Brainwashed
A brief history of classroom indoctrination
“What good will it do for the whole nation to perish?” — Caiaphas, John 11:50 [0]
Last week I was drafting Part Two of the Four-Layer Lock — the credentialing pipeline — and the essay opened with one sentence: “It begins in elementary school, where children are brainwashed to obey and memorize what they’re told.” I got stuck there. The claim is the kind of thing many of us take for granted about American public schools, and a fair number of private ones — but I had never actually dug into it. I had never researched brainwashing beyond what floats around on social media. So I decided to. What I found is what follows.
It begins in elementary school, where children are brainwashed to obey and memorize what they’re told. The memorizers are rewarded with top grades. The children distracted by disturbing or unanswered questions suffer lesser grades. Global warming, the childhood vaccine schedule, and HIV are three examples of the kind of question the memorizer learns not to raise.
I. The Word
The word brainwashed has a clinical meaning. It was developed by the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton in his 1961 study of American servicemen, missionaries, and intellectuals who had been subjected to coordinated thought-reform programs in Chinese prisons during and after the Korean War.[1] Lifton was Yale-trained, working under a research grant, conducting structured clinical interviews. His diagnostic criteria were peer-reviewed and have stood for sixty-five years.
Lifton identified eight criteria by which thought-reform programs operate. Three are sufficient for what follows. Sacred Science: the doctrine is presented as morally absolute and beyond question. Loading the Language: thought-terminating clichés replace substantive engagement with alternative interpretations. Doctrine Over Person: when the individual’s reasoning or experience conflicts with the doctrine, the doctrine wins and the conflict is treated as the individual’s defect.[2]
What follows is the documented record of how these criteria have been met, in writing, by curricular material delivered to American schoolchildren over the last hundred years. The record is documentary. The publishers in each case have described the purpose of their curriculum in their own words. The publishers’ words are the demonstration.
II. The Baseline: McGuffey, 1836-1920
For most of the nineteenth century, American elementary education ran on a single set of texts. William Holmes McGuffey published the first Eclectic Reader in 1836. By 1920 the McGuffey series had sold approximately 122 million copies and had been the principal reading instruction for several generations of American schoolchildren.[3]
The McGuffey curriculum assumed a civic-republican framework grounded in biblical literacy, Lockean natural rights, and the moral particulars of the Decalogue. The student was taught to read by reading the founding documents of the country he was being asked to inherit. The student was not asked to evaluate whether the country deserved his loyalty. The student was being formed to be a citizen of it.
This is not the history of brainwashing. This is the baseline that brainwashing replaced. It is named here because the replacement is the story.
III. The Theoretical Frame: Dewey, Columbia Teachers College, and Soviet Russia, 1916-1938
John Dewey published Democracy and Education in 1916. The book is the foundational text of what would become the dominant strand of twentieth-century American educational theory. Dewey was based at Columbia University Teachers College, which between 1916 and 1950 trained the generation of curriculum designers, textbook writers, and education-school faculty who would in turn train every American public-school teacher of the next forty years. The institutional pipeline is not in dispute.
In 1928, Dewey traveled to the Soviet Union as part of an American educators’ delegation. He published his impressions in a series of New Republic articles in November and December 1928, collected the following year as Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World. The book is a primary source. Dewey’s own description of the Soviet school system is uncontested:
“The schools are, in current phrase, the ‘ideological arm of the Revolution.’ In consequence, the activities of the schools dovetail in the most extraordinary way, both in administrative organization and in aim and spirit, into all other social agencies and interests.”[4]
And:
“Nowhere else in the world is employment of [propaganda] as a tool of control so constant, consistent and systematic as in Russia at present. … In Russia the propaganda is in behalf of a burning public faith. … In consequence, propaganda is education and education is propaganda. They are more than confounded; they are identified.”[5]
Dewey was not condemning what he described. He was admiring it. He praised what he called the “marvelous development of progressive educational ideas and practices under the fostering care of the Bolshevist government,”[6] and concluded that “only in a society based upon the cooperative principle can the ideals of educational reformers be adequately carried into operation.”[7]
The reciprocal traffic is documented. Between 1918 and 1921 — during the Russian Civil War, when Bolshevik resources were under extreme pressure — the Soviet government translated and published Dewey’s Schools of Tomorrow, How We Think, The School and Society, and a 62-page pamphlet excerpted from Democracy and Education.[8] Lenin’s government considered Dewey’s pedagogy an “essential weapon to gain control over the Russian people.”[9] Dewey, for his part, considered the Soviet program a model.
This is the academic source of the American curricular transformation that followed. It is not an inference. It is what Dewey wrote, in his own words, in the year Joseph Stalin began the collectivization of Soviet agriculture and the liquidation of the kulaks. Columbia Teachers College, the institution Dewey shaped, trained the writers of the textbooks that came next.
IV. The First Mass Case: Harold Rugg, 1929-1944
Harold Rugg was a professor at Columbia Teachers College, a colleague of Dewey, and the author of the first deliberately ideological mass-distribution social-studies textbook series in American history. Man and His Changing Society was published in fourteen volumes between 1929 and 1944. At its peak, Rugg’s textbooks were used by approximately five million American schoolchildren in over five thousand school systems.[10]
The Rugg textbooks replaced the McGuffey civic-republican framework with an explicit collectivist reframing of American history, in which private property was treated as a transitional and probably obsolete institution, the Constitution as a document drafted by economic elites to protect their interests, and American industrial development as a record of exploitation requiring federal restructuring to remedy. The framework was sourced openly to Dewey and to the New Republic progressivism of the 1920s.
Between 1939 and 1942, the American Legion, the National Association of Manufacturers, and a coalition of parents’ groups documented Rugg’s content, exposed it publicly, and pressured local school boards to withdraw the textbooks. By 1944, the series had been withdrawn from nearly every school district that had adopted it.[11]
The Rugg episode is the first documented mass case of curricular thought-reform in American public schools. It is also the first documented case of the cure: parental exposure, public objection, school-board response, withdrawal. The pattern that produced the disease and the pattern that produced the cure are both in the record. The cure required parents to read the textbooks and to organize.
V. The Federal Escalation: MACOS, 1965-1975
The 1944 withdrawal of Rugg did not end the project. It moved it. The next mass case was federally funded.
Man: A Course of Study (MACOS) was a fifth- and sixth-grade social-studies curriculum developed by Jerome Bruner and Peter Dow at Education Development Center under National Science Foundation funding beginning in 1963. It was distributed to approximately 1,700 American school districts between 1969 and 1975.[12] The curriculum used ethnographic films of Netsilik Inuit life — including infanticide, senilicide, and wife-sharing — to teach American fifth-graders that moral norms are cultural artifacts without binding force across societies. The pedagogical purpose, stated in Bruner’s own publications, was to dissolve the student’s inherited moral categories and reconstitute them around a behaviorist-structuralist framework.[13]
Congressman John B. Conlan (R-Arizona) led the public objection beginning in 1975, demanding congressional review of NSF curricular funding. House subcommittee hearings established the curriculum’s content and pedagogical intent on the record. NSF funding for MACOS was terminated. The curriculum was withdrawn.[14]
MACOS, like Rugg, is documented in the publishers’ own words. The withdrawal, again, required a public official willing to read the curriculum and force the issue into hearings.
VI. The University Pipeline: Marcuse, Alinsky, and the Higher-Education Source, 1965-1971
While Rugg was being withdrawn and MACOS being prepared, the academic source pipeline was being reconfigured. Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt School philosopher who had emigrated to Columbia in 1934 and moved to Brandeis and UC San Diego, published Repressive Tolerance in 1965. The essay’s operational thesis, stated in Marcuse’s own words:
“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left. … The restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions.”[15]
This is not a description of a thought-reform program in a foreign country. This is a published policy recommendation, by a tenured American professor, for the management of speech and instruction in American universities. The essay was widely assigned. It shaped a generation of graduate students in the humanities and education schools who would in turn write the teacher-training curricula of the 1980s and 1990s.
Six years later, Saul Alinsky published Rules for Radicals (Random House, 1971), the operational manual that took Marcuse’s theoretical frame and translated it into organizing tactics. Alinsky dedicated the book to “the very first radical … who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”[16] The acknowledgment is in print, on the dedication page, in every edition published from 1971 to the present.
These are the texts that trained the writers, editors, curriculum designers, and teacher-trainers of the generation now in administrative control of American K-12 education. They are not contested. They are published. They are assigned. They are cited approvingly in the standard education-school literature.
VII. The K-12 Trickle: Howard Zinn, 1980-Present
Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States was first published by Harper & Row in 1980. It has sold more than 2.6 million copies. The book is used as a primary or supplementary text in thousands of American high schools and several hundred colleges. The Zinn Education Project, founded in 2008 and run jointly by Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, distributes Zinn-based curricular materials free to K-12 teachers; by 2023 it had registered over 160,000 teachers in its distribution network.[17]
Zinn’s framework is the direct ancestor of what followed. American history is rewritten as a record of class and racial oppression. The framework is presented not as one interpretation but as the corrective truth. Independent scholars — Sean Wilentz, Michael Kazin, Oscar Handlin — have published substantive critiques of Zinn’s historiography.[18] The K-12 student who is assigned Zinn does not encounter Wilentz, Kazin, or Handlin in the assignment.
VIII. The Contemporary Case: The 1619 Project, 2019-Present
In August 2019, The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to The 1619 Project. The lead essay, by Times staff writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, opened:
“It is finally time to tell our story truthfully. … [We must] regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.”[19]
And, several pages later:
“That black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true ‘founding fathers.’ And that no people has a greater claim to that flag than us.”[20]
Five senior American historians objected. Sean Wilentz (Princeton, Davis 1886 Professor of American History), James M. McPherson (Princeton, Pulitzer Prize for Battle Cry of Freedom), Gordon S. Wood (Brown, Pulitzer Prize for The Radicalism of the American Revolution), Victoria Bynum (Texas State University), and James Oakes (CUNY Graduate Center, two-time Lincoln Prize) signed a joint letter to The New York Times Magazine dated December 20, 2019, requesting correction of specific factual claims regarding the causes of the American Revolution. The New York Times Magazine declined the correction.[21]
The pipeline from journalism to elementary-school classroom was documented in the New York Times Magazine issue itself. Printed inside the August 2019 issue, beneath a heading reading “The 1619 Project In Schools”:
“Teachers: Looking for ways to use this issue in your classroom? You can find curriculums, guides and activities for students developed by the Pulitzer Center at pulitzercenter.org/1619. And it’s all free! … This curriculum supports students and teachers in using The 1619 Project to challenge historical narratives, redefine national memory and build a better world.”[22]
That paragraph is not from a critic. It is the publisher’s own statement of the curriculum’s purpose: redefine national memory. The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting developed the curriculum and distributed it free of charge. The National Education Association — the largest teachers’ union in the United States — distributed the Pulitzer Center curriculum to its members through its EdJustice initiative.[23] By 2021, the Pulitzer Center reported the curriculum’s deployment in more than 4,500 K-12 classrooms across the United States.[24]
Since 2020, a child in a fifth-grade classroom is not in a position to evaluate the academic merits of the project against the objections of McPherson, Wood, Wilentz, Bynum, and Oakes. The child does not know they exist. The child is given the curriculum.
IX. The Diagnosis
Apply Lifton’s three criteria to the contemporary case as the inheritor of the chain.
Sacred Science. The 1619 Project does not present 1619 as one possible framing among several. It presents 1619 as the corrected truth. Hannah-Jones’s framing — “It is finally time to tell our story truthfully” — positions the prior dominant narrative as a falsehood. The reader’s role is to receive the corrected doctrine. The Pulitzer Center curriculum’s own mission statement — “redefine national memory” — confirms that the curricular purpose is not to teach historical evaluation but to replace the student’s memory with the corrected version. Rugg used the identical structural move in 1929 with the Constitution. Zinn used it in 1980 with the founding generally. Dewey provided the theoretical justification in 1916. The mechanism is continuous.
Loading the Language. The 1619 Project’s economic-history argument labels the alternative interpretation as motivated by a “more comforting origin story, one that protects the idea that America’s economic ascendancy developed not because of, but in spite of, millions of black people toiling on plantations.”[25] The substantive scholarly tradition that grounded modern business history in the 19th-century railroad — Alfred D. Chandler’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Visible Hand (1977) and a sixty-year line of corporate-history scholarship — is not addressed on the merits. It is attributed to a desire for psychological comfort. The phrase is a thought-terminating cliché. Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance provided the theoretical license fifty-four years earlier: substantive engagement with the Right is not required, because the Right’s positions are themselves expressions of false consciousness to be neutralized rather than answered.
Doctrine Over Person. A fifth-grader who responds, “But the documentary record names Washington and Jefferson as the founders, and they signed the Declaration,” has, by the curriculum’s framing, missed the point. The student’s reliance on the primary documentary record is reframed as evidence of the falsified memory the curriculum exists to correct. Rugg used the identical move with American industrial history in 1935. MACOS used it with the moral categories of the fifth-grader’s own family in 1970. Zinn used it with American history generally in 1980. The student’s independent reasoning is the problem the curriculum is designed to solve. The lineage runs from Dewey in 1916 to the present without a break.
Three of Lifton’s eight criteria are met. The other five — Milieu Control, Mystical Manipulation, Cult of Confession, Demand for Purity, Dispensing of Existence — can be applied to the same material by any reader willing to read Lifton and the publishers’ own statements of purpose side by side. The diagnosis is clinical. The diagnosis is not partisan.
X. The Word
American children are brainwashed beginning in elementary school. The curricular material being delivered through a documented institutional pipeline — The New York Times Magazine → Pulitzer Center → National Education Association → American classrooms — meets the clinical criteria for thought reform that Lifton established in 1961. The pipeline is not new. It traces in unbroken descent to Dewey at Columbia Teachers College in 1916, to Rugg in 1929, to MACOS in 1969, to Marcuse and Alinsky in the universities, to Zinn in the K-12 trickle, to Hannah-Jones in the current decade. Each step is documented. Each step is named. Each step is sourced to the publishers’ own statements of purpose.
The publishers have not, at any point in this hundred-year history, claimed that the purpose was to teach American children how to read a primary source and form an independent judgment. The publishers have stated the purpose. Dewey: “propaganda is education and education is propaganda.” Rugg: a deliberate reframing of American history away from constitutional republicanism. Bruner on MACOS: the systematic dissolution of inherited moral categories. Marcuse: “new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions.” Zinn: history as the systematic recovery of class struggle from documents drafted to conceal it. The Pulitzer Center on the 1619 Project: “redefine national memory.”
The word brainwashed is the clinically correct word for what the publishers have described. The publishers’ words are the demonstration. A reader who prefers a softer word — indoctrination, curricular capture, narrative replacement — is free to choose one. The softer words mean approximately the same thing. They are not more accurate.
The historical record contains three documented cases of the cure being attempted. The first two succeeded. The third has not.
1944. Rugg was withdrawn because parents read his textbooks and organized. The American Legion, the National Association of Manufacturers, and local parents’ groups documented the content, exposed it publicly, and pressured local school boards. The boards responded. The series was pulled.
1975. MACOS was withdrawn because a congressman read the curriculum and forced congressional hearings. Representative John B. Conlan (R-Arizona) put NSF’s curricular-funding practices on the record. The funding was terminated. The curriculum was pulled.
2021. Parents in Loudoun County, Virginia, attempted the 1944 pattern. They attended school-board meetings and objected on the record to gender-policy and curricular changes. On September 29, 2021, the National School Boards Association sent a letter to President Biden requesting federal law-enforcement intervention against parents at school-board meetings, characterizing the parents’ conduct as “the equivalent of a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”[26] On October 4, 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memorandum directing the FBI and U.S. Attorneys to convene meetings with federal, state, and local law enforcement to address what the memorandum termed a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”[27] In November 2022 and again in the House Judiciary Committee’s November 2023 final report, whistleblower disclosures established that the FBI had applied a counterterrorism threat tag — “EDU-OFFICIALS” — to parents identified at school-board meetings.[28] The curriculum was not withdrawn. The parents were investigated.
The cure was the same. The cure had worked twice. In 2021 it was met with the deployment of the federal counterterrorism apparatus against the people attempting it.
The history of brainwashing in American public education is a hundred years old. It has been continuous. It is documented. The pattern of resistance is also documented, and so is the pattern’s recent collapse. The reader is the one who decides whether the cost of the third attempt is bearable. The cost in 1944 was that parents had to read the textbooks. The cost in 1975 was that one congressman had to force hearings. The cost in 2021 was a federal investigation of the parents themselves. The cost in 2026 is what 2021 demonstrated it would be.
The curricular material is still available. The publishers’ statements of purpose are still on the record. The cure is still named.
XI. The Consequences
The consequences are visible. National test scores have fallen across every measured category. The 2024 NAEP long-term-trend assessment recorded the lowest reading and mathematics scores in over thirty years for 13-year-olds.[31] The 2022 NAEP Civics assessment recorded 22% of eighth-graders at or above proficient, the lowest level since the assessment began. Reagan Foundation polling in 2023 found that 36% of American adults could name the three branches of government, and only 19% of 18-to-29-year-olds knew that the Civil War was fought over slavery.[32] Annenberg Public Policy Center 2023 polling found 47% of adults could name the three branches.[33]
University admissions practices have moved to accommodate the decline. Beginning in the 2020-2021 admissions cycle, the University of California system, the Ivy League, MIT, Stanford, and a large fraction of selective American universities suspended or eliminated standardized testing requirements for undergraduate admission.[34] Several institutions have since restored the requirement after observing what its removal did to entering-class performance. The American Bar Association approved a 2022 resolution permitting law schools to dispense with the LSAT.[35] The accreditation standards for American medical schools have admitted parallel revisions to clinical-readiness expectations.
The man-on-the-street video — recorded by a generation of independent journalists on college campuses, on spring break, and at street-corner interviews — has produced a documentary record of college-age Americans unable to identify the century in which the American Revolution occurred, the reason for the Civil War, the date of World War II, the three branches of government, the books of the Bible, the Great Depression, or the wars that came after the Kennedy assassination.
The consequences of an indoctrinated, dumbed-down generation are obvious to everyone except the academically crippled who are incapable of the reason, logic, and basic civics that allow Americans to participate as citizens. The consequences are obvious to anyone paying attention.
The consequences were not accidental.
XI-B. And at the Top of the Pyramid
The man-on-the-street video documents the bottom of the pipeline — the graduates who cannot name the three branches, cannot place the Civil War, cannot identify the books of the Bible. The harder question is what the pipeline does to the students it certifies as its best product. The students who graduate with honors from the most selective schools in the country. The ones who are not “academically crippled.” The ones the country is asked to trust as tomorrow’s chief executives, tomorrow’s hospital administrators, tomorrow’s pharmaceutical-board directors.
The Wharton School answered that question in 1977, and it published the answer in its own faculty’s journal.
J. Scott Armstrong, then a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, recruited two thousand business students and managers in ten countries and seated them on the simulated Board of Directors of the Upjohn Company. The case before them was real and on the historical record: Upjohn’s antibiotic Panalba, which the FDA had moved to remove from the market in 1969 because its fixed-ratio combination produced lethal side effects that the substitute drugs — sold by Upjohn’s competitors, at the same price, providing the same therapeutic benefit — did not produce. The case file explicitly informed each board that safer substitutes were on the market at the same price. The only thing Panalba had over its competitors was the fact that it was Upjohn’s.[29]
Armstrong stated the experimental question without euphemism: “what decision would a manager make if he could earn $1,000,000 for each customer that he was willing to kill?”
The answer, across fifty-seven independent control-group boards, was unanimous.
Not one board voted to remove Panalba from the market. Zero out of fifty-seven. And it was worse than passive acquiescence: 79% of those boards voted to take active steps to obstruct removal — to sue the FDA, to lobby Congress, to delay the regulatory process while the body count continued. The same individuals, asked outside the boardroom role to evaluate the decision in the abstract, identified it as irresponsible 97% of the time. The boardroom changed the answer. The credential changed the answer. The role changed the answer.
Armstrong cited Milgram explicitly in the paper’s theoretical framing. He was right to. Milgram had obtained 65% obedience to lethal-level shocks from New Haven laypeople instructed by a man in a lab coat. Armstrong obtained 100% obedience to a lethal-product decision from credentialed business students instructed by nothing more than a case-study cover sheet describing their fiduciary duty to shareholders. The Wharton MBA was a more efficient instrument of compliance than the Yale laboratory had been.[29]
Panalba was not hypothetical. Upjohn really did fight the FDA’s 1969 removal action. Upjohn really did lose in court in 1972. And during the three years of litigation delay, real American patients took the drug, and real American patients died. The board of directors of the actual Upjohn Company in 1969 made the decision that Armstrong’s fifty-seven simulated boards then unanimously reproduced eight years later. The credentialed class did not learn from the failure. The credentialed class repeated the failure under controlled experimental conditions, in ten countries, with statistical regularity.
The graduates the country is asked to trust as tomorrow’s pharmaceutical executives, tomorrow’s hospital-system CEOs, tomorrow’s HMO board chairmen, tomorrow’s vaccine-manufacturer directors are not the graduates who could not name the three branches. They are the graduates who could. And what the credentialing pipeline produced in those graduates is the documented willingness — at the rate of 100% in the controlled trial, with 79% going beyond compliance into active obstruction of those who would stop the harm — to kill and cripple Americans for profit when the role required it.
That is not a contrarian opinion. That is the Wharton School publishing the negative result openly, in 1977, and waiting forty-nine years for the country to read it.
The Wharton boardroom was only one corridor of the credentialing pyramid. The medical schools produced the parallel cadre. The graduates of Harvard Medical, Johns Hopkins, UCSF, and the rest of the top-tier American medical schools were the ones who certified, promoted, and clinically administered the diagnostic technologies that converted signals — antibody reactions, polymerase-chain-reaction amplifications, surrogate-marker cutoffs — into the legal and clinical authority to detain, medicate, segregate, and forcibly treat human beings for HIV, hepatitis C, Ebola, and ultimately COVID-19. They did this with technologies whose underlying analytical limits they did not, in the great majority of cases, understand — and could not have explained to a court if asked. Kary Mullis, who invented the polymerase chain reaction and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it, said on the record and repeatedly that PCR was not designed to diagnose infectious disease and could not do so. The credentialed apex of American medicine proceeded as if he had not spoken.
The protocols that followed — high-dose AZT in the 1980s and 1990s, ventilator-and-remdesivir in 2020, the suppression of early outpatient treatment, the mandated injection of an emergency-use-authorized product into healthy children and pregnant women — were military-grade compliance instruments applied to a civilian population that had not consented to the experiment. The casualty count is in the millions. The wealth transfer that ran in parallel — from the American middle class to the pharmaceutical manufacturers, the hospital systems, the asset-management firms that owned the manufacturers, and the federal contractors who policed the compliance — is documented at approximately four trillion dollars between March 2020 and the end of the public-health emergency.[30] The Panalba boardroom did not stay in the boardroom. It graduated into the hospital, into the regulator, into the public-health agency, and into the press release. And it did at planetary scale, with billions of subjects, what Armstrong’s fifty-seven boards had done with one drug in 1977.
Reformation?
There is one bright signal in the record. While total undergraduate enrollment in American degree-granting institutions fell 9% between 2013 and 2023,[36] American trade-school and vocational enrollment has risen sharply in the same period, and the rise is now in its third consecutive year of acceleration. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported that public two-year vocational colleges grew 11.7% in Spring 2025 against 2.1% growth in Bachelor’s programs, that vocational two-year enrollment has grown nearly 20% since Spring 2020, and that these institutions now serve 871,000 students — 19.4% of all public two-year enrollments.[37] The fastest-growing programs are not abstractions: mechanic and repair (+14.9% year-over-year), construction (+8.1%), and culinary programs (+7.7%).[38]
The push is as documented as the pull. Tuition for four-year public universities rose 36.7% between 2010 and 2023.[39] Trade-school annual cost can be as low as $4,200. Demand for plumbers, pipefitters, steamfitters, electricians, and welders is projected to grow steadily through 2034 against persistent shortages.[40] Even within the AI-disruption debate, the Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton has publicly observed that “plumbers are less at risk” than legal assistants and paralegals.[41]
A generation of high-school graduates is voting with its feet — walking past the overrated credentialing pipeline that produced the consequences above, toward work that must be done correctly the first time. Bad wiring burns buildings down. Bad welds collapse bridges. Like engineering, the trades cannot be brainwashed. Reality grades performance. High performance builds a better country.
The escape from the indoctrination pipeline is not only economic. It is generational. A young woman who has been homeschooled in the founding documents, who can read the Federalist papers without a translator, who knows why the Decalogue is in the schoolroom in McGuffey and why it is not in the schoolroom now, will recognize a young man who has trained as an electrician or a welder or a diesel mechanic — who has spent four years working with materials that punish dishonesty — as a partner she can build a household with. The young man, in turn, will recognize her. Neither of them is at the mercy of the credentialed bureaucracies. Neither of them is waiting for the permission of a hiring committee, a tenure committee, a diversity statement, or an HR portal. Neither of them owes a hundred thousand dollars to a loan servicer who is collecting on a degree that does not work. And neither of them is alone — because the same instinct that drove them out of the pipeline is driving thousands of others out of it at the same time, and they are finding each other.
The children they raise will be educated in two histories at once. The first is the history that made the country possible — the founding documents, the Decalogue, the Lockean grounding of natural rights, the long line of biblical and constitutional inheritance that McGuffey assumed and that Dewey set out to dissolve. The second is the history of what was done to the generations that came between. Those children will know who Lifton was. They will know who Dewey was, and what he wrote, and what he intended. They will know what the Rugg textbooks did, what the 1619 Project did, what MACOS did, what the NSBA letter did, what the FBI’s “EDU-OFFICIALS” tag did. They will know what Wharton’s own faculty published in 1977 about the men who would graduate to run the pharmaceutical boardrooms. They will not be brainwashed, because they will be the first generation in a hundred years educated about the brainwashing — by parents who walked out of it themselves, with their eyes open.
That is what the criminogenic bureaucracies fear. They do not fear opposition. They have processed opposition for a century and have the institutional muscle memory to absorb it. What they fear is the household that no longer needs them — the marriage that forms without their licensing, the child that learns to read without their curriculum, the trade that earns without their accreditation, the church that gathers without their permission, the life that is healthy and productive and God-centered without their pharmaceutical, psychiatric, or therapeutic intermediation. They fear it because it does not show up on their dashboard, does not respond to their incentives, does not flinch at their threats, and does not require their approval to continue.
That household is being reconstituted now, quietly, one couple at a time, across the country.
The plan was always to crush the citizen into dependence so that the bureaucracy that fed on him could thrive. Iron Mountain named the mechanism.[42] The Kissinger memoranda built it into United States policy.[43] The Church Committee documented the apparatus that carried it out.[44] They called it “public education.”
As Dennis Prager described, the smaller the citizen, the bigger the government — the bigger the citizen, the smaller the government.
End Notes
[0] Joseph Caiaphas was the High Priest of the Second Temple from approximately AD 18 to AD 36 — the senior religious authority in Judea under Roman occupation, charged with the stewardship of the Jewish people’s faith, law, and Temple. After Jesus raised Lazarus, the chief priests and the Pharisees called the Sanhedrin into session. Their concern, in their own words, was not that Jesus was wrong. They conceded He performed signs. Their concern was institutional: “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation” (John 11:48). Caiaphas cut off the deliberation with the sentence above. It was a utilitarian calculation — one innocent man’s death, weighed against the survival of the Temple, the priesthood, and the visible Jewish polity. The council adopted his framing. The crucifixion follows from that meeting. Within a generation Rome destroyed the Temple anyway. The pattern — the credentialed steward who sacrifices the truth in front of him to preserve the institution he is charged to steward, and who is destroyed along with the institution within the lifetime of his own children — is the pattern this essay documents in the American schoolroom.
[1] Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961).
[2] Lifton, Thought Reform, Chapter 22, “Ideological Totalism,” pp. 419-437. The eight criteria are: (1) Milieu Control, (2) Mystical Manipulation, (3) Demand for Purity, (4) Cult of Confession, (5) Sacred Science, (6) Loading the Language, (7) Doctrine Over Person, (8) Dispensing of Existence.
[3] William Holmes McGuffey, Eclectic First Reader (Cincinnati: Truman and Smith, 1836) and successor volumes. Estimated sales figure 122 million is the standard figure in the publishing history literature; see John H. Westerhoff, McGuffey and His Readers: Piety, Morality, and Education in Nineteenth-Century America (Nashville: Abingdon, 1978).
[4] John Dewey, Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World (New York: New Republic, Inc., 1929), Chapter IV, “What Are the Russian Schools Doing?”, p. 61.
[5] Dewey, Impressions of Soviet Russia, Chapter III, “A New World in the Making,” pp. 53-54.
[6] Dewey, Impressions of Soviet Russia, p. 69.
[7] Dewey, Impressions of Soviet Russia, p. 86.
[8] Paul Kengor, Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2010); Robin Eubanks, Credentialed to Destroy: How and Why Education Became a Weapon (independently published, 2013). The Soviet translations of Dewey’s pedagogical works — Schools of Tomorrow (1918), How We Think (1919), The School and Society (1920), and a Democracy and Education pamphlet excerpt (1921) — are documented in the Soviet publishing records of the period.
[9] Eubanks, Credentialed to Destroy, citing the Bolshevik publication records.
[10] Harold Rugg, Man and His Changing Society, 14 vols. (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1929-1944). For the adoption and circulation figures, see Ronald W. Evans, This Happened in America: Harold Rugg and the Censure of Social Studies (Charlotte: Information Age Publishing, 2007).
[11] Evans, This Happened in America, chapters on the 1939-1944 withdrawal campaign; see also Bessie Louise Pierce, Citizens’ Organizations and the Civic-Training of Youth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933) for the earlier framework. Standard secondary treatment: Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), chapter on the Rugg controversy.
[12] Peter B. Dow, Schoolhouse Politics: Lessons from the Sputnik Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). Dow was MACOS’s principal architect; his book is a primary-source memoir of the program’s development, distribution, and termination. Adoption figure of approximately 1,700 districts cited by Dow.
[13] Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), and Toward a Theory of Instruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966). The MACOS curriculum’s pedagogical objectives are stated in Bruner’s foundational papers; the curriculum’s stated goal of using cross-cultural ethnographic material to dissolve inherited moral categories is documented in the curriculum’s own teacher manuals.
[14] U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Science and Technology, NSF Science Education Project Hearings on MACOS, 94th Congress, 1975. Congressman John B. Conlan’s role is documented in the Congressional Record of April and October 1975. The NSF subsequently terminated curricular-development funding; the program was withdrawn by 1976.
[15] Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, by Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), pp. 81-117. The quoted passages are from pp. 109 and 113.
[16] Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Random House, 1971), dedication page.
[17] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1980; subsequent editions HarperCollins). Sales and adoption figures from the publisher and from the Zinn Education Project’s annual reports. Zinn Education Project: zinnedproject.org.
[18] Sean Wilentz, “A Matter of Facts,” The Atlantic, January 22, 2020 (criticism of the 1619 Project that draws on the same historiographic standards Wilentz had previously applied to Zinn); Michael Kazin, “Howard Zinn’s History Lessons,” Dissent, Spring 2004; Oscar Handlin, “Arawaks,” The American Scholar 49, no. 4 (Autumn 1980): 546-550 (review of Zinn 1980 edition).
[19] Nikole Hannah-Jones, “The Idea of America,” The New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019, p. 14.
[20] Hannah-Jones, “The Idea of America,” p. 16.
[21] Sean Wilentz, James M. McPherson, Gordon S. Wood, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes, letter to the editor, The New York Times Magazine, December 20, 2019; reprinted in American Historical Review 125, no. 1 (February 2020). The New York Times Magazine declined to issue the requested correction.
[22] “The 1619 Project In Schools,” in-issue classroom-integration announcement, The New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019. Pulitzer Center curriculum: pulitzercenter.org/1619.
[23] National Education Association EdJustice, 1619 Project Resources, archived at nea1619projectresources.neocities.org. The NEA is the largest labor union in the United States by membership and the largest teachers’ union in the country.
[24] Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, 1619 Project Education Network reporting, 2021.
[25] The 1619 Project, The New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019, essay on American capitalism. The economic-history tradition the essay declines to engage on the merits is grounded in Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), Pulitzer Prize for History 1978.
[26] National School Boards Association, letter to President Joseph R. Biden Jr., September 29, 2021. The letter characterized parental conduct at school-board meetings as “the equivalent of a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes” and requested federal intervention including invocation of the USA PATRIOT Act. The NSBA subsequently apologized for the letter on October 22, 2021, after substantial member-state disaffiliation; the apology did not retract the underlying request.
[27] U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Attorney General, memorandum from Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, “Partnership among Federal, State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial Law Enforcement to Address Threats Against School Administrators, Board Members, Teachers, and Staff,” October 4, 2021. Available at justice.gov.
[28] U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, interim staff reports (November 2022) and final report (November 2023). The FBI counterterrorism threat tag “EDU-OFFICIALS” and its application to parents at school-board meetings is documented in the whistleblower disclosures incorporated into the November 2022 staff report and the November 2023 final report. Reports available at judiciary.house.gov.
[29] J. Scott Armstrong, “Social Irresponsibility in Management,” Journal of Business Research 5, no. 3 (September 1977): 185-213. Conducted while Armstrong was on the faculty of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Sample: approximately 2,000 subjects across 10 countries, including 166 in the United States, distributed across 57 control-group boards. Findings (abstract, p. 185): “None of the 57 control groups in this case were willing to remove a dangerous drug from the market. In fact, 79% of these groups took active steps to prevent its removal. This decision was classified as irresponsible by 97% of the respondents to a questionnaire.” The Panalba case is historically real: Upjohn’s fixed-ratio antibiotic combination was the subject of FDA removal action beginning in 1969, sustained in court in 1972, during which time substitute drugs providing equivalent therapeutic benefit were commercially available from Upjohn’s competitors. Armstrong cites Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience” (1963), in the paper’s theoretical framing. Publicly available from the University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons at https://repository.upenn.edu/marketing_papers/31/.
[30] On Kary Mullis’s published statements on the limits of PCR for infectious-disease diagnosis, see Mullis’s Nobel Lecture (1993) and his public statements 1990s-2019; Mullis stated repeatedly that PCR was designed to amplify a known genetic sequence in vitro, not to diagnose a disease in a patient. On the COVID-era wealth transfer: estimates of the upward redistribution of household wealth during the federal public-health-emergency period (March 2020 - May 2023) cluster around $4 trillion when combining ARRA-and-CARES-Act direct transfers to corporate balance sheets, Federal Reserve asset-purchase support of pharmaceutical and healthcare equities, pandemic-procurement contracts (including Operation Warp Speed, BARDA, and Strategic National Stockpile awards), and the parallel destruction of small-business equity through differential lockdown enforcement. See Oxfam, Inequality Inc. (January 2024); RAND Corporation, Trends in Income from 1975 to 2018 (and post-2020 updates); Institute for Policy Studies, Billionaire Pandemic Wealth Gains (ongoing series, 2020-2023). The casualty-count estimates for the COVID-era protocols are debated and depend on protocol scope; for the ventilator-and-remdesivir and mRNA-injury components, see the published mortality and adverse-event datasets curated by the U.S. Renal Data System, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), the U.S. Department of Defense Medical Epidemiological Database (DMED) as released under Sen. Ron Johnson’s 2022 letters, and the British Office for National Statistics excess-mortality datasets.
[31] National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Long-Term Trend Assessment Results, 2024. National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education. Available at nationsreportcard.gov. The 2024 long-term-trend results recorded the lowest reading and mathematics scores for 13-year-olds in over thirty years.
[32] Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute / YouGov, National Defense Survey, 2023. Available at reaganfoundation.org. Findings: 36% of American adults could correctly name the three branches of government; 19% of 18-to-29-year-olds knew the Civil War was fought over slavery. NAEP Civics 2022: 22% of eighth-graders scored at or above proficient — the lowest level since the assessment began.
[33] Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey, 2023. Available at annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org. Finding: 47% of American adults could name the three branches of government.
[34] University of California Office of the President, statement on standardized testing in undergraduate admissions, May 2020 (suspending SAT/ACT use); subsequent statements 2021-2024 finalizing the policy. Comparable test-optional or test-blind policies were adopted by MIT, Stanford, and the Ivy League beginning in the 2020-2021 admissions cycle. MIT restored its testing requirement in 2022 (statement from the Dean of Admissions, March 28, 2022); other institutions have followed with partial or full restorations.
[35] American Bar Association, Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Standard 503 revisions, November 2022 and subsequent actions, permitting ABA-accredited law schools to dispense with the LSAT or other valid and reliable admissions test. Documented at americanbar.org.
[36] National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics. Total undergraduate enrollment in degree-granting postsecondary institutions fell approximately 9% between 2013 and 2023. Available at nces.ed.gov.
[37] National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, Current Term Enrollment Estimates, Spring 2025. Public two-year vocational colleges grew 11.7% in Spring 2025 against 2.1% growth in Bachelor’s programs. Vocational two-year enrollment has grown nearly 20% since Spring 2020 and now serves 871,000 students, comprising 19.4% of all public two-year enrollments. Earlier NSC reporting documented a 4.7% Spring 2023→Spring 2024 rise at public two-year colleges driven by trade credentials. Reported by Axios, “Trades make a comeback with Gen Z workers,” April 14, 2024; NPR, “Many in Gen Z ditch colleges for trade schools. Meet the ‘toolbelt generation,’” April 22, 2024; Investopedia, “More Gen Zers are Opting for Trade School,” October 19, 2025; NTD, “Gen-Zers Increasingly Choosing Blue Collar Jobs Over College,” December 20, 2024. NSC underlying data available at nscresearchcenter.org.
[38] National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, Spring 2023 → Spring 2024 program-level data. Mechanic and repair: +14.9% (96,289 → 109,932 students); construction: +8.1% (66,214 → 71,585 students); culinary programs: +7.7% (54,437 → 58,644 students).
[39] National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, tuition trend data. Average tuition at four-year public universities rose 36.7% between 2010 and 2023. Available at nces.ed.gov.
[40] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, projections through 2034. Demand for plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters projected to grow approximately 4% annually with roughly 44,000 annual job openings. Comparable shortages projected for electricians and welders. Available at bls.gov.
[41] Geoffrey Hinton, public remarks on AI displacement risk, widely reported 2024-2025. Hinton, a Nobel laureate in Physics (2024) and the recipient of the 2018 Turing Award, has identified skilled trades — naming plumbing specifically — as less exposed to large-language-model displacement than knowledge-work roles including legal assistants and paralegals.
[42] Leonard C. Lewin, ed., Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace (New York: The Dial Press, 1967), Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 67-27553. The document was published as the leaked report of a confidential Special Study Group convened to consider the social and economic functions served by the institution of war and the substitute institutions that would be required if war were eliminated. Lewin, the named editor, later claimed authorship of the document as satire in a 1972 essay in the New York Times Book Review.
The satire claim deserves scrutiny. Satire in the canonical sense — Swift’s A Modest Proposal, Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World — operates by inversion or exaggeration of an extant pattern recognizable to the contemporary reader, with the author’s contemporary frame and the satirical distortion both visible on the surface of the text. Iron Mountain does not satisfy that test. It reads as a sober policy-analytic document, technical in vocabulary, internally consistent in argument, and structured as the formal output of an analytic body. More to the point: the substitute institutions for the social functions of war that the document specifies — a “permanent, virtually omnipotent international police force,” an “established and recognized extraterrestrial menace,” “massive global environmental pollution,” “fictitious alternate enemies,” “a comprehensive program of applied eugenics,” and a “social-welfare program… directed toward maximum improvement of general conditions of human life” (Section 6, “Summary of Substitutes” table, pp. 62-63) — match in specific detail the trajectory of American and transnational policy across the six decades following the document’s publication.
The reader is left with two explanations. The first is that a freelance writer with no policy, intelligence, or military background produced, by accident, a document that anticipated the National Security Council’s population-control framework (1974), the COVID-era pharmaceutical-compliance apparatus (2020-2023), and the climate-emergency political architecture (2010-present) with the mechanisms named correctly in approximately the order they occurred. The second is that the document is what it presents itself as — the output of a deliberation that did take place — and the satire claim is the plausible-deniability cover applied after the leak. The 1972 Lewin essay does not adjudicate between these explanations. The intervening sixty years of policy do. The reader applies Occam’s razor.
[43] National Security Study Memorandum 200, “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests” (December 10, 1974), classified by Harry C. Blaney III, declassified by F. Graboske, National Security Council, July 3, 1989, under provisions of Executive Order 12356. The study, prepared at the direction of Henry A. Kissinger as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, identified thirteen “key countries” as priority targets for population intervention: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia, and Colombia (NSSM 200, Part One, Chapter II). The same document recommended that “allocation of scarce PL 480 [food aid] resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production” (Chapter VIII). The framework was adopted as official United States policy by National Security Decision Memorandum 314, signed by President Gerald R. Ford on November 26, 1975 (Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, NARA Record Group 273, Box CL 314), which directed the Administrator of USAID to “concentrate U.S. population assistance” on the same thirteen countries (NSDM 314, p. 2), referred to these efforts using the explicit phrase “population control programs” (p. 3), and established a permanent monitoring apparatus under the NSC Under Secretaries Committee with semi-annual and annual reporting requirements to the President (pp. 4-5). The Director of Central Intelligence appears on the NSDM 314 cc line (p. 5), establishing the documentary connection between United States population policy and the intelligence community.
[44] U.S. Senate, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Senate Report 94-755 (“Church Committee Final Report”), Book I (Foreign and Military Intelligence, 642 pp.) and Book II (Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, 404 pp.), April 1976. The Church Committee’s final report documented the operational record of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in their domestic application during the 1947-1975 period, including the MKULTRA program of behavioral and pharmaceutical research on non-consenting human subjects, the COINTELPRO program of domestic political surveillance and disruption, and the parallel programs of mail-opening, electronic surveillance, and infiltration of academic, religious, and civic institutions. The Committee’s bipartisan findings established the documentary basis for the proposition that the United States intelligence apparatus operated programs of social manipulation domestically, against American citizens, on a scale and with methods that had previously been the subject of public denial. The Final Report’s findings are public record. See also: U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification, joint hearing before the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, August 3, 1977.