David Ignell: Socialist indoctrination runs deep in American public schools

By DAVID IGNELL

The American Federation of Teachers is the second largest teachers’ union in the United States with 1.7 million members. AFT’s president from 1939-1942 was George Counts, who obtained a doctorate in education from the University of Chicago.

Counts was highly influential in the field of public education and charting its course for the next century.  He taught at Teachers College, Columbia University from 1927 to 1955.  He authored 29 books and dozens of papers on education.  

Counts was also active politically. He served as the New York State chairman of the American Labor Party until in his words “our great democratic ally, the Communists captured control” of the party.  Counts went on to found the Liberal Party in 1945, ran for US Senate in 1952 and was its party chairman from 1955-1959.  

In 1932, Counts gave a series of three speeches to the movers and shakers in our nation’s education system.  He then combined the content of those speeches into a pamphlet called “Dare the School Build a New Social Order?”

Counts called for systemic dismantling of the individual pursuit of life, liberty and happiness enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and replacing it with what he termed “collectivism.”  He wrote, “fundamental changes in the economic system are imperative.  Whatever services historic capitalism may have rendered in the past, and they have been many, its days are numbered.”  

Our colleges of education are badly captured and have been for decades. The result of their use of Critical Pedagogy is that our children are being radicalized instead of educated, but more than that they're being destabilized so they can be radicalized elsewhere, like online. pic.twitter.com/fcf9cgPhOj

— James Lindsay, anti-Communist (@ConceptualJames) September 15, 2025

Counts seemed careful not to call his anti-capitalist, revolutionary system “socialism” but semantics aside, his “collectivism” was the same ideology. Counts wrote our society must be “disassociated from its individualistic connections” and replaced “by some form of socialized economy”.  

Counts knew the consequences of what he was proposing.  He wrote, “a planned, coordinated and socialized economy, managed in the interests of the people, would involve severe restrictions on personal freedom. Undoubtedly, in such an economy the individual would not be permitted to do many things that he has customarily done in the past.”

A primary concern was “to make certain that every Progressive school will use whatever power it may possess in opposing and checking the forces of social conservatism and reaction.”  Counts advocated that “teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most of their conquest.” 

One of the audiences that Counts addressed was the Progressive Education Association, an organization of 11,000 education administrators. Toward the end of his speech, he admitted to steering America’s education system “upon very dangerous ground” and “flirting with the idea of indoctrination.”  But those admissions did not deter Counts or the PEA from forging ahead.

The next year, the PEA’s Committee on Social and Economic Problems issued a report titled “Call to the Teachers of the Nation.” Counts was the Committee chairman and many of its members were his fellow faculty members from Teachers College.  

The PEA report asserted “men cannot work alone or in small groups as did their fathers. Technology has created a world in which they must work together in closest interdependence. And they cannot work together unless their actions are controlled and unified by some community of purpose.” 

It continued, “men cannot own and operate the means of production as they did at the time of the founding of the nation.  As a consequence, the fulfillment of the old ideal requires a reversal of loyalties at certain points.” 

The PEA report called for this revolutionary change in America’s thinking to be implemented not by elected leaders, but by unelected teachers, who were deemed the “spiritual leaders of the masses of the people” and “the bearer of culture and a creator of social values”.  The report even had the audacity to state that the “taxpayers have no special claim on the schools”.

In the mind of our educators, We the People was rewritten to “We the Teachers” and the coordinated indoctrination of American students began in earnest.   

These revolutionaries called for their socialist ideology to be fertilized by calling on teachers to “repudiate utterly the ideal of material success as the goal of education, abandon the smug middle-class tradition on which they have been nourished in the past.”   The PEA report continued, “In promotion practices, in school activities, in the relations of pupils and teachers and administrators, the ideal of a cooperative commonwealth should prevail.“

The report asserted textbooks must “emphasize the trend toward collectivism in economy, the emergence of a world order.”  This strategy ensured that even when students did homework outside the school, the indoctrination continued.    

The PEA report proscribed not only an offensive attack in the classroom and the home but a defensive strategy towards the general public.  “If the profession is to be a factor in the process of social reconstruction, its members must oppose every effort on the part of publishing houses, business interests, privileged classes and patriotic societies to prescribe the content of the curriculum.” 

The report also called for teachers to be trained in this ideology through teacher’s colleges which “to be worthy of the name, should be a center of truly liberal education.”  

Finally, the PEA report called for the radicalization of teacher unions in America.  “The progressive minded teacher of the country must unite in a powerful organization, militantly devoted to the building of a better social order.  This organization would need to be equipped with the material resources, the legal talent, and the trained intelligence necessary to wage successful warfare in the press, the courts, and the legislative chambers of the nation.”  

In 1930, AFT membership had been in decline for several years and stood at 7000.  After the PEA report, AFT membership exploded by nearly 500% over the next decade reaching 39,000 by 1939, the year Counts became its president.  

In 1958, when former FBI agent W. Cleon Skousen wrote the “Naked Communist”, the combined membership of the AFT and the National Education Association was 1 million.  Today it stands at 4.5 million.  The lobby power of these national organizations at the state and local levels is practically unchecked.  

Objective #17 of the Communists set forth by Skousen was “Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda.  Soften the curriculum.  Get control of teachers’ associations.  Put the party line in textbooks.”  

Today, objective #17 has been accomplished.  Our public schools are clearly under the control of the unions, and the results are an unmitigated disaster.  

Over the past 25 years, products of our socialist ideology and teachers’ unions have entered hundreds of schools like Sandy Hook Elementary, Robb Elementary, Columbine High and Virginia Tech and riddled them with bullets and death.  Hundreds of innocent students have been murdered by indoctrinated young men who are no longer taught the Ten Commandments and the need to be responsible for their own actions.   

Meanwhile, the indoctrination continues, and many brainwashed students now glorify these mass murderers and agents of chaos as heroes.  The teachers’ unions try to evade responsibility for this indoctrination by further eroding our Constitution, blaming the gun manufacturers and lobbying for gun control.   

Skousen saw communism as a criminal conspiracy.  He wrote that Communists induced us to “accept the idea that communism is a legitimate expression of political action”, and “it is a mistake to treat it as a political party”.  Vladimir Lenin, the man who turned Marxist theory into a political reality, was convinced that socialism was a necessary steppingstone for communism.  The indoctrination introduced by Counts, and promoted and safeguarded by the teachers’ unions, is leading America down the path to destruction.  

It’s time to free American public schools from this bondage. We The People must connect the dots and act to restore the foundation that The United States of America was founded upon.

David Ignell was born and raised in Juneau Alaska where he currently resides.  He formerly practiced law in California state and federal courts and was a volunteer analyst for the California Innocence Project. He currently writes as a forensic journalist and recently authored a book on the Alaska Grand Jury.