What's the Matter With Kids Today?

Does anyone remember that song from the movie "Bye-Bye Birdie"? Of course the children of that generation cannot even compare with what's going on today, but the same question applies "what's the matter with kids today?" Many parents believe, and recognize, that there is definitely something wrong, they are wondering why their children are not learning, money is pouring in (close to $11,000 is spent per student per year) yet the children continue to fail standardized tests. Many more cannot pass the standard entrance exams required by colleges. The Department of Education becomes more and more involved, mandating curriculum; yet the situation is getting worse instead of better. Perhaps if we look to history, we might find an answer! Perhaps this article written over twenty years ago can help define the turning point and why the downward spiral continues with each succeeding generation. Do you truly believe you have been educated? Perhaps indoctrinated would be a better word...

Phyllis Schlafly is author of the book "Child Abuse in the Classroom". She writes:
  "A remarkable real-life drama took place in seven American cities during March 1984. Hundreds of parents traveled to one of seven locations to testify at U.S. Department of Education Hearings on proposed regulations for the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment. More than 1,300 pages of testimony were recorded by court reporters as parents, public school teachers, and interested citizens spelled out their eye-witness accounts of the psychological abuse of children in the public schools.
  They related how classroom courses have confused schoolchildren about life, about standards of behavior, about moral choices, about religious loyalties, and about relationships with parents and with peers.
  These Hearings explain why we have 23 million adult illiterates who graduated from public schools, and why young people are experiencing high rates of teenage suicide, loneliness, premarital sex, and pregnancies. These Hearings explain how schools have alienated children from their parents, from traditional morality such as the Ten Commandments, and from our American heritage.
  These Hearings explain why children are emotionally and morally confused and why, in the apt colloquialism, they need to "search for their identity."
  These Hearings explain what children have been doing in their classrooms instead of learning to read, write, spell, add, subtract, and the essentials of history, geography, and civics.
  These Hearings explain how children learn in school to be "sexually active," take illegal drugs, repudiate their parents, and rationalize immoral and anti-social conduct when it "feels" good in a particular "situation."
  These Hearings speak with the thunderous voice of hundreds of parents who are angry at how their children have been emotionally, morally, and intellectually abused by psychological and behavioral experiments during classroom hours when the parents thought their children were being taught basic knowledge and skills. Parents are indignant at the way that educator "change agents," spending federal tax dollars, have used children as guinea pigs for fads and experiments that have been substituted for real learning."
  Schlafly draws attention to Senator S.I. Hayakawa's warning in 1978 that U.S. public schools had rejected the notion of education as the acquisition of knowledge and skills. Instead they practiced education as "therapy." Schools had replaced "cognitive education (which addresses the child's intellect, and teaches knowledge and skills) with affective education (which addresses the child's feelings and attitudes, and spends classroom time on psychological games and probing personal questionnaires)."

  Schlafy continues: ""Therapy" techniques used in the classroom include violent and disturbing books and films; materials dealing with parental conflict, death, drugs, mental illness, despair, and anger; literature that is mostly negative and depressing; requiring the child to engage in the role-playing of death, pregnancy, abortion, divorce, hate, anger and suicide; personal attitude surveys and games (such as Magic Circle) which invade the private thoughts of the child and his family; psychological games which force the child to decide who should be killed (such as the Survival Game); explicit and pornographic instruction in sex acts (legal and illegal, moral and immoral); and a deliberate attempt to make the child reject the values of his parents and his religion...

  The originators of "therapy" education began peddling their notions in the 1930s at about the same time that the teaching of reading started its steep decline. This psychological experimentation only existed in spots here and there around the country until 1965 when federal funding through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act began to finance curriculum and teacher training for the entire country...
  The reader might also wonder, why was there no media coverage of these seven days of Hearings involving intensely controversial issues, dramatic presentations by hundreds of concerned parents, and documented accounts of child abuse in the classroom?"
The full article can be found here.
Then I suggest you watch this video "Who Controls Our Children", a six part series from a PA town meeting with Peg Luksik, president of the National Parents Commission.
And then, look at your children's text's books.