So the teacher acknowledges the kids are impressionable and that she is instilling ideas that will stay with them into adulthood. And what is the primary lesson they’re taking out of preschool, before they’re in any way able to critically analyze it?
The planet must be saved. From what you ask? From people.
Ask yourself what this means to a young, impressionable child. It teaches that child to feel guilty about being a human being. It attempts to imbue him with the self-loathing at the root of progressivism. This is where it starts.
Indoctrinating children into any ideology before they are intellectually equipped to question it is evil in and of itself. But it’s especially evil to teach them to feel guilty for being born. That’s what the whole environmental movement is based upon. They want to convince people their very existence is evil, resulting in a debt they can never repay, no matter how much they’re taxed.
They begin encouraging children to form an emotional bond to this idea at a very young age. That makes it even harder for them to question it later in life, when they have the intellectual capacity to do so. Some people can never overcome the emotional bonds they formed as children to progressive ideas. That’s why reason doesn’t work in persuading them.
Lesson Two: The Free Market Is Evil
For those who think I’m exaggerating the extent to which children are brainwashed into radical environmentalism, let me issue a challenge. Show me a classroom that has children singing songs and doing art projects celebrating capitalism and free enterprise. I won’t hold my breath.
Ask your child what he learned about the industrial revolution. Again, you’ll hear a few basic facts. You’ll hear about the emergence of mass production, the assembly line, and maybe even a few of the many inventions of those greedy, white males like Edison and Bell.
But if you talk to your child for more than a few minutes, you’ll eventually hear the progressive lie about that wonderful time in human history. You’ll hear the industrial revolution created child labor and monopolies run by robber barons who exploited their workers. You will hear the early progressive governments came in and saved us all from capitalism.
What is this teaching children? It teaches them the free market is inherently bad, or at least dangerous, and the government is a benevolent force that protects us from it. They are never taught the unintended negative consequences of government regulation. They are never taught that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was lobbied for by Standard Oil’s competitors so they could charge consumers higher prices for oil. I wasn’t taught this in school. Were you?
Here is something else you never learned in school: The industrial revolution actually ended child labor by making parents productive enough to not need their children to work. It was a sad reality that children had to work in factories to ensure the family could eat, but child labor didn’t start during the industrial revolution. Child labor was a fact of life for all of human history. The work children did in factories during the industrial revolution was actually much easier than the back-breaking work they did previously on the farm.
The government was only able to pass child labor laws when families no longer needed children to work. Had child labor laws been passed before the industrial revolution, the children would have starved. Why else would parents make their children work?
Do you actually believe parents were sadistic monsters or greedy slave drivers in the nineteenth century? It’s ridiculous, but that’s what government schools have taught whole generations to believe. They have taught them to believe illogical, ridiculous lies. This is only one of them.
Those so-called monopolies and robber barons are just more of the same progressive nonsense. Did you know that Standard Oil had hundreds of competitors when the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was passed? Did you know that Standard Oil had lowered its prices for decades before the government broke it up, making life for the middle class and poor a little easier? I didn’t learn that in school. I’ll bet you didn’t, either.
I know what you must be saying: “Savage, now you’ve gone too far. This sounds like an implausible conspiracy theory where everyone is out to brainwash us.”
That’s not what I’m saying. You have to understand the history of public schooling and the progressive agenda. They’ve had control over public schools for over one hundred years. Most of the teachers who advance the agenda don’t even realize they’re doing it. Most are well-intentioned, public-spirited people who want to educate children. They were taught these progressive lies by teachers who themselves didn’t know any better. Now they’re passing the lies on to those who will teach your grandchildren or great-grandchildren.
The only reason there are any conservatives left in this country is progressivism is inherently unrealistic and self-contradictory. Many, many conservatives started out as liberals, but the real world showed them how horrible this life-denying philosophy really is. They cured themselves of progressivism.
Lesson 3: American Culture Is Evil
Along with junk science and phony progressive history, public schools also teach multiculturalism as a required subject. There isn’t any one classroom or teacher dedicated to this. It’s taught in all classes, all the time.
I should clarify: I mean progressive multiculturalism, which is the celebration of all cultures except one—American culture. Speaking in grammatically correct American English is not part of the agenda. Students who speak English as a second language or who actually can’t speak any language properly at all are given first priority. They have to be accommodated, even if it means students who read, write, and speak English very well suffer.
Earlier this year, students at Pine Bush High School in upstate New York catcalled and denounced their student body president for reciting the Pledge of Allegiance during the morning announcements. Some students actually sat down in protest.8 Believe it or not, I couldn’t have been happier to hear it.
I was happy because it wasn’t the Pledge the students were protesting, but the language it was recited in. As part of its efforts to celebrate National Foreign Language Week, this school’s administration thought it would be just wonderful to have the Pledge to our flag recited in the language of the maniacs who burn our flag. Wouldn’t that show how tolerant and accepting we progressive Americans are?
These pedantic academics are constantly trying to provoke clear-thinking people with stunts like this. From depicting Jesus as black to recasting classic male heroes as women to this latest stupidity, they continually attempt to shock people into realizing how racist or sexist or close-minded they are. They just can’t wait to say, “Oh, are you shocked by that? Aren’t you glad I made you recognize your subconscious prejudices? Aren’t I just wonderful?”
According to Fox News, “The school said the pledge was recited in Arabic as a way to honor National Foreign Language Week ‘and in an effort to celebrate the many races, cultures and religions that make up this great country.’”9
Really? Public schools celebrate races, cultures, and religions? What week do they celebrate Caucasians, American culture, and Christianity?
They don’t. Those are not allowed. To celebrate those would be racist, intolerant, and theocratic. Don’t you realize how oppressive white people have been to other races? Don’t you realize American culture is capitalist and built on slavery and exploitation of low-paid workers? Don’t you realize we have a separation of church and state?
Guess what? The kids in this school weren’t buying it. Whatever other progressive nonsense they’ve unknowingly accepted, that inherent common sense that eventually led Reagan away from liberalism must have kicked in and they fought back. Eventually, the school issued an apology. Score one for the good guys, at least for now.
Conservatives won that battle, but they’re losing the war in public schools. The progressive narrative that Muslims are a persecuted minority and Islam a misunderstood religion of peace is too well funded and pervasive. In a school in Wisconsin, students were given an assignment to “
pretend you are… Muslim.”10
The assignment asked students to give “3 examples of what you do daily for your religion and any struggles you face.”
This would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. I’m wondering if any of the students had the presence of mind to say, “I have more trouble practicing my Christian religion than Muslims do practicing theirs.” It would certainly be true. Referring to God as “Allah” is perfectly acceptable in public schools, while referring to God as “God” or “Jesus” is strictly prohibited.
Think about how far the school environment has deteriorated to get to the point where an assignment like this could be given to students, while any reference to the Christian religion is banned. Can you imagine the uproar if the word Christian were substituted for Muslim in this assignment? How about if the teacher asked students to imagine they were a Christian living in western Iraq right now? Which group is more persecuted, Muslims in America or Christians in Iraq?
I doubt most American schoolchildren today could answer that question correctly.
Marcuse and Fromm for Kids
In my last book, I told you about Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, who were intellectual leaders in the “sexual revolution” of the 1950s and 1960s. If you didn’t read it, let me sum it up for you. The sexual revolution was all about moving America toward socialism. Marcuse and Fromm believed that if Americans were liberated from sexual repression, they would give up their individual liberty and become functionaries of the state, whose only value was greater degrees of hedonism.
I’d say they were quite successful, wouldn’t you? Look around you. Look at the prevalence of sexual license in all areas of American culture. From music videos to movies to the most popular websites on the Internet—porn sites—Americans are literally saturated with sex. The sexual revolution succeeded in breaking down all morality and restraint in the sexual lives of adults. Sex education and free condoms are accomplishing the same thing in schools.
I’m sure if you made that last statement to any of your liberal friends, they’d screech, “What? You don’t want teenagers to have condoms? Are you against safe sex? Don’t you care about the children’s health care?”
These are the kinds of replies you get from liberals. If a conservative says anything about condoms, liberals automatically assume they want them legally banned. That’s because they only understand two approaches to anything: ban it or subsidize it. That people should choose what they want to buy, pay for it with their own money, and take responsibility for the consequences just doesn’t occur to progressives.
If teenagers are going to have premarital sex, it’s obvious they are better off using condoms than not using them. But what about not encouraging them to have sex in the first place? Isn’t that what handing out free condoms in school does? Is it not still an accepted economic principle that when you subsidize something you get more of it?
By subsidizing condoms in schools, you are going to get more kids in schools having sex. Do I even have to ask if more teenage sex is a good thing? Are more teenage pregnancies a good thing? More teenagers with STDs?
By the way, redefining condoms as “health care” is a linguistic coup that puts Orwell’s newspeak to shame. Even Goebbels would have been proud. Suddenly, condoms become the same as cancer treatments or heart surgery. Then liberals can cry, “How can you heartless conservatives deny children health care?”
I’m sure you remember Sandra Fluke making the condoms-are-health-care argument to Congress in trying to get them subsidized. It didn’t end there. She’s inspired a high school senior in Gainesville, Florida, to make the same argument in getting condoms provided by taxpayers in her public school.11
The aptly-named Kira Christmas decided taxpayers should be Santa Claus when it comes to condoms, regardless of their relatively affordable cost, even for low-income earners. She started a petition to garner support. The only problem was the school district superintendent. He objected to the idea on what has unfortunately become very unusual grounds.
“Teaching kids about birth control, disease prevention, those kinds of things but as far as actually giving out condoms, that’s really a parental role, a family role, that is not something that the school district should be taking on,” said spokesperson Jackie Johnson.12
Imagine that. Educating children and making decisions regarding their sexual activity should be left up to parents. What a novel idea. It might be too dangerous, though. If parents were allowed to make decisions regarding their children’s sexual education, they might start asserting a right to make decisions regarding all aspects of their children’s education. We can’t have that, can we?
The school superintendent eventually caved to the pressure and reversed his decision prohibiting condom distribution in Alachua Schools.13 The “compromise” the school board made was to allow parents to opt out of the program.
They can’t opt out of paying for free condoms for schoolchildren, but they can fill out a form and send it in to the school. The school nurses will refuse to distribute condoms to those students whose parents have dutifully filled out the government form.
One of the most disturbing aspects of this story is the extent to which local students have been brainwashed into the progressive, socialist mind-set. A foundational socialist plank since Plato has been that the government should raise and educate children, rather than parents. This is what Hillary Clinton really meant when she said, “It takes a village to raise a child.”
Apparently, at least some young people in this school district believe the government does a better job as well. A freshman student at University of Florida writes in his school paper:
Parents, on the other hand, often live in states of euphoric ignorance. Many are unaware of their children’s sex lives, and they avoid potentially awkward conversations by settling for the sexual education their kids receive in school… Changing family dynamics and facilitating conversations about the importance of safe sex will take much more time, so, until then, we need schools to help students overcome these obstacles.14
Another teenage student, presumably from the Alachua school district, echoed Wilde’s sentiments: “If your parents don’t want to talk about it, they feel awkward then it’s a good thing to have like a nurse there just willing to do it.”15
Yes, parents are incompetent and inadequate when it comes to raising their own children, so the government has to help until such time as family dynamics can be changed. These comments could have been made by Vladimir Lenin. It’s horrifying that they came from American teenagers. It looks like government schools are at least succeeding at one thing: producing good little socialists.
The Common Progressive-Islamist Core
The power-hungry maniacs out to steal the minds and souls of our children aren’t satisfied with merely taking power away from parents. They also want power over education taken away from your local school board and even your state. If they get their way, only the National Ministry of Truth will decide what children learn or don’t learn in school. This is what Common Core is really about.
Last year, Wyoming prohibited adoption of the National Academy of Social Sciences (NGSS) standards for K–12 education because they included teaching global warming as established science. They included a prohibition in their 2014–2016 budget for any use of funds to review the standards.
The progressive jackals went wild and launched an all-out campaign against the legislators. On March 2, 2015, the Wyoming governor signed a bill overturning the prohibition and allowing the state board of education to review the standards. It is only a matter of time before the board of education approves the standards and another example of grassroots resistance to the progressive agenda is crushed.
This is how it happens, one progressive lie at a time. If left unchecked, this set of standards or some other will be adopted in every state, and generations of children will grow up not knowing anyone ever questioned the climate change scam, just as they’ve grown up never knowing Standard
Oil lowered its prices for two decades before being broken up by the government.
That was why I warned readers about Common Core in my last book, Stop the Coming Civil War. It’s not only because it’s ineffective. We’ve all seen Common Core’s processes for doing what used to be simple math problems lampooned on the Internet. It’s not only because it adopts every progressive lie ever told as established scientific or historical fact.
One of the men who actually wrote the Common Core standards admitted this at a debate at Saint Anselm’s College in Manchester, New Hampshire, last year. “The reason why I helped write the standards and the reason why I am here today is that as a white male in society, I’ve been given a lot of privilege that I didn’t earn,” said David Pook.16
Of course, Pook is going to have a hard time determining whether the standards will truly overcome the white privilege he believe exists. That’s because the exclusive New Hampshire prep school he teaches at has only seven black students currently enrolled, out of a total student body of 369.17 This typical limousine liberal may go whole days without even seeing a black student.
What is most dangerous about Common Core is its potential to become the required set of educational standards for all schools, public or private. Just imagine if the list of lesson plans I provided from Kids.gov became the standard curriculum in every public school. That’s what progressives really want. If they can make Common Core mandatory, no nonprogressive will ever emerge from an American school again. That’s why it has to be stopped.
Over the past year, there has actually been some good news on this front. Parents across the nation and across the political spectrum are taking a stand against Common Core. Believe it or not, liberal New York State is leading the charge.
Ninety-five percent of eligible children at Brooklyn New School didn’t take Common Core tests administered in April 2015. Seventy percent of their peers joined them at West Seneca Central School, outside Buffalo, New York.18 In all, an estimated 200,000 eligible students will have opted out of these tests statewide.19
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