from educators shifting emphasis away from teaching traditional values and the 3R's. At the Kansas Governor's Education Summit in 1989, a leading educator told why:
Some people say we are spending more on schools and getting less. I disagree—what we are doing is taking on more and more in schools and that will continue. We are not only feeding kids at lunch, we are feeding them in the morning also. We are supplying more psychological services. We are providing special ed services. More and more the school is the cog or center of all human resource development.
What Are Schools Doing To Children Morally ? 23
To make room for the "new things" reformers have added, emphasis on the basics of the 3Rs, traditional moral values and character was downgraded in America's schools. One of the first "new" things was in-class sex education. In a 1994 column, Phyllis Schlafly gave some of the history—and the results.
Sex education started coming into public schools about 30 years ago, and became progressively more explicit until many courses include actual demonstrations of how to use con- traceptives and pornographic videos to explain the facts of life to minor children ...often without the knowledge of parents.
Controversies have been ongoing ever since. Typical of the complaints was a situation which made the front page of the Washington Times in early 1997. Parents at Centreville Elementary School in Fairfax County (near Washington DC) were told fifth and sixth grade girls would be shown videos dealing with sexual development in girls—while boys would be shown videos appropriate for boys.
However, at the family dinner table on March 21, Mr.
and Mrs. Larry Wiggins were stunned to learn that their young daughter had also been shown videos that depicted the sexual awakening of boys. The paper reported:
Mr. Wiggins, 39, remembers his face growing red when his 11-year- old daughter talked of what she had just learned in her sex-ed class, using such words as "ejaculation," "wet dreams," and "erections."
The Wiggins protested to the school. Their protests were picked up by the press. A series of follow-up stories reported "enormous confusion" as to Fairfax school policies on what videos children were to see. The paper reported:
School administrators, parents and even school board mem- bers who voted on the policy could not agree whether girls
were supposed to see boys' videotapes and vice versa. After much discussion, it turned out the policy had been to show all sex-education material to both sexes—-despite the contrary information given to parents at an orientation session.4
Two years of parental protests and school board
"studies" resulted in the Fairfax County School Board again promising parents in December 1997 (as they had two years earlier) that fifth grade boys and girls would only see sex ed films showing sexual develop- ment pertaining to their own gender. In a lengthy editorial page letter in the December 13, 1997 Washington Times, a mother reviewed the controversy and said:
In summary, the Fairfax County public school system has thwarted parents every step of the way with this film.
Children who are younger and younger get more and more sex information, including promotion of tolerance for and even encouragement of homosexual behavior.
It starts in the first grade. Columnist Thomas Sowell turned the spotlight on a New York City controversy in 1992. He wrote:
There was a recent flap in New York City over first grade textbooks titled "Daddy' s Roommate" and "Heather Has Two Mommies." Both books were designed to acquaint [and con- dition] first-graders to the idea of homosexual parents.
Widespread protests over the books being available in schools and in children's reading sections of public libraries have developed in such widely diverse places as Goldsboro, North Carolina; Roswell, New Mexico;
Springfield, Oregon; and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
In the book, Daddy's Roommate, the little boy says he's "happy" about his dad's live-in partner. A Washington Times column by Thomas Sowell quoted from the book which has the little boy saying:
What Are Schools Doing To Children Morally? 25
"Being gay is just one more kind of love," when he notices that his dad and the roommate Frank steep together.
C o n c e r n i n g t h e u s e o f D a d d y ' s R o o m m a t e a n d Heather Has Two Mommies books in New York city schools for little children, Sowell pointed out that, amazingly, only one local New York City school district objected. All the other districts quietly accepted this remaking of social values as a role for public schools.
Even the one unwilling district objected only because it was "too early for this kind of thing." Sowell asked appropriately:
What are American public schools doing getting into such things in the first place? Do they have time and energy to dissipate in ideological crusades to reshape the values of other people's children, when educators are failing miserably to convey the academic skills they are being paid to teach?
Sowell added:
No small part of the reason why American school children fall so far behind their contemporaries in other countries in educa- tional achievement is that Japanese and other young people are studying math, science and other solid subjects while our children are being brainwashed about homosexuality, en- vironmentalism, multiculturalism or a thousand other non- academic distractions.
Few parents or citizens realize the pervasiveness of classroom brainwashing, or the utter dishonesty with which it is smug- gled into the schools under misleading labels.
Does anyone ask himself why it should take years and years to teach schoolchildren so-called "sex education?" Obviously it does not. What takes years and years is to wear down the values they were taught at home and lead them toward wholly different attitudes and wholly different conceptions of the world. Brainwashing takes time—and it takes this time away from academic subjects.
The brainwashing can start in preschools even before children enter regular kindergarten. Family Concerns, Inc. of Atlanta, Georgia issued an alert in 1996 about a curriculum being offered in state-run four-year-old pre- kindergarten programs in Georgia. All state and private day care providers received the Anti-Bias Cur- riculum produced by the National Association for the Education of Young Children in Washington DC. One activity which teachers are instructed to use with four- year-olds says:
Make copies of an outline of a body as drawn by a preschooler, and in small groups ask children to fill in all the body parts to show if the person is a boy or girl.
What is the merit of focusing the attention of four year- olds on the body parts of the opposite sex? At various places in the book teachers are instructed to look for opportunities to use and explain words like
"penis" and "vagina" to the four year olds.
Family and church beliefs are undermined in various subtle ways. When children come to pre-school their ideas and experiences have all been derived from their families. Rather than reinforcing family values and beliefs, the national anti-bias curriculum says:
Help children discover the contradictions between their ideas and their own experiences. Sometimes children will accept firsthand experience as truth; sometimes they will cling to social norms or their own ideas about gender behavior. Don't get discouraged when stereotypic gender play [boys playing like boys and girls like girls] and remarks continue despite a rich antisexist curriculum....The key is to provide many op- portunities for new ways of thinking and reasoning. Over time, many children will integrate nonsexist attitudes into their beliefs and behavior. Children may also experience emotional conflict about acting differently than social norms, especially when their families agree and act according to the norms [Page 51], (Emphasis added.)
What Are Schools Doing To Children Morally? 27 At the time Sowell was writing about pro-homosexual bra i n w a s h i n g i n k i n d e r g a r t e n in N ew Y o r k C i t y s c hools, National Review reported on how such pro- homosexual materials get used. The story said:
One factor is the enlarged role homosexuals are playing in molding New York City school policy. When the Federal Government made a grant to New York's schools to support education in drug prevention, $500,000 of that money was awarded to the Gay and Lesbian Community Center....The volunteers who will staff condom distribution rooms in city high schools and who will be available to counsel children on sexuality include delegates from the Gay Men's Health Crisis and the Hetrick Martin Institute for Gay and Lesbian Youth, both of which have been designated as official resources for the New York City school system.