“Soviets in the Classroom” by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt

“Soviets in the Classroom: America’s Latest Education Fad” is a three-page article, first published in 1989, written by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt (b. 26 October 1930 – d. 8 February 2022).

Iserbyt was a freelance writer and the Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) during the first term of President Ronald Reagan. She authored The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, first published in 1999.

This article is merely three pages and it is easier to just read it, but it is in essence a blunt warning about the agreements between the US and USSR that allow the latter to infiltrate and inject its communist ideology into the former’s education system.

This is usually done under the guise of “cooperation” in the scientific, educational or cultural fields, amongst others. One such agreement was signed in Geneva in 1985 and another in Moscow in 1988.

Not surprisingly, it is not just the government that is involved—tax-exempt entities are used.

Why did the U.S. Department of State authorize the unelected, tax-exempt Carnegie Corporation, a long-time and well funded advocate of disarmament and “world interdependence” to negotiate with the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which is known to be an intelligence-gathering arm of the KGB, regarding “curriculum development and the restructuring of American education?” Is it because “privately endowed foundations can operate in areas government may prefer to avoid” as stressed by Dr. David Hamburg, President of the Carnegie corporation, psychiatrist, and chief negotiator for the exchange agreement, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, June 12, 1987?

Iserbyt then provides 10 examples of “exchange activities” that illustrate the dangers of such agreements.

The first (#1) is the promotion of “Critical Thinking” which is relativism disguised as something useful. The author does not word it that way but that is what it is for it at least tacitly denies absolutes.

Another example (#3) is textbook revision:

3. The American-Soviet Textbook Study Project began in 1977, was suspended in 1979 when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan Afghanistan, and resumed in 1985 under the Geneva Agreement. At a conference held in Racine, Wisconsin in November 1987, the U.S. representatives acquiesced in the Soviet insistence that American textbooks should present a more “balanced” (i.e. friendly) discussion of Lenin and should give the Russians more “credit” for their role in World War II. …

Much of this, of course, is/was funded by American taxpayers:

In 1988 the U.S. Department of State awarded $4,540,000 to various groups involved in education exchanges with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This amount, which is probably the amount doled out annually, is just the tip of the funding iceberg, with large annual grants from other government agencies and tax-exempt foundations keeping the controversial exchanges afloat.

The article is brief and highly generalized, intended to be a mere wake-up call. If one wants details, then one should keep digging. To facilitate this, the author finishes the article with a half-page timeline since the infiltration of communist thought into US education began in the 1930s (depending on how one wants to draw the line).

There is, of course, much more history to it. More generally, the infiltration of the underlying liberalist thought into modern Western education began way before then but that is outside the scope of Iserbyt’s article.