Skip down to change agent
William Glasser or Values Clarification"...change the values and take a different course of living, then evolution will continue... Do not forget that from now on you have to be Earth citizens...."1 Robert Muller, former UN Assistant Secretary-General. Global Citizenship 2000 Youth Congress
When fifteen-year-old Kevin walked into his American History class at Cupertino High School in California, he was given a handout. He glanced at the title: "Heterosexuality: Can It be Cured?" Weird, he thought and looked around. Some of his friends were studying it, too. He read on:
"Heterosexuality is a condition characterized by a sexual attraction to members of the opposite gender. Many persons, in all cultures, at all times, have been heterosexual. Whatever the cause of this phenomenon, we can state without doubt that there are many problems associated with heterosexuality, both for the individual and society at large."
Curious, Kevin scanned the list of problems. Women were especially vulnerable, it said. They could face sexually transmitted diseases and unplanned pregnancy as well as mental and psychological hazards" such as "a state of homophobia." The suggested treatments included psychotherapy and wide-spread sterilization of the heterosexual population. Was this a joke?
The next page gave the source of this bizarre "research". It came from the American Public Health Association Caucus of Gay and Public Health Workers.
Undermine traditional values
It's no secret that the gay and lesbian coalition have waged an intense campaign to draw young students into their lifestyle. Their demand for laws mandating classroom sensitivity training designed to build "respect" for their values has opened classrooms to unspeakable propaganda. And they are not alone in the battle against concerned parents who would block their "right" to indoctrinate captive young everywhere.
Planned Parenthood and its partners around the world also demand that children must be set free to indulge in sexual thrills-without fear of pregnancy. So does SIECUS (The Sex Information and Education Council of the United States). Together they have prepared a titillating display of films, textbooks, props, and promotional material. Most of it is designed to promote rather than deter sexual activity-and, more subtly, earth-centered spirituality. The two go together.
It's not surprising that Sexuality and Man, a collection of articles compiled by SIECUS board members, sports a yin-yang symbol on the cover. One of its authors, Dr. Lester Kirkendall unveiled the SIECUS philosophy:
"The purpose of sex education is not... to control and suppress sex expression, as in the past, but to indicate the immense possibilities for human fulfillment that human sexuality offers. The individual must be given sufficient understanding to incorporate sex most fruitfully and most responsibly into his present and future life."2
The primary goal, however, is to change values. The first steps are: "challenging the students' fixed beliefs,"3 shaking their moral convictions, and breaking down modesty and inhibitions. The titillating sex-ed films, suggestive classroom discussions, and provocative literature serve the purpose well. Children are forced to think the unthinkable and visualize the forbidden-until sensuality has replaced Christianity in their minds and hearts. Before long, sin looks cool; and what God calls good seems boring.
A shocked father described some of sex education programs in his home state, Massachusetts:
"A 14-year-old Beverly High School girl came home and told her father that he was a 'homophobe.' She had just returned from 'Homophobia Week' sessions at the school."
"At Silver Lake High School, the ninth-grade health text teaches: 'Testing your ability to function sexually and to give pleasure to another person may be less threatening in the early teens with people of your own sex.' Also, 'You may come to the conclusion that growing up means rejecting the values of your parents.' Students were told to keep the book in their lockers and not take it home."
"In Brookline, a transsexual had been invited to explain to a class of first-graders how a sex change can take place. Parents had not been notified or prepared to counsel their frightened, confused children."
"In Westford, thirteen-year-olds were asked on a quiz: 'What is the best method against pregnancy?' The choice of 'abstinence' was deemed incorrect."4
What do students gain from these lessons? They learn to question home-taught values and look with "open minds" at dangerous alternatives. Many educators know that when children are trapped in sensuous lifestyles, they can no longer delight in God.
It makes sense. Remember, "the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one." (1 John 5:19) Satan has always distorted truth, twisted facts, and seduced people with enticing counterfeits of God's promises. His latest argument is persuasive: Peace and unity are good. War and conflict are bad. Religions that stir guilt and bring division are dangerous. And Christianity, the biggest culprit, blocks progress toward a more evolved set of values based on all the world's religions.
To understand this planned rebellion against biblical values, look back to 1970. Education psychologist Dr. William Glasser had just pioneered a "daring new program" for changing attitudes. His book, Schools Without Failure, introduced a manipulative strategy for turning the class into an encounter and counseling group: Children would share their feelings and air their complaints under the guidance of a trained facilitator with a politically correct answer. They learned to empathize with another's lust and respect each other's feelings. Soon, they had traded God's moral standards for self-made choices. No longer would authoritarian parents impose their values on submissive children. They would write their own rules!
Or so it seemed. Actually Glasser's tactics manipulated students into yielding individual choice--along with privacy and family loyalty. Consider the effect of the following suggestion:
"Children will often become very personal, talking about subjects that ordinarily are considered private A child who discusses drunken brawls at home might quietly be asked to talk about something that has more relationship to school. Changing the subject in this way is sometimes unwise, however, because it is just those drunken brawls at home that have the most relationship to his school progress."5
Children would share their feelings and air their complaints under the guidance of a trained facilitator with a politically correct answer. They learned to empathize with another's lust and respect each other's feelings. Soon, they had traded God's moral standards for self-made choices. No longer would authoritarian parents impose their values on submissive children. They would write their own rules!
And today we know that those private "brawls" become part of a student's computerized portfolio. A child's "honest" sharing about family activities gives school officials the needed data about family values. It enables them to monitor every family member--not just the kids in the classroom.
Professor Sidney Simon went a step further. His book, Values Clarification--A Handbook of Practical Strategies for Teachers and Students, added a more intrusive note to the vast selections of manipulative values-changing strategies used to speed the social transformation. Among the classroom exercises which soon filtered into textbooks and schools everywhere was a tactic called "values voting."
The teacher simply asks questions dealing with personal values. The students say "yes" by raising their hands. They answer "no" by pointing their thumbs down. They discuss their answers. Consider some of the questions. For example, "How many of you
- think there are times when cheating is justified?
- regularly attend religious services and enjoy it?
- think that women should stay home and be primary wives and mothers?
- would like to have a secret lover?
- would choose to die and go to heaven, if it meant playing a harp all day?" 6
For middle and high schools students, Simon added questions such as: "How many of you think sex education instruction in the schools should include techniques for lovemaking and contraception?" and "How many of you think you will continue to practice religions, just like your parents?"7
You may recognize some of these questions. They have become standard fare in classrooms across the country. Whether teachers or school counselors lead the encounter groups, children are urged to share intimate details of family life. Most parents are kept in the dark.
During this directed dialogue, verbal and written responses are carefully monitored by watchful teachers, who are required to assess each child's individual "progress" toward the new attitudinal goals. Intrusive classroom surveys, "private" journal entries, and classroom writing projects all help expose personal beliefs and values.
If teachers and school counselors see anything that might hinder a student from meeting the new affective standards for politically correct attitudes, the child could be labeled "at risk"-meaning more monitoring, state control, and possible removal of a child "whose home environment was felt to have a malignant influence."8
Establish target values
The rejection of traditional values happened with the approval of our political leaders. Remember what President Bush said in 1992 when he announced America 2000: "Nations that stick to stale old notions and ideologies will falter and fail. So I'm here to say, America will move forward New Schools for a new world."9
Actually, George Bush endorsed values clarification long before he became president. In 1974, he helped write a report titled, "Man, Education, and Society in the Year 2000." Funded by HEW's Office of Education, it concluded that "the 50 states should organize a commission to establish the values that are significant in approaching problems (e.g., population) that must be faced in the future." The summary explained that
"The traditional cluster of knowledge, skills, values and concepts will not help our young face the future in their private life, the international situation.... Perhaps there is a need for clarification of new values needed to solve future problems."10
He is not the only president who proved his loyalty to global education before winning the White House. In 1987, (then) Governor Bill Clinton served on The Study Commission on Global Education with other education, business, and New Age leaders. Together they prepared a report titled "The United States Prepares for Its Future: Global Perspectives in Education." Its Foreword stated that "It now seems almost conventional to speak of American citizenship in the same breath with international interdependence and the planetary environment."11
These leaders envisioned a world without war-a global village where young and old would share a common set of values, fulfill their prescribed civic responsibility, and consent to what Al Gore called "a wrenching transformation of society."12
In this new world, sexual experimentation would be okay, but dissent and resistance would not be tolerated. Group consensus and conformity to the planned changes ahead would be essential. In the end, all would supposedly live together in peace and unity.
Their vision of the new world order is not unlike the managed society described by Aldous Huxley in his 1932 futuristic fantasy, Brave New World:
- Children are raised collectively according to the needs of the global labor market.
- Group thinking has replaced individual views.
- Communal "Feelies" or sensory experiences are encouraged.
- Casual sex is obligatory.
- Mandatory pills prevent pregnancy.
- People are kept too busy with work and trivia to think or complain.
- All must participate in mystical group rituals invoking a universal god.
- Peer pressure and constant surveillance ensure compliance.
The similarities between our schools and Huxley's Brave New World is not as strange as it might seem. Aldous Huxley's brother was Julian Huxley, the first Secretary-General of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization). Promoting the same socialist and humanist values as John Dewey, Julian Huxley brought his brother's vision into UNESCO and laid the foundations for the new international education system. Our Goals 2000 is little more than the American branch of what UNESCO, in 1973, called a "continuous and integrated process" of "lifelong learning."13
Vital to the implementation of this monstrous system are the deceptive marketing strategies needed to persuade the public to submit to its oppressive rules and laws. After all, this new tightly managed world system would eliminate all the freedoms most Americans now take for granted. It would own each child and control each person. But it would sanction the sexual sins God forbids.
Today, this twist on freedom serves a purpose. As in recent totalitarian regimes, well-chosen compensations distract the masses from the anguish of tyranny. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley describes the seductive "feelies" that compensate for the loss of freedom. First among them is sexual license:
"As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator... will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope, movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate."14
Sensual, earth-centered values are anything but new to the human race. Pagan cultures have indulged in sexual promiscuity along with occult rituals since the beginning of history. And whenever God's people in Old Testament times turned away from their Shepherd, they were soon caught up in the same deadly lusts that corrupted their pagan neighbors. We see the same cultural decay here and now, and the New Testament explains the process:
"although they knew God, they
"did not glorify Him as God
"became futile in their thoughts
"claimed to be wise... became fools
"exchanged the truth of God for a lie
"worshipped and served created things
"Therefore God GAVE THEM OVER to
1. "the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves
2. "vile passions. committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error.
3. "a debased mind being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness. they are whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful; who not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them."Our children are not immune to the world's seductive messages. Many hear the same tempting promises and the alluring voices that others hear and follow. They, too, want friends and fun. So when the tempting promises ring out day after day, week after week, they start to sound both true and natural.
Concerned about their spiritual safety, our Shepherd reminds them:"Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God." (Romans 12:2-3)
Unless we help our children build a mental framework and filter based on biblical truth, the world's philosophies will probably squeeze them into its mold. It takes discernment, diligence, and delight in God to stand firm in His truth when friends choose to follow their feelings. But those who have chosen to stand firm, wear His armor, trust His promises, and follow Him no matter what, will be led by the Shepherd in a peace and triumph the world can never understand.
Read the second half of this report, "Character Training for Global Citizenship"
Endnotes:
1 Robert Muller, Global Citizenship 2000 Youth Congress, Vancouver, Canada, April 5, 1997.
2. Lester Kirkendall, Sexuality and Man (SIECUS). [I have this book but am still trying to find it.]
3. David Krathwohl, Benjamin Bloom and Bertram Massia, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, The Classification of Educational Goals, Handbook II: Affective Domain, (McKay Publishers, 1956), 55.
4. Mark E. Howerter, "The Other Side of the News" http://www.prairienet.org/otherside.
5. William Glasser, M.D., Schools Without Failure (NY: Harper & Row, 1969), 161.
6. Sidney B. Simon, Leland W. Howe, and Howard Kirschenbaum, Values Clarification-A Handbook of Practical Strategies for Teachers and Students (New York: Hart Publishing Co., 1972), 38-39, 41-46.
8. Harold Shane, Today's Education (Jan. 1969). Shane worked with Terrel Bell (later President Reagan's Education Secretary) on a NEA Bicentennial Report on "Cardinal Principles" that would "bring about a harmoniously interdependent global community." Cited by Dennis Cuddy, Chronology of Education (Highland City, FL: Pro-Family Forum, 1994), 59-60.
9. George Bush, White House, April 18, 1991. America 2000: An Education Strategy.
10. Man, Education and Society in the Year 2000, a report issued by the Institute for Chief State School Officers, 1974. Summary written by Dr. Grant Venn, CSSO Institute Director. Cited by Dr. Dennis Cuddy, 55-56
11. The United States Prepares for Its Future: Global Perspectives in Education, Report of the Study Commission on Global Education," 1987. The report is financed by the Rockefeller, Ford and Exxon Foundations. Cited by Dr. Dennis Cuddy, 80.
12. Al Gore, Earth in the Balance (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992), p. 274.
13. George W. Parkyn, Towards a Conceptual Model of Life-long Education (Paris: UNESCO, 1973), 8.
14. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: HarperPerennial, 1932), xvii. 8