On The Radicalism of The Humanist Manifesto

Below, Discourse Online contributor, William Gairdner, provides a Summary of The Humanist Manifesto (Parts I 1933, and II, 1973), with some brief comments of his own in square brackets.

Everyone concerned about the perceived decline of the West, should know what this Manifesto preached – and preaches still.

Although it is a highly self-contradictory document and of low intellectual value, The Humanist Manifesto clearly sums up the entire philosophy of “secular humanism” that is today so much in the air. It has been signed by hundreds of influential intellectual and political figures such as John Dewey, Issac Asimov, Sir Herman Bondi, Sidney Hook, Sir Alfred Ayer, B.F. Skinner, and Sir Julian Huxley; by feminists such as Betty Friedan, by economists such as Gunnar Myrdal, architect of the Swedish Welfare State, and of course by the Sex-Ed Mafia, Professor Lester Kirkendall, Alan Guttmacher, and Canadian abortionist Henry Morgentaler, past President of the Humanist Association of Canada.

I used the word “preaches”, because the signatories refer to themselves as “religious humanists” –  founders of a new “vital, frank, and fearless religion capable of furnishing adequate social goals and personal satisfactions” to the world. The essence of this “religion,” which denies any supernatural reality – is the worship of man himself – the God-man.

What follows is an abbreviated list of their founding beliefs in their own words. Reflect upon them; even though very few teachers have ever heard of this manifesto, many of these values and beliefs are today being transmitted to children in most of the public schools of the land, as matters of fact, through the process of infusion. And of course, they are spread by media and entertainment folk of all sorts. They are especially powerfully communicated via the highly-charged medium of Sex-Ed, if not by intent, then by consensus.

Recall that as early as 1925 there were over 1,000 U.S. schools actively involved in “progressive education”, much of it steered by people in complete sympathy with the views listed below. The thousands of teachers in these schools, and the Teacher’s Colleges that trained them, constituted a vast unofficial network for the promotion of so-called “humanist” values, via the media, the bureaucracy, and the law – even though the vast majority of humans in the Western world have never abandoned their strongly held Judeo-Christian values – ones utterly in conflict with this so-called religious-humanism.

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Was Dewey a Marxist?

This article was developed as a proposal for a Ph. D. thesis at the Faculty of Education, McGill University. It was published in Discourse, The St. Lawrence Institute, Winter, 1994.

In 1975 I published an article entitled “Some Reflections on Canadian Education” in the History and Social Science Teacher. I argued then that Canada had never produced an indigenous philosophy of education but had accepted imported ideas, first from Europe and later from the United States.

I pointed out that, by the late nineteenth century, the classical curriculum of the British grammar school, imported in the early years of colonial North America, gave way to the ideas of European social revolutionaries like Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Herbart and Froebels. These philosophers changed our perception of the school’s purpose, slowly eroding the traditional concentration on formal literacy and the acquisition of knowledge, and giving way to an increasing concern with the methods of teaching and the interests of the child.

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