From National Core to Global Core
Going straight to global standards would be a tough sell in many places. So UNESCO focused on getting national governments to adopt national standards to bring about the UN’s vision. In early 2015, it released the “2015 Global Monitoring Report — Education for All” on its progress. Among other successes, UNESCO celebrated the “implementation of global targets at the national level.” “In 1990, 12 learning assessments were conducted according to national standards, but by 2013 the number had increased to 101,” gushed the UNESCO report. In America, those national standards had already become infamous: Common Core.
Aside from the federal government, billionaire UN devotee Bill Gates was the primary financier of all things Common Core. Estimates suggest he poured more than $2 billion — yes, with a b — into the standards. So while his own children attended an elite private school that boasts of not using Common Core, the national education program (see article on page 15) was imposed on virtually all public schools across America. Now it is bleeding into homeschools and private schools, too.
But there is more to the story. Gates signed a formal agreement with UNESCO to globalize education in 2004. On behalf of Microsoft, Gates personally signed a Cooperation Agreement with the UN agenda to speed up — with the UN agency — the globalization of education through information technology. “Together, UNESCO and Microsoft aspire for there to be a quantum leap in the quality of courses and in accelerating their uptake by educationalists … through the availability of standards, guidelines or benchmarks,” the agreement explains, calling for the creation of a “master curriculum (Syllabus)” while noting that UNESCO would “explore how to facilitate content development.”
Then-UNESCO Director General Kōichirō Matsuura dropped some more bombshells in a speech. Among the goals of the partnership with Microsoft: “fostering web-based communities of practice including content development and worldwide curricula reflecting UNESCO values,” Matsuura explained. The agreement also noted: “Microsoft supports the objectives of UNESCO as stipulated in UNESCO’s Constitution.”
Shortly thereafter, the Bush administration signed the G8 Moscow Declaration purporting to commit the U.S. government to a globalized education regime for America. “Ministers recognized that the internationalization of education is a reality,” the declaration states, adding that “high standards” should be created by “sharing research-based practices” to help people live in a “global society.” Signatories “affirmed their support for UNESCO’s leadership” and agreed that the globalist program would be “implemented by education ministers of all the world’s countries and international organizations, including the World Bank, UNESCO, and UN.”
That globalized education regime will include globalized standards under the guise of having a “Common Core” for all children everywhere. UNESCO’s use of that very term goes back nearly four decades. In 1984, the same year President Ronald Reagan ended U.S. participation in the agency, UNESCO released a document entitled “A Methodological Guide to the Application of the Notion of Common Core in the Training of Various Categories of Educational Personnel.” It was aimed at training educators worldwide with the same standards, so they could fan out across the globe with the same ideas. A 2011 document about the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning also uses the term Common Core, again in relation to training education chiefs worldwide. Socialist and humanist John Dewey used a similar strategy — seize control of teachers’ colleges — to successfully hijack American education. It was extremely effective.
Even in America, Common Core peddlers funded by Gates have celebrated the global nature of the national standards. In an advertisement for Common Core by the Gates-funded Council of the Great City Schools, the narrator boasts about it. “The [Common Core] standards are consistent from school to school, and they match up with international standards, too,” the narrator says as a cartoon suggests standards will be the same in Chicago, Paris, and Shanghai. “Now we know how we are doing compared to just about everyone…. With the same rules, everybody can compete on the same kind of staircase.”
Leading Common Core peddlers have proudly trumpeted their efforts to globalize American education. As far back as 2014, a conference hosted by Common Core ringleader and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush was called Globalization of Higher Education. Among the attendees were Hillary Clinton, chief Common Core peddler and then-U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, former World Bank President Robert Zoellick, UNESCO officials, university presidents, and more.
Duncan, Obama’s education secretary, was instrumental in foisting the globalized Common Core on America. In a 2010 speech to UNESCO, Duncan referred to the UN education agency as one of the administration’s “global partners” to promote “improvements” and “strengthening” (read: globalizing) of education around the world. “Today, education is a global public good unconstrained by national boundaries,” Duncan declared. “It is no surprise that economic interdependence brings new global challenges and educational demands.”
Duncan also told UN bureaucrats how education would be used to transform people’s attitudes and promote sustainable development. “Education is still the key to eliminating gender inequities, to reducing poverty, to creating a sustainable planet, and to fostering peace,” Duncan continued, with “sustainability” being UN-speak for central planning and global governance. Quoting former South African President Nelson Mandela, Duncan argued that education “is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
And that is exactly what they are doing. In a separate 2010 speech, Duncan revealed that the U.S. Department of Education “is taking a leadership role in the work of educating the next generation of green citizens and preparing them to contribute to the workforce through green jobs.” (Emphasis added.) The year before Duncan’s admission, Obama’s Green Jobs Czar Van Jones resigned when an interview surfaced in which he described himself as a “communist.” UN documents have also explained the “green economy” plan. “Transitioning to a green economy requires a fundamental shift in the way we think and act,” explained a 2012 UN report on the green economy advocating global central planning. Another UN report on the green economy, developed by Obama policy architect John Podesta, said the “worldview and behavior” of every person on Earth must be “dramatically altered.”
The transformation is to be brought about through schools. “We must advance the sustainability movement through education,” explained Duncan. “We at the Education Department are energized about joining these leaders in their commitment to preparing today’s students to participate in the green economy, and to be well-educated about the science of sustainability.” Duncan, who got almost every state to accept Common Core, added that the administration was working to “build the science of sustainability into the curriculum, starting in kindergarten and extending until the students graduate from high school.” This should “prepare all students with the knowledge they need to be green citizens.”
On UNESCO’s website is a report headlined “Education for Sustainable Development” that reveals a great deal about this sustainable education. “Generally, more highly educated people, who have higher incomes, consume more resources than poorly educated people, who tend to have lower incomes,” the UN “toolkit” for global sustainable education explains. “In this case, more education increases the threat to sustainability.” That may help explain another key development. Both UNESCO and Common Core demand that reading be taught using the “whole word” or “sight” method first exposed as quackery in the 1840s by Boston school leaders. In UNESCO’s 2005 Guide to Teaching Reading at the Primary School Level, the UN agency says “children should be able to learn sight vocabulary in context rather than isolation.” In Crimes of the Educators, coauthored with this writer, the late Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld, who dedicated 50 years of his life to education and the teaching of reading in particular, called UNESCO’s approach “the most confusing, irrational, and nonsensical reading program ever invented by so-called educators.” Under Common Core, kindergarten children are also forced to memorize sight words. This leads to massive reading problems. (see page 24)
The Future of American Education
Under Trump, the U.S. government has officially withdrawn from UNESCO. However, Common Core remains firmly in place, and the current administration continues to advance the same UN-backed policies pushed by the previous one on everything from sexualization to globalization.
In September, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos signed a global declaration calling for, among other absurdities, using education to indoctrinate children on “sustainable development.” The declaration, produced at the first ever Education Working Group of the Group of 20 (G20) governments, was entitled “Building consensus for fair and sustainable development.” How free nations can build “consensus” on “education” with murderous Islamist and communist regimes that indoctrinate children with ideologies of tyranny was not explained. What was clear: The whole vision revolves around the UN Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, a road-map to global technocracy.
“Education is the foundation of personal development as it provides children, youth and adults with the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes necessary to reach their full potential,” declared the education ministers, including some whose regimes torture and slaughter critics of communism or Islam. They agreed to “promote the development of curricula … which have a strong focus on … values and attitudes.” As part of that, they agreed to “provide education that supports better integration of common values like … sustainable development.” Also, the officials vowed to “foster the inclusion of non-cognitive skills such as socio-emotional skills across the curriculum,” which is basically educrat-speak for psychological conditioning to bring about desired “values and attitudes.” To enforce compliance, they agreed to use “robust and comprehensive learning assessment systems and data.”
Calling for “international investment in education,” the deal touts “existing and potential international mechanisms for financing education.” If federally funded and controlled education was bad, wait until “international mechanisms” are in charge. “We commit to strengthening international cooperation … and developing joint initiatives at bilateral, regional and multilateral levels,” the education czars said. “We commit to facilitating the internationalization of education.”
Another troubling development in American education that continues to march on is the federally funded “Full Service Community School” model. These schools, which are spreading across America thanks to federal funds, are essentially parental replacement centers. They put themselves in charge of every aspect of a child’s life and well-being, ranging from the food and nutrition they receive to their dental and mental health. Meanwhile, federal agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education have started talking about parents as “equal partners” with government in child-rearing.
It is clear that even under Trump, who promised to kill Common Core and get the feds out of education, nothing substantial has changed on the education front. All of the reformers who thought electing a Republican Congress and a Republican president would solve the problem have been proven wrong again. The fix is in at the top. Yet the stranglehold that the globalists and deep staters have had over and within the U.S. government, long before Trump became president, can be broken. Exposing their subversive scheming to globalize education will certainly help loosen their grip. But to actually break it, concerned Americans need to demand that their lawmakers abolish the U.S. Department of Education by passing H.R. 899 and get the feds out of the education sector altogether. In the meantime, protecting one’s own children is absolutely essential.
Sidebar: UN Seeks to End Education Alternatives
As the UN usurps more and more control over what is taught in the classroom, it is also working to have its member states, mostly dictatorships and repressive regimes, clamp down on educational freedom. Not surprisingly, the crackdown is being justified under the guise of “human rights.” Concerned that students in private schools around the world are not receiving sufficient doses of globalist indoctrination prescribed by various global agreements, the dictator-dominated UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution in July of 2015 calling on governments worldwide to “monitor” and “regulate” non-government education. Governments and dictators should also impose “standards” on private schools, the UN bureaucrats said in the controversial document.
Incredibly, the resolution even speaks of “protecting education from commercialization.” What it really means, of course, is protecting government-run monopoly education from competition by superior providers. After all, why would parents spend money on a private school if the tax-funded education provided by government was just as good or better? Obviously they would not. So what the UN pseudo-human rights bureaucracy is really saying is governments must prevent parents from choosing better alternatives. Of course, following the prescriptions outlined by Karl Marx, some members of the UN human rights body actually ban any forms of non-government-run education already.
The UN council, composed of some of the most ruthless communist and Islamist autocrats on Earth, regularly condemns freer nations — often for upholding actual rights instead of UN-defined privileges mischaracterized as human rights. Continuing with its long tradition, the body urged governments to “fulfill the right to education” by, among other schemes, “putting in place a regulatory framework guided by international human rights obligations for education providers that establishes, inter alia, minimum norms and standards for the creation and operation of educational institutions.”
The document also calls for governments and dictators to start “monitoring private education providers” and “holding accountable those whose practices have a negative impact on the enjoyment of the right to education.” Setting aside the fact that education is a service and a privilege, not a right — real rights, by definition, mean freedom from coercion, not compulsory “services” from government — the resolution did not make clear what sorts of “practices” the UN and its members believe have a “negative impact” on “the enjoyment of the right to education.”
Also in the resolution was a call for governments to use tax funds to support “research” (read: biased “studies” touting government education) and “awareness-raising activities” (read: propaganda touting government education) on the issue. Supposedly, the “research” and “awareness” should help people “better understand the wide-ranging impact of the commercialization of education on the enjoyment of the right to education.” Of course, a mountain of research on the topic is already available, and it shows that government-run schools exist to serve government — and that private schools, homeschooling, and other alternatives are drastically superior to public education, generally at a fraction of the cost.
UNESCO repeatedly has condemned Israel while granting membership to the Palestinians and naming ancient Jewish sites as Palestinian heritage sites. WND reported UNESCO designated the Temple Mount, the likely site of the original Jewish temples during biblical times, with Muslim names.
The U.S. and Israel announced their intent to withdraw from UNESCO in 2017, but the formal departure date was December 31, 2018. The AP reported the move was a “new blow” to the U.N. agency, which is famous “as a crucible for anti-Israel bias.” Israeli U.N. envoy Danny Danon, the AP reported, confirmed his country “will not be a member of an organization whose goal is to deliberately act against us, and that has become a tool manipulated by Israel’s enemies.” The U.S. already had stopped paying hundreds of millions of dollars in fees imposed by UNESCO, and Israel had withheld about $10 million.
- https://www.infowars.com/unesco-and-the-new-world-order-in-their-own-words/
- https://www.thenewamerican.com/print-magazine/item/31250-education-s-future-globalization-of-indoctrination
- https://www.wnd.com/2019/01/u-s-abandons-unesco-over-anti-israel-bias/
