Displaying posts categorized under

EDUCATION

How and Why Joe Biden Opposes Patriotic Education By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/how_and_why_joe_biden_opposes_patriotic_education.html

Of all the executive orders that newly elected Joe Biden swiftly enacted,  nothing is more indicative of his anti-American animus and radical left-wing influence than his revoking Trump’s “1776 Commission” to promote “patriotic education.” 

The 1776 Commission to Create a Patriotic History Curriculum is in direct contrast to the “1619 Project,” which reflects a decidedly  anti-American, factually incorrect, and blatantly biased program currently being pushed through the U.S. education system.

The mission of the 1776 Commission is “to defend the legacy of America’s founding, the virtue of America’s heroes, and the nobility of the American character.”  But the left continues the mendacious onslaught of falsehoods about America.

Considering the people Biden is choosing to assist him, this move should come as no surprise.

After all, Susan Rice, his incoming domestic policy adviser, views America as a racist nation.  In fact:

[I]n 1986 she wrote an 86-page book titled A History Deferred, which claimed that because most U.S. students were ‘taught American history, literature, art, drama, and music largely from a white, western European perspective, their grasp of the truth, of reality, is tainted by a myopia of sorts.’  Hence, ‘[t]he greatest evil in omitting or misrepresenting Black history, literature, and culture in elementary or secondary education is the unmistakable message it sends to the black child,’ Rice elaborated.  ‘The message is ‘your history, your culture, your language and your literature are insignificant.  And so are you.’

Transmitting the Truth About America’s Founding Anyone not blinded by prejudice can see that freedom is under assault in America. To rekindle the distinctively American variety of freedom it is first essential to understand it. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/23/transmitting-the-truth-about-americas-founding/

Among the 17 executive orders emitted by the Biden Administration on January 20, perhaps the most disturbing was the abolition of the 1776 Commission, the body President Trump formed last year to “enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union.” 

Other of Biden’s executive orders will have a more immediate practical effect. His scuttling of the Keystone Pipeline, for example, will throw thousands of Canadians and Americans out of work. Furthermore, by signaling the new administration’s hostility to fossil fuels, it will also abet the process of undermining America’s energy independence, one of President Trump’s greatest accomplishments and a dynamic motor of America’s prosperity. There is cheering tonight in Tehran, oil-rich Arab states, and Moscow because of those insidious initiatives. And it goes without saying that there is wild celebration in Beijing as they digest the implications of the fact that the man whose family they so conspicuously enriched over the years made it to the White House. 

Another of the Biden Administration’s early woke initiatives is obeisance to the tiny but turbulent “transgender” lobby. Accordingly, another executive order requires that high-school and college sports teams allow men who say they are women to compete on women’s sports teams, the effect of which will be to obliterate women’s sports. Henceforth, too, all government forms will ask what people’s “preferred pronouns” are. One wit suggested that Biden should say his preferred pronoun was “Xi,” after his big benefactor in China. 

The negative consequences of Biden’s more pragmatic executive orders are incalculable. Nevertheless, the symbolic importance of dissolving the 1776 Commission may, in the end, be the single most destructive act promulgated by the new administration in its opening effort to repeal the achievements of the last four years. 

In dissolving the commission, the Biden Administration clearly signaled that it was siding with the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” a malignant, anti-American fantasy whose guiding axioms are that America was founded as a “slavocracy” and that the American Revolution was fought primarily to perpetuate the institution of slavery. 

What if the Department of Education Were Running Reeducation Camps Fri Jan 22, 2021 Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/01/what-if-department-education-were-running-daniel-greenfield/

How ambitious is this whole attempt to exploit the manufactured crisis with a massive government crackdown on political dissent?

Here’s an NPR interview with Cynthia Miller-Idriss an “expert” on “extremism”.

But we also know that that’s always a Band-Aid solution, that by the time you get to the need to infiltrate groups or deplatform people who are spreading mass amounts of disinformation, you’re already just so far down the pipeline that you’re now talking about deradicalization instead of actual prevention. So this has to be something that involves, you know, Health and Human Services. It has to involve the Department of Education. 

“The need to deplatform”.

We got past the point where we’re pretending otherwise. Now let’s talk about how the DOE and HHS can work on this.

It’s the kind of thing that we invest in as a country or through foundations and foreign ministries overseas in fragile democracies to help the public understand what manipulation looks like and how they could be persuaded by it, but we haven’t done it in our own country, and I think that’s going to have to change.

Thoughts on the 1776 Commission and Its Report By Victor Davis Hanson SEE NOTE PLEASE

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/2021/01/21/thoughts-on-the-1776-commission-and-its-report-n1398928
Biden to Rescind Trump Admin’s 1776 Report on “Patriotic Education” RSK

The newly formed President’s Advisory 1776 Commission just released its report. The group was chaired by Churchill historian and Hillsdale College President Dr. Larry P. Arnn. The vice chair was Dr. Carol M. Swain, a retired professor of political science. (Full disclosure: I was a member of the commission.)

The unanimously approved conclusions focused on the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the historical challenges to these founding documents and the need for civic renewal. The 16-member commission was diverse in the widest sense of the familiar adjective. It included historians, lawyers, academics, scholars, authors, former elected officials and past public servants.

Whether because the report was issued by a Donald Trump-appointed commission, or because the conclusions questioned the controversial and flawed New York Times-sponsored 1619 Project, there was almost immediate criticism from the left.

Yet at any other age than the divisive present, the report would not have been seen as controversial.

First, the commission offered a brief survey of the origins of the Declaration of Independence, published in 1776, and the Constitution, signed in 1787. It emphasized how unusual for the age were the founders’ commitments to political freedom, personal liberty and the natural equality endowed by our creator — all the true beginning of the American experiment.

Educational Ethnic Cleansing by Richard Kemp

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16977/educational-ethnic-cleansing

“Jewish people today on campus can be tolerated, protected or abused. At no point are they treated as equals.” — David Collier, Academia, January 18, 2021.

This Jew-hate is cloaked in anti-Zionism, a doctrine that claims the Jewish state, alone among the nations, has no right to exist. It seeks to whip up anti-Israel hatred by focusing on three core lies: accusations of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and settler-colonialism.

The government has been working to persuade universities to adopt the IHRA definition, including the threat of removal of funding streams. Often bitterly contested by academic staff desperate to remain unchallenged in their bully pulpits, as of last autumn only 29 of 133 higher education institutions had complied….

“The goal is achieved! No more Jews at German universities,” the leading Nazi student newspaper, Die Bewegung, triumphantly proclaimed in 1938.

Of course, nothing like it could ever happen again. Except something like it is happening again — now, and in Britain. According to a report published this week by David Collier, a British researcher, some UK universities are now virtually Judenfrei: free of Jews.

This is a chilling indictment not just of British academia but of a liberal democratic society that has tolerated, often through ignorance or complacency, a wave of discrimination against Jews that has swept through the universities over recent decades. From these halls of learning antisemitism has spread out, driving and empowering what is now a solid movement that threatens Jews in various parts of society and has led to many of them leaving. This is not just in Britain. Collier characterises academia as “the epicentre of global antisemitism”.

Scholastic Pushes a False Racial Narrative to Elementary School Children By Matt Muns

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/15/scholastic-pushes-a-false-racial-narrative-to-elementary-children/

Scholastic seeks to connect emotively with our children and change the way they think about the United States and the ideals, principles, and freedoms it was founded upon.

What do George Floyd, Thanksgiving, and the Civil War all have in common? The publicly traded Scholastic Corporation has made a conscious decision to weave them into a twisted account of American History (their label) portraying our country as systemically racist, fundamentally flawed, and essentially evil. Articles written in their weekly Scholastic News Review are mandatory classroom reading and discussion for our children—6 million in total from first through sixth grade across the country, according to Scholastic.

During back-to-school week in August, these 6 million mostly elementary-age students were welcomed back with an article titled “Demanding Justice,” with the subheading: “Protests spread across the United States after a Black man is killed by police.”

The opening article paragraphs are misleading and disturbing:

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are demanding an end to the long history of racism and police brutality against Black people in the U.S. He (George Floyd) died after being pinned to the ground by a white police officer. The officer had pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than 8 minutes. Floyd repeatedly said he couldn’t breathe.

The 1776 Report A Trump commission tries to correct the historical record.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1776-report-11610754084?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

President Trump established the 1776 Commission with an executive order last year for the purpose of producing a counter-balance to the political left’s largely negative interpretation of American history.

The commission’s report, set for release Monday, won’t silence criticism of America, as liberal teachers groups feared. That isn’t in the power of the federal government, let alone an advisory commission. Instead, the 1776 Report makes the case for the American creed and a less radical way to teach history.

“Neither America nor any other nation has perfectly lived up to the universal truths of equality, liberty, justice and government by consent,” the report states. “But no nation before America ever dared state those truths as the formal basis for its politics, and none has strived harder, or done more, to achieve them.”

The Declaration of Independence’s claim that “all men are created equal” was a revolution in itself, a turning point in world history. To reduce America to its violations of that principle, as do many contemporary writers, is to miss the distinguishing part of the story that roused freedom lovers and terrified tyrants everywhere—and still does. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrate Monday, could make America better by insisting it be truer to its own founding principles.

Those steeped in recent academic accounts of the U.S. may wonder how the 1776 Report can say core U.S. principles are “true” and still call itself history. That’s because it reads the Declaration not as archaeology or dissimulation, but as a live claim that demands adjudication.

Can anyone be surprised to hear that undergraduate history enrollments lately have hit new lows, facing worse drop-offs than any other department?

Terror U: Who is Suppressing Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities? Terrorism against Israel is not only promoted within the university walls; it is celebrated publicly. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/terror-u-who-suppressing-academic-freedom-richard-l-cravatts/

In January of 2019, the Academic Freedom Committee of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) wrote a letter to Benyamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, and several other ministers and officials. In that condemnatory letter, MESA, an organization that has been obsessively and chronically anti-Israel, chastened Israel, with the purpose of the complaint “. . . to urge a halt to the Israeli army and security forces conducting arbitrary arrests at and incursions into Palestinian universities, assaulting students, faculty, and staff and obstructing the education of thousands of students.” 

Of specific concern to MESA was the 2018 arrest of Yehya Rabie, the President of Birzeit University’s Student Council by the IDF and a similar arrest of Omar al-Kiswani, the previous President of Birzeit University’s Student Council. “While the Israeli army accused Rabie and al-Kiswani of ‘suspected involvement in terror activity,’” the letter flippantly stated, “both men remain in detention without trial. These arbitrary arrests and detentions without trial are not the exception but the rule” and such arrests, it was claimed, “follow a pattern of Israeli forces’ aggression on Palestinian campuses.” 

For an organization of coddled, safely-ensconced professors in American universities it is easy, of course, to castigate Israel for its behavior in insuring the safety of its citizenry, particularly since in discussing the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, MESA has reliably expected no rational or reasonable behavior from the perennially-oppressed Palestinians and has singularly blamed Israel for its alleged brute treatment of the Palestinians, including these specific arrests which, it contended, “follow a pattern of Israeli forces’ aggression on Palestinian campuses,” and the “attacks, assaults, and detentions described above are grave violations of basic rights to education and academic freedom.”

What’s Happening to a Public School Teacher Who Attended the D.C. Protest Should Worry Us All Bronson Stocking Bronson Stocking

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bronsonstocking/2021/01/10/school-suspends-teacher-for-attending-dc-protest-n2582896

Hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters gathered in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday to protest an election many consider to be unfair. One of those attendees, a public school teacher in Allentown, Pennsylvania, has been relieved of duty pending a formal investigation into his attendance at Wednesday’s protest. 

“Because of the emotion and controversy stirred by the events of January 6, 2021, the teacher has been temporarily relieved of his teaching duties until the School District can complete a formal investigation of his involvement,” reads a statement from Allentown School District Superintendent Thomas Parker. 

You can now be relieved of duty because people are emotional. 

“Yesterday’s events have added to the confusion and uncertainty our students are experiencing during this unprecedented time,” Thomas continued. “To that end, we are reminding our staff to think carefully about what they share online and how it could affect their students and fellow community members. While we all have the right to express ourselves, it is important to do so respectfully. We ask the same of our students and families.”

The superintendent said the district remains committed to meeting “the academic, social, and emotional needs” of students.

“Thank you for your support in creating a safe, equitable, and inclusive environment for students to raise questions and develop a diversity of perspectives about our community, our nation, and the world in which we live,” Thomas added. 

The statement was also provided in Spanish.

Is the Wisdom of Homer Immune to Cancel Culture? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/2021/01/07/is-the-wisdom-of-homer-immune-to-cancel-culture-n1311490

Amid the current hysteria of toppling statues and renaming things, we keep mindlessly expanding the cancel culture.

We are now seeing efforts to ban classics of Western and American literature. These hallowed texts are suddenly being declared racist or sexist by preening moralists.

Or, as one Massachusetts high school teacher recently boasted on social media, “Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!”

Proud?

Over 20 years ago, John Heath and I co-authored “Who Killed Homer?” We warned that faddish postmodernist race, class and gender theories — coupled with narrow academic specialization — was killing the formal discipline of classics in universities.

We worried that without custodians, the appeal of the great literature of Greece and Rome might wane in high schools as well. And it apparently has.

But why should we still read classics such as Homer’s “Odyssey” in the first place?

Classics teach us about the great challenges of the human experience — growing up, learning from adversity, never giving up, and tragically accepting that we are often at the mercy of forces larger than ourselves. All of these trials are themes of “Odyssey.”

Sometimes, Odysseus needs more than brains and brawn — like luck and divine help. How does the old Odysseus, after 10 years of wandering to get home to Ithaca, differ from his younger heroic self on the battlefield at Troy? What old skills and what new ones allow him to defeat the human and inhuman forces of the universe that try to stop his return home?

Great Western literature also questions, or even undermines, the very landscape it creates. Why is Athena, the tough female god, so much more astute than male Olympians like the touchy braggart Poseidon?

How does a supposedly docile, wifely Penelope outsmart the purportedly best and brightest male suitors on Ithaca?