The American education system focuses more on politically correct crusades than intellectually correct arguments.
By Thomas Sowell

A woman with a petition went among the crowds attending a state fair, asking people to sign her petition demanding the banning of dihydroxymonoxide. She said it was in our lakes and streams, and now it was in our sweat and urine and tears.

She collected hundreds of signatures to ban dihydroxymonoxide — a fancy chemical name for water. A couple of comedians were behind this ploy. But there is nothing funny about its implications. It is one of the grim and dangerous signs of our times.

This little episode revealed how conditioned we have become, responding like Pavlov’s dog when we hear a certain sound — in this case, the sound of some politically correct crusade.
People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities. In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators.

Educational institutions created to pass on to the next generation the knowledge, experience, and culture of the generations that went before them have instead been turned into indoctrination centers to promote whatever notions, fashions, or ideologies happen to be in vogue among today’s intelligentsia.

Many conservatives have protested against the specific things with which students are being indoctrinated. But that is not where the most lasting harm is done. Many, if not most, of the leading conservatives of our times were on the left in their youth. These have included Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and the whole neoconservative movement.

The experiences of life can help people outgrow whatever they were indoctrinated with. What may persist, however, is the lazy habit of hearing one side of an issue and being galvanized into action without hearing the other side — and, more fundamentally, not having developed any mental skills that would enable you to systematically test one set of beliefs against another.

It was once the proud declaration of many educators that “We are here to teach you how to think, not what to think.” But far too many of our teachers and professors today are teaching their students what to think — about everything from global warming to the new trinity of “race, class, and gender.”
Even if all the conclusions with which they indoctrinate their students were 100 percent correct, that would still not be equipping students with the mental skills to weigh opposing views for themselves, in order to be prepared for new and unforeseeable issues that will arise over their lifetimes, after they leave the schools and colleges.

Many of today’s “educators” not only supply students with conclusions, but promote the idea that students should spring into action because of these prepackaged conclusions — in other words, vent their feelings and go galloping off on crusades, with neither a knowledge of what is said by those on the other side nor the intellectual discipline to know how to analyze opposing arguments.

When we see children in elementary schools out carrying signs in demonstrations, we are seeing the kind of mindless groupthink that causes adults to sign petitions they don’t understand or, worse yet, follow leaders they don’t understand, whether to the White House, the Kremlin, or Jonestown.

A philosopher once said that the most important knowledge is knowledge of one’s own ignorance. That is the knowledge that too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach our young people.

It takes a certain amount of knowledge just to understand the extent of one’s own ignorance. But our “educators” have given assignments to children who are not yet a decade old to write letters to members of Congress, or to Presidents, spouting off on issues ranging from nuclear weapons to medical care.

Will Rogers once said that it was not ignorance that was so bad but “all the things we know that ain’t so.” But our classroom indoctrinators are getting students to think that they know after hearing only one side of an issue. It is artificial stupidity.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — The Kansas City school board voted Wednesday night to close nearly half the district’s schools in a desperate bid to stay afloat.

The board’s 5-4 decision came after parents and community leaders made final pleas for the district not to shut down 29 out of 61 schools as it seeks to erase a projected $50 million budget shortfall.

“The urban core has suffered white flight post-the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. the Board of Education, blockbusting by the real estate industry, redlining by banks and other financial institutions, retail and grocery store abandonment,” Kansas City Councilwoman Sharon Sanders Brooks said to applause from a standing-room-only crowd of more than 200 people.

“And now the public education system is aiding and abetting in the economic demise of our school district,” she said. “It is shameful and sinful.”

Under the approved plan, buildings would be shuttered by the end of the school year. Teachers at six other low-performing schools would be required to reapply for their jobs, and the district would sell its downtown central office. It also would cut about 700 of the district’s 3,000 jobs – including 285 teachers.

Laura Loyacono, 45, the parent of a 13-year-old girl and 16-year-old boy, served on a committee that helped draft the closure proposal.

“It’s not an easy thing,” Loyacono said. “We knew going into that we would have a significant number of schools because of the budget issues and because the resources have been so diluted and so spread out that I think some of the program quality has really suffered. Some of the really good programs we have really suffered.”

Despite the need, she said nobody likes to see schools closed.

“It’s a tough day,” Loyacono said.

Superintendent John Covington has spent the past month making the case to sometimes angry groups of parents and students that the closures are necessary.

Covington has stressed that the district’s buildings are only half-full as its population has plummeted amid political squabbling and chronically abysmal test scores. The district’s enrollment of fewer than 18,000 students is about half of what the schools had a decade ago and just a quarter of its peak in the late 1960s.

Many students have left for publicly funded charter schools, private and parochial schools and the suburbs.

Fewer students means less money from the state. For the past few years, the district has been plowing through the large reserves it built up when money from a $2 billion court-ordered desegregation plan was flooding its coffers.

School administrators have said that without radical cuts, the district could be in the red by 2011.

Further stressing the budget, the district will lose $23.5 million in the upcoming academic year that it had received from the state for educating students who attended seven schools that have switched to a better-performing neighboring district.

By Howard Blume

The federal government has singled out the Los Angeles Unified School District for its first major investigation under a reinvigorated Office for Civil Rights, officials said Tuesday.

The focus of the probe, by an arm of the U.S. Department of Education, will be whether the nation’s second-largest district provides adequate services to students learning English.

Officials turned their attention to L.A. Unified because so many English learners fare poorly and because they make up about a third of district enrollment, more than 220,000 students.

“This is about helping kids receive a good education, the education they deserve,” said Russlynn Ali, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights. She plans to announce the inquiry at a news conference Wednesday.

L.A. school officials said they welcomed the federal examination.

The probe would provide an outside evaluation to help the district identify and expand successful programs, said Supt. Ramon C. Cortines. “And if there are egregious areas of misconduct by the district, I will move on it immediately.”

Federal analysts will review how English learners are identified and when they are judged fluent enough to handle regular course work. They’ll examine whether English learners have qualified, appropriately trained teachers. And they’ll look at how teachers make math and science understandable for students with limited English.

The ultimate goal of federal officials is to exert pressure on L.A. Unified and other school districts to close the achievement gap that separates white, Asian and higher-income students from low-income, black and Latino students.

Federal authorities aren’t accusing L.A. Unified of intentional discrimination, but the civil rights office seeks to uncover policies and practices that result in a “disparate outcome.” Enforcement options include withholding federal money; more than 23% of the district’s $7.16 billion operating budget comes from the federal government.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan launched the ramped-up enforcement effort Monday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where law enforcement officers beat and drove back 600 civil rights marchers on March 7, 1965. Without naming school systems, officials said 38 faced compliance reviews; on Tuesday it became clear that L.A. Unified was among them.

Some observers hailed a resurgent civil rights office they said had languished under the George W. Bush administration.

“This is a big deal after eight years of lackluster enforcement,” said Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the locally based Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund.

Less impressed was Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute, based in Washington, D.C.: “School districts are going to see this announcement and freak out, take shortcuts and just push minority kids into Advanced Placement whether they are ready for them or not,” he wrote on his blog.

In L.A., second grade is the apparent high-water mark for English learners. At that level, 33% test as proficient in English. By eighth grade, proficiency levels decline to 2%, although that includes recent immigrants and excludes students who have moved into the “fluent” category. But even among newly fluent students, only 35% test as academically proficient in English in the 11th grade.

Language problems ultimately contribute to high dropout rates as well as the inability of many graduates to complete college and compete for jobs, researchers say.

The federal action comes two years after L.A. Unified convened what it billed as a historic summit on educating English learners.

“There was a litany of recommendations,” said school board member Yolie Flores. “Then nothing happened.”

She called the federal action “way overdue,” adding, “unless we get external pressure or a mandate or a lawsuit, we are derelict in what we need to be doing for some students.”

An internal district report cited numerous accomplishments, including the recent training of 15,000 teachers in English-language development strategies.

In other districts, the division also will look at equal access to college-prep classes, equal opportunity for African American students, sexual harassment, violence and services to the disabled.

Daily Mail

The original manuscript of Albert Einstein’s groundbreaking theory of relativity has gone on display in its entirety for the first time.

Einstein’s 46-page handwritten explanation of his general theory of relativity is being shown at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem as part of its 50th anniversary celebration.

In the manuscript, which helps explain everything from black holes to the Big Bang and contains the famous equation of E=MC², Einstein demonstrates an expanding universe and shows how gravity can bend space and time.

Israeli students inspect Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity on display in its entirety for the first time

The academy’s president Menahem Yaari said: ‘We wanted something unique that would have global significance, and fortunately we could have access to a manuscript that has never been seen in its entirety before.’

First published in 1916, the general theory of relativity remains a pivotal breakthrough in modern physics.

This is the first time the original manuscript has gone on display in its entirety for the first time

The manuscript contains Einstein’s explanations of his theory, including equations such as the E=MC²

Hanoch Gutfreund, former president of the Hebrew University and chair of its academic committee for the Albert Einstein Archives said: ‘It changed our understanding of space, time, gravitation, and really the entire universe.

‘I refer to it as the Magna Carta of physics. It’s the most important manuscript in the entire archives.’

Despite its central place in the canon of Einstein’s work, the original manuscript has never attracted as much attention as the man himself.

According to Mr Gutfreund, museums around the world have been content to display only a few pages of the manuscript at a time, as part of larger features on the personal and professional accomplishments of perhaps the modern era’s most influential scientist.

That is partly because the contents of the general theory, especially in the original German, remain too obscure for non-scientists.

It took Einstein eight years after publishing his theory of special relativity to expand that into his theory of general relativity, in which he showed that gravity can affect space and time, a key to understanding basic forces of physics and natural phenomena, including the origin of the universe.

But exhibit organisers say the significance of Einstein’s pages of careful writing and diagrams will not be lost on casual viewers.

They say the display will present the manuscript in the context of the theory’s legacy – which includes everything from modern space exploration to commercial satellite and GPS technology.

Mr Gutfreund said: ‘The greatest challenge at the frontier of physics is to make progress on these issues, the ideas that Einstein developed, discarded, and the errors he made.

‘People will be able to appreciate this even if they’re not able to understand the contents.’

Einstein was one of the founders of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

He contributed the manuscript to the university when it was founded in 1925, four years after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics.

His will bequeathed the rest of his papers to the university upon his death in 1955.

The university is lending the manuscript to the academy for the anniversary celebration.

The manuscript will be on display until March 25, overlapping with the 131st anniversary of Einstein’s birth on March 14.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A shooting at an Ohio State University campus maintenance building left one employee dead and two others wounded, the university said Tuesday. A suspect was taken into custody.

The shooting was first reported at 3:30 a.m. Tuesday, university Police Chief Paul Denton said at a news conference. The two wounded workers were taken to Ohio State University Medical Center, where one was in critical condition and the other was in stable condition, he said. The third employee was pronounced dead at the scene.

Heavily armed campus officers searched buildings in the area, including a university power plant, and the person who police believe was responsible for the shooting was taken into custody, Denton said.

Ohio State, the nation’s largest university, said no students were hurt and that classes would be held as scheduled.

“This is a tragic event, and our hearts go out to all of the families,” said Vernon Baisden, a university assistant vice president of public safety.

The maintenance building where the shooting occurred is just east of Ohio Stadium, the massive football stadium where the school’s football team plays.

SOS–California

“God made the Idiot for practice,” Mark Twain observed, “and then He made the School Board.”

In the Poway school district, that famous quip, if posted on a teacher’s wall, might be ordered taken down.

After all, the quotation supposes the existence of a deity with a flair for American design.

By all accounts, Brad Johnson, a 30-year math teacher at Westview High School in Rancho Peñasquitos, is the salt of the classroom. If he feels his AP Calculus students are sagging, he’ll perform a cartwheel to pump them up. What a 57-year-old guy.

About three years ago, Johnson was told to remove two 7-foot banners he had displayed for more than two decades (along with about 200 nature photographs.) Granted, he’ll never be confused with designer Tom Ford, but his students like his folksy style, Johnson told me.

The banners, which the Poway Unified School District suddenly found out of bounds, included the following statements: “In God We Trust”; “One Nation Under God”; “God Bless America”; “God Shed His Grace on Thee”; and “All Men are Created Equal They Are Endowed by Their Creator.”

In its finite wisdom, the district argues these ancestral phrases, framed in isolation from historical “context,” advance one religion over another.

Johnson did as he was ordered, but he was mystified. No student or parent had ever complained. District officials and board members had been in his classroom over the years. No blowback.

In Poway, it should be said, tradition allows teachers discretion in adorning classrooms.

As revealed in court filings, Poway classrooms included a 40-foot string of Tibetan prayer flags, posters of the Dalai Lama, pictures of Buddha, an American flag with 50 peace symbols in place of stars, and lyrics to John Lennon’s “Imagine”: “Imagine there’s no Heaven/It’s easy if you try/No hell below us/Above us only sky … .”

Johnson contacted the Thomas More Law Center, the Michigan-based law firm that defends Christian expressions, including the Mount Soledad cross. A civil-rights lawsuit was filed.

On Feb. 25, U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez issued a blistering summary judgment in favor of Johnson.

Benitez ordered that Johnson’s banners be restored, the district pay Johnson’s legal expenses (up to $250,000) and each of the eight named defendants — board members, the superintendent, an associate superintendent and Johnson’s principal — pay $10 to the math teacher, an exquisite kick in the pants.

A school, Benitez wrote, should sponsor tolerance.

“Fostering diversity, however, does not mean bleaching out historical religious expression or mainstream morality,” the judge wrote. “By squelching only Johnson’s patriotic and religious classroom banners, while permitting other diverse religious and anti-religious classroom displays, the school district does a disservice to the students of Westview High School, and the federal and state constitutions do not permit this one-sided censorship.”

Last week, I sat at a desk in Johnson’s classroom and stared at his banners. To celebrate his victory, he had brought in red, white and blue helium balloons.

I asked him how his students had reacted to the good news. They gave him a round of applause, he said.

For the past three years, an AP government class has argued his case in mock court, creating a high level of campus awareness.

Though he never discusses religion during math class, Johnson told me why he feels such affection for his banners.

“Our national value is that we’re not here by chance,” he said. “When I look at my students, I don’t see them as random things. I see them as somebody God has created, designed, and I have the privilege of having a hand in building them as human beings for the future. That inspires me every day, every day.”

In a district news release, Associate Superintendent Bill Chiment signaled that the beat would go on. The board would vote to appeal Benitez’s ruling:

“School administrators need to have clarity and guidance from the federal court of appeals in this area. It is not just about these particular banners in this particular room, we are concerned with the lawsuits we will get in the future if the district cannot control what goes up on classroom walls.”

Gee whiz, a federal judge, citing precedent, isn’t good enough guidance for Poway?

Tonight, the school board will decide whether to appeal. Another option is strip all extracurricular decorations, closing down that forum for teachers.

By all means, the board should feel free to appeal Benitez’s ruling. With one small caveat.

Every cent of future legal costs should come out of the pockets of the eight defendants.

They’re already $10 in the hole. What’s another few thousand if they can entice yet a higher court to conclude that they truly are divinely perfected idiots.

By Dr. Richard L. Cravatts  

Noam Chomsky, who spoke at Boston University’s Jacob Sleeper Auditorium on March 2nd as part of the noxious Israeli Apartheid Week and a guest of Students for Justice in Palestine, clearly lives in an academic netherworld of political fantasies, conspiracies, and intellectually-imbecilic distortions of history and fact. As a result, MIT’s professor emeritus of linguistics has become a widely-known, eagerly-followed superstar of the Israel-hating, America-hating Left.

Slavish affection and apologetics for the murderous despots of the Soviet Union, Khmer Rouge, and Viet Cong

The explosive power of Chomsky’s animus for the imperialist West―Israel and the U.S. in particular―is only matched by his slavish affection and apologetics for the murderous despots of the Soviet Union, Khmer Rouge, and Viet Cong, whose barbarous excesses were in his mind, of course, predicated by the oppression and exploitation of the tyranny of Western democratic states.

If Chomsky’s vituperation against America has been a defining theme in his intellectual jihad, an obsessive, apoplectic hatred for Israel has more completely dominated his screeds and spurious scholarship. Like other anti-Zionists in the West and in the Arab world, Chomsky does not even recognize the legitimacy of Israel, believing that its very existence was, and is, a moral transgression against an indigenous people, and that the creation of Israel was “wrong and disastrous . . . There is not now and never will be democracy in Israel.” 

Jewish power is a repellant notion for Chomsky, just as the hegemonic might he ascribes to the terror states of Israel and America is the scourge of peace―not, of course, the destabilizing barbarism of Islamism. The existence of Israel not only subjugates the long-suffering Arabs, but is driving the entire globe toward annihilation, Chomsky suggested, using the image of Israel having succumbed into a kind of moral madness. Its very psychosis had become a source of power, and the exercise of that power would bring about global genocide. “Israel’s ‘secret weapon . . ,’” Chomsky wrote, evoking an apocalyptic vision, “is that it may behave in the manner of what have sometimes been called ‘crazy states’ in the international affairs literature . . . eventuating in a final solution from which few will escape.”

Chomsky denounces Israel’s identity as a Jewish state as being essentially racist on its face, and decries the very notion of its Jewishness as necessarily violating the concept of social equity by being exclusionary, elite, and, in David Duke’s words, ‘supremacist.’ While he is happy to, and regularly does, ignore the murder of Jews by Palestinians, Chomsky never hesitates to point to the perfidy of Israel, and its barbarous assault on their Arab neighbors who, in his socialist fantasies, wish for nothing more than to live in peace. He draws the perverse parallel between Israelis and Nazis so frequently in his writings that, to paraphrase the wry Professor Edward Alexander, he would be rendered nearly speechless if he was unable to use the epithet of Nazi against Israel in every sentence he utters.

If imperialism itself can be classified as a type of state-sponsored “terror,” as it regularly is in the morally-incoherent universe where Chomsky and other anti-Western thinkers reside, then it is quite simple to suggest, as Chomsky regularly does, an equivalence between the murderous acts of Hamas and Hezbollah who attempt to address perceived grievances and the legitimate self-defense of democracies whose citizens are under attack by murderous, non-state actors. Once someone has equated the rogue terror of one party with the legitimate acts of self-defense by sovereign nations, it is possible, and indeed inevitable, that he or she will start investing both actors with the same moral, and legal, standing.

Traveled to Beirut to Hezbollah’s headquarters to meet with its Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah

Chomsky’s optimism concerning the political aspirations of Hezbollah is equally as ludicrous. In 2006, when he traveled to Beirut to Hezbollah’s headquarters to meet with its Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Chomsky was naturally impressed with the terrorist’s “reasoned argument and persuasive argument that [arms] should be in the hands of Hezbollah as a deterrent to potential aggression . . . .”  As for Chomsky’s “reasoned” Nasrallah, his lovely opinions concerning Israel and the Jews are widely known, including his view that Jews “are a cancer which is liable to spread again at any moment,” but “if they all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.” And in keeping with Chomsky’s own pathological obsession, Nasrallah has suggested that, since the Zionist regime is nothing but a blot on mankind, “there is no solution to the conflict in this region except with the disappearance of Israel.” That would seemingly but a perfect world for Professor Chomsky, but what would he then write about so fervently and with so much venomous enthusiasm?

SOS

LA JOLLA: UCSD Chancellor Marye Anne Fox and her staff yesterday struck an agreement with members of the campus Black Student Union to significantly widen the university’s efforts to attract and retain minority students. As part of the agreement, the university promised to shift more funds to admissions programs that target minorities and to create a task force to step up the recruitment of underrepresented faculty.

Black student leaders declared the pact a victory in their fight to make the campus more diverse.

The Black Student Union and other organizations demanded many of the changes in light of a recent series of race-related incidents, including the discovery of a noose and a KKK-style hood on the University of California campus.

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The noose and KKK-style hood incidents were actually created by other minority students and not white students, however, the incidents were conveniently and solely blamed on white students.

 Allowing someone into any school based solely on skin color (in this case black) and not on academic merit is wrong; it produces nothing but resentment from those actually qualified and deserving. Extortion (affirmative action) has never produced good results, but it has given those that couldn’t make it on their own merit a certificate of accreditation.

By Brian McVicar –The Grand Rapids Press

IONIA — To the little boy’s mother, it was just a 6-year-old boy playing around.

But when Mason Jammer, a kindergarten student at Jefferson Elementary in Ionia, curled his fist into the shape of a gun Wednesday and pointed it at another student, school officials said it was no laughing matter.

They suspended Mason until Friday, saying the behavior made other students uncomfortable, said Erin Jammer, Mason’s mother.

School officials allege Mason had displayed this kind of behavior for several months, despite numerous warnings.

“I do think it’s too harsh for a six-year-old,” said Jammer, who was previously warned that if Mason continued the practice he would be suspended. “He’s six and he just likes to play.”

Jammer says her son isn’t violent, and there are other, more effective ways of teaching him not to make a gun with his hand.

“Maybe what you could do is take his recess away,” suggested Jammer, adding her son doesn’t have toy guns at home.

“He’s only six and he doesn’t understand any of this.”