Excerpt:
In the quest to instill healthy eating habits, schools in Ontario have banned bottled water, but not decaffeinated soft drinks. Fries are out, but pizza is in, as long as it has whole-wheat crust, low-fat cheese and no pepperoni. In Alberta, Dunstable School south of Slave Lake instituted a “Character Education and Virtues Program” that involved rewarding students who did good deeds by putting their names on a wall, giving them a free pizza lunch and a chance to win money for a bike. But the program was also used to monitor the number of good deeds each student performed and then investigate those who didn’t do enough.
A New Brunswick school was met with outrage when it tried to impart moral values to its Grade 4 students by asking them to decide in 10 minutes or less who they would save if the Earth was about to explode: an Acadian francophone, a Chinese person, a black African, an English person or an Aboriginal person. The problem came when a parent, whose daughter was adopted from Ethiopia and was the only visible minority in the class, felt the project promoted stereotypes, prompting the province’s education minister to condemn the assignment.
Such morality-based assignments are part of a growing emphasis on cross-curriculum teaching, which encourages teachers to find lessons that draw links between a variety of academic subjects, said Doretta Wilson, executive director of the Society for Quality Education.
The organization conducted a study to look for errors and “unsubstantiated dogmatic statements” in Canadian science curriculum. It found a Manitoba science manual that urged teachers to promote the message that historic Aboriginal cultures “exemplified the qualities of good stewardship in their interactions with the environment,” and a New Brunswick Grade 5 science class policy that promoted the belief that sauna whirlpools and other alternatives to conventional medicine “prevent or cure illnesses.” In Quebec, it found a physics curriculum that advocated that science could be used to help advance Quebec nationalism because “a society can express its cultural identity only in conjunction with some form of scientific and technological autonomy.”
Increasingly, value-based teachings have come in the guise of environmental activism, which school have been promoting with varying degrees of commitment and sometimes conflicting messages.
As part of the Toronto District School Board’s climate change action plan, an elementary school had every student write a letter to the Prime Minister to crack down on idling vehicles and held a contest to find the student who could design the best “eco-ticket” to be slapped on the windshield of an offending car.
Meanwhile in natural gas and oil sands communities in northern Alberta, B.C. and Saskatchewan, the petroleum industry has banded together to create its own environmental awareness program for elementary schools. As part of the program, students don a chef’s hat and have a “fossil fuel bake” and then put on a “petroleum play.” The program donates $5,000 to the school to help create an outdoor education project.
Global warming alarmism is nothing but socialism – i.e. – government-controlled redistribution of wealth. So what we have here is the taxpayer-funded indoctrination of children so that the children will believe in government control of the free market (production and consumption).
I find it very annoying that Christians often want to provide these public schools with more and more money. I often have discussions with Christians who are in favor of public schools and single-payer health care who nevertheless want to get married and have families. Do they not realize where the money for all of these government programs comes from? The money comes from families and from the companies who employ parents. So the very people who support social programs, poverty programs, environmental programs, education programs, etc. are the ones who are working to undermine civil society by transferring wealth from families and the businesses who hire parents to government.
What I find the most perturbing is how Christians bash businesses and capitalism and then complain that men won’t marry. What sort of man wants to pay half his income to secular-leftists so that his children can be indoctrinated by public schools? (And you can’t opt out of paying for them) When Christians talk about “taxing the rich” so that government can “help the poor” and “protect the environment”, then they should NOT expect that there will be any money left over for marriages and child-raising. If you think it’s a good idea for parents to pay government to teach the children their worldview and values, then why are parents and families needed? People should just work and have babies, and then the government should take their money and decide what children will believe, right?
UPDATE: I noticed that California gay activists have introduced a bill to push their agenda in the schools as well.
