Ever wonder why kids come home from school often sounding as if they had received woefully inadequate instruction in everything from English, history, and civics to mathematics, science, and other traditional fields of learning?
That’s because, in far too many K-12 classes across the country, these subjects have been pushed aside in favor of a curriculum specifically designed to set children on a path toward progressive indoctrination of their impressionable young minds. This is not a new development; it’s been gradually tightening its grip on our education system (public and private) ever since the poisonous progressive ideas of John Dewey and his acolytes started making their way into school curricula during the last century.
Over time, the discipline of history has given way to “social studies,” and the teaching of science has undergone a noticeable politicization.
In their 2017 book, “Deconstructing the Administrative State: The Fight for Liberty,” Emmett McGoarty, Jane Robbins, and Erin Tuttle discuss the battle of ideologies that has lasted over a century and continues today, pitting those who defend the American Experiment and its constitutional structure against those who seek to replace that structure with one that empowers them to implement their ideas with little or no popular input. All three scholars are affiliated with the Washington-based American Principals Project Foundation.
Curse of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
By hijacking the traditional school curriculum and transforming it into an instrument of indoctrination, progressive educators can mold minds to their hearts’ content. The authors note that many students are subjected to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), written in 2011 under the direction of Achieve, Inc., the same organization that wrote the controversial Common Core national standards for English, arts, and mathematics.
After evaluating the NGSS, the Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank that actually supported Common Core, determined that the NGSS was “inferior” to standards in 20 other states. In physical science, it observed that “it would be impossible to derive a high school physics or chemistry course from the content included in the NGSS.”
Instead of introducing students to the world of scientific inquiry, NGSS seeks to inculcate progressive social values. It does so by striving to “engage” students during classroom instruction by brainwashing them and pressuring them to become active participants in rescuing the planet in accordance with environmentalist dogma.
The NGSS provide targeted goals for what students should know at the end of different grade levels. Quoting directly from the NGSS playbook, the authors cite the NGSS Global Climate Change standards for three grade levels:
By the End of Grade 5: If Earth’s global mean temperature continues to rise, the lives of humans and other organisms will be affected in many different ways.
By the End of Grade 8: Human activities such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels are major factors in in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature (global warming). Reducing human vulnerability to whatever climate changes do occur depend (sic) on the understanding of climate science, engineering capabilities and other kinds of knowledge, such as understanding of human behavior and on applying that knowledge wisely in decisions and actions.
By the End of Grade 12: Global climate models are often used to understand the process of climate change because these changes are complex and can occur slowly over Earth’s history. Though the magnitudes of humans’ impacts are greater than they ever have been, so too are humans’ abilities to model predict and manage current and future impacts. Through computer simulations and other studies, important discoveries are still being made about how the ocean, the atmosphere and the biosphere interact and are modified in response to human activities, as well as to changes in human activities. The science and engineering will be essential to both to understanding the possible impacts of global climate change and to informing decisions about how to slow its rate and consequences – for humanity and well as for the rest of the planet.
The underlying assumptions of human-induced climate change are never challenged, nor are students, including those at higher levels, encouraged to consider alternative explanations for climate variability.
Education Establishment’s Relentless Campaign to Adopt NGSS Nationwide
By 2017, 18 states had adopted the NGSS since the standards were completed in 2011. “The remaining states face a relentless campaign from the education establishment to adopt the standards,” McGroarty, Robbins, and Tuttle point out. “For example, the National Association of School Boards of Education (NASBE) has pushed adoption of NGSS by state school boards, which generally exercise authority over state academic standards. Efforts to reject the NGSS face a barrage of ‘export’ reports by the NASBE to refute any objections raised.”