Tag Archive for: indoctrination

Jihadi Indoctrination of American Children is Active and Spreading

We have witnessed indoctrination taking place in America’s elite universities, creating a conveyor belt of brainwashed Hamas-supporting activists.

Now evidence is emerging that Jihad promoters are poisoning the elementary educational system in America, too.

The jihadi savagery of Oct. 7, 2023, when thousands of Palestinian armed terrorists, eagerly followed by Gaza’s citizens, stormed across their border into Israel in an orgy of murder, torture, rape, robbery, and hostage-taking.

This had been predicted by organizations dedicated to gathering the evidence of a generational anti-Semitic brainwashing in schools and summer camps across the Palestinian divide from Gaza to Ramallah. The warnings of these NGOs were ignored by Western decision-makers despite the evidence shown to them about Palestinian intentions.

Organizations, such as the Center for Near East Policy and UN Watch, documented the Palestinian schoolbooks filled with Jihadi indoctrination in classrooms and summer camps, leading children to pledge themselves to the annihilation of Israel and the murder of Jews.

The material, the evidence, is freely available, but Western organizations and governments continued to plow millions of dollars and euros into the Palestinian industry of hate and death.

Hamas propaganda on elite American campuses is well known, but now the target is American schoolchildren.

This brainwashing is being introduced into high schools and even into the elementary educational system in America.

One example, quoted in a Jerusalem Post article on June 7, 2024, titled ‘Portland’s teacher union creates anti-Israel program,” reported that the Portland Association of Teachers are promoting an indoctrination program for children as early as pre-kindergarten to high school in which the next generation of Americans will be brainwashed to delegitimize Israel, describing it as an “illegitimate settler-colonial state.”

American children are being taught to participate in Palestinian protests turning them into anti-Israel activists.

Together with a group known as Oregon Educators for Palestine (OGP) they have created a curriculum that includes courses such as “Know your Rights in Teaching,” “Organizing for Palestine within Portland Public Schools,” and “Teach Palestine! Resources for Portland Public Schools” lesson guide.

Their document provides counter definitions to reduce the legitimacy of Israel by using key terms. For example, they deduce Anti-Semitism as being a “European Christian phenomenon” and Zionism as “a settler colonial political ideology and movement.”

Their guide recommends teachers to have the academic freedom (restriction) to select (reduce) writings on Palestine only to that written by Palestinian authors, as they put it, “to offer content and context based on the authors backgrounds and opinions.”

Part of their indoctrination removes words such as “terrorism” particularly when applied to acts of Palestinian terrorism.  Instead, they replace it with the word “resist.”

Everything is wrapped around concepts such as “Occupation” even if that applies to areas from which Israel withdrew its citizens in the search for peace.

Based on that novel concept, the barbarous attacks of Oct. 7, or mass killing by Palestinian suicide bombers and gunmen, can be translated into acts of “resistance to the occupation,” even when committed by Palestinians emerging out of their self-governing territories to kill thousands of Israelis in their hometowns inside Israel.

I know. I became one of the members of the Netanya Terror Victims Association after a procession of suicide bombers and gunman targeted my hometown that hugs the clifftops of the Mediterranean, the sea defined by their slogan of a Palestine “from the River to the Sea.”  

In the quest for this homeland, they murdered dozens of Netanya folk, some of whom I knew.

Now social studies lessons for grades 3-5 in America will include a week-long curriculum on “settler colonization and Palestine.”

The Portland Association of Teachers represents over 4,500 educators. In their description of the events of Oct. 7, we can clearly define what they consider progressive to be utterly regressive.

PAT educators handed out documents claiming that the horrendous massacres, tortures, rapes, and hostage-taking were, in the words of PAT, justified “resistance.”

In May, Mosaic magazine featured an article entitled “Anti-Israel Indoctrination Starts in Elementary Schools.”

This is the opening phase of a Jihadi education in America. One that accurately copies Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad brainwashing.

There is a battle going on in the California school system. Last September, a law suit claimed that a California school district tried to impose an anti-Israel curricula.

As I predicted, the Jihadi indoctrination has leapt across the pond from the Middle East, engineered and financed by people with an agenda to convert America based on a curriculum practiced in schools and summer camps under the regimes of Hamas and the PLO Palestinian Authority.

This is the brainwashing that has prevented the mutual peace once desired by Israel but killed by incessant hate-educated Palestinians, a blind hatred that has blocked all hope for a better future for frustrated Israelis and hated-filled Palestinians.

It is now taking root in the American elementary education system.

It must be stopped before it inflicts permanent damage both to the children, to the American psyche, and to American Israeli relations, which is the ultimate aim of the haters.

©2024. Barry Shaw. All rights reserved.

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I’m a Former Teacher. Here’s How Your Children Are Getting Indoctrinated by Leftist Ideology.

Your children are being indoctrinated. The education system designed to teach them how to think critically has been weaponized by the radical left to push an anti-American agenda.

As someone who has worked in education for four years, I have seen firsthand how your children are being ensnared by the left and their teachers.

I worked with kids from ages 3 to 13 and saw the brainwashing that exists at all levels of education. The left uses a combination of propaganda and suppression to push kids into the ensnaring grip of socialism and anti-patriotism.

First is the propaganda. Teachers will assign work instilling the idea that the pillars of Western civilization were evil, and their memories deserve to be thrown in the trash.


How are socialists deluding a whole generation? Learn more now >>


Here’s an example. I was helping one of my elementary school students with a homework assignment about listing famous Britons throughout history. She already had some of the more obvious ones: Shakespeare, Princess Diana, Queen Elizabeth.

“Well, how about Winston Churchill?” I recommended.

“Oh no, not him,” she replied. “He was a racist and didn’t think women should have rights. He wasn’t a good guy.”

I was floored. It clearly wasn’t something she came up with on her own. She was just regurgitating propaganda her teacher had taught her. All sense of nuance and critical thinking about the man who saved Europe from the Nazis was gone. Churchill committed “wrongthink,” so in the bin he goes.

Another way the left propagandizes is through the normalization of its views and positions as nonpolitical.

The Black Lives Matter organization is a prime example of this. Many of my colleagues wore Black Lives Matter pins and apparel to school in blatant violation of school rules forbidding political statements on clothing.

When I asked for a justification of the behavior, I was told it wasn’t political to support the group, it was a matter of human rights. The children would see these pins and clothes and connect radical leftist groups with basic human dignity. “How dare you question Black Lives Matter? I was taught this is a matter of human rights!”

But it isn’t just a matter of actively teaching that America and the West are evil. Suppression of “wrongthink” is equally as important to the brainwashing process. The lessons I was allowed to teach also were censored.

I was preparing a lesson on Thanksgiving involving Pilgrims and American Indians, with an activity centered on making paper teepees for arts and crafts. Cue the progressive panic.

Other teachers at the school were incensed that a non-Indian was “appropriating” Native American culture for an activity. Of course, these teachers weren’t Indians either, they just wanted to virtue signal.

The whole thing culminated in a hilarious incident where my colleagues tracked down the one teacher on staff who was one-sixty-fourths Native American and asked her if it was cultural appropriation. In her esteemed authority, it most certainly was. The school administrators pulled me aside and promptly nixed the project.

The suppression extends to American religious values as well. I would try to engage my students with folk stories from around the globe to teach them world history and other cultures.

Story time went on without a hitch until I decided to tell stories from the Bible. Other teachers began to complain I was preaching Christian values to the children and attempting to convert them.

Keep in mind, this wasn’t a problem when I was sharing stories from other ancient cultures throughout history. Stories about ancient India and China were fine and encouraged as “sharing unheard voices.” After sharing the story of the Tower of Babel, I was told to switch back to non-Christian stories or face consequences.

The young adults who today gleefully tear down statues of the Founding Fathers were incubated in our very own schools, groomed to burst from the education system and burn America down.

The left argues the great men and women who built this nation are problematic and must be destroyed. Conservatives must demand an end to the indoctrination of our youth or face a new American public taught since childhood that the country shouldn’t exist.

COMMENTARY BY

Douglas Blair is an administrative assistant at The Heritage Foundation and a graduate of Heritage’s Young Leaders Program.

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A Note for our Readers:

Democratic Socialists say, “America should be more like socialist countries such as Sweden and Denmark.” And millions of young people believe them…

For years, “Democratic Socialists” have been growing a crop of followers that include students and young professionals. America’s future will be in their hands.

How are socialists deluding a whole generation? One of their most effective arguments is that “democratic socialism” is working in Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Norway. They claim these countries are “proof” that socialism will work for America. But they’re wrong. And it’s easy to explain why.

Our friends at The Heritage Foundation just published a new guide that provides three irrefutable facts that debunks these myths. For a limited time, they’re offering it to readers of The Daily Signal for free.

Get your free copy of “Why Democratic Socialists Can’t Legitimately Claim Sweden and Denmark as Success Stories” today and equip yourself with the facts you need to debunk these myths once and for all.

GET YOUR FREE COPY NOW »


EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Homeschooling, Socialization, and the New Groupthink by B.K. Marcus

“But what about socialization?”

We who educate our children outside the school system confront an exhausting array of accusations posing as concerns, but the most puzzling — and the most persistent — is the socialization question. For years, I’ve taken it at face value:How, the skeptic seems to be asking, will your kids ever learn to be sociable if you keep them locked up at home all day?

That very few homeschooled kids lead the lives of sheltered isolation implied by this question does not seem to assuage the questioner. There’s something kids are assumed to receive from the process of group schooling — especially from large, government-funded schools — that helps them fit in better with society at large.

Learning to Be a Cog

I recently talked to a mom who wants to homeschool her daughter. The girl’s dad objects to the idea because, he insists, home education will fail to prepare her for “the real world.” I find it significant that this man is career military. The real world, as he knows it, is regimented, tightly controlled, and bureaucratized into stasis — at least compared with the very different real world of voluntary exchange and spontaneous order.

If your goal for your children is a lifetime of government work, then by all means send them to public school: the bigger, the better. But if, by “socialization,” you mean ensuring that a child becomes sociable, that he or she develops the intelligence and social reflexes that promote peaceful and pleasurable interactions with larger groups of friends and strangers, then the irony of the what-about-socialization question is that it gets the situation precisely backwards. It is schooled kids, segregated by age and habituated to the static and artificial restrictions of the schooling environment, who demonstrate more behavioral problems while in school and greater difficulty adjusting to the post-school world.

Does “Socialization” Mean Peer Pressure?

While homeschooled kids learn to interact daily with people of all ages, schools teach their students to think of adults primarily in terms of avoiding trouble (or sometimes seeking it). That leaves the social lessons to their peers, narrowly defined as schoolmates roughly their own age.

If your goal for your children is a lifetime of government work, then by all means send them to public school: the bigger, the better. 

Thomas Smedley, who prepared a master’s thesis for Radford University of Virginia on “The Socialization of Homeschool Children,” put it this way:

In the public school system, children are socialized horizontally, and temporarily, into conformity with their immediate peers. Home educators seek to socialize their children vertically, toward responsibility, service, and adulthood, with an eye on eternity.

As a result, most homeschooled kids grow into well-adjusted, flexible, and emotionally mature adults, open to a diversity of peers and social contexts.

Psychology professor Richard G. Medlin wrote in “Homeschooling and the Question of Socialization Revisited,”

Homeschooling parents expect their children to respect and get along with people of diverse backgrounds.… Compared to children attending conventional schools … research suggest that they have higher quality friendships and better relationships with their parents and other adults.

Furthermore, says Medlin, “They are happy, optimistic, and satisfied with their lives.” How often do you hear those words applied to any other group of children?

Meanwhile, “there seems to be an overwhelming amount of evidence,”according to researcher Michael Brady, “that children socialized in a peer-dominant environment are at higher risk for developing social maladjustment issues than those that are socialized in a parent-monitored environment.”

The Persistence of the Socialization Myth

The contention that kids kept out of large group schools will somehow suffer in their social development never made any sense to begin with. (In fact, large group schools may hurt social development.) Did no one enjoy any social skills before the era of mass education?

Decades of research now support the common-sense conclusion: the artificially hierarchical and age-segregated structure of modern schooling produces a warped form of socialization with unhealthy attitudes toward both authority and peers.

The students who escape this fate are those with strong parental and other adult role models and active engagement with a diverse community outside school. Homeschooling holds no monopoly on engaged parents or robust communities, but those advantages are an almost automatic part of home education.

So why does the socialization myth refuse to die?

Perhaps we have been misunderstanding the critics all along. Homeschoolers think of socialization as the development of an autonomous individual’s social skills for healthy interactions within a larger community. But maybe what we consider healthy isn’t at all what the critics have in mind.

Reprogramming the Quiet Child

Susan Cain’s 2012 book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, does not specifically address homeschooling, but Cain does talk about the history of education and the evolution of what she calls the “Extrovert Ideal — the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight.”

Starting in the 1920s, Cain tells us,

The experts advised parents to socialize their children well and schools to change their emphasis from book-learning to “assisting and guiding the developing personality.” Educators took up this mantle enthusiastically.…

Well-meaning parents of the midcentury sent their kids to school at increasingly young ages, where the main assignment was learning to socialize. (emphasis added)

In the 19th century, education was still understood to mean the development of an individual’s character, intellect, and knowledge. By the mid-20th century, education reformers had shifted the emphasis away from preparing the individual student for his or her future and toward integrating individuals into a larger group and a larger vision of a reformed society.

The New Groupthink

We 21st-century Americans may think of ourselves as “unlike the starched-shirted conformists of the 1950s,” to use Cain’s phrase, but she sees the extrovert ideal asserting itself once again in what she calls “the New Groupthink,” which, she explains, “elevates teamwork above all else.”

In ever more schools, this teamwork is promoted “via an increasingly popular method of instruction called ‘cooperative’ or ‘small group’ learning.” This “cooperative” approach, whatever the intentions behind it, actually hurts students — introverts and extroverts alike — both academically and intellectually. To explain why, Cain cites the work of Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, a Swedish psychologist and one of the world’s leading researchers on expertise.

Occasional solitude, it turns out, is essential to mastery in any discipline.

It’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which [Ericsson] has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful — they’re counterproductive. They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them.

Cain and Ericsson offer several reasons why deliberate practice is best conducted alone, “but most important,” writes Cain, “it involves working on the task that’s most challenging to you personally.”

Co-ops, study groups, playgroups, and à la carte classes mean that a homeschooled student spends plenty of time with other kids, including conventionally schooled kids. But homeschooling also allows children more alone time for the kind of learning Ericsson describes.

This is not what most schools offer; neither is it compatible with the emphasis on cooperative learning.

The Homeschooled Self

“The structure and reality of traditional schools,” writes Rebecca Kochenderfer for Homeschool.com, teach kids “to be passive and compliant, which can follow the children throughout life. Children can learn to take abuse, to ignore miserable bosses or abusive spouses later on.”

“In a traditional school,” Kochenderfer adds, “someone else usurps authority.”

Kids from homeschooling families learn a very different lesson about authority and responsibility.

Researcher John Wesley Taylor used the Piers-Harris Children’s Self-Concept Scale to evaluate 224 homeschooled children for self-esteem. “On the global scale,” writes Taylor, “half of the homeschoolers scored at or above the 91st percentile. This condition may be due to higher achievement and mastery levels, independent study characteristics, or one-on-one tutoring situations in the homeschool environment.”

A strong “self-concept ” doesn’t mean that homeschooled kids are self-centered. “Their moral reasoning is at least as advanced as that of other children,” according to Richard G. Medlin’s research, cited earlier, “and they may be more likely to act unselfishly.” What it does mean, however, is that children educated at home are less likely to grow up to be followers.

In 1993, J. Gary Knowles, then a professor of education at the University of Michigan, surveyed 53 adults who had been taught at home by their parents. He found that nearly two-thirds were self-employed. That’s more than twice the global average and about 10 times the current national average. “That so many of those surveyed were self-employed,” said Knowles, “supports the contention that home schooling tends to enhance a person’s self-reliance and independence.”

That independence may be the real source of critics’ concerns.

“Public school educators and other critics,” Knowles commented, “question whether home-educated children will be able to become productive, participating members of a diverse and democratic society.”

But with so much evidence for the superior results achieved by homeschooling — both academically and socially — we have to question the critics’ goals. Is their concern really for the welfare of those educated outside the schools? Or is it rather, as so much of their language suggests, for the success of a particular vision of society — a vision that they fear the independently educated may not readily accommodate?

B.K. MarcusB.K. Marcus

B.K. Marcus is editor of the Freeman.

UNC Chapel Hill’s “Literature of 9/11” course teaches students to embrace jihad, hate America

As the incomparable Daniel Greenfield puts it, #OnlyTerroristLivesMatter.” Neel Ahuja is identified in this College Fix article as “an associate professor of English, comparative literature, and geography at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.” However, UNC’s website lists him more specifically as “associate professor of postcolonial studies in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC.” “Postcolonial studies”: that’s as likely to present a positive or even fair view of the United States of America as the Department of “Queer Theory” is to present a course entitled The Wisdom of Pat Robertson.

“According to Ahuja’s Blinkness rating page – which is similar to Rate My Professors but specific to Chapel Hill – he seems to be popular with his students, and received generally positive reviews. However, several students also warned not to disagree with Ahuja, especially in a graded assignment.” Of course. UNC, like virtually all major universities today, is not a center of higher learning, but a center of far-Left indoctrination, and woe unto you if you dare get out of step. UNC is a particularly ugly and virulent center of this indoctrination, employing the likes of Carl Ernst, who has won an award from the genocidally antisemitic Islamic Republic of Iran for his work on whitewashing Islamic jihad, and Omid Safi, the desperately dishonest Islamic supremacist who has since moved on to even greener dawah opportunities at nearby Duke. In any case, I’m sure that UNC’s embarrassment at having me as an alumnus is outstripped only by my disgust at having gone there. But nowhere else would the situation have been significantly different.

Of the dismal and one-sided offerings in this propaganda session masquerading as a college class, the only one I have read is The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Speaking of regrets, I was sorry I had wasted my time. The book was an extended exercise in grievance-mongering, intending to show how U.S. policies were driving thoughtful, reasonable people to become jihad terrorists. Despite the word “fundamentalist” in the title, there was little in the book about Islamic texts and teachings, and what effect they could have upon a devout believer. No, it was all the fault of the big bad U.S.

Neither Neel Ahuja nor UNC is some egregious anomaly. This is what most all college and university students are learning today, all over the country. How will that work out in twenty or thirty years, unless there is some massive change? With a country voluntarily surrendered to and subjugated by its enemies — delivered over to them by leaders who didn’t think there was, in America and Judeo-Christian civilization, anything worth defending.

“UNC’s ‘Literature of 9/11’ course sympathizes with terrorists, paints U.S. as imperialistic,” by Alec Dent, The College Fix,

An English class offered at UNC Chapel Hill this fall called “Literature of 9/11” explores the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks from the perspective of radical Islamists and those who view America as an imperialist nation.

The reading assignments for the class, which includes poems, memoirs and graphic novels, present terrorists in a sympathetic light and American political leaders as greedy, war hungry and corrupt, according to a review by The College Fix.

The readings mostly focus on justifying the actions of terrorists – painting them as fighting against an American regime, or mistaken idealists, or good people just trying to do what they deem right. None of the readings assigned in the freshman seminar present the Sept. 11 attacks from the perspective of those who died or from American families who lost loved ones.

“ENGL 72: Literature of 9/11” is taught by Neel Ahuja, an associate professor of English, comparative literature, and geography at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill….

As for “Literature of 9/11,” its online description states it aims to “explore representations of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath in literature and popular culture.”To that end, the class covers a wide variety of readings, according to a list detailed by the campus bookstore’s website.

In the Shadow of No Towers by Speigelman

Poems from Guantanamo: Detainees Speak by Falkoff

Reluctant Fundamentalist by Hamid

Sand Opera by Metres

Sirens of Baghdad (Trans Cullen) by Khadra

Stuff Happens by Hare

In the Shadow of No Towers is a collection of 9/11 comics by celebrated graphic artist Art Speigelman, who witnessed the attacks from his home in lower Manhattan. None of his family died in the attack, but Speigelman told Democracy Now he felt anger at how the incident was turned into a patriotic rallying cry, and his Towers work is an extension of those emotions.

The horrors his family survived that morning “were only the beginning for Spiegelman, as his anguish was quickly displaced by fury at the U.S. government, which shamelessly co-opted the events for its own preconceived agenda,” according to the book’s Amazon description.

Poems from Guantanamo: Detainees Speak is a collection of poems penned by Guantanamo detainees; The Reluctant Fundamentalist is the fictional tale of a successful Pakistani in America who gradually comes to believe America is imperialistic and evil; Sand Opera is a collection of poems on torture, race and war; The Sirens of Baghdad is a thriller depicting a good man turning into a terrorist; and Stuff Happens – taking a line from Donald Rumsfeld – is an anti-war, anti-government, anti-military play that mixes fact with fiction in its dramatic interpretation of the decision to invade Iraq.

According to the course’s online description, “following an introduction to the concept of terrorism and to the production of knowledge about political violence in the fields of law, politics, religious studies, and terrorism studies, we will explore a diverse array of themes related to the 9/11 attacks and the ‘war on terror’ as depicted in memoirs, poetry, novels, public art, graphic novels, film, and music: explanations of the causes and consequences of political violence; the role of religion in public culture and state institutions; national security discourse; mourning, trauma, and public memorials; depictions of the US military in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan; and the perspectives of detainees and minority communities on the attacks and their aftermath.”

According to Ahuja’s Blinkness rating page – which is similar to Rate My Professors but specific to Chapel Hill – he seems to be popular with his students, and received generally positive reviews. However, several students also warned not to disagree with Ahuja, especially in a graded assignment.

An online database of professor salaries maintained by the News & Observer states Ahuja’s annual salary is $72,100.

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of Neel Ahuja.

Common Core: The Bullying of Parents and Public School Children

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth,” said Vladimir Lenin who led the revolution that imposed Communism on Russia.

When he wrote, Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler said “whoever has the youth has the future.” In his vision for the Nazi Party, education would be the key that ensured that he had ‘the youth’ of Germany fully indoctrinated.

All dictators and authoritarian regimes know that what is taught in their schools offers the greatest opportunity to maintain control over their societies.

That is what has been occurring since the introduction of the Common Core standards that the Obama regime has imposed on our national education system and the good news is that protests against it from concerned parents and others are beginning to increase and gain momentum.

Teachers will tell you that “one size fits all” does not apply in the classroom and never has. Children learn at a different pace with some doing so rapidly while others need extra help and attention. Learning that is entirely dependent on ceaseless testing puts stress on every child and that is the most common complaint about Common Core.

Education in America has been in decline since the 1960s when the teachers unions gained control over the process, putting themselves between the local boards of education and parents. Would it surprise anyone to learn that the Department of Education was established by President Jimmy Carter who signed it into law in 1979? It began operation on May 4, 1980. You will find no reference, no mention of education in the U.S. Constitution and it should not be a function of the federal government.

In a recent commentary by Joy Pullmann in The Daily Caller, she said, “The latest scheme is the field testing of Common Core assessments. This spring more than four million kids will be required to spend hours on tests that have little connection to what they learned in class this year and will provide their teachers and schools no information about what the kids know.”

“Parents who object to this scheme,” said Pullman, “face bullying and harassment from public officials. From New York to Denver to California, some schools are responding by forcing kids who opt out to sit at their desks and do nothing during the several-hour tests. Normal people call that a ‘time out’ and it is a punishment.”

Wyoming has become the first State to block a new set of national science standards that address climate change. In Michigan last year a group of protesters stopped the State from adopting the science standards.

Here are some excerpts of what the science standards teach as “The Essential Principles of Climate Science.”

  • “The impacts of climate change may affect the security of nations. Reduced availability of water, food, and land can lead to competition and conflict among humans, potentially resulting in large groups of climate refugees.”
  • “Humans may be able to mitigate climate change or lessens its severity by reducing greenhouse gas concentrations through processes that move carbon out of the atmosphere or reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
  • “The most immediate strategy is conservation of oil, gas, and coal, which we rely on as fuels for most of our transportation, heating, cooling, agriculture, and electricity. Short-term strategies involve switching from carbon-intensive to renewable energy sources, which also requires building new infrastructure for alternative energy sources.”

From “A Framework for K-12 Science Education” children are to be taught that “If Earth’s global mean temperature continues to rise, the lives of humans and other organisms will be affected in many different ways.” Only the Earth’s mean temperature is not rising! The planet is in a natural cooling cycle that is now seventeen years old, meaning that none of the students in today’s schools have ever experienced a single day of “global warming.”

By the end of grade 8, the Framework teaches that “Human activities have significantly altered the biosphere, sometimes damaging or destroying natural habitats and causing the extinction of many other species.” This, too, is untrue. The U.S. Endangered Species Act, despite listing thousands of species, has not officially “saved” more than a handful at best and this assertion is questionable.

By the end of grade 12, students are expected to believe that “Changes in the atmosphere due to human activity have increased carbon dioxide concentrations and thus affect climate.” While it is true that there has been an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide this is a good thing because it is an essential factor in the increase of all vegetation that includes food crops and healthier forests. Moreover, this increase does not play any role in the Earth’s climate.

The central theme of these “science standards” is to teach that we should be reducing our use of fossil fuels, the primary energy sources our nation and the world requires. What these standards do in reality is repeat and reinforce federal government laws and regulations to justify its CO2 emissions regulations based on the current method of computing the Social Cost of Carbon, but these “costs” are pure fiction.

None of the computer models that have predicted global warming over the past four decades have been accurate. None are capable of representing the state of the Earth’s vastly complex climate.

The sooner Common Core is removed from the nation’s education system, the better.

Editor’s Note: To learn more or follow the debate on Common Core, visit The Heartland Institute’s “Education Weekly” newsletter that provides data via Common Core Watch.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

RELATED STORY: Common Core’s Validation: A Weak Foundation for a Crooked House