I realize that I haven’t written a blog in months. It was this whole quit my job, start my own business thing that got in the way. I still think of things that I want to say and I often look for the purple ground on issues when I am watching or reading the news. But I guess it took something extra ridiculous to motivate me to finally get back to the blog.

Here’s the cliff notes version of the story with two short videos that you should watch:

Arizona passed a law that basically said “Pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people. … A school district or charter school in this state shall not include in its program of instruction any courses or classes that include any of the following:
1. Promote the overthrow of the United States government.
2. Promote resentment toward a race or class of people.
3. Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.
4. Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”

Sounds like common sense to me.  The law also says that it is not to be applied against portions of curriculum that contain individual lessons about particular groups and historical events such as the holocaust.

Here is where things get kooky. Turns out that the Tucson School District does have a course that may violate this new law: Mexican-American Studies, formerly known as “La
Raza (the race) Studies. This course teaches that the United States stole the southwest from Mexico, that the Pilgrims brought plagues to intentionally wipe out indigenous peoples, and that Thanksgiving should be changed to a day of atonement for the evil that the U.S. perpetrated on the Mexican people.

First of all, I think the more we hyphenate our citizens, the more we replace the concept of
a melting pot with separate pots of hyphenated sub groups. In fact, a dictum on the Seal of the United States and most of our currency says “E pluribus unum” or “out of many, one”. With courses like the one in Tucson, we may have to change it to “out of many, many”

We are a land of immigrants, and that fact has made us strong as a country. Matter of fact, we are such a new country compared to the rest of the world that, Native Americans aside, we could all hyphenate our names back to some other country of origin by going back only a few short generations. What unites us as a nation is the idea that we are all Americans, with allegiance to and pride in this country, even as we honor and respect the many cultures and countries that our families came from.

If the Mexican-American studies course in Tucson were just about Mexican-American heritage, history and culture, I could at least understand the positive intentions of the
curriculum planners. I took a class in Latin American Culture in college and it was a wonderfully enlightening course.

But what we have here is something insidious and that is the reason that I thought it deserved a blog. All Americans, left, right and hyphenated, should be outraged that our public school tax dollars are being used to teach disdain for the United States and the overthrow of our government. “Sowing of seeds of hate” has nothing to do with ethnic studies; it is an attempt by socialist radicals to use our youth as pawns in their war against capitalism and the existing power structures.

Think I am exaggerating?

A concerned parent attended the school board meeting in Tucson to read jaw-dropping
excerpts from the course’s textbooks, including “An Epic Poem,” which states:

I shed tears of sorrow, I sow seeds of hate
The force of tyranny of men who rule by farce and hypocrisy,
In a country that has wiped out all my history, stifled all my pride….
My land is lost and stolen, My culture has been raped
Poverty and city-living under the colonial system of the Anglo has frustrated our people’s culture
One note, especially to those young chicanos, hard drugs and the drug culture is the invention of the gringo because he has no culture.
We have to destroy capitalism…The Declaration of Independence states that we the people have the right to revolution, the right to overthrow a government that has committed abuses and seeks complete control over the people. This is in order to clean out the corrupted, rotten officials that developed out of any type of capitalistic systems.

Another part of the book reads,

Today I have a message….to the children, the students, the workers, the masses, and to the bloodsuckers, the parasites, the vampires who are the capitalists of the world: The schools are tools of the power structure that blind and sentence our youth to a life of confusion, and hypocrisy, one that preaches assimilation and practices institutional racism.”

You can watch the rest of the outrageous excerpts below. Remember, these books are
being used in five different classes with kids as young as 3^rd grade.

Here is a link to the curriculum: http://www.tu4sd.com/p/faqs-ethnic-studies_16.html

And to the excerpts read aloud at the meeting:

Matter of fact, at the end of the reading, the concerned parent lists out times where
the book uses foul language, both in Spanish and in English. A school board member asks the parent to please not read the bad words in the public meeting because there are young people in the audience. The irony is not lost on the crowd and someone shouts out “but that’s what they are teaching in the classrooms!”

When truth came to light about the outrageous content of this course, the Tucson
school board held a meeting to vote on whether to make the course an elective
instead of a social studies course that retires general education requirements. The good little soldiers of the Mexican-American Studies program swarmed the meeting chanting “fight back” and chaining themselves to desks in the meeting room. The meeting had to be rescheduled. But things only got worse at the second meeting, when the riot police had to be called in to deal with the protesting youth.

The following video does a great overview of what happened. And you will notice that many of the concerned officials are in fact liberal Democrats. This is not a red / blue America issue. This is a red, white and blue America issue; which flag do our schools teach allegiance to?

So what can we learn from the madness in Tucson? First of all, who the heck was approving these textbooks? Where is the accountability? Second of all, parents have to be
involved in their kids’ schooling. Not everyone can afford private school (biting tongue on vouchers diatribe), and not all parents have the time or resources to home school. Public school is the only option for many parents. But if parents send their kids off to school with no self-appointed oversight on what their children are reading and learning, than the parents have tacitly given consent to whatever indoctrination a rogue instructor or course teaches their children.

I am not a parent yet, so I don’t want to sound preachy on the subject, but do you look through your kids’ textbooks? Do you ask for a class syllabus? Do you discuss what they learned in school today with your children? Do you ever attend school board meetings? Not only will staying involved with your kids’ education make them more likely to succeed in school, parents are the first line of defense against the infiltration of our education system by radicals or wackos teaching your kids values that do not match up to your own.

Note: apparently my videos aren’t working anymore. So I am looking for some others. Here is one that shows the protests at the first school board meeting: