"We see, in many a land, the proudest dynasties and tyrannies still crushing, with their mountain weight, every free motion of the Consciences and hearts of men. We see, on the other hand, the truest heroism for the right and the greatest devotion to the Truth in hearts that God has touched. We have a work to do, as great as our forefathers and, perhaps, far greater. The enemies of Truth are more numerous and subtle than ever and the needs of the Church are greater than at any preceding time. If we are not debtors to the present, then men were never debtors to their age and their time. Brethren, we are debtors to the hour in which we live. Oh, that we might stamp it with Truth and that God might help us to impress upon its wings some proof that it has not flown by neglected and unheeded." -- C.H. Spurgeon . . . "If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:31, 32 . . . . .

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Wednesday, September 2, 2009

IN THE NEWS: OBAMA'S CLASSROOM CAMPAIGN

By A.M. Kisly

I read a news article this morning and felt it important enough to share it with our readers.
While the Bible clearly teaches us in PROVERBS 22:6, to "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it", it is striking that our nations leaders intend on forcing their own indoctrination upon our children as well.

I cannot stress how important it is to keep yourselves informed, because no one seems to be able to tell the difference any more between scientific facts, political lies, economic truths, or blatant self-interest, and the ever
increasing intrusive "Change" we've been hearing about by our government.

It would be prudent for us to be well informed in order to better equip ourselves, so that we can deal with these issues as they come upon us.

In PROVERBS 4 we read,
(1) "Hear, ye children, the instruction of a father, and attend to know understanding. (2) For I give you good doctrine, forsake ye not my law." (It is God's law that we must study and know, for without it we are doomed to be led away captive by our enemies.) (3) "For I was my father's son, tender and only beloved in the sight of my mother. (4) He taught me also, and said unto me, Let thine heart retain my words: keep my commandments, and live. (5) Get wisdom, get understanding: forget it not; neither decline from the words of my mouth. (6) Forsake her not, and she shall preserve thee: love her, and she shall keep thee. (7) Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding. (8) Exalt her, and she shall promote thee: she shall bring thee to honour, when thou dost embrace her. (9)She shall give to thine head an ornament of grace: a crown of glory shall she deliver to thee. (10) Hear, O my son, and receive my sayings; and the years of thy life shall be many. (11) I have taught thee in the way of wisdom; I have led thee in right paths. (12) When thou goest, thy steps shall not be straitened; and when thou runnest, thou shalt not stumble. (13) Take fast hold of instruction; let her not go: keep her; for she is thy life. (14) Enter not into the path of the wicked, and go not in the way of evil men. (15) Avoid it, pass not by it, turn from it, and pass away. (16) For they sleep not, except they have done mischief; and their sleep is taken away, unless they cause some to fall. (17) For they eat the bread of wickedness, and drink the wine of violence. (18) But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day. (19) The way of the wicked is as darkness: they know not at what they stumble. (20)My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings. (21) Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thine heart. (22) For they are life unto those that find them, and health to all their flesh. (23) Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life. (24)Put away from thee a froward mouth, and perverse lips put far from thee. (25) Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee. (26) Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established. (27)Turn not to the right hand nor to the left: remove thy foot from evil."
Great instruction for ourselves as well as our kids. Unfortunately, our children are not going to be taught these truths in the classroom. So what will they be learning?

Taken from Creators Syndicate, Michelle Malkin writes:

On September 8, young students across the country will be watching television. Yes, they’ll be parked in front of the boob tube and computer screens watching President Obama’s address on education. Instead of practicing cursive, reviewing multiplication tables, diagramming sentences, or learning something concrete, America’s kids will be lectured about the importance of learning. And then the schoolchildren, from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, will be exhorted to Do Something — other than sit in their seats and receive academic instruction, that is. Education Secretary Arne Duncan dispatched letters to principals nationwide boasting that “This is the first time an American president has spoken directly to the nation’s school children about persisting and succeeding in school.”

But the goal is not merely morale-boosting. According to White House event-related guides developed by the U.S. Department of Education’s Teaching Fellows, grade-school students will be told to “listen to the speech” and “could think about the following:
 

*What is the President trying to tell me?

*What is the President asking me to do?
*What new ideas and actions is the President challenging me to think about?
* Students can record important parts of the speech where the President is asking them to do something. Students might think about: What specific job is he asking me to do? Is he asking anything of anyone else? Teachers? Principals? Parents? The American people? After the speech, teachers will ask students:
*What do you think the President wants us to do? *Does the speech make you want to do anything?
*Are we able to do what President Obama is asking of us? Obama’s White House Teaching Fellows include Chicago high school educator Xian Barrett, a fierce opponent of charter schools who founded a “Social Justice Club” and bussed students to protests and Michelle Bissonette, a Los Altos, Calif., teacher who is “focused on developing my leadership as a more culturally and racially conscious educator.”
The activist tradition of government schools using students as junior lobbyists cannot be ignored. Zealous teacher’s unions have enlisted captive schoolchildren as letter-writers in their campaigns for higher education spending. Out-of-control activists have enlisted their secondary-school charges in pro-illegal immigration protests, gay marriage ceremonies, environmental propaganda stunts, and anti-war events.

And last year’s presidential campaign saw disgraceful abuses of power by pro-Obama instructors. In New Rochelle, New York, elementary students were given an in-class assignment to color in drawings of Barack Obama – including a picture of a campaign button featuring his face and the slogan “Students for Obama 2008.”

In Cumberland County, N.C., a fifth-grade-school teacher turned a “civics” discussion into an unhinged harangue against a girl who said her family supported John McCain.
Nor can the Democrats’ strategy of using kiddie human shields to advance their legislative agenda be overlooked in the context and timing of Obama’s speech.

Children have been front and center of the Left’s push for an ever-increasing government role in health care – from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s use of seventh-grader Baltimore school kid Graeme Frost to push for the massive S-CHIP entitlement expansion, to President Obama’s none-too-coincidental choice of Massachusetts 11-year-old town hall questioner Julia Hall (the daughter of a prominent Obama activist/organizer who assailed Obamacare critics’ “mean” signs), to the Kennedy family’s decision to put grandson Max Allen on center stage to pray for health care reform at his uncle’s funeral last week.


So when the Department of Education directs schools to gather children ‘round the TV monitors for Obama’s pep talk and then do this…


• Create posters of their goals. Posters could be formatted in quadrants or puzzle pieces or trails marked with the labels: personal, academic, community, country. Each area could be labeled with three steps for achieving goals in those areas. It might make sense to focus on personal and academic so community and country goals come more readily.

• Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals. …parents have every right to worry about their children being used as Political Guinea Pigs for Change.

Postscript: Stanley Kurtz’s invaluable investigation of the Obama/Ayers/Chicago Annenberg Challenge ties last fall is must-read.
A very timely and relevant excerpt:


The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago’s public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg.
In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation’s other key body, the “Collaborative,” which shaped education policy.

The CAC’s basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda. …The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism.

In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland’s ghetto.
In works like “City Kids, City Teachers” and “Teaching the Personal and the Political,” Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative?

“I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, “Sixties Radicals,” at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.
…CAC translated Mr. Ayers’s radicalism into practice.
Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with “external partners,” which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).

Mr. Obama once conducted “leadership training” seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama’s early campaigns.
External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC’s in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students.
 
They found no evidence of educational improvement. …Mr. Ayers is the founder of the “small schools” movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to “confront issues of inequity, war, and violence.” He believes teacher education programs should serve as “sites of resistance” to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.)
The point, says Mr. Ayers in his “Teaching Toward Freedom,” is to “teach against oppression,” against America’s history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation. The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming “guilt by association.”

Yet the issue here isn’t guilt by association; it’s guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.


What is going on in America today will have detrimental effects on future generations. I can only encourage you to be vigilant and to really become involved in your child's education. How else will you know what is taking place in their schools or be able to determine what is in the best interest of your child.
It's not the government's job to train up your child, it is yours.

1 comment:

James J. Fire said...

From the U.N. charter, to our own nation's plans and implementations of the child as a ward of the State, rather than of their parents, we see further and greater developments of a socialist society, which denies parental authority and the family as a foundation of society.

One of the tenets of socialism is to create a publicly funded school system where children are indoctrinated in socialism, humanism, and of course, evolution (when a Communist regime, be it the USSR or China, or N. Korea seek to overtake another country and bring them under socialism, the first thing they indoctrinate them with is NOT Karl Marx, surprisingly enough. Its Charles Darwin!).
In order for the State to claim absolute authority, it must abrogate any other, namely God; thus its vital that the propagandized populace adheres to the idea that God (or truth) does not exist.
This enables the State to grant or deny privileges (not rights, for these are inherent) of the people, rather than what our founding fathers stated:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of [land]."

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