3 THE TROUBLING THIRTIES “And the builder of this new world must be education.... Plainly, the first step
in the case of each country is to train an elite to think, feel, and act internationally.” The preceding words of Paul Mantoux of Paris, France are taken from the foreword to International Understanding by John Eugene Harley, published by the Stanford University Press in 1931. A flock of individuals of collectivist persuasion jumped on Monsieur Mantoux’s bandwagon
in “The Troubling Thirties.” Aldous Huxley brought along his Brave New World; Professor George Counts contributed his Dare the School Build a New Social Order?; William Z. Foster (national chairman of the Communist Party of the United States of America) wrote his Toward a Soviet America; John Dewey co-authored The Humanist Manifesto I; the Carnegie Corporation added its Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies and its Eight-Year Study (which was in the 1990s referred to by the Education Commission of the States as the model for Outcome-Based Education); and surprisingly, Herbert Hoover proposed a Research Committee on Recent Social Trends to Implement the Planned Society. The thirties were indeed troubling. Unfortunately, the average American was unaware of the
important steps being taken to collectivize (socialize) this nation, particularly that of utilizing the schools as the vehicle through which Mantoux’s “new world” could be brought into being.
1931
INTERNATIONAL UNDERSTANDING BY JOHN EUGENE HARLEY (STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS: 17