Battle Flags, Etc.

The U.N. Convention On The Rights Of The Child
America Prepares for the Parental Battle of the Decade

From: http://www.oregonobserver.com
By Betty Freauf
(Excerpts from the Fall 1993 Colorado Eagle Forum Newsletter)

UN (United Nations) blue and white helmet targeted by rifle scope crosshairs.
Under the guise of a "child's rights" measure, The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child may be ratified by the U.S. Senate. If passed, this wolf in sheep's clothing could substantially undermine the authority of parents to exercise vitally important responsibilities toward their children if these responsibilities infringe on the child's "right" to autonomy and self-expression as defined by a panel of "experts" appointed by the United Nations.

The CONVENTION would redefine the Family Law in America. In 1994 Oregon had a Task Force on Family Law. It's purpose was to craft a new system to resolve relationship and children's disputes. Bills were submitted to the 1995 Oregon legislature.

The impact of the CONVENTION is particularly ominous in light of the fact that the United States Constitution declares treaties to be the law of the land. Under the Constitution's Supremacy Clause of Article VI, all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution of laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.

The CONVENTION would give children the "right" to disregard parental authority. Although several of the treaty's provisions offer generally positive, non-offensive platitudes, a substantial portion of this charter undermines parental rights. The U.N. CONVENTION would: (1) transfer parental rights and responsibilities to the state. (SB 1051-B passed by the 1993 Oregon legislature), (2) undermine the family by vesting children with various fundamental rights which advance notions of the child's autonomy and freedom from parental guidance; and (3) establish bureaucracies and institutions of a national and international nature designed to promote “the ideas proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations and to investigate and prosecute parents who violate their children's rights. The state will determine the child's "best interest" (SB 1051-B from the 1993 Oregon legislature and SB 689 from the 1997 Oregon legislature).

All children must be immediately registered after birth. Severe limitations will be placed on the parent's right to direct and train their children. Section 1 of Article 13 declares a child's right to "seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child's choice." Article 14 says children have a legal right to object to all religious training. Alternatively, children may assert their right against parental objections to participation's in other religions.

Parents could be prevented from forbidding their child to associate with people deemed to be objectionable companions, i.e. gangs, cults, racist organizations, etc.

Article 18 says the state must assist parents in the raising of children (SB 1051 and SB 689). It calls on the State to co-parent by rendering "appropriate assistance to parents and legal guardians in the performance of their child-rearing responsibilities and shall ensure the development of institutions, facilities and services for the care of children", i.e. Parent training, Family Resource Centers, etc. Corporal punishment is prohibited. Article 43 says international experts will parent our children (SB 689).

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The U.N. Convention On The Rights Of The Child: America Prepares for the Parental Battle
Whose Children? Gov't owns the children; and public schools shape them into obedient...
Parent Training Of Children Axed By NII!
UN Rights of the Child: the UN owns and controls the children, not parents.


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The government owns the children; and public schools shape them into obedient, collectivist servants of the state and the global village.

The New American * July 21, 1997
WHOSE CHILDREN?
----------------
by William Norman Grigg

UN (United Nations) blue and white helmet targeted by rifle scope crosshairs.
America's parents are battling for the right to raise their kids

"Those who educate are more to be honored than those who bear the children. The latter give them only life; the former teach them the art of living."

- Carolyn Warner, former Superintendent of Public Instruction in Arizona

"Each child belongs to the state."

- William H. Seawell, professor of education at the University of Virginia

Who are the primary stewards of children - parents, or state- appointed bureaucrats? Are parents, as John Locke wrote, instruments in God's "great design" with "an obligation to nourish, preserve, and bring up their offspring"? Or are they merely temporary custodians of the state's children, expected to provide lodging and meals during those brief periods when the children are not under the state's direct supervision? Is the public education system intended to supplement the efforts of parents to educate their children, or to supplant the parents altogether? These questions were examined last fall in Colorado, and the answers are relevant to anyone who wants to understand the character and purposes of America's public education system.

Preserving Parental Rights

In 1996, citing concerns about the state's growing usurpation of parental authority, a coalition of conservative groups placed a proposed Parental Rights Amendment (PRA) on the Colorado ballot. Had the measure passed, that state's constitution would have included specific recognition of the fact that parents have the primary responsibility "to direct and control the upbringing, education, values and discipline of their children," and pro-family activists in other states would have been emboldened to enshrine that principle in their own state constitutions. Of course, this prospect horrified partisans of the principle of parens patriae ("fatherhood of the state"), and in short order a counter-coalition of left-wing activists assembled to defeat the measure.

The anti-PRA lobby, which drew heavily from teachers' unions, left- wing pressure groups, and hard-core homosexual activists, called itself "Protect Our Children" - a name reflecting the assumption that the state must protect its children from their parents. One major component of the anti-PRA coalition, the left-wing group that calls itself "People for the American Way," condemned the proposed measure as an "attack on the freedom to learn" and protested that if PRAs were to pass in Colorado and elsewhere "communities would [be] paralyzed under the threat of lawsuits about virtually all the services and programs they provide" - a revealing objection, as it assumes that education requires the envelopment of schoolchildren in a web of state-provided services. Amid great acrimony, the Colorado PRA was defeated.

But Colorado is not the only state to wrestle with a PRA. Last January the Virginia Senate rejected a proposed PRA. The measure's opponents, according to the Newport News Daily Press, described it as a threat to "the health, safety and welfare of children." How would recognizing parental authority imperil children? According to Democratic State Senator Joseph V. Gartlan Jr., who opposed the measure, recognizing the primacy of parental authority to direct the upbringing and education of children would "throw into a tailspin society's reasonable efforts to protect against abuse and neglect." This objection illustrates another tacit assumption at work in our public education system: Although parents are not the primary stewards of children, they are the primary threat to children.

The rejection of a PRA by the Kansas state legislature in 1994 was in large measure a vindication of the idea that parents are a threat to their children. The significance of the PRA's defeat in Kansas was not lost on Jim McDavitt, director of the Kansas Education Watch network. "With the defeat of the Parental Rights Amendment every parent in Kansas was told by over half the legislators that they are not the primary decision makers in the lives of their children," McDavitt observed. "They are, however, as a group at large, considered capable and likely of criminal child abuse."

During debate over the Kansas PRA, State Representative Denise Everhart declared, "I have a thousand stories of child abuse that I will recite on the House floor one at a time if I have to in order to keep this amendment from passing." A similar tack was taken by State Representative Rochell Chronister, who told her colleagues that "every time I see this amendment, I cannot help but think of those children that were burned alive by David Koresh in Waco, Texas." Taking their cues from this dishonest description of the Waco outrage, PRA opponents christened the measure the "David Koresh amendment."

Abuse by the State

Waco actually illustrates the dangers of entrusting the state with the role of protecting children. In that incident, the federal government sought to rescue children from alleged parental abuse by attacking their home with automatic weapons, tanks, and poison gas. But the Waco tragedy is not the only incident in which the state has abused children in the name of "protecting" them.

On March 19, 1996 at the J.T. Lambert Intermediate School in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, 59 eleven-year-old girls were herded into the school nurse's office, told to remove their clothes, and forced to undergo a genital examination. Many of the children began crying, only to be berated for acting like "babies." Some of them tried to escape. School authorities explained after the fact that the children were inspected for abnormalities or symptoms of venereal disease and that parents had been given an opportunity to exempt their children from the exam. However, several of the traumatized girls had been examined over the explicit objections of their parents.

Katie Tucker, the mother of an 11-year-old girl who was forcibly examined, told the press: "The girls were scared. They were crying and trying to run out of the door, but one of the nurses was blocking the door so they couldn't leave. My daughter told the other nurse that 'My mother wouldn't like this. I want to call her.' And they said, 'No.' And my daughter said, 'I don't want this test done.' And the nurse said, 'Too bad.'"

Dr. Ramlah Vahanvaty, who performed the exams, responded to parental criticism by dismissing it as a product of "ignorance." "Even a parent doesn't have the right to say what's appropriate for a physician to do," Dr. Vahanvaty declared, insisting that the forcible violation of 11-year-old girls was "in the best interest of the children."

Once again we are brought back to the central point of contention: Is the task of defining "the best interests" of children to be assigned to the state and its agents, or to the parents? This matter is not addressed in the U.S. Constitution - for reasons that are misunderstood by many. As Dr. Allan Carlson of the Rockford Institute observes, "The Founders understood the family to be the social unit that reconciled liberty with order, that kept the individual's interests in balance with the interests of community and posterity." For this reason, Carlson writes, "family issues are avoided in the U.S. Constitution because they were irrelevant"; the federal government was given no jurisdiction over family life. The Founders understood and sustained Locke's view that God "made parents instruments in His great design" and had "laid on the children a perpetual obligation of honouring their parents.... From this obligation no state can absolve children."

"Village" Children

To the extent that government at any level had any role in family policy, it was to be a local responsibility. In contemporary America, however, "family policy" is defined by the central government, and the public school system is the primary means through which federal intervention in the home is facilitated. After all, as Hillary Rodham Clinton maintains, "It takes a village to raise a child" - "village" in this instance referring to the state.

"In every country, government must be a partner in the effort on behalf of children," Mrs. Clinton declared in a June 6th address to the Second World Congress on Family Law and the Rights of Children and Youth in San Francisco. "Government can help ensure that children have a healthy start in life, a solid education, and skills they need to compete in a global economy." It is also government's task, according to Mrs. Clinton, to "give parents the tools they need to be good parents" - and, presumably, it is government's job to decide whether parents are doing an adequate job of raising the state's children.

The implicit assumption in Mrs. Clinton's speech - namely, that the role of parents is to act as administrative agents for the state within the home - was made more explicit in remarks offered by Attorney General Janet Reno to the same gathering. According to Reno, the task of raising children involves nothing less than "reweaving the fabric of community around the youngsters who are at risk," a category which apparently includes all American children. "The first place we need to start is at home," Reno declared. "We know the risk factors for violence, and, even more importantly, we know what types of support, services, and sanctions children, youth, and families need to develop safely, without violence."

Reno continued: "We are working together to give them a chance for a strong and tolerant future by doing everything we can to promote parenting skills, to provide proper preventive medical care in the early years, to provide them safe, constructive child care in the formative years, to provide them with the afternoon and evening programs that can make a difference, giving them the education they need to really become productive members of society." In Reno's litany of "support, services, and sanctions," where could parents possibly fit in?

But the Clinton Administration and its allies are not content merely to provide children with "afternoon and evening programs" and "safe, constructive child care." Throughout the country, school districts are developing "wrap-around support services" that begin with home visits from social workers - often before the child is born. Such programs as "Success by Six" in Minnesota, "Parents as Teachers" in Missouri, and "Open Doors" in Hawaii focus on getting agents of government into the home as early as possible and keeping them there during the pre-school years. "I cannot say enough in support of home visits," Mrs. Clinton enthused in her ghost-written opus It Takes a Village. The Administration's Goals 2000 education program provides federal subsidies for such state-level initiatives as a means of ensuring that all children arrive at the doorstep of government schools "ready to learn" - meaning that they have become habituated to the state's guiding influence in their lives.

But the Clintonites have even greater ambitions for the state's role in the lives of "its" children and the Administration's 1995 budget offered a revealing glimpse of its fundamentally totalitarian mind-set. In a preface to a section dealing with "Family Preservation and Support Funds" - which contained increases in federal funding for Head Start, child immunizations, and other "investments" - can be found the following remarkable pronouncement:

As early as the fourth century B.C., the philosopher Plato stressed the importance of investing in children from an early age. In The Republic, he discusses the type of poetry youth should learn, physical exercise they should undertake and diets they should follow.... He observes, "the first step, as you know, is always what matters most, particularly when we are dealing with those who are young and tender. That is the time when they are taking shape and when any impression we choose to make leaves a permanent mark."

President Clinton once recalled that his mentor, the late Georgetown history professor Caroll Quigley, taught him that Plato "was a fascist" - and yet the Administration's preferred template for education and social policy is Plato's totalitarian Republic. Tragically, as we shall see, this is entirely in keeping with the origins and purposes of America's statist education system.

Fascist Philosophy

"Throughout history, rulers and court intellectuals have aspired to use the educational system to shape their nations," writes Sheldon Richman in his book Separating School and State. "The model was set out by Plato in The Republic and was constructed most faithfully in Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany.... One can see how irresistible a vehicle the schools would be to any social engineer. They represent a unique opportunity to mold future citizens early in life, to instill in them the proper reverence for the ruling culture, and to prepare them to be obedient and obeisant taxpayers and soldiers."

Plato's model for his own utopian Republic was ancient Sparta, in which children were taken from their parents during infancy and molded into soldiers for the militaristic Spartan society. Thus, Plato's utopian blueprint specified that "no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent," and the society was to be based upon a "community of property and a community of families."

The Platonic model was embraced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the intellectual architects of the French Revolution. Rousseau taught that the state was "the common mother of all her citizens," and he maintained that "instead of saying that civil society is derived from parental authority, we ought to say rather that the latter derives from the former" - in other words, that parents received a limited child-rearing mandate from the state. This totalitarian concept was embraced by the leaders of revolutionary France. Bertrand Barere, a member of the revolutionary Committee on Public Safety, instructed his colleagues that "children belong to the general family, to the Republic, before belonging to private families."

Prussia also adopted Plato's totalitarian model of government education. According to Richman, "Europe's first national system of education was set up by King Frederick William I of Prussia in 1717. His son, Frederick the Great, following in his father's footsteps, said, 'The prince is to the nation he governs what the head is to the man; it is his duty to see, think, and act for the whole community.'" This principle was insinuated into every aspect of the Prussian school system. Following Prussia's defeat at the hands of Napoleon in 1806, Frederick William III tightened the grip of the Prussian system even further. Notes Richman: "He instituted certification of teachers and abolished semi-religious private schools.... Children aged 7 to 14 years had to attend school. Parents could be fined or have their children taken away if the children did not attend. Private schools could exist only as long as they kept to the standards of the government's schools."

When a unified German nation was created, it was the Prussian model of education that prevailed. German philosopher Johann Fichte defined the German education ethic by explaining that schools "must fashion the person, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will." In 1917, German educational theorist Franz de Hovre observed: "The prime fundamental of German education is that it is based on a national principle.... [It is] education to the State, education for the State, education by the State. The Volksschule is a direct result of a national principle aimed at national unity. The State is the supreme end in view." Just a few years later, the Nazi (National Socialist) Party seized control of Germany's centralized educational system - with tragic results for that nation and the world.

Importing Parens Patriae

But it should not be assumed that the Germans were uniquely enamored of centralized statist education. Award-winning teacher and educational commentator John Taylor Gatto writes, "A small number of very passionate American ideological leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century; fell in love with the order, obedience, and efficiency of its education system; and campaigned relentlessly thereafter to bring the Prussian vision to these shores." This admiration for the Prussian system was not based on its ability to impart knowledge or to develop intellectual skills; rather, it was that system's success in creating "obedient and subordinate graduates, properly respectful of arbitrary orders."

Sheldon Richman notes that American public school advocates "imported three major ideas from Prussia. The first was that the purpose of state schooling was not intellectual training but the conditioning of children 'to obedience, subordination, and collective life.'... Second, whole ideas were broken into fragmented 'subjects' and school days were divided into fixed periods 'so that self-motivation to learn would be muted by ceaseless interruptions.' Third, THE STATE WAS POSITED AS THE TRUE PARENT OF CHILDREN." (Emphasis added.)

But the "parenthood" of the state ultimately rests upon coercion - something that was clearly understood by advocates of the "Prussianization" of American education. Calvin Stowe, author of the 19th-century tract The Prussian System of Public Instruction and Its Applicability to the United States, wrote: "A man has no more right to endanger the state by throwing upon it a family of ignorant and vicious children than he has to give admission to the spies of an invading army. If he is unable to educate his children, the state should assist him - if unwilling, it should compel him."

Some state courts eagerly embraced both the Prussian educational philosophy and the associated notion that the state is the true parent of American children. In 1839, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, invoking the concept of parens patriae, ruled that the state was entitled to seize children from parents found to be "unequal to" or "unworthy of the task" of educating their children. By the end of the 19th century, the "Prussianization" of U.S. education was well underway, and the doctrine of parens patriae had become firmly embedded in America's legal culture. In 1882, the Illinois Supreme Court asserted: "It is the unquestioned right and imperative duty of every enlightened government, in its character of parens patriae, to protect and provide for the comfort and well- being of its citizens.... The performance of this duty is justly regarded as one of the most important governmental functions, and all constitutional limitations must be so understood and construed so as not to interfere with its proper and legitimate exercise." A 1901 decision by the Indiana Supreme Court extended this principle backward into the nursery, holding that the state is the principal steward over children even in infancy - thus embracing, in principle, Plato's original totalitarian design.

"By the early twentieth century," observes educational historian Joel Spring, "the school in fact had expanded its functions into areas not dreamed of in the early part of the previous century.... The school [became] a central social agency in urban America. The one theme that ran through all these new school programs was the desire to maintain discipline and order in urban life. Within this framework, the school became a major agency for social control."

Elitist Designs

"Social control" was the stated objective of the General Education Board (GEB), a private institution created by John D. Rockefeller in 1902 that developed and promoted various radical schemes to reconfigure American society through the statist school system. "In our dreams, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand," wrote GEB Chairman Frederick Gates. "The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk."

As the resources of the Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and other foundations became available to underwrite their designs, subversives and collectivists within the school system became brazen about their intentions. In 1932, George S. Counts, a Fabian Socialist who taught at Columbia University Teachers College, instructed his followers that "teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most of their conquest" by seeking to "influence the social attitudes, ideals and behavior of the coming generation." Counts contended that America had entered "a new age where ignorance must be replaced by knowledge, competition by cooperation, trust in Providence by careful planning, and private capitalism by some form of socialized economy."

The "knowledge" the educrats had in mind, of course, was not the moral and intellectual wisdom needed to live responsibly in a free society, but the propaganda required to win blind obedience to the arbitrary dictates of an all-powerful state. Students, in fact, would be conditioned to view the state (not the family) as the most important of all loyalties and institutions and (eventually) to love Big Brother. The state would equip its students with enough "knowledge" to perform certain tasks in the interests of the state, but not enough to think independently or to yearn for freedom. As we shall see in subsequent articles in this issue, the "dumbing down" of an entire generation of American youth has been a tragic result of this insidious program.

Socialists of a more militant variety were also making big plans for America's educational system. In his 1932 book Toward Soviet America, William Z. Foster, head of the Communist Party, USA, declared, "Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following: the schools, colleges, and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education and its state and local branches. The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic, and other features of the bourgeoisie ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism, and the general ethics of the new socialist society."

It is not difficult to recognize the fulfillment of many of Foster's ambitions in our contemporary public education: A national Department of Education does set the policy for school systems across the country; biblical religious content has been purged out of public schools and replaced in many instances with the neo-pagan nostrums of earth worship; in the name of "multicultural" education, patriotic depictions of American history have been jettisoned, and once-renowned figures from Columbus to George Washington are subjects of ritualized execration; and children are constantly marinated in notions of "world citizenship" and "collectivism." Even as children in government-run schools are taught subservience to the state, they are encouraged to develop hostility toward other traditional sources of authority, such as the moral teachings of their parents.

Glue of Coercion

Some might object that the proliferating pathologies that characterize contemporary government schools - drug abuse, sexual promiscuity and teen pregnancy, violence, and other misbehavior - effectively rebut the idea that the school system is intended to "maintain discipline and order." But this misses the point: The government school system has succeeded brilliantly in creating a society that can only be held together by state coercion, in the form of police power.

"For 140 years this nation has tried to impose objectives downward from a lofty command center made up of 'experts,' a central elite of social engineers," John Taylor Gatto told the New York State Senate in 1991 after being named that state's Teacher of the Year. "It hasn't worked. It won't work.... It doesn't work because its fundamental premises are mechanical, anti-human, and hostile to family life. Lives can be controlled by machine education but they will always fight back with weapons of social pathology: drugs, violence, self-destruction, indifference, and the symptoms I see in the children I teach."

Gatto pointed out that in the name of fostering collective order, the statist school system is destroying community: "[I]t destroys communities by relegating the training of children to the hands of certified experts - and by doing so it ensures our children cannot grow up fully human" - becoming instead mindless automatons programmed by the state's change agents. Rather than instilling in youngsters an appreciation for individual liberty, the system has brought to life "the ancient pharaonic dream of Egypt: compulsory subordination for all.... Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid."

"The future of education, and of America as a free society, depends on the liberation of the American family from the grip of the public school," contends Sheldon Richman. "Regardless of motives, the people who foisted state education on us have committed a grave offense.... Using a variety of strategies, we must reclaim the right to raise our children and to help them educate themselves. In a fundamental sense, that is the American way." There is no more important task, Richman concludes, than to build "a wall of separation between school and state" and restore a system of "family-based learning" in which children can develop their God- given abilities as free individuals.

"It is a great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass- schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students' parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things," laments John Taylor Gatto. To restore sanity to American education, to rescue the increasingly embattled family, and to preserve and perpetuate individual freedom, "a different way to do things" must be found - and soon.

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The U.N. Convention On The Rights Of The Child: America Prepares for the Parental Battle
Whose Children? Gov't owns the children; and public schools shape them into obedient...
Parent Training Of Children Axed By NII!
UN Rights of the Child: the UN owns and controls the children, not parents.


Battle Flags, Etc.

Parent Training Of Children Axed By NII!

From: http://www.thewinds.org/index.html
7-28-97.

UN (United Nations) blue and white helmet targeted by rifle scope crosshairs.
"Fundamental, Bible-believing people do not have the right to indoctrinate their children in their religious beliefs because we, the state, are preparing them for the year 2,000, when America will be part of a one-world order global society and their children will not fit in." This, according to Peter Hoagland, a former U.S. Congressman, is what's coming. It may be a shocking statement, but as the year 2,000 nears, the new system which educates the nation's children is being set in place. These mechanisms of change have long been contemplated and are now being implemented.

President Clinton is establishing a system which is designed to guide the United States and the world into the 21st century and a key element of that plan is the establishment of the National Information infrastructure (NII). Also called the information superhighway, it is by all accounts designed to bring dramatic changes.

The NII is so universal and far-reaching that virtually every department and function of government is involved. It also incorporates the business community, the educational system, the health care industry, libraries and community centers. It is planned that every home in America will be connected to this network so that every facet of life and every part of society will be interconnected.

The "Agenda for Action on the NII" shows the huge potential that information technology has to effect social change. The plan dramatically outlines a vision of the fast approaching future in which a web of advanced communication networks and computers will supply vast amounts of information to households, business and government.

"Change is coming much faster than ever before. In our lifetimes we will see information technology bring more changes to more aspects of our lives than have been witnessed in the previous century. Digital technology is merging the functions of television, telephones and computers. Fundamental changes are in store for us in the ways we work, learn, shop, communicate, entertain ourselves, and get health care and public services; and these are just the applications we can foresee." NII Agenda for Action.

In an address to the NII Advisory Council, President Clinton said, "The era of big government is passing from the scene...but doesn't mean that we should have a weak one. It doesn't mean we can allow individuals and families and communities to go back to a time when they had to fend for themselves. In this new world we are facing...we need a strong set of new ideas in which the government is the partner in the fight for the future."

FIGHT FOR THE FUTURE

The president has outlined an agenda in which he plans to connect all schools, libraries and community centers in the country to the information superhighway by the year 2,000. This would seem a commendable and far-sighted move by the president, but it deserves closer scrutiny. It deserves to be examined in the light of its actual context.

The "fight for the future" began early in this century when the National Education Association (NEA) became federally chartered in 1906. Since that time, the NEA has been steadily working in cooperation with a unified group of individuals and organizations to achieve its goals. In 1934 at the annual meeting of the NEA, Willard Givens said, "the major function of the school is the social orientation of the individual. It must seek to give him understanding of the transition to a new social order." The ground work was being laid for a new social order and it was determined that the educational system was to be the critical starting point.

"A new social order" is a theme which would be in a developmental process in the nation's school system from that time forward. But what is really meant by the term? It may be better understood by a further statement from the NEA Journal in 1946. "In the struggle to establish an adequate world government, the teacher can do much to prepare the hearts and minds of the children for global understanding and cooperation. At the very top of all the agencies which will assure the coming of world government must stand the school and the teacher." A "new social order" reveals itself to be "world government".

With such an overtly radical agenda and the power to accomplish it, who actually is the NEA? The Kansas NEA executive director states that the NEA "is controlled and run by a group of non-educators...well-paid professional staff who have their own agenda, which is not necessarily in the best interest of public education."

CHANGE-AGENTS

It was recognized that the transition of the United States from a sovereign, constitutional republic to the status of a subservient nation state, dominated by the new world order would indeed require a long period of subtle, calculated change in the thinking of the nation. In the 1970 issue of a NEA publication is stated, "The change-agent teacher does more than dream; he builds, too. He is a part of an association of colleagues in his local school system, in his state, and across the country that makes up an interlocking system of change-agent organizations. This kind of system is necessary because changing our society through evolutionary educational processes requires simultaneous action."

Catherine Barrett, NEA president said in 1973 that "dramatic changes in the way we will raise our children in the year 2,000 are indicated, particularly in terms of schooling. The teacher can rise to his true (stature). More than a dispenser of information, the teacher(s) will be AGENTS OF CHANGE." Saturday Review of Education , Feb. 10, 1973.

NII PURVEYOR OF CHANGE

The real agenda of the president's task force has been to implement this system of alteration and change into the schools of this country. Federal Communication Commission chairman, Reed Hundt says the Telecommunication Act of 1996 makes connecting classrooms a national imperative. "Under this law", says Hundt, "for the very first time it is as a matter of Federal law, the policy of this country that there will be access to advanced telecommunication services to every child in this country."

One of the major goals is to develop and foster informed government policy that "promotes our social goals" for the NII. If the social goals of the NII are compared with those of the NEA, they are found to be identical. When examining the statements, one must look beyond the benevolent words to where the ideas lead, to their true intent.

What is the vision of the NII for education? "Linking students to the new digital information networks could FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGE EDUCATION. We must CHANGE OUR EXPECTATIONS about how classrooms and students should perform. We must invest substantially in teacher training. Computers require that teachers be adept at coaching rather than DICTATING AN ESTABLISHED BODY OF KNOWLEDGE TO THEM. WE MUST ACCEPT NEW IDEAS CONCERNING THE GOALS OF EDUCATION. Student- centered learning is more appropriate to the information age than teacher- centered learning. Knowledge is CHANGING SO RAPIDLY that students must learn to be LIFELONG LEARNERS rather than ABSORB ANY SINGLE SET OF FACTS THAT LIKELY WILL SOON BE OUT OF DATE." NII Agenda for Action.

Brock Chisholm, former head of the World Health Organization has written that to achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family tradition, national patriotism, and religious dogmas. He further states: "We have swallowed all manner of poisonous CERTAINTIES fed us by our parents (and ) Sunday school teachers....The reinterpretation and eventual ERADICATION OF THE CONCEPT OF RIGHT AND WRONG which has been the basis of child training... these are the objectives for charting the necessary changes in human behavior." Road to Socialism , pg. 37.

The objective of the NII and the NEA seems to ensure that the concept of right and wrong and the certainty of truth will "soon be out of date." Dr. Arati Prabhaker, referring to the NII said, "What is happening today with the information revolution is a dramatic change...a lot of our FUNDAMENTALS are CHANGING."

COMMON CAUSE

President Clinton said in an address to the NEA that he believes his goals for America closely parallel those of the NEA, further stating: "You and I are joined in a common cause, and I believe we will succeed." It has been made clear what the common cause is that the president and the NEA share. It is nothing less than the degradation, domination and destruction of America and the remnants of freedom which remain in the world. Again quoting from the NII Agenda for Action, "Amid technological change and SOCIAL UPHEAVAL, we need gathering spots where we can... weave a (new) social fabric." It is planned that the (new) social fabric will consist of a subservient, servile herd. The president has also promised that "out of CHAOS (social upheaval) shall rise the new world order." Social upheaval and chaos are prerequisites for the new world order, they prepare the way. Chaos and social upheaval are the problems which make the global herd willing to receive the new world order as the solution.

One does not even have to read between the lines to understand what is planned, they have spelled it out clearly. The world can expect "social upheaval" and "chaos". Dr. Dennis Cuddy, a former official in the U.S. Department of Education writes, "When the government begins to treat people in a manner which is beyond freedom and dignity, it is unlimited in the cruelties that will follow. Families are destroyed under the guise of protecting the family, schools become indoctrination centers where all manner of rebellion against parents, morality, love of country and civility are promulgated (under very benevolent, caring people and 'for your own good'). When a nation is ruled by such leaders, there is no way out." Florida Forum , July,1996.

Founding father Samuel Adams said, "While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader." This prophesy has met its fulfillment in America today. "When a nation transgresses, it has many rulers." Proverbs 28:2.

###

"Let Waco be a lesson to every American"...Klinton.

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The U.N. Convention On The Rights Of The Child: America Prepares for the Parental Battle
Whose Children? Gov't owns the children; and public schools shape them into obedient...
Parent Training Of Children Axed By NII!
UN Rights of the Child: the UN owns and controls the children, not parents.


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UN Rights of the Child: the UN owns and controls the children, not parents.

YOUR CHILD, THE GLOBAL CITIZEN
by William Norman Grigg
The New American * July 21, 1997

UN (United Nations) blue and white helmet targeted by rifle scope crosshairs.
According to a recently published report from the United States Committee for UNICEF, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has been ratified by 191 countries. "The remaining two countries which have not ratified the Convention are Somalia and the United States," the document observed. Since Somalia has descended into Hobbesian anarchy, the United States is the only nation with a functioning government to withhold ratification of the Convention.

Who is to blame for this "scandalous" state of affairs? The UNICEF Committee's report insists that ratification has been withheld on account of "an epidemic of misconceptions about its intent and content" that has been spread by a handful of "right-wing extremists" bent on poisoning the political wells: "Conservative organizations including the Christian Coalition, Concerned Women for America, Eagle Forum, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, the John Birch Society, the National Center for Home Education, and the Rutherford Institute have spearheaded the efforts in opposition to the Convention. These organizations have made a significant effort to portray the Convention as a threat to national sovereignty, states' rights, and the parent-child relationship."

A "fact sheet" distributed at the recent "Second World Congress on Family Law and the Rights of Children and Youth" in San Francisco (Children's Rights Congress) accuses conservative groups of disseminating "misleading, unnecessarily inflammatory or unfounded information about the substance and intent of the Convention...." The same accusation was retailed in an essay in the Fall 1996 issue of Transnational Law and Contemporary Politics, which lamented that "the Convention faces extremely well-organized and vociferous political opposition in the United States [from] conservative organizations [who] have expressed strong opposition to the Convention and are mounting a well-coordinated political attack on it with the intention of blocking U.S. ratification." The essay accused opponents of the Convention of "polarizing the American public" and haughtily asserted that "the opposition does not speak for a consensus of the American people."

A common rhetorical theme of the Convention's supporters is that only irrational right-wing ideologues could construe the treaty as a threat to parental rights, constitutional order, and national sovereignty. However, a close reading of both the Convention and the pronouncements of its supporters will illustrate that its critics understand and appreciate both the intent and the substance of that treaty only too well.

Compelling Force

Speaking at the Children's Rights Congress, Nobel Prize Laureate Dr. Jose Ramos-Horta of East Timor observed that the Children's Rights Convention "challenges the dichotomy between the privacy of the family and the public domain of the State and its instrumentalities. THE CONVENTION DISAGGREGATES THE RIGHTS OF CHILDREN FROM THE RIGHTS OF FAMILIES AND CONSTITUTES CHILDREN AS INDEPENDENT ACTORS WITH RIGHTS AND WITH RESPECT TO BOTH PARENTS AND WITH RESPECT TO THE STATE." (Emphasis added.)

In simpler language, Dr. Horta's conclusion agrees with that of the Convention's critics in America: The Convention is intended to emancipate children from parental authority within the home, and invests them with "rights" that can be enforced against their parents.

The parental role, as defined by the Convention, is that of "guaranteeing and promoting the rights set forth in this Convention" and of bringing up their children "in the spirit of the ideals enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations." The document also instructs ratifying governments to "render appropriate assistance to parents" in these endeavors - an open- ended mandate for government intervention in the home. Furthermore, it must be remembered that governments do not "assist" - they compel; hence, the Convention would require, in principle, that ratifying governments compel parents to bring up their children in accordance with the UN's guidelines.

The UN's International Year of the Family (IYF) program, which co- sponsored the Children's Rights Congress, insists that the family must be reconstituted as "the smallest democracy at the heart of society." In keeping with that theme, UNICEF explains that "rather than creating conflict between the rights of parents and the rights of children, the Convention encourages an atmosphere conducive to dialogue and mutual respect."

How might this work in practice? Under the Convention, if a child decides he has a "right" to join a street gang or religious cult, for example, the parent's role would be to engage in "dialogue," rather than exercising parental authority in ways that inhibit the child's "freedom of association" or "freedom of religion." In the secular egalitarian order which the Convention seeks to create, parents and children would be equal before the state - a radical departure from the biblical worldview in which children are required to honor and obey their parents to the extent that the parents honor and obey God.

The Convention would also forbid parents to employ biblically mandated physical discipline. UNICEF explains that the Convention "makes it clear that children shall be protected from all forms of mental or physical violence or maltreatment. Thus, any forms of discipline involving such violence are unacceptable."

Most ominously, the Convention would establish the legal framework for the seizure of children from parents who use their authority in an "undemocratic" fashion or who practice spanking or other "unacceptable" means of discipline. Article 9 of the document dictates that "a child shall not be separated from his or her parents" unless "competent legal authorities subject to judicial review determine that such separation is necessary for the best interests of the child." When read in light of what it would empower government to do, this passage is revealed to be a license for the state to snatch children at whim. After all, what government, no matter how corrupt or incompetent, would not see its own actions as being in "the best interest of the child"?

"Geopolitical Social Contract"

Would the Convention, as its critics claim, constitute a threat to national sovereignty and America's constitutional order? The answer is an emphatic "yes."

UNICEF's The State of the World's Children 1997 report specifies, "Once a country ratifies [the Convention], it is obliged in law to undertake all appropriate measures to assist parents and other responsible parties in fulfilling their obligations under the Convention.... Fulfilling their obligations sometimes requires States to make fundamental changes in national laws, institutions, plans, policies and practices to bring them into line with the principles of the Convention."

In other words, just as unconstitutional federal "mandates" are used to dictate policies to the states, the Convention requires ratifying national governments to enforce UN standards within their nations, even if this requires "fundamental changes" in their political systems. And what are some of those treaty-mandated standards? They include free education, child care, health care, family planning services, etc. "to the maximum extent of [the nation's] available resources." In the case of the United States, those "fundamental changes" would include the destruction of America's constitutional system.

The U.S. Constitution does not authorize the central government to play any role in child or family policy. To the extent that government at any level has such a role, it falls within the rights reserved to the people and to the states by the Tenth Amendment; in short, it is a local and state responsibility. However, according to the "fact sheet" distributed at the Children's Rights Congress, "The Convention would prevail over state law in all cases."

Clearly, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is the spearhead of a radical assault on parental rights, national sovereignty, and the U.S. Constitution. However, according to UN adviser Eugene Verhellen, who is director of the Children's Rights Centre at the University of Ghent in Belgium, the Convention is also "a geopolitical, binding social contract" that will advance the Marxist vision of "human rights."

In a workshop at the Children's Rights Congress, Professor Verhellen explained that there have been "two generations of rights." The first generation, embodied in the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution, led to restrictions on the state's interference in the lives of its subjects; this was the generation of "civil and political rights." The second generation began "in 1917, with the revolution in Russia," Verhellen approvingly stated. As a result of that revolution, "economic, social, and cultural rights emerged. By nature, these two generations of rights assume different roles for the state."

Although the Children's Rights treaty contains provisions dealing with civil and political protections, Verhellen notes that the Convention (like all the other UN "human rights" instruments) is a "second generation" human rights instrument in that it expresses "a romantic idea of how the state should take care of us, about how we as an organized state can provide human dignity and live a decent life" - and is therefore the political offspring of the Soviet revolution.

Ratification of the Convention requires national governments to eschew "incremental" child and family policies in favor of "comprehensive and integrated" policies, continued Verhellen. As one workshop participant noted without a hint of disapproval, a less euphemistic term to describe such "comprehensive" national policies would be "socialist" - the "womb to the tomb" policies typical of both Scandinavian welfare states and Soviet-style despotisms.

But the Convention embodies another radical principle, according to Verhellen: Parens Patriae, or the "parenthood of the state," a principle whose triumph will result in nothing less than the "deconstruction and the reconstruction of the concept of the family." "By recognizing children as the bearers of rights that the state must protect, the [Convention] makes family relationships more equal," Verhellen explained to The New American. "This process will eliminate the hidden inequalities that are found in the older concept of the family." Invoking the UN slogan that the family must be "the smallest democracy at the heart of society," he insisted that "the family in this new society must serve as a kind of mediator, preparing its members to be part of the larger democracy."

The Real Purpose

Perhaps the most powerful indictment of the Convention is provided by a partial roster of ratifying nations. As Dr. Ramos-Horta observed in his address, "Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam are all parties to the Convention." None of the regimes governing those nations has displayed a notable commitment to improving the lives of children. Indeed, as left-wing activist Caroline Moorehead, a supporter of the Convention, recently pointed out, "The Convention on Children is being violated, systematically and contemptuously, and no countries violate it more energetically than those that were quickest to sign. Almost every ill it set out to remedy has grown worse in the years since it was drafted."

This is because the Convention is not intended to protect children, but to enhance the powers of the United Nations. Hillary Clinton, honorary chair of the Children's Rights Congress, claims that "it takes a village" to raise a child. Through the Convention, the new world orderites hope to become the chieftains of a global village in which the UNICEF slogan "Every child is our child" will be realized. It is to the credit of America that it has thus far refused to enlist in this cynical and destructive enterprise.

- William Norman Grigg

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The U.N. Convention On The Rights Of The Child: America Prepares for the Parental Battle
Whose Children? Gov't owns the children; and public schools shape them into obedient...
Parent Training Of Children Axed By NII!
UN Rights of the Child: the UN owns and controls the children, not parents.