The date is 1900.  Professor John Dewey and his cadre of "Progressives" launch an ambitious scheme to transform the country.  They want a more collectivist society.  For convenience, let's call their goal European Socialism.

However, the United States is hostile to Socialism and Communism for another hundred years.  Beatrice Webb, founder of the Fabian Society in London, decrees that the word "Socialism" shouldn't be used in America.  The recommended euphemism is "Progressivism" and, later on, Liberalism. 

Socialism, as that term is generally understood, is what Dewey plans for us, but he can't say it.  He and his gang must dissemble at every turn.  They have to lie and, little by little, work outside the law.

Fabian Socialists willingly accept a subversive role.  They operate as saboteurs, like termites eating the foundations of a house.  These secret Socialists become "agents of influence" and "change agents" – all synonyms for the same sneaks.  They will change your world whether you like it or not. 

Note that these people are now conspirators working in secret.  They can't help being dishonest.  In education, they are changing your children in ways they have not explained and you have not approved.  They promise to "educate" your kid, but what they mean is that they will indoctrinate your kid.

By 1925, a great deal of deception is normal.  Tangled webs are woven.  Secret plots unfold in all directions.  In K-12, the legacy going forward is criminal.  The DNA of the American Education Establishment is now fully formed.  We are stuck with it until this day.

Of course, these plotters do not think of themselves as criminals.  They think of themselves as a cultural and intellectual avant-garde.  They are the high priests of a new society, which Aldous Huxley satirized in Brave New World (1931).

Here we confront an interesting moral question.  How many deceptive schemes can you undertake before you are just another midnight burglar, another Mafioso? 

This split runs deep through the whole field of education.  Our colonizers are the professors up at Columbia Teachers College and Harvard's Graduate School of Education.  They are arrogant and contemptuous people, and they come bearing Socialism.  Lucky you.  You will accept this gift or else.

These professors view the great majority of people as peasants who must be socially reengineered.  Brains must be washed clean, souls flushed out, heads filled with new values.  Those are the secret projects ongoing throughout K-12. 

In his last book, Samuel Blumenfeld summed up the juggernaut this way: "K-12 education is a criminal enterprise from top to bottom."  (His title tells you everything: Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America's Children.)

The same story is told by Charlotte Iserbyt in The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America and by John Taylor Gatto in his The Underground History of American Education.  Both books are available free on the internet.

These three books, and many others, reinforce the same crucial insight.  This country did not have a weird stretch of bad luck so that our schools got dumber and dumber.  Far from it.  We have been the victims of a continuous assault.  Muggings are not accidents; they are violent crimes.  The average American is the target of this plot.  The muggers are the Education Establishment, serenely smug about their philosophical beliefs.

So-called "progressive" education is more invasive and hostile than most parents ever realize.  Socialists don't want to teach kids to read and count; they want to rewire them philosophically and emotionally.  Furthermore, all this social engineering is wrapped in deception that renders it more immoral.  Our elite educators engage in deceptive advertising, bad faith, mislabeling, and consumer fraud.  A tangled web, indeed.

Our Education Establishment endlessly commits breach of promise and breach of contract.  When our education commissars take the job of running our public schools, they implicitly promise to provide the practical, traditional education that parents want and expect.  However, our educational elite have little interest in fulfilling that contract.

The Education Establishment knows very well what American parents want and expect.  They know that you believe that your kids will learn to read, do arithmetic, etc.  Forget about it.

Contempt has led to an unhealthy relationship.  Promising one thing and delivering another makes the whole operation a con.

Many children can't read.  They can't do basic arithmetic.  They don't know the most basic information.  All of that is made possible by the disdain and malfeasance of the country's education commissars.

To accomplish its dirty work, our Education Establishment has two strategies: eliminate as much of the traditional curriculum as possible, and then muddle whatever is left so that students don't understand or retain very much.

How are we going to fix this?  The people at the top are set in their ways.  Assume they will fight a rear guard action over every dumb theory.  QED: They have to be challenged and/or outflanked at every point.

Meanwhile, encourage all the forces that are not part of the Socialist onslaught to look for better role models.  The U.S. surely has 1,000 great private schools, Montessori schools, and classical academies.  Encourage your local public school to copy those examples. 

The official theories and methods are going to make your children dumb, so eliminate those methods as much as possible.

Bruce Deitrick Price explains theories and methods on his education sites Improve-Education.org.  (For info on his four new novels, see his literary site Lit4u.com.)