Blog — Why Should Schools Be Shocked When
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Players Do Not Stand For National Anthem?
It’s been going on for weeks now — the public being subjected to ball players, and now cheerleaders, who refuse to stand for the National Anthem. This all began with San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Time magazine recently showed their “disapproval” of his actions by placing him on the front cover! Role models, such as Kaepernick, should realize their message of disrespect is being witnessed by impressionable kids who want the kind of attention he is getting. Kaepernick, who says he’s protesting for a variety of reasons from police brutality to the mistreatment of vets, makes an average annual salary of $19,000,000. The twenty-eight year old quarterback seems unable to appreciate the country that has given him so much!
Kaepernick’s protest was joined by players on other NFL teams and other sports teams. It has now filtered down to high school sports players and even cheerleaders as happened at Cornell High School in Coraopolis. Unfortunately, this time the National Anthem was being performed by a Veterans of Foreign Wars Color Guard. A school board member told a local news station that the cheerleaders had the right to take a knee. The superintendent acknowledged the timing of the cheerleaders’ protest was not appropriate considering the presence of the VFW Color Guard, but he stood by their right to free speech! One of those VFW members was a WWII vet who enlisted at about the age of the cheerleaders. He especially did not appreciate their actions saying, “They don’t know what they are doing, them young kids . . . . We love our flag very much. We fought for it.”
But should school officials be surprised when their students show disrespect for the National Anthem and our flag? Not really . . . all they have to do is check out the history they are teaching these kids!
- Four out of five – 81% — of seniors from the top 55 colleges and universities in the United States received a grade of D or F.
- They could not identify Valley Forge, or words from the Gettysburg Address, or even the basic principles of the U.S. Constitution.”
- Over one-third of the survey’s respondents were unaware that the Constitution provides for the separation of powers within the Federal Government.
In 2010, Paul Kengor wrote, ” my research had affirmed what I long suspected: Many self-professing “liberals/progressives,” especially those railing against the alleged evils and excesses of America and, more so, of America’s anti-communists, were, in fact, hardened communists — albeit closet communists. To cite a few now being carefully reevaluated: Arthur Miller, Harry Hopkins, I.F. Stone, and Howard Zinn.” Recently opened FBI files confirmed that Howard Zinn’s was a Communist Party member!
Liberals and progressives made Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States a bestseller, core reading for classroom pedagogy and, further amplifying the absurdity, the basis for documentaries like the History Channel’s “The People Speak.” The Zinn Education Project is a curriculum meant to expose children from pre-school through high school to American history through the philosophical lens of Zinn.
Zinn says of America, with her representative government and guaranteed freedoms, that, “The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history,” parceling out just enough wealth and comfort to its citizens to keep them from revolting. To Zinn, all of America’s wars are evil. It is not that he supports Hitler, or King George, or slavery, or Mullah Mohammad. It is that he views war as merely another excuse for the rich to expand their wealth while controlling the people with words like valor and justice.
If Zinn is occasionally more sympathetic to one oppressor than another (Mao for the as-many-as forty-million people killed in just three years in The Great Leap Forward, over, say, Columbus, who Zinn blames for the ultimate loss of a similar number of Native Americans over three-centuries) he can be excused his mild hypocrisies. In the end, he would consistently denounce both as proof of his master thesis – That power and wealth corrupt. Thus Zinn holds no allegiance to any man, party, or nation.
In a 1998 interview the late Howard Zinn is asked what he hoped to accomplish with his textbook “A People’s History of the United States.” He replied, “A quiet revolution is a good way of putting it. From the bottom up. Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives. It would be a democratic socialism.”
Here’s another example: Prentice Hall’s The American Experience, which has been aligned to the Common Core.
The opening page of the slim chapter devoted to World War II called “War Shock” features a photograph of a woman inspecting a large stockpile of thousand-pound bomb castings. The notes in the margins of the Teacher’s Edition set the tone:
In this section, nonfiction prose and a single stark poem etch into a reader’s mind the dehumanizing horror of world war. . .
The editors of the textbook script the question teachers are supposed to ask students in light of the photograph as well as provide the answer:
Ask: What dominant impression do you take away from this photograph?
Possible response: Students may say that the piled rows of giant munitions give a strong impression of America’s power of mass production and the bombs’ potential for mass destruction.
Translation: Americans made lots of big bombs that killed lots of people.
There is no reading in this chapter ostensibly devoted to World War II that tells why America entered the war. There is no document on Pearl Harbor or the Rape of Nanking or the atrocities committed against the Jews or the bombing of Britain. The book contains no speech of Winston Churchill or F.D.R. even though the reading of high-caliber “informational texts” is the new priority set by the Common Core. There is not a single account of a battle or of American losses or of the liberation of Europe. The rest of this chapter consists in a poster of a junk rally to gather metals for the making of munitions, a New York Times editorial, and a political cartoon penned by Dr. Seuss (who supported the war). There is not a single document or sentence in the chapter that would make a young reader consider the Axis Powers anything other than “enemies” in quotes. Essentially, all of World War II has been reduced to dropping the bomb and consequently, we are led to believe, America’s inhumanity. In short, the entire presentation of the Second World War is not an exercise in critical thinking; nor will it make students “college and career ready.” This is not teaching. It is programming, pure and simple.
Why do more students in American schools believe socialism and communism is okay. Too many are being taught that in school!
In 2009, the College of Education officials established the “Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group.” It’s charged with helping to devise a new system for training prospective K-12 teachers, because current teachers lack “cultural competence,” a factor officials believe contributes to the poor performance of minority students.
What’s the task force’s main recommendation? That new teachers be immersed in a liberal political agenda that’s highly critical of American social norms, particularly the notion that all people can positively influence their own destiny through hard work and determination.
The task force “recommended that aspiring teachers must repudiate the notion of the ‘American Dream’ and instead “must embrace – and be prepared to teach our state’s kids – the task force’s own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic,” according to writer Katherine Kersten of the Star Tribune.
“The report advocates making race, class and gender politics the ‘overarching framework’ for all teaching courses at the university,” Kersten wrote. “It calls for evaluating future teachers in both coursework and practice teaching, based on their willingness to fall into intellectual lockstep.”
The task force recommends that prospective teachers begin by confessing their own bigotry. They would have to prepare a report “describing their own prejudices and stereotypes, questioning their ‘cultural motives’ for wishing to become teachers, and take a ‘cultural intelligence’ assessment designed to ferret out their latent racism, classism and other ‘isms,’” according to the newspaper.
Is there any wonder why kids, and some young adults, think it’s okay not to stand for the National Anthem? A recent national survey by Reason-Rupe found that 53 percent of 18 to 29 year olds view socialism favorably, compared to only a quarter of Americans over 55. Only 32 percent think favorably of capitalism. Our kids, the future of America, are being taught to hate their own country, their nation’s history, their way of life. This must change!
This cartoon seemed far-fetched in 1948.
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