indoctrination

Ethics Quote of the Week: Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“Why does a public school herd its students into campaign events — replete with student musicians repurposing the school’s fight song to support a political candidate? It’s compulsory schooling and compulsory participation in politics. The purpose is openly political.”

Bloggress Ann Althouse, criticizing a Harris campaign stop at a high school in Georgia.

I am inclined to agree with Althouse and see this as totalitarian-ish indoctrination, but only because the public schools have been tending increasingly that way in recent years. It’s possible, I think, that the motivations of the teachers and the school were not partisan but educational. In a healthier era when parties didn’t try to demonize each other, a chance to experience a Presidential campaign up close would have been regarded as unique teaching opportunity. I know that in 1960, when I first began my obsession with U.S. Presidents, I would have loved to be in the middle of a candidate’s visit, and which candidate would have mattered to me not one whit.

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I’m Curious: What Would You Call The Results of This Newsbusters Study In Addition To “Unethical”?

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

Newsbusters has the results of a study it performed to examine the political orientation of Late Night TV Guests. It isn’t a surprise to me in the least, yet seeing the results still gave me a jolt. As I write this, I am trying to figure out what this obviously intentional practice of the networks and entertainment industry is, exactly. But first, the study…

It tallied the guest appearances on five daily late night comedy shows: ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. The period examined was the nine months from October 2, 2023, to June 27, 2024.

In that period, progressive/Democrat guests outnumbered conservative/Republican guests 137 to 8, or 94% to 6%. If you just count partisan officials, the count was 34 Democrats to 5 Republicans.

Colbert—naturally—had the greatest cumulative discrepancy at 14-1. The Jimmy Kimmel balance count was 7-0. Seth Meyer’s was 3-0, and Jimmy Fallon, who is mostly apolitical (except in his monologues) was 1-0. Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show came in at 9-4.

In the category of journalists and celebrities, the slant was 104 progressives to 3 conservatives.

Colbert was again the most biased at 34-0. The Daily Show was second in bias at 29-1. Meyers had a 21-0 progressive imbalance, Fallon’s was 11-1, and Kimmel’s was 7-1. No journalists from conservative publications or platforms were allowed: here are the outlets represented:

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Hey Douthat! How About Coming Right Out and Stating That U.S. College Students Are Indoctrinated into Radical, Progressive, Marxist Ideology?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Talk about burying the lede.

Sort-of conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat issued what might have been a useful column, What Students Read Before They Protest, about the reasons why students at Columbia and other “elite” educational institutions are demonstrating in favor of Hamas, terrorism, anti-Semitism, and wiping Israel off the face of the earth. But Douthat, who can write clearly and forcefully when he wants to (or, I suppose, when his woke and biased editors let him) instead buries his own objective in foggy rhetoric, Authentic Frontier Gibberish and equivocation to such an extent that 1) few will have the patience to read it and 2) the importance of his point is diluted and lost.

This is how Jonathan Turley used to write until he was red-pilled.

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Public Education Indoctrination Update…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

1. On Legal Insurrection, Ramona Bessinger blows the whistle on a program she participated in, a Department of Homeland Security funded training program for teachers to combat “disinformation” as part of a “media literacy” effort called Courageous RI. offered through the University of Rhode Island. “The idea of Media Literacy made its way into K-12 schools as a solution to combat perceived “disinformation” and “violent extremism,” she writes. “Both terms are defined as a result of children being exposed to ‘disinformation’ while at school….But who should judge what is mere opinion vs “disinformation”? This sort of subjective judgment is exactly what public school teachers should never do.”

“[W]hat happens once a child is identified as “extremist”?  Well,” she explains, “naturally, any child identified as an extremist would want to please their teachers, therefore abandoning their pattern of “disinformation” and “violent extremist” views for the accepted viewpoint.   The student then becomes a member of the accepted in-group and may in fact help in identifying other children and teachers that are seen as extremist.”

“In fact, we are seeing this play out in K-12 schools across the nation,” the teacher writes. “Students are encouraged to identify peers or, worse, their teachers who they feel represent extremist views, then report that individual to other adults…In some cases, teachers are protested, harassed and bullied, while in other cases, peers may be  singled out and bullied.”

She relates her experience of seeing “the Courageous RI facilitators [pointing] to Trump as the root cause of all social media and media disinformation. They blamed  Trump for influencing “MAGA Republicans” to commit violence and more. During the weekly online training sessions, I asked for evidence to support their claims that violent extremism and disinformation existed in K-12 schools.  I was quickly dismissed or directed to chat conversations where conservative voices were singled out and suppressed.”

“Any student or faculty member with opposing political view-points on controversial topics like climate change, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) agendas, race-based narratives, and more could be identified by a media literacy teacher or student, then referred to thought partners who would set out to correct said student’s line of thinking or to persuade the child to abandon their point-of-view.”  Worse case, peers and friends would report on each other and in some cases teachers like me would be protested and singled out for conservative view-points.”

In addition to the troubling tale she tells, I was bothered by the poor grammar, syntax, spelling and punctuation in her post. She is a high school teacher, after all. I had to make several edits to make her post comprehensible.

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Woke Kindergarten

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I honestly thought this story was a parody when I first read about it. Horrifyingly, Woke Kindergarten is real: a genuine dead canary in the mine of U.S. culture. On the company’s website, it boasts, “Woke kindergarten is a global, abolitionist early childhood ecosystem & visionary creative portal supporting children, families, educators and organizations in their commitment to abolitionist early education and pro-Black and queer and trans liberation.” The babber on that page shouts, “Power to the little people!”, a direct call-out to Marx, and what that really means is “Power to radical anti-American ideology through the programming of its children.”

Claiming that the schools are more dedicated to indoctrinating children than in educating them is another one of those conservative conspiracy theories people catch from Fox News like the flu, I keep reading. The next time someone tells you that, send them the Woke Kindergarten link right after you respond, “Bite me, you useful idiot.”

Wandering through the site is like visiting Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, early education version. “Woke Words of the day” include “Ceasefire,” “Protest,” Strike,” “Abolish” and “Anti-Racist.” The kids are introduced to the wonders of censorship. How are children introduced to poetry, its meter, its rhyme schemes, its beauty? Here’s one of Woke Kindergarten’s “teachable poems”:

Sure, it doesn’t doesn’t scan and is incomprehensible, but there’s a leftist message in there somewhere. On most of the site, the communist aspirations are hardly hidden. “Lil’ Comrade Convos” is one section. Under “Woke Wonderings”, described as “unconventional questions rooted in liberatory thought” that teachers and parents are supposed to pose to 4 and 5-year olds, who, as we all know, are well equipped with the experience and critical thinking skills to evaluate them, we have these loaded queries…

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Comment of the Day: “Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Ethics Alarms post regarding the Harvard-Harris poll showing that Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 had wildly diverging beliefs from the rest of the population in supporting “woke values and victim culture” ended with the plaintive query, “Now what?”

Michael R, in his Comment of the Day to “Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…,” answered the question thusly:

***

Hmm… So, maybe you CAN’T allow people who hate this country and what it stands for teach the children. Maybe you CAN’T let them control the media including the news. Maybe you CAN’T let them be hired by the government and take over the 4th branch. We have allowed this for 50 years and now we are surprised by the results.

Who could have predicted this would be the outcome?

Of course, everyone with a brain predicted this at least since the 1970’s. Now, the problem is what to do about it? You can’t fix the education system.

  • You can’t hire teachers that aren’t fixated on spreading the woke mind virus because the people doing the hiring only hire people who have appropriate brain washing.
  • You can’t become a teacher if you don’t support the woke mind virus because the education faculties will throw you out otherwise.
  • Even if the faculty don’t want to throw you out, the professional standards call for DEI, pronoun usage, etc. It is a requirement of the program that you believe these things.
  • If you don’t pledge allegiance to the woke agenda, you don’t meet the requirements of the teacher ed program. Even if that is ignored, the accreditation body would remove the department’s accreditation if they allowed an outsider to become a teacher.
  • Even if you somehow overcame that, the teacher’s union would eliminate any teacher hired who didn’t conform.

There are a couple obvious options.

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Fire The Teacher And School Board, Pull Out All The Students, Raze The Building And Sow The Grounds With Salt…But First, GET OUT!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Ugh. Here is another one of those “conservative stories” that so far the progressive media has ignored. I can’t find any non-conservative reports, but it appear to be real. A tenth-grade teacher of “Ethnic Studies World History” at Chief Sealth International High School (Could there be a description that screams “Woke mania!” any more shrilly?) failed a student on a class quiz called “Understanding Gender vs. Sex” because he wrote that only women can become pregnant as an answer to one question and and that only men have penises on another.

According to local radio 770 KTTH, some of the questions on the quiz focused involved personal pronoun use (“When someone uses ‘they/them’ pronouns, what does that mean about their gender identity?”) and stereotypes. (“True/false: Transgender people are gay”). Question 4 asked for a true or false response to the statement, “All men have penises.” The student chose “true” because 99.9% of the time it is true. The teacher marked it incorrect. Question 7 was another true or false question, “Only women can get pregnant.” Again, The same student marked this statement “true” as well. The teacher believes that men can get pregnant, though 99.999999999999999999999+ men throughout history and currently could not and can not.

The child’s mother is perplexed, reportedly telling the Jason Rantz Show on the radio station that her complaints have gone unanswered, and that her son says he has been called “fucked and racist” and “a product of the patriarchy” by teachers in the school.

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“Nah, Colleges Don’t Indoctrinate Students! It’s A Conspiracy Theory!” Brown Replies, “Hold My Beer!”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The Washington Examiner reports that 40% of Brown students now identify as LGTBQ+. The Brown Daily Herald’s 2023 Spring survey revealed that 38% of students, more than five times the national rate, no longer consider themselves “cis.” The gay and lesbian population has increased by 26% and the percentage of students identifying as bisexual has increased by…wait for it!… 232%. Just eleven years ago, in 2010, only 4% of Brown University students said they were not conventionally heterosexual. Now it’s 38%.

Commenting on this phenomenon at the Victory Girls blog, Lisa Carr writes in part,

The new “cool kids” now are changing their names every other day, along with changing their identities to anything contrary to their biological sex. Joe becomes Joelene who is dating Mary who wants to be known as “Mike”. Mary is nominated for Homecoming King while Joe is the Homecoming Queen; both in their gender-fluid and ambiguous outfits. And yes, they are probably still wearing those filthy, ugly masks because society told them to stay scared. (But alas, don’t be scared to cut off your genitalia.) This is the new cult. This is the trend we are seeing in colleges but I would argue that this seed is being planted as early as elementary school….This is no longer about loving and accepting all. This is about subtle conversion by suggestion.

Apparently a Brown professor, Dr. Lisa Littman, argued that campus culture and peer groups were pressuring students into such epiphanies regarding their true sexual identities, and got herself fired for it. Continue reading →

Small Victories: Relentless Ridicule Beats Back Ludicrous Wokeness At Brandeis

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There is hope!

Brandeis University in Massachusetts published one of those “Oppressive Language” lists, telling students that phrases and words like “ladies and gentlemen,” “policeman,” “picnic,” “people of color,” “rule of thumb” (don’t ask me!) were offensive to somebody, and should be avoided. Also “Take a stab at it,” “trigger warning,” and “beating a dead horse” (Too violent!), and “African-American,” “long time no see,” “lending a deaf ear,” and “handicapped space”.”” (Identity based!) Other examples include “Homeless person, “powwow,” “picnic,” “freshman,”and “mentally ill.”Once the list was publicized, the mockery sent Brandeis’s way was relentless, as well as deserved, even though the taboo list eventually had a disclaimer that the web page “is not a university expectation, requirement or reflection of policy.”

That didn’t help. Making the university look especially silly as well as hypocritical was Campus Reform’s report in June 2021 that Brandeis was still using many of the phrases and terms on the BadSpeak list. “Freshman” and “picnic,” for example, were still turning up in articles, blogs, and department materials. The Brandeis University Teacher Education Program Handbook also used the term “rule of thumb!”

Campus Reform reported last week that Brandeis quietly took down the list.

Ethical Quote Of The Month: Elon Musk

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“You are the government. They are NOT your kids.”

—Entrepreneur and Twitter savior Elon Musk, responding to the Biden Administration’s totalitarian rhetoric in its latest pander to the LGBTQ lobby.

The White House released a tweet from the Biden-Harris administration that stated, “To the LGBTQI+ Community – the Biden-Harris Administration has your back.” The video accompanying the tweet states, “these are our kids,” and “not somebody else’s kids; they’re all our kids.”

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