Schools Replace Geography With Activism
By Brian Yates (04/21/05)
How well do you know geography? If you’re like most American students, not very well. According to the Louisville “Courier-Journal,” less than 20 percent of Americans can find either Iraq or Afghanistan on a world map, and 11 percent can’t even pick out the United States.
Dr. Harm de Blij of Michigan State University, who spoke in Louisville last week, blames our lack of geographical literacy, in part, on that fact that the course simply isn’t taught in many schools.
Why isn’t it taught? Laura Clifford, JCPS social studies specialist, whined to the C-J that “schools have a scarcity of time.” The No Child Left Behind Act shares blame as well because of its emphasis on reading and math.
To listen to the schools, geography isn’t taught because there is simply not enough time between the three R’s. The truth is; however, elementary and high schools are increasingly using their young and impressionable students for political activism.
In Greenwich, Connecticut, second-graders were taken out of school to deliver posters to J.P. Morgan Chase headquarters with the message “protect the rainforest instead of hurting the Earth for oil.”
That effort, sponsored by the Rainforest Action Network and enabled by the school, wasn’t the first time RAN has used children to target banks. Bank of America, as well as the former CEO of Citigroup, Sandy Weill, received letters from schoolchildren demanding the bank not make loans to oil companies. Here’s an excerpt, as quoted in the “Wall Street Journal:”
Dear Mr. Weill,
My name is Aekta, and I am in the 4th grade at Canyon Rim Elementary. I am studying about the rainforest…I guarantee you that all my relatives will find some other bank, unless you stop lending money to rainforest destroyers.
When asked by Alan Murray of the “Wall Street Journal” just how far RAN wanted these banks to go, Ilyse Hogue of RAN said, “Do I personally not want them to lend to oil companies? Yes.”
The irony of all this is many of these children are trying to save the very rainforests they likely can’t find on a map.
Rainforests aren’t the only target of today’s school activists. Students at Westbury High (New York) are lobbying their state legislature for tighter gun control.
According to their school website, a group of social studies students (what irony) boarded a bus at their school to head to Albany. They also participated in a “morning workshop at the high school” in preparation for the lobbying trip. The workshop was led by the New Yorkers Against Gun Violence organization.
Students at the Raleigh Charter High School (North Carolina) took part in a student strike to oppose the war with Iraq in March of 2003. Nearly 50 students from Raleigh Charter took part.
While you may wonder how a student strike to protest war contributes to learning, it pales in comparison to a West Seattle High School student assembly. Three veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan were invited to speak. The heroes arrived to find a theater stage “strewn with figures costumed as Iraqi men, women and children splashed with blood.”
Operation Support Our Troop’s Nadine Gulit said “over the loud speaker (someone) was denouncing our military, saying ‘Americans are killing my family!’”
The soldiers also had to endure students in Abu Ghraib-style costumes and a narrator screeching about civilians killed and abused by our military.
And just last week, schools held “Kick Butts Day” to expose the evils of Big Tobacco. They invited the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids to hold around 2,000 events, including anti-tobacco school assemblies, classroom art projects, no-smoking pledge drives, and even mock trials of the Marlboro Man.
Iowa students demanded state legislators raise the cigarette tax, and in Boston, kids painted a graffiti wall to express “their feelings about the tobacco industry.”
Said the Campaign, “They want the tobacco industry to stop targeting them with marketing for cigarettes…and they want elected officials to do more to protect them from tobacco.” (As if an innocent kid is in danger of being jumped in an alley by a Virginia Slim.)
Schools can’t find time to teach geography because they’re too busy pushing their activist political agenda on their young, impressionable students, many of whom simply don’t know any better. Big Tobacco, Big Army, and Big Bank aren’t keeping our kids from learning…Big Liberal is.
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