The Lost Generation
By Ari Kaufman (03/22/06)
"We are losing an entire generation of kids."
An acquaintance of mine begrudgingly stated this to me at a dinner in upscale Mill Valley, California, last weekend. She continued then to explain how her daughter, a high school student at an elite, liberal-dominated private high school in San Francisco, is being careful to avoid the usual indoctrination often seen by radical teachers in all too many schools in 2006.
My acquaintance, looking around at the trendy bistro ! at the middle-aged former hippies turned millionaires, then continued, "Thankfully, she can come home to me and my husband for clarification of this left-leaning slant since I know the truth from my education in the pre-PC days. But how will this generation, taught by Howard Zinn books that Columbus and Americans are mass murdering terrorists, racist and hated by the world, tell their kids our nation's proud truths when we (my generation) are older? To combat the possibility this would happen, we are certain to provide her with other information at home and different opinions from articles and books."
Further, she claims that, like on most campuses these hypocritical d! ays, "Tolerance does not include tolerance for diversity of opinion. For example, when our daughter posted on a school conference/forum board on the computer her views regarding Hurricane Katrina, she actually had an upperclassman tell her she was going to track her down and find her the next day. As a ninth grader, she rightly took this as a threat."
These harrowing anecdotes and double standards of free speech unfortunately know no bounds it seems, as last year, when her daughter was attending an exclusive and private K-8 school, the kids were asked not to put their pro-Bush stickers on their loose-leaf notebooks or clothing, but other kids were ! allowed to continue to wear their "Bush is the devil/Hitler" t-shirts.
Further, she explained the school's mindset when it comes to the presentation of the curriculum:
"It’s the kind of topics the school discusses, or the approaches to incidents, hunger, the war, women, where you can see the left slant. It’s subtle, in a strange sort of way. It permeates everything at the school, without being overtly against the other side. It’s taken as matter of fact that the left view is how it is.
"For example, the kids saw and discussed, “Crash." It never occurred to them that white and black people will lock their doors driving through certain neighborhoods not because they are black neighborhoods, but because they are bad neighborhoods, with high crime rates. But at my daughter's school, they make it sound like if you lock your doors in this situation, and you are w! hite in a black neighborhood, you are racist. To them, it is how it is. To us, it is indoctrination. It isn’t overtly anti-conservative, but subtly implies it."
Personally, I take pride that, along with an unfortunate paucity of my friends, I am one of only a small and dwindling percentage of those under 30 that can still think for themselves. Most students' and young adults' open-mindedness is killed by one-sided instruction from teachers and professors.
When a renowned writer read my recent treatise on biases in education, he referred directly to Howard Zinn and others who think and publish book along his line of regressive, apologist thinking:
"It is the Zinn-minded who keep the hate-rant going by instilling mistrust in successive generations. Rather than celebrate our near-fusion, they insist we haven’t even begun. Zinn, along with many like-minded teachers infesting our schools, has been spreading this gospel of self-hate long enough.
He makes the case that: everything that may offend, everything that is not politically-correct, anything that reminds us of uncomfortable truths, and everything that stands in the way of the broadest possible marketing has been left out; and that what is put in its place is geared to stultifying the process of understanding. Then, after making his case and arguing for less editorializing in education, he calls for restoring a ‘true’ socialist teaching of history a-la Zinn.
These guys would crack me up if I didn’t know how influential they’ve been with my own kid."
It always perturbs me that the far, far left-wing professors use the word "everything" and other absolutist terminology when declaring the evil in Americans, past and present, but when topics in classes like my girlfriend's are discussed, professors inform insouciant students that they take issue with notions of theories (science and religion, for example) being absolute.
Well, which one is it? Guess it depends upon who is teaching and who or what is being studied.
While Howard Zinn's book is required reading in only some college classes, James Loewen's 1995 book, "Lies my Teacher Told me" is required reading in nearly all freshman level history/ethnic studies classes. Thanks to the innocuous and humorous title, it even caught my eye as a college freshman in 1996, but then I opened it and read all the hate and gobbledygook, and even at 18, I was appalled, unlike the other 350 kids in my class who were enthralled by the re-written history it displayed.
Personally, I don't think my teachers lied to me. Did my teachers write the textbooks we used in K-12 schools then? Nope. So, the authors lied? Well, aren't most of the authors actually college professors? There is just too much ambiguity for me to discern who is right and wrong here. I'll trust my judgment.
My acquaintance's husband is an immigrant from the Soviet Union. At age 45, he has only been in this country slightly more than half of his life. He is very conservative like all eastern European immigrants who have lived in communism; not those whose communistic experiences are solely based upon spending a warm day or two with Castro in Cuba like Harry Belafonte.
He and his New Yorker wife found a great life in the USA, and have both been very successful. He noted that this "cannot happen anywhere else or in socialist Europe."
However, now that his oldest daughter is seeing the early signs of potential "indoctrination" at her high school, he is sadly forced to tell her not to speak out in class for fear of blackballing, grade changes and/or lack of future letters of recommendation for college, simply since his family leans right-of-center, and supports the President in 85% Democratic Marin County. There is no tolerance for that, and teachers are not above being dishonest and ruining her future due to her political beliefs.
"I dealt with this in the USSR and the left for USA to escape it. I can't believe I am dealing with the same here 25 years later," he sadly stated as we finished dinner.
These occurrences are similar to what I experienced during my ephemeral teaching career in Los Angeles. Since, in teachers' minds, the "GOP is against education" and "they (the GOP) are our enemies who want to cut spending and to fail," how could I say that I vote for those "idiotic murderers in the Bush Administration" and be able to keep my job as a teacher in the inner-city? (Note that President Bush, not surprisingly, has INCREASED public education spending by upwards of 533 million through 2004.)
Had I stayed in education, I would not have done to my students what too many teachers are today. It stems from a combination of ignorance and perpetual insecurity. My former colleague and I will attempt to expose the root of all this with our recommendations in an upcoming book.
Essentially, it now appears I was forced out of my chosen career by the monolithic, self-selecting lovers of Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Perhaps these so-called educators should read George Orwell's, "Animal Farm," or at least let their students do so.
In the meantime, in America, we are all free to state and believe whatever we so choose, even if, heaven forbid, in public and private schools.
LINKS:
http://www.therant.us/guest/a_kaufman/02112006.htm
http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/liesmyteachertoldme.php
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=4154
http://aaronhanscom.blogspot.com/
http://indeed.blog-city.com/
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