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School of Liberal Thought

You can bet your last dollar if this happened in my school district I would be raising hell so fast and so loud I would be breathing fire.

Public school students from kindergarten through high school held a 1960s-style teach-in here Tuesday, dedicating a school day to a discussion of a possible U.S. war with Iraq

Dan Siegal, the school board member who wrote the teach-in resolution, said the school district's 46,000 students need to learn all about the causes and consequences of war.

"What is the role of oil in this dispute?" Siegal asked. "Do we really believe the United States is concerned simply because Saddam is a bad guy — or is this a way we can gain control over oil reserves in Iraq?"

This is a public school district, funded by public money. How dare they spend a day focusing on such one-sided issues and call it education.

The material was presented in what the board considered age appropriate ways. For example, a fifth grade class watched a video about Palestinian children and heard from a member of a pro-Palestinian group.

Patterson told the high school students that the military is deceptive and that President Bush's reasons for going to war are misguided.

Age appropriate? That's not even school appropriate. How can you take a volatile, divisive issue like that and preach one side of it in a school setting? This is not education, it's indoctrination. It's brainwashing when you are talking about kids as young as ten having this crap forced into their heads without any sort of debate or open discussion on the other sides of the issue.

More teach-ins are planned for the future. School officials say that next time, they'll try harder to find speakers in favor of the Bush administration's policy in order to give students a more balanced view.

How about this? You don't preach about it all, especially not with grade school kids. How about you concentrate on getting those math and verbal skills up and teaching these kids how to read and write properly so they can get into college. Then, when they achieve that all imporant acceptance into Liberal University choose journalism or liberal arts as a major, they can have all the anti-war protests and demonstrations they want. Of course, the only people paying any attention to them will be the students with the PETA and Greenpeace and Amnesty International t-shirts.

I fear for our future if this is what are children are subjected to in the classrooms every day.

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Comments

Thats the problem... stuff like this breeds retards like this one.

If this is your first wake-up call about what is going on in our government-run schools (aka "public" schools), then you have many more shocks in store for you. Indoctrination is the norm, not the exception, and has been for many decades. Several generations of children have gradually been trained to accept rapidly decreasing freedoms, and none of them have been taught to think for themselves. Perfect fodder for corrupt politicians to get away with whatever they like.

Stuff like this goes on all the time. You should hear the enviromentalist propaganda that spouted sometimes. Of course in other parts of the country (like where I'm from) the chapter on evolution is always conviently skipped over in biology class.

When I was in grade school, we had a weeks long introduction of modern ecological "thinking". In other words, Nature=Good, Everything the Human Race Does=Bad. No deviation from the party line was allowed and if you dared do so you were verbally hammered by both the teachers and their suck-up, sycophantic, student supporters.

By the way -- that was back in the late 60s. This has been going on for a loooong time.

Oakland has a military style school in their school district - the Oakland Military Institute - OMI.

They will not allow West Point recruiters to speak to the children in the OMI.

These kids are almost ALL minorities, and are probably the best candidates in Oakland for getting a decent education for free.

I shake my head.

And public 'educators' wonder why the trend towards home-schooling is growing all throughout the country.

More people are getting fed up with the political indoctrination that is taking the place of real learning in our schools.

Some of these so-called educators need a good horse-whippin'.

Now see...I have no problem with them devoting a day to discussing the possible war. It's not like kids aren't aware of it. You can't go anywhere without hearing about it. I think its great for kids to discuss current issues. You know the old saying knowledge is power. They most likely hear all sorts of wild, ridiculous rumors from their classmates. Some of them might be terrified and have no one to talk with.

I also don't have a problem with them hearing different points of view. There are always two sides to everything. We think they're wrong; they think we're wrong. That's the whole point.

What I do have a problem with is teaching children only one side of the story. Give them each point of view & let them decide what they believe. Kids are smarter than people give them credit for.

This part in particular bothered me: "The material was presented in what the board considered age appropriate ways. For example, a fifth grade class watched a video about Palestinian children and heard from a member of a pro-Palestinian group."

Did they happen to show any age-appropriate videos of Isralei children, shoppers, dancers, or other civilians being shredded to nail-filled bits by Palestinian homocide bombers? Of Palestinian "leaders" calling for death to all Jews?

My first reaction on seeing the quote was "huh, probably Oakland". Followed the link, and, yep, sure enough.

For what it's worth, the vast majority of California isn't like that.

Isralei = Israeli. Boy, that preview function would be useful to actually use. ;)

Well I should mention that I just remebered having a pro war rally when I was in the 4th grade for Desert Storm. We were a bunch of jingoists back then... :-) I guess it really just depends on where you're from, because a case for conservative indoctrination could be just as easily made in the southwest Missouri school districts I attended. The evolution thing was the perennial 'not with a 60 foot pole" issue. My 5th grade science teacher got in some fairly deep crap b/c some stupid girl told her mommy that she was teaching astrology, when she should have said astronomy. News crew even showed up for that. Various Satanic Panics, a few flayed squirrels, that sort of thing. A book about menustration got banned from the library a year or two ago. (They reconsidered, since they decided they should at least read the book before banning it)

Wow. I just remebered why I hated my hometown.

It's the same in a lot of places, and it's that kind of indoctrination that makes people suspicious of ANY schoolkids speaking out for or against a cause.

Example: Right in my backyard, students from a couple of high schools were protesting Iraq. First thought: How were these kids manipulated into their ideas? Then doubts: Maybe they're sincere and genuine. But you read stuff like this, and it's harder and harder to believe the latter.

I watched a segment on this last night on the Orielly Factor (or whatever, Bill calls that show on MSNBC).

He had the chairdude on of the area schoolboard from Oakland and he pretty much took him to task for it saying that it was brainwashing kids etc..

The Oakland school official said that they tried to invite some big wig Republicans to come and give their side...but couldn't find any takers--so they just gave the kids each copies of Bush's last state of the union address or something. I'm sure they made it far in that! Especially the seven year olds.

Like Orielly said, to a seven year old, if a grown up (teacher/authority type) says that war is bad...that's pretty much the gospel truth.

Still it would have been nice if the right could have sent someone in. Who knows how hard they tried.

Bill also said that since the school was receiving govt funding that maybe they should just watch themselves. And that pretty much tells all the private or otherwise schools out there all they need to know about the caveats of taking government money, which disturbed me.

Orielly said the school would be better off concentrating on reading issues, since the rank very low nationally and lowest in the state. But, hey, who needs to bother with reading when you can just be told what to believe all day? Right?

"Do we really believe the United States is concerned simply because Saddam is a bad guy — or is this a way we can gain control over oil reserves in Iraq?"

Sure, that works for me. When the taps are opened wide and oil runs $15 a barrel, and the Iraqi people have billions to spend repairing what has been done to their country during three decades of being Saddamized, what will these weenies bleat about?

As peat pointed out, 7 year olds are not up for critical discussion on national issues. Their tactics are similar to personal injury lawyers who parade photos of injuries past gullible juries. Tugging too hard at the heartstrings can often unplug the brain. As this is true of adults, how easy is it for children, brainwashed by years of this drivel, to become critical thinkers, and realize the truth?

We can only hope as they grow, they discover blogging.

Public schools should be very careful how they present this kind of information.

What this school did was obviously biased and it gave the children very little to choose from.

In fact, I am not too sure about discussing a subject as nasty as war too heavily with 7 year olds. That's not to say it shouldn't be discussed at all, because however bad it might be, our youth are not going to be well served by being insulated from the truth.

Ideally, in this situation what a teacher would do is explain the objective facts of the situation, and then solicit opinions from the students, without offering her own opinion in order to keep the discussion balanced and to get those little brains working.

This of course, does not happen in the public school system, and to make it even worse, parents and students usually have no recourse. At least in college, if I get a professor who is a dick, I can switch teachers, or (in most cases) I can just be a dick right back and get away with it but children and parents don't have that option in the public school system.

The incessant hell-raising in public schools over the teaching of evolution is a perfect example. The schools seem to have an ability to do exactly what the parents don't want done. Some schools won't even touch evolution, others teach evolution as if it were some incontrivertible scientific fact. Both approaches have serious problems. Evolution is worth examining in school, but it should not be parrotted as truth. In fact, from what research I've done with my chemistry and biology buddies here at school, evolution is really nothing more than a wild-assed guess based on scant data. Which is fine with me, sometimes wild-assed guesses are all you have, but it needs to be clear that that is all it is.

Anyway, I got off on a tangent. To make my point short, to fix the problem we just need to abolish the public school system and use vouchers. I think the people would be better served this way, and even if they weren't, you don't really learn much of anything useful in the public school system. You need to attend a university to get a real education and by the time you are going into college brain-washing isn't a problem anymore--you are way too old for that.

You have to trust the kids to know when they are being shoveled a load of that which makes gardens grow --- because they do.

I'd love to sit in on one of these teach-ins just to watch the schools administrators see it all go horribly, horribly wrong.

This type of fardling idiocy is the number one reason I decided two years ago to homeschool my daughter... and we've never regretted it.

Here's an article that gives some insight into how out of control our schools often are - and why. www.city-journal.org/html/13_1_how_i_joined

It wasn't just that they invited "big-wig Republicans." From what I've read, they specifically invited Bush and Powell, who not surprisingly were unable to drop what they were doing and rush out to a high school teach in.

I remember during the first war in Iraq, we had an in class activity writing letters to President Bush telling him we didn't want war. At the time I never wondered about parent permission or who paid for the postage. My Girl Scout troop leader was horrified. I didn't have much of an opinion either way at the time. K-12 I was heavily immersed in left liberal democratic propaganda via my school teachers. It took me 1 semester of college to outgrow it. Now I'm an ardent supporter of the current war. Effective indoctrination huh?