The answer is “Who controls higher learning controls America!”
We are all aware of the sorry state of our education system in this country – particularly the co-optation of our schools’ curriculum by Socialist-oriented teachers’ unions (read Standing Up to Goliath by Rebecca Friedrichs). Now there is more reason for concern: China’s massive ideological insurgency is now infested in our higher education system – and have been for scores of years (Google “Universities divulge billions in unreported foreign donations”). Institutions of “higher learning” are required by federal law to report all donations from foreign governments. They haven’t for at least twenty years. It wasn’t until the Department of Education began investigating – and prosecuting some- that they all “suddenly” started reporting more than 8.5 billion dollars in foreign donations.
While it is no surprise that China (or Russia, or Japan, or Germany or any other country (see Friendly Spies: How America’s Allies are Using Economic Espionage to Steal Our Secrets by Peter Schweitzer) have been stealing trade secrets the shocking part is our American universities are soaking it up! They are the epitome of Lenin’s Useful Idiots. China has bought not only access to technical research but it has told universities which communist professors to hire and what curriculum to teach! The original plot for the “new” Red Dawn movie originally had China as the enemy. The Chinese government told the movie company to fire the producer – and they did! They changed it to North Korea!
The American citizen is being sold into slavery by treasonous, monopolistic capitalists who have no conscience or patriotism. It started with John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company (now Exxon and BP). J.D. illegally exported aviation gas to the Nazis while they were bombing London in WW II. Ford Motor Co., Chase Bank and Coca Cola were other members of “The Fraternity” (see Trading with the Enemy: An Expose’ of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949 by Charles Higham, 1983; and The Coca-Cola Company Under the Nazis by Eleanor Jones and Florian Ritzmann.)
It is exactly this kind of corrupt capitalism that breeds the discontent exploited by Marxists. (see David Stockman’s The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, April 2, 2013)
“The laws of history are as immutable as the laws of physics.” – Isaac Asimov. In that vein I’m providing portions of a lecture by Robert M. Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1945 titled “Higher Learning in America” published in 1936. “He aimed his criticisms especially at the chaotic fragmentation of modern knowledge, at over-specialization among both teachers and students, at the “cult” of professionalism among academics, and at what he saw as a general lowering of standards:
“The most striking fact about the higher learning in America is the confusion that besets it. This confusion begins in high school and continues to the loftiest levels of the university. …Let us examine the causes of the ‘confusion’. The first of them is very vulgar; it is the love of money. It is sad but true that when an institution determines to do something in order to get money it must lose its soul. How much of the current ‘confusion’ in universities would have been eliminated if boards of trustees had declined gifts which merely reflected the passing whims of wealthy men? [or the ideological agendas of foreign governments?]
I do not mean, of course, that universities do not need money and they should not try to get it. I mean only that they should have an educational policy and then try to finance it, instead of letting financial motivations determine educational policy. Undoubtedly the love of money has a good deal to do with the “service station” conception of a university.
The love of money means that a university must attract students. To do this it must be attractive. This is interpreted to mean that it must go to unusual lengths to house, feed, and amuse the young. Nobody knows what these things have to do with higher learning. Everybody supposes that students think they are important. The emphasis on athletics and social life that infects all colleges and universities had done more than most things to confuse these institutions and to debase higher learning in America.
Even more important than the love of money is their confused notion of democracy. This affects the length, the content, and the control of education. According to this notion a student may stay in public education as long as he likes, may study what he likes, and may claim any degree whose alphabetical arrangements appeals to him. Accordingly, education should be immediately responsive to public opinion; its subject matter and methods may be regulated in great detail by the community, by its representatives, or even by its more irresponsible members…
Since an anti-intellectual university is a contradiction in terms, it is no wonder these theories justifying it are very odd. For instance, there is the “great-man” theory of education. Under this theory you pay no attention to what you teach, or indeed to what you investigate. You get “great-men” for your faculty. Their mere presence on the campus inspires, stimulates and exalts. It matters not how inarticulate their teaching or how recondite (arcane, abstruse, obscure) their researches, they are, as the saying goes, “an education in themselves”.
…The love of money, the “great-man” and other “progressive” theories amount to a denial that there is or should be content to education. As the institutions’ love of money makes it sensitive to every wave of popular opinion, and as popular opinion is that the object of education is economic, both the universities and the public conspire to degrade the universities… To these a distorted notion of democracy leads us to admit any and all students, for should not all our youth have equal economic opportunities?
The universities are dependent on the people. The people love money and think that education is a way of getting it. They think too that democracy means every child should be permitted to acquire the educational insignia that will be helpful in making money. They do not believe in the cultivation of the intellect for its own sake. [For example, young people – or old – who declare “I will never read another book” after graduation]. The distressing part of this is that the state of education determines the state of the nation.
If there are permanent studies which every person who wishes to call himself educated should master; if those studies constitute our intellectual inheritance, then those studies should be the center of a general education. They cannot be ignored because they are difficult, or unpleasant, or because they are almost totally missing from our curriculum today. Educators cannot permit the students to dictate the course of study unless they are prepared to confess that they are nothing but chaperones, supervising an aimless, trial-and-error process which is chiefly valuable because it keeps young people from doing something worse.
The free elective system as Mr. Elliot introduced it at Harvard and as progressive education adapted it to lower age levels amounted to a denial that there was content to education. Since there is no content to education, we might as well let students follow their own bent. …This overlooks the fact that the aim of education is to connect man with man, the present with the past, and to advance the thinking of the race. If this is the aim of education, it cannot be left to the sporadic, spontaneous interests of children…
We propose the ‘permanent studies’ because these studies draw out the elements of our common human nature, because they connect man with man, because they connect us with the best that man has thought, because they are basic to further study and to any understanding of the world.
What are these ‘permanent studies’? They are those books which have through the centuries attained the dimensions of classics. A classic is a book that is contemporary in every age. The conversations of Socrates raise questions that are as urgent today as they were when Plato wrote. In fact they are more so because the society in which Plato lived did not need to have them raised as much as we do today. We have forgotten how important they are.
It may be that we can outgrow the love of money, that we can get a saner conception of democracy, and that we can even understand the purposes of education. It may be that we can abandon our false notions of progress and that we come to prefer intelligible organization to the chaos that we mistake for liberty. Upon education our country must pin its hopes of true progress, under the direction of reason; of true prosperity.”
To answer Who Controls America? It appears the Chinese do – thanks to the money-grubbing, monopolistic, treasonous politicians and CEOs who sold us out. Thanks a lot Joe Biden, et al.
