How was your education?

I recently stumbled across www.truthaboutib.com, which I think is a fascinating example of the single-mindedness that unfortunately seems to be increasing in present-day media. It's so unabashedly single-minded that I thought it was worth a mention.

The website, written somewhat anonymously by wealthy suburbanites from Upper St. Clair, PA, is essentially against the International Baccalaureate high school curriculum on the basis of it touting "anti-American" propaganda. Their tag-line is "IB's primary purpose is to promote globalism and turn our children into global citizens. TAIB'S primary purpose is to celebrate what it means to be American and to preserve freedom for our children and grandchildren."

The IB: shameless anti-America propaganda

The essence of the site is difficult to capture from any single quotation, but this one does the trick, I think. In response to Federal funding for disadvantaged schools to adopt the IB, the site claims that "school administrators believe this is "free" money that schools can use to further their new world order agenda. What they are really doing is enslaving the very children in their care to a future of unsustainable debt and anti-American indoctrination. "

What exactly is threatening? Let's see... they quote the IB's document, emphasizing "In the PYP [Primary Years Program], the attempt to define international-mindedness in increasingly clear terms, and the struggle to move closer to that ideal in practice, are central to the mission of PYP schools." The document continues outlining the importance of re-thinking to avoid bias. In response: "IBO's own document as a direct assault on our Constitutional and Judeo-Christian values must be deaf, dumb and blind."

Now the website does have certain valid points about cost, penetration, and recognition in the US marketplace, but most of the flames emerge from paragraphs of this America-before-the-world (or America is the world) type banter.

In one section, a student tries to argue for the importance of international understanding to the website's editor, to be told "Your [time] would have been better spent studying our Constitution and Declaration of Independence to better understand your rapidly disappearing rights as an American and what is really most valuable and worth fighting for."

I'm not trying to make a value judgement here. Probably the editor believes the greater truths of the world are contained in America's founding documents, and that's fine. But to actively seek to prevent others from knowledge, especially knowledge based on the present world's condition, seems pretty anti-freedom, which you might say is anti-American.

Stuff like this does tend to make me uncomfortable, and if you are sickened by closed mindedness, avoid visiting the website. (They've even got a whole page dedicated to pro-IB comments that they have shrugged off).