“Now class, I’m not going to say this again—no essays about evil guns, or you’ll be sorry.”
Dewey Christian is an English teacher at Denton High School in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and on the evidence of this incident, one more example of how our children are being warped by arrogant bullies and fools under the pretense of public education. The teacher told students to write a few sentences about whatever topic they chose—“a fun experience,” one student said. However, when two seniors turned in papers that referenced guns—the Horror!— Christian scolded and humiliated them in front of the class, and told them that they would receive zeros unless they chose a different topic.
Fired, that’s all—that’s what this teacher should and must be. Continue reading →
The fine art of whitewashing, brought to you by Tennessee’s tea parties.
It might have been Chris Rock’s anti-Fourth of July tweet, or perhaps because there hadn’t been enough news stories making tea party members look racist or foolish (though there have), but suddenly Salon and other left-leaning websites started publicizing an 19 month-old press conference by Tennessee tea parties demanding that the Tennessee legislature pass a law that would whitewash American history, particularly as it applies to the Founders. From a report in the Commercial Appeal from January of 2011:
“Hal Rounds, spokesman for the group, recently claimed at news conference that there was ‘an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the Founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.’ As a result, the Tea Party organizations argue, there should be ‘no portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.’ ‘The thing we need to focus on about the Founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,’ Rounds explained of his interpretation of the legacy of the Founding Fathers.”
There is a lot of useful information to be extracted from this remarkable theory, some with ethics ramifications, and some without. Among the non-ethical conclusions are that… Continue reading →
Here we have a video, taken with a North Carolina high school (North Rowan High School) student’s cell phone during class. (yes, it just points at the ceiling. It’s the audio that matters):
Now lets’s play…SPOT THE OUTRAGE!
(There are ten!)
OUTRAGE 1: Does this sound like a class in session to you? Students are laughing and joking, barely paying attention. What kind of learning can occur in such a a chaotic environment? Do parents realize this is what school is like today?
Is the fact that a student is recording the class without the teacher’s consent an ethical breach? Once I would be tempted to answer yes: recording without permission is always unfair and a Golden Rule violation unless there are special circumstances. However, special circumstances were present, and may be present in more classrooms than our fragile sanity will permit us to accept. I now think perhaps all public school classrooms should be videotaped, all the time.Then we would quickly know the extent of our education catastrophe, as horrifying as that would be.
OUTRAGE 2: The teacher of the social studies class presents as the“fact of the day” the Washington Post sliming of Mitt Romney based on his mistreatment of a fellow student in his prep school days. In itself, this is not an inappropriate topic for discussion by a high school class, as the story raises many fascinating issues. How much do the students feel their conduct during their tender years should count against their character 50 years hence? Is it relevant to the presidential election in any way? How have attitudes toward “sissies,” gays and less-than masculine boys changed since the early Sixties, if at all? How have attitudes toward and awareness of homosexuality? What does this story say about the objectivity of the press? Is it fair? None of these legitimate and discussion-worthy questions, however, seemed to occur to the teacher, who was simply trying to show that “Romney was a bully in high school” in a clumsy and transparent effort to indoctrinate her students in her own political views. Continue reading →
Here is what’s scary to me: a teacher considers giving his middle school students the assignment of doing opposition research on the Republican presidential candidates, and no ethics alarms go off for him at all. Fairness? Objectivity? Abuse of power? Prudence? Bias?
Not a ding.
Michael Denman assigned his 8th grade students at Liberty Middle School in Fairfax County the task of researching the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the four presidential hopefuls looking to challenge President Obama and forward them to the Obama campaign. The students were told to research the backgrounds and positions of each of the candidates ,find their “weaknesses,” and to prepare strategy papers to exploit them in the campaign. Then they were told to find a contact in the Obama campaign to send them to. Continue reading →
You see, the Hitler Youth was BAD indoctrination and manipulation of children. Forcing students to protest budget cuts is GOOD indoctrination. Understand, students? .
Third through fifth graders at an elementary school in Michigan’s Walled Lake Consolidated School District were assigned by at least one teacher this week to write letters to Gov. Rick Snyder protesting his budget cuts. Students were told the best letters would be forwarded to the governor. According to one parent, teachers prepped the students with explanations of the cuts—from the teachers’ perspective only, of course. Students also were asked to speak in front of their classmates about why they didn’t like the budget cuts, as if they could have any real understanding of the issue.
Teachers are engaging in gross misconduct and abuse of power when they use children they have been entrusted to teach to further their personal, political and economic agendas. This isn’t just indoctrination; it is forced labor and exploitation. The school board has apologized—wonderful. Now when will those teachers be sent packing? My kids and your kids are not trained monkeys to be programmed and manipulated into unwitting political combatants. These teachers are better than the child molesters, but not by much.
When, if ever, the deteriorating education profession agrees on a serious and comprehensive ethics code, it had better include a provision that prohibits this outrageous conduct in the strongest terms.
Believe it or not, Yip Harburg is only 7 years old in this photo...
Third graders at Woodbrook Elementary School in Albemarle County, Virginia recently performed a song called “Part of the 99,” proclaiming their solidarity with the “Occupy” movement’s zeitgeist. The song was part of a program sponsored by “Kid Pan Alley,” a children’s arts organization. The children worked with a facilitator to develop the theme and lyrics for a song, and that facilitator, who so far has not been identified, obviously, and I mean that in the “do these people really think we’re all idiots?” sense of the word, manipulated the process to produce an “Occupied Youth” moment. A blog got wind of it, and the criticism, richly deserved, erupted on the internet.
Incredibly, the school denies that any indoctrination went on, and claims that the children came up with the lyrics and theme on their own. As “who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” lies go, this one is superb. Here are the lyrics those third graders supposedly came up with by themselves: Continue reading →
A German language teacher at Western Hills High School in Fort Worth, Texas sent 14-year-old honors student Dakota Ary to the principal’s office for telling a classmate that he believes “homosexuality is wrong.”
Ary, who was raised in a church that believes homosexuality violates God’s laws, has a right to believe whatever he chooses to, and also has a right to express those beliefs as long as he doesn’t denigrate fellow students or incite violence or a disruption. There are words for schools punishing students for their beliefs, and among those words are “indoctrination,” “coercion,” brain-washing,” and “unethical.” Continue reading →
Octavia Nasr, a CNN editor and reporter for two decades, just got her walking papers for a 140-character tweet reading, “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.. One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.” The problem is that this particular “giant” was an anti-American, anti-Israeli terrorist who advocated suicide bombings and who encouraged terrorist acts by Hezbollah. In an explanatory blog post that failed to save her job, Nasr blamed the limitations of Twitter, and explained that she didn’t really admire him, just his stance against the abuse of Muslim women.
Ethics Alarms 