-By Larry Sand
Venerable Scholastic has joined progressive educators and teachers unions in an effort to indoctrinate and radicalize American school children.
Scholastic, a student magazine that has been in business for over 90 years, has caught the progressive fever. (H/T Mary Grabar.) This malady affects common sense and good judgment and leads the afflicted to report news from a biased, progressive viewpoint.
In its December issue, Scholastic, which purports to “believe that all sides of the issues of our times should be fairly discussed — with deep respect for facts and logical thinking,” gets all gooey-eyed about the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, mentioning that OWS concerns itself with “protesters,” “voicing concerns,” “Americans wanting more opportunity to share in company’s prosperity,” and “workers that they feel that they can never get ahead.” To be sure, some of these types are present at OWS events.
But, Scholastic omits a few inconvenient details, like the fact that the OWS camps have been a magnet for Communists, anarchists, street hustlers, and common criminals and have been breeding grounds for murder, rape, vandalism, robbery and anti-Jewish sentiment. The filth left by many of these criminals — I mean protesters — has taxed municipal sanitation systems at great cost to taxpayers. As of December 9th, there were 417 incidents in all. You would think that Scholastic could have managed to mention that all is not sweetness and light in OWSland.
How did Scholastic treat the Tea Partiers? Not so well. Tina Korbe at Hot Air quotes from the October 2010 Scholastic,
“Tea Party candidates also had some surprise wins in primary elections, which determine who will represent their political parties on the November ballot. Christine O’Donnell, a candidate for Vice President Joseph Biden’s Senate seat in Delaware, was backed by the Tea Party. She has since become known as the candidate who has had to declare publicly that she is ‘not a witch.’
“In Nevada, Sharron Angle, a Tea Party-backed Republican candidate, has become a real threat to U.S. Senator Harry Reid, who currently serves as the Senate Majority Leader. Reid called out the big guns to go up against his opponent. Former President Bill Clinton was recently in Nevada campaigning for him and warning voters against casting their ballots in anger.
“’If any time in your life you make an important decision when you’re mad, there’s an 80 per cent chance you’re going to make a mistake,’ Clinton said at a rally for Reid. ‘I don’t want people to abandon their anger. I want them to channel it so they can think clearly.’”
So, the OWSers have “concerns” but the Tea Partiers are “angry.” Christine O’Donnell is reduced to her unfortunate “Not a witch” comment, but Harry “Taxes are voluntary” Reed gets only positive words. (Just a personal note – I have been to many Tea Parties and have spoken at a couple and never saw or heard about any rapes robberies, assaults, vandalism or Jew hatred. And the area the Tea Party was held was in pristine condition after those involved held their event and went home.)
We would be lucky if it were just a student magazine like Scholastic that is spreading the bowdlerized OWS message to kids, but this is just not the case. Just a few examples of other offenders are the people behind the Facebook page Teach • Occupy Wall Street which claims,
“Teach Occupy Wall Street is for educators to share ideas, lesson plans, resources, website, youtubes, classroom practice etc. as we teach about the Occupy Wall Street movement. It is important for teachers to model civic courage to their students — the notion that we should act as if we live in a real democracy. One way to do that is to engage students in deep thinking about what is going on in the world around them. Spread the word. Teach OWS!”
Where to begin? “…we should act as if we live in a real democracy.” Don’t these “educators” know that our founders gave us not a democracy but a republic? Benjamin Franklin put the reason for this succinctly, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.”
Then there are the teachers unions that have done their best to take advantage of the class warfare sentiment inherent in the OWS movement, whose motto could very well be “I’m poor because you’re rich.” As I wrote back in October,
“A couple of weeks ago, United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten made sympathetic statements about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Now the California Teachers Association has jumped in with a full endorsement and suggestions on its website as to how teachers and others can get involved in OWS activities.
“Stunning in its mendacity, CTA issued a press release (H/T Mike Antonucci) which announced its “support of the nationwide ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement for tax fairness and against corporate greed.” It goes on to say, ‘…a stable tax structure begins with everyone paying their fair share.’”
Additionally, when OWS fever was peaking last month, teachers actually called in sick and encouraged their students to join them in solidarity with other protesters on the frontlines.
At the end of the day, school children are being manipulated, lied to and taught a one-sided, distorted view of the world. From the mainstream media, many of their teachers and their unions and “educational” magazines, kids are getting hit foursquare with highly politicized, progressive propaganda. Its purveyors have no interest in education or the truth, only presenting the “facts” that fit their worldview. It’s disgusting and everyone involved in this enterprise should be ashamed of themselves.
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Larry Sand began his teaching career in New York in 1971. Since 1984, he has taught elementary school as well as English, math, history and ESL in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where he also served as a Title 1 Coordinator. Retired in 2009, he is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues – information teachers will often not get from their school districts or unions.
“CTEN” was formed in 2006 because a wide range of information from the more global concerns of education policy, education leadership, and education reform, to information having a more personal application, such as professional liability insurance, options of relationships to teachers’ unions, and the effect of unionism on teacher pay, comes to teachers from entities that have a specific agenda. Sand’s comments and op-eds have appeared in City Journal, Associated Press, Newsweek, Townhall Magazine, Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union Tribune, Los Angeles Daily News, San Jose Mercury News, Orange County Register and other publications. This past May, after his weekly blog proved to be very popular, he began writing a monthly article for City Journal, the Manhattan Institute’s policy publication. He has appeared on numerous broadcast news programs and talk radio shows in Southern California and nationally.
Sand has participated in panel discussions and events focusing on education reform efforts and the impact of teachers’ unions on public education. In March 2010, Sand participated in a debate hosted by the non-profit Intelligence Squared, an organization that regularly hosts Oxford-style debates, which was nationally broadcast on Bloomberg TV and NPR, as well as covered by Newsweek. Sand and his teammates – Terry Moe of the Hoover Institution and former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, opposed the proposition – Don’t Blame Teachers Unions For Our Failing Schools. The pro-union team included Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. In August 2010, he was on a panel at the Where’s the Outrage? Conference in San Francisco, where he spoke about how charter school operators can best deal with teachers’ unions. This past January he was on panels in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Mateo in support of National School Choice week. Additionally, CTEN has hosted two informational events this year – one addressing the secret agenda that is prevalent in many schools these days and the other concerning itself with California’s new Parent Trigger law. The latter event was covered by both the English and Spanish language press.
Sand has also worked with other organizations to present accurate information about the relationship between teachers and their unions, most recently assisting in the production of a video for the Center for Union Facts in which a group of teachers speak truthfully about the teachers’ unions. At this time, he is conferring with and being an advisor to education policy experts who are crafting major education reform legislation.
CTEN maintains an active and strong new media presence, reaching out to teachers and those interested in education reform across the USA, and around the world, with its popular Facebook page, whose members include teachers, writers, think tankers, and political activists. Since 2006, CTEN has experienced dramatic growth.