Before sending your kids to college you REALLY need to be aware of something…
We send our sons and daughters to college so they'll come out prepared to support themselves and their families well, and to hopefully be a positive force for good in our crazy world. (Not that we all need college for that, not everyone goes to college, nor should they.) We also hope that along the way they're encouraged to THINK. However, you'll be enraged to learn more about what often happens…
Sometimes instead of learning to think for themselves, their still maturing minds are indoctrinated toward the opinions of their biased college professors. This actually happens in many high schools, too. For Christian parents, it's bad enough that we have to be concerned about what professors our kids might be exposed to who may be hostile toward faith issues, but for parents who believe in real food/sustainable food principles vs. the factory farming model, then we need to be concerned with indoctrination on another level as well…
Big Ag Indoctrination
A long-time reader friend emailed me and was disgusted:
We were just at Cornell University a few weeks ago for a kids' science fair event…and it smelled of big business donations. There were cows with plastic ports in their sides so they can “clean out the rumen”… Only problem is, that milk machine had huge eyes and they looked sad.
We were all disgusted, it was the most horrible thing I've ever seen.
Then they explained to us how only big CAFO farms (concentrated animal feeding operations) “know how to farm pigs safely” and, “A lot of people think they can have pigs on small farms where the pigs are on pasture, but they don't realize all the dangerous things that are in the dirt. Pigs need to be in a really clean environment to be safe.”
They also told everyone, “Yes, your pets need all these drugs to stay safe, too, or they could die!”, which led to my daughter asking if our cat was going to die. I replied no, he was not. Then I asked the college student spouting “corporate truths” what happened to all the cats and dogs that were around before the world of big drugs invented all these preventative drugs? Her answer: “They died!” So I asked, “They died? All of them?” And she said, “Yes, they ALL DIED!!”, while looking straight at my girls. My 11 year old, bless her heart, then asked, “Well, if they all died, where did the pets we have now come from?”
So yes, my 11 year old is smarter than an Ivy League College student.
Sigh… I think that as we start interviewing colleges, in order to vote with our education dollars we may need to inquire as to how much of the college budget is based on corporate donors.
This education for profit model is out of control.
She also shared this article with me about a student-led revolution: The GMO Debate: One Student’s Experience of Pro-GMO Propaganda at Cornell University — read a few excerpts:
My name is Robert, and I am a Cornell University undergraduate student. However, I’m not sure if I want to be one any more. Allow me to explain…
Cornell, as an institution, appears to be complicit in a shocking amount of ecologically destructive, academically unethical, and scientifically deceitful behavior. Perhaps the most potent example is Cornell’s deep ties to industrial GMO agriculture, and the affiliated corporations such as Monsanto.
Currently, the vast majority of US commodity crops (corn, soy, alfalfa, sugar beet) are genetically engineered to either withstand Roundup herbicide or produce Bt toxin pesticide. These “technologies” are ecologically damaging and unsafe. The majority of these crops go to feed animals in factory farms. The remainder generally gets converted into corn syrup, white sugar, vegetable oil, or biofuels — you know, good stuff! This combined approach of growing GMO commodity monoculture crops, and feeding them to factory-farmed livestock, is one of the most ecologically destructive forces our planet has ever seen. It’s also a leading contributor to climate change. In fact, some experts believe it to be the leading cause.
I sat in on a course entitled “The GMO Debate”.
I was expecting members of an intellectual community coming together, with proponents and critics of GMO food each giving the best verified evidence they had to support their cause. Given all that I had learned about GMO agriculture, I was excited to participate for the “GMO skeptic” side.
The GMO Debate course, which ran in the fall of 2015, was a blatant display of unscientific propaganda in an academic setting. There were a total of 4 active professors in the course, and several guest speakers. They took turns each session defending industrial agriculture and biotechnology with exactly zero critical examination of GMOs. In spite of the course’s name, there was a complete lack of actual “debate”.
It gets better.
During the semester, emails were released following a Freedom of Information Act request, showing that all four of the professors in the class, as well as several guest speakers, the head of Cornell’s pro-GMO group “Alliance for Science”,and the Dean of the College of Arts and Life Sciences were all copied in on emails with Monsanto. This was part of a much larger circle of academics promoting GMO crops on behalf of the biotech industry. Jonathan Latham PhD, virologist and editor of independentsciencenews.org, documented this in an article titled “The Puppetmasters of Academia”. I highly recommend giving it a read, for further context.
Perhaps saddest of all was the inclusion of several visiting African agriculture-academics in the course. They were brought here by the “Cornell Alliance for Science”. This organization was completely funded by a $5.6 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and appears to espouse only pro-GMO rhetoric. For those of you who are unaware, Bill Gates is a proponent of using agricultural biotechnology in Africa, India, and other developing regions. So in essence, a group of African representatives got indoctrinated into the industrial and GMO agriculture framework, and were sent home to disseminate this information … after all, who could question the expertise of an Ivy League powerhouse such as Cornell?
(Read the entire article here, and find out what the author ended up doing about all of this.)
Shocking, isn't it?!
By the way, I agreed with the author's opinions in that article almost entirely, but I did have to leave this little comment:
“I agree with most everything in this article, except this statement, ‘As Professor T. Colin Campbell will tell you, the foods that come from this system (animal products and processed foods) are responsible for causing the vast majority of chronic disease.'
Please consider that it’s the FACTORY FARMED animals and the processed foods that are the problem, not sustainably and traditionally raised animals that people have always eaten. Here are a couple articles with more information:
It drives me crazy when the two completely different models of raising farm animals are bunched together when they are vastly different! (Here's one more post from a while back on that: Are Meat Eaters Ruining the Earth?)
More you may like:
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
Ali says
Thank you, Kelly, for this informative article and all the links. Although I’ve done my college stint (RN), I seem to have gotten through it, at least politically, untainted. And even though I was taught the same ol’ “pharmaceuticals will save the world” and “the Food Pyramid” rhetoric, my childhood upbringing by a healthfood nut kicked into high gear (thank you, dad) and I have since supplemented my training with common sense.
I have an intense dislike of Big Pharma/Food/Ag/Etc and governmental intrusion into the lives of ordinary folks who want to live in accordance with nature and their beliefs, raise their children as they see fit and interact with and help like-minded individuals.
Thank you for all you do!
KitchenKop says
That’s great to hear Ali, because as you know, most nurses are pretty hard-headed about all of that stuff!
Kelly
Bill Vanyo says
There is no education that someone doesn’t call “indoctrination”.