National "indoctrination" association: year after year, one of our nation's most powerful labor unions continues to slip its leftist agenda past an ever-gullible public--and impressionable young students.

Over the weekend of July 4, the National Education Association (NEA) held its annual convention, called the Representative Assembly (RA). It received--not surprisingly--little news coverage. Given the ultra-radical agenda of the NEA, the media near-blackout was to the organization's benefit.

When people read the name "National Education Association," they don't immediately think union--they think professional organization. But the NEA is arguably one of the most powerful labor unions in the United States. Certainly, teaching is the most unionized profession, with a staggering 68 percent of teachers belonging either to the NEA, or its much smaller AFL-CIO competitor, the American Federation of Teachers. Comparatively, only 9.4 percent of private sector employees are unionized (as of 1998).

In 1857, when the NEA was organized, it was indeed a professional organization, concerned with standards, ethics and educational techniques. But in 1917, the NEA was taken over by socialist, progressive educators. In the 1960s, the NEA morphed into a public sector union--a union with a subversive purpose.

On the surface, the NEA will have you believe it is merely concerned with teacher salaries, teacher professionalism and the educational well-being of our children. But a closer look at NEA officials, NEA ties with other organizations and NEA policy reveals a markedly different story: The NEA's true goal is to nationalize our education system, with the NEA in control, and in the process dumb down and morally corrupt our children in preparation for acceptance of a socialistic new world order.

The Moral Abyss

One of the areas where the NEA is most active is in destroying the traditional morality of our nation. Reading the list of resolutions from last year's and past NEA Representative Assemblies is eye-opening (this year's resolutions have not been published yet). Consider the following excerpts from recent RA resolutions:

* Sex Education: "The NEA recognizes that the public school must play an increasingly important role in providing the instruction. Teachers ... must be legally protected from censorship and law suits." (Resolution B-36, 1998)

* Diversity: "Funds must be provided for programs to alleviate race, gender and sexual orientation discrimination and to eliminate portrayal of race, gender and sexual orientation stereotypes in the public schools." (A-13, 1996)

* Abortion: "The NEA supports family planning, including the right to reproductive freedom...." The NEA "urges the implementation of community-operated, school-based family planning clinics that will provide intensive counseling by trained personnel." (I-12, 2003)

The NEA officially claims to take no stand on abortion--just on "family planning" and "reproductive freedom." But a closer look at their own publications and the curricula in public schools exposes that lie. In fact, one of the NEA's own publications is entitled Why the NEA Must Be Pro-Choice.

In most public schools, the curriculum reflects the NEA abortion bias. One health text used in the Massachusetts school system teaches ninth-graders the following in the discussion of abortion: "You may come to the conclusion that growing up means rejecting the values of your parents."

The NEA doesn't pretend that they take no stand on homosexuality. They're all for it. The NEA's Human & Civil Rights Action Sheet (which bears the NEA logo) makes this clear. Following are just a few of the Action Sheet's recommendations:

* "Work with the school district, the parent-teacher organization, and community groups to provide information to other members, parents, and counselors about the developmental and health needs of homosexual, lesbian, and bisexual students."

* "Recommend ... that the library include positive learning materials about homosexuals, lesbians, and bisexuals."

* "Encourage the establishment and maintenance of peer support and community self-help programs for homosexual, lesbian, and bisexual students."

* "Work with the school district to develop or expand school policy and curricula, including accurate portrayals of homosexuals, lesbians, and bisexuals throughout history, and to ensure respect for diversity, including homosexuals, lesbians, and bisexuals."

The NEA bases its position on diversity on the skewed, long-discredited "research" of Alfred Kinsey. The Action Sheet restates Kinsey's assertion that 10 percent of the U.S. population is homosexual, a grossly inflated figure.

One of Kinsey's co-authors, Wardell Pomeroy, helped found the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). The NEA is a regular bedfellow of SIECUS, and regularly endorses publications and videos produced by this squalid group (many of whose projects have been endorsed and even funded by Playboy's Hugh Hefner). In a triumph of euphemistic rhetoric, the National Education Association called SIECUS "a new, voluntary health agency."

But the roll call of SIECUS organizers tells the real story. Many SIECUS officials and authors were notorious Communist-fronters. Pomeroy himself endorsed both child sex and incest. Tellingly, the January, 1967 NEA Journal featured an article by Mary Calderone, SIECUS co-founder and former Planned Parenthood medical director. The article was entitled "Planning for Sex Education."

Another favorite organization of the NEA is the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). In 2000, the then-president of the NEA, Robert Chase, gave the keynote address at the GLSEN conference. GLSEN distributes homosexual propaganda throughout our schools. For example, their book Celebrating Families features lesbian mothers with adopted daughters. Their movie That's a Family depicts homosexual couples as normal, healthy "families." The accompanying lesson plan for fourth through sixth grade compares opposition to homosexuality to anti-Christian persecution. In 1999, the then-director of communications for GLSEN stated that "we're going to raise a generation of kids who don't believe [the claims of] the Religious Right."

It is also common knowledge that the NEA opposes a "moment of silence" at the beginning of the school day, for fear that some children might utter a prayer to God during that moment. But the NEA has sponsored an entire "Day of Silence" for homosexual students, with the goal of promoting awareness and acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle.

On almost every front, the NEA gushes that its policies are "for the children," or, in some cases, "for the teachers." But again, that is just rhetoric. Every policy and every plan laid by the NEA is intended to expand its own power and influence in pursuit of its goal of total control over education in this country--and total control over the mental and moral development of our children.

Promoting World Government

To understand why the NEA is doing what it is doing, it is necessary to understand the ties between the NEA, socialism and world government.

The NEA has long extolled the UN and its goal of a new world order. In 1946, Joy Elmer Morgan, the editor of the NEA Journal wrote:

   In the struggle to establish an adequate
   world government, the teacher
   has many parts to play. He must begin
   with his own attitude and knowledge
   and purpose. He can do much to prepare
   the hearts and minds of children
   for global understanding and cooperation....
   At the very top of all the
   agencies which will assure the coming
   of world government must stand
   the school, the teacher, and the organized
   profession. [Emphasis added.]

Forty years later, the NEA was still singing the praises of a UN-dominated global government. A 1985 NEA Representative Assembly resolution reads: "The NEA recognizes the interdependence of all peoples and urges that the United States make every effort to strengthen the UN to make it a more effective instrument for world peace."

In particular, the NEA favors the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). As the global school board for the UN, UNESCO was a big sponsor of SIECUS. However, the agenda is bigger. A close examination of UNESCO's beliefs also reveals an organization inimical to American independence.

The UNESCO publication In the Classroom with Children Under Thirteen Years" of Age declared that early and diligent methods would be required to "correct many of the errors of home training [which] cultivate attitudes running directly counter to the development of international understanding.... As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can produce only precarious results."

In 1998, the UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education had on its agenda "a far-reaching reform of higher education worldwide." Two NEA higher education leaders were invited to that conference. They were Roger Knutsen the then-president of the National Council for Higher Education, NEA's advocacy group for higher ed issues, and Virginia Ann Shadwick, a librarian at San Francisco State University and a member of the California Faculty Association.

Not so incidentally, Shadwick went as one of five delegates representing Education International (EI), the NEA's international affiliate. This international teachers' union is headquartered in Brussels, and is the result of the merger between the World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession and the International Federation of Free Trade Unions. None other than Mary Hatwood Futrell, past president of the NEA, was the mastermind of this "global NEA." According to the El Constitution, the El acts toward the "establishment and protection of open, publicly funded and controlled educational systems and academic and cultural institutions." (Emphasis added.)

What Can We Do?

Destroying morality in this nation is an important step in bringing an end to the American constitutional republic and replacing it with a socialist one-world order. John Adams, our second U.S. president, stated: "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other." Creating an amoral and humanistic society unsuitable for constitutional liberty is a necessary prelude to the creation of a socialistic, one-world government.

The NEA's militantly humanist, aggressively globalist agenda is difficult to reconcile with the warm fuzzy image of a beloved local teacher--who happens to be a dues-paying member. But remember--the NEA is a multi-level organization. Teachers at local schools may have neither the time nor the inclination to follow what the state and national levels of the union are doing with the money the teachers pay every year. And, even if they are aware of the issues, they may feel powerless. Many states require teachers to join the NEA, and teachers who refuse to join the NEA are often marginalized.

But it is imperative that more teachers and parents wake up to the goals and methods of the NEA, and that they begin to weaken the NEA's grip on our nation's education system and on our children. So, what can be done?

First, teachers fortunate enough to work in one of the 22 right-to-work states can drop their NEA memberships. They can also write letters to school officials, their fellow teachers, and the local newspaper outlining the reasons for doing so.

Those working in a state requiring NEA membership have two options. One is to become an agency fee payer. This means that the portion of NEA dues (usually about 20 percent) used for political purposes may be refunded. They must ask for the refund every year in writing. Another course is to file as a religious objector. If successful, this claim would send all NEA dues to a charity of the claimant's choice.

Of course, the NEA will not give up dues without a long fight. It took Shawn Austin, a part-time school-transportation secretary in Michigan, two years to win her religious objector status. It took industrial-arts teacher Dennis J. Robey of Ohio eight years to win his.

As a replacement for NEA membership, teachers can investigate joining other organizations, such as the Association of American Educators. Not only does the AAE provide teachers with a support organization, but it also provides group liability insurance. (Many teachers join the NEA because they believe it is the only way to affordably obtain such insurance.)

It is also crucial that parents monitor their child's textbooks, tests, reading assignments, and so on. Parents cannot assume what their children bring home is the whole picture. They should also agitate in local schools for moral choices in educational materials. And parents must discuss moral issues with their children on a regular basis, so their children have a framework by which to judge what they are being taught. After all, whether or not children attend public schools, their education is an inescapable parental responsibility.

Breaking the NEA's grip on our nation's education system is not an easy task, nor will it be done over night--but it can be done. The loosening of that grip on impressionable young children starts with you.

Jodie Gilmore, a home-schooling mother of two, is a freelance writer.