Introduction to the Globalist Education Series
Introduction to the Globalist Education Series
Part 1 of The Globalist Education Series
The following series of articles represent several years of research into the field of modern education which was originally ignited by a brief investigation into the Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) Review initiated by then Minister for Education and Skills Richard Bruton in April 2018.
Readers outside of Ireland may find this material interesting as similar reviews of existing RSE programmes have been undertaken in countries such as in England and Wales. The nearly identical methods and outcomes of these review processes speak to the manner that the reviews are a means to implement, in the national context, that which has already been enshrined in international standards.
It is this global administrative structure, its historical origin and evolution since the early decades of the twentieth century, which gave me pause to conduct a deeper investigation.
Several years ago, I published an article entitled What is the United Nations Doing to Irish Education? Global Citizenship and Comprehensive Sexuality Education.1
Having published this first effort, I found myself unprepared to write a worthy follow-up owing to the many questions and avenues of research that rapidly opened up before me after picking at that particular scab.
Accordingly, I decided to challenge myself to produce a more thorough body of work which would address the ideological content and “hidden curriculum” of modern education within which the RSE curriculum resides.
Accordingly, this series of articles includes extensive discussion of a set of ideological trends with profound implications for the education of the young which are foundational to the post-Enlightenment West. The RSE Review can be viewed as merely another project in this process of managed social transformation.
Whilst researching this project I have received guidance from certain people whose help has been invaluable. None of those people seek public acknowledgement, but I do wish to express at the outset my gratitude for taking on a thankless job regardless of the personal sacrifices involved. My work stands on the shoulders of those who have come before me and some will be cited in this investigation.
The RSE Review process will be discussed later in the investigation. Before we do so, a discussion of the character and purpose of modern education is necessary. The importance of this historical excavation project will become clear as this series of articles is published.
The most relevant international instruments providing legitimacy to changes in the area of the Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE) and RSE curricula include the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and guidelines produced by United Nations organs such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), both of which were established after WWII.
The philosophy of the United Nations is represented in its flagship Agenda 2030 which is the most recent instalment of the United Nations’ sustainable development agenda which began to be constructed during the 1970s with a series of influential conferences organised almost entirely by progressive operatives close to the post-war Anglo-American alliance.
Foundational to the sustainable development agenda, and most of the legislative output of international institutions such as the United Nations, is the form of progressive technocratic managerialism upon which the entire enterprise is premised.
This ideological construct can be viewed as the natural conclusion of the secularising mission of humanism and of the Enlightenment which emphasises rationalism and the concept of evolution—and its corollary, the belief in social progress—rather than divinely ordained higher principles such as objective truth and the pursuit of traditional Western virtues such as honour and self-sacrifice.
Indeed, the Enlightenment was a radical departure from these older ideas associated with classical philosophy and Europe’s Christian religious heritage, coming as it did with its political agenda to transform mankind via the application of human reason and scientific expertise to provide greater material comfort for all.
Perhaps the most significant emanations of the idealism associated with the Enlightenment, and the post-Enlightenment revolutions which rocked Europe over subsequent centuries, have been the evolving concept of human rights and the cult of equality.
One of the most prescient observations that can be made about human rights ideology is the manner in which it continues to transform, unmooring itself from natural law and discovering, in the process, new rights for newly recognised groupings of people which were previously somehow obscured.
Regardless, human rights and the pursuit of greater equality have become the foundational logic of a network of powerful institutions and of a plethora of secular administration procedures which now direct Western society, the RSE Review being a prime example.
As a response to the destructive religious wars of the Reformation, Western liberalism and liberal democracy have certainly provided a solid basis upon which to establish a stable society, uniting men behind the promise of enlightened self-interest and the concept of a universal brotherhood of mankind.
Whilst much could be written of the benefits that this coupling of philosophical idealism and pragmatism has brought to Western society, we are primarily concerned with the limits of the Enlightenment project, out of which soon emerged new forms of ideological radicalism which were largely premised upon the realisation of greater equality.
Although I will be making a number of strident critiques of Enlightenment ideology and other sacred cows associated with progressive ideology throughout the following series of articles, my own thoughts are far from being dogmatic. Indeed, I admire much of Enlightenment thought, particularly the application of science for the social good and the idea of making knowledge available to all who seek it.
My intent is to hold the mirror and be as accurate as I can be. Whether or not you agree with my conclusions or analysis of the facts as I present them is a matter for your own consideration.
Enlightenment philosophers were certainly animated by a desire to put philosophy to work for the common good rather than have it remain the domain of a dedicated elite.
Influential political philosopher, and author of a notable critique of American education,2 Allan Bloom, argued that the egalitarian mission of the Enlightenment brought science into collaboration with the new secular political power and corrupted the practice of philosophy by bringing it under the aegis of the modern university where it became another subject amongst many whilst increasingly ceasing to provide its core function—the pursuit of the truth.
The modern university is the foundational institution of the Enlightenment and out of it flow the institutions of the political project of liberal democracy which are generally premised upon scientific rationalism, materialism, cosmopolitanism and atheism.
As such, the political, cultural and social structures that have developed in the twentieth century rely upon the wielding of universalistic values which have provided the basis for the liberal democratic regime with its ever-shifting standards of acceptable behaviour or opinion.
In more recent times, these standards have become an expression of American pragmatism combined with neo-Marxist and postmodern informed social theory, all of which acts as a solvent for traditional values and institutions that allegedly block economic and social “progress”.
The university produces the intellectuals, the politicians, the lawyers and the economists, governs the practice of science, journalism and law, rewards its loyal membership, scolds and chastises dissenters, all whilst proclaiming itself to be the sole arbiter of truth and, accordingly, enjoying a fruitful relationship with the economic power behind the liberal democratic regime.
The restrictive and reductive view of man preferred by the university who is now viewed through the lens of science and the self rather than as a unique human soul who experiences the world from a cultural and religious tradition, also guarantees his dehumanisation as something to be studied, controlled and, if necessary, modified.
This has led to the type of managerialism inaugurated over the last century which saw the emergence of a network of institutions and experts charged with directing the economy and society at large.
Whilst the capitalism outlined by the British classical economist David Ricardo was assumed to operate within the confines of natural law and to be limited to economic life, the managerialism inaugurated with the Great War and the great task of organising the war efforts of the Allies knows no bounds in its quest to organise every resource and direct each activity of modern life.
It must also be remembered that the experts who carry out this work are the finished products of the modern university and have little need for the vestigial institutions or myths of liberal democracy beyond utilising them as camouflage for their own all-encompassing power.
Bloom’s critique of the modern university, written several decades ago, raised questions over the rather mundane objectives of modern education whilst highlighting the penetration of continental philosophies within American intellectual circles which formulated the basis of managerialism and the later culture of political correctness or PC which has recently been rebranded as “woke”.
PC or woke culture represents a soft totalitarianism which, counterintuitively, is almost entirely the product of the modern university and of the evolution of ideological subcultures within its confines.
Making much of this possible, Bloom argued, was the Enlightenment’s combination of theory and practice to unleash human self-interest which, he argued, compromised both, resulting in an increasingly politicised philosophy and a tendency to rely upon theoretical models uninformed either by tradition or earlier knowledge.
This has created a tendency for scientific and ideological fads premised on rather flimsy rationalisation which lack a firm understanding of man in the context of the whole or at least with regard to the transcendent.
This can be understood as a distinctly modernist error which has resulted from the desire to understand man purely on scientific and materialist terms or by the invocation of powerful emotional narratives of oppression constructed from the threads of a politicised reading of history as in the case of feminist, queer or racial theory.
The tendency to make the central purpose of education to be the pursuit of social change premised upon current ideological trends brings us to the issue of declining standards and questionable course choices.
Unable, and unwilling, to educate all men to reach the highest standards of excellence or virtue, the progressive seeks to educate all to a lower level achievable by a majority. Ideological content must take up ever-larger segments of the curriculum lest an independent thought bring the entire house of cards down.
The teacher becomes a social worker, a surrogate parent and, principally, a manipulator out to undo the perceived harm done by the parents and community whose traditions, values and institutions are assumed to be backwards and harmful.
The production of a cosmopolitan, scientific and managerial elite who are charged with directing social change with the idealistic goal of achieving greater equality and the utilitarian goal of deriving greater economic growth, is in reality a crude reduction of Enlightenment idealism and materialism.
In fact, rights are nothing other than the fundamental passions, experienced by all men, to which the new science appeals and which emancipates from the constraints imposed on them by specious reasoning and fear of divine punishment. These passions are what science can serve. If these passions, given by nature, are what men have permission –a “right”—to seek satisfaction for, the partnership of science and society is formed. Civil society then sets as its sole goal that satisfaction—life, liberty and the pursuit of property—and men consent to obey the civil authority because it reflects their wants. Government becomes more solid and surer, now based on passions rather than virtues, rights rather than duties.3
Western liberal democracy, then, was formulated firstly as a utilitarian relationship premised on feeding man’s appetites which, although allowing for economic and social progress as well as the expansion of Western civilisation outwards, has always lacked the kind of metaphysical significance accorded to earlier institutions derived from God or the higher virtues.
As such, the central animating objective of progressive ideology, since it emerged during the end of the nineteenth century as a consequence of the emergence of a powerful industrialised economy made up of large institutions and operated by a new middle class of professionals and government employees, has been the attainment of social control over the teeming masses created by the Industrial Revolution.
Under the guise of social concern, a new class of progressive elite has been able to influence those in their own society by pointing to the suffering of alien peoples, foreign crises and abstract threats such as war or climate change to fuel an agenda of social transformation.
With this in mind, the activities and ideological beliefs of the progressive expert class, whose output rests largely on advancing concepts such as “openness” and “equality” across the entire world in tandem with an agenda of economic integration primarily benefitting large economic institutions, will be teased out throughout this investigation as we determine their impact on Western education.
It will be demonstrated that it is this expert class, collaborating within a global network of institutions, who have so directed modern education along utilitarian and ideologically progressive lines with results that are worthy of questioning.
Later, this will lead us to a discussion of twentieth century progressive social activism based on gender, sexuality and race which has led to such ideologies becoming embedded across the education system, as will be amply demonstrated in our analysis of the RSE Review and SPHE curriculum.
This neo-Marxist and postmodern ideological ferment can be viewed as a distinctly elitist imposition of a set of secular religious beliefs, each demanding piety and faithful compliance.
That such puritanical religion so occupies the minds of many modern intellectuals ensures that the dominant international financial elite are free to engage in socially rapacious economic practices whilst paying a monetary indulgence to the organised church of progressive social justice causes and to a raft of increasingly redundant academic institutions churning out ever-increasing numbers of radicalised “change agents”.
The religiosity with which these vague precepts and their accompanying social agendas are pursued requires a discussion of the relationship of such beliefs to the smorgasbord of nineteenth century bourgeois spirituality. Such a discussion would be remiss without addressing the secularisation of Christianity, particularly the Puritan inheritance of the United States, and of later movements such as theosophy which provide an avenue into progressive ideology and progressive education respectively.
It would appear that the secularisation and materialism inaugurated by the Enlightenment quickly evolved into a tendency to equate man with God. This did not eradicate the religious impulse but merely inverted it from the metaphysical to the physical and into secular crusades, political ideologies and, later, to the seeking of an atheistic spirituality based on the self as exploded to prominence with the emergence of the human potential movement during the 1960s, as part of an era of social and economic revolution.
Seeking a spiritual dimension within one’s self rather than in the hereafter also established the premise that alleviating human suffering and transforming the physical world was a moral good, if not the moral good to which all people should be brought up to pursue.
As such, Christian missionary activity soon evolved into a secular crusade in which wealthy Western elites, infatuated by the progressive social agenda enveloping late nineteenth century America, came to establish large global-minded Foundations with a view to directing the future of the human species as a whole by the application of Western science and technology, along with globalising the Western living pattern to the developing world and their teeming populations.
The power of this structure and its own evolution and expansion over the last century will provide an opportunity to demonstrate the immense power of such institutions and their ongoing influence over Western education and the advancement of LGBT ideology and queer theory amongst other ideological developments which have moved from fringe academic pseudo-intellectual indulgence into national educational curricula and legal statute.
Following its emergence out of progressive economic circles in the United States during the 1950s, the post-war development paradigm represented the most daring attempt yet at serving man’s passions. It paved the way for global economic integration whilst helping to establish the archetypal economist as the authoritative planner of a modern society.
The next step was the United Nations sustainable development agenda that is proclaimed to be a plan for the entire world which, rather ominously it must be said, commits all member states, including Ireland, to ensure “no one will be left behind”.4
The idealistic and utopian promises of sustainable development are a mask for utilitarianism and technocracy. This represents the shadow cast by the Enlightenment and, more directly, of progressive ideology, which will be shown to be premised upon social control rather than liberation.
Have not the bloodiest revolutions, most brutal dictatorships and oppressive totalitarian societies of the twentieth century frequently invoked the kind of lofty idealism derived from the Enlightenment whilst unleashing the liberative powers of science and reason?
This begs the further question: has the coalescence of philosophical, scientific and political power inside of Western institutions, starting with the modern university, undermined our understanding and application of human reason and led to the construction of a regime that is actually irrational and authoritarian in character?
The Anglo-American world’s answer to the totalitarian ideologies of Communism and Fascism was progressive ideology which was itself influenced from utilitarianism and socialism with continental influences such as German social democracy and later continental economic and social theory, much of which was piped directly into the academic environment of the United States during the first half of the twentieth century via institutions such as the University of Chicago, Columbia University and the New School for Social Research in New York City where European intellectuals were welcomed and given prominent roles in educating the next generation of American social, cultural and economic elite.
The 1960s saw the emergence of the radical student politics of the New Left and once that fizzled out it splintered into a series of smaller shards of progressive social activism including the ecology movement, the gay liberation movement, and various Third World liberation movements which frequently collaborated with a coterie of militant racial and ethnic activists, many of which were either directly or rhetorically linked to Communist regimes intent on destroying the West.
As many of these idealistic students moved into careers in human rights-based activism, Western economic elites were busily driving forth a global economic agenda which would see the offshoring of a considerable portion of the Western industrial base as part of a more globalised economy involving a further ceding of sovereignty to progressive international institutions charged with directing international trade and instruments of international human rights law.
This economic and social agenda has been greatly served by the promotion of sustainable development, with its doomsday predictions of climate catastrophe, and the anti-natalist culture of Western nations which discourages family formation in favour of obtaining economic and social status.
As Western economies have shed productive employment in favour of financial services, public sector and civil society employment, the working class has correspondingly withered. The place it traditionally occupied on the left wing has now been reserved for the neo-Marxist and postmodern theorising of a new class of activist academics who have been nurtured within the comfortable confines of university sociology departments.
Severing the link between the left wing and economics or class in favour of creating a new political coalition of ethnic and sexual minorities has ensured that no organised opposition to the globalised economic paradigm can be mounted. In fact, the left wing now serves as a militant force defending mass migration and policing working-class people who attempt to stop their systematic disenfranchisement within their own societies.
The cornerstone of the new globalised economy has been the wealth transfer from West to rest whereby Western economies have been systematically deindustrialised to the benefit of countries such as China, India and others whose teeming populations have been simultaneously invited to become citizens of Western nations, much to the dissatisfaction of the majority of Western citizens.
The opportunities for profit opened up by low tariffs and by a mobile immigrant labour force have created a new racial proletariat to be organised by the pseudo-intelligentsia made up almost entirely of university radicals.
The real beneficiaries of the new globalised economy have been large financial institutions and global corporations who were relieved of their obligations to their own societies and who, in the case of Ireland and other countries, are in a position to dictate the conditions within which they prefer to operate.
The great driver of the new paradigm of economic globalisation and racial and sexual grievance politics has been the United States which has exported its secularised puritanism packaged alongside its corporate managerial culture.
The American worker was first to be pitted in a race to the bottom against the developing world for the leftover rind of his own society whilst the children of the privileged have continued to reap the rewards, becoming champions of diversity and inclusion.
The decaying towns across the heartland of America, littered by drug addiction and despair, are the result of this betrayal, their populations being fair game for progressive pundits to pillory as “rednecks” and racists worthy of contempt for daring to rebuild their shattered lives through politics or activism.
American intellectual Christopher Caldwell offers a sobering analysis of the American Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s and its transformation of American society, including the role of the modern university as the engine of the revolution.
The two elite projects that caused the most institutional upheaval at the start of the twenty-first century—diversity and digitization—were hatched, headquartered, and run in universities. There was affinity between them. Computers looked like the solution to many problems of intolerance and inequity. The algorithms they ran on were neutral and dispassionate. They couldn’t be taught to hate like the flag-waving men who drove eighteen-wheelers or the paranoid housewives who sat on school boards in Kansas.5
All of this idealism and utopianism was soon to give way to the contemporary paradigm of big tech with its censorious and Orwellian social and economic agenda of tax-minimisation and cheap labour, blended with a radical form of progressive social engineering presented as philanthropy.
The tech revolution of the 1960s, which arrived shortly after the Civil Rights revolution, began a new era of global systems and networks in which monopolies of scale were erected that made Standard Oil look small by comparison.
A new progressive economic elite, initially imbued with a faith in the power of connecting distant peoples and overcoming geographic and cultural barriers, later coalesced into a new oligarchy, one that now holds immense control over the world’s economy and the social development of the West.
Soon business leaders and marketing spivs felt it important to enlighten everyone of their philosophical and spiritual insights and to inform the less ambitious citizens how their society ought to be transformed. Having enough money has continued to be the main barrier to entry into the “social impact” game via establishing a tax-exempt Foundation or think tank.
Futurists predicted a future without the drudgery of work. These promises were soon followed by a new generation who declared that history itself had ended as the Berlin Wall came down. Economic globalisation took on a religious quality as it melded into an ongoing process of global integration led by money men with progressive social values and the purer Gnostics in the United Nations system.
Onto the world political stage strutted the new, trendy Western leaders of the 1990s embodied by the smooth-talking Bill Clinton, himself a Rhodes Scholar and anti-war activist during Vietnam, and Tony Blair, whose New Labour was to demographically transform Britain having won an electoral majority.
Both men were trained in the modern university, products of an education system which has increasingly prepared the young to be progressive change agents rather than independent thinkers imbued with a sense of morality and an expectation of duty to their own society and its cultural forms.
Not all change is necessarily good and the social changes wrought by Clinton and Blair included an onslaught on traditional values within state institutions, including within the education systems of their respective countries.
The ideological and institutional links between the Third Way ideology of New Labour and the New Democrat movement which informed much of Clinton’s policy agenda are notable and indicate a level of collaboration not often addressed.
In the atmosphere of optimism and with the influx of foreign money that engulfed Ireland in the 1990s, an offshoot of this progressive economic and social elite quickly obtained a position of total hegemony and now finds itself in a position to direct the development of Irish society via social engineering.
The form of progressive social imperialism pursued by this international infrastructure is an irresistible force, coming as it does packaged within the dominant information and communications infrastructure of the twenty-first century whilst enjoying the ability to destroy the economy should any ideological resistance to its Puritanical crusade emerge.
The manner in which this force now dominates American politics, most visibly through the platform and institutional dominance of the Democratic Party, has cemented its place within official American foreign policy where the Civil Rights revolution continues.
Considering the power of Anglo-American culture and the influence of Anglo-American foreign policy within Irish political circles, it would be foolish to ignore its role in shaping modern Irish society.
Caldwell argues that the “rival constitution” inaugurated by the Civil Rights revolution has destroyed the legitimacy of traditional American society and has been the guiding logic of a new regime built on true inequality which has been unfurled institutionally via the relentless management of process.
This new regime consists of an alliance of minority groups, including racial and sexual minority activists, who have been joined by the progressive elites at the top of American society in systematically deconstructing American institutions and the rights documented in the American Constitution, derived as they are from natural law, in the name of diversity and inclusion, all the while enriching themselves and erecting an economic system that serves a new class of progressive elite who use philanthropy to disguise their tax-efficient social engineering projects.
To merely consider this alternative reading of the Civil Rights era is to blaspheme the new regime and its pantheon of minority saints who have replaced the historical figures of American society.
Behind this new human rights regime stands the progressive economic elite which has come increasingly to the fore since the Gilded Age. The beneficiaries of exorbitant wealth stratification, this new elite likes to tout their social conscience that has afforded them their role as defenders of the “marginalised”.
What milestones such as the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision which desegregated American schools actually did was to empower a zealous federal government to intrude into regular people’s lives and pave the way for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which effectively ended the constitutional right to freedom of association.
What was being fought over in the 1960s was something different from civil rights. It was a conception of human rights that had arisen in the twentieth century.
Gandhi had advanced it. So had the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, promulgated at the United Nations in 1948. American liberals were inclined to think it an improvement on the country’s own constitutional traditions.6
As decolonisation gripped the developing world, Western progressives, bankrolled with untold millions in Foundation funding, ramped up the population control movement whilst also pursuing the forced integration of the United States.
The human rights regime was only getting started and its ever-evolving pursuit of equality united terrorist organisations and middle-class college students looking for some cause to believe in before moving on to the lucrative career that was always waiting for them once the thrill of being a left-wing radical waned.
The human rights revolution was prone to the same problems of ideological purity and violence that have historically plagued all revolutions made up of numerous minority factions seeking to impose their will upon society.
The ensuing cycle of violent outbursts followed by the pandering of white liberals to the demands of the radicals became so routine that it soon attracted new minority groups seeking to benefit from the status of being oppressed in a Western country.
A sophisticated machine benefitting from the expensive educations of the professional classes such as academics, lawyers and the media has emerged out of this perversion of justice.
The ongoing avalanche of legal and legislative victories has, in the name of equality, introduced ideological justice.
The group that has had to pay the price for the human rights regime has generally been the less fortunate whites who may have been denied opportunities due to affirmative action selection practices or diversity and inclusion policies which can favour less qualified minority candidates.
Civil Rights law soon expanded with further Supreme Court decisions upon which further swathes of new legislation were drafted with the intention of extending civil rights to new realms and newly designated minorities.
Owing largely to the manner that the Civil Rights paradigm justified intruding into all relationships and interactions between people based on its arbitrary wielding of the concept of equality, the political process soon tended to give way to federal governmental dictates and to the courts.
Civil Rights also laid the legal groundwork for the stifling politically correct or PC paradigm that was to come during the 1980s and 1990s.
Fear of litigation and financial or reputational ruin ensured compliance from the private sector whilst the university continued to develop the canon of theory which underpinned the entire process.
Transformative political figures in modern Irish society, such as former President Mary Robinson who derived her ideological formation through time spent at Harvard during the height of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, drew inspiration from what Irish intellectual Desmond Fennell correctly identified as American progressive ideology in their attempts to completely remake Irish society during the 1990s.
The most obvious result of this inspiration was seen through the use of carefully constructed legal challenges designed to change existing legal and social norms which was a strategy initially employed by activists in America long before Robinson began her career as a barrister championing human rights causes in the European Court of Justice (ECJ).
Progressive social change such as legislating for gay marriage has been advanced using these techniques and, as American intellectual Darel E. Paul observes, was driven largely by progressive elites produced in the modern university.7
After earlier attempts at the scientific control of man including behaviourism and eugenic selection theories, progressive forms of education turned to humanistic psychology during the 1960s and 1970s in order to mould the attitudes of the young.
Under the guise of “values”, a semantic abstraction constructed to outflank the concept of morality, the young of the West were increasingly informed that they could choose their own values based on their own personal feelings. Whatever felt good was good. That this new humanistic value system emanated out of the secularised puritanism of the United States is not surprising and will be discussed in due course.
The education project within which this new system of values formation was packaged has philosophical roots in the Enlightenment and in Germany but became a real movement across the West and most significantly in the United States during the early decades of the twentieth century.
Following WWII, this progressive form of education and its broader ideology was globalised as part of the American living pattern, initially via the Marshall Plan in Europe, and later through the economic development paradigm which was driven by international institutions such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a handful of large endowed Foundations and a new form of institution, the non-governmental organisation, henceforth referred to by the familiar acronym, NGO.
This new variant of para-democratic institution allowed the dominant Western progressive elite to engineer society across all borders, physical and legislative, whilst Foundations and new institutions influenced national governments who were eager for investment capital and training to drive economic advancement.
The mid-century population control movement provided the backdrop to the initial proliferation of NGOs such as International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), founded by eugenicist and birth control activist Margaret Sanger in 1952, and was an entirely Western phenomenon emanating out of the earlier eugenics movement which had dominated Western thought since the time of Darwin.
Darwin had been drawing from the writings of Thomas Malthus who had warned of the dangers of overpopulation on world resources. The population control movement was also intrinsically connected to the theory of evolution via the wealthy progressives who made up its core base and who wished to reduce the teeming masses outside the West.
Following the decline of the Western empires during the twentieth century, the population control movement provided a perfect replacement vehicle to facilitate the meddling of Western progressives in the affairs of other nations whilst providing a justification for the establishment of a global society, an ideological project uniquely important to progressives and one largely irrelevant to the insular cultures found outside the West.
Indeed, the majority of those involved in the population control movement were ardent internationalists and determined to establish international institutions to direct world affairs and the personal lives of the entire planet.
The convening of several conferences saw the hammering out of a social agenda including the legislating for divorce, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the broad promotion of contraception and sex education as part of a dedicated international movement targeting population growth. This campaign was particularly influential in countries such as India where eugenic practices such as abortion and sterilisation were linked to Western economic aid.
The 1927 World Population Conference in Geneva was orchestrated by Margaret Sanger who had founded the American Birth Control League in 1921. The Conference was planned with Sanger’s full-time organiser Edith How-Martyn, a suffragette graduate of the progressive London School of Economics (LSE), and can be credited with establishing the new paradigm that replaced the old eugenics model with a truly international movement centred on the global management of migration, population and economics.
One of the common themes in these discussions was that population growth together with improvements in transport and communications had made the world small.8
Although there were differences amongst the delegates, it was acknowledged “that narrow definitions of national interest and a strict defense of state sovereignty would stand in the way of addressing population problems.”9
What the Conference also made clear was that the developing world wished to export its excess population whilst the West was already in demographic decline, its progressive elite class mired in an anti-natal culture.
The West would promote population control in the developing world, under the assumption that these countries would fall into a Western pattern of economic development and family structure.
The naivety of this assumption, ignoring as it did the historical differences in fertility and family structure seen in Western societies compared to elsewhere, did not stop it becoming the basis for the broader economic development doctrine of the United States following WWII.
Billions of dollars of Western aid was channelled via new institutions such as the American federal government’s United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and large private philanthropies such as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations under the demand that population reduction measures also be undertaken.
Elsewhere, the new institutions of the United Nations, the WHO and UNESCO, were established under the same ideological basis as the population control movement.
The alliance of American and British progressives in the population control movement was predicated on a naturalistic view of human sexuality which presaged the progressive social agenda which was to come with the sexual revolution and the resulting reform of marriage in line with the economic and cultural demands of progressive ideology.
An avowed eugenicist, international networker, and friend of influential sexologist and sexual reformer Havelock Ellis amongst others, Sanger provides us with an avenue into understanding the progressive’s desire to control human sexuality under the guise of humanitarianism and science.
Ellis and his allies in the World League for Sexual Reform, such as fellow sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, were the original campaigners for progressive sexual reform including “an advocacy of sexual education, sexual equality of men and women, reform of marriage and divorce laws, encouragement of contraception and birth control, reformation of the laws on abortion, protection of the unmarried mother and the illegitimate child, prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, removal of the economic factors that led women into prostitution, promotion of a rational attitude toward sexually ‘abnormal’ persons, and reformation of the laws regarding sexual offenses.”10
The membership of Ellis in the Fellowship of the New Life, and its offshoot the Fabian Society, followed a pattern shared by many progressives who preached the gospel of scientific control over human evolution and occupied the rest of their time imbibing proto-New Age spirituality.
Along with her British progressive allies, Margaret Sanger enjoyed the support of the progressive elite including W.E.B. Du Bois, Bertrand Russell along with the leading lights of the eugenics movement such as Julian Huxley,11 scion of the famous eugenicist family whose grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, had been known as “Darwin’s Bulldog”, and who was later to become the first Director General of UNESCO which was founded after WWII.
The combination of eugenic practices with programmes to improve the health and nutritional standing for every child born allowed the belief to become widespread that parents could choose contraception so as to give their children the best possible start in life as part of a small family.
Converting eugenic policies into a series of consumer choices and programmes for public health also allowed a suitable fig leaf to be positioned so that social engineers could direct society more passively and continue to intrude into the family and sex lives of everyone else.
These initiatives influenced the 1942 Beveridge Report in Britain and had previously given rise to League of Nations initiatives on malnutrition and disease which quickly “displaced old-fashioned negative eugenics.”12
As such, this focus on improving environmental conditions “helped discredit the racial and class prejudices that had inspired a whole generation of eugenicists but also curtailed their political appeal.”13
The emphasis on environment rather than biological determinism, coupled with the vilification of Nazi eugenic policies via postwar propaganda, made the acceptance of a set of international institutions and health standards, directly linked to badly needed foreign aid programmes, seem reasonable. The institutions charged with administrating this global effort also allowed American soft power to be wielded under the guise of a universalist economic and social mission, a covert form of eugenics or “reform eugenics”.
The marriage of eugenics and birth control quietly guided those deemed unfit not to breed via international institutions such as Sanger’s, which became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) in 1942, the largest such institution in the world and a leading promoter of sex education programmes.
In London, the National Birth Control Association (NBCA), originally established under the leadership of Margaret Pyke as the National Birth Control Council (NBCC) in 1930, changed its name to The Family Planning Association (FPA) in 193914 and joined with British eugenicists in establishing a series of women’s health centres,15 a move symbolising the new paradigm whereby vast amounts of public and Foundation funding were to be channelled through a network of front organisations charged with advancing population control under the banner of healthcare.
Notably, Pyke’s husband Geoffrey Pyke ran the Malting House School in Cambridge where progressive education and the theories of Maria Montesssori, John Dewey and Sigmund Freud were implemented by psychoanalyst and head teacher Susan Isaacs.16
Following WWII, institutions such as UNESCO, the United Nations Population Commission and John D. Rockefeller III’s Population Council led to the first American economic development strategies such as the Point Four programme which was directly derived from earlier Rockefeller Foundation programmes, the core objectives being the creation of a global consumer culture and a modern worker.17
The concept of public health became foundational to such development programmes.
It would guide not only America’s own efforts, but also UNICEF’s campaign against tuberculosis, and WHO’s effort to eradicate malaria. In this way what became known as “development” was conceived of as the triumph not merely of economics over politics, and of man over nature, but of man over himself, in an evolutionary process that was at least partly biological in nature.18
The near mystical belief that such economic development plans would precede the creation of democratic societies and liberal economies across the developing world was pursued with a sense of mission by a growing list of NGOs and charities.
It was impossible to promote contraception and population control in the developing world whilst promoting natalist policies at home, a paradox faced directly by Britain and France who wished to maintain economic links with their former colonies in Asia and Africa.
By necessity, a world population policy could not be seen as being biased in favour of white populations or Western societies, even if they were contributing little to the population explosion which was, and remains, an Asian and African phenomenon. This failure to honestly address overpopulation ensured that the declining West would have to drink its own poison and subsidise the developing world via aid programmes until some future point in which a more integrated global economy could be assembled.
Western progressives were to choose suicide by their policies of sterile sexuality and replacement immigration in order to maintain the ever-expanding state bureaucratic infrastructure and the increasing cost of future public sector entitlements such as pay and pensions.
The call for a world population policy by Julian Huxley provided an avenue to a world government via the new institutions of the nascent United Nations. UNESCO’s philosophy, written by Huxley himself, specifically promoted the population control agenda. Indeed, there can be no such thing as a world population policy or any other global policy without a world government to administer it.
The population control movement was generously funded by America’s Foundations and by the American Federal government and saw the creation of a boom industry in newer sciences such as demography and disciplines related to economic development. The future of the West was to be tied completely to the successes and failures of the developing world.
The proliferation of NGOs, ostensibly working in areas such as population control, economic development and, later, the social crusades for multiculturalism and gay liberation, has formed an irresistible force of progressive social transformation staffed largely by the coterie of professional activists who are churned out like automatons by the modern university with job titles such as “development expert” or “diversity and inclusion officer”.
Indeed, the role of NGOs will be shown to be extensive in terms of the RSE Review from the international to the local level where they influence government policy and schools directly.
Whilst presenting themselves as the embodiment of Western democratic representation, NGOs are an entirely institutional phenomenon associated with advancing narrow sectional interests whilst enjoying the support of powerful elites engaging in vast schemes of social engineering.
The proliferation of Western-funded NGOs that accompanied the development paradigm across the developing world, or “Third World”, saw idealistic progressives, Marxist subversives and Christian missionaries working within the international structures predominantly created and administrated by the Anglo-American foreign policy establishment through, for example, the United States Department of State and the United Nations.
Prior to the proliferation of NGOs, it is clear that domestic support for world government, a long-standing progressive goal harking back to the liberal imperialism of the nineteenth century, was not popular with Western people.
This situation was summed up by Samuel P. Huntington and his co-authors of the 1975 report entitled The Crisis of Democracy, that was commissioned by the newly formed Trilateral Commission, who bemoaned the loss of faith shared by Western populations for institutions of government.
American diplomat Richard N. Gardner, of the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and Columbia University, provided insight into how America’s progressive ruling class came to realise that support for world government and Western leadership was being stymied by the limitations on the centralisation of power within Western political structures and contemporary events such as those unfolding at the United Nations General Assembly where America and the West were now outnumbered by developing nations generally hostile to the globalist plans of Western progressives.
The hope for the foreseeable future lies, not in building up a few ambitious central institutions of universal membership and general jurisdiction as was envisaged at the end of the last war, but rather in the much more decentralized, disorderly and pragmatic process of inventing or adapting institutions of limited jurisdiction and selected membership to deal with specific problems on a case-by-case basis, as the necessity for cooperation is perceived by the relevant nations.
Such institutions of limited jurisdiction will have a better chance of doing what must be done to make a "rule of law" possible among nations—providing methods for changing the law and enforcing it as it changes and developing the perception of common interests that is the prerequisite for successful cooperation.
In short, the ‘house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great ‘booming, buzzing confusion,’ to use William James' famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.
Of course, for political as well as administrative reasons, some of these specialized arrangements should be brought into an appropriate relationship with the central institutions of the U.N. system, but the main thing is that the essential functions be performed.19
This characteristically practical American approach to advancing global social transformation represents a ground-up strategy of using many smaller organisations to carry out the work previously assumed to be the role of large institutions such as those of the United Nations.
Gardner, a former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, was central to the realignment of American institutions towards sustainable development in the 1960s and highlighted global environmental regulations and economic development assistance to the developing world as policies that could move the world’s nations closer to global government.
In 1992, Gardner was Special Advisor to the United Nations in Rio at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED),20 also referred to as the Earth Summit, the chief product of which was the signing by world leaders of the United Nations' sustainable development treaty, Agenda 21.21
Sustainable development and other agendas have run along largely uncontested ever since, owing in no small measure to the manner that these agendas operate via a multitude of institutions with little meaningful input from the average citizen who is silently governed by this bureaucratic edifice.
Over the following series of articles we will discuss the role of education within this deeper context.
What will become clearer is that social engineering has become institutionalised as part of an ongoing quest towards the creation of a world society, a project that continues to haunt Western progressive elites who have been separated from the very foundation of Western civilisation, particularly classical philosophy and the Christian spiritual tradition, by a plethora of modernist ideologies which are premised on their shared belief in progress.
Excavating the Gnostic roots of the modern period of Western civilisation that followed the Enlightenment will provide us with a deeper understanding of the progressive’s interest in obtaining social control, the progressive’s desire to construct a global government, and the progressive’s project of building an education system designed to produce compliance with these objectives.
As the principal post-war vehicle for the advancement of global government, the United Nations is ostensibly intergovernmental, whilst other institutions such as the European Union and Council of Europe apply pressure on member states to ratify and implement United Nations agreements whilst also maintaining their own canon of legislation which has been ratified by member states such as Ireland.
The utopian ambitions shared amongst the drafters of the United Nations Charter were somewhat constrained by the ambitions of most of the world’s nations to retain national sovereignty.
A pragmatic compromise to these constraints meant that the first instruments established under the United Nations system were largely based upon natural law, which had been the original basis of Enlightenment thought, and of the Constitution of the United States which had attempted to reconcile the limitations of human nature with lofty idealism.
Nevertheless, an international network of true-believers has been built around the United Nations and has consistently advanced their utopian objectives of world government and of orchestrating international agreements which see member states charged with implementing United Nations policy domestically.
An expert class of progressive academics, moneyed philanthropists and dedicated administrators now holds immense power over many areas traditionally considered the domain of parents, including education, via its relationship with domestic activists, NGOs and governmental bodies.
Free of the constraints of any meaningful democratic oversight, this remote, yet nonetheless guiding hand, will be discussed throughout this investigation and its power over Irish society will be explored, but first we must uncover its interest in, and influence over, Western education as a crucial competency towards creating a utopian global civilisation.
In doing so, we will lay out a potted history of globalism and the recurrence of bad ideas regarding the education of the young who continue to be marshalled towards this cause.
This article has had minor updating recently and can be read here: https://theirishnationalist.com/what-is-the-united-nations-doing-to-irish-education-global-citizenship-and-comprehensive-sexuality-education/.
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 287.
UNDP, “What does it mean to leave no one behind?,” 9 August, 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20211221075959/https://www.undp.org/publications/what-does-it-mean-leave-no-one-behind.
Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, 200.
Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, 26.
Darel E. Paul, From Tolerance to Equality: How Elites Brought America to Same-Sex Marriage.
Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, 75.
Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, 75.
Vern L. Bullough, Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research, 73.
Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, 64.
Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, 104.
Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, 105.
Margaret Pyke Trust, “A Brief History,” accessed 22 September, 2024, https://archive.ph/2024.10.18-083726/https://margaretpyke.org/about/history/.
Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, 109.
W. A. C. Stewart, The Educational Innovators Volume 2: Progressive Schools 1881-1967, 120-121.
Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, 119.
Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, 120.
Richard N. Gardner, “The Hard Road to World Order,” Foreign Affairs, April 1974.
American Academy of Diplomacy, “Richard N. Gardner, accessed 27 September, 2024, https://web.archive.org/web/20240420165642/https://www.academyofdiplomacy.org/members-1/gardner/richard-n.
United Nations, “United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 3-14 June 1992,” archived 21 May, 2024, https://web.archive.org/web/20240521102928/https://www.un.org/en/conferences/environment/rio1992.