'Avant-Garde Sustainability Curriculum' to Replace Three R's at Nation's Oldest High School

[AnnS]

July 27, 2010

'Avant-Garde Sustainability Curriculum' to Replace Three R's at Nation's Oldest High School
By Peter Wilson


A recent Boston Globe story reveals the destructive effects that Al Gore and global warming activists are having on American education. According to the story,

[A]fter a screening of "An Inconvenient Truth'' three years ago, [students in the Youth Climate Action Network] started brainstorming ideas for transforming the nation's oldest public school into an energy-efficient building with an avant-garde sustainability curriculum.

Boston Latin is not some radical alternative private school; it is the city's preeminent public high school and the nation's oldest school, founded in 1635, one year before Harvard, with an all-star list of former pupils that includes Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock. BLS is consistently ranked one of the nation's best high schools, with a mission to "ground its students in a contemporary classical education." Admission to BLS is based solely on academic performance: standardized test results plus grade point average.

The Youth Climate Action Network is likewise not some obscure student club. Founded at BLS, "Youth CAN" has expanded to eight schools in Massachusetts, with an uncompromising vision: "Imagine many youth climate action groups speaking with one voice, insisting that legislators make the necessary changes pertaining to global warming."

It is common for school administrators to support student activism through school clubs and student councils -- on the scale of, for example, responding to student demands to serve organic milk in the cafeteria. Youth CAN, however, has more ambitious goals; Boston Latin students have dreamed up a new 70,000-square-foot, $6.2-million green roof project for their school, where they can, among other things, grow "local food" in the rooftop greenhouse.

Headmaster Lynne Mooney Teta and faculty are fully on board with the "student-driven" building project and are moving forward with the sustainability curriculum:

Under this fall's pilot program, all students will be exposed to sustainability issues in a wide range of courses.

"It's not an add-on to what teachers are already doing; it's simply a shift in perspective,'' Teta said. "Teachers from across the building of all disciplines will play a role.''

"Simply a shift in perspective"? How reassuring.

A physics teacher comments that "he envisions sustainability issues as the 'backbone of the curriculum,' integrated in many subject areas."

Outside environmental activists have come in to "help," notes the Globe:

In a series of workshops this summer, Boston area teachers of all subjects are developing lesson plans integrating sustainability ideas, with the help of the Children's Environmental Literacy Foundation.

Many universities have recently instituted sustainability departments, which offer an elective course of study to young adults who theoretically have received a strong educational foundation in their K-12 years. This is insufficient for groups like CELF, which candidly describes its mission on its website:

At the college level, many traditional fields of study have evolved to offer students the knowledge they'll need to become part of the sustainability revolution. CELF believes sustainability education must begin earlier in students' academic life. We focus on K-12 as formative years for shaping thinking, attitudes, values and behaviors.

We believe that it is as important for students to recognize the interconnectedness of natural and human-built systems as to learn reading, writing and arithmetic. Once students grasp the connections between a stable economy, a healthy environment and equitable social systems, and their role as global citizens, they are successfully launched into an already more sustainable world -- a world that they are empowered to protect and enjoy. [Emphasis added.]

I'm sure that the people at CELF feel good about what they're doing, and they might even admit their program is radical -- necessarily so because of the ecological Armageddon they believe we face. But to me, this sounds very dangerous. Totalitarians throughout history have understood the power of co-opting youth, and here is an organization advocating what can only be called the indoctrination of a generation of students in our country's public schools, beginning in kindergarten, into radical environmentalism and advocacy for "equitable social systems" -- at the expense of reading, writing and arithmetic! Similarly, the physics teacher quoted above states: "Our goal as educators is to help students understand how to get to a sustainable world." Isn't your goal as a physics teacher teaching physics? The disregard for the essential purpose of education -- -imparting knowledge -- is aggressively blatant.

The current Youth CAN students have not even been subjected to the new sustainability curriculum pushed by CELF, and in the coming years, Boston Latin will turn out students who will be among the leaders of the nation. Imagine putting activists like this in charge of the public fisc.

Gail Sullivan, an architect working with the students, has enthusiastic praise for the students' plans: "'[T]he students said yes, yes, and yes to all the different features.' ... Unfazed by the hefty price tag, students ... have been raising money and applying for grants over the past year to make their green wonderland a reality, piece by piece."

Want to build an expensive "green wonderland"? Get a grant. Yes, yes and yes. The mentality these students have already learned is that when you are in the planet-saving business, you pay for your schemes with someone else's money, just as the Obama administration pays for its current spending sprees. Just as all government pays for anything. "Unfazed by the hefty price tag." Indeed.

Or imagine Sullivan as Energy Secretary. She observed, "If the only goal were reducing energy costs, it might make the most sense to cover the roof with solar panels." In other words, if you need to reduce energy costs, the solution is to install the world's most expensive, least efficient energy source in a northern city with limited sunshine. Need to lower health care costs? Expand coverage. And on and on, ad nauseam.

Of course, they may be a glimmer of hope. The green rooftop will offer students the opportunity to "measure the wind velocity from the rooftop turbines or test how much energy the solar panels generate."

Perhaps when they see the pitiful amount of energy generated by their hefty price tag, they will recognize the importance of nuclear power and fossil fuels. Then again, reality is no impediment to those who believe their cause is just.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/...lity_curr.html

[mikitta]

You know, it's a sad and sorry shame that care of the environment and the commitment to BE GOOD STEWARDS for God's creation in such a way that we PRESERVE it was never made a Christian issue. It has become a huge secular issue and watch point, however, with Christians being cast as the careless and unfeeling bad guys.

The Church, over the course of the industrial revolution and into the present, has so dropped the ball on this it's pathetic.

I really don't think there is anything wrong with what they are doing. It should have been implemented within the context of a Christian nation over 100 years ago. Rather, we went right along with the rest of the world in raping the land for our own profit and pleasure with no consideration of it's conservation. I don't think God is well pleased with us at all.

God Bless,
mik

[Mizfit]

You know, it's a sad and sorry shame that care of the environment and the commitment to BE GOOD STEWARDS for God's creation in such a way that we PRESERVE it was never made a Christian issue. It has become a huge secular issue and watch point, however, with Christians being cast as the careless and unfeeling bad guys.

The Church, over the course of the industrial revolution and into the present, has so dropped the ball on this it's pathetic.

I really don't think there is anything wrong with what they are doing. It should have been implemented within the context of a Christian nation over 100 years ago. Rather, we went right along with the rest of the world in raping the land for our own profit and pleasure with no consideration of it's conservation. I don't think God is well pleased with us at all.

God Bless,
mik

I agree. I have heard of shools starting gardens. Eating organic and local saves money on shipping and tastes better. (I have eaten at my daughter's school, nasty), and is also healther. With diabetes becoming an issue its a great idea. I think we should have been the first to recognize the need to care for the land God gave us......

The only thing I didn't like was the "global community". It still has the 'setting up for OWG' feel to it but I may be a little paranoid given our president and our current state as a country. Well also the lack of other education unless it meshes with this "avant-garde sustainability" curriculum. (.....what exactly does this mean?----Like everything is connected and such? ----if so this could also become something akin to a religion)

[mikitta]

What it boils down to is that the secular world is taking the mantle that the Church and Her people should have taken up long ago. It should have been OUR mission but we were too busy enjoying the benefits of industry without taking care to make that industry something that didn't destroy our world.

As for the OWG .... unfortunately, that is all meshed together with secularism. It is man's attempt to create God's kingdom without having God on the throne to rule it. It is the mistaken belief that mankind can usher in their own utopia. Fools, haven't they read the classics? Even the secularists of 150 years ago recognized that a man made utopia would be subjugation and enslavement only.

God Bless,
mik

[Carl]

The esteemed movers and shakers of the educational world of our children have been giving 'BUSTED' education since before the 70s. Study what Dewey called for in the education of our children.

Why do you suppose there is such resistance to home schooling??

Sustainability - - is a joke! It will prove to be no more sustainable than any other sustainable man's endeavor. It will have to be tweaked again and again to get it right.

Lord I pray for these fools that leave You out. That do not consider Your Words of Truth.

[AnnS]

Yep, same old yada yada yada gobbledy goop for redistribution of wealth; now pimping out our generation of children in their socialist agenda.

[AnnS]

The esteemed movers and shakers of the educational world of our children have been giving 'BUSTED' education since before the 70s. Study what Dewey called for in the education of our children.

Why do you suppose there is such resistance to home schooling??

Sustainability - - is a joke! It will prove to be no more sustainable than any other sustainable man's endeavor. It will have to be tweaked again and again to get it right.

Lord I pray for these fools that leave You out. That do not consider Your Words of Truth.

Glad you brought this up; Dewey was a self-proclaimed Marxist and was director of the NEA in the early 1900s. History of the NEA.

Chronology of the NEA

Some of the names that come up of the people involved like Algir Hiss (who was convicted of spying for the Soviets while he was an advisor to FDR) doesn't take a brain surgeon to connect the dots on that one.

[Carl]

I think that I started school when the "Look see Jane run, see Dick run" books first came out. 1946 ish. And to think that Michigan was denied statehood until they presented a Bible based curriculum to the US government.

[AnnS]

I think that I started school when the "Look see Jane run, see Dick run" books first came out. 1946 ish. And to think that Michigan was denied statehood until they presented a Bible based curriculum to the US government.

Sure come a long way down hill, huh.

Almost every prestigious university in America was founded by Christians.

[AnnS]

History of America's Education
Universities, Textbooks and Our Founders
Last of Three Parts
by April Shenandoah

March 12, 2002

Bill Maher of ABC's Politically Incorrect, said,"America has never been a Christian Nation". However, as we read about the founding of our universities and the first textbooks that were used in this country, we cannot dispute our Christian foundation.

106 of the first 108 colleges were started on the Christian faith. By the close of 1860 there were 246 colleges in America. Seventeen of these were state institutions; almost every other one was founded by Christian denominations or by individuals who avowed a religious purpose.

Harvard College, 1636 - An Original Rule of Harvard College: "Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life, (John 17:3), and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning."

William and Mary, 1691 - The College of William and Mary was started mainly due to the efforts of Rev. James Blair in order, according to its charter of 1691, "that the Church of Virginia may be furnished with a seminary of ministers of the gospel, and that the youth may be piously educated in good letters and manners, and that the Christian religion may be propagated among the Western Indians to the glory of Almighty God."

Yale University, 1701 - Yale University was started by Congregational ministers in 1701,"for the liberal and religious education of suitable youth…to propagate in this wilderness, the blessed reformed Protestant religion…"

Princeton, 1746 - Associated with the Great Awakening, Princeton was founded by the Presbyterians in 1746. Rev. Jonathan Dickinson became its first president, declaring, "cursed be all that learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ."

University of Pennsylvania, 1751 - Ben Franklin had much to do with the beginning of the University of Pennsylvania. It was not started by a denomination, but its laws reflect its Christian character. Consider the first two Laws, relating to Moral Conduct (from 1801): "1. None of the students or scholars, belonging to this seminary, shall make use of any indecent or immoral language: whether it consist in immodest expressions; in cursing and swearing; or in exclamations which introduce the name of God, without reverence, and without necessity. "2. None of them shall, without a good and sufficient reason, be absent from school, or late in his attendance; more particularly at the time of prayers, and of the reading of the Holy Scriptures."

Some other colleges started before America's Independence include: Columbia founded in 1754 (called King's College up until 1784), Dartmouth ,1770; Brown started by the Baptists in 1764; Rutgers, 1766, by the Dutch Reformed Church; Washington and Lee, 1749; and Hampton-Sydney, 1776, by the Presbyterians.

It may surprise many to know that the Bible was truly the first textbook. The New Haven Code of 1655 required that children be made "able duly to read the Scriptures… and in some competent measure to understand the main grounds and principles of Christian Religion necessary to salvation."

a. The Bible was the central text - John Adams reflected the view of the founders in regard to the place of the Bible in society when he wrote: "Suppose a nation in some distant region, should take the Bible for their only law-book, and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited!… What a Utopia; what a Paradise would this region be!" John Adams, Feb.22, 1756

b. Hornbooks - Hornbooks were brought to America, from Europe, by the colonists and were common from the 1500's - 1700's. A hornbook was a flat piece of wood with a handle, upon which a sheet of printed paper was attached and covered with transparent animal horn to protect it. A typical hornbook had the alphabet, the vowels, a list of syllables, the invocation of the Trinity, and the Lord's Prayer.

c. Catechisms - There were over 500 different catechisms used in early education. Later, the Westminister Catechism became the most prominent one.

d. The New England Primer - It was the most prominent schoolbook for about 100 years and was used through the 1800's. It sold over 3 million copies in 150 years.

e. Webster's Blue-Backed Speller - First published in 1783 it sold over 100 million copies. It was one of the most influential textbooks and was based on "God's Word."

f. The McGuffey Readers - Written by minister and university professor William Holmes McGuffey, the McGuffey Readers "represent the most significant force in the framing of our national morals and tastes" other than the Bible.

While there were many other textbooks (especially in the 1800's), the ones just mentioned were some of the most important.

Education in Religion was central to our Founders: Benjamin Rush signer of the Declaration of Independence wrote, "…the only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without this, there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments." The type of education that shaped our Founders character and ideas was thoroughly Christian. It imparted Christian character and produced honest, industrious, compassionate, respectful, and law-abiding men. It imparted a Biblical world-view and produced people who were principled thinkers. ***

This 3-part Series on the History of Education is an excerpt from April Shenandoah's book, "So…Help Me God!"

April Shenandoah's Internet home is: HOME/Ambassador of Prayer ***

History of America's Education - Universities, Textbooks and Our Founders - Last of Three Parts