White House Withdraws Call for Students to 'Help' Obama
President Obama's plan to speak to the nation's schoolchildren in a video address next week erupted into controversy as critics claimed he was trying to indoctrinate America's kids.
FOXNews.com
Thursday, September 03, 2009
The Obama administration is rethinking its course recommendations for students ahead of President Obama's address to the the nation's schoolchildren next week, rewriting its suggestions to teachers for student assignments on how to "help the president."
White House aides said the language was supposed to be a inspirational, pro-education message to America's youths, but its unintended consequences were evident.
White House Withdraws Call for Students to 'Help' Obama - Political News - FOXNews.com
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Caught with his hand in the cookie jar, Obama admits he was attempting to use youth to assist him and starts to walk away slowly.
The very first thing on our "to Do" list when we win it all back is to fire all the Czars and Close the Department of Indoctrinatization (aka" Dept of Education). Education is up to the parents through the states and communities, not the Fed
I truly hope that this is the 'straw that broke the camel's back,' as they say, but I fear that it is too late to worry about indocrination, as the left has dutifully followed a generations-long plan that has born the fruit that they expected: the Obama Administration.
Not to mix too many metaphors, but this address to our children is merely the icing on the cake.
1. "But the dissolution of the belief in the work ethic began with the cultural protests of the 1960s, which questioned and discarded many traditional American virtues. The roots of this breakup lay in what Daniel Bell described in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism as the rejection of traditional bourgeois qualities by late-nineteenth-century European artists and intellectuals who sought to substitute for religion or morality an aesthetic justification of life.
2. "University education departments began to tell future grammar school teachers that they should replace the traditional teacher-centered curriculum, aimed at producing educated citizens who embraced a common American ethic, with a new, child-centered approach that treats every pupils personal development as different and special. During the 1960s, when intellectuals and college students dismissed traditional American values as oppressive barriers to fulfillment, grammar schools generally jettisoned the traditional curriculum. Education professors eagerly joined New Left professors to promote the idea that any top-down imposition of any curriculum would be a right-wing plot designed to perpetuate the dominant white, male, bourgeois power structure, writes education reformer E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in his forthcoming The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools."
3. "The new every child is special curriculum prompted a sharp uptick in students self-absorption, according to psychologists Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell in The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. What resulted was a series of increasingly self-centered generations of young people displaying progressively more narcissistic personality traits..."
Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic? by Steven Malanga, City Journal Summer 2009
4. "At a recent meeting of the New York Teaching Fellows program (Teach for America: provides an alternate route to state certification for about 1,700 new teachers annually) , Sol Stern found the one book that the fellows had to read in full was Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.
This book has achieved near-iconic status in Americas teacher-training programs...that Pedagogy of the Oppressed was one of the most frequently assigned texts in their philosophy of education courses.... This ed-school bestseller is, instead, a utopian political tract calling for the overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless societies."
5."The pedagogical point of Freires thesis : its opposition to taxing students with any actual academic content, which Freire derides as official knowledge that serves to rationalize inequality within capitalist society.. Freires rejection of teaching content knowledge seemed to buttress what was already the ed schools most popular theory of learning, which argued that students should work collaboratively in constructing their own knowledge and that the teacher should be a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage.
6."The impetus for this kind of thinking came from the veterans of the student-protest and antiwar movements of the 60s, who put down their placards and began their long march through the institutions, earning Ph.D.s and joining humanities departments. Once in the academy, the leftists couldnt resist incorporating their radical politics (whether Marxist, feminist, or racialist) into their teaching. Celebrating Freire as a major thinker gave them a powerful way to do so. "
Pedagogy of the Oppressor by Sol Stern, City Journal Spring 2009
This is the 'bed' we have made for the children growing up in the public schools.
Why fear proselytizing by President Obama, in a one hour lecture, when we have ignored the last 50 years of dissolution in public education?
