Tuesday, July 14, 2020


Here's What This Liberal University Did When an Incoming Student Dared to Say She Supported Trump

Marquette University has threatened to reconsider their admission acceptance of a recent high school graduate, citing a pro-Trump video the teen posted to social media.

Samantha Pfefferle, an 18-year-old girl, said in an interview with The College Fix that her admission to the university was no longer a guarantee and she was forced to undergo a series of morality questions in order to prove she still belonged in the school's Class of 2024. 

Pfefferle said she was asked how she would respond if a "Dreamer who lived down the hall" came up to her and said "she didn’t feel safe or comfortable" with the conservative views or her presence on campus.

"[He] had the heart to tell me I wasn’t a student,” Pfefferle said. “This means that my classification is still in limbo and is currently being decided by the administration."

The video that Pfefferle posted to TikTok features the incoming freshman calling out the Trump haters and showing the world she does not care about what others think of her political beliefs.

She titled the video: "When the libs find their way to your page."

Pfefferle has a series of captions sprawled in the video, as she dances and sings to 6ix9ine's GOOBA.

The text sections read: "When people find out I support Trump, they try to hate on me...and change my views."

People viciously attacked Pfefferle in the comments section of the video that has nearly 600,000 views.

A "Trump 2020: Keep America Great" banner is noticeable in the background as well as a Trump sticker on a car parked in the driveway of her home.

“Someone burn her house down,” wrote a TikTok user.

"I hope you get shot," wrote one user.

“Congrats on outing yourself as a racist, homophobe, transphobe, and misogynist,” wrote another.

People quickly figured out what school Pfefferle was going to in the fall given the fact that she was wearing a Marquette sweatshirt and the “Marquette University 2024” sign behind her.

The trolls said they would report her actions to Marquette admissions. The recent high school grad welcomed the threats in subsequent videos and liberals made good on their promise as the school attempted to “reeducate” Pfefferle before she even stepped foot on campus.

Conservatives quickly took to Twitter to defend Pfefferle, and strongly encourage Marquette to reconsider their decision to give the incoming freshman an ultimatum.

“Defund academic leftist indoctrination!” tweeted Donald Trump Jr. “It’s truly sad to see what’s going on in college campuses.”

“Another example of the growing reality that colleges don’t want political diversity on campus,” said former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. “Did they follow up with any incoming students who posted ‘Defund the Police’? I doubt it.”

“Marquette Univ. threatened to cancel 18 y/o, incoming freshman Samantha Pfefferle’s admission just for posting a pro-Trump video,” said TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk. “She is being attacked online and of course the media & university ignore all of it.”

The canceling of Samantha Pfefferle comes a week after a Harvard grad Claira Janover posted a TikTok of herself threatening to stab those who say “all lives matter.” There was no reaction or comment from Harvard regarding Janover’s actions. However, she was fired from her job at Deloitte.

Plenty of incoming freshmen and current college students have posted Black Lives Matter related commentary and some share at least one “woke” post with their followers on social media each day. Marquette’s actions infringe upon a student's right to freedom of speech and it's a prime example of the reason why so many young people are afraid to discuss their political beliefs in fear of the consequence.

A Marquette spokeswoman, in an email late Tuesday night, told Empower Wisconsin that the school had not rescinded Pfefferle’s offer, but she said “the admissions team did recently have a conversation with incoming freshman Samantha Pfefferle about statements made on her social media accounts.”

There is currently a petition to stop Marquette from removing Pfefferle from the school that already has collected thousands of signatures.

SOURCE 





Trump Administration Pushes for Schools to Reopen in Fall

Some school districts were successful in distance learning during the spring COVID-19 outbreak, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said Wednesday, but far too many were disappointments and “just gave up.”

“Things like this cannot happen again in the fall. It would fail America’s students. It would fail taxpayers who pay high taxes for their education,” DeVos said during a press conference held by the White House coronavirus task force. “Ultimately, it’s not a matter of if schools should reopen. It’s simply a matter of how.”

Vice President Mike Pence, head of the task force, conducted the press conference at the Department of Education. It also included top public health officials, but President Donald Trump did not attend.

However, Trump addressed the matter during a Rose Garden event later Wednesday at the White House.

“The U.S. is by far No. 1 in testing, No. 1 in the world in testing, and the mortality rate is the lowest, or just about the lowest, of any nation in the world,” the president said. “And we are safely reopening our country and, very importantly, we are safely reopening our schools.”

During the earlier press conference at her department, DeVos acknowledged risks are involved in reopening schools, but added that “lost opportunities for students, particularly the most vulnerable among us” are also a risk, particularly for students with disabilities.

“It will look different depending on where you are,” DeVos said, referring to some states with a larger surge in COVID-19 cases than others. “What’s clear is that students and families need more options.”

She singled out Fairfax County, Virginia, a wealthy suburb of the District of Columbia where many federal workers live, as having what she called an “elite public school system” that had a disastrous performance.

“I talked to all of the state schools chiefs at least once, most of them more than once,” DeVos said. “They have told me that while many of the districts in their states have done well through the past several months, a number of them they were very disappointed in doing next to nothing.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said that different measures could be taken to ensure safety, such as keeping students in one classroom rather than having them switch classes.

Earlier Wednesday, Trump tweeted that in “Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS.” He added: “May cut off funding if not open!”

The Education Department is “seriously considering” using federal funds as an incentive for schools to reopen, DeVos said in an interview Tuesday night on Fox News Channel.

During the press conference, Pence took a softer approach, noting that 90% of school funding comes at the state and local level. The Trump administration will work with states based on their circumstances, he added.

The vice president stressed several times that public health experts favor reopening schools.

“What we heard again yesterday from education officials and what we heard from the American Academy of Pediatrics [is that] it’s absolutely essential that we get our kids back into the classroom for in-person learning,” Pence said, adding:

We can’t let our kids get behind academically. Remember that for children who have mental health issues, for special needs children, for nutrition, for children in communities facing persistent poverty, the school is the place where they receive all those services.

So, this is not just simply about making sure our kids are learning, advancing academically. But, for their mental health, for their well-being, for their physical health, for nutrition, we’ve got to get our kids back to schools.

Trump also went after the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a tweet.

“I disagree with @CDCgov on their very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools,” Trump tweeted. “While they want them open, they are asking schools to do very impractical things. I will be meeting with them!!!”

Dr. Robert Redfield, CDC director, sought to explain the goal of the guidelines, which include strong social distancing recommendations for children in schools.

“The guidance that CDC continues to put out for schools K-12 and higher learning is intentional for reopening and keeping our schools open,” Redfield said.

Redfield said the CDC would issue clarifications to the guidelines next week.

“I want to make it very clear, what is not the intent of CDC’s guidelines is [for them] to be used as a rationale to keep schools closed,” he said. “We are prepared to work with each school, each jurisdiction to help them use the different strategies they proposed, and help do it safely, so they come up with the optimal strategies for those schools.”

Redfield later noted: “In general, this virus does not cause significant damage in children.”

“Unlike influenza,” he said, “we really don’t have evidence that children are driving the transmission cycle of this.”

However, during a Rose Garden event later Wednesday, Trump addressed the matter.

“The U.S. is by far No. 1 in testing, No. 1 in the world in testing, and the mortality rate is the lowest, or just about the lowest of any nation in the world,” the president said. “And, we are safely reopening our country and very importantly, we are safely reopening our schools.”

SOURCE 






There's a Brilliant Solution for Getting Kids Back to School—Which Is Why It'll Probably Get Shot Down

While some states have announced that schools will reopen as planned in the fall, others have indicated they won’t. Still others say they’re taking a wait-and-see approach.

Parents, teachers, and kids are stuck in educational limbo as the COVID-19 pandemic, or what’s left of it, drags into its sixth month (or is the seventh?). The novel coronavirus, which may have hitched a ride here from Wuhan, China, as early as last December, has largely passed over school-age children, with 14 deaths nationwide in the 5-14 age group, according to the CDC, and 149 deaths in the 15-24 age group.

I am in no way trivializing the tragedy of those deaths and the suffering of the families who lost loved ones, but that’s, at most, 163 deaths out of more than 50 million students—0.000326%.

And while most schools did not begin closing down until mid-March, the first death in the 5-14 group wasn’t recorded until the last week of March and by May 1 there had only been four deaths in that cohort—a month and a half after the shutdown. Compared to the number of children who die from accidents every year (more than 12,000), COVID deaths are statistically insignificant in the younger population.

While the risk of death from COVID is small for children, teachers are a different story. Many of them fall into the high-risk category due to age or preexisting health conditions. And many families have concerns for loved ones who might come into contact with a child who brings the virus home from school, or so the argument for keeping schools shuttered goes.

Laura Hill, a fifth-grade teacher in the Akron Public School system, told PJ Media that the benefits of allowing children to return to school far outweigh the risks for students.

“The majority of our students are disadvantaged by many factors in their home and community environments,” she said. “School attendance gives our kids a stable environment and a schedule to adhere to each weekday,” along with food and counseling in many cases. “Due to the family structure in economically disadvantaged homes, there is oftentimes little academic support for our students due to the parent either having to work a schedule that is not flexible or the parent simply becoming overwhelmed.” Most of her students last year were being raised by a single mom or grandmother. “I think I had five students out of 30 who were blessed to be in a household with a mom and dad,” she explained

So what’s the answer? Do we just keep schools closed until there is a vaccine? Do we reopen and let the chips fall where they may. Or is there another option?

Melanie Elsey, national legislative director for the American Policy Roundtable, thinks she may have a solution.

During the nonprofit public policy group’s COVID briefing on Thursday (watch below), Elsey said, “There’s a time crunch now because school is starting and parents are panicking because they want their children back in school.”

“There really isn’t any reason to not put children back in school since they are not the vulnerable population,” said Elsey, a former educator. “Teachers, though, are saying, ‘What if we are at risk? What if we’re the ones who catch the disease?'”

“My solution is that schools should put everyone back—five days a week—in the classroom, business as usual,” she said. “If a parent is concerned, allow that child to do distance learning. If a teacher has a concern for their own health, let that teacher be the one who teaches the distance learning. Assign the teachers who have concerns to the distance learning.”

That seems like a perfectly reasonable solution, doesn’t it? The people who are frightened and want to exercise extra caution can stay home, while those who think it’s safe to return to school can do so.

While Hill says older students might be able to handle remote learning, she thinks younger students, especially those in urban schools like the one where she teaches, “would feel more emotional stability if they could return to school full-time.”

“I know that some of the older people on staff in our building, especially those who are either immune-deficient in some way or have family members at greater risk do not want to return to their classrooms,” Hill said.

“I do think parents should be given options. If parents can provide a safe and stable environment that allows their student to work at home and desires to keep their child home to learn remotely they should have that right.” And teachers who don’t feel safe due to true health concerns “should be given the privilege to teach those students who will learn remotely.”

Sure, there will need to be some shuffling if some teachers remain at home while others return to the classroom. The regular first-grade teacher who decides she’s not ready to return to school might find herself with a fourth-grade online class—or a mixed-age class—but with a little flexibility and creativity it could be done.

The extraordinary times we live in call for outside-the-box solutions. Now’s as good a time as any—better, perhaps—to rethink the way we educate our children and to look for creative solutions to deal with the issues we face.

SOURCE 







Australia: Citizens not all equal when it comes to the getting of wisdom

Civics should be taught in the schools.  But what if it degenerates into Leftist propaganda?  That is the dilemma conservative governments face.  The author below does not see it

What do we want our citizens to know? Applicants for citizenship must pass a test on the rudiments of our political system and they are given a booklet to prepare for it. Citizens by birth pass no such test, and many would not be able to answer an abstract question such as: “What arm of government has the power to interpret and apply the law?”

The test, introduced by the Howard government in 2007, is for new citizens. But what about those born here, including the children of these new citizens?

For about 20 years I taught first-year Australian politics at La Trobe University to large classes of students, many of whom were the first in their family to attend university, and many of whose parents were born overseas. In the first tutorial, I would ask them why they were studying politics.

Occasionally one said it was because they wanted to become a politician, but the most common answer was that they would soon be casting their first vote and so wanted to know more about how our political system worked. Obviou­sly, they did not feel that what they could learn from their parents would be enough.

Politics is now one of the discip­lines that Education Minister Dan Tehan wants to charge students a premium to study, along with others in the humanities and social sciences.

Much of the discussion of this has been about the esoteric upper reaches of these disciplines where French theorists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are accused of spreading a conformist postmodernist relativism and under­mining confidence in the traditions and history of the West.

Defenders, such as Luke Slattery in Inquirer last month, stress the civilising role of the Western humanist tradition; others point to the lifelong benefits to individuals of learning how to read and think well, to the transferable skills of humanities and social ­science graduates and to their robust­ employment outcomes.

Little has been said, however, about what we want our young people to know. Bizarrely, Tehan’s schedule of HECS fees aims to encourage prospective students to do teaching while discouraging them from training in the disciplines many will actually teach, such as history, geography and politics. It also discourages them from studying subjects that would teach them about Australia, not to mention the countries from which many of them came.

My students learned nothing about Foucault or Derrida. Instead­ we studied Australia’s institutions of parliamentary demo­cracy, the challenge of balancing individual rights and liberties with democratic electoral politics, the tensions inherent in federalism, the histories of the parties. Such courses exist in every Australian university and thousands of students­ take them every year.

There are periodic outbursts of anxiety, especially from conservatives, about how little Australians know about the politics and histor­y of their own country. In January, in response to one such outburst, Tehan announced a special program of the Australian Research Council for research in Australian society, history and culture because, he said: ­“Between 2011 and 2020, just 3 per cent of grants under our primary competitive grant scheme — the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Grants — were in the areas of Australian society, history­ or culture.”

The reason for this is univer­sities’ competition for inter­national rankings, where Aust­ralian-focused research is at a disadvantage, but that is another story. The point is that the Morrison government recognises that the Australian community benefits from people knowing about our history, society and culture.

So why is it discouraging young people from studying them?

SOURCE  


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