Pedagogical Impact Assessment
From Scholastic Formation to Technocratic Social Engineering
The Classical Foundation - Scholasticism and the Development of Judgment
The educational framework that forged the American Founding generation was not a historical relic, but a sophisticated system of cognitive armour (vigilance) designed to produce citizens capable of self-governance. This pedagogical rigor was a strategic necessity; it formed independent judgment as the primary defense against the inevitable encroachments of tyranny. This was the Tripod of Liberty in action; a system where the individual’s mental and moral discipline served as the bedrock for a stable republic.
As documented by James J. Walsh in Education of the Founding Fathers of the Republic, the colonial college curriculum was a direct continuation of Medieval Scholasticism. The intellectual architecture of Boethius, St. Anselm and Thomas Aquinas did not vanish at the Reformation; rather, it remained the core of American higher education well into the nineteenth century. The mental training ground was centred on the conciliating of Aristotelian logic with metaphysical inquiry. Evidence of this rigour is found in the graduation requirements of the era, where candidates for the degree of B.A. were required to defend a series of ‘about one hundred propositions’ in public disputations. This process ensured that education formed defenders of the Republic who were trained not merely to memorize facts, but to wield Logic, Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy as instruments of forensic defence for the rights of man.
The anthropology of this era viewed the individual as a moral agent - imago Dei -created in the image of God. This metaphysical premise was the anthropological precondition for a rights-based order. Because man was understood as a being with a soul and intrinsic dignity, his rights were recognized as inherent and grounded in Natural Law, rather than granted by the state (as per the British and European governance systems. America alone was unique in this and remains so today). This Scholastic understanding of self-evident truths, stated in America’s Declaration of Independence, created a citizenry whose primary duty was vigilance at scale.
This classical model of the vigilant citizen, however, became the primary target of a 19th and 20th century ontological replacement (by enemies foreign and domestic) movement designed to dismantle the very foundation of individual sovereignty. To (as Andrew Carnegie proudly proclaimed; ‘take back America’). Note Carnegie’s financial, strategic and tactical role in the long campaign, deployed through education as weaponized statecraft. There is a reason my pinned post on X is a thorough breakdown with analytical commentary of Augustin Rudd’s excellent book documenting the subversive ‘New Education’ movement and it’s essential required reading to understand how and why America is in the position it’s in now. How and why we got here:
The Radical Inversion - The New Educationists and Materialist Philosophy
The New Education™️ movement was not a mere shift in teaching methodology; it was a deliberate ontological inversion and a form of asymmetric warfare conducted against the domestic population. Led by Harold Rugg and John Dewey, this movement sought to repurpose the classroom from a site of knowledge transmission into a laboratory for the ‘reconstruction’ of society. It was the ideological solvent intended to dissolve the constitutional framework from within.
The Rugg-Dewey doctrine was built upon a radically materialistic philosophy that explicitly denied the natural and inalienable rights of man. In the 1936 Educational Foundations syllabus, the New Educationists characterized the doctrine of natural rights as a “hangover 18th-century answer” that was “inadequate to meet the rottenness” of social and financial life. They labeled the exercise of these rights as “hurtful freedoms” that obstructed the path to a planned collective order. This was, in forensic terms, a treasonous repudiation of the Founders’ premises and principles for the Constitutional Republic.
The New Educationists demanded a ‘thoroughgoing change’ to the American governance model, contrasting their collectivist vision against the traditional order with the following propaganda baked into all aspects of education pedagogy;
The Inadequacy of Individualism
They viewed the primacy of the individual as an obsolete concept, claiming the “age of individualism in economy is closing.”
Repudiation of Absolute (Creator/Nature endowed) Freedom
Rights and freedoms were no longer seen as inherent, but were said to “derive their just authority from the way they work when tried” - a total rejection of immutable Natural Law.
The State as the Source of Rights
By denying that individuals have any rights save those granted by the state, they struck directly at the foundation of the Constitution.
The Demand for Collectivist Planning
They advocated for a statist order where individual merit is submerged into the “morass of collectivism.”
To operationalize this, the teacher was reimagined as an “artist teacher.” No longer an instructor of objective disciplines, the teacher became an agent of the “New Social Order,” tasked with “bending the twig” of the next generation toward a Scientific Socialist Planned Economy - a Technate under World Federation. That ‘artist teacher’ makes an appearance here:
This philosophical and pedagogical shift necessitated a complete methodological deconstruction of the curriculum to ensure the student was stripped of their intellectual defences to discern, comprehend and resist this transition. Tactically speaking, long term success was far more viable with the educated population desiring and even demanding this transition. Evangelizing for it and actively protesting against all obstacles to it, manufactured under the guise of dialectical narrative warfare media propaganda over many decades.
Methodological Deconstruction - The Replacement of Knowledge with Conditioning
The strategic elimination of history, civics, and geography as separate disciplines was essential to removing the student’s civic inheritance. These subjects were merged into an omnibus (Carnegie funded) “social science.” This allowed collectivist doctrines to be bootlegged into the curriculum, replacing the study of Natural Law with “social construction.”
The Deweyite apparatus operationalized Wundtian behaviouralism, treating the American student as a ‘biological organism’ devoid of a soul. This “Skinner Box” model of education focused on adaptive behaviour and environmental conditioning rather than the cultivation of reason. By treating man as a stimulous-response beast without intrinsic rational faculties, conscience and moral agency (inherent dignity), the educationists established the anthropological precondition for technocratic governance.
Augustin Rudd identified six forensic points regarding how education was weaponized for political reconstruction:
Dissolution of Natural Law
The explicit denial of the metaphysical premises that ground the American Republic.
Subordination of the Individual
The transition from the primacy of the individual to the managed collective unit.
Erasure of the Ontological and Anthropological man (agent) of The Declaration
The rejection of man as a metaphysical being in favour of a biological organism shaped by environment. The consequences of that are detailed here:
Replacement of Truth with Conditioning
Treating truth as relative and morality as a byproduct of material conditions (dialectical materialism).
Weaponization of Education
Repurposing schools to spearhead the building of a new social order through indoctrination.
Centralization of Power
Using the educational system to manufacture the infrastructure for a statist, planned society. Once the individual’s judgment is neutralized through this behavioural conditioning, the population is no longer capable of self-rule, necessitating a transition to centralized, technocratic management. To understand more on the specific role and purpose of judgement for self governance see here:
The Operational Endpoint - Technocracy and Resource Management
Technocracy is the logical conclusion of a society where the population has been reduced to managed collective units. In this model, the state functions not as a protector of rights, but as a scientific manager of ‘human resources’. This transition from constitutional republican citizenship to an administrative scientifically managed population was formally catalyzed by the Carnegie Foundation’s 1933–34 Report on the Role of Social Science in Education (covered extensively in Bending The Twig), which identified collectivism as a ‘historical inevitability’ and sought to formalize the preparatory phases of what in 1937 Elon Musk’s grandfather worked on - the ‘Technate’ - which the current administration’s geopolitical resource acquisition strategy looks to be completing.
The technocratic operational endpoints of pedagogical inversion are clear:
Oligarchical Big Foundations and the 5th Column
The transition is driven by a Scientific Socialist Planned Economy, funded by foundations and NGOs acting as a 5th Column to subvert the Constitutional Republic and Free Enterprise system.
From Sovereignty to Stakeholder Capitalism
Economic agency is being replaced by Stakeholder Capitalism and Communitarianism, models that prioritize collective resource management over individual ownership.
The Technate Model and Digital Tokenization
The final stage involves the digital tokenization of all resources. Human beings are treated as extracted resources (viewed through transhumanist and post human lenses) and governed by AI models.
Co-option of Leadership
This transition has utilized the co-option of church leadership across denominations to facilitate the co-option of the Distributism model of resource management outside of its specific theological religious domain. Skin suiting Catholicism and effectively neutralizing spiritual resistance to the technocratic order.
In the Technate, the rejection of transcendent moral law is complete. Governance is achieved through the socio-scientific distribution of assets, where the population is managed as an organism, a biological mass without agency (see Daniel Robinson’s’First Principle’ above) rather than a body of sovereign citizens.
The Erosion of Vigilance and the Future of Governance
The historical arc from Scholastic formation to technocratic social engineering represents the ultimate Pedagogical Inversion. By dismantling the intellectual framework of the individual, the New Education movement conducted a successful campaign of asymmetric warfare against the American mind.
George Washington warned in his Farewell Address that the purpose of education was to maintain “vigilance at scale.” In a constitutional republic, the citizens are the government; if their capacity for independent judgment is destroyed, the republic ceases to exist in function, despite its apparent patriotic cosmetic veneer. The Deweyite model was the instrument used to attack and destroy this capability, “bending the twig” away from the practice of vigilance and toward the passivity of the managed collective. The poisoned fruits of this inversion are visible today in modern Social Justice Activism. Students are conditioned for political participation and protest( frequently violating due process) before they understand the legal and moral responsibilities of citizenship. You saw it in Black Lives Matter protests and you’re seeing it now in Minnesota. The transition from the formation of judgment to the manufacturing of activists for a pre-defined social order happened over a century ago and Dewey’s ‘A Common Faith’ was transparent;
For a detailed breakdown of the specific incompatibilities between The Humanist Manifesto (Dewey was a key signatory and instigator of the Council of Foreign Relations, in addition to being the person responsible for bringing Horkheimer et al of the Frankfurt School to Columbia Teachers College, setting them up to operate in America) and the Declaration of Independence, see here:
Look at these dates and understand that the post 1960s Critical Theory and Maoist Insurgency Warfare tactics plus the Marxist and Liberation Theology Freireian tactics have been the most recent phase of a long sustained campaign of warfare on domestic population operationalized through the academy and education for well over a century and if we track back further even than the Prussian subversive foundations, we find the sophistry and scepticism embedded within the Cartesian and Kantian conquest of the Anglo-American academy through the 19th century (following America’s warm embrace of Philosophical Pragmatism, Positivism and Progressivism, to have taken out all cognitive defence against the assault waged following the establishment of the Federal Reserve and the National Education Association.
The defining crisis of modern Western civilization is the shift from the individual as imago Dei to the individual as a “managed resource.” This pedagogical revolution has effectively neutralized the intellectual defences of the so called ‘educated’ citizenry, paving the way for a technocratic governance that replaces the rule of law with the machinery of scientific management. Without a return to the Scholastic recognition of Natural Law and the cultivation of independent judgment, the capacity for self-governance will remain a ‘faded’ curio - a ‘relic’ of the past, a cosmetic veneer practised rhetorically in Classical Education ‘Great Books’ programs, severed of its necessary essential metaphysical realism; the understanding and agency for self governance.
Unless this is all learned and comprehended as part of the professional training for Teachers, Lawyers and all Public Office holders swearing an oath of office to uphold and defend the Constitution, nothing will change and those professionals are not going to learn any of this as a hobby in their ‘spare time’ - and nor should they! It takes a great deal of effort and time to comprehend and the huge obstacles are the existing accrued misapprehensions through unexamined premises and language deception. This requires skilled structured in person teaching and support for those learning it. Now where is the political will, the finance, the resource and the infrastructure for that? Where is the commitment to Institutional Stewardship for this knowledge and practise? The America 250 Celebrations so far look to be all about that subversive term ‘Democracy’ which the Founders fought so hard to reject and defend against. The media AI mini biographical pieces on the Founders themselves are very engaging but they teach none of this. The presentations on American Civil War History likewise teach none of this. Everything ‘out there’ is cosmetic only. There is nothing whatsoever about the necessary understanding of the human person that the Founders encoded and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. So far there is much in the name of celebrating America’s Founding which in function is serving to negate it and the media consuming public is not even aware of this even as it’s happening. Who will resource and operationalize the institutional stewardship of Washington’s legacy now - of Vigilance itself?
Thanks to your work and other’s like you I am beginning to understand something about our world and how we arrived at the present state of affairs. It’s an amazing story. Thanks for your work it’s very important and amazing as well 👍