A new ethics code greeted the nearly 500 students at United Methodist-related Duke Divinity School when they returned from spring break.
Edward E. Plowman
www.worldmag.com
April 19, 2003
A new ethics code greeted the nearly 500 students at United Methodist-related Duke Divinity School when they returned from spring break. It didn't go over well with everybody.
The "conduct covenant" covers the usual bases: no stealing, cheating, or plagiarizing. It calls on students to live in Christian community and to be accountable to one another, open to judgment, to show respect and honor friendships. It also calls on them to be welcoming, hospitable, and "chaste."
Gays and lesbians on campus had a problem with that word. Did it mean gays and lesbians would violate the code if they had sex?
Not to worry. Ethics professor Amy Laura Hall said the faculty unanimously agreed that chastity could include sexual relations among homosexuals.
Full article:
http://www.worldmag.com/articles/7104
Friday, March 30, 2012
HOMESCHOOLING FAMILIES CAN'T TEACH HOMOSEXUAL ACTS AS SINFUL IN CLASS
[Excerpts] courtesy of The Berean Call
Under Alberta's new Education Act, homeschoolers and faith-based schools will not be permitted to teach that homosexual acts are sinful as part of their academic program, says the spokesperson for Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk.
"Whatever the nature of schooling -- homeschool, private school, Catholic school -- we do not tolerate disrespect for differences," Donna McColl, Lukaszuk's assistant director of communications, told LifeSiteNews on Wednesday evening.
"You can affirm the family's ideology in your family life, you just can't do it as part of your educational study and instruction," she added.
Reacting to the remarks, Paul Faris of the Home School Legal Defense Association said the Ministry of Education is "clearly signaling that they are in fact planning to violate the private conversations families have in their own homes."
Section 16 of the new legislation restates the current School Act's requirement that schools "reflect the diverse nature" of Alberta in their curriculum, but it adds that they must also "honour and respect" the controversial Alberta Human Rights Act that has been used to target Christians with traditional beliefs on homosexuality. "School" is defined to include homeschoolers and private schools in addition to publicly funded school boards.
McColl emphasized that homeschoolers were already included in the current definition of "school" in the School Act, going back to 1988 or longer. And Section 16, she said, "is specifically with regards to programs, courses, and instructional materials."
According to McColl, Christian homeschooling families can continue to impart Biblical teachings on homosexuality in their homes, "as long as it's not part of their academic program of studies and instructional materials."
Full article:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/exclusive-homeschooling-families-cant-teach-homosexuality-a-sin-in-class-sa
More Info:
http://www.thebereancall.org/
http://www.carylmatrisciana.com/
Under Alberta's new Education Act, homeschoolers and faith-based schools will not be permitted to teach that homosexual acts are sinful as part of their academic program, says the spokesperson for Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk.
"Whatever the nature of schooling -- homeschool, private school, Catholic school -- we do not tolerate disrespect for differences," Donna McColl, Lukaszuk's assistant director of communications, told LifeSiteNews on Wednesday evening.
"You can affirm the family's ideology in your family life, you just can't do it as part of your educational study and instruction," she added.
Reacting to the remarks, Paul Faris of the Home School Legal Defense Association said the Ministry of Education is "clearly signaling that they are in fact planning to violate the private conversations families have in their own homes."
Section 16 of the new legislation restates the current School Act's requirement that schools "reflect the diverse nature" of Alberta in their curriculum, but it adds that they must also "honour and respect" the controversial Alberta Human Rights Act that has been used to target Christians with traditional beliefs on homosexuality. "School" is defined to include homeschoolers and private schools in addition to publicly funded school boards.
McColl emphasized that homeschoolers were already included in the current definition of "school" in the School Act, going back to 1988 or longer. And Section 16, she said, "is specifically with regards to programs, courses, and instructional materials."
According to McColl, Christian homeschooling families can continue to impart Biblical teachings on homosexuality in their homes, "as long as it's not part of their academic program of studies and instructional materials."
Full article:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/exclusive-homeschooling-families-cant-teach-homosexuality-a-sin-in-class-sa
More Info:
http://www.thebereancall.org/
http://www.carylmatrisciana.com/
OBAMA'S LEGALIZATION OF SLAVERY AND SYSTEMATIC POPULATION REDUCTION
By Dave Hodges
March 30, 2012
NewsWithViews.com
“If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.” -Thomas Jefferson
The lessons of history clearly demonstrate that dictatorial regimes, whether they be Socialists, Communists, and Marxists will not hesitate to use food as a weapon against their own people in order to solidify power and impose absolute autocratic control. Food can be withheld from the masses by preventing it from being grown and harvested, by contaminating it and rendering it unfit for human consumption or by simply preventing food from being distributed to a targeted population.
Full article:
http://www.newswithviews.com/Hodges/dave120.htm
March 30, 2012
NewsWithViews.com
“If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.” -Thomas Jefferson
The lessons of history clearly demonstrate that dictatorial regimes, whether they be Socialists, Communists, and Marxists will not hesitate to use food as a weapon against their own people in order to solidify power and impose absolute autocratic control. Food can be withheld from the masses by preventing it from being grown and harvested, by contaminating it and rendering it unfit for human consumption or by simply preventing food from being distributed to a targeted population.
Full article:
http://www.newswithviews.com/Hodges/dave120.htm
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Video Game: Would You Shoot Americans?
Infowars Nightly News
November 19, 2011
A promotional article for Rainbow Six Patriots calls on you to stop a homegrown terrorist threat and make the call: do you kill civilians to save perhaps hundreds of other lives? This video game, based on the Tom Clancy series, simulates a war on Patriots and so-called homegrown terrorists, posing scenarios where the hero decides whether to pull the trigger on Americans or shoot cops and civilians for the ‘greater good’.
Full article and video:
http://www.infowars.com/game-simulates-cop-killing-infowars-nightly-news/
November 19, 2011
A promotional article for Rainbow Six Patriots calls on you to stop a homegrown terrorist threat and make the call: do you kill civilians to save perhaps hundreds of other lives? This video game, based on the Tom Clancy series, simulates a war on Patriots and so-called homegrown terrorists, posing scenarios where the hero decides whether to pull the trigger on Americans or shoot cops and civilians for the ‘greater good’.
Full article and video:
http://www.infowars.com/game-simulates-cop-killing-infowars-nightly-news/
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say
www.telegraph.co.uk
By Stephen Adams, Medical Correspondent
1:38PM GMT 29 Feb 2012
The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.
The journal’s editor, Prof Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, said the article's authors had received death threats since publishing the article. He said those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.
The article, entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?”, was written by two of Prof Savulescu’s former associates, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.
They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”
Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.
“We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.”
As such they argued it was “not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense”.
The authors therefore concluded that “what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled”.
They also argued that parents should be able to have the baby killed if it turned out to be disabled without their knowing before birth, for example citing that “only the 64 per cent of Down’s syndrome cases” in Europe are diagnosed by prenatal testing.
Once such children were born there was “no choice for the parents but to keep the child”, they wrote.
“To bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”
However, they did not argue that some baby killings were more justifiable than others – their fundamental point was that, morally, there was no difference to abortion as already practised.
They preferred to use the phrase “after-birth abortion” rather than “infanticide” to “emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus”.
Both Minerva and Giubilini know Prof Savulescu through Oxford. Minerva was a research associate at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics until last June, when she moved to the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Melbourne University.
Giubilini, a former visiting student at Cambridge University, gave a talk in January at the Oxford Martin School – where Prof Savulescu is also a director – titled 'What is the problem with euthanasia?'
He too has gone on to Melbourne, although to the city’s Monash University. Prof Savulescu worked at both univerisities before moving to Oxford in 2002.
Defending the decision to publish in a British Medical Journal blog, Prof Savulescu, said that arguments in favour of killing newborns were “largely not new”.
What Minerva and Giubilini did was apply these arguments “in consideration of maternal and family interests”.
While accepting that many people would disagree with their arguments, he wrote: “The goal of the Journal of Medical Ethics is not to present the Truth or promote some one moral view. It is to present well reasoned argument based on widely accepted premises.”
Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, he added: “This “debate” has been an example of “witch ethics” - a group of people know who the witch is and seek to burn her. It is one of the most dangerous human tendencies we have. It leads to lynching and genocide. Rather than argue and engage, there is a drive is to silence and, in the extreme, kill, based on their own moral certainty. That is not the sort of society we should live in.”
He said the journal would consider publishing an article positing that, if there was no moral difference between abortion and killing newborns, then abortion too should be illegal.
Dr Trevor Stammers, director of medical ethics at St Mary's University College, said: "If a mother does smother her child with a blanket, we say 'it's doesn't matter, she can get another one,' is that what we want to happen?
"What these young colleagues are spelling out is what we would be the inevitable end point of a road that ethical philosophers in the States and Australia have all been treading for a long time and there is certainly nothing new."
Referring to the term "after-birth abortion", Dr Stammers added: "This is just verbal manipulation that is not philosophy. I might refer to abortion henceforth as antenatal infanticide."
By Stephen Adams, Medical Correspondent
1:38PM GMT 29 Feb 2012
The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.
The journal’s editor, Prof Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, said the article's authors had received death threats since publishing the article. He said those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.
The article, entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?”, was written by two of Prof Savulescu’s former associates, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.
They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”
Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.
“We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.”
As such they argued it was “not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense”.
The authors therefore concluded that “what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled”.
They also argued that parents should be able to have the baby killed if it turned out to be disabled without their knowing before birth, for example citing that “only the 64 per cent of Down’s syndrome cases” in Europe are diagnosed by prenatal testing.
Once such children were born there was “no choice for the parents but to keep the child”, they wrote.
“To bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”
However, they did not argue that some baby killings were more justifiable than others – their fundamental point was that, morally, there was no difference to abortion as already practised.
They preferred to use the phrase “after-birth abortion” rather than “infanticide” to “emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus”.
Both Minerva and Giubilini know Prof Savulescu through Oxford. Minerva was a research associate at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics until last June, when she moved to the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Melbourne University.
Giubilini, a former visiting student at Cambridge University, gave a talk in January at the Oxford Martin School – where Prof Savulescu is also a director – titled 'What is the problem with euthanasia?'
He too has gone on to Melbourne, although to the city’s Monash University. Prof Savulescu worked at both univerisities before moving to Oxford in 2002.
Defending the decision to publish in a British Medical Journal blog, Prof Savulescu, said that arguments in favour of killing newborns were “largely not new”.
What Minerva and Giubilini did was apply these arguments “in consideration of maternal and family interests”.
While accepting that many people would disagree with their arguments, he wrote: “The goal of the Journal of Medical Ethics is not to present the Truth or promote some one moral view. It is to present well reasoned argument based on widely accepted premises.”
Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, he added: “This “debate” has been an example of “witch ethics” - a group of people know who the witch is and seek to burn her. It is one of the most dangerous human tendencies we have. It leads to lynching and genocide. Rather than argue and engage, there is a drive is to silence and, in the extreme, kill, based on their own moral certainty. That is not the sort of society we should live in.”
He said the journal would consider publishing an article positing that, if there was no moral difference between abortion and killing newborns, then abortion too should be illegal.
Dr Trevor Stammers, director of medical ethics at St Mary's University College, said: "If a mother does smother her child with a blanket, we say 'it's doesn't matter, she can get another one,' is that what we want to happen?
"What these young colleagues are spelling out is what we would be the inevitable end point of a road that ethical philosophers in the States and Australia have all been treading for a long time and there is certainly nothing new."
Referring to the term "after-birth abortion", Dr Stammers added: "This is just verbal manipulation that is not philosophy. I might refer to abortion henceforth as antenatal infanticide."
US Intelligence to keep tabs on Americans with no ties to terror
Until now, the National Counterterrorism Center had to destroy immediately information about Americans that already was stored in other government databases when there were no clear ties to terrorism. Giving the NCTC expanded record-retention authority had been urged by members of Congress, who said the intelligence community did not connect strands of intelligence held by multiple agencies leading up to a failed bombing attempt on a U.S.-bound airliner on Christmas 2009.
[Hmmm, now everybody is a terrorist suspect... They already used the underwear bomber to leverage implementation of body scanners, now leveraging this false flag patsy to justify keeping information about everyone.]
Full article:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/03/22/us-intelligence-to-keep-tabs-on-americans-with-no-ties-to-terror/
More news:
http://raptureready.com/rapnews_db.php
Friday, March 23, 2012
So few can make fools of so many...
“Assemble a mob of men and women previously conditioned by a daily reading of newspapers; treat them to amplified band music, bright lights ... and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless sub-humanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many”
(Aldous Huxley - The Devils of Loudun, 1952).
(Aldous Huxley - The Devils of Loudun, 1952).
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Facts erased from schoolbooks
What the? Now facts erased from schoolbooks
You won't believe what's intentionally left out from key U.S. date
Drew Zahn
wnd.com
Who perpetrated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 – a group of men merely fighting “for a cause,” or a band of radical Muslims bent on violent jihad?
According to a new, comprehensive study of 6th-12th grade textbooks used by schools across the country, America’s children are being taught a very different answer to that question than many alive to witness 9/11 remember.
The non-profit organization ACT! for America Education studied 38 textbooks from popular publishers like McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin, for example, to determine whether American schoolchildren are being taught the truth about Islam and its role in 9/11.
The report, titled “Education or Indoctrination? The Treatment of Islam in 6th through 12th Grade American Textbooks,” compares what it found in the textbooks with 275 historical sources, listing 375 footnoted citations, to conclude that America’s textbooks are laced with “historical revisionism.”
“This report shines a bright light on a pattern of errors, omissions and bias in the textbooks reviewed,” explained ACT! for America Education founder Brigitte Gabriel in an email. “To give you just one example of the errors our research uncovered, in discussing the 9/11 attacks, the textbooks typically fail to mention the perpetrators were Muslims or that they acted in the cause of Islamic jihad. In one book the terrorists are portrayed as people fighting for a cause.
“In just a few years after Sept. 11,” she continues, “the history of what happened on that tragic day was rewritten in our school textbooks. Omitting this vital information, that jihad was the motivation for the attacks, makes it difficult, if not impossible, for today’s young teens, who don’t remember 9/11, to really understand what happened that day – and why.”
According to the executive summary of the report, “The full report reveals a pattern of historical revisionism, omissions and bias in the presentation of all aspects devoted to Islam in these textbooks. These aspects include its theology and doctrines, its role as a world religion, its ongoing struggle with Western tradition and its intrinsic anti-Semitism.”
The summary continues, “Textbook errors identified in the report range from egregiously false historical statements to significant omissions and subtle half-truths. Some are blatant and obvious, others are subtle and deceptive. The errors in these textbooks are not grammatical or typographical. They are substantive, significant and often repetitive.”
For example, the report notes the textbook “World History: Patterns of Interaction,” published by McDougal Littell/Houghton Mifflin in 2007, glosses over the violent birth of Islam and paints its founder, Muhammad, in a glowing light.
“In Medina, Muhammad displayed impressive leadership skills,” the textbook asserts. “He fashioned an agreement that joined his own people with the Arabs and Jews of Medina as a single community. These groups accepted Muhammad as a political leader. As a religious leader, he drew many more converts, who found his message appealing.”
But did Muhammad win converts among and build a peace accord with the Jews? The study’s founders cite several sources and recorded histories in asserting this description is a bald-faced lie.
“This language is a gross falsification of the relationship between Muhammad and the Jews of Medina,” the report states. “Muhammad … expelled two of the Jewish tribes from Medina and destroyed the third, beheading the men and selling the women and children into slavery. This important and essential historical fact of the Medinan period is commonly omitted in the textbooks reviewed, and it is impossible for students to accurately understand the rise of Islam without it.”
The report also questioned the textbooks’ descriptions of jihad.
“An Islamic term that is often misunderstood is jihad,” asserts Houghton Mifflin’s 2003 textbook “Across the Centuries.” “The term means ‘to struggle,’ to do one’s best to resist temptation and overcome evil. Under certain conditions, the struggle to overcome evil may require action. The Qur’an and Sunna allow self-defense and participation in military conflict, but restrict it to the right to defend against aggression and persecution.”
“The term jihad is, indeed, ‘often misunderstood,’” the report replies, “primarily because faulty definitions like this are prevalent in academia and the media.
“First, this passage redundantly and incorrectly asserts that jihad warfare is solely defensive in nature,” the report continues. “According to the Qur’an , the mandate of jihad includes aggressive warfare for the explicit purpose of making Islam supreme over the entire world. For instance, Surah 9:5 commands Muslims to ‘fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, And seize them, beleaguer them, And lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)’ (parenthetical in original). Surah 9:29 commands Muslims to make war upon ‘People of the Book [Christians and Jews], Until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, And feel themselves subdued.’”
The report’s executive summary concludes, “It is clear that the textbooks examined throughout this report contain extensive amounts of material that is seriously historically flawed and often unmistakably biased.”
Specifically, the report details dozens of ways in which it contends the textbooks stray from accurately teaching about Islam, including the following list, quoted directly from the report’s summary:
“Perhaps the greatest disservice done to students,” the report concludes, “is the net effect of the accumulation of these errors — the creation of a faulty historical narrative that not only misrepresents Islam but creates an inaccurate comparison between Islam, Christianity and Judaism, and between the Muslim world and the West. Regardless of the issue – slavery, conquest and imperialism, the Crusades, the Arab-Israeli conflict, to name a few – Islam and the Muslim world are not generally held to the same rigor of historical analysis that the textbooks apply to Christianity, Judaism and the West.”
But to many Americans, the politically correct nature of handling 9/11 may be the most surprising.
The report, for example, quotes the textbook “Horizons,” published by Harcourt in 2005: “On Sept. 11, 2001, the United States was the target of a horrible act of terrorism, or violence to further a cause.”
The report explains, “The statement that the 9/11 attack was carried out to ‘further a cause’ is left undefined. There is no mention that the ’cause’ was Islamic jihad.”
It continues, “Rarely are the terrorists identified as Muslims, and the jihadist motivations for their actions are omitted. Omitting these two critical facts leaves students with an incomplete, and thus inaccurate, understanding as to why 9/11 happened.”
ACT! for America Education claims it has sent the executive summary of its finding to over 70,000 state and local school board members nationwide. In addition, the executive summary contains a list of recommended actions on its final pages, for those who, according to Gabriel, want to “wake up America to what this report has uncovered.”
Full article:
http://www.wnd.com/2012/03/911-gets-pc-rewrite-in-u-s-textbooks/
More information:
http://www.actforamericaeducation.com/
You won't believe what's intentionally left out from key U.S. date
Drew Zahn
wnd.com
Who perpetrated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 – a group of men merely fighting “for a cause,” or a band of radical Muslims bent on violent jihad?
According to a new, comprehensive study of 6th-12th grade textbooks used by schools across the country, America’s children are being taught a very different answer to that question than many alive to witness 9/11 remember.
The non-profit organization ACT! for America Education studied 38 textbooks from popular publishers like McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin, for example, to determine whether American schoolchildren are being taught the truth about Islam and its role in 9/11.
The report, titled “Education or Indoctrination? The Treatment of Islam in 6th through 12th Grade American Textbooks,” compares what it found in the textbooks with 275 historical sources, listing 375 footnoted citations, to conclude that America’s textbooks are laced with “historical revisionism.”
“This report shines a bright light on a pattern of errors, omissions and bias in the textbooks reviewed,” explained ACT! for America Education founder Brigitte Gabriel in an email. “To give you just one example of the errors our research uncovered, in discussing the 9/11 attacks, the textbooks typically fail to mention the perpetrators were Muslims or that they acted in the cause of Islamic jihad. In one book the terrorists are portrayed as people fighting for a cause.
“In just a few years after Sept. 11,” she continues, “the history of what happened on that tragic day was rewritten in our school textbooks. Omitting this vital information, that jihad was the motivation for the attacks, makes it difficult, if not impossible, for today’s young teens, who don’t remember 9/11, to really understand what happened that day – and why.”
According to the executive summary of the report, “The full report reveals a pattern of historical revisionism, omissions and bias in the presentation of all aspects devoted to Islam in these textbooks. These aspects include its theology and doctrines, its role as a world religion, its ongoing struggle with Western tradition and its intrinsic anti-Semitism.”
The summary continues, “Textbook errors identified in the report range from egregiously false historical statements to significant omissions and subtle half-truths. Some are blatant and obvious, others are subtle and deceptive. The errors in these textbooks are not grammatical or typographical. They are substantive, significant and often repetitive.”
For example, the report notes the textbook “World History: Patterns of Interaction,” published by McDougal Littell/Houghton Mifflin in 2007, glosses over the violent birth of Islam and paints its founder, Muhammad, in a glowing light.
“In Medina, Muhammad displayed impressive leadership skills,” the textbook asserts. “He fashioned an agreement that joined his own people with the Arabs and Jews of Medina as a single community. These groups accepted Muhammad as a political leader. As a religious leader, he drew many more converts, who found his message appealing.”
But did Muhammad win converts among and build a peace accord with the Jews? The study’s founders cite several sources and recorded histories in asserting this description is a bald-faced lie.
“This language is a gross falsification of the relationship between Muhammad and the Jews of Medina,” the report states. “Muhammad … expelled two of the Jewish tribes from Medina and destroyed the third, beheading the men and selling the women and children into slavery. This important and essential historical fact of the Medinan period is commonly omitted in the textbooks reviewed, and it is impossible for students to accurately understand the rise of Islam without it.”
The report also questioned the textbooks’ descriptions of jihad.
“An Islamic term that is often misunderstood is jihad,” asserts Houghton Mifflin’s 2003 textbook “Across the Centuries.” “The term means ‘to struggle,’ to do one’s best to resist temptation and overcome evil. Under certain conditions, the struggle to overcome evil may require action. The Qur’an and Sunna allow self-defense and participation in military conflict, but restrict it to the right to defend against aggression and persecution.”
“The term jihad is, indeed, ‘often misunderstood,’” the report replies, “primarily because faulty definitions like this are prevalent in academia and the media.
“First, this passage redundantly and incorrectly asserts that jihad warfare is solely defensive in nature,” the report continues. “According to the Qur’an , the mandate of jihad includes aggressive warfare for the explicit purpose of making Islam supreme over the entire world. For instance, Surah 9:5 commands Muslims to ‘fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, And seize them, beleaguer them, And lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)’ (parenthetical in original). Surah 9:29 commands Muslims to make war upon ‘People of the Book [Christians and Jews], Until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, And feel themselves subdued.’”
The report’s executive summary concludes, “It is clear that the textbooks examined throughout this report contain extensive amounts of material that is seriously historically flawed and often unmistakably biased.”
Specifically, the report details dozens of ways in which it contends the textbooks stray from accurately teaching about Islam, including the following list, quoted directly from the report’s summary:
- The doctrine of jihad is omitted, incorrectly defined, inaccurately described, or understated.
- Faulty description of women’s rights under Islam: The oppressive and discriminatory nature of Shari’a law with respect to women is omitted, mischaracterized or understated.
- Omission or minimization of the Islamic slave trade, in sharp contrast with what is typically an extensive and appropriately critical examination of the Atlantic slave trade operated by Europeans.
- Aggrandizement and elevation of Muhammad’s character that is contradicted by accepted historical facts.
- Omission or minimization of Muslim conquest and imperialism, in sharp contrast with what is typically an extensive and appropriately critical examination of European and other imperialism.
- False claim of Islam’s historical tolerance of Jews and Christians.
Misrepresentation of Shari’a Law in such areas as its applicability to non-Muslims and the separation of church and state. - False presentation of the Crusades as the cause of the animosity between Christianity and Islam.
- Faulty historical narrative of the Crusades. Muslims in the Holy Land are commonly depicted as innocent victims of unprovoked aggression who were defending “their” lands against Christian invaders, rather than what is historically accurate: (1) that Muslims invaded and conquered the Holy Land centuries prior to the Crusades; (2) that Christians and Jews were victims of Muslim conquest and aggression centuries prior to the launching of the Crusades; and (3) that the Crusades were launched to wrest back control of the Holy Land from the Muslim invaders and conquerors.
- Chronological revisionism of the historical development of Judaism, Christianity and Islam which incorrectly portrays Islam as preceding Judaism and Christianity and the Muslims/Arabs as the indigenous people in the Holy Land, resulting in the delegitizimation of Israel.
- Treatment of Islamism as though it has no origins within classical Islam and Islam’s Holy Books.
- Islamist Holocaust revisionism that attributes the creation of Israel to world guilt over the Holocaust and incorrectly maintains that Arabs were forced to give up land for the survivors of the Holocaust.
- Omission of the fact that the United Nations created a two-state partition for Palestine, one for the Jews and one for the Arabs.
- Omission of the fact that the Arabs refused to accept the offer of an independent Arab state contained in the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine.
- False claim of Israel’s responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem.
- Omission of the fact that the PLO’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist was and remains a verbal recognition only, contradicted by the unrevised PLO charter.
- Inaccurate claim that most Middle Eastern terrorist groups have roots in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
- Omission of the fact that Islamic jihadists target Americans not only for their support of Israel but also for what they consider the “decadent nature” of Western way of life that threatens the spread of Islam throughout the world.
- Failure to explain why the Islamic jihadists targeted the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and to identify the fourth target as the White House.
“Perhaps the greatest disservice done to students,” the report concludes, “is the net effect of the accumulation of these errors — the creation of a faulty historical narrative that not only misrepresents Islam but creates an inaccurate comparison between Islam, Christianity and Judaism, and between the Muslim world and the West. Regardless of the issue – slavery, conquest and imperialism, the Crusades, the Arab-Israeli conflict, to name a few – Islam and the Muslim world are not generally held to the same rigor of historical analysis that the textbooks apply to Christianity, Judaism and the West.”
But to many Americans, the politically correct nature of handling 9/11 may be the most surprising.
The report, for example, quotes the textbook “Horizons,” published by Harcourt in 2005: “On Sept. 11, 2001, the United States was the target of a horrible act of terrorism, or violence to further a cause.”
The report explains, “The statement that the 9/11 attack was carried out to ‘further a cause’ is left undefined. There is no mention that the ’cause’ was Islamic jihad.”
It continues, “Rarely are the terrorists identified as Muslims, and the jihadist motivations for their actions are omitted. Omitting these two critical facts leaves students with an incomplete, and thus inaccurate, understanding as to why 9/11 happened.”
ACT! for America Education claims it has sent the executive summary of its finding to over 70,000 state and local school board members nationwide. In addition, the executive summary contains a list of recommended actions on its final pages, for those who, according to Gabriel, want to “wake up America to what this report has uncovered.”
Full article:
http://www.wnd.com/2012/03/911-gets-pc-rewrite-in-u-s-textbooks/
More information:
http://www.actforamericaeducation.com/
Thursday, March 15, 2012
The Pledge versus the Oath
When an oath for schoolchildren was being contemplated the socialists knew exactly what they were doing.
The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty
http://www.thefreemanonline.org
The Pledge versus the Oath
by James Peron • May 2001 • Vol. 51/Issue 5
When George W. Bush became president last January, he struck a familiar pose. Raising his right hand before the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he swore to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The oath serves to remind us that the United States is a constitutional republic with a federal system. The oath also reminds us that the Constitution is the cornerstone of the American system. The government is supposed to be bound by the Constitution. As such, government is not omnipotent but strictly limited to the functions and purposes enumerated in the Constitution. Legislation, regardless of how popular, is supposed to be consistent with it, and any laws that conflict with it are invalid.
Behind the Constitution are specific principles that America’s Founders consciously held and promoted. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is, for all practical purposes, the birth certificate of the United States. In it Jefferson outlined the principles of the Founders. These principles have a long and honorable history. (See my article “The Declaration of Independence: It’s Greek to Me,” Ideas on Liberty, August 2000.) But the Founders realized that it was impractical, and unnecessary, to expect the American people to understand that history and philosophy. The Declaration and the Constitution were all that Americans needed to understand. If the people were loyal to the Constitution, then the Republic was safe.
Of course there have been individuals who were opposed to the Founders’ philosophy and opposed to a constitutional republic with limited powers. Almost from the beginning there were individuals who promoted a government of unlimited powers. They wanted the people to express their loyalty, not to the Constitution, but to the state.
The differences between the two ideologies is striking. If one swears an oath to the Constitution it implies limited government by definition. It also implies that individual rights are paramount in the American system of governance. But when one swears to support the government instead of the Constitution, those principles disappear.
Imagine if our elected officials, instead of swearing to uphold the Constitution, simply swore to support the government! At this point nothing the government does could be consistently challenged. There would be no limitations on the state or on its functions. Individual rights would be nonexistent. The entire philosophy of the Founders would be turned inside out. If one supports the Constitution, then individual rights are the foundation on which the enumerated powers of the government are based. If one, instead, swears allegiance to the government, then it is the foundation on which specific enumerated rights are granted. The first system supports a concept of natural rights that reside in the individual. The second is one of legal positivism, which says that rights are whatever the state grants.
The Founders wanted a government where the rights of the people come first. The function of government is simply to protect those pre-existing rights. Statism argues just the opposite. For the statist the government comes first and rights are privileges granted at the whim of the state. These two philosophies could not be further apart.
If we were to place in order the structure of the American system it would be:
The people and their natural rights. Individuals are endowed with certain rights that are theirs by nature. These include the rights to life, liberty, and justly acquired property.
The Declaration of Independence. This manifesto set out the basic beliefs of America’s Founders regarding rights and the nature of government.
The Constitution of the United States. This document, based on the principles clearly enunciated in the Declaration, established the method of proper government. It was not intended to explain the philosophy of government but only outline how it should operate. Powers were strictly enumerated while rights were not.
The Republic. The end result of all of this would be the American Republic itself.
The president-elect and our elected officials do not swear an oath to the Republic but to the Constitution. The Constitution is the cause, the Republic the effect. If the Constitution is ignored, then the Republic is lost. Support for the Republic that does not include fidelity to the Constitution leads to a loss of both the process and the outcome.
Pledge of Allegiance
Why is it, then, that so many American schoolchildren are required to swear allegiance to the flag and the Republic “for which it stands” rather than the Constitution? Millions of children start each school day with the Pledge of Allegiance: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Wouldn’t we be much safer as a Republic if the children learned to respect the Constitution? If we were to place the flag in the hierarchy above, it would follow the Republic. The flag is a symbol of the Republic. It seems odd to pledge allegiance to the flag and to the Republic while ignoring both the Declaration and the Constitution.
To understand why this reversal took place we need to look at the history of the Pledge of Allegiance itself. Most of us grew up with the Pledge, and we probably assumed that it was always part of the American culture. But that is not true. Even the current version is relatively new. The phrase “under God” was not in the original version; it was added only in 1954. The Pledge itself doesn’t go back farther than the 1890s. It’s a child of the socialist Progressive movement.
It was during the late 1800s that, for the first time, widespread advocacy of socialism and statism became popular in the United States. Numerous authors wrote novels promoting these doctrines. Among those novels were Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Bellamy wrote of a futuristic America where socialism reigned. In its first year of publication, 1888, the book sold 100,000 copies and eventually topped a million in print; it was translated into 20 languages. As a work of American fiction it was surpassed in the nineteenth century only by Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben Hur.
John Dewey, the great advocate of government schooling and a socialist, called Bellamy his “Great American Prophet” and said: “What Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to the anti-slavery movement Bellamy’s book may well be to the shaping of popular opinion for a new social order.” In fact Dewey took many of his socialist ideas for education and indoctrination from Bellamy. Historian John Baer said that Dewey “was ready to advocate Edward Bellamy’s type of education and to reform American society through ‘progressive education.’” Dewey was keenly interested in the Soviet Union and wrote articles praising the educational system imposed by the communists. (The material from Baer comes from his book The Pledge of Allegiance: A Centennial History, 1892-1992. See www.vineyard.net/vineyard/history/pdgech0.htm [1].)
In Looking Backward the main character, Julian West, falls asleep in 1887 only to awaken in the year 2000. He finds an America where the means of production are owned by the state and everyone earns equal income. Jobs are assigned by the government to citizen-conscripts, who must work for the state from the age of 21 until retirement at 45.
Edward Bellamy, along with his cousin Francis Bellamy, were the two major spokesmen for what they called “Nationalism,” by which they meant the nationalization of all industry under state control. Across America some 167 Nationalist Clubs were formed. In 1889 one of the Boston Nationalist Clubs formed an auxiliary called the Society for Christian Socialists. According to Baer, “The principles [of the Society] stated that economic rights and powers were gifts of God, not for the receiver’s use only, but for the benefit of all. All social, political and industrial relations should be based on the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, in the spirit of the teachings of Jesus Christ. Capitalism was not based on Christian love but on selfish individualism.”
Francis Bellamy became the vice president in charge of education for the Society. Other prominent members included Francis Willard, the leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and W.D.P. Bliss, a well-known minister.
The Bellamy cousins came from a long line of Baptist clergymen. Their grandfather had been a top aide to “The Great Awakening” evangelist Jonathan Edwards. Francis Bellamy was a seminary graduate and an ordained Baptist minister who openly preached socialism from the pulpit. But this led to conflicts with his congregation. One member, however, was enthusiastic about Bellamy’s socialist principles: Daniel Ford, editor of the religious publication The Youth’s Companion. Ford also was founder of Boston’s famed Ford Hall Forum.
Loyalty to the State
After Bellamy was relieved of his ministry, Ford offered him a position with his magazine. Together they continued to work with various advocates of socialism and decided that a program was needed to teach American youth loyalty to the state. They realized that the individualist tradition in America did not lend itself easily to the “patriotism” needed for the socialist state of Looking Backward.
Ford and Bellamy contacted the National Education Association (NEA), which was then headed by William Torrey Harris. Harris, according to Baer, “believed in a state controlled public education system. As the leading Hegelian philosopher in the United States he believed that the State had a central role in society. He believed youth should be trained in loyalty to the State and the public school was the institution to plant fervent loyalty and patriotism. Like many other American educators of his time, he admired and copied the Prussian educational system.”
A staunch opponent of private education, Harris wanted public education centralized in every way possible and used his influence to work toward that goal. He was unhappy that local education made it difficult to exploit the schools to indoctrinate children into accepting their proper role in society. His goal was shared by the Nationalist Clubs. The Lynn, Massachusetts, club persuaded the state legislature to require attendance at school until 15 years of age and to increase the school year from 20 to 35 weeks. John Taylor Gatto, an outspoken critic of government education, notes that Harris was one of the main proponents of using government schooling to indoctrinate and not educate. Gatto, in a speech on education, “Confederacy of Dunces: The Tyranny of Compulsory Education,” quotes Harris: “Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom.” Gatto continues: “This is not an accident, Harris explains, but the ‘result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.’”
It is obvious why Harris was happy to join Bellamy’s crusade. In 1892 Harris got the NEA to support a National Public School Celebration, which would promote loyalty to both the state and its schools. It was decided that they would promote an agenda written by The Youth’s Companion. The NEA asked Bellamy to be the chairman of the celebration. At the main event he gave a speech that showed the importance of public education in the task of political indoctrination. He told the audience, “the training of citizens in the common knowledge and the common duties of citizenship belongs irrevocably to the State.” Bellamy, like his cousin, wanted to use government schools to help promote a socialist agenda. He felt that one way of encouraging this agenda would be the teaching of state loyalty. To this end he wrote a pledge, which students across the country were asked to take. With a few minor changes this pledge is what is now called the Pledge of Allegiance. (According to Black’s Law Dictionary, “allegiance” is an “Obligation of fidelity and obedience to government in consideration for protection that government gives.”)
Bellamy attempted to accomplish several goals with his Pledge of Allegiance. He saw it as a means of inculcating support for a centralized national government over the federalist system of the Founding Fathers. He was particularly troubled by the idea that the individual states formed the federal government, fearing that secession from the union might be seen as legitimate after all. He kept in mind the “Oath of Allegiance,” which was forced on the South after the Civil War. Baer quotes Bellamy as saying: “The true reason for allegiance to the Flag is the ‘republic for which it stands.’ . . . And what does that vast thing, the Republic, mean? It is the concise political word for the Nation—the One Nation which the Civil War was fought to prove. To make that One Nation idea clear, we must specify that it is indivisible, as Webster and Lincoln used to repeat in their great speeches.”
Ford’s Youth’s Companion first published Bellamy’s Pledge on September 8, 1892, in its original format: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Bellamy’s widow said he lamented that he couldn’t use the motto of the French Revolution, “liberty, fraternity, and equality,” instead. He was tempted to use the phrase, but thought that it was “too fanciful” and that its use was “thousands of years off in realization.”
The Youth’s Companion actively promoted the Pledge and loyalty to the government. At the time it was uncommon for a school to fly a flag outside its premises; that practice was almost exclusively associated with military bases. But during its campaign The Youth’s Companion sold thousands of flags for use at public schools.
Baer says Francis Bellamy acknowledged that his Pledge put forth the ideas of cousin Edward. Francis originally toyed with the idea of making the Pledge more openly socialistic, but decided that if he did so it would never be accepted.
The reason that elected officials swear an oath to the Constitution is clear. And the reason that Francis Bellamy wrote his pledge is also clear. Bellamy’s goal was not to inculcate the values of Jefferson and Adams. Instead, his desire was to promote the socialist utopianism of his cousin Edward.
The U.S. Constitution is anathema to socialists of all types. It is a roadblock to be circumvented. That Edward Bellamy understood this can be seen in his comparison of the written U.S. Constitution and the unwritten English one: “England’s Constitution readily admits of constant though gradual modification. Our American Constitution does not readily admit of such change. England can thus move into Socialism almost imperceptibly. Our Constitution being largely individualistic must be changed to admit of Socialism, and each change necessitates a political crisis” (quoted in Rose L. Martin, Fabian Freeway, p. 136).
The British Fabian socialist Ramsay MacDonald came to the same conclusion after a visit to the United States. In a speech printed in the February 1898 Fabian News he said: “The great bar to progress [in the United States] is the written constitutions, Federal and State.”
When an oath for schoolchildren was being contemplated the socialists knew exactly what they were doing.
Article printed from The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty: http://www.thefreemanonline.org
URL to article: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-pledge-versus-the-oath/
URLs in this post:
[1] www.vineyard.net/vineyard/history/pdgech0.htm: http://www.vineyard.net/vineyard/history/pdgech0.htm
The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty
http://www.thefreemanonline.org
The Pledge versus the Oath
by James Peron • May 2001 • Vol. 51/Issue 5
When George W. Bush became president last January, he struck a familiar pose. Raising his right hand before the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he swore to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The oath serves to remind us that the United States is a constitutional republic with a federal system. The oath also reminds us that the Constitution is the cornerstone of the American system. The government is supposed to be bound by the Constitution. As such, government is not omnipotent but strictly limited to the functions and purposes enumerated in the Constitution. Legislation, regardless of how popular, is supposed to be consistent with it, and any laws that conflict with it are invalid.
Behind the Constitution are specific principles that America’s Founders consciously held and promoted. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is, for all practical purposes, the birth certificate of the United States. In it Jefferson outlined the principles of the Founders. These principles have a long and honorable history. (See my article “The Declaration of Independence: It’s Greek to Me,” Ideas on Liberty, August 2000.) But the Founders realized that it was impractical, and unnecessary, to expect the American people to understand that history and philosophy. The Declaration and the Constitution were all that Americans needed to understand. If the people were loyal to the Constitution, then the Republic was safe.
Of course there have been individuals who were opposed to the Founders’ philosophy and opposed to a constitutional republic with limited powers. Almost from the beginning there were individuals who promoted a government of unlimited powers. They wanted the people to express their loyalty, not to the Constitution, but to the state.
The differences between the two ideologies is striking. If one swears an oath to the Constitution it implies limited government by definition. It also implies that individual rights are paramount in the American system of governance. But when one swears to support the government instead of the Constitution, those principles disappear.
Imagine if our elected officials, instead of swearing to uphold the Constitution, simply swore to support the government! At this point nothing the government does could be consistently challenged. There would be no limitations on the state or on its functions. Individual rights would be nonexistent. The entire philosophy of the Founders would be turned inside out. If one supports the Constitution, then individual rights are the foundation on which the enumerated powers of the government are based. If one, instead, swears allegiance to the government, then it is the foundation on which specific enumerated rights are granted. The first system supports a concept of natural rights that reside in the individual. The second is one of legal positivism, which says that rights are whatever the state grants.
The Founders wanted a government where the rights of the people come first. The function of government is simply to protect those pre-existing rights. Statism argues just the opposite. For the statist the government comes first and rights are privileges granted at the whim of the state. These two philosophies could not be further apart.
If we were to place in order the structure of the American system it would be:
The people and their natural rights. Individuals are endowed with certain rights that are theirs by nature. These include the rights to life, liberty, and justly acquired property.
The Declaration of Independence. This manifesto set out the basic beliefs of America’s Founders regarding rights and the nature of government.
The Constitution of the United States. This document, based on the principles clearly enunciated in the Declaration, established the method of proper government. It was not intended to explain the philosophy of government but only outline how it should operate. Powers were strictly enumerated while rights were not.
The Republic. The end result of all of this would be the American Republic itself.
The president-elect and our elected officials do not swear an oath to the Republic but to the Constitution. The Constitution is the cause, the Republic the effect. If the Constitution is ignored, then the Republic is lost. Support for the Republic that does not include fidelity to the Constitution leads to a loss of both the process and the outcome.
Pledge of Allegiance
Why is it, then, that so many American schoolchildren are required to swear allegiance to the flag and the Republic “for which it stands” rather than the Constitution? Millions of children start each school day with the Pledge of Allegiance: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Wouldn’t we be much safer as a Republic if the children learned to respect the Constitution? If we were to place the flag in the hierarchy above, it would follow the Republic. The flag is a symbol of the Republic. It seems odd to pledge allegiance to the flag and to the Republic while ignoring both the Declaration and the Constitution.
To understand why this reversal took place we need to look at the history of the Pledge of Allegiance itself. Most of us grew up with the Pledge, and we probably assumed that it was always part of the American culture. But that is not true. Even the current version is relatively new. The phrase “under God” was not in the original version; it was added only in 1954. The Pledge itself doesn’t go back farther than the 1890s. It’s a child of the socialist Progressive movement.
It was during the late 1800s that, for the first time, widespread advocacy of socialism and statism became popular in the United States. Numerous authors wrote novels promoting these doctrines. Among those novels were Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Bellamy wrote of a futuristic America where socialism reigned. In its first year of publication, 1888, the book sold 100,000 copies and eventually topped a million in print; it was translated into 20 languages. As a work of American fiction it was surpassed in the nineteenth century only by Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben Hur.
John Dewey, the great advocate of government schooling and a socialist, called Bellamy his “Great American Prophet” and said: “What Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to the anti-slavery movement Bellamy’s book may well be to the shaping of popular opinion for a new social order.” In fact Dewey took many of his socialist ideas for education and indoctrination from Bellamy. Historian John Baer said that Dewey “was ready to advocate Edward Bellamy’s type of education and to reform American society through ‘progressive education.’” Dewey was keenly interested in the Soviet Union and wrote articles praising the educational system imposed by the communists. (The material from Baer comes from his book The Pledge of Allegiance: A Centennial History, 1892-1992. See www.vineyard.net/vineyard/history/pdgech0.htm [1].)
In Looking Backward the main character, Julian West, falls asleep in 1887 only to awaken in the year 2000. He finds an America where the means of production are owned by the state and everyone earns equal income. Jobs are assigned by the government to citizen-conscripts, who must work for the state from the age of 21 until retirement at 45.
Edward Bellamy, along with his cousin Francis Bellamy, were the two major spokesmen for what they called “Nationalism,” by which they meant the nationalization of all industry under state control. Across America some 167 Nationalist Clubs were formed. In 1889 one of the Boston Nationalist Clubs formed an auxiliary called the Society for Christian Socialists. According to Baer, “The principles [of the Society] stated that economic rights and powers were gifts of God, not for the receiver’s use only, but for the benefit of all. All social, political and industrial relations should be based on the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, in the spirit of the teachings of Jesus Christ. Capitalism was not based on Christian love but on selfish individualism.”
Francis Bellamy became the vice president in charge of education for the Society. Other prominent members included Francis Willard, the leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and W.D.P. Bliss, a well-known minister.
The Bellamy cousins came from a long line of Baptist clergymen. Their grandfather had been a top aide to “The Great Awakening” evangelist Jonathan Edwards. Francis Bellamy was a seminary graduate and an ordained Baptist minister who openly preached socialism from the pulpit. But this led to conflicts with his congregation. One member, however, was enthusiastic about Bellamy’s socialist principles: Daniel Ford, editor of the religious publication The Youth’s Companion. Ford also was founder of Boston’s famed Ford Hall Forum.
Loyalty to the State
After Bellamy was relieved of his ministry, Ford offered him a position with his magazine. Together they continued to work with various advocates of socialism and decided that a program was needed to teach American youth loyalty to the state. They realized that the individualist tradition in America did not lend itself easily to the “patriotism” needed for the socialist state of Looking Backward.
Ford and Bellamy contacted the National Education Association (NEA), which was then headed by William Torrey Harris. Harris, according to Baer, “believed in a state controlled public education system. As the leading Hegelian philosopher in the United States he believed that the State had a central role in society. He believed youth should be trained in loyalty to the State and the public school was the institution to plant fervent loyalty and patriotism. Like many other American educators of his time, he admired and copied the Prussian educational system.”
A staunch opponent of private education, Harris wanted public education centralized in every way possible and used his influence to work toward that goal. He was unhappy that local education made it difficult to exploit the schools to indoctrinate children into accepting their proper role in society. His goal was shared by the Nationalist Clubs. The Lynn, Massachusetts, club persuaded the state legislature to require attendance at school until 15 years of age and to increase the school year from 20 to 35 weeks. John Taylor Gatto, an outspoken critic of government education, notes that Harris was one of the main proponents of using government schooling to indoctrinate and not educate. Gatto, in a speech on education, “Confederacy of Dunces: The Tyranny of Compulsory Education,” quotes Harris: “Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom.” Gatto continues: “This is not an accident, Harris explains, but the ‘result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.’”
It is obvious why Harris was happy to join Bellamy’s crusade. In 1892 Harris got the NEA to support a National Public School Celebration, which would promote loyalty to both the state and its schools. It was decided that they would promote an agenda written by The Youth’s Companion. The NEA asked Bellamy to be the chairman of the celebration. At the main event he gave a speech that showed the importance of public education in the task of political indoctrination. He told the audience, “the training of citizens in the common knowledge and the common duties of citizenship belongs irrevocably to the State.” Bellamy, like his cousin, wanted to use government schools to help promote a socialist agenda. He felt that one way of encouraging this agenda would be the teaching of state loyalty. To this end he wrote a pledge, which students across the country were asked to take. With a few minor changes this pledge is what is now called the Pledge of Allegiance. (According to Black’s Law Dictionary, “allegiance” is an “Obligation of fidelity and obedience to government in consideration for protection that government gives.”)
Bellamy attempted to accomplish several goals with his Pledge of Allegiance. He saw it as a means of inculcating support for a centralized national government over the federalist system of the Founding Fathers. He was particularly troubled by the idea that the individual states formed the federal government, fearing that secession from the union might be seen as legitimate after all. He kept in mind the “Oath of Allegiance,” which was forced on the South after the Civil War. Baer quotes Bellamy as saying: “The true reason for allegiance to the Flag is the ‘republic for which it stands.’ . . . And what does that vast thing, the Republic, mean? It is the concise political word for the Nation—the One Nation which the Civil War was fought to prove. To make that One Nation idea clear, we must specify that it is indivisible, as Webster and Lincoln used to repeat in their great speeches.”
Ford’s Youth’s Companion first published Bellamy’s Pledge on September 8, 1892, in its original format: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Bellamy’s widow said he lamented that he couldn’t use the motto of the French Revolution, “liberty, fraternity, and equality,” instead. He was tempted to use the phrase, but thought that it was “too fanciful” and that its use was “thousands of years off in realization.”
The Youth’s Companion actively promoted the Pledge and loyalty to the government. At the time it was uncommon for a school to fly a flag outside its premises; that practice was almost exclusively associated with military bases. But during its campaign The Youth’s Companion sold thousands of flags for use at public schools.
Baer says Francis Bellamy acknowledged that his Pledge put forth the ideas of cousin Edward. Francis originally toyed with the idea of making the Pledge more openly socialistic, but decided that if he did so it would never be accepted.
The reason that elected officials swear an oath to the Constitution is clear. And the reason that Francis Bellamy wrote his pledge is also clear. Bellamy’s goal was not to inculcate the values of Jefferson and Adams. Instead, his desire was to promote the socialist utopianism of his cousin Edward.
The U.S. Constitution is anathema to socialists of all types. It is a roadblock to be circumvented. That Edward Bellamy understood this can be seen in his comparison of the written U.S. Constitution and the unwritten English one: “England’s Constitution readily admits of constant though gradual modification. Our American Constitution does not readily admit of such change. England can thus move into Socialism almost imperceptibly. Our Constitution being largely individualistic must be changed to admit of Socialism, and each change necessitates a political crisis” (quoted in Rose L. Martin, Fabian Freeway, p. 136).
The British Fabian socialist Ramsay MacDonald came to the same conclusion after a visit to the United States. In a speech printed in the February 1898 Fabian News he said: “The great bar to progress [in the United States] is the written constitutions, Federal and State.”
When an oath for schoolchildren was being contemplated the socialists knew exactly what they were doing.
Article printed from The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty: http://www.thefreemanonline.org
URL to article: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-pledge-versus-the-oath/
URLs in this post:
[1] www.vineyard.net/vineyard/history/pdgech0.htm: http://www.vineyard.net/vineyard/history/pdgech0.htm
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
28 Signs That U.S. Public Schools Are Rapidly Being Turned Into Indoctrination Centers And Prison Camps
http://endoftheamericandream.com
It has been said that children are our future, and right now the vast majority of our children are being "educated" in public schools that are rapidly being turned into indoctrination centers and prison camps. Our children desperately need to focus on the basics such as reading, writing and math, but instead a whole host of politicians, "education officials" and teachers are constantly injecting as much propaganda as they possibly can into classroom instruction.
Instead of learning how to think, our children are continually being told what to think. Not only that, our children are also being trained how to live as subservient slaves in a Big Brother police state. Today, nearly everything that children do in public schools is watched, monitored, recorded and tracked. Independent thought and free expression are greatly discouraged and are often cracked down upon harshly.
If students get "out of line", instead of being sent to see the principal they are often handcuffed, arrested and taken to the police station. In addition, law enforcement authorities are using weapons such as pepper spray and tasers against young students in our public schools more than ever before.
Children in U.S. public schools are not learning how to live as strong individuals in the "land of the free and the home of the brave". Rather, they are being trained how to serve a Big Brother police state where control freaks run their entire lives. If we continue to allow all of the liberty and freedom to be systematically drained out of our school children, then there is not going to be much hope for the future of this nation.
The following are 28 signs that U.S public schools are being turned into indoctrination centers and prison camps....
#1 All 50 U.S. states are now constructing federally-mandated databases that will track the behavior and performance of all public school students in America throughout their entire school careers. According to the New York Post, the Obama administration wants to use the information that is gathered for a wide array of purposes....
The administration wants this data to include much more than name, address and test scores. According to the National Data Collection Model, the government should collect information on health-care history, family income and family voting status. In its view, public schools offer a golden opportunity to mine reams of data from a captive audience.
#2 All over America, school children are being immersed in the radical green agenda. In fact, in many areas of the country children are actively trained to watch how their parents behave and to correct them when they are being "environmentally unfriendly". The following is from a recent New York Times article about this phenomenon....
“I have very, very environmentally conscious children — more so than me, I’m embarrassed to say,” said Ms. Ross, a social worker in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. “They’re on my case about getting a hybrid car. They want me to replace all the light bulbs in the house with energy-saving bulbs.”
Ms. Ross’s children are part of what experts say is a growing army of “eco-kids” — steeped in environmentalism at school, in houses of worship, through scouting and even via popular culture — who try to hold their parents accountable at home. Amid their pride in their children’s zeal for all things green, the grown-ups sometimes end up feeling like scofflaws under the watchful eye of the pint-size eco-police, whose demands grow ever greater, and more expensive.
Later on in that same article, a district superintendent is quoted as saying that they try to inject the green agenda wherever they can into the curriculum....
“We’re trying to integrate it into anything where it naturally fits,” said Jackie Taylor, the district’s superintendent. “It might be in a math lesson. How much water are you really using? How can you tell? Teachers look for avenues in almost everything they teach.”
#3 One 13-year-old student down in New Mexico was recently handcuffed and forcibly removed from a classroom just because he burped in class. In all, over 200 students in Bernalillo County "have been handcuffed and arrested in the last three years for non-violent misdemeanors".
#4 All over America, students are being taught that the First Amendment does not apply in public schools. Expressions of free speech in school are often cracked down upon very hard. For example, one group of high school athletes was recently suspended for "Tebowing" in the hallways of their school.
#5 Many public school sex education classes have totally crossed the line. Instead of just "educating" children about sex, many sex ed courses are now "indoctrinating" children about sex. One recent example of this was detailed in the New York Times....
IMAGINE you have a 10- or 11-year-old child, just entering a public middle school. How would you feel if, as part of a class ostensibly about the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, he and his classmates were given “risk cards” that graphically named a variety of solitary and mutual sex acts? Or if, in another lesson, he was encouraged to disregard what you told him about sex, and to rely instead on teachers and health clinic staff members?
That prospect would horrify most parents. But such lessons are part of a middle-school curriculum that Dennis M. Walcott, the New York City schools chancellor, has recommended for his system’s newly mandated sex-education classes. There is a parental “opt out,” but it is very limited, covering classes on contraception and birth control.
#6 Sadly, this "sexual indoctrination" appears to be working. According to one recent study, sexual conduct between teen girls in the United States is now at the highest level ever recorded.
#7 Putting kids in jail has become standard operating procedure in the United States. Today, nearly one-third of all Americans are arrested by police by the time they reach the age of 23. At this point, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and the largest total prison population on the entire globe, and yet our society just continues to become more unstable.
#8 In some U.S. schools, RFID chips are now being used to monitor the attendance and movements of children while they are at school. The following is how one article recently described a program that has just been instituted at a preschool in California....
Upon arriving in the morning, according to the Associated Press, each student at the CCC-George Miller preschool will don a jersey with a stitched in RFID chip. As the kids go about the business of learning, sensors in the school will record their movements, collecting attendance for both classes and meals. Officials from the school have claimed they're only recording information they're required to provide while receiving federal funds for their Headstart program.
#9 Increasingly, incidents of misbehavior at many U.S. schools are being treated as very serious crimes. For example, when a little girl kissed a little boy at one Florida elementary school recently, it was considered to be a "possible sex crime" and the police were called out.
#10 Even 5-year-old children are now being handcuffed and arrested by police in public schools. The following is from a recent article that described what happened to one very young student in Stockton, California earlier this year....
Earlier this year, a Stockton student was handcuffed with zip ties on his hands and feet, forced to go to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and was charged with battery on a police officer. That student was 5 years old.
#11 A teenager in suburban Dallas was recently forced to take on a part-time job after being ticketed for using bad language in one high school classroom. The original ticket was for $340, but additional fees have raised the total bill to $637.
#12 It is not just high school kids that are being ticketed by police. In Texas the crackdown extends all the way down to elementary school students. In fact, it has been reported that Texas police gave "1,000 tickets" to elementary school kids over a recent six year period.
#13 Our children are being programmed to accept the fact that they will be watched and monitored constantly. For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is spending large amounts of money to install surveillance cameras in the cafeterias of public schools all across the nation so that government control freaks can closely monitor what our children are eating.
#14 If you can believe it, a "certified TSA official" was recently brought in to oversee student searches at the Santa Fe High School prom.
#15 Last year, a 17 year-old honor student in North Carolina named Ashley Smithwick accidentally took her father's lunch with her to school. It contained a small paring knife which he would use to slice up apples. So what happened to this standout student when the school discovered this? The school suspended her for the rest of the year and the police charged her with a misdemeanor.
#16 According to blogger Alexander Higgins, students in kindergarten and the 1st grade in the state of New Jersey are now required by law to participate "in monthly anti-terrorism drills". The following is an excerpt from a letter that he recently received from the school where his child attends....
Each month a school must conduct one fire drill and one security drill which may be a lockdown, bomb threat, evacuation, active shooter, or shelter-in place drill. All schools are now required by law to implement this procedure.
So who in the world ever decided that it would be a good idea for 1st grade students to endure "lockdown" and "active shooter" drills? To get an idea of what these kinds of drills are like, just check out this video.
#17 In some U.S. schools, armed cops accompanied by police dogs actually conduct surprise raids with their guns drawn. In this video, you can actually see police officers aiming their guns at school children as the students are lined up facing the wall.
#18 The U.S. government is now encouraging children to spy on their parents as part of the "war on terror". If a school official hears that a parent has said the "wrong thing" at home, that parent could potentially get labeled as a "potential terrorist".
#19 The U.S. government has also been increasingly using "polls" and "surveys" as tools to gather information about all of us. In previous articles, I have noted how government authorities seems particularly interested in our children. According to Mike Adams of Natural News, the CDC is starting to call parents all over the U.S. to question them about the vaccination status of their children....
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which has been comprehensively exposed as a vaccine propaganda organization promoting the interests of drug companies, is now engaged in a household surveillance program that involves calling U.S. households and intimidating parents into producing child immunization records. As part of what it deems a National Immunization Survey(NIS), the CDC is sending letters to U.S. households, alerting them that they will be called by "NORC at the University of Chicago" and that households should "have your child's immunization records handy when answering our questions."
You can see a copy of the letter that the CDC has been sending out to selected parents right here.
#20 Last year, a high school student in Southern California was suspended for two days because he had private conversations with his classmates during which he discussed Christianity. He was also banned from bringing his Bible to school ever again.
#21 In early 2010, a 12 year old girl in New York was arrested by police and marched out of her school in handcuffs just because she doodled on her desk. "I love my friends Abby and Faith" was what she reportedly wrote on her desk.
#22 Back in 2009, one 8 year old boy in Massachusetts was sent home from school and was forced to undergo a psychological evaluation because he drew a picture of Jesus on the cross.
#23 A little over a year ago, a 6 year old girl in Florida was handcuffed and sent to a mental facility after throwing temper tantrums at her elementary school.
#24 Other students in Florida have actually been arrested for bringing a plastic butter knife to school, for throwing an eraser, and for drawing a picture of a gun.
#25 Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has announced that school officials can search the cell phones and laptops of public school students if there are "reasonable grounds for suspecting that the search will turn up evidence that the student has violated or is violating either the law or the rules of the school."
#26 Increasingly, authorities are using "pre-crime" technology on our children in order to identify potential problem individuals. For example, the Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice has announced that it will begin using analysis software to predict crime by young delinquents and will place "potential offenders" in specific prevention and education programs.
#27 At one public high school in McAllen, Texas earlier this year, students were ordered to stand up and recite the Mexican national anthem and Mexican pledge of allegiance. School authorities have failed to explain how reciting a pledge of allegiance to a foreign nation has any educational value whatsoever.
#28 All over the United States, tasers are increasingly being used to "subdue" high school students. The following are two very shocking examples of this that were cited in a recent Alternet article....
On September 29, Keshana Wilson, 14, was shocked in the groin with a Taser while shoved against a parked car by Allentown, Pennsylvania police officer Jason Ammary, just outside her high school. The incident was captured on surveillance footage. Allentown police argue that the officer’s behavior was justified because “Wilson was cursing and inciting a group of people” as well as resisting arrest. While defending his fellow officer, Allentown Assistant Police Chief Joseph Hanna argued, “officers are trained to use the justified amount of force dictated by the actions of the resister, not their age or gender.”
Zahrod Jackson, a 17-year-old student, “was eligible to receive free lunch” at Middletown High School in Connecticut, according to a June report in the Middletown Press. Last September, Jackson exited the cafeteria line with a slice of pizza, but returned for a beef patty after spotting both pizza and a beef patty on the tray of a student who also receives free lunch. A screaming match ensued between Jackson and a cafeteria worker who accused the teen of stealing. The commotion quickly caught the eyes of SROs Kurt Scrivo, who “threw Jackson onto the cafeteria floor,” and Alex Rodriguez, who Tasered him five times.
So is all of this brutal repression helping our children get a better education?
Of course not.
The truth is that the American population is rapidly being "dumbed-down".
Today, American 15-year-olds do not even rank in the top half of all advanced nations when it comes to math or science literacy.
Not only that, our public schools are also producing kids that are woefully unprepared for college. The United States once had the highest proportion of young adults with post-secondary degrees in the world. Today, the U.S. has fallen to 12th.
Our public education system absolutely stinks and it is getting worse all the time.
I went to public schools all of my life, but I would never want to send my children to public schools now. They are going downhill really, really fast.
Just sending different politicians to Washington D.C. is not going to change the course of this nation. We need a complete political, economic, educational, moral, spiritual and philosophical renewal. Right now America is becoming a little more like North Korea every day. If we continue on this path there will be absolutely no future for our children and our grandchildren.
It is absolutely disgusting that our public schools are being transformed into indoctrination centers and prison camps. This is not what America is supposed to be about.
If we do not choose to stand up and fight for the future of this country, then we are going to get the future that we deserve.
Full article:
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/28-signs-that-u-s-public-schools-are-rapidly-being-turned-into-indoctrination-centers-and-prison-camps
It has been said that children are our future, and right now the vast majority of our children are being "educated" in public schools that are rapidly being turned into indoctrination centers and prison camps. Our children desperately need to focus on the basics such as reading, writing and math, but instead a whole host of politicians, "education officials" and teachers are constantly injecting as much propaganda as they possibly can into classroom instruction.
Instead of learning how to think, our children are continually being told what to think. Not only that, our children are also being trained how to live as subservient slaves in a Big Brother police state. Today, nearly everything that children do in public schools is watched, monitored, recorded and tracked. Independent thought and free expression are greatly discouraged and are often cracked down upon harshly.
If students get "out of line", instead of being sent to see the principal they are often handcuffed, arrested and taken to the police station. In addition, law enforcement authorities are using weapons such as pepper spray and tasers against young students in our public schools more than ever before.
Children in U.S. public schools are not learning how to live as strong individuals in the "land of the free and the home of the brave". Rather, they are being trained how to serve a Big Brother police state where control freaks run their entire lives. If we continue to allow all of the liberty and freedom to be systematically drained out of our school children, then there is not going to be much hope for the future of this nation.
The following are 28 signs that U.S public schools are being turned into indoctrination centers and prison camps....
#1 All 50 U.S. states are now constructing federally-mandated databases that will track the behavior and performance of all public school students in America throughout their entire school careers. According to the New York Post, the Obama administration wants to use the information that is gathered for a wide array of purposes....
The administration wants this data to include much more than name, address and test scores. According to the National Data Collection Model, the government should collect information on health-care history, family income and family voting status. In its view, public schools offer a golden opportunity to mine reams of data from a captive audience.
#2 All over America, school children are being immersed in the radical green agenda. In fact, in many areas of the country children are actively trained to watch how their parents behave and to correct them when they are being "environmentally unfriendly". The following is from a recent New York Times article about this phenomenon....
“I have very, very environmentally conscious children — more so than me, I’m embarrassed to say,” said Ms. Ross, a social worker in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. “They’re on my case about getting a hybrid car. They want me to replace all the light bulbs in the house with energy-saving bulbs.”
Ms. Ross’s children are part of what experts say is a growing army of “eco-kids” — steeped in environmentalism at school, in houses of worship, through scouting and even via popular culture — who try to hold their parents accountable at home. Amid their pride in their children’s zeal for all things green, the grown-ups sometimes end up feeling like scofflaws under the watchful eye of the pint-size eco-police, whose demands grow ever greater, and more expensive.
Later on in that same article, a district superintendent is quoted as saying that they try to inject the green agenda wherever they can into the curriculum....
“We’re trying to integrate it into anything where it naturally fits,” said Jackie Taylor, the district’s superintendent. “It might be in a math lesson. How much water are you really using? How can you tell? Teachers look for avenues in almost everything they teach.”
#3 One 13-year-old student down in New Mexico was recently handcuffed and forcibly removed from a classroom just because he burped in class. In all, over 200 students in Bernalillo County "have been handcuffed and arrested in the last three years for non-violent misdemeanors".
#4 All over America, students are being taught that the First Amendment does not apply in public schools. Expressions of free speech in school are often cracked down upon very hard. For example, one group of high school athletes was recently suspended for "Tebowing" in the hallways of their school.
#5 Many public school sex education classes have totally crossed the line. Instead of just "educating" children about sex, many sex ed courses are now "indoctrinating" children about sex. One recent example of this was detailed in the New York Times....
IMAGINE you have a 10- or 11-year-old child, just entering a public middle school. How would you feel if, as part of a class ostensibly about the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, he and his classmates were given “risk cards” that graphically named a variety of solitary and mutual sex acts? Or if, in another lesson, he was encouraged to disregard what you told him about sex, and to rely instead on teachers and health clinic staff members?
That prospect would horrify most parents. But such lessons are part of a middle-school curriculum that Dennis M. Walcott, the New York City schools chancellor, has recommended for his system’s newly mandated sex-education classes. There is a parental “opt out,” but it is very limited, covering classes on contraception and birth control.
#6 Sadly, this "sexual indoctrination" appears to be working. According to one recent study, sexual conduct between teen girls in the United States is now at the highest level ever recorded.
#7 Putting kids in jail has become standard operating procedure in the United States. Today, nearly one-third of all Americans are arrested by police by the time they reach the age of 23. At this point, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and the largest total prison population on the entire globe, and yet our society just continues to become more unstable.
#8 In some U.S. schools, RFID chips are now being used to monitor the attendance and movements of children while they are at school. The following is how one article recently described a program that has just been instituted at a preschool in California....
Upon arriving in the morning, according to the Associated Press, each student at the CCC-George Miller preschool will don a jersey with a stitched in RFID chip. As the kids go about the business of learning, sensors in the school will record their movements, collecting attendance for both classes and meals. Officials from the school have claimed they're only recording information they're required to provide while receiving federal funds for their Headstart program.
#9 Increasingly, incidents of misbehavior at many U.S. schools are being treated as very serious crimes. For example, when a little girl kissed a little boy at one Florida elementary school recently, it was considered to be a "possible sex crime" and the police were called out.
#10 Even 5-year-old children are now being handcuffed and arrested by police in public schools. The following is from a recent article that described what happened to one very young student in Stockton, California earlier this year....
Earlier this year, a Stockton student was handcuffed with zip ties on his hands and feet, forced to go to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and was charged with battery on a police officer. That student was 5 years old.
#11 A teenager in suburban Dallas was recently forced to take on a part-time job after being ticketed for using bad language in one high school classroom. The original ticket was for $340, but additional fees have raised the total bill to $637.
#12 It is not just high school kids that are being ticketed by police. In Texas the crackdown extends all the way down to elementary school students. In fact, it has been reported that Texas police gave "1,000 tickets" to elementary school kids over a recent six year period.
#13 Our children are being programmed to accept the fact that they will be watched and monitored constantly. For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is spending large amounts of money to install surveillance cameras in the cafeterias of public schools all across the nation so that government control freaks can closely monitor what our children are eating.
#14 If you can believe it, a "certified TSA official" was recently brought in to oversee student searches at the Santa Fe High School prom.
#15 Last year, a 17 year-old honor student in North Carolina named Ashley Smithwick accidentally took her father's lunch with her to school. It contained a small paring knife which he would use to slice up apples. So what happened to this standout student when the school discovered this? The school suspended her for the rest of the year and the police charged her with a misdemeanor.
#16 According to blogger Alexander Higgins, students in kindergarten and the 1st grade in the state of New Jersey are now required by law to participate "in monthly anti-terrorism drills". The following is an excerpt from a letter that he recently received from the school where his child attends....
Each month a school must conduct one fire drill and one security drill which may be a lockdown, bomb threat, evacuation, active shooter, or shelter-in place drill. All schools are now required by law to implement this procedure.
So who in the world ever decided that it would be a good idea for 1st grade students to endure "lockdown" and "active shooter" drills? To get an idea of what these kinds of drills are like, just check out this video.
#17 In some U.S. schools, armed cops accompanied by police dogs actually conduct surprise raids with their guns drawn. In this video, you can actually see police officers aiming their guns at school children as the students are lined up facing the wall.
#18 The U.S. government is now encouraging children to spy on their parents as part of the "war on terror". If a school official hears that a parent has said the "wrong thing" at home, that parent could potentially get labeled as a "potential terrorist".
#19 The U.S. government has also been increasingly using "polls" and "surveys" as tools to gather information about all of us. In previous articles, I have noted how government authorities seems particularly interested in our children. According to Mike Adams of Natural News, the CDC is starting to call parents all over the U.S. to question them about the vaccination status of their children....
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which has been comprehensively exposed as a vaccine propaganda organization promoting the interests of drug companies, is now engaged in a household surveillance program that involves calling U.S. households and intimidating parents into producing child immunization records. As part of what it deems a National Immunization Survey(NIS), the CDC is sending letters to U.S. households, alerting them that they will be called by "NORC at the University of Chicago" and that households should "have your child's immunization records handy when answering our questions."
You can see a copy of the letter that the CDC has been sending out to selected parents right here.
#20 Last year, a high school student in Southern California was suspended for two days because he had private conversations with his classmates during which he discussed Christianity. He was also banned from bringing his Bible to school ever again.
#21 In early 2010, a 12 year old girl in New York was arrested by police and marched out of her school in handcuffs just because she doodled on her desk. "I love my friends Abby and Faith" was what she reportedly wrote on her desk.
#22 Back in 2009, one 8 year old boy in Massachusetts was sent home from school and was forced to undergo a psychological evaluation because he drew a picture of Jesus on the cross.
#23 A little over a year ago, a 6 year old girl in Florida was handcuffed and sent to a mental facility after throwing temper tantrums at her elementary school.
#24 Other students in Florida have actually been arrested for bringing a plastic butter knife to school, for throwing an eraser, and for drawing a picture of a gun.
#25 Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has announced that school officials can search the cell phones and laptops of public school students if there are "reasonable grounds for suspecting that the search will turn up evidence that the student has violated or is violating either the law or the rules of the school."
#26 Increasingly, authorities are using "pre-crime" technology on our children in order to identify potential problem individuals. For example, the Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice has announced that it will begin using analysis software to predict crime by young delinquents and will place "potential offenders" in specific prevention and education programs.
#27 At one public high school in McAllen, Texas earlier this year, students were ordered to stand up and recite the Mexican national anthem and Mexican pledge of allegiance. School authorities have failed to explain how reciting a pledge of allegiance to a foreign nation has any educational value whatsoever.
#28 All over the United States, tasers are increasingly being used to "subdue" high school students. The following are two very shocking examples of this that were cited in a recent Alternet article....
On September 29, Keshana Wilson, 14, was shocked in the groin with a Taser while shoved against a parked car by Allentown, Pennsylvania police officer Jason Ammary, just outside her high school. The incident was captured on surveillance footage. Allentown police argue that the officer’s behavior was justified because “Wilson was cursing and inciting a group of people” as well as resisting arrest. While defending his fellow officer, Allentown Assistant Police Chief Joseph Hanna argued, “officers are trained to use the justified amount of force dictated by the actions of the resister, not their age or gender.”
Zahrod Jackson, a 17-year-old student, “was eligible to receive free lunch” at Middletown High School in Connecticut, according to a June report in the Middletown Press. Last September, Jackson exited the cafeteria line with a slice of pizza, but returned for a beef patty after spotting both pizza and a beef patty on the tray of a student who also receives free lunch. A screaming match ensued between Jackson and a cafeteria worker who accused the teen of stealing. The commotion quickly caught the eyes of SROs Kurt Scrivo, who “threw Jackson onto the cafeteria floor,” and Alex Rodriguez, who Tasered him five times.
So is all of this brutal repression helping our children get a better education?
Of course not.
The truth is that the American population is rapidly being "dumbed-down".
Today, American 15-year-olds do not even rank in the top half of all advanced nations when it comes to math or science literacy.
Not only that, our public schools are also producing kids that are woefully unprepared for college. The United States once had the highest proportion of young adults with post-secondary degrees in the world. Today, the U.S. has fallen to 12th.
Our public education system absolutely stinks and it is getting worse all the time.
I went to public schools all of my life, but I would never want to send my children to public schools now. They are going downhill really, really fast.
Just sending different politicians to Washington D.C. is not going to change the course of this nation. We need a complete political, economic, educational, moral, spiritual and philosophical renewal. Right now America is becoming a little more like North Korea every day. If we continue on this path there will be absolutely no future for our children and our grandchildren.
It is absolutely disgusting that our public schools are being transformed into indoctrination centers and prison camps. This is not what America is supposed to be about.
If we do not choose to stand up and fight for the future of this country, then we are going to get the future that we deserve.
Full article:
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/28-signs-that-u-s-public-schools-are-rapidly-being-turned-into-indoctrination-centers-and-prison-camps
The 5-Minute Speech Which Got Judge Napolitano Fired from Fox News
The 5-Minute Speech Which Got Judge Napolitano Fired from Fox News
www.washingtonsblog.com
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/02/the-5-minute-speech-which-got-judge-napolitano-fired-from-fox-news.html
www.washingtonsblog.com
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/02/the-5-minute-speech-which-got-judge-napolitano-fired-from-fox-news.html
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
US MILITARY OPERATIONS GET AUTHORITY FROM THE UN NOT THE CONGRESS
Admission by Sec Panetta and Gen Dempsy that Obama and the US Military do not seek or need Congressional approval (as called for in the US Constitution).
Instead they follow the UN, international approval, and international law.
Further evidence that our US Military has become nothing more than a NWO entity for enforcement globalist interests.
Watch it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXP-5u9Ug9I
Instead they follow the UN, international approval, and international law.
Further evidence that our US Military has become nothing more than a NWO entity for enforcement globalist interests.
Watch it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXP-5u9Ug9I
Impeachment Called for Obama's Unconstitutional Wars
Resolution calls for Obama's Impeachment if he continues unlawful, unconstitutional use of military force.
H. CON. RES. 107
Expressing the sense of Congress that the use of offensive military force by a President without prior and clear authorization of an Act of Congress constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under article II, section 4 of the Constitution.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112%3AH.CON.RES.107
H. CON. RES. 107
Expressing the sense of Congress that the use of offensive military force by a President without prior and clear authorization of an Act of Congress constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under article II, section 4 of the Constitution.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112%3AH.CON.RES.107
Friday, March 02, 2012
11 Reasons To Get Your Kids Out Of The Government Schools
11 Reasons To Get Your Kids Out Of The Government Schools
Michael Snyder
February 28, 2012
It should be painfully obvious to everyone by now that it is time to get all of our kids out of the government schools. The public school system in the United States has been dramatically declining for a long time, and in most areas of the country the public schools are open sewers at this point. Yes, there are some U.S. public schools that are still very good and that do a decent job of preparing our young people for their adult lives. But those good schools are the exception to the rule. Hopefully the school shooting that just happened in Ohio will be a wake up call to millions of parents out there. Drugs, sex and violence are rampant in American public schools today. The "teachers" are endlessly pushing specific political and social agendas down the throats of our kids, and the skills that our children really need such as reading, writing and mathematics are often badly neglected. Hopefully we can get more parents educated about what is really going on in these schools. After all, why would any parents want to send their children into an environment that is going to be highly destructive for them for six to eight hours a day?
Sadly, "destructive" is not too hard a word to use for the environment in these public schools. I went to public schools all my life, and they were absolutely horrible. Unfortunately, they have gotten even worse since the time that I left them.
The following are 11 reasons to get your kids out of the government schools....
#1 You Could Be Arrested For Something That Your Child Does
Yes, you read that correctly. If your child writes a story or draws a picture which a teacher or an administrator takes the wrong way, you could end up in jail.
The following example is from thestar.com....
A Kitchener father is angry at police after he was arrested at his child’s school and later strip-searched at the police station, all because his 4-year-old daughter drew a picture of a gun in class.
“I’m picking up my kids and then, next thing you know, I’m locked up,” Jessie Sansone, 26, said of his ordeal on Wednesday. “I was in shock. This is completely insane.”
The school principal, police and child welfare officials, however, all stand by their actions. They say they had to investigate to determine whether there was a gun in Sansone’s house that children had access to.
#2 Your Child Could Be Arrested While At School For Just About Anything These Days
As I have written about previously, children all over the United States are being arrested by police in government school classrooms for some absolutely crazy things. Just check out the following examples....
*A 12-year-old girl named Sarah Bustamantes was recently arrested for spraying herself with perfume at a public school in Texas.
*A 13-year-old kid attending a public school in Albuquerque, New Mexico was recently arrested by police for burping in class.
*A 12-year-old girl at a school in Forest Hills, New York was marched out of her public school in handcuffs by police just because she doodled on her desk. "I love my friends Abby and Faith" was what she reportedly scribbled on her desk.
*When a little girl recently kissed a little boy at one Florida elementary school, it was considered to be a "possible sex crime" and the police were called out.
#3 Your Child Might Be Bodily Harmed By Security Thugs
All over the nation, public schools students are being bodily injured (sometimes permanently) by school security thugs. The following are a couple of examples....
*A security thug at one school in California actually fractured the arm of one 16-year-old girl because she left some crumbs on the floor after cleaning up some cake that she had spilled.
*In Allentown, Pennsylvania a 14-year-old girl was tasered in the groin area by a school security thug even though she had put up her hands in the air to surrender to him.
#4 Virtually Everything That Your Child Does At School Is Being Put Into A Database Somewhere
As I described in a previous article, public schools (in conjunction with the federal government) have become obsessed with watching, monitoring and recording the activities of our kids.
According to the New York Post, the Obama administration is planning a vast new database which will collect all sorts of information about our children. Is this the kind of information that you want the federal government to keep track of?....
The administration wants this data to include much more than name, address and test scores. According to the National Data Collection Model, the government should collect information on health-care history, family income and family voting status. In its view, public schools offer a golden opportunity to mine reams of data from a captive audience.
#5 Our Kids Are Not Learning Anything In These Public Schools
As I have documented before, American public school students are being dumbed-down and millions of them end up dumb as a rock and yet still are able to graduate from high school somehow....
The following are some of the absolutely amazing results of a study conducted a few years ago by Common Core....
*Only 43 percent of all U.S. high school students knew that the Civil War was fought some time between 1850 and 1900.
*More than a quarter of all U.S. high school students thought that Christopher Columbus made his famous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean after the year 1750.
*Approximately a third of all U.S. high school students did not know that the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of religion. (This is a topic that I touched on yesterday).
*Only 60 percent of all U.S. students knew that World War I was fought some time between 1900 and 1950.
Sadly, we are rapidly falling behind the rest of the globe. At this point, 15-year-olds that attend U.S. public schools do not even rank in the top half of all advanced nations when it comes to math or science literacy.
#6 Our Public School Kids Are Being Forced To Take Large Numbers Of Vaccines
All over the nation, children that have not received all of the "required vaccines" are being banned from school.
Many parents do not want dozens of toxic vaccines injected directly into the bloodstreams of their kids, but in many states today you will not be able to send your kids to the public schools if they don't submit to the shots.
This is just another reason why all American families should pull their kids out of these government schools immediately.
#7 Exposed To Rampant Sexual Promiscuity
When you send your kid to a government school, you are sending them into an environment where they will be exposed to rampant sexual promiscuity on an endless basis.
When the kids around you are constantly talking about sex and joking about sex, it makes it nearly impossible to escape it.
What makes things even worse is that the "sex education" courses are becoming more detailed and more graphic than ever. One example of this phenomenon was detailed in the New York Times....
IMAGINE you have a 10- or 11-year-old child, just entering a public middle school. How would you feel if, as part of a class ostensibly about the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, he and his classmates were given “risk cards” that graphically named a variety of solitary and mutual sex acts? Or if, in another lesson, he was encouraged to disregard what you told him about sex, and to rely instead on teachers and health clinic staff members?
In some U.S. public schools, kids are even having sex in the school bathrooms.
Do you want that to happen to your kid?
#8 Teachers Are Having Sex With The Students
It seems like almost every single day there is another news story about teachers having sex with public school students.
The following are just a few of the headlines that I found from this week....
-"More California Teachers Accused Of Sex Crimes"
-"Teacher Accused Of Sex With Student Appears In Court"
-"Queen's Teacher's Aide Charged With Child Sex Abuse"
-"Teacher Caught In Bed With Teen Student"
#9 U.S. Public Schools Are Dominated By Radical Control Freaks That Are Teaching Our Kids How To Live Like Slaves
The level of control that is exerted over the lives of children in many of our public schools is absolutely frightening.
I know that I have mentioned the following example several times, but it is worth repeating because it shows just how far things have gone. One 4-year-old girl recently had her lunch confiscated by a control freak at one U.S. preschool because it did not meet USDA guidelines....
A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because the school told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.
The girl’s turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the person who was inspecting all lunch boxes in the More at Four classroom that day.
The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs - including in-home day care centers - to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.
Do you want sick control freaks inspecting the lunches that your kids bring from home every single day?
If not, perhaps it is time to pull them out of the government schools.
#10 Specific Social And Political Agendas Are Being Shoved Down The Throats Of Our Kids In U.S. Public Schools
If you think that the government schools are "neutral places" where all social, political and religious beliefs are tolerated, then you are either ignorant or you are delusional.
The truth is that very specific social and political agendas are built into the curriculums of most public schools. Often, these social and political agendas are the same ones that are being force-fed to public school children in other western nations.
If your children are attending a government school, a system of "right and wrong" is being pounded into their heads that may be very different from what you would teach them.
In one recent New York Times article, a district superintendent admitted that particular agendas are integrated into classroom instruction anywhere that they will fit....
“We’re trying to integrate it into anything where it naturally fits,” said Jackie Taylor, the district’s superintendent. “It might be in a math lesson. How much water are you really using? How can you tell? Teachers look for avenues in almost everything they teach.”
If you want to see where all of this is going, just check out what is going on in Europe. In the UK, teachers that don't promote the "correct agenda" face harsh disciplinary action.
Those that control the public schools don't just want to "educate" your children.
They want to indoctrinate them.
#11 If Your Children Attend Public Schools They Could End Up Dead
Sadly, the school shooting that just happened in Ohio reminds us all once again that this is a matter of life and death. Our schools are not safe and they are becoming less safe all the time.
While the odds are not great that your children will actually be murdered in our public schools, the truth is that there is a very good chance that they could be scarred for life by the destructive environment in these schools.
Most Americans that have gone through the public school system emerge from it with deep emotional scars. If you have some of these emotional scars you know exactly what I am talking about.
The vast majority of our public schools are horrible places. Just ask kids that are going to public high schools right now. Most of them hate it.
Sometimes people argue that we should keep our children in the public schools so that they can be a "light" and so that they can be a good influence.
Unfortunately, that is just not the reality of the situation. Our kids go there to be taught, and it is the teachers that have the authority. Our children are far more likely to be changed by their teachers and their friends than they are to significantly change the system around them.
When you are young and insecure, it can be incredibly difficult to take a stand for what is right when all of your teachers and all of your friends are going the other way.
We need to protect our children and we need to put them into environments where they will be safe, protected and will receive a quality education.
Growing up is hard enough without having to spend 30 to 40 hours a week in a nightmarish hellhole where you will be physically, mentally and emotionally tortured.
Full article and links:
http://www.activistpost.com/2012/02/11-reasons-to-get-your-kids-out-of.html
Michael Snyder
February 28, 2012
It should be painfully obvious to everyone by now that it is time to get all of our kids out of the government schools. The public school system in the United States has been dramatically declining for a long time, and in most areas of the country the public schools are open sewers at this point. Yes, there are some U.S. public schools that are still very good and that do a decent job of preparing our young people for their adult lives. But those good schools are the exception to the rule. Hopefully the school shooting that just happened in Ohio will be a wake up call to millions of parents out there. Drugs, sex and violence are rampant in American public schools today. The "teachers" are endlessly pushing specific political and social agendas down the throats of our kids, and the skills that our children really need such as reading, writing and mathematics are often badly neglected. Hopefully we can get more parents educated about what is really going on in these schools. After all, why would any parents want to send their children into an environment that is going to be highly destructive for them for six to eight hours a day?
Sadly, "destructive" is not too hard a word to use for the environment in these public schools. I went to public schools all my life, and they were absolutely horrible. Unfortunately, they have gotten even worse since the time that I left them.
The following are 11 reasons to get your kids out of the government schools....
#1 You Could Be Arrested For Something That Your Child Does
Yes, you read that correctly. If your child writes a story or draws a picture which a teacher or an administrator takes the wrong way, you could end up in jail.
The following example is from thestar.com....
A Kitchener father is angry at police after he was arrested at his child’s school and later strip-searched at the police station, all because his 4-year-old daughter drew a picture of a gun in class.
“I’m picking up my kids and then, next thing you know, I’m locked up,” Jessie Sansone, 26, said of his ordeal on Wednesday. “I was in shock. This is completely insane.”
The school principal, police and child welfare officials, however, all stand by their actions. They say they had to investigate to determine whether there was a gun in Sansone’s house that children had access to.
#2 Your Child Could Be Arrested While At School For Just About Anything These Days
As I have written about previously, children all over the United States are being arrested by police in government school classrooms for some absolutely crazy things. Just check out the following examples....
*A 12-year-old girl named Sarah Bustamantes was recently arrested for spraying herself with perfume at a public school in Texas.
*A 13-year-old kid attending a public school in Albuquerque, New Mexico was recently arrested by police for burping in class.
*A 12-year-old girl at a school in Forest Hills, New York was marched out of her public school in handcuffs by police just because she doodled on her desk. "I love my friends Abby and Faith" was what she reportedly scribbled on her desk.
*When a little girl recently kissed a little boy at one Florida elementary school, it was considered to be a "possible sex crime" and the police were called out.
#3 Your Child Might Be Bodily Harmed By Security Thugs
All over the nation, public schools students are being bodily injured (sometimes permanently) by school security thugs. The following are a couple of examples....
*A security thug at one school in California actually fractured the arm of one 16-year-old girl because she left some crumbs on the floor after cleaning up some cake that she had spilled.
*In Allentown, Pennsylvania a 14-year-old girl was tasered in the groin area by a school security thug even though she had put up her hands in the air to surrender to him.
#4 Virtually Everything That Your Child Does At School Is Being Put Into A Database Somewhere
As I described in a previous article, public schools (in conjunction with the federal government) have become obsessed with watching, monitoring and recording the activities of our kids.
According to the New York Post, the Obama administration is planning a vast new database which will collect all sorts of information about our children. Is this the kind of information that you want the federal government to keep track of?....
The administration wants this data to include much more than name, address and test scores. According to the National Data Collection Model, the government should collect information on health-care history, family income and family voting status. In its view, public schools offer a golden opportunity to mine reams of data from a captive audience.
#5 Our Kids Are Not Learning Anything In These Public Schools
As I have documented before, American public school students are being dumbed-down and millions of them end up dumb as a rock and yet still are able to graduate from high school somehow....
The following are some of the absolutely amazing results of a study conducted a few years ago by Common Core....
*Only 43 percent of all U.S. high school students knew that the Civil War was fought some time between 1850 and 1900.
*More than a quarter of all U.S. high school students thought that Christopher Columbus made his famous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean after the year 1750.
*Approximately a third of all U.S. high school students did not know that the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of religion. (This is a topic that I touched on yesterday).
*Only 60 percent of all U.S. students knew that World War I was fought some time between 1900 and 1950.
Sadly, we are rapidly falling behind the rest of the globe. At this point, 15-year-olds that attend U.S. public schools do not even rank in the top half of all advanced nations when it comes to math or science literacy.
#6 Our Public School Kids Are Being Forced To Take Large Numbers Of Vaccines
All over the nation, children that have not received all of the "required vaccines" are being banned from school.
Many parents do not want dozens of toxic vaccines injected directly into the bloodstreams of their kids, but in many states today you will not be able to send your kids to the public schools if they don't submit to the shots.
This is just another reason why all American families should pull their kids out of these government schools immediately.
#7 Exposed To Rampant Sexual Promiscuity
When you send your kid to a government school, you are sending them into an environment where they will be exposed to rampant sexual promiscuity on an endless basis.
When the kids around you are constantly talking about sex and joking about sex, it makes it nearly impossible to escape it.
What makes things even worse is that the "sex education" courses are becoming more detailed and more graphic than ever. One example of this phenomenon was detailed in the New York Times....
IMAGINE you have a 10- or 11-year-old child, just entering a public middle school. How would you feel if, as part of a class ostensibly about the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, he and his classmates were given “risk cards” that graphically named a variety of solitary and mutual sex acts? Or if, in another lesson, he was encouraged to disregard what you told him about sex, and to rely instead on teachers and health clinic staff members?
In some U.S. public schools, kids are even having sex in the school bathrooms.
Do you want that to happen to your kid?
#8 Teachers Are Having Sex With The Students
It seems like almost every single day there is another news story about teachers having sex with public school students.
The following are just a few of the headlines that I found from this week....
-"More California Teachers Accused Of Sex Crimes"
-"Teacher Accused Of Sex With Student Appears In Court"
-"Queen's Teacher's Aide Charged With Child Sex Abuse"
-"Teacher Caught In Bed With Teen Student"
#9 U.S. Public Schools Are Dominated By Radical Control Freaks That Are Teaching Our Kids How To Live Like Slaves
The level of control that is exerted over the lives of children in many of our public schools is absolutely frightening.
I know that I have mentioned the following example several times, but it is worth repeating because it shows just how far things have gone. One 4-year-old girl recently had her lunch confiscated by a control freak at one U.S. preschool because it did not meet USDA guidelines....
A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because the school told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.
The girl’s turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the person who was inspecting all lunch boxes in the More at Four classroom that day.
The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs - including in-home day care centers - to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.
Do you want sick control freaks inspecting the lunches that your kids bring from home every single day?
If not, perhaps it is time to pull them out of the government schools.
#10 Specific Social And Political Agendas Are Being Shoved Down The Throats Of Our Kids In U.S. Public Schools
If you think that the government schools are "neutral places" where all social, political and religious beliefs are tolerated, then you are either ignorant or you are delusional.
The truth is that very specific social and political agendas are built into the curriculums of most public schools. Often, these social and political agendas are the same ones that are being force-fed to public school children in other western nations.
If your children are attending a government school, a system of "right and wrong" is being pounded into their heads that may be very different from what you would teach them.
In one recent New York Times article, a district superintendent admitted that particular agendas are integrated into classroom instruction anywhere that they will fit....
“We’re trying to integrate it into anything where it naturally fits,” said Jackie Taylor, the district’s superintendent. “It might be in a math lesson. How much water are you really using? How can you tell? Teachers look for avenues in almost everything they teach.”
If you want to see where all of this is going, just check out what is going on in Europe. In the UK, teachers that don't promote the "correct agenda" face harsh disciplinary action.
Those that control the public schools don't just want to "educate" your children.
They want to indoctrinate them.
#11 If Your Children Attend Public Schools They Could End Up Dead
Sadly, the school shooting that just happened in Ohio reminds us all once again that this is a matter of life and death. Our schools are not safe and they are becoming less safe all the time.
While the odds are not great that your children will actually be murdered in our public schools, the truth is that there is a very good chance that they could be scarred for life by the destructive environment in these schools.
Most Americans that have gone through the public school system emerge from it with deep emotional scars. If you have some of these emotional scars you know exactly what I am talking about.
The vast majority of our public schools are horrible places. Just ask kids that are going to public high schools right now. Most of them hate it.
Sometimes people argue that we should keep our children in the public schools so that they can be a "light" and so that they can be a good influence.
Unfortunately, that is just not the reality of the situation. Our kids go there to be taught, and it is the teachers that have the authority. Our children are far more likely to be changed by their teachers and their friends than they are to significantly change the system around them.
When you are young and insecure, it can be incredibly difficult to take a stand for what is right when all of your teachers and all of your friends are going the other way.
We need to protect our children and we need to put them into environments where they will be safe, protected and will receive a quality education.
Growing up is hard enough without having to spend 30 to 40 hours a week in a nightmarish hellhole where you will be physically, mentally and emotionally tortured.
Full article and links:
http://www.activistpost.com/2012/02/11-reasons-to-get-your-kids-out-of.html
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