 |
| Carnegie Civic Training |
To those opposing Communist Core, to the exclusion of tax-funded school choice/charters, take note. This Marxist curriculum is being used in charter schools which have no elected boards. That is what those supporting school choice/charters can expect their children to be exposed to when ALL schools are tax-funded "choice" schools: tax-funded with NO elected boards to whom parents can complain!
Joyce Baldwin's summary follows:
As The Civic Mission of Schools urges, both the Massachusetts school district and the D.C. public charter high school “infuse a civic mission throughout the curriculum . . .so that the students are able to ‘live what they learn’ about civic engagement and democracy.” The experts whose input shaped the report recommend “conducting more research that helps to define and develop standardized indicators of civic engagement, especially those that expand the meaning of citizenship and take a broader view beyond voting, volunteering, and knowing facts about the government.” Evaluation of the innovative ways in which civic education is changing in these schools and others throughout our country will yield valuable data to help states shape their education policies.
The Hudson schools and César Chávez are different in many ways, one a suburban school district, the other an urban high school drawing students from all parts of its city. The two academic institutions have developed different iterations of school-based civic education, yet they share a number of characteristics. In both Hudson and César Chávez, for example, all students—including those who might otherwise be disaffected—have ongoing opportunities to be engaged in the civic life of their communities, to begin to appreciate how classroom lessons are inextricably linked to their civic experiences and to learn how to voice their opinions and listen to the thoughts of others.
Civic engagement programs in the Hudson and Washington, D.C. schools help young people begin to understand how lessons learned in the classroom, in the Patanal of Brazil and in local governing groups in their communities resonate in their lives. Through civic engagement securely anchored to academics, the youngsters begin to gain a rich understanding of our democratic life and learn the skills needed to contribute to our nation in a meaningful way. As Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian has said, “When young people learn that they can make a real difference in their communities, civic lessons of the heart will become integral to their lives, and hopefully the youngsters will become active, caring citizens, who understand that the future of our democracy is truly in their hands.”
 |
| Carnegie's "Civic Education in Schools" |
(1) SOVIETS IN THE CASSROOM: AMERICA’S LATEST EDUCATION FAD WRITTEN BY THIS WRITER in 1989 (published four years after the fact by America’s Future, Inc.), details the U.S.-Soviet and Carnegie-Soviet education agreements. (For full text of this pamphlet, see Appendix XXIII.) Two excerpts dealing with the specific agreements follow:
(a) The agreements call for “Cooperation in the field of science and technology and additional agreements in other specific fields, including the humanities and social sciences; the facilitation of the exchange by appropriate organizations of educational and teaching materials, including textbooks, syllabi and curricula, materials on methodology, samples of teaching instruments and audiovisual aids… exchange of primary and secondary school textbooks and other teaching materials... the conducting of joint studies on textbooks between appropriate organizations in the United States and the Ministry of Education of the U.S.S.R.”...
(b) The Carnegie Corporation’s exchange agreement with the Soviet Academy of Sciences has resulted in “joint research on the application of computers in early elementary education, focusing especially on the teaching of higher level skills and complex subjects to younger children.” (“Higher level skills” is often a euphemism for “critical thinking skills.”) Carnegie’s 1988 one-year $250,000 grant is funding implementation of this program, coordinated on the American side by Michael Cole, director of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition at the University of California, San Diego. (pp. 259-260)
(2) DAVID HORNBECK, SUPERINTENDENT OF MARYLAND’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS, IN TESTIMONY BEFORE the Maryland State Board of Education in 1984 attempted to “mandate community service at state-approved places.” During Hornbeck’s testimony he quoted the late Ernest Boyer, then president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, as saying, “In the end the goal of service in the schools is to teach values—to help all students understand that to be fully human one must serve.” (p. 217)
(3) “THE FOUNDATION MACHINE” BY EDITH KERMIT ROOSEVELT WAS PUBLISHED IN THE December 26,1968 issue of The Wanderer. In this important article Mrs. Roosevelt discussed problems that had been created by the Carnegie Corporation’s new reading program as follows:
Even now the Carnegie Corporation is facing protests from parents whose children are exposed to the textbooks financed by the foundation under its “Project Read.” This project provides programmed textbooks for schools, particularly in “culturally deprived areas.” An estimated five million children throughout the nation are using the material in the programmed textbooks produced by the Behavioral Research Laboratories, Palo Alto, California. This writer has gone over these textbooks in the “Reading” series financed by the Carnegie Corporation and authored by M.W. Sullivan, a linguist. These foundation-funded books reveal a fire pattern that amounts to an incitement to the sort of arson and guerilla warfare that took place in Watts, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. On one page in the series we find a torch next to a white porch. The caption reads invitingly, “a torch, a porch.” Further along there is a picture of a man smiling while he holds a torch aloft. The caption beneath it reads: “This man has a t_rch in his hand.” The children are required as an exercise to insert the missing letter to fill in the word torch. The next picture shows the burning torch touching the porch, with a caption, “a torch on a porch.” Thus, the children are led in stages to the final act that suggests itself quite naturally. The picture in the series shows a hand moving the hands of a clock to twenty-five minutes past one, while this same shack is being devoured by flames. The message is plain: an example of a man who deliberately commits the criminal act of setting a home on fire. Tragically, these young children are being indoctrinated with a pattern of anti-social ideas that will completely and violently alienate them from the mainstream of American middle-class values.... Other pictures in the Carnegie-funded supposedly educational texts include a comparison of a flag with a rag, the ransoming of an American soldier in a Chinese prison, a picture that shows people kneeling in a church to say their prayers beside a picture of a horse being taught to kneel in the same way, a reference to a candidate elected to public office as a “ruler,” a picture of a boy stealing a girl’s purse, and another boy throwing pointed darts at a companion whom he uses as target practice.
Understandably, the Carnegie-financed books are causing concern to local law-enforcement officials, many of whom have to cope with riot or near-riot conditions. Ellen Morphonios, prosecutor for Florida in its attorney’s office, and a chief of its Criminal Court Division, said recently: “It’s a slap in the face and an insult to every member of the Negro community, saying that the only way to communicate with Negro children is to show a robber or violence. It’s like subliminal advertising. If this isn’t subversive and deliberately done as part of a master plan.… Only a sick mind could have produced it.”
Repeated instances of this type of anti-social activity obviously constitute a strong argument for removing the tax-exempt status of these educational foundations, and for curbing their activities by Federal regulations and Congressional oversight. (pp. 82-83)
 |
| Paulo Freire |
(4) PAULO FREIRE’S INFLUENCE ON WORLD EDUCATION, INCLUDING EDUCATION IN THE UNITED States, is revealed in an interesting article entitled “Radical Theorist Takes His Message to the World” published in The New York Times August 19, 1986. Some excerpts follow:
Within days of the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in July 1979, Nicaragua’s new leaders had tracked down the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire at the university where he was lecturing in the United States and had issued him an invitation to come to Managua to help reorganize the country’s education system and design its new literacy program.
When Portugal underwent its revolution in 1974 its new Government made a similar offer to Mr. Freire, as did Chile’s Institute for Agrarian Reform during the period just before the election of Salvador Allende Gossens there.”
Newly independent nations in Africa, ranging from Angola to Tanzania, have also sought the advice of the man regarded as perhaps the foremost literacy expert and radical educator in the world.
“It’s something that pleases me,” Mr. Freire said recently as he passed through New
York City, on his way to a series of workshops and seminars at American universities. “At times, I have been criticized by some philosophers of education, who place me in postures that they classify pejoratively as revolutionary....”
Mr. Friere (pronounced FRAYree) first became widely known in this country with the publication Pedagogy of the Oppressed more than 15 years ago. He has argued that it is not education which shapes a society, but rather society which molds education to fit the ends and interests of those in control. In his view, education, particularly the process of learning to read and write, “can become an instrument of social transformation by making those at the bottom of society aware of their plight and the reasons for it.”
In practice, refined through literacy campaigns among peasants in the Brazilian Northeast beginning in the late 1950s and later on four continents, Mr. Freire and his many disciples have relied on words like “hunger” or “land,” chosen for their relevance to the pupil’s own political and social situation, to teach peasants and workers to read and write. The objective is to develop among them what Mr. Friere calls “a critical comprehension of reality.”
...But Mr. Freire also argues that his distinct education has considerable relevance in the industrialized nations of the capitalist world. Mr. Freire’s methods have been adapted in the United States by feminist, Hispanic and black groups that operate adult literacy programs or train teachers. Even some corporations, such as Consolidated Edison in New York, have at various times used his techniques in education programs for new workers with low levels of formal education.
“I am not a technician of literacy, as many people apparently saw me in the beginning,” he said. “I am an educator who thinks globally.”...
To some of his critics, including the Reagan Administration, Mr. Freire’s emphasis on the practical has been taken to an absurd extreme in Nicaragua, where second graders count not apples or oranges but hand grenades and rifles to learn arithmetic. (p. 237)
 |
| The Carnegie plan |
Although the above article may seem outrageous, why should we be surprised considering the recommendations made by Carnegie in its little blue book Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies (1934). This book called for using the schools to change America from a capitalist country to a socialist/communist planned economy. Go to American Deception.com where the aforemenetioned book is a free download. (Type "Conclusions" into the search engine)
