Posted on 10/19/2002 7:09:57 AM PDT by George Frm Br00klyn Park
WorldNetDaily / Commentary
Henry Lamb
What are your kids learning?
Posted: October 19, 2002
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com
Geography was once taught in the fourth grade. Mrs. Howard, a sweet little lady with blue-gray hair, started each year by teaching her students how to spell: "George Eats Old Gray Rats And Paints Houses Yellow." She would announce the phrase and then make the entire class repeat the phrase aloud. Yes, she also subtracted one point for every misspelled word on every paper – even in her geography class.
She taught about the great explorers and the lands they discovered. She brought to life Marco Polo, Lief Ericsson and Sir Francis Drake. She made the pyramids real and told of the mysteries of the Incas to her wide-eyed students.
My, how things have changed. I've just reviewed a portion of a middle-school text entitled, "Geography: The World and its People," published by McGraw Hill. Here we find lessons about:
• Eye on the Environment: Danger – Ozone Loss
• United States and Canada: Trash
• South America: The Disappearing Rain Forest
• Europe: Pollution
• Russia: Chernobyl – Nuclear Disaster
• Southwest Asia: Water – A Precious Resource
• Africa: Desertification
• Asia: Habitat Loss
• Great Barrier Reef: Trouble Down Under
This is geography?
Each lesson comes with a statement of the problem, solutions and a list of "what you can do." The "solution" to the trash problem in the U.S. and Canada says:
"Environmentalists want paper manufacturers to pay a tax on each ton of new paper produced, which should encourage the use of recycled paper."
The "what you can do" tip says: "Boycott fast-food restaurants that do not use recycled materials for packaging."
Each lesson follows a similar pattern. One lesson says: "Support International Green Cross – an environmental protection group organized at the recent Earth Summit." This, of course, is Mikhail Gorbachev's outfit that seeks to put his stamp of approval on "sustainable" products. There is a big circle on the same page that says: "Equal Rights for all species."
This is the clap-trap being taught in geography classes in public schools.
The text was reviewed and approved by the National Geographic Society and a dozen "Multicultural Consultants." One of the three authors, Richard G. Boehm, was one of seven authors of the "national standards in geography," prepared for Goals 2000.
It's the same in math classes, in history classes and in all classes. Our kids are being brainwashed instead of being taught the fundamentals that will prepare them to compete in a free society.
Robert Hillmann's book, "Reinventing Government," details how and why our public-education system has been transformed. The process has been underway for decades and is so deeply entrenched that an education revolution may be required to stop it.
Parents protest to their local school boards, who say they have nothing to do with what's in the textbooks. Textbook publishers publish what school districts purchase. Teachers teach what the state requires. The state requires whatever produces federal funds. The teachers' unions determine what the federal government requires.
Home schooling – and private schools – may be the revolution that collapses this public brainwashing system.
The objective of public education today appears to be the preparation of society to accept the notion that the "public good" – as defined by government – is more important than individual achievement, and that whatever government does, advances the public good.
Individuals who are forced to suffer the pains of public policy should do so willingly, in order to advance the public good. The people in South Florida, for example, who are being forced off their land, should be happy to receive whatever the government decides to give them. After all, restoring the Everglades is a "public good" far more important than the dreams and hopes of any individuals.
What's frightening is the number of people who have already been brainwashed into believing that individual rights, and individual achievement, do not matter – what matters is whatever government decides is the public good.
Organizations such as the Maple River Education Coalition, and others, are fighting an uphill battle trying to inform parents about what their children are learning. The hill is even steeper at the state and federal levels. Those who control the curriculum also control the funding. They now have firm control over what children are taught, and they are not about to relinquish that control.
Today, we need teachers like Mrs. Howard, who was more concerned about her students' education than their beliefs and their "politically-correct" activities. These teachers are an endangered species in the public-education system. They are, however, finding refuge in the nation's private schools. On with the revolution!
Henry Lamb is the executive vice president of the Environmental Conservation Organization and chairman of Sovereignty International.
THIS article at WND
McGraw-Hill also publishes workbooks that can be purchased at any bookstore. I use many of their books to homeschool my young children. We have a Grade 3 Geography workbook published by McGraw-Hill, but the contents aren't anything like this writer describes. It sounds like the books used in school are different. McGraw-Hill probably just publishes what the school wants.
I must admit that it's hard to find quality books even at the bookstore for homeschooling. I bought a history book published by Scholastic in conjunction with schoolteachers at Dial-A-Teacher. It looked like it just outlined the facts without opinions. But, once I started reading it at home, I realized that it, too, was incredibly biased. Talking about early settlers from Europe, it states: "They used guns to take whatever they wanted. They thought they had the right to do this." Not only would an historian not know what people "think", but it was a very poorly written sentence for a history book. And, then, the "Bill of Rights" printed in the back of the book aren't the Bill of Rights at all, but a translation of what each amendment means (according to the writers of the book, of course).
Down With The Left !!
Let's Roll !!
The RATS Are In Disarray...Eradicate The Rodents !!
Fire Democrats, Hire Republicans !!
GWB Is The Man !!
Snuff Saddam, NOW !!
Death To all Tyrant's !!
The Second Amendment...
America's Original Homeland Security !!
Freedom Is Worth Fighting For !!
Molon Labe !!
I completely understand, and if it was twenty years ago, I would agree on the tactic. Not now. It's too late. Even if you could wrench the local district away from the State, you won't find a staff of union teachers who aren't already set against you and individually committed to undermining everything you demand. That process of teacher brainwashing is completed in teachers' colleges at the universities. It even infests private schools (which is why we pulled our kids out of private school and brought them home). Then there are those nasty State mandates, lawsuits, etc. that the NGOs will bring the moment your district expresses any independence.
Why Johnny Can't Read was fifty years ago. A Nation at Risk was twenty years ago. We ALL knew what was wrong AND what to do about it back then. What DID we do? We increased real education spending (after inflation) by nearly 50%. The recommendations that we needed to make the system accountable to parents were exactly the same as they are now. Things got worse. We were in a better position to fix it back then than we are now.
Did it happen?
Nope, I'm in full agreement with the Exodus Mandate. It may only take one in five students leaving to collapse the finances of the system. Home educators have one in forty students now and are growing about 15% per year at a rate that is accelerating. At 15% growth, we'll reach that one-in-five threshold in about 17 years.
Here is my proposal for public schools. This program will end up privatizing the public schools from the inside. I sent it to Bill Simon in June:
Until I see Beck enforced and unified school districts broken up, my plan is to crash the system.Education Policy Components
- Enforce the U.S. Supreme Court decision re Communications Workers v. Beck (487 US 735, 1988).
- Assist formation of corporate service associations. Offer State funding for local school districts to divest into smaller, more personalized institutions.
- Use the private and home education market to develop and test learning tools and services. Private validation services could assess product performance against product claims. School boards would be free to select guaranteed products for use in public schools.
- Insurance on the guarantee would cover the cost of remedial education if the product fails to meet warranted performance.
- Veto any bill requiring home and private educators to conform to State teacher certification standards.
- Veto any bill requiring State supervision of home schools.
- Analyze any Federal program for insufficient funds and unintended consequences suspecting unfunded mandates. Cite New York v. United States (505 US 144, 1992).
- Publicly excoriate Bill Lockyer at every opportunity.
You are WAY behind the curve on the latest in educational trends. More of what I sent to Bill Simon:
As private education advances, it will offer MORE choices than public schools ever could. The real problem is the credentialing racket. If unshackled, it wouldn't take very long for a complete transformation; my guess is about five years.As home-educators have grown in number, they have been organizing into loosely knit education cooperatives that point to a new form of public education: a decentralized, customer-oriented network for lifelong learning, using products customized to meet individual interests and abilities. That promises what 21st Century public education could really become: a multi-disciplinary market of customized learning products and services.
We are already starting to see the effects of this change. Software and curriculum companies are finding a growing market of customers committed to gaining competitive advantage. Colleges and universities are offering online degrees because they need superior students to assure productive alumnae. Superior teachers could get rich transmitting their ideas and methods to a mass-market. Where better to develop those products and sell them to the world than California?
We can use private and home education as if they were R&D laboratories developing and testing proven learning tools and services. Public school parents on school boards could then select those products that the State would fund for use in public schools. It is a gradual transformation, from experimenting on our children with untested academic theories, to contracting for innovative tools and methods that have been proven in the marketplace.
All we have to do is let it happen and keep government from regulating new educational methods out of existence. If you elect me Governor, that is what I will do. Federal education dollars aren’t worth the price of Federal control and bureaucratic requirements. Private and home education both leave the State with more money to spend per-child and provide a competitive incentive for public schools to keep their customers.
Interesting....diligence!! and good luck.
The communists infiltrated and hijacked enviromentalism when their original venue failed.
Communism was originally an economic theory on the control of the production and distribution of goods and services (read wealth). It ALWAYS fails in the long run because people won't keep working to make someone else rich without gain for themselves. The word gets out, suckers won't sign on anymore and communisn collapses.
The red bastards don't give up, they just acquire a new trade name (Enviromentalism) and continue selling the same old ____.
The ultimate goal of the environmentalists is all about the creation of a one-world government.
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