The New School

Pay special attention to the 21st Century Community Learning Centers Act. This is the funding stream for GOALS 2000 (now being folded into the reauthorization of the ESEA) and the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) establishment of "One Stop (Cummunity) Centers", formerly known as your public school, coming into sharper focus for the newly initiated. These are the centers that are to track and "provide for us" ... whether we want it or not ... or as one characterized, from cradle to grave ...

If you have never read Pearl S Buck's Tell The People...Talks With James Yen About the Mass Education Movement, you might want to visit your library. This is a slim volume filled with many parallels to today's "restructuring" of society through public education. Follow the theme:

They will become educated as they reconstruct their lives. It is education through reconstruction, and reconstruction through education.

In Marc Tucker's letter to Hillary Clinton, Tucker writes:

We think the great opportunity you have is to remold the entire American system for human resources development, almost all of the components of which were put in place before World War II.

Keep in mind as you read Tucker's letter to Hillary, that the letter was addressed to Hillary, not Bill, and that Hillary went to Wellsley.

When you tap into this Pearl S Buck's book, written in 1945, you will read James Yen's counsel to readers and future leaders:

You must stimulate the mind of the people so that they demand the thing you have to give them ... We must not think of nations as units ... This is an experiment for people everywhere ... You must start with youth ... You must create a community feeling, a sense of fellowship... [but you must also] ... create divine discontent, a desire for better living. Future leaders? What you teach becomes the habit. Develop intelligent leadership ... through serving, one leads (Community service).

Speaking of the masses Yen says,

We don't make them farm leaders but we prepare them to be leading farmers, content to operate locally ...[there] must be something people can pay for within their economic range .... [so as to] be content with the less of the four constants: education, social services, health and jobs.

On page 30 Yen's relationship to the Rockefeller Foundation is revealed. The foundation was connected through its the Vice President, Selskar M. Gunn. The foundation substantially underwrote this Great Experiment in China. Mr.Yen gives much credit to the American people for their support which he characterized as, "generous". Note references to achieving the plan's goals through the courts which was deferred at the time in favor of driving change through the less noticeable vehicle of "education".

Pearl Buck in her forward to the book cautions, however, speaking of "the plan",

No one can carry out this plan, whether as a private individual or through government, who does not have first in his heart the belief which these young Chinese had, the belief that the plain peoples are worthy of food and health and livelihood and good government. There is a grave danger that this requirement is forgotten in much of the thinking that is being done today, notably in the western countries .... A program imposed upon people will fail if it does not fulfill what they themselves want. Compulsion, even for their own good, will simply defer the hope of peace.

Fran Rice

Vermont

╪