Culture

Redefining "Literacy" for a New World Order

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Berit Kjos
Kjos Ministries
May 15, 2001

Words, like symbols, send different messages to different people in a changing culture. Take literacy. The familiar word that once referred to reading and writing, now represents a “family of literacies” – environmental literacy, economic literacy, etc. -- that imply politically correct understanding of various social issues: global warming, socialism versus capitalism….

These revolutionary meanings were justified by Richard Kelder,^[1] keynote speaker at the 1996 World Conference on Literacy:

"Literacy represents different things to people.... All want higher levels of literacy and this higher anxiety level feeds the political, social and economic myths associated with the concept and further masks its reality, preventing many from recognizing literacy's historical, political, cultural, social, and ideological complexities and implications…. By bringing a critical dimension to 'multi-literacies'.... students will develop a meta-language for understanding how meanings are created.^[2]"

Creating new meanings that rule out the biblical world view is essential to the new way of learning. And today's information technology and management systems will help assess individual progress and monitor change, progress, and cooperation.^[3]

It's not surprising that an unsuspecting public, which still links the familiar word to old fashioned phonics, has given its approval for a far broader agenda than the word itself implies. Few realize that the open-ended new meanings allow governments to adapt literacy standards and strategies to their own agenda for social transformation.

The magnitude of this deception multiplies when U.S. leaders export their international education plan to other nations. "The United States will sponsor the creation of hemispheric centers for teacher excellence," said President Bush at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec on April 21, 2001. That same day, the White House published a fact sheet with this message:

"Teaching and literacy are the foundation for development and democracy. The United States will sponsor the creation of three Centers for Teacher Excellence throughout the hemisphere to provide teacher training for improving literacy and basic education.... The program will create an Internet Portal linking teacher training institutions, think tanks, schools, and universities...."

Along with our "progressive" education and psycho-social strategies, we are offering the world our sophisticated surveillance and teaching technology designed to assess and monitor people of every age. This intrusive system includes financial and educational incentives that pressure both teachers and students to conform to new global standards and ambiguous definitions for literacy.

Some of those literacies are listed in Section 231(b) of The Workforce Investment Act of 1998, which calls for a human resource system that would manage and monitor pre-schoolers, parents, “workers” and others outside our formal education system:

"Workplace literacy" is defined as "literacy services that are offered for the purpose of improving the productivity of the workforce through the improvement of literacy skills." Section 203 (18) It means basic work and communication skills -- those that are specific to the job, not the ability to read books. It includes politically correct attitudes such as cooperation and compliance.

"Numeracy" is mathematical literacy.

"Problem solving" fits into a large group of words and phrases that point to group thinking. All potential workers and servers must learn to work in groups, participate in the consensus process, dialogue according to new rules, seek common ground, find collective solutions and demonstrate adaptability and willingness to conform.

"Other literacy skills" leaves the law open to all kinds of intrusive interpretations that support the UN plan for lifelong learning, mental health and socialization for the global village.

“Family Literacy Services” means “services that are of sufficient intensity in terms of hours, and of sufficient duration, to make sustainable changes in a family, and that integrate “Interactive literacy activities between parents and their children” with “Training for parents regarding how to be the primary teacher for their children and full partners in the education of their children….”

Do you wonder “sustainable changes in a family” means? Or “interactive literacy?” Both refer to the collective thinking and politically correct understanding needed to build compliant and unified global citizens. In the minds of globalist educators, faith in God's unchanging Word brings resistance rather than readiness to embrace the global ideology. Today’s “learning” plans must match the first official goal of both America’s and UNESCO’s education plans: "By year 2000, every child come to schools ready to learn."

But God has a different plan. Proverbs 22:6 tells us to “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Christian training, which brings triumph with God, comes through faith in the same truths that are despised by today's leading visionaries. It won’t be easy to follow God in a world that demands compromise, but in Christ we have all the strength and wisdom we need – along with peace and joy for all eternity.

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Endnotes

[1] In 1996, Richard Kelder was the director of the Institute for Postsecondary Pedagogy at the State University of New York.

[2] Follow the trail from The National Institute for Literacy to The International Literacy Institute (ILI), a partnership between Penn State and UNESCO. It sponsored the 1996 World Conference on Literacy where Richard Kelder was keynote speaker. His paper has been available through the ILI website.

[3] (Read chapters 2 and 3 in Brave New Schools)