How Power and Money Shape the Minds of Our Children – Part 2

By Sandy Szwarc
© Szwarc 2025

As the globalists advanced their mission through the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, education continued to be their core focus. Having successfully torn down America’s educational system and made it a function of the state, they turned their sights on the final step: to turn children into global citizens.

UNESCO is the Lead Organization for UN’s Sustainable Development Goals

After years without significant movement, UNESCO’s efforts to influence school curriculums began to achieve greater success in 2004 when it signed a Cooperation Agreement with Bill Gates at Microsoft. It agreed to use “information and communications technologies” (ICT) for education, social, and economic development, and gave Gates’ full support for UNESCO to develop a master curriculum for teacher training.

The core standards this cooperative agreement developed included:

• environmental education integrated into every school subject,
• education to promote UN’s sustainable goals, and
• teaching on spiritual beliefs as defined by the global collective.

In 2009, UNESCO’s Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) program was launched. It designed “social and emotional learning” (SEL) to be mainstreamed into global education guidelines – with online courses and all learners connected through AI. Its courses were to ensure worldwide compliance with UN’s 2030 agenda for sustainable development and included topics such as “climate change: reflect, empathize and act”; biodiversity; global citizenship; identity, and migrants. It also offered a guide to embedding all school textbooks with “education for sustainable development” (ESD) and global citizenship.

Today, UNESCO is a massive organization of 194 member organizations and 12 associate members. UNESCO’s 2024-2025 budget is over $1.7 billion. The U.S. funds 22% of UNESCO’s total budget ceiling. Due to the politicization of UNESCO, it’s anti-American agenda, and spending abuses, the U.S. withdrew from UNESCO in 1984, but then rejoined it in 2003 under George W. Bush (with Congress appropriating $73 million to $84 million in annual assessed contributions). In 2018, under President Trump the U.S. again withdrew from UNESCO. But President Biden rejoined UNESCO in 2023, increased the number of Americans working in staff roles at UNESCO by 20%, and intensified America’s role in UNESCO’s network through 22 U.S. university chairs, nine UNESCO “Creative Cities” and 25 “Biosphere Reserves.” This ensured UNESCO’s role in America’s top academic and scientific agencies.

UNESCO is now the lead organization behind the new “Pact for the Future” for accelerating UN’s Agenda 2030 and its Sustainable Development Goals. Those are also outlined in UN’s Common Agenda for Transforming Education.

UNESCO’s priorities for 2024-2025 include 250 pages of strategic resolutions and budgets from its Executive Board for: Africa, small developing islands, gender equality and gender transformative education, diversity and inclusion, artificial intelligence, gene-editing, information technology, communication marketing, global citizenship, climate change disasters (stating “the era of global warming has ended, and the era of global boiling has arrived”), biodiversity, water sustainable management, hate speech, and prioritizing its category 1 projects: International Institute for STEM Education in Shanghai, China, its International Centre for Theoretical Physics, and Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission.

Despite the long-standing activism for UNESCO by teacher unions and academia, none of these UNESCO priorities have anything to do with helping children academically.

Digital Transformation and Governance.

UNESCO’s education policies include an especially draconian initiative: global “digital governance” and “digital transformation for positive change across our mandated areas.” Not only does it call for digital learning content and training of teachers to use remote and hybrid computer-based teachings and AI; it calls for national education systems to have an interconnected data base with “digital monitoring” of school policies and curriculums, and their compliance with UN 2030.

UNESCO works with governments to establish policies to regulate this digital transformation. It grew from UNESCO’s 2012 “Open Educational Resources” (OER) declaration that governed teaching, learning, and research in all mediums, and promoted the development of expanded digital learning in education. Under UNESCO, OER must use ICT and contribute to social inclusion, gender equity and special needs education; and improve cost efficiency and compliance with learning outcomes (assessments and testing). ICT must also facilitate the gathering and sharing data with government and outside “stakeholders.”

In other words, as Alice Linahan, a parent and founder of Voices Empower, wrote, it is cradle to career data collection, exposing our children to “surveillance capitalism.”

Digital data is where the money is.

Incredibly, an unclassified document from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reported that with the movement for digital transformation in schools, education-related ICT patents increased. Over the past 20 years, the top 100 firms filing education-related ICT patents were major multimedia and/or electronics firms seeking commercialization.

However, OECD researchers examined if ICT made any difference in education and found that policy makers, industries, and society as a whole are asking schools to use ICT based on an “extremely weak technical core.”

Just like the past hundred years, education continues to experiment on children, using learning psychology and behavior theories that don’t apply to practical classroom teaching. Educational research and development continues to be “very weak in producing practical solutions,” the OECD researchers said. “People get sued for doing that in the “real” professions, where the absence of a strong technical core of knowledge and discourse about what effective practice is carries a high price.” They compared it to an airline pilot coming on the intercom and saying, “I’ve always wanted to try this [descent] without the flaps.”

Digital learning is not where the science is.

UNESCO’s own 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report (funded by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and others) examined the usefulness of digital technology in education. It found scant solid data to show a benefit in actual practice. Technology has risks of its own in learning processes, it reported, and there remains a lack of reliable, unbiased data about how technology is affecting education or if expensive digital technology the best use of resources.

An independent systematic comprehensive review of two decades of evidence also found modest positive effects on learning outcomes at best. Investments in ICT and professional development to improve school education have “yet to provide fruitful results,” the researchers concluded. As both this study and UNESCO noted, research reporting “favorable” results is filled with bias, such as lack of control groups and failing to control for other factors such as more teaching resources or teacher support.

Commercial interests are both salesman and advisors, and marketing research rarely  features classroom use, according to the UNESCO monitoring report. The research being used by policy makers simply reflects commercial marketing. Independent evaluations of digital reading and math instruction tools have found negative or null effects on learning, even while the tools continue to be heavily marketed by companies, it said. Commercially popular digital games, for example, while appearing to have math applications, aren’t focused on learning objectives. Digital transformation is a rapidly developing field but not based on evidence. The report also found that, in actuality, few countries are integrating AI in their education systems.

Ikechukwu Onyekwelu, managing editor at Edugist, was similarly unimpressed with the benefits of digital technology in education. Increased ICT use in fourteen nations was associated with poorer student performance. Supplying a million laptops in Peru failed to improve learning, he reported, and online remote learning worsened disparities in an analysis of more the 2 million students in the U.S.

OECD – UN’s Tyrant

Why was it so surprising that OECD admitted to the failed evidence for digital transformation? OECD is the primary coordinator of UN organizations, including UNESCO, UNFPA, UNOSSC, and UNICEF, working for global digital transformation.

OECD launched in 1961 and is the UN’s official watchdog, monitoring countries for compliance with the UN’s agenda. Lacking enforcement power, it works through public, stakeholder and peer suasion.

Its multilateral surveillance system and nearly 200 committees determine policies covering every aspect imaginable for governments and private businesses – on economics, global taxation and tax policies, trade and “globalization,” banking, science and technology, business, employment, development, food security, sustainable agriculture, fishing, water governance, mineral and fossil fuel, climate change, green energy and low-carbon futures, immigration, health and healthcare policies, promoting universal health coverage and the World Health Organization, social-economic equity, “human rights,” gender equity and inclusion, urban planning and development, legal and justice services, and education.

Its recent focus has been promoting and monitoring adherence to UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals, global financing agreements, and the Paris Climate Agreement. It collects global data on 170,000 data points on every country, and maintains the UN’s monitoring global database and digital platform.

In 2021, the UN General Assembly approved a stronger role for OECD to ensure the world would deliver on the UN 2030 agenda, through financing development and mobilizing resources, developing an international tax system, “anti-corruption” programs, and transformation to a digital economy.

That year, it came up with an international tax system for a globalized and digitalized economy, with global minimum taxes imposed on members. Their motivation, according to tax professionals with Proskauer Tax Talks, was “to address perceived abuses of ‘base erosion and profit shifting’ by multinational corporations to reduce their overall effective tax rate.” President Trump took swift action on January 20, 2025 against these discriminatory foreign tax policies, issuing a Memorandum to the Secretary of the Treasury to restore America’s sovereignty and establish protective measures for Americans and American companies.

Working with UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank, OECD also developed its own international student testing, PISA (International Student Assessment), which examines outcomes, education “equity,” and “value for the money.” This global test hopes to change the way the world teaches children, purportedly for an AI future.

Its priorities for promoting UN’s agendas – instead of educating students − is evident. Since 1997, under director Andreas Schleicher, PISA has moved away from math, reading and science to “global competencies” such as open mindedness, “social cohesion and justice,” “emotional resilience,” global inequity and human rights, and participation in democratic institutions.

The Vice Chair of PISA is Peggy Carr, U.S. Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics at the Department of Education, appointed by President Biden in 2021 after being its director since 1993. For more than 20 years, she’d also served on the board of a North Carolina charter school, investigated in recent years for questioned financial policies. The NCES also administers the Nation’s Report Card.

OECD also conducts surveys to assess the social and emotional skills of children, and issues policy papers to raise awareness of “Social Emotional Learning” (SEL), another UN Sustainable Development Goal.

The U.S. is barely mentioned, only once, in its Global Policy Network. Yet, American taxpayers are paying for these globalist agendas that do not in any way benefit Americans, our children, or our schools. In fact, the U.S. funded 18.3% of OECD’s total budget in 2024. OECD’s latest Official Development Assistance (ODA) data reported that in 2023, the U.S. is also the largest provider of ODA for its programs, projects and technical assistance, spending $66 billion, and accounting for 30% of its total expenses. 

A Century of Evidence is Clear

The motives of teachers unions, academic professionals and government bureaucrats overseeing the education of American children have nothing to do with educating our children. A century of evidence demonstrates that their primary focus is furthering the globalists’ vision of a one-world government and indoctrinating young people to be global citizens.

But exactly what they are teaching our young people is shocking and goes against every Christian and scientific truth. Next, we’ll go inside the global citizenship curriculums to see for ourselves the new age spirituality being taught. It they succeed, it promises to remove the last remnants of Biblical teachings from our children’s lives and the planet.

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Sandy Szwarc, BSN, RN, retired emeritus, has been a researcher and writer for more than forty years. She writes on a wide range of topics – science, health, medicine, diet, energy, medical ethics, and more − always returning to discernment, testing all things against evidence and sound science, and most of all guided by God’s Word. She has recently resumed blogging at her new blog: https://junkfoodscience.weebly.com/