Bill Gates Teams Up With UNESCO


Bill Gates Teams Up With UNESCO


Issues and Action in Education

An e-letter produced
by
EdWatch, a nonprofit organization.

December 2, 2005

        Standards, tests, and
accountability — they sound so good, but whose standards? Whose tests?
Accountability to whom? While Bill Clinton dismisses the out-of-date concept
of local control of education, the column below by Phyllis Schlafly
describes UNESCO (the UN education agency) and its efforts to influence U.S.
school curriculum. Look, for example, at UNESCO’s curriculum plans:

Declaration on the Decade for Education for Sustainable Development and its
adoption by the UN. The highly politicized curriculum of sustainable
development based on the Earth Charter is described in the EdWatch article,
“Sustainability

Defined.”

        Is UNESCO making headway? Look at

one curriculum UNESCO has developed. And there’s more to come under the
name “international standards.” “UNESCO’s efforts in the 1960s and 1970s to
influence U.S. school curriculum were unsuccessful. But now UNESCO has found
a sugar daddy,” states Schlafly below.

 

Bill Gates Teams Up
With UNESCO
 

Nov. 30, 2005 by Phyllis Schlafly
Read this column

online.

President Bill Clinton made a speech on January 22, 1997 to a suburban
Chicago audience so friendly that it interrupted him with applause 29 times.
One line in his speech, however, was greeted with stony silence: “We can no
longer hide behind our love of local control of the schools.”

Clinton is gone from the White House, but the federalization laws of his
Administration ­ Goals 2000, School-to-Work, and Workforce Investment ­ are
still in place. President George W. Bush, who says the federal government
has “a role to play in education,” has merely substituted labels more
comforting to Republicans: standards, tests, and accountability.

Now we find that the process is no longer just federalization; it’s
globalization. Who would have guessed that UNESCO (United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) would be positioning
itself to design curriculum for American schools?

President Reagan withdrew the United States from UNESCO on December 31, 1984
because it was corrupt, anti-Western, and a vehicle for far-left propaganda.
Unfortunately, President George W. Bush rejoined UNESCO in 2003.

UNESCO’s efforts in the 1960s and 1970s to influence U.S. school curriculum
were unsuccessful. But now UNESCO has found a sugar daddy.

On November 17, 2004 at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris, UNESCO signed a
26-page “Cooperation Agreement” with Microsoft Corporation to develop a
“master curriculum (Syllabus)” for teacher training in information
technologies based on standards, guidelines, benchmarks, and assessment
techniques. The Agreement states that the Syllabus will “form the basis for
deriving training content to be delivered to teachers,” and “UNESCO will
explore how to facilitate content development.”

Bill Gates initialed every page in his own handwriting. You can read the
Agreement at

www.eagleforum.org/links but Microsoft has fixed it so you can’t print
it out.

Following the signing of the Agreement, UNESCO Director General Koichiro
Matsuura explained it in a speech. One of its goals, he said, is “fostering
web-based communities of practice including content development and
worldwide curricula reflecting UNESCO values.” No doubt that is agreeable to
Bill Gates because the Agreement states that “Microsoft supports the
objectives of UNESCO as stipulated in UNESCO’s Constitution.”

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has helped to finance the National
Governors Association plan in Idaho to train students to work in the global
economy. Idaho is one of six states selected by the National Governors
Association for pilot projects.

The National Governors Report of December 2004 (when Virginia Governor Mark
Warner was chairman) makes clear that the purpose is to use the public
schools to build a planned economy. The report speaks approvingly of “using
schools to feed workers into selected corporations,” “identifying their
state’s key industries and needs for skilled workers in order to define a
common agenda between their workforce and economic development programs,”
“the integration of education, economic development, and workforce
development policies,” “seamless connections between the components of the
[education] system and with the skill demands of the workplace,” and
“connecting workforce development to economic needs.”

It’s hard to see any difference between the 2004 National Governors
Association plan and the earlier plans floated when Bill Clinton was
President. The plan uses a lot of mumbo-jumbo to change America from free
enterprise to a planned economy, and to turn public school students into a
compliant workforce for multinational corporations.

The new buzzwords are “career pathways,” “education pipeline,” “redesigning
high schools,” “smaller learning communities,” and “cluster-based economic
development strategies.” Recycled buzzwords from prior years include
“school-to-work,” “workforce development system reform,” “business-education
partnerships,” and “meaningful outcome measures.”

Six public hearings on the proposals were held in Idaho in October, and 500
people showed up at the Boise hearing. The reaction was overwhelmingly
negative from both parents and teachers.

The Idaho Board of Education announced this month that after receiving
“hundreds of comments,” it has made “modifications to Idaho’s plan to
redesign high schools and middle schools,” but those changes are minimal.
The original plan would have required all 6th-grade students to select their
learning plan for a specific career pathway and choose “career focused
electives” to enter the workforce.

Under the revised plan, students will have to do this only by the 8th grade.
But how many 8th graders do you know who can (or should) map out their
career pathway and narrow their education options to meet that single goal?

And what about the colossal conceit of the politicians and businessmen who
think they can predict the jobs that 8th graders can or will want to fill in
their future years? Planned economies are always a failure, and students
should be educated to reach their potential whatever it is.

For more information on school-to-work as
part of the planned economy, see “
STW is alive and well” by Michael Chapman, “


Senator lectures on educational complacency,”
from the

Naples

Sun Times, and Schlafly’s

“

Small Learning Communities: The New Face of School-to-Work.“

Ed
Watch
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