"The Deliberate Dumbing Down
of America", by Charlotte Iserbyt, is a chronological history documenting the failure of
the past 100 years of education reform. Citations from government plans, policy documents, and
other key writings record the rise of the disastrous modern education reform movement.
"Dumbing Down Our
Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves but Can't Read, Write, or Add" by
Charles J. Sykes. Nowhere has the flight from quality plaguing American life these days
been more obvious than in our primary and secondary schools -- on the whole, the graduates seem
less well-read and less well-spoken, less knowledgeable and less able to compute.
Why America Is Free: An
Excellent History Textbook for Your Family. One disease that has plagued modern education
is the revisionist history so often found in public school textbooks. Many people today have
confused ideas about our freedom and how we became a free people. Few things could do more to
straighten out the political confusion of our own times than if every parent in America would read
the book Why America Is Free aloud to his or her children.
Noah Webster's 1828 Dictionary. You'd be surprised
at the difference between today's dictionary definitions and those in the 1828 dictionary. Of
course, back then, words like "office" and "partner" were not used as verbs. But there are many
elementary words which have taken on very different meanings since 170 years ago. For example,
here is the 1828 definition of "marriage":
"The act of uniting a man and a woman for life; wedlock; the legal union of a
man and a woman for life. Marriage is a contract both civil and religious, by
which the parties engage to live together in mutual affection and fidelity, till
death shall separate them. Marriage was instituted by God himself for the purpose
of preventing the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, for promoting domestic
felicity, and for securing the maintenance and education of children."
The Flummery Digest: an
interesting collection of news items related to political correctness gone amok. Updated regularly.
Three Myths of the Great
Depression. Myth Number One: The New Deal helped get us out of the Great Depression.
In fact, the New Deal was an inevitable economic failure. Roosevelt's formula of substituting government
programs for a normal business recovery had no chance of relieving the high unemployment. FDR relied on
extracting tax dollars from individuals and corporations to fund government programs, such as the Works Progress
Administration (WPA), which hired workers to pick up trash, cut down trees, and build roads, bridges, and
schools. The jobs Roosevelt thought he was creating were a mirage. They merely transferred jobs
from the productive private sector to the inefficient public one.
An Empty Place at the
Table. The first official thanksgiving proclamation was issued in 1777 by the Continental
Congress after the American victory in the Battle of Saratoga. … However, it was not until
1941 that Thanksgiving became an official national holiday.
PC,
M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine: The shenanigans of
political correctness have been well documented. But most people, even those who keep up with these
debates, probably assume they're confined to the liberal arts, rather than the hard sciences.
Think again. As Sally Satel shows in PC, M.D., political correctness has also infected the world
of medicine and public health -- with results that may actually threaten everybody's well-being.
Incorrect
Thoughts: Notes on Our Wayward Culture: Leo opens the reader's eyes to the world of
political correctness. The book, a collection of Leo's columns over the years, exposes attempts
by the media and university elite and turns their arguments upside down. Leo is hardly a political
partisan but definitely takes aim at the cultural left and this book is a direct hit.
Two
Steps Ahead of the Thought Police: A curmudgeonly columnist collects his pieces from the
past five years, focusing on the continuing contact points in the culture wars. Leo is firmly in
the "enough already" camp.
"Disney: The Mouse Betrayed",
by Peter Schweizer and Rochelle Schweizer. This hardbound book exposes the moral decline of one
of America's best-loved companies, Disney. Topics include: Disney as a partner in the
nation's largest pay-per-view pornography distributor; pedophile and sexual abuser problems at Disney
World; how Disney's Hollywood Records produces some of the most violent, pro-suicide, and pro-Satan
music in the industry; and the radical transition of Disney animated feature films from morally
correct entertainment for children to politically correct entertainment.
"The
Assault on Parenthood : How Our Culture Undermines the Family" by
Dana Mack. Many middle-class and working-poor U.S. parents feel that the schools,
the courts, and the welfare system are alienating them from their kids. Those institutions,
they say, use such things as sex education, counseling, and mainstreaming (of special needs
children into regular classrooms) to turn kids into acquiescent consumers in a homogenized
commercial culture, and they will forcibly separate children from
their parents -- on trumped-up abuse charges or because a household falls below an
arbitrary standard of material comfort -- to achieve that end.
"The
War Against Parents" by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Cornel West, and Eric West. A
powerful call for parents to organize and fight back against a society that pays lip service to
family values, then abandons mothers and fathers to an economic and political swamp.
"Life
Without Father: Compelling New Evidence That Fatherhood and Marriage
Are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society", by David Popenoe. Every
unhappy family may be unhappy in its own way, but a common denominator of familial misery
is an absent father.
"The
De-Moralization of Society : From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values" by
Gertrude Himmelfarb. Excerpt of a synopsis by Ray Olson: Neither puritanical nor
hypocritical, the moral Victorian era stands in sharp contrast to "de-moralized"
post-World War II England and America, as Himmelfarb shows in a long epilogue that
ends in hopes for a new reformation that "will restore not so much Victorian values
as a more abiding sense of moral and civic virtues." This is intellectual history
and historically based argument as good as they get.
"Just the Facts" on Racial
Issues. For example, here is an excerpt from the "Affirmative Action" section: A
memo was circulated by the Clinton administration Defense Department that stated: "In the
future, special permission will be required for the promotion of all white men without disabilities."
