Remember when distressed Tea Partiers and right-wingers claimed that President Obama’s 2009 televised speech to the nation’s school kids was an attempt at “indoctrination?”
Well, a Tea Party group in Florida certainly appears to be making its best effort to program kids as young as eight in the ways of true conservatism.
According to the St. Petersburg Times, a group known as the Tampa 912 Project will offer a week-long summer camp on subjects such as “America is good,” “I believe in God,” and “I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.”
This is no joke.
It’s kind of like a Bible study group, except they teach kids to be selfish, rather than teaching them Jesus’ message of helping the least among us.
Organized by conservative writer Jeff Lukens and staffed by volunteers from the 912 Project, the “Tampa Liberty School” will meet every morning July 11-15 at a Christian school building, with kids age 8-12 in attendance.
The so-called curriculum has kind of a creepy, fascist feel to it.
Based on the Times’ report, here’s a couple of the lesson plans:
* Children will win hard, wrapped candies to use as currency for a store, symbolizing the gold standard. On the second day, the “banker” will issue paper money instead. Over time, students will realize their paper money buys less and less, while the candies retain their value.
* Kids will start out in an austere room symbolizing Europe, where they are made to sit quietly. The children will pass through an obstacle course to arrive at a brightly decorated party room (the New World). Red-white-and-blue confetti will be thrown. But afterward the kids will have to clean up the confetti, learning that with freedom comes responsibility.
* Still another example: Children will blow bubbles from a single container of soapy water, and then pop each others’ bubbles with squirt guns in an arrangement that mimics socialism. They are to count how many bubbles they pop. Then they will work with individual bottles of solution and pop their own bubbles. “What they will find out is that you can do a lot more with individual freedom,” Lukens said.
I frankly don’t see the connection between shooting bubbles and wanting the government to run our companies and factories. But it does seem like Lukens hopes to make 8 year olds embrace the gold standard, mock Europe, link patriotism with religiosity, hate the U.S. government, and rebel against paying taxes.
“We want to impart to our children what our nation is about,” Lukens said, “and what they may or may not be told.”
When that lesson is “imparted” on third graders, isn’t that kind of like “indoctrination?”
