This is the eighth of ten lessons on Agenda 21 commonly known as Sustainable Development. Today you will learn…
How, Through Education, the American Citizen is being Dummied Down and Trained to be a Cog in the Centralized Industrial Machine of a One World Government.
I doubt that many people today believe that in America we have a strong, successful educational system. Yes, most would agree that there are many places where we could improve the system.
The question you should ask yourself during this lesson is, “Has the Federal Government manufactured this crisis in education, so that at the appropriate time, and it could be argued that now is that time, the Federal Government could ride to the rescue and create the solution-a Nationalized Education System from birth to career used to indoctrinate our children to be good global citizens with the appropriate skills to meet, not their needs, but those of the centralized government?”
Keep in mind during this lesson that there are many things, outside of the classroom, that can affect a child’s chances of learning, such as the destruction of our families, Constitution, and Christian faith. Many of these have been, if not caused by the government, exacerbated by the government. These ideas that were discussed in Lesson 1 deserve to be revisited in that they have a significant role to play in their negative effect on a child’s ability to learn.
Today the family structure is too often in disarray. Without a stable home life, it is difficult for the child to focus on his learning and further, if there is only one parent in the home, supervision of the child’s behavior and homework is especially challenging.
Do you remember in 1992 when Dan Quayle was excoriated by the left for suggesting that two parents are better than one? Have you seen how the role of women in society today has been elevated until the perception is that women can and should do it all? It might be asked; do women really want that much responsibility, and does the family benefit when it is implied that men have little importance either at home or in the workplace?
This elevation of women in the workplace has nothing to do with women, and everything to do with Agenda 21. Agenda 21 states that educated women tend to have fewer children. So if Sustainable Development policies can increase the socioeconomic status of women, who then will produce fewer children, causing the population to decrease, the Sustainabilists will have achieved their primary goal. If the family is destroyed in the process, and children are too distracted to pay attention in school, that is simply the price that must be paid to advance Sustainable Development policies.
Add to the destruction of the family unit, Christianity is under attack. Christianity teaches many key lessons that give society a value-driven citizen. Christianity teaches to not lie or steal.
The author of this article was a science teacher for 30 years. As those years passed, it became increasingly clear that the students were lying and cheating with abandon; lying to avoid taking responsibility for their actions and cheating to avoid doing the necessary work to earn the good grade. The result was a student who lacked the knowledge, skills, and values necessary to be an asset to themselves or society.
Furthermore, our Constitution and the brave men that worked so hard to create that amazing document are now being relegated to the back seat on the history bus. These fine men believed in limited government, the importance of owning property, and the value of self-reliance. By ignoring the contributions of these men to society our children are prevented from using them as positive role models and learning the lessons they taught. This makes it much easier for our educational system today to teach instead that private property must be given up for the good of the collective and that dependence on the government is desirable.
Towards the end of the 20th century the stage was set. The crisis in education was evident enough to the public that big government felt it could receive a mandate to make reforms in education. Congress passed three key educational laws during the Clinton Presidency; they were the, “Goals 2000 Act“, “School-to-Work-Act“, and the “Improving America’s Schools Act “of 1994.
Those were followed by the passage in 2001 of George W. Bush’s, “No Child Left Behind”. Bush, while passing the “No Child Left Behind” ACT (NCLB), openly agreed to work with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the education arm of the United Nations, to work towards common goals in education. In other words, as directed by Chapter 36 of Agenda for the 21st Century (aka Agenda 21), Bush was promising that the United States was fully on board with integrating Sustainable Development ideas into the classrooms of America.
Through a myriad number of rules, NCLB, attempted to force the schools and teachers to accept the responsibility for student’s performances. There were many rules about what would happen if schools did not improve the required amount in any given year. The pressure on the schools to improve the student’s performances was huge. While scores often improved, in the case of Ohio, the improvement was so great that it looked suspicious. It came, then, as no surprise that in 2012, a group of Ohio school districts, including the Columbus School District, began to be investigated for fudging their numbers.
No Child Left Behind did not require that states participate; however, the federal funds were withheld if the states did not. At least NCLB did not attempt to force a Nationalized Educational System. It left at least some of the decisions to the states.
It is important for citizens to remember that the founders wanted education to be a state issue. In that way, each state could decide what was best for their citizens. It also allowed a citizen, who was dissatisfied with the way their state handled education, to move to another state to be serviced. Keep this in mind as we move on to discussing the…
Common Core Curriculum.
In 2007 the efforts to create a Nationalized Educational System called the Common Core began.
Common Core Standards were written with the help of a $100 million dollar donation from the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation, along with other grant money provided by our tax dollars that were passed out by the federal government via the U.S. Dept. of Education.
Two separate sets of states combined efforts to either participate in the Smarter Balanced Assessment approach or the Partners for Assessment of Colleges and Careers (PARCC).
Ohio is a member of PARCC, which is being pushed by Linda Darling Hammond, a colleague and friend of the infamous radical Bill Ayers. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has also been an active player in the push for Common Core.
He is quoted at the Sustainability Summit in 2010, as saying,
“Today I promise you that the Dept. of Education will be a committed partner in the National effort to build a more environmentally literate and responsible society’. ‘We must advance the sustainability movement through education… Education and sustainability are the keys to our economic and our ecological future”.
Wow, and I thought education was about learning to read, write, and do arithmetic. Apparently not anymore!
Just because a state, like Ohio, is part of the Consortium, does not mean it is automatically signed up to adopt these standards. That requires that the government do what it does best- use our tax dollars to entice the states to adopt this new set of standards. So, $4.35 million dollars from the 2009 Stimulus Bill was used to create the Race to the Top Competition (RTTT).
To enter the competition, to possibly earn money and waivers to some of the No Child Left Behind mandates, a state must accept the Common Core Standards, in this case SIGHT UNSEEN, as the standards had not yet been written.
One of the most successful government strategies for implementing new ideas with minimum back lash is to do it as quickly as possible before opposition can be rallied. This ploy was used very effectively in the case of Common Core.
The states were rushed to judgment when the Race to the Top applications became available in November of 2009, but were due back by January 2010. During this time, few state legislatures were open for business, so the state officials, if they choose to sign on, would have to do so without the approval of their state legislatures.
It was not until two months later, in March of 2010, that the draft standards for Common Core were available for reading. The final Common Core Standards came out three months later in June. The states had two more months to make their final commitments by August of 2010, as to whether they wished to abide by requirements of the CC standards.
It is important to point out that standards are not curriculum; however, standards drive the curriculum. Standards are a little like the frame of a house. The frame of a house decides what the house will look like. In that same way, standards decide what the curriculum looks like and what kinds of things will appear on the tests. Standards drive the educational experience for the student and, ultimately, how well or poorly the student will be prepared for his career and life.
Just because the government was heavy-handed in the development and acceptance of the Common Core, that does not necessarily mean it is going to turn out badly, does it? An inventory of the concerns about Common Core should serve to provide that answer.
Once a state adopts Common Core, the state and parents have control over only 15% of the curriculum, although they will pay for 100% of the expense. In essence, the state and the parents have lost virtually all control over the education of the students in their state. This goes against the 10th Amendment to our U.S. Constitution that gives control of education to the states. Further, CC violates three federal statutes; the General Education Provisions Act, the Dept. of Education Organizational Act, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.
The tests that will go along with CC standards will be very expensive, as the students must take them on computers. The purchase and maintenance of all of this technology makes the donation by the Gates Foundation look like an example of Crony Capitalism (see Lesson 5). The expense of this program will increase even more because all of the tests are to be graded by hand. All these people will have to be hired, trained, and paid for their service.
Possibly more worrisome is that the current administration is constantly pushing social equity. Couple this with the fact that each student will be identified by any number of non educational markers, like ethnicity, religion, and gender. Might those, who are hired to grade these tests, be tempted or encouraged to add to or subtract from the test scores to balance out for any social inequalities?
You might also wonder, if this administration, that is equally interested in achieving economic justice, might not use the data like ethnicity, gender, religion, etc., that is being compiled and stored on each student, to decide at the end of the student’s education, whether that student should or should not be eligible for higher paying jobs?
And compiling and storing data on our children they are. Whether it is legal or not is somewhat questionable. In the past sharing of student personal information with the federal government was illegal. However; both consortiums, Smarter Balanced Assessment and Partners for Assessment of Colleges and Careers, are both contractually obligated to the federal government to give this information to the Dept. of Education, Dept. of Labor, and Dept. of Health and Human Services. Additionally, now that the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act has been gutted, many of the records are being funneled by the states directly to the feds, which somehow makes this OK.
There are significant concerns about the height of the hoop through which our students using CC will be expected to jump. CC at this time only applies to a school’s Math, Language Arts, and English curricula. It is expected that later, all areas of the curricula will be affected. While proponents say the standards are rigorous, some of the harshest critics were those who were on the validation committees for Math, Language Arts, and English.
Dr. James Milgram of Stanford University, the only math person on the validation committee, said that our kids will be two years behind when they graduate, compared to the most successful countries, and that it would be unlikely that they would be ready for university level math after completing Common Core.
Dr. Sandra Stotsky, who served on the English validation committee refused to sign off on the English standards, saying that they will not prepare the students for college, and that she thought that the highest reading level was on about a 7th grade level.
Assumptions would be that most students upon high school graduation would be able to attempt a 2 year college using these standards. One of the major concerns is that there will be 50% less classical literature in English classes and no British literature, except for a small amount of Shakespeare. In its place will be nonfiction informational text, like manuals, brochures, and even menus. In addition, teachers are being discouraged to give historical context and/or to encourage passionate readings of great historical works like the Gettysburg Address. This is likely to cause the best teachers to quit, and the lesser teachers who remain to be retrained to teach the nonfictional material.
If you remember from previous lessons, founders knew it was critical for the states to maintain their individuality and sovereignty. You also learned that making borders irrelevant is a requirement of a One World Government. If Common Core proponents succeed, by nationalizing the curriculum, while creating uniform mediocrity across state lines, then there will no recourse for the citizen. There will be no opportunity to move to another state to acquire a better education for their child. If there is total uniformity, and the education is mediocre in all states, then students will have no choice but to participate in a uniformly mediocre educational experience.
Not even home schoolers or private schools will be exempt from the CC standards. The ultimate irony is that those that are pushing the hardest for CC are the same folks who criticize anyone who does not embrace diversity, yet CC’s whole strategy is to eliminate diversity in the classroom. The only way for a state to sidestep CC is if their legislature never adopts it or if they repeal it.
If the main reason for creating CC was to create uniformity across state lines-for which there is no data showing it works for large countries like the U.S., and to create a more rigorous academic curricula, which there is no reason to believe is the case, then why is there such a push to implement CC by the school year 2014-2015? The answer, as with most of our problems today, comes back to Sustainable Development/Agenda 21.
Those that were once called Socialists, but are now called Progressives, have long attempted to replace the free market with a managed economy where educational and job opportunities are under the strict control of a centralized economy. In that way, the government can insure that social, economic, and environmental justice is always achieved, so that ethnicity, gender, and religious, inequalities can be redressed, perhaps through advantageous job opportunities. Thus today’s youth will be tomorrow’s cogs in the industrial machine controlled by big government and at the mercy of social, economic, and environmental justice.
So, going back to the question that was posed at the beginning of this lesson. “Has the Federal Government manufactured this crisis in education, so that at this point in time the Federal Government could ride to the rescue and create the solution-a Nationalized Education System from birth to career used to indoctrinate our children to be good global citizens with the appropriate skills to meet, not their needs, but those of the centralized government?” Only time will tell-unless you are willing to make stopping Common Core a priority right now.
In Lesson 9 you will learn how Sustainable Development policies will create a One World Order that will be unresponsive to the citizen and run by Big Government, Big Business, and Non Governmental Organizations.
However, it is strongly suggested that you read the Lesson 8 supplemental materials before proceeding to lesson 9. You may do that by clicking on the links to the Lesson 8 supplementals provided below.
Should the White House Control What Your Kids Learn?
