Aldous Huxley on the Mike Wallace Show (5/18/58)

WALLACE: This is Aldous Huxley, a man haunted by a vision of hell on earth. A searing social critic, Mr. Huxley 27 years ago, wrote Brave New World, a novel that predicted that some day the entire world would live under a frightful dictatorship. Today Mr. Huxley says that his fictional world of horror is probably just around the corner for all of us. We’ll find out why, in a moment.

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Erica Carle - October 7, 2008

[...] In seeking to learn more about Bellamy and the influences that helped to shape his thoughts, I discovered that he had been profoundly affected by the writings of a man named Auguste Comte. Having never heard of Comte, I went to my 1910 Werner Encyclopædia (American edition of Britannica), and had my second unsettling experience.

Comte devoted his entire life to blueprinting a philosophical SYSTEM which could be used to sanction total control over all the people of the world for all time—eliminating and/or destroying all contrary philosophies and religions, particularly Christianity.

COMTE’S SYSTEM
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Gennady Stolyarov II

The dismal and declining student performance at America’s public schools is no accident. Nor is the pervasive bullying by peers and repression by teachers that the brightest, best-mannered, and most accomplished students encounter in public schools today. Both are the direct results of the educational philosophy promulgated by John Dewey (1859-1952), the originator of “Progressive” education and a self-proclaimed advocate of collectivism and opponent of teaching objective knowledge in the schools. Dewey’s ideas have largely shaped the ways in which today’s American public education system works—or, more accurately, does not work.

To call John Dewey a socialist is no exaggeration or derogatory epithet. It is the literal truth. Dewey read and greatly admired Edward Bellamy’s 1887 novel, Looking Backward, which described an egalitarian utopia in which private property was abolished and the capitalist system was a relic of the past. In the 1920s, Dewey wrote extensively in praise of the Soviet education system—so much that he was invited to visit the Soviet Union in 1928 and observe schools in the USSR. He based many of his recommendations for American education on the Soviet model.

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Berit Kjos - September 28, 2008

Obama: “I will ask for your service and your active citizenship when I am president of the United States … this will be a central cause of my presidency.”[1]

Obama: “People of all ages, stations, and skills will be asked to serve…. I will set a goal for all American middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year….”[2]

Saul Alinsky (Obama’s Marxist mentor): “The disruption of the present organization is the first step toward community organization…. All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new.”[3] Rules for Radicals (excerpts here)

Brave New World: “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned… to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.”[4] Aldous Huxley

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Jim Fedako - September 23, 2008

Let me be honest and forthright: I have an agenda – I always do.

You can be certain that I am typing with a purpose in mind. I am typing in order to satisfy a much sought-after end. My end – my reason – is the hope that this article will influence a few, turning them toward the path of liberty.

Are you shocked or offended that I have an agenda? Is it wrong – no, is it necessarily evil when a man has an agenda; when a man has a given end for which he will use some means to obtain? Certainly not. We all have agendas that guide our actions. And we accept the presence of our own personal agendas without question or concern.

When discussing the evils of government-run education, many folks say that I have a personal agenda. Well, no kidding. If I wake in the morning, I have an agenda. The rhetorical use of the word agenda in a pejorative sense implies that others do not have agendas – this being a false assertion. Those folks have at least one agenda that gets them out of bed in the morning: to continue forcing me to pay for their government school nonsense.

So why it is that many – nay, most Americans – take offense to the idea that public schools have an agenda? Why is it that folks who recognize their own agendas cannot recognize that the individuals running the school system have agendas too? Why can’t these folks accept that those who fought some 150 years ago for the adoption of government-run schools had an evil agenda? Or that many today use government schools for vile intentions? Why not? Yes, why not, indeed?

The reason is twofold: The first is that the prime end of government-run education is graduates who support the system. This is not some hidden agenda – it is right out in the open. This publicly lauded end is termed citizenship – and a good citizen always supports the so-called public good of government education. When the schools say that our goal is to educate citizens, you can be certain that they do not mean citizens who question the state or its bureaucracies and unions.

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Berit Kjos - September 2008

Obama’s “Universal” Service Plan  - Part 1

“These are serious times,” said Barack Obama recently. “And they call for a serious debate about where we need to take the nation.”
That’s true! So where does he want “to take our nation?” How does his version of “service” fit his vision of CHANGE? And what will it cost in terms of freedom, privacy, taxes, and government control?
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