UNESCO: A Global School Board
William Norman Grigg | The New American
January 23, 1995
It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the state with money and equipment.... When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in control of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen ....
-- Humanist philosopher
(and UNESCO adviser)
Bertrand Russell
This October, if the Clinton Administration has its way, the United States may rejoin the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which the U.S. left in 1984. UNESCO had never been a popular organization in this country, and various UNESCO-related educational initiatives in the 1950s and '60s had shattered upon the adamantine resistance of the American public. Furthermore, by the time of Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, American public opinion had turned decisively against the UN and all of its works. Something had to be sacrificed to placate the electorate, and UNESCO was chosen as the organizational scapegoat.
Under the leadership of Director-General Amadou Mahtar M'Bow of Senegal, the stench of socialism emanating from UNESCO became unbearable. One British commentator described M'Bow's UNESCO as a "Third World kleptocracy": The body swilled enormous amounts of money -- one-quarter of which was taken from American taxpayers -- to fund M'Bow's opulent lifestyle and to underwrite an incessant stream of anti-American and anti-Western rhetoric. Under M'Bow, the body devoted itself to advancing a "New World Economic Order" which would radically redistribute wealth from the prosperous "North" to the undeveloped "South." However, the final outrage for most Americans came when the organization announced a "New World Information Order" which would require all journalists to be licensed -- presumably by a global body -- in order to report on world affairs. This proposal decisively alienated the "mainstream" press, which was uncharacteristically quiet when the Reagan Administration announced the U.S. withdrawal.
Speaking at a December 1983 press conference about UNESCO, State Department spokesman Alan Romberg declared that the body had "politicized virtually every subject it deals with," had displayed a "hostility toward basic institutions of a free society, especially a free market and a free press," and had "demonstrated unrestrained budgetary expansion." Notwithstanding all of this, however, the Reagan Administration made it perfectly clear that the withdrawal was temporary. Secretary of State George Shultz pledged undiminished support for the UN and stated that the 12-month notice was intended to give UNESCO "a potential opportunity to respond to the serious concerns that have caused our withdrawal." The clear implication was that UNESCO could use its time in the "penalty box" to rehabilitate its reputation and make it more palatable to a distracted public.
American Reentry
Apparently, the rehabilitation campaign is almost complete. In August 1993, a Clinton Administration task force under the direction of Assistant Secretary of State Douglas Bennet (CFR) recommended that the United States resume its dues-paying membership in UNESCO in October of 1995. This followed the introduction of a House resolution by Representative Esteban Torres (D-CA), a former ambassador to UNESCO, which urged American re-entry into the body.
Last fall, the New York Times editorialized that the Reagan Administration's decision to withdraw from UNESCO until at least 1995 made "political as well as fiscal sense." Of course, as long as America was coughing up one-quarter of the annual bill for a third-world kleptocracy, the political opposition to UNESCO was intense. However, the Times assured us, UNESCO Director-General Frederico Mayor "has cut the payroll and generally returned UNESCO to its original mission as a promoter of literacy, a protector of cultural monuments and a champion of a freer flow of education."
As is usually the case, the Times presented the public with only half the truth -- the wrong half, as it happens. UNESCO is indeed ready to resume its "original mission"; however, that mission was better illustrated by M'Bow's socialist evangelism than by Mayor's tactical retrenchment. Simply put, UNESCO was designed to function as both the school board and the propaganda ministry of the new world order. This was candidly conceded in a pro-UNESCO editorial published in The Saturday Review in 1952:
If UNESCO is attacked on the grounds that it is helping to prepare the world's peoples for world government, then it is an error to burst forth with apologetic statements and denials. Let us face it: the job of UNESCO is to help create and promote the elements of world citizenship. When faced with such a "charge," let us by all means affirm it from the housetops.
Founded in Paris in November 1946, UNESCO was both a continuation and an expansion upon the Paris-based International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, which was affiliated with the League of Nations. In their 1951 work, UNESCO: Purpose, Progress, Prospects, former UNESCO officials Walter H.C. Laves and Charles A. Thompson identify another interesting ancestor of the UN organization: The Soviet All Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, or the "Voks." Founded in 1925, the Voks professed a desire to bring about "the world union of intellectual forces for the triumph of genuine world culture" and sought to inspire intellectuals to "fight the war danger [and] agitate for peace" -- themes which would resonate with UNESCO's self-assigned mandate.
The National Education Association (NEA) was also among the earliest advocates of a global school board, and in 1920 the NEA created an International Relations Committee for the purpose of facilitating education for "world understanding." The campaign for a world "bureau of education" began in earnest in 1943, with the creation of an NEA "war and peace fund" which collected donations for such a body. Across the Atlantic a similar campaign was being undertaken in London under the direction of the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education (CAME). A formal proposal to create a United Nations Bureau of Education was considered at the Ninth Meeting of CAME, which was held in London in April 1944. The U.S. sent a high-profile delegation to the event, which produced a draft for an interim UN educational organization.
Global Re-education
Even in its embryonic state, UNESCO was devoted to radical social engineering. Laves and Thompson note, "The delegates at [the preparatory conference in] London called for better education to fashion better men for a new life in a democratic society." The Yugoslav delegate to the meeting candidly urged the embryonic body to embark on a campaign to re-educate the world's population. Of course, the objective of re-education for the creation of a new man found a ready-made constituency among Marxists. Former communist Joseph Z. Kornfeder later explained that "UNESCO corresponds to the agitation and propaganda department in the Communist Party. This department handles the strategy and method of getting at the public mind, young and old."
Founding UNESCO Director-General Julian Huxley angered some American officials by appointing communists and communist sympathizers in key posts. For example, the chief of the Soviet Ministry of Education served as an early director of UNESCO's secondary education department. But such gestures were to be expected from the propaganda arm of an organization which numbered among its architects such American communist quislings as Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. In 1956, the Senate Judiciary Committee concluded that "by far the worst danger spot, from the standpoint of disloyalty and subversive activity among Americans employed by international organizations, is UNESCO...." The report recalled that Piere Gerety, a former chairman of the International Organizations Employees Loyalty Board, had testified that "there existed in UNESCO a clique of people who placed the interests of the Communists and Communist ideology ... above their own country."
Such is the background of the entity which presumes to act as the world's intellectual vanguard. According to Julian Huxley, "The world today is in the process of becoming one, and... UNESCO must help in the speedy and satisfactory realization of this process...." Huxley defined the body's governing philosophy as "a scientific world humanism, global in extent and evolutionary in background." Huxley declared that "political unification in some sort of world government will be necessary for the definitive attainment" of the next stage in "human evolutionary progress."
Furthermore, according to Huxley UNESCO would assist in the process of "values clarification" on a global level. Because none of the religious traditions was adequate to the needs of a world government, a new world morality would have to be summoned into existence, and it would be UNESCO's task to do the summoning: "It will be one of the major tasks of the philosophy division of UNESCO to stimulate ... the quest for a restatement of morality that shall be in harmony with modern knowledge and adapted to the fresh functions imposed on ethics by the world of today." Instilling this new world morality in schoolchildren would be UNESCO's most important task.
Molding "World Citizens"
The preamble to the UN convention on "Children's Rights" demands that children be "brought up in the ideals proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations." The most substantial obstacle to this objective consists of parents who choose to raise their children to appreciate and defend biblical morality and America's institutions of constitutional government. Thus, it is not surprising that the thrust of the "educational" efforts undertaken by UNESCO and its supporting elites has been to usurp parental prerogatives regarding education in order to mold children into "world citizens."
Parents who are beguiled by the winsome idealism expressed in some portions of the UN's founding documents -- the UN Charter and the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" -- should acquaint themselves with the world body's perspective on the origins and purposes of "human rights." Under the American concept, the individual possesses God-given rights which the state must protect. However, the UN embraces a collectivist worldview in which "rights" are highly conditional concessions made by an all-powerful government: Individuals enjoy the "freedom" to serve the purposes established by the almighty state, and their "rights" are therefore granted or rescinded at the whim of the ruling elite.
In 1951, while the language of the Universal Declaration was fresh and the UN's prestige was at its zenith, a telling exposition of the UN's concept of "rights" was presented by Lin Mousheng, who was then the secretary of the UN Commission on Human Rights. According to Mousheng, "The procedural, cultural, and political rights on the one hand, and the economic, social, and educational rights on the other, were to a large extent developed under the inspiration of the liberal movement of the eighteenth century and the socialist and communist movement of the nineteenth century respectively .... [This] represents a new synthesis of human thought and may well be the harbinger of a new epoch in human evolution."
The "liberal movement" referred to by Mousheng is best embodied by the militant secularism which created the French Revolution, not the biblically inspired movement which led to American independence and the creation of the U.S. Constitution. The "liberals" of that era sought not only dis-establishment of established churches, but aggressively sought to de-Christianize entire societies in order to make room for a new secular religion of the state. The desired result was not a morally accountable individual who could live as a free man, but rather a deracinated political subject whose actions and beliefs were to be regimented according to the "general will" as it was interpreted by an omnipotent government.
The UN's debt to the doctrine of the "general will" is recognized by Mousheng in his interpretation of Article 29 of the UN Declaration: "Article 29 has two ideas: On the one hand, everyone has 'duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.' On the other hand, the community may impose such limitations on the exercise of rights and freedoms 'as are determined by law....'" In other words, from the UN's point of view, the individual is "free" to do exactly as he is told to do by the "community's" rulers. This concept of "citizenship" is, in a specific sense, anti-American -- and it is this perspective which is promoted by UNESCO and its allies.
In order to bring about the "new synthesis of human thought" referred to by Mousheng, it would be necessary to expunge "improper" attitudes among would-be world citizens. Accordingly, one of the early concerns of the UNESCO network was to conduct an "educational offensive" against nationalist and traditionalist attitudes.
In 1948, UNESCO produced a ten-volume series of pamphlets entitled Toward International Understanding, which was designed to help educators foster a sense of "world citizenship" within schoolchildren. (During the same year the NEA published a similar guide entitled Education for International Understanding in American Schools.) In the first pamphlet of the series, UNESCO recommended that schools seek to develop in students "an attitude of mind favorable to international understanding, which will make them conscious of the ties which unite the people of the world, and ready to accept the obligations which an interdependent world imposes" (emphasis added). To that end, history, geography, cultural studies, and related subjects were to be taught with a specific objective: "... to stress the interdependence of the modern world, the development of international cooperation and the need for a world community...."
But UNESCO was not content merely with the manipulation of the cognitive aspects of conventional education. Director-General Huxley urged the organization to exploit "affective" -feeling-based -- avenues to "regulate" schoolchildren. He maintained that such an approach was necessary in order to cure the "repression" associated with traditional concepts of guilt and sin, thus "emancipating" the individual from outmoded moral attitudes. Wrote Huxley:
One other item which UNESCO should put on its program as soon as possible is the study of the application of psycho-analysis and other schools of "deep" psychology to education .... If we could discover some means of regulating the process of repression and its effects, we should without doubt be able to make the world both happier and more efficient.
In an ironic echo of Brave New World -- a cautionary tale written by his brother Aldous -- Director-General Huxley insisted that the application of psychological methods to schoolchildren "would mean an extension of education backwards from the nursery school to the nursery itself" (emphasis added). Although this element of UNESCO's program has yet to be implemented worldwide, it has seen use in totalitarian countries such as Communist China and Romania. Furthermore, psychological intervention of a less expansive variety has been openly advocated by UNESCO in the war against patriotism.
Nationalist "Contamination"
UNESCO's Eleventh International Conference on Public Education, which was held in Geneva from June 28 to July 2, 1948, concluded that "one of the chief aims of education today should be the preparation of children and adolescents to participate consciously and actively in the building up of a world society" and that "this preparation should include not only the acquisition of skills, but more particularly the formation and the development of psychological attitudes favorable to the construction, maintenance and advancement of a united world..." (emphasis added).
That conference created 12 recommendations for globally oriented public education, which were submitted to "the Ministries of Education of the various countries." One recommendation was that "the educational authorities of different countries exchange views and information on the nature and results of this teaching in order to make the best use of their experience...." One result of that "exchange of views" was Volume Five of the 1948 UNESCO series, which was entitled "In the Classroom with children under thirteen years of age." The booklet, which was produced during a month-long UNESCO seminar held in Podebrady, Czechoslovakia in 1948, was primarily targeted at attitudinal "problems" which impede "worldmindedness."
The UNESCO panel declared, "Before the child enters school his mind has already been profoundly marked, and often injuriously, by earlier influences" -- specifically, by insufficiently "worldminded" parents. Parents are criticized in the report for "infecting" their children with "nationalism," "chauvinism," and "sclerosis of the mind." To overcome these supposed handicaps, UNESCO recommended that "whether in the home, the social environment or the school, our children should be educated ... to prepare themselves for citizenship in a world society." Of course, this will require early and persistent efforts to "correct many of the errors of home training," which may "cultivate attitudes running directly counter to the development of international understanding."
The "experts" summarized their indictment in these terms: "As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can produce only precarious results." Dangling from this brazen declaration was a tacit endorsement of Huxley's statement that "global education" will eventually have to begin in "the nursery itself."
Curing "Improper" Attitudes
Among the key American institutions used to transmit the UNESCO party line to the educational establishment was the teachers' college at Colombia University, whose leading lights included humanist John Dewey and sundry Fabian socialists. Writing in a pro-UNESCO compilation shortly after the organization was founded, Otto Klinberg, a professor of psychology at Colombia, sketched out a set of recommendations for a campaign for the "symptomatic treatment of attitudes" which impeded world unity. According to Klinberg, "An attack should be made on the social and environmental conditions which support hostility [to] international understanding" (as embodied in the UN) and "the deeper psychological components and motives related to attitude formation must not be neglected .... "In short, mass psychoanalysis of the American public would be a necessary prelude to world government.
In 1950, a group of social scientists led by Marxist Theodor Adorno published a study entitled The Authoritarian Personality. As summarized by the late social commentator Christopher Lasch, the approach taken by the Adorno report dictated that America's social problems "could be eradicated only by subjecting the American people to what amounted to collective psychotherapy -- by treating them as inmates of an insane asylum." This assumption was enlarged upon by social scientist Daniel Bell in his 1955 work The New American Right (which was re-issued in 1963 as The Radical Right). Citing Adorno's "enlightening" study, Bell traduced conservatives as psychologically disturbed individuals whose conservative views were merely camouflage for "a rather profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways...." One token of this mental dysfunction, according to an essay in Bell's compilation, was "the incredibly bitter feeling against the United Nations."
In short, those who opposed the UN, or who were "excessively" concerned about the advance of domestic socialism, weren't merely misguided; they were sick and could be "cured" only through state intervention. The increasingly "therapeutic" nature of American education is, to a significant extent, a reflection of the UNESCO agenda.
The prevalence of sex education in America's government school monopoly is another little-recognized effect of UNESCO's influence. Julian Huxley instructed UNESCO to deploy the techniques of psychoanalysis to fight "repression" -- a term generally used in the context of sexual behavior. The campaign to free children from the "repressive" mores of their parents is arguably the most effective means of subverting the home.
In 1964, UNESCO sponsored an International Symposium on Health Education, Sex Education and Education for Home and Family Living in Hamburg, Germany. That conference produced a set of "findings" which have since entered the common parlance of sex education. For instance, delegates were told that "children learn about sex elsewhere, rarely in the home," that formal sex education is made necessary by the fact that "sex is emphasized commercially in the mass media," that "sex education should begin at an early age," and so on. The educators who attended the conference were introduced to various methods of affective instruction, including "discussion techniques, role-playing, psycho- and socio-drama...."
Most importantly, the conference attendees endorsed a template for universal sex education which had been presented by two Swedish delegates. In addition to explicit discussions of sexual practices and anatomy, the UNESCO model sex education program dealt with abortion, birth control, and the practice of "sexual deviations" -- all of which were banned in most American states at the time of the conference.
The SIECUS Connection
Three months after the UNESCO conference, the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) was chartered. Within a very short time, SIECUS became the country's most influential sex education "clearinghouse," providing materials for hundreds of school districts throughout the United States. As author Claire Chambers observes in her book The SIECUS Circle, "the SIECUS program of sex education [was] a carbon copy of the Swedish program, as adopted by UNESCO." In her exhaustively documented study of the SIECUS network, Chambers observed that "the SIECUS orbit ... expanded to envelop publishing houses, film producers, governmental and private agencies, foundations, medical societies, educational institutions, and religious bodies."
In its quest to normalize perversion, SIECUS has even attacked the "incest taboo." In 1979, the organization published a "scholarly" report by Paul Ramey which urged Americans to revise their moral attitudes regarding incest. The report also distinguished between "positive" or "consensual" incest and "abusive" incest. (This could be considered another Swedish import: The socialist Swedish government legalized father-daughter incest as a means of "democratizing" the family.) Despite the predictable negative public reaction, SIECUS refused to abandon its pro-incest initiative; in fact, it expanded the crusade to include other forms of child molestation.
During a 1985 conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex (a SIECUS front), Dr. Mary Calderone, a founding member of SIECUS, participated in a panel discussion on child sex abuse. Some of the participants were probably startled when Calderone contributed a kind word for pedophilia: "I have a question that is almost the reverse of what we've been talking about. What do we know about situations in which young children and older people have had a sexual relationship of one kind or another that has been pleasant, and the child feels good about it because it's warm and seductive and tender?... If the child really enjoys this, it may be the only time the child ever gets a loving touch."
Significantly, SIECUS' pro-incest campaign began at roughly the same time that concern over child abuse became a national obsession. Most states require the same public schools which dispense SIECUS-inspired sex education to report suspicions of child abuse to law enforcement agencies. The 1992 SIECUS publications catalog listed Ramey's 1979 pro-incest paper, which was surrounded by newer offerings dealing with sex abuse prevention. Furthermore, the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, which follows the SIECUS approach on most sexual matters, has been active in the effort to combat "sexual harassment" in schools -- an epidemic of which is the predictable result of adolescent exposure to SIECUS-derived "educational" pornography.
Wherever it has had a substantial impact, the effect of the SIECUS sex ethic is to leave parents and children morally perplexed and dependent upon the ministrations of "experts." The increasing acceptance of that ethic can be seen in contemporary America -- a society in which parents cannot govern their homes without government-approved instruction in "parenting skills" and professional individuals cannot negotiate the business world without receiving instruction in the latest doctrinal revision regarding "sexual harassment." In short, a society of a sort favorable to UNESCO's first constituency -- government.
For most people, the most recognizable attribute of tyranny is a government's ability to compel its subjects to perform unremunerated labor -- that is, slavery. For this reason it should be of great concern to Americans that an increasing number of school districts are enacting mandatory "community service" requirements for high school graduation. Although the programs vary, they all require unpaid "service" as a means of teaching students about their "community responsibilities" -- that is, their supposed debt to the state.
No subject has been dearer to the heart of President Bill Clinton than his National Service program, which includes the "AmeriCorps," the Corporation for National and Community Service, Volunteers In Service to America (VISA), and the Civilian Conservation Corps. The Corporation for Community and Public Service, which coordinates "community service" projects, is an extension of an initiative that began as the Commission for Community and National Service during the Administration of Republican George Bush. However, UNESCO was an early and enthusiastic sponsor of "community service" at the international level.
In 1951, David S. Richie, the executive secretary of the Friends Social Order Committee, wrote an essay describing the history of the "volunteer labor camp movement." Initiated during WWI as an alternative to compulsory military service, the concept migrated to America during FDR's New Deal, where it became a showcase of egalitarian social engineering. According to Richie, the New Deal mass-labor programs were the inspiration for similar UNESCO-related efforts involving youth. He explained that the work camps were "primarily directed toward socializing the attitudes of participants, awakening in them ... a deep devotion to the struggle for social justice by nonviolent means."
In 1946, American and European work camp activists began to consolidate their efforts. The next year, recorded Richie, "The leadership of UNESCO recognized the potential contribution of international work camps to reconstruction and education for international understanding and offered their assistance with educational aids and joint sponsorship." In 1948, UNESCO convened an international work camp conference which included representatives of the "World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY)," a communist organization which helped coordinate "large camps for tens of thousands of young people in the eastern European countries." At that conference UNESCO established an international work camp Coordinating Committee which, until 1950, included WFDY representatives.
Service or Slave Labor?
Although UNESCO was strongly supportive of the international youth labor camp concept, the idea failed to take root in the United States and Western Europe. This fact was not lost on Richie, who lamented the curious lack of enthusiasm among American youth for manual labor as a means of "socializing attitudes," noting that "in certain Eastern European countries, governments have enrolled hundreds of thousands of volunteers ready to work without pay on projects financed by the government." Ah, if only the United States were more like Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe! The Clinton Administration's desire to enroll hundreds of thousands of youth in nationally directed national service suggests that the cultural convergence longed for by Richie is nigh upon us -- and, significantly, the UN appears to be ready to undertake new initiatives in "community service" at the global level.
On March 6-12, 1995, the UN will hold the "World Summit for Social Development" in Copenhagen, Denmark. According to that event's prospectus, one proposal to be discussed regarding the "mobilization of human resources" in the interest of creating global "solidarity" is a service program for youth: "A Youth Voluntary Service to the community at the world level should be considered to instill in young people a sense of service to the community [and to] create a sense of solidarity at the world level." Some UNESCO-allied groups have already inaugurated global "community service" projects. One example is Global Routes, a "non-profit corporation that provides international community service opportunities to high school and college students." A related program called the Global Service Corps offers adults "an encounter with one's own responsibilities of global citizenship."
A revival of the "international labor camp" program would take on a rather frightening aspect, should UNESCO and its comrades succeed in defining manual labor as a responsibility of global citizenship. It should be remembered that the most active supporters of the Clinton Administration's National Service program would make "voluntarism" mandatory by law. If present trends continue, it is not inconceivable that in the near future some American students may confront a UNESCO-inspired "global service" graduation requirement.
Notwithstanding its occasional setbacks, UNESCO has never relented in its efforts to become the school board to the world, nor have its American allies ceased to promote educational schemes designed to teach schoolchildren their "obligations as world citizens." The most recent amalgam of the various elements of the UNESCO agenda -- "affective" learning, indoctrination in collectivism, "service" learning, and the like -- can be found in the various outcome-based education (OBE) programs which afflict school districts nationwide.
"Transformational" OBE programs lock an individual student into a computer-driven behavioral loop which seeks to "remediate" improper attitudes in pursuit of approved "outcomes." Accordingly, the kinship between the OBE design and the "transformational" pedagogy supported by UNESCO is patent. Like the comprehensive approach envisioned by Toward International Understanding, OBE seeks to uproot traditional attitudes which impede political consolidation -- first at the national level, and then eventually at the global level. OBE is the latest bid to realize Bertrand Russell's vision: A completely socialized education system which will "catch the patient young" and use "money and equipment" provided by the state to create a passive, controlled population.
Shaped by "Experts"
OBE is the descendant of the disastrous "mastery learning" approach, a pilot program of which the Continuous Progress-Mastery Learning (CP-ML) project utterly destroyed the Chicago public school system in the late 1970s. According to educator James T. Guines, who helped design the Chicago program, the CP-ML approach was based on the behaviorist approach favored by psychologist B.F. Skinner. Like Bertrand Russell, Skinner believed that the human behavior could be shaped by "experts" in much the same way that "a sculptor shapes a lump of clay."
An appreciation of Skinner's essential philosophy can be obtained through a perusal of his 1971 book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which was financed by a federal grant through the National Institutes of Mental Health. Skinner asserted that "we need to make vast changes in human behavior" and specified, "What is needed is a technology of behavior" which will permit ruling elites to address problems such as "overpopulation," environmental destruction, war, and so on. According to Skinner, "Freedom and dignity illustrate the difficulty. They are the possessions of the autonomous man of traditional theory, and they are essential to practices in which a person is held responsible for his conduct and given credit for his achievements. A scientific analysis shifts both the responsibility and the achievement to the environment." In other words, it would be necessary to deprive humanity of freedom and dignity in order to bring about the triumph of the "scientific world humanism" sought by UNESCO's Julian Huxley.
Through the "scientific design" of culture, according to Skinner, human evolution could be advanced and human survival insured. Of course, this would provoke opposition from traditionalists: "A technology of behavior is available ... but defenders of freedom oppose its use. The opposition may raise certain questions concerning 'values.' Who is to decide what is good for man? How will a more effective technology be used? By whom and to what end?" Skinner proposed that a "true 'fourth estate,' composed of scientists, scholars, teachers, and the media," would be a reliable custodian of the social "controllers" -- thus insuring that "change agents" would be monitored by an elite which shares their radical ambitions. This arrangement is dreadfully familiar to those parents who have opposed Skinnerian OBE schemes.
James Guines, the Skinnerian disciple who helped design Chicago's proto-OBE program, explained its guiding philosophy to the Washington Post: "If you can train a pigeon to fly up there and press a button and set off a bomb [as Skinner had done during WWII], why can't you teach human beings to behave in an effective and rational way? We know we can modify human behavior. We're not scared of that. This is the biggest thing that's happening in education today."
OBE would be an extraordinary threat to American liberty if it were a purely domestic endeavor. However, the program is an American branch of a worldwide initiative intended to bring about the consummation of UNESCO's original mission: The creation of a world government which "will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen."
In March 1990, UNESCO co-sponsored the World Conference on Education for All at Jomtien, Thailand. That conference, which attracted representatives from more than 150 nations, created two documents: The World Declaration on Education for All, and The Framework for Action to Meet Basic Learning Needs. The Framework lists six goal areas that intimately parallel the Goals 2000 legislation enacted by Congress and signed by President Clinton in the spring of 1994.
The Jomtien conference produced the World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA), the American branch of which is United States Coalition for Education For All (USCEFA), an organization whose sponsors include the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. USCEFA defines its mission as "taking this worldwide consensus [created at Jomtien] and bridging between the initiatives for reform in other countries and the goals for education reform in the United States" -- in short, its mission is one of "bringing Jomtien home."
The Coalition held its first national conference in Alexandria, Virginia on October 30, 1991, an event which attracted nearly 300 "leaders in education, business, and media from over 28 countries." Out of the Alexandria meeting came a conference report entitled "Learning for All: Bridging Domestic and International Education."
The "Learning for All" report states, "Schools are at the center of the current social and economic transformation"; accordingly, they are given the task of imparting to school children "higher order skills such as creativity, critical analysis, [and] global thinking..." (emphasis added). The document illustrates the kinship between America's national education goals and UNESCO's global proposals in this passage: "The need to define readiness for schooling is especially critical, since it is the cornerstone of the goals of both the America 2000 [now called Goals 2000] and Education For All Declarations."
UNESCO and its allies are confident that a decade in exile has expunged the organization's taint. Now that "communism is dead," and America's emerging nationalized education system is being rapidly "harmonized" with UNESCO's EFA guidelines, we can expect a renewed, expanded, and intensified campaign to make the public school monopoly an indoctrination appendage of UNESCO, designed to create "world citizens" who will submit to the state of their own free will and earnestly love Big Brother.