The wildfires raging in Arizona aren’t the only catastrophe the state is facing. When Americans are drawn together to simply do the right thing, we accomplish the extraordinary for the good of the nation’s survival. Nothing could demonstrate this better than the hard work of many over the last four years to expose the disturbing curriculum and activities surrounding Ethnic Studies in the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD).
For those unfamiliar with the subject, Ethnic Studies is offered as a course throughout many schools in the country. It encourages students to identify as a hyphenated-American (Mexican-American, African-American, Asian-American, etc.) instead of simply being an American. Though not all Ethnic Studies programs entertain anti-U.S. sentiment and overthrow, the potential for such activity to spread indeed exists. For more information, please read: In the Eye of A Storm: The Occupied Classroom
While Arizonans await the findings from Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal regarding the controversial program (determining whether the course violates state law), there are many heroes in this fight who put themselves at professional and personal risk in order to stop the enslavement of young minds in TUSD. Bear in mind the course is not exclusive to Tucson, but the TUSD curriculum is unique as it offers a militant model.
You may be surprised to learn that several people who identify as liberal democrats, advocates of social justice and former community organizers serve as the staunchest opposition to Ethnic Studies. Glenn Beck introduced one such Tucsonan who founded www.TU4SD.com exposing the curriculum. Together with some involved in tea parties, Smart Girl Politics, Winning With Women, and genuinely concerned citizens of all stripes, a strong unit has been formed in getting the word out both locally and nationally.
Many have warned about the potential for Ethnic Studies to go further with youth activism embracing larger scale chaos within the state and nation. Here is the proof: (note who is providing space for this event) Tucson Social Justice Groups Plan Nationwide Protest
Legislation may ban the course, but it is going to take patient, dedicated people to help the students. Principles indeed override politics and there is a realization that what is taking place is dangerous – both for the students, our city and yes, the country.
It took a village to uproot the lives of many children in Tucson; it will take ‘we the people’ to love the hate out of them.
Additional info: Tucson’s Mexican-American Studies Problem
H/T to Mike Shaw TV for video posts
Below are scenes from the May 3, 2011 riots at the TUSD building:
Supporters and protestors of Ethnic Studies outside TUSD building
These were the students who chained themselves to board member chairs the week before.
Students inside board room (not all are high schoolers)
Recipe for rotting a country from the inside out:
1) Take population and divide according to superficial ethnic and racial characteristics.
2) Take portions of history to assign “oppressed” label to some groups, and “oppressor” label to others.
3) Encourage this kind of group identification (and polarization — “multi-culturalism”) in mass and entertainment media, school curriculums (ethnic studies), and at all levels of government.
40) Stir (but don’t blend) groups well in a pie pan and bake for several generations using “political correctness” as the “pie crust” to keep from boiling over.
Voila! An ethnic casserole sure to give national stomach cramps and indigestion!
And the remedy for these conditions? Sarah’s Omelette Shop Soup of the Day:
The “Big O’ Bowl” of Chicken Soup with a side of extra crispy “Whoop-a**”
Coming to a school district near you!
It’s sad that our modern, supposedly-enlightened thinking encourages us to identify ourselves first and foremost by our race, gender, and class, rather than by our values or our humanity. Add to that the emphasis on feelings (such as self-esteem), which crowds out fundamental skills and attitude (reading, writing, attitude). Then we go around pursuing our own fulfillment above all else, leaving kids to grow up as best they can in whatever piece of the broken family they find themselves discarded in. And to top it all off, we’re going to leave them hopelessly in debt, which we ran up to pay for our own excesses. (As a side note, it’s interesting that Obama’s support is highest among young people; they’d be singing a different tune if they’d just look at the numbers. From the perspective of simple self-interest, Obama’s better for the old people, because he’s leading a national binge that the oldsters will benefit from and then die off without having paid for, but the young ones will be stuck with the bill.) Every way you look at it, we are giving the next generation an extremely raw deal.
A shocking thing that Glenn Beck pointed out is that Ward Churchill, an ethnic studies “professor” (w/ no Ph.D., only a Masters in arts) who was fired from C.U. for plagiarism and fraudulent scholarship in 2007, was seen at the student riot where they chained themselves to the school board chairs. We saw similar kinds of disruptive violence from his devoted ethnic studies students at C.U.
From what I’ve read, he’s now part of a private “youth group” in the area that’s promoting this militant multicultural agenda. Before he was fired I heard a lot of recordings of him promoting violence, and in a few rare cases, overthrowing the government. Often he knew where the line was, and left that conclusion as an implication in the mind of his audience, giving him “plausible deniability.”
There were also reports of him accosting people for enforcing things like parking violations he committed. He has an ex-wife who lives near Boulder, CO. who won’t go near him, saying he threatened her life.
I don’t know if he’s still involved with this. He had been involved with a militant Indian rights group (which other Indian rights groups around the country have disassociated themselves from) for many years that would hold protests in Denver on Columbus Day, disrupting the parade celebrating it. He has been sued several times for this, but every time juries have let him off. Typically he’s cited U.N. resolutions, which advocate indigenous protest against oppression, and First Amendment protections, in his defense.
BTW, the Colorado Supreme Court recently announced it will hear Churchill’s appeal to get his C.U. job back early next year. He lost an appeal at a lower court last year.
Hi there, Makeshifty –
Yes, it is interesting Churchill would show up at a school board meeting in Tucson, isn’t it? It’s also interesting just two weeks prior to the first riot, a conference called ‘Making Education Matter: Youth, Teachers, Professors and Community Organizers as Activist-Scholars’ was being held in New Orleans. The presenter was Augustine Romero, the Tucson school district’s Director of Student Equity, who helped implement the Ethnic Studies program in the Tucson Unified School District in 1998. At the conference, there were other educators from Arizona. There were also students brought to the conference to give a ‘performance’ (precursor perhaps?) which included ‘transformative resistance’ and a discussion on how *they* have organized against Arizona’s HB2281 (the Ethnic Studies Ban) and SB1070.
It probably will not surprise you the keynote speaker was William Ayers.
There is a very deep-rooted network tied in with the Ethnic Studies program (outlined in the first link in the post – by no means is it the full scope!) and it goes well beyond the classroom – even outside of this country.
I know a little something about this, because a few years ago I read up on what David Horowitz had written about how ethnic studies got started at universities, that it was really part of a neo-Marxist program of political correctness designed to fracture American society (that, and “peace studies,” which he exposed as being quite violent). Women’s studies is typically part of the same program, as is the movement for multiculturalism.
I have nothing against studying other cultures, their histories, women’s rights, etc. That’s not what this is about. This is a deliberate political and cultural program of destruction. There’s a good, brief documentary on this that’s online called “The History of Political Correctness.” It talks about a group of Marxists who founded what was called “the Frankfurt School” in Frankfurt, Germany many decades ago. They had come to the conclusion that Marxist theory as it was laid out by Marx had some flaws in it, mainly because his prediction that the Proletariat, the working class, would rise up against their Bourgeois masters hadn’t happened when he predicted it should have. They worked to translate Marxism from economic into cultural terms in order to, they hoped, create the revolution that hadn’t come about naturally. They tried some experiments that failed, but ultimately found some success in America by working on cultural minorities: women, and ethnic minorities, and promoting the sexual revolution, though according to Horowitz that didn’t come about solely because these people wanted it. He said more or less that they happened to “get in front of that train” to try to lead it. One of the striking things Horowitz said in this is that the followers of the Frankfurt School in America, working in academia, didn’t have any plans for the future of America. The original inspiration for this “cultural translation” of Marxism they had worked on was to first destroy American society as it was, but to then build a Marxist society in its ashes. He said eventually these people gave up on the idea of building a future here, and just set their objective on destroying American society, with no end game after that.
I think a lot of people are blind to this, because most people can’t imagine that anyone would have these objectives, while sounding like they’re working to “liberate” people from “oppression.” It just doesn’t make any sense to them that someone would actually take a significant amount of time dedicating their life to these objectives, because most people are focused on trying to make a better life for themselves, and to them that’s the only thing that makes sense. I think one has to have an analytical, and skeptical mind to get it, looking at the question, “What is the net effect of this?”
OMG, Makeshifty – were you listening to the conversation my friend and I were having over coffee this morning? lol! We were discussing The Frankfurt School, John Dewey, Hitler Youth. My goodness – the vibe is out!
You are absolutely spot on in your comments. When The Frankfurt School came to America (at Dewey’s urging), it accelerated communism in this country via the classroom. Add to that Dewey being hailed as the ‘Father of Modern Education’ and the fact we built our public education system on a German model – what could go wrong there?
About three weeks ago, I was on a radio program in Vegas discussing Ethnic Studies and giving a history in terms of the Mexican Marxist student activists of the 1960’s being very involved in the present situation in Tucson. Benjamin Bloom’s name came up – another giant in the world of education responsible for Bloom’s Taxonomy, a model on ‘learning domains’ which every person entering the education field is required to know as they will apply it in their objectives and lesson planning. Sounds harmless, right? But what about when the goal of the lesson is to ‘fundamentally change’ a child’s world view? Bloom wanted that. He viewed school as the place where a child’s ‘fixed’ beliefs were to be challenged and torn down (that is, the beliefs instilled by parents). What can you say about a guy who believed the following:
“A large part of what we call ‘good teaching’ is the teacher’s ability to attain affective objectives through challenging the students’ fixed beliefs…A child is not truly using his higher order thinking skills until he no longer believes in absolutes of right and wrong.”
You may be interested in Charlotte Iserbyt’s ‘Deliberate Dumbing Down of America’ which can be found for free online if you do a general search on her name/title of the book. It will go great with Horowitz’s writings (of which I am a big fan), Thomas Sowell, Gertrude Himmelfaub and Jacques Barzun. Diane Ravitch used to be all over this, too, but she’s changed her tune a bit and it’s not encouraging.
What is encouraging is the word is getting out, but we are not out of the woods on this at all yet. Regardless of what our state superintendent concludes (and I’m disappointed he failed to release the report Friday), this is far, far, far from over especially when this movement has a friend in the White House and in the social justice education movement.
Videos that have been posted online have been one of my resources. “The History of Political Correctness” is one of them.
I have heard of Dewey as both a great educational theorist and as the father of progressivism. I am finding this among some educators, that they have some good ideas about how to teach subjects like mathematics and computing (as in computer science), but they are also avowed communists. It’s been difficult for me to reconcile that, though I’ve gained a little better understanding of this recently. I started into Horowitz’s book, “Radical Son,” and he talks about how his father was a great teacher, but he was also a Soviet agent (as was Horowitz’s mother. He grew up in a communist family, and was one himself for many years) in the U.S. during the Cold War. One of the accounts he gives is one of his father’s students was questioned about his teacher’s communist ties. He said he had no idea about this connection, that he learned a lot about writing from him, which is why he came to him, and he said his teacher mentioned nothing about communism the whole time he knew him.
I listened to an interview with Hilary Putnam, who talked a little about Marx and Engels, and made some comparisons with their major adherents. A few things that seem to draw academics to Marxism is educators are often about sharing, sharing knowledge, that is, but sharing nonetheless. They like to spend time exploring theories and ideas, and how they can affect a group positively. Marx and Engels both took what is often accepted by modern educators as a scientific approach towards industrial society, and capitalism. This probably draws educators in, because science has the air of legitimacy to those who are interested in the mind, and I think insofar as science goes, for good reason. The fly in the ointment that I detected from what Putnam said is that Marxism was formed out of an old model of scientific thought that was abandoned in the 20th century. By Putnam’s account, Marx and Engels used a very thorough and sophisticated inductive analysis that epitomized the way scientists thought about any area of study during the 19th century. The thing is, 19th century scientific thinking was found by the “hard sciences” to be wrong-headed in some significant ways, in the late 19th century, and subsequently there was a sea change in scientific thought, but the sense I have is that Marxism didn’t translate into it. It has remained stuck in the 19th century way of thinking. To try to compensate for this failing, the Frankfurt School decided to try to translate Marxism into cultural terms, as I said, rather than use modern scientific analysis to reexamine Marx’s and Engels’s theories, and perhaps find their flaws. One could say that this is par for the course, because most of the thinking about schooling, both what school is for, and how subjects are taught are, in essence, not that different from the educational theories of the 19th century, still.
Putnam didn’t talk about this, but the sense I have is that modern Marxists still hold true to this old way of thinking, because it makes so much sense to them. For whatever reason they don’t see that it represents a very old way of thinking, and as we’ve seen with the “experiments” that have been tried, they’ve been disasters. I talked with a teacher who teaches high school mathematics in another country, who has told me he believes in socialism/communism, about the failures of the implementations of communism. He had all these excuses, that what was called “communism” didn’t really implement it the way Marx said it should be, that wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few to the extreme, and that the reason the other tries failed is that the working class never understood what communism was about. Never once did he consider the idea that the theory might be wrong, that it doesn’t work, no matter how I coaxed him, and put alternate theories to him. It’s strange to me that someone who could have some deep insights into math education, who seemed capable of examining ideas, and being intelligently critical of arguments, could not bring himself to critically examine his own beliefs about society and economics.
Perhaps this would explain it. A wise educational theorist I know about, who is both a mathematician and scientist, has said, “Mathematics without science is dangerous.” By this he meant that mathematics tends to encourage certain ways of thinking that can lead to disasters in society if not checked by the discipline of science, because math achieves truth by proof, but not by trial. There is no consideration of evidence, there is no deep insight into human failings, or epistemology, that we are quite capable of fooling ourselves, and no sense that our perception is flawed, and that we can only approximate the truth, especially when we’re talking about the real world, and not just abstractions, and sometimes more than one way of seeing the same phenomenon can be equally valid.
One thing I’ve learned is even with our apparent “progress” in society, people who live in our modern society, who have gone through our schools, and even have college degrees, are just as prone now to think as people did a few hundred years ago. That was a scary realization!
Re. Charolette Iserbyt
I’ve seen a few interviews with her (they’re on YouTube). I’ve had “Deliberate Dumbing Down of America” for a while, and I’ve read a little into it. I’ve been meaning to read more of it. What little I saw caused me to think that there’s something there, but what she presents needs to be read with some discernment, a grain of salt. My sense of her is she definitely comes at education with a point of view. The problem I see with her perspective is anything that deviates from that she’s suspicious of. Not to say that she doesn’t make some legitimate points. I just get this gut feeling that what she puts out there needs to be listened to in context, in the sense of having a background in the history of public education, pedagogy, etc., because I think she takes things the wrong way sometimes.
Let’s just say I’ve had some real life experience with this from being involved in activist movements. Not all literature that seems to explain an issue, and brings alarming facts into view should be taken at face value, though the material can be valuable in identifying a very real problem. It should prompt us to read more sources on these areas to get a better idea of what’s going on.
Those kids look like zombies. Could be that “indoctrination” will look good on a resume.
That’s exactly what I thought, too, Strider. I was in the board room until it was apparent a riot was underway. Prior to the girls standing up, removing their shirts & jackets to reveal the tshirts w/ ‘You can silence my voice, but not my spirit’, they were turning around photographing those of us in the room even though cameras were not permitted except for local media. Our bags had to be checked before entering, so how does this happen? There were police in the room, too, who did absolutely nothing at that point.
The thing that really made my heart sink was the look on their faces – just like in the photos except in 3D. It is the look of a once young vibrant person being turned into a hate machine.
My first concern in all of this is definitely for the kids in this program. I love kids and felt I had something to offer as a teacher, and I do. What I see taking place in this course and throughout the curriculum is nothing short of child abuse. When a course begins by using the first 30 days to force these children to shed their identity (they are not allowed to use their names in class) and to repeat an oath daily that begins by sounding much like the beginning of The Beatle’s ‘I Am The Walrus’, then no wonder they begin looking like zombies. Their lives are being sucked away by the aging, hate-filled student activists of the 1960’s having a mid-life crisis, using someone else’s child to move forward with their insanity.
I can’t sit by and hope it fizzles away. None of us can.
I mentioned this on the link above. It saddens me to see the culture and language of the southwest or basically the western states losing the battle against these illegal aliens. The first excuse was that they needed a job to support their families in Mexico. Then they brought their families and extended families and use up the welfare state, schools, hospitals, etc that was suppost to support the legal citizens of this country. And now they just want to take our country? WTF? Why? So they can turn it into the same crapistan they escaped from? Do they think they can make the southwest prosper better than it has been under our laws/rights/Constitution? How, by breaking laws, lying, stealing, and cheating? There was a video this week that showed a union march in Los Angeles that had support of the socialist/communist party. Clearly, this crap in Tucson is being supported by agitator groups like these. I hope the people of Tucson don’t get intimidated and stop this crap immediately!
I am from Tucson and Sierra Vista AZ and have lived their since the early 1960’s. Tucson was a beutiful place. I entered the military for 20 years and went back for visits. Tucson has changed bigtime into a crime ridden city especially because of the illegal mexican element. I have seen the explosion of drug-gang crime to where there are literally a cop, shariff, border patrol, highway patrol, county and city police vehicle on every corner of the city (it seems…). I decided not to live there because of it anymore but I visit my family often. I loved that area so much and my heart is really broken about the condition it has become. I live in Georgia now and have learned we have an illegal problem here- far from the border. The argiculture element brings them in. The Gov. here signed a decent law but my feeling is that these people don’t even know how bad this illegal alien stuff is. I just say that Tucson is a “Paradise Lost.”
Great discussion and research material mentioned above. A good defense to this will be to spread the word and expose these people which I am diffinately going to do!