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Jewish World Review Sept. 18, 1998 / 27 Elul, 5758
Thomas Sowell
Are we sheep?
HAVE WE BECOME A NATION OF SHEEP?
Chicago is the latest and largest public school system to impose compulsory "volunteer"
work on its students as a requirement for graduation. If the parents stand for this in
Chicago, you can expect it to spread all across the country.
There is even less reason to put up with such heavy-handedness from education
bureaucrats in Chicago than in most other places, because the school system there is
under the control of an elected mayor. If the voters get up in arms, this half-baked
power play will have to go. But if the public can be soothed or deflected with pretty
words like "community service," you can expect "educators" to push their intrusions into
students' lives even further.
Most of the children in the Chicago schools cannot read at the national average. Yet the
bureaucrats want them out serving soup to bums or handing out leaflets for the Sierra
Club.
What is happening in the Chicago schools is not limited to Chicago or even to the
"community service" craze. It is part of a much larger and much older hidden agenda
that goes back at least as far as John Dewey.
Professor Dewey, the godfather of "progressive" education, said it all, 70 years ago:
"The great task of the school," he said "is to counteract and transform" the beliefs and
values that the child brings from "the home and the Church."
That is what the educational trends of the past two generations have been all about,
whether the specifics were called "values clarification," "community service,"
"outcome-based education" or a thousand other pretty names. Once you look behind
these glittering labels to the specific things that are said and done, the agenda becomes
clear: Undermining the values and beliefs that parents have taught their children and
replacing them with politically correct notions from the counter-culture.
"Community service" is not about the community or about service. It is about using
children for ideological agendas and using those agendas to insinuate the welfare-state
view of the world on impressionable young minds.
This is not about educating children. It is about using children as cannon fodder in
ideological battles and as guinea pigs for experiments. Children are also being used by
the schools as entering wedges through which to invade the family itself and insinuate
and impose the agenda of the anointed on the unwary.
Intruding into family privacy is the first step toward intruding into the family itself.
Most parents have no idea how much personal family information is being collected
from school children and fed into computer networks.
These networks can integrate medical, psychological, academic and social information
from numerous sources to create an electronic dossier on each individual child -- a
dossier that can follow that child on through school and out into the adult world.
Assurances about the confidentiality of such information are absolutely meaningless.
Even when the forms filled out by children or their families have no name on them, the
forms themselves are pre-coded with identifying numbers that tell a computer whose
form it is. Assurances that this information will never be given to any "unauthorized"
individuals or organizations likewise mean nothing, because anyone they give it to will
be called "authorized." It is one of the signs of our dumbed-down education that we are
so easily taken in by people who play with words.
The most fundamental objection to the manipulation and indoctrination of children is
not to what educators want children to be used for. Children are not being sent to
school to be used for anything. The school is supposed to be used to educate them.
Above all, the so-called educators should never forget whose children these are.
Parents who want to debate the merits or demerits of various programs using their
children as guinea pigs in the schools miss the point entirely. The real question is:
"Whose children are these?"
Who takes the consequences if the latest fads in the schools turn out to be wrong?
It is children and their parents -- not the glib and smug talkers. Decisions should be
made by those who pay the price when things go wrong, not by those looking for
"exciting" things to do, instead of
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