Editor’s Note:
This month, special guest author, Dr. Mary Byrne, Ed.D., provides an in-depth look at Phyllis Schlafly’s seminal book, A Choice Not an Echo, adding insights she gleaned from her research, which she says “demonstrate how insightful and prophetic Phyllis was.” Dr. Byrne wrote the first three articles in this month’s issue, along with the book review in celebration of the 60th year since A Choice Not an Echo was first published on May 1, 1964.

The Rockefeller Plan for Federal Aid to Education
— No Real Choice

In the 1964 edition of A Choice Not An Echo, Phyllis Schlafly described her chance discovery of a 1957 meeting of what Phyllis called “kingmakers” at St. Simons Island. She exposed the Rockefeller political machine that U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) confronted when he announced his 1964 candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in the primary election against New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller.

Before Nelson’s youngest brother David — president of Chase Bank and the youngest grandson of John D. Rockefeller — launched his invitation-only “kingmaker” group (the Trilateral Commission), he was involved in steering America’s national political system to select the Republican party’s presidential nominee at this secret meeting. Also present was Henry Kissinger, a Harvard professor and director of a Special Studies Project for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The Rockefellers’ Fundamental
Transformation of American Education

The fundamental transformation of American education to serve a national workforce agenda began long before Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama announced on Oct. 30, 2008: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Almost immediately after the 2009 swearing in of Obama, the U.S. Department of Education introduced “college and career readiness” for all students as a national goal in its Race To The Top (RTTT) grant competition. RTTT provided grant money to selected states to transform their education systems by adopting a common set of standards and assessments aligned to those standards, which were already conveniently available through participation in the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI).

A Choice Not an Echo 2.0

In the updated 50th anniversary edition of Choice (published November 2014 and referred to in this article as Choice 2.0), former Texas Congressman Ron Paul wrote in the foreword that activists “will find a disturbing similarity between the Establishment’s treatment of grassroots conservatives in the 1950s and 1960s and its treatment of the liberty movement in 2008 and 2012” (p. xii). The updated Choice 2.0 gives extensive space to the “Rockefeller Machine” with particular attention to Senator Goldwater’s description of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission (TC). David Rockefeller organized the TC in 1972 at the Rockefeller family’s estate in Tarrytown, NY nearly a decade after Phyllis originally published Choice.

Phyllis lauded Goldwater for his exposure of the TC’s report “The Crisis of Democracy” presented at the plenary session of the TC’s May 30-31, 1975 meeting in Kyoto, Japan. She said Goldwater “was one of the earliest to recognize the multinationals’ long-range scheme to induce Americans to accept a dumbed-down school system and a lower standard of living in order to compete in the global economy with cheap Third World labor.”

What Books Should Kids be Reading?

(Third in our series of recommended reading lists for children of all ages. We will continue to publish additional lists in Education Reporter over the next few months. — Ed.)

Classic children’s books are scarcely to be found in school classrooms and libraries today, so parents must ensure that their kids are reading books that educate, absorb, and entertain in a manner that stimulates curiosity and increases the child’s eagerness to learn about the world.