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He That Has Ears To Hear, Let Him Hear
(Matthew 11:15-30)
Challenging both secular wisdom and religious doctrines. - Will our descendants know moral virtue?
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"Cursed be all that learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ."
"Liberty without learning
is always in peril; learning without liberty is always in vain."
"Much learning does not teach understanding. --Heraclitus
James Madison, Primary Author of the U. S. Constitution and 4th U.S.
president. America's Providential History, p. 93
John F. Kennedy
Public Education
Propaganda Factories
Progressive Politically Correct National Education Association (NEA),
Expelling God, Christ, and the Bible, Omitting America's Christian
Foundation and Heritage, GLSEN, United Nations International
Baccalaureate, more...
(For more on creating future drones, see Unions and Democrats.)
"The purpose of education is to make the choices clear to people, not to make the choices for people." --American writer Peter McWilliams (1949-2000)
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." George Orwell
Foundation: "[T]he only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments. Without religion, I believe that learning does real mischief to the morals and principles of mankind." Benjamin Rush (1806 – Sylvania Urban, The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, Vol. 56 [London, John Nichols, 1786], 776.)
In 1818, Thomas Jefferson described the goals of education: “To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business; To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts, in writing; To improve by reading, his morals and faculties; To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either; To know his rights; to exercise with order and justice those he retains; to choose with discretion the fiduciary of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence, with candor and judgment; And, in general, to observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed.”
In Paris, John Adams wrote in his diary, June 2, 1778: "In vain are schools, academies, and universities instituted, if loose principles and licentious habits are impressed upon children in their earliest years... How is it possible that children can have any just sense of the sacred obligations of Morality or Religion if, from their earliest infancy...their fathers (are) in as constant infidelity to their mothers?"
Schools push a curriculum of propaganda
By George F. Will - The real vocation of some people entrusted with
delivering primary and secondary education is to validate this
proposition: The three R’s — formerly reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic —
now are racism, reproduction and recycling. Especially racism. Consider
Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction. It evidently considers
“instruction” synonymous with “propaganda,” which in the patois of
progressivism is called “consciousness-raising.”
Wisconsin’s DPI, in collaboration with the Orwellian-named federal
program VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America; the “volunteers” are
paid), urged white students to wear white wristbands “as a reminder
about your privilege, and as a personal commitment to explain why you
wear the wristband.” A flyer that was on the DPI Web site and
distributed at a DPI-VISTA training class urged whites to “put a note on
your mirror or computer screen as a reminder to think about privilege,”
to “make a daily list of the ways privilege played out” and to conduct
an “internal dialogue” asking questions such as “How do I make myself
comfortable with privilege?” and “What am I doing today to undo my
privilege?”
After criticism erupted, the DPI removed the flyer from its Web
site and posted a dishonest statement claiming that the wristbands were
a hoax perpetrated by conservatives. But, again, the flyer DPI posted
explicitly advocated the wristbands. And Wisconsin’s taxpayer-funded
indoctrination continues, funded by more than Wisconsin taxpayers.
In Delavan-Darien High School’s “American Diversity” curriculum,
students were urged to verify white privilege by visiting a Wal-Mart toy
section and counting the white and black dolls. After objections, the
school district is reconsidering this curriculum.
Such distractions from the study of calculus and literature are
encouraged by CREATE Wisconsin (the acronym stands for Culturally
Responsive Education for All: Training and Enhancement), which is funded
with federal tax dollars from IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities
Education Act. The disability being rectified here is, presumably, the
handicap of insufficient guilt — arising from false consciousness —
about white privilege.
Today, the school systems in 20 states employ more non-teachers
than teachers. The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice reports
that between 1950 and 2009, while the number of K-12 students increased
96 percent, full-time-equivalent school employees increased 386 percent.
The number of teachers increased 252 percent, but the number of
bureaucrats — including consciousness-raising sensitivity enforcers and
other non-teachers — increased 702 percent. The report says states could
have saved more than $24 billion annually if non-teaching staff had
grown only as fast as student enrollment. And Americans wonder why their
generous K-12 financing (higher per pupil than all but three of the 34
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations) has done
so little to improve reading, math and science scores.
Common Core Corrupts By
Michelle
Malkin - The Obama administration is corrupting education. America’s
downfall doesn’t begin with the “low-information voter.” It starts with
the no-knowledge student. For decades, collectivist agitators in
our schools have chipped away at academic excellence in the name of
fairness, diversity, and social justice. “Progressive” reformers
denounced Western-civilization requirements, the Founding Fathers, and
the Great Books as racist. They attacked traditional grammar classes as
irrelevant in modern life. They deemed grouping students by ability to
be bad for self-esteem. They replaced time-tested rote techniques and
standard algorithms with fuzzy math, inventive spelling, and
multicultural claptrap. Advertisement Under President Obama, these
top-down mal-formers — empowered by Washington education bureaucrats and
backed by misguided liberal philanthropists led by billionaire Bill
Gates — are now presiding over a radical makeover of your children’s
school curriculum.
It’s being done in the name of federal “Common Core” standards that
do anything but set the achievement bar high. Common Core was enabled by
Obama’s federal stimulus law and his Department of Education’s “Race to
the Top” gimmickry. The administration bribed cash-starved states into
adopting unseen instructional standards as a condition of winning
billions of dollars in grants. Even states that lost their bids for Race
to the Top money were required to commit to a dumbed-down and amorphous
curricular “alignment.” In practice, Common Core’s dubious
“college-ready” and “career-ready” standards undermine local control of
education, usurp state autonomy over curricular materials, and foist
untested, mediocre, and incoherent pedagogical theories on America’s
schoolchildren.
Over the next several weeks and months, I’ll use this column space
to expose who’s behind this disastrous scheme in D.C. backrooms. I’ll
tell you who’s fighting it in grassroots tea-party and parental revolts
across the country from Massachusetts to Indiana, Texas, Georgia, and
Utah. And most important, I’ll explain how this unprecedented federal
meddling is corrupting our children’s classrooms and textbooks. (Read
Michelle's entire column at the link for her initial details.)
Who are the Educational ‘Experts’ Controlling Our Schools? by Karen Schroeder - Although college professor Noel Ignatieve has issued a call to abolish the white race, he is one of many anti-American professors who prepare college students to become teachers. ...Despite organizing Marxist discussion groups, being arrested for throwing paint bombs, and lacking credentials, Noel Ignatieve was accepted by Harvard into the Graduate School of Education. He became a Harvard faculty member, joined the Communist Party USA, formed the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (POC), and became involved in Students for a Democratic Society. He became part of the Maoist New Communist Movement before becoming a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art. He is the co-founder and co-editor of the journal Race Traitor which displays the motto, “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”
Another is Howard Zinn (1922– 2010), a “progressive” American historian and social activist. During his tenure as a political science professor at Boston University, he wrote A People’s History of the United States to depict the struggles of Native Americans and African Americans against their oppressors, the American colonists. His goal was to “rewrite history books to eliminate the oppressors and to honor the champions of equality and justice.” The book takes a stand against European and US conquests and expansion, capitalists, and capitalism. These ideologies are shared by a significant number of professors including William Ayers and Cathy Wilkerson who were Weather Underground members and by Marxist professors Eric Gutstein, David Michael Smith, and Jeanne Lorentzen.
...Many are concerned that anti-American philosophy occurs in the new standards for social studies curricula and in textbooks used across the US. Policies that were touted as essential to promote tolerance now infiltrate colleges with anti-American staff and agendas to silence opposing views. Ward Connolly, Carol Swain, and Mason Weaver are conservative blacks who have been shouted down and robbed of their first amendment rights by college students who did not believe tolerance should be granted to conservative views.
The National Education Association Shows Its Politics By Phyllis Schlafly - In preparation for the convention, NEA leaders had been urging their members to hold house parties to teach their friends why Obama deserves their votes. House parties were one of the successful tactics Obama used to win his election in 2008. The NEA convention passed its usual scores of anti-parent, anti-school-choice, pro-feminist, pro-homosexual resolutions that morph into the NEA's Legislative Program. This authorizes the highly paid NEA staff to lobby Congress, state legislatures, education departments and school boards to adopt NEA policies. One significant new resolution adopted this year reads: "The Association also believes that members have the right to have payroll deduction of both Association membership dues and voluntary political contributions." That should make it clear that the way to cut the NEA's political power is for state legislatures to pass paycheck protection laws that prohibit the racket of state governments deducting political contributions out of the paychecks of teachers and turning the money over to the NEA bosses to elect Democrats. ...The NEA's official Legislative Program includes many items that implement radical liberal ideology but have nothing to do with educating students. This column isn't long enough to list the 31 pages of fine print detailing the NEA's legislative demands, so I'll just mention a few to give you the flavor.
Defunding the Education Thugs By Eric Rauch - It has been reported that as few as 29% of Americans have confidence in the public school system, which only goes to prove how ineffective the system really is. ...But the really important thing is that this lack of confidence has led parents to actually do something about it. Major cities in the United States are seeing plummeting attendance, as fed-up parents are pulling their kids out of the government indoctrination centers and enrolling them elsewhere. This is, in fact, what will ultimately speak the loudest. Empty desks lead to fewer tax dollars for the school district, and this is a very good thing, especially when we’re talking about a government enterprise that spends anywhere from 9 to 15 thousand dollars ($30,000 in Washington D.C. schools) a year per student. When parents actually begin to consider what they could be getting for that amount of money in private schools the numbers don’t bode well for the public ones. An increasing number of parents are even opting for homeschooling.
...Year after year, test scores decline, school violence goes up, and more money is always the answer. So much money has been dumped into the failing institution that the Department of Education (DOE) now commands more than $90 billion (the Heritage Foundation estimates it at $120 billion, so I am being more than generous here) each year to keep its bloated bureaucracy of inefficiency afloat. If more money is the answer, when does enough become enough to actually yield better results than the year before? How long must we beat our heads against the same wall before realizing that it is completely ineffective?
What is even more encouraging though, is that the thug organization of indoctrination, also known as the NEA (National Education Association), is also hemorrhaging members. USA Today reports that the NEA has lost more than 100,000 members since 2010. It projects that by 2014 the union group could lose as many as 308,000, which translates into a lost annual revenue of $65 million. This is the only language that the NEA and the DOE understand. Lightening the load of their deep pockets by removing large amounts of extorted cash is the only way they will begin to take notice of their utter failure and lack of concern (besides using their own failures to lobby for more money, of course). So much for it being “all about the children.” Wise parents by the droves are no longer listening to the propaganda and the scare tactics and are taking action for the sake of their own kids. What are you waiting for?
Teaching Children Tolerance Marxist-Style Founded in
1991 as a project of the
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC),
Teaching Tolerance (TT) works to
“foster
school environments that are inclusive and nurturing,” and to help
teachers “prepare a new generation to live in a diverse world.”
Toward these ends, TT produces a plethora of multimedia
teaching kits,
online curricula, and professional-development resources for classroom
instructors, as well as a biannual publication,
Teaching Tolerance
magazine, which reaches
more than 450,000 educators nationwide. All of these materials are made
available to educators at no cost. The individual
in charge of Teaching Tolerance is
William Ayers, the former
Weather Underground terrorist and university professor. In a
glowing
profile that appeared in Teaching Tolerance magazine, SPLC research
fellow Gabrielle Lyon depicted Ayers as an “education reformer,” a
“civil rights organizer,” a champion of “social justice,” and a “teacher
and author” with “a
rich vision of teaching that interweaves passion, responsibility and
self-reflection.” Bearing the unmistakable imprint of Ayers and SPLC
founder
Morris Dees, TT's
lesson plans contain reading materials and suggested classroom
activities designed to steer K-12 students toward the conclusion that
America is, and always has been, an inequitable, racist and sexist
society. For example: A series of lessons titled “Issues
of Poverty” emphasize that “poverty is systemic, rooted in
[capitalist] economics, politics and discrimination.” More examples
here:
School Prayer in America - Watch the new video, and
learn the true story of how school prayer was removed from public
schools. "The foundation of national morality must
be laid in private families... In vain are Schools, Academies, and
Universities instituted, if loose principles and licentious habits are
impressed upon children in their earliest years... The
vices and examples of the parents cannot be concealed from the children.
How is it possible that children can have any just sense of the Sacred
Obligations of Morality or Religion if, from their earliest Infancy,
they learn their mothers live in habitual infidelity to their fathers,
and their fathers in as constant infidelity to their mothers?" --John
Adams 1778 "But of all the views of this law none is
more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people
the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty.
For this purpose the reading in the first stage, where they will receive
their whole education, is proposed, as has been said, to be chiefly
historical. History by apprising them of the past will enable
them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of
other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the
actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under
every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views."
Thomas
Jefferson (1781 Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 14 -
Reference: Jefferson Writings, Peterson, ed., 274.)
Charlotte Iserbyt — Full Interview — The Secret History Of Western
Education Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt served as the head of policy at
the Department of Education during the first administration of Ronald
Reagan. While working there she discovered a long term strategic plan by
the tax exempt foundations to transform America from a nation of rugged
individualists and problem solvers to a country of servile, brainwashed
minions who simply regurgitate whatever they're told.
"Let us with caution indulge the supposition that
morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to
the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure,
reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality
can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." --George Washington
from his Farewell Address, 1796
On SEPTEMBER 21, 1924, America's 30th President, Calvin
Coolidge, addressed the Holy Name Society in Washington, D.C., saying:
"The worst evil that could be inflicted upon the youth of the land would
be to leave them without restraint and completely at the mercy of their
own uncontrolled inclinations. Under such conditions education would be
impossible, and all orderly development intellectually or morally would
be hopeless."
America's Best Colleges! Really? /Christian Newswire/ --
Dr. John A. Howard, Co-Founder and Senior Fellow at The Howard Center
for Family, Religion & Society, has announced that his new book,
America's Best Colleges! Really? has been published by Crossbooks and is
available at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and Christian bookstores
everywhere. The new book provides an "eyewitness" overview of the
radical individuals, federal concepts and extremist movements which tore
apart the educational philosophy based on Christendom that had produced
America's phenomenally successful free society for centuries.
Steve Forbes, Editor in Chief at Forbes Magazine, describes the new
book, "Sobering, Eye-Opening, thought provoking look for parents and
students at what you actually get from a higher education in America
today." ...For more information about Dr. John A. Howard, The Howard
Center for Family, Religion & Society and the World Congress of Families
visit www.profam.org and
www.worldcongress.org.
Author and Washington Times columnist Marybeth Hicks is on a
campaign to expose what she views as a Left-wing's assault on the
nation's children. ---
Hicks cites the almost
universal disregard for Constitution Day as an illustration of liberals'
attempt to shape young minds. Although federal law requires public
schools to observe that holiday, studies show up to 90 percent are not
doing so. Hicks, who worked in the Reagan administration, says that
statistic is just one example of how political correctness and pop
culture are misleading America's kids. She warns that today's parents
must be brave parents to protect their children from being misled by the
media, educators and their peers. In her new book, Don't
Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid: Confronting the Left's Assault on Our
Families, Faith, and Freedom, she sounds the alarm on the views of
the next generation. Hicks reports that frightening percentages of our
children believe: Socialism is better than the free market. Christianity
is judgmental. America is the villain of world history. Family does not
mean marriage. She said parents must work to reset their children's
moral compass so they have the strong character and values needed to
lead our nation into the future. If not, she warns that we'll soon wake
up in a very different America -- a far cry from the land of the free.
Exciting Schools by John
Stossel (Sept. 2011) - School spending has doubled over the past 30
years. Yet what do we get? More buildings and more assistant principals
-- but student learning? No improvement. If you graph the numbers, the
spending line slopes steeply, while the lines for reading, math and
science scores are as flat as a dead man's EKG. Why no improvement?
Because K-12 education is a government monopoly, and monopolies don't
improve. And yet I'm happy to announce some good news: Cool things are
starting to happen in classrooms. I was surprised to meet kids who said
they like school. What? I found school boring. How can it be that these
fourth-graders tell me that they look forward to going to school and
that math is "rockin' awesome"? Those kids attend one of those new
charter schools. Charters let them escape the bureaucracy of regular
schools, including, often, teachers union rules. These schools compete
for kids because parents can always choose another school. That makes
them better. Not every charter school is good, but the beauty of
competition is that bad ones go out of business, while good ones expand.
Then good schools teach more kids. Choice and competition produce
quality. Anyone surprised? Government schools rarely improve because no
matter how bad they are, they still have captive customers.
1,183,700 Violent Crimes Committed at Public Schools; Only
303,900 Reported to Police By
Terence P. Jeffrey - By this
government estimate, 879,800 violent crimes committed at U.S. public
schools in the 2009-2010 school year were not reported to police. These
statistics are part of a report—“Indicators
of School Crime and Safety: 2011”—published jointly on Feb. 22 by
the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education
Statistics (NCES) and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice
Statistics (BJS). As defined by the report, “violent crimes” included
rape, sexual battery other than rape, physical attack or fight with or
without a weapon, threat of physical attack with or without a weapon,
and robbery with or without a weapon. The Department of Education and
the Department of Justice based their school-crime estimates on the
School Survey on Crime and Safety which surveyed a representative sample
of about 2,600 public schools around the country.
The
Real Agenda Behind Gay Anti-Bullying Clubs In Your School By Peter
Baklinski - In the early 90���s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered
(GLBT) activists in Massachusetts sought to indoctrinate school children with
homosexual values. GLBT activist Kevin Jennings, who was later appointed by
President Obama as the assistant deputy secretary of the Office of Safe and
Drug-Free Schools inside the Department of Education, masterminded the scheme of
gay anti-bullying programs as a perfect inroad into the otherwise resistant
classrooms of the nation. “If the Radical Right can succeed in portraying us as
preying on children, we will lose,” warned Jennings in a 1995 speech to fellow
GLBT activists outlining his strategy. “Their language–‘promoting
homosexuality’–is laced with subtle and not-so-subtle innuendo that we are
‘after their kids.’”
Jennings argued that the key to success lay in “framing” the issue in another
way, to the advantage of the GLBT cause. The strategy consists in linking the
GLBT cause to “universal values” that everyone in the community has in common,
such as “safety.” One then builds on this universal value the idea that
“homophobia” represents a “threat” to students’ safety since it creates a
“climate where violence, name-calling, health problems, and suicide are common.”
From this point, one simply promotes legislation and programs for schools that
frames the GLBT agenda in the language of these universal values. “This framing
short-circuited their arguments and left them back-pedalling from day one,”
boasted Jennings. “[N]o one could speak up against our frame and say, ‘Why, yes,
I do think students should kill themselves:’ This allowed us to set the terms
for debate.” (For a fuller description please see the
special report on Jennings by Mass Resistance. )
...
Public Schools Pressured to Embrace Porn, but Not Prayer
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the Leftist legal and political agenda is
its unqualified determination to propagandize and sexualize children – while
attacking their religious freedom. The ACLU, for instance, has launched a “Don’t
Filter Me” initiative, threatening to sue seven school districts across the
country unless they deactivate Web filters on their library and classroom
computers that block student access to sexually explicit material. Why? Because
some of the sites blocked belong to groups advocating homosexual behavior and
the ACLU claims that not allowing children to access those sites violates their
constitutionally protected rights.
...
Link on the New
Hampshire NEA web site. Check the last paragraph!! (http://www.neanh.org/workshops/index.html)
The last paragraph: “Setting the Record a Little Less Straight - Although
many textbooks have become more miniroty-inclusive in recent years, lesbian,
gay, bisexual and transgender voices and lives are still being excluded. Learn
some strategies for adding in what's been left out, especially in the high
school literature classroom.”
“Oral sex,
masturbation, and orgasms need to be taught in education,” Diane
Schneider told the audience at a panel on combating homophobia and
transphobia. Schneider, representing the National Education Association
(NEA), the largest teachers union in the US, advocated for more
“inclusive” sex education in US schools, with curricula based on liberal
hetero and homosexual expression. She claimed that the idea of sex
education remains an oxymoron if it is abstinence-based, or if students
are still able to opt-out.
Comprehensive sex
education is “the only way to combat heterosexism and gender
conformity,” Schneider proclaimed, “and we must make these issues a part
of every middle and high-school student’s agenda.” “Gender identity
expression and sexual orientation are a spectrum,” she explained, and
said that those opposed to homosexuality “are stuck in a binary box that
religion and family create.”
A woman wants
to teach children as young as eleven about oral sex, masturbation, and
orgasms in a public school setting
and it’s not news!!??!!
A little digging finds that
Ms. Schneider is a high school health educator and very active with
the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) in upstate NY,
where she is its co-chair. She is also proud of the Gay Straight
Alliance (GSA) that she advises in her high school. Her presentation at
the UN conference was part of her training from the NEA’s Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Trainer of Trainers.
Elect Your Boss, Easy as 1-2-3! by Kyle Olson: There's a dirty
little secret in public school governance: for a few thousand dollars, unions
can run the table. How? Elect the school board. Then, at negotiation time, they/re sitting across the bargaining table from their friends
Zero Tolerance Policies: Are the Schools Becoming Police States?
By John Whitehead - What we are witnessing, thanks in large part to zero
tolerance policies that were intended to make schools safer by discouraging the
use of actual drugs and weapons by students, is the inhumane treatment of young
people and the criminalization of childish behavior.
...Nine-year-old Patrick Timoney was sent to the principal's office and
threatened with suspension after school officials discovered that one of his
LEGOs was holding a 2-inch toy gun. That particular LEGO, a policeman, was
Patrick's favorite because his father is a retired police officer. David
Morales, an 8-year-old Rhode Island student, ran afoul of his school's zero
tolerance policies after he wore a hat to school decorated with an American flag
and tiny plastic Army figures in honor of American troops. School officials
declared the hat out of bounds because the toy soldiers were carrying miniature
guns. A 7-year-old New Jersey boy, described by school officials as "a nice kid"
and "a good student," was reported to the police and charged with possessing an
imitation firearm after he brought a toy Nerf-style gun to school. The gun
shoots soft ping pong-type balls.
...What these incidents, all the result of overzealous school officials and
inflexible zero tolerance policies, make clear is that we have moved into a new
paradigm in America where young people are increasingly viewed as suspects and
treated as criminals by school officials and law enforcement alike. Adopted in
the wake of Congress' passage of the 1994 Gun-Free Schools Act, which required a
one-year expulsion for any child bringing a firearm or bomb to school, school
zero tolerance policies were initially intended to address and prevent serious
problems involving weapons, violence and drug and alcohol use in the schools.
...Finally, these policies, and the school administrators who relentlessly
enforce them, render young people woefully ignorant of the rights they
intrinsically possess as American citizens. What's more, having failed to learn
much in the way of civic education while in school, young people are being
browbeaten into believing that they have no true rights and government
authorities have total power and can violate constitutional rights whenever they
see fit. There's an old axiom that what children learn in school today will be
the philosophy of government tomorrow. As surveillance cameras, metal detectors,
police patrols, zero tolerance policies, lock downs, drug sniffing dogs and
strip searches become the norm in elementary, middle and high schools across the
nation, America is on a fast track to raising up an Orwellian
generation--one populated by compliant citizens accustomed to living in a police
state and who march in lockstep to the dictates of the government. In other
words, the schools are teaching our young people how to be obedient subjects in
a totalitarian society.
New
Film Documents Unions' Destruction of Public Education By Kyle
Olson - "Kids Aren't Cars" is a
new short film series set for release February 1st. Using examples from the
Midwest, it documents the impact organized labor has had on the American
education system, creating a one-size-fits-all assembly line model that leaves
students behind and treats teachers equally, stifling innovation and
improvement. See the
trailer here.
We tell the story of two Indiana teachers recognized state-wide for their impact
on students, only to be fired literally the next day because they lacked
seniority of their co-workers. Numerous leaders sound the alarm, but do elected
leaders have the courage to stand up to the all-powerful teachers' unions? The
tide seems to be turning, but the need is dire. The United States
continues to slip globally [pdf], with student achievement lagging behind
Iceland and Hungary.
In short, it's because our public school system is designed to benefits adults,
at the expense of children. The focus has been on spending - which invariably
ends up in pay, health benefits and retirement for the employees. "Kids
Aren't Cars" is an unflinching look at the state of public education in
America and what can be done about it. The film's Facebook page is
here.
(For more on Unions, see
Unions and Democrats.)
o
A Tale
of Two Ivies: How Our Nation’s Most Elite Universities Lost Their Way
and Sold Their Souls to Porn Stars, Sadomasochists, and Sexual Obsession
by Michael
W. Hannon Nathan Harden’s “Sex and God at Yale” graphically shows
what moral bankruptcy and relativism has produced at the Ivies. ...For
better or worse, Columbia has been regarded as a trailblazer on issues
of sexual “progressivism” since long before I entered its hallowed
gates. Back in 1993, the university’s Health Promotion Program launched Go
Ask Alice!—a Q&A-style website offering insight on such meaningful
topics as sex with stuffed animals, breastfeeding one’s sexual partner,
urine-drinking fetishes, and that annoying medical guideline about
having to abstain from sex for three weeks after an abortion. The following year, Columbia became home to the
nation’s first university-recognized sadomasochism club, Conversio
Virium. (That’s Latin for “exchange of forces.” Glad to see those
Classics majors putting their education to good use.) Then in 2006,
Columbia partnered with one of Soho’s notorious sex shops to bring its
students “Sex Toys 101,” a workshop put on by the university’s own
Health Services, which earned the school a glowing write-up in
the New York Daily News. You might reasonably think that it can’t get
much worse than teddy bear masturbation and S&M clubs. How I wish you
were right. But during my first term at the school, Columbia students
found a way to one-up themselves yet again. In October of 2008, a group
of my classmates released the first issue of a raunchy new (unofficial)
campus publication, oh so cleverly titled C-Spot. Apparently it wasn’t
enough for students to exhibit sex toys; from now on, they were going to
be exhibiting themselves. ...Nathan Harden’s Sex
and God at Yale is a phenomenal book, and a timely and insightful
addition to this conversation. But it definitely is not written for
those with a weak stomach. A recent graduate and a proud Yale Man
himself, Harden writes not to slander the name of his alma mater, but to
lovingly reprimand her for failing to live out her noble calling. ...One of Yale’s most infamous events, and one that
occupies about a hundred pages of Sex and God at Yale, is Sex Week. Held
every other year, Sex Week features a ten-day series of activities, with
varying levels of university involvement from one event to another.
During Harden’s time, it featured such uplifting installments as:
“Defiant Desires,” an S&M symposium; “Y-Couture Fetish Fashion Show,”
with student models, of course; “Getting What You Really Want,” an
anti-monogamy talk by a “polyamorist activist”; “Babeland’s Lip Tricks,”
wherein a burlesque performer gave a 90-minute oral sex workshop to a
packed auditorium of students; “Speed Dating—Give Some, Get Some!”,
which is pretty pathetically self-explanatory; “Love Junkies,” a panel
discussion in which a “clinical sexologist” described the group therapy
he once gave to a grandfather, a grandmother, and their sex slave;
“Erotic Piercings,” a section which I highly recommend skipping over in
the book, as I’m still having nightmares about it; and “BDSM 101,” yet
another sadomasochistic event, but this one including a demonstration in
which the presenter, herself a porn star, got naked in a Yale classroom
and became a human prop in the presentings. Once again, I sense some
potential conflicts with the prevailing feminist ideologies of the Ivy
League. Somehow, I don’t think this is quite what Gloria Steinem had in
mind. 
U.S. public schools: Progressive indoctrination camps
by Chuck Norris -
(This is Part 1 of a two-part series on U.S. public schools.)
Why should liberals want to change the public educational system when it
is turning out the product they have been striving for years to produce?
Check out these real news headlines from the past several weeks and
months about the state of U.S. public education across the country:
Pre-Teen
Orgasm: What Teachers'Unions are Fighting For by Larry Sand
- NEA’s reprehensible sexual agenda goes on unabated and the MSM is MIA.
… I could not find a single 
Our government education system has been spending more and more each year, yet
the results have been the same. While unions demand higher spending - which of
course ends up in the pockets of their members - money is not fixing the
problem.
Those that have been in the trenches gave shocking interviews - stories of money
grabs by adults while children are left behind.
An executive director of a literacy clinic in Detroit - where high school
graduates go to learn how to read - compared the actions of the school board to
the Ku Klux Klan. "If they were sitting up there in Klan robes," she said, no
one would be tolerating what is going on, but the effect is the same. [Eight of
the 9 school board members are black.]
o Colleges Nationwide Recruit Homeschool Grads /Christian Newswire/ -- As the modern-day homeschool movement confidently marches forward into its fourth decade, colleges and universities are opening wide their doors to welcome its mature, prepared graduates to their ranks. Homeschoolers score an average of 37 percentile points above the national average on standardized achievement tests and typically score above average on the SAT and ACT, statistics that apparently have caught the eye of college admissions personnel. Since 1999, the number of homeschoolers in the United States has increased by 74%, and today thousands of young men and women are graduating from high school -- at home.
o Academic Hypocrisy By Thomas Sowell - It is fascinating to see people accusing others of things that they themselves are doing, especially when their own sins are worse. Academics love to say that businesses are not paying enough to people who work for them. But where in business are there people who are paid absolutely nothing for strenuous work that involves risks to their health? In academia, that situation is common. It is called college football. How often have you watched a big-time college football game without seeing someone limping off the field or being carried off the field? College athletes are not to be paid because this is an "amateur" sport. But football coaches are not only paid, they are often paid higher salaries than the presidents of their own universities. Some make over a million dollars a year. Academics also like to accuse businesses of consumer fraud. There is indeed fraud in business, as in every other aspect of human life -- including academia.
...in the February 17th issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education on the chronic over-supply of historians. Worse yet, leading university history departments are resisting demands that they keep track of what happens to their students after they get their Ph.D.s -- and inform prospective Ph.D.s of what the market is like. If any business operated this way, selling customers something that was very costly in time and money, and which the sellers knew in advance was almost certain to disappoint their expectations, academics would be bursting with indignation -- and demanding full disclosure to the customers, if not criminal prosecutions. But The Chronicle of Higher Education reports "faculty resistance" to collecting and publishing information on what happens to a university's history Ph.D.s after they leave the ivy-covered walls with high hopes and low prospects.
...For people not familiar with academia, a tenure-track appointment does not mean that the appointee has tenure, but only that the job is one where a tenure decision will have to be made at some point under the "up or out system." At leading universities, far more are put out than move up. There are also faculty appointments that are strictly for the time being -- lecturers, adjunct professors or visiting professors. Half the 2010 Ph.D.s from Duke University and the University of Pennsylvania have these kinds of appointments, which essentially lead nowhere. They are sometimes called "gypsy faculty."
Finally, there are Ph.D.s who are on postdoctoral fellowships, often at the expense of the taxpayers. They are paid to continue on campus, essentially as students, after getting their doctorates. More than one-fourth of the 2010 Ph.D.s from Rutgers, Johns Hopkins and Harvard are in this category. At least these universities release such statistics. A history professor at Rutgers University who has studied such things says: "If you look at some of the numbers published on department Web sites, they range from dishonest to incompetent." But apparently many academics are too busy pursuing moral crusades in society at large to look into such things on their own ivy-covered campuses.
o The Absence of Consequence by John Hayward (2010) - Walter E. Williams is a distinguished professor of economics at George Mason University, and a popular conservative columnist. He recently published his autobiography, Up From The Projects, detailing his "lower middle-class beginnings in a mixed but predominantly black neighborhood in West Philadelphia."
In the course of reviewing his good friend's book, Dr. Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institute, who comes from a similar environment in bygone Harlem, remarks: "There were also teachers, and then professors, who played a role in developing his mind-- especially hard-nosed teachers in Philadelphia who chewed him out when he messed up and UCLA professors who bluntly told him when his work wasn't good enough. None of them was the kind of warm, chummy educators that so many hold up as an ideal. After Walter Williams earned his Ph.D. in economics and went on to become a professor himself, he was scathing in his criticism of fuzzy-minded faculty members who think they are doing students a favor by going easy on them or giving them higher grades than they deserve." When it comes to slaying the orcs of liberal ignorance, Williams and Sowell are Legolas and Gimli.
They doggedly refuse to let America forget what black communities were like before the Great Society broke their spirit, in the course of trying to fill their wallets with other peoples' money. They also frequently discuss the negative effects of grade inflation, "outcome based education," and the Cult of Self-Esteem on students. Sowell's comment prompted me to reflect that both are essentially manifestations of the same terminal flaw in collectivist thought: the poisonous absence of consequence. The modern classroom, using the circuitry of self-esteem to execute a program of grade inflation, is a controlled application of collectivist principle.
Think of the grades as a resource, which can be either earned or rationed. In the days Williams and Sowell recall, it was largely a matter of earning, which meant some students earned poor grades. Nowadays, as the old joke goes, every student is "above average." The grades are rationed according to need, parceled out by an ideology that says no child should be allowed to fail. As always with collectivism, the ideological allocation of currency (grades) does not increase the overall level of value in the system (education.) In fact, it reduces the level of educational wealth. Students don't properly understand when they're failing, so neither they, nor the system serving their educational needs, can adjust to compensate.
Modern education devalues grades, the same way collectivism inevitably resorts to devaluing currency. Everybody gets at least a "C+" (or whatever they're calling it these days), so a "C" no longer has any intrinsic meaning. The cult of self-esteem could be seen as dealing in massive intellectual subsidies. Grading curves take from the top earners, the most accomplished students, and give to the lowest echelons, a redistribution of achievement. The educational establishment does this to insulate both its students, and itself, from consequence. Consequence is a natural component of freedom, for the ability to "win" implies the possibility of "loss." The absence of consequence, on either intellectual or economic levels, is toxic. It prevents us from improving, and clouds our ability to assess both excellence and mediocrity. If the worst students do not face the consequences of their educational choices, they can never receive the help, or discipline, they truly need.
True Tolerance website, you’ll find the following resources: The “Educate Yourself” section, which provides examples of troubling books, classroom materials and school programs that are cropping up in schools across the country. The “Express Your Viewpoint” tool center that provides suggested talking points and tips to help you approach school officials with your concerns. A “Latest Issues” section, where you can access bullet point “fast facts” and statistics on the issue of bullying--to help parents and students navigate this sensitive topic in their schools. The site’s “Take Action” center, which enables you to send professionally packaged information from national legal experts, about parental rights and religious freedoms, directly to your school officials via email.
Time to leave No Child Left Behind, behind Steve Farrell - In America, Communist Party USA Founder William Z. Foster, wrote in 1932: "Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following; The schools, colleges and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education (which did not exist at that time) and its state and local branches. The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and the general ethics of the new Socialist society. Present obsolete methods of teaching will be superceded by a scientific pedagogy. The churches will remain free to continue their services, but their special tax and other privileges will be liquidated. Their buildings will revert to the State. Religious schools will be abolished and organized religious training for minors prohibited. Freedom will be established for anti-religious propaganda." Such is the final aim of free and federal education!
When Government Unions Win, Everybody Else Loses by Tom McLaughlin - After the SEIU effectively drove the chancellor of the Washington D.C. school system to resign, they gained a hollow victory. Not too much good news about public education coming out of our nation's capital. Michelle Rhee resigned as chancellor of the Washington, DC school system. She was doing everything she could to break the left-wing teachers' union's power to protect its deadwood teachers and principals. She modified the teacher evaluation process by taking student progress on tests into consideration and she fired over 200 ineffective teachers and administrators. She had the support of Mayor Adrian Fenty, but other public employee unions including the infamously left-wing SEIU joined up to defeat him and pull the rug out from under Rhee.
The American Federation of Teachers spent over $1 million in the effort. Unions won. Students lost. This came on the heels of another bit of bad news last year in our capitol city when Congress (which administers the District of Columbia) eliminated a school choice program for 1700 DC school children. President Obama, who sends his children to an expensive private school in DC, did nothing to support the school choice program for poor DC kids. Democrats are beholden to the teachers' unions, which are the biggest supporters of that party nationwide, just ahead of trial lawyers. School choice anywhere it's offered is anathema to teachers' unions. Most of their political capital is spent defeating school choice (voucher) programs nationwide. Here too, unions won. Students lost.
Shortly after Michelle Rhee resigned, the DC school system started feeding dinner to students as well as breakfast and lunch. According to an article at change.org, "This new early dinner program will feed 10,000 kids who may spend up to 10 hours a day at school in early-care and after-school programs." So, now US taxpayers are feeding three meals a day to school kids in our nation's capital. They're spending ten hours a day in school with early care and after school programs, yet change.org is lamenting that food stamp aid may be cut to pay for it. "Forty percent of households reported not having enough money to buy food at least one time," the article claims, and the federal government is "robbing Peter to pay Paul" when it cuts food stamps.
...Most newspapers report the per-pupil cost for DC schools at $13,000 per
year, but if an article
in the Washington Times is correct, the real number is $24,600! That's the
figure you get when you take all the money spent on the schools and divided it
by the number of students. My only question at this point is: when are we going
to provide beds for them? We babysit them before and after school, we feed them,
we teach them to brush their teeth, teach them about the birds and the bees,
provide counseling - so what's left for parents to do? Where is it going to end?
The school choice program that Democrats in Congress cut cost the Washington
DC school district only $7500 per pupil. At $24,600 per pupil the District
spends, that would be a net savings of more than $17,000 per student. The 1700
students who took advantage of it were thriving. Their parents were happy with
it too, but the teachers' unions were not because it shone a bright light on
what a bloated, corrupt education bureaucracy the unions created and preserved.
If it expanded and was copied across the country, the teachers' union monopoly
would be smashed and Democrats would lose their biggest constituency. It had to
go.
Warnings & Wisdom Ignored...
Thomas Jefferson Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia, 1818: "To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business; To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts, in writing; To improve, by reading, his morals and faculties; To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either; To know his rights; to exercise with order and justice those he retains; to choose with discretion the fiduciary of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence, with candor, and judgment; And, in general, to observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed."
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The Truth About
GLSEN's School Climate Report by Candi Cushman -
It's a generally recognized principle that truly objective, scientific
research should not be conducted by people who have a vested, political
interest in the outcome. But this principle doesn't seem to faze GLSEN
(the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.) For years, GLSEN has
pressured schools to introduce homosexual topics and books to kids as
young as kindergarten. And its favorite method for justifying those
demands is to trot out statistics from its very own
National School Climate Survey (the latest report was released this
September). You might also notice that statistics from this report are
constantly cited in national media when the issue of homosexual activism
in schools is discussed. But what's rarely acknowledged is that the data
was compiled and interpreted entirely by GLSEN's own in-house activists.
Seven teachers at Concord, MA, Carlisle High School hold assembly
telling students how they "came out" as homosexuals -- encouraging
students to do the same.
(MassResistance.org) Using
the excuse of "gay youth suicides" reported in other states, schools in
Massachusetts are intensifying their propaganda to portray homosexuality
as a positive, natural, and irreversible behavior for kids to engage in
-- and at the same time stigmatize any criticism of homosexuality as
dangerous and even a sign of mental illness.
On October 21, 2010 a group of seven homosexual teachers at
Concord-Carlisle High School led an afternoon assembly describing to
students how they "came out" as homosexuals, and how "their lives have
improved as a result." They emphasized that "coming out" - publicly
declaring oneself as "gay" or "transgender' - is a healthy growth
experience, and that once you've finally internalized that you're "gay"
(or "transgender") it's permanent but satisfying. The event was reported
in
the local Carlisle Mosquito newspaper.
It's not known whether the assembly was mandatory for any of the
students, but according to the newspaper report, the school's Little
Theatre was completely filled and there was standing room only. It was
organized by the schools "gay-straight alliance" club, known as
Spectrum. Such clubs regularly work closely with the taxpayer-funded
Massachusetts Commission for Gay Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender
Youth and the Mass. Department of Education.
Among the seven teachers was math teacher Peter Atlas. Atlas is a
long-time homosexual activist, a personal friend and colleague of
Kevin Jennings, and former board member of GLSEN. His public
homosexual-related activities in schools date back to 1993. A Boston
Globe article once described how (among other things) he offers
matchmaking advice to gay teens.
Read more about Peter Atlas on the MassResistance Blog.
Ironically, Atlas began his talk by saying that all his college
friends have died of AIDS. But he's very glad he "came out," and he
encourages kids to do it. "My worst day out is better than my best day
in the closet," he said.
Several of the teachers described what they portrayed as the irrational
fear, "homophobia," and general backwardness of their parents,
relatives, and others who first reacted negatively to their coming out.
But afterwards, they assured the students, their relatives accepted them
as gay, so students shouldn't be worried about that.
Science teacher Brian Miller said he was much happier after coming out
because he could "be himself." He thanked the school for being a "safe
place" to be homosexual.
Alice Slocum, a health teacher at the school, told the kids that she
regrets having waited until college to come out, because it "wasted so
much time." She added that coming out solidifies your homosexual
identity, and that "once you say it, you can't take it back."
She said because she's a health teacher who's come out, a colleague told
her that she's "saving lives."
Social studies teacher Ben Kendall, a faculty sponsor of the
gay-straight alliance club, concluded the event by encouraging kids to
get involved with the gay-straight alliance club. Also, he said,
students that they could confide with the school's counseling department
with complete privacy -- that no one would tell their parents.
Most parents still in the dark, don't see the danger
One mother in Carlisle who found out about this assembly was very
outraged. She sent us her thoughts and observations:
Unfortunately, many parents and taxpayers still don't understand and
appreciate the militant push in the public schools to normalize
homosexuality, transgenderism, and related behaviors in the minds of
vulnerable and impressionable kids. This is why the homosexual lobby
fights so hard against our strong parents' rights legislation (which
we'll be re-filing in the Legislature this year).
Human Rights Campaign (HRC) "Welcoming Schools" curriculum Candi Cushman, Focus on the Family education analyst, recently brought to my attention an emerging trend. During a recent summit on bullying prevention, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation's largest homosexual-advocacy group, announced that it was calling on the federal government to endorse and provide funds for homosexual-themed elementary school curriculum. Under the innocent-sounding name of "Welcoming Schools," HRC has developed a controversial, stealth curriculum that has already been piloted in several public school districts. HRC claims this curriculum is all about teaching diversity and preventing name calling, but our analysis of the curriculum proves otherwise. A quick examination of the lesson plans revealed its more about indoctrination, Candi explains. Using misleading titles like tolerance lessons, bully prevention and safe schools, a curriculum with homosexual themes could be making its way into your child's school. At the elementary school level, one book depicts furry animals to promote homosexuality.
Bus Tour Exposes Indoctrination in Public Schools Touring the United States in a school bus, filmmaker Colin Gunn hopes to inform Christians about the indoctrination he says is taking place in public schools. Gunn will take his wife and seven children from Waco, TX to Boston, MA, talking with educators, historians and everyday Americans about the problems with public schools. The month-long tour, which begins on August 31st, will be made into a documentary film later this year.
Gunn contends that public school curriculum is antagonistic to Christianity, promotes Darwinian propaganda and socialist, Marxist agendas. He considers it ironic that Christians send their children to a school system that undermines their values. He says, "There is no neutrality in education. All education is intrinsically religious. It's no victory if we just get creation taught alongside evolution. What we need is Christian education in every subject."
Concerned about the effect of public education on future generations, Gunn decided to embark on the 3,000 mile bus tour as a means of engaging Christians on these issues. He hopes that his seminars during the tour, and the subsequent film, will cause Christians to rethink the government school system entirely. He points out that "The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and government schools don't have that wisdom."
The "Indoctrination Bus Tour" will visit historic sites and key locations related to public education, including Dayton, TN, site of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925; the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY; Washington, DC; New York, NY; and Boston, MA, the birthplace of public education. Joining the Gunn family on the tour will be Gunn's fellow producer, Joaquin Fernandez, and a film crew prepared to interview various Christian leaders and average Americans. The producers will be "live blogging" during the tour so supporters can follow their daily progress.
Colin Gunn is an award-winning producer/director and accomplished animator. Originally from Hamilton, Scotland, Gunn is now a US citizen and lives in Waco, Texas with his wife and seven children. To interview Colin Gunn, please contact Joaquin Fernandez at 803-240-4934 or contact@indoctrinationmovie.com. More information about the Indoctrination Bus Tour and film can be found at www.indoctrinationmovie.com.
College Bound: The Changing Role of Parents By Janice Shaw Crouse - The New York Times advised parents of incoming college freshmen to drop their kids off, back off, walk away, and move on so that their students can develop independence. In the article, parents who don't hop in the car, return home and consider their parenting over are dismissed as super-involved or over-involved and are described as Velcro parents, Helicopter parents, or baby-on-board parents. ...These attacks against parenting are another attempt to intimidate parents into surrendering their influence to that of supposedly superior intellectuals and professional educators who know what's best for our children.
...First, your role as a parent lasts a lifetime. While
your role changes dramatically at various stages in your children's lives,
it is important and significant at each stage. You have to learn to be
adaptable to those changes, but it is vital that you provide the support
that your children need in their college days and provide the guidance
that they will ask for when you make it clear that you are still there for
them and that you won't tell them what to do or interfere with their
growth into maturity and adulthood. Most of us do not want our children's
first real trip on the high wire of independence to be without a safety
net. As the song says, we want to be the wind beneath their wings. As I
talked to the parents of incoming freshmen, I wanted them to be
particularly alert to three things:
1. Your child is beginning one of the most significant and challenging
stages of his or her life. Perhaps for the first time, that child is on
his or her own and it is a proverbial make-or-break situation. (Hopefully,
you have spent the previous 18 years preparing them for this day emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, and spiritually.) They
need to know that you will continue to be there as a parent to provide
support and/or guidance as they request it.
2. Over the four years of college or university life, students will make
many of the most important decisions of their lives. Wise parents will
anticipate the challenges and temptations and prepare their children with
the character and arguments that they need to avoid risky and destructive
behavior; loving communication and wise counsel can help your child resist
temptation and make good decisions.
3. Over the next four years, your child will sit under the influence of a
few professors who enjoy tearing down the moral and religious views of
their students. For such profs, teaching is a game, and the intellectual
seduction of their students is the conquest that makes their teaching
challenging. Their agenda is to separate students from their parents,
thereby, they hope, removing the influence of traditional, Judeo-Christian
values. Wise parents will listen carefully and be ready to help counter
such pernicious nonsense.
There is no reason for parents to accede to the condescending and patronizing attitudes of those who believe that parents are superfluous in their children's lives once they reach college age. Of course a parent's role must change, but the parental role is still important, and I can attest to the fact that it can be as meaningful, memorable, and significant in the college days and into adulthood as it was during all the previous stages of your child's life. Nothing is more gratifying to a parent than to see a child become a mature adult — well-adjusted, well-educated, and well-prepared to make their own decisions.
Our schools, dumb and dumber By Alan Caruba As the nation's children return to elementary and secondary schools, it is increasingly essential that their parents and communities coast to coast realize how poorly served they are and how their learning environment is increasingly tainted by a socialist agenda. ...In mid-August, The Wall Street Journal reported that "New data show that fewer than 25% of 2010 graduates who took the ACT college-entrance exam possessed the academic skills necessary to pass entry-level courses, despite modest gains in college-readiness among U.S. high school students in the last few years."
...The word "education" does not appear in
the U.S. Constitution and, until the Department of Education came along,
it was the responsibility of States and local communities. A government
that has managed Conrail since 1976 without once making a profit should
not have been trusted with the nation's educational system.
I opposed No Child Left Behind when former President Bush proposed it and,
like former President Reagan, I have long believed the Department of
Education should be ended and that responsibility be returned to the
States and local communities. The DOE exists today as little more than an
obstacle to learning in the classroom and a giant funding machine.
The DOE is pretty much owned by the National Education Association which
is not an "association," but a powerful union, the largest with an
estimated 3.2 members. The Democrat Party is heavily indebted to it for
funds and campaign workers.
It is doubtful that most Americans know that, for the past several months,
the NEA's website has recommended that its members read "Rules for
Radicals" by the late Saul Alinsky, a dedicated communist. If NEA members
adopt its political agenda, the enemy will literally be in our nation's
classrooms.
It has not gone unnoticed that Obama's "American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act," otherwise known as the "Stimulus Act" enabled the education lobby to
suck up billions more from taxpayers.
The Act allocated $5 billion to early learning programs, including the
failed Head Start and Early Head Start, child care and programs for
children with special needs. It also allocated $77 billion for "reforms"
to allegedly strengthen elementary and secondary education, including
$48.6 billion to "stabilize" state education budgets. It was a Full
Employment Act for teachers and school administrators.
...The federal government must get out of the education business, must devolve responsibility back to the states and local communities, and they in turn should refuse to deal with teachers unions in order to regain control over the education of the nation's most precious resource, its children.
They're doing it: U.N. makes its move into your school Program already operating in hundreds of U.S. locations By Michael Carl - WorldNetDaily - The Brown Academy of Chattanooga, Tenn., the 3,000th International Baccalaureate World School The agenda of the United-Nations-funded and -run International Baccalaureate Curriculum is making massive inroads into America's public schools, with operations already established in more than 1,000 locations. Worldview Weekend President and Founder Brannon Howse says the program is trying to train American students to embrace an anti-Christian worldview. "This U.N. curriculum is extremely hostile to Christians. It's hostile to American values and ideas and very big on humanism, redistribution of wealth, and very big on pluralism and that all religions are equal," Howse told WND. Howse says one of his radio program's listeners is frustrated that there is no outcry from the public.
IB Promotes both a Political Agenda and a Specific Religious Belief System United Nations International Baccalaureate (IB) promotes both a Political Agenda and a Specific Religious Belief System. The IB Program Continuum has as its prime purpose, to Teach and Develop within each student a Specific set of Values, a Specific Ethos and a Specific form of Ethical Reasoning. The Question that should be asked at this point and often is not is…. Specifically Which Values, Ethos and Ethical Reasoning, does the IB Seek to instill in each Student in its program? The Answer is found through the following links: (Click article link for all resources.) ...What are the Values of the Earth Charter? One Value among others is the teaching that the Earth “Mother Earth” or “Gia” is a Sentient living Being …. and that Mankind are destroying her, so it is mankind’s duty to reverse this “abuse” and limit itself and its posterity by Educating the youth into a Belief system of Service to the Earth and Sustainable Development.
...The Earth Charter is also connected to the Temple of Understanding; a UN backed Religious Belief System and dare I say A Religion of it’s own. Who’s beliefs are virtually the same as those expressed within the Earth Charter Document. ...It is important to keep in mind that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that “Gia aka Mother Earth Theory” and “Humanism” are both viewed by the law in accordance with the U.S. Constitution as Religions and Religious Belief systems with their own set of tenants, requirements and demonstrations of faith. They sit alongside Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Atheism, Wicca etc. as equally protected belief systems. However through IB programs both the Gia and Humanism religious systems are being taught to our children in every class they take at an IB school, including those that are Public schools that are paid for with public money.
...Finally to Tie this together so there is no misunderstanding, and the argument cannot be made that IBO and IB classes have no connection with the UN, UNESCO, Earth Charter and so on…….Lets look at the IBO’s Require materials list for Teachers and School Administrators attending IBO Training sessions and Conferences. Below is the required materials list for the PYP (i.e. the Elementary School Program) Scroll down to the section on “Sustainability as International-mindedness”
by Joseph C. Phillips - Such was our founder's belief in the preeminence of God that when the First Continental Congress convened in 1774, Massachusetts delegate Thomas Cushing suggested to the assembly that together they pray for divine guidance and protection. The historical events that would forever change the world were preparing to unfold: war loomed on the horizon; the Declaration of Independence would be signed, and a nation conceived in liberty would be born. In this moment, men of varied religious beliefs -- Presbyterians, Episcopalians, some Quakers, others Baptists or Congregationalists – were led in prayer by an Episcopal priest in an appeal to the almighty that was described as extraordinary, filling the bosom of every man present. It would not be the last time the founders appealed to the Almighty God.James Madison acknowledged God's favor in our founding in Federalist 37 referring to a finger of that almighty hand, which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution. I dare say that men like Madison and Cushing would not recognize the America of today, filled with politicians afraid to confess their faith or educators fearful of offending the sensibilities of their students with any mention of God.
...Moreover, the founders believed religion and religious teaching to be essential to the maintenance of a free society. The great patriot Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania wrote, All its [Christian revelation] doctrines and precepts are calculated to promote the happiness of society, and the safety and well being of civil government. Therefore, reasoned Rush, "the only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments." In short the founders recognized not only the nexus between virtue and happiness, but also virtue and liberty. We should not be surprised when those that endeavor to erase God from our history also seek to shackle us to the administrative state. Man will either be governed by a power from within or controlled by a power from without.Â
In his farewell address, George Washington said, "Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." The founders would find the mushy multi-cultural political correctness of the 21st century to be outrageous.
Progress: Schools Teaching Your 10-Year-Old Child About Anal Sex by Lori Ziganto
NEA celebrates 'drag queen' teachers by Bill Bumpas - OneNewsNow - 7/15/2010 - The National Education Association (NEA) continues to alienate more and more of its conservative constituents as the organization showed its liberal leanings at its 2010 national convention. At this year's meeting in New Orleans, the largest professional organization and labor union in the U.S. recognized a new caucus: the NEA Drag Queen Caucus. (See list of recognized NEA caucuses [PDF]) "They already have had the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, [and] Transgender Caucus and apparently felt that the drag queens needed their own caucus," explains Finn Laursen, executive director of Christian Educators Association International (CEAI).
The Sin of Public Education By Lee Duigon - If you have school-age children, what;s the single best thing you can do for them, for your family, and for your country? That's an easy one: pull them out of public school! And that goes double if you call yourself a Christian.
...This is the kind of teaching that goes on every day in public schools. Don't listen to your parents, kids. They're not as smart as you. They don't understand about things like global warming, social justice, homophobia, and why we ought to march around singing hymns to Dear Leader. This whole country would be paradise, if it wasn't for them and their old-fashioned thinking. We are talking about a public education system for which a self-confessed pedophile enabler, Kevin Jennings, serves as Safe and Drug Free Schools boss in the Dept. of Education. Jennings is the founder of GLSEN, an arm of Big Sodomy that has installed homosexuality clubs in thousands of public schools around the country.
... Nevertheless, Christian parents and their pastors are notoriously in denial. ...But why should parents and pastors have a problem with schools that teach their children that parents and pastors are all wet? That the Bible is wrong about just about everything, and anyone who takes it seriously is either stupid, or evil, or both? Tens of millions of Christian children are getting this poison drilled into their skulls every school day. The message to Christians from their enemies is, "You breed em, you feed em--and we'll do our level best to lead Ëœem into being socialists and pagans." That Christians are oblivious to this rather blatant message testifies to the hardness of their hearts and the woodenness of their heads.
...The Bible warns God's people not to get too comfortable in Babylon: Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. (Revelation 18:4) But apparently a lot of God's people feel pretty much at home in Babylon. They send their 8-year-olds to anti-Christian schools with the excuse that these little kids are there to be "salt and light" to a pagan public school establishment. Your kids are not salt and light to this beast, Christians. They're only lunch. Comments No Comments Found.
PETITION TO REMOVE IB FROM AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS Please join concerned parents across the United States who are fighting to prevent the takeover of their public schools by the International Baccalaureate Organization (IB). For nore info see TRUTH ABOUT IB.
Has art gone too far? "I was taught that communism was bad until I took history in the International Baccalaureate program at Richmond High," she said. (See Truth About IB - All you need to know about the International Baccalaureate Programme but were afraid to ask)
Peg Luksik on Outcome Based Education (OBE) (Youtube) its failures, criteria referenced testing, national data banks and more. ... outcome-based education obe no child left behind public government schooling. Note: It is not just Pennsylvania..
What Will They Learn? by Walter E. Williams - When parents plunk down $20, $30, $40 and maybe $50 thousand this fall for a year's worth of college room, board and tuition, it might be relevant to ask: What will their children learn in return? The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) ask that question in their recently released publication, "What Will They Learn: A Report on the General Education Requirements at 100 of the Nation's Leading Colleges and Universities." ACTA conducted research to see whether 100 major institutions require seven key subjects: English composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics and science. What ACTA found was found was alarming, reporting that "Even as our students need broad-based skills and knowledge to succeed in the global marketplace, our colleges and universities are failing to deliver. Topics like U.S. government or history, literature, mathematics, and economics have become mere options on far too many campuses. Not surprisingly, students are graduating with great gaps in their knowledge -- and employers are noticing."
De-Programming Students by Thomas Sowell - Letters from parents often complain of a sense of futility in trying to argue with their own children, who have been fed a steady diet of the politically correct vision of the world, from elementary school to the university. ...Yet trying to undo the propaganda that passes for education at too many schools and colleges, one issue at a time, may not always be the best strategy. There are too many issues on which the politically correct party line is considered to be the only way to look at things. ...Another approach might be to respond to the dogmatic certainty of some young person, perhaps your own offspring, by asking: "Have you ever read a single book on the other side of that issue?" ...Would it make sense for a jury to reach a verdict after having heard only the prosecution's case, or only the defense attorney's case, but not both? ...Some students may even imagine that they have already heard the other side because their teachers may have given them their version of other people's arguments or motives. But a jury would never be impressed by having the prosecution tell them what the defendant's defense is. ...students may have been shown Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" in school, but are very unlikely to have been shown the British Channel 4 television special, "The Great Global Warming Swindle." ...Hearing only one side does nothing to equip students with the experience to know how to sort out opposing sides of other issues they will have to confront in the future, after they have left school and need to reach their own conclusions on the issues arising later. Yet they are the jury that will ultimately decide the fate of this nation.
Education or Edjukashun? Alan Caruba - My father used to say that there was no defense against stupidity. ... In his time, American education was as basic as it comes. You learned these fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic. You were taught, not just history, but something called civics, lessons about the way the nation was governed and why our republic was a leading example of "government of the people, by the people, for the people." Of the 2,500 Americans who took the test that included college students, elected officials and other randomly selected citizens, nearly 1,800 flunked the 33-question test on basic civics. The elected officials scored slightly lower than the public with an average score of 44% compared with 49%; less than half. There are two great threats facing America today. One is the vast ignorance of our history and of the way we govern ourselves, and the other is the growing numbers of functionally illiterate Americans. ...I do not blame teachers, some of the most under-appreciated people in our society. They are the victims of an educational system whose demise began in earnest in the 1960s. (You can learn more about this process by reading my four-part series, The Subversion of Education in America.)
American Minute for May 28th
He left Yale for four years to fight in the Revolutionary War. After graduation, he became a lawyer and taught school in New York. Dissatisfied with the children's spelling books, he wrote the famous Blue-Backed Speller, which sold over one hundred million copies. After twenty-six years of work, he published the first American Dictionary of the English Language. His name was Noah Webster, and he died MAY 28, 1843. In his 1788 essay, "On the Education of Youth in America," printed in Webster's American Magazine, Noah Webster wrote: "Select passages of Scripture...may be read in schools, to great advantage. In some countries the common people are not permitted to read the Bible at all. In ours, it is as common as a newspaper and in schools is read with nearly the same degree of respect." Noah Webster continued: "My wish is not to see the Bible excluded from schools but to see it used as a system of religion and morality." In his book, The History of the United States, published in 1832, Noah Webster wrote: "All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible."'God' - the new four-letter word in public schools - Why is religion taboo in American schools? Christian attorney John Whitehead addresses that question.
"God has become THE four-letter word in most public schools in the United States," says Whitehead, founder of The Rutherford Institute. And he explains in a commentary why that has come to pass: "An elite segment of society that views God as irrelevant has come to predominate." (View video commentary)
Whitehead gained his legal insights into the phenomenon through the many cases of religious discrimination that have crossed his desk.
"What's happened is [that] the elitists -- the people who run American society, from the public education system to certain governmental institutions and figures -- have basically decided that God is irrelevant to public discussion," says Whitehead during an interview with OneNewsNow.
"...This ignores the 120 million-plus people in America who take their religion seriously, [who] practice it, and who pay taxes to support institutions like the public schools."
And what that does, adds Whitehead, is force those people -- along with their religious rights and their free-speech rights -- into "utter subservience" to all other beliefs.
The issue, according to the attorney, is not separation of church and state -- an argument frequently cited by those who assume the secular viewpoint. "The issue in such instances is the religious believer versus the secular state," he writes. "It is also a denial of everything this country stands for in terms of the freedoms of speech, religion, and a respect for moral tradition."
Whitehead believes that what exists now in America is akin to the old Soviet Union and China, where it is religious believers fending off the state.
Public Schools Teach the ABCs of Islam By Erick Stakelbeck - Muslims discovered America? Or that Jerusalem is an Arab city? That's just some of the "history" that students in America's K-12 classrooms have been taught in recent years--with the help of taxpayer money.
Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners. 1 Corinthians 15:33
"A trained intelligence can do much, but there is no substitute for morality, character and religious conviction." President Calvin Coolidge, 1924
"A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education." President Theodore Roosevelt
Ronald Reagan: "If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit." ..."Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children what it was once like in the United States when men were free."
Rewriting American history - The Bradley Project on America's National Identity recently issued its report, called "E Pluribus Unum" ("from many, one"). It calls attention to a decline in civic and historical literacy and a system of education that emphasizes ethnic identities over shared citizenship. In other words, it suggests that we are not doing a good job of teaching students the fundamentals of American history, but we are succeeding in teaching them to be hyper-aware of the divisions among us rather than all that unites us. So two things are happening here. We are producing students with the scantest of knowledge of American history, and planting in them a distorted vision of it.
American Minute for September 20th: Fisher Ames helped ratify the U.S. Constitution and authored the final House language of the First Amendment. At age 46, Fisher Ames was elected Harvard's president, but declined due to an illness which led to his death on July 4, 1808. An orator, Fisher Ames stated no one could be eloquent "without being a constant reader of the Bible and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language." In January 1788, Fisher Ames stated: "The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the...ignorant believe to be liberty." In his Dangers of American Liberty, February 1805, Fisher Ames warned that democracy without morals would eventually reduce the nation to the basest of human passions, swallowing freedom: "A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction." In Palladium Magazine, SEPTEMBER 20, 1789, Fisher Ames wrote: "We have a dangerous trend beginning to take place in our education. We're starting to put more textbooks into our schools...containing fables and moral lessons...We are spending less time in the classroom on the Bible, which should be the principal text in our schools." Fischer Ames concluded: "The Bible states these great moral lessons better than any other manmade book."
American Minute for January 4th: A proponent of public education, Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote his Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic, 1786: "I proceed...to inquire what mode of education we shall adopt so as to secure to the state all of the advantages that are to be derived from the proper instruction of the youth; and here I beg leave to remark that the only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid on the foundation of religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments." Benjamin Rush continued: "But the religion I mean to recommend in this place is that of the New Testament...Its doctrines and precepts are calculated to promote the happiness of society and the safety and well-being of civil government."
When the
Light
is absent,
darkness
inevitably is present.
When moral virtue
is absent,
secular humanism is
present.
When moral
righteousness is absent,
evil is present.
When responsibility
and discipline is absent, "political
correctness" is rampant.
Click
here for education resources for
parents, teachers, students, home schooling, and more.
Click here for a report on a rally against
"Virtue Terrorism."
Click here for Mission
America's "Choice 4 Truth" and "Truth at Schools."
"Why don't they tell the truth at school about homosexuality?" It's Mission America's companion web site, Truth At School. A great resource on the issue of homosexuality in our schools. The site contains sections on "The Hidden Agenda," "Talking Points," tips for parents and students, how to get organized in your community, and a long list of helpful resources.
While many get angry with God for "allowing" terrible things to happen within our schools, many of those same people have "allowed" God to be kept out of our schools. He that has ears to hear, let him hear. (For more on the question of evil click here.)
The primary responsibility of
education DOES NOT belong to schools.
Don't let the indoctrination of your children bring shame to you.
And you shall love the LORD thy God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words, which I command you this day, shall be in your heart: And you shall teach them diligently unto your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up. Deuteronomy 6:5-7
"And, you fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." Ephesians 6:4
"Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old, he will not depart from it." Proverbs 22:6
"My, son hear the instruction of your father, and forsake not the law of your mother." Proverbs 1:8
"Hear, ye children, the instruction of a father, and attend to know understanding." Proverbs 4:1
"He that begets a fool does it to his sorrow: and the father of a fool has no joy. A foolish son is a grief to his father, and bitterness to her that bare him." Proverbs 17:21,25
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because you have rejected knowledge, I will also reject you, that you shall be no priest to me: seeing you have forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children. As they were increased, so they sinned against me: therefore will I change their glory into shame. They eat up the sin of my people, and they set their heart on their iniquity. And there shall be, like people, like priest: and I will punish them for their ways, and reward them their doings. For they shall eat, and not have enough: they shall commit whoredom, and shall not increase: because they have left off to take heed to the LORD. Hosea 4:6-10
"It is the duty of parents to maintain their children decently, and according to their circumstances; to protect them according to the dictates of prudence; and to educate them according to the suggestions of a judicious and zealous regard for their usefulness, their respectability and happiness." --James Wilson, Lectures on Law, 1791
Parent-centered education reforms continue to proliferate nationwide. This year, more than 1 million children will be able to attend safe and effective schools chosen by their parents, thanks to reforms implemented at the state and local level. I urge you to become better acquainted with the many schooling options now available. Heritage [Foundation]'s Types of School Choice is a great place to start. It outlines just about everything, from tax credits and education savings accounts to scholarships and charter schools. And it shows why parents should settle for nothing less than excellence when it comes to the supremely important task of educating their children. We need to remember that "parents not federal bureaucrats†are best situated to direct their children's education. Rebecca Hagelin (PatriotPost.us)
School choice expands, kids benefit More and more children are benefiting from school choice, Heritage education expert Dan Lips writes in a new in-depth analysis. Millions of students are taking advantage of programs like charter schools, public school choice and vouchers, reflecting a dramatic improvement in education options over the past two decades.
Click here for education resources for parents, teachers, students, home schooling, and more.
"A
nation which does not remember what it was yesterday,
does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do."
President Woodrow Wilson, 1911
Did you know..."The fate of empires depends on the education of youth." Aristotle
In Palladium magazine, SEPTEMBER 20, 1789, Fisher Ames wrote: "We have a dangerous trend beginning to take place in our education. We're starting to put more textbooks into our schools...containing fables and moral lessons...We are spending less time in the classroom on the Bible, which should be the principal text in our schools." Fischer Ames concluded: "The Bible states these great moral lessons better than any other manmade book." (American Minute)
"To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society." Theodore Roosevelt
Schools were originally set up by Churches for the purpose of Bible teaching.
In 1690 Connecticut established a Literacy Law with a fine of $25 (extremely considerable for that time) because children must be able to read if they are to read the Scriptures.
On March 28, 1787, when Dr. Benjamin Rush - a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the man considered "the father of modern medicine" - proposed his plan for public education in America, he wrote: "Let the children who are sent to those schools be taught to read and write - - (and) above all, let both sexes be carefully instructed in the principles and obligations of the Christian religion. This is the most essential part of education." In 1791, Dr. Rush wrote a pamphlet titled, "A Defense of the Use of the Bible as a Schoolbook." AND a letter to John Armstrong,, March 19, 1783: "[T]he only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments." And "Without religion, I believe that learning does real mischief to the morals and principles of mankind." AND warned if America ever removed the Bible from the classroom, all of our time will be spent fighting crime.
In 1690, Benjamin Harris' New England Primer textbook
with a memorization rhyming alphabet was introduced using Scripture to
teach reading and pronunciation. This Primer was reprinted and used for
210 years, until 1900, which the framers of our Republic were reared.
In 1781 Congress ruled that a new English edition of the Bible be printed and used by schools. (Where was the ACLU?)
Noah Webster, On the Education of Youth in America, 1788: The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.
John Adams: "It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives."
Samuel Adams: "Since private and public Vices, are in reality, though not always apparently, so nearly connected, of how much Importance, how necessary is it, that the utmost pains be taken by the public, to have the Principles of Virtue early inculcated on the minds even of children, and the moral sense kept alive, and that the wise institutions of our ancestors for these great purposes be encouraged by the government. For no people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when Knowledge is diffus'd and Virtue is preserv'd. On the contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauch'd in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders."
American Minute for September 14th: Son of a butcher, his family died when a plague swept England, leaving him an estate. He attended Emmanuel College, was ordained, married and sailed for Massachusetts where he pastored the First Church of Charlestown. At age 31, he died of tuberculosis on SEPTEMBER 14, 1638. His name was Rev. John Harvard. The College at Cambridge was renamed for him. Fifty-percent of 17th-century graduates were ministers, as were ten out of twelve of Harvard's presidents prior to the Revolution. Harvard's founders wrote: "After God had carried us safe to New England, and we...rear'd convenient places for God's worship...dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust...it pleased God to stir up the heart of one Mr. Harvard, a godly gentleman and a lover of learning...to give the one half of his estate...towards the erecting of a college and all his Library." As 106 of the first 108 schools in America were founded on Christianity, Harvard's Rules & Precepts stated September 26, 1642: "Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life. John 17:3."
American Minute for September 21st: On SEPTEMBER 21, 1924, America's 30th President, Calvin Coolidge, addressed the Holy Name Society in Washington, D.C., saying: "The worst evil that could be inflicted upon the youth of the land would be to leave them without restraint and completely at the mercy of their own uncontrolled inclinations. Under such conditions education would be impossible, and all orderly development intellectually or morally would be hopeless." Calvin Coolidge continued: "The Declaration of Independence...claims...the ultimate source of authority by stating...they were... 'appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the rectitude of' their 'intentions.'...The foundations of our independence and our Government rests upon basic religious convictions. Back of the authority of our laws is the authority of the Supreme Judge of the World, to whom we still appeal." President Coolidge concluded: "It seems to me perfectly plain that the authority of law, the right to equality, liberty and property, under American institutions, have for their foundation reverence for God. If we could imagine that to be swept away, these institutions of our American government could not long survive."
The Directorate of Indoctrination Leftist Academic Apparatchiks By Mark Alexander - "Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." --George Washington from his Farewell Address, 1796
...Of course, "the kind of change" led by socialist unions in government schools across the nation is already in lock step with what "Washington, DC" dictates. They're both bent upon churning out legions of useful idiots necessary to ensure incremental implementation of Democratic Socialism. Of incremental implementation, Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev once said, "We can't expect the American people to jump from capitalism to communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have communism."
...The importance of government education as a tool for denying Rule of Law has been advocated by generations of tyrants. In order to achieve totalitarianism, they must undertake to expel God from the academy. Karl Marx wrote, "The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions at state expense." His student Vladimir Ilyich Lenin concurred, "Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." As Josef Stalin understood, "Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." Leftists also understand that the earlier socialist indoctrination is applied, the greater its force, and the greater the likelihood it will stick. Obama promised in his inaugural speech that he would "transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.
...The nation's oldest academic institution, Harvard University, was established in 1636 and named for Puritan minister John Harvard. A 1643 college brochure identified Harvard's purpose: "To advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches." Harvard alumnus John Adams (class of 1755) wrote in 1776, "It is the duty of all men in society, publicly, and at stated seasons, to worship the SUPREME BEING, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe." In his Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law, Adams wrote, "Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers."
Yale, the nation's third oldest academic institution, was established
in 1701 by royal charter "wherein Youth may be instructed in the Arts
and Sciences [and] through the blessing of Almighty God may be fitted
for Publick employment both in Church and Civil State." Yale alumnus
Noah Webster (class of 1778), wrote in the forward of his 1828 Webster's
American Dictionary, "In my view, the Christian religion is the most
important and one of the first things in which all children, under a
free government ought to be instructed. ... No truth is more evident to
my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any
government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free
people."
Princeton was founded by "New Light" Presbyterians of the Great
Awakening for the purpose of training their ministers. Jonathan
Dickinson, a Presbyterian minister and leader of the Great Awakening of
the 1730s, was the school's co-founder and first president. Princeton
alumnus James Madison (class of 1771) observed, "The belief in a God All
Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the world
and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be
drawn from too many sources nor adapted with too much solicitude to the
different characters and capacities impressed with it."
Virginia's College of William and Mary, founded in 1693, was Anglican. Baptists founded Rhode Island College, now Brown University, in 1764. Congregationalists established Dartmouth College in 1769 to extend Christianity to native populations.
Founder Benjamin Rush wrote, "[T]he only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without
A DEFENCE OF THE
USE OF THE BIBLE IN SCHOOLS
By Dr. Benjamin Rush (1745-1813), distinguished physician and signer of the
Declaration of Independence in 1776. Dr. Rush was an outspoken Christian,
statesman, and pioneering medical doctor. He was a prolific author, publishing
the first American chemistry textbook. In 1797, President John Adams appointed
Rush as Treasurer of the U.S. Mint, a position he held until 1813. He also
founded America's first Bible society. At the time of his death in 1813, he was
heralded as one of the three most notable figures of America, the other two
being George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.
AmericanMinute.com for May 28th: He left Yale for four years to fight in the Revolutionary War. After graduation, he became a lawyer and taught school in New York. Dissatisfied with the children's spelling books, he wrote the famous "Blue-Backed Speller," which sold over one hundred million copies. After twenty-six years of work, he published the first American Dictionary of the English Language. His name was Noah Webster, and he died MAY 28, 1843. In his 1788 essay, "On the Education of Youth in America," printed in Webster's American Magazine, Noah Webster wrote: "Select passages of Scripture...may be read in schools, to great advantage. In some countries the common people are not permitted to read the Bible at all. In ours, it is as common as a newspaper and in schools is read with nearly the same degree of respect." Noah Webster continued: "My wish is not to see the Bible excluded from schools but to see it used as a system of religion and morality." In his book, "The History of the United States," published in 1832, Noah Webster wrote: "All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible."
Unbelievable videos of homosexual indoctrination in elementary school
classrooms. (MassResistance.org) You won't believe this!
These two videos are so hot that national homosexual activists forced
YouTube to remove them. But you can see them here. Since we posted this on
Thursday, we have literally gotten feedback from AROUND THE WORLD. See
with your own eyes what goes on in elementary school classrooms in more
and more public schools. This is how the youngest of children get
brainwashed by the most odious propaganda techniques - in both public and
private school classrooms - and most parents don't have a clue of what's
going on. And this is why David Parker is spending his savings to take
this to federal court. You will cry when you see this. This is why you
need to be involved!
Are your children the property of the State?
What are your children being taught to believe?
Social Engineering at your expense, both in your children's virtue and your tax
dollars.
Without a heritage every generation starts over.
"The philosophy of the schoolhouse in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next." Abraham Lincoln
"Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom, and then lost it, have never known it again." Ronald Reagan
In 1833, Justice Joseph Story wrote, “Let the American youth never forget, that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors; and capacity, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence." Joseph Story (Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833) Reference: Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 718. PatriotPost.us Quotes:
Darkness (GLSEN)
results when Light (Christ)
is removed.
(John 3:19-21)
Using the The "Trojan Horse" of "safety" our children are now
learning "accepted" immorality and no longer moral virtue.
Risk Audit: Measure the Promotion of Homosexuality in Your Local Schools - MissionAmerica.com
101 Reasons to Home School Highlights the shortcomings of government-run schools and believe strongly in the importance of father's having a vision for their family, and encouraging Christians to constantly develop a more biblical worldview.
Why doesn't the mainstream media report these FACTS? The increase in children being born out of wedlock in Scandinavia since marriage was redefined! William Murray, the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition, warns of the dangers of legalizing same-sex marriage in the United States. He says Scandinavia has had nearly a decade of legal homosexual marriage, and it has nearly destroyed the institution of marriage altogether. More details: http://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/4/132004c.asp (See more facts at Lifestyle Consequences of homosexuals.
The Sleazy History of GLSEN Special Report from Mission America Transparency? Decency? Not on your life with this parent-avoiding group. ...GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, poses as a “gay rights” and “anti-bullying” group for youth, going to bat for them on issues like discrimination. But GLSEN is actually a threat to children, unless parents don’t care about their kids being drawn into early deviant sexual activity, or learning to approve of sinful, God-defying behaviors without the parents' knowledge. To put it bluntly, when you think GLSEN, think “children and bodily fluids.” Yes, it’s that bad. Behind GLSEN’s window-dressing rhetoric about safe schools, bigotry, "homophobia", oppression, and concerns about harassment, lies the reality: advocacy of actual homosexual sex, sometimes implicit, sometimes very explicit, even for young kids. And sometimes it’s with adults. They also support gender change even for elementary age children, and they will suppress the rights of others so that exploited children can act out these perilous behaviors. And this is okay for kids whenever they are “ready for it.” It’s the ultimate in foolish child "empowerment", with parental consent irrelevant. In fact, bypassing parents is GLSEN’s trademark, and is all over its activities. Parents are generally the enemy of “queer” youth, especially parents with religious or moral objections.
Public Education Against America
March 17, 2006: Several weeks ago, The Patriot noted an ABC "20/20" documentary by John Stossel on America's schools called "Stupid in America." Stossel's thesis, in essence, was that market competition supported by vouchers would drive the quality of education upward. Seems a no-brainer to us. However, we're shocked, SHOCKED to report that teachers unions were not at all happy with Stossel or ABC. In fact, "several hundred" teachers showed up at Stossel's door recently to protest. One of them was accidentally candid, saying competition would "take money away from...our union leaders." And here all this time we thought it was about "the children." Meanwhile, students are being indoctrinated by teachers who aren't teaching the subject they're hired to teach, and poor kids are forced to stay in failing schools based solely on their geography (the subject not being taught by one Jay Bennish of Colorado's Overland High). This much is clear: Teachers unions exist to benefit teachers, not students. They exist to extort from local governments higher salaries, greater benefits and fewer accountabilities. Were it not so, these unions wouldn't be so deathly afraid of the free-market competition that makes the rest of American enterprise the envy of the world. PatriotPost.us 06-11 Digest
The Washington Post has published a "news" article titled: "Putting Parents in their Place." "They are needy, overanxious and sometimes plain pesky--and schools at every level are trying to deal with them." Educators are annoyed at these meddlesome parents and are now devising programs "to help them separate from their kids--and [educators] are taking a harder line on especially intrusive parents." I'm not making this up. Of particular concern to these "experts" are parents who hover. During my time in the legislature when we would call the educational "establishment" onto the carpet for their poor results they would point the finger at mom and dad saying there must be more parental involvement. One overlooked issue here is trust. A report out this week details how New York City schools are instructing kindergartners in HIV/AIDS. A few years back, New York educators faced a parents' revolt when they assigned Heather Has Two Mommies to grade schoolers. In Overland Park, Kan., a parent-run website (www.classkc.org) protests graphic and offensive assigned readings. Happily, the Kansas State Board of Education has now changed policy on sex education. Previously, parents had to opt their kids out. Now, if they want sex ed they must opt their kids in. This is a far more family-friendly policy. Parents realize that they can delegate the authority to educate their children but they cannot delegate the ultimate responsibility.
Will your kids be Christian? December 20, 2005 By Bruce Shortt - WorldNetDaily.com - Many evangelicals were shocked last June when Dr. Albert Mohler, the Southern Baptist Convention's leading theologian, wrote that it is now time for responsible Southern Baptists to develop an exit strategy from the public schools. But why should it have been shocking? For years innumerable, journalists, activists and scholars have been chronicling the metastasizing pathologies of the public school system. Surely few today are wholly unaware that the government's schools have become foundries of ignorance and bad character. Surely few are wholly unaware that the government's schools are the nation's largest pusher of psychotropic drugs. Surely few are wholly unaware that violent crime and sexual abuse of students in the government's schools are far from uncommon. And surely few can be wholly unaware that the government's schools now incorporate curricula and programs that both are a threat to our children's physical and psychological health and are, in many instances, pornographic. Read Complete column.
"Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." George Washington
"Knowledge unenlightened by the truth of God is dark knowledge. We may have a B.S., an M.S., and a Ph.D., but without the Lord all we have is dark information. It may help navigate us in the world of darkness, but by itself will never lead us to the truth. Apart from the revelation of the Spirit of God, none of us could ever find our way into the light. Darkly educated people are like those whom Paul described to his young protoge', Timothy, as 'always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth.'" (2 Timothy 3:7) Rediscovering the Kingdom by Myles Munroe
In an article published September 20, 1789, in the Palladium magazine, Fisher Ames wrote: "We have a dangerous trend beginning to take place in our education. We're starting to put more and more textbooks into our schools...little books into the hands of children containing fables and moral lessons... We are spending less time in the classroom on the Bible, which should be the principal text in our schools... The Bible states these great moral lessons better than any other manmade book." At the young age of twelve, Fisher Ames was admitted into Harvard College and after graduation became an attorney in Boston. Rising in Massachusetts politics, he participated in ratification of the U.S. Constitution and was elected to the first session of the U.S. Congress, where he helped write the Bill of Rights. He was offered the presidency of Harvard, but declined due to ill health. His name was Fisher Ames. Ames considered private property as essential to a freedom, and that the government's role was to defend it. www.AmericanMinute.com 1-888-USA-WORD
"The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head." -- Noah Webster, On the Education of Youth in America, 1788
Are they being taught that homosexuality, that which goes against nature, is "normal and has devastating consequences?" Is this in direct opposition of how faith-based parents are raising their children, with a high regard for morality.
Has the American Christian Heritage been removed from History, from your child's Public School, College or Universities, and been replaced with the basics with OBE - the psychology of producing worker bees, utilizing drugs? The drugging of American children under the guise of ADD and like-minded "psychoanalysis" of keeping kids from being kids, because aggression and competition is contrary to the liberal quest of controlling "drones."
"The great enemy of the salvation of man, in my opinion, never invented a more effectual means of extirpating Christianity from the world than by persuading mankind that it was improper to read the Bible at schools. The Bible, when not read in schools, is seldom read in any subsequent period of life. It should be read in our schools in preference to all other books from its containing the greatest portion of that kind of knowledge which is calculated to produce private and public temporal happiness." Benjamin Rush
Patriotism, commitment, discipline, and respect are being programmed out of America's education system, because these attributes will build strong self-confident individuals that will not be deceived into relinquishing the individual freedoms and rights upon which America was founded. The liberals will never be able to to form their New World Order, replacing God with a One World Government.
"Let the American youth never forget, that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors; and capacity, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence." Joseph Story
"It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives." John Adams
"Few subjects are as important to the future of America as a thorough understanding and appreciation of the U.S. Constitution by every school student. It is not enough to simply praise the document as one of the foundations of our nation. It is essential that students learn why and how the Constitution governs the structure and function of government. It is crucial that students learn that government is empowered by the consent of the governed, not the other way around. They must learn that this power is transmitted to the government through the election process and that they, individually, bear the responsibility to choose candidates who reflect their views. They must learn that freedom in America is the reason why the nation has prospered. Freedom is neither granted nor guaranteed by the government. Government can only limit freedom. Freedom is granted by the Creator and guaranteed by responsible individuals who hold their government accountable. A thorough knowledge and appreciation of the U.S. Constitution is the first step toward becoming a responsible citizen. The next step is to act continually on that knowledge, to keep government within the limits of power to which the people consent." Henry Lamb
Revisionism: How to Identify It In Your Children's Textbooks by David
Barton
U.N. influence in U.S. schools - Toward World Understanding, a UNESCO textbook, says: "As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can produce only rather precarious results. As we have pointed out, it is frequently the family that infects the child with extreme nationalism."Â
The International Baccalaureate (IB) program: Administrators do not tell you that the current IB program for ages 3 through grade 12 promotes socialism, disarmament, radical environmentalism and moral relativism, while attempting to undermine Christian religious values and national sovereignty.
Do you think U.S. Students should be taught: 1. Primarily as American citizens or global citizens? 2. That the U.S. is an independent sovereign nation or under the United Nations? 3. The "New Civics" curriculum while eliminating teaching the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights? 4. The UN's Declaration of Human Rights as being superior to the Bill of rights? With the American History and Civics Education Act (deceptive terminology) which replaces the teaching of traditional American history and civics with the "New Civics" curriculum of a global village, one world government, and open borders?
Indoctrination In High School By David Horowitz ...
When I visited this teacher's classroom some days later this suspicion was confirmed by the posters of Che Guevara and Mother Jones she had adorning her English classroom walls along with a sign that said "Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam." ...I confronted several of the teachers present over what I considered the abuse of students in their charge. Using students as a captive audience on whom to inflict one's political prejudices was entirely unprofessional, I said, and a violation of the students' academic freedom. Students are in school to be educated and have a universally recognized right at least in American schools not to indoctrinated. ...The scene I had witnessed is part of a drastic change in the educational culture in America which is coming more and more to look like the educational systems in Havana and pre-liberation Iraq. It's time for the rest of us to do something about this. I have formed a national organization called Parents and Students for Academic Freedom. Information is available at (web site). Chapters are local and are independent so long as they follow our guidelines for academic freedom. Parents and students need to begin forming them now. On the website you can find a model bill of rights for your school and model legislation for your legislature. I hope by the fall to have an Academic Bill of Rights for K-12 schools, which would prevent political indoctrination in K-12 classrooms pending in several legislatures. You can help by starting chapters of Parents and Students for Academic Freedom in your school and in your state."Don't mention God" (ACLJ.org) - that's what a professor told a college student who was writing a paper on religion and its place in government! Now we've learned this student will be penalized and DENIED the appropriate review and grade on her paper - because she mentioned God! The English 101 student, whose name is Bethany, was told she could pick the topic for her quarterly term paper. She made her choice, and the professor approved - but he also told Bethany not to mention God in the paper. In fact, in an email, he specifically said: "no mention of big 'G' gods, i.e., one, true god argumentation.... perhaps 'Religion has no place in government' would be a more viable and topical subject."
Mona Charen's article The most important book of the year depicts Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom who have produced a book that should rock the nation. "
No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning" is an absolutely brilliant analysis of what ails American education today.Left-Wing Groups Silent on Schools' Muslim Indoctrination - By Wes Vernon 1/21/2004 - Parents who are furious that their children are receiving indoctrination in Islam in their schools have yet to hear support from most of the same left-wing groups that loudly lecture Americans on what they call “separation of church and state," a phrase that appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution.
As America approaches its 225th birthday, a recent poll shows that almost a quarter of America's teenagers have trouble passing a fourth-grade level U.S. history test. In fact, 22 percent could not name the country from which the United States declared its independence. Fourteen percent thought 'France' was the correct answer. In addition, 17 percent did not know there were 13 original colonies, and 15 percent were unaware that the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation commissioned the study, which surveyed 1,000 teenagers nationwide. Source: CNSNews.com
One of the nation's leading constitutional scholars says a majority of Americans are ignorant when it comes to understanding the basis of their freedoms. Howard Phillips of The Conservative Caucus believes the problems Americans are facing -- specifically, an activist judiciary and its efforts to stifle religious freedom -- are a direct result of the failure of the public education system to teach the basis of American freedoms: the Constitution. "We have generations of young people and now middle-aged people -- and law school graduates -- who have not studied the Constitution, who don't recognize its importance, don't recognize that it is the anchor of our liberty, and don't recognize that the Supreme Court and all the federal courts are under the Constitution -- not over it," the conservative icon says. Several members of Congress want to craft a thorough bill that would mandate the teaching of the U.S. Constitution and its principles to all American students. Phillips says that would ensure the survival the nation and its freedoms. AgapePress.org NEWS BRIEFS (http://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/12/52003h.asp)
Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth Shapiro, Ben - Townhall columnist Ben Shapiro reveals how America's university system is one of the largest brainwashing machines on the planet. Examining this nationwide problem from firsthand experience, Shapiro shows how the leftists who dominate the universities use their power to mold impressionable minds.
Teaching our children sin is "normal"
Click here for details on GLSEN's agenda in our schools.
Planned Parenthood's 'Teenwire': Debauching Our Children Web site openly promotes fornication, bisexuality and homosexuality.
NEA and GLSEN show their hateful attitudes at convention (Washington times 7/27/2004): What's really amazing in the article below is how Kevin Jennings and GLSEN must realize how deceitful they are being. On our web site are articles about GLSEN, quoting from their own material, where they encourage kids to learn about things like the Kinsey scale of "flexible" sexual desires, and about how kids should be allowed to experiment with any sexual orientation until they find what's right for them. This is a reckless and irresponsible message, but if that's their position, why not be able to go from homosexuality to heterosexuality? It reveals the purely political motivations involved, and their determination to absolutely shut down the opposition by any means possible. Reasonable debate and genuine tolerance are not desired by these folks. If you want to read pertinent excerpts from GLSEN's material go to www.missionamerica.com/oldagenda26.php.
Teachers Union Honors Homosexual Activist The National Education Association has honored noted homosexual activist Kevin Jennings. In his own book, Jennings admits that as a teacher he did not report a case of teacher-on-student sexual abuse. Jennings, who now heads the GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, has also taught homosexuality to kindergarteners, and participated in a conference where graphic sexual practices were taught to teens among other notable misdeeds. Bob Knight, director of CWA's Culture and Family Institute has more.
A leading pro-family advocate says "sexual orientation codes" in schools are simply a vehicle homosexuals use to try and brainwash children. Pete LaBarbera is with the Culture and Family Institute, an arm of Concerned Women for America. He says homosexuals activists are using "Nazi-like" tactics to reach the nation's schools and promoting their agenda to an impressionable and captive audience of children. He says parents should know homosexuals are using "sexual orientation policies" as a means of disguising their true agenda: capturing young minds. Beside the obvious morality issues, LaBarbera says parents should be outraged that homosexuals would attempt to indoctrinate children into such an unhealthy and deadly lifestyle. LaBarbara says kids are being "practically brainwashed" because they do not even know what sex is yet -- and yet they are being taught about homosexuality.
Gay activist groups, with teachers union applause, are importing a disturbing agenda into the nation's public schools. See Article: Queering the Schools
MASS FistGate: Although the focus has changed somewhat. the object is still to normalize homosexuality in the schools, beginning in preschool and kindergarten. MassNews
ACLU Launches Nationwide Effort to Force Gay-Straight Alliances on Schools 1/29/2003 Concerned Woman For America. "They admit this is a Trojan horse," said Culture and Family Institute's senior policy analyst Peter LaBarbera. "Homosexual activists know that rural communities are the most resistant to their agenda, so in order to force their way into schools, they are using the cover of the well-funded ACLU."
Education plus money does not equal achievement by Cal Thomas (7/6/2004) Observation and common sense have told me for years that there is no relationship between the amount of money spent on education and student achievement. Now a study to be released July 7 by the Cato Institute provides irrefutable facts that lead to the same conclusion.
High on Cents, Lacking Sense by Edwin J. Feulner (7/30/2004) (Excerpts) They believe that if they just had more money, their problems would vanish. But it seldom works out. ...Since 1965, federal spending on education has quadrupled, from $25 billion then to an inflation-adjusted $108 billion in 2002. ...The Education Department recently reported that all 50 states, the District of Columbia and eight territories are sitting on piles of federal cash -- some $2.7 billion. It's probably unfair to judge a federal program on spending alone -- we also should consider whether or not it's delivering "bang for the buck." But it is safe to say, when states are returning hundreds of millions of dollars, that education isn’t under funded. And our children have little hope of winning the education lottery until we stop pretending that it is.
Vouchers and votes by Thomas Sowell (10/15/2003) During a recent visit to Washington, I was told by a high official there that he had posed this question to Democrats: "Why are you so opposed to vouchers?" The reply: "We aren't going to give you guys (Republicans) a victory." One of the tragedies of the public schools is that they have become so enmeshed in bureaucratic rules and constrained by court decisions that they can do little to prevent a handful of classroom clowns and hoodlums from making it virtually impossible to educate other students in many ghetto schools. Nor can public schools get rid of even a grossly incompetent teacher without administrative and legal processes that can drag on forever and cost tens of thousands of dollars. Public schools are also trapped in rigid hiring rules that keep out highly qualified people who have not suffered through enough mind-numbing education courses to be called "certified." Private schools, and to some extent charter schools, escape these rigidities. Teachers' unions and others in the education establishment say that it is "unfair" that public schools have to compete with other institutions that do not have these and other bureaucratic and legal handicaps. Fairness applies to people. Institutions are just means to an end -- serving people. If other institutions can get the job done better, then that is the way to go. Maybe vouchers and charter schools can give teachers' unions incentives to try to free the public schools from their handicaps, instead of trying to impose the same handicaps on other schools, in the name of "fairness." The greatest unfairness today is denying a decent education to poor children, for whom that is often their only way out of poverty. Click here for entire article.
School prayer.
Attributed to an Arizona Student
Now I sit me down in school
Where praying is against the rule
For this great nation under God
Finds mention of Him very odd.
If Scripture now the class recites,
It violates the Bill of Rights.
And anytime my head I bow
Becomes a Federal matter now.
Our hair can be purple, orange or green,
That's no offense; it's a freedom scene.
The law is specific, the law is precise.
Prayers spoken aloud are a serious vice.
For praying in a public hall
Might offend someone with no faith at all.
In silence alone we must meditate,
God's name is prohibited by the state.
We're allowed to cuss and dress like freaks,
And pierce our noses, tongues and cheeks.
They've outlawed guns, but FIRST the Bible.
To quote the Good Book makes me liable.
We can elect a pregnant Senior Queen,
And the 'unwed daddy,' our Senior King.
It's "inappropriate" to teach right from wrong,
We're taught that such "judgments" do not belong.
We can get our condoms and birth controls,
Study witchcraft, vampires and totem poles.
But the Ten Commandments are not allowed,
No word of God must reach this crowd.
It's scary here I must confess,
When chaos reigns the school's a mess.
So, Lord, this silent plea I make:
Should I be shot; My soul please take!
Amen
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