Indoctrination Displaces Education

Indoctrination Displaces Education
Part One

The public schools in the United States are being used — somewhat obviously — as socialist indoctrination centers rather than institutions of learning. Evidence of this is abundant, if you look for it, and I have. Shown below are some of the things I've found.

Revising history to fit the template of socialist politics

This is really about wasted time. When teachers engage in leftist indoctrination in public schools, it displaces other academic activities that would probably be much more helpful to the students in the long run. Studying such things as math, spelling, citizenship, geography and applied science would be far more beneficial than listening to the teacher recite the "facts" he or she has learned from Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan and Barbra Streisand.

Schools Erase America From U.S. History. Among the goals listed for the Mexican-American Studies are "social justice" and "Latino Critical Race Pedagogy." Pictures of the classroom showed the walls decorated with "heroes," such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Tucson also offers courses especially for African-American and Native American students. These classes obviously divide the student population by race, a practice we thought was not supposed to be tolerated anymore.

Textbooks Deny Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II Their Rightful Place in History. I spent much time during the past few weeks helping my son study for the state-wide World History test he took a few days ago. Working with him through his studies, I learned his class presented a brand new version of history, a version that never occurred. Some can argue different versions/interpretations of events that happened centuries ago, but his text book and curriculum distorted events I saw with my own eyes.

Let's Hear It for Tex Avery. The board's new language called on students to be able to explain how the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy, as well as those of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the arms race, and the space race, "increased Cold War tensions." But the board of education further mandated for study "how the later release of the Venona Papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government." This appeared to strike Texas liberals as an outrageous intrusion of right-wing ideology. Yet the role of the Venona decryptions of Soviet secret intelligence by American code-breakers, in identifying Soviet agents at work in official institutions, has never been questioned by historians of any political sympathy since Venona was released beginning in 1995.

Does Obama Have Something Against Cops? [Scroll down] Here's Obama last night in Ottumwa, Iowa, Indian Hills Community College, he held a town meeting. ... Julie Morales, a student at Indian Hills Community College asks the president, "I was wondering what your plan was for our undocumented workers who helped establish our country." What is this woman being taught? Undocumented workers helped establish the country? I didn't have that chapter in my history book in junior high or high school.

History and Ideology in Textbooks. Teaching is not dictation. It is not the simple transference of knowledge from one person to another. That kind of straight-line thinking leads to automatons, not critically thinking, independent-minded citizens. Rather, teaching should be about encouraging students' minds to expand and grow.

Who Decides What's In Your Kids' Textbooks? This week in Texas, the State Board of Education will consider curriculum modifications that could impact millions of students across America. That's because what Texas ultimately decides has great influence among textbook publishers.

Expert: Reagan Gets the Shaft in Textbooks. As the Texas textbook battle continues to simmer, [Larry] Schweikart says the first thing he does to determine whether a book is politically slanted is to go to any section discussing President Ronald Reagan. What you'll find there, he says, will tell you everything you need to know...

Why the Texas Textbook Debate Matters. Is America a "constitutional republic" or a "democratic" one? Is Country & Western more of a significant cultural movement than Hip Hop? Is there such a thing as "separation of church and state"? These are but a few of the hundreds of questions the 15 elected members of the Texas State Board of Education have been agonizing over for nearly a year as they struggled to reach an agreement and adopt the Lone Star State's standards for social studies.

Culture War Turns to Texas Textbooks. What do liberal lawmakers in California share with their conservative counterparts in Texas? Very little. But this week both are watching the 15 member Texas State Board of Education, which will choose the next generation of history textbooks for most American children.

How Dare You Teach Conservatism! Texas's elected state board of education, back in March, had the audacity to instruct Texas book publishers as to the need for more philosophically conservative standards in the social studies curriculum. The Texas market is so large that textbook publishers generally take what Texas dishes out and put it appreciatively to their lips. The content of a textbook tailored for Texas can influence the content of a textbook adopted in, good heavens, Vermont or New Jersey. This makes the proceedings vital, not to say controversial.

Textbook Texas. Post '60s liberal ideology ... holds that state and church were marked at the start for apartness. The Texas board of education, so far from accepting the postmodern view of things, has ordered a quest for balance. Members want it noted that the words "separation of church and state" appear nowhere in the Constitution. As indeed they don't: deriving instead from a Jeffersonian metaphor. The need to make plain the difference between what Jefferson wrote in a private letter to the Danbury, Conn., Baptists and the actual language of the First Amendment aches for exposition. (Whether Texans, or anyone else, should look to the public schools for intelligent exposition of that sophisticated point is a different proposition.)

White calls for removing politics from classroom. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White said Saturday that if elected in November, he would pick a new chairman for the State Board of Education to "undo some of the damage" from controversial social studies curriculum standards adopted Friday [5/21/2010]. Critics contend they shortchange minorities and push a rosy view of history.

Rebuttal: Fringe liberal groups and media are working overtime to spread misinformation, hoping to convince Texans that the Board has completely removed Thomas Jefferson from the social studies standards (Jefferson is actually more prominent in the U.S. History standards than anyone else except George Washington) and not fairly representing minorities (approved standards actually contain more minority representation than ever before). The ACLU and others are using misinformation to force their ideology into the curriculum and force the State Board of Education (SBOE) to delay the final vote on the social studies standards until after the November elections, hoping there will be more liberal representation on the Board. (Source: Liberty Institute, Weekly Issues Alert, May 5, 2010.)

Tell the Liberal Left... Stop Rewriting History! The fringe left is trying to distort the truth and silence thousands of Texans -- including numerous teachers and parents who have called, e-mailed and testified before their State Board of Education (SBOE) member. The extremists are even using our great Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, as a political pawn. Jefferson was never removed from social studies as falsely reported by many. Jefferson will be taught at three grade levels, and the Declaration of Independence and its political ideas are emphasized repeatedly in the standards.

PC textbooks are full of skewed history. California's textbooks and other materials must instill a "sense of pride" in students' heritages and may not include "adverse reflection" on any group. Cultural or lifestyle differences may not be portrayed as "undesirable." Members of minority groups must be shown "in the same range of socioeconomic settings" as those in the majority.

Teachers emphasize the Indians' side. Teacher Bill Morgan walks into his third-grade class wearing a black Pilgrim hat made of construction paper and begins snatching up pencils, backpacks and glue sticks from his pupils. He tells them the items now belong to him because he "discovered" them. The reaction is exactly what Morgan expects: The kids get angry and want their things back.

When I Was a Boy, America Was a Better Place. When I was a boy, the purpose of American history textbooks was to teach American history. Today, the purpose of most American history texts is to make minorities and females feel good about themselves. As a result, American kids today are deprived of the opportunity to feel good about being American (not to mention deprived of historical truth). They are encouraged to feel pride about all identities — African-American, Hispanic, Asian, female, gay — other than American.

English Professors Are Detached From Reality. It's official: you spend tens of thousands of dollars to send your kids to college. In return, the colleges turn out graduates who are more ignorant than when they enrolled. According to a recent report from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, seniors at Yale, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, and several other top schools actually know less about American history and government than entering freshmen.

Indoctrinate U: A Must See Movie! Shouldn't universities be promoting different thoughts and viewpoints, encouraging diverse discussion and debate? Does this homogeneous, narrow-minded, intolerant brainwashing that's happening all over American campuses perk your interest?

School Name Swap Favors Socialist. A former school official in San Antonio wants to change the name of an elementary school from one with Confederate connotations to one with socialist ones because the former is racist, reports the San Antonio Express-News. Former Harlandale Independent School District administrator Nick Calzoncit … says he evaluated all the schools in San Antonio named after racists and bigots and singled out Stonewall as the worst. He wants the school name changed to Cesar Chavez Elementary.

Academic Inbreeding. By practicing the craft of tracing history that they themselves reject, we can see how we get the revisionist historians who, for better or worse, mostly the latter, now dominate academia.

A lesson in how schools are named: In Berkeley, Calif., the community at Thomas Jefferson Elementary School has been debating whether to change the name because Jefferson was a slave owner, a motivation that has sparked other school name changes across the country.

Texas History Rewritten: "Remember the Alamo" toned down to avoid alienating Mexican students. "School administrators say they … fear that rampant pride will alienate the growing Mexican student population in their midst."

Why Is the Government Printing Textbooks? Parents of high school students would be well advised to look at "We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution", a book that is the federally mandated text for what these students learn about the founding and fundamental principles of this nation. When you [read this book], you will discover that the "self-evident truths" of the Declaration of Independence have been magically transformed into mere "ideas" from the eighteenth century.

Textbooks: "Where the Curriculum Meets the Child". With the shift to presenting history from a multicultural point of view — where all cultures and values, including American, are treated as equally valid — history textbooks that present U.S. history to students in a positive framework are becoming less and less common. When combined with "dumbing down" on writing and skimping on content, the quality of U.S. and world history textbooks has become an issue of major concern to many Americans.

Textbook on Arabs removes blunder. An Indian tribe has forced distributors of an Arab studies guide for U.S. teachers to remove an inaccurate passage that says Muslim explorers preceded Christopher Columbus to North America and became Algonquin chiefs. A report that is critical of "Arab World Studies Notebook" says, "One can only wonder if this has ever been questioned by the teachers who use its materials, or if they feel they must agree to any claim made by Muslims as an 'alternative perspective' or risk being labeled insensitive, Eurocentric, or racist."

Just another day in the life of freedom: The United States, as every child educated in a public school knows, is guilty of terrible sins against minorities, women and the Third World. When these kids reach college, they are taught even more tendentious nonsense about the rest of the world — about how peace loving and benevolent other nations are compared with us.

Twisted history: One of the reasons our children do not measure up academically to children in other countries is that so much time is spent in American classrooms twisting our history for ideological purposes.

California Offers Textbook Case of Political Correctness: A textbook review process in California has changed or eliminated references to everything from the Founding Fathers to hot dogs, leaving many to charge the state with distorting history in the name of political correctness.

Churchill dropped from England's history syllabus. Britain's World War II prime minister Winston Churchill has been cut from a list of key historical figures recommended for teaching in English secondary schools, a government agency says. The radical overhaul of the school curriculum for 11- to 14-year-olds is designed to bring secondary education up to date and allow teachers more flexibility in the subjects they teach, the Government said.

College Communities Continue To Be Naïve About Ruthless Dictators: Many college professors and left leaning students will quickly denounce the United States as a greater danger to world peace but will often ignore ruthless dictators like Castro and Saddam Hussein. This has been especially the case during the last week when we have observed war protests around the country.

Kill the white man? Writing in the current edition of Harvard Magazine, Noel Ignatiev, a Harvard fellow and Marxist activist, argues that "abolishing the white race" (give or take a few murders, of course) "is desirable" because it would rectify the overt discrimination of the past.

The Jay Bennish Subsection

The assault on American youth. The last Global Geographic Literacy Survey, assessing the geographic knowledge of 18-24-year-olds in nine different countries … found, for example, that only 17 percent of young Americans could locate Afghanistan on a map; 29 percent could not correctly identify the Pacific Ocean; and 11 percent were unable to find the continental United States. If high-school geography classrooms around the United States are anything like that run by "teacher" Jay Bennish, at Overland High School in Aurora, Colorado, the results are understandable.

Teacher rebuked for Bush diatribe. High school teacher Jay Bennish will return to the classroom Monday [3/13/2006] after receiving a rebuke from his school district for delivering a highly charged political lecture during an honors geography class.

Bush-bashing teacher typifies a union bent on indoctrination. All right, grab your Rand McNally World Atlas and open it to the "Map of the United States as Nazi Germany." It's on the border of "George W. Bush is Eerily Like Hitler." At least it is in the classroom of Jay Bennish, the Denver high school geography teacher who is on paid leave because he couldn't find it in himself to just teach his subject.

Unsatisfying end to Bennish affair. Bennish's return to school Monday ought to trouble district parents, in part because it isn't clear that he really intends to change his ways. "Jay Bennish has promise as a teacher," Superintendent Monte Moses said in a two-page statement, "but his practice and deportment need growth and refinement." Yes, that's one way of putting it. And how will Cherry Creek ensure his "growth and refinement"? The public doesn't know because the district won't say, citing confidentiality in personnel matters.

Jay Bennish and 1973. The debate about Jay Bennish, the Colorado high school teacher who confused a diatribe against the Bush administration with a lesson in geography, is not about free speech, but about the meltdown of Western civilization.

Fire Bennish for His Moral and Historical Ignorance. The righteous indignation against the classroom activism of Jay Bennish has thus far centered on the inappropriateness of such remarks, the obvious left-wing slant of Bennish and his desire to proselytize, and the clear violation of district policy. All these considerations make a slam-dunk case for getting rid of Bennish quickly, and the school district's plodding attempts to decide what to do simply show how bureaucratic, union-driven, unfocused, and cowardly the regular public school system has become.

Youth indoctrination update. It's academic and intellectual dishonesty when a teacher, who is supposed to be teaching geography, uses his classroom to indoctrinate relatively uninformed teenagers. Recording the teacher's comments broke neither school policy nor Colorado law. But more importantly, I believe that what teachers say in class should be subject to parental and public scrutiny.

We hope the preacher-teacher learned his lesson. He admitted no wrongdoing for giving an argumentative classroom lecture in which he referred to "eerie similarities" between things said by Adolf Hitler and President Bush. … He wouldn't discuss how he will do things differently when he comes back from paid administrative leave.

Paid Speech in our Classrooms. Apparently, it's acceptable in the Cherry Creek School District for a geography teacher to use 20 minutes of class time for a left wing, fanatically whacko, socialist diatribe, providing he has made arrangements for Ann Coulter to tell the class what she thinks of communism. Isn't public education great? Here's a better idea. Spend the forty minutes in geography class teaching kids about geography.

Teacher's anti-U.S. diatribe caught on tape. A high school teacher caught by a student on audiotape in an anti-U.S. and anti-capitalism diatribe was placed on administrative leave after the recording was made public.

[That's his biggest problem. A lot of controversies fade away quickly, disappear from the news media, and are easily forgotten. But not if there's a recording of the incident. Of course, if there was videotape, we'd never see the end of it.]

Jay Bennish, Colorado Teacher, Caught in Liberal Indoctrination Scandal. A collection of links to news articles about this incident.

Michelle Malkin has a transcript of "the whole, crazy screed."

Classroom brainwashing: Governor Bill Owens of Colorado has cut through the cant about "free speech" and come to the defense of a 16-year-old high school student who tape-recorded his geography teacher using class time to rant against President Bush and compare him to Hitler. The teacher's lawyer talks about First Amendment rights to free speech but free speech has never meant speech free of consequences.

Matt Lauer sets his audience up for ignorance. The mainstream media positioned this story as a teacher who was disciplined, because, after listening to the president's State of the Union speech, he said Bush sounds a lot like Hitler. Unfortunately, the mainstream media failed to report the fact that on February 1st, while addressing his high school geography class, Jay Bennish sounded a lot like Osama Bin Laden.

Animal rights activism

It was only a few decades ago that people could engage in hunting, fishing, raising farm animals for food, without being perceived as anything but normal, hard working and productive members of society. But today there are people whose commitment to animal rights leads them to make trouble for anyone who raises animals for food or fur. Leather and fur clothing have become politically incorrect, and today's school kids are taught about farming from a very different perspective than the schools of fifty years ago.

To concede that animals have rights — and to teach vegetarianism in school — is a revision of history that conflict with the Bible and leads to the destruction of American traditions.

PETA's School Raid Rolled Into Sushi. You would be forgiven for thinking that PETA cares more about a school of fish than a school of children. Once again, the group is swimming upstream from common decency by trying to brainwash children with anti-fishing messages.

Animal Rights Lunatic Is A Dog's Best Friend. Last week, students at the University of Iowa participated in their school's annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Human Rights Week. Despite the event's emphasis on human rights, Steven Best — philosophy chair at the University of Texas El Paso and co-founder of the Animal Liberation Press Office along with Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine spokesperson Jerry Vlasak — managed to worm his way onto the speakers' list and make the case for his decidedly anti-human agenda. Speaking to over 100 horrified spectators, Best said he'd sacrifice the life of a stranger to save his dog.

School Boards Beware: An animal rights group posing as a health organization recently wrote school foodservice directors all across the U.S., urging them to serve exclusively vegetarian meals as a response to recent news about mad cow disease.

PETA Coaches Kids on 'Religious' Objections to Dissection: A militant animal rights group is encouraging children to raise religious objections when asked to dissect animals in school, even if the dissection of animals may not be against their formal religious tradition.

School Nutrition Professionals Flunk PCRM. The deceptive Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) deserves a dunce cap for pushing its radical animal-rights agenda at the expense of children's health. So say Albuquerque, New Mexico school nutrition professionals. After initially assisting PCRM with its annual "school lunch report card," the nutrition coordinator (a registered dietician) for Albuquerque schools "said she probably would not have cooperated with the group ... if she had known more about it." She told the Albuquerque Tribune: "Real physicians would not recommend a vegan diet for growing children."

More about The Invasion of the Food Police

Affirmative action, diversity, and multiculturalism

Multicultural study means there is an emphasis on anything and everything that contrasts with America's historically male-dominated English-speaking white culture. It is change for the sake of change — the result of the rebellious 1960's counterculture finding its way into the academics.

White Guilt Awareness Day. "White guilt" is the politically correct agenda taught by the Left on college campuses today. ... White guilt perpetuates the victimization of minorities by convincing them of how terrible their existence is. As long as we keep telling people they are victims, the Left will continue their reign over the oppressed, students will be forced to be more politically correct in order to avoid further injustice, and white students will continue to be ashamed of themselves and find ways to apologize to society. White hate groups are just one of a few different means used at universities to battle the "privileged." Welcome to the politically correct world of higher education — allow them to tell you how you should feel.

The Case Against Mortarboarding. I have received a number of e-mails over the years from disgruntled parents griping about the left-wing indoctrination their kids are forced to undergo at colleges and universities all over America. ... If I were running things, most high school grads would enter trade schools. America will always need nurses, plumbers, carpenters, glaziers and mechanics. What nobody needs is some 21-year-old schnook who's wasted four years and most of his inheritance majoring in black, Hispanic or lesbian studies.

White Student Sues For Racial Discrimination. This fall, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear two race-related lawsuits filed by white parents in Seattle, Washington, and Jefferson County, Kentucky, who claim their government school systems are engaged in discrimination by using race to make school assignments, a practice supposedly outlawed by Brown v. Board of Education. (Although based on political considerations and a flawed sociological study, rather than on legal arguments, Brown nevertheless is the law of the land.)

The First Affirmative Action Candidate. It seems as if American college students have been groomed to cheer a black presidential candidate thereby providing them with a small measure of ablution from their "racist sins." Unfortunately, they were not trained to apply universal moral standards and sound judgment when analyzing issues and individuals. Rather, their worldview is seen through the limited prism of white guilt. The outcome of which is that white America, Europe and Israel are tainted with sin, and blacks, Muslims and those of the third-world are victims, and therefore virtuous regardless of their actions or motivations.

Ethnomathematics: Even math education is being politicized. A new textbook, "Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers," shows how problem solving, ethnomathematics and political action can be merged. Among its topics are: "Sweatshop Accounting," with units on poverty, globalization and the unequal distribution of wealth. Another topic, drawn directly from ethnomathematics, is "Chicanos Have Math in Their Blood." Others include "The Transnational Capital Auction," "Multicultural Math," and "Home Buying While Brown or Black."

A betrayal of the civil rights struggle. During the 2003-04 school year, only 52 of the nation's 92,000 public schools were labeled "persistently dangerous," a designation under the No Child Left Behind Act entitling students to move to an alternate "safe" school. Philadelphia had 14 schools labeled as "persistently dangerous" and Baltimore had six. … School violence, including assaults on teachers and staff, is not restricted to inner city schools but occurs also in suburban and rural schools. However, the bulk of the violence is at schools with large black populations.

Enough Already. Many have weighed in on Eric Holder's "cowards" slur. He obviously hasn't paid much attention to college campuses, where the obsession with race permeates departments, curricula, hiring, faculty profile, student events, funding, etc. Bumper-sticker identification and hair-trigger readiness to accuse someone of racism to further a particular ideological or even personal agenda are now 30 years old and institutionalized in higher education.

Noose Outcry: A New Entry in the Campus Hall of Shame. Does anyone still wonder why college culture is the laughingstock of the larger community? Our campuses seem to lurch from one politically correct knee-slapper to the next. Does anyone crack a book at these places anymore?

Sending Poor Kids to Middle-Class Schools Doesn't Fix the System. Proximity is not destiny, educationally speaking. A generation of experience with racial integration has taught a clear lesson: Sitting black kids next to white kids in school is not a silver bullet that zaps unequal achievement. However, the faith that proximity leads to equal achievement remains the cargo cult of education.

Pin the tail on the honky: If you haven't been following the campus cultural wars lately, you might find it hard to believe that some of those quotes were actually uttered. But if you have worked or studied on a campus lately, chances are you've heard variations of several of them.

Academic Cesspools: Professor Noel Ignatiev, of the Massachusetts School of Art, explains that his concern is to do away with whiteness. Why? "Because whiteness is a form of racial oppression." Ignatiev adds, "There cannot be a white race without the phenomenon of white supremacy." What's blackness? According to Ignatiev, "Blackness is an identity that can be plausibly argued to arise out of a resistance to oppression." Bucknell professor Geoff Schneider agrees, saying, "A lot of our students, I think, are unconsciously racist." Both Ignatiev and Schneider are white.

Academic Cesspools II. The Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a frontline organization in the battle against academic suppression of free speech and thought, released information about what's going on at the University of Delaware, and probably at other universities as well, that should send chills up the spines of parents of college-age students.

An Afro Centric Curriculum Will Segregate Students. In Philadelphia, students are going to be required to take a year-long course in African and African-American history — written by an "Afro centrist". … No good can come of placing more emphasis on the events and experiences of one race over that of another in our public schools. … Implementing a curriculum in which a theme of black oppression dominates, is simply trading inequities.

Capistrano Abandons Race-based Student Attendance Policies. The Capistrano Unified School District will stop using students' race to determine where they will go to school, under a comprehensive settlement approved by the Board of Trustees Monday night [11/27/2006]. The settlement comes in response to a lawsuit brought by Pacific Legal Foundation, which challenged the District's policy of utilizing race as a factor when drawing attendance boundaries, along with the current attendance boundaries plan created pursuant to that policy.

Reporter claims assault at 'racist' public school. A radio reporter attempting to interview the principal of a publicly funded school backed by radical groups that lay claim to the Southwestern U.S says he was chased down and tackled at the campus today, apparently by order of the principal.

A definition of racism, itself racist. Apparently, blacks and Latinos and Native Americans can't be racist. So the next time a kid of minority color pulls a knife on a white kid, calling him "Whitey" or worse, we'll know that this wasn't racist. The next time a minority rights champion flies off the handle and says that all whites are racists, we'll know that statement isn't itself racist. How will we know? Because according to the people who teach our children, only white people in America can be racist!

The flag, the schools, the immigrants, and us. Exalting multiculturalism and multilingualism, and encouraging separatism on the part of minorities, liberals are in effect asking Americans not just to open their doors but to tear down the house.

Planning ahead is considered racist? Are you salting away a little money for your retirement? Trying to plan for your kids' education? If so, Seattle Public Schools seems to think you're a racist. According to the district's official Web site, "having a future time orientation" (academese for having long-term goals) is among the "aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype and label people of color." Huh?

"I pledge allegience to my black people". One of the nation's fastest-rising poetry prodigies is a 7-year-old New York girl whose poisonous demagogic advocacy of black separatism makes Al Sharpton look like Mister Rogers. … Autum Ashante' is the natural offspring of militant multiculturalism and government-sanctioned identity politics. We reap what we sow.

Baking up a controversy. The enemies of campus bake sales are at it again, inflaming one another over the dire threat of cupcakes and cookies sold at different prices to whites, minorities, and women. The sales are political parody, of course, poking fun at affirmative action policies and trying to get a debate going. Campus orthodoxy holds that such policies are sacred and that any dissent, even in the form of satirical cookie prices, is illegitimate and deserving of suppression.

Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times. During my last two years at Dorsey High, I've had my classroom burnt to the ground, had a death threat, physical assaults, and constant accusations of racism. Community "activists" in our area have written woeful letters to the Superintendent, imploring her to remove me from my position as a Spanish teacher. Their accusation: Students are failing my class because they're forced to learn Greek and Hebrew instead of Spanish.

Enforced diversity: William Anderson describes his participation in a mandatory "diversity" seminar for his new job at Frostburg State University in Maryland. After recounting some of the idiotic exercises, he observes that liberals have managed to impose such indignities as these "diversity" sessions because of their control of so many social institutions.

Multiculturalism's War on Education. Back to school nowadays means back to classrooms, lessons and textbooks permeated by multiculturalism and its championing of "diversity." Many parents and teachers regard multiculturalism as an indispensable educational supplement, a salutary influence that "enriches" the curriculum. But is it?

Rap Music as Education an Insult to Minority Youth, Says Columnist. A growing number of public school teachers across the U.S. are using rap music to teach history and English — but that's not sitting well with one conservative columnist.

Western Civilization At Stake: Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) worries that too many young Americans — particularly immigrants and their "first generation" children — are being taught the wrong lessons in our schools. We cannot allow this to continue or else we risk becoming the Dis-united States of America. If you care about our country and its heritage, then you need to contact your local school board and state legislators and emphasize the importance of their recognizing the importance of Western Civilization.

Liberal segregationist in the schools: The spirit of George Wallace is alive and well — among left-wing zealots in some of America's most "progressive" taxpayer-funded schools. In Oberlin, Ohio, local school board president Tony Marshall argues that only black high school teachers should teach "black history."

Black History Month vs. Condoleezza Rice:

A friend of mine from Arkansas writes the following: "Thought you'd appreciate this little anecdote. A co-worker of mine has a daughter in public elementary school, here in Pine Bluff. They're still doing Black History Month stuff, apparently, because the kids were told to come to class dressed as a famous (and presumably accomplished) African-American. My co-worker's kid was told to come as Tina Turner. My co-worker informed the teacher that her child would come as Condoleezza Rice instead. The teacher refused to allow it, on grounds that Rice 'is for white people.' Nice, huh?"
— Jay Nordlinger in National Review.

Politically Correct Education: Multiculturalism is often given as the driving ethic that prompts one to be politically correct. At the foundation of this movement is the belief that all education is political. Nowhere in the curriculum can one find a hiding place from race, class, or gender issues. Added to this assumption is the law of moral and ethical relativism: All systems of thought, all cultures, are equal in value. To assume otherwise is politically incorrect by definition.

Quota "logic": Old-timers may remember a radio program about a crime-fighting hero called The Shadow, who had "the power to cloud men's minds, so that they cannot see him." Affirmative action has that same power today. Some of the murkiest thinking of our times has come from those defending group preferences and quotas.

Quota "logic" part II: What most blacks need is — first of all — the kind and quality of education that they do not get in most ghetto schools. Least of all do they get this education from those teachers who spend precious class time dredging up the past instead of preparing students for the future.

College Prof Shunned by "Tolerant" Crowd for Opposition to Affirmative Action. A professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington has requested a debate with black activist Jesse Jackson. Dr. Mike Adams wants a face-off with Jackson on Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor to discuss the issue of affirmative action. But Adams says he doubts Jackson will be "courageous enough" to come on the program and debate the topic.

Sincerity of "Diverse" College Campuses Questioned: A conservative activist says despite all the "diversity" hype on public university campuses today, there is little tolerance for those who dare to question left-wing ideology.

Race is Still an Issue in College Admission, Activist Says: In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209, which did away with racial preferences in admissions. The Center for Equal Opportunity says the University of California is ignoring the law in a unseemly manner and is back to using race as a factor in admitting first-year students.

The Prep-School PC Plague: The diversity industry — the profession paid to harangue Americans about racism and sexism — has burrowed deep into the nation's elite prep schools. Where private secondary schools once inculcated American citizenship and patriotism, today they employ diversity professionals to show students their complicity in an unjust society.

Diversity vs. "Diversity": Sometimes it seems as if "diversity" is going to replace "the" as the most often used word in the English language. Yet the place where this word has become a holy grail -- academia -- shows less tolerance for genuine diversity of viewpoints than any other American institution.

Penn State Caves to Activists: Pennsylvania State University has given in to the "diversity" demands of hundreds of leftist students camping out in the student union.

Military memorial not PC enough: A memorial to commemorate alumni who "gave their lives" in military service to the United States say the honorarium is not "diversified" enough.

The London Terror Plot's Academic Connection. One of at least 24 "young Western Muslims" nailed in the British airliner bombing plot last week, [Waheed] Zaman is described as "a well-known political activist" at London Metropolitan University. According to the Times of London, "He is head of the Islam Society at London Metropolitan University and is reported to have spoken at Muslim rallies and written a number of articles about Islam for the student magazine."

The Crime of Being White: Recently I wrote a piece about Keith John Sampson, a college student who was charged with "racial harassment" for reading an anti-Ku Klux Klan book. Not surprisingly, the article evoked a great response, including emails from those with their own stories to tell about persecution inspired by what I will call caucaphobia.

American Politics Aren't 'Post-Racial'. The story began prosaically enough. Keith Sampson, a student employee on the janitorial staff earning his way toward a degree, was in the habit of reading during work breaks. Last October he was immersed in "Notre Dame Vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan." Mr. Sampson was in short order visited by his union representative, who informed him he must not bring this book to the break room, and that he could be fired.

There is also a section about racial bias in College and University Admissions.

Feminism and abortion acceptance

If today's school children can be taught to accept abortion as a normal and harmless part of our culture, then it will be easier to convince them to vote for socialists when they become adults. Abortion "rights" are an indispensable key to the Democratic Party platform.

A Conservative Kid Tries To Survive In California Schools. My name is Sam Besserman, I'm eleven years old, I live in Beverly Hills, California, and ever since I can remember I have been subjected to political bias in school. The first time I noticed the bias was actually in preschool where the teacher was reading a book about the importance of mothers and the inferiority of fathers. I tried to tell the teacher that dads might be just as important. The teacher responded in a sing-song, "No, listen to me, I'm the teacher."

All eyes on Planned Parenthood field trip. The school board voted early yesterday morning for an investigation of last week's field trip that brought middle school students to a Planned Parenthood office. The board told school administrators to investigate the matter, recommend any changes needed to school policies and decide if disciplinary action needs to be taken.

Not Your Mother's Tupperware Party. Shame the student who thinks of abortion as anything other than a right; this class had over 400 young, impressionable minds (including a freshman-heavy enrollment) and the message relayed eerily echoed that of Capitol Hill Democrats: anyone who thinks of abortion as something other than a "right" is simply outside the mainstream.

Feminism and the College Curriculum: Is there any truth to the charge that the traditional curriculum promotes sexism and social injustice? Is modern higher education in America "oppressive," "undemocratic," "masculinist," and in need of radical reform? These are charges being directed against the academy by leading academic feminists.

Feminist Victory. Lawrence H. Summers is stepping down as president of Harvard University. His critics cite a number of missteps – from challenging the eminent African-American professor Cornell West to expressing support for the U.S. military – that contributed to his demise. But those were minor scrapes; he's leaving because he never recovered from a wound inflicted by the Harvard gender police.

The shibboleths of academe. As uncomfortable as it might make feminists, the empirical evidence points to small but important differences in scientific and mathematical abilities between men and women. On average, women perform better on verbal tests, while men demonstrate greater visual-spatial capabilities, and these differences are more striking at both the lower and upper extremes of intellectual ability.

Sex Games: Coming to a High School Near You. Title IX turns 35 this month and the bad gals have officially won. Sex quotas in sports under the anti-discrimination law are de rigeur on college campuses. And the Bush administration's failure to even challenge this perversion of the law — concocted, for the most part, by and during the Clinton administration — means that eliminating men's sports opportunities in the name of "creating" opportunities for women now has bipartisan blessing.

PC Campuses Hold Peril for Women: By some counts, women are now a majority on American campuses, receiving most of the degrees, which dispels the notion that the educational system favors boys and oppresses girls. The trend toward more women in higher education is to be applauded and encouraged, but it also calls for a warning...

Breeding Victimology in Girls and Leaving Boys Behind in the Name of Equality

American Girl's gifts to agency lead school to scrap show. A Catholic school in Waukesha County is the first non-profit group in the nation to cancel a coveted American Girl Fashion Show amid concerns that the Wisconsin-based doll company behind the show gives money to a national girls organization that presents abortion, contraception and a lesbian sexual orientation as acceptable.

Red and blue bioethics: Bioethics has hardened into an activist ideology that pervades the medical world, the schools, and government. This explains why Leon Kass, a moderate conservative who heads the president's committee on bioethics, is under such fierce attack and why Princeton University picked Peter Singer as its first scholar in bioethics. Singer thinks parents should be able to kill disabled newborns.

Jennifer Rankin's protest. What harm would it have done to leave her alone? ... Jennifer Rankin wasn't hurting anybody. She wasn't bothering a soul. She covered her mouth with red tape in mute protest. That's all. For this, officials at Peninsula Shores District School brought out the police? For this they kept her isolated in a room at the school for an entire day?

Anti-abortion fetus dolls handed out to Norfolk students. Plastic human fetus dolls — soft, in pink and brown, and about 4 inches long — have been handed out at Oakwood Elementary School by an employee who was put on administrative leave Thursday over the situation. The dolls, which were distributed over weeks or months, are not authorized by the division as instructional materials, spokeswoman Elizabeth Thiel Mather said Thursday [5/20/2010].

California school settles suit over anti-abortion shirt. A California school district sued by a former sixth-grade student who was asked to remove an anti-abortion T-shirt has agreed to pay $50,000 to settle the suit.

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