Posted on 12/11/2013 12:44:35 PM PST by Crapgame
Freepers, as an adjunct professor of humanities, I am most interested in your opinions on American historiography and education.
“We need to fight back on this critical battleground in order to preserve our future generations.”
Conservatives need to have more children, teach them Godly, conservative values, and inspire their children to become teachers and education leaders.
Anyone demonstrating the least hint of conservative values is denied access to the teaching profession, or driven out of the teaching profession if they should succeed in escaping notice while earning their Bachelor’s degree in education.
I think you probably can start with philosopher John Dewey, whose ideas were fundamental to having government control education in the 1920s. While the so-called public school dates back to the 1800s, it was really Dewey who saw the potential for propagandizing kids-—especially new immigrants-—through the school system.
You get it! Nearly every teacher in this nation ( both private and government schooling) has gone through this Marxist hazing in their godless and Marxist-run colleges and universities.
become teachers and education leaders
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They need to inspire their children to creatively invent entirely different venues of education other than the Prussian monstrosity followed by the government schools and far too many private schools.
Government schooling is socialist-entitlement, collectivist, and single-payer schooling. It must be eliminated because it is fundamentally corrupt.
I understand the desire for many conservatives to remove their kids from public schools. I largely agree. My own children attend Catholic schools and my wife and I are highly engaged in their education.
Thanks for the many responses though I am surprised that no one has fingered Charles Beard as a culprit in the decline of American history teaching.
Finally, yes I am required to use this text. As an adjunct I have no say in the selection of texts for the class. I take pains to point out inconsistencies and what I consider errors on the part of the publishers when I present their powerpoints. One good thing, since Christmas break is upon us next week, I have a full month to go through the 30 odd Powerpoints provided by the publisher and edit them to better suit what I think should be the focus of American history.
There were lots of causes but I think The Immigration Act of 1965 was key. It was designed by Teddy Kennedy and his liberal cohort to multiculturalize America. Denying the country’s founding principles and history has been part and parcel of that fateful legislation’s goal.
What schooling models out there work well that are not Prussian-modeled and not run by collectivists?
It impugned the character of the Framers as money grubbing capitalists who set up a system to protect their gains and keep the people down.
It took the better part of 40-50 years for real historians (Adair, Wood) to refute Beard, but the damage was done. Beardian history facilitated the radical leaps of the New Deal, Great Society, Obama.
Our Framers suffered a hit to their public standing and respect from which they have not recovered.
Ultimately, the only system of education that is truly effective is the one which facilitates life-long self-education. Teachers and tutors can assist an individual to educate themselves, but the student is ultimately responsible for recognizing their own obligation for teaching themselves with whatever resources can be exploited under the circumstances. The present educational system is designed to defeat any efforts to escape the indoctrination and re-education doctrines.
Even at that, though, we were taught by an older generation which knew history and managed to sneak some into the curriculum.
The first successful "reform" by the Progressives was the makeover of American public education beginning in the 1890's. Its purpose, of course, was to make it reflect our democratic values.
But it was [and still is] a serious misunderstanding of democracy.
P.S. Thank you for teaching. More of us should.
UNIONS,Democrats!
1921 - The Emergency Quota Act, also known as the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921, the Per Centum Law, and the Johnson Quota Act (ch. 8, 42 Stat. 5 of May 19, 1921) restricted immigration into the U.S. Although intended as temporary legislation, the Act "proved in the long run to be an important turning-point in American immigration policy" because it added 2 new features to American immigration law: (1) numerical limits on immigration from Europe and (2) the use of a quota system for establishing those limits. The Emergency Quota Act restricted the number of immigrants admitted from any country annually to 3% of the number of residents from that same country living in the U.S. as of the U.S. Census of 1910. Based on that formula, the number of new immigrants admitted fell from 805,228 in 1920 to 309,556 in 1921-22. The act meant that only people of Northern Europe who had similar cultures to that of America were likely to get in. The reason given was that the American government wanted to protect its culture when this act was introduced, however some felt it was mainly a response to Eastern European Jews fleeing persecution that had been growing since about 1890.
1965 - The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act, INS, Act of 1965, Pub.L. 89–236) abolished the National Origins Formula that had been in place in the U.S. since the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. It was proposed by U.S. Representative Emanuel Celler (D-NY: His paternal grandparents and maternal grandmother were German Jews. This was the culminating moment in Celler's 41-year fight to overcome restriction on immigration to the U.S. based on national origin.), co-sponsored by U.S. Senator Philip Hart (D-MI) and heavily supported by U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA). The Hart-Celler Act replaced the EQA with a preference system that focused on immigrants' skills and family relationships with citizens or U.S. residents. It marked a radical break from the immigration policies of the past. The law as it stood then excluded Asians and Africans and preferred northern and western Europeans over southern and eastern ones. At the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s the law was seen as an embarrassment by, among others, POTUS #35 JFK, who called the then-quota-system "nearly intolerable". Some historians thought that JFK saw a chance for retaliation in response to the anti-Irish Catholic bigotry by WASPs he encountered as a younger man. After Kennedy's assassination, POTUS #36 LBJ signed the bill at the foot of the Statue of Liberty as a symbolic gesture.
In order to convince the American populace - the majority of who were opposed to the act - of the legislation's merits, its liberal proponents assured that passage would not influence America's culture significantly. POTUS #36 LBJ called the bill "not revolutionary", SoS Dean Rusk estimated only a few thousand Indian immigrants over the next 5 years, and other politicians, including Senator Ted Kennedy, hastened to reassure the populace that the demographic mix would not be affected; these assertions would later prove wildly inaccurate. In line with earlier immigration law, the bill also prohibited the entry into the country of "sexual deviants", including homosexuals. By doing so it crystallized the policy of the INS that had previously been rejecting homosexual immigrants on the grounds that they were "mentally defective" or had a "constitutional psychopathic inferiority".
After ethnic quotas on immigration were removed in 1965, the number of actual 1st generation immigrants living in the U.S. eventually quadrupled from 9.6 million in 1970 to about 38 million in 2007. Over 1 million persons were naturalized as U.S. citizens in 2008. The leading countries of origin of immigrants to the U.S. were Mexico, India, the Philippines, and China. Nearly 14 million immigrants entered the U.S. from 2000 to 2010. Family reunification accounts for approximately two-thirds of legal immigration to the U.S. every year. The number of foreign nationals who became legal permanent residents (LPRs) of the U.S. in 2009 as a result of family reunification (66%) exceeded those who became LPRs on the basis of employment skills (13%) and for humanitarian reasons (17%).
That's what you're reading in your American Experience text. It's the ongoing dialectical disintegration and polarization of our most valuable cultural artifact: our history.
Completely agree with your assessment, but you provided a lot more specific details than I would have been able to give, thank you!
For a short, one hour overview of what has happened to our education system and culture:
http://agendadocumentary.com/
My question to the two of you is this, how do we reverse this?
I don’t think we can correct the problems in our country without correcting the problems in our education system first, so would be very interested to hear ideas on what we could do to take the textbooks and leading universities back from the communist/socialist/liberals,and especially the history, government, education and other ‘social science’ departments.
Good for you! So many teachers in the universities don’t know or don’t care what kind of lies they are teaching the kids via these socialist textbooks.
Teacher’s College @ Columbia gets my vote.
+1. Headstart also impacted it.
Immediate thoughts:
It may be too late. I agree with the phrase "demographics is destiny." Whites (liberals and conservatives) will have declined to 50% of the U.S. population by 2040. Despite diversity training, the 3 tribes, white/brown/black, are not going to unite together in the U.S. "melting pot" for peace. Some whites will attempt to get along with the browns/blacks, but this alignment will only last short term.
1. Forget the blue states.
2. Invite conservatives from blue states to migrate to the red states.
3. Develop seminars on the education problem. Develop 2 paths - 1 for the adults and 1 for the HS students. Network to present these seminars in conservative church denonminations, fraternal/service organizations, private shcools, home school associations, and conservative political groups. Maybe develop a web-site to host this information.
4. Develop a counter-measure to the NEA and the NFT. Members biggest concern seems to be job security. Politicians have a history of appointing education superintendents who have their favorite teachers.
5. Develop a strategy to take-over the state education structure which selects the text books. Maybe make a list of acceptable books and no-go books much like the Catholic Church used to do when it rated movies.
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