U.S. HISTORY TEXTBOOK PORTRAYS TRUMP AS MENTALLY ILL, RACIST

A new high-school American history textbook depicts President Donald Trump as mentally ill and castigates both him and his supporters as racist.

Published by Pearson Education, “By the People: A History of the United States” will be used by many Advanced Placement students beginning in 2020, reports Todd Starnes.

In the final section, titled “The Angry Election of 2016,” the book states Trump’s “not very-hidden racism connected with a significant number of primary voters.”

“Most thought that Trump was too extreme a candidate to win the nomination, but his extremism, his anti-establishment rhetoric, and, some said, his not very hidden racism connected with a significant number of primary voters,” the book says.

Trump’s supporters, the author writes, are “mostly older, often rural or suburban, and overwhelmingly white.”

It says supporters of Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton “feared that the election had been determined by people who were afraid of a rapidly developing ethnic diversity of the country, discomfort with their candidate’s gender and nostalgia for an earlier time in the nation’s history.”

Clinton supporters “also worried about the mental stability of the president-elect and the anger that he and his supporters brought to the nation.”

A high-school student in Minnesota, Tarra Snyder, told Fox News she was “appalled” by the “blatantly biased” textbook. “It was really, really surprising to me,” she said. “I really believe that learning should be objective and that students can make their own decisions based on what they’re able to learn in a classroom, and if the facts are skewed then students aren’t able to make well-rounded decisions on what they believe.”

Starnes said a Pearson spokesman defended the textbook, arguing it underwent “rigorous peer review to ensure academic integrity.”

“This work is designed to convey college-level information to high school students and meet specific Advanced Placement standards. It aims to promote debate and critical thinking by presenting multiple sides of historical issues and offering a broad survey of arguments from the 2016 presidential election and other recent topics,” the spokesman said.

“We have reviewed the passages in question independently and in the context of the rest of the book. This review has confirmed that the text offers a broad view of critical arguments from both sides of the 2016 presidential election.”

‘Raw hatred’

Powerline blogger Paul Mirengoff wrote that the textbook clearly is using the phrase “Clinton supporters” as “a device to plant the idea that President Trump is mentally unstable, a proposition for which there is no basis other than raw hatred of the man.”

Responding to Pearson’s defense, he said the “peers” who reviewed the book “clearly share the blatant partisanship and mindless anti-Trumpism of the textbook’s author.”

“If they didn’t hate Trump, they wouldn’t be peers. They would be academic outcasts,”  Mirengoff wrote.

He said any schools that uses the book “should be the target of vigorous protests.” “The political blowback should be fierce,” he said.

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UK: The real problem with SATs

Jeremy Corbyn wants to scrap SATs for all the wrong reasons. In Britain, SATs are exams taken during grade school

Political meddling has devastated education. Unrestrained bureaucracy has led to a teach-to-the-test culture in schools. The obvious solution is to give teachers the autonomy they need to carry out their jobs as they see fit.

Spiked has been making this argument for some time now. This week, Jeremy Corbyn appeared to join the fight by announcing that a Labour government would scrap SATs and ‘let teachers teach’. In a speech to the annual conference of the National Education Union (NEU) in Liverpool, Corbyn said that ‘Teachers get into the profession because they want to inspire children, not pass them along an assembly line’.

Corbyn vowed to scrap the compulsory national tests for 10- and 11-year-olds. Labour would develop ‘a broad curriculum aimed at a rounded education’. Yet although Corbyn’s rhetoric sounds good, it is not all it seems. The leader of the opposition is no friend of teacher autonomy and there is nothing new or refreshing in his vision for education.

Corbyn is correct to identify a problem with SATs. Many primary schools go insane at this time of year. There is often a hothouse atmosphere of test preparation that almost completely eliminates normal schooling for year-six pupils. Children are subjected to a regime of coaching and mock testing. If you want to see teaching to the test at its worst, visit a primary school in May. In my experience, the worst primary schools are also those that make the most fuss about SATs. The war-footing atmosphere feels like a defensive posture, as if, deep down, the head and staff know that the tests risk exposing the fact the pupils haven’t learned very much by the time they leave the school.

Even in schools which don’t take this assembly-line approach, the spectre of SATs testing can still distort the curriculum, with SATs syllabuses dictating what school time is spent on. The reason for this preoccupation is that schools are judged according to their SATs data. Poor SATS scores lead to low rankings in national league tables and are used as a negative performance indicator by the Department for Education and Ofsted. The accountability implications are serious and can have a direct bearing on the fortunes of headteachers, teachers and the school as a whole. But given the amount of coaching all students receive, the data does not produce an accurate or reliable account of pupil attainment or teaching quality.

But none of this was what compelled Corbyn to call for SATs to be scrapped. Instead, he repeated the well-worn mantra that the tests stress out young children, give them nightmares and make them cry. The NEU has called for a boycott of SATs on this basis, too. But I have never met these supposedly traumatised children in any of the numerous primary schools I have visited. Mostly, kids are bored out of their minds rather than stressed out by the endless preparations.

For Corbyn, testing is also problematic because, in his view, education should be all about freeing pupils’ ‘imagination’ and ‘creativity’. Schools should focus on individual needs in order to develop rounded pupils who are ready for life in the world, he argues.

But there is nothing new in this approach to education. For two generations now, education orthodoxy has favoured meeting the needs of individuals and has sought to provide life-skills rather than transmit knowledge. And it has been a dismal failure. What’s more, attempts to reverse this trend are met with hostility from the likes of Labour and the NEU.

When Corbyn says he wants to ‘free up teachers to teach’, he really means that they should be free to teach in line with the status quo. This freedom to teach is unlikely to be extended to the likes of Michaela School, Great Yarmouth Charter Academy or Outwood Grange, which are regularly attacked by Labourites and the teaching unions for daring to do things differently.

What Corbyn gets wrong is that the problem with SATs is not the tests themselves. There is nothing wrong with standardised assessments of what a typical child knows at the end of primary education. The issue lies in how the people working in education treat the tests. The bean-counters in Whitehall seem to think that the numbers in their spreadsheets reflect the quality of education. They are all too ready to beat poor performers with a stick. They don’t seem to realise that nothing truly worth doing in teaching can be measured.

The solution, however, is not the one that Corbyn proposes. Telling young people that they are being victimised by testing will get them nowhere. Playing to the education-union gallery by romanticising the failed orthodoxies of the present, while pretending that they are radical and innovative, will only make things worse. There is plenty wrong with SATs, but Labour is not offering a fresh alternative.

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Many University Campuses Are Playgrounds for Insanity
    
If you think the left hasn’t taken over university life in America, you are probably not paying close enough attention or in denial.

I’m not just talking about the liberalism of the professors and the core curriculum but about all of college life. There are glaring examples of leftist extremism everywhere you turn, and they’re so loony that even sane liberal parents should be concerned.

In September, a Michigan State University student awoke from his nap to an apparently unbearable sight, according to The College Fix. His roommate was watching a video of conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. I can guess what some of you must be thinking as you read this: “I sure am glad my kids were never exposed to such provocations, such obnoxious, inconsiderate and uncaring roommates.”

You are probably also thinking, “But if my kid had been the subject of such a triggering event, I hope he would have had the presence of mind to exercise self-help and extricate himself from the hostile environment.”

In this instance, the innocent victim didn’t react violently. He calmly booted up his own computer and filed a complaint against his roommate with the administration’s bias reporting system. Kind of makes you well up with vicarious pride, no?

“Ben Shapiro is known for his inflammatory speech that criticizes and attacks the African American community,” wrote the student in his complaint. “I thought hate had no place on MSU’s campus yet MSU has roomed me with someone who supports hate speach” (misspelling in the original quote).

As a parent you will also be gratified to learn that the university dutifully dispatched an investigator to dig into this urgent matter and to work for a “room change if the claimant would like one.”

A few observations. Ben Shapiro communicates directly and refuses to bow to the gods of political correctness, but his speech is not inflammatory unless you define that as any utterance that leftist students disagree with and therefore unreasonably consider to be incendiary. Nor does Shapiro attack the African American community, and the false allegation that he does is far more inflammatory than anything he says in his podcasts or speeches.

That a major university would even dignify a complaint so frivolous on its face is deeply disturbing. In a sane campus situated in a sane world, a sane administration would have informed the offended student that universities are institutions of higher learning that promote freedom of academic inquiry. It would have told the student that he, not his innocent roommate, is the one who has the problem. He would have to learn that differing political viewpoints are not grounds for psychiatric alarm or switching roommates.

If, on the other hand, the Shapiro-friendly roommate had persistently accosted the offended snowflake in a ceaseless effort to proselytize him, that might be a different story. But in this case we are talking about a roommate minding his own business and watching a video on his own computer. As long as leftists all around us continue to portray mainstream conservative speech as hate speech and inherently racist, sexist, homophobic and all of the rest — and that’s exactly what they do — then we’ll see such faux controversies continue to proliferate. Our leftist culture is indoctrinating kids from the crib to the academy that conservative ideas are so heinous that merely harboring them in the presence of a liberal is a microaggression that demands redress. If I’m exaggerating, then please explain the aforementioned incident — and hundreds of others like it.

I’m sure you realize that if my word limit for this column were 70,000 words, I could fill it with similar examples. Let me leave you with a few more from The College Fix, lest you think I’m blowing conservative smoke. For more, check out the website.

Wake Forest University is hosting a series of “listening sessions” for faculty and staff of color (no white people allowed) to promote “inclusivity” in response to a student protest over “white supremacy.” Don’t bother to look up the definition of “inclusivity.” Leftists have seized control of our dictionaries, too. LOL.

During a guest lecture at Boston University, a University of Washington professor who specializes in “whiteness studies” reportedly railed against colorblindness, saying that white people who see people as individuals rather than as members of their race are “dangerous.” I hope I don’t need to remind you that this is wholly out of phase with the teachings of the universally revered Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — not to mention just outright bizarre.

I shouldn’t have to issue a disclaimer, but as a matter of self-protection I will: Nothing I’m saying here is to diminish actual displays of racism when they occur. They can and should be addressed. But it should be obvious that the political left has bastardized our language by redefining terms to demonize political opponents and suppress their speech.

Incalculable damage is being done by characterizing differing opinions as “hate” and “racist” when they are nothing of the sort. Leftists are causing immeasurable suspicion, distrust and divisiveness in teaching that conservatives and/or Trump supporters are bigoted. Such slanders are exacerbating the very conditions they purport to address, and people need to speak out against this destructive trend in our culture and on our campuses.

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