Remember this film?
The first character to die
is the history prof
from the kids' high school --
he asks the paratroopers
if there's something wrong . . .
Posted on 03/08/2006 11:12:02 AM PST by mathprof
No one familiar with our nation’s increasingly dysfunctional public schools should have found it surprising that a Colorado High School teacher named Jay Bennish delivered a 20 minute, anti-American rant to his 10th grade geography class taken straight out of Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore. True enough, Mr. Bennish was somewhat cruder than your average leftist teacher. Apparently, he was also too stupid to realize that political indoctrination in the classroom goes over much more smoothly and is less likely to cause a public uproar if the teacher observes a few minor pedagogical constraints.
In fact, Bennish might have been uniquely fatuous, but he is not unique. There are smoother, more effective Bennishes everywhere in our great American high schools. That’s one reason why our graduates are so full of self-esteem and have all the right attitudes, but actually know less math, science and history than their counterparts in most of the world’s industrialized nations. Indeed, although political indoctrination in our universities gets all the attention, it is even more widespread and dangerous in our elementary and high schools. The younger the students are, of course, the less likely are they able to withstand – or even detect – attempts at social and political thought control in the classroom. At least the higher education professoriate denies that it favors using the classroom as a political bully pulpit. By contrast, the K-12 public school establishment has adopted a quasi-official pedagogy that encourages the classroom teacher to shape students’ beliefs on controversial issues like race, gender, sexual preference, and American foreign policy.
The documentation on this is so extensive that Jay Bennish might have a pretty good Nurenberg defense: “my union and my professional teacher association made me do it.”
For example, the National Education Association, the larger of the two national teacher unions, supports “the movement toward self-determination by American Indians/Alaska natives” and believes these designated victim groups should control their own education. It believes that all schools should designate separate months to celebrate Black History, Hispanic Heritage, Native American Indian Heritage, Asian/Pacific Heritage, Women’s History, Lesbian and Gay History. This nearly takes up the entire school calendar, leaving scant time for American history – or Geography, the subject that Mr. Bennish was supposed to be teaching when he went off on Bush and Bush’s Amerikkka.
After 9/11, the NEA posted guidelines on how teachers should discuss with their students the terrorist attack on our homeland. It was filled with multicultural psychobabble and stressed the need for children to be tolerant and to respect all cultures – while hardly saying a word about the fact that the country was at war with a vicious enemy out to destroy our tolerant society. The document came so close to apologizing for the 9/11 attack that a public outcry ensued, and the union was forced to remove the teacher guidelines from its website.
NEA-affiliated teacher organizations, such as the National Council of the Social Studies and the National Council of Teachers of English, carry on the political struggle by training teachers to focus inordinate attention in the classroom on issues of “diversity.” The NCSS believes that academic history – which some of its leaders have disparaged as "pastology" – is elitist and irrelevant. The organization has successfully lobbied state education departments to require little or no history. Instead, it has filled the schools with a hodgepodge of "global studies," "cultural studies," and "peace studies" that present all cultures and civilizations as equal in value.
If NCSS had its way, American education’s entire system would reflect a race- and gender-centered pedagogy. The organization's official policy paper, "Curriculum Guidelines for Multicultural Education," is one of the scariest documents in American education today, going far beyond the demand that social studies curricula reflect the grievances of a rainbow coalition of ethnic and racial groups. In the tone of a commissar's lecture at a political reeducation camp, the NCSS exhorts teachers, administrators, and other school employees to think and act multiculturally during every moment of the school day, lest they become accomplices of American culture's invisible but omnipresent racism. Teachers are instructed to scrutinize every aspect of the school environment – from classroom teaching styles and the pictures on the walls to the foods served in the lunchroom and the songs sung in the school assemblies – to be sure they reflect "multicultural literacy."
At the heart of the NCSS paper lies a fundamentally racist assumption: "[T]he instructional strategies and learning styles most often favored in the nation's schools," the guidelines declare, "are inconsistent with the cognitive styles, cultural orientations, and cultural characteristics of some groups of students of color." These students flourish under "cooperative teaching techniques" rather than the "competitive learning activities" that work for white kids.
We are left with this Orwellian conclusion by the Social Studies group: "Schools should recognize that they cannot treat all students alike or they run the risk of denying equal educational opportunity to all persons."
I tell them, though, that if they really care about education in the US, they should be very upset about how much time is being wasted on PC indoctrination. As the article says, it is a bigger problem in K-12 then it is in universities. You can avoid wacko professors, but it is hard to avoid getting HS teachers like Jay Bennish.
A typical US student can't do rudimentary math or even find the US on the map, but they have an abundance of self-esteem and the America-is-evil attitude.
Remember this film?
The first character to die
is the history prof
from the kids' high school --
he asks the paratroopers
if there's something wrong . . .
Back in my day, competition was king.
Colleges and universities knew of my High School. We won math and science statewide competitions. The method used? Chairs in rows, go to the head of the class by test scores.
Now, in the same school, because of pc, my daughter had to repeat calculus in college even though she had a 4.0 in high school. Government schools are failing and need monies attatched to students, ala John Stossell.
The thing about the Dover trial that struck me as odd was how it was framed as a debate over "separation of church and state," when the real issue was whether or not the proponents of ID and the anti-evolutionists were trying to impose a pseudo-scientific curriculum upon this school district.
I didn't disagree with the conclusion that it wasn't a credible scientific theory, but I thought it somewhat paradoxical that learning evolution should be mandatory, while an ignorance of almost every other subject, from algebra, to literature, to Western history, to geography, to biology, is considered perfectly Constitutional, if not acceptable.
Aren't public schools supposed to be centers for social engineering and indoctrination in "correct" attitudes, not places of learning?
This is actually a true statement, if you apply it to individuals rather than groups.
Oddly enough, most European countries use voucher-like systems that allow for school competition. Occasionally they do something right.
The student that recorded the teacher was on Fox last night.Very intelligent and articulate for his age.Colmes got kind of snotty with him.BTW:I'm a product of the public school system(1thru12).I graduated with a B average,and even took a few honors classes my senior year.My first quarter of college was spent taking remedial math and English.From what i understand things haven't gotten any better.
BTTT
I was really disturbed when a bunch of those kids at that school walked out of the building in a protest to support Bennish shouting "Bush Sucks!" etc. Somewhere there were a bunch of liberal elitists at the NEA smiling and saying "It's working exactly as we planned."
On average this is certainly true (but not by as much as you might think). Fortunately, our very top students are better than their European counterparts. If we lose that edge, we're sunk.
bump
Ping.
Quite possibly, although I understand that much of the America falling behind Europe in education thing is exaggerated. As Europe develops its own hostile minority ethnic groups, their average educational performance drops.
Norwegian kids in Minnesota are just about as educated as Norwegian kids in Norway. Except there are a lot fewer kids in Norway.
YEP! thats why I put up K-8, i remember growing up i was in like 3rd grade and Reagan was Office, and they had the students vote for his re-election. I was on Reagans side telling the kids "hey why not vote for him he hasn't done a bad job everything is going good" :)
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