Posted on June 30, 2007

by

Daniel Clark

Maine's school system must be the envy of the world. At least you'd think so, by the vocabulary that five of its fourth-graders used in an essay on global warming, which was published by the Portland Press Herald.

"We want everyone to help curb global warming," the nine year-olds plead. "The ocean is warming at such an alarming rate that the continents are in danger." They know this because, "Katrina was only a Category 1 storm when it crossed Florida. It became a monster storm by feeding off the extremely warm water in the Gulf of Mexico." They also warn that, "Greenland … will disappear in our lifetime if our fossil fuel usage goes unchecked."

These concerned kids even claim to have observed global warming personally. "Just notice the strange weather around us this winter and spring and even summer-like days in March." One might wonder what they have to compare it to. They've only experienced eight of each season previously, and surely can't even remember all of those. Nevertheless, they conclude, "Although global warming is a huge pending global disaster, we all have the means to change it together." Then comes the punch line.

"Because the United States contributes one-third of the carbon dioxide emissions worldwide, here are seven sensible ways to save our seven beautiful continents." Those ways include using fluorescent light bulbs, planting trees, and, of course, watching Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. As any nine year-old can tell you, those are indeed sensible ways to curb the pending global disaster.

This isn't the first time that such an academic put-up job has been made public. Remember the debate over "school lunch cuts" in 1995? Rather than have the federal government micromanage public school lunch programs, the Republicans decided to block-grant the funding to the states, so that each state could administer the program as it saw fit. Although the amount of federal funding was increased substantially, the Democrats and therefore the news media characterized this as a "cut."

One particular classroom of third-graders, we were told, decided that they were not going to take this lying down. With news cameras present, they wrote letters to Congress, uniformly expressing a point of view conspicuously similar to that of the teachers' unions. A close-up of one of them revealed the sentence, "Please do not decentralize our school free lunch program." The credulous liberal media took the letter at face value, meaning that they expected us to believe not only that an eight year-old used the word "decentralize," but that he or she understood its ramifications, and heartily disapproved.

The only reason anybody found out about the global warming and school lunch episodes is because they were deliberately publicized. What we don't know is how many liberal teachers abuse their authority in this manner every day, when nobody outside of the classroom is looking. So if you're a parent of an elementary school student, you might want to start screening your child's classwork, in search of topic sentences like these:

"Our exploitative capitalist system crushes the proletariat under the heel of the bourgeoisie."

"Somatic cell nuclear transfer promises to eradicate a myriad of diseases and disabilities."

"Gender roles are a social construct, promulgated by reactionary religious zealots."

Liberals love to talk about how they do everything for the children, but more often than not, children are only a means to their political ends. To them, possession is ten tenths of the law, just as long as they are the possessors. Liberal teachers possess other people's children for about seven hours a day, and they intend to use them. Any parents who object to turning their children into unsuspecting political tools can expect to be regarded as meddlesome pests.

It's no coincidence that liberal politicians are always the ones to promote new education programs designed to take children away from home for as long as possible. Former presidential candidate Bill Bradley even proposed public education "beginning at birth." The former senator, who supports abortion at any time for any reason, apparently thinks that babies have their brains installed at some point as they pass through the birth canal.

Ironically, the creation of the kind of government-run human farms that Bradley envisioned would be one way of bringing God back into the classroom. That's because those schools would need to equip themselves with a steady supply of crucifixes -- for potty training, that is. Afterward, the tikes can learn how to write grant applications to the National Endowment for the Arts.

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