Tag Archives: Indoctrination

News

Why school choice promotes good and restrains evil

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First, let’s see how tax credits that promote school choice help the poorest children to find a better way forward.

The Institute for Justice will be arguing the case before the Supreme Court.

Excerpt:

On November 3, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the oral arguments in the case Garriot v. Winn. Arizona, like many states, offers tax credits to individuals and businesses for donations to fund scholarships for students to attend private schools. The goal of these programs is to give as many students as possible the resources they need to get a good education. The Dennard family has benefited from this program. Hear their story.

It’s good to help poor children to avoid failing schools. In fact, the only people who are hurt by this are the teachers who are paid way too much and yet fail to perform because they are insulated from competitive pressures with no accountability to parents and students.

Should we be funneling money into public schools to pay teachers to fail to do their jobs for our kids?

Well, here an example of what unionized teachers do in public schools when parents aren’t looking.

Excerpt:

Three van loads of Hughes High students were taken last week – during school hours – to vote and given sample ballots only for Democratic candidates and then taken for ice cream, a Monday lawsuit alleges.

The complaint was made by Thomas Brinkman Jr., a Republican candidate for Hamilton County auditor, and the Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending & Taxes against Cincinnati Public Schools.

“They plan to bring four more high schools (to vote) this week,” Christopher Finney, COAST attorney, said Monday after filing the suit.

It seeks a temporary restraining order to prevent school officials from participating or helping students participate in partisan politics during school hours or with school property or employees involved.

But the school district’s lawyer denies any school connection.

“No CPS personnel engaged in the promotion of candidates or any political party,” CPS attorney Mark Stepaniak noted in a written release.

That’s why we need to de-fund the Department of Education and force public schools to compete with private schools, charter schools and homeschooling. Public schools are nothing but indoctrination camps for teaching impressionable young people to favor bigger government, which leads to higher salaries for their indoctrinators – the public school teachers and their greedy unions. The fact that these teachers can coerce children to agree with them using the power of the red marking pen makes me sick to my stomach.

We need to enact vouchers and make public schools compete, just like private business have to compete. The public school system is a worthless monopoly and it needs to be broken up right away.

 

News

NSF spends 2 million to create Darwin indoctrination lesson plans

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The NSF is, of course, the National Science Foundation. And the 2 million, of course, came from the pockets of taxpayers.

Here’s the post at Evolution News.

Excerpt:

The goal of the Evolution Readiness Project is to get “young children” to “believe in” evolution. According to the National Science Foundation’s website, they’ve spent $1,990,459 of taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation (NSF) dollars to bankroll this project. Welcome back to school.

The agenda of the project is further clarified in the NSF Grant Award Abstract which states that it aims “to support a learning progression leading to an appreciation of the theory of evolution and evidence that supports it.” That’s fine, but why only the evidence that supports evolution?

Only the evidence in favor of Darwinism? What about the evidence against Darwinism?

The project justifies its dogmatic approach by promoting the myth that there is no scientific dissent from the consensus view on natural selection:

Yet, essentially there is universal agreement among scientists that evolution by natural selection is the fundamental model that explains the extraordinary complexity and interdependence of the living world. Moreover, evolution by natural selection is a quintessential scientific theory, explaining an extraordinary collection of data, including much that Darwin himself was unaware of, with a small collection of powerful ideas.

Of course, it is not true that “essentially there is universal agreement among scientists” about evolution by natural selection. Over 850 Ph.D. scientists have now signed a statement expressing their skepticism of modern evolutionary theory’s “claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life,” and urge that “[c]areful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

The rest of the article lists a stack of non-Christian, non-theistic scientists who doubt the efficacy of Darwinian mechanisms to explain macro-evolution.

Darwinism is “hide the decline” applied to the history of life.

News

FBI investigating public school teacher for supporting terrorism

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From the radically leftist Minneapolis Star Tribune. (H/T Verum Serum via Power Line)

Excerpt:

The homes of five Twin Cities activists, including three prominent leaders of the Twin Cities antiwar movement, were raided Friday by the FBI in what an agency spokesman described as an “investigation into activities concerning the material support of terrorism.” The office of an antiwar organization also was reportedly raided…

Among the homes raided were the apartments of Jessica Sundin, who was a principal leader of the mass antiwar march of 10,000 on the opening day of the Republican National Convention two years ago, and Mick Kelly, who was prominent in that protest and among those who announced plans to march on the Democratic National Convention in Minneapolis, if the city is selected to host it in 2012. Neither has been arrested.

A raid was also conducted on the home of Meredith Aby, another local antiwar leader who was frequently the spokeswoman for the march on the GOP convention.

But Morgen at Verum Serum has a lot more.

Excerpt:

The other thing I wanted to point out, which is really the headline here, is that Meredith Aby, the activist named in the last paragraph above, is actually a public high school teacher in Bloomington, MN. Her official school web site is here (and another one here). Not surprisingly she is a social studies teacher.

Aby is apparently a long-time leader of the anti-war movement in Minnesota, with her activism centered around an organization called the Anti-War Committee. While I think most people would agree that this alone should not preclude her from teaching young people, I think it does raise legitimate concerns about her objectivity. Especially given that the courses she teaches include US Government, Civics, and World History.

More troubling, Aby is apparently also quite active in promoting her political beliefs, which lean about as far left as you can get. She is a frequent contributor on Fight Back! News, the media arm of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and has been a speaker at numerous events organized by other overtly socialist groups, including the new incarnation of the SDS (Bill Ayers’ old group).

In short, she’s a commie. And unless Minnesota is more “progressive” than I realize, I can’t imagine there are very many parents who would be comfortable with her teaching their children about world history and political philosophy.

Here’s a little bit about her from one of her web sites:

Meredith Aby grew up in Worthington, Minnesota (the turkey capital of the world!). She graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota with a degree in history, women’s studies, and Spanish. She is the head debate coach at Jefferson and has coached speech at Jefferson and at Kennedy. Aby teaches debate, philosophy, civics, world history, U.S. government, and AP U.S. government. She has been teaching in Bloomington Public Schools since 1997 and is the proud mother of the cutest baby in the world!

No mention of a husband there.

Can you imagine entrusting your children to a left-wing radical like this? And letting her have the power of grading them based on their agreement and compliance with her value system? Yet we have to fund these government schools whether we like it or not – they’re paid for with taxpayer money.