School Test Teaches Kids: "Commands Of Government Officials Must Be Obeyed By All"

Papers produced by global education corporation; Part of ‘No Child Left Behind’ program
Steve Watson
Infowars
Oct. 31, 2013

A parent of a ten year old was shocked to discover a grammar and writing test paper that their child brought home from school reads more like document from an authoritarian country such as China.

The parent sent a portion of the test paper to Infowars, revealing that it contains sentences such as “The commands of government officials must be obeyed by all.”

The paper uses such sentences and asks school children to replace certain words in order to make the sentence contain a possessive noun.

Others within the paper include:

“The job of a president is not easy.”

“He makes sure the laws of the country are fair”

“The wants of an individual are less important than the needs of a nation”

Here is the portion of the paper Infowars received:

Upon further investigation it appears that the paper is part of a set produced by Pearson Education, a global corporation that provides education publishing and assessment services to schools in the US and the rest of the world. Pearson is the world's largest for-profit education business.

The particular sentence about everyone obeying government commands appears in other Pearson papers, such as this fifth grade grammar test.

According to the company’s Wikipedia page and its website, Pearson owns leading educational media brands including Addison--Wesley, BBC Active, Bug Club, eCollege, Fronter, Longman, MyEnglishLab, Penguin Readers, Prentice Hall, Poptropica and Financial Times Press. Pearson is part of Pearson PLC, which also owns Penguin Books and the Financial Times.

In 2010, Pearson also negotiated a 5 year, $32 million, contract with the New York State Department of Education to design tests for students in grades 4-8.

Some have criticized the company’s test papers. Last year papers designed for NYSED were found to contain over 30 errors. Writing for the New York Times, Gail Collins noted:

“We have turned school testing into a huge corporate profit center, led by Pearson, for whom $32 million is actually pretty small potatoes. Pearson has a five-year testing contract with Texas that's costing the state taxpayers nearly half-a-billion dollars.”

Collins outlines the fact that Pearson is being contracted under the controversial No Child Left Behind program set up by the government in 2001:

“This is the part of education reform nobody told you about. You heard about accountability, and choice, and innovation. But when No Child Left Behind was passed 11 years ago, do you recall anybody mentioning that it would provide monster profits for the private business sector?”

Collins continues:

“[Pearson's] lobbyists include the guy who served as the top White House liaison with Congress on drafting the No Child law. It has its own nonprofit foundation that sends state education commissioners on free trips overseas to contemplate school reform.”

Ah… all becomes clear. Government contracted education papers telling children that they must obey the commands of the government. Nice.

Along with enforcing government mandated rules such as banning packed lunches, this will be seen by many as yet another example of how the nanny state is encroaching via the public education system.

It's a concept also being promoted by the mass media. Earlier this year, MSNBC ran a segment pushing the notion that kids belong to the "collective," and that the "idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families" should be eliminated.

These revelations also remind one of Common Core, federally mandated education principles, which are effectively dumbing down students by standardizing education across the board and shutting out diversity in teaching.
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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.