The longer one observes American public schools today, the more comprehensive and deep-rooted the globalist infection appears. The erstwhile revolutionary-leftist underground has become the establishment, in public education and every other institution.

Educators now call themselves “change agents,” in Timothy Leary’s radical parlance. No lie is too big (“Diversity = Excellence”) and no trick too low to be deployed in the radicals’ mission to deform the public school curriculum. A true-life example of the trick tactic: A guidance counselor pre-empts a fifth grade social studies class to deliver the pro-diversity unit du jour. She shows the class two cardboard boxes, a dingy white one labeled “1” and a box swathed in shiny, colorful plastic, labeled “2.” Cooing that “there’s no right or wrong answer, it’s just what you feel, any answer is okay,” the change agent passes out sheets on which the students are to write their names, their preferred box number, and one reason why they chose it.

A majority of students choose box number two, because it is more appealing to the eye. Ah, but dingy box number one contains a stash of stickers! “Well,” smirks the agent, “I guess those who picked number one each get a sticker, and all you who picked number two just get left out. Too bad.” (An observer mutters, “So there was a ‘right’ answer,” and the shameless agent chuckles, “Yeah, how ’bout that.”)

While parents have been distracted trying to earn enough money to stagger under their ballooning tax burden without stumbling out of the middle class, or lulled by soothing smooth talk to the effect that “We’re the experts, you aren’t qualified to teach a dog to beg, just leave it all to us,” virtualK’ every lesson that our children are being taught—from “C-A-T spells caf to “2 + 2 is 4″—is pure propaganda. At the same time, our children are being programmed to take their assigned places in One world’s merged global labor force.

The National Center on Education and the Economy, directed by Marc Tucker, is promoting legislation called School-to-Work that explicitly recommends matching education to future labor-force requirements, whatever these are deemed to be. School-to-Work is part of the mutated “Goals 2000” package that President Clinton has been pushing on behalf of the elite and its National Education Association allies since taking office. The most recent headlines the effort has generated appear under the rubric of “national testing,” but there are several other aspects to it as well, all proceeding quietly with fiat funding under the ver,’ noses of the public and our remaining champions in the legislative branch.

National testing is designed to create a psychological profile of each student. Questions on national tests delve into attitudes and feelings, and a high proportion of the answers are hand-scored, which injects still more of the elite’s subjective bias into the tests. Files produced by such testing will be made available to potential employers and government agencies, ensuring that incorrect attitudes and inappropriate aptitudes can receive “intervention.”

In the Dresden, Ohio, school district, where Sehool-to-Work has already been adopted, high school seniors can study basket-weaving for credit. According to the Foundation Endowment’s newsletter, Academfcs First, “Of the 195 student seniors who participated . . . between 1989 and 1995, 129 later applied for employment at [local basket company] Longaberger. Today, 74 percent are still employed at the basket factory.”

One of the consultants to Goals 2000 is Ira Magaziner of healthcare-reform fame, who told the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that, as Oneworld grinds the pluribus into unum, “Millions of jobs will be lost, but millions more will be created. Training and education will be needed for the transition.” And Messrs. Tucker and Magaziner seem to know what those brand-new jobs will be.

More wives and mothers are in the labor force than ever before, yet median family income—not even allowing for inflation—is $1,000 less than it was ten years ago. Full employment now means that every adult must work in order for the household to remain solvent. Solvency, of course, is relative: families routinely carry $10,000 in debt and are considered solvent if they have not yet filed for bankruptcy. This consumer debt has risen in symmetrical proportion to tax increases over the past two decades, as people unconsciously spend the income they have earned even though it has been confiscated by withholding.

In half the states of America, more people work for various levels of government than work in manufacturing. Without differentiating between public and private employment, the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts the biggest percentage increases in the following occupations by 2005: employment interviewers (who for the most part work for temp agencies), loan officers and counselors, management analysts and consultants, p.r. managers, p.r. specialists, lawyers and judges, paralegals, economists and market researchers, biomedical researchers (genetic engineering is shaping up to be the major thrust of future research), medical records technicians, dental hygienists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, home health aides, speech and language pathologists, psychologists, “human services workers,” social workers, special education teachers (more and more children are being consigned to special ed in order to keep them out of the official averages on standardized tests), adult education teachers, teachers’ aides, preschool teachers and childcare workers, counselors, actors (the booklet says “keen competition is expected for these jobs because large numbers of people are attracted to this career, which does not require formal preparation”), counter clerks, rental clerks, general office clerks, sales reps in service industries, receptionists, corrections officers, security guards, and private detectives and investigators.

The biggest losers? Agriculture, petroleum and mining engineers, surveyors, physicists, mathematicians, the clergy, reporters and correspondents, computer operators, fishermen, hunters and trappers, forestry and logging, mechanics, machinists, precision assemblers, tool-and-die makers, welders, textile and apparel workers, shoe and leather workers, and rail transport occupations — in other words, the kinds of jobs that make a nation self-sufficient.

The forced merger of Americans’ standard of living with that of one billion worldwide unemployed and billions more in the Third World who slave for a few dollars a day will not fulfill the “every man a king” philosophy of the old American labor movement. This is why it is so important for those who desire this merger to sever the generational memory link and replace it with—nothing. In a word, multiculturalism.

Contrary to Goals 2000’s prattle about “excellence,” “technology,” and “higher-order thinking,” the economy of Oneworld will require a mere handful of programming and managerial brains; below them, a large stratum of militarized bureaucratic enforcers; and finally, a mass of manipulable, deracinated generic “labor”—with a tiny elite leveraging everything from without. The consolidation of wealth in our time grants the power to shake and shift the whole world to a small international elite.

While labor unions are weaker than ever and may lose what’s left of their political clout through “campaign finance reform,” human labor qua labor is faced with its greatest threat yet. Rather than denounce organized labor, conservatives need to recognize that it is the best ally we have against those who would destroy national sovereignty and other protections against globalist tyranny. We need a new international labor movement. Not “Workers of the World, Unite!” but the proletarianized middle classes of the West organizing themselves to resist the destruction of the forms of political sovereignty that protect them, and offering one another moral support in the process.

School-to-Work is not the only threat. The school science curriculum now consists of Saving the Earth 101: Recycling, Pollution, Preserving the Rainforest, and Global Warming. No attempt is made to convey scientific concepts; it is enough to learn to posture correctly whenever the elite—a very well-funded amateur scientific body, expert (in its own opinion) in the Laws of Nature—attempts to justify its grasping, willful ways by telling us what we must give up next. Thus science becomes a kind of courtier embellishment, a bag of magic tricks that “prove” such things as the need for more federal taxes and regulations to control “global warming.”

Actual scientists are alarmed at the devolution of science instruction. Earlier this year, a group of 30 California scientists and teachers led by three Nobel laureates offered to write the state some K- 12 science standards for free—but were rejected in favor of a group of the usual suspects, whom the state hired for $178,000.

Glenn Seaborg, co-discoverer of several uranium-related chemical elements, warned in the laureate group’s proposal to California that “our citizens lack a depth of understanding even of the implications to society of rapid scientific progress, and our college-bound high school graduates lack the most rudimentary preparation for careers in the natural sciences. . . . Educational content is continually diluted in a failed effort to produce palatable bits of information for progressively less skilled students.”

Tests administered by the National Assessment Governing Board in 1997 showed 33 percent of American fourth-graders have a “below basic” grasp of scientific concepts, with the proportion rising to 40 percent by eighth grade and 43 percent by 12th grade. No more than three percent of any state’s student body performed at the advanced level. Boys slightly outperformed girls in 12th grade, but not in the lower grades, which indicates that science instruction is being tinkered with to boost girls and hobble boys, just as has been done with mathematics. The latest report of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, released in February, shows this clearly: the United States was one of only three nations without a significant gender gap in “general math knowledge” among 12th graders. We also ranked last, below 20 European nations, in physics and advanced math—though we did beat out Cyprus and South Africa in “math and science literacy.” Such is the price of gender equity.

Aside from this never-ending quest to make girls and minorities look as good as or (ideally) better than white males academically, there is another reason for the continual dilution of the math and science curriculum: now that all those smart dames who used to go into teaching enjoy a bevy of other career options, the profession is full of hacks who “teach” math and science and yet could not pass a mid-level course in any branch of either. One-third of high school math teachers and one-fifth of high school science teachers—and a full half of those teaching physical sciences—neither majored nor minored in their field.

So what exactly are these teachers teaching our kids to do? First of all, to eat anything but meat. Schoolchildren are trained to accept a diet radically different from that of their parents. They are fed chocolate-covered ants and grasshoppers by zealous activists during special events. Their Weekly Reader runs scary stories about mad cow disease and regularly beats the drums about Americans’ wasteful eating habits. The number of grade-school children who have (at least temporarily) decided it’s cool to be vegetarian is growing at a record rate.

Archer Daniels Midland, Supermarket to the World, runs an ad that asks, “When there are 20 billion at the table, the question will not be, ‘Where will they sit?’ but ‘What will they eat?'” On the minimum Oneworld wage our children are slated to get, the answer is definitely not red meat.

Schoolchildren are also being taught the very metric system rejected repeatedly by their elders. Lessons and homework are expressed in metric, and the use of metric is required in order to pass unit tests. None of the dire prophecies of “America’s inability to compete” in a world economy gone metric has come to pass, but it is the principle of the thing for the Oneworlders: they have decreed that metric is the One Best Way, and so we shall accept it or else.

Organized science has quit following the Christian calendar, employing instead such terms as BP (Before Present) and BCE (Before Current Era) to date geologic and astronomic events; and business may use the so-called “Millennium Bug” as an excuse to drop Christian dating altogether. Give them a centimeter, and they’ll take a kilometer.

“Oh Russia, my wooden Russia! / I am your last poet,” lamented Sergei Esenin. “Ancient mysterious world of mine, / You quietened like a wind blown out.” But ah (as Esenin might have written), into that silenced vacuum of extinguished folkways oozes Global Culture, by default. The official food of the New World Order is pizza, the official sport is soccer, the official language is pidgin English (although the French are fighting that tooth and nail, to their credit), the official uniform is blue jeans (the better to feel like a real, productive worker), and the official orientation is homosexuality (the better to distract yourself from “politics” without either forming a family that might contest the state for authority or having uncontrolled quantities of children for the state to raise). “Yet I am ready,” continued Esenin, “with a pure heart to swear / that street lighting in Baku / is better than the stars.”