May 12, 1999

Everybody's looking for the causes of the terrible tragedy at Columbine High
School in Littleton, Colorado, and for ways to prevent such horrible
happenings in the future. Hillary Clinton has volunteered her intuition that
"part of growing up is learning how to control one's
impulses."

Putting aside the point that most of us don't have impulses to go on a
killing rampage, who is going to teach kids to control their impulses?
Certainly not the "village" (i.e., the government or government schools),
which Mrs. Clinton believes should have prime responsibility
for raising children.

For the past 25 years, the prevailing dogma in public school teaching has
been Values Clarification (as in the tremendously influential 1972 book of
the same name by Sidney Simon). That means teaching students to reject "the
old moral and ethical standards" and instead create "their own value system."

Values Clarification teaches that, since there are absolutely no absolutes,
students can make their own decisions about behavior instead of looking to
God, the Ten Commandments, parents, church, or other authority that teaches
that behavior should conform to traditional
morality. Indeed, Eric Harris created his "own value system."

Modern public school teaching exalts "tolerance" of other people's behavior
as the highest virtue, and "self-esteem" as education's principal objective.
We are forbidden to be "judgmental" about the behavior of others when they
indulge in their impulses instead of
controlling them.

As best described by the late Senator (and former university president) Sam
Hayakawa, the public schools adopted "an educational heresy . . . that
rejects the idea of education as the acquisition of knowledge and skills . .
. and regards the fundamental task in education as therapy."  These "therapy"
courses opened the floodgates to all sort sorts of  psychological courses,
one of the weirdest of which was Death and Dying.
 

In 1987 Colorado Eagle Forum produced a two-hour video in which student Tara
Backer spoke at length about the relentless focus on death, dying and suicide
in her sophomore classes at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. She
and several of her classmates attempted suicide as a result of this
depressing teaching, and it took them many months to recover from the
experience.

Tara was subsequently interviewed for an ABC 20/20 program in 1988, where she
said, "I had thought about [suicide] as a possible option for a lot of years,
but I never would have gonethrough with it, never, because I wasn't brave
enough. The things that we learned in the class taught us how to be brave
enough to face death."

She added, "We talked about what we wanted to look like in our caskets."
ABC's Tom Jarriel concluded the segment by asking if these courses "suggest
death as an answer to adolescent problems."

The 20/20 segment showed morbid visuals of student visits to cemeteries,
embalming labs, and crematoriums, and told about picking some bones out of
the ashes. It was clear that Tom Jarriel and Hugh Downs thought that death ed
was bizarre.

An investigative piece in Atlantic Monthly the same year confirmed that death
and dying courses are given in "thousands of schools," often sneaked into
health, social studies, literature or home-economics courses without parents'
knowledge. The magazine described how these courses include requiring
students to write their own obituaries, epitaphs, wills, or suicide notes,
and to decide how they would prefer to die, have their body disposed of, and
who they want for pallbearers.

Unfortunately, parents in Illinois, Michigan and Florida have attributed
their sons' suicides to public school courses in death, dying, or suicide.

Death ed is apparently still taught at Columbine. One student told the
Associated Press that shooter Eric Harris was asked to write out his will as
part of a class assignment.

Littleton, Colorado has been a focus for many years for all the trendy
"edufads" such as Outcome Based Education (OBE). In 1993, parents rebelled
against this dumbing-down process and, by a two-to-one vote, elected a
"back-to-basics" school board.

The teachers union hit back in the following election and retook control of
the Littleton schools. The union was supported by People for the American
Way, who used the usual negative slurs, accusing those opposed to OBE of
being "fundamentalists" and part of the "religious right."

Some politicians are using the Columbine tragedy to push their liberal
political agenda, such as gun control. That's obviously not the answer since
killers Harris and Klebold violated 18 current federal and state gun control
laws that, had they lived, would have kept them locked up for the rest of
their lives.

We are paying a terrible price for allowing public school curricula to teach
students to create "their own value system" instead of respecting moral laws
such as "Thou shalt not kill." It's time to overturn the foolish Supreme
Court decision that bars the Ten Commandments from
public school classrooms.

by Phyllis Schlafly

From: ILEagles@aol.com
Date: Fri, 21 May 1999 18:05:02 EDT
Subject: Is your child educated about death?

. . .

For example, a young lady who attended a Catholic high school a few years ago
innocently shared with us how in their social studies class they wrote their
own eulogy and epitaph for their tombstones.  In addition, a local funeral
home brought to the class a casket, and the teacher encouraged the class to
one by one climb into the casket to "experience being dead."  Unimaginable?
No.  It is verified that this happened in a local Catholic school.

. . .

We have attached Phyllis Schlafly's 5/12/99 column on "What Happened at
Columbine?"