If you want a single name for who’s to blame in the dumbing down of America, John Dewey gets my vote.

Liberal Humanist Dewey (1859-1952), the man behind the Dewey Decimal System, is recognized as the “Father of the Progressive Education Movement,” that first gained dominance in America’s public school systems and universities in the 1950s and took over everything by the early ’70s.

“The fundamental dogma of this movement is probably best defined as a mixture of collectivist (i. e., socialistic, even Marxist) political theory and Freudian/Jungian psychology,” writes Sam Weaver for the website www.renewamerica.us. “The goal of the progressive education movement was (and remains today) to subvert American founding ideas and principles and to replace them with secular and collectivist directives and ‘values.’ It was (and is) a permissive, ‘Unitarian Universalist’ approach to education.”

Dewey, contributor to the original Humanist Manifesto who wholeheartedly embraced relativism and the New Agers’ global government, was once quoted saying, “Faith in the prayer-hearing God is an unproved and outmoded faith. There is no God and there is no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or moral absolutes."

As Weaver further reports, “(Dewey) was highly influential in the establishment of the modern National Education Association (NEA), and he all but single-handedly set the ultra-liberal standard to which the NEA adheres to this day.

“[Incidentally, with the blessing of the U. S. Department of Education, established in 1979 during the Carter Administration, the NEA has become one of the most — if not the most — powerful forces for shaping the hearts and minds of America's youth.] Dewey refined and established curricula at New York's Columbia University Teacher's College for the express purpose of bringing about "social progress and reform."

”Many today idolize John Dewey as a great thinker and an icon of public education. Increasingly, however, clear-thinking ‘regular folks’ — especially those trapped in inner-city public schools or those who have children who must attend these schools — are beginning to see the dreadfully destructive force of his ‘progressive,’ permissive, ‘touchy-feely’ approach to indoctrination . ..er, pardon me, ‘education.’ "

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Here’s what my pastor, Richard Jordan, had to say about Dewey’s disastrous influence on America in a sermon the other week:

“The problem in the government school system, folks, is not that they don’t have enough money. The problem is they’re using a flawed system of education that started with John Dewey in the first half of the last century.

“Dewey’s idea was to use the school as a socialization vehicle and he knew he couldn’t just come into a school and say, ‘Now we don’t need to teach grammar, we need to teach this Gestalt-type kind of a thing,’ so what he did was go after the college professors, determining, ‘I’m going to teach the teachers who teach the teachers.’

“He realized he could start at the top and control that. That’s why it is today that the university campuses of America are the last bastion of Marxism on the face of the planet outside of Communist China, and it isn’t even that strong there.

“I’ve been to former Communist countries. I’ve sat with former Communist officials in Eastern Europe and talked to them about their Communism and most of them had no real commitment to it. I’m talking about people who can speak five to seven languages and were diplomats and representatives of the country. You talked to them and they said, ‘Well, we were idealistic. We wanted to serve people and that was the tool that was placed in our hand, but it was flawed.’

“It doesn’t work and they’ve abandoned it for something else—not necessarily something better, or more workable, like you’d hope for, but they abandoned it nonetheless.

“You say, ‘Well why is it in the American university campuses?’ Because there was this concerted effort to do that and it wasn’t challenged. The revisionist histories and so forth—the multiculturalism that says every culture is equal to another and there’s no absolute and there’s no one that’s exactly right—all go back to Dewey. He had this conviction and he promulgated it among the elitists and it’s come down to your children’s classrooms

“It’s not the teachers; it’s the methodology they’re following to get you there. It’s the basic rudiments of the thing that’s the problem. By the way, that’s where the Christian school movement came from in the late ’60s, early ’70s. A host of Christian people began to realize what the problem was and they said, ‘We don’t want that!’

“And now all across America you have private Christian schools, and since the late ’70s and early ’80s, the home-school movement took off and that’s a whole other horse of a different race, and a different issue, but it’s all been an attempt to try to teach Johnny to read and Mary to count and it has nothing to do with money spent. You know that in Christian schools they don’t spend nearly the money the government schools do. But you get a much different kind of result in that thing.”