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‘Remoulding’ the NEA for ‘Molding the Future’

By Dr. Mary Byrne

Editor’s Note: In last month’s Education Reporter, Dr. Mary Byrne, Ed.D., provided an in-depth look at how public education in America has changed over the past century and the forces that have worked to effect these changes. This month, Education Reporter continues to publish her extensive research on this topic in the first of three follow-up articles.

The August 1997 Phyllis Schlafly Report posed the question, “Is the NEA Union 'Molding the Future'?”1 Phyllis wrote: “The NEA's political work is as much about ideology as harvesting increased tax dollars for public schools.” Then she identified a list of federal legislation the NEA supported to eliminate parents’ authority over their children’s education; expand big government control of education; expand government-run health care; support the U.N. agenda; and, support cultural values and behaviors aligned to “the New World Order” while denying any respect for traditional American culture and values.

Phyllis’s identification of the National Education Association’s (NEA) ideological agenda and its relationship to the federal government’s progressive education policies demonstrated her shrewd powers of discernment. She did not elaborate, however, on how the NEA came to adopt that ideology or its origins.

As discussed in the April 2023 issue of Education Reporter, members of the “Dewey Group” at Teachers College, Columbia University, were the primary thought leaders permeating American-based organizations and injecting their Marxist-laced, British Fabian ideology as activists implementing the Fabian’s global agenda.

The banner at the top of the iconic Fabian Window (also mentioned in the April 2023 issue) displays the phrase, “Remould it nearer to the heart’s desire.” This phrase, representing the Fabian’s mission to reconstruct the world, is an excerpt from an Iranian poem, “The Rubaiyat.”2 Fabians are not unique in referencing the Rubaiyat to publicize their agenda. The phrase also appears in the opening pages of a document produced by another progressive think tank, the Council of the Club of Rome.3, 4 So that, “Molding the Future” is a common agenda among several progressive elitist think tanks.

The stack of books between the images of Fabian Society founding members at the bottom of the window indicates that, for the intellectual Fabians, the process to “remould” or socially reconstruct the world would be accomplished primarily through education.5 A shield bearing the image of a wolf in sheep’s clothing located above the globe on the anvil suggests the stealth practices of permeation and deception which Fabians use to capture positions of power in key institutions of culture — government, universities, labor unions — and promote legislative policies supporting their plans.

The answer to Phyllis’s question “Is the NEA Union ‘Molding the Future?’” is an unequivocal “Yes, but . . .” Yes, the NEA is molding the future of American education, but, its function is more like a front organization for international actors who are operating the NEA in order to mold American culture nearer to their hearts’ desire. Since its inception, NEA’s founders and leadership have envisioned a different America through the centralization of education at the federal level of government — something the Founders never intended, but neither was the ideology of social reconstruction of American citizens and the nation intended by the Founders.

What kind of education is being ‘remoulded’?

George Washington described a liberal arts education as the foundation of a free citizenry. He warned against elevating other forms of government other than the new republican form of government invented by the Founders and authors of the United States Constitution. He warned in his farewell address,


  • ... we ought to deprecate the hazard attending ardent and susceptible minds, from being too strongly, and too early prepossessed in favor of other political systems, before they are capable of appreciating their own.... For this reason, I have greatly wished to see a plan adopted by which the arts, Sciences and Belles-lettres [beautiful literature], could be taught in their fullest extent ... with the means of acquiring the liberal knowledge which is necessary to qualify our citizens for the exigencies of public, as well as private life....6

The NEA is indeed working to mold the future of America into something unintended by its Founders. But the NEA itself was “remoulded” by Fabian influencers in the 1930s who permeated, captured, and redirected its future to reflect something unintended by its founders. The NEA was transformed from a professional organizaation into an instrument for union organizing, political activism, and government capture.

Who dunnit?

The April 2023 Education Reporter identified the people and processes at work in the British Fabian Society and its American sister organizations, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society/League for Industrial Democracy, which are orchestrating the social reconstruction of the United States. Their goal was/is to transform our sovereign, self-governing republic into a socialist member-state cooperating in a world government. Their strategy was to “Educate, Agitate, Organize” teachers who would cultivate popular support for global socialism among students while organizing those teachers into labor unions as voting blocks to support candidates and legislation aligned with their social reconstruction agenda at the state and federal levels.

This article series describes how the NEA was “remoulded” from a professional organization into a radical political and labor-organizing powerhouse by Fabian operatives. It includes a history of a younger, parallel education organization, the Progressive Education Association (PEA), that shared leadership with the NEA through Teachers College activists John Dewey and George Counts.

Origin of the NEA as a professional education organization

Prior to the 1850s, public schools were still a relatively new concept. In 1647, colonial Massachusetts was among the very first places in the world to make the education of young people a public responsibility; however, most schools were privately run.7 By the mid-1850s, the number of public schools was starting to rival private academies, and schoolteachers formed associations in 15 of the 31 states for the purpose of sharing information, experiences, and ideas. But there was no national body to coordinate the interests of teachers until August 1857, when 10 of the 15 state education associations issued a call to “unite ... to advance the dignity, respectability, and usefulness of their calling.”8

Thomas Weston Valentine, Esq. principal of a large public school in Brooklyn, had been the prime mover to establish the New York Teachers Association.9 He wrote the call for teachers throughout the country to meet in Philadelphia “... for the purpose of organizing a National Teachers Association [NTA].”10 The mission of the association was to “...advance the interest of the profession of teaching, and to promote the cause of popular education in the United States (emphasis added).”11

Although the U.S. Constitution deliberately did not include education as an enumerated power of the federal government, Valentine shared his vision of a cabinet position for a federal department of education (similar to a ministry of education in European countries) at the first conference. In his opening speech, Valentine stated:


  • I trust the time will come when our government will have its Educational Department just as it now has for Agriculture, for the Interior, for the Navy, etc. ... But until this shall be done—as it must be, sooner or later—we need some such combination of effort as shall bring the teachers of this country more together.... (p. 18)12

Within a decade, Valentine’s dream came true. President Andrew Johnson established a federal department of education in 1867, but many in Congress hated the new department. They saw it as an unconstitutional power grab and abolished it just a year later.13 More than a century would pass before the NEA would lobby the Carter administration for another federal department of education with a cabinet position.

American teacher organizing — a British idea

At an 1859 NTA conference, Ohio Teacher Association leader Andrew Rickoff suggested the formation of NTA was influenced by British thought leaders responding to the social problems in urban areas created by the industrial revolution. Rickoff suggested:


  • Through the active exertions of friends of public instruction in Great Britain, a kind of information and training is given in the national and of the “British and Foreign” Societies schools, scarcely thought of in our own country ... it is useless to deny that in the large manufacturing towns, and even in the rural districts, a class of people is growing up who have not had instruction at home ... (emphasis added) (p. 173)14

Once organized, the NTA functioned mainly as a forum for promoting America’s developing public school movement. It was a rhetorical outlet for these education leaders and their plans to address issues developing in newly formed schools that were educating children living in newly created manufacturing towns. The structure of the NTA functioned as a non-governmental department of education.

In 1870, the NTA absorbed three smaller organizations: the American Normal School Association, the National Association of School Superintendents, and the Central College Association, and was renamed the National Education Association (NEA). In 1886, the NEA was incorporated in Washington, D.C. Zalmond Richards—founder of Union Academy in Washington, D.C. and a faculty member at Columbian College (now known as George Washington University (GWU)) —became the NEA’s first president. GWU currently houses the NEA archives.15

In 1906, the NEA received a Congressional charter giving it tax-exempt status under the presumption that it served as a non-partisan organization for the purpose of upgrading teaching to a profession. The presumption was valid because at that time public servants could not unionize. When NEA’s headquarters moved to Washington, DC in 1919, it grew from a fledgling professional organization to an effective lobbying agency.

Also, in Washington, D.C. in 1919, an informal group established the Progressive Education Association (PEA). PEA’s purpose was the dissemination of information about progressive education pedagogy rather than matters of professional status. The PEA and NEA were connected by education interests, but they would become intimately bound by the permeation of, and capture by, thought leaders of a variation of progressive education, social reconstructionists, on faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University. Both the PEA and NEA in turn became radicalized in a manner their founders had not intended.

See the second part of this article in the upcoming June Education Reporter.

Dr. Mary Byrne is an educational consultant and a co-founding member of the Missouri Coalition Against Common Core. She holds a doctorate in special education from Columbia University, and has spent the past 38 years in education and education research at all grade levels.

Footnotes:

1 https://www.phyllisschlafly.com/family/education/the-phyllis-schlafly-report-august-1997/
2 https://www.therubaiyatofomarkhayyam.com/rubaiyat-full-text/
3 https://archive.org/details/TheFirstGlobalRevolution/page/n1/mode/1up?view=theater
4 https://www.clubofrome.org/about-us/
5 https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2017/09/13/hammering-out-a-new-world-the-fabian-window-at-lse/
6 https://www.loc.gov/resource/mgw2.024/?sp=229&st=pdf&pdfPage=87
7 https://www.massmoments.org/moment-details/massachusetts-passes-first-education-law.html
8 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=miua.0677752.1857.001&view=1up&seq=1&q1=Valentine
9 https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1857/08/07/78503592.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
10 https://archive.org/details/newyorkteacher00assogoog/page/308/mode/2up?q=Valentine
11 https://archive.org/details/blackboardpowern0000gord/page/22/mode/2up
12 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=miua.0677752.1857.001&view=1up&seq=1&q1=Valentine
13 https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/09/department-of-education-history-000235/
14 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=miua.0677752.1857.001&view=1up&seq=1&q1=Valentine
15 https://library.gwu.edu/timeline-national-education-association-nea

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