2 posts tagged “school”
Listening to talk radio a couple of days ago, I heard a guest give an account of a teacher who truly taught his students about Marxism. He gave them two final grades on their hard work. One was the grade they'd actually earned but would not count, the other was the scaled grade for the average of the whole class. He nearly had a riot on his hands. The kids who'd earned great grades were angry at kids who'd done poorly, accusing them of laziness and idiocy. I wish I'd been able to catch the speaker's name, but work was demanding at that point and I couldn't find it online afterward.
Most people don't know that socialism has already been tried in this country, indeed at its earliest beginnings. The first settlement tried the communal lifestyle, where everybody's crops were stored in one common storehouse and the whole community would pull from that storehouse as food was needed. The leaders couldn't get everybody to work their fields because they knew they could count on somebody else's hard work to make it through the harsh winters. It wasn't until they assigned everybody a plot of land and let them keep their crops for themselves that the community began to thrive. Socialized benefits mean socialized effort. Capitalized benefits mean capitalized effort. Which one is evil in your eyes?
Philanthropy works in similar ways. If you want to save the world, do you vote for the programs and politicians who support them to do the work, or do you volunteer through a local outreach group and send money to successful aid organizations? Expecting government to fix all the ills is like voting for a communal storehouse for your potatoes. Donating to a successful privately run program is like putting your potatoes in your own storehouse. If the program is failing, you stop giving to that one and find one that does work. But the state won't let you stop giving them your tax dollars whether the programs they are used to support are successful or not. Legislating gifts is dangerous to the very people you want to help. If you see a need and think, "What can I do? What difference can one person make?" start doing something and find out how much one person can do!
China is a communist country, but decades after the revolution, their leaders recognized the communist regulated industry was a failure and implemented capitalist programs. Capitalism in China is making China an industrial success. Not so the communist social, legislative, and law enforcement programs. Constant revelations about their moral atrocities are leaking out into the international media. All Muslim nations are bottomless pits of moral piety resulting in torturous death sentences and mutilations for millions. A few of them are economically successful based solely on the oil revenues. The king and princes of Arabia are funding the spread of Islam throughout the world with these revenues. So the world is struggling to break the oil addiction and break the funding of this stone age ideology. There is no room for success in the absence of freedom.
During my research for this article, I came across a reference to California Law that prohibits the advocacy of communism in schools. Here is that state law:
51530. No teacher giving instruction in any school, or on any property belonging to any agencies included in the public school system, shall advocate or teach communism with the intent to indoctrinate or to inculcate in the mind of any pupil a preference for communism.
In prohibiting the advocacy or teaching of communism with the intent of indoctrinating or inculcating a preference in the mind of any pupil for such doctrine, the Legislature does not intend to prevent the teaching of the facts about communism. Rather, the Legislature intends to prevent the advocacy of, or inculcation and indoctrination into, communism as is hereinafter defined, for the purpose of undermining patriotism for, and the belief in, the government of the United States and of this state.
For the purposes of this section, communism is a political theory that the presently existing form of government of the United States or of this state should be changed, by force, violence, or other unconstitutional means, to a totalitarian dictatorship which is based on the principles of communism as expounded by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.
Any teacher sporting a poster of Che Guevara, Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Kim Jong Il, Putin, Castro, or any other socialist advocate, and found promoting communism should be fired and charged with a crime against children. Any teacher discovered participating in communist or registered with communist organizations should be fired.
When this ideology comes home to roost, when its applied to your work, your rewards, it isn't nearly as attractive as when its applied to others, to the 'rich and the powerful.' Smart people either learn how to use communism to their benefit or they look for ways to escape it. Capitalism isn't perfect but its, at least motivating. That motivation is what this great country was built on. Do you think the kids who had worked hard would have worked just as hard the next year knowing that their grades would only be balanced against the lazy and dull? It isn't that the quick and sharp kids are evil, it is that the whole class benefits by the success of the achievers. In the same way, it isn't that rich and powerful people are necessarily evil, it is that their success keeps the rest of us employed and civil. Their is no social Robin Hood in social programs. For there to be a Robin Hood, there has to be criminal injustice in the authority charged with collecting taxes. Now we'd all agree there have been transgressions in American tax collecting and spending, but 'We The People' do still have the power to vote them out or otherwise hold them accountable without legislating taxes to even out the distribution. It isn't just about being fair, it is about keeping the motivation the founding fathers built in to the bedrock of our society.
This was sent to me in the form of a newsletter from the Middle East Forum
by Cinnamon Stillwell
FrontPageMagazine.com
February 5, 2008
http://www.meforum.org/article/1848
Public school children in grades K-12 are being assigned textbooks that misrepresent and, in some cases, glorify Islamic beliefs and history – often at the expense of other religions and cultures. The apologetics and indoctrination common in university Middle East studies programs is being carried into public schools by contentious, ahistorical, and inaccurate textbooks written by those same Middle East studies professors.
History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond, a textbook published by the Teachers' Curriculum Institute, was removed from the Scottsdale, Arizona school district in 2005 for this very reason. The textbook is now causing controversy in California and at the center of the storm is Cal State University-Sacramento sociology professor Ayad Al-Qazzaz.
An Iraqi native who specializes in Middle East studies, Al-Qazzaz, is both a contributor to History Alive and one of the gatekeepers who approved it for use in California's public middle schools. And, according to an American Textbook Council review cited by World Net Daily (WND):
Al-Qazzaz is a Muslim apologist, a frequent speaker in Northern California school districts promoting Islam and Arab causes…[He] also co-wrote AWAIR's 'Arab World Notebook.' AWAIR stands for Arab World and Islamic Resources, an opaque, proselytizing 'non-profit organization' that conducts teacher workshops and sells supplementary materials to schools.
A parent and former student in one of Al-Qazzaz's Middle East studies courses wrote to WND expressing her own reservations:
That was a big flag for me…after seeing Al-Qazzaz as one of the main contributors I began to put two and two together … about the extra book coming home only in this class and I questioned where this book's money source came from – I still do not know.
Al-Qazzaz's contributions to History Alive on the subject of jihad are flagrantly biased, as he consistently presents jihad as merely a personal struggle rather than a holy war.
Hence, as noted by WND, the text presents jihad as "an effort by Muslims to convince 'others to take up worthy causes, such as funding medical research'" and that "even at its most violent, 'jihad' is simply Muslims fighting 'to protect themselves from those who would do them harm.'"
In a 2003 KXTV, Sacramento, story on "Islamic War Ethics," he elaborated:
Al-Qazzaz says there are two levels of jihad. The greater jihad is every Muslim's quest to live out their faith in their daily lives, to improve themselves and to become a better Muslim. The lesser jihad means to protect one's people and fight against enemies, he says. So the greater jihad prompts devout Muslims to remember their religious guidelines while fighting, which would cause them to treat war prisoners well.
One suspects the victims of beheadings and torture would beg to differ. Moreover, that Islamists (otherwise known as jihadists) worldwide repeatedly cite jihad as a motivating factor belies Al-Qazzaz's contention that war is the "lesser jihad."
In a 2002 interview with Peace Magazine, Al-Qazzaz rejected the association of "jihad" with "fundamentalism" and advocated what's come to be known as the "root causes" approach to combating Islamic terrorism:
You are not going to get rid of suicide bombers by killing them. You have to know the causes. It is like a disease. You can treat the symptoms but if you don't know the causes, the symptoms keep coming up.
Yet, when the interview turned to the study of Islam and its connection to terrorism, Al-Qazzaz skirted the issue by blaming others. After first accusing Islam scholar Bernard Lewis of "becoming progressively anti-Islam and Zionist," he continued:
There are two schools of thought about Islam in the US. One school is headed by Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes, who equate Islam to terrorism. The other school, headed by John Esposito, argues that there are bad apples everywhere. You have terrorists in Islam, terrorists in Judaism, terrorists in Hindu-ism. But the majority of the people, though they may be backward, do not have a terrorist attitude.
Al-Qazzaz's characterization of both Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes is demonstrably false. Neither equates Islam with terrorism, but, rather, seeks to examine the undeniable connection between the two. John Esposito, who heads the Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown, is a leading Wahhabi apologist who consistently seeks to muddle what is in fact an Islam-specific issue.
Considering Al-Qazzaz's troubling viewpoints on these matters, his involvement with History Alive and other Middle East studies textbooks is cause for alarm. Not only do California education officials need to undertake a rigorous and unbiased reexamination of such textbooks, but also the gatekeepers approving their use. Otherwise, it's simply a case of the fox guarding the hen house.
Cinnamon Stillwell is the Northern California Representative for Campus Watch. She can be reached at stillwell@meforum.org.
