ENVIROPEDDAGOGY: ARE STUDENTS BEING TAUGHT SCIENCE OR SILLINESS IN REGARDS TO ECOLOGY?
By Frederick Meekins
Feb. 15, 2001

Parents send their children to school seeking to ground their offspring in the classic academic disciplines of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Parents might be surprised to learn that some public schools are acquiring a decidedly different emphasis.

Students at a number of Maryland Schools, according to the February 8, 2001 Southern Maryland supplement of the Washington Post, are participating in an educational curriculum produced by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the State Department of Education called the Maryland Bay Schools Project.

In this program based on eco-immersion, students are constantly bombarded by a bevy of environmental facts and fallacies throughout every facet of the school day.

For example, students solve math problems pertaining to flies and compose odes in honor of the creatures and geographical features found along the legendary Chesapeake. However, there is more to this program than improving math and science test scores. Part of the goal is to bring about social and cultural transformation.

One nine-year-old boasted in the Post story of her triumph in pressuring her parents into forsaking oyster consumption.

Gary Heath of the State Department of Education said in the article, "There are a number of environmental problems facing the state, and we need to make sure that the children, when they are adults, can deal with that."

The question arises are these children being taught the objective science needed to ferret out the truth or mere opinion masquerading as the only logical solution.

It must be remembered that the Maryland Bay Schools Project was not formulated by a panel of dispassionate scholars seeking to convey an objective set of facts. The curriculum was produced in conjunction with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an organization with an interest already vested in a predetermined set of policy outcomes.

Would the liberals usually wrapped up in these kinds of environmental programs want the social studies curriculum controlled by the Central Intelligence Agency or the Department of Defense regarding the strategic threats arrayed against the United States? Better yet, would they want the Southern Baptist Convention formulating a curriculum addressing America's declining moral standards?

The Bay Schools Project program was justified by education officials on the grounds that students need to learn early of the threats to the environment.

As future stewards of God's creation, children should be taught to care for and appreciate His handiwork. But must students be forced to endure environmental pessimism every hour of the school day? If this approach was practiced in a religious setting, it would be called brainwashing.

There are other evils in the world such as abortion, excessive taxation, undeserved welfare, and the overall sinfulness of mankind. But liberals would declare academic programs emphasizing these concerns to the exclusion of all other as absolutely morbid, and rightfully so. And even devout Christians cannot help but almost laugh at some of the private school curriculums so Bibliocentric in nature as to require students to diagram Scripture verses as part of their grammar lessons. Balance is a virtue worth cultivating.

From my own sources, I know for a fact that some Southern Maryland schools are slacking on the basics. I have heard there are kindergartners failing to learn their letters. Others have been taught that Christmas is merely a festival of lights and that White children should celebrate the Black nationalist commemoration of Kwanza. Now they want to waste more time cleaning creek beds and keeping oyster flats.

Through various court cases, liberals and secular humanists have removed Judeo-Christian beliefs as the backbone of the public education system and have declared through academic fads such as values clarification and multiculturalism that it is not the place of the school to imbue the student with a set of traditional values. It is, therefore, inappropriate for them to use the public schools to impose their revolutionary agendas on those least capable of withstanding the onslaught of this scholastic foolishness.

Previous Page