Posted on 07/22/2011 5:43:06 AM PDT by markomalley
This is one part of a running series entitled “Indoctrination Fridays,” a weekly review of leftist propaganda incorporated into public school curriculum, much of it geared towards elementary students. For more of the series, please visit PublicSchoolSpending.com.
Any good community organizer knows an effective protest requires two things: a bully to excoriate and a catchy slogan that resonates in the public mind.
Even though most protestors are “uncomplicated” people, don’t be deceived; staging an effective rally is not a simple task.
First, a bully must be identified. For progressives, a bully is anybody who disagrees with you politically, so there is no shortage of candidates. However, as Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” explains, it’s best to settle on one target to isolate and attack.
Next, protestors need to come up with a catchy slogan to shout at the designated bully. Most people don’t have the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s “gift” of reducing complex ideas into simplistic rhymes. This skill must be taught.
Which brings us to this week’s installment of the Indoctrination Fridays series: Gender doesn’t limit you – A research-based anti-bullying program for the early grades.
This charming six-part lesson plan is designed to stamp out (mostly) gender-based bullying from Pre-K all the way through 6th grade.
Most readers will agree that bullying is a problem and that teachers should talk to students about it in a thoughtful, reasonable manner.
But thought and reason are totally absent from the “Gender doesn’t limit you” lesson plans, which only provide children with a designated slogan to shout at suspected bullies.
Here’s an example from Lesson 4 – Biased Judgments:
To start the lesson, teachers are instructed to tell students that, “Sometimes one group of kids thinks that they are better at something than another group because of their gender.”
The teacher then tells students that whenever someone makes a highly offensive remark such as “boys are better at soccer than girls,” they should tell the offender, “Give it a rest. No group is best.”
Since repetition is crucial to the learning process, the plan provides teachers with four scenarios to read to students. After each one the class is instructed to shout, “Give it a rest. No group is best.”
Here’s one of the scenarios from Lesson 4:
(Teacher): “Paul and Vanessa are baking cookies together. Vanessa says that girls are better at baking than boys. What do we tell Vanessa? One, two, three GO!”
(Class): “Give it a rest, no group is best.”
That’s the extent of the lesson. Identify a bully (doesn’t that Vanessa sound like a monster?), give the kids a slogan to shout, and practice with a few scenarios.
It’s like that for each lesson, although the quality of the slogans varies. Here’s a Cliff’s Notes version of the lesson plans:
For the “Peer Exclusion” lesson, kids are instructed that “not letting someone play with you just because of their gender is called bullying….” Applicable slogan: “You can’t say, ‘Boys/Girls can’t play.’”
For the “Role Exclusion” lesson, students are told that, “Boys and girls can have any job they want to, or do any activities that they want.” If some insensitive lout attempts to define gender roles in the children’s presence, they are to say, “Not true! Gender doesn’t limit you.”
And so it goes for six lessons. Some of the remaining slogans include “That’s weird! Being boys and girls doesn’t matter here” and “I disagree! Sexism is silly to me.”
As you can see, the quality of the sloganeering fades with each lesson.
You can also see the “lessons” aren’t designed to develop critical thought or meaningful classroom discussions. In fact, the researchers who designed these lessons brag that “teaching students catchphrases to interrupt gender bullying” is far more effective than “using literature to challenge gender stereotypes.”
What this curriculum seems best designed for is to teach kids there’s a bully around every corner and the best way to handle him (and you just know it’s a “him”) is to shout clever slogans.
Sure, the kids whose school careers are frittered away with such tripe might not be prepared to enter the competitive world of work or college. But rest assured, these kids will know what to do when a bully like Scott Walker or Chris Christie tries to take away their seat on the government’s gravy train.
That’s right, these lesson plans will produce some wonderful union activists someday.
Tell her she's full of crap. Men are better cooks than women.
I'm definitely better than most women.
And a new slogan:
“Take that crap down the road. Its nothing but a pantload!”
hey-hey, ho-ho....this crap has got to go.
Hey, how about a raceless society? If a president is a bozo, you don’t feel guilty about admitting it, just because he’s half black!
I’m all for this as long as they refute the feminist lies that girls mature faster than boys and women are better at relationships then men.
Like that will happen. Liberals must have their double standards.
Some tangential relevance from “1984”:
‘Our duty to the Party,’ said Julia promptly.
‘How did you know that?’
‘I’ve been at school too, dear. Sex talks once a month for the over-sixteens. And in the Youth Movement. They rub it into you for years. I dare say it works in a lot of cases. But of course you can never tell; peopIe are such hypocrites.’
She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:
‘When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simpIy sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?’
That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.
I like yours better!
Stolen from “Chants for Dummies”. Hey, your tagline fits right in with this article!
Although Wilhelm Reich was a socialist/Marxist, he did a lot of work in this area. He said that the energy which animated all psychoses and neuroses was damned up sexual energy. That, he said, was the result of incomplete orgasms. A complete orgasm could only be had if you were with the right person, at the right time and in the right place, and if all else went well. Needless to say that everyone at some time or another, maybe even all the time, had damned up sexual energy. He called this energy orgone and even built a machine called an orgone accumulator to measure it.
Perhaps this is why he was demonized, discredited, and all his books, patents, machines, etc., were burned or destroyed. If this idea caught on, where would the Leftist get recruits?
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A reason to homeschool if I ever saw one. This has to qualify in the top ten.
There’s a huge difference between teaching children to treat each other with proper courtesy and respect regardless of their differences, and denying reality.
This is stupidity beyond belief. Pretending that the differences don’t exist is NOT going to help teach the kids how to behave towards others and treat them.
But teaching them proper etiquette and common courtesy is far more work than the lazy, brain dead liberals want to invest in someone. Besides, it looks too much like Christianity to teach others to do unto others as they would have other do to them. Much easier to deny reality and not acknowledge the moral aspect.
You are absolutely right! Here is what I posted on another thread, based upon this same story:
The compulsion driven need to pretend that we are all interchangeable is an absolute insult to anyone with any sense, regardless of race, sex, class or whatever. No two of us are alike; but instead of encouraging people to develop the reality of their own nature--after all, economic progress throughout the historic period has depended upon a division of labor, based upon the point;--we have this neurotic need to pretend to an equality that is a moronic concept. No two apples on the same tree are even equal.
I am not--certainly not as a lawyer--denying that it is desirable that people have equal access to the Courts; or that the scales of Justice should not weigh the issues in any case, with a proper balance. But what is essential to any understanding of where our contemporary problems arise, is to appreciate that this idiotic egalitarian mindset is in fact, The Greatest Mischief Ever Wrought.
I have found that when challenged, no Leftist can actually defend it, but most Conservatives think it less than nice to do so. The result is that the demands from the Left grow ever more absurd, ever more extreme.
In contrast, think of all the generations of happy children who celebrated their hopes to grow up as men & women, in each case proud to carry on as admirable role models had carried on before them. Egalitarianism trashes all that is noble in the human experience.
William Flax
So, let’s say Sheila says “You can’t criticize this president! He’s black!”
What do we say to Sheila?
[insert your rhyming slogan here]
So....is the econuts’ verstion of “Cut, Cap and [no]-Sow?”
Meet the teachers:
Great points.
What good is it to *celebrate diversity* and then turn around and deny it?
The hypocrisy of their position is unbelievable.
Wow! It seems odd to me that the very people that force Darwinism (survival of the fittest) and Evolution (nature) as the only legit theories for teaching, are the same ones that want to deny nature at every chance they get.
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