As another example of the show’s forward thinking, Davis said, the new Sesame Street season that begins next week will introduce children to the basic ideas of sustainable living.  “It’s a curriculum about nature and caring for the world that is just right for today,” he said.  ”This show continues to stay very current with ideas that are in the zeitgeist.”

Sustainability.  Makes you feel smart just reading that word, doesn’t it?  Who doesn’t want sustainability?  This is a great new tactic of the Left; the raping of our language and the use of beautiful sounding, unassailable words to represent an agenda with far more controversial ideas.  Sustainability.

Sustainability is not just about putting your empty beer bottles into a special bin to keep them separate from your other trash.  It’s also more than driving a car with a giant battery in it (which will eventually poison our water system after all of these “Hybrids” end up in a landfill… didn’t think about THAT, did you Mr. Begley?).   It’s also more than building giant solar panels which require preciously scarce water to stay constantly clean and efficient or giant windmills which end up killing endangered birds.  No, sustainability is not any of those ineffective yet relatively benign efforts at “saving our planet.” Sustainability, as a National policy, is the most regressive and dangerous idea the Green-Left has ever put forth.  Sustainability is the death of the West’s economic dominance.

Spend just ten minutes reading up on the various aspects of sustainability, sustainable living, sustainability and de-growth, sustainability and population control… These concepts all start with the same basic premise:  We humans, are the problem.  There are too many of us, we are exploiting the earth’s resources… If we don’t radically change how we live, the earth will not be able to sustain us.

And now, it’s the new concept being pushed on our kids through those fuzzy little monsters on Sesame Street.  We’ll be watching to see how this philosophy manifests itself and what little green seeds will be planted into the fertile minds of our pre-schoolers who were placed in front of the show by their parents hoping they’d get a head-start in phonics and counting.

Radical environmentalism, demonization of capitalism and corporations, social justice through environmental security… these issues, of course, will not be part of Elmo’s World…  But, as PBS Ombudsman Michael Gelter said last week about Sesame Street’s Fox News parody:

I don’t know what was in the head of the producers, but my guess is that this was one of those parodies that was too good to resist. But it should have been resisted.

Let’s hope that radical environmentalism doesn’t turn out to be one of those ideas that the producers find “too hard to resist.”

Addendum:  You think I’m exaggerating about this whole “Sustainability” message to our kids and how it will affect our economy?  Take a look at the blog page that is associated with the National Geographic / Sesame Street article.  They suggest that instead of buying a new Halloween costume, kids should swap old costumes with their friends.  What kid of insignificant impact on our environment would such a move make?  But, ask the poor guy who owns the Halloween costume shop in your town… what kind of impact will it have on him?

Good questions, Mr. President.

Our posterity

One answer is that those American heroes certainly did not sacrifice their all to secure the Blessings of Liberty for self-interested public school employees to recruit, re-educate, politicize and socially transform our Posterity — American school children — into “Global Citizens” that campaign in the name of environmental “Sustainability.” 

People familiar with modern public education should be well aware by now that one of the ‘Re-Thinking’ pursuits in K-12 school districts these days is the values inculcation of belief systems that sustain “global citizenship.”

This political mission is commonly advocated while suppressing and/or demonizing varying, skeptical viewpoints — to which students are lawfully and ethically entitled under national and statewide academic freedom codes and regulations. 

Global citizenship is a postmodernist incarnation of Cosmopolitanism and “world citizenship,” one of a number of controversial political causes for which William Carr’s National Education Association advocated in the 1950s – back when the NEA began promoting the notion that the United Nations was the only hope of mankind.

Mr. Carr once wrote: “Teach those attitudes which will result, ultimately in the creation of a world citizenship and world government.”

Sustainability a.k.a., “sustainable development” crystallized in the United Nation’s Brundtland Report. It states, in part:

‘Sustainable development’ is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”; “An additional person in an industrial country consumes far more and places far greater pressure on natural resources than an additional person in the Third World” and “in the final analysis, sustainable development must rest on political will.

DE-GROWTHERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

Wither General Motors and the incandescent light bulb…

Of course, acknowledgement of natural resource conservation and humanity’s place in ecological systems is an important aspect of elementary education.

But, the administration of dis-informational, faith-based political values systems (in the name of ‘science’) — to the exclusion of scientific method’s required skepticism and educational ethics’ practice of varying viewpoints — is, at the very least, unprofessional and deserving of vigilant critical scrutiny.

Statist canon like “social justice,” “global citizenship,” environmental “sustainability” and “multicultural education” are now pervasive in American schools, but are not sustaining captive young minds.

Parents, not educators, have the right to decide values, articles of faith and creeds for their children. Of course, children are free to make up their own minds whether to accept them over time. But it is not the job of public servant educators to undermine or contradict parents. That would be hostile.

Students do not attend public school so that teachers can make them hate American culture, society and their own species; that the human race is some kind of dangerous animal that must be culled by Planned Parenthood, or world government.                       

It’s bad enough when what they teach is false. They also lay extreme guilt trips on children that make them question whether they are killing our species and planet.

Such mind-numbing is a hostile act intended to brown/blackout common sense, faith, familial bonds, logic and reason from ‘green’ minds.

Wither ‘question authority’ and ‘dissent is patriotic’?

Small wonder charter and home-schooling are now such successful growth industries nationwide (against which – surprise! – the NEA et al. politically oppose funding).

Teach your children well…

How to impact positive change?

The same as one would were a public school or teacher discovered proselytizing religious scripture on the taxpayers’ dime.

Teach yourself well, as well.

Investigate and de-code these politically (not educationally) charged buzzwords and creeds, and specifically how they are being unprofessionally, unethically, even unlawfully propagated in your community’s public education system.

Access and read your local school district’s policies and state education codes and regulations concerning controversial issues, educational ethics, political neutrality and academic freedom.

Lodge formal complaints where appropriate. Follow-up in writing with your superintendent and school board when your district’s mission plan and/or teachers enact similar bullying as previously reported here, here, and here.

Unless of course you feel that America’s students – our Posterity – should not be burdened with varying viewpoints in public school, and that ‘this is one that’s no longer a debate.’

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.” – Gen. George S. Patton

Lexicon:

Global Citizenship

Sustainability

World Citizenship

Social Justice

Multicultural Education

Academic Freedom

Pass it on…

UPDATE: My thanks to reader/writer Ashley Thorne for calling my attention to these two articles on ”Sustainatopia”:

http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?doc_id=697 
http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?doc_id=787