This story is not specifically Common Core related, but illustrates the trust a student inherently places in their teachers at school who get them more hours in a day than their parents do. The parent and school will remain anonymous where this took place. If the school system wants to claim it is teaching critical thinking, both sides of an argument must be presented and look at source documents. When only one side, whichever it is, is presented, that’s called indoctrination, especially when the trusted teacher explains to unwitting students that they are presenting facts instead of theories.
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Three years ago my husband and I were helping with the campaigns for Mike Lee and Morgan Philpot. We met a gentleman through those campaigns named Larry. (You may even know him.) I don’t remember his last name. Larry moved here from California and warned us at that time that Utah would soon have the same standards for history and science that California has had for many years. He told us that soon the only science being taught would be political science (from liberal views) and environmental science. We had already started homeschooling our younger children, but hoped we could get our oldest daughter through high school before that happened.
Last year our daughter was in the 11th grade. She is in the concurrent enrollment program so all her classes count as college credit for generals. We found out that her (only) science class she would be taking was environmental science. We were alarmed and asked her why she signed up for that. We asked her if she knew how controversial the class would be. She said that the school did offer biology and chemistry but that those classes were only offered once and at an hour that conflicted with other classes she had to take. However, environmental science was available multiple hours. She didn’t think there would be any problem with what would be taught.
We hoped she was smart enough to see through the propaganda as we have for years joked and laughed at global warming and many other related issues. Throughout the school year my husband went through her text book with her and talked to her teacher. What we ended up with was a wedge in our relationship with our daughter.
Our once very level headed, smart and loving daughter became resentful towards our “closed minded views.” She wouldn’t speak to us for weeks. What had happened is her teacher showed Al Gore’s video on global warming. (Though laughable to us it was very convincing to her.) The teacher also presented the ideas of common wealth and for the greater good among other liberal ideas that had nothing to do with the environment. She told her class that she neither supported or was against any of these ideas, but that everyone needed to have an ‘open mind’ and consider these ideas as possibilities. She also counseled them to not to listen to their parents if they opposed such thinking! That we (the parents) had ‘closed minds’ if we weren’t open to such ideas, and are just old and set in our ways.
It was a very frustrating year to say the least and now we are hoping to make it through one last year in the public school system. Because we try to keep the lines of communication open with all of our kids, we have somewhat mended our relationship with her. She still remains confused and leans towards favoring the ‘greater good’ theory. This year in one of her classes she was taught that most illegal immigrants pay their taxes while less than half of American citizens pay their taxes. We should be grateful to the illegals for keeping our government running! This all happened here at ____ high school.
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Related articles:
Common Core social studies standards are meant to indoctrinate
Teachers can hide behind the Common Core label to indoctrinate
This is what happens when you let others raise your children. Public schools have been taken over by the progressives. Anyone that sends their kids to public school should not be surprised when their kids start treating you as the enemy. Get your kids out of public schools now. Home school or privately funded Christian schools are the only answer. Public education is lost forever. Parents have given up their parental rights and now there is only one answer. If you really want to you will, if not you will find an excuse. You can get a college degree from home too. http://www.homeschoolcollegeusa.com. its free K-College home school program by a mom in Florida (Jennifer Farrell)
I encourage people to come to the Nov. 9th Agency Based Education conference. It will help you see ways to set up a home school co-op, and give you loads of ideas. There’s stuff there for educators as well who are in the public school system.
I suppose I was lucky in a sense, having been involved in the environmental movement back when “conservation” meant “wise use.” So the heavy indoctrination that came later only had a marginal effect. I suppose I was also lucky that on Earth Day I, I heard eminent climatologist Ried Bryson warn of climate change. He predicted that at the rate the earth was cooling at the rate that air traffic was increasing, and more contrails being laid down in the sky, that by the year 2000 that all the contrails would merge and seeing the sun would be a rarity. Also lucky I suppose that I have a good memory. Well I do believe we occasionally saw a round yellow bright orb in the sky back then, but in the meantime, air traffic exploded under deregulation, and not only did the sun shine brightly, but the earth warmed a bit. So Bryson was not only wrong, but spectacularly so. BTW, he switched sides before his death and became a “warmer” apparently without damage to his professional reputation. One lesson that I learned, is do not be alarmed by alarmists. We were told then, “we have to do something, and do it now, before it is too late.” Just as now. Except the remedies should be exactly the opposite of those prescribed 43 years ago.
RE: the daughter. Consider this evidence:
1. East Anglia climate center, and the New Zealand Climate Center, both lost their original data, so peer review is impossible
2. Michael Mann’s hockey stick- After seeing it portrayed in the media on numerous occasions, I read an article by Mann himself. The media does not show that Mann included margins of error around his hockey stick. As it went back many centuries, I could see that his graph did not account for 2 major climate events that were until the 1990’s, not even disputed, That is, the existence of a Mideaval Warming (approx 700-1300 AD) and a Little Ice Age of about 150 yrs, ending around 1850, OR PRECISELY WHEN RELIABLE TEMPERATURE DATA STARTED BEING COLLECTED. It took me about 15 minutes to realize that this was not science, but fraud. This was confirmed when several of the “climategate” emails congratulated Mann on obscuring these “inconvenient truths.” Now add a paper by Steve McCullough who delved more deeply into Mann’s methodology, and we see that 4 different methods were used to plot his graph. COuld he have chosen these with an eye to a predetermined result?
4. See D’Aleo-Smith statistical analysis of NOAA data. SEems that outrageously impossible data were counted, like 600 Degree F temperatures, and weather stations NOT reporting warming were systematically excluded.
5. Satellite infrared readings of the entire earth have not shown significant change.
6. There always were and always will be years, decades, even centuries that are outliers of the general trend in climates. Note the several Ice Ages, interspersed with warmer weather.
7. Without Global Warming, I would be sitting at the edge of an iceburg a mile thick. So I ask, which is better, global warming or global cooling
8. Even the highly political IPCC had to admit that recently there has been no increased warming. THey erroneously conclude that global warming will continue, contra recent data. (Note-climate could go either way, warmer or cooler, what is erroneous is to ignore the data and make conclusions that contradict it.)
9. The Climategate deniers look to oil company funding to “prove” bias of investigations by “deniers.” Given the collectivist mindset of the media, of academia and of many in politics, could there just be a bias in favor of man-made global warming that is just as powerful an incentive as money from energy companies? To ask is to answer, I am afraid. But in any case, the quality of the data and the quality of the analysis of it should stand alone, regardless of funding.
Maybe this letter will help dissuade the young lady from believing the brain washing she is undergoing.
Ken Van Doren
BS, Wildlife Ecology, Honors Graduate, UW Madison
My oldest daughter, who in now out of the schools system, came home when she was in second grade and said that she could call the cops on us if we made her to clean her room. That was a real eye opener.
My boys tried that on me. I handed them the phone and told them to go ahead. I needed a 45 day vacation. At that they got quiet and cleaned up their mess…I then went to that school and informed them that I don’t know what they are supposed to be teaching in their classes but the next time a school district tried to undermine my parental authority, my kids would be home taught.
I taught 2nd grade in 1969. I learned in college that parents didn’t have the training to work with their children in teaching reading and shouldn’t be involved. It was better to just let the teacher do it. This didn’t seem to be the case in Utah and I was surprised to see how involved the parents were expected to be in their children’s education. I stopped teaching after two years to raise a family, but I kept receiving the teacher magazines for a few years after that. There were several articles about the “old fashioned parents with old fashioned ideas.” Teachers were encouraged to help their students realize that they needed to get passed the things their parents taught them. I wish I had kept those magazines. I did for a while but finally threw them out. You can see that teachers have been brainwashed for many years. This isn’t a new thing.
I am so grateful that my husband encouraged me to home school our children. They learned to think for themselves and we became a very close family. I believe they are more prepared for today than most of the children who are being brain washed by the school system. It wasn’t easy and I had to give up some things that I wanted to do, like sewing. But it was well worth it.
I wish you had a blog. I’d be reading it!
I also teach Concurrent Enrollment for the state of Utah, English composition. When I was hired by the university to teach to remote sites, I was given pretty much carte blanch to teach the content. Because I’ve taught for a dozen years, they either didn’t feel they needed to check on me, or they simply don’t have the resources to supervise what I’m doing.
I’m confident I’m teaching writing in the best possible way, but the point is, no one is checking.
A lot of faith and trust is put into college instructors to do the right thing, and schools frequently have no control–and no idea–what kind of education their students are receiving. Concurrent Enrollment is an excellent program, but it’s also a taste of a university education, which frequently can run very liberal.
This video is all you need to know about the prevalence of Marxist inculcation in the classroom, from K-12 to college. Be warned.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDeXhmTz_0M
Trish, I saw the English paper left behind at college that contain the student’s input of the sexually themed poems with the sexually twisted 20th (or 19th) century poets, as the required assignment by the overly liberal instructor. Like it has anything to do with English composition and morally & apolitically constructive learning.
This was at UVU, if you want to know.
Sometimes being able to home school isn’t so simple an answer. I know many families who have children they would love to home school but the kids are in ‘joint custody’ of divorced parents. If both parents are NOT on board with schooling ideas, public school wins hands down in the court room as the schooling of choice. We have to fight these issues, because whether or not our kids are in home school it does effect all of us.
I hope to never see the day that Common Core is forced upon the home schoolers with in home government checks. Rumors are flying around that Obama already has this idea in place. We can’t throw blaming fingers at parents who can’t pull their kids out of public school, we need to do all we can to help each other. :)
Debbie, I assure you, the homeschool community is fighting against the common core, even though our kids are homeschooled.
Did the readers here know that if you click on the photo of the post writer that it links to their blog? Cool!
But here is a chilling admission from an avowed leftist in higher education. (from National Review)
Sometimes you come across a truthful statement by a leftist who admits that he wants to reprogram students, discrediting old, bigoted ideas and replacing them with fresh, wonderful, enlightened progressive ones. The late Richard Rorty was one of them. Consider the following from Rorty and His Critics:
The late Richard Rorty, the philosopher and devout atheist, is refreshingly honest. He argued that secular professors like himself need to “arrange things” so that incoming students who enter college “as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists” will “leave college with views more like our own.” The goal of education, said Rorty, is to help these youth “escape the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.” Rorty was bracingly candid in his message to parents: “We are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable.”
Oops, I lied. To see a writer’s blog you need to click on their NAME. . . . Sorry.
What happens when one viewpoint is all a child gets? Indoctrination. The Common Core pod people would say that the public schools liberate the children from the rigid cultural morality of the parents.
However, only parents have the right and responsibility to educate their children. The limited power of the federal government is derived from (given to them by) the PEOPLE, not the other way around, and this power can be withdrawn at any time.
So it is in education: whatever limited part, or subjects taught, the people have allowed the public schools to do, parents have the right and responsibility to oversee and approve or disapprove, and take corrective action as needed. Those of us who have relegated the education of our children to the public schools, have left our children in the hands of a teaching profession indoctrinated at the liberal universities and driven by the teachers unions; the unions, in turn, are driven by Marxist dogma; and the teachers and the unions are also driven by the feds (i.e. dollars) who are also driven by the liberal universities and by Marxist dogma. What did you think you were going to get from public education? Now more than ever.
Historians have many theories for the fall of great civilizations. But I think that a major factor in the breakdown of civilization is the failure to pass culture on from one generation to the next–father to son, mother to daughter. Anything that disrupts the flow of culture (values, morals, beliefs, faith, teaching by example, etc.) can lead to civilization downfall. It seems to me that where the family is the basic unit of civilization, the thing that holds us together is our culture. Who’s culture will your children and grandchildren be raised in?