2009-12-4 Miscellany

Reading List: Let's just get the worst of this out of the way right off the bat. Some of you already know that the "Safe Schools Czar" Kevin Jennings has failed in the past to actually safeguard a student. His founding of GLSEN is also well known. What isn't well known, what many parents don't even want to imagine, let alone confront, is GLSEN's recommended reading list. Gateway Pundit has slogged through the filth so we don't have to (but they provide screen shots if you want to verify their findings). From their two part blog post:

Above all, the books seemed to have less to do with promoting tolerance than with an unabashed attempt to indoctrinate students into a hyper-sexualized worldview.

As if that job wasn't being done very well by the media. Let's make it clear. Every person is valuable and no person should be ill treated. However, every parent must have the right to know what resources are being used to educate their child and have the right to veto its use.




Remedial Education: From the University of Minnesota comes a new twist for their teacher credentialing program which is designed to:

"...ensure that "future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression."
further--
"The U, it says, must "develop clear steps and procedures for working with non-performing students, including a remediation plan." Katherine Kersten via Star-Tribune

I will never understand how this ensures that any child actually learns to read and do math.

Climategate: Science is dying--I thought this essay by Daniel Henninger at the WSJ stood out.

"Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences."

Those of us who believe in an Intelligent Designer have known for a long time that hard science had been co-opted by another type of faith. Ben Stein made a movie about it. The California University system won't allow credits acquired while using ID resources--regardless of the student's grasp of evolution. And now we have Climategate, an instance where 'scientists' purposefully hid the truth. In a better world science would be...well, scientific. It would demand facts based on replicable proofs and would welcome full review. It would not encourage or suffer for a moment another Piltdown man--Noble/Oscar prize winning or not. If all truth is relative...why bother? If you put your faith in science--it has failed you.