The PC campus - politically corrupt

I'm kind of tired of hearing about our "politically correct" colleges and universities. There's nothing "politically correct" about them. They are politically corrupt. Let me give you a personal and very recent example of what I'm talking about.

My eldest daughter was mostly homeschooled. Later, she found she had a love for art and interior design. She decided she wanted to pursue a career in that area. To enter the art school of her choice, she needed to take some basic educational courses and decided the easiest and most economical choice would be through the Northern Virginia Community College system.

As a graduate of the "public university" myself, I expected the worst in political indoctrination - even in this so-called "red state." But nothing could prepare me for the horror story my daughter told me after her first class in the fundamentals of design materials - a required course for her to advance to the prestigious art school she hopes to attend in a year or two.

The professor began the four-hour class by showing Al Gore's new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." That's right. That's what I said. The taxpayer-supported professor at this taxpayer-supported institution abused her students on the first day of an art class by showing them Al Gore's propaganda flick on "global warming."

But it gets worse - a lot worse. Following the two-and-a-half hour Al Gore presentation, the students were treated, according to my daughter, to 30 minutes of weeping by the professor who carried on about the terrible threat to the planet posed by this global warming menace. Keep in mind, this is an art class.

Next, students were told they would have to see the movie at least two more times and write a paper about it. Did I mention this was an art class?

Next, students were given their homework assignments: Change incandescent light bulbs to fluorescent, plant trees, etc. Maybe you're asking yourself: "What does this have to do with art?" I was wondering the same thing. I asked my daughter. She explained that a few paragraphs of the material they would be reading in their textbook on design materials had to do with the environment. Thus, it wasn't a stretch for this activist masquerading as an art teacher to turn her entire class into a training center for eco-whack jobs.

I feel sorry for my daughter. She knows what's going on here. Imagine what it is like sitting through this kind of forced re-education because you are at the mercy of this professor if you want pursue your dreams? I'm so mad I could spit.

I wanted to call up my state legislator and complain. But then I remembered, this is not the exception, it is the rule! This goes on every day in colleges and universities across this country. It's just that I haven't been exposed to it firsthand in this way since I was a student myself. So, instead I vented on my brother, who thinks much like I do about such matters. He had a great line: "I always suspected libs needed a course on how to change a light bulb. This pretty much confirms it." He added: "And aren't they opposed to cruel and unusual punishment? Sitting through Gore's movie three times would certainly qualify even by Gitmo standards."

Unfortunately, all we do is laugh about outrages like this. We have to start seeing it for what it is - corruption, abuse of taxpayer dollars, government abuse of authority. Dismissing it as "political correctness" is just way too polite

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Australia: Phonics still being ignored by "unscientific" teacher-training colleges

Education faculties will have to abandon their unscientific ideology of reading if children across the nation are to be guaranteed basic literacy. This claim is made by Max Coltheart, a leading member of the group of 26 academics, mostly psychologists, whose open letter to former education minister Brendan Nelson inspired a national inquiry into how reading is taught. In his first assessment of the outcome of the inquiry, which reported in 2005, Professor Coltheart of Macquarie University has warned that unless Dr Nelson's successor, Julie Bishop, takes on the education academics he holds ultimately responsible for poor literacy, the inquiry will have been wasted.

Professor Coltheart, an advocate of the phonics method of teaching reading, said as far as he could tell not a single education faculty had shown any sign of heeding the reformist recommendations of the inquiry. The faculties were wedded to the failed whole-language method, he said. "They're so defensive, they won't do it unless they're compelled to," he told the HES. "Most of them are of a very unscientific frame of mind. They hate the idea that you can even measure reading. Is (Ms Bishop) going to compel them to (reform) or is she going to shelve (the report)?"

Ms Bishop said the commonwealth did not have the power to force education faculties to adopt the report's recommendations. But she pointed to the requirement that states submit from May next year to annual national literacy and numeracy testing for students in years three, five, seven and nine as a condition of the federal funding agreement. "This testing will place significant pressure on university education faculties to produce teachers with the skills to more effectively teach reading, grammar, mathematics and other key skills," she said. It was up to the states, as employers of most teachers, to insist that education faculties turn out graduates with the right skills to teach literacy.

Terry Lovat, from the Australian Council of Deans of Education, disputed Professor Coltheart's image of education academics as captive to the whole-language method and hostile to phonics and the Nelson inquiry. "I think that if the whole-language approach ever dominated, it has not done so for 15 years: it's a straw man," Professor Lovat said. He said the inquiry, on which he sat, had been influenced by the education deans in finding that classrooms needed a balance between direct instruction phonics and indirect "literacy saturation". Education faculties, including his own at the University of Newcastle, were well aware of the report's recommendations and were taking them into account in regular internal reviews.

The debate about teacher training is expected to reach a new pitch this year. A federal parliamentary inquiry into teacher education is expected to report before March. Labor's education spokesman Stephen Smith has unsettled teacher unions by endorsing "a rigorous assessment" of teacher performance in the classroom.

Professor Coltheart said the public debate about reading tended to assign blame to teachers but they themselves were victims of the unscientific culture of education faculties. "Somebody's got to be blamed for (poor literacy) and it looks to me it's the faculties, and if Julie Bishop does nothing she can be blamed, too," he said. He said surveys suggested that up to 20 per cent of children and adolescents emerged with very poor literacy.

With Melbourne University's Margot Prior, Professor Coltheart has written a 5000-word analysis of the Nelson inquiry and its aftermath. It is expected to be published soon by the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences. "(The inquiry found that) the whole-language approach to the teaching of reading, currently the most widely used approach to the teaching of reading in Australian schools ... is not in the best interests of students, especially those students who are having difficulty learning to read," they write.

They say this method disapproves of direct instruction in rules for translating letters of the alphabet into sounds. They say the method holds that children learn to read and interact with texts to create meaning for themselves, just as they learn to talk without any explicit teaching. They say that any successful reading program has to begin with so-called synthetic phonics, in which children are taught to read by matching letters with sounds and putting them together into syllables. They say a thorough overhaul of teacher training is necessary. "(But) we know of no plans for the universities to improve the training of teachers in the science of reading, and in evidence-based methods for teaching reading and assisting children with difficulties in learning to read. "This is despite the fact, noted in the Nelson report, that it is currently possible for Australia's future teachers to complete a bachelor of education course with less than 2 per cent of total credit points devoted to instruction in the teaching of reading."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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