CSCOPE in Texas has come under fire lately for its lesson plans, curriculum and taxpayers unable to access the content of these plans/curriculum. An article recently was circulating about girls having to wear burqas in Texas classrooms as part of a CSCOPE lesson plan. From wnd.com:
...in Lumberton, Texas, this week, high school girls were made to wear burqas as part of a CSCOPE study of Islam.
One student quoted the teacher as saying, “We are going to work to change your perception of Islam.”
The teacher in the burqa lesson, according to a student, also said, “I do not necessarily agree with this, but I am supposed to teach you that we are not to call these people terrorists anymore, but freedom fighters.”
Critics argue that this should not be a teacher’s role, and are concerned that CSCOPE curriculum appears agenda-driven.
According to a student in the class, the lesson was to teach about the life of women in Islam. The burqa exercise focused on fashion and did not include the fact that in many Muslim communities, women who appear in public without a burqa face being beaten, imprisoned or murdered by family members, vigilante groups or even the state.
At the end of class, the students were assigned to write a paper about Egypt. According to one student, they were instructed to discuss “how Egypt was a good country until democracy took over, and that things were finally corrected when the Muslim Brotherhood came into power.”
Muslim women are portrayed as liberated in CSCOPE literature. In a lesson titled “Thinking About Sexuality” that utilizes a series of film clips, students are asked, “What do the women portrayed in these film clips think Islam teaches about sexuality? How are their thoughts similar or dissimilar to your own ideas about sexuality?”
Read more here.
Now let's see what's going on in Missouri. We don't have CSCOPE but we have IB curriculum in rural Camdenton, Missouri. What is IB teaching these students? From a Missouri citizen:
In Camdenton IB students are doing the same by the girls wearing burqas and reading books about Muslims and the ravages of our war on their society while money is being raised for the schools in Afghanistan.
From lakenewsonline.com:
Camdenton, Mo. -- Thanks to the collaborative efforts of students at Dogwood and Hawthorn Elementary schools, Camdenton High School, Camdenton R-III faculty and staff, and the entire community, the CHS International Baccalaureate (IB) students have raised $5,194.84 for Pennies for Peace. Pennies for Peace supports the construction of schools in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
IB students read a children’s book to the elementary students, played traditional Afghani games with the students, and constructed a mock school for the children to visit.
Read more here. Below is the accompanying photograph in the article. Why are the girls in Camdenton wearing burquas unless they are of the Islamic faith?
Can someone in Camdenton place their hands on the IB curriculum offered in this school and give us an idea of what is taught in Camdenton schools? It would be interesting to compare and contrast what CSCOPE teaches about Islam and what IB teaches their students about this faith and the role of women in Islamic society.
As an aside, maybe CSCOPE and IB would like to investigate the Pennies for Peace program and the controversy surrounding its founder. Maybe what these kids have been taught as truth is not entirely factual.
You might want to read this too: http://granitegrok.com/blog/2009/03/ib
ReplyDeleteThis is a very unnerving situation. I am appalled. I pray that this IB is stopped at this town and never goes any further. I truly hope that our future generations OF AMERICANS see this program for what it is and never let it see the light of day. A Missouri patriot
ReplyDeleteMy son is in the Camdenton IB program and it is not like this at all. He has many conservative teachers as well as a few Liberal teachers. Debate is always allowed. CSCOPE is something I do worry about, not IB. Basically it comes down to the teachers. If you have a liberal teacher then those ideas are going to be presented. My husband and I actively engage in political and world event discussions with our son since he is going to get hit hard in college with crazy ideas. I want to give him a solid foundation of truth before he goes. The IB program was good since he needed to be academically challenged. He also got an extra 8k dollars IB scholarship from an in state University because of the IB program. And he starts out as a sophomore in college saving even more money. Camdenton is known for having excellent schools and taking away the IB program will only hurt the kids who need academic challenges. I am a christian conservative, about as far right as you can get and I will be disappointed if we lose this program. Do you have a child in the program? If not how do you even know what they are doing? With what is going on with CSCOPE and what this president is doing to our country we need to stay focused and this is a distraction from real problems. I can assure you this program is NOT a problem. FYI, burqas must cover the entire body and head/face except the eyes which are sometimes covered with a screen. If that happened at Camdenton I would be there in a heartbeat demanding answers. The article above is from last year, this was not done this year. Probably because we Camdenton parents are pretty vigilant about what our kids are taught.
ReplyDeleteNot enough space here to address what anonymous (March 22, 2013) has tried to explain in support of IB. I am tired of the same old justifications for an Un-American and Anti-Christian World View being accepted by so called Christian Conservatives! If you accept the premise that IB is really the future of the American Education System then you are neither Conservative nor Christian. All one has to do is read the IB Mission Statement and IB Learner Profile to understand that IB is not a curriculum but a frame work to bring International Mindedness and Global Citizen worldviews to America’s youth. I wrote a couple of papers on this issue last year and I include the link below. I just ask that if you are a Christian and a Conservative to read the article.
ReplyDeletehttp://exaltedkingdomgospel.blogspot.com/2012/03/international-baccalaureate.html
http://exaltedkingdomgospel.blogspot.com/2012/03/battle-of-worldviews.html
More Info for anonymous (March 22, 2013).
ReplyDeleteWhat is the role of faith schools in the IB community: See link below.
http://www.ibo.org/ibaem/conferences/documents/Roleoffaith.pdf
Who/What is Aga Khan and why is Aga Khan quoted by IBO?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aga_Khan
Doesn't sound like Christian Conservatism to me! You will be hard pressed to find anyone from IBO that actually quotes any Christian dogma!
Hos_4:6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.
We may see programs like IB as uneventful when it comes to what our children beleive, but that is not the intent of the organization or those behind it. Just read the paper at this link!
ReplyDeletehttp://blogs.ibo.org/positionpapers/files/2010/09/East-and-West_George-Walker.pdf
From the IBO article above:
Western humanism celebrates the life, the only life, we have in this world, rather than any anticipated life beyond it. It does not deny the significance of religious belief but insists that human virtue does not necessarily owe anything to religious intervention. Authority—religious and secular—is open to challenge in the search for truth. Empathy and scientific understanding create a set of moral values that confer dignity upon human beings who have the capacity—though not the necessity—to “say no to God”.
For better or for worse, humankind is on its own, believing, in Socrates’ words, that the unexamined life is not worth living.
Scholarship must function independently of religious authority and devise its own criteria for truth, or for the different truths that shape our chosen classifications of knowledge and understanding—scientific, historical, mathematical, religious, moral etc. The search for these truths will be through the accumulation and examination of evidence, through argument and debate, and through the construction and demolition of hypotheses.