How Do You Conquer America Without Firing a Shot?
In 1981, a woman with impeccable establishment credentials took a job in Ronald Reagan’s Department of Education.
Her name was Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt. Her father was a member of Skull and Bones, Yale’s elite secret society that has produced generations of presidents, CIA directors, and establishment power brokers.1 She had worked in education her entire career. She believed she was joining an administration committed to dismantling the federal Department of Education and returning control to parents and local communities.
Instead, she discovered something else entirely.
Hidden in filing cabinets and tucked away in policy papers, she found documents outlining a comprehensive plan to transform American education from a system designed to create independent thinkers into one designed to produce compliant workers. The plan wasn’t new. It had been in motion for decades. And both political parties were in on it.
So she did what any reasonable person would do.
She smuggled the documents out and made them public.
The Insider
Charlotte Iserbyt wasn’t some fringe activist or conspiracy theorist. She was a consummate insider.
She served as Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) during the Reagan administration.2 Before that, she had served on the Board of Directors of the National Education Association (NEA). Her father, who was a member of Skull and Bones, had served in the State Department. Her family connections ran deep through the American establishment.
She knew these people. She understood how they operated. And when she saw what was happening inside the Department of Education, she couldn’t stay quiet.
The documents she discovered detailed plans for outcomes-based education, school-to-work programs, and something called “performance-based assessment.” These weren’t just educational reforms. They were a complete restructuring of what education was supposed to accomplish.
The goal wasn’t to teach children to think independently. It was to prepare them for their predetermined role in a planned economy. Reading, writing, and arithmetic were being replaced with attitudes, values, and beliefs. Academic achievement was being redefined as workforce compliance.
The Book That Changed Everything
In 1999, after years of research and documentation, Iserbyt published The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America: A Chronological Paper Trail.3
The book wasn’t a theory. It was a documentary record. Over 700 pages of government documents, policy papers, foundation reports, and academic studies, arranged chronologically from 1896 to 1999. Each document carefully sourced. Each connection meticulously traced.
What she documented was stunning.
The transformation of American education wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t the result of good intentions gone wrong or bureaucratic incompetence. It was deliberate. It was planned. And it had been underway for over a century.
The paper trail began with John Dewey and the progressive education movement at the turn of the 20th century.4 It ran through the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations in the 1920s and 1930s. It connected to behavioral psychology programs funded by the military during World War II. It intersected with UNESCO’s global education initiatives in the 1950s and 1960s. It accelerated with federal education programs in the 1970s and 1980s.
And it all pointed in the same direction: away from academic excellence and individual achievement, toward social adjustment and workforce preparation.
Carnegie, Rockefeller, and the Foundations
Following the money led Iserbyt back decades before the federal programs of her era.
She documented how the major tax-exempt foundations, particularly Carnegie and Rockefeller, had systematically worked to reshape American education beginning in the early 1900s. These weren’t charitable organizations interested in helping children learn. They were social engineering laboratories interested in population control.
The Carnegie Corporation funded studies arguing that too much education was dangerous. They promoted “life adjustment” education over academic rigor. They worked to eliminate classical education in favor of vocational training. They funded the development of “progressive” education methods that de-emphasized reading, writing, and mathematics.
The Rockefeller Foundation went further. John D. Rockefeller Sr. is often quoted as saying: “I don’t want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers.”5 Though this quote’s primary source attribution remains disputed among historians, it captures the philosophy reflected in the foundation’s educational programs.
His foundation funded the General Education Board, which wrote in its Occasional Papers: “In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk.”6
They weren’t hiding their intentions. They were writing them down.
The playbook Iserbyt documented (using tax-exempt foundations to reshape society through education)7 wasn’t new even then. It was the refinement of techniques developed over centuries, now applied with industrial efficiency to American schoolrooms.
The Soviet Connection
One of the most explosive revelations in Iserbyt’s research was the connection between American education reform and Soviet educational methods.
The U.S. and Soviet Union signed a major cultural and educational exchange agreement in 1958 (the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement), which was renewed periodically through the Cold War.8 While Iserbyt was working in the Department of Education in the early 1980s, she raised concerns about Soviet influences on American education reform. A general U.S.-USSR cultural agreement was renewed in 1985 at the Geneva summit, though the specific nature and impact of these exchanges remain debated.
The Soviet education system was designed around central planning principles. Students were channeled based on aptitude testing into predetermined roles. Individual achievement was subordinated to collective needs. Critical thinking that challenged state orthodoxy was discouraged.
Iserbyt argued that similar principles were being imported into American educational reforms.
Iserbyt documented these agreements and connections in her research. She released her findings to the public and was immediately attacked as a McCarthyite fear-monger.
But the agreements were real, even as interpretations of their significance varied widely.
Outcomes-Based Education: The New Name for an Old Plan
By the time Iserbyt was working in the Department of Education in the 1980s, the plan had a new name: Outcomes-Based Education (OBE).
OBE sounded reasonable. Set learning outcomes. Measure whether students achieve them. Hold schools accountable. What could be wrong with that?
Everything, according to Iserbyt’s research.
The “outcomes” weren’t academic. They were behavioral. Students weren’t being measured on whether they could read or solve math problems. They were being measured on their attitudes, values, and beliefs. Whether they were “cooperative.” Whether they accepted “diversity.” Whether they demonstrated “social responsibility.”
The assessment methods weren’t tests. They were psychological profiles. Students were asked questions about their families, their political beliefs, their personal feelings. The data was collected and stored. Parents weren’t informed. Many teachers didn’t even understand what they were participating in.
And perhaps most disturbing, students couldn’t fail anymore. The system was designed to “remediate” them until they achieved the desired outcomes. Academic standards were lowered to ensure everyone could meet them. Excellence was replaced with mediocrity. Individual achievement was replaced with group conformity.
This wasn’t education. It was conditioning.
The Whistleblower
When Iserbyt started copying documents and releasing them to the public, she became a target.
She was fired from the Department of Education. She was blacklisted from education jobs. She was called a conspiracy theorist, an extremist, a right-wing nut. Mainstream media refused to cover her findings. Academic journals wouldn’t review her work. The documents she had smuggled out were dismissed as “taken out of context” or misinterpreted.
But she kept going.
She spoke to parent groups. She testified before state legislatures. She appeared on radio programs and gave interviews to anyone who would listen. She published her research independently when no mainstream publisher would touch it. She put the entire book online for free so anyone could read it.
She wasn’t interested in making money. She was interested in exposing the truth.
The Homeschool Explosion
One of the most telling responses to Iserbyt’s work was what it triggered in parents.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, as her research spread through grassroots networks, homeschooling exploded. Parents who read her documentation and then looked at what was happening in their own children’s classrooms realized she was right. The dumbing down wasn’t a theory. It was happening to their kids.
They pulled them out.
Homeschooling numbers grew dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic, peaking at approximately 3.7 million children in 2020-2021 before stabilizing around 3.1-3.4 million by 2022-2023.9 The COVID lockdowns accelerated the trend, but the foundation had been laid decades earlier by parents who had read Iserbyt’s work and decided they couldn’t trust the system anymore.
Parents who made the leap discovered what Iserbyt had been saying all along: education works when it’s designed to actually educate.10 Homeschooled children weren’t just learning to read and think critically. They were rediscovering what education looked like before it became a system of behavioral conditioning. The results spoke for themselves.
The education establishment blamed COVID. They blamed politics. They blamed budget cuts and teacher shortages. They never acknowledged that millions of parents had simply lost faith in a system that had stopped trying to educate their children.
Why It Matters Now
The patterns Iserbyt documented in 1999 have only accelerated.
Common Core was sold as raising standards. Instead it standardized mediocrity. Social-emotional learning (SEL) is sold as supporting student wellbeing. Instead it’s psychological profiling and behavioral modification. Competency-based education is sold as personalized learning. Instead it’s the final elimination of academic standards.
The language changes. The marketing improves. But the goal remains the same: produce compliant workers who don’t ask questions and don’t think critically.
Test scores confirm what parents already know. American students rank near the bottom among developed nations in reading, math, and science. But they lead the world in self-esteem. They feel good about themselves even though they can’t read at grade level. That’s not an accident. That’s the design.
The New Phase: Engineering Conflict From Within
The dumbing down wasn’t the end goal. It was preparation for what came next.
By the 2020s, a new element had been introduced into American classrooms: systematic hatred disguised as social justice education. The same foundations and NGOs that Iserbyt exposed weren’t just producing compliant workers anymore. They were producing activists trained to see the world through the lens of oppressor and oppressed.
And one group was increasingly cast as the ultimate oppressor: Jews.
Under the banner of “anti-Zionism” and “decolonization,” American schools began teaching children that Israel was a uniquely evil nation, that Jews were “colonizers,” and that violence against them could be justified as “resistance.”11 Teachers’ unions promoted materials equating Zionism with racism. School libraries stocked books portraying terrorists as freedom fighters.
This wasn’t accidental curriculum drift. It was the deliberate injection of conflict into a population already stripped of critical thinking skills.
The strategy was elegant in its simplicity: empty minds are the easiest to program. Students who couldn’t analyze arguments, evaluate evidence, or think independently were perfect vessels for whatever ideology their educators poured into them. And increasingly, what was being poured in was hatred.
The digital age accelerated the process. Algorithms and social media completed what the classroom had started, feeding students curated content that reinforced tribal identities and emotional reactions over rational thought.12 A generation raised without strong reading skills or critical thinking capacity was now spending hours daily in digital echo chambers designed to maximize engagement through outrage.
The result was predictable. Students who couldn’t read at grade level were being taught whom to hate. And hatred, unlike literacy, requires no critical thinking at all.
A dumbed-down population that can’t think independently is easy to manipulate. But a dumbed-down population filled with tribal hatred? That’s a population that will tear itself apart from within, too busy fighting each other to notice who’s actually pulling the strings.
Carnegie and Rockefeller had focused on producing workers. Their successors were producing warriors for a cultural civil war, armed not with knowledge but with rage, their empty minds filled with precisely calibrated resentments.13
The classroom had created the vacuum. The algorithm filled it. And the result was a generation primed for conflict rather than citizenship.
The Documents Don’t Lie
What made Iserbyt’s work impossible to dismiss, despite decades of attempts, was the documentation.
She didn’t speculate. She didn’t theorize. She showed you the actual documents. The foundation reports. The government memos. The UNESCO agreements. The Carnegie studies. The Rockefeller funding streams. The Soviet exchange agreements. The OBE implementation guides.
All of it sourced. All of it verified. All of it available for anyone to read.
You could disagree with her interpretation. You could argue about what it all meant. But you couldn’t deny that the documents existed. You couldn’t deny what they said. You couldn’t deny who wrote them and who funded them.
The paper trail was real.
The Silence That Speaks Volumes
Like Antony Sutton, whose exposé on Skull and Bones was aided by the secret society documents Charlotte Iserbyt sent him from her late father’s collection, she too was largely ignored by mainstream academia and media.
No major newspaper profiled her. No television news program investigated her claims. Her book wasn’t reviewed in the New York Times or the Washington Post. Education schools didn’t assign her work. Ed policy journals didn’t engage with her research.
She was simply erased from the conversation.
When she died in 2022 at age 93, the obituaries were brief and perfunctory.14 No major outlet ran a retrospective on her life’s work. The education establishment she had exposed for decades acted as if she had never existed.
But her work survived. The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America remains in print. Her website is still active. Her interviews are archived online. And a new generation of parents discovering that their children can’t read is finding her documentation and realizing it explains everything.
The Question That Won’t Go Away
Charlotte Iserbyt raised a question that the education establishment has never answered: If these reforms were really about helping children learn, why do they consistently result in lower achievement?
Why do students in countries that never adopted progressive education methods consistently outperform American students? Why do classical education schools and homeschools produce better outcomes than public schools with vastly higher per-student spending? Why does every metric of academic achievement decline as spending increases and new reforms are implemented?
The answer Iserbyt provided was simple and disturbing: Because the reforms were never designed to improve academic achievement. They were designed to accomplish something else entirely.
You don’t need to believe in vast conspiracies to see that something is fundamentally broken in American education. You just need to look at what Charlotte Iserbyt documented.
And ask yourself why her work has been so systematically ignored.
The Legacy
Iserbyt wasn’t the first to notice something was wrong with American education. Teachers and parents had been raising concerns for decades. But she was the first to document the coordinated, deliberate nature of the transformation with a comprehensive paper trail.
She showed that it wasn’t incompetence. It wasn’t bureaucracy. It wasn’t lack of funding or poor training or insufficient resources. It was intentional.
And once you see that, you can’t unsee it.
The reading wars, the math wars, the constant cycling through new educational fads that somehow always make things worse, they all make sense when you understand they’re not designed to improve education. They’re designed to maintain a system that produces exactly what it was built to produce: compliant workers who don’t question authority and don’t think for themselves.
Charlotte Iserbyt spent her life trying to wake people up to this reality. She paid a professional price for it. She was marginalized, dismissed, and eventually erased from the official narrative.
But the documents remain. The paper trail still exists. And every parent watching their child struggle in a system that seems designed to fail them can read her work and understand why.
That’s a legacy the education establishment can’t erase, no matter how hard they try.
The Work Continues
Iserbyt traced the education thread. Sutton followed the money. Quigley mapped the networks. Their work laid a foundation that scholars are still building on today.
Eric Daniel Buesing spent 22 years researching elite power structures, building on exactly this foundation. His book The Hidden Hand: Wealth, Power, and Control from Pharaohs to Corporations traces these patterns even further back, from Sumerian temple economies to modern corporate networks. It’s the kind of comprehensive historical analysis that connects the dots across millennia, not just decades.
If Iserbyt showed you how they dumbed down education and Sutton showed you the money trail, Buesing shows you the 5,000-year pattern. The same techniques Iserbyt exposed, using behavioral psychology to engineer compliant workers, were being refined in Egyptian temples and Roman patronage networks thousands of years ago. The Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations she documented weren’t inventing something new. They were applying ancient playbooks to modern schoolrooms.
The book documents how a 2011 ETH Zurich study discovered just 147 firms controlling 40% of global wealth.15 How the same families appear generation after generation in positions of power. How crisis is systematically weaponized to consolidate control. What Iserbyt found in education was one thread in a tapestry woven across five thousand years.
Pre-order now: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-hidden-hand-eric-daniel-buesing/1148336792
The complete text of The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America is available for FREE online. Charlotte Iserbyt wanted everyone to read it. The documents she compiled speak for themselves.
Notes
1. Wikipedia, “Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt,” last modified April 2, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Thomson_Iserbyt.
2. Wikipedia, “Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt.”
3. Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America: A Chronological Paper Trail (Ravenna, OH: Conscience Press, 1999).
4. Peter Gibbon, “John Dewey: Portrait of a Progressive Thinker,” Humanities 40, no. 2 (Spring 2019), https://www.neh.gov/article/john-dewey-portrait-progressive-thinker; Lawrence A. Cremin, “John Dewey and the Progressive-Education Movement, 1915-1952,” The School Review 67, no. 2 (Summer 1959): 160-173.
5. This quote is widely attributed to Rockefeller in educational reform literature, including Iserbyt’s work. However, historians note that primary source verification for this exact quote is disputed. It nonetheless reflects sentiments found in General Education Board documents and policies. See discussion in Iserbyt, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, 8.
6. General Education Board, Occasional Papers, no. 1 (New York: General Education Board, c. 1906-1913), as quoted in Iserbyt, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, 32. The full context concerns rural education reform vision.
7. For detailed analysis of foundation influence on education policy, see “Weaponized Philanthropy: The Reece Committee,” Sleuth Fox (blog), accessed December 29, 2025, https://sleuthfox.substack.com/p/weaponized-philanthropy-the-reece.
8. William Henry Lacy III and Georgy Zarubin, “Agreement Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Exchanges in the Cultural, Technical, and Educational Fields” (1958); Yale Richmond, U.S.-Soviet Cultural Exchanges, 1958-1986: Who Wins? (New York: Routledge, 1987); “U.S.-USSR General Agreement of November 21, 1985 and Program of Cooperation and Exchanges for 1986-1988,” signed at Geneva Summit. Note: Iserbyt’s claims about a specific 1985 “Education Technology Agreement” signed by Secretary Terrel Bell are disputed in the historical record; Bell left office in 1984, and the 1985 Geneva accord was a broader cultural renewal. The 1958 Lacy-Zarubin Agreement established the foundation for ongoing U.S.-Soviet educational exchanges.
9. National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), “Research Facts on Homeschooling,” 2021-2023, https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/; U.S. Census Bureau, “Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey Shows Significant Increase in Homeschooling Rates in Fall 2020,” news release, March 22, 2021; Brian D. Ray, “How Many Homeschool Students Are There in the United States? Pre-Covid-19 and Post-Covid-19: New Data,” NHERI, 2021. Homeschooling numbers peaked at approximately 3.7 million during the 2020-2021 school year due to pandemic lockdowns, then stabilized around 3.1-3.4 million by 2022-2023.
10. “Liberating Our Children: A Parent’s Journey to Homeschooling,” Sleuth Fox (blog), accessed December 29, 2025, https://sleuthfox.substack.com/p/liberating-our-children-a-parents.
11. “The Trojan Horse: How America’s Education System Became a Pipeline for Antisemitism,” Sleuth Fox (blog), accessed December 29, 2025, https://sleuthfox.substack.com/p/the-trojan-horse-how-americas-education.
12. “Silent Minds in a Digital Manipulation Age,” Sleuth Fox (blog), accessed December 29, 2025, https://sleuthfox.substack.com/p/silent-minds-in-a-digital-manipulation.
13. Iserbyt, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America; see also discussion of foundation strategies in “Weaponized Philanthropy: The Reece Committee.”
14. Wikipedia, “Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt”; death date confirmed as February 8, 2022.
15. Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston, “The Network of Global Corporate Control,” PLoS ONE 6, no. 10 (2011): e25995, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0025995.
Bibliography
Census Bureau, U.S. “Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey Shows Significant Increase in Homeschooling Rates in Fall 2020.” News release, March 22, 2021.
Cremin, Lawrence A. “John Dewey and the Progressive-Education Movement, 1915-1952.” The School Review 67, no. 2 (Summer 1959): 160-173.
General Education Board. Occasional Papers, no. 1. New York: General Education Board, c. 1906-1913.
Gibbon, Peter. “John Dewey: Portrait of a Progressive Thinker.” Humanities 40, no. 2 (Spring 2019). https://www.neh.gov/article/john-dewey-portrait-progressive-thinker.
Iserbyt, Charlotte Thomson. The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America: A Chronological Paper Trail. Ravenna, OH: Conscience Press, 1999.
Lacy, William Henry III, and Georgy Zarubin. “Agreement Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Exchanges in the Cultural, Technical, and Educational Fields.” 1958.
National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI). “Research Facts on Homeschooling.” 2021-2023. https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/.
Ray, Brian D. “How Many Homeschool Students Are There in the United States? Pre-Covid-19 and Post-Covid-19: New Data.” NHERI, 2021.
Richmond, Yale. U.S.-Soviet Cultural Exchanges, 1958-1986: Who Wins? New York: Routledge, 1987.
Sleuth Fox (blog). “Liberating Our Children: A Parent’s Journey to Homeschooling.” Accessed December 29, 2025. https://sleuthfox.substack.com/p/liberating-our-children-a-parents.
———. “Silent Minds in a Digital Manipulation Age.” Accessed December 29, 2025. https://sleuthfox.substack.com/p/silent-minds-in-a-digital-manipulation.
———. “The Trojan Horse: How America’s Education System Became a Pipeline for Antisemitism.” Accessed December 29, 2025. https://sleuthfox.substack.com/p/the-trojan-horse-how-americas-education.
———. “Weaponized Philanthropy: The Reece Committee.” Accessed December 29, 2025. https://sleuthfox.substack.com/p/weaponized-philanthropy-the-reece.
Vitali, Stefania, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston. “The Network of Global Corporate Control.” PLoS ONE 6, no. 10 (2011): e25995. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0025995.
Wikipedia. “Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt.” Last modified April 2, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Thomson_Iserbyt.
