U.S. Elementary School Homework Teaches Kids ‘Government Is Family’

If you are a public school student in America, apparently Uncle Sam literally believes he’s your uncle.

Yesterday The Blaze reported on an homework sheet it received from the concerned parent of an Illinois fourth grader. The school is teaching children that the U.S. government is “like a nation’s family”.

Titled “What is Government?,” the worksheet goes on to teach the children:

“Government is all of the agencies, departments, organizations, groups, individuals in a nation who make, carry out, enforce, and manage conflicts about rules and laws. Government is like a nation’s family. Families take care of children and make sure they are safe, healthy and educated, and free to enjoy life.”

The sheet comes complete with a little cartoon drawing that depicts Uncle Sam holding a little baby wearing the same hallmark stars-and-stripes themed top hat.

The ten questions that follow go on to use a repetitive back-and-forth technique to thoroughly draw up similarities between a child’s family and the U.S. government. Examples include, “How does your family keep you safe?” followed by “How does the government keep its citizens safe?” and “How does your family keep you healthy?” followed by “How does the government keep its citizens healthy?”

Is this homework indoctrination and government propaganda at its finest being served up to brainwash young malleable minds in our nation’s public schools?

East Prairie School Superintendent Teri Madl told The Blaze in a statement, “It is meant to offer a simple analogy that helps children understand that part of a government’s role is to set rules, enforce those rules, and provide safety, security and freedom for its citizens. It is not an attempt to include and/or promote a political message.”

How this superintendent can claim this homework is not an attempt to include a political message when the whole entire worksheet appears to be one giant political message is beyond this writer’s ability to comprehend.

This worksheet goes against the very grain of the intent of our founding fathers who envisioned a limited government that would be kept in check from abusing its powers — to a government we live under today that invades every aspect of a person’s life as if it is trying to actually be a family instead of a government.

Notice rules (not referred to as “laws” by Madl or even initially by the worksheet), safety and security all come before freedom on the superintendent’s list. Founding fathers like Benjamin Franklin said, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Instead, this homework reads like educational propaganda straight out of Stalinist Russia. It was cult-of-personality communist leader Joseph Stalin who said, “Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party” after all. Under Stalin, all print — everything from school textbooks to print media — was under tight government control for the purposes of indoctrination under the communist agenda. Stalin, by the way, went by the nickname ‘Uncle Joe’.

Now children are being “taught” in American schools that the government will keep them healthy (think Obamacare’s forced mandate) and safe (think National Security Administration spying on every American for our ‘safety’, the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration goon squad dispensing of our freedom at major transportation hubs just to name a few).

Even a minimal amount of research will yield an alarming number of similarities between Soviet Russia under cult-of-personality Stalin and modern America under cult-of-personality Obama. Perhaps one of the only differences that immediately comes to mind is that I am able to write this article without being tossed into a gulag or killed for doing so.