by Beverly Eakman
October 11, 2012
NewsWithViews.com
On Tuesday, October 9, the day after Columbus Day, newspapers reported not one, but two, audacious initiatives: (1) an effort in Denver to have teachers embolden youngsters to actively pursue “social change” within the “dominant culture,” which can be taken for inciting insurrection, and (2) a voter-registration drive in Florida schools aimed at getting kids registered as Obama Democrats, with an outright refusal to do the same for the Republican Party and its nominee, Mitt Romney. In addition to voter “registration,” Pasco County Schools brazenly permitted a former teacher to deliver Obama speeches to senior high-school students.
FoxNews reporter Todd Starnes learned that an outfit going under the moniker Organizing For America was “given access to as many as a half dozen high school and middle school campuses.” The usual outrage by the community and parents made the rounds of news services in both instances. But it was too late to rein in the Left or launch a campaign of traditional values in government schools.
A lawsuit might have been winnable 20 years ago—in both cases. Today, you’d find it hard to locate a sympathetic judge who’d touch either one. Not because there aren’t any conservative, even Republican, judges. Not because today’s judges are unaware of the questionable legality of these two incursions.
Quite simply, the Left has been allowed to become too powerful.
For over 40 years, conservatives have declined to take the Left’s attack on our nation’s schools seriously. Now we, and all Americans, are paying the price.
Time and again, the left-wing has proved its willingness to push the envelope of constitutionality to ensure that each new crop of youngsters is in their hip pocket. Beginning with university departments of teacher preparation, schools have been increasingly steeped in left-wing ideology: first, biased textbooks; then psychological assessments passed off as academic tests; followed by social studies and graphic sex education institutionalized as legitimate curricula. Traditional standbys like chronological history and physiology were jettisoned. Then ROTC and Christian standards of conduct got the boot.
Such operations as Organizing For America are front groups for the radical Left. There are hundreds of them. For example, the American Planning Association (APA) uses trained functionaries to serve as “agents of change.” These provocateurs are hard-core activists. They pose as “facilitators” and “moderators” of local committees and focus groups. By twisting words and utilizing slick slogans, they dupe local officials and grassroots groups into launching initiatives or instituting measures that are helpful to socialist-leftist causes. Locals generally have no clue they are dealing with professional manipulators, many of whom are recruited straight out of college, based on their university record of activism and/or school assessments. Their political leanings are easily obtained from the rosters of degree programs in political science, psychology and education—and from dormitory “Resident Assistants,” who report on the conversations of students. Some of the larger front groups, such as the National Education Association’s National Training Lab (NTL) provide actual “boot camps” to teach operatives how to counter their conservative and traditionalist opposition. Some NTL “graduates” go directly into the classroom and foist their various radicalism on young children.
The Republican Party and most major conservative groups have known since the 1960s that the National Education Association (NEA) was skirting tax laws to help left-wing candidates win seats on local school boards and in legislative races—via off-shoots like Uniserve. This columnist was teaching in a California classroom when the union merged its local and state chapters with national organization. Since then, the NEA’s annual Legislative Agenda has become increasingly aggressive in its call for left-wing causes.
Republicans could have gone after all these groups on a variety of charges—but didn’t. Instead we held conferences that preached to the choir. We decried “global education” until it morphed into “multiculturalism,” and sex education until it morphed into “gay rights.” We condemned watered-down academics until even the definition of “cognitive” was changed to include pupils’ worldviews and opinions.
What were we thinking? Did we imagine that some 40 years of left-wing indoctrination would somehow result in a voting population of patriots, traditionalists and constitutionalists? We dumped millions into campaign committees—while fiddle-faddling over worthless educational “fixes” like the Effective Schools Movement, America 2000, Goals 2000, School-to-Work, Outcome-Based Education and No Child Left Behind. None of these tackled the critical problem of leftist incursion into our nation’s classrooms.
So, instead of honoring Columbus Day, our children now celebrate National Coming Out Day! Congratulations!
Whether or not Mr. Obama wins Election 2012, America has already lost its founding ideals. It is questionable whether a Romney Administration could ever cut enough to turn around today’s unfathomable debt.
But hey, don’t you dare complain. If you do, you’ll be said to suffer from “uncertainty avoidance” and “mental rigidity.”
Read the tea-leaves, People: Chris Mooney’s feted tome, The Republican Brain. Robert Altemeyer’s celebrated Right Wing Authoritarian (RWA) Scale. Psychologist Robert McCrae’s (among other notables’) findings that “that conservatives have an enlarged ‘fear’ area in their brains, with [only] smaller areas associated with courage and optimism….” A joint (taxpayer-funded) “study” out of the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation attributing ideals about morality and individualism to “dogmatism.”
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Wanna get away? Good luck with that…where are you going to go?
It’s going to take more than a new face at the top in Washington to renew popular support for a Republic—assuming young people even know what that is. If we don’t make a wholesale change in the coming term—in Congress, state legislatures, governorships, right down to cabinet appointees and staff aides (who advise elected officials)—then here’s what’s going to happen: The lid slams shut and the Party (you know which one) is over. And there’s nowhere to run!
� 2012 Beverly Eakman - All Rights Reserved
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This ArticleBeverly K. Eakman began her career as a teacher in 1968. She left to become a scientific writer for a NASA contractor. She went on to serve as a former speechwriter for the Voice of America and for the late Chief Justice Warren E. Burger when he chaired the Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. She was an editor and writer for the U.S. Dept. of Justice before retiring from federal government. She is now author of six books covering education policy, mental-health issues, data-trafficking and political strategy with dozens of keynote speeches, feature articles and op-eds to her credit. Her most recent works include A Common Sense Platform for the 21st Century and the 2011 Edition of her ever-popular seminar manual, How To Counter Group Manipulation Tactics (Midnight Whistler Publishers, 2010 and 2011, respectively).
Mrs.
Eakman can be reached through her
website: BeverlyE.com
