I remember how it was -- JR
Scholastic Mag Smears Trump
If your children have been trudging home lately with a backpack full of animus toward President Donald Trump, it might just be because they’re learning that he’s a racist.
And they’re not just learning this from a couple of woke young teachers unable to separate their political views from their professional duties. No, they’re learning it from Scholastic magazine, the tried-and-true reading companion that has for decades been a fixture in classrooms across the country. “Over 6 million students read Scholastic News every week!” the editors tell us. “See why so many teachers rely on this exceptional magazine to engage their students, build nonfiction-reading skills, and increase content-area knowledge.”
As might be expected, Scholastic has developed a suite of “Election 2020” materials, including candidate profiles of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, as well as perspectives on the leading issues of the day: pandemic response, racial justice, economy, healthcare, climate change, education, immigration, and America and the world.
“The long history of unjust treatment of Black people in America is a major focus of this election,” begins the Racial Justice category, which goes on to explain that “in the wake of police killings of Black Americans, huge protests erupted across the country in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.” We then learn that President Trump “has defended law enforcement, opposed protesters’ calls for reforms, and taken an aggressive stance against the [wait for it!] largely peaceful demonstrations. In July, for instance, he sent federal police to Portland, Oregon, to break up rallies there. Local officials say those officers illegally detained protesters and sparked violence.”
To recap: The police were routinely killing blacks, the result of which was an eruption of “protests” and “peaceful demonstrations” and “rallies,” but there was no rioting, no looting, no arson, no defacing or yanking down of statues, no efforts to incinerate cops in their vehicles with Molotov cocktails, no prolonged takeovers of whole sections of our nation’s cities, no attempts to burn down federal courthouses, no assaults, no battery, and no murders. Nothing like that. And it was the president who “sparked violence” in otherwise peaceful Portland.
“Many people see the president’s response to the protests as part of a pattern of racism,” the indoctrinators at Scholastic tell our children. “He has repeatedly made racist statements and at times shown support for people who promote white supremacy. He has also largely refused to acknowledge the role racism plays in America. For example, he has dismissed research showing that Black people are more likely than white people to be stopped, arrested, and killed by the police.”
Not surprisingly, none of Heather Mac Donald’s data-driven research appears to have made its way into Scholastic’s Trump-hating BLM propaganda. Nor was there any mention of the empowering self-help message of, say, Candace Owens. Nor the death of retired police chief David Dorn, a black man far more worthy of martyr status than Michael Brown or George Floyd or Freddie Gray or Rayshard Brooks. No, the sad fact is that not all black lives matter to the Marxists at Black Lives Matter.
You’re encouraged to read the entire Trump profile yourself and compare it to that of Joe Biden, who undergoes his own share of criticism (without Scholastic calling him a racist) but who seems substantially more sympathetic than President Trump, despite his own troubled history on race. Indeed, his Scholastic profile finishes with this: “He has pledged to expand access to high-quality education, business opportunities, health care, and housing for Black Americans. He has also called for the U.S. government to increase investigations into claims bias and brutality against Black people in police departments nationwide, so that patterns of discrimination can be exposed and fixed.”
Translation: Vote for Joe!
And this, of course, is just the section on “racial justice.” We can only imagine how Scholastic contrasts President Trump’s and Joe Biden’s positions on, say, “immigration” or “climate change.”
https://patriotpost.us/articles/74454-scholastic-mag-smears-trump-2020-10-27
Why Do Republicans Send Their Kids to College?Inside Higher Ed recently reported that over five times as much money has been given by higher education donors to Joe Biden than to Donald Trump. Among professors, the ratio exceeds seven to one. Countless surveys show that the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in the social science and humanities areas of universities is even more lopsided. I once met a Republican sociologist and was so astonished that I asked for his autograph.
This is widely known, even among the general public. I ask myself then: why do middle class folks who have fared relatively well under capitalism in America, people often conservatives or libertarians, send their kids to colleges where they know the instructors predominantly have quite different political orientations, and where the suppression of views antithetical to traditional American values is increasingly commonplace?
Two recent examples: students at Skidmore College are demanding that the school fire an art professor who committed the unpardonable sin of attending a pro-police rally. Second, the University of Chicago English department is only taking doctoral students interested in black studies. Shakespeare and Milton aficionados need not apply. Many middle class parents who know about these things no doubt are asking: do I want to send my child to a school like that? Do I want to send my kid to a place where a significant part of the college community believes it is bad to show support for the police?
The main reason for doing so is that the piece of paper accompanying a college degree historically has had enormous value, with college grads making upwards of double what high school diploma holders earn. A huge percentage of the nation’s most wealthy and politically powerful people not only attended college, but graduated from elite private schools which, ironically, on average are more liberal (based on faculty political orientation) than mid-quality state universities. The “sheepskin effect” is pronounced, and many view a diploma as a prerequisite to a comfortable middle class life.
College presidents need to appease multiple constituencies if they want a long, successful tenure. These constituencies include, typically, a left-oriented faculty and administrative bureaucracy, students who mostly are relatively apolitical but a strident and sometimes large minority of whom often push the same progressive faculty agenda, and alumni of varying persuasions who are on average much more conservative than current campus inhabitants. The students and faculty are on campus and have the capacity to make life miserable for the president; the alumni are distant, disbursed, and less knowledgeable about what is really happening on campus. Thus the administration listens mainly to left-oriented campus denizens, and anyhow most are sympathetic to their perspective.
There are, however, campuses with a much more conservative orientation, and my sense is that these schools on average are doing quite well. In Flyover Country, I think of schools like Hillsdale College, Grove City College, and some Christian schools of diverse denominational perspective, such as Liberty University and Saint Vincent College. The Left Coast has a surprising number of these schools: Pepperdine and Chapman universities and Claremont McKenna College in the Los Angeles area come immediately to mind. And many prominent state schools are also known as not being flamingly liberal—I don’t hear much about radicals rebelling at Texas A and M University, for example.
The politics of all of this are interesting. The Democratic Party leans heavily on the academy for personnel to help run governments they control, provide progressive ideas, and help fund campaigns. Yet some first-rate academicians have also furthered Republican ideals. I think of Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse as a current example. Conservative to middle of the road prominent Black scholars like Tom Sowell, Walter Williams and Glenn Loury are proof that not all African-American intellectuals are reflexively far-left progressives.
On balance, however, campuses are far more left-oriented than the general public, and the disconnect between the Real World and the Ivory Tower has grown pretty large over time, which, on balance, I think is hurting universities and leading to reduced public support. To remain popular on campus, college presidents often praise student protesters, but in so doing annoy some donors and state legislators. Colleges and universities cannot ignore the Real World that funds them.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13267&omhide=true
While Australia's schools coach kids in social activism, literacy takes a back seatSchool students are being groomed for social activism while too many are still functionally illiterate as they leave the classroom.
A new OECD report shows that Australia’s school system has an excess focus on students developing “awareness of global issues”.
Little wonder our students’ performance in the OECD-run Program for International Student Assessment has plummeted faster than almost any other country. More than one in five 15-year-olds don’t have the essential literacy and numeracy they will need to be successful in work or further study.
It provides yet further evidence that Australia’s school system has got its priorities upside-down. Of course we should encourage our children to be good global citizens. It’s heartening to know they are inclusive and aware of diversity. They report more positive attitudes about immigrants and embrace the perspectives of others than in most OECD countries.
The problem is that efforts of the school system to engineer increased “global competences” comes at a cost — namely the education of our young learners — and for two reasons.
First, there is only so much time in the school day and year. And Australian students already spend more time in the classroom than in most countries. The problem is that this time is not being used well. For decades, teachers and educationalists have warned that the school curriculum has become bloated and overcrowded. Flirting with fashionable but untested teaching trends, entertaining fringe educational issues and bringing woke causes to the classroom are all part of the problem.
Despite this obvious progressive march through the education system, concern over infiltration of those ideas into the curriculum and schools has been routinely dismissed as little more than “conservative hysteria”.
There are now multiple reviews of school curriculums under way across the country, but there is little hope the malign and wasteful influences will be struck out.
A central element of the Australian curriculum — which sets the pace for the states and territories — is the focus on so-called “general capabilities”. The competences that are taught and assessed include: personal and social capability; ethical understanding; and intercultural understanding — nice-to-haves, but surely not the centrepiece of schooling.
We need to focus on addressing our students’ literacy and numeracy deficits, with a drive for higher academic standards and expectations from our educators.
The second problem is that, while the curriculum has embraced global issues, it has resisted any effort to reinforce Australian ones. Our students are unfamiliar with our own history, how our democracy works, and have decreasing (or little) national pride.
They’re encouraged to identify as global citizens, rather than as Australians — witness the constant undermining of our national holidays and traditions. Students are often misled to believe our country is racist, sexist, and a selfish polluter. Our school system should educate away foolish misconceptions, rather than promote them in the name of postmodernism and critical theory.
It’s true that the continued pace of globalisation will mean our teenagers need more global awareness than in decades past. But the progressive left has twisted this to mean exclusion of nationhood. We need more, not less, emphasis on Australian civics and citizenship — something that successive governments have promised but failed to deliver.
Not only does the education of school students suffer, but so does their wellbeing.
It’s not standardised testing and end-of-school exams that has resulted in the heightened anxiety of our teens but rather the obsessive preaching of celebrity activists, such as Greta Thunberg, who are preoccupied with building students’ political activism.
We must put an end to the needless sacrificing of our young learners’ futures in service of progressive globalism. In its place, we need to remodel a rigorous and ambitious education system that doesn’t continue to ignore national aspirations and needs.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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