From their beginning in the early nineteenth century, European philosophers, political theorists, and educators sought to establish the left’s educational dictatorship. These academicians interchangeably referred to themselves as both socialists and communists. Modern synonyms for these terms have expanded to include liberals and progressives. These intellectuals understood the importance of education in their effort to hasten societal evolution toward the goal they envisioned. Marx and Engels were commissioned by the Communist League in London to draft a detailed theoretical and practical program of the party. The result was the 1848 publication of The Communist Manifesto.
In his section of The Communist Manifesto, with an introduction by Gareth Stedman Jones, 2008, titled Proletarians and Communists Marx wrote the following.
“But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.
And your education! Is not that social, and determined by social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society by means of schools, © The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.
In the early 1920’s during Marxist Study Week in Frankfurt, Germany, Karl Korsch and Georg Lucs conducted seminars for leading Western European scholars. According to the author of The Frankfurt School Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. 1994, the statement by Marx, You cannot transcend philosophy without realizing it, was central to the discussions of the early theoretical formulation of the left’s educational dictatorship. He summarized the discussions as follows:
It meant that intellectuals who were prepared to ally themselves to the proletariat (workers and laborers)were to have an important role to play. There could be no question ofcuring’ them of their intellectuality. Rather, it was necessary to transmit this intellectuality to the workers.
Later to a similar group, Lukacs stated,
As you now emerge from economic struggle and devote yourselves to culture, you are devoting yourselves to that part of the control of society which will produce the central idea for future society.
In his 1924 Inaugural Address for The Institute for Social Research, at Frankfurt University Carl Grnburg, said,
“And then,there are the optimists. They see, instead of a decaying form of culture, another, more highly developed one approaching. And for their part they consciously demand that what is outmoded should stand aside in favour of what is emerging, in order to bring it more speedily to maturity.
Many people are firmly scientifically convinced that the emerging order will be a socialist one, that we are in the midst of the transition from capitalism to socialism and are advancing towards the latter with gathering speed. I, too, subscribe to this view. I, too, am one of the supporters of Marxism.
I need not emphasize the fact that when I speak of Marxism here I do not mean it in a party-political sense, but in a purely scientific one, as a term for an economic system complete in itself, for a particular ideology.
From the early 1950’s through the early 1970’s, Herbert Marcuse taught, as a political theorist, at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis from 1954 to 1965, and the University of California, San Diego. He supported the students of the anti-war movement in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s in the United States and around the world. During an anti-war symposium discussion period in Berlin, a student asked him this question,
What material and intellectual forces are required for radical change?
In his response summarized in The Frankfurt School, Marcuse admitted his helplessness, as follows:
In order for new demands to develop, the mechanisms that reproduced the old demands would first have to be abolished; while, on the other hand, in order to abolish those mechanisms, the demand for them to be abolished would first have to be created. The only solution he could envisage was aneducational dictatorship’.”
In the United States, the concept of the left’s educational dictatorship is the model for the rescue of education from the influence of the ruling class demanded by Marx in The Communist Manifesto. The left’s educational dictatorship is the means by which what is outmoded is being forced to stand aside in favour of what is emerging, in order to bring it more speedily to maturity in Grnburg’s words.
In the United States of America, the Marxists of the liberal progressive movement have accomplished their major goal for education. They have used their political power and academic supremacy to established the left’s educational dictatorship. Demands to abolish the old mechanisms have been created from preschool to Ph.D. level educational programs. The current generation of teachers is, for the most part, completely supportive of the liberal progressive agenda for the future of our country. Faculties,at alllevels are dominated by liberals and progressives. The publication process, including editorial boards for most liberal arts and social science journals, is also dominated by liberals and progressives. In many cases, conservatives need not submit manuscripts for publication under these circumstances. In the current culture of political correctness, university and secondary education students now demand that conservatives of all stripes are banned or restricted on their campuses. The reality of our Founders Judeo-Christian heritage has been scrubbed from both curricula and textbooks at every level. Virtually all references to God and the traditional Biblical family are prohibited and disparaged in our schools.
Since Marxism is “a body of rational norms” that has been largely assimilated into modern social sciences, our students are taught by curricula determined byleft’s educational dictatorship. The applicable principles of Marxist philosophy are now taught in each liberal arts and social science discipline. With these educational programs, each new generation of citizens becomes more tolerant of and often in favor of a more socialist society in the United States.
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