Part E
Awake V
U. N. Influence in Our Schools
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Since its beginning, the United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organization have been trying to impose an international curriculum to prepare students for world government. More than 500 U.S. schools are now using the International Baccalaureate program, and the Department of Education has just awarded a $1.2 million grant to expand the program in middle schools in Arizona, Massachusetts and New York.
In one of its first efforts in 1949, the UNESCO textbook titled
(how dare we teach our children to be loyal to and love their country)."As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can produce only rather precarious results. As we have pointed out, it is frequently the family that infects the child with extreme nationalism"
In the 1960’s, Dr. Robert Muller, UN deputy secretary-general, prepared a
"World Core Curriculum." Its first goal stated:"Assisting the child in becoming an integrated individual who can deal with personal experience while seeing himself as a part of the greater whole. In other words, promote growth of the group idea, so that the group good, group understanding, group interrelations and group goodwill replace all limited, self-centered objectives, leading to group consciousness."
(Very Orwellian when you stop to think about it).The U.N.’s global education program took a major step in 1968, when UNESCO provided the funding to create the International Baccalaureate Organization, a non-government organization, in Geneva, Switzerland. The IBO is now providing the curriculum for 33,000 teachers in nearly 1,500 schools around the world, 55 of which are middle schools in the Washington, D.C. area. UNESCO says the IB curriculum promotes human rights, social justice, sustainable development, population, health, environmental and immigration concerns.
"We're living on a planet that is becoming exhausted,"
says George Walker, IB's director- general in Geneva. "The program remains committed to changing children's values so they think globally, rather than in parochial national terms from their own country's viewpoint." (Think in One World Terms)Jeanne Geiger, an outspoken critic of the program in Reston, Va., wrote to a local newspaper:
"Administrators do not tell you that the current IB program for ages 3 through grade 12 promotes socialism, disarmament, radical environmentalism and moral relativism, while attempting to undermine Christian religious values and national sovereignty." The IB program was dropped at Woodson High School in Fairfax, Va., when critical parents told local school officials that the best universities in Virginia did not give full credit for the IB program.The goals and methods of the IB program reach much further than the 502 U.S. schools now officially enrolled. The Center for Civic Education, which, by law, writes the curriculum for civics education in the United States, says:
"In the past century, the civic mission of schools was education for democracy in a sovereign state. In this century, by contrast, education will become everywhere more global. And we ought to improve our curricular frameworks and standards for a world transformed by globally accepted and internationally transcended principles."
This global influence can be clearly seen in the new mission for the National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies."The United States and its democracy are constantly evolving and in continuous need of citizens who can adapt to meet the changing circumstances. Meeting that need is the mission of social studies. Students should be helped to construct a pluralist perspective based on diversity [and] should be helped to construct a global perspective."