Be afraid
This is the scariest thing I’ve read in awhile, at least locally. Schoolgirls being gassed in Afghanistan is much scarier, but locally the Child Evangelism Fellowship is scary as hell. Good News Clubs are terrifying.
Remember the little girl who told her classmate that she was going to hell? Well that was a Good News Club at work.
Their teacher overheard the increasingly heated exchange. When class resumed, she asked everyone to pay attention. People from different religious backgrounds, she explained, have very different perspectives on certain kinds of issues. Emma, feeling good that she had stood her ground, seemed content with the result. But Ashley was crushed. “You mean they lied to me right here in school?!” she began to cry. “Because that’s what they taught me here! How can they lie?”
Because they aren’t actually part of the school but they seem to be, thus giving small children the impression that they are Teachers telling The Truth.
Because the Good News Club seeks to reach children who in many cases are not old enough to read, a centerpiece of its program is the “wordless book,” a simple picture book intended to convey different Evangelical doctrines…The Good News Club aims to use afterschool facilities as soon as possible after the bell rings. Aside from adding to the convenience for students and parents, this maximizes the possibility of contact with non-participating students. It also has the effect of making it difficult for very young children to distinguish between the Good News Club and the other classes they take in school.
And that’s not just a by-product, it’s part of the point.
The club’s best promoters, as the CEF well understands, are the children themselves. Participating students are instructed to invite their classmates to join the group, and prizes are often given to those who succeed. The group’s focus, indeed, is concentrated on the “un-churched” children more than it is on those already in the fold. “If every public elementary school student in the United Sates could join a Good News Club,” the CEF Web site states, “we could revolutionize our culture in one generation!” In short, the confusion Ashley evinced on the playground about just what her school was teaching her was no accident. It is built into the design of the Good News Club program. The average six-year-old cannot reliably distinguish between programs taught by his/her school and those taught in his/her school; and the CEF may be determined to make use of this fact in order to advance its religious aims.
Bad…but at least schools can say No, right? Parents can say No and the schools can say No. Right?
No.
In 2001, in Good News Club v. Milford Central School, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that to exclude the club on the grounds that it is a religious group is to discriminate against its particular religious viewpoint, in violation of 1st Amendment protections on the freedom of speech. The court also went out of its way to say that it could conceive of no basis for concern about a possible violation of the clause of the 1st Amendment that prohibits the establishment of religion. The author of the court’s majority opinion was Clarence Thomas. It is perhaps interesting to note, in that respect, that in a recent speech before a school group, Justice Thomas reminisced fondly about his own school days when he would see “a flag and a crucifix in each classroom.”
Fucking hell – where have I been? How did I not know about the Milford decision? What a nightmare…
“Milford is a bad decision,” a lawyer for Americans United for Separation of Church and State wrote to my husband. But it “is not going to be overturned right now. The lower courts will all follow it and the Supreme Court in its current configuration is not going to reverse itself on this issue.”
Help help.
Horrible. Although the cowboy movie music on the CEF site was a surprise. They are wranglers of children? Moving the herd to greener pastures?
I want to read more but the “Good New Club at work” link goes back to The Patriotic Vanguard Sierra Leone News Portal. Understandable, since your vision is probably affected by the rage and horror you’re experiencing.
This sounds like that church north of Seattle that was sending in volunteers to help teachers in the classroom and the lunchroom. Except sneakier because they are exploiting a well known developmental phenomenon – children are not hard to confuse. . .
One more group whose members will be surprised at their eventual well-deserved reward in the Rope and Burning Hell.
Maybe someone should use this Milford decision to set up a political propaganda programme at their local school.
I’m sure it wouldn’t take long for the Karl Marx Club to provoke a supreme court U-turn. Just imagine the wordless version of the Communist Manifesto – pictures of fat cats, toiling labourers, and of course the infamous Red Page.
Oops, will fix that link. Meanwhile it’s on the front page, in News – well it’s here
http://www.independent.com/news/2009/may/07/reading-writing-and-original-sin/
The Karl Marx thing won’t work, because it’s specifically religion that gets this extra protection – the free exercise clause, you see – though the Court did also cite free speech.
Considering the politics of most of the teachers, and certainly the teachers’ unions, I’d say that the Karl Marx Club is already well and truly ensconced in the schools.
eagle bomber, just because the education unions and curriculum groups are run by people stuck in Foucault 101, it doesn’t follow that they are Marxists. That might have been nearer to true 20 years ago.
Hm. While the evangelism-is-child-abuse schtick is flying, ‘teacher-education-is-child-abuse’ is the theme of this article I found on aldaily:
http://city-journal.org/2009/19_2_freirian-pedagogy.html
“You might expect the required readings for these struggling rookies to contain good practical tips on classroom management, say, or sensible advice on teaching reading to disadvantaged students. Instead, the one book that the fellows had to read in full was Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.
For anyone familiar with American schools of education, the choice wasn’t surprising. Since the publication of the English edition in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has achieved near-iconic status in America’s teacher-training programs… The odd thing is that Freire’s magnum opus isn’t, in the end, about education—certainly not the education of children. … instead, a utopian political tract calling for the overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless societies. Teachers who adopt its pernicious ideas risk harming their students—and ironically, their most disadvantaged students will suffer the most.”
e.b I think protection of teacher jobs is the main focus of the teachers unions,education marist or not comes a very poor second to that. The reason the union fights school choice so hard is because if they alowed real competition the schools would empty.
I’m sure a school could set a policy for extracurricular activities that would be enforceable – or that at least would not fall foul of existing judgements. A requirement that there be no conflict of fact with the content of the curriculum, say?
And, when these children grow up, will they then form the christian shock troops, who with Cardinal O’Connor, believe that “Atheists are not (fully) human” ??
Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet
Really scary.
I would be the first to argue that Schools of Education and Colleges of Education in the U.S. have a lot of useless baggage. For part of my career I was a faculty member in one of them and I’ll never rejoin those ranks. But the comments here are making huge general statements with tiny evidence. Since 1991 I have taught in four teacher preparation programs in two states. I have never used Freire in a teacher preparation program, and to my knowledge neither did anyone else.
The article you cite is about the reading material in an “alternative path to credential” program. These programs are usually the furthest from typical teacher preparation. Reports about what they use as reading matter should not be expected to reflect what other programs use, which may or may not be silly or worthless. In my experience those of us who work with teachers and students who want to be teachers have bigger things to worry about than whether or not Freire is read by our students.
Not to mention the fact that teachers’ unions and teacher ed are completely off topic.
“I’m sure a school could set a policy for extracurricular activities that would be enforceable – or that at least would not fall foul of existing judgements.”
What on earth makes you sure of that? The point about the Milford judgment is precisely that that is not the case.
Right-wing Christian groups have an explicit worked-out campaign to use the free exercise clause as a way to impose religion on public schools and other public arenas.
What if we replaced the Karl Marx Club with a Nazi Occult Club? They’d have to allow that under the Milford decision.
Would they? I don’t think so; not unless ‘Nazi Occult’ is a recognized religion, which I don’t think it is.
That’s one of many difficulties with free exercise jurisprudence of course: what prevents people from simply labeling whatevery they want to do ‘religion’ and thus getting a free pass? ‘Not much,’ is the answer – but I think in practice the established religions have a much easier time of it.
The free exercise clause is a nightmare.
Testing.
TESTING??? DON’T START ME ON TESTING!!!1!
;-)
:- )
Comments now working again via individual posts; Jeremy fixed it.
I really liked this post. Can I copy it to my site? Thank you in advance.