• Marybeth Hicks,Don’t Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid: Confronting the Left’s Assault on Our Families, Faith, and Freedom, Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 202 pages, $24.95
When I heard a snippet of information about Marybeth Hicks’ Don’t Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid: Confronting the Left’s Assault on Our Families, Faith, and Freedom, I thought that it might be an interesting book. It is interesting, and shocking. Hicks’ book provides example after example of how the leftist, socialist agenda is being spoon-fed to Americans children from kindergarten through 12th grade.
She opens her book with a statement by then-Sen. Barack Obama, who stated, “I am absolutely convinced that culture wars are just so ’90s. Their days are growing dark.”
“Obama was right,” Hicks said. “The culture wars are over. We lost.”
Hicks contends, “We are no longer fighting to uphold traditional social values. Now we’re fighting a battle over the very definition of what it means to be an American. A decade ago there was talk among conservatives of a strategic retreat.”
Hoping to “raise a new generation of Americans who would undo “the damage the Left was wreaking on all our institutions,” she says, many would “hunker down at home or in private and parochial schools” which did not work. The Leftists continued to infiltrate public schools virtually unchallenged.
Hicks points out that many teachers have been fed a diet of socialist Kool-aid from kindergarten through college and have “bought it hook, line, and sinker.”
Hicks provides chapter after chapter showing how leftist, socialist ideas are incorporated into the subjects students study from elementary school through high school. One of the major tenants of socialistic curriculum is social justice, the notion that life is not fair. She points out that elementary students especially are vulnerable to the life isn’t fair agenda and the younger this can be instilled in children, the easier it is for them to absorb it unquestioned.
Even the math curriculum has elements of a social justice agenda. The science curriculum is full of anti-American ideas that proclaim our country as the destroyer of the planet. Hicks’ revelations help explain why American students are falling behind their peers in other nations in science and math.
Like many, I bought into the idea that there is an obesity epidemic in the U.S., especially in school age children. Hicks provides documented studies that show this is untrue.
Hicks’ chapter on the campaign against God is shocking. There is not only a movement to remove God from schools; there is an anti-theism movement. She documents how many of the TV shows that our children watch portray religious individuals, especially Catholics and Jews, as sexual predators and murderers.
Hicks is critical of the Common Core State Standards Initiative curriculum funded by the Gates Foundation. Thirty-five states, including North Carolina, have signed on to CCSSI in order to get federal funds, which she notes, “nationalizes the academic expectations for America’s high school students,” and eliminates local and state control of education.
As shocking as the information is within this book, nothing is more shocking than the chapter, ‘Queer is the New Normal.’ The information should be read, but it is just too graphic to be included in this review.
The statement by National Educators Association’s Bob Chanin (page 102) at his retirement is a must-read because illustrates the motivation of the NEA and it is not the education of children.
As I was reading this book, the Occupy Wall Street protestors were in the news. These protestors are a perfect illustration of the students who drank and digested the Kool-aid. One of Hicks’ biggest concerns is the absence of economics education in schools and the lack of understanding of our free market economy. Only 21 states require an economics class in high school, leaving millions of students “financially illiterate,” says Hicks.
Finally, in the last chapter of the book, Hicks shows how parents can combat the Left’s agenda and provides a list of 11 Civic Virtues that can help restore the next American generation. CJ