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by Carl Teichrib
“Fifty years is ample time in which to change a world and its people
almost beyond recognition. All that is required for the task are a sound
knowledge of social engineering, a clear sight of the intended goal –
and power.”
– Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End
“A world society cannot be haphazard. Since there are no precedents, it
cannot be traditional at this stage in its development. It can only be
deliberative and experimental, planned and built up with particular
objectives and with the aid of all available knowledge concerning the
principles of social organization. Social engineering is a new science.”
– Scott Nearing, United World
Without question, one of the greatest tools for social engineering is in
the realm of public education. This is not a blanket statement
downplaying the role of education per se, but a judgment call
recognizing the tremendous influence that the educational system can
play in creating “social change.”
Consider this statement from Naresh Singh, a program director at the
International Institute for Sustainable Development:
“Education has been advanced as significant in bringing about changes in
attitudes, behaviour, beliefs and values.…In order to redirect
behaviour and values towards institutional change for sustainable
development there is a need to investigate strategic options in relation
to educational philosophies, scope for propagation and adoption, and
groups most likely to be susceptible to change.”
All of this points to a radical shift now taking place – a shift which
emphasizes “global thinking” and “planetary norms.” According to the
IISD literature: “…the task of education for the immediate future is to assist in
activating an ethic of planetary sensitivity…We must pass from a
human-centred to an earth-centred sense of reality and value.”
This “global-shift role” for general education is a foundational
platform for UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organisation. The first Director General of UNESCO, Julian
Huxley, clearly laid out UNESCO’s educational scope:
“In general, UNESCO must constantly be testing its policies against the
touchstone of evolutionary progress. A central conflict of our times is
that between nationalism and internationalism, between the concept of
many national sovereignties and one world sovereignty.…
“The moral for UNESCO is clear. The task laid upon it of promoting peace
and security can never be wholly realised through the means assigned to
it – education, science and culture. It must envisage some form of
world political unity, whether through a single world government or
otherwise.…However, world political unity is, unfortunately, a
remote ideal, and in any case does not fall within the field of UNESCO’s
competence. This does not mean that UNESCO cannot do a great deal
towards promoting peace and security. Specifically, in its educational
programme it can stress the ultimate need for world political unity and
familiarise all peoples with the implications of the transfer of full
sovereignty from separate nations to a world organization.”
Back in 1968, UNESCO, along with The Twentieth Century Fund (now called
The Century Foundation) and the Ford Foundation, helped start a new
educational body located in Geneva, Switzerland; the International
Baccalaureate Organization.
Originally, the IBO was established to provide a common educational
basis for international students that would be acceptable to
universities around the world. With this in mind, IBO curriculum has,
for over 35 years, emphasized that its students broaden their
understanding of various cultures, languages, and points of view.
Understanding other’s points of view, cultures and languages is, in
itself, a noble task – it’s something that I work at pursuing and
instilling within my own children and in myself. But underlining IBO’s
philosophy is something deeper; according to George Walker, the Director
General at IBO, “International education offers people a state of mind:
international-mindedness. You’ve got to change people’s thinking.” Hence, “students develop an awareness of moral and ethical issues and a
sense of social responsibility…fostered by examining local and
global issues.”
This is not simply ambiguous language. In advancing the
international-mindedness of IBO, the organization has endorsed the Earth
Charter – an earth-centered declaration which venerates global
political-ethical-moral and spiritual unification. Some, such as Mikhail
Gorbachev, have gone so far as to compare the Earth Charter with “those
10 or 15 Commandments which we all know about…those famous
testaments.…”
Providing the Earth Charter initiative with advanced support, the
International Baccalaureate Organization has agreed to become an Earth
Charter partnership entity, along with such groups as the Association of
World Citizens, Friends of the Earth, Global People’s Assembly, Rain
Forest Action Network, the U.S. branch of the United Nations Association,
and the World Parliament of Religions. Furthermore, IBO Deputy
Director General, Ian Hill, sits on the Earth Charter Initiative
Education Advisory Committee.
Propagating this new global “testament,” IBO is currently looking at
ways to incorporate the Earth Charter into the following curriculum
areas; Theory of Knowledge, Environmental Systems, Environmental
Science, Technology and Social Change, Peace and Conflict Studies,
Experimental Science, Philosophy, Geography, History, Math, and the
Arts. None of this would be very remarkable if the IBO were a small
entity stuffed somewhere in a forgotten corner of the world – but it’s
not. Presently [in Sept. 2004 when this article was written. –Ed.],
almost 1,300 schools around the globe are authorized to offer IBO
programs. And in the United States and Canada, close to 650 schools are
tied in to the IBO, with 473 in the U.S. Adding to this, the IBO is
linked into a number of United Nations’ functions beyond the U.N.-inspired
Earth Charter and UNESCO – where it holds a special consultative
status. Examples of this U.N. partnering includes: preparatory work for
the U.N.’s World Summit on Sustainable Development, activities within a
number of U.N. International Schools, and involvement with a variety of
United Nations Model programs. Simply put, it’s an organization with
considerable “social change” inroads at the international level.
Funding for the body also reflects this global-local-global approach.
During the month of October 2003, in a monetary show of support, the U.S.
Department of Education awarded the IBO a grant of $1.17 million.
According to the IBO press release, these U.S. taxpayer funds were to be
specifically channeled into setting up IBO programs “in six middle and
high school partnerships in disadvantaged areas in Massachusetts, New
York and Arizona.”
Additional funding for the IBO has come from 14 other major national
governments, including the United Kingdom, Japan, and Canada. Monies
have also been funneled in through contributions from the Goldman Sachs
Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the U.S. Agency for
International Development, the Armand Hammer Foundation and the Armand
Hammer United World College, the United Nations International School,
the New York Times Foundation, Gulf Canada, the IBM World Trade
Organization, and many others. Obviously, incorporating a global
mind-change educational agenda carries a hefty price tag – and it’s no
surprise that heavy financial hitters are involved in the play.
Progressing the idea of an international educational platform, Professor
Azim Nanji, Director of the Institute of Ismaili Studies, delivered a
speech to the International Baccalaureate Organization on May 5, 2003,
stating that we need to see things in broader terms than just
nation-states and western liberal democracy. Additionally, he stated
that when people’s religious beliefs become a vehicle for political and
social agendas, it’s an abuse of religion.
Somehow I think the irony of this proposition went unnoticed. By
endorsing and incorporating the Earth Charter, the IBO is blatantly
pushing a pseudo-religious/spiritual agenda – an international
social-change concept that is grossly intertwined with global governance
aspirations, United Nations empowerment, and earth-centered religious
philosophies. UNESCO itself, as part of IBO’s foundational base,
endorses a quasi-religious version of international education through
the work of a former high-ranking U.N. official, Robert Muller.
In 1989, Robert Muller received the UNESCO Peace Education Prize for his
work in developing a World Core Curriculum. Frederico Mayor, the
Director-General of UNESCO at the time, praised Muller as an “innovator
in education” and gave accolades for Muller’s book, New Genesis: Shaping
a Global Spirituality, saying that it “offers the world a blueprint for
a new, spiritual vision of human destiny.”
Yes it does! According to New Genesis:
“…humankind is seeking no less than its reunion with the ‘divine,’
its transcendence into ever higher forms of life. Hindus call our earth
Brahma, or God, for they rightly see no difference between our earth and
the divine. This ancient simple truth is slowly dawning again upon
humanity. Its full flowering will be the real, great new story of
humanity, as we are about to enter our cosmic age and to become what we
were always meant to be: the planet of God.”
Predictably, Muller’s World Core Curriculum follows this New Genesis/New
Age vein. In fact, Muller’s World Core Curriculum is really more of a
philosophy of education than an actual curriculum – a philosophy firmly
grounded in New Age concepts of man’s deification and “Earth spirituality.”
Bridging all of this, Muller explains, “Yes, global education must
transcend material, scientific and intellectual achievements and reach
deliberately into the moral and spiritual spheres.”
Why? According to Muller:
“We must manage our globe so as to permit the endless stream of humans
admitted to the miracle of life to fulfill their lives physically,
mentally, morally and spiritually as has never been possible before in
our entire evolution. Global education must prepare our children for the
coming of an independent . . . happy planetary age.”
Lucile Green, a long-time world government activist and friend of Robert
Muller, describes this new “planetary age” in her memoir, Journey to a
Governed World:
“A wholistic, one-world view is emerging from space travel and other
miracles of modern technology and from communication. A new
consciousness is also emerging from a growing awareness in the West of
the wisdom of the Eastern world-view. Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and
Shinto, while they differ in many respects, portray the world as a
multi-dimensional, organically interrelated eco-system of which man is
one of many inter-dependent parts. Perhaps we can learn through them to
see the world whole, as it really is, and together – West and East – begin to build the foundations of a new world order.
“The most urgent item on the planetary agenda is to set the limits of
freedom and order in supra-national, global affairs. A constitution for
the world is needed which combines the achievements of both hemispheres;
that is, constitutional limitations and a bill of rights from the West
and a spacious world-view from the East.”
Another contemporary of Muller, William D. Hitt, wrote in his book The
Global Citizen, “As global citizens, we will need a new type of
thinking.”
This is the crux of global social change: a “new type of thinking” that
bridges international education, global ethics, world political unity,
and the emergence of a “planetary spirituality.” It is the desire to
shape and mold man according to man’s image. It is the desire to re-cast
history and human endeavor to conform with a centralized-utopian version
of a “world society” – a society shaped by propaganda,
planetary-correctness, and a faulty and exalted image of man and nature.
And finally, when contemplating the move towards this world society and
the propaganda role of “international education,” consider the words of
Scott Nearing, an avid socialist and proponent of world government:
“The conversion of a continent of localists into a continent of
nationalists in a few generations must rank as one of the outstanding
achievements of modern times. Indoctrination works. Human loyalties can
be and are speedily shifted by experience coupled with propaganda.
“Worldizing processes are building up a great number and variety of world
experiences. Millions of human beings, responding to these experiences,
are already world conscious, world minded and prepared to function as
citizens in a world society. Such human beings have passed through and
graduated from the school of nationalism. They are worldists. They wait
with impatience for the emergence of a world commonwealth.”
As the line between education, “political correctness,” and propaganda
becomes increasingly blurred, it is essential that we navigate this
global maze with sobriety, clear thinking, and an understanding of the
forces that are shaping our 21st century.
© Copyright 2004 by Carl Teichrib
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