The Wall Street Journal published a remarkable letter last week from the L99L New York State Teacher of the Year hurling a broadside attack against the entire public school system. Charging that government (public) schooling “ki1Is the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents,” he opposes a national curriculum and national testing and instead cal1s for “real free-market choices.”
You can get a good look at the public (government) schools’ disrespect for home and parents by reading the resolutions passed over the Fourth of July weekend in Miami Beach at the annual convention of the nation’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association.
Hostility to parental choice in education is paramount in the NEA’s national and state legislative agenda. Labeling all choice plans “deleterious” and “detrimental,” the NEA proclaims its bitter opposition to all “federally or state-mandated choice or parental option plans” and instructs its members to “work for the defeat” of all plans for tuition tax credits or vouchers. (A-11, A-12, A-13, A-14)
So deep-seated is the bitterness of the NEA toward any schools not controlled by the teachers’ unions that one NEA resolution warns that “closed public school buildings should be sold or leased only to those organizations that do not provide direct educational services to students and/or are not in direct competition with public schools.” (A- 25) The NEA cannot tolerate the competition of even one private school in an abandoned building in a community that may have scores of modern, fully-equipped tax-supported schools.
Of course, the NEA is adamantly opposed to homeschooling. The NEA
demands that, if homeschooling is allowed, the parents must have teachers’ certificates, be licensed by the state, and teach only a curriculum approved by the state bureaucrats. (C-39)
More teachers are seeking jobs today than there are jobs available, so the NEA has devised plans to create more jobs by forcing little children into public schools at younger ages. The NEA calls on its members “to seek legislation to ensure that early childhood developmental programs offered primarily through the public schools be fully funded and available on an equal basis and culminate in mandatory kindergarten with compulsory attendance.” (C-3)
The NEA demands that Family Life Education (the code word for Sex Education) must include “birth control” and “diversity of sexual orientation.” The NEA asserts that: “it is the right of every individual to live in an environment of freely available information, knowledge, and wisdom about sexuality.” (C-30) This means the NEA claims the right to teach children about contraceptives, homosexuality, incest, and sexual deviations without parental consent or interference.
The NEA demands that the schools teach “comprehensive” AIDS education programs “as an integral part of the school curricular,” including “all means of transmission.” (C-46) “Integral part” is the code word for concealing it so that parents cannot remove their children from the AIDS class
The NEA resolution demands that “every child should have direct and confidential access to comprehensive health care.” (C-9) The NEA calls on the schools to provide “every student” with “immediate, direct and confidential access to health, social, and psychological services,” as well as “comprehensive school-based, community-funded student health care clinics.” (C-10)
“Confidential” is the code word meaning without parental knowledge
or consent. “Comprehensive” is the code word for providing contraceptive devices. “School-based” is the code word for doing all of the above inside the school building.
The NEA demands that the public schools not only do “counseling” of all students “beginning at the prekindergarten level,” but that this counseling “be integrated into the entire education system.” “Integrated” is the code word for hiding it in various classroom subjects so parents will not be able to remove their children from this unwanted psychological manipulation. (C-12)
This counseling includes all sorts of surprising areas: sexual orientation (e-13), stress (C-L4), and suicide (C-15). And of course, the NEA has climbed on board the trendy move to be “politically correct” and demand the teaching of multiculturalism. (C-24)
The NEA’s blatant feminist agenda includes abortion-on-demand (I-21), comparable worth (i.e., substituting government wage control for market value) (F-5), and “affirmative action” employment for women, minorities, homosexuals, and the disabled (F-22). The NEA is also trying to insinuate feminist ideology into textbooks and classroom materials by censoring out what it calls “sex-stereotyped roles” (that means texts or pictures showing women as homemakers) and “sexist language” (that means using such words as mother or father instead of parent). (B-13) The NEA demands that “gender-free awareness” be “interwoven into the total educational system.” (B-10)
The NEA has monopoly control over the government (public) school system, its administration, its personnel, its curriculum, and its money. No wonder the fastest growing movement in the country today is the demand to free children from this anti-parent monopoly.
