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UN Poisoning US Education with Our Tax Dollars

March 19, 2004

By Tom DeWeese

The Bush administration’s schizophrenic relationship with the United Nations continues unabated. It is dazzling to watch one part of the administration rebuke the UN for failing to respond to the threats of dictatorships to American security while another zealously takes up a UN program designed to create a generation of Americans educated to believe in a system of global government.

It is astonishing that the Bush administration has begun issuing grants to help spread a United Nations propaganda program that describes itself as a “universal curriculum” for teaching global citizenship, peace studies and equality of world cultures. The US Department of Education has issued its first $1.2 million grant to implement the UN’s International Baccalaureate (IB) program to middle schools that are to become feeder schools for the IB’ s high school diploma program in low-income school districts.

The IB program had been adopted by about 1,450 schools in 115 countries, including 502 schools in the United States. The Bush administration grants will expand the IB program initially in Arizona, Massachusetts, and New York.

Children caught between the comparable “New Civics” curriculum now being implemented and the IB program will have no concept of the US ideals of limited government controlled by “We the People.” They will be fully indoctrinated into accepting the idea of a one-world government that only recognizes the power of the state to “grant” our rights. Gone is Thomas Jefferson’s idea of unalienable rights. They were “self evident” to Jefferson and those who sacrificed their lives for American independence, but the new curriculum views them as antiquated curiosities.

Yet, this is what Education Secretary Rod Paige calls “world-class education.” Most everyone else would call the IB program “socialism.” Worse, such indoctrination is taking place in public school classrooms, paid for by taxpayer dollars, and forced on unsuspecting children. What makes this more infuriating is that it’s being funded and implemented by a Republican administration!

This same administration and its educational programs have recently been called to task in a report, the “American Diploma Project.” The result of cooperation between three major think tanks, the report concludes that, “The diploma has lost its value because what it takes to earn one is disconnected from what it takes for graduates to compete successfully beyond high school---either in the classroom or the workplace.”

Coupled with the BI program, not only will American students be taught that allegiance to America, our governmental and economic systems, should be replaced by global citizenship, but the diplomas they are earning are just a “broken promise” of the education they should have received!

The educational system in America is in total meltdown. E.D. Hirsch, Jr., author of “The Schools We Need: And Why We Don’t Have Them” has written that “Successful reading requires more than an ability to decode or ‘sound out’ words. It also requires adequate background knowledge or ‘cultural literacy. ’ Without background knowledge of history, literature, art, music, science and math, students will read, but without comprehension.”

With the UN-sponsored International Baccalaureate (BI), instituted at the middle school level, American students will be taught a curriculum that stresses code words such as human rights and social justice, but which in practice the UN has never successfully been able to implement or enforce. Many of the members of the UN are some of the world’s worst dictatorships, guilty of the worst abuses of human rights and social justice.

Moreover, American children will be taught about the environmental scheme called “sustainable development” that, in reality, means blocking development for almost any reason because it requires using the Earth’s natural resources. They will be indoctrinated to accept the UN’s views on immigration, population, health, and other environmental concerns.

Mostly what they will learn about are that the values that have sustained the United States of America and which make it a magnet for freedom-hungry people around the world. Instead, the curriculum teaches about the failed system of socialism. George Walker, IB’s director-general, based in Geneva, Switzerland, says the program is committed to changing children’s values so they think globally, rather than in “parochial national terms from their own country’s viewpoint…”

Henry Lamb, one of the nation’s experts on the United Nations, warns that the United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) “has been trying to impose an international curriculum to prepare students for world government” since its inception. During the Reagan administration, the US dropped its membership in UNESCO, citing how corrupt it had become. Typically, the Bush administration just put us back in!

As a result, the current administration tacitly supports the view of a 1949 UNESCO textbook, “Toward World Understanding”, that says, “As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can produce only rather precarious results. As we have pointed out, it is frequently the family that infects the child with extreme nationalism.”

Think back to the countless American homes, offices and other structures that flew the flag after 9-11 as a symbol of their allegiance to the United States. To the UN, this is “extreme nationalism” that “poisons” the minds of our children.

One critic of the program warned, “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.”

Do you want your children growing up without learning the basic facts of our Constitutional form of government? Without learning the facts of our history, replete with the battles fought to retain individual freedoms, States rights, and the rule of law? A review of science, and even math texts, reveals that sustainable development, environmental protection, and social justice dominate material children are force-fed in the name of education.

Either each new generation of Americans must be taught the truth about our heritage, our governmental system of checks and balances, of guaranteed rights that come from the governed, and why our economic systems has made us the most powerful engine of progress on Earth, or they will fall prey to the UN globalists that want to control their future.

The International Baccalaureate program should be ripped from the classrooms of America, defunded, and thrown upon the same ash heap of history where the former Soviet Union and other despotisms can be found.