No Child Left Inside: More Indoctrination Coming to a School Near You
ByWe don’t like to sound the alarm too often about bad legislation proposed in Congress. After all, if we sent out tweets and email alerts regarding every bad idea we’ve seen legislators consider in the last congressional session, our loyal counter-revolutionaries would be drowning in our warnings.
However, we do want to advocate putting the breaks on the No Children Left Inside Act of 2009.
Yesterday, at an event in a park near the capitol, Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) stood with a group of cute kids and some very exotic creatures to promote the legislation. He argued: “These young people will be the environmental stewards and leaders of tomorrow, and we have to prepare them today – and that’s the whole point of this legislation.”
We dissent. We think it’s a good thing for children to learn about the world around them, but we also think the Senator would be more truthful to say his legislation strives to create the “liberals of tomorrow” instead of the “leaders of tomorrow.”
The legislation spends $500 million dollars to make sure that schoolchildren are indoctrinated in the schema of the environmental movement. The issues and the choice of curriculum will be formulated by state educational agencies in plans that will ultimately be approved or disapproved by urban intellectuals at the Federal Department of Education. Those who submit compliant plans will receive federal grants in order to implement the plans.
In other words, the federal government will pay state departments of education for drafting approved environmental education plans so that even children who are growing up in a household and community as backwards as yours will be provided with “the truth” about global warming, overpopulation, endangered species, and whatever other trendy cause is deemed worthy and all-important in the future.
We think that children in many if not most public schools are already injected with enough environmentalism to kill an elephant. According to one poll conducted in March of this year, one out of every three children aged 6 to 11 fears that the Earth won’t exist when they grow up. Apparently, Senator Reed feels the need to subsidize further overkill.
We appreciate that communities are different and support local school boards in their efforts to implement school policies that make sense for their community. However, even if we were fond of uniform educational mandates from state and national bodies, we’d have serious concerns about whether it makes sense to implement additional environmental studies when teachers keep insisting that they don’t have the class time they’d like in order to help children struggling with the basics.
We understand that state educational administrators will probably jump at the prospect of the federal grants, but if there’s isn’t enough time for reading and math right now, there certainly isn’t enough time for indoctrination and Sierra Club campfire sing-a-longs.
(Special thanks to CNSNews for great coverage.)
