Over the last three decades, there have been a number of excellent books written to explore the direction education reform has taken. Some look narrowly at specific programs or policies; other take a broader perspective, following the historical trends that bring us to our present moment.
Robin Eubanks’ Credentialed to Destroy: How and Why Education Became a Weapon falls into the latter category. This means that, while there are many points at which she might have begun to tell her story, she starts with the thought of Johann Fichte, a German philosopher bridging the late 18th – early 19th centuries. Fichte, a Freemason who reduced the idea of “god” to moral behavior, envisioned a “socialized” national education that would “mould the Germans into a corporate body, which shall be stimulated and animated in all its individual members by the same interest.”(1) The educational system, therefore, had to be egalitarian: “So there is nothing left for us but just to apply the new system to every German without exception, so that it is not the education of a single class, but the education of the nation.”
This new education system was not designed to appeal to a student’s free will because “recognition of, and reliance upon, free will in the pupil is the first mistake of the old system.” The education system Fichte had in mind “destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied upon with confidence and certainty.” Generations of children, schooled in blind obedience to the State, were well-primed for the tyranny of Nazism. (more...)
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