Family Security Matters: How Globalism is Destroying America

By Cliff Kincaid and Andy Selepak

January 24, 2007

If ever there were an adventure that threatens the sovereignty of America, is it globalism, replacing patriotism throughout our land. This is something you will not hear our liberal politicians say out loud. FSM Contributing Editors Cliff Kincaid and Andy Selepak explain how this spells America’s doom.

It’s the sleeper issue of the 2008 campaign the assault on American sovereignty. Will America remain an independent nation? Or will we lose our identity because of policies of “open borders” and transnationalism which transform us into mere residents of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s “global village?”

Our media have made their decision. In fact, a recent Time article gives our young people their marching orders: “Kids are global citizens now, even in small-town America, and they must learn to act that way.”

If President Bush is to have a worthwhile legacy, he must stand in the way of this insidious process, even at this late date in his presidency. For our part, in domestic and foreign affairs, we must continue acting like Americans¯and we must insist that our leaders protect America’s borders, national identity, and national language, English.

Personally, we must teach our young people that America, a unique and unprecedented experiment in human freedom and self-government, must not only survive but prosper and expand.

Yet the Time article, “How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20^th Century,” argues that the solution to all of our problems is “global education” so students can compete in the “global economy” and become “global citizens.” This spells America’s doom.

The Time article makes it clear that, in the Brave New World of global education, the Founding Fathers have been replaced with British and French thinkers, 9/11 conspiracy theories have replaced facts about the global Islamic threat, and U.S. History has taken a backseat to World History. Students are being taught to think across borders, be sensitive to other cultures, and learn foreign languages. The new role for educators is to eradicate American nationalism.

All of this is confirmation of what is in Nathan Tabor’s new book on the U.N., The Beast on the East River. He argues that the U.N. and the leftist National Education Association are behind a process of indoctrinating American school children into thinking of themselves as global citizens rather than patriots.

As part of this targeting of American young people, Time writers Claudia Wallis and Sonja Steptoe make it plain that they have to entertain the worst possible thoughts about America and its government.

Under the subheadline of “A New Kind of Literacy,” Time writes about juniors in a classroom being “riveted by a documentary called ‘Loose Change’ unspooling on a small TV screen at the Baccalaureate School for Global Education, in urban Astoria, N.Y.” Time explains that “The film uses 9/11 footage and interviews with building engineers and Twin Towers survivors to make an oddly compelling if paranoid case that interior explosions unrelated to the impact of the airplanes brought down the World Trade Center on that fateful day. Afterward, the students¯an ethnic mix of New Yorkers with their own 9/11 memories¯dive into a discussion about the elusive nature of truth.”

The so-called “documentary” called “Loose Change” makes the case that 9/11 was carried out by a secret government involving U.S. officials who blamed the terrorist attacks on hapless Muslims. Time finds this film “oddly compelling” and a device that enables students to seek the truth.

The “elusive nature of truth?” If we are raising young people who don’t or can’t comprehend the nature of the global Jihad threatening our survival as a nation, and which killed almost 3,000 Americans on 9/11, then we are on the road to total destruction. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would feel right at home discussing the Holocaust in a school that uses a 9/11 conspiracy theory as a teaching lesson.

To support this quest for global citizens, Time uses a quote from Mike Eskew, CEO of UPS, who says UPS needs to be “global trade literate, sensitive to foreign cultures, conversant in different languages.” Time magazine believes current U.S. students aren’t being prepared to work for companies like UPS or become global citizens because “fewer than half of high school students are enrolled in a foreign-language class and…social-studies curriculum tends to fixate on U.S. History.”

In the same article, Time discusses the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, “a high-powered, bipartisan assembly of Education Secretaries and business, government and other education leaders,” which has created “a blueprint for rethinking American education from pre-K to 12 and beyond to better prepare students to thrive in the global economy.” In the Executive Summary of the report, the commission writes that American schools need “to adopt internationally benchmarked standards for educating its students and its workers.” And according to Time, changing the entire American educational system is only possible “if we add new depth and rigor to our curriculum and standardized exams, redeploy the dollars we spend on education, reshape the teaching force and reorganize who runs the schools.”

But as we saw in those students watching the “Loose Change” conspiracy movie, this process is well underway. Time also cites a public elementary school, the John Stanford International School in Seattle, which “has taken the idea of global education and run with it. All students take some classes in either Japanese or Spanish. Other subjects are taught in English, but the content has an international flavor.” The magazine notes that global corporations like Nintendo and Starbucks contribute to the school’s $1.7 million-a-year budget.

Before opening the school, the principal, Karen Kodama, surveyed 1,500 business leaders and found that exposure to “world cultures” was an important trait desired by executives. So the school decided that “instead of circling back to the Pilgrims and Indians every autumn, children at Stanford do social-studies units on Asia, Africa, Australia, Mexico, and South America.”

The Stanford school, it turns out, is just one of the many schools that now feature this global citizen curriculum known as the international baccalaureate (I.B.) program. It was first introduced in 1968. According to Time, international baccalaureate programs offer courses with an international perspective, “so that even a lesson on the American Revolution will interweave sources from Britain and France with views from the Founding Fathers.”

So our founders are relegated to merely offering their “views” on why America exists.

The article quotes Jeffrey Beard, the director general of the International Baccalaureate Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, who says, “We try to build something we call international mindedness. These are students who can grasp issues across national borders.” These international baccalaureate schools are growing, from 350 in 2000 to 682 today.

The day is coming when American students cease pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States and start regarding themselves as global citizens. In fact, that day has already come at some schools. At one Pennsylvania school, fourth-grade students were asked to sign a “Pledge of Allegiance to the Earth.”

For the time being, however, there is still hope. Cub Scouts are still required to say the Pledge of Allegiance and learn something about what it means to be an American citizen. The Scouts is a magnificent program that parents should encourage their sons to participate in. Better yet, parents should take a leadership role in their local Scout pack and become Cub Scout den leaders.

If the liberals ever succeed in destroying the Scouts program, you will know that America is finished.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at cliff.kincaid@aim.org

FamilySecuirtyMatters.org Contributing Editor Andy Selepak, a writer at Accuracy in Media, is the author of the study, New Evidence of Liberal Media Bias, published as an AIM Report. He can be reached at andrew.selepak@aim.org