RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/21/scholastics-new-school-catalog-hawks-books-to-indoctrinate-kids-with-identity-politics/

The world’s largest publisher and distributor of books to kids, which hosts the No. 1-visited site for U.S. elementary school teachers, has gone full-on woke. You won’t believe the garbage they’re selling to public schools.

This year’s back to school catalog for grades three to six from Scholastic, a children’s publishing giant, features books selected through a partnership with the identity politics pressure group We Need Diverse Books. The results are about what you might imagine.

The catalog’s front page features books about a Pakistani-American girl whose Milwaukee mosque is vandalized in a “hate crime,” a girl who finds out “her dad is secretly dating her best friend’s mom,” and a book about “Native American Heroes” who of course include political activists. Delightful. Third through sixth graders — who are approximately ages eight to twelve — definitely need this kind of broadening of their childish perspectives.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/21/howard-zinns-anti-american-propaganda-takes-smithsonian/

Teach-ins’ at the taxpayer-funded Smithsonian and in New York City promise anti-historical indoctrination from socialist Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States.’

Long ago, during my childhood, school began right after Labor Day, and Columbus Day, commemorating the date Christopher Columbus discovered the New World on Oct. 12, 1492, was the first holiday of the school year.

Not anymore. Columbus Day of late has been marked by defacement of statues and hordes of angry adolescents demanding an end to the holiday. Leading young people in the hate-fest are teachers who have been educated with Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.”

This semester, the Smithsonian Institution is helping. Teachers will learn new teaching strategies and receiving continuing education credits at two “teach-ins” — on Sept. 7 in Washington, D.C., at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, and on Sept. 28 in New York City.

Both “teach-ins” are efforts of our national museum, the Smithsonian, and D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice, “a project of Teaching for Change.” The invitation promises to feature “classroom resources for K-12 from Native Knowledge 360 [Degrees]” and from “the Zinn Education Project, including the campaign to abolish Columbus Day.”

The Zinn Education Project’s Infiltration

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/shortcircuiting_the_natural_love_of_learning_in_young_people.html

There can be little doubt that the majority of today’s students are largely incapable of literate performance. They are also collectively devoid of humility before the majesty of the Great Tradition and the lessons of experience that would allow them to grapple with a strenuous and comprehensive curriculum of study.

They have been deprived of genuine instruction in the academic disciplines, indoctrinated in the political shibboleths of the time, and coddled into a state of self-assured autonomy of judgment. This is common knowledge.

Grasping the rudiments of grammar and style, learning how to write coherently (by which I mean both the cursive of penmanship and the cursive of thought), and reading with comprehension in history, literature, philosophy and politics have become dead letters, quite literally. The state of juvenility and ineptitude in which they loiter bodes ill for the culture.

The default procedure among administrators and teachers is to ignore the obvious, to install largely useless computer instruction in the acquisition of writing skills and language proficiency, insist that “fairness” justifies weakening admission standards at the expense of quality, and that ‘social justice” rather than scholarly achievement and disciplinary merit is the aim of education.  

While these institutional debits and failures remain in place, the crux of the issue lies elsewhere. Nothing can supplant early reading — that is, actual reading and being read to — in the home. This is an advantage that cannot be overestimated. Education, as the adage has it, begins in the home with loving and responsible parents. According to Aristotle in the Politics, a child’s character and potentialities are formed by the age of seven, and there is considerble truth to that. Failing such parental supervision, students enter the education system at a deficit. Reclamation is always difficult though differentially possible, assuming native and untapped inclination in the student, a curriculum stressing the basics and expanding outward, an administration concerned with education rather than entrenchment, and teachers who are themselves well-educated and professionally accountable — a Sisyphean proposition.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/20/common-core-screen-overdoses-ruining-american-kids-intelligence/

Between ineffective teaching methods at school and an overdose of screen time at home, our children are becoming intellectually deficient. We need to reverse the trends.

By every metric (SAT, ACT, and even IQ), the intelligence and aptitude of American students has declined in recent years. As Joy Pullmann documents in an article about the results of using Common Core, student performance on state standardized tests has also gone down — that is, when the scoring isn’t changed to show better results.

Before casting blame on who’s responsible, it’s important to understand what these numbers actually mean. All of these tests attempt to measure higher-order thinking skills as they relate to abstract scenarios, nothing more or less. They do not measure the level of practical skills people might have, their emotional intelligence, or even their actual knowledge of things.

Rather, they assess students’ critical thinking (the ability to analyze), problem solving, and knowledge application. People who have these higher-order thinking skills are generally more adaptable to any kind of learning, particularly the kind of learning that happens in higher education.

Higher-order thinking is also important in a time most activities are computerized and information comes in abstract forms such as images and text. American students who lack these skills will struggle much more when most jobs and other domains in life (communication, management, choosing a lifestyle, etc.) demand this of them.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274681/leading-left-wing-economist-vilifies-trump-and-joseph-klein

Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, an economist who is Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, hates President Trump. That’s no surprise, considering that he is part of left-wing academia and the United Nations wealth redistribution system.

“Trump is mentally disordered: megalomaniacal, paranoid, and psychopathic,” wrote Professor Sachs. “This is not name-calling. Trump’s mental condition leaves him unable to keep his word, control his animosities, and restrain his actions.”

Sachs is not only an economist, it seems. He is a self-appointed armchair “psychiatrist,” who has taken his own Trump derangement syndrome to the point of siding with Iran and China against the United States.

Sachs thinks that the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran was peachy keen. How dare President Trump withdraw from a deal that lifted sanctions against the Iranian regime and gave it gobs of cash upfront to finance its terrorist proxies around the world and fund its illicit ballistic missile development program?  How dare the president question the value of Iran’s loophole-ridden commitments that will sunset in the not-too-distant future and reimpose sanctions on the hegemony-seeking Islamist regime? According to Sachs, who is also pretending to be a lawyer in addition to a psychiatrist, the sanctions are “tantamount to war, in violation of the United Nations Charter.” Sachs goes on to say that the sanctions “constitute, or at least should constitute, a crime against humanity.” The only crime against humanity here is the Iranian regime’s state sponsorship of terrorists who kill innocent people, which the sanctions are designed to combat. As the Washington Post reported earlier this year, “since President Trump introduced sweeping new restrictions on trade with Iran last year…Iran’s ability to finance allies such as Hezbollah has been curtailed. Hezbollah, the best funded and most senior of Tehran’s proxies, has seen a sharp fall in its revenue and is being forced to make draconian cuts to its spending, according to Hezbollah officials, members and supporters.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/the_demise_of_public_education.html

One may believe that those in charge of public education are qualified to administer the task of educating America’s youth.  One may believe they have the best interests of society at heart.  And one may believe they are doing the best they could do, given the conditions under which they have to work.  Abundant evidence, however, points to the conclusion that none of those beliefs is valid.

Public education has become an institutionalized form of child abuse.  Rather than being a tool used to prepare children to become productive adults, public education is being used to indoctrinate them to believe what powerful interest groups wish them to believe.  This process is designed to transform America into a place unfit for human habitation, in which rights are suppressed, powers of government are unlimited, and traditional faith-based values are rejected.

What children in public schools are being told to accept as facts and truth is often nothing more than opinions of those who reject reason and do what they might to prevent students from developing the intellectual skills required for critical thinking so they might embrace their own enslavement and the subversion and degradation of their society.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274612/back-school-and-howard-zinn-classroom-mary-grabar

California has scrapped its proposed Ethnic Studies curriculum. The Orange County Register took from the 300 pages of sample guidelines, quotations about “’guiding values and principles’” that would “’cultivate empathy’” and encourage students to “share stories of ‘struggle and resistance’ and ‘critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.’” The editorial board “blasted” the curriculum as “’leftist propaganda’” that included capitalism in “the roll call of oppression.”

According to the Washington Times, the Jewish Legislative Caucus and 83 Jewish and pro-Israel organizations objected to the fact that the curriculum’s minority groups included “Arab Americans, but not Jewish Americans, and identified multiple examples of bigotry, but not anti-Semitism.” The curriculum also promoted the “anti-Israel, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, . . . BDS supporters such as Women’s March co-leader Linda Sarsour,” and included anti-Semitic rap lyrics,.

Kudos to the Orange County Register, the 84 pro-Israel groups lobbying against the curriculum, and to the citizens voicing their complaints in the feedback form.

But citizens should not let down their guard.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/13/california-readies-new-anti-semitic-curriculum-for-high-school-students/

California plans on adding a big fat healthy dose of antisemitism into its high school curriculum. Perhaps this is why the Qatar foundations has been spending millions of dollars in the American education system?

According to Adam Kredo at Free Beacon:

The California Department of Education is facing backlash after permitting a host of anti-Israel activists to build a statewide educational curriculum that demonizes the Jewish state and is said to be fostering hatred of Jewish and Israeli-American students, sources said.

Already, 83 pro-Israel and anti-discrimination organizations have petitioned the state’s education department to reform its Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) to remove multiple instances of what they say is anti-Semitic and anti-Israel bias.

Opponents say the new material will foster “an unsafe environment for Jewish and Israeli-American students.”

“We are aware that many individuals and groups affiliated with the Jewish community have already written to you about the ESMC’s shocking omission of information about American Jews and anti-Semitism, its use of classic anti-Semitic stereotypes, and its blatant anti-Israel bias,” a coalition of 83 pro-Israel organizations led by the AMCHA Initiative, a watchdog group that combats anti-Semitism in America, wrote to California’s Education Department.

“This includes the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, who wrote to you that they ‘cannot support a curriculum that erases the American Jewish experience, fails to discuss anti-Semitism, reinforces negative stereotypes about Jews, singles out Israel for criticism and would institutionalize the teaching of anti-Semitic stereotypes in our public schools,’” the groups wrote.