Sacramento's got a new charter school on the way, and it professes to be a "humane" school built around a mission of "non-violence." Debra Saunders has the info:
If you took all failed, trendy education bureaucrat ideas, packaged them in a school and put radical animal-rights activists in charge of it, you'd end up with something like the Humane Education Learning Community — a kindergarten-through-sixth-grade charter school approved by Sacramento's San Juan Unified School District...
Let me confess that when Sacramento parent Ann Silberman first alerted me to this proposed school, I didn't jump. The goal of a "violence free" school is laudable — unless it is used to dress up animal-rights indoctrination as pedagogy. Then, it threatens to be anti-academic.
As kooky as Californians can be, I told her, I can't believe that the requisite number of parents would sign on to send their kids to an education-lite charter school. Wrong. It turns out that the law doesn't require charter-petition signers to live in the district or even near it...
Silberman believes that parents could be drawn to the idea of the school because they'll think "this is a new touchy-feely California idea where all the kids are there to be nice to each other" without understanding the radical animal-rights agenda behind it.
And boy, is there ever a radical agenda behind it all. One of the charter petitioners, Dr. Yale Wishnick, is also a board member of PETA, the group that likens the slaughter of chickens to the Holocaust; the same group whose co-founder opposes the use of seeing-eye dogs. Oh, and this is also the same group that has made donations to radical "animal-rights" eco-terrorists such as the Earth Liberation Front. When PETA members espouse "non-violence" towards all, they often don't include people who disagree with them in that category.
Debra chronicles the non-educational education plan in place for the school:
The charter model will "replace discipline based on rewards and punishments with one based on respect, responsibility and reverence"...
Because, as we all know, there's no evidence to suggest that children need disclipline, nor that they respond well to appropriate rewards and punishments.
Here's a clue as to how un-academic the K-6 school is likely to be if it opens next fall: "Mahatma Gandhi (the petition reads) once said, 'The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its non-human animals are treated.'''(Clue: Gandhi did not use the term "non-human animal.")
Clue: This school is already out to convince its youth that humans who don't revere "non-human animals" don't deserve humane treatment, because it's not above modifying Ghandi quotes to leave out any inference that we should treat human animals with respect and compassion as well.
I needn't modify any PETA quotes to clarify their lack of compassion for human animals: "It would be great if all the fast-food outlets, slaughter-houses, these laboratories and the banks who fund them exploded tomorrow." - Bruce Friedrich, PETA spokesperson.
While the petition promises rigorous academics, it's hard to find advanced math or challenging literature buried under the avalanche of edu-jargon, as in "value of relationships," "a safe learning environment for students to speak about their own authentic feelings and experiences," "class bonding" and "constructivist and multicultural education and thematic, project-based learning."
Wow. I didn't think that much eduspeak could be crammed into one petition.
Where's the math? The kids may not know how to multiply, but math classes will help students "explore economic costs as they relate to environmental degradation, the loss of wildlife and companion animal overpopulation." (No indoctrination there.)
I have to assume that they will not actually teach math at this school, because it doesn't take much math to understand that much of what is pushed as environmental legislation is based on bad science.
Other readers sent links to the original SacBee story about this charter school; my apologies for not being able to post it before now.
Posted by kswygert at October 27, 2003 11:32 AM