Does U.N.’s Agenda 21 Education Mandate Push Common Core in USA?
Please read the Agenda article before this one for a broader overview.
What Does Common Core Have To Do With the U.N.’s Agenda 21 ?
–And Why Should You Care?
There’s an interesting article about Obama’s call for the U.S. to pay for education of the world. It’s ”A Global Fund for Education: Achieving Education for All” that you can read in full here: http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2009/08/education-gartner
Its summary states: “In order to realize the world’s commitment to ensuring education for all by 2015, important innovations and reforms will be needed in the governance and financing of global education. In 2008, Presidential Candidate Barack Obama committed to making sure that every child has the chance to learn by creating a Global Fund for Education. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has recently called for a new architecture of global cooperation… A new Global Fund for Education… must be capable of mobilizing the approximately $7 billion annually still needed to achieve education for all, while holding all stakeholders accountable for achieving results with these resources. None of these objectives will be achieved without a major rethinking of the global education architecture and an evolution of current mechanisms for financing education… Achieving these two Millennium Development Goals, and the broader Education for All Goals… will require more capable international institutions.”
I have to ask three questions as I read this:
- Since when do nations collectively finance global education?
- Since when has the whole world agreed on what should be taught to the whole world?
- Since when is the United States of America reduced to “accountable stakeholder” status over its own educational and financial decision making?
So Obama created a global education fund, using U.S. taxpayer money. I don’t remember voting on this.
And Hilary Clinton is misusing the word “inclusiveness” to now mean “no more independent sovereignty for anyone.” Meanwhile, there’s a United Nations/UNESCO program called “Education For All” that involves the same ideas and the very same key people as “Common Core”. And there’s also an “Education, Public Awareness and Training” chapter in the U.N.’s Agenda 21 goals.
Both the U.N.’s educational goals (via UNESCO and “Education for All” ) and “Common Core” do sound very appealing on the surface. Each seeks to educate by teaching the exact same standards to all children (and adults) on a national or a global scale. But both supercede local control over what is taught to students, and both dismiss the validity and importance of the U.S. Constitution implicitly.
Both UNESCO’s educational goals and Common Core are, coincidentally, heavily funded by activist and philanthropist Bill Gates, one of the wealthiest billionaires on earth. http://www.eagleforum.org/links/UNESCO-MS.pdf ( Link to Gates’ Microsoft/Unesco partnership)
Gates gave the Common Core developer/copyright holders, NGA/CCSSO, about $25 million dollars to promote his special interest, Common Core. (See CCSSO: 2009–$9,961,842, 2009– $3,185,750, 2010–$743,331, 2011–$9,388,911 ; NGA Center: 2008–$2,259,780 at http://www.keepeducationlocal.com .
Gates partnered with UNESCO/U.N. to fund ”Education For All” as well. See http://bettereducationforall.org/
The “Education For All” developer is UNESCO, a branch of the United Nations. Education For All’s key document is called “The Dakar Framework for Action: Education For All: Meeting Our Collective Commitments.” Read the full text here: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001211/121147e.pdf
At this link, you can learn about how Education For All works:
In a nutshell: “Prior to the reform of the global EFA coordination architecture in 2011-2012, the Education for All High-Level Group brought together high-level representatives from national governments, development agencies, UN agencies, civil society and the private sector. Its role was to generate political momentum and mobilize financial, technical and political support towards the achievement of the EFA goals and the education-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). From 2001-2011 the High-Level Group met annually.”
The six goals of “Education For All” are claimed to be internationally agreed-upon. But since much of what happens with the United Nations threatens the sovereignty of the United States and all sovereign nations, I do not recognize that these goals, or anything else for that matter, are “internationally agreed-upon.” Do you?
For everyone on earth to totally agree, we’d have to submit to a one-world government with a one-world constitution that would override any individual country’s constitution. There are some great thoughts on this subject here: http://www.keepeducationlocal.com/
But in the U.N.’s own words:
“Agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment. Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, and the Statement of principles for the Sustainable Management of Forests were adopted by more than 178 Governments at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janerio, Brazil, 3 to 14 June 1992. The Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) was created in December 1992 to ensure effective follow-up…” See: http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
So Agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of action to be taken by everyone. We all apparently have been signed up to agree, whether we agree or not. I’m already getting the communist creeps.
But most of us haven’t even heard of Agenda 21 nor do we know anything about “sustainable development”.
On the linked Education and Awareness page of that same U.N. website, we learn:
“Education, Public Awareness and Training is the focus of Chapter 36 of Agenda 21. This is a cross-sectoral theme both relevant to the implementation of the whole of Agenda 21 and indispensable for achieving sustainable development.” http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/susdevtopics/sdt_educawar.shtml
Did you get that? Education is indispensable for the U.N. to get its agenda pushed onto every citizen worldwide. They just admitted it out loud. They want a strong hand in determining what is taught worldwide.
So then we click on Chapter 36. The “indispensable” implementation tool they are describing are your children’s American public schools. Yes, really:
36.2 says they plan to “reorient” worldwide education toward sustainable development. (No discussion, no vote, no input needed on this reorientation plan, apparently.)
36.3 says: “While basic education provides the underpinning for any environmental and development education, the latter needs to be incorporated as an essential part of learning. Both formal and non-formal education are indispensable to changing people’s attitudes so that they have the capacity to assess and address their sustainable development concerns. It is also critical for achieving environmental and ethical awareness, values and attitudes, skills and behaviour consistent with sustainable development and for effective public participation in decision-making. To be effective, environment and development education should deal with the dynamics of both the physical/biological and socio-economic environment and human (which may include spiritual) development, should be integrated in all disciplines, and should employ formal and non-formal methods
- Environmental education will be incorporated in formal education globally.
- Any value or attitude held by anyone globally that stands independent to that of the United Nations’ definition of “sustainable education” must change. Current attitudes are unacceptable.
- Environmental education will be belief-and-spirituality based.
- Environmental education will be integrated into all disciplines, not just science.
The stated objectives (36.4) include endorsing “Education for All,” achieving “environmental and development awareness in all sectors of society on a world-wide scale as soon as possible”; and to achieve the accessibility of environmental and development education, linked to social education, from primary school age through adulthood to all groups of people; and to promote integration of environment concepts, including demography, in all educational programmes, and “giving special emphasis to the further training of decision makers at all levels.”
Does that not sound like quite an agenda?
But it gets worse.
Under “Activities,” we find:
“Governments should strive to update or prepare strategies aimed at integrating environment and development as a cross-cutting issue into education at all levels within the next three years. This should be done in cooperation with all sectors of society…. A thorough review of curricula should be undertaken to ensure a multidisciplinary approach, with environment and development issues and their socio-cultural and demographic aspects and linkages.”
So, if a country like the USA, for example, has a Constitution and G.E.P.A. laws that states that its federal government has absolutely no legal right to supervise or direct state school systems, then what? How can it be done?
I’ll tell you how! Just get a U.S. President to circumvent Congress and the states’ right to educate. Just use nongovernmental groups like the NGA/CCSSO to write and copyright new national educational standards. Just pay groups to do what you are not legally authorized to do. Just create “Race to the Top” grants. Just promote a socialist education system but call it a state-led Common Core. Then get billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates to promote and pay for most of it.
And that is what has happened.
They go on to say how countries should pay for all the reorientation and values/attitudes changing for all people. And there’s even a media-to-museum rebranding blitz outline:
“Countries… should promote a cooperative relationship with the media, popular theatre groups, and entertainment and advertising industries by initiating discussions to mobilize their experience in shaping public behaviour and consumption patterns and making wide use of their methods. Such cooperation would also increase the active public participation in the debate on the environment. UNICEF should make child-oriented material available to media as an educational tool, ensuring close cooperation between the out-of-school public information sector and the school curriculum, for the primary level. UNESCO, UNEP and universities should enrich pre-service curricula for journalists on environment and development topics;
(f) Countries, in cooperation with the scientific community, should establish ways of employing modern communication technologies for effective public outreach. National and local educational authorities and relevant United Nations agencies should expand, as appropriate, the use of audio-visual methods, especially in rural areas in mobile units, by producing television and radio programmes for developing countries, involving local participation, employing interactive multimedia methods and integrating advanced methods with folk media;
(g) Countries should promote… environmentally sound leisure and tourism activities… making suitable use of museums, heritage sites, zoos, botanical gardens, national parks…”
So, it should be pretty clear that there is a huge re-education program happening to all countries, the aim of which is to change people’s attitudes toward believing in “sustainable development” and environmental education. If it’s picking up litter, some other innocuous program, fine; spend trillions without taking a vote to make sure we all think alike. Stupid but harmless. On the other hand, what if, what IF, it’s something we DON’T all agree upon? There are hundreds of countries. Even if it were just up to China* vs. the U.S. to define “sustainable behavior” how would we ever agree? Paper or plastic? Paper wastes trees; plastic creates landfills. These “green-defining” issues are endless.
But the problem, in a nutshell, is simply: Whose version of “sustainable” do you want to re-educate everyone to believe –assuming that you can accept massive-scale propagandizing for the promotion of one single belief system, under which people didn’t get a representative vote)