Beverly Eakman’s new book, Walking Targets, is a detailed and accurate description of the troubling
and dangerous state of education in contemporary United
States of America.
It used to be, until some 50 years ago, that the purpose of
American education was the teaching of knowledge and academic skills. Not
anymore. Today the purpose of education in the States is the “transformation”
(not education) of the child.
This new purpose of education in America
mirrors education as defined by the United Nations. In July of 2003, for
example, UNESCO, an arm of the UN, called for changing the world by utilizing
education as “the primary agent of transformation.” And how is “transformational
education” defined by UNESCO? It is
defined as changing the “values, behavior and lifestyle” of the child, not as
the teaching of knowledge and academic skills [p. 4 of the draft statement for
UNESCO’s “Decade of Education for Sustainable Development”].
Walking Targets
explains with precision and detail how transformational education is being
conducted in our land. The book is an anthology of Eakman’s most popular
articles, essays, and lectures. The selections are insightful, written in
clear, no-nonsense language, are easy to read and painfully accurate.
The first selection, “Blindsided By Education Leftists:
Republicans Assure Their Own Marginalization,” is one of the most important-and
refreshing-chapters in the book. In it Eakman argues that by supporting the leftward
agendas of Goals 2000 and No Child Left Behind, Republicans have ensured their
own destruction by supporting a system which requires that our children be
indoctrinated in the ideology of the hard left. Eakman shows how these radical
federal programs are calculated to produce the “global village idiots” as
described by Tom DeWeese in his endorsement of the book.
The obvious consequence of these leftist federal education
programs is ensuring that the prevailing worldview of America’s
up and coming voters will be hostile to the goals and principles of the
Republican Party (and the United States America). (For a detailed analysis of
how the federal hostile-takeovers of education carry out this radical agenda,
see my own America’s Schools: The
Battleground for Freedom, EdWatch, 2005, and Fed
Ed: The New Federal Curriculum and How It’s Enforced, EdWatch, 2002.)
Other chapters in the book describe: the excessive drugging
of our school children; brainwashing our children in the name of “mental health,”
with the stage set by very early universal “psychological screening”; defining
traditional values as being “mental disorders”; advocacy of moral relativism
under the guise of “moral neutrality”; and undermining the American Creed (as
in the statement by
Minnesota State Senator Steve Kelley, then-Chairman of the Senate Education
Committee, who said that it was an “historical error” to include the
Declaration of Independence as one of our founding documents).
Other topics described by Eakman include: constructivist
math (also called “reform math,” “postmodern math,” and “fuzzy math”) which
ensures that children so-schooled are not prepared for college-level math; the
replacement of Western civilization with the agenda of “multiculturalism”; the
advocacy of “tolerance” (gay rights); blatant Marxism; global warming mythology
and Earth First ! mentality (Pantheism)-all in the name of so-called “science.”
B. K. Eakman also describes how behavioral problems are now
defined as mental disorders to be treated by drugs and psychotherapists, not by
good structure and discipline. She additionally details how the privacy of our
students is increasingly being undermined and is subject to “data mining” that can
and will be used by transformational utopians to label, indoctrinate and
control these individuals throughout their lives.
What to do? Eakman has a number of concrete and useful
suggestions including “twenty questions” for so-called “education candidates.”
These questions are designed to smoke out the real agenda of these candidates.
Knowing what to do is actually not all that difficult.
Eakman’s answer is essentially a return to traditional education with its
clarity of purpose as being the transmission of knowledge and academic skills
and its insistence that the right methods are the methods that actually work in
accomplishing these objectives. (Noted education scholar E. D. Hirsch has come
to the same conclusion.) It should be fairly obvious that this is the only way
we can reverse the persistent 80 point decline in SAT scores that occurred in
the sixties and seventies when progressive education replaced traditional
education as the norm for education in America.
How important is this book? It is must-reading for all
Americans-including those committed to private, Christian and home education. Out
of ignorance or a desire to be “with it,” even some non-public schools are now adopting
the obscene curricula of the leftists, including the horrendously destructive
constructivist math.
Allen Quist, a professor of American Government at Bethany Lutheran College in Mankato, Minnesota, originally wrote this review for EdWatch.
