All links point to Twitchy, a wonderful Twitter aggregation site implemented by Michelle Malkin.
During that Administration that ran things in our country from 1977 until January 20, 1981, we got as gifts from the store of bad Marxist applications, the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. Two behemoth top down government bureaucracies designed to alleviate some perceived pain, which in fact were either caused by previous government intrusions or fabricated whole sale from nothing. The Department of Energy was created supposedly to insure that we would never again be held hostage as a nation to the whims of Mid Eastern Despots, using their oil to inflict their will upon our national politics. The idea was that only through the aid of a government agency, would sufficient domestic energy production become possible. The result of course has been the opposite. The Department of Energy has acted as a block to domestic sources of energy, and the recent energy surge gleaned from hydraulic fracturing has been in spite of government interference, and not a result of any aid from the Department of Energy. In fact, the boom has been almost entirely fueled by privately owned land, leased over government objection to private companies who have bypassed the federal behemoth at every turn.
The other brand new spiffy bureaucracy given to us by Jimmy Carter of course was the Department of Education, the main topic of today’s post. The original purpose of the Department of Education was to improve the quality of education for America’s Children, who at the time, were placing second or third among all industrialized nations on a consistent basis. Currently, after three decades of our federal government’s intrusion into our schools, our children are not even cracking the top 25 on a consistent basis. This is hardly a picture of success, at least in terms of the actual mandate. It does however manage to get even worse than that. When the sounds start emanating to end this drain of our national resources, the political left begins whining immediately that this would be the end to Head Start. The problem is of course, emotional blackmail aside, every study of Head Start shows that children who graduate from that vaunted program have actually been harmed by the experience, and are less ready to enter a full day of school and learn than if they would have just merely skipped the program entirely. Thanks to the Department of Education, our children are less qualified than most in the industrial world to perform basic math, but somehow feel better about their skills than those who outperform them. This is because self esteem is actually something that has been taught in place of math, or at least shares time. Rather than teaching basic economics and an accurate history regimen, duty to the state has been coupled with alternate history lessons showing the glories of Socialism and why those governments were actually better for their citizenry than systems that allowed for maximal freedom.
George W. Bush was not the worst President in our national history, and he got a lot of things right. I would even defend him on most issues, but one place where he really blew it, and I mean in spectacular fashion, was the No-Child-Left-Behind-Act. Not specifically the implementation of the act under President Bush, but because of the chicanery that the ambiguous act allowed to happen under the stewardship of his replacement. (There are several instances of this to be sure, with our current NSA spying scandal being one such example, Fast and Furious another, but discussions of those failures would be beyond my intended scope for this discussion.) No Child Left Behind was the primer for Race To The Top, which is where Common Core was born. Common Core, for the uninitiated, is the federal government’s new idea to teach all of the children in our nation the same curricula, while eliminating local control of the parents who’s children are being impacted by those decisions as to what will and will not be taught in school. In short, those of you with children no longer know what’s best for your kids, big brother does, and he’s fully intending on inflicting his vision for their upbringing on you.
So, exactly what will your kids be learning through common core, and how will they be taught this? I’m glad you’ve asked, the answer can be found by clicking here. Besides the fact that the assignments themselves had glaring errors in math, spelling, and grammar, there is this little gem:
Check out the answers to numbers 4,5, and 6 particularly. This purportedly was for an English class, teaching our children how to read and write, and the lesson clearly calls for obedience to the state, and acquiescence to the collective. Remember that this lesson is designed for every child in America. This is Marxist dogma, and it is now the common core curricula being taught to our kids.
Here’s another example from the same site:
Here’s another bizarre school assignment to add to the pile, courtesy of Wisconsin-based talk show host Vicki McKenna. Students are asked to work in groups to choose seven people to save from a shipwreck. To help in their decision, they are given some rudimentary information about each passenger, such as race and religious views.
Mr. Blake, for example, is a Mormon who “sympathizes with anti-black views,” while Mr. Newton is a “black power advocated” [sic] who is “suspected of homosexual activity.” You can see the educational value, especially when you take into account Father Frans, a priest who is “often criticized for liberal views.”
Rather than reading, writing, Science, Math, Economics, History, or anything formerly considered worthy of inclusion in the basics of what our children learn as a part of their education, which used to be geared towards creating productive members of society, our children are learning conflict resolution, liberal policy, the intolerant toleration of the left, Marxist dogma, and anything but the aforementioned subjects. We as a nation are not, “racing to the top.” We are racing towards mediocrity, or worse.
The Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, himself a socialist with plenty of bona fides in that particular arena, has declared that all of the push back on common core is due to, “racist white mothers from suburbia.” Pushing the bile back down my throat in order to finish this last thought, I have to tell you that were my children still of school age, I’d be plenty pissed. It’s not just my same old objection that any and all dissent in our nation has been dismissed as pure racism for the entirety of Barack Obama’s time as our President. Nor is it the fact that these statements, all of them, amount to nothing more than ad hominem attacks, meant to stifle debate and avoid meeting us in the arena of ideas. It is the thought of what in the hell will we do when the bulk of our work force is populated by idiots, who have learned not one God Damned useful thing to help them be productive to the level that we will need for them to be productive at? This will produce an entire generation of kids who are unable to tie their own shoes or put their pants on correctly. Do we really want a whole generation of children to become adults, completely unprepared for the shit storm that is adult life? This transcends bad idea, and has moved into the territory of downright dangerous.
If your goal were to destroy America, is there one single decision that you would have made differently than any of those made by Barack Obama?
Cross Posted from Musings of a Mad Conservative.
Tags: Department of Education
