If the country is going to have a New World Order population, which is what President Bush's open invitation to mass Third World immigration will create, it ought also to have a New World Order educational system, which the administration is in the process of setting up.

Last week the Washington Times reported just how the Bush administration is pushing a United Nations-designed program for a "culturally neutral" "universal curriculum" for teaching what the Times calls "global citizenship, peace studies and equality of world cultures." [Learning globally, By George Archibald, January 18, 2004]

The program is called the International Baccalaureate program for middle schools, and the U.S. Education Department under Secretary Rod Paige is already funding it.

The department has issued its first $1.2 million grant to implement the program for "feeder schools" in low-income school districts.

Mr. Paige defends the program faithfully:

"We are ever mindful of the lessons of September 11, one of which is that all future measures of a rigorous K-12 education must include a solid grounding in other cultures, other languages and other histories," Mr. Paige said last year when he announced the new globo-education programs. "In other words, we need to put the 'world' back into 'world-class' education."

Actually, we don't. If September 11 taught us anything, it was that other cultures need to learn something about ours, not the other way around, which is what Mr. Paige says.

But aside from that minor point, there are lots of other things wrong with what the Bush crowd is doing.

The Washington Times story quotes a document describing the goals of the program as being to teach "a set of culturally neutral universal values to which all people aspire," based on human rights, equality of the sexes and "open-mindedness to change and obligation to environmental protection and sustainable development." The program started with UNESCO in 1996, and its director in Geneva described it last June as what the Times calls "committed to changing children's values so they think globally, rather than in parochial national terms from their own country's viewpoint."

"International education offers people a state of mind; international-mindedness," he wrote in a recent background paper on the program. "Education weaves together the threads of peace," and "We need an education that recognizes the realities of the 21st century. We're living on a planet that is becoming exhausted. People everywhere aspire to the standards of living that people in the West take for granted, and at the same time, they want to maintain cultural differences that they feel make life worth living."

The curriculum is an obvious effort to strip what are called "cultural particularities" out of the school curriculum and therefore out of the minds of those unfortunate enough to be educated in it.

More precisely, it's a transparent attempt to destroy the unique Western and American cultural legacies by wiping the mental slates of its young subjects clean—and to replace Western and American culture with what its architects imagine is "universal" and "culture-neutral" content.

The curriculum is also pretty obviously founded on a major fallacy—that there is such a beast at all as "culture-neutral" or "universal" content.

The truth is that all the values and ideas the "culture-neutral" curriculum jabbers about are themselves of Western origin—the ideals of "peace," and "end to war," "tolerance," "open-mindedness to change," and the need for environmental protection.

In so far as such beliefs exist outside the West, it's because Western countries have exported them.

But most of these ideals flourish in the West at all because of the cultural framework in which they arose. Strip away that framework, which is what traditional education tries to conserve and pass on, and you'll probably wind up losing the ideals (though not all of them are worth keeping anyway).

The anti-Western and anti-American flaws of this foolish and destructive program ought to be clear enough, but what is not so clear is why the Bush administration is embracing it and pushing it at all.

It's not as much of a mystery as it may seem, since the administration is guided by its own intellectual goop of "compassionate conservatism," which merely repackages liberalism as conservatism, and by the transnationalism the president's father immortalized in the phrase "New World Order" after the 1991 Iraq war.

In the New World Order, there will be neither national sovereignty nor national identity, and just as the population of the nation is to be replaced by Third World immigrants, so the culture of the nation is to be replaced by one suitable only for rootless and deracinated people—a people that can be deluded that what it is told to think and believe is really "universal" and "culture-neutral" because it has long since ceased to have any real culture of its own.

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[Sam Francis [email him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection of his columns, America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available from Americans For Immigration Control. Click here for Sam Francis' website. Click here to order his monograph, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future and here for Glynn Custred's review.]