Thursday, February 10, 2022



A new report finds systemic racism, sexual obscenity, and anti-Americanism in U.S. public education, even in a deeply red state

While Idaho is considered a refuge for people fleeing Democrat-controlled areas, a new report shows the state’s supermajority Republican legislature has not protected children from far-left politics in public schools, including state-sponsored racism and hiding transgender ideation from childrens’ parents.

Report authors Anna Miller and Dr. Scott Yenor note that the kind of extremist ideology affecting kids in blue and purple states is also metastasizing within small-town and rural public schools in locales that faithfully vote Republican.

“School administrators in Coeur d’Alene manipulated an 11-year-old girl into believing she was a boy and should undergo gender transition surgery,” Miller writes in a study overview in The American Mind. “The elementary school counselor had coached the young girl into believing she was transsexual and instructed her how to tell her parents about her new identity. According to a recorded phone call between the counselor and parent, the principal and other school officials had known about this and began calling the girl by a boy’s name while purposefully choosing not to inform the child’s parents.”

Coeur d’Alene has a population of approximately 54,000, according to census data. It’s in rural north Idaho, within commuting distance to Spokane, Washington. It’s a conservative lumber, manufacturing, and health-care town surrounded by mountains and lakes. People live there to enjoy the classic American way of life, but their public schools work to undermine that way of life with public resources, in the absence of effective oversight from elected officials.

Leftist morality that undermines the beliefs and desires of a majority of Idaho’s citizens is rampant throughout the Republican-run state’s education systems, says Miller and Yenor’s recently released report for the Idaho Freedom Foundation and Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life: “Things that were unthinkable five or 10 years ago now are everyday practices in public schools across America.”

Many Idahoans have “the sense that Idaho is immune from these disturbances,” the report notes. “Our school districts seem responsive and responsible. Our laws emphasize conservative values. We have Republican supermajorities… There may be an Idaho difference, but the difference is not what people think. Idaho is uniquely complacent about the trends that people in other states see.”

Putting Explicit Sexual Info In Kids’ Hands
One of the most visible ways many Idaho public schools push extremism common to far-left locales is in exposing kids to adult sexual practices and gender ideology, often without parent knowledge or consent.

For example, a “socioemotional learning” curriculum “used in many school districts statewide including Coeur d’Alene, Pocatello-Chubbuck, and West Ada … encourages students to question their sexual orientation and gender, be activists for issues such as transgenderism, and use the website LoveIsRespect.org for sex advice. The website includes resources such as ‘Five tips for your first time,’ refers places to get an abortion, and promotes sexual taboos like polyamory,” the report notes.

Being a red state offers little, if any, refuge from sexual voyeurism in schools, the report notes: “data suggests that LGBTQ-affirming curricula are widely available in Idaho’s education system. They estimate 31% of Idaho’s middle schoolers and 51% of high schoolers are taught about sexual orientation and similar numbers are taught about ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender expression.’ Similarly, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network’s (GLSEN) data show 12% of schools teach curriculum promoting the LGBTQ agenda and 47% of school libraries provide students with LGBTQ-related resources,” Miller writes in The American Mind.

Idaho public schools spread such sexual ideology despite state laws requiring schools “to teach abstinence and provide factual, medically accurate and objective information.” The report details how even though several state laws attempt to restrain public schools from exposing children to pornographic and politicized sexual details, many teachers ignore the laws’ text and clear intent.

Teachers Are Deliberately Trained to Teach Racism
Idaho’s education system also heavily subsidizes the racial grievance industry with public funds, starting with teacher training and certification, the report notes. Idaho’s state board of education adopted certification rules common to 18 states that require teachers to develop “culturally responsive teaching. ” These Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium rules “cite Gloria Ladson-Billings’s definition of culturally responsive teaching. She is known for introducing critical race theory to education,” the report notes.

To be certified to teach in Idaho, teachers and other school personnel are thus required to “reflect on personal and cultural biases” “to broaden and deepen his/her own understanding of cultural, ethnic, gender, and learning differences.” To be certified as a “culturally responsive educator” under these requirements, “Two key practices include the rejection of colorblindness and replacing instruction about facts with narrative stories,” the report notes.

In Idaho, this has resulted in the same anti-American and racially biased lessons parents have exposed across the nation. For one example, “iCivics curriculum used in Boise School District’s Third Grade Citizenship unit teaches children that NFL players kneeling in protest at the playing of the national anthem is a sign of civic engagement, rather than disrespect to the country.”

This also results in Idaho churning out teachers who are trained to ignore and undermine any legal restraints on such highly politicized and socially destructive teaching.

“Teachers arrive in schools steeped in teaching techniques designed to dismantle traditional culture, reject colorblindness, adopt social constructivist views of truth and culture, and promote anti-racism. Teacher training reinforces and expands these early efforts. Education nonprofits offer curriculum and programming packages to school districts and principals to bring these elements and techniques into the daily experience of the classroom,” the report says.

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Cambridge's Jesus College is guilty of double standards

An event took place in Cambridge last week that was rare enough to reach the national press: a public hearing by the Diocese of Ely Consistorial Court in Jesus College chapel. It was brought about by a group of alumni who were opposing a move by the Master and Fellows of the College to remove a commemorative plaque to one of their greatest benefactors, the 17thcentury courtier and financier Tobias Rustat. His financial bequest was equivalent to over £4 million in present values, and his munificence is – or rather, was – celebrated in an annual College feast.

I attended much of the hearing, spread over three days. It was calm, exquisitely courteous, decorous in wigs and gowns, and occasionally enlivened by the sort of ponderous legal repartee that readers of Rumpole of the Bailey would have savoured. Both sides presented their arguments in detail, with care, and at considerable length. Some might have thought it much ado (and much expense) about nothing. But as the hearing proceeded the points at issue, which at first sight appear arcane, became increasingly clear and significant. Sometimes embarrassingly so.

Undeniably the College have a substantial case, which revolves round one simple point. Rustat was an investor in a slave trading company. For that reason, his memorial – a unique and artistically important three-and-a-half ton marble carving from the workshop of Grinling Gibbons – is now offensive to students, Fellows and not least the Master, Sonita Alleyne (the first black female head of a Cambridge college). They want it gone. They are supported by the Bishop of Ely himself, the Rt Revd Stephen Conway, and the Dean and Chaplain of the College. The case is now to be determined by the Deputy Chancellor of the diocese, sitting as judge.

Perhaps the College will get their way. But I do not think they emerge from the process with credit. So convinced were they of their moral probity and intellectual self-sufficiency that they were not really interested in anyone else’s opinion or expertise. Having made up their collective mind, they were not inclined to confuse it by facts. Alumni who wrote reasoned counter-arguments (including a distinguished black academic) or offered detailed information about the sources of Rustat’s fortune, were ignored or brushed off. Requests for information about the College’s own research into the subject were denied on a variety of pretexts.

Was Rustat truly a ‘slave trader’? Was his fortune derived from the trade? Did any of the money he gave to the College come from trading in human beings? That last possibility, said one witness, was ‘vanishingly small’.

What about the rest of his long and respectable life? Was it all tarnished by his investments in the Royal African Company, and association with a trade that was then almost universal? Were the emotions expressed by some students whipped up by misinformation circulated by the College itself? Should students not be informed of the complexities of the issue, rather than being fed what one of them called ‘inflammatory language’?

Such considerations were swept aside by the College. Was the Master not concerned, she was asked, that students who had written to support the removal of the memorial had used identical phraseology, and that this phraseology was fallacious? It didn’t appear so. ‘I’m talking as a person of colour with lived experience’, Sonita Alleyne told the hearing.

When Professor Lawrence Goldman, speaking as an opposing alumnus, mildly suggested she was not the only person with such lived experience (he is Jewish), she replied that this was not at all the same thing. A Whoopi Goldberg moment? Anyway, as the College’s barrister put it, any association with slavery, however slight, was ‘sufficient of itself’ to make a memorial ‘problematic’, if not ‘an abomination’. If this is accepted as a precedent, ecclesiastical lawyers may look forward to much profitable employment.

Behind the sometimes tedious legal pedantry lie several significant issues. One, as the Bishop of Ely put it with admirable directness, is ‘who owns our history?’ For him and Jesus College, the answer seems clear: those who can stake the loudest claim to victimhood – in this case, some Cambridge students and academics who to most people lead highly privileged lives. Thus is decided, in the words of the Bishop (who is chair of the Church of England’s National Board of Education), what is suitable for ‘celebration’ in our history. This in a nutshell is what our present culture wars are about. They who control the past control the future.

Another issue is what university education, including religious education, should involve. Should it provide reassurance, a safe space in which students are not expected to face uncomfortable views? Or should it confront them with moral and intellectual complexities, and encourage them to examine their own presuppositions? Cambridge students, said the Master, would not accept the latter, nor should they: the Chapel should be ‘an uncontested space’ which students ‘look at with the morality they have now.’ To this, Professor Goldman, an Oxford historian with many years of teaching students, responded that the College pleaded the priority of ‘pastoral care’, but that the real failing of pastoral care was not to educate.

Looming behind all this is the grubby question of double standards. As is now well known, Jesus College has a close relationship with the People’s Republic of China, from which it has received substantial funds. If Rustat’s money was ‘tainted’, is not this money tainted too? If 17thcentury slavery was an abomination, what about 21st century slavery in China?

Dr Véronique Mottier, chair of the College’s legacy of slavery working party pleaded ignorance on this. ‘I’m not an expert,’ she said. As it happens, she is not an expert on 17th century slavery either, being a social scientist specialising in theory, gender and sexuality – adequate, apparently, for judging Tobias Rustat, though not for judging Xi Jinping.

How much money had the College received from China? ‘Ask the Master’, replied Dr Mottier. The barrister duly did, and the Master replied that the College had an ethics committee and followed University policy. This was not a reassuring answer. When asked whether she would denounce human rights abuses today with the same energy as those three centuries ago, she ventured that violations in China ‘should concern us’.

But all this, declared the College’s barrister impatiently, was ‘tilting at windmills’. The issue was a very narrow one: moving a commemorative plaque. Talk of cancel culture, tainted money and relations with China were a ‘complete irrelevance’. So there we have it. The College hopes to win its case by excluding wider ethical considerations. If I were a member of Jesus College, I would not be feeling very proud. ‘Hypocrisy is not a Christian virtue,’ observed the opposing barrister in his closing remarks. Many eminent authorities seem to disagree.

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International students should be encouraged to come back to Australia

The Prime Minister has announced a number of excellent initiatives to encourage the return of international students to Australia now that our borders have reopened, from extending working rights to rebates on visas. Behind these initiatives is a recognition that international students are critical contributors to our economic prosperity and crucial to filling workforce shortages in key industries.

This is equally true at a state level. Pre-COVID, spending by international students and their visiting families helped to support more than 95,000 full-time equivalent jobs in NSW, not just in education but also in sectors such as hospitality and tourism, pouring $30 million a day into the NSW economy. And the vibrancy of the diverse cultural life international students bring underpins the character of a globally connected community.

International students hold our education system and qualifications in high regard – nearly 90 per cent are satisfied with their study experience at an Australian university, according to government surveys. They also see Australia as a safe and enjoyable destination.

But during the past two years, many international students who would otherwise have studied in NSW have instead gone to countries with fewer border restrictions like the United States, Britain and Canada. Or they have simply decided to study at home. That meant a $5 billion hit to the NSW economy in 2021, and potentially another $6 billion this year.

Even though our borders are now open, the rate of student return is very slow. Given the proven benefit of our international students to our communities and to NSW, what more can be done by universities, government and business to hasten their return?

In order to restore their confidence in us and put us ahead of competitor destinations, government, business and the education sector should work together to provide a suite of targeted incentives for students to come to NSW.

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My other blogs: Main ones below

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://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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