PrintOctober 6, 2009
Kevin Jennings Vision of Public Education
Breitbart.tv has linked to a YouTube audio clip where Obama’s Safe School Czar Kevin Jennings mocks the idea of prohibiting the promotion of homosexuality in public schools by saying heterosexual promotion already exists.
In a speech in 2000 Jennings said:
First of all, we all know what’s really promoted in our schools: Heterosexuality is promoted in our schools. Every time kids read Romeo and Juliet or they’re encouraged to go to the prom or whatever is it is, kids are aggressively recruited to be heterosexual in this country.
And you know what? It doesn’t work. The reality is that if schools could affect your sexual orientation there would have been no gay people in the first place. But there [are] still people out there who believe that myth, because you know what? It’s easy to panic people if you make them think that they’re after you’re kids.
And you know what? It doesn’t work. The reality is that if schools could affect your sexual orientation there would have been no gay people in the first place. But there [are] still people out there who believe that myth, because you know what? It’s easy to panic people if you make them think that they’re after you’re kids.
I’m not sure Romeo and Juliet as a good example of heterosexual promotion. I remember reading the story of a 16-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl who knew each other for four days and committed suicide because their parents wouldn’t let them date and thinking, “I’m going to hold off dating for another couple years.”
But seriously, Jennings rationale is that despite the “heterosexual promotion” in schools, gay people still exist, so schools cannot effect decisions about sexual orientation. Therefore, we should promote homosexuality in schools.
While Jennings is spouting an obvious logical fallacy, perhaps the more import issue is to ask how someone like this has so much power. How can someone like Jennings have authority from the White House to exercise control (on some level) over every single public school attending child in America?
The process of controlling children through school has come about as follows:
1. Change schooling from a familial and community responsibility to a local governmental responsibility.
2. Give government the power to levy the taxes on the public to educate the public’s own children.
3. Change the objective of schooling from the preservation of freedom and moral order to the vehicle whereby people are made equal.
4. Confiscate and control so many resources via taxes so as to enable public sector schooling to maintain a near complete monopoly on pre-secondary education.
5. Change schooling from a local government responsibility to a state government responsibility.
6. Slowly outlaw any form of moral or religious speech in schools under the pretense that such speech violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.
7. Change schooling from a state responsibility to a federal responsibility.
8. Use the previously established notion of equality, combined with the erasure of Judeo-Christian values to introduce a parallel value system supposedly based on “equality."
9. Use the politically and monetarily isolated position of government bureaucracy to indoctrinate impressionable minds in value and belief systems the students would never accept as adults.
2. Give government the power to levy the taxes on the public to educate the public’s own children.
3. Change the objective of schooling from the preservation of freedom and moral order to the vehicle whereby people are made equal.
4. Confiscate and control so many resources via taxes so as to enable public sector schooling to maintain a near complete monopoly on pre-secondary education.
5. Change schooling from a local government responsibility to a state government responsibility.
6. Slowly outlaw any form of moral or religious speech in schools under the pretense that such speech violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.
7. Change schooling from a state responsibility to a federal responsibility.
8. Use the previously established notion of equality, combined with the erasure of Judeo-Christian values to introduce a parallel value system supposedly based on “equality."
9. Use the politically and monetarily isolated position of government bureaucracy to indoctrinate impressionable minds in value and belief systems the students would never accept as adults.
The preceding list reads like a sort of Communist conspiracy, but it is rather an observation of the facts. Once we reach step number nine, the only question is what value system will be taught in schools.
That is where Obama and Jennings come in. The value system to be preached through schools (and via health care, environmental and other policy) is Obama’s and his Czars’. A frightening prospect for America’s future.
