Wednesday, November 28, 2018


Fruits of College Indoctrination
 
Much of today’s incivility and contempt for personal liberty has its roots on college campuses, and most of the uncivil and contemptuous are people with college backgrounds. Let’s look at a few highly publicized recent examples of incivility and attacks on free speech.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, were accosted and harassed by a deranged left-wing mob as they were leaving a dinner at Georgetown University. Sen. McConnell was harassed by protesters at Reagan National Airport, as well as at several venues in Kentucky. Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife were harassed at a Washington, D.C., restaurant. Afterward, a group called Smash Racism DC wrote: “No — you can’t eat in peace — your politics are an attack on all of us. You’re (sic) votes are a death wish. Your votes are hate crimes.” Other members of Congress — such as Andy Harris, Susan Collins and Rand Paul — have been physically attacked or harassed by leftists. Most recent is the case of Fox News political commentator Tucker Carlson. A leftist group showed up at his house at night, damaging his front door and chanting, “Tucker Carlson, we will fight! We know where you sleep at night!” “Racist scumbag, leave town!”

Mayhem against people with different points of view is excused as just deserts for what is seen as hate speech. Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray discovered this when he was shouted down at Middlebury College and the professor escorting him was sent to the hospital with injuries. Students at the University of California, Berkeley shut down a controversial speaker and caused riot damage estimated at $100,000. Protesters at both UCLA and Claremont McKenna College disrupted scheduled lectures by Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has discovered so-called bias response teams on hundreds of American college campuses. Bias response teams report to campus officials — and sometimes to law enforcement officers — speech that may cause “alarm, anger, or fear” or that might otherwise offend. Drawing pictures or cartoons that belittle people because of their beliefs or political affiliation can be reported as hate speech. Universities expressly set their sights on prohibiting constitutionally protected speech (http://tinyurl.com/y7jo75dg). As FIRE reported in 2017, hundreds of universities nationwide now maintain Orwellian systems that ask students to report — often anonymously — their neighbors, friends and professors for any instances of supposed biased speech and expression.

A recent Brookings Institution poll found that nearly half of college students believe that hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment. That’s nonsense; it is. Fifty-one percent of college students think they have a right to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. Nineteen percent of students think that it’s acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking. Over 50 percent agree that colleges should prohibit speech and viewpoints that might offend certain people (http://tinyurl.com/yayxt45u). One shouldn’t be surprised at all if these visions are taught and held by many of their professors. Colleges once taught and promoted an understanding of Western culture. Today many professors and the college bureaucracy teach students that they’re victims of Western culture and values.

Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech.” Much later, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said, “Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.” From the Nazis to Stalinists to Maoists, tyrants have always started out supporting free speech, just as American leftists did during the 1960s. Their support for free speech is easy to understand. Speech is vital for the realization of their goals of command, control and confiscation. The right to say what they please is their tool for indoctrination, propagandizing and proselytization. Once the leftists gain control, as they have at many universities, free speech becomes a liability and must be suppressed. This is increasingly the case on university campuses. Much of the off-campus incivility we see today is the fruit of what a college education has done to our youth.

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Moral Bankruptcy

People who follow politics, even casually, learn not to expect high moral standards from politicians. But there are some outrages that show a new low, even for politicians.

Among the consequences of Democrats' recent election victories, especially at the state and local levels, is the election of officials who have publicly announced their opposition to charter schools, and their determination to restrict or roll back the growth of those schools.

What have the charter schools done to provoke such opposition?

Often located in low-income, minority neighborhoods, these schools have in many cases produced educational outcomes far better than the traditional public schools in such neighborhoods.

A Success Academy charter elementary school in Harlem had a higher proportion of the children in one of its classes pass the statewide math exam than in any other class at the same grade level, anywhere in the state of New York.

As a result of the charter schools' educational achievements, it is not uncommon for thousands of children to be on waiting lists to get into such schools -- in New York City, tens of thousands.

This represents a huge opportunity for many low-income, minority youngsters who have very few other opportunities for a better life. But, to politicians dependent on teachers' unions for money and votes, charter schools are expendable.

In various communities around the country, charter schools are already being prevented from moving into empty school buildings, which would allow them to admit more children from waiting lists.

Denying these children what can be their one chance in life is a new low, even for politicians.

Political rhetoric can camouflage what is happening. But the arguments against charter schools are so phony that anyone with a decent education should be able to see right through them. Unfortunately, the very failure of many traditional public schools to provide a decent education enables their defenders to get away with arguments that could not survive any serious analysis.

Consider the incessantly repeated argument that charter schools are "taking money away from the public schools." Charter schools are themselves public schools, educating children who have a legal right to be educated with taxpayer money set aside for that purpose. When some fraction of children move from traditional public schools to charter schools, why should the same fraction of money not move with them?

What is the money for, if not to educate children? The amount of taxpayer money spent per child in charter schools is seldom, if ever, greater than the amount spent per child in traditional public schools. Often it is less.

Another argument used in attacking charter schools is that, despite particular charter schools with outstanding results, by and large charter school students' results on educational tests are no better than the results in traditional public schools. Even if we accept this claim, it leaves out one crucial fact.

White students and Asian students together constitute a majority of the students in traditional public schools. Black students and Hispanic students together constitute a majority of the students in charter schools.

On virtually all educational tests, black and Hispanic students score significantly lower than white and Asian students. If charter schools as a whole just produce educational results comparable to those in traditional public schools as a whole, that is a big improvement.

If you want to make a comparison of educational results with comparable students, you can look at results among children living in the same neighborhood, at the same grade levels -- and with both charter school children and children in a traditional school being educated in the very same building.

Such comparisons in New York City showed, almost every time, a majority of the students in the traditional public school scoring in the bottom half in both math and English, while the percentage of charter school students scoring in the top half was some multiple of the percentage of other students scoring that high.

This is what the teachers' unions and the politicians want to put a stop to. Who will speak up for those children?

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Australia: Union turns on teacher over ‘don’t vote Liberal’ post

A public school teacher who pledged to ensure her students “don’t vote Liberal” when they graduated should be investigated by the Education Department, the teachers’ union says.

Regina Wilson, a South Australian teacher and union delegate, is at the centre of a firestorm over political interference in the classroom by union-affiliated teachers after her post on the Australian Education Union’s Facebook page was yesterday revealed by The Australian.

Amid a community backlash against Ms Wilson’s comments, AEU state president Howard Spreadbury conceded “the posting of her intent needs to be investigated”. He said there was “at this stage” no evidence Ms Wilson had carried through on her vow to ­“ensure that the next generation of voters in my classroom don’t vote Liberal”.

“She believes that part of developing students’ critical thinking is to talk to them about politics,” Mr Spreadbury said.

“It’s not for me to make the judgment about whether she’s right or wrong … I think that it does need to be followed through.”

Ms Wilson’s post was deleted on Tuesday night after inquiries by The Australian.

The AEU yesterday would not confirm whether Ms Wilson remained a delegate, as it prepares for likely strike action next week over stalled enterprise bargaining ­negotiations.

The 58-year-old former Fair Work inspector is an international student program manager who also teaches classes in Years 8, 9 and 11 at the 1000-student Woodville High School in northwestern Adelaide, located in safe Labor-held federal and state electorates.

Yesterday, she claimed she was being targeted because of her gender and insisted her post was meant to be “private … for my friends and family only”, even though she posted it publicly on the AEU’s Facebook forum.

“It (the post) did not identify me as a teacher at Woodville High School or an AEU member,” she told The Australian.

South Australian Treasurer Rob Lucas raised the matter with union bosses last week but they took no action at the time.

Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan yesterday said parents would be concerned if their children were “being indoctrinated with the political ideologies of teachers”.

“Teachers hold a unique position in our society and we trust them to educate our kids — that trust should not be abused to further any political agenda,” he said.

“The classroom should be a place of learning, not a place where teachers recruit students to their political worldview.”

Mr Lucas yesterday maintained pressure on the teachers’ union, telling ABC radio that “we’re not going to accept this sort of behaviour or action or indications of an intent to involve students in politics in the ­classroom”.

“I think this sort of action or this sort of behaviour is completely unacceptable,” he said.

Disciplinary proceedings were a matter for Education Department chief executive Rick Persse, he said.

An Education Department spokesman said: “The department has a clear process for dealing with alleged misconduct.”

South Australian Education Minister John Gardner said the public sector code of ethics also “makes it fairly clear that campaigning for partisan politics in the classroom isn’t appropriate”.

Australian Catholic University senior research fellow Kevin ­Donnelly said the incident was not surprising as the teachers' union had a long history of left-wing ­activism.

Jennifer Buckingham, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, said left-wing political biases permeate all classrooms but “it’s just generally a bit more subtle”.

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