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Everybody's looking for the causes of the terrible
tragedy at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado,
and for ways to prevent such horrible happenings in the
future.
Hillary Clinton has volunteered her intuition that "part of
growing up is learning how to control one's impulses."
Putting aside the point that most of us don't have impulses
to go on a killing rampage, who is going to teach kids to
control their impulses? Certainly not the "village" (i.e., the
government or government schools), which Mrs. Clinton
believes should have prime responsibility for raising children.
For the past 25 years, the prevailing dogma in public
school teaching has been Values Clarification (as in the
tremendously influential 1972 book of the same name by
Sidney Simon). That means teaching students to reject "the
old moral and ethical standards," and instead "make their
own choices" and "build their own value system."
Indeed, Eric Harris and his sidekick, Dylan Klebold, did
"build their own value system," which allowed them to kill
13 people at Columbine, then take their own lives. Harris
and Klebold were not dumb or underprivileged; they came
from affluent two-parent families. Professionals who
evaluated them concluded that Harris was "a very bright
young man who is likely to succeed in life," and that Klebold
was "intelligent enough to make any dream a reality." (New
York Times, April 23, 1999)
Values Clarification teaches that, since there are
absolutely no absolutes, students should engage in personal
"decision making" about behavior instead of looking to God,
the Ten Commandments, parents, church, or other authority
which teaches that behavior should conform to traditional
morality.
Values Clarification is a book of 79 dilemmas for the
teacher to present to the students. The most frequently used
classroom dilemma is the "lifeboat game" (and its numerous
variations, such as the fallout shelter). The student is told
there are ten people in a sinking lifeboat and four must be
thrown out to drown so that the other six may live. The
student is vested with the authority to decide who lives and
who dies. Shall it be the famous author, or the pregnant
woman, or the rabbi, or the Hollywood dancer, or the
policeman?
Any answer is acceptable -- whatever each student feels
comfortable with is OK, and the students can all choose
different drowning targets because there are no right or
wrong answers. No wrong answers, that is, except one.
One mother told our Eagle Forum Parents Advisory Center
that her child answered the question by saying, "Jesus
brought another boat and nobody had to drown." That child
got an F for giving an unacceptable answer.
The world view of Cassie Bernall, who looked into the
barrel of a gun and said, "Yes, I believe in God," is not
acceptable within the rubric of Values Clarification. She
was killed by a fellow student who had built his own value
system.
As in the "lifeboat game," Harris and Klebold had
already decided that it was their right to decide who would
live and who would die. Harris posted on the Internet: "My
belief is that if I say something, it goes. I am the law, and if
you don't like it, you die. . . . Feel no remorse, no sense of
shame." (Washington Post, April 29, 1999)
As part of a Government and Economics class at
Columbine, Harris and Klebold made a video in which they
showed themselves as hit men hired out to do violence to
athletes. The video was violent and ended with the two
bludgeoning the head of a dummy amid much fake blood. It
amounted to a practice run for the Columbine shooting. The
teacher of that class has refused to talk to reporters about the
tape. (Washington Post, April 29, 1999) Another student-made
video ends with four students walking away from Columbine
High School, which explodes in a scene of orange special-effects flashings. (Denver Rocky Mountain News, May 6, 1999)
When a surviving student was asked if anybody noticed
anything odd about these student-made videos, she replied
that "everybody's video involved fighting." She noted that
many of the videos were violent and that her own contained
sexual scenes.
In Creative Writing class, Harris wrote his will as one of
his assignments. Harris's and Klebold's writings were filled
with gore and profanity. According to another student, they
wrote about "rocket launchers, grenades, zombies killing
people, ripping people's flesh." Harris and Klebold spent
hours and hours playing "death matches" with violent
computer games. (Associated Press, April 22, 1999)
Harris was thrilled when Bill Clinton started bombing
Yugoslavia. A classmate who sat next to him remembers
Harris saying, "I hope we do go to war. . . . [I want to] shoot
every one." Harris tried to enlist, but Marine recruiters
turned him down when they discovered he had taken a
powerful anti-depressant drug called Luvox. (Washington Post,
April 29, 1999)
Modern public school teaching exalts "tolerance" of
other people's behavior as the highest virtue, and "self-esteem" as education's principal objective. Harris and
Klebold made a practice of annoying their teachers by
propping their feet on their desks and leaning back in their
chairs. In the modern classroom, we are forbidden to be
"judgmental" about the behavior of others when they indulge
their impulses instead of controlling them.
Death Education at Columbine
In 1987 Eagle Forum of Colorado produced a two-hour
video in which student Tara Becker spoke at length about the
relentless focus on death, dying and suicide in her junior
class at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. She
and several of her classmates attempted suicide as a result of
this depressing curriculum, and it took them many months to
recover from the experience.
Tara was subsequently interviewed for an ABC-TV
20/20 program (aired Sept. 21, 1990) where she said, "I had
thought about [suicide] as a possible option for a lot of years,
but I never would have gone through with it, never, because
I wasn't brave enough. The things that we learned in the
class taught us how to be brave enough to face death." She
added, "We talked about what we wanted to look like in our
caskets."
The 20/20 segment showed morbid visuals of student
visits to cemeteries, to embalming labs where they were
encouraged to touch "still warm human remains," and to
crematoriums where they were told about picking bones out
of the ashes. ABC stated that one out of ten schools teaches
death education, that there is no approved curriculum, and
that the teachers' training often consists only of a one-day
workshop. It was clear that ABC's Hugh Downs and Tom
Jarriel thought that death education was bizarre. Jarriel
concluded the segment by asking if these courses "suggest
death as an answer to adolescent problems." We urge ABC
to re-air that important segment because of its relevance
today. Curiously, ABC refused to release a tape of this
program to Matt Drudge.
In 1988, Atlantic Monthly published an investigative
article ("Mortal Fears," Feb. 1988, p.30) confirming that death and
dying courses are given in "thousands of schools," often
sneaked into health, social studies, literature or home-economics courses without parents' knowledge. Atlantic
described how these courses require students to visit
cemeteries and funeral homes, write their own epitaphs to be
put on tombstones made out of construction paper, write
obituaries, wills, or suicide notes, decide how they would
prefer to die, and plan their own funerals, body disposal and
pallbearers.
Atlantic quoted from professional journals to demonstrate the widespread support for death education among
educators. It quoted The School Counselor as stating in
1977: "Death education will play as important a part in
changing attitudes toward death as sex education played in
changing attitudes toward sex information and wider
acceptance of various sexual practices." Atlantic also
quoted a National Education Association report entitled
"Education for the 70's" which stated: "Schools will
become clinics whose purpose is to provide individualized,
psycho-social treatment for the student, and teachers must
become psycho-social therapists."
Most parents are unaware that the mission of the public
schools has dramatically changed in the last 20 years by
downgrading basic academics and instead using teachers as
pseudo-psychologists conducting group therapy. This
change was best described by the late U.S. Senator (and
former university president) Sam Hayakawa, who -- in
successfully persuading Congress to pass the Protection of
Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA) in 1978 -- said that the
public schools have adopted "an educational heresy . . . that
rejects the idea of education as the acquisition of knowledge
and skills . . . and regards the fundamental task in education
as therapy."
This invasion of the public school classroom by pseudo-psychologists conducting group therapy opened the floodgates to all sorts of psychological courses and surveys in
sexuality, drugs, incest, death, suicide, stress, and self-esteem. Some of these courses incorporate guided imagery
or New Age or occult practices. Readers used in elementary
schools are often filled with weird or violent images, and
little children are often taught to take their problems to
Pumsy the dragon or DUSO the dolphin.
Surely, one of the weirdest of these psychological
courses is death education. According to the Atlantic
Monthly article, parents in Illinois, Missouri, Michigan and
Florida have attributed their sons' suicides to public school
courses in death, dying, or suicide.
Littleton, Colorado is an area where public schools for
many years have adopted all the trendy "edufads" such as
Outcome Based Education. OBE is a dumbing-down
process that is heavy on the use of attitudinal and subjective
materials and tests, rather than (in Hayakawa's words) "the
acquisition of knowledge and skills."
In 1993, at the high school in the district adjacent to
Columbine, parents rebelled against this dumbing-down
process and, by a two-to-one vote, elected a "back-to-basics"
school board. The teachers union struck back in the following election and retook control. The union was supported by
People for the American Way, using the usual negative slurs
to accuse those opposed to OBE of being "fundamentalists"
and part of the "religious right."
Some politicians, unfortunately, are using the Columbine
tragedy to push their liberal political agenda, such as gun
control. That's obviously not the answer since killers Harris
and Klebold violated at least 17 current federal and state gun
control laws that, had they lived, would have kept them
locked up for the rest of their lives.
Does anybody think that Harris and Klebold would not
have known how to release a mandatory gun lock? Or would
have been deterred by a three-day waiting period, since
Harris's own journal detailed year-long plans for the killing?
The tragedies at Columbine High School, as well as
those in Washington, Mississippi, Kentucky, Arkansas,
Oregon, and Georgia, demand that we investigate the
curriculum taught in the public schools, the value system that
is taught, and the powerful legal drugs that children are
taking. We are paying a terrible price for allowing public
school curricula to teach students to create "their own value
system" instead of respecting moral laws such as "Thou shalt
not kill."
Parents Win Victory Over Nosy Surveys
Parents have just won a tremendous legal victory over the
widespread public school practice of forcing students to answer
nosy, privacy-invading questions about themselves and their
families. The U.S. District Court in San Antonio, Texas, has
signed the final order of judgment in a class action case against
the San Antonio Independent School District (SAISD) brought
by parents, who were represented by the Texas Justice Foundation.
The wide-reaching order is of landmark and nationwide
importance. For many years, parents have objected to the way
that schools force students to respond to nonacademic questionnaires intruding on pupil and family privacy and involving
matters that are none of the school's business.
Parents also object to the way that the so-called therapeutic
classroom is crowding out academics and basic skills.
Schoolchildren are routinely subjected, not only to intrusive,
depressing surveys, but also to psychological and attitudinal
exams and guidance counseling, usually without parental
knowledge or consent.
The case called Lisa T. v. SAISD began when 10-year-old
Melissa's mother voiced her objections to the Hillcrest Elementary School about sex education, death and suicide education,
and the lack of academic instruction. Lisa T.'s daughter tested
three years below grade level and her son tested four years
below grade level as a result of being taught about UFOs, the
Bermuda Triangle, how to embalm, etc., instead of spelling and
math.
Complaints to the superintendent and the school board got
Lisa T. nothing but harassment of Melissa, who was subjected
to interrogations about "what her mother was up to." The
SAISD then administered intrusive, psychological surveys to
students at Jefferson High School, delving into the feelings and
emotions and invading their personal privacy and family
relationships.
Teachers assured students that their survey responses
would remain confidential even from parents. Concurrently,
the school conducted daily classes that gave comprehensive
group guidance counseling, without parental preview or
consent, and without respecting the conscience or convictions
of the parents or students.
Here are samples from the nosy questionnaires. "What do
you consider to be the best thing about your home and the
worst? How do you get along at home? If you could change
one thing about your family, what would it be and why?"
More depressing questions from the SAISD's surveys
included: "What's the thing you need most that you are not
getting from your family? Has anybody close to you died in
the last year or so? Do you ever wish you were a boy or a girl
instead of what you are? What things do you worry about?"
Another question reveals the dramatic curriculum changes
that have taken place in the public schools: "Select the group
counseling sessions you would like to participate in: Managing
Anger; Parent/Teen Conflict; Coping with Stress; Interpersonal
Relationship; Grief/Loss; Study Skills; Other."
The court's order in the Lisa T. case requires the school
district henceforth to obtain parental consent for all guidance
counseling, psychological exams, and intrusive surveys. The
consent forms must notify parents if the surveys include
controversial topics such as political affiliations, sexual
behavior and attitudes, or requests for privileged information,
including potentially embarrassing mental and psychological
problems.
SAISD shredded all its objectionable intrusive surveys in
the presence of parent representatives. Parents were notified
that they could review their own children's questionnaires prior
to the shredding.
SAISD will establish a new district-wide committee of
parents and school staff to review possibly-intrusive surveys
prior to submitting them for approval or rejection by the school
board and before asking for parental consent. The district will
give employees in-service training on state and federal parental
rights and instruct them that they may not retaliate, intimidate,
interrogate, or harass students or parents who are exercising
their rights.
This Texas case is the latest chapter in a long-running
battle against nosy surveys about sex, drugs, death, attitudes,
and family matters, and against psychological tests and
courses, that first received national attention with the passage
of the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA) by
Congress in 1978. The public school establishment, led by the
National Education Association, had a collective tantrum when
the Reagan Administration issued regulations in 1984.
Seven days of hearings held by the Department of Education in 1984 put hundreds of cases of psychological abuse in
the classroom on the record, but the public school establishment continued to bitterly oppose enforcement of PPRA.
Despite a strengthening of the law's language by Senator
Chuck Grassley's amendment in 1994, despite pledges of
enforcement in the Contract With America, and despite
notorious violations such as the 149-question federally-financed
survey given to Minnesota children in 1989, PPRA has never
been enforced until now. This issue is more important in 1999
than ever before because technology now allows the data
collected on nosy surveys to be entered in student computer
portfolios that can be used against the student all his life.
The Lisa T. case marks a real turning point in the battle for
parents' rights. It provides a model for what parents and their
lawyers can accomplish elsewhere.
The need for the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment
and its regulation was explained in the best-selling 1984 book
Child Abuse in the Classroom edited by Phyllis Schlafly (Pere
Marquette Press, Box 495, Alton, IL 62002, $8). For another
important source of information on the changes in public school
curriculum, see Eagle Forum's video documentary, Crisis in
the Classroom ($25).
Excerpts from:
NOTICE AND DECLARATION OF PARENTAL RIGHTS
Compiled by the Texas Justice Foundation
Surveys and Evaluations:
b.) I __________(do/do not) give my written consent to the
Educational Institution or School District to require or otherwise
subject my child(ren) to any survey, analysis, personal inventory
or evaluation that reveals information concerning political
affiliations; mental and psychological problems potentially
embarrassing to the child(ren) or his/her family; sex behavior and
attitudes; illegal, anti-social, self-incriminating and demeaning
behavior; critical appraisals of other individuals with whom the
child(ren) has/have close family relationships; legally recognized
privileged or analogous relationships, such as those of lawyers,
physicians, and ministers; or income (other than that required by
law to determine eligibility for participation in a program or for
receiving financial assistance under such program).
This includes, but is not limited to: (1) all surveys, personal
inventories, questionnaires, or any other document that is personally intrusive, invading the privacy of my child(ren), myself, or
our family, and/or that delves into the psyche or thoughts of my
child(ren), (2) any method of obtaining information, individually
or in a group activity, that is not directly related to academic
instruction and that is designed to elicit information about
attitudes, habits, traits, opinions, beliefs or feelings of my
child(ren), and/or (3) any activities that have been designed to
affect behavioral, emotional, or attitudinal characteristics of my
child(ren).
Removal of Child From Classroom or Activity:
n.) I hereby exercise my right to remove my child(ren)
temporarily from any and every class or other school activity that
presents, covers or discusses the following topics or activities
because they conflict with my religious and/or moral beliefs. I
request that my child(ren) be placed instead in an academic
program in accordance with his intellectual abilities. I request that
the classroom materials on these subjects be provided to me and
I will then determine how they will be covered with my child(ren):
· Affective Development (including, but not limited to,
Non-Academic Decision Making, Non-Academic Problem
Solving, Self-Esteem, Interpersonal Effectiveness and
Cross-Cultural Effectiveness) · Death Education (including, but
not limited to, Suicide Education and Euthanasia) · Dream
interpretations, evaluations, meanings, or discussions · Drug
Education · Evolution (other than as a theory only) · Family
Planning and/or Parenting Skills · Globalism curriculum,
One-World Government, Anti- American or Anti- Nationalism
teaching, advocacy, or promotion · Guidance Counseling, whether
group or individually · Human Sexuality (including, but not
limited to, Abortion, AIDS, Alternative Lifestyles, Birth Control,
Contraceptives and/or their use, Divorce, Extramarital Sex,
Homosexuality, Incest, Premarital Sex, Prostitution, Roles and
Society Norms of Males and Females, Sex Behavior or Activity)
· Internet Access without direct adult supervision · Journaling
(including Log Books, Diaries, Personal Journals) on topics that
are personally intrusive and/or invasive to my child(ren)'s, my or
our family's right to privacy and other personal matters · Life
Skills Instruction - Social and Personal Training (including, but
not limited to, Interpersonal Relationships; Non-Academic
Personality Tests or Evaluations; Sensitivity Training; exercises
in, or strategies that call for or elicit self-disclosure; attitudes
towards or about parents, or the relationship between my
child(ren) and his/her parent(s) · Meditation, Visualization
· Origin of the Universe (other than as a theory only) · Population
Growth, Control, or Reduction · Psychology or Psychoanalysis
(including, but not limited to, Group Encounter Sessions,
Sociograms, Self-Evaluations and/or Auto-Criticism, Sociodrama
and/or Psychodrama Exercises · Religiously offensive literature or
reading material · Relaxation techniques or exercises (including,
but not limited to, Hypnotic Exercises or Techniques, Imagery,
Suggestology or other Yoga Techniques) · Values Clarification
(including, but not limited to Moral Dilemma Exercises,
Life/Death Decision Exercises or Survival Games, Role-Playing
involving moral issues) · Witchcraft, Magic ("Black" or "White"),
Mysticism, Mother Earth, Gaia, New Age, Occultism, the
Supernatural, Wicca.
Duty to Care for and Control Child's Medical Care:
p.) As the Parent/Guardian/Managing Conservator of the
above-mentioned child(ren) I have the right and duty to care for,
control and protect my child(ren); and provide for their medical
and dental care and psychiatric, psychological and surgical
treatment. (Texas Family Code §151.003). Therefore, before any
physician, nurse, or other health care provider is provided by you
to my child(ren) (as an employee, agent, contractor or affiliate) or
is allowed to care for or treat my child(ren), other than reasonably
necessary emergency care, they must disclose to me, as the person
authorized to consent for my child(ren), the risks and hazards
involved in the care or procedure, and must receive my written,
signed consent to the medical care, including therapy and guidance
counseling, before any such care or procedures are administered.
Retaliation and Harassment for Exercise of Constitutionally
Protected Rights:
u.) Both my child(ren) and I have the right to be free from
any and all acts of retaliation, harassment, intimidation, interrogation, or other acts of retribution by any employee or agent of the
School District or Educational Institution for the exercise of any
of my constitutionally protected rights, including, but not limited
to, the right to direct the moral upbringing and education of my
child(ren).
This Notice of Parental Rights was prepared by the Texas
Justice Foundation. The full text appears in Eagle Forum's
Education Reporter, June 1999, and is available from the Texas
Justice Foundation, 8122 Datapoint Dr., Suite 812, San Antonio,
Texas 78229, (210) 614-7157, Fax: (210) 614-6656, Email:
TxJF@prodigy.net, Web site: http://www.txjf.org
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