Conformity and Collectivist Core

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During a late evening visit to our local restaurant, I witnessed a progressive middle-aged couple pleading with their young child to give up a toy she had taken from her playmate’s home. As they were arguing back and forth, loud enough for the entire restaurant to hear, all I could think of was, why bring a small child so late to a restaurant and, for God’s sake, isn’t anybody in charge of their children anymore?

Have parents relegated their parental authority and their rights to raise and educate their children entirely to schools, to progressive ideology, and to the federal government? Do parents even know what their children are taught and if so, do they care what their precious kids learn every day?

As a former college teacher, I know from experience that some parents cannot wait to get their children out of the house; some only care if they are fed and safe from harm; some only care that test scores are up and their children are promoted, even socially promoted, to the next grade; some only care that they get a diploma at the end of twelve years; others that their entrance exams are high enough to get them scholarships and admission to the college of their dreams; and some delude themselves that their children are getting a balanced education in line with our American values.

Do many parents bother to sit in a classroom to hear for themselves? Are parents even allowed anymore to sit in a class? Are parents allowed to express their opinions to the school board without being arrested for trespassing or thrown out of the meeting because they dared to ask an inconvenient question?

A Chinese American mom from Colorado was pleading with the school board in her county to reject Common Core because it is the same curriculum as the Communist Core in China. Lily Tang Williams, who came to America for freedom, grew up under Mao’s China. Nationalized standards represent communist indoctrination, she said, preparing students to be good little workers and not to think critically and independently.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAIetn6sE00

“Chinese children are not trained to be independent thinkers; they are trained to be cash machines and trained workers for corporations.”  She asked rhetorically, “What happened to individual rights and individual freedom in America? Where are the parents? Why Common Core, this top down education from the federal government with corporations holding the carrots and the federal government the sticks? Do you want your children to be cheap workers for American corporations? Do not follow China’s model! Their system produces great test-takers but not critical thinkers!” Pleading with the board, Lily said that it took her ten years to get rid of the brainwashing she suffered in her native China. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilaSvC9PGKk

The assault on our children and our parental rights is relentless. The government is dictating what we feed them, how we raise them, whether they are allowed to walk from school; they are going to weigh them in schools without parental consent, and they are going to collect biometrics on our children in order to build up a national database tracking them from cradle to grave. Ask yourselves why? What is happening to our privacy, God-given rights, and freedoms?

Teaching is an art and every child has God-given talents that must be nurtured individually as much as possible. Children are not numbers that can be neatly boxed into a rubric for the convenience of Conformity Core dictated by the government.  

Florida Standards Assessments (FSA) is testing for the Common Core which is supported by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. http://www.fsassessments.org/resources/?section=3-test-administrators

One young child, Sydney Smoot, a fourth grader at Brooksville Elementary School, spoke on March 17, 2015 to the Hernando County School Board, voicing very articulately and with aplomb, her concerns about FSA testing.

What are Sydney’s concerns? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogBuz4dU5Ew

1.       One test and one end-of- the-year score defines her as a failure or a success, regardless of anything else Sydney learned in five years of school.

2.       She cannot share anything nor discuss the test with her parents. Why if it involves her education and her future?

3.       Why should she be forced to take one test that has not been tested nor validated on other students in Florida? How could it be accurate and reflect what she knows?

4.       Why stress children the entire year, often eliminating recess and other fun activities, in order to prep for one test only, when they should be taught and tested throughout the year, measuring along the way what they have learned? To accurately measure progress and what they know, students should be tested at the beginning of the year, middle of the year, and end of the year.

Seasoned teachers, who understand what is at stake, are resigning in protest. Oklahoma City math teacher, Juli Sylvan, with more than 20 years teaching experience, expressed in her resignation letter her objection to the data-mining of children, the implementation of the Common Core standards in “defiance of state law,” and the fact that “It is a complete takeover of what is taught in the public school system. It takes away the individual’s freedom and joy of learning because of the one size fits all approach. All students don’t learn or express themselves in the same way. Common Core tends to do away with individualism — which is one of the attributes that makes America great. Diversity is one of our greatest resources, but Common Core erodes this great strength by taking parents, teachers, and elected officials out of the decision making process.” http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/20443-in-resignation-oklahoma-teacher-blows-whistle-on-common-core

 

According to Sylvan, even though Oklahoma passed a law ending Common Core in the state, education officials have continued implementing the Common Core standards in violation of the state law by using the scheme of Teacher Leadership Effectiveness (TLE) to coerce teachers into Common Core compliance.

Governor Mary Fallin signed into law HB 3399 on June 5, 2014, which withdrew Oklahoma from the Common Core Standards Initiative (CCSSI), “allowing the state to adopt its own public education standards.”  http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/2014/201406100.asp

 

Sylvan told The New American that “I was constantly being harassed and threatened with termination for not implementing Common Core components (data collection, testing, teaching strategies aligned to Common Core)”…  “As a teacher in the classroom in that environment with constantly being harassed, my ability to protect my students from Common Core was being rapidly diminished.” Her conscience did not allow her to “promote or contribute to the implementation of Common Core.”

 

And Common Core testing is now aligned with the national standardized testing for college entrance exams.

 

I came across a pamphlet from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) which is a non-profit organization launched in 1995 in D.C. with the purpose “to promote academic freedom, academic excellence, and accountability in higher education.”  

 

ACTA has a difficult job since colleges and universities in the U.S. are experiencing low academic standards, weak curricula, more than double the rate of inflation tuition fees, more demand for public and private funding, no accountability to students, alumni, and taxpayers, and attacks on anything American, on free thought and on free speech, usually relegated to a “free speech” zone, a tiny campus spot far away from the usual student foot traffic.

 

Teaching, learning, rational debate, free exchange of ideas, and the pursuit of truth are under attack, quite literally in some cases, where students were physically threatened and attacked by their teachers and the courts upheld this abominable behavior.

 

Professors have the freedom to speak their minds but students’ academic freedom is another story.  A scientific study commissioned by ACTA found that almost half of students attended classes in which professors frequently used political comments in their classes even though they were totally unrelated to the subject; 46% said that professors used the classroom to express personal political views;  and 42% “reported reading assignments that presented only one side of controversial issues.” A Zogby poll found that 58% of Americans believe bias in the classroom is a very serious problem.

 

With adult literacy and skills declining thanks to fluff courses and watered down curricula, and worthless degrees, the student loan debt has ballooned to $826 billion, larger than the credit card debt, while jobs for college graduates are scarce.

 

The National Assessment of Adult Literacy found that millions of college-educated Americans cannot understand newspaper editorials or instructions for taking medicine. As students learn less and less, they take longer and longer to graduate. In 2007, the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems reported a six-year graduation rate of 56.1 percent. The four-year graduation rate is so low that colleges no longer record it. www.goacta.org

 

The moral of the story is, if you want education to decline even further, and creative individualism that built such a successful America, the former envy of the world to disappear, and, if you want to transform American students into pliant proletariat workers for crony capitalist corporations, Common Core is the way to indoctrinate them into the collectivist utopian mindset.

 

Children Should Come With Instructions

“Tolerance is the last virtue of a dying society.” - Aristotle

Children don’t arrive at birth with a conveniently written manual to address every parental crisis in the middle of the night. It is hard being a parent, especially a good parent, and many of us do need the Idiot’s Guide to Parenting.  Liberals are more than willing to step in via free government programs to give firm instructions and to control how you raise your children.  They have been pretty successful so far in taking away many parental rights while molding the next liberal generation.

When I had children in the 80s, there were no self-help books, and the only source of scholarly parental wisdom and what to do was Dr. Benjamin Spock, M.D. However, most of the time I deferred to my mom’s experience and to other elders who laughed when TV stars and psychologists with out-of-control children tried to give parental and child-rearing advice.

Protecting my children from self-inflicted injury was not easy – dangers lurked in every corner, plug, cabinet, dangling string, slippery surface, sharp object, pill bottle, knife, scissors, freezer, electric socket, chewable toy, and especially the bathroom. As a toddler, one of my daughters loved to drink water out of the commode with her Sippy cup. Being escape artists, it was hard to hold on to them in public places. I managed fine without having to put them on a leash/harness, a common practice at that time. They did complain bitterly much later that they were on a tight leash as teenagers.

With every stage of development, new and interesting challenges arose but nothing was as hard as the teenage years. At this developmental stage, our children decided that we, the parents, were an utter embarrassment to them. We should have been banished to a faraway island, while they could freely choose a new set of parents, preferably someone hip and young, who had not fallen off the fashion train in the 70s; this someone would have to be glamorous, smart, and more accommodating and understanding of their “simple” needs and immediate demands.

Because I grew up in a different culture, my views of what constituted proper parenting and those of my American counterparts often clashed. After all, I was not really American, I was naturalized. My children hated me and felt as if they were the victims of my Old World antiquated ways of mothering. I was experimenting and destroying their future. What was I thinking? Why would I not let them do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and with whomever they wanted?

For starters, why was it necessary for kids to spend the night in a total stranger’s home whose parents I did not know, whose house I could not inspect, and whose bad habits I might not approve of to be displayed in front of my children, and whose lack of parenting I might find shocking. What was wrong with our home and their own beds? After all, they did have summer camps for sleepovers in the middle of nature, surrounded by lots of fun critters.

Why was it necessary for parents to spend inordinate amounts of money on slutty clothes for their children when a simple, no, you are not going to dress like that, would have sufficed? Who was the parent? Did they need the latest trinkets, toys, electronics, stereos, DVDs, Cabbage Patch dolls, and other useless devices that stifled creativity?

What was wrong with kids meeting in the back yard, close to nature and the sandbox, using their creativity and boundless energy to play? My daughters never came inside before sundown. Nowadays kids have to have play dates. What is that all about? Do you match the kids based on your friendship preferences, moral values, wealth, and social status?

I never understood the total disregard for morality, propriety, and for the welfare of other parents’ children, coming to their friends’ homes to “hang out” where alcohol, drugs, and tobacco consumption were encouraged and provided, with the expectation that children having sex was normal - “it is better to have sex in our home, supervised, instead in some seedy place.” What is wrong with saying no, you are not doing that in my house?

American clothing style has degenerated from elegant, proper, and detailed, to the skimpy, improper, and right down scandalous. As a very elegantly dressed professor who made her own clothes once said, there has to be a middle way between being “half naked in public and the burka.”

Boys cannot concentrate in school with girls dressed in mini-skirts, showing their derriere, and dressed in tight tops with their breasts hanging out. Worse yet, certain administrators and teachers approved of such a dress code and did not send the offenders home to change. On the contrary, some administrators sent students home who wore patriotic t-shirts or displays of religious affiliation such as a cross or Bible verses, for fear that it might make other students uncomfortable.

When I go out to a restaurant to eat with my family, I expect a relaxing atmosphere, conversation, and good food. I am not there to listen to past middle age men with trophy wife number two teaching their bratty kids their ABCs in public and how to properly color within the lines, disrupting the entire restaurant atmosphere. Also, I am not there to look at skimpily clad women’s body parts with rolls of baby fat overflowing their several sizes too small garments.

Nobody should have to witness the obscene and right down pornographic dress and behavior of our youth imitating Hollywood stars who have no moral compass. Hanna Montana was a role model for young girls for a long time and parents loved her. But Miley’s pathetic performance, simulating sex on stage, surrounded by teddy bears, degrades and dehumanizes women, debasing innocence and preparing young people to accept more twisted and perverse behavior to come. Nothing seems to shock us anymore.

“Miley’s performance may have been raunchy, but no one can deny that she seemed to be enjoying flaunting her sexual power and prowess. She would be no man’s sexual victim. She modeled for our girls that even a sweet Hannah Montana could grow into a sexually confident young woman who was having a very good time with her sexuality.” (Huffington Post, Why Miley Cyrus Is Actually a Good Role Model for Girls, August 29, 2013)

Modesty, honesty, innocence, and propriety have been lost long time ago, replaced by the race to the top of smut and titillation. This is what liberalism and feminism-gone-wild have done to young girls and young women, who confuse dancing around half-naked with power, sexuality, and achievement.

Parents must have been mortified. They control the purse strings, the education of their children, and the TV remote, not Hollywood or academia. Yet the degradation of our culture and of our youth continues in the name of tolerance. Liberalism has promoted the idea of being non-judgmental because they don’t want people to think for themselves, they want to groom and prepare the next generation of faithful and blind liberal followers.

 

 

 

 

 

Our Children, Global Citizens, and the Collective

“Our Children Belong to the Collective” is a phrase that brings back bad memories and nightmares for survivors of communism. It is alarming when an MSNBC host says that your kid belongs to the collective. I’ve seen and experienced Hillary’s global village of “collective” children and did not like it. I do not like Agenda 21’s “collectivism,” global citizens, or Hillary’s secular village raising our children – it is a frightening prospect.

Former communist dictator Ceausescu and his wife brainwashed children through slogans in and out of school to believe that their parents were the President and his wife. Disparaging biological parents, community organizers and teachers encouraged the worship of the communist party and its absolute tyrannical leader as the only source of parental advice and guidance.

They were told to snitch on their parents; they were asked repeatedly how much money their parents had, what furniture, cars, hunting rifles, jewelry, paintings, cash under the mattress, conversations with each other, and who visited their homes.

Children, innocent and sincere, told the truth, without realizing that their honest answers would put away their parents for good, not understanding why their parents disappeared overnight, and heartbroken when sent to the many state orphanages where they would never see their parents again and the aggressive re-education into the communist utopia began.

At some point during his rule, the dictator forbade any form of contraception and abortion was severely punished. The population was dwindling because people could not afford to feed and support many children. The population was committing demographic suicide for financial and economic reasons. Food was hard to come by, living space was very cramped, and nobody had many possessions left.

An explosion of babies whose parents were too poor to support ensued. The dictator was happy to receive them in his many orphanages specially designed to educate the next cadre of communist apparatchiks and to train his personal army.

Ironically, one such baby, who was conceived from a rape and his mom gave him up for adoption to the communist training school, eventually became part of the firing squad that shot the dictator and his wife on December 25, 1989. He testified that no soldier knew who had the real bullets and who had the duds. He was convinced that divine retribution and karma coincided.

Would parents willingly give up their children to be raised by the state in this country? Perhaps some who are frustrated with unruly kids they do not know how to handle anymore or never knew how to raise properly because they were immature themselves and unprepared for the difficult job of parenting. The promise that the state will educate children who are out of control might be tempting to some.

Parents are already reprimanded by some states if they spank or punish their children by taking away privileges. Social services intervene and remove the children from such homes and put them in foster care. The state becomes de facto parents.

States give minor children birth control, the morning after pill, and Planned Parenthood counseling without the knowledge and consent of the parents. In such cases, parental rights are bypassed - they are made irrelevant by the state.

Parents are not allowed in classrooms to see what lessons and revisionist history their children are taught. In Texas, parents are not permitted to view the CSCOPE socialist-indoctrinating curriculum. Common Core is attempting to nationalize and control the education of our children.

At the university level the socialist “collectivist” mentality prevails. Columbia just hired a professor who spent years in jail as a domestic terrorist with the Weather Underground. Is this the role model we want to teach our students? Academia has been indoctrinating young minds for a long time with the tacit consent of parents – they are the payers of tuition and are not asking questions.

Everybody was outraged when the coach at Rutgers was seen on tape physically and verbally attacking his student athletes. Where is the moral outrage when conservative students are verbally abused and tormented by their liberal college professors?

The all-powerful teacher derides students’ views and opinions that are different from his/hers, threatens to fail them, or gives them bad grades. The students are often harassed the entire semester – the professor picks on them and makes insensitive and insulting remarks to intimidate them into submission. Some drop the class but many have no choice but to stay.

Benji Backer, a fifteen year old from Appleton, Wisconsin, was so bullied by teachers for his conservative political views that he had to switch schools. He was so tired of being told that he was a racist because his views conflicted with his teachers’ that he fought back the intolerant bullies from the left by going public with his plight. (Red State and Fox News)

Children do not belong to the state, they belong to a family, to their parents, and it is important to stress parental rights before it is too late. The “collective” will make pliant drones out of young minds that no longer can or are allowed to think for themselves as individuals with free will.