Dissecting Leftism points the way to a WorldNetDaily article which suggests that the UN-sponsored efforts to teach middle-schoolers about "global citizenship, peace studies and equality of world cultures" is not a benevolent enterprise, nor one friendly to the idea of US students being well-schooled in US civics, law, and history:
The U.N.'s global education program took a major step in 1968, when UNESCO provided the funding to create the International Baccalaureate Organization, a non-government organization, in Geneva, Switzerland. The IBO is now providing the curriculum for 33,000 teachers in nearly 1,500 schools around the world, 55 of which are middle schools in the Washington D.C. area.
UNESCO says the IB curriculum promotes human rights, social justice, sustainable development, population, health, environmental and immigration concerns...
Jeanne Geiger, an outspoken critic of the program in Reston, Va., wrote to a local newspaper: "Administrators do not tell you that the current IB program for ages 3 through grade 12 promotes socialism, disarmament, radical environmentalism and moral relativism, while attempting to undermine Christian religious values and national sovereignty"...
The goals and methods of the IB program reach much further than the 502 U.S. schools now officially enrolled. The Center for Civic Education, which, by law, writes the curriculum for civics education in the United States, says:
"In the past century, the civic mission of schools was education for democracy in a sovereign state. In this century, by contrast, education will become everywhere more global. And we ought to improve our curricular frameworks and standards for a world transformed by globally accepted and internationally transcendent principles."
A critical review of "We the People; the Citizen and the Constitution," a civics textbook written by the Center for Civics Education, reveals that the teaching of historical facts is replaced with teaching attitudes and values about multi-culturalism and world-mindedness. A review of science, and even math texts, reveals that sustainable development, environmental protection and social justice dominate the material children are taught.
No longer are American children learning about the structure of a federal republic compared to a parliamentary democracy. No longer are children learning the difference between capitalism and socialism. No longer are children being taught why the United States became the most powerful economic engine the world has ever known.
Instead, they are being taught that with less than 5 percent of the world's population, the U.S. uses 25 percent of the world's resources and produces 25 percent of the world's pollution. They are being taught that the U.S. is the No. 1 terrorist nation. They are being taught that the rest of the world is mired in poverty because of the greedy capitalists in the United States.
I admit I know little about the specifics of IB programs, but I do wonder why, at a time when so many American students have trouble with basic reading and writing skills, that the U.S. Department of Education issued a $1.2 million grant to help this kind of "education" reach middle-schoolers. Some parents disagree with the IB program as well:
Critics of the International Baccalaureate program at Reston's Langston Hughes Middle School and South Lakes High School have focused on the program's promotion of cultural egalitarianism, pacifism and what they say is its anti-Western bias.
Such concerns don't seem important to IB supporters:
Rena J. Berlin, Fairfax County's IB coordinator at Langston Hughes Middle School, said she knows Mrs. Geiger and other critics "very well," but believes "that all students who learn how to think globally, how to make connections between subjects, and how to 'learn how to learn' will be better prepared to be IB diploma students when they get to 11th grade."
Posted by kswygert at February 19, 2004 11:54 AM