Democratic School Choice versus Autocratic "Social Justice" Professors

Matt Sanchez has another good post, this one about liberal classmates and professors blaming Hispanic failures in the public schools on--surprise--America's racism, imperialism, and capitalism:

"Not in my Latino Studies course, where everything is someone else’s fault: biased schooling, racial profiling, polarization of the economy, the weakness of labor, the list goes on and we constantly have to regurgitate this gripe before touching on something that barely appears anywhere—the ability of the individual to control his or her own life."

Of course, the real solution to this failure would be to give poorer parents a choice to opt out of the Godless, dumbed-down, moral relativist public schools by offering them vouchers to send their kids to parochial or private schools.

Two great articles. Don't miss these:

Sol Stern, education scholar at the Manhattan Institute has a book about the miracles Catholic schools are doing with students the liberal education establishment cannot handle. Nevertheless, "social justice" professors don't want your kids going here. They might actually be successful and prosperous, have an absolute sense of right and wrong, and gain an appreciation for capitalism, freedom, America, and Western Civilization.

Another new pamphlet also by Sol Stern, appearing in Front Page Magazine, about the new recycled fad in education and the biggest threat to our freedom and prosperity: Public school education not for learning facts and our American and Western heritage but rather for learning "social justice." "Social Justice" professors are indoctrinating young teachers, who in turn feel public schools with their captive audience are perfect grounds for bringing forth a new socialist utopia, in which all the crimes of Western Civilization will be rectified by destroying it and replacing it with a socialist utopia filled with diversity of unassimilated peoples from around the world.

Of course, this brave new world cannot come about if parents are allowed to decide what is best for their own children. They might (horrors) send their kids to Catholic schools, which will undo everything "social justice" professors have worked so hard for. For a typical "social justice" professor, the writings of one of the brightest and most celebrated young "Social Justice" professors, Dan Butin, graduate of UVA and professor of Cambridge College, e.g. "Service-Learning," are instructive. Here is Dan Butin's website.

Oh Wonder!
How much diversity and justice is there here!
How beautious social justice professors are!
Oh Brave New World
That has such people in it!

2 + 2 = 5

In a disturbing article in the New York Post, Manhattan Institute's scholar Sol Stern describes how math teachers in New York are being taught to use math classes to indoctrinate students on the evils of capitalism and the United States:

March 20, 2007 -- THERE'S a fifth column in New
York City's public schools - radical teachers who openly undermine Schools Chancellor Joel Klein's curriculum mandates and use their classrooms to indoctrinate students in left-wing, anti-American ideology.

One center for this movement is El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice
in Brooklyn, the city's first "social justice" high school. The school's lead
math teacher, Jonathan Osler, is using El Puente as a base from which to
organize a three-day conference in April on "Math Education and Social Justice."

Who are the experts that will give the lessons? Surprise: "Social Justice" education professors. Just what our country needs post-September 11:

Another of the math conference's "experts" is Cathy Wilkerson, an adjunct professor at the Bank Street College of Education. Her only other credential mentioned in the program is that she was a "member of the Weather Underground of the 60s."

Some credential, indeed. On March 6, 1970, she was in a Manhattan townhouse helping to construct a powerful bomb to be planted at a dance attended by civilians on the Fort Dix, N.J., army base. The bomb went off prematurely, destroying the townhouse and instantly killing three of the bomb makers.

The article goes on to describe who is funding this conference and the neat lessons elementary school teachers are learning in "social justice" seminars to teach a captive audience:

The meeting was chaired by Edwin Mayorga, a fourth-grade teacher at PS 87 on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and NYU education professor Bree Pickower. Mayorga urged his fellow teachers to "be political inside the classroom, just as we are outside the classroom. The issues we are up against as we teach for social justice are the mandates of [Mayor] Bloomberg, Klein and No Child Left Behind."

Pickower reminded the teachers of the group's Katrina curriculum, which teachers could use to convince elementary-school students that the hurricane was not really a natural disaster, but an example of endemic American racism. Mayorga described how he had piloted the Katrina curriculum with his fourth graders at PS 87 and pronounced it a big success.

Leaving nothing to chance, the Katrina curriculum provides teachers with classroom prompts designed to illustrate the evils of American capitalism and imperialism. For example, one section of the curriculum is titled, "Two Gulf Wars," and suggests
posing the following question to students: "Was the government unable to respond
quickly to the crisis on the Gulf Coast because the money and personnel were all
being used in Iraq?"

Many of the same "experts" pushing this "social justice" or "anti-anti-social justice" (see post below on "Skewed Perspective") are teaching our future teachers how to teach and indoctrinate the future generation of Americans in teacher's colleges. Many states have a "Social Foundations" requirement for all teachers to be certified, hence another captive audience for Marxists to convince that America is the source of all evil in the world.

Given that David Steiner has proven the overwhelming bias in Social Foundations university classes, perhaps it is time for states to start abolishing this licensure requirement.