Yet More Indoctrination
Posted by MichaelW on 01 Nov 2007 at 5:09 am | Tagged as: Society, Education, Media, MichaelW's Page, Domestic Politics
I know the left takes its For The ChildrenTM rhetoric seriously. However, I was not aware just how pervasively their anti-capitalism, anti-Bush, anti-war, and anti-military agenda was being pushed on our kids. Nickelodeon is the latest indoctrination arena where a “news” program hosted by Linda Ellerby offers stories such those found at this link. Watch the whole video.
Army Wife provides this rundown of the program:
Pay particular attention to the second and fourth [Ed. - she actually means the fifth] stories.
This Nickelodeon “news program”, is not a news program. It is a leftist primer on how to be a “left-wing radical REBEL”.
[…]
Ms. Ellerby uses leftist propaganda buzz words like “taking on the establishment”.
She shows a group of “tweenagers” walking around in orange jumpsuits, hooded and yelling from a bullhorn. “We are not ok, with people being tortured by American soldiers!” “Are cooperation’s priority over human lives?”
There is also a call for the impeachment of the President in the second segment of the video, “democracy is at stake because of the President violating the Constitution”.
The fourth [Ed. - fifth] segment of video shows another tweenager, who has put together a video of wounded Iraqi children, with the song Jesus Loves Me playing over it. This teenager blames America, the military, for what is happening in Iraq. This young girl says “she finds, videos and facts on the Internet” to show what is REALLY happening in Iraq. I am guessing she is getting these images from Al Jazeera.
The foolish and ill-informed children featured in these stories are held up as examples for Nickelodeon’s viewers. Never once is their strident activism examined in any critical fashion, nor their lock-step views challenged. Corporations are bad and exploit people. Soldiers are torturing prisoners. Pres. Bush is violating the Constitution. Standardized tests are (yet another) form of institutionalized racism. America and her military are solely to blame for the death, maiming and misery of Iraqi children. These are the unquestioned ideals promoted by Ellerby’s program. That is brain-washing pure and simple, and I find it disturbing at best.
Just to be clear, I don’t have a problem with kids being presented with these sorts of issues. They’re much quicker on the uptake than a lot of people realize. It is the uncritical presentation of the leftist agenda that I resent. Feeding kids these ideas in manner that implies there are no reasonable arguments against the stated positions renders the Nickelodeon program nothing more than propaganda.
And it makes no difference here that the children featured in the stories are deemed “rebels”; in fact it makes the problem worse. Ellerby seems to suggest that radical leftist activism is the only way to make the world better. The implication is that corporations, capitalism, the military, and of course George Bush are all part of the problem for which these rebel kids are offering rational solutions. There is not even a whiff of a suggestion that the kids might be relying on false premises or poor data. Instead, they are shown accomplishing wonderful changes in their worlds, by encouraging adults to adopt their ideas. The result is the unescapable conclusion that those ideas are not only reasonable, but desirable. That’s not a recipe for critical thinking. It’s a method of indoctrination.
I know one channel my kids will never watch.
[HT: Newsbusters]
Technorati Tags: Nickelodeon, Nick News, propaganda, indoctrination, leftist agenda, education, children’s programming, radical activism
Trackback URI | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed
