This is the final installment of the Indoctrination Fridays series.  They can all be read at PublicSchoolSpending.com.  A book featuring more leftist curricula, entitled, “Indoctrination! How Useful Idiots Are Using Our Schools to Subvert American Exceptionalism” will be released later this year.

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 earthquake mercilessly shook the country of Haiti, causing death and destruction of Biblical proportions. By the time the last aftershock was registered, approximately 85,000 Haitians were dead, and hundreds of thousands more were injured or left homeless.

Some observed that the 1989 San Francisco earthquake also reached 7.0 on the Richter scale, but that left 63 people dead and left about 12,000 homeless. The difference between the two was that California’s buildings are designed to withstand powerful earthquakes, and Haiti’s are not.

That realization brought renewed attention to the poverty of the Haitian people. Onlookers began to question why the tiny Caribbean country was so hopelessly poor and ill-prepared.

Garrett Glass of the Digital Freedom Network suggested a possible reason:

“In Haiti’s 200-year quest for freedom, one of the most crucial components of freedom, which leads to prosperity, has never been effectively implemented or even seriously tried (much less respected). The Haitian system of establishing property rights is so convoluted, complicated and corrupt that to the average citizen of Haiti owning any property will always remain just a dream. The connection between poverty and the lack of property rights is often overlooked.”

George Mason University economist Walter Williams noted that the rule of law is virtually nonexistent in Haiti:

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On July 30, 2011 a few thousand teacher union activists descended upon Washington D.C. for a “Save Our Schools” rally. The keynote speaker that day was actor Matt Damon, who took the occasion to bash standardized testing.  You know, virtually the only thing used to assess student achievement and a tool for teacher accountability.

“I said before that I had incredible teachers,” Damon told the crowd. “And that’s true. But it’s more than that. My teachers were EMPOWERED to teach me. Their time wasn’t taken up with a bunch of test prep — this silly drill and kill nonsense that any serious person knows doesn’t promote real learning.”

He added that teachers should help kids fall “in love with the process of learning” rather than worrying that students are filling “in the right bubble on a test.” Damon, a proud leftist, was repeating an oft-heard criticism from the left that standardized testing harms student learning. They argue that “teaching to the test” creates student automatons who are only capable of regurgitating factoids deemed important by the government.

Many Americans reason that if the test covers the essential things kids need to know, then “teaching to the test” makes sense and wonder what all the fuss is about.

Frankly, I wondered that myself – until I came across “Teaching About Global Warming in Truck Country” by Jana Dean, an eighth grade science and social studies teacher in Washington state. Dean’s article is included in “Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching for Equity and Justice, Volume 1.”

In the article, Dean recounts the difficulty she had in selling students on the dangers of man-made global warming. Dean teaches in a rural community where most families still use trucks in their everyday activities. Early on in the global warming unit, one student asked if Dean was telling him he could never drive a truck like his father does.

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Those of us who attended public schools before “social justice” spread through the curriculum like a bad infection probably remember sitting in math class and working through problems such as this one:

Leroy has one quarter, one dime, one nickel, and one penny. Two of the coins are in his left pocket and the other two coins are in his right pocket. The coins have been randomly placed in the two pockets.

What is the probability that Leroy will be able to purchase a 30-cent candy bar with the two coins in his left pocket? Using the coins, explain your reasoning.

We didn’t know it at the time, but while we busily charted all of Leroy’s different coin combinations, we were actually being taught to tacitly approve of America’s exploitative capitalistic system.

Think that’s taking things a bit too far?

Read the words of a “fair trade” blogger and judge for yourself:

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This is one part of a running series entitled “Indoctrination Fridays,” a weekly review of leftist propaganda incorporated into public school curriculum, much of it geared towards elementary students.  For more of the series, please visit PublicSchoolSpending.com.

In the late 1990s, the Los Angeles Unified School District partnered with United Teachers Los Angeles – funded by a federal grant – to produce a multi-part curriculum entitled, “Workplace Issues and Collective Bargaining in the Classroom.”

Education Action Group obtained it from the California Department of Education.

The purpose of the lessons is to get students to appreciate the need for collective bargaining, and experience first-hand how it works. During the lessons, which can take up to a week of class time, students pose as either “labor” or “management” and bargain a teachers’ contract.  They grapple with such issues as health insurance co-pays, raises and hiring procedures. Finally, the union has someone to feel its pain!

The curriculum includes a video which touts the success of the program.  It’s insightful that the very first speaker on the video is the president of the teachers union, A.J. Duffy:

“UTLA plays a unique role in the labor movement in L.A. As the second largest teachers’ union in the country, with all of our other responsibilities, we are in the position to educate the next generation of civic leaders by reaching out to high school students and having them participate in a unique UTLA program. … The Collective Bargaining Education Project brings the lessons of labor to the classroom by involving students in the same process UTLA and other unions engage in to gain better wages and working conditions for teachers and students at L.A. Unified Schools.”

The union endorsements of the curriculum don’t stop there.

Linda Tubach, one of the curriculum’s creators, says “The students have a very direct experience with the issues that they’re going to face in their workplaces and their experience is a collective one in small groups, mentored by coaches who have direct experience in the collective bargaining process.”

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This is one part of a running series entitled “Indoctrination Fridays,” a weekly review of leftist propaganda incorporated into public school curriculum, much of it geared towards elementary students.  For more of the series, please visit PublicSchoolSpending.com.

Leftist educators will take just about anything and turn it on its head to fit their agenda.  Even children’s fairytales don’t escape the slaughterhouse.

Ellen Wolpert, a longtime “early childhood educator” in Massachusetts, penned an article entitled, “Rethinking ‘The Three Little Pigs.’”

You’re probably familiar with the story: a big, bad wolf threatens to destroy the homes of three individual pigs. There’s a lot of huffing and puffing on the wolf’s part, but he can only blow over the two homes that were constructed with straw and sticks.

The house standing left standing is made of brick, leaving readers to conclude that careful planning and hard work (as represented by the brick house) leads to success. The pigs’ definition of success, of course, is to avoid being eaten by the wolf.

That’s how normal, well-adjusted people interpret the story. But Leftists, by and large, are dour, unhappy people who see oppression and bigotry around every corner. So it’s no surprise that Wolpert sees a dark and malicious subtext to the simple fairy tale.

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This is one part of a running series entitled “Indoctrination Fridays,” a weekly review of leftist propaganda incorporated into public school curriculum, much of it geared towards elementary students.  For more of the series, please visit PublicSchoolSpending.com.

Any good community organizer knows an effective protest requires two things: a bully to excoriate and a catchy slogan that resonates in the public mind.

Even though most protestors are “uncomplicated” people, don’t be deceived; staging an effective rally is not a simple task.

First, a bully must be identified. For progressives, a bully is anybody who disagrees with you politically, so there is no shortage of candidates. However, as Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” explains, it’s best to settle on one target to isolate and attack.

Next, protestors need to come up with a catchy slogan to shout at the designated bully. Most people don’t have the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s “gift” of reducing complex ideas into simplistic rhymes. This skill must be taught.

Which brings us to this week’s installment of the Indoctrination Fridays series:  Gender doesn’t limit you – A research-based anti-bullying program for the early grades.

This charming six-part lesson plan is designed to stamp out (mostly) gender-based bullying from Pre-K all the way through 6^th grade.

Most readers will agree that bullying is a problem and that teachers should talk to students about it in a thoughtful, reasonable manner.

But thought and reason are totally absent from the “Gender doesn’t limit you” lesson plans, which only provide children with a designated slogan to shout at suspected bullies.

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This is one part of a running series entitled “Indoctrination Fridays,” a weekly review of leftist propaganda incorporated into public school curriculum and geared towards elementary students.  For more of the series, please visit PublicSchoolSpending.com.

The real targets of the Green Movement are free markets and capitalism, not theoretical global warming.  There is always another agenda.

Back in 2008, Detroit News columnist and WJR talk radio personality Frack Beckmann brought to light a series of lessons produced by Creative Change Educational Solutions, a non-profit outfit producing plans for teachers that want to instruct their students on environmental issues.

Beckmann decried the fact that the curriculum developed by Creative Change focuses on criticizing capitalism by having students compare “wages and working conditions in factories in China and Vietnam (to) corporate profits…and compensation for chief executive officers.”  In other words, the distribution of wealth is unacceptable and must be changed.  That will save the whales!

This curriculum is much worse than Beckmann lets on, however.  The lessons have spread throughout southeast Michigan.  One school district, Bloomfield Hills – which ironically serves one of the wealthiest communities in the state – purchased the curriculum for $750. Ann Arbor Public Schools paid $4,900 for a day-long seminar.  Similarly, Eastern Michigan University paid Creative Change $19,133.67 between 2007 and 2008 to “identify community groups and schools, help to develop, plan for, and facilitate Stakeholders Meetings, and collaborate writing the implementation proposal.”

Eastern Michigan University and Ann Arbor Public Schools, spent our tax dollars to spread this poison around the region.

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Note: This is one part of a running series entitled “Indoctrination Fridays,” a weekly review of leftist propaganda incorporated into public school curriculum and oftentimes geared towards elementary students.  For more of the series, please visit PublicSchoolSpending.com.

The Black Panthers of the 1960s and 1970s and the New Black Panther Party today are known for employing violence, intimidation and radicalism to get their way.  The Black Panthers were founded in 1966 on Marxist principles, advocating socialism as a solution for the grievances of African-Americans.

Its “Honorary Prime Minister,” Stokley Carmichael, said in a speech that year:

“This country is a nation of thieves. It stole everything it has, beginning with black people. The U.S. cannot justify its existence as the policeman of the world any longer. I do not want to be a part of the American pie. The American pie means raping South Africa, beating Vietnam, beating South America, raping the Philippines, raping every country you’ve been in. I don’t want any of your blood money. I don’t want to be part of that system. We must question whether or not we want this country to continue being the wealthiest country in the world at the price of raping everybody else.”

The far-left Southern Poverty Law Center, which also has curricula that will be featured in this series, has labeled the New Black Panthers a “hate group.”  That’s saying something.

But that’s of little relevance to Wayne Au.

The Seattle high school teacher-turned-professor taught his students to apply the principles of the Black Panthers to their own problems.  Seriously.

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A paper published by several college professors, entitled “Organizing the Curriculum for Labor Consciousness,” calls for more weaving of Big Labor history and tactics into every day K-12 school curriculum.

The professors cite leftist American “historian” Howard Zinn, who wrote:

“If teacher unions want to be strong and well-supported, it’s essential that they not only be teacher-unionists but teachers of unionism.  We need to create a generation of students who support teachers and the movement of teachers for their rights.” (emphasis added)

Kate Lyman, an elementary teacher in the Madison, Wisconsin school district, is clearly answering the call.

According to an article she penned for the leftist Rethinking Schools magazine, she was swept into the recent collective bargaining protests in her hometown by her daughter and Facebook, because “that’s how they did it in Egypt.”

Lyman described the mass “sickout,” which forced some districts, including her own, to cancel classes, as “four exhilarating days, four confusing days, four stressful and exhausting days.”

For the record, she’s speaking on behalf of the self-serving school employees.  She’s not talking about the working parents that had to scramble to find child care because their children were not in school.

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This is one part of a running series entitled “Indoctrination Fridays,” a weekly review of leftist propaganda incorporated into public school curriculum, much geared towards elementary students.  For more of the series, please visit PublicSchoolSpending.com.

In typical union and socialist propaganda, employers are depicted as cruel and uncaring business owners who never miss an opportunity to cheat and mistreat workers.

Big Labor’s “us versus them” worldview is so entrenched that they can’t recognize the fact that most successful companies value their employees, and do whatever they can to retain their best workers. That reality, of course, undercuts the relevance of unions.

So what’s a union to do?

Like their fellow travelers in the “man-made” global warming community, the unions know they have to indoctrinate the young with their propaganda. But when you’re dealing with kindergartners, you have to insert the concept of unionizing subtly into lessons.  You’ll get blank stares if you talk about the virtues of Jimmy Hoffa or the Service Employees International Union.

The California Federation of Teachers produced the perfect solution with “Trouble in the Hen House: A Puppet Show.” To spare you the unpleasantness of reading this bilge, here’s the basic plot:  a bunch of hens feel “oppressed” by the farmer, so they band together and create Hens United. The angry unionized chickens are too powerful a force for the farmer to handle, so he capitulates to the hens’ demands.  Here’s a key excerpt:

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This is one part of a running series entitled “Indoctrination Fridays,” a weekly review of leftist propaganda incorporated into public school curriculum and geared towards elementary students.  For more of the series, please visit PublicSchoolSpending.com.

The California Federation of Teachers thinks it’s important for kids to learn how to run a business.  I come from a small business family, so I’m cool with that.  The curriculum immediately starts off on the wrong foot, though, because it’s not from the perspective of an entrepreneur, but rather a disgruntled employee.

A “Labor Studies Curriculum for Elementary Schools,” entitled “The Yummy Pizza Company,” takes up to 20 classroom hours over a two-week period.  Important concepts in the 10 lessons, such as the value of work and money management, are critical components, but are quickly overshadowed by the fact that 40% of the curriculum is about forming Pizza Makers Union Local 18.  That’s right – the program is focused on teaching kids to unionize.

I don’t suppose this creative curriculum has anything do to with current issues, like collective bargaining privileges for public employees. Teachers wouldn’t be so blatant as to involve young children in their political issues, would they?

Art lessons are incorporated into the curriculum. Students are assigned the task of designing a union logo and membership cards.  Math is also a focus. Part of the lesson involves calculating “union dues as a percentage of wages.”

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