HP: Our guest for this broadcast is Mrs Peg Luksik, chairman of the National Parents' Commission, host of her own television programme on N.E.T., the political talk and news network, and a lady who has run some outstanding races for governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Mrs Luksik is married with 6 children and has become nationally recognised as an expert on the key education issues facing our nation and a strong proponent for the rights of parents with respect to the education of their children.
HP: Peg, how did you get involved in the education issue?
PL: Well, I am a certified teacher in the state of Pennsylvania. My children range in age from 14 to 2. So I'm involved both personally and professionally in what's happening in education. Pennsylvania was one of the very first states that began to look at the total restructuring picture. I got a copy of the regs, read them, thought…
HP: You say the total restructuring picture. Do you mean policies emanating in Washington and coming into the states?
PL: At the time we were told that each state, that Pennsylvania was doing it all by itself and that this was coming right from our state. We later found out that the policies were being directed from Washington and that all 50 states were doing the same restructuring yet all of the citizens in all those different states were being told 'oh no…this has nothing to do with anything that's happening anywhere else'.
HP: What were the general themes of the restructuring?
PL: It changed education from traditional education which was academically content based where you earned Carnegie credit units to what's called Outcome Based Education where the state sets the graduation requirements in terms of the attitudes, the skills and the knowledge that the state says every single child has to demonstrate to the state's standard. That fundamentally shifted education and became a mandate from the state to the child. It also turned the mission of public education. Instead of education being for your benefit, the purpose of public schools now became to create a work force. And so we saw the Goals 2000, we saw the Approving America Schools Act and then we saw the School to Work initiative, all happening from the federal level, making money available to the states if they bought into the programme and revamped their schools.
HP: Who started this? Is this Hilary Clinton's idea, or did it begin elsewhere?
PL: It began way before her. If you trace the national goals of education…we can trace them back to 1989. President Bush wanted to be the Education President. The governors had a conference. The first one was in Virginia in early '89 and then in November in which at …Kansas … had a conference just on education talking about the national goals, and they were met by experts from across the country. One of them, Shirley McCune who was the senior director of the Mid-Continent Educational Research Lab., said: we're really talking about restructuring society and so we have to be honest about that, that we're just not talking about changing a little bit what's happening in the classrooms, we're talking about a fundamental restructuring of society with schools really being the wedge.
HP: Well where do they get the authority to do this? There is nothing in the United States constitution which authorises the federal government to be in education and …. we're supposed to have a tenth amendment which says that the powers are not explicitly delegated to the federal government and reserved to the states through the people. By what claim has the federal government moved into these areas?
PL: Well, they just did, and they said it was in the common good, it was in the common interest, and we're going to make money available and so they said well the programmes are really voluntary, because you don't have to apply for the money, but all the states become …pigs at the trough.
HP: So that was their excuse for getting around the constitutional issue and in effect the states invariably sold their constitutional heritage for a …… federal potage.
PL: Yes, for the dollars.
HP: And the best way for states to preserve their independence and the authority of the parents within the state is to say no to the federal money. Just say no.
PL: Right, only that becomes very difficult, because for example the state of Montana did say no, so individual school districts went to the federal government anyway. Virginia, the same kind of thing happened.
HP: So the government can bypass state authority.
PL: They are bypassing state authority.
PL: In Alabama, the state of Alabama applied for and received Goals 2000 money and Governor James was educated on what was really happening said: this isn't a good idea. I'm going to stop. I'm going to give the money back and I'm going to stop. And secretary Rily, US Secretary of education Rily wrote to the governor saying sorry, the department of education has to tell us to stop. You can't pull the state out of this programme.
HP: You mean the state department of education, which was not under the authority of the governor.
PL: The secretary is separately elected in Alabama. But it's still a department under the auspices of the chief executive officer of the state but they told them well you just can't get out so then you have a power struggle between the state and the federal government structure and how far does the governor go? We haven't had governors that have really gone far enough.
HP: Now, some of these names sound pretty good. Outcome Based Education carries the connotation that you want good outcomes, that you want to improve the quality of education. School to Work implies that young people are being prepared for careers at a time when jobs can be scarce, and everyone is taught from an early age how important it is to have goals and 2000 is a nice round number. What's wrong with these?
PL: Don't they sound wonderful…
HP: Yeah what's wrong with it?
PL: Let's take Outcome Based Education. The state isn't measuring outcomes, they're mandating outcomes. The state is not telling schools to teach things, they're saying to the children you have to demonstrate what we say. I did a debate in Washington a number of years ago and my opponent said ooh Mrs Luksik you are just such a radical, these are goals everybody agrees with. Don't you want all students to learn that democracy is better than totalitarianism and I said no and the audience went….ooohhhh. I said I want all schools to teach it, but once I mandate that a child believe it I have totalitarianism. That's Outcome Based Education. It doesn't say I am going to teach you it says that you have to believe and then show ….
HP: In other words the federal government has created a mould and they want to take our children, whatever their shape, whatever the direction we would assign them, and cut them and paste them and rearrange them so… they fit into their mould.
PL: Right. Right.
HP: How do they do it? What are some of the details?
PL: If you look at the outcomes across all the states, and…. frankly the federal government will say, and Mrs Clinton for example travelled the country saying, the federal government can't do that, that's silly. States submit plans and the plans have to be approved. Well the plans include your outcomes, so if the secretary isn't happy with your plan he can turn the plan down and in fact states like Oregon and Pennsylvania and others have had to have their plan revised to be able to be approved to get the money. When we look across the country at the outcomes we don't see literacy. We see: students will come to appreciate the history and nature of prejudice. That's being interpreted in Grove City Pennsylvania with a curriculum on cultural relativity where all cultures have to be interpreted internally. There's nothing right or wrong, so… if a nomadic culture wants to leave sick people or elderly people along the road that's a very practical thing to do.
HP: They taught people that in some societies cannibalism has to be respected because it's the prevailing culture, respected to the extent that it should be approved, not merely understood.
PL: And there's a difference between understanding that that's what somebody else did and then saying well, we can't say that's a bad thing to do. The 7th graders in Grove City were given a story ..among others but this particular one about how Eskimos killed a man because he wouldn't sleep with an Eskimo's wife. That was the hospitality offered and the white man said no really so they killed the white man and it was the white man's fault you see because he should have gone with the, you know, when in Rome. What a thing to tell children, what a thing to bring into children…
PL: We have outcomes that talk about using prejudice or using discrimination. For example in the state of Oregon even the preschools have been told by the state if you do a unit on families you must include gay and lesbian families because it would be discrimination if you divided them up so, …if you show pictures, two mummies, two daddies, mummy and daddy. They're all equal. Well that's fundamentally restructuring society and… invading a child's thinking and a child's attitudes.
In Kentucky the valued outcome talks about effective use of community resources. The children are required to go into drug stores and buy condoms. They are required to visit birth control clinics to get pills and then they have to do a report on would you buy your condoms here or would you get your pills at this clinic, and have it signed off so they can't even fake it, they have to be there. Well that's again invading what would be a parents' territory. We have citizenship outcomes that the children will demonstrate citizenship. In Pennsylvania and I believe in Maine we have children who have been denied graduation because they didn't do compulsory volunteer service hours.
Now, a compulsory volunteer is a slave yet these children were denied graduation.
HP: The 13th amendment prohibited that.
PL: The parents filed suit. They lost. They lost.
PL: Well that raises a very good question. If you are a parent, one not nearly so experienced and skilled as Mrs Peg Luksik, what can be done?
HP: The first thing we always tell parents to do is to be nosey. Go in and ask to see everything and don't take no for an answer. Ask and ask in writing and ask in front of a witness. One mother that I know went in and said I wanted to see …whatever …and the school official said well you can't see that. And she took a piece of paper out of her purse, she laid it on the table, and she wrote 'On this date'… she wrote the date…'Mrs so.and so refused to give me access to…..…' , she signed her name, she turned around and said would you sign this and the worker said, 'I won't sign that'. She had a friend with her and she turned around and said 'the worker refused to sign this' witnessed by … and her friend signed it. She had the information in ten minutes because she documented it in writing.
HP: So in other words the parents have to have the confidence to be assertive...
PL: You do.
HP: And that confidence has to arise from the knowledge that the children are theirs.
PL: Right.
HP: Not the teachers', not the bureaucrats', not the federal government's.
PL: That's exactly right.
PL: The second thing you need to do is read. You know…don't just read... if you’re child…. for example let's say it’s Social Studies…don’t read the lesson they’re having tonight only…Sit down at the beginning of the year and read the book. Now does that mean you have to read every single word? No, but you're an adult. You should be able to skim a third grade social studies book or even an eighth grade social studies book in a night or two. Tell your child: bring it home I want to see it because it's too late when they come home on Tuesday and say 'we had…' for you to fix it. But if you've read the book ahead of time and you know that chapter 8 in that book is going to deal with whatever it is and you're not too happy with that you can plan ahead. Either you can write a note and say: well when are you teaching chapter 8, I want my child excused from chapter 8. You can prepare your child for chapter 8 and get them ready for what's going to be there and teach them your point of view. You can demand an alternate curriculum for chapter 8 or perhaps you can go in and work with the district to have them not do chapter 8 but first you have to know that chapter 8 is there and it's better to know it in September than in March when they taught chapter 8 yesterday. So we always tell people: work ahead. Look at what's coming and be prepared for it so you know before the fact and you can get yourself and your child ready. It's too late after they've already seen it and they've been exposed to it.
HP: Now, you ran twice for governor of Pennsylvania. You almost won the Republican nomination in 1990, and in 1994 your showing was an historic strength. You got the largest vote of any non-major party candidate for governor in more than 100 years. If you were ever to be elected governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania what could you do about this?
PL: Well the governor has a lot of power in Pennsylvania. First of all the department of education is part of the Executive Branch in Pennsylvania and the governor has purse string power in our state, not just to zero out money but to reduce funding. The Governor can require that budgets be submitted in a form that make all of those little programmes separate line items so that they can be pulled out and zeroed out or changed. The governor can set policies in place saying that there will be no programme in the state implemented without validated research made publicly available before implementation. Not some superintendent or government official saying 'trust me …..'. You show me where this works and what happened to the children and …how much did this cost. The governor can restore to school districts the local control that they need to run their district at the local level and say we are not going to be required to submit strategic plans.
HP:….When we come back we will talk about the sex-training of your children in the government schools.
BREAK
HP: ……Thank you for telling us how much a governor can do to restore the rights of parents with respect to education. But I'd like to go into more detail on what's wrong with some of these programmes. For example, there's a programme called DARE which relates to drug awareness and Bill Clinton brags about what a wonderful programme this is. School-to-Work sounds pretty good to many people. What's wrong with these programmes?
PL: You know, the DARE programme has a lot of police support, it's had a lot of money funnelled into it, yet the research isn't coming up.
HP: What does DARE stand for? What is it supposed to do?
PL: You know I don't remember what the letters stand for off the top of my head….
……
PL: The police do it…they come in and teach. But again it's the whole idea you have to make a decision, we're going to build your self esteem, and we're going to help you be able to make a decision. Well, putting children through the decision making process and telling them that the process of deciding is more important than what the decision was is not an effective way to deal with programmes where you definitely want them to decide a particular way. I mean we're not talking about chocolate and vanilla ice-cream. We're talking about something that can really change your life and so the research is telling us that children going through the programme are not likely to do less drugs. It is not an effective programme.
HP: The problem with drug training and sex training in the schools is that it's presented to young people as if it were a matter of discretion. They say on the one hand there is an 11th commandment thou shalt not smoke tobacco, marijuana may be a little bit different, may be that's ok, decide against the drugs and thou shalt only have sex in certain circumstances etc., instead of saying 'thou shalt not', and when they do offer reasons for avoiding drugs or extramarital sex, the reasons are always pragmatic rather than moral, and if the reason why you're not supposed to engage in adultery or premarital sex is because that's what god instructs but if you simply approach it from the stand point of well there are bad consequences then people think it's ok if you can avoid those bad consequences.
PL: Well not only do they just say well there are bad consequences they say this is how you avoid the bad consequences. We'd prefer you don't but if you do, here's something that might make the bad consequences not so bad.
HP: The government shouldn't be in these programmes at all in the area of sex-training because even the best of them offend against the modesty and the privacy of the individual student.
PL: Oh absolutely.
HP: And it's an area that simply ought not be invaded by the government at minimum and ought not be invaded otherwise as well and one of the reasons our society has lost its innocence is that we don't respect the virtue in innocence, of people who are virtuous and innocent, and we degrade young people through these programmes. In your state of Pennsylvania there's the horrible example of that young girl who was put through the most kind of humiliating and embarrassing exam. Why don't you …
PL: Well actually there were several, there were more than one. It was in the East Stroudsburg school district. The district sent home at the end of 5th grade notices saying …you know you have to have a physical for 6th grade and mum and dad you can have a physical and send it in from the doctor. If we don't hear from you by November such and such the school will do the physical unless you tell us now. Well some parents did physicals and some parents didn't.
HP: So it's called opt out whereas the real answer is opt in.
PL: Right. Right.
HP: Maybe that's another subject.
PL: So the school then decided that they were going to do physicals. There was no advance notice sent home that on this date the physical was going to be given. The little girls were brought ten at a time down to the nurse's office. They were stripped to their underwear and left sitting in a waiting room and then one by one pulled into the nurses office where they were laid on a table with no sheet no nothing and given a genital examination with touching by …a female doctor. The little girls in the waiting room heard… one by one pulled in and…..they didn't know what was happening…the one inside they could hear 'no I don't want to' crying… the little girls asked to call their mother…they were…. forbidden to call their parents. At one point some of the little girls reported that the nurse locked the door and wouldn't let them leave. The little girls came home crying, upset; one little girl went into the shower and wouldn't come out for like a half an hour. They responded as if they had been violated because they had been violated….
HP: Thanks to your friendly government.
PL: Right. There are about 50 little girls involved and every single set of parents as far as we know showed up to complain…The district's first response was to say they were looking for signs of sexual abuse. Now wait a minute, you don't get to assume sexual abuse…
HP: By performing it.
PL: By performing it. And remember… this is the same district that says 'good touch bad touch'. There are parts of your body typically covered by your underwear that are private and if you say no, no-one has the right to touch that over your discretion
HP: Unless they work for the government.
PL: And the district did to them exactly what they said. So talk about breaking down. Now there are several law suits in progress over the case. A variety of the parents have sued and there are some lawsuits in progress. The district's response was to say that it was perfectly ok and perfectly fine and this was their policy and that they had the absolute right to do this and that the parents were the problem in this picture. The parents were the ones who over reacted. The parents were the ones. What also surfaced was that some of those little girls had had private physicals and had turned them in and… they said I already had a physical, I shouldn't be here at all and they said well we lost your paper we're doing it to you anyway.
HP: And of course another of the other horrendous things is that in some of the sex training programmes and that's what sex education is, it's sex training, it doesn't prepare people for modesty, it doesn't prepare people for chastity, it doesn't prepare people for godly behaviour. It trains them to avoid sex, …err, to engage in sex. The goal of the programme is not to preserve virtue, it's to prevent the birth of children, either by contraception or by abortion. And in the course of training people toward this government-mandated objective which is in basic conflict of the religious values of I would hope most Americans, they have gone so far as to actively encourage young people to engage in every conceivable form of sexual conduct short of actual penetration…..
PL: Right. Well first of all that's not reality, because you know it's like gunning the motor but saying 'now don't take the car anywhere.' It's not real, kids won't do that. But second of all it works negatively in two directions. Sometimes Christian parents have a tendency to say...'well my children are very strong, so they can withstand this'. First of all that's not really accurate, because they're children. But some children will give in to the temptation and engage in behaviours that will harm them. All children in these programmes are subjected to information, materials and suggestions that will titillate, that are designed to arouse certain passions and certain feelings. Children who come from strongly religious backgrounds, the only way they can survive it is to suppress what was supposed to be normal natural healthy feelings that are being evoked unnaturally. Well then later in life they have the opposite problem, where they have such a history of suppressing feelings now they have a problem letting them out. So it hurts in both directions.
HP: Well one could certainly argue that sending a child to a government school is a form of child abuse and that's why so many parents are now deciding to teach their children at home or to send them to parochial schools or protestant schools or other forms of private education where there is a larger measure of parental control of what is taught and where the teachers are more nearly accountable to what the parents want….
PL: What used to be a trickle is now a flood. You know, in Pennsylvania the home school population has gone from around 3,000 students to over 13,000 students in less than a 5 year period. So we are seeing an enormous burgeoning of parents saying 'not with my children you don't.'
HP: Of course if parents were not required through the tax system to subsidise these government education bureaucratic monopolies, very few people would chose to send their children to the kinds of schools that are now generally available in government buildings. Basically what we are doing is paying the mortgage on structures which now house some very bad ideas and some very flawed premises of education. I think…one of the things we need to do whenever there is a new bond issue for education, whenever there is a budget battle, we have to think twice as to whether or not we want to send any more money to these education bureaucrats.
PL: Well you know there is that old saying about before you can teach then …first of all you have to get its attention and voting no on some of these bonds issues will tend to make them ….pay attention to what it is that you’re saying…….
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