February 12, 1980

NEW SOLIDARITY

Page 7

Education: Cornelia Reynolds

The Truth About Jean Piaget

The 1960s generation of environmentalists. With Piaget in our schools, we will have another. Few people know it, but there is one man who is responsible more than any other for the destruction of American schooling, and he is not even an American. That man is Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget. Little is generally known about Piaget's role as a leader of the international circle of education and scientific policy makers whose aim is to make education a form of brainwashing for implementing environmentalist deindustrialization and liberal-fascist "One World" social engineering

proposals. But the fact is that all the new curricula adopted in this country since the 1950s in math, science, reading and social sciences are based to a large degree on aspects of Piaget's theories. Piaget's work was introduced into this country beginning in in 1952 and promoted by Jerome Bruner and the National Science Foundation, who were later responsible for the popularization of the "new math" and other new curricula. Piaget is best known for his claim that intelligence develops in a sequence of physiologically fixed stages related to age which set the limits and character of what can be learned during that stage. For Piaget, all learning is based on mere sense perception. He claims action and thought are a strict continuum in which the earliest forms of thought are the infant's own sensory-motor actions. These actions, as patterns devoid of imagery, gradually evolve through stages into thought. For this reason, all knowledge must be recreated by experience in every generation, says Piaget. "Natural" Education Piaget has claimed that the greatest practical accomplishment of this charlatanry is that it provides a psychological justification of the "natural" education methods of liberal fascists Jean Jacques Rousseau and John Dewey. Since the time of Rousseau, who originated the term, "natural," education has sharply denigrated skills acquisition and science, promoting instead the vicious anarchist brand of schooling associated today with the "open classroom" in the primary grades and the unlimited electives policy so common in our secondary schools. That ideology always includes the key tenets: that the child should teach himself exclusively by experience based on his own interests; that peer relationships based on propitiation, are to be valued over the teacher-pupil relationship based on moral leadership; and that the child should be protected from the moral or intellectual demands of socialization in order not to interfere with his "natural" development. As educational policy all of this is nothing more than the outright promotion of primitivism, and a stepping stone to turning droves of antinuclear, antiscience "greenies" out of our schools. Piaget's political career has been devoted to having these concepts adopted as education policy internationally. The leading political vehicle for promoting these policies is the United Nations Educational, Science and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which Piaget collaborated in founding in the 1940s, having been since an Assistant

Director General and a key leader over many years. UNESCO's work in the Third World has focused on the "appropriate technologies" road to development without capital equipment and investment. UNESCO and Education Like Piaget himself, to most people UNESCO appears an innocuous organization at first glance. What they don't know is that UNESCO grew out of the British-founded Council of Allied Ministers of Education, an organization founded with the stated objective of ensuring British control over the European-wide education policies in the postwar period. It was then turned over to prodrug Julian Huxley, Piaget and others to be expanded as an international organization associated with the United Nations. UNESCO collaborates closely with the International Bureau of Education, which Piaget has headed since 1929. Piaget describes the purpose of UNESCO and of his own work as the establishment of "la sort of international Charter or Code of Public Education, a body of pedagogical doctrine" based on Rousseauvian ideology and Piaget's brainwashing pedagogy. The practical effects of this brainwashing are reflected in Piaget's position for many years as an international director of the organization which has been proven the founding and controlling organization of left-wing terrorism, the Frankfurt School. Thanks to Mary Gilbertson, who recently published an expos of the National Science Foundation in the latest issue of Fusion magazine, for background information on Jean Piaget.