The initial target of the Cultural Marxists was academia. The Frankfurt School was actually a Socialist Think Tank located within Frankfurt University in Germany. When they fled Hitler in the 1930’s, they were brought to the US and Columbia University by so-called education expert John Dewey, but he was actually a believer in Marxism. The spread of the work of the Frankfurt School people was accomplished through the university system, where they developed students, wrote books, gave lectures, and developed followers, reaching the overall culture in the 1960s.
They gradually took over the Social Sciences, and began to gain prominent positions is the corresponding professional societies, accomplishing for example the removal of homosexuality from the DSM in 1973. In the 1970s, the influence of Postmodernism was imported to the US from French Marxist philosophers such as Jacques Derrida. Derrida imported his beliefs to the English Department at Yale University, and the resulting identity politics and the accompanying identity “disciplines” (e.g., Women’s Studies, Black Studies, LGBTQ Studies, etc.) spread like wildfire throughout North American universities.
By the late 1980s the culture was being increasingly impacted by what became known as “political correctness”. Meanwhile their accumulation of power in academia was becoming dominant, impacting the training of teachers, the writing of text books, and the development of education standards, as well as infiltration into university administration, including human resource departments.
The culmination of this infiltration in terms of pre-K through 12 education in the US came with the stealth imposition of Common Core starting around 2010. Both the curriculum content and methodology were established for neo-Marxist indoctrination, with no dissenting points of view provided. Students were to be taught how to follow directions, and not how to think. Great literary classics were replaced by EPA edicts, and students spent more time writing and less time reading than in the past. The sex education aspects of Common Core were overly explicit and age-inappropriate. A second-grade homework assignment at a school in the mid-West was classic neo-Marxism: “Tell how the state is like your family, only better.”
Critique: With or without Common Core, pre-K through 12 public education is dominated by politically correct thought, and higher education as well. In the case of universities, the activism is growing increasingly confrontational, with most administrators obeying the activists, who were trained and encouraged by their Postmodern/neo-Marxist sympathizing humanities’ faculty. Very unfortunately, in many cases Christian higher education has been strongly influenced by Postmodern/neo-Marxism, and should not be automatically considered free from political correctness.