-By Warner Todd Huston
Last week I spied a short piece at Illinois Review about a post on My Suburban Life that detailed the story of a left-wing teacher that was shocked that a majority of her students in DuPage County, Illinois voted for Republican Representative Peter Roskam in the school’s mock election.
Social studies teacher Lori Keough of Glenbard High School found herself flummoxed that her students voted for every Democrat on the fake ballot but Representative Roskam, a Republican. Glenbard High is situated in Roskam’s 6th legislative district.
Students picked Republican Peter Roskam for the 6th district, with 52 percent of the vote, compared to Democrat Benjamin Lowe, who brought in 44 percent. For the other elections, students mainly voted for Democrats.
Social studies teacher Lori Keough was surprised by yesterday’s results.
“Just because DuPage County is so Republican, I was shocked that Democrats won every single race except for Roskam,” she said. “It shows in general that students are learning on their own and making decisions on their own and not going with what their parents think.”
You just have to laugh at this blinkered assumption that left-wing teacher Keough had here. So the kids didn’t make decisions just “going with what their parents think” but agreed with her that all Democrats should be elected… and as far as she is concerned her indoctrination of students is evidence of students “learning on their own” but if kids went with their parent’s ideas, why they are not “learning on their own.”
Just like a left-winger to assume that a parent’s influence on their own kids is bad but a teacher’s propagandistic efforts are but “teaching” kids to think on their own. I am sure that this woman supports the left’s massive efforts to push Democrat politics on kids in schools, too.
Just for one example of schools pushing Democrats on students, in Cincinnati, Ohio a school actually bussed voting age kids to a polling center and instructed them to vote for Democrats. This and the massive propaganda efforts pushed by President Obama’s political organization to cajole kids to vote for Democrats proves that democrats are experts at the underhanded efforts to push kids toward the Democrat/union agenda.
But lets all face a typically youthful folly in that a majority of kids always lean toward left-wingism. Left-wing ideology always appeals to children of no life experience, people with no stake in the system, and those who are not very learned. Left-wingism is a feels-good notion based in starry-eyed dreams, not reality. It is infused with “feeeeelings” not logic and common sense. These are the sorts of ideas un-tethered to reality that appeals to kids and it is natural that in these sort of mock elections kids often lean toward Democrats.
But the real news here is that kids throughout DuPage are still voting for Roskam,a Republican, at the same time they are otherwise filling their little fake ballots out for Democrats. Roskam is an extremely popular fellow and is bucking the left-wingism that teacher flood kid’s minds with as well as bucking the youthful folly of high Democrat support.
Several other area schools also showed high support for Roskam. York High found big support for Peter Roskam and so did Glenbard West and Lake Park schools.
In any case this is all very interesting news. It sure seems that Peter Roskam has garnered an awful lot of good will even among those kids that would otherwise more easily support Democrats, even as Obama’s own organization has flooded schools with his propaganda.
Not only has Roskam been able to build a base even among DuPage area kids but those kids have also turned away from someone that might seem more “like” them in Roskam’s opponent, Ben Lowe. Lowe is a 26-year-old environmentalist who has written a couple of kitschy books. Lowe is also a race baiter and has been involved in an accusation of “racial profiling” for a May encounter with Cicero police. Just the sort of wild-eyed activism that kids often love.
It seems pretty clear that Roskam has succeeded in bucking quite a few trends that would otherwise play against him.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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