“Of all the views of this law [for public education], none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe as they are the ultimate guardians of their own liberty.”
Thomas Jefferson
Notes on the State of Viriginia
I am not really sure why I felt the need to quote Jefferson. Quoting Jefferson is something of a futile attempt to revive the passion for liberty that so defined the founding of our nation. And this quote in particular, expressing Jefferson’s hope in public education as a defense mechanism against tyranny, came to mind yesterday while I was observing some freshman at The Ohio State University study for their Biology exam.
They were frantically preparing for their final exam – it was a scene that truly encapsulated a college experience: pale faces, white knuckles, loads of coffee, textbooks, and notes stacked sky-high. And of course, the laptop.
This time, however, the students were watching an online video entitled The Story of Stuff. The 20-minute video discusses a number of things from the evil corporations manipulating our militaristic government, how big-box stores dump waste on third world countries , how capitalists are conspiring to deplete our natural resources for some sort of monetary gain and how massive consumerism has led to an endless cycle of working, buying and depression.
To me, it seemed like the video was more propaganda and less science. Nevertheless, my tenacity got the best of me and I decided to do some research on the video. The writer and narrator, Annie Leonard, is a veteran of GAIA (Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives), Health Care Without Harm, Essential Action and Greenpeace International. According the website, “Annie is fiercely dedicated to reclaiming and transforming our industrial and economic systems so they serve, rather than undermine, ecological sustainability and social equity.” I was right: the goal is to reshape and reform our system into a new system, effectively a new world order.
What Leonard is attempting to do is use environmentalism as a mask for growing statism. So who funded this?
The two largest donors were The Tides Foundation and The Funders Workgroup for Sustainable Production and Consumption. I investigated the Tides Foundation and found that their donors include both The Heinz Foundation (headed by the wife of Massachusetts Senator John Kerry) and the Soros Foundations Network (headed by the infamous uber-liberal George Soros).
The video that those Ohio State students were assigned by their professor is directly linked to Soros, Kerry, The Tides Foundation and Greenpeace—all closely associated with the progressive agenda. The bias is not exclusive to that Ohio State biology class. According to the website the video has over 6 million views.
In Ralph Nader’s words “Ann Leonard’s film the ‘Story of Stuff’ is a model of clarity and motivation” for over 6 million viewers to fight against free-enterprise, against business and against innovation. Note how this video is a complete reversal of Jefferson’s quip: the Biology class is not rendering students as “guardians of their own liberty” but as victims to an ever growing state.
The citizens of Ohio should respond to this disturbing development by making sure that their students are not being indoctrinated in the classroom.
To watch Leonard’s video visit:
www.storyofstuff.com
For more information of the relationship between environmentalism and statism visit:
http://cei.org/pdf/4507.pdf
[...] Indoctrination 101 Posted by: Charles Couger | July 10, 2009 [...]