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"CIVIL EDUCATION" The New Fad To Train Your Child To Work In A Soup Kitchen!

After Hillary is through singing to your babies, you will be able to send them into the school house of the future. Here, they will enter a program that links schools with communities and social services - all part of a concerted commitment to what is being called "civil education."

A monster called the "Partnering Initiative on Education," which says it represents more than 106,000 schools and universities, controlling more than 64 million students, is ready to announce a model program that will involve students in a range of social service activities like food drives, environmental projects and working with the elderly.

Proponents say the initiative is especially important at a time "when the notion of restoring a sense of community is so much a part of the national debate and when the educational spotlight has increasingly been on a push for higher test scores, better tests and more rigorous standards."

Yes, you read that right. Now that "Back-to-Basics" advocates are starting to win some battles to assure children are taught to read and write in the classrooms, these guys are mounting a counter offensive to get back to the social agenda.

Don Ernst, director of government relations for the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (one of the perpetrators of this insanity) says, "I think one of the things that has been lost in the past decade and maybe longer is the belief that there is more to education than simply preparing people for a job." Wow, what kind of songs did his parents sing to him?

The effort is supported by, guess who, the National Education Association, the Department of Education and the American Association of School Administrators.

So now your kids are going to learn character and become good citizens by working for the homeless, the elderly and the Sierra Club. What if they don't believe in those causes? What if they want to spend their spare time with their families or earn extra money for college? Who decides? And what are their political motives?

Can the children become good citizens and build character by working with the American Policy Center to help stop these programs? Now there's a litmus test.