Kid with visor
© Mark PegrumMobility-Mixed Reality And The Crossing Of Linguacultural Boundaries
Why have teachers' unions been pushing ed-tech that is driving schools into the 4IR? Look no further than Education International, a global federation tied to UNESCO & the WEF that dominates most teachers' unions in the US and beyond.

For nearly a hundred years, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) - the two largest teachers' unions in the United States - have cozied up to corporate foundations, such as the Rockefeller philanthropies and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with multinational technology companies, including IBM and Microsoft. After almost a century of cutting side deals with Robber Barons and Tech Barons alike, the AFT and the NEA are now parroting the Gates Foundation's "Reimagine Education" campaign, which is being buoyed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Altogether, the AFT, the NEA, the WEF, and UNESCO are all "reimagining" a new post-human education system as they simultaneously push for ed-tech overhauls. As documented in my investigative series, "Teachnocracy," these overhauls seek to privatize public schools through partnerships with Big Tech corporations that facilitate online "distance learning" to accommodate indefinite classroom health restrictions in a post-COVID world.

In fact, the AFT and the NEA are tethered to the WEF and UNESCO through an entity known as Education International (EI). EI is a Global Union Federation (GUF) that combines "383 member organisations," including the AFT and the NEA, and collaborates with the WEF and UNESCO. As the intermediary between America's teachers' unions and the WEF and UNESCO, EI has been galvanizing the AFT and the NEA into conformity with the "reimagine" ed-tech agendas of these global governance institutions. To put it bluntly, EI puppeteers the AFT and the NEA using marionette strings that are tied to the WEF and UNESCO. In turn, the AFT and the NEA, along with the other 381 member organizations belonging to EI, are being spurred to "reimagine" schools through corporate ed-tech innovations geared towards advancing the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) that is being accelerated by the WEF and the United Nations (UN) through the policy agendas collectively known as the "Great Reset."

By consolidating nearly all of the world's teachers' unions under a single GUF, EI has been corralling educators across the planet into a uniform global workforce that marches in lockstep with the corporate ed-tech initiatives of internationalist oligarchs at the WEF and UNESCO. Rather than representing the grassroots concerns of local teachers at the international bargaining tables of the WEF and UNESCO, EI has been co-opting unionized educators, including AFT and NEA members, by signing them on to the "Reimagine" and "Reset" campaigns of the WEF and the UN in order to build the ed-tech data-mining infrastructure necessary to globalize the post-human Social Credit economy that underpins the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

How Technocrats Formed EI to Globalize Ed-Tech
Group protesters
© EI/ei-ie.orgOrigins and History of Education International
In 1946, two years after the Bretton Woods agreement set up the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to finance a new global economy, the World Federation of Education Associations (WFEA), which was founded in 1923, rebranded itself as the World Organization of Teaching Professions (WOTP). Then, in 1951, the WOTP banded together with several other unions to form the World Confederation of Organizations of Teaching Professions (WCOTP). That same year, the International Federation of Free Teachers' Unions (IFFTU) was established.

Fast-forward to 1993, and the WCOTP, which was chartered as a union of professional associations, and the IFFTU, which was chartered as a union of trade organizations, merged to form Education International, which now "represent[s] more than 32 million teachers and education support personnel in 178 countries and territories."
EI Founders
© ei-ie.org/CleanShotEI's Founders and founding leaders
When EI was inaugurated, the President of the WCOTP was Mary Futrell, who was simultaneously the President of the NEA, which is organized as a union of professional associations like the WCOTP. At the same time when EI was founded, the President of the IFFTU was Albert Shanker, who was simultaneously the President of the AFT, which is instituted as a union of trade organizations like the IFFTU. Upon dissolving the WCOTP and the IFFTU, both Futrell and Shanker became the founding Co-Presidents of EI. By converting the WCOTP and the IFFTU into the singular EI under the leadership of the NEA and AFT presidents, Futrell and Shanker amalgamated America's two largest teachers' unions with the world's two largest international teachers' unions, thereby homogenizing professional teachers' associations and school trade organizations under a global bureaucracy bent on technocratically planning the world economy for what is now known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Futrell and Shanker were perfect for the task of stirring up America's teachers and school workers into an international brigade of workforce developers commissioned to train students for the hi-tech jobs of the future Fourth Industrial Revolution:
  • Shanker was a Trilateral Commission member who collaborated with unnamed "bankers" and "the head of IBM" to set up the global-technocratic school reforms posited by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his 1970 Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era. In this futurist tome, Brzezinski, who co-founded the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller, postulated that the "technetronic era" of schooling would "scientifically" manage student learning through a computerized system of "home-based education through television consoles and other electronic devices" deployed by "business companies" for the purposes of "work-study" job training in the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution. Brzezinski's vision of workforce homeschooling managed by ed-tech companies was carried out by Shanker, who spearheaded the public-private charter schooling industry, which evolved into virtual charter school corporations that train students for workforce competence through adaptive-learning courseware programmed with cognitive-behavioral conditioning algorithms.
  • Futrell has served as the Co-Director of the Center for Curriculum, Standards, and Technology (CCST), and she has also sat on the Board of Directors of the International Council on Education for Teaching (ICET) as well as the Board of Directors of K12 Inc. The latter company, K12 Inc., is the international virtual charter school company that was set up by US Secretary of Education, William Bennett, after he took over Project BEST (Basic Education Skills through Technology), which was America's domestic version of UNESCO's "Study 11." Futrell was also a Member of the US National Commission for UNESCO, and she was also appointed as the President of Americans for UNESCO.
Thanks to Shanker kicking off the public-private charter school industry for workforce training; and thanks to Futrell directing K12 Inc.'s virtual charter school business in accordance with the ed-tech standards of the CCST and the ICET; these presidents of the AFT, the IFFTU, the NEA, and the WCOTP were instrumental in advancing the proliferation of ed-tech through Project BEST and UNESCO Study 11. Less than a decade after BEST and Study 11 laid the "information technology" (IT) infrastructure for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Shanker and Futrell consolidated their unionized constituents under the banner of EI in order to galvanize all AFT and NEA teachers into a single herd that can be cattle-driven to follow the globalist directives of multinational corporations in bed with world governance institutions, such as UNESCO and the World Economic Forum.

AFT President Shanker and NEA President Futrell are no longer members of EI. Nevertheless, Education International continues to honor these founding EI presidents by issuing awards and scholarships in their honor: the Albert Shanker Education Award and the Mary Hatwood Futrell Scholarship Fund. Meanwhile, the current President of the AFT, Randi Weingarten, is a current Board Member of EI; Lily Eskelsen Garcia, who was the President of the NEA until September 2020, is the current Vice President of EI; and David Edwards, who was an Associate Director at the NEA, is the current General Secretary of EI. With AFT and NEA officials continuing to hold high office at Education International since the GUF's inception, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association have been tethering all of the USA's teachers' unions to the globalist policies of EI.

Now, with nearly all the world's unionized teachers bundled under the GUF monolith of Education International, the WEF and UNESCO are bolstering the Fourth Industrial Reset with the help of EI technocrats, including Robert Harris, Susan Hopgood, Fred Van Leeuwen, and Jelmer Evers, who all collaborate with global governance institutions, including UNESCO and the World Economic Forum.

Robert Harris, Susan Hopgood, and UNESCO Globalize Ed-Tech for Social Credit Data-Mining

When Education International was established in 1993, Founding Presidents Shanker and Futrell were accompanied by an Australian educator, Robert Harris, who was also a Founding Member of EI. Prior to becoming a co-founder of EI, Harris was the Secretary-General of the WCOTP, where Futrell was president. Upon co-founding Education International, Harris "was elected as Executive Director for Intergovernmental Relations, charged with establishing EI's role as the spokesperson for the world's teachers and education employees." Harris also served as EI's Director of International Relations.

Currently, Harris is a member of the WEF, and he is also the Chair of the Working Group on Education, Training and Employment Policies of the Trade Union Advisory Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Additionally, Harris has also served as the President of the United Nations' Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) as well as the President of UNESCO's Conference of NGOs. As an EI liaison to UNESCO, Harris set the stage for Education International's partnership with UNESCO's Global Education First Initiative (GEFI), which was steered by EI President Susan Hopgood to pave the way for the new UNESCO Global Education Coalition (GEC) with Big Tech corporations that are members of the WEF.

In 1995, approximately one decade after UNESCO Study 11 laid the groundwork for the IT and ed-tech infrastructure for the burgeoning Fourth Industrial Revolution, EI Executive Director Harris spoke at the International Conference on Education hosted by UNESCO's International Bureau of Education (IBE). During this speech, Harris historicized how EI's alliance with UNESCO builds on the 1966 partnership between UNESCO and the International Labor Organization (ILO), which called for
"authorities and teachers [to] recognize the importance of the participation of teachers, through their [union] organizations . . . to improve the quality of the education service."
In alignment with this mission to globalize teachers' unions under the prospects of the 1966 UNESCO-ILO partnership, the 1995 UNESCO-IBE International Conference on Education, which was facilitated by Harris, Futrell, and several other EI bureaucrats, called for the worldwide adoption of ed-tech, including "distance education technologies" that are presently being deployed by Big Tech corporations, such as Microsoft, Google, and IBM, in bed with UNESCO's EI-endorsed GEC. It should be noted here that UNESCO's GEC partners with both the WEF and the ILO, the latter of which is the first and oldest UN "specialized agency," which stems from the League of Nations: the precursor to the United Nations.

Harris's UNESCO-IBE speech was prefaced by the "Opening Address" from Pat Atkinson, who was the Minister of Education, Training, and Employment in Canada's Province of Saskatchewan. In this "Opening Address" to the 1995 UNESCO-IBE conference, Atkinson professed that,
"[i]n a world of rapidly changing technology and the global marketplace [sic], . . . [w]e must use appropriate technologies to create opportunities for learning. New technologies can become a magic wand for a small child."
Following these speeches from Atkinson and Harris, the UNESCO IBE laid out the official "Declaration of the 44th session of the International Conference on Education," which proclaimed that schooling systems should be reformed
"in conformity with the aims of the [UN's] World Declaration on Education for All" by "improving curricula, the content of textbooks, and other educational materials, including new technologies" and emphasized the need "[t]o make better use of communication technologies for and by education (for example, distance education, educational television and radio)."
Fast-forward to the 21st century, from 2012 to 2016, Education International teamed up with UNESCO to drive UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's Global Education First Initiative with EI President Susan Hopgood seated on the GEFI Steering Committee. The UNESCO-GEFI project partnered with the World Bank and the Global Business Coalition for Education (GBC-E), which regiments the following multinational technology corporations on its roster of "Member Companies": Microsoft, Hewlett Packard (HP), Intel, Dell, Lenovo, Accenture, Viacom, and Pearson. Four years after this GEFI/GBC-E partnership, spurred by COVID lockdowns, UNESCO launched its Global Education Coalition (GEC), which is endorsed by Education International along with EI's satellite, the US National Education Association, in order to disseminate "distance learning" technologies from ed-tech companies, such as Khan Academy, Blackboard Inc., McGraw Hill, Technovation, Virtual Educa, EdTech Hub, and Sesame Workshop. UNESCO's EI/NEA-sponsored GEC also includes Big Tech corporations, such as IBM, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Huawei, Verizon, Facebook, Zoom, and Qualcomm, all of which simultaneously partner with the WEF, where Robert Harris is a member.

In sum, for almost thirty years, with the help of Robert Harris and Susan Hopgood, UNESCO and EI have been collaborating to build the international ed-tech infrastructure, infrastructure that will be used to data-mine students' psychometrics for Social Credit algorithms programmed for "human capital management" in the global "stakeholder" economy of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Fred Van Leeuwen, WEF, and UNESCO Push Post-Humanist Ed-Tech for the 4IR

Harris, as a Founding Member of Education International, was also a consultant to EI's Founding General Secretary: a Dutch Academic named Fred Van Leeuwen, who was the General Secretary of the International Federation of Free Teachers' Unions under President Shanker until the IFFTU merged with the WCOTP to form EI. Like Harris, Van Leeuwen, who is now Education International's General Secretary Emeritus, has also been an EI liaison with both the World Economic Forum and UNESCO where he has collaborated with Big Tech corporations to "reimagine" workforce schooling for the global Social Credit economy of the post-humanist Fourth Industrial Revolution envisioned by the WEF's boss, Klaus Schwab.

As the General Secretary of EI, Van Leeuwen was a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Education Systems in 2012. That same year, he attended the WEF's Annual Meeting where he participated in an "interactive session" titled "The Education-Entrepreneurship-Employment Nexus." At the same time, the WEF's "Entrepreneurship initiative" was "support[ed]" by technology companies, including Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco. As corporate members of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Education Systems, Intel launched its "Easy Steps digital literacy programme" while Cisco Networking Academy
launched programs to train students how to "succeed in a technology-driven world by teaching the skills needed to design, build, manage and secure computer networks - improving their career prospects while filling the global demand for networking professionals."
In brief, through the WEF's Global Agenda Council on Education Systems, Van Leeuwen collaborated with Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco to expand global ed-tech systems for the purposes of "creating curricula to meet pressing needs" of the "future labour demands" of the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The WEF's Global Agenda Council on Education Systems has also pursued the "Education for All" mission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization where Van Leeuwen, as a member of UNESCO's Senior Experts' Group, has called for "reimagining" school through post-humanist ed-tech programmed with artificial intelligence (AI) geared for "Social Score" data-mining of students' psychometrics and biometrics. In a 2015 UNESCO whitepaper entitled "Rethinking Education: Toward a Global Common Good?," Van Leeuwen and his comrades at the Senior Experts' Group proclaimed that
"[d]igital connectivity holds promise for gains in health, education, communication, leisure and well-being. Artificial intelligence advances, 3D printers, holographic recreation, instant transcription, voice-recognition and gesture-recognition software are only some examples of what is being tested. Digital technologies are reshaping human activity from daily life to international relations."
In a nutshell, Van Leeuwen and his UNESCO cadre hyped how humanity will be "reshap[ed]" through the post-humanist convergence of AI, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and biometric ed-tech.

Today, through UNESCO's new Global Education Coalition, which is currently promoted by EI, and the WEF's Annual Meetings, which EI General Secretary Van Leeuwen has frequently attended, these worldwide ed-tech advances in cognitive-behavioral AI; holographic VR and AR; and socioemotional biometrics and psychometrics have been steadily accelerated by Education International in close cooperation with multinational technology corporations, such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Huawei, and McGraw Hill. In 2013, just two years before Van Leeuwen signed onto the UNESCO "Rethinking Education" whitepaper as the General Secretary of EI, he attended the WEF's Annual Meeting along with delegates from UNESCO and representatives from these globalist tech companies that are now key players in UNESCO's GEC: Other Big Tech corporations and ed-tech companies in attendance with Van Leeuwen at the 2013 WEF Meeting include Salesforce, Accenture, HP, Intel, Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, Cisco, Mozilla, Yahoo! Inc., Adobe, and Cengage Learning.

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About the Author:
John Klyczek has an MA in English and has taught college rhetoric and research argumentation for over eight years. His literary scholarship concentrates on the history of global eugenics and Aldous Huxley's dystopic novel, Brave New World. He is the author of School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education (TrineDay Books); and he is a contributor to several publications, including New Politics, OpEdNews, and Counter Markets. Klyczek is also the Director of Writing and Editing at Black Freighter Productions (BFP) Books. His website is schoolworldorder.info