taught to do a job based on a system of competencies, as opposed to an ability to problem solve, it is all they know how to do. It is not uncommon for people to continually return the outcome based technical schooling programs to learn how to do a new job because the previous one they were trained in no longer exists, or they simply have not been trained well enough to do the job.   

Patriotism and religion are other aspects of individualism which must be undermined for a system like this to work.  In 1932, William Foster, national chairman of the Communist Party of the United States wrote the book Toward Soviet America, where he described his vision of American education, which is strikingly similar to what we see today as much of what he describes has been accomplished.

               "A U.S. Department of Education; implementation of a scientific materialist philosophy; studies revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology; students taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and general ethics of a new socialist society; present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy. The whole basis and organization of capitalist science will be revolutionized. Science will become materialistic, hence truly scientific. God will be banished from the laboratories as well as from the schools." (Foster, Toward Soviet America)

While Trump is calling for the merging of these two departments, his education secretary, Betsy Devos, is suggesting our education system be reformed to be more like Europe’s. That is the last thing America needs if we are to survive as a free republic as opposed to a social democracy. This initiative as well as the merging of two unneeded bureaucracies should be opposed by all freedom loving Americans. Unfortunately, much of this communist education system has been implemented years ago which is why Americans are so easily distracted by the mellow dramatics of a circus sideshow designed to keep them distracted from the fact that despite Trump winning the election, a leftist agenda slowly drives on.