Just to stimulate a little positive thinking, here are a few elementary suggestions for different types of individuals:
Suggestions for Parents
1. Stay close to your children to make sure they are being trained to think like Washington and Lincoln, not like Marx and Lenin.
2. In providing physical needs for your family, don’t forget their spiritual needs. We are in an ideological war. From a Marxist viewpoint an atheistic mind is already three-fourths conquered.
3. Take your children to church, don’t send them. Be sure they are getting true religious values, not modernistic debunking.
4. Help your children grow up. Don’t fall for the current Socialist-Communist line that parents are a detriment to their children. They are only a detriment when they don’t do their job.
5. Children require a formula of 90% love and discipline.
6. Do not fall for the “permissive” school of psychology which says discipline will harm human development. Such thinking produces hoodlums with maladjusted personalities who are likely to fall for every “ism” that comes along. A child needs to know that he lives in an orderly world. Discipline is part of it—not extreme harshness but a reasonable and consistent enforcement of the rules.
7. Because “youth problems” happened to be one of my own areas of professional study, I wrote a book designed to answer the Communist and Socialist charge that modern parents cannot do a good job of raising children.{129}
8. Be active in PTA. If you are not, Communists and centralized planners will take over.
9. Have a “freedom library” in your home. Include good biographies of the founding fathers.
10. Take a little time each day to keep up with political problems at home and abroad.
11. Subscribe to a good news magazine.
12. Where you have older children, make current events part of the dinner table talk. Be quick to point out left-wing slanting of news, TV or radio broadcasts. There is far more of this slanting than most people realize.
13. Organize a family, a neighborhood or church study group. Help your family realize that there is a great struggle going on in the world which they can help to win.
14. Let your children see that you are interested in civic affairs, that you participate in political affairs, that you are concerned with what is going on. They borrow many of their own attitudes from you.
Suggestions for Teachers
1. The most important single force in winning against Communism is in the field of education. Therefore you are in the front-line trenches.
2. Be certain you have taken time to get a good background on Communistic thought so you can detect it quickly wherever it appears.
3. Define for students the difference between the factors which made Americans the first free people in modern times and the principles which have destroyed freedom wherever the Socialists and Communists have taken over.
4. Help the students understand that free enterprise has produced and distributed more material wealth than any other system man has yet discovered. Point out that it also permits most of our citizens to make a living doing the things they enjoy. At least they can change jobs if they don’t like what they are doing. It is also vital for students to appreciate that the remaining weaknesses in our system are important, but they are minute compared to the monumental problems of the bare-subsistence economies under Socialism and Communism.
5. Beware of those who come pretending to help education when they are trying to seize control of education. Socialist and Communist planners have ambitions to eliminate all local control—which means the teachers themselves would lose control.
6. Be alert to the fact that education was infiltrated by the Socialist-Communist contingent over thirty-five years ago. Many of them were top-echelon personalities who worked their way into leading educational organizations. Because they were hard workers they gained sweeping control of some of our most respected institutions.
7. Read “Education for One Socialist World,” which is Chapter 8 in The U.N. Record, by Chesly Manly (Henry Regnery Co., Chicago, 1955). On page 175 Mr. Manly lists a number of books which every teacher should read in order to be aware of the attack against American education during the past four decades.
8. In addition, you will find the following books helpfuclass="underline"
• Conquest of the American Mind, by Dr. Felix Wittmer, (Meador Publishing Co., Boston)
• What’s Happened to Our Schools? by Rosalie M. Gordon, a pamphlet published by America’s Future, Inc., New Rochelle, New York.
• The Turning of the Tides, by Paul W. Shafer and John Howland Snow. (Long House Publishers.)
• Progressive Education Is Reducation, by Jones and Olivier. (Meador Publishing Co., Boston.)
• Brainwashing in the High Schools, by Dr. E. Merrill Root. (Devin-Adair, New York)
• Communist-Socialist Propaganda in American Schools, by Verne P. Kaub (Published by Lakeshore Press, Madison, Wisconsin.)
9. If any of the educational organizations to which you belong are Socialist-oriented, try to recapture them. Do not try to do it alone. Gather a group of alerted teachers around you and move forward as an organized group.
10. Encourage the teaching of “Communist Problems” in the school. Such a course can become an excellent vehicle to teach American students how to appreciate their own way of life. The name of the course is important. “Communist Problems” is likely to be more acceptable than teaching “Communism.”
11. Watch for slanted passages in text books. Socialist authors have invaded the textbook field. So have some with even more radical views. Brainwashing in the High Schools, by E. Merrill Root, is an analysis of 11 American history books which reflect the destructive left-wing line.
12. Don’t be misled by the current atheistic drive to take God out of the classroom. “Separation of church and state” was to keep creeds out of the curriculum, but not God. It would be as unconstitutional to teach irreligion in the classroom as it would be to emphasize some particular religion. As teachers we are not to teach a particular faith, but parents are within their rights when they insist that the classroom is not be used by those few teachers who seek to destroy faith. Teachers who believe that teaching atheism is a necessary part of a good education are not really qualified to teach in a Judaic-Christian culture. They are entitled to be atheists but, as public employees, they are not entitled to teach it. If they do, they are violating an important constitutional principle.
13. Encourage patriotic speakers at school assemblies. Excellent films are also available. Many organizations now have well-informed speakers who can give impressive talks on subjects which arouse excellent student response.
14. When a Freedom Forum is held in your area, try to attend.
Suggestions for Students
1. The mind of the student is considered a major battlefield by Communist strategists. The Communist conquest of a country is always preceded by the extensive activities of “converted intellectuals.” However, the most vigorous antagonists of Communism are some of these same intellectuals who have been disillusioned and returned to the side of freedom.