There was a time, between the mid 1960s and the collapse of the Evil Empire around 1990, when little children were raised by “progressive” parents to fear that a terrible nuclear war was about to destroy all life on earth, starting at any moment, and all because the Western world was armed with nuclear weapons. The instilling of terror in the poor tots could not start early enough in the passionate opinion of hippie and New Left moms and dads. Ghoulish lullabies were sung to babies about carrion crows sitting on their cradles.

By winning the Cold War, the wicked West – led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – put an end to that scam. Though maybe not to the effects of the dread deeply implanted in two or three generations of children.

What is it with the Left that it wants to instill anxiety and fear in their kids? Do they want their nights riven with shrieks as junior wakes hysterical from a nightmare? Seems so.

They’re at it again. This time the bed-time story – and the day time lesson – is that the earth is about to heat red hot, boiling oceans are about to rise and flood the continents, all the cuddly white polar bears will drown (because they cannot swim and have to dwell on ice floes which will melt under them), the tops of the mountains will lose their pretty caps of snow, fish will mutate into Jesus Christ or Charles Darwin, and all because the wicked West won’t stop using aerosol cans, herding flatulent cows, driving motorcars, and breathing out.

This is from Front Page, by Mary Grabar:

Under [Arne Duncan’s] watch the Department of Education has become a propaganda arm used to influence the next generation to accept the idea of catastrophic man-made climate change as per the UN, the Environmental Protection Agency, and such groups as the National Wildlife Federation. 

In a multi-pronged approach, the Department is teaming up with various non-profit and government organizations and curriculum companies to promote “fun” contests and activities for students, while promoting the next phase of Common Core “State Standards” — in science.

For example, the Department’s latest Green Strides newsletter (February 28) announced three contests for K-12 students who display their agreement with the government’s position on climate change.

In that newsletter, the Department of Education announced that another federal agency, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [EPA], and its National Environmental Education Foundation, have “launched an exciting video challenge for middle school students called Climate Change in Focus”.  In this contest, middle school students are asked to make a video that “expresses why they care about climate change and what they are doing to reduce emissions or to prepare for its impacts”.  To win loyalty to the EPA, it is announced that winning videos will be highlighted on the EPA website. The effort sounds like the kids’ cereal box promotions of yore: the top three entries will receive “cool prizes like a solar charging backpack”,  winning class projects will receive special recognition for their school, and the first 100 entrants will receive a year’s subscription to National Geographic Kids Magazine.

Another contest, National Wildlife Federation’s Young Reporters for the Environment, invites students “between the ages of 13-21 to report on an environmental issue in their community in an article, photo or photo essay, or short video”. Entries should “reflect firsthand investigation of topics related to the environment and sustainability in the students’ own communities, draw connections between local and global perspectives, and propose solutions”.

Students are also encouraged to make nominations for “Champions of the Earth”, a “UN-sponsored award for environment, Green Economy, and sustainability”. …

Students already get exposed to climate change and sustainability in textbooks which are bought with taxpayer funds, as well as in videos and online materials produced by taxpayer-supported Public Broadcasting. Many students, of course, have had to sit through Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. …

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) — the next phase of Common Core — will make the situation worse, however. Students will be even less capable of distinguishing science from propaganda. These standards, like those for math and English Language Arts, were produced by Achieve, a nonprofit education group started by corporate leaders and some governors.

Started by lefties is our guess. Sensible decision to be “non-profit”. Who would buy their product?

As in the standards for English Language Arts and math, the NGSS are intended to be transformative, or as Appendix A states, “to reflect a new vision for American science education”. They call for new “performance expectations” that “focus on understanding and applications as opposed to memorization of facts devoid of context”. 

In plain words, indoctrination – teaching what to think,  instead of education – teaching how to think.

And they can even manage to do this with the teaching of Mathematics. Wow!

It is precisely such short shrift to knowledge (dismissively referred to as “memorization”) to which science professors Lawrence S. Lerner and Paul Gross object. The standards bypass essential math skills in favor of “process”, they asserted last fall at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation blog. [They said that] Common Core standards, in all disciplines, are written with a lot of fluff to conceal their emptiness. …

Lerner and Gross condemn the “slighting of mathematics”,  which does “increasing mischief as grade level rises, especially in the physical sciences”. Physics is “effectively absent” at the high school level. … [They] attack the “practices” strategy, as an extension of the “inquiry learning” of the early 1990s, which had “no notable effect on the (mediocre) performance of American students in national and international science assessments”. 

With some sarcasm, they write, “It is charming to say ‘students learn science effectively when they actively engage in the practices of science’.” However, … beginners don’t and can’t “practice” [science]  as do experts. The practices of experts exploit prior experience and extensive build-up in long-term memory of scaffolding: facts, procedures, technical know-how, solutions to standard problems in the field, vocabularies — of knowledge in short.

Not only do the Next Generation Science Standards shirk the necessary foundations in math and science knowledge, but they explicitly call for including ideological lessons, such as “Human impacts on Earth systems”.

For grades K-2, students are to understand, “Things people do can affect the environment but they can make choices to reduce their impact.” In grades 3 through 5, students will learn “Societal activities have had major effects on the land, ocean, atmosphere, and even outer space. Societal activities can also help protect Earth’s resources and environments.” …

The objective, of course, is not teaching legitimate science, but indoctrination.

Amazingly, ten states have already voluntarily adopted the Standards.

Such efforts, coordinated by the Department of Education, threaten the future of science itself.

When will this lunacy pass? We venture to state our secret conviction, hoping the all-powerful EPA Gestapo is not listening:

The planet we live on is not under any existential threat. And if it were, there’s not a thing anyone could do about it. 

So sleep well, children. Happy dreams.

Every day, the Liberal American education system teaches about the global warming ‘crisis.’ Recently, a student friend of mine was presented with a 115 item list of things he could do to help ‘save’ the environment. Here are a few gems:

1. Use cloth diapers. Wonderful – now, instead of throwing away my baby’s diapers, I can wash ’em and reuse ’em. Welcome to 40 years ago.
2. Invest in well-made, functional clothing. Saving our environment, one pair of used overalls at a time.
3. Explore and learn about your community. I don’t stalk and am not a peeping Tom.
4. Learn where your waste and sewage goes. Yes, the journey of poop is a thrilling one. Tell it to be home by 11:00 PM!
5. Research socially responsible investments. Remember to kiss your money goodbye.
6. “Adopt a grandparent” from the local senior center. That’ll annoy the old chap.
7. Following on from the item above: volunteer to cook for senior citizens.
8. Sponsor a clothes swap. I hope that the clothes swapped are ‘well-made and functional.’
9. Educate yourself on global and ‘third world’ (their quotes) issues. May I suggest tyranny, mass murder, slavery, and starvation?
10. Spend time visualizing world peace. I can’t, can you?
11. Vote for candidates who support Green values. Is that a Liberal I smell?
12. Put toxic substances out of reach of children. Because children could potentially damage the environment once they enjoy a quick shot of Drano.
13. Communicate openly with your friends and coworkers. Gather ’round the water cooler for a heart-to-heart chat.
14. Work to unlearn cultural sexism and racism. Because everyone is sexist and racist. Except the racists, of course.
15. Ecotourism and ecoconsumerism. Yes, let’s enjoy two things that don’t even exist.
16. Decrease TV watching and increase creative learning. It’s been proven: sitting in front of a TV produces over 7 tons of CO2 per HOUR. Creative learning on the other hand, produces only 4 (or less if you buy carbon credits).

The packet ends with ‘have fun and be joyful.’ This to me is an invitation to get into my Hummer, put it in park, and hold the gas pedal down for a good twenty minutes. Nothing feels quite as good as a V8 revving up.

Have any of our readers encountered such Green ‘advice?’ Please tell us about it; it’s very entertaining.

 From Power Line:

More than any other cartoonist now working, I think, Michael Ramirez makes incisive points with his drawings. Like this one; click to enlarge:

It’s an excellent point: the real Bill Ayres scandal is not that he is pals with a guy who turned out to be President; it’s that he has had, over a period of years, a considerable influence on how children in Chicago have been educated. And that influence has been entirely pernicious. Ayers’ radical, racially separatist curriculum has been studied and has been found to be educationally worthless. In today’s liberal world, of course, that doesn’t put him out of business. On the contrary.

Bill Ayers happens to be famous, by virtue of his relationship with Barack Obama and the fact that some years ago, he bombed the United States Capitol and other landmarks. But how many other "educators" share Ayers’ perspective and values, but have never bombed anything and don’t happen to be friends with the President-elect? That number is huge. No one is tracking their influence on our youth, but isn’t it obvious that the influence of leftists in our public and private schools is both vast and malign?

We have become all too familiar with the sexual corruption of innocence by schools teaching the very young more about sex than they have any need to know or comprehension of, with special stress on indoctrinating them to accept homosexuality as normal.

Some are being corrupted with political indoctrination. Here a Canadian paper describes how children are being taught lies about Saudi Arabia and misled about Islam.