Global Education is one of the fads sweeping through public schools in the 1980s. It’s appearing in most schools, in most grade levels, in most teacher workshops, and in most textbooks and teaching materials.
Global Education does not mean teaching the history, geography, government, culture, or language of nations around the globe. A good education has always included world history and geography, comparative government, and foreign languages.
Global Education is very different. It does not use traditional textbooks of history and geography whose purpose is to increase individual knowledge, but instead uses newly-written materials designed for predetermined social and political goals.
Here are the principal signposts by which Global Education can be identified. (1) Censoring out American history, government, Constitution, geography, culture, and heroes, and the facts about our unprecedented American freedoms.
(2) Banning patriotism. Global Education uses every possible technique of semantics and selection of materials in order to eliminate patriotism from teachers and students. (3) Indoctrinating the error of equivalence, that is, the falsehood that other nations, governments, legal systems, cultures, and political and economic systems are essentially equivalent to ours and entitled to equal respect. This hypothesis is false, both historically and morally.
(4) Imposing on schoolchildren the political and social preferences and biases of special interest groups, particularly world government, pacifism, and disarmament. (5) Deceiving parents as to the goals and content of Global Education, and brainwashing teachers to use techniques of indoctrination.
The most authentic description of the purposes and methodology of Global Education was spelled out in a 39-page document called “Global Education: State of the Art,” which was prepared and published in 1983 by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory in Portland, Oregon, financed by a federal grant from the National Institute of Education under the U.S. Department of Education.
The Northwest Laboratory Report states that Global Education requires “massive re-education” of teachers in order to change “the teacher’s own attitudes,” as well as the content and the process of education. Teachers must be conditioned to be comfortable with Globalism perspectives such as political interdependence, moral ambiguity, and social empathy for other nations as equivalent to our own.
The Northwest Laboratory Report states that teachers must submit to “value change” in a “re-education process,” and to the “reshaping” of their attitudes and beliefs. The Report concedes that it is unlikely that a teacher holding “ethnocentric and nationalistic views” (i.e., patriotic views) will be able to teach Global Education effectively.
“Infusion” is the basic technique of indoctrination-by-deception. The Northwest Laboratory Report calls infusion a “key thread” of Global Education. The Report includes an “infusion grid” showing how to infuse Global Education into science, physical education, health, arts (creative and performing), economics, anthropology, world history, psychology, literature, social studies, and foreign language.
It isn’t easy to get thousands of teachers in the public school system to suppress their patriotic attitudes and kowtow to the Global Education cult. Typical of the programs developed to train teachers to accept these directives is the Center for Teaching International Relations at the University of Denver.
A recent report on this Denver Center prepared by Region VIII of the U.S. Department of Education provides evidence that it is a full-blown teacher-training process to implement false information (such as the alleged moral equivalence of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.) and political biases (such as disarmament is the path to peace).
The Denver Center places heavy emphasis on pacifism through psychological games and role-playing. It is typical of the Denver Center materials that they blame U.S. selfishness for poverty in foreign lands, but they don’t blame Communist governments for anything. Psychological games also promote disrespect for economic freedom.
These New Authoritarians are determined to expurgate patriotism and appreciation of American institutions and culture from school classrooms. It’s time for parents and taxpayers to speak up against their plan to indoctrinate children to accept Global Government and international control of our resources.
