Your Child and The New Age Chapter 3 Schools and Values Clarification

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Should schools teach values? They inevitably do. So the essential question is: Whose values?

Years ago, history books presented honorable heroes who modeled faith, courage, honesty, and integrity. Elementary readers introduced children to memorable characters who demonstrated genuine love, not a fleeting loving feeling, but the deep, laying-down-your-life kind of love that is so often ridiculed today.

A daring new curriculum has taken their place - texts that have been carefully combed for any trace of biblical bent. Literature free from "biased" words like wife, husband, or marriage. Books that emphasize reality and relevance by modeling adultery, dishonesty, and drug abuse.

Called values clarification, this "progressive" program challenges our children to defend or deny all the precious goals and guidelines of earlier days. It insists that the only true values are those a child chooses himself in response to his immediate needs, desires, and circumstances. It tells him, Do your own thing!" The result is a growing social chaos among people who, like Israel during the time of the Judges, do what is "right in their own eyes."¹

A mother from Kenosha, Wisconsin felt the painful effects of what her children were learning in school:

By the time my first two children had reached third grade, I realized something was wrong. The child I took to school in the morning was not the child I picked up after school in the afternoon. If this change had been a positive change, reflecting academic progress, I would have been delighted. However, the change I noticed was in their value system. They seemed to be desensitized to the morals I had been trying to instill in them as their mother, and I thought that I had failed.

I failed because I had assumed that the schools my children were attending were like the schools I had attended.

I found instead that the thrust of schools had turned from education to indoctrination I found the values I instilled in my children were not reinforced or respected by the schools, but were systematically challenged in the classroom.²

Spreading like cancer, this values transformation extends from the very core of our educational system to all its parts. In the name of progress, it promotes a self-centered kind of freedom from commitment, and self-control.

In transpersonal education, the learner is encouraged to be awake and autonomous, to question, to explore all the comers and crevices of conscious experience, to seek meaning, to test outer limits, to check out frontiers and depths of the self. (Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy)

Junior and senior high school students throughout Michigan were told to relax and "fantasize" in order to design a device for birth control "they would enjoy using." They were to discuss the criteria used for planning and the ad vantages of one design over another. Finally, they compared their design with existing contraceptives.³

What do students learn from this kind of exercise? The answer lies in the common goals of the humanist NEA, the New Age movement, and Planned Parenthood - three social forces that are surging forward together dead set on accomplishing their purpose.

Beliefs And Goals Of
Humanist "NEA"	New Age	Planned Parenthood
"Traditional dogmatic or authoritarian religions that place God ... above human needs and experience do a disservice to the human species."	"Intimacy is prized for its shared psychic intensity and transformative possibilities .... For many people, giving up the idea of exclusive relationships is the most difficult paradigm shift in their own transformation."4	Founder Margaret Sanger called sex the "radiant force" enabling mankind to attain "the great spiritual illumination which will transform the world, which will light the only path to an earthly paradise." How? "By expressing ourselves, by realizing ourselves more completely."7
"…individuals should be permitted to express their sexual proclivities and pursue their lifestyles as they desire."	"When one begins the transformative process, death and birth are imminent: the death of custom as authority, the birth of the self ....."5	Faye Wattleton, current head and the 1986 Humanist of the Year, says, "Too many of us are focused upon stopping teenage sexual activity rather than stopping teenage pregnancy."8
"Happiness and the creative realization of human needs and desires ... are continuous themes of humanism. We strive for the good life, here and now."	"A closed relationship, like a closed system in nature, loses energy."6
(From Humanist Manifesto II)	(Marilyn Ferguson,The Aquarian Conspiracy)

This hedonistic philosophy cannot bring fulfillment. Instead, it stirs insatiable cravings. Luring children into this sensuous, self-centered lifestyle is Satan's most effective way of turning them away from God. If they embrace sin, they cannot see God’s glory (2 Corinthians 4-4).

Back to "Nature"

Humanism enflamed the intellectual community because it matched what they already believed. Likewise, Darwin's theory of evolution became an instant hit, because he put a plausible "scientific" framework around a myth that had already found acceptance - thus validating it. This explains why "creative" scientists could produce a full-bodied drawing of their mythological missing link from fractions of bones and get away with it. Though admittedly false, the familiar monkey-to-man line-up may remain in textbooks as if true - until evolutionists find better "proof' for their popular beliefs. The probabilities of chance-evolution have been likened to that of a tornado sweeping through a scrap yard and accidentally forming a Boeing jet.

Far more than an attempt to explain origins, evolution has become a social philosophy - the way to view all of life. Evolutionists see man simply as a higher form of animal. Since we train animals to serve society, why not use psychological techniques like behavior modification in the classroom? Why not free children to exercise their natural instincts, satisfy their evolving animal nature, and thereby fulfill their human potential?

Humanist goals have not changed since Darwin’s days. In fact, the educators who signed the Humanist Manifesto II in 1973 stressed a "natural" and evolutionary way of life.

In the area of sexuality, we believe that intolerant attitudes, often cultivated by orthodox religions and puritanical cultures, unduly repress sexual conduct. The right to birth control, abortion, and divorce should be recognized… Moral education for children and adults is an important way of developing awareness and sexual maturity (Humanist Manifesto II, 6)

Even before the signing of the revised manifesto, two innovative humanists, William Glasser and Sidney Simon, showed the way to implement it. Published in 1969, Dr. Glasser's book, Schools Without Failure, presented a "daring new program": The class, led by the teacher, would become a counseling group. Somehow, by airing uncomfortable circumstances and feelings each day, this encounter group was supposed to teach social responsibility and solve behavioral problems. Consider the effect of this suggestion by Dr. Glasser:

Children will often become very personal, talking about subjects that ordinarily are considered private... The teacher should keep in mind that in class meetings, free discussion seems to be beneficial and that adult anxieties are often excessive. Nevertheless, a child who discusses drunken brawls at home might quietly be asked to talk about something that has more relationship to school.

Changing the subject in this way is sometimes unwise, however, because it is just those drunken brawls at home that have the most relationship to his school progress."⁹

Professor Sidney Simon went a step further. His book, Values Clarification-A Handbook of Practical Strategies for Teachers and Students, is packed with classroom exercises, which filtered into textbooks and public schools. A popular strategy called values voting is "a simple and very rapid means by which every student in the class can make a public affirmation on a variety of values issues."¹⁰

The teacher simply asks a question. The students respond affirmatively by raising their hands. They give a negative reply by pointing their thumbs down. If undecided, they fold their arms. To pass, they do nothing. After the teacher has asked about ten questions, the class discusses the answers. Each child is forced to take a public stand even if he passes. Imagine the effect of this kind of peer pressure on a child who feels insecure.

The teacher asks, "How many of you ...

 think there are times when cheating is justified?

 regularly attend religious services and enjoy it?

 think that women should stay home and be primarily wives and mothers?

 would like to have a secret lover?

 would choose to die and go to heaven, if it meant playing a harp all day?¹¹

Simon recommends this list for all ages. For secondary students, he adds questions such as: "How many of you think sex education instruction in the schools should include techniques for lovemaking, contraception?" and "How many of you think you will continue to practice religion, just like your parents?"¹²

You can see the rise of the New Age as a barometer of the disintegration of American culture. Dostoyevsky said anything is permissible if there is no God. But anything is also permissible if everything [or everyone] is God." (Robert J.L. Burrows, Spiritual Counterfeits Project, in "New Age Harmonies" Time, December 1987, 72)

Clarifying Values Clarification

Parents and teachers across the nation have agonized over the emotional damage caused by the psychological manipulations of Values Clarification. In response to their outcry, the Department of Education held hearings in seven locations across the country to implement the Protection of Pupil Rights (Hatch) Amendment.

Hundreds of parents testified at the hearings held in Seattle, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Phoenix, Orlando, Concord (New Hampshire), and Washington, D.C. Phyllis Schlafly compiled excerpts from the official transcripts of the proceedings into an amazing book, Child Abuse in the Classroom. The reported violations fell into these categories:

Bias against Christian values. A mother from Oregon, whose son became "very confused as to the rightness or wrongness of stealing," shared this testimony:

Striving with religious zeal to convert children to "moral relativism" or "situational ethics," humanist educators argue that anything other than "value-free" teaching is religion. To them, only values that fit man's desires are valid. For if man is his own god, he has divine authority to choose his own rights and wrongs. Frequent name changes blocked the kind of "clarification" that would expose the mental manipulation. Programs might be called "values education," "self-awareness," "decision-making, self acceptance," or "interpersonal relation skills."

Values clarification is neutral, argues Simon, since every value is as valid as any other. To him, the only wrong position is one that believes in absolute values - and therefore opposes his belief that all values are relative."¹⁵

Bias against traditional authorities such as parents and the church. An eighth-grade sex education curriculum, titled "Are You Ready for Sex?" and used in Manistee, Michigan, asked questions such as: "Do you know why your parents and/or religion have taught that intercourse should wait until marriage? Do you accept these ideas? If so, would you be creating a lot of inner turmoil to go against your own beliefs?"¹⁶

Parents from New Jersey "Could not find ... in any of the hypothetical situations, a single portrayal of parents in a positive manner. Parents were shown to be overreaching, nagging, unfair, overcritical of their children’s friends." No wonder many children are confused about values, question their faith, and resist their parents.¹⁷

Denial of the right to privacy. Values projects often require students to keep journals about their own and their parents' private activities. They are warned to tell no one.

One mother summarized her feelings, "I consider this curriculum an invasion of family privacy, a subtle effort to erode all authority and undermine the traditional values that have made this nation great…"¹⁸

Practice of dangerous and destructive psychological techniques. The following attempts at Values Clarification, in a program called preventive Guidance and Counseling, occurred in Lincoln County, Oregon. The parents learned about the program after they determined to find out why their children came home agitated on certain days.¹⁹

· An eleven-year-old girl was placed in front of her counseling class to tell her feelings when she found her father dead. Upon disclosing this information, she was later hassled by classmates with teasing questions.

A second child was forced, under threat of discipline to stand in front of the class and tell how it felt to have parents going through a divorce.

A third child answering a questionnaire said, "Daddy spanks me, and sometimes pulls down my pants to spank me." Dad was then taken to the police station.²⁰

Concealment of strategies from parents. Many of the ways schools gain private information about the home life of its students are so subtle they escape notice. Often personal projects are hidden in curriculum that appear unrelated, such as physical education, English, or history. A teacher in the Lansing, Michigan school district observed: