Paolo Freire Schools aka Your Child's School (Public and Private)

I came to know Paolo Freire when I began my fight against Whole Language and saw his influence in the Whole Language Movement. I have now come to see that was only the beginning, a small part of what would evolve. Marxists with Freire's influence through his philosophy as expressed in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, came to see their empowerment would come by taking over the cultural bastions of our nation. 

It began with Education. Teachers influenced by their professors who had been indoctrinated with this supposed "empowerment" of Freire's philosophies became unwitting revolutionaries in the dismantling of true education. 

The most recent alarm rings out with Social Emotional Learning (SEL). And that is when I discovered James Lindsay's New Discourses. And that is when I started watching his truly enlightening podcasts that I knew to be true because of what I had already seen in the Whole Language Catalog, the Bible of "reading teachers" coming out of our colleges of education. 

Meet James Lindsay. This former liberal came to see the influence of this Marxist agenda and set about enlightening the rest of through his podcast, New Discourses, available on YouTube. 

"SEL becomes a psychology based syringe to inject the Marxist theories," Lindsay proclaims. Marxism and Woke Marxism. 

(SEL=Social Emotional Learning and it is in your schools as a supposed psychological answer to violence in schools and the misuse of guns. What it does is promote "the work" that is the insertion of Marxism into our schools and the minds of our children.)

 

James Lindsay and the New Discourses

Do not think you school is immune from this. This is a screenshot of one of Dothan, Alabama's libraries. 

Comments by parents in Utah who studied the Second Step Program in their schools: https://www.utahparentsunited.org/uploads/1/3/3/6/133631373/8th_grade_review-second_step__detailed__.docx.pdf

 James Lindsay asserts that "a culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed ... and put social grievances ahead of objective truth". In New Discourses, he presents a complete study of the basis and evolution of the Marxism that dominates our school, both private and public. 

One might say it began with Liberation Theology:  The theology of liberation is a combination of Marxist philosophy with certain biblical motifs. It argues that we should reconstruct the whole of Christian theology by seeing it through the “axis of the oppressor and the oppressed.”

SUMMARY 

The theology of Liberation developed in the 1960s to argue for the liberation of various groups—primarily poor, black, women—from economic and political bondage. For these theologians, it is not enough to support the oppressed; one must be committed to social movements, even revolutions, dedicated to overturning the structures of society. For this purpose, liberation theologians adopt Marxism as an “analytical tool,” with which they make radical revisions to every traditional Christian doctrine.

One prominent Liberation Theologian in South America is Dom Helder Camara. 

Dom Helder Camara is important for today because Klaus Schwab, founder and director of the World Economic Forum and proponent of THE GREAT RESET considers him a spiritual father. Dom Helder Camara introduced Klaus Schwab and Paolo Freire, another liberation theologian. When Boston Catholic Marxists introduced Paolo Freire to American Marxist Henry Giroux, Giroux discovered the way to spread his Marxists beliefs through Paolo Freire's concept of infiltrating education to promote the Marxist agenda.

Three bibles of the liberation theology movement are:

§  Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire

§  For the Liberation of Brazil, by Carlos Marighela

§  Love in Practice: The Gospel in Solentiname, by Ernesto Cardenal

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I quote here from The Atheist Conservative https://theatheistconservative.com/tag/paulo-freire/

In its height in the late 1960s and 1970s, liberation theology– a distinctly Latin American movement – preached that it was not enough for the church to simply empathise and care for the poor. Instead, believers said, the church needed to be a vehicle to push for fundamental political and structural changes that would eradicate poverty, even – some believed – if it meant supporting armed struggle against oppressors.

In Nicaragua, priests inspired by liberation theology took an active part in the 1979 Sandinista revolution against Anastasio Somoza’s rightwing dictatorship. The philosophy also influenced leftist rebels in Mexico and Colombia, where one of the main guerrilla factions was led for nearly 30 years by a defrocked Spanish priest, Manuel Pérez. …

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(One of those defrocked Marxist Priests was Paolo Freire)

Now more from the Atheist Conservative...

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“He [the present Pope] was very critical of the liberal Marxist version of liberation theology,” said Austen Ivereigh, who has written a biography of Pope Francis. “At that time, you had leftwing movements in Latin America but in fact these were middle-class movements, which he believed used the poor as instruments. He had a phrase he used – that they were for the people but never with them.”

But since his election as pontiff in 2013, Pope Francis’s insistence that the church be “for the poor”, and his pointed criticisms of capitalism and consumerism have gone a long way to rehabilitate the liberation theology movement and incorporate it within the church. Experts point, too, to Francis’s decision to name Oscar Romero, the iconic Salvadoran archbishop who was assassinated by rightwing death squads in 1980, as a martyr as another sign of the resurgence in liberation theology…

The Vatican itself has not formally embraced liberation theology. Even xc himself has denied that his appointment as prefect by Pope Francis – which was seen in some circles as a triumph of liberation theology because of Müller’s relationship with Gutiérrez – represented the “opening of a new chapter” following the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict.

Liberation theology was invented, named, and funded by the KGB, according to one of its defecting agents. Damien Thompson reports – and comments with some skepticism which we do not share – in the (UK) Spectator:

The respected Catholic News Agency has published an interview with Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former general in Romania’s secret police who was one of the Eastern Bloc’s highest-ranking defectors in the 1970s. In it, he says that the Soviet Union – and the KGB in particular – created liberation theology, the quasi-Marxist movement that flourished in Latin America from the 1960s to the 1990s and is still a powerful influence on the Catholic Left.

The interview provides fresh evidence of the infiltration of liberation theology by Russia – a subject Catholic liberals would much rather not discuss, just as they don’t want to know about the heavy Soviet investment in CND (the British campaign for nuclear disarmament). …

I don’t believe that the KGB ‘created’ a movement as complex as liberation theology and I’m far from convinced that its name was dreamt up in the Lubyanka.

But Pacepa … makes detailed claims that the Soviets kick-started, funded and moulded liberation theology … He cites as one of his sources Aleksandr Sakharovsky, the Russian agent who set up Romania’s secret police agency. Pacepa describes him as his ‘de facto boss’ in the 1950s. Sakharovsky later became head of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB.

Here are the key quotes from the interview:

The birth of Liberation Theology was the intent of a 1960 super-secret “Party-State Dezinformatsiya Programme” approved by Aleksandr Shelepin, the chairman of the KGB, and by Politburo member Aleksey Kirichenko, who coordinated the Communist Party’s international policies. This programme demanded that the KGB take secret control of the World Council of Churches (WCC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and use it as cover for converting Liberation Theology into a South American revolutionary tool …

The KGB began by building an intermediate international religious organization called the Christian Peace Conference (CPC), which was headquartered in Prague. Its main task was to bring the KGB-created Liberation Theology into the real world.

The new Christian Peace Conference was managed by the KGB and was subordinated to the venerable World Peace Council, another KGB creation, founded in 1949 and by then also headquartered in Prague …

During my years at the top of the Soviet bloc intelligence community I managed the Romanian operations of the World Peace Council (WPC). It was as purely KGB as it gets. Most of the WPC’s employees were undercover Soviet bloc intelligence officers … Even the money for the WPC budget came from Moscow, delivered by the KGB in the form of laundered cash dollars to hide their Soviet origin. In 1989, when the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, the WPC publicly admitted that 90 per cent of its money came from the KGB.

And now the bit that will really wind up Catholic liberals:

I [Pacepa] was not involved in the creation of Liberation Theology per se. From Sakharovsky I learned, however, that in 1968 the KGB-created Christian Peace Conference, supported by the world-wide World Peace Council, was able to manoeuvre a group of leftist South American bishops into holding a Conference of Latin American Bishops at Medellin, Colombia. The Conference’s official task was to ameliorate poverty. Its undeclared goal was to recognise a new religious movement …

True to the chief pretense of each parent, the priests of both the South American Church and the Kremlin claimed that the intention of liberation theology was to stand with the poor and oppressed. Its theologians declared that the cause of all poverty and oppression is capitalism, and Christians must work to replace capitalism with socialism.

The man whom Pope Francis is now welcoming to the Vatican, Gustavo Gutierrez of Peru, wrote in his book A Theology of Liberation: “The goal is not only better living conditions, a radical change if structures, a social revolution; it is much more: the continuous creation, never ending, of a new way to be a man. A permanent cultural revolution.” Gutierrez struggles manfully through some 300 pages to reconcile the Christian idea of salvation of the individual soul and its reward in heavenly bliss,  with the Marxist insistence on collective salvation through revolution and the reward of an egalitarian society on this earth. He does not succeed. Whether he is aware of it or not, the Christian idea is totally overwhelmed and replaced by the Marxist idea. Liberation theology takes more after one parent than the other.

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Liberation Theology became Liberation Pedagogy in the US when Paolo Freire was introduced to Henry Giroux by a network of liberation theologists in Boston. Alongside Paulo Freire, Henry A. Giroux is widely considered to be the founding father of critical pedagogy. Critical is one of those words co-opted by the Left to make one think it is a higher level thinking process when it is actually the Marxist infusion into different areas of our culture, such as "critical" race theory, etc. 

https://theatheistconservative.com/tag/paulo-freire/

Taking to heart the command to go into education to convert from within was domestic terrorist Bill Ayers  and his wife  Bernadine Dohrn. Ayers is an activist and curriculum specialist who hired Barach Obama to work with him on the Chicago Anenberg Project. 

http://sharmanbursonramsey.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-chicago-connection-to-common-core.html

We see this already in our streets. 

Critical Race Theory

I highly recommend that parents, teachers and legislators listen to New Discourses to gain an understanding of what and why the curriculum at your child's school is what it is. This has not "just happened." It is a part of a plan.

Like Cassandra, I have been sounding the alarm on Paolo Freire and Whole Language for years. Much has spawned from these dangerous people--Critical Race Theory, Social Emotional Learning, White Privilege...and on and on.

“The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he did not exist.” And the next greatest trick was convincing good people that nothing like what we actually see going on could really happen with such nice people running our schools. They might as well say, "Who are you going to believe? Us or your lying eyes!"

Teachers as Liberators Produce Students as Revolutionaries

https://sharmanbursonramsey.blogspot.com/2017/02/teachers-as-liberators-produce-students.html

 Radical Possibilities (You wonder why Alabama is 52nd in the Nation in Education?)

https://sharmanbursonramsey.blogspot.com/2017/11/radical-possibilities-your-children.html

Amazing, isn't it how they proclaim something to be one thing when it is very definitely something else! From where do you think this is really coming?

https://sharmanbursonramsey.blogspot.com/2017/11/peace-education-conflict-resolution.html

Common Core: A Petri dish for Radicalism

https://sharmanbursonramsey.blogspot.com/2017/11/common-core-petri-dish-for-radicals.html

I hope you are not so naive as to believe Common Core is out of our Schools. Social and Emotional Learning is coming in to seal the deal!

WHEN DOES LIFE BEGIN?

 

When does Life begin? Perhaps the answer is in the question. Life begins at the beginning. A sperm enters an egg and becomes one cell. All the information for what comes next is included there in that cell. Amazing, isn't it? 

Somehow as that single cell divides, it takes with it the directions for becoming a nerve cell, a brain cell, a skin cell, and on and on and on until that simple single cell becomes the complex creature we know as a baby. From where does that direction come? 

I think of Mickey Mouse in Fantasia and imagine the grand orchestration from the Creator creating that marvelous creation of His. All of that begins with a beginning. 

 

But that was not what I was taught. I was taught that ontogeny recreates phylogeny. That an organism, in the course of its development, goes through all the stages of those forms of life from which it has evolved. In other words, humans go through the evolutionary process from fish to man in the womb. Therefore, they proclaim, that life really has no value, is not human, is merely little more than a parasite to get rid of. 

Really? Perhaps that was what they thought before ultrasound. Now you can measure the heartbeat at 8 weeks. So in 56 days after conception, God has orchestrated the symphony of that baby's life, directing one cell to be muscle, another to be a toenail, another to become a heart. You can see the embryo suck its thumb. Yet, it is the same single cell that we started with, only with directions to be something special. Incredible. 

The lips of that embryo will one day give the smile or sing the song that touches a heart. Somehow words will come from the movement of special organs. That voice will have a uniqueness to it. Why? How?

 

Are we to think that God's direction stops there? If God could do that with a single cell, what can He do with our lives? What could WE do with our lives if we would allow ourselves to be a part of His fantastic orchestra? Instead of marching to the beat of a different drummer.

But children are not taught this wonder. They are given lessons on sex directed by Planned Parenthood. They are taught the location of the closest abortion clinic. Planned Parenthood then sells those aborted baby parts. 

And yet, those who tell us they rely upon science for their climate change beliefs tell us that they do not know when life begins. They insist that whatever and whenever life begins, the mother has the right to dispose of whatever grows within her. Indeed, that belief has expanded to give the mother the right to kill a baby after birth. To what age would these people have the right to kill expanded? Susan Smith drowned her sons because they were an impediment to her date life. Did she have the right to do so according to those who disagree with the Supreme Court Decision? If so, her prison incarceration is wrong. Should we leave unwanted babies on the side of the road like the Chinese did for years with female infants? 

 

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill that codifies the right to an abortion in state law, according to The Associated Press. The Reproductive Health Equity Act, or House Bill 1279, guarantees access to reproductive care before and after pregnancy and bans local governments from imposing their own restrictions. We sow to the wind and reap the whirlwind. 

 

So, why do I have any right to comment upon this? I am a woman who has had an abortion and I regret it every day of my life. My newest novel, Choices and Secrets, was 50 years in the writing. Somewhere in that book the story of that abortion is told along with what life has taught me since. 

 

My husband, Dothan attorney, Joel Ramsey, passed away on November 20, 2020, of Alzheimer’s. I had prayed for his salvation since 1974, the year I, myself, was saved. On August 2nd, 2020, he rolled over and told me, “I need to make a public profession of my faith in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.” The next morning, I sent out an email to those I knew had been praying for him that read, “Hallelujah! Did you hear the angels sing?” We went to our Sunday school class the next day and he made that public profession. He later called that his "Road to Damascus Experience." 

 

That night he rolled over once again and said, “I need to be Baptized. 

 

"Go to sleep," I said. "I will call and talk to the preacher tomorrow.” 

 

He persisted. "I need to be baptized," he said. “I need to be immersed.” 

 

“Get up,” I said. “Get in the bathtub. I will baptize you.” He got up and I did baptize him. I later spoke to our pastor. He said he knew many family members who baptized those in their family. 

 

We began praying together at night. One night I told him, “Joe, we both need to ask God’s forgiveness for killing our baby.” The abortion occurred on November 15, 1969, the Saturday after our wedding. I had already asked God’s forgiveness, but Joe had always justified what we had done. He didn't want to talk about it. I cried alone. Now, his heart was ready to ask forgiveness, which he did. 

 

We have a double urn that now holds his ashes. One day, I will join him in that beautiful wooden box. Our stone in the Ramsey plot at Dothan Cemetery reads: 

RAMSEY

Joel Wardlaw 

Beloved husband of Sharman

May 3, 1947-November 20, 2020

 

Sharman Jean Burson

May 15, 1950-

Beloved wife of Joel

 

FORGIVEN AND ALIVE IN CHRIST

 

I praise God for blessing us with His forgiveness. 

 

As long as my husband was alive, he thought we should keep our actions as a deep dark secret. But, when one has committed a grievous sin, repentance is necessary. I think God accepted Joe’s repentance. 

 

We were married for fifty-one years. Though we got engaged in June of 1969, we had planned to have a long engagement. I loved him so much I could barely stand watching him leave when he deposited me at the dormitory. He was in Law School. And I was studying to be a teacher. I soon found myself pregnant. 

 

Not wanting to shame our parents by having an early baby, and as I realized later, not having the courage to face public disgrace, Joe and I began frequenting bus stations, where he would query taxi drivers if they knew a doctor that would perform abortions. During that time, Time Magazine published an article on an Episcopal priest in Detroit or Chicago (I really cannot remember) who assisted in getting girls in trouble an abortion. The weekend after we got married Joe and I boarded a plane (my first) and flew to talk to that priest. We checked into the downtown hotel he recommended, got a taxi and got taken about a block away on the other side of a park to the Episcopal church where we sat in the priest’s office.  He had us tell our story. He then arranged for an appointment later that afternoon. All I remember about that day was a fog shrouded city and a vastness of grey. 

 

A knock came at the door of the dingy hotel room. One double bed, a bathroom and a TV. Joe had the Alabama football game on. The young doctor stood at the door with his medical bag. “You’ll do it here?” Joe asked. The doctor nodded. Joe looked at me questioning.  So what happened next was all my fault. 

 

I was to be a mother, the greatest blessing of all. I was to be the “keeper of the home,” the guardian of the most sacred, safest entity of all, the family. But I was young and selfish. In truth, I was a coward. I did not want to shame my parents. I did not want my sister and brother labeled with my misbehavior. I did not want Joe’s brothers to think poorly of me. Nor did I want to be an embarrassment to my friends and sorority sisters. While the abortion had never been my idea, I hated to lay the onus on Joe. 

 

I nodded and with that I take responsibility for what happened next.

 

The young man (I assume he was a doctor. Probably a resident paying for his education doing abortions on the side). He and Joe struck up a conversation about the football game while I lay on the plastic sheet floating from the shot he gave me, watching from above feeling the scraping within me, then watching the doctor flush my baby down the toilet of an anonymous hotel in a strange city. A neon sign flashed red outside our window. Joe paid the man with money my parents had placed in an account for my college use. He went downstairs and got me a chicken salad sandwich. 

 

We flew home the next morning. Joe held my hand and said, “If you had died, I would have signed up to go to Vietnam.”

 

We had a wonderful life. But the gift God had meant for me, my baby, was never forgotten. I always think of the baby as a she, though the doctor never said. I heard a mother in the doctor’s office where I had signed in as “Mrs.” and took a pregnancy test, talk of her baby saying if she was a girl, they would name her Heather. I liked that name and thought if this baby was a little girl, I would like to name her Heather. I guess I had not really given up on Joe deciding we should have our child. She would have been born in June of 1970. I later had a friend whose daughter was born in June of that year and every time I saw her, I would think of the baby I “lost”. 

 

Late sixties and early seventies, pilots, soldiers and sailors were coming home from Vietnam with PTSD. I think that women who have had abortions also suffer PTSD. That is not something the feminists speak of when they say their body is their own to determine what to do with it. 

 

My high school biology teacher taught us “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” That means that during the development in the uterus, a fetus goes through evolutionary stages The theory of recapitulation, also called the biogenetic law or embryological parallelism—often expressed using Ernst Haeckel's phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"—is a historical hypothesis that the development of the embryo of an animal, from fertilization to gestation or hatching (ontogeny), goes through stages resembling or representing successive adult stages in the evolution of the animal's remote ancestors (phylogeny). It was formulated in the 1820s by Étienne Serres based on the work of Johann Friedrich Meckel, after whom it is also known as Meckel–Serres law. (Wikipedia)

 

So, if what was growing inside of me was just a fish or such, it wasn’t really human was my reasoning. And according to some church teachings, the soul didn’t enter the baby until the fourth month when the mother felt a “quickening”.  

 

That was science in the 1960s. And supposedly, we are to rely upon “science.” So now we know that Roe v Wade was based on a lie, a politically expedient application of fake science for a political purpose--the supposed “liberation” of women. 

 

Now 51 years later, ultrasound tells the truth. The picture of the tiny hand grasping that of a physician performing an in utero operation to save its life demonstrates the fact that as Albert Schweitzer once said, “I am life that wills to live, and I live amidst life that wills to live.” He had come upon a flock of birds that when disturbed by his presence flew en masse in a cloud of white to escape the danger. So too will a fetus attempt to avoid a probe during a medical procedure. Before birth we see in an ultrasound that little one cherishes life before ever taking a breath. Life that wants to live.

 

Am I comforted by the feminist dogma that a woman’s body is hers and hers alone to decide? Feminists say that it is about equality and giving women the right to choose and not making the choice for women.

 

I say it is not about equality because equality would not determine that government school sex education curricula be designed by Planned Parenthood, an organization that profits from selling baby body parts.  Equality would provide young women with facts, not propaganda by radical feminists and a several billion-dollar business.

 

God blessed us with three children and five grandchildren. 

 

I had an abortion. Been there. Done that. Wear the t-shirt.

 

I think now, after my husband’s salvation, he would be willing to share our story in the hope of helping others with their “Choice.” 

 

Let me say, I have friends who had "early" babies. I have only admiration for these courageous women. I do not sit in judgement of those, who like me, chose to have an abortion. 

 

I also lost a baby to an infection.  I will have my children remember those already in heaven on my husband's and my headstone already in City Cemetery. The one I lost to infection would have been a little boy the nurses said when he was delivered. 

 

I am so grateful for God's forgiveness. The lives of my unborn children should have meaning. I wish I had gotten to know my little angels.  Hopefully, the choices brought out in my novel will have meaning to some other woman. Choices and Secrets is dedicated to those babies.

 

To those of you who made the same "choice" that I did, just remember, "God is good. His mercy is everlasting.  His Truth endures to all generations." Lean on His promises. Ask His forgiveness and make your life have meaning to honor those lost to your "choice." 

 

P.S.

 

Apparently, the question of life has been in the forefront of my thinking ever since I started writing. In my collection of cozy mysteries, Mint Julep Trilogy, I pondered the idea of life as a commodity, children conceived and born for their body parts. 

"Life that wants to live."

The Giver: force children to think the unthinkable and reconsider the values they learned at home?

 I must admit to being quite shocked when my granddaughter told me that her Classical Christian School assigned this book for her to read. She is 11 years old. I remembered having read the book years earlier when my oldest daughter was also given the book, and again when my first granddaughter was assigned the book at another private Christian school. I look around me at the world today and cannot help but think we parents should have been more vigilant and less trusting even of curriculum we truly think we can trust! Can you see how this could contribute to the WOKE culture and even to situations like Columbine and more recent tragedies?

The book, The Giver by Lois Lowry, was reviewed by Berit Kjos and I had to look very hard to find the review I remembered so well. I give full credit to the wonderful author. Her website is: http://crossroad.to.  A list of her articles: https://blog.moriel.org/authors-1/berit-kjos.html. Her books include Brave New Schools. She chronicles: 

• The cultural shift from a Christian to a global paradigm. 

• The classroom shift from fact and logic to feeling and imagination. 

• The growing acceptance of a code of ethics that bans biblical truth.

• How movies, television and classrooms promote a global spirituality. 

• Why the "consensus process" turn young and old against absolute truth. 

• Why many Christians are conforming to this transformational process. 

 

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This article by Berit Kjos of Kjos Ministries is an extremely dynamic and flowing presentation of one of the most corruptive and destructive tools availble to public education.

Berit first accounts the book through interaction with Laura, a fourth grade student who experienced the book by oration from her teacher. Berit's relation of the horrors of the experience are inescapable -- infanticide by lethal injection to the baby's brain in the name of convenience and manipulation of entire populations for the good of the State! Shades of Hitler Germany!!!

Next, Berit identifies how The Giver parallels Hillary Clinton's Village concept: state control of entire populations, usurping of parental rights and control, inhibition of individuality, and mandatory community services -- all to the "Fatherland."

That the principal of Laura's school refused to remove the book because of his/her "reluctance to stifle academic freedom" is ludicrous. How in the Holy name of Jesus can this kind of fantasy poison be of any value. Tell me what educational objectives are served by such infectious tripe? How can presentation of infanticide and socialistic controls as acceptable and even desirable be of any traditionally educational use? And this is not to mention the fact that The Giver presents graphic murder of babies as a necessary part of life and presents it to they who were babies not that long ago!

As your brother in Christ, I beg you to do whatever you morally can to remove this book from the shelves of our schools. We are likely to pay dearly if we don't. We have enough influence by our culture to desensitize us to murder and governmental manipulations and to set the stage for moving into the village concept of general acceptance of whatever is dealt to us -- we do not need another book to help cultivate this cancer through our kids! Heavenly Father, help us. Heal our land! 

Thomas A. Carder
President
ChildCare Action Project: Christian Analysis of American Culture (CAP)
P. O. Box 177
Granbury, TX 76048-0177

(Red for Emphasis in the excerpt)

The Giver: Serving The Greater Whole
An excerpt from Brave New Schools
by Berit Kjos

Laura's fourth-grade teacher was reading a new book called The Giver. The story seemed sort of strange and spooky, but most of her classmates at Adams Elementary School in Davenport, Iowa, liked it. After all, it had won the 1994 Newbery Medal--and was dedicated to "all the children to whom we entrust our future."¹ Therefore it had to be good--didn't it?

The book told about a special community where every child felt safe, ate plenty of food, took pills to stop any pain, and lived in a family no larger than four. Overpopulation was no problem since new babies were limited to fifty a year. Born to professional "birth mothers" instead of real mothers, the newborns were placed in Nurturing Centers where older children helped care for them during volunteer hours. To keep people comfortable and free from stress, handicapped babies and low-weight twins were "released" to go to a mystical "Elsewhere."

Each December all the children advanced into the next age group. At the Ceremony for the Ones, the healthy babies born during the year were assigned to selected families. Jonas, one of the Elevens, still remembered when his sister Lily was a One and came to live in his family. This December, she would become an Eight and receive her first voluntary service assignment. On the same day, all the Nines would get their first bicycle, and the Tens would get special haircuts. The new Elevens would soon have to take daily pills to quench the strange "stirrings" that came with puberty.

Each group of children--up to Twelve--learned to follow the rules for their age, succeed in school, complete their service assignments, and share their dreams and feelings with their designated family. Sometimes Jonas preferred to hide his feelings, but that was against the rules. (Social Emotional Learning SEL?, my comment)

As they neared December once again, Jonas and the other "young adults" waited anxiously for the Ceremony for the Twelves. This year, they would receive their permanent Assignments--their place to work during their productive years. These Assignments were chosen by the Committee of Elders who had been observing every child. Jonas, who had intuitive power to "see beyond," was chosen to be the Receiver of Memories - the one who would know the past. The former Receiver, who now became the Giver, would place his hands on Jonas' back and psychically transfer all past experiences and distant memories to the boy. Eventually, Jonas would become the community's source of wise counsel and secret wisdom - like a tribal shaman.

Laura and her classmates listened, imagined, absorbed, and pondered. Sometimes Laura felt uncomfortable--as when Jonas had to bathe a frail, slippery Old woman during his volunteer hours at the House of the Old. But the worst part came when Jonas' father, a Nurturer, had to "release" the smaller of two newborn twins.

As the teacher read from the book, Laura pictured the scene she heard: Jonas and the Giver were watching the Release on a video screen. They saw a small windowless room with a table and scale--the same room Jonas had seen during his service work at the Nurturing Center. "It's just an ordinary room," he said to the Giver. "I thought maybe they'd have it in the Auditorium, so that everybody could come. All the Old go to Ceremonies of Release. But I suppose that when it's just a newborn, they don't...."

Suddenly, Jonas saw his father enter the room with a tiny newchild. He put it on the scale and noted the weight. "...you're only five pounds ten ounces," he said, "A shrimp!"

A shrimp? Laura could identify with the tiny infant. She, too, was a low-birth-weight twin. Feeling shaky, she listened closely as the teacher continued to read:

His father turned and opened the cupboard. He took out a syringe and a small bottle. Very carefully he inserted the needle into the bottle and began to fill the syringe.... [Then he directed] the needle into the top of newchild's forehead, puncturing the place where the fragile skin pulsed. The newborn squirmed, and wailed faintly.

"Why's he--"

"Shhh," the Giver said sharply.

His father... pushed the plunger very slowly, injecting the liquid into the scalp vein until the syringe was empty....

As Jonas continued to watch, the newchild no longer crying moved his arms and legs in a a jerking motion. Then he went limp. His head fell to the side, his eyes half open. Then he was still...

His father tidied the room. Then he picked up a small carton that lay waiting on the floor, set it on the bed, and lifted the limp body into it.... He opened a small door in the wall... It seemed to be the same sort of chute into which trash was deposited at school.

His father loaded the carton containing the body into the chute and gave it a shove. "Bye-bye, little guy," Jonas heard his father say before he left the room. Then the screen went blank.²

Stunned, Laura stared at her teacher. Would they really kill a baby if it didn't weigh enough? The horrible image of the tiny infant, murdered and thrown down a chute like a piece of garbage made her sick. Her thoughts raced on. How could the kind Nurturer kill it! What if it had been her! She was just as tiny when she was born. And she already been thinking about death. Only weeks ago, her own grandmother had died.  (Death Education?my question)

She rushed home from school and burst into the house. "Mom, Mom," she cried, "Guess what my teacher read today!" She poured out her story, while her mother, Elaine Rathmann, listened quietly.

The next day, Mrs. Rathmann, a member of the local school board, visited the school. When she suggested that The Giver might be inappropriate reading for fourth-graders, the principal indicated his reluctance to "stifle academic freedom."

Next, she told the teacher how the book had affected her daughter.

"But I didn't tell the class what I believed," he answered. "I let them come to their own conclusion. My children know fiction from nonfiction."

But that doesn't matter, thought Mrs. Rathmann. Sometimes an exciting story can transmit horrible images and socialistic messages more easily than a history lesson.

THE 21st CENTURY GLOBAL VILLAGE.

The Giver fits into the flood of classroom literature that force children to think the unthinkable and reconsider the values they learned at home. It also models many of the pitfalls and imagined perfections of the utopian school-centered community being implemented by today's national and international change agents:

State surveillance and control of health, wealth, attitudes, beliefs, values and behavior.

State controlled child care, health care, training of parents, vocational guidance and work assigment.

Mandatory "voluntary" service.

Personal privileges conditioned on compliance.

In many parts of our country - as in the envisioned community -- teams of professional "experts" are already replacing parents as ultimate decision makers in the lives of children. As suggested by the slogan, "It takes a whole village to raise a child," they will make sure parents are trained to follow the prescribed guidelines for parenting. If this new system is implemented by AD 2000-2001 as planned, all who refuse to conform will find their parental authority usurped by trained educators and community leaders.

A sensational fantasy? Not at all, as you will see in Chapter 7. Since many of the specific strategies are hidden behind "sugar-coated" promotion and misleading labels, few see the danger. Some are silenced by the politically correct notion that discernment spells intolerance. Others simply don't believe that America could really change all that much. After all, we have our Constitution!

Could we have become a nation of listless frogs, drifting blindly in cultural waters that are nearing the boiling point? Laura's mother, a school board member, would probably answer yes. She saw the blind drifting both in her daughter's classmates and among the other parents.

"The Giver desensitized students to the new values," she told me. "Though the last part showed the downside, the book helped make the futuristic community seem normal. Their conclusions would be based on the biased information they were given."

"Did other parents share your concern?" I asked her.

"I don't think so. They didn't want to be disturbed. No one else was willing to say, 'I won't let you teach this to my child.'"

"See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ." (Colossians 2:8)

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Note: Years ago, a young boy in Zaire named Kyosa was "chosen to know" special tribal secrets.³ He is now a scholar in African spirituality, but his mystical initiation echoes one of the many ominous themes in Lois Lowry's Newbery Award Winner, The Giver. Like all Newbery winners, this popular book can be found in classrooms and libraries from coast to coast. Some states add study questions and special programs to amplify its message.

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Brave New Schools (Harvest House Publishers) is available through Christian bookstores and by calling 1-800-829-5646.

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Endnotes:

¹ Lois Lowry, The Giver (New York: Bantam, 1993). 
² Ibid., 148-149. 
³ San Jose Mercury News, January 6, 1996. 

http://www.capalert.com/sexedabcdisney/thegiver1.htm

The Giver fits into the flood of classroom literature that force children to think the unthinkable and reconsider the values they learned at home. It also models many of the pitfalls and imagined perfections of the utopian school-centered community being implemented by today’s national and international change agents:

• "State surveillance and control of health, wealth, attitudes, beliefs, values and behavior.
• "State controlled child care, health care, training of parents, vocational guidance and work assignment.
• "Mandatory ‘voluntary’ service.
• "Personal privileges conditioned on compliance." 
  (Excerpted from Brave New Schools by Berit Kjos.)

http://www.pawcreek.org/parental-discernment/

Evil Ideas

This book is full of ideas, very dangerous and extremely dark. Those who defend this kind of literacy garbage would laugh at any possibly bad consequences. One reason is that they live in a dark world of ideas to begin with and this kind of material is the real world to them. More importantly is that these people are "change agents" and they have an agenda. If you do not learn to discern ideas and not just look at the vehicle (drama, book, television program), then all I say will be empty. The ideas behind the drama, etc. is what is most important.

https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/politics/NWO/nwo_0008.txt