Posted on 06/05/2005 9:55:23 PM PDT by Crackingham
Concerned that public schools are becoming sites of liberal indoctrination, activists have generated a wave of efforts to limit what teachers may discuss and to bring more conservative views into the classroom. After all, they say, if related campaigns can help rein in doctrinaire faculty on college campuses, why not in K-12 education as well? So far this year, at least 14 state legislatures have considered bills aimed at colleges that would restrict professors and establish grievance procedures for students who perceive political bias in teaching. None have become law, but the movement has momentum: Four state universities in Colorado, for instance, adopted the principles under legislative pressure in 2004.
"The last six months [have] been kind of a watershed for the academic-freedom movement," says Bradley Shipp, national field director for Students for Academic Freedom, a group founded by conservative activist David Horowitz in 2003. "It is going to filter itself down to the K-12 level."
It's an important battle front, proponents say, because younger students are more impressionable. They are concerned about multicultural lesson plans that go into detail about the Muslim faith, and cite incidents such as a young child being reprimanded by a teacher for writing about wanting to become a soldier.
An aggrieved faction of conservative high school students and parents appears eager to take up the cause:
• ProtestWarrior.com has equipped 160 high school chapters and about 100 individual students with materials to publicize, for instance, whenever a teacher "tries to shove his ideology down someone's throat."
• A group known as Christian Copts of California has distributed 5,000 booklets in Florida and California this year denouncing a seventh-grade world history section as an "attempt to engrave Islam in the minds of ... children."
• Parents and Students for Academic Freedom formed in August 2004 to give parents a forum to address "the one-sided teaching and partisan indoctrination in our nation's secondary schools." The group urges school boards and legislatures to adopt the same speech-restricting principles that its parent organization (Students for Academic Freedom) urges at the college level.
• A cybercommunity, Republicanvoices.org, based in Massachusetts, is soliciting testimony from K-12 students about political bias in the classroom. Led by a 12-year-old editor (with guidance from adults), it aims to leverage support for reform of what it calls "the liberal, bureaucratic, public school indoctrination machine."
These proposed remedies will spawn their own set of problems, some observers say. Teachers who are "ideologically coloring a subject" in any direction are troublingly out of line, but "the risk is that teachers will feel even further restrained than they already do," says Patricia Sullivan, director of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington think tank that advocates for public schools.
Current events discussions, for instance, would become next to impossible in such an environment, Ms. Sullivan says. "[It would be] very difficult to not cross the line.... A teacher could very easily in a course of normal conversation express views, and I just don't know how you regulate that."
Another interesting ping for you!
Long overdue.
Well, you manage to "regulate" diversity and free speech for conservatives......so, I'm sure you'd figure something out..../sarcasm.
I get the impression the CSM is actually UPSET at this development...
Are becoming??? Public schools have always been sites of liberal indoctrination. That was their purpose on their founding by liberal Unitarian elitist Horace Mann.
Read Samuel Blumenfeld's "Is Public Education Necessary?" for the proof of my assertion. Amazon.com link. Historic Overview of the Development of Public Education, May 29, 2002
Reviewer: Adrian C Keister "keisterac1" (Radford, VA USA)
Mr. Blumenfeld does an excellent job bringing out the true history of public education, as Richard Owen and Horace Mann thought of it. He pays special attention to the conflict between the Calvinists (responsible for the American form of government) and the Unitarians. He rightly pinpoints the Unitarian take-over of Harvard as one of the most important and far-reaching events in the history of education. He chronicles the way in which the Unitarians copied the Prussian idea for a public school, delves into their motives, and comes to his conclusion. Incidentally, the motives the Calvinists had for education was to teach people how to read the Bible. The Unitarians wanted education to reform the world. Looking at the utter failure of education to reform the world, one can only come to the conclusion that the Calvinist ideal, while not appealing to all, worked very much better. There is no way to teach ethics and morality while attempting to leave religion out.
None have become law, but the movement has momentum:
It's about time. The biggest problem that conservatives have faced has been their unwillingness to go on the offensive. Winning 99% of the time with a purely defensive strategy results in defeat. We need to put the liberals on defense on every issue.
Already done. Give it the religion test. If a similar view, informed by religion cannot be expressed, then it can't be expressed by adherents of the cult of Leftism.
Katie Rausch Tyler Whitney had trouble distributing his conservative paper in school.
Do you think K-12 public schools are becoming sites of liberal indoctrination?
Current tally:
No. 73.03 % (501)
Yes. 26.97 % (185)
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