New Initiative Seeks to End JROTC Programs to ‘Counter the Dangerous Nature of Conservatism and Militarism in Public Schools’

By Danette Clark

In an effort to remove anything and everything resembling patriotism and military-style discipline and teamwork from public schools, a new initiative has been launched that specifically targets JROTC, Starbase, Young Marines, and several other voluntary school programs.

“A National Call: Save Civilian Public Education”, launched late last year, is the effort of several progressive organizations to “confront the conservative, corporate, and military influences in our educational system” and to counter their “dangerous nature.”

From the website, SaveCivilianEducation.org:

The signers of this statement believe it is urgent for all advocates of social justice, peace and the environment to recognize the dangerous nature of this problem and confront it with deliberate action.

The most aggressive outside effort to use the school system to teach an ideology with ominous long-term implications for society comes from the military establishment.

On the site’s “Where Do We Go From Here?” page, a call is made to others to join their efforts:

Progressive individuals, organizations, foundations and media all have important roles to play in confronting the conservative, corporate and military influences in our educational system.

To that end, the initiative provides a list of “ideas for action,” which includes speakers pools to address youth groups, classrooms and youth conferences, and the support of outreach and educational initiatives that “teach progressive values to young people.”

“Organizations supporting efforts to introduce history and civics lessons from a progressive perspective” are also recommended. Among those are Communist Howard Zinn’s Zinn Education Project and Rethinking Schools, an organization whose curriculum editor, Bill Bigelow, admits that he wants to “tell students that they shouldn’t necessarily trust the ‘authorities,’” and says that he sees “teaching as a political action… to equip students to build a truly democratic society.”

Bigelow, an endorser of the Save Civilian Education initiative, also teaches that George Washington was not a hero, but a war criminal.

One particular Rethinking Schools resource, Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, was banned from Tucson, Arizona classrooms because it was found to be extremely hostile toward whites and depicted America, in general, as a racist and oppressive nation.

Other endorsers of the initiative are Iraq Veterans Against the War, Code Pink co-founder Madea Benjamin, former California Senator and former Weather Underground Organization leader Tom Hayden, and far left MIT professor Noam Chomsky, all of whom have partnered for years in their anti-U.S. military efforts.

Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) is a Communist-led anti-war organization that continually works to increase its presence in public school classrooms.

Both IVAW and Code Pink partner with some of the most radical anti-Israel organizations in the world, like Al-Awda, for example, an organization that denies Israel’s right to exist.

IVAW speakers have been known to show graphic war images to students while blaming U.S. soldiers for murdering innocent civilians.

For example, as recently reported, U.S. military veteran and IVAW member Ethan McCord can be seen in a video telling high school students that U.S. soldiers are trained from day one to dehumanize the enemy and also “to dehumanize civilians here at home”. Later in the video, McCord refers to military recruiters as pimps and the army as their whore.

In a 2011 resolution on Palestine, IVAW described the United States’ military support of Israel as a “coordinated strategy to dominate the Middle East.”

Another endorser of the initiative, Countering the Militarisation of Youth, says they oppose any U.S. military presence and influence in education as well as in social media, entertainment, fashion, and even public events such as parades and memorials.

The group says their work is “breaking the cycle of teaching violence to young people”, yet ironically, they partner with groups like the Muslim Students Association, an organization founded by the jihadi terrorist group, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Save Civilian Education claims that some military programs sneak into schools under the cloak of STEM education, and therefore, calls for an end to those as well.

Also a ‘threat’, they say, are lesson plans and coloring books created by tea party groups that “teach a conservative interpretation of the Constitution, where the federal government is a creeping and unwelcome presence in the lives of freedom-loving Americans.”

According to the group, the problem with this kind of curriculum and with programs like JROTC, Young Marines, and Starbase, is that they have the “effect of popularizing military values, soldiering and, ultimately, war.”

JROTC is a voluntary program that says it exists to teach students character education, student achievement, wellness, leadership, and diversity, while preparing them for college and to be leaders in a diverse workforce.

The JROTC curriculum includes “education in citizenship, leadership, social and communication skills, physical fitness and wellness, geography, and civics.”

Starbase, also a voluntary program, says its mission is to expose the nation’s youth to the “technological environments and positive civilian and military role models found on Active, Guard, and Reserve military bases and installations, nurture a winning network of collaborators, and build mutual loyalty within communities…”

Through the Starbase program, students can “study Newton’s Laws and Bernoulli’s principle; explore nanotechnology, navigation and mapping” and “use the computer to design space stations, all-terrain vehicles, and submersibles.”

The Starbase website says the program seeks to “motivate students to explore Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM)” and “serves students that are historically under-represented in STEM, such as those who live in inner cities or rural locations, are socio-economically disadvantaged, low in academic performance or have a disability.”

Where #OccupyWallStreet Really Began — Obama’s Hand in the Movement

By Danette Clark    May 3, 2012

“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I say calmly,
‘Your child belongs to us already. What are you? You will pass on. Your
descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community.”– Adolf Hitler

Since protesters first began setting up their drug dens, love shacks, and hippie huts in downtown Manhattan on September 17th, we began questioning whether Occupy Wall Street is really a grassroots movement, as it claims to be, or a movement manufactured and orchestrated by communist and socialist organizations.

We know now that OWS has received financial support from George Soros, Louis Farrakhan, and SEIU, among others. But where did it really begin? How do people living in a country with more freedoms and opportunity than any other place in the world develop a mindset of entitlement and come to believe that we are a racist, imperialist nation whose free market system is oppressive?

I believe Occupy Wall Street is both a grassroots movement and a movement manufactured by communists, socialists, and progressives — and most certainly with the help of Barack Obama.

This movement began decades ago. While we were busy building homes, pursuing careers, and planning for retirement, OWS was being incubated in classrooms across the country. There are thousands of social justice schools in America that have, for decades, brainwashed youth with a distorted view of history and reality, and a general hatred for America, its founders, and its capitalist economic system.

Although education reformers like John Dewey and G. Stanley Hall led the way in secularist indoctrination in America’s schools as far back as the 1800s, the most successful push came in the 1990s, with the help of our president.

When Obama worked with William Ayers through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995 to 1999, they funneled large sums of money to an education reform movement that Ayers had already worked with for some time, Theodore Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools.

In fact, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created by the Annenberg Institute, whose stated mission was to build upon the work of Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools and to support sustained focused efforts to expand education reform to youth across the country.

The work of Ayers and Obama through the CAC, combined with the work of Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop, literally parlayed a group of approximately 200 progressive schools into a network of over 1,000 in a little over a decade. When you consider that CES has dozens of partner organizations and affiliates working within various school districts across the country, the number of radical schools in America is actually much greater than 1,000 and almost impossible to count.

Although financial backing is crucial to the survival of a movement like OWS, the movement would not exist without the many years of groundwork. After all, to quote William Ayers, “education is the motor-force of revolution” and “Teaching . . . urges revolutions large and small”.

So, in all fairness, we should give credit where credit is due. As re-writers of history, developers of curriculum, designers of “smaller learning communities”, teachers, organizers, promoters, and guest speakers in these schools of social justice, these are some of the real people behind the OWS movement:

• Communist, domestic terrorist and former co-founder of the Weather Underground Organization, William Ayers

• Communist, domestic terrorist and former member of the Weather Underground Organization, Bernardine Dohrn

• Communist, Maoist, and former member of the Weather Underground Organization, Mike Klonsky

• Communist and former member of the Weather Underground Organization, Howard Machtinger

• Ex-prisoner, communist, and former member of the Black Panther Party, Angela Davis

• Communist, the late Howard Zinn

• Communist and former “green jobs czar”, Van Jones

• Socialist and developer of critical race theory, Derrick Bell

• Socialist and admirer of the Black Panther Party, Cornel West

• Champion of Black Liberation Theology, Rev. Jeremiah Wright

• Top education advisor to Obama’s presidential campaign, Linda Darling Hammond

• And last, but not least, President of the United States, Barack Obama

As president, Obama has continued to boost social justice education, specifically CES schools and its affiliates. During his first two weeks in office, he publicized a visit to CES’s Capital City Charter School in Washington, D.C., praising it as innovative and stating “this is how schools should be”.

The president has held several town hall meetings at CES schools, visited countless others, and awarded billions in grants to progressive schools and education initiatives.

Obama’s education plan calls for small schools and smaller learning communities and makes specific reference to TRIO and Upward Bound, which are federally-funded programs that were instituted for the benefit of underprivileged students but have since been overtaken by social justice educators and used for the indoctrination of children through after school and summer programs.

CES has partnered with both TRIO and Upward Bound in the creation of new schools.

President Obama’s education plan also specifically touts the North Carolina Teaching Fellows program which was, until recent years, directed by Howard Machtinger, former Weather Underground member and bomb-making buddy of William Ayers.

Other notable mentions for their “contributions” to social justice education and the birth of the OWS movement:

• Dolores Huerta (now head of the US Department of Labor) for her memorable speech at Tuscon High Magnet School wherein she told students the theme of the day is “Republicans hate Latinos…Republicans hate Latinos.”

• Poway Unified School District which allows an annual school sponsored National Day of Silence in conjunction with the Gay Lesbian and Straight Alliance (GLSEN – led by Obama’s ‘safe schools czar’, Kevin Jennings), but does not allow students to wear t-shirts with bible scripture on them expressing their opposition to homosexuality.

• St. Paul Public Schools for promoting the White Privilege Conference to students and Seattle Public Schools for going so far as to transport students to another state to attend the conference (on the tax payer’s dime).

• Methuen Public Schools and Marblehead Public Schools for transporting students in two public school buses to a GLSEN and Planned Parenthood sponsored conference about how to practice homosexual sex. At the conference, students were given “fisting kits” for use in oral sex.

And who can forget all those videos of children being led by their teachers to sing praises to Obama? The North Sore Tea Party provides an extensive list of indoctrination videos here.

Aaron Klein and Brenda J. Elliott’s latest book, Red Army: The Radical Network that Must be Defeated to Save America, devotes two chapters to social justice education and provides the names of several schools, organizations, and curriculums to keep an eye on.

Michelle Malkin also has some great articles on indoctrination. Look for those on the web.

Please find out where these schools are in your area and contact your local representatives, school board members, and even your governor. Look at your children’s history books and ask questions about what they are learning.