Who Controls Our Schools?
This is a question we should ask ourselves… Are our schools still really under ‘local control’ and if not, what can we do to regain control?
Whatever Happened to America?
An Essay by a Former TeacherAll across America, people are losing their jobs and homes. Meanwhile, government continues to tax and spend, including school boards that use OUR money to pay for dubious UNESCO “global” curriculum programs. Is this really necessary?
How many of you watched the YouTube video of the “Miss Teen America” contestant as she painfully attempted to answer the following question?
“Recent polls have shown that a fifth of all Americans can’t locate the US on a world map. Why do you think this is?”
Her answer drifted from the actual question about people in the US finding the US on a map, to “our education in South Africa and Iraq, and everywhere, like such as”…
Those were her exact words - “our education in South Africa and Iraq, and everywhere, like such as”. I had no idea we were responsible for the education of South Africans or that this was even part of the question.
Her train of thought seemed to reflect the dumbed-down and politicized curriculum to which she had obviously been exposed. For all the talk about teaching critical thinking skills, she could not drum up even the simplest most obvious cause and effect explanation; they can’t find the US on a map due to not ever having been taught such skills.
This girl’s inclination to drift off into a stream of consciousness-style response that was Afro-centric and social in nature, tells us a lot about what IS being taught — a highly subjective agenda framed in a collectivist mindset rather than the teaching of skills. I know for a fact that the teaching of skills has been downplayed or outright forbidden in the past 20 years.
If you listen to her again, you will see that even though the question asked about Americans, the overall theme of her answer was that people in other countries like Africa and Iraq have no maps because they are poor, thus we should help them. World socialism and redistribution of the wealth is a common underlying theme in today’s UN-influenced curricula. Maybe that explains why it’s not deemed important that students be taught to find their sovereign country, with its unique boundaries, on a map?
I have been either a student or a teacher in the public school system since 1953. As a 35-year veteran teacher, I barely survived the ‘retraining’ sessions (Delphi Technique) that came with many Federally mandated (supposedly optional) programs such as Goals 2000, OBE, ‘School Reform Act of the 1990’s’, and NCLB. As explained in this document, these programs are worse than just passing educational fads, they are actually deliberate attempts to change our ways of thinking about our government. Even for teachers, training was not about strengthening our subject matter skills, but adjusting our attitudes.
See Overview of Fed Dept of Ed for a basic overview of the Federal Government’s role in education up to now.
I used to wonder what was responsible for all the sudden craziness and lack of common sense in the so-called ‘best practices’ teaching method, until I remembered what I had studied of the UN from the 1970’s and on. I then understood that whenever the United States signed a treaty with the UN, such as the “World Declaration on Education for All of 1990″ at the UN’s World Conference on Education for All (WECFA) it had to enforce these agreements locally via Federally mandated programs. The goals of these programs were never more clear than when I suffered the horrific consequences of refusing to sign a statement to agree to the teaching of the goals of ‘world government’ as part of my contract in the 1990’s. But neither the abuses of the administration nor the threat of psychiatric experimentation caused me to buckle under and abandon my loyalty to teaching my country’s form of government, or to abandon the teaching of basic skills.
This nonsense has not gone away.
The unfamiliar need first to study the vast UN website and all its declarations and charters and treaties to understand the mindset under which it operates. They have plans for every facet of your life, including your family and its very happiness. It’s an Orwellian nightmare. And the schools are the perfect vehicle for the social changes they would like to see.
I have even discovered some college professors, the ones teaching our teachers, use whole syllabi based only upon UN goals and declarations, with the UN flag proudly displayed over it all.
The “International Baccalaureate” Programme, like Goals 2000, OBE, and school reform initiatives, and many other federal programs, is nothing more than a elitist vehicle to effect social changes. As I warned back when Goals 2000 was being debated, the groundwork has been laid.
And now parents all over our country are actually gladly paying for this Trojan Horse.
See: Red Orbit
For those of you who have never heard of it, the “International Baccalaureate” or “IB” that is causing such interest among the soccer mom crowd, was created and is run by UNESCO, an arm of the UN, straight out of Geneva, Switzerland.
Make no mistake about it — the UN’s goal is to impose a centralized government system upon all countries with themselves as the single authority, based on their goals as stated in many of their documents. It amounts to a coup against our Constitutional Republic, and is being done without firing a shot.
The town of Bedford will offer IB “optionally” in 2009, according to one relieved parent, who said she would never let her own kids participate. Londonderry has the program in some capacity, and now Windham, Gilford, and Bow are exploring it, to the horror of some residents.
UNESCO would like to eventually see participating schools adopt IB permanently as their main curriculum. In order to create a demand for their services, they have created a reputation for themselves with little more than buzzwords such as ‘rigorous’, ‘world class’, and ‘high standards’, but no real proof that their courses give students a leg up on anything regarding college credits or early admissions.
In Utah some gullible residents have put so much pressure on the three Senators who were responsible for voting down IB funding, that the vote will be circumvented and funding will be found for it anyway. So much for the representation of sensible Utahns. You cannot imagine the epithets being hurled at these Senators. One Utah newspaper even had the audacity to repeat the lie told to parents by the IB salesperson that IB had ‘nothing to do with the UN’. When I asked the parents about this, they were completely mum to explain it, even though they were present at the informational session where this was said and saw the website that clearly shows this is a UN program.
They seemed content to be blissfully ignorant of the fact that they would be turning over control of their child’s education to some communist bureaucrat at the UN, based in Geneva, Switzerland of all places! Should school districts hand over local control to the UN in return for the promise of ‘high standards’?
Just what are these standards? Indeed as seen within some of the IB curriculum’s loaded test questions, America’s capitalistic success is blamed for the poverty of other nations, and world socialism is encouraged. One test question was based on the premise that poor black women were so used to being abused by whites that they could better sympathize with the terrorists who perpetrated 911. The students were then asked to elaborate on that (not whether it was true or not). I won’t even comment on the part about sympathy for the terrorists!
One IB teacher claimed that those opposed to the program used “scare words” such as “communism and collectivism” saying he didn’t even know what those words meant. I cannot imagine someone claiming to be a history teacher not knowing what “collectivism” means. Has his generation been so poisoned by their own public schooling that they no longer know the difference between the US Constitution and Bill of Rights and the UN’s goals as laid out in their Millenium Goals, Agenda 21 and Earth Charter? I can only guess that a lot of the parents themselves have already been so dumbed down by Goals 2000 they too don’t even know the difference between capitalism, socialism, collectivism, etc.
Never mind then, the reasons why this program is called a deadly “Trojan Horse” for totalitarianism from educational tracking groups that oppose it; just look instead at IBO’s own new website which clearly states their purpose:
Even the students who write about IB will tell you the only thing rigorous about it is the mountains of homework that isolates them and keeps them tired and stressed out. Is THAT not laying out the EXACT IDEAL CONDITION for brainwashing?
Much could be written about the failure of the ‘new’ academic methods that our schools already employ, and like Goals 2000 before it, IB’s faulty academic methods have a purpose. They leave much room for attitudes-based learning geared towards shifting to a ‘global’ focus. Here is one quote from IB materials that is an example of the typical re-constructivism and lack of absolutes: “If truth is difficult to prove in history, does it follow that all versions are equally acceptable?”
The kids who are enrolled in IB sometimes see the political aspect of it, and sometimes not, but almost ALWAYS see the fraudulence in the academics. The UN is all about total global taxation and redistribution of the wealth, personal and unilateral disarmament, secular humanism, formation of world court and world army, and the deconstruction of the self-rule of the nation states. To the kids, a lot of it is learning the art of elitist “BS”.
The Urban Dictionary provides some opinions from IB students themselves:
Entries #17 and #19 are excellent but here is one of my favorites:
“The International Baccalaureate Program is an organization dedicated to the predation of young minds through manipulation and psychological brainwashing. It corrupts students into believing that they are part of a privileged and elite society of more intelligent beings and raises its own prestige by forcing students to commit to nineteen-hour work days, thereby causing parents to believe that the massive and unreasonable amount of travail must equate with a higher education. This in turn deters the ordinarily rational parents from protesting when asked to pay absurd amounts of money for exams that their children grow to despise. It is not until their fourth year in this fraudulent program that the participants realize that this course has no effect on the colleges to which they intend to apply. By this time, the student has already dedicated thousands of hours to this corporation (doubt not that it is indeed a corporation) and human nature insists that they complete the program.
Its long, unpronounceable and un-spellable name only adds to its supposed prominence.
In short, this institution is designed to swindle valuable money and time away from its members by exploiting competitive young adults. An essential part of surviving IB is knowing the intimidating effect of a thesaurus.”
Out of the mouths of babes…I say. This is not about academics but about ‘world values’ and changing attitudes.
And now a little background from the research organization EdWatch.org:
“Since its beginning, the United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organization has been trying to impose an international curriculum to prepare students for world government. More than 500 U.S. schools are now using the International Baccalaureate program, and the Department of Education has just awarded a $1.2 million grant to expand the program in middle schools in Arizona, Massachusetts and New York.
In one of its first efforts in 1949, the UNESCO textbook, titled “Toward World Understanding,” used to teach teachers what to teach, said:
“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.”
In the 1960s, Dr. Robert Muller, U.N. deputy secretary-general, prepared a “World Core Curriculum.” Its first goal:
“Assisting the child in becoming an integrated individual who can deal with personal experience while seeing himself as a part of ‘the greater whole.’ In other words, promote growth of the group idea, so that group good, group understanding, group interrelations and group goodwill replace all limited, self-centered objectives, leading to group consciousness.”
The U.N.’s global education program took a major step in 1968, when UNESCO provided the funding to create the International Baccalaureate Organization, a non-government organization, in Geneva, Switzerland. The IBO is now providing the curriculum for 33,000 teachers in nearly 1,500 schools around the world, 55 of which are middle schools in the Washington D.C. area.
UNESCO says the IB curriculum promotes human rights, social justice, sustainable development, population, health, environmental and immigration concerns.
“We’re living on a planet that is becoming exhausted,” says George Walker, IB’s director-general in Geneva. “The program remains committed to changing children’s values so they think globally, rather than in parochial national terms from their own country’s viewpoint.”
Jeanne Geiger, an outspoken critic of the program in Reston, Va., wrote to a local newspaper: “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.”
The IB program was dropped at Woodson High School in Fairfax, Va., when critical parents told local school officials that the best universities in Virginia did not give full credit for the IB program.
The goals and methods of the IB program reach much further than the 502 U.S. schools now officially enrolled. The Center for Civic Education, which, by law, writes the curriculum for civics education in the United States, says:
“In the past century, the civic mission of schools was education for democracy in a sovereign state. In this century, by contrast, education will become everywhere more global. And we ought to improve our curricular frameworks and standards for a world transformed by globally accepted and internationally transcendent principles.”
This global influence can be clearly seen in the new mission for the National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies:
“The United States and its democracy are constantly evolving and in continuous need of citizens who can adapt to meet the changing circumstances. Meeting that need is the mission of social studies. Students should be helped to construct a pluralist perspective based on diversity [and] should be helped to construct a global perspective.”
A critical review of “We the People; the Citizen and the Constitution,” a civics textbook written by the Center for Civics Education, reveals that the teaching of historical facts is replaced with teaching attitudes and values about multi-culturalism and world-mindedness. A review of science, and even math texts, reveals that sustainable development, environmental protection and social justice dominate the material children are taught.
No longer are American children learning about the structure of a federal republic compared to a parliamentary democracy. No longer are children learning the difference between capitalism and socialism. No longer are children being taught why the United States became the most powerful economic engine the world has ever known.
Instead, they are being taught that with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. uses 25 percent of the world’s resources and produces 25 percent of the world’s pollution. They are being taught that the U.S. is the No. 1 terrorist nation. They are being taught that the rest of the world is mired in poverty because of the greedy capitalists in the United States.
The effectiveness of generations of this U.N. globalist curriculum is evidenced by many of the talking heads interviewed on the nightly news, and even by some of the presidential hopefuls.”
And this from Boutros Boutros-Ghali, from the 1993 CFR publication Foreign Affairs Magazine:
“…it is undeniable that the centuries old doctrine of absolute and exclusive sovereignty no longer stands…A major intellectual requirement of our time is to rethink the question of sovereignty.”
In conclusion, there is no reason for school systems in the US to pay big money to UNESCO in return for faulty academics and anti-American political propaganda, under the guise of ‘high standards’. The only standard the UN cares about is the promotion of its own goal of centralizing everyone and everything.
Once you peel away the onion layers, you may find these standards, which have already been instituted in one way or another, to be at odds with your rights and freedoms as a citizen of the USA under our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and at odds with your country’s right to be a sovereign nation.
IB should therefore be rejected, and normal, rigorous, skills-based education be instituted. Forced community service, as what is required with IB, should be ruled out.
The Federal Department of Education should also be disbanded. Even before IB became well-known, the Feds had already sent us down the same slippery slope. In fact the US Constitution does not indicate that the Federal Dept of Education should educate a single child. That should be done locally if the people want it. Since its formation, there has been no improvement in academic performance. There is a saying with which I can wholeheartedly agree, and that is, “The government schools teach only what the government wants us to know, nothing else, and that is precious little.”
Even if your only concern is for the skills of our students, hopefully it won’t be too late by the time people wake up and say “What Ever Happened to America”?
Further Reading
International Baccalaureate: A Major Movement to Change Students’ Values
Social Engineering for Global Change
The Alinsky Technique: How Teachers Are Manipulated
Transformational Education and the Global Warming Fantasy
Beware the Delphi Technique
Fuzzy Math Faces Revolt
Cooperative Learning Can Backfire