Thursday, August 16, 2012

Education is the Foundation of the Future


Have you ever asked yourself, "How can Progressives like President Obama hate America? How can anyone who was raised in the most free and prosperous society in the History of the world believe America is an imperialistic power and the source of evil?"
If we can’t understand our adversary we may defeat them, but we will never know what it is that motivated them. This lack of understanding leaves us open to assault by the same forces in the future. If we wish not only to defeat Barack Obama and the forces of Progressivism in the November elections but also to set America on the path to restoration we must understand the root cause of the Progressive delusion and modern Liberalism which Michael Savage has correctly labeled a mental illness, and I consider a Socially Transmitted Disease.

If you want to understand something it is necessary to learn where it came from and how it came to be. Even if President Obama was educated partially in his adopted country of Indonesia he is a prime example of the assembly-line progressive education that has become the norm in America today: bash America at every chance and cram the idea of a living constitution and the necessity for government intervention in every aspect of daily life.

We’ve all heard horror stories of the anti-American bilge being pumped into our youth in today’s schools, so the following personal experiences shouldn’t shock anyone too much.
As an educator I participated in a program that combined college and high school classes so that students could earn credit towards their high school diploma and at the same time work on an Associate Degree. I was happy to work in this program, and I helped many hard working students earn their Associates at the same time they earned their high school diploma giving them a decided advantage when they went on for their Bachelor degree.

During the course of my years in the trenches of blended education I was in control of the college side of the class; however, I had no authority to stop the blatant dissemination of Progressive propaganda that made up the totality of some teachers’ curriculum. While in the classroom I strive to present material in such a way as to lead students in the direction of critical thinking. I would present both sides and urge students to evaluate and come to their own conclusions. Many times after a semester of teaching Political Science students would come up and ask, "Now that the class is over tell us, which are you a conservative or a liberal?"

Many of my high school teacher colleagues were not so subtle. Here are two examples that were more the rule than the exception in many classes:
1. One Political Science class had the following assignment; watch Fahrenheit 9/11by Michael Moore and then write an essay on how many ways President Bush lied to trick America into an unjust war.
2. In a History class the students were assigned to read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and then write an essay on the dehumanizing effects of capitalism.

The list of such blatant and crude attempts to mold our children into good little Progressives that I witnessed would fill a book on how not to teach, but this is nothing new. I am sixty three years old and though not as out-in-the-open or in-your-face I was subjected to the same type of illiberal liberalism when I was a youngster in school.
In grade school I did encounter one History teacher who had been in the profession since before my father was born. She still thought it a good thing to teach American History as an objective subject instead of a vehicle for her own agenda. She inspired students to look at the evidence and think. She however was the exception. From Math to English, from Geography to History teachers were constantly extolling the benefits of government social programs and depicting America as a world-class bully marching around imposing its will on poor little nations that couldn’t protect themselves.
In high school I was suspended for accusing a Social Studies teacher of being a communist. Years later he admitted that he in fact had been a communist since the forties. Another teacher rejected any History paper that he felt was too patriotic which he dismissed as jingoism. A teacher of Russian spent more time in class extolling the virtues of the USSR than teaching the language. When I complained about this forty five minute daily propaganda session I was again suspended. All of this took place back in the 1960s. This isn’t a new problem.
The Progressives realized long ago that if they could take over the nation’s education system they could raise up generations of Americans with no conception of the uniqueness of America as the world’s bastion of freedom and liberty. Today we see the fruit of this campaign: legions of voters ready to throw away our heritage for a government check. The descendants of the Founders are willing to surrender their freedom to strive for the best in exchange for the security of just enough to get by.
So as the wisest woman I have ever known, my wife asks me, "What can we do now?"
Back in the early 90s we decided that what we needed to do was go to school so that we could become teachers. Neither of us wants to impose our ideas on others, but we do want to present the materials in an objective manner and help our students acquire the critical thinking skills necessary to be informed citizens. Whenever a student asks me to figure out what their grade is during a semester I tell them, "If you give a man a fish he will eat for a day.  If you teach him to fish he can eat forever." I then proceed to teach them how to find an average and how to translate that into a letter grade.
What can we do now? We can’t all become teachers but we can all become involved in our local school boards. We can all do our due diligence and find out what is being taught at our local schools, and we can follow the procedures to correct what is wrong and implement what is right. One thing is for sure if we do not regain control of our schools we will lose the future.

Our leaders are leading us down the primrose path to collectivism. Our education establishment is conditioning America to accept it. Step-by-step, inch-by-inch we have strayed from a federal republic operating on democratic principles with liberty and justice for all to a centralized bureaucracy dispensing cradle-to-grave loot taken from producers and redistributed to non-producers. We may have gotten here step-by-step but we are not too many steps away from one step too many. Barack Obama has stated that his goal is to fundamentally transform America. From stimulus slush finds, shadow governments, and imperial edicts he is systematically remaking us into a centralized state based on social democracy and wealth redistribution.

In 1962 the leader of the socialist slave camp we knew as the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev, said "The United States will eventually fly the Communist red flag…The American people will raise it themselves.  We can't expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism."

Education has led the way to this precipice and only education can lead our way back. If we don’t learn from our mistakes and once again begin building up America through education we may learn that Khrushchev was right.

Did we win the Cold War defeating an enemy dedicated to our destruction to end up proving the wisdom of a cartoon character, "We have met the enemy and he is us"?
Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion. He is the Historian of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com © 2012 Robert R. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens




 
 
 
 

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