"One should not be illegal, while the other is legal. We are
facing a distinction between virtual and real child porn without a
difference for the end consumer and the children being abused. And for
the men and women who fall into a child porn fetish, they don’t avoid
using real children because the images they find are “virtual” or
“drawn.” When children are the target of abuse, whether the image is
virtual or real, then why are Supreme Court Justices, Politicians, and pagan parents arguing for the inclusion of child porn in schools and libraries? What is their goal?"
That there has been more than a year of citizens petitioning the Christian County Library to remove access to sexually explicit and age inappropriate materials with NO RESPONSE from the publicly-appointed board of trustees, is problematic to say the least.
It looks like the executive director and other activists within the library system are running the show. If the board of trustees does not respond to the public, then it must be inferred they do not represent the taxpayers.
Joe Hoft of Gateway Pundit published a guest post January 27 about the attack on the Missouri Freedom Caucus by RINO senators Caleb Rowden and Cindy O'Laughlin.
From the article: "Meet the Missouri Senate Majority Leader Cindy O’Laughlin (Dist. 18) and
the Missouri Senate Pro-tempore Caleb Rowden (Dist. 19), who not only
silenced the Missouri Freedom Caucus senate members, Senator Bill Eigel
(Dist. 23), Senator Andrew Koenig (Dist. 15), Senator Rick Brattin
(Dist. 31), and Senator Denny Hoskins (Dist. 21) but had them removed
from their respective committee assignments, had their senate staff
salaries cut and their parking spaces revoked. What was the Freedom
Caucus Senators’ requesting – a conservative agenda to protect our
children."
Also, there is a rally/protest at the Capitol on January 30, as well as the Missouri Freedom Initiative's Knock and Shock event. Patrick Holland of the Freedom Initiative had this to say about both events, "Knock and Shock will still be on January 30th
for those who want to join in. We will be working Eigel’s SB735, Moon’s
SJR61 and Hardwick’s HB1955. Knock and Shock is scheduled for 9:00AM to
5:00PM. Any amount of time you can stay is helpful, even if you can
only stay for a few hours. Knock and Shock will break at 10:45 AM so we
can participate the protest. When the protest/rally is over, we will
resume Knock and Shock operations. Our mission is twofold on the 30th. This protest is grassroots based and the idea started with Catherine Dreher (Rogue Politics) but many more have come in to help, including Jodi Grace (Missouri Freedom Foundation), Byron Keelin (Freedom Principal Missouri), Valerie Swearington (We the People) and MANY more."
The Missouri Freedom Caucus has used the recent unpleasantness with decepticon Republicans President Pro-Tem Sen. Caleb Rowden and Majority Floor Leader Sen. Cindy O'Laughlin to make political hay. You can read about it here. This is one of the funniest responses.
The Springfield School Board, in a 4-3 vote on Tuesday night, voted against publicly supporting a bill that aims to bring more local control to school districts.
You read that right.
The News-Leader's Claudette Riley does a nice job outlining the issue here, although she should have referred to Dr. Mary Byrne by her professional credentials. Dr. Byrne, who is referenced in the article has nearly 40 years experience as an educator from K-12 and post-secondary education. She deserves to be referred to properly.
Senate Bill 814 is designed to give local school districts more control over testing, sharing of testing results, and accrediting agencies. The full bill is here.
According to the News-Leader, "...the state board will not accredit the districts and will only be allowed to use test results to satisfy the federal law that mandates testing in certain grades and subject areas on an annual basis." Sounds reasonable.
While Springfield school board members acknowledge that the system is broken, the status quo was preserved as the board declined to show support for SB 814 or invite its sponsor Sen. Jill Carter, and educator Dr. Mary Byrne to speak on its behalf.
Dr. Mary Byrne
Board member Dr. Maryam Muhammadkhani's move to have the bill publicly supported by the school board ultimately highlighted the status quo positions of the four members who voted against it: board member and current candidate Danielle Kincaid, board member and current candidate Scott Crise, and board members Judy Brunner and Shurita Thomas-Tate.
Both Kincaid and Crise have been endorsed by the self-described "non-partisan" political action committee United Springfield. Ironically, it was Muhammadkhani who noticed the partisan manner of the "non-partisan" candidates/board members as they refused to meet with Carter and Byrne. As quoted in the News-Leader, she said, "I feel that we came together tonight, not in good faith, because if we wanted to come together and really give this a chance, we would have agreed to hear from the senator, let her make a case for her bill."
Kincaid paid lip service to bipartisanship, but in the end she felt it more important to let the hired school lobbyist provide direction. "I don't support or not support this bill," she was quoted as saying.
Crise likewise noted, "Things could be added to [the bill] we don't agree with so let's just let our lobbyist do their job and support it through the platform rather than specifically support this bill."
The outcome is that the Springfield Board of Education declined to hear from the bill's sponsor and a seasoned educator about returning some local control to their school district. Instead, they decided to rely on a hired hand to do their thinking for them.
United Springfield PAC has endorsed their candidates, according to the Springfield News-leader. And as I said here* their choice was not going to be anything other than the status quo, which is doing such a stellar job. 😬
United Springfield was formed to keep the school system under the thumb of progressive Uniparty members and local power structures, and tied to groups like the Missouri School Boards Association (MSBA). According to the Springfield News-leader, their candidates are:
1) Scott Crise (Incumbent and previously endorsed by the Springfield Chamber of Commerce)
2) Danielle Kincaid (Incumbent and previously endorsed by the Springfield Chamber of Commerce)
Where's the money coming from? The Springfield Daily Citizen shares that here, and just to show you how partisan are these people who claim they are nonpartisan, according to the link, "People who donated $5,000 each include former Springfield Mayor Tom
Carlson, who is also the publisher and chairman of the board of
directors for the Springfield Daily Citizen." Now, just read that article again knowing that the former mayor and current publisher of the paper is giving money to a PAC that has just endorsed the preferred status quo of the "long-time leaders" in Springfield.
Does anyone, anyone believe today that the press is nonpartisan? To quote George Carlin, "It's a big club and you ain't in it."
The narrative is playing out just as noted. It's a dirty business trying to keep the status quo going when one's school district is failing on so many levels.
UPDATE: Chuck Hatfield, the MSBA lawyer who started the United Springfield PAC weighs in on the ruckus in the Missouri Senate today when Sen. Caleb Rowden foolishly removed several of the Freedom Caucus senators from their committees, and even took their parking spaces.
What a nice fellow, eh?
*"If
Provance tows the line, if she speaks only positivity, rainbows, and
unicorns to voters, she will undoubtedly earn the endorsement of the
United Springfield PAC."
David Rice is back with the second of five articles, "Why is Child Porn Legal?" dealing with the subject of child porn and how porn has found its way into our schools and libraries. Rice details a recent visit he had with the Christian County Library's Executive Director:
"I recently met with the Executive Director at the Library near my home. I
told her the material was illegal. She told me it was legal, and her
smug look of satisfaction let me know I was uninformed. That is why I
started this series. I dug into the law and discovered she was right. It
is legal."
Part two dissects the legalities behind what has happened. Another must read.
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.
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’sfirst
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.
One so wants to recoil from this stuff and not think on it. But in all honesty, porn has affected, on one level or another, almost everyone in modern society. Christians must be willing to take up the cross and fight. Porn, and in particular child porn, is a scourge that grows ever larger.
Our betters (those with most of the money, education, and influence) have long since abandoned their moral position and are not to be followed or trusted. This includes elected officials who pay lip service to protecting children but in reality do little or nothing.
From Rice's article:
"Overall, the Miller decision is just bad
law. One of the justices, William J. Brenner, Jr., was eager to remove
as many obscenity laws as he could. We can all give him thanks for his
service to this nation. I need a sarcasm font. We were given a law which
created a market for obscene materials across the nation. Its claim to
return the issues to the states is a valueless claim. We are one bad
petition initiative to change the Missouri Constitution to enshrine the
right to porn in our libraries and our schools. This is what happens
when you side with a Free Love worldview."
Our local culture has become so degraded that our Christian County Library is on par with public libraries in St. Louis and Kansas City for the amount of smut pushing the early sexualization and indoctrination of our children.
But there is hope. The monthly library board of trustee meetings have become a sort of revival of Christian sentiment. Pastors are getting involved, though sadly they are few and far between. Victims of the "pornification of our culture" speak about its trauma, and how to be saved and healed.
The "educated" voices that speak in favor of allowing minors access to smut are slowly being overcome by common sense and sanity. But the Enemy of common sense and sanity will not give up easily.
The next meeting of the Christian County Library is scheduled for Tuesday, January 23 at 6 p.m. Check the link to confirm the location as the meeting draws closer.
In the meantime, keep up with David Rice's series. Don't turn away. Local action has national impact.
