Portrait of an Agenda

Portrait of a Graduate hell mouth

By Gretchen Garrity

The Hell Mouth that is our education system is fast swallowing the rights of parents and the well being of children in a swill of globalist agendas designed to usher in a compliant and submissive population of workers.

And local schools in Christian and Greene counties are implementing these agendas, including the Ozark and Nixa school districts, and Springfield Public Schools.

I will concentrate on one program, the Portrait of a Graduate, as an illustration of what is happening. However, there are dozens of such programs that have been inserted into schools through curriculum, teaching methods, counseling programs, even health programs.

Here is one explanation of Portrait of a Graduate (and you can find lots more at the link):

"Originating with the non-profit organization Battelle for Kids, and shaped by transformational education partners like KnowledgeWorks, POG programs have been adopted by states and districts nationwide, all using similar terminology geared towards a single vision:

• Collective goals for graduates
• Mindset requirements for student “success”
• Equitable practices embedded in schools

The Portrait of a Graduate framework is fundamentally incompatible with the classical liberal idea that “hopes, dreams, and aspirations” for a student solely belong to the student and his or her family, not controlled by a “community” or “collective vision” six degrees removed from the student."

The amount of private, non-governmental organizations that suck the lifeblood out of local public schools is mind-boggling. These groups work hand-in-glove with government agencies, like the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, to implement globalist agendas. These agendas are presented as new methods, new ways of educating children, even the transformation of the education system, and include a plethora of training, resources, legal aid, consulting, and so forth for teachers, administrators, and students.

For instance, here's Panorama Education, a website that helps schools implement Portrait of a Graduate. Data collection via surveys and other means is featured, according to Higher Ground, a website focused on exposing the systems that are transforming our institutions:

“Panorama Education’s website shows how they build their behavioral surveys and data collection around Portrait of a Graduate. (Panorama was founded by US AG Merrick Garland’s son-in-law—the reason that Garland went after parents that oppose Critical Race Theory at local school boards).” -- Higher Ground

These organizations are very clever in presenting to their public school customers a competency and confidence in their expertise. Materials and training are professionally produced and thorough. 

Your tax dollars are paying for it all.

As many others have asserted, there is a particular cooperation that has happened at the highest levels of business and government to implement an overarching program of gaining control of children in every aspect of their being. From intrusive data collection to mind-bending indoctrination of children into an authoritarian control grid, the globalist agenda has overwhelmed local schools.

EXPOSING PORTRAIT OF A GRADUATE

From: Ozark School District

“Portrait of a Graduate is being used to fundamentally transform the purpose of US education—shifting curriculum, assessment, school accountability and data collection away from academics and towards Social and Emotional Learning (SEL).”  -- Higher Ground

While your local school district touts the Portrait of a Graduate (hereafter referred to as POG) program as a positive and exciting learning avenue for students, it is in reality a Social Emotional Learning (SEL) system. It indoctrinates students to be flexible, teachable, resilient, collaborative, dependable, etc., to ideologies like Critical Theory, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and other Marxist-type ways of thinking and being.

Parents take the words at face value, not understanding that students are being taught a form of Groupthink. In the Ozark School District, POG has been implemented at all grade levels--K-12. According to the school district, "In 2020, we gathered members of our community and asked what character traits are important for an Ozark graduate. The discussion resulted in nine traits we have embedded within our curriculum to ensure our graduates are prepared for success."

The nine traits that the Ozark School District supposedly chose after gathering the community together, is almost exactly what the promulgators of this globalist program suggest on their websites, and is remarkably similar to most other school districts that implement POG. See the graphic above.

PUSHING POG ON THE SCHOOL BOARD LEVEL

Also in Ozark, the administration often has a Portrait of a Graduate recognitions program at the monthly school board meetings. A child from each grade level is chosen to appear and receive a certificate for their adherence to the trait of the month. A teacher or other adult describes to the board how that child has exemplified the trait during their school day, and why they deserve to be recognized.

It goes on for sometimes close to an hour. This is part of the schtick of POG, highlighting the children in a public setting. It reinforces the program not only for students, but parents and indeed the school board. Of course this type of recognition does not belong in the monthly business meeting of a school district. It is for show. And it works, unfortunately. It is one reason why the public portion of the board meetings can stretch three or more hours.

MOVING ON TO NIXA

The Nixa public school district has this to say about their Portrait of an Eagle:

"To ensure our portrait was not just a piece an unused document, we chose to go through a comprehensive process similar to our CSIP when developing our Portrait of an Eagle. We worked with Battelle for Kids, a national not-for-profit organization committed to collaborating with school systems and communities to realize the power and promise of 21st-century learning. In the fall of 2022, we assembled a design team consisting of a diverse group of community members, families, students, and educators. In all, our design team consisted of around 70-80 members, with one-third being students. Our design team was driven by our leadership team, which was made up of building and district leadership."

And guess what Nixa schools came up with: Critical Thinkers, Confident, Adaptable, Empathetic, Effective Communicators.

The organization that worked with the Nixa school district, Battelle Kids, is linked with KnowledgeWorks, a Bill Gates-funded organization that promotes SEL. (As an aside, be on the lookout for anything like "competencies," or "competency-based education." These go hand-in-hand with what Battelle Kids and the other NGOs are SEL-ling to us. Because the public school system is imploding via poor student outcomes, the focus has become "soft skills," "competencies," "attitudes," and "values.")

From: Nixa School District

 

 

 

 

HOW ABOUT THE SPRINGFIELD PUBLIC SCHOOLS?

Here's what SPS has to say about their POG choice of attributes:

"Over the past few years, Springfield Public Schools officials asked a diverse group of stakeholders to come together to identify the community's goals for all students. The goal was to create the District's Portrait of a Graduate. The stakeholders included parents, teachers, students, business leaders, representatives from higher education, and area non-profits...The group identified six core attributes all students will need to be successful post-graduation. The attributes include academically empowered, engaged citizen, collaborator, communicator, creative, and critical thinker. Once the core attributes were identified, the process of building a platform in which students can showcase their work was started."

And just to show readers that POG is not only for students, the SPS also is anticipating a Portrait of an Educator. The indoctrination is deep and wide:

"Portrait of an Educator empowers teachers to demonstrate the skills necessary to support students becoming contributing community members. More information on Portrait of an Educator is coming soon." 

GLOBAL, NOT LOCAL

None of this is a local effort, other than to gather and guide along any area "stakeholders" as the agenda is implemented. According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, Emotional, Learning (CASEL), "A recent scan of employer surveys and job listings confirmed that the most in-demand skills, such as teamwork and adaptability, are high-level social and emotional skills (Yoder et al., 2020)."  

Organizations like CASEL, which are integral to helping implement SEL in schools nationwide, spend a lot of time focusing on what employers want in a worker, rather than graduating students who are independent-minded and can read, write, and do math well. They are blowing smoke in the eyes of parents, and encouraging administrators and staff to collude with organizations like the World Economic Forum, and UNESCO. 

They pay lip service to "critical thinking," but the overall focus is on traits that allow groups like CASEL and the WEF to inject the SEL agenda.

 Like many other non-governmental organizations (NGOs), CASEL is active politically:

"The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) and Committee for Children applaud the FY2024 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies bill, which provides essential funding for K-12 education, including a Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Initiative to support SEL and “whole child” approaches to education and other investments that support students’ academic, social, and emotional learning. CASEL, Committee for Children, and the Leading with SEL Coalition sent a letter to appropriators calling for investments in SEL. The SEL and Whole Child Initiative..."

The UN's educational arm, UNESCO is busy with SEL, too:

"At UNESCO MGIEP, we recognize the urgent need for Social Emotional Learning (SEL) to be mainstreamed into education systems to transform education and shape a future that is geared towards providing peace and human flourishing. SEL can be described as learning that allows all learners to identify and navigate emotions, practice mindful engagement and exhibit prosocial behaviour for human flourishing towards a peaceful and sustainable planet."

The confident, earnest, and concerned verbiage is typical of all these groups. Here UNESCO promotes SEL in order to implement social justice in Columbia of all places:

"Discriminatory mindsets are the root cause of human rights violations and injustices across boundaries. Inequality has long-lasting consequences for individuals and communities.Post-pandemic, mental health challenges, especially for vulnerable children, are crucial. Our education and health systems must address this need. To tackle these urgent problems, SEL for wellbeing and social justice must be taught in classrooms. Think Equal is a socio-emotional education programme for Early Childhood that promotes prosocial behaviors and reduces antisocial behaviors."

This is a global plan. It is not and never has been local. Our local school districts are either profoundly ignorant or willing participants in this grand scheme to bring authoritarian control to our local communities. Neither is preferable.

Here is DESE's "Portrait of a Gifted Learner." Sound familiar?

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

Parents, grandparents and taxpayers must get involved, get educated about these programs, and petition their local school boards. Get your school board and school administration up-to-speed. Give them the information you have learned about. Don't let them tell you that POG is harmless. There are plenty of links here to get educated about SEL's POG. Attend your monthly school board meeting and speak about POG. Educate the board. Make them accountable through publicizing what is going on and asking them to drop SEL programs from their school curriculum.

You trust your children to be taught reading, writing, arithmetic, history, science and so on. To find out that they are being taught instead how to be dependable, adaptable, and empathetic so they can exhibit social skills that employers and authoritarians desire, is not what taxpayers and parents are paying for. 

It is, in fact, intolerable.

 

Controlled Programming

 

By Gretchen Garrity

Tuesday night (March 19, 2024) there was a Nixa School Board Candidate Forum. It was hosted by the Nixa Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) and the Nixa Teachers Association (NTA). Held in the Media Center, the forum was well attended.

The sponsors had selected questions and given them to the candidates ahead of the forum. Therefore, the candidates' answers were about as vanilla as they could get. They were canned. They were rehearsed. I'm not blaming the candidates. Who wouldn't want to be spared inconvenient questions, or questions that one had no answer for? Who would want to be confronted by an upset parent or voter?

The forum was what is called controlled programming. You, the voter, have no voice (unless you managed to get a submitted question chosen and even then you couldn't talk). If you arrived at the meeting early enough to meet and shake hands with the candidates, you might have been able to ask them a question. Or, if you lingered afterwards you might have gotten a question in. 

But the formal process of a citizen squaring off in public with a declared candidate, a citizen positioned as an equal able to query and expect answers from the person who is asking for their vote, was missing.

In general, these forums are how the System checks off boxes. Public meeting? Check. Candidate forum? Check. Voter information? Check. Public duty? Check. 

It's all for show.

How much is really learned about the candidates? Having sat through a couple of these types of events, the candidates pretty much said the same things as at the other times. The forum last night was recorded. Whether it was live-streamed or will be released online I don't know. If it was live-streamed or released, I would've saved the time and energy of being a mere spectator needed to fill the audience.

I had questions. They weren't the questions in the prearranged forum. They were tough questions I wanted to ask two of the candidates. 

A question for current school board president/candidate Josh Roberts: "You mentioned that the school district is currently consulting with a psychologist to decide whether to provide an on-campus psychologist to teachers. Can you tell me what has changed in the last decade or so that would warrant teachers needing a psychologist on campus?"

A question for school board candidate Megan Deal: "Can you give your opinion of trauma-based education?" And a followup, "Would you agree that parents should be provided an opt-out form if they decide they don't want their children participating in any type of data collection via surveys, questionnaires or evaluations that refers to their child's feelings or beliefs or attitudes, especially those relating to sexual behavior, orientation, or gender identity?"

Civic participation in the election process is so important that events like the PTO/NTA forum ultimately prove unhelpful. What has happened to debates, and open forums, where voters can get a real idea of the candidates' suitability for public office? To preempt questions from the citizens and give candidates the questions ahead of time is a disservice to the community when there is no other avenues for public discourse.

We are being controlled by a managerial class of government workers and their associates who may not even be aware that the processes they implement are not in the spirit or letter of a free exchange of ideas. Citizens deserve to be able to interview the candidates in order to determine which one best deserves their vote.

I would ask the Nixa PTO and NTA to change their format during the next election and allow a period of time for the citizens to actually participate in the forum. Allow questions that might bring up uncomfortable subjects such as Social Emotional Learning and Diversity Equity and Inclusion, and how those agenda--implemented from both the federal and state level in our local schools--are causing behavioral issues in students.

Instead of calling for more social workers and psychologists and more government programs, perhaps a truly open forum would allow citizens to engage on a level that would actually bring both enlightenment and change to our school boards and ultimately benefit the students and staff.

I'm inserting this video of an interview of Abigail Shrier, author of Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up, to give you an idea of how important ideas are not being shared with our candidates, or others in the audience. It's fascinating, and our community needs to know that there is a very different narrative to the one we are exposed to by the System, which is always and only a call for more programs and more staff:

One last point. We the People of Christian County is the only group I know of (please tell me if you know of others), that had local school board candidates come to speak...and take unvetted questions from the citizens. I would say a couple of the candidates were probably sweating by the time they got out of there, but they came and took questions. Thanks to Josh Roberts and Megan Deal of Nixa, and to Jason Shaffer in Ozark and Edmund Unger in Sparta. And a big thanks to We the People of Christian County.

Moses the "Superintendent"

 

Detail of a 19th-century wood engraving by Frederick Richard Pickersgill

David Rice does a great job of exposing the worldview of Nixa School Board candidate Megan Deal, who recently spoke at a local meeting. It is vitally important to understand where candidates are coming from.

They can say many right things, they can be Christians, they can be articulate and pleasant. But if their basic understanding of the world is not in line with your values as a voter, you have a decision to make.

In order to really get at their true opinions, you have to spend time digging. Rice does that. He's showing the reader what the press will not--the truth.

From his article:

"[Megan Deal] spoke alongside other school board candidates and she talked about the emotional and mental health needs of the students who are being overlooked by the system. In other words, she claimed she was looking for the marginalized children in schools. 

She seems to be focused on her narrowly focused project of finding the students during relaxed times at school (like lunch or transitioning from classroom to classroom). She thinks the board should be there speaking to the students during those periods and learning from the overlooked (marginalized) students.

She also spoke about being like Aaron to Moses, trying to lean on her Christian background for her candidacy. She referenced Exodus 17:12-13, when Aaron and Hur lifted Moses’ arms so that God’s power could still work through him. She described the school board trustees as the Aaron to the Superintendent’s Moses."

Read the whole thing here: Can we Trust Megan Deal to be a Nixa School Board Trustee?

Looking for Answers?

Do you ever wonder why it takes up to $100,000 to run for an unpaid school board position for the Springfield Public Schools? Do you wonder why violence in schools is on the rise? Why levels of anxiety among students is so high?

 Why are academic scores flat or falling? Why is teacher retention a big problem for school districts? Why do school districts keep asking for more bond money for more capital projects when they don't maintain the buildings they have? 

Do you ever wonder why out-of-town people founded a "nonpartisan" United Springfield PAC in order to get their preferred candidates elected?

Millions of taxpayer dollars are at stake. And more than that, a pernicious agenda that pushes gender ideology, DEI, SEL and CT is working hard to maintain the control grid that usurps parental rights and local school control.

You know something is wrong, but you can't quite put your finger on it. Here is your opportunity to get answers and solutions. 

Our children and their teachers deserve to be able to learn and teach in a safe environment. 

Register here.

And look for a Q&A with a public school teacher here later today.

Understanding the International Baccalaureate Program

 

By Gretchen Garrity

 

To most parents the International Baccalaureate program is a highly-respected organization that seeks to educate the brightest students with a world-class education, readying them for higher education and broader career opportunities. That perception could not be further from the truth. 

The IB program is an organization that provides students with an education in Globalism and Marxism through a SEL (Social Emotional Learning) system that delivers indoctrination to every student enrolled. Just like many of the woke non-profit educational organizations that “serve” the government schools, the IB program is indoctrinating students (and their teachers) in a political system that is anathema to the values of our Republic.

James Lindsay describes SEL as, "...composed of psychological and social work–based interventions on children performed by teachers and other non-professionals (in psychology and social work) in uncontrolled, non-therapeutic spaces in order to teach them “right” and “wrong” answers to socially and emotionally relevant circumstances. Some, such as your humble encyclopedist, have suggested that the intentional implementation of Social-Emotional Learning in schools should be a felony and involve the relevant administrators going to prison. Some states in the United States, such as North Carolina, seemed to preemptively anticipate this potential issue with the implementation of SEL and proactively granted immunity to teachers and school faculty administering SEL against charges of practicing psychology on children without a license."

HISTORY OF THE IB PROGRAM

According to the IB organization’s website, the seeds of the IB program began in 1962 with the founding of the Atlantic College, one of the first educational institutions with an international curriculum. Founded by German educator, Kurt Hahn, the college as originally conceived was meant to bring understanding and cooperation among students in order to overcome Cold War hostilities among nations.

According to an article on Wikipedia, “Drawn from all nations, the students would be selected purely on merit and potential, regardless of race, religion, nationality and background.”

Remember that point, because if true, the IB program has largely abandoned that selection process in favor of the racist policies of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

“KEY INFLUENTIAL EDUCATIONALISTS”

The IB organization names four individuals who were key to helping form the program’s ideas on curriculum: John Dewey, A.S. Neill, Jean Piaget, and Jerome Bruner. Three of the four were psychologists. 

Let’s take a look at socialist psychologist John Dewey.

According to author Samuel L. Blumenfeld in a 1985 Imprimis article¹, “In 1894 [Dewey] became professor of philosophy and education at the University of Chicago where he created his famous Laboratory School. The purpose of the school was to see what kind of curriculum was needed to produce socialists instead of capitalists, collectivists instead of individualists. Dewey, along with the other adherents of the new psychology, was convinced that socialism was the wave of the future and that individualism was passe. But the individualist system would not fade away on its own as long as it was sustained by the education American children were getting in their schools. According to Dewey, “…education is growth under favorable conditions; the school is the place where those conditions should be regulated scientifically.” In other words, if we apply psychology to education, which we have done now for over fifty years, then the ideal classroom is a psych lab and the pupils within it are laboratory animals.”

Also, according to Blumenfeld, “Dewey’s joining Cattell and Thorndike at Columbia brought together the lethal trio who were literally to wipe out traditional education and kill academic excellence in America. It would not be accomplished overnight, for an army of new teachers and superintendents had to be trained and an army of old teachers and superintendents had to retire or die off.”

John Dewey also felt that literacy was overrated. According to Blumenfeld, “But it was Dewey who identified high literacy as the culprit in traditional education, the sustaining force behind individualism. He wrote in 1898:

My proposition is, that conditions—social, industrial, and intellectual—have undergone such a radical change, that the time has come for a thoroughgoing examination of the emphasis put upon linguistic work in elementary instruction…

The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school-life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to me a perversion.”²

Dewey and his Progressive colleagues managed to introduce the “whole word” and “look say” methods of teaching reading, which were originally used to teach the deaf to read. The widespread implementation of these methods in public government schools has contributed to the drastic decline in literacy among our children. And it was done on purpose by one of the “key influential educationalists” the IB program touts.

Further, according to Aliya Sikandar in the Journal of Education and Educational Development, “Dewey was largely inspired by Marx’s theory of social struggle and conflict between classes. Marx’s theory of conflict is that the society is stratified and layered with different strata and there is a competition within these different classes. Marx stresses that social analysis should focus on class structure and relations. Dewey had an inspiration from Habermas’s thoughts, which are in the traditions of Kant, and emphasize the role of education to transform the world into a more humane, just, and egalitarian society.”³

Sikandar writes, “Dewey’s main concern was a disparity between the experiences of child and the kind of concepts imposed upon him. He believed that this gap curbs a child’s natural experiences and abilities, forcing him to follow the dictates of a formal education. Dewey is equally critical of the progressive education which imposes concepts, such as the right of free expression or free activity as these tenets of education also impose ideas upon a child. Dewey was deeply inspired by the vision of a liberal free society and realized the pressing need of freedom and equality, emancipation from social bounds to liberate individual and society from the structures of power.”
⁴

These and other Progressive and Marxist ideas have morphed into the systems of delivery we see in today’s International Baccalaureate program, as well as public schools all over the nation. Hidden in the form of SEL and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), these same pernicious ideas have been working to undermine and control the intellect of students.

EDUCATIONAL TRENDS

 

From History of the IB

In its slide presentation on the history of the IB, the organization compares and contrasts traditional and progressive educational trends. Traditional methods such as memorization are compared to “critical analysis.” Testing goes from objective IQ tests to a “range of skills testing.” A didactic or moral-based teaching becomes “constructivism,” in which a child develops his/her own moral understanding through experiential methods of learning. Machine-scored tests become criterion-referenced tests.

In a nutshell, these progressive trends mean that objective testing for IQ and content mastery, a shared curriculum that all students should master, and a moral base for knowledge is all thrown out the window in the service of indoctrinating children into a globalist, Marxist world view.

Indeed, a great deal of the IB program is designed for this end. Recently, the IB put out a DEI statement to read in part:

“Diversity, equity and inclusion statement:

We aim to live these values through these commitments:

• The IB will embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion practices in our work—and reflect this commitment as we develop our policies and procedures—both as an employer and as an educational organization

• We commit to promoting human rights and the idea of one shared humanity in all our work, both as an employer and as an educational organization

• The IB commits to promoting justice—social, economic and ecological—in our work, both as an employer and as an educational organization

• Alongside our community, we will work to help protect the environment and the local ecosystems that form it

• The IB will foster a sense of agency and enquiry in both the people we work with and the young people we help to educate

• We embrace learner variability so that our learners are not excluded on the grounds of any of their characteristics, and so that our stakeholders can develop and thrive in a culture of equal opportunities for learning, personal growth, and developing the ability to make positive change

• The IB commits to act supportively and with consideration for young people affected by difficult or adverse circumstances, their own changing personal histories or contexts, or other challenges affecting their life as IB students

• We will work to promote the voices, identities, and leadership of marginalized people in our work, both as an employer and as an educational organization. We will be transparent in all our policies relating to the people we work with and as we work with our educational programmes and resources through a diversity, equity and inclusion lens

• We will explore new ways to open our programmes and our work to new languages, cultures and contexts

• The IB commits to being fully focused on the needs of our staff, IB World Schools and their educators and students, as we challenge ourselves to become a more diverse, open, inclusive, and accepting organization, standing against racism, prejudice, discrimination and marginalization wherever we can. “

It is clear that a political persuasion is of utmost importance to the IB. Words like diversity, equity, inclusion, promoting human rights, justice, protecting the environment, promoting the leadership of marginalized people, etc., are all the wording of today’s Marxist lexicon. Cloaked in benign-sounding wording, these concepts mean something very different to those imposing them on our children. And unfortunately, many public schools have fallen for the IB program, including the Ozark School District.

OZARK SCHOOL DISTRICT AND THE IB

At the Sept. 21, 2023 Ozark School Board meeting, the IB program (a part of the school since 2012), was evaluated. The presenters, Ozark High School Principal Dr. Jeremy Brownfield and IB coordinator Stacie Moran, spoke in favor of the program. The slide presentation can be found here. Video prompted to the IB presentation:

The slide presentation, as clever as it was in attempting to downplay the actual IB cost versus AP cost (in purely financial terms), could not hide the taxpayer dollar waste as compared to the Advanced Placement program. What wasn’t readily seen in the slides is that the IB program for 2024 will cost taxpayers $228,246.80 for a total of 74 students (the majority of whom will not be in the diploma program). The diploma program currently has a total of 28 students, both seniors and juniors. Dividing the total cost by the number of students comes out to $3,084.42 for the IB program, while the AP program calculation is a total of $871.64 per student.

What Dr. Brownfield did in his calculations was to compare total “student seats” (how many classes were taken by each student), instead of program cost per student. And when one compares the policies of colleges regarding both the AP and IB programs (see slide 12 of the presentation), the cost to taxpayers cannot justify the IB program. The ROI (return on investment) is not there.

Slide 12 of OSD IB Presentation

Later in the presentation, the call is for expanding the IB program to the Middle Years Program, hiring additional staff and training. The purely financial aspects of the IB program should see it dropped by the Ozark School District. However, the political indoctrination alone should be the stake in the heart of the IB program.

IB STUDENTS SPEAK AT TOWN HALL

At an Ozark School District Town Hall meeting on December 7, 2023, a student in the IB program got up to speak. It starts out well. The student describes her involvement at school and asks a great question of the school board: What is the best form of education? Board member Patty Quessenberry launches right into the progressive view of student-directed education. She pays lip service to a “baseline,” but then affirms that what interests the student is the most important avenue of learning. 

Next, board member Guy Callaway says nearly the same thing. He mentions that his niece had been in the IB program. Board member Christina Tonsing requests input from the students about the Academies program (read about them here,) and shares that educational trends tend to come and go.

Then Don Currence, the mayor of Ozark, speaks about some controversial opinions that had been shared on a Ozark community Facebook page. Another IB student gets up to speak. She wants more money for the arts. She’s already spoken to Principal Dr. Jeremy Brownfield, but she “wants more details.” Partnerships with local arts organizations is mentioned as a possible solution. School board member Amber Bryant shares that a cost analysis is being done.

It’s wonderful up to this point. But at the 40-minute mark one of the two IB students gets up again to ask about the Ozark community page on Facebook previously mentioned by Mayor Currence. She wants to get rid of it. She wants to censor free speech in order to protect her teachers and fellow students. Later at 44 minutes in, a woman gets up and suggests teaching “media literacy,” which is a form of censorship masked as educating students how to discern mis- and disinformation.

WHAT IS MEDIA LITERACY?

John D. Sailor of the National Association of Scholars describes it this way: “But what, exactly, is this pedagogy? The Critical Media Literacy Guide, a book by UCLA professors Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share, offers a broad and influential summary. Kellner and Share cite Marx’s observation that “in every epoch, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class” to argue that media literacy should be taught through the lens of power and identity groups. Critical media literacy seeks to undermine what it sees as the dominant institutions of Western capitalist society—or, to use the academic jargon, to foster “counter-hegemonic alternatives.”⁵

In the video, which I urge you to watch from the prompt onward, then Interim-Superintendent Lori Wilson, and Curriculum Superintendent Craig Carson both admit that media literacy is being taught to very young students up through high school.

Towards the end of the meeting, one of the IB students asks a question regarding helping recent immigrants from Ukraine and Russia by “growing” curriculum to make it “less of a culture shock.”

Perhaps the globalist perspective taught in the IB curriculum is what prompted the remarks in favor of censoring free speech on Facebook (hardly known as a bastion of free speech anyway), and concern for recent immigrants’ cultural sensibilities.

THE UNESCO CONNECTION

Also during the meeting Ozark School Board Member Christina Tonsing asked about UNESCO (the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization), which has been historically associated with the IB program. According to J. P. Singh in “United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization: Creating norms for a complex world,” “Auguste Comte’s (1798–1857) “Religion of Humanity” ascribed to science the basis of society and global solidarity that would replace God as its ordering principle. Comte’s positivist theory of humanity reflected science to be not just a source for Enlightenment ideas of progress, but also to be its spiritual core. Comte provides a precursor to the ideas of scientific humanism that became popular in the 1930s. Julian Huxley, UNESCO’s first director- general (1946–48), tried to provide a similar manifesto in his pamphlet UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy: “Thus the general philosophy of UNESCO should, it seems, be a scientific world humanism, global in extent and evolutionary in background.”8 The thrust of Huxley’s ideas was toward human perfection rooted in natural selection, evolution, and one dangerously close to eugenics.”⁶

Kimberly Ells writes about UNESCO in her article “The endgame of Social and Emotional Learning programs the UN is pushing is to shape all children to meet the needs of a global society.” Ells says, “[A]ccording to the global purveyor of SEL standards, 27 states so far have adopted K-12 SEL competencies, and all 50 states have adopted SEL competencies for pre-K students. But where is this massive push for SEL coming from, and what are the motives behind it? The answer to this question is becoming clear: The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is a primary force behind the SEL movement worldwide.”⁷

Later in the article, Ells asserts that UNESCO is ultimately concerned with making global citizens who, “In short, proponents of the sustainable development goals and SEL want to instill “pluralistic thinking” in your child in the name of global peace. They want children to be taught to value the “collective good” over individual liberties, rights, and property despite the fact that the freest, most prosperous nations in the world are founded on individual liberties, rights, and property.”⁸

WHAT CAN WE DO?

This is the crux of the matter with organizations like the International Baccalaureate program and UNESCO. They are not in unity with the laws, values, and culture of the United States of America. In fact, through deception and clever wording, these organizations and many like them have been subverting our educational institutions for decades.

The hour is quite late. These organizations have not just a toehold, but a stranglehold on our institutions. Parents and taxpayers should insist that programs like the IB be dropped from the curriculum at the Ozark School District. Teachers should be retrained if needed.

________________________________________________________________________________

¹Samuel Blumenfeld, “Who Killed Excellence?” Imprimis, Sept. 1985, Volume 14, Issue 9, https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/who-killed-excellence/

²Samuel Blumenfeld, “Who Killed Excellence?” Imprimis, Sept. 1985, Volume 14, Issue 9, https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/who-killed-excellence/

³Aliya Sikandar, “John Dewey and His Philosophy of Education, Journal of Education and Educational Development, Vol. 2 No. 2 (December 2015) 191-201, file:///tmp/mozilla_gigi0/John_Dewey_and_His_Philosophy_of_Education.pdf

⁴Aliya Sikandar, “John Dewey and His Philosophy of Education, Journal of Education and Educational Development, Vol. 2 No. 2 (December 2015) 191-201, file:///tmp/mozilla_gigi0/John_Dewey_and_His_Philosophy_of_Education.pdf

⁵John D. Sailor, “Media Literacy’s False Promise,” City Journal, Aug. 16, 2021, https://www.city-journal.org/article/media-literacys-false-promise

⁶J.P. Singh, Introduction to “United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization: Creating norms for a complex world,” (2011), https://jpsingh.info/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Singh-UNESCO-Front-Matter-Intro.pdf

⁷Kimberly Ells, “The endgame of Social and Emotional Learning programs the UN is pushing is to shape all children to meet the needs of a global society,” The Federalist, Aug. 23, 2022, https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/23/un-program-teaching-kids-social-and-emotional-learning-actually-seeks-to-kill-their-individualism/

⁸ Kimberly Ells, “The endgame of Social and Emotional Learning programs the UN is pushing is to shape all children to meet the needs of a global society,” The Federalist, Aug. 23, 2022, https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/23/un-program-teaching-kids-social-and-emotional-learning-actually-seeks-to-kill-their-individualism/

 

Never Give Up, Never Give In

 

"In one South Carolina community, a conservative activist group called ‘Moms for Liberty’ not only took over their local school board, they also fired the progressive superintendent and banned the teaching of Critical Race Theory. And that was just in the first two hours. Impressive."

More here. Apparently they have a way to go since they are spotlighting DEI in their December 2023 newsletter, a year later. It took a long while to corrupt the schools, and it will take a while to bring them back to sanity.

 

NEW: a group of Moms for Liberty backed school board members were sworn in Tuesday

Within 2 hours, they’d fired the superintendent & the district’s lawyer, banned CRT and set up a committee to determine books to ban for “pornographic content”https://t.co/tRcOMub2nD

— Tyler Kingkade (@tylerkingkade) November 17, 2022

What is SEL and why should it be resisted?

By Gretchen Garrity

Chances are your school is infected with Social Emotional Learning (SEL). The Ozark School District certainly employs it, claiming it is teaching children how to be kind or collaborative or empathetic or resilient, etc. Seems very innocuous and it is sold that way by the school district. It is, however, a method of indoctrinating children to think and act in ways that lead to an acceptance of DEI and CRT, gender ideology and so on--social and political ways of thinking that many parents do not approve of.

The video below is instructive because it tells the story of how one instructor became concerned about SEL in her school district. According to Jennifer McWilliam's website, "In 2019, Jennifer was working as a “Reading Intervention Instructor” when she became very concerned about the education transformation unfolding at her school and across our nation. As she began to research what was causing the shift in focus from academics to ideology, she learned about the driving force behind the change: Social Emotional Learning. In September 2019, she started to inform parents and citizens about the concerning changes in the education system. In February 2020, Jennifer was fired for exposing the SEL program at her school."

🚨This 4th archived video was the first time I ever spoke about Social Emotional Learning (SEL). I hope this brings Courage to everyone joining the fight to protect children & save America. Video 1. Brief explanation / Video 2. recorded on 12/17/2019 #ExpelSEL pic.twitter.com/dcEintP4P1

— Jennifer McWilliams (@Jenn_McW) December 12, 2023

In the Ozark School District, Assistant Superintendent Dr. Craig Carson included in his December Board Narrative several instances where SEL is being implemented. On page 1 is a planned future "Curriculum Conversation" titled, "How Ozark teaches emotional regulation and socialization between peers."

On page 4 under Training is, "Academic Behaviors - POG in conjunction with SEL." Additionally, on page 7, Dr. Carson shares a consulting visit by Cassandra Erkens of Solution Tree, a company that pushes SEL as part of its efforts to "help" schools:

 

 

Here is a short and very helpful graphic from Courage is a Habit that explains SEL. Here is another one that explains the cycle of indoctrination. Lastly, here is a video from James Lindsay of New Discources, in which he exposes SEL. It is well worth the time it takes to listen to his podcast. Around 16 minutes in Lindsay explains how many leading educators are completely ignorant of SEL, its true purpose and how widely it is implemented in schools. As Lindsay says, it is a pretty package with something horrible inside.