Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

418 and the First Amendment Center: Washington, D.C., 1998). The opening paragraph of the article is very telling: A group of educators and policy advocates yesterday united around a “new consensus” on teaching about religion in public schools, calling it a long-shot agenda but the most likely to satisfy all Americans…. …“If this book is the next step, it’s a big step,” said Diane Berreth of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), which advises public schools on teaching. The “new approach” seeks a middle ground between totally secular schools and those where the local majority religion is promoted by school officials. “Religion is still not taken seriously in the public school curriculum,” said Charles Haynes, a co-author of the new guidebook. Warren Nord, a University of North Carolina humanities professor and co-author, said, “A full education must acknowledge different ways of knowing reality, from the scientific and economic to the religious and moral.”... Miss Berreth of ASCD said a few pilot schools must test the new agenda to prove its effectiveness. “This may be a role of [charter schools],” she said. [Ed. Note: The above two authors made their remarks at a symposium with five other pan elists. The event was sponsored by the Freedom Forum and the ASCD, which published the 220-page book with the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University. If anyone out there believes a book published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (a spin-off of the National Education Association which consistently issues tirades about Christians who believe in sound moral values) could come up with anything the purpose of which is not to make further inroads into the destruction of whatever absolut ist values our children still have, then I suggest they have been living under a rock ever since the 1940’s when the drive to eliminate absolutist moral values from our schools started. The ASCD was heavily involved in the mind-altering curriculum Tactics for Thinking . Researchers and activists involved in following the circuitous path taken by those who want to remove religious-based absolute values from this planet, starting in the schools, have thrown roadblocks in their way every time they surfaced with a new sugar-coated version of their sugar-coated values-destroying curriculum. How many more times must citizen researchers leap forward to expose this fraudulent crowd which has used semantic deception (given its programs the following misleading labels) and operated as the following entities: • “Character Education” in the early 1970’s (which advised those involved not to use the “red flag” word “values”); • The Public Education Religion Study Center at Wright State University’s “comparative religion” curriculum (which was funded by Religious Heritage of America, Inc. and the Lilly Endowment of the Eli Lilly Corporation); • the appointed Maryland Values Commission, another project shared with Religious Heritage of America; • the American Institute for Character Education (AICE), funded by the Lilly Endow ment; • the Williamsburg Charter proposal which led to the First Amendment Center’s cur riculum “Teaching about Religion,” and now, Taking Religion Seriously across the Curriculum , which a high school teacher from San Diego, California said should be