Flit(tm)

Educational Indoctrination

I just sent this off to my school's principal. She was just so provincially clueless about why any parent would be concerned about Obama's school address that I knew I had to write to her. With the recent pro-obama schoolkid video showing up, I finally had a visual hook to explain what the worries are.

When I dropped in the week prior to the presidential speech to children, you said you didn't understand why anybody would object to the President speaking to the nation's schoolchildren. Looking at you, I took you at your word because I'd seen that face before in coworkers and friends who simply had no exposure outside their own subculture and were encountering something truly new, different, and diverse from their normal experience. I'm sure that I've worn that same face myself a time or two. It happens.

For the record, George HW Bush's speech to the schoolchildren of the United States had Democrat led congressional hearings into the propriety and legality of such a speech. In the end, there were no prosecutions but at the time, they were apparently threatened.

When the speech transcript came out shortly prior to the speech, my immediate concerns were put to rest. This is why I did not protest when you deviated from the procedure you outlined verbally to me in showing the speech to my 4th grader. No opt out form came prior to it being shown.

When I read the White House released transcript, I did note that the original version DoE curriculum materials didn't make much sense paired with that speech and guessed that whatever was there originally had been scrubbed down to the proper neutrality it should have had from the start. The White House later admitted that the speech had been changed and the original version has never been released. But that's just of academic interest. What truly concerns me is the children, my own and our community's.

The public schools, being public, have an obligation to political neutrality with regard to partisan politics. It's a public trust. In the normal course of life, there is a proper assumption that the professionals are doing their job and not engaging in indoctrination.

Some of your professional colleagues have violated that trust and this violation is the source of that parental concern you seemed so puzzled at in our face to face meeting. One school in NJ actually was so wrapped up in their little cultural bubble that they filmed one of their indoctrination sessions which ended up on the 'net. I'm including the youtube URL for you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zrsl8o4ZPo

The inclusion of policy buzzwords straight out of the Democrat party is simply inappropriate for a children's song taught in a public school. It is doubly inappropriate for children who are as young as the ones in the video.

Unfortunately, once you start seeing evidence of indoctrination this blatant, the question naturally becomes what about my local district, my kids. Are the teachers teaching my kids really neutral or are they just smarter about how they're betraying their public trust? You have not been proactive in dispelling these questions so far as I can tell. I suspect you just have been unaware of videos like the one I referred to above (there are a couple I've seen out there and I don't purposefully look for them). Now you know.

I have sympathy for the position your ethically challenged colleagues have put you in. I wish you the best in navigating these waters. Please let me know if I can be of assistance.

9-11 blinders

On September 11, 2001, a long series of misjudgments finally came around and bit us. We'd been blinded and thought that "it just can't happen here" until it did. So now a lot of people say never again. I'm not convinced that they've thought it through deeply.

While we are unlikely to ever again recreate the exact set of blinders we had that bright shining morning when almost three thousand innocents paid with their lives for our leadership's long series of miscalculations, a fuller understanding of never again means never again putting blinders on, not switching out one set for another. In that fuller sense of never again, we are failing and it breaks my heart.

The Right as Rebels

Tigerhawk asks "why has it taken so long" for the right to adopt the guerrilla tactics of the left. In short, what is known today as the right's become the guerrillas again, for the first time since the 1780s. Here's my note responding at more length there.

While the Constitution was in ascendency, while the Founders were, more or less, in the driver's seat, those on their side were smart to adopt the tactics of defense and conservatism. It is only when the Constitution no longer is top dog and the Founders are no longer animating our politics that it makes sense for their advocates to adopt the aggressive tactics of an Alinsky.

The left expects to be the barbarians at a tea party but grandma just pulled out her scattergun and they haven't even realized how much the rules just changed.