Reporting on key Nebraska K-12 education issues on a daily basis from Susan Darst Williams, a writer who lives at the base of Mount Laundry, Nebraska. To subscribe to this blog's mailing list, and see a variety of other education features and information, visit the main education website, www.GoBigEd.com
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Monday, October 20, 2008
Posted
6:10 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
OF 'RADICALIZING' EDUCATION
Ooh. Here's a good backgrounder to read if you want to know what is meant by "radicalizing" education in America.
Presidential candidate Barack Obama is in the thick of things with his associate, unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, recently ix-nayed from giving a speech at the University of Nebraska College of Education, thank goodness.
Ayers as grantwriter and Obama as board chairman "radicalized" schools in Chicago using the $150 million of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (the original $49.2 million grant that Ayers got was a 2:1 challenge match, enlarging the overall take). It was supposed to help disadvantaged kids do better in school. Instead, the money was sprinkled around to individuals and groups -- including to Ayers for "teacher training" -- who would then come under Obama's spell as a "community organizer."
This is how radical ideas get pushed on teachers and students, such as "military budgets snatch food from the mouths of poor children," and "homelessness is the fault of corporate America."
This is how we get charts in math textbooks and on standardized tests that supposedly are about how to read a bar chart, but look closer: they show a slanted take on income distribution in America, with an eye toward fomenting political pressure to force a "fairer" distribution of material and human resources -- i.e., stirring up class warfare with a direct goal of instilling communism, through school curricula and activities.
If Obama is elected, this is what schools from coast to coast will be doing.
Read this and share it, please:
www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_ed_school.html
Labels: Ayers, Barack Obama, radicalizing education, University of Nebraska
Comments:
Who can list examples of the radical agenda in our schools? I can think of these:
universal preschool
graphic, permissive, highly age-inappropriate sex ed
Whole Language that denies there is a correct way of penmanship, decoding and composing text
Whole Math that denies there are correct, fast, efficient and accurate ways of computing
Cooperative Group Learning which denies individual study, effort and performance
Denial of Grouping By Ability, which creates unhealthy dependence on the strong learners by the struggling ones, and associated emotional distress for all levels
Special Ed Inclusion, which slows down all learners and costs three or four times as much as it should
Bloom's Taxonomy, a philosophy of thinking which denies absolute truth and makes everything relative and subject to synthesis
Critical thinking, which relegates everything to a political "issue"
Historical revisionism, which seeks a radically leftist rewrite of American history and expunges traditional concepts and even words like "family," "mother" and "father"
Denial of the Honor Roll through rampant grade inflation
Subversion of effort with standards-based education, which dumbs down the top 50% to the "standard" and makes them wait 'til the bottom 50% meets the "standard," so they learn far less than they could have otherwise
WHAT ELSE?!?!?
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universal preschool
graphic, permissive, highly age-inappropriate sex ed
Whole Language that denies there is a correct way of penmanship, decoding and composing text
Whole Math that denies there are correct, fast, efficient and accurate ways of computing
Cooperative Group Learning which denies individual study, effort and performance
Denial of Grouping By Ability, which creates unhealthy dependence on the strong learners by the struggling ones, and associated emotional distress for all levels
Special Ed Inclusion, which slows down all learners and costs three or four times as much as it should
Bloom's Taxonomy, a philosophy of thinking which denies absolute truth and makes everything relative and subject to synthesis
Critical thinking, which relegates everything to a political "issue"
Historical revisionism, which seeks a radically leftist rewrite of American history and expunges traditional concepts and even words like "family," "mother" and "father"
Denial of the Honor Roll through rampant grade inflation
Subversion of effort with standards-based education, which dumbs down the top 50% to the "standard" and makes them wait 'til the bottom 50% meets the "standard," so they learn far less than they could have otherwise
WHAT ELSE?!?!?
# posted by 
: 8:56 PM
: 8:56 PM