Brave New Schools

(An invited article by John Loeffler, "Steel on Steel Productions.")

Recently, the State of Colorado has been attempting to entirely rewrite its children's code. As a part of the proposed changes, language was introduced by pro-family legislators to protect parents' rights and prevent unwarranted state intrusion into family life. This legislation was killed in the Senate Judiciary Committee. In undoing the provision, state Senator Dottie Wham, chairperson of that committee, stated that the Colorado Children's Code was no place for parental rights; the Children's Code was there to protect children and it needed to remain for and about children.

Who Owns the Children?

In Senator Wham's view, parents do not have the best interests of their children at heart and the state has a better idea of how children should be raised, even if that means defending children from their own parents. If Senator Wham's views were unique, it might raise a few eyebrows, but in reality it represents what is a major philosophical contender for raising the minds and hearts of children in this country. Indeed, the concept of guarding children from their parents is one of the major themes drummed by the educational establishment. Take, for example, the words of Kathy Collins, former legal counsel to the Iowa Department of Education:

Children...are not "owned" by their parents....the Christian fundamentalists who want the freedom to indoctrinate their children with religious education do not understand [that] the law that prevents them from legally teaching their kids prevents someone else from abusing theirs.¹

To demonstrate that this isn't a new or recent opinion, consider Chester M. Pierce's keynote address to the 1972 Association for Childhood Education International:

Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our founding fathers, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being... It's up to you, teachers, to make all of these sick children well by creating the international children of the future.²

And that's exactly what the education establishment has been doing for decades now, and the effort is reaching its apex by being solidified into law, binding on all. Although the battle for the minds of the children of this country is now raging, one which determines whether or not the next generation ever gets to hear the gospel, the church has failed to recognize the danger of the movement and indeed many of its members working in "the system" have been made unwitting accomplices by not knowing what it is they were participating in or endorsing.

For the last five decades, education through its various organs, such as the United Nations, Department of Education and tax-exempt foundations working hand-in-hand with the DOE such as the Carnegie Foundation and other groups like the regional educational laboratories etc., has worked on transforming education from a process whereby teachers act on behalf of parents to teach children what are deemed essential facts, to a state whereby parents are "partners" with the educational establishment that is seeking to teach "global" values rather than fact-oriented thought. If the parents don't go along, their wishes and values can be overridden by an enlightened elite of educrats.

Womb-to-Tomb Education

These organizations have created a womb-to-tomb educational agenda packaged in modular, nice-looking curricula, which are being locked into place as you read this article. Many of these curricula look nice and fool teachers and parents alike. They oftentimes have a stated for-public-consumption purpose that is vastly different than the true purpose. Without understanding the entire system being put in place, arguing about the merits of one segment of the curriculum usually yields little.

For example, the debate over Outcome Based Education has been fierce around the country. The fact that OBE's name has been changed dozens of times to throw parents off the track, each time it is introduced in a state or school district, the arguments pro and con usually revolve around what are called "exit outcomes" and what standards will be used to measure student performance.

One Christian public school principal said that the opposition to OBE in her district was simply the result of a few uninformed parents. In reality, it was the principal who was badly uninformed.

She probably didn't know there are three stages to OBE implementation:

1. traditional,
2. transitional,
3. and, transformational.

Most teachers don't know either; schools are only now implementing Stage 1.

If parents and teachers knew that Stage 3 involves a program of complete student psychological profiling, indoctrination and politically correct mind-shaping, there would be a mass revolt. As a result it had to be introduced in stages so no one will catch on and people will get accustomed to the new system without objection. That way adjustments to the new paradigm can be made gradually.

These alleged goals on the part of the educational establishment are not the invention of wacko right-wingers and "enemies of public education," as is frequently alleged by the establishment. Most of the claims made by the religious right wing can be documented from United Nations, U.S. Departments of Education and Labor documents as well as lectures, articles and other sources by the various designers of these curricula and their related organizations, such as the Carnegie Foundation.

Many of these documents have been forcibly obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and only after much effort. It has been clear the educational establishment has not wanted parents to know where it is headed.

So where is education headed? Definitely not for the much-touted "reform." "Reform" has served as a mantra to keep the blinders on an unsuspecting public while a much different agenda is forced into place. There is not the slightest intention on the part of those designing educational curricula to return to a fact-based method of teaching. A much different plan is afoot and lip service is paid to reform and local control only to act as a cover for the new plan.

The basic goal of education is a total transformation to womb-to-tomb education, featuring global, socialistic, pantheistic values, where feelings reign supreme and facts are minimized. Consider the 1989 Governor's Conference on Education where Dr. Shirley McCune of the Midwest Regional Laboratories said:

What's happening in America today...is a total transformation of our society. We have moved into a new era...I'm not sure we have really begun to comprehend...the incredible amount of organizational restructuring and human resource development...[What] we have to do is to build a future... the revolution... in curriculum is that we no longer are teaching facts to children.

Legislation Underway

Major legislation has either been passed or is in the process of being passed at the federal level. H.R.6 and other bills were passed a few years ago, empowering Outcome Based Education as the national standard, the goals of Goals 2000 (which originated as a United Nations plan) as national policy, and creating a national school board.

H.R.1617, now passed in Congress and in conference committee, creates a direct tie between education and labor, and requires the holding of a type of diploma, a Certificate of Initial Mastery (CIM), in order for anyone to get a job. This means everyone will have to pass the state's curriculum just to be employed. Bear in mind, we're not just talking about facts for job qualification but attitudes and psychological profiles.

States are being coerced into the federal plan by being refused money unless they cooperate. Only a few states told the federal government to take a hike. Here's some of what states are buying into:

Parents As Teachers

When Goals 2000 states as a goal that all children shall start school ready to learn, it means that children will have been prepped from birth to move into state schools. Under PAT, a social worker will appear at the hospital when a child is born. The child is assigned a social security number and the social worker appears at the home every six weeks or so to check up on how well the children are being raised. Currently PAT(sometimes called Home Visitations 2000 and other names, again to fool parents) is now voluntary. It won't be when the final legislation is locked into place.

A National School Board

H.R.6 (already law) established a national school board. Although the cry today is local control, that's an interim cover-up for a reality where the federal government has created a national school board, which will set national outcomes that will be imposed on the states. States may voluntarily comply, but this is a joke since the federal government forces the states to comply by withholding federal money from states which don't.

School-to-Work

This is H.R.1617 (currently in conference committee following passage by both houses) and is actually the opposite end of Parents as Teachers. H.R.1617 will:

1. Create a national electronic data base as part of a massive "National Labor Market Information System" to collect personal and psychological information on all people in the work force and force all employers to list all available jobs in central data banks. It will establish an electronic portfolio for each individual, and track private details of each person's life from cradle to grave, which would most likely include health activities, a person's beliefs and attitudes, etc. This information would be available to government personnel in all job centers and agencies but not to the people themselves.
2. Reclassify 16-year-old children as adults to avoid child labor laws and put them to work in apprenticeship programs replacing traditional academics. The last two years of high school will be abolished and the apprenticeship programs substituted for these.
3. Force each person into the system by requiring everyone to obtain one or more certificates (Certificate of Initial Mastery (CIM), Certificate of Advanced Mastery (CAM) or the OSC (Occupational Skills Certificate)) just in order to get or keep a job or be admitted to college. This is part of the so-called lifelong learning program, including forcing attitudes to fit politically correct gender standards.
4. Govern a person's "lifelong" training, testing, tracking, surveillance, and work force assignments, very similar to the former Soviet Union's disastrous five or ten-year plans. When a person leaves one job, he or she will have to go through the system again for an attitudinal checkup.
5. Manage all employment in the country through what are called "work force delivery areas" or "one-stop centers," which can assign workers to whatever area they are required by labor. At these centers there will be counselors who prescribe diagnostic testing, skill testing, group and individual counseling, retraining, remediation, and rehabilitation, before and after each job assignment.

Home schoolers and private schoolers believe they will be exempt from all these things. They should think again because the education establishment has no such plans to allow a large percentage of the population to slip by unnoticed. Because a large number of parents who care for their children recognize that the public schools are in an irretrievable slide toward disaster, they have pulled their children from the system and have begun to return to a more traditional education system, including religious education. Their children are scoring well above average on SAT scores.

This creates a problem for the educrats, because their dream of socialism is all-encompassing. As a result, there will be incessant increasing legal pressure to force home schoolers and private schools to conform. The most salient of these will be through the CIM, mentioned above. If plans go on schedule, and they are to date, it will be impossible to obtain a job without a CIM. A student will not be able to obtain a CIM until he or she meets the outcome standards required by the state. As a result, home and private schoolers will be forced into the system because they will have to "teach to the tests" to achieve the acceptable outcomes.

The implications of all of this for the church are staggering. The new global values are in opposition to much of what Christianity teaches. Since the global values are now being adopted by law and curricula, it is an easy jump to see where the state can just as easily declare the teaching of certain forms of politically incorrect religion to be a psychological disorder. If parents then manifest this "disorder" by teaching it to their children, this would constitute child abuse and at that point the state, in the "best interests of the children," would step in and remove them from their parents to prevent further "abuse." In the United States it would be ludicrous to consider this if it weren't already happening.

This is important that the reader understand: The radical changes in education, which will totally transform this culture, are under way; they are not part of some future possibility. The shift to relative values affects how people will view "freedoms" and "rights" as well as how Christianity will be viewed in just a few years. Consider what it will be like for you to live in a culture which doesn't believe in absolute values, where all rights are based on the feeling of the moment and what seems right, which deems tolerance as the ultimate good but which is mercilessly intolerant of things it deems in opposition to itself.

In other places and times, the church called this persecution.