Fabian Permeation and Capture of the NEA: The People, Processes and Purpose
By Dr. Mary Byrne
Editor’s Note: The May and June issues of Education Reporter featured parts one and two of a series by Dr. Mary Byrne, Ed.D., on how the National Education Association (NEA) is molding the future of American education. The May article demonstrated that, before the NEA could succeed in this effort, it first had to be remolded itself. In June, we explored the history of the Progressive Education Association (PEA). This month, Education Reporter publishes part three, the final portion of this fascinating exposé.
When Teachers College, Columbia University’s George Counts approached the National Education Association (NEA) with his social reconstructionist ideas, the NEA had already been primed for transforming the role of schools from education to preparation as social change agents. In 1913, the NEA published bulletin 41 that proposed to redefine the duties of citizenship. An excerpt of bulletin 41 as cited in the Reece Committee report follows:
- High school teachers of social studies have the best opportunity ever offered to any social group to improve the citizenship of the land. This sweeping claim is based upon the fact that the 1 million high school pupils is probably the largest group of persons in the world who can be directed to a serious and systematic effort, both through study and practice to acquire the social spirit.
- It is not so important that the pupil know how the President is elected or that he shall understand the duties of the health officer in his community. The time formerly spent in the effort to understand the process of passing a law under the President’s veto is now to be more preferably used in the observation of vocational resources of the community.
- The committee recommends that social studies in the high schol shall include community health, housing, homes, human rights versus property rights, impulsive action of mobs, the selfish conservatism of traditions and public utilities. (emphasis added) (p. 225)1
Thus, the NEA recommended the Fabian-Dewey agenda for high school curricula including the social studies of urban problems and socialism.
Two days after delivering his “Dare” speech to the PEA in 1932, Frontier Thinker George Counts (see April 2023 issue) approached the NEA with his ideas to build a new social order characterized by governmental economic planning and a national education system.2 The NEA had been primed for a national system of education since its organizing meeting in 1857. In July 1934, Dr. Willard Earl Givens, a graduate of Teachers College, Columbia University where as a self-identified socialist and chairman of the committee of the NEA Department of Superintendents, produced a statement entitled, “Education For the New America.”
Givens had gotten his Master’s degree at Teachers College, Columbia in 1915 and studied there until 1917. He took power at the NEA at a time when George Counts’ Marxist radicalism (1927-1955) was at its height. Givens, who had chaired the committee of the NEA’s Department of Superintendents, gave an address titled, “Education for the New America,” at the 1934 Proceedings of the 72nd Annual Meeting of the NEA. He announced that a dying ‘laissez-faire’ must be completely destroyed and all of us, including the ‘owners’, must be subjected to a large degree of social control. (p. 78)3 Shortly thereafter, Givens was made the NEA’s executive secretary and served in that capacity from 1935 to 1952, giving George Counts a contact in the alumni network.4
Why the radicalization of the NEA matters
Dr. Malcolm Skilbeck, a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Austrailia, completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of London where the Fabian Society’s London School of Economics is located.5, 6 Skilbeck’s 1972 thesis, Education and The Reconstruction Of Culture: A Critical Study Of Twentieth Century English and American Theories, provides an analysis of the influence Fabian Society co-founders Sidney and Beatrice Webb had on the social reconstruction agenda (experimentalism) of John Dewey and Harold Rugg for shaping a national common core curriculum in the United States, particularly with respect to Rugg’s development of his social studies textbook series.7, 8
Excerpts from his now 50-year-old dissertation expose the Fabian foundations of the United States’s Common Core State Standards and assessments developed in partnership with the London-based Pearson Publishing Company and incentivized for adoptions by States through the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top Grants.9, 10 Interestingly, Pearson gave the Obamas a joint $65 million book deal bigger than any previous presidential book deal in history — an unprecedented amount of money for a presidential memoir.11 The excerpts are below:
- Reconstructionist thinking is conspicuous in those modern nation-building enterprises which seek to direct schooling by broad social policy objectives. Throughout the twentieth century, in England and America, many educational thinkers have diagnosed a contemporary cultural crisis and proposed large-scale remedial treatment. These proposals have come most notably from Fabian socialists, scientific rationalists like [H.G.] Wells and [Bertrand] Russell, Dewey and other American experimentalists.... (p.2)
- ...Curriculum content and strategies for teaching and learning are a detailed complex of centrally important strategies for the reconstructionists. By contrast with classical humanists, much emphasis is given to a supposed need to re-define and to re-integrate traditional organizations of subject matter. Science, and particularly social science material, is given a predominant place, and various schemes of organization are proposed — most significantly the so-called social core curriculum, familiar as a more or less totally integrated programme of study which is organized around themes and issues of current social relevance and concern and grounded in a new set of social-moral values. (p. 56)
- Realization that through universal, public education a whole nation’s children may be influenced has led those reconstructionists in societies where the common school is a reality to propose measures for reaching and influencing whole populations. Of these measures the most notable is the common core curriculum. (p. 606)
- Sidney Webb, on one of the rare occasions when he was aroused to a passionate denunciation, criticized “class education” which condemned people to a servile role, and hinted at a curriculum that would unite the classes and eliminate vocational predestination. There is no contradiction between this ideal of social unity as reflected in a common core curriculum and a utilitarian approach to learning. (pp. 446-447)
- Thus the universal, public school was assigned the task of stabilizing change by forming an integrated, democratic character in the youth. The curriculum was to be the principal means to this end, and it was to serve a symbolic function, as exemplar of the new democratic order. Hence the distinctively moralistic tone of reconstructionist curriculum theorizing, the emphasis on a set of basic values, the prominence given to historical and social subject matter, and the recommendations concerning pupil participation and activity. (p. 607)
The NEA supported the effort to institutionalize the Common Core State Standards into American schools with information dissemination, tool kits, and a public relations campaign.12, 13, 14 Though it did not start out as a tool of the Fabian Society, it has, through its leadership and support of political candidates over the course of a century, consciously or unconsciously assumed the role of one its American allies.
Conclusion
Fabian Society co-founders, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, endorsed a “core curriculum design” where studies would extend into adult life in order to create a “world consciousness” — elements that characterize the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
The long-standing relationships among members of the British Fabian Society and the American financial elite, the American academic elite, and the American political elite (especially U.S. Presidents Clinton and Obama) provided a powerful network for designing and implementing a more than 50-year-old plan to capture American public education for the social reconstruction of the United States according to the globalist agenda of the British Fabian Society.
Phyllis Schlafly called out the NEA in 1997 for its desire to “Mold the Future” of American children according to the desires of a foreign agenda. If those in positions of power in this country, especially members of Congress and governors of states, had listened to her then, perhaps the United States could have reversed course and saved a generation of children from the propaganda and control of elites who have no respect for American children or our country.
If they choose to stay the course, parents will have to realize that their responsibility is to take the reins from foreigners and education experts, and to “Mold the Future” for their children and the world.
Footnotes:
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