Cheat-Seeking Missles

Sunday, December 19, 2004

Another Reason to Homeschool

Let's brainwash our kids to accept moral blindness, one-worldism and lower expectations! And let's do it by encouraging our schools to bring in UNESCO's International Baccalaureate K-12 curriculum! Here's what it offers!

The Earth Charter (www.earthcharter.org) is radical stuff. It ignores the idea of property rights, promotes the notoriously corrupt United Nations as the key instrument of world peace, denounces the "dominant patterns of production and consumption," and promotes universal health care and the "equitable distribution of wealth."

The IB curriculum (www.ibo.org) and the Earth Charter are separate, but the charter gives you a good idea of the values that lie at the heart of the IB program. A lot of the IB curriculum is of the "be nice to your neighbor" variety. But a lot of the rest of it is propaganda.

Those are excerpts from Steven Greenhut's commentary on IB in today's aOC Register. (here) The UNESCO-sponsored international school curriculum is starting to find its way into US schools. Greenhut has little trust for socialism, environmentalism or big government, and he's not too happy about IB's spread:

Under the best scenario, IB programs might do little more than promote a vague international perspective. But I see the potential for mischief once this curriculum becomes well entrenched and IB officials can be more bold in their social-change efforts.

We are not citizens of the world, but citizens of America.

There's much to value in other cultures, much to be gained by understanding how other peoples view the world. I would never argue that the American perspective is always the right perspective, or that students ought to be indoctrinated with pro-American jingoism, or that problems in America should be sugar-coated or ignored.

But students should not be taught that America is prosperous because of some geographic accident. The nation has succeeded because of the decisions of our founders, who created a Constitution that protects individual rights, private property, free markets, the rule of law and limited government.

Those are the true international values, likely to succeed in any nation where they are implemented. They are the values most likely to lead to the worldwide peace, harmony and prosperity that IB says it wants to advance. Why look to international bureaucrats for the right lessons, when they can be found so much closer to home?