CFR Uses Fear Tactic to Merge Education, Economy
By Carole Hornsby Haynes, Ph.D. January 10, 2020
The globalist Council on Foreign Relations is reaching out to state and local leaders to make unconstitutional changes for the integration of education and the economy. Using fear tactics to force an unquestioning massive change in public opinion, a CFR report claims its recommendations must be quickly enacted to avoid overwhelming consequences in America.
What is not being told is that their far reaching and comprehensive scheme will shift America from a Constitutional Republic to a freedom killing collectivist society. The CFR’s Task Force report, “The Work Ahead: Machines, Skills, and U.S. Leadership in the Twenty-First Century, " predicts major changes in America for which workers must be properly educated and trained using education policies resembling those in totalitarian nations such China and the Soviet Union.
Recommendations include expanded welfare, government involvement in retirement and healthcare, and increase immigration even though the report admits increased immigration will bring large scale job losses for American workers.
Ignoring that the Constitution does not permit federal government involvement in either education or the economy, the panel claims it is government’s role to control job training and placement. The panel claims that worker training must be a top national priority with K-12 education linked to jobs of the future. Since government has failed woefully at predicting, we have to wonder how it can predict future jobs in a rapidly changing technological world.
The CFR narrative discounts the “plentiful agricultural land and rich endowment of natural resources” and “hard work and entrepreneurial ambitions of its people” as reasons for the U.S. becoming the world’s most successful economy in the early 20th century. The key ingredient was the expansion of government high schools to build a skilled workforce with high school diplomas. After World War II state subsidized colleges offered affordable post secondary education to acquire college diplomas.
Now the panel’s report states that “60 percent of retail workers are not proficient in reading and 70 percent have difficulty working with numbers.” Consequently employers are having difficulty filling job openings.
The study fails to mention that academic education is not the goal of public schools. Students are being fed a steady diet of dumbed down content with social and emotional learning laced with far left ideology. The architects of American public schools, who were mostly communists, socialists, humanists, and/or eugenicists, have taken control of the classroom to use it for social and political change – to transform America from a Constitutional Republic with Judeo-Christian values to an atheist, socialist society.
My commentary, “American Workers Are Dumbest In World,” explains why students are not prepared for a rapidly changing job market.
“The U.S. has “gone from being the world’s best educated workforce to the least well educated in the industrial world: an existential crisis,” according to a recent National Center On Education and the Economy (NCEE) policy brief, co-authored by Marc Tucker....“More than two-thirds of eighth graders are not proficient in any core subjects, according to the National Assessment of Education Progress data….Our average American high school graduates are two-and-a-half years behind those in top-performing countries. The curriculum of our colleges is at the level of high schools in top-performing countries...Academics are watered down with class time reduced for academic subjects...It was Tucker who laid out out the German-based master plan for the Clinton administration to centralize education and change it from academic learning to workforce training for a nationally planned and managed economy.”
The CFR report states, “As many as one-third of American workers may need to change occupations and acquire new skills by 2030 if automation adoption is rapid, according to an estimate by McKinsey Global Institute (MGI).” Nearly 60% of jobs could have one-third of their tasks automated by existing technologies but only about 5% of jobs could be fully automated.
In my commentary about the same McKinsey study, “Why 21st Century Automation Won’t Create Mass Unemployment,” I reported,
“Only 9% of U.S. workers face a high risk of losing their jobs through automation, since some tasks in the same job can be done better by humans….Even as manufacturing jobs are being replaced by robots, the demand for labor-intensive services with humans is soaring."
Recommendations and changes being promoted by the CFR:
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Free postsecondary education for all Americans that links “education more closely with employment outcomes.” Will taxpayers be saddled with even higher taxes or students with higher debt levels? With the approach that education is about employment, workers are viewed as “human resources” or cogs in the wheel. Public education is simply workforce training, not a real education with indepth focus on core subjects and the teaching of eternal moral values, how to think, how to be self-educated, and how to be a self-governing citizen.
- “Government should have an explicit goal of creating better jobs and career paths for Americans.” The U.S. Constitution does not permit government control over the economy or education. The CFR proposal is a globalist plan for government control and government dictated career choices based upon the needs of the state.
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Force state and local governments to do central planning and incorporate that into K-12 education. Schools will focus on workforce training beginning at early ages rather than providing a real education that will prepare them for life’s changes including those in mid-career.
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Adopt “workplace readiness standards” in middle and high school curricula. The education establishment will be required to predict future jobs, which is a fool’s folly. If the standards are for current jobs, then students will be narrowly trained for present jobs and will require retraining in near future – at government expense.
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“Expanded counseling for students to set them on successful education-to-work paths.” Central planners will dictate the career paths of students to fulfill economic needs of the state, regardless of their personal interests.
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The federal government should “preserve and expand its survey data.” The panel calls for extensive federal data mining with the linking of data from government, employers, and educational institutions for distribution to researchers and application developers. It references the College Transparency Act pending in Congress as being critical for college student data mining. The bill seeks to overturn the ban on a federal student unit record database so college students can be followed after graduation. Congress passed FEPA in 2018 to allow sharing K-12 personal data among government agencies. The CFR plan along with FEPA and CTA will set up a national database from cradle to grave for lifetime government tracking of citizens.
NOTE: All Texas high school graduates are required by law, as a condition for graduation, to file an application for a federal college loan, even though 53% of the 2018 graduates were NOT college ready. Eventually ALL Texas public school students and their families’ personal information will be in this federal student unit record database, even if they do not attend college.This is a violation of their 4th Amendment right to privacy.
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Create “lifelong learning accounts.” Workers will require ongoing retraining which will be patterned after the “best features of the European ‘flexicurity’ models.” Since K-12 students are receiving a dumbed down, narrowly focused education, they will be forever dependent on the government for retraining and help. Many companies are reluctant to invest in mid-career retraining so it will become government’s responsibility to set up a national funding program for mid-career retraining. This is a flagrant violation of the U.S. Constitution.
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National College Scorecard for ranking schools. This continues efforts begun by the Obama administration. While it can be helpful to have information about colleges and their graduates, a national ranking requires collection of personal student information. It allows the federal government to demonize schools, such as Christian schools that refuse to adopt the extremism infecting higher education.
The McKinsey study estimates that 65% of children today will work at future jobs that don’t even exist. Many of the new jobs will require higher skills. Unless public education is changed dramatically from its current state, the U.S. will not be able to compete successfully in a rapidly changing marketplace.
The proposed CFR plan will create Communist style learning with social engineering by the government. It’s a globalist scheme that will suck the U.S. into a police state in a new world order.