Donald Kagan Upholder of Western Civ at Yale

(Editor www.thereportcard.org: The National Association of Scholars study points out that Western Civ courses, once the backbone of American Liberal Arts curricula in higher education are vanishing. The Common Core Standard now adopted in 46 states may deal a coup de grace to Western Civilization courses, American History, and rigorous reading and writing in our Nations K-12 schools. In the attached Wall Street Journal editorial, Yale’s great classicist Donald Kagan fears that America as a Constitutional Republic might be finished. Dr. Kagan says prophetically: . “There is no hope for anything if you don’t have a population that buys into” a strong and free society, he says. “That can only be taught. It doesn’t come in nature.”

Yet, Classical Education is still taught at St. Johns College, Hillsdale and a few places of higher education. The Report Card just completed a three part series on Great Hearts Academies in Phoenix. Great Hearts schools are dedicated to the value of a classic liberal arts education and their results are nothing less than phenomenal. So, the choice is ours: educate our children to appreciate the value of liberty as our heritage, or sink into the abyss of the all-powerful state. Dr. Kagan of Yale makes it quite clear what will befall liberty if we abandon our roots.

‘Democracy May Have Had Its Day’

Donald Kagan, Yale’s great classicist gives his final lecture, fighting as ever for Western civilization

.By MATTHEW KAMINSKI The Wall Street Journal

New Haven, Conn.

Donald Kagan is engaging in one last argument. For his “farewell lecture” here at Yale on Thursday afternoon, the 80-year-old scholar of ancient Greece—whose four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War inspired comparisons to Edward Gibbon’s Roman history—uncorked a biting critique of American higher education.

Universities, he proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are “individualized, unfocused and scattered.” On campus, he said, “I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness.” Rare are “faculty with atypical views,” he charged. “Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values.” He counseled schools to adopt “a common core of studies” in the history, literature and philosophy “of our culture.” By “our” he means Western.

This might once have been called incitement. In 1990, as dean of Yale College, Mr. Kagan argued for the centrality of the study of Western civilization in an “infamous” (his phrase) address to incoming freshmen. A storm followed. He was called a racist—or as the campus daily more politely editorialized, a peddler of “European cultural arrogance.”

Not so now. Mr. Kagan received a long standing ovation from students and alumni in the packed auditorium. Heading into retirement, he has been feted as a beloved and popular teacher and Yale icon. The PC wars of the 1990s feel dated. Maybe, as one undergrad told me after the lecture, “the pendulum has started to swing back” toward traditional values in education.

Mr. Kagan offers another explanation. “You can’t have a fight,” he says one recent day at his office, “because you don’t have two sides. The other side won.”

Zina Saunders

He means across academia, but that is also true in his case. Mr. Kagan resigned the deanship in April 1992, lobbing a parting bomb at the faculty that bucked his administration. His plans to create a special Western Civilization course at Yale—funded with a $20 million gift from philanthropist and Yale alum Lee Bass, who was inspired by the 1990 lecture—blew up three years later amid a political backlash. “I still cry when I think about it,” says Mr. Kagan.

As he looks at his Yale colleagues today, he says, “you can’t find members of the faculty who have different opinions.” I point at him. “Not anymore!” he says and laughs. The allure of “freedom” and “irresponsibility” were too strong to resist, he says.

His sharp tongue and easy sense of humor hearken to the Brooklyn of his youth. Born in 1932 in a Lithuanian shtetl, Mr. Kagan was raised in Brownsville, which was then a working-class Jewish neighborhood. He rooted for the Yankees on Brooklyn Dodgers turf—”everything you need to know about him,” as his son Robert, the neoconservative writer, once said. He was a high school fullback. Mr. Kagan is personally warm, always tough and occasionally smart alecky. Imagine Robert DeNiro as an eminent conservative scholar of ancient Athens. He has no patience for “nonsense” or “wrong ideas.” He’s a guy who’ll tell you what’s what and that’s that. Generations of faculty and students came away bruised from Kagan encounters.

The tussles over course offerings and campus speech of course speak to something larger. Democracy, wrote Mr. Kagan in “Pericles of Athens” (1991), is “one of the rarest, most delicate and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience.” It relies on “free, autonomous and self-reliant” citizens and “extraordinary leadership” to flourish, even survive.

These kinds of citizens aren’t born—they need to be educated. “The essence of liberty, which is at the root of a liberal education, is that meaningful freedom means that you have choices to make,” Mr. Kagan says. “At the university, there must be intellectual variety. If you don’t have [that], it’s not only that you are deprived of knowing some of the things you might know. It’s that you are deprived of testing the things that you do know or do think you know or believe in, so that your knowledge is superficial.”

As dean, Mr. Kagan championed hard sciences, rigorous hiring standards for faculty, and the protection of free speech. Those who see liberal education in crisis return to those ideas. “Crisis suggests it might recover,” Mr. Kagan shoots back. “Maybe it’s had its day. Democracy may have had its day. Concerns about the decline of liberty in our whole polity is what threatens all of the aspects of it, including democracy.”

Taking a grim view of the Periclean era in Athens, Plato and Aristotle believed that democracy inevitably led to tyranny. The Founding Fathers took on their criticism and strove to balance liberty with equality under the law. Mr. Kagan, who grew up a Truman Democrat, says that when he was young the U.S. needed to redress an imbalance by emphasizing equality. The elite universities after the war opened to minorities and women, not to mention Brooklyn College grads like himself—then “it was all about merit,” he says.

The 1960s brought a shift and marked his own political awakening. Teaching at Cornell, Mr. Kagan watched armed black students occupy a university building in 1969. The administration caved to their demands without asking them to give up their rifles and bandoliers. He joined Allan Bloom and other colleagues in protest. In the fall of that year, he moved to Yale. Bloom ended up at the University of Chicago and in 1987 published “The Closing of the American Mind,” his best-selling attack on the shortcomings of higher education.

In the decades since, faculties have gained “extraordinary authority” over universities, Mr. Kagan says. The changes in the universities were mirrored in the society at large. “The tendency in this century and in the previous century at least has been toward equality of result and every other kind of equality that could be claimed without much regard for liberty,” he says. “Right now the menace is certainly to liberty.”

Over lunch at the private Mory’s club last week, we marvel over the first-ever NCAA championship for Yale’s hockey team, the oldest program in the country. “Unbelievable!” says Mr. Kagan with the gleam of a sports obsessive. In 1987, he stepped in for a year to direct Yale’s athletic department—probably the only classics professor ever to hold the post anywhere. His first initiative was to call to disband the NCAA or take Yale out of it. “I wish I had,” he says. “It’s so disgusting, it’s so hypocritical, it’s so wicked. The NCAA is just a trade organization meant to increase profits.”

Whether athletics, democracy or war are the topics of discussion, Mr. Kagan can offer examples from the ancients. His lifelong passion is Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War—the epic clash between those former allies, militaristic Sparta and democratic Athens, that closed out the fifth century B.C.

As Thucydides wrote, people go to war out of “honor, fear and interest.” War, he also said, “is a violent teacher.” Another enduring lesson from him, says Mr. Kagan, is “that you can expect people, whatever they may be, to seek to maximize their power”—then a slight pause—”unless they’re Europeans and have checked their brains at the door, so mortified are they, understandably, by what happened to them in the 20th century. They can’t be taken seriously.”

These days the burden of seriousness among free states falls on America, a fickle and unusual power. The Romans had no qualms about quashing their enemies, big or small. While the U.S. won two global conflicts and imposed and protected the current global order, the recent record shows failed or inconclusive engagements in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Some would argue that free societies are too soft to fight brutal wars too long. Mr. Kagan offers culture and political leadership as an explanation. “We’re a certain kind of culture which makes it hard for us to behave rationally when the rational thing is to be tough,” he says. “We can do it when we’re scared to death and there seem to be no alternatives. When it’s time to nail down something, we very often sneak away.”

The protection and distance offered by two oceans gives America the idea—or delusion—of being able to stay out of the world’s problems. Mr. Kagan also wonders about possible “geocultural” shifts at play. A hundred years ago, most people worked the land for themselves. Today they work for a paycheck, usually in an office. “Fundamentally we are dependent on people who pay our salaries,” says Mr. Kagan. “In the liberal era, in our lifetime, we have come more to expect it is the job of the government to provide for the needs that we can’t provide. Everything is negotiable. Everything is subject to talk.” Maybe that has weakened the American will.

Also don’t forget, says Mr. Kagan, “unsubtle Christianity” and its strong strain of pacifism. “Who else has a religion filled with the notion ‘turn the other cheek’?” he asks. “Who ever heard of such a thing?! If you’re gonna turn the other cheek, go home. Give up the ball.”

In 2000, Mr. Kagan and his younger son, Frederick, a military historian and analyst, published “While America Sleeps.” The book argued for the reversal of the Clinton Cold War peace dividend to meet unforeseen but inevitable threats to come. The timing was uncanny. A year later, 9/11 forced the Pentagon to rearm.

With the end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the U.S. is slashing defense again. “We do it every time,” Mr. Kagan says. “Failing to understand the most elementary childish fact, which is: If you don’t want trouble with somebody else, be sure he has something to be afraid of.”

Brownsville, not Thucydides, taught him that. “Any kid who grows up in a relatively tough neighborhood gets quick early lessons in what the realities are,” he says. His 1995 book, “On the Origins of War,” made a moral and strategic case to exert as much effort and money to safeguard peace as to win a war.

Thucydides identified man’s potential for folly and greatness. Mr. Kagan these days tends toward the darker view. He sees threats coming from Iran and in Asia, yet no leadership serious about taking them up. The public is too ignorant or irresponsible to care. “When you allow yourself to think of it, you don’t know whether you are going to laugh or cry,” he says.

The Kagan thesis is bleak but not fatalistic. The fight to shape free citizens in schools, through the media and in the public square goes on. “There is no hope for anything if you don’t have a population that buys into” a strong and free society, he says. “That can only be taught. It doesn’t come in nature.”

Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.

Roma Downey

(Editor www.thereportcard.org Former Touched by an Angel star Roma Downey and Mark Burnett producer of “Survivor” wrote in a recent “Wall Street Journal” op-ed that the Bible should be taught in Public Schools. They make a great point. At the time of America’s Founding Fathers, the Bible was the most read book in 18^th century America, followed by “Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law.” Blackstone himself was influenced by the Bible famously saying: “If a law of man goes against the laws of God, then it is no law at all.” The Bible was quoted by virtually all of America’s Presidents. Take away the Bible references from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the mighty 2^nd Inaugural Address and they shrink into meaninglessness. Imagine FDR’s D-Day Prayer without the Bible. Harry Truman recognized the State of Israel before any other country because of his Biblical upbringing. In the 19^th Century the Bible was widely taught in America’s schools and America children were the world’s best educated, according to de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.” With all of the ideas about educational standards bandied about, and the controversy over the Common Core Standards teaching the Bible is a great idea whose time has come again).

By ROMA DOWNEY AND MARK BURNETT

Have you ever sensed in your own life that “the handwriting was on the wall”? Or encouraged a loved one to walk “the straight and narrow”?

Have you ever laughed at something that came “out of the mouths of babes”? Or gone “the extra mile” for an opportunity that might vanish “in the twinkling of an eye”?

If you have, then you’ve been thinking of the Bible.

These phrases are just “a drop in the bucket” (another biblical phrase) of the many things we say and do every day that have their origins in the most read, most influential book of all time. The Bible has affected the world for centuries in innumerable ways, including art, literature, philosophy, government, philanthropy, education, social justice and humanitarianism. One would think that a text of such significance would be taught regularly in schools. Not so. That is because of the “stumbling block” (the Bible again) that is posed by the powers that be in America.

It’s time to change that, for the sake of the nation’s children. It’s time to encourage, perhaps even mandate, the teaching of the Bible in public schools as a primary document of Western civilization. We know firsthand of its educational value, having grown up in Europe—Mark in England, Roma in Ireland—where Bible teaching was viewed as foundational to a well-rounded education. Now that we are naturalized U.S. citizens, we want to encourage public schools in America to give young people the same opportunity.

This is one of the reasons we created “The Bible,” a 10-part miniseries premiering March 3 on the History Channel that dramatizes key stories from Scriptures. It will encourage audiences around the world to open or reopen Bibles to understand and enjoy these stories.

Without the Bible, Shakespeare would read differently—there are more than 1,200 references to Scripture in his works. Without the Bible, there would be no Sistine Chapel and none of the biblically inspired masterpieces that hang in countless museums world-wide.

In movies, without biblical allegories, there would be no “Les Misérables,” no “Star Wars,” no “Matrix,” no “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, no “Narnia” and no “Ben-Hur.” There would be no Alcoholics Anonymous, Salvation Army or Harvard University—all of which found their roots in Scripture. And really, what would Bono sing about if there were no Bible?

Teaching the Bible is of course a touchy subject. One can’t broach it without someone barking “separation of church and state” and “forcing religion down my throat.”

Yet the Supreme Court has said it’s perfectly OK for schools to do so, ruling in 1963 (Abington School District v. Schempp) that “the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as a part of a secular (public school) program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.”

The Supreme Court understood that we’re not talking about religion here, and certainly not about politics. We’re talking about knowledge. The foundations of knowledge of the ancient world—which informs the understanding of the modern world—are biblical in origin. Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th president known more as a cigar-chomping Rough Rider than a hymn-signing Bible-thumper, once said: “A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.”

Can you imagine students not reading the Constitution in a U.S. government class? School administrators not sharing the periodic table of the elements with their science classes? A driver’s ed course that expected young men and women to pass written and road tests without having access to a booklet enumerating the rules of the road?

It would be the same thing, we believe, to deny America’s sons and daughters the benefits of an education that includes a study of the Bible. Although we are both Christians, the list is long of ardent atheists who appreciate the Bible’s educational heft while rejecting its spiritual claims. It is possible to have education without indoctrination. On this point, believers and nonbelievers should be able to “see eye to eye.” (More Bible goodness.)

Interestingly enough, the common desktop reference guide “The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy” best sums up the Bible’s value as a tool of cultural literacy. Its first page declares: “No one in the English speaking world can be considered literate without a basic knowledge of the Bible.”

Can we

National Association of Scholars New Report on History Bias

By Bill Korach. www.thereportcard.org

The National Association of Scholars has provided The Report Card with an advanced copy of their new Study entitled “Recasting History: Are Race, Class, and gender dominating American History?” After having perused the 63-page report, the quick answer to the question posed by the title is “Yes, Race Class and Gender dominate the instruction of history at the university level.” These columns usually focus on K-12 public education, but what is taught at the university level influences what is taught at K-12. We recently reported on the far left anti-American bias that the Lexington Institute discussed in their just released study about curricula in America’s Teaching Colleges. The National Association of Scholars is an independent membership association of academics and others working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America’s colleges and universities. The NAS advocates for excellence by encouraging commitment to high intellectual standards, individual merit, institutional integrity, good governance, and sound public policy.

The NAS has essentially documented the continuing anti-American bias at all levels of education. What are Race, Class and gender studies? They all have this in common: a focus on how non-whites, non-affluent and women have been victimized throughout America’s long and sordid history. Students who have spent time under this form of indoctrination, will rarely find anything good about America. Is it any wonder that a recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that “70% of white working class Americans, and 78% of blacks believe that the U.S. economic system unfairly favors the wealth.” So, the country that has provided more opportunity for more human beings than any county in history is to be understood through studies of Race, Class and Gender Bias-and nothing else. Can we still wonder where the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd gets their ideas?

The NAS report looks at history as conducted that the University of Texas and Texas A & M. NAS discusses their primary finding in their executive summary:

In 1971, the state of Texas enacted a legislative requirement that students at public institutions complete two courses in American history. With that mandate in mind, the Texas Association of Scholars and the National Association of Scholars’ Center for the Study of the Curriculum proposed to determine how students today meet the requirement, and what history departments offer as a means of doing so. What courses can students take, and what vision of U.S. history do those courses present? This study is the result of our investigation.

Our report focuses on the University of Texas at Austin (UT) and Texas A&M University at College Station (A&M), flagship institutions serving large undergraduate populations. For this study we examined all 85 sections of lower-division American history courses at A&M and UT in the Fall 2010 semester that satisfied the U.S. history requirement. We looked at the assigned readings for each course and the research interests of the forty-six faculty members who taught them. We also compared faculty members’ research interests with the readings they chose to assign.

We found that all too often the course readings gave strong emphasis to race, class, or gender (RCG) social history, an emphasis so strong that it diminished the attention given to other subjects in American history (such as military, diplomatic, religious, intellectual history). The result is that these institutions frequently offered students a less-than-comprehensive picture of U.S. history. We found, however, that the situation was far more problematic at the University of Texas than at Texas A&M University.

We classified course readings by how much they focused on race, class, and gender. Course sections with half or more of their content having an RCG focus were classified as high; those with 25 to 49 percent having an RCG focus were classified as moderate; and those with less than 25 percent having an RCG focus were classified as limited. We classified faculty members assigning primarily high RCG readings as “high assigners” of RCG materials.

Specifically, NAS found that RCG teaching crowds out any study about the greatness of Western thinking of the kind once favored by Charles Eliot, President of Harvard from 1869-1909. The famous Harvard Classics that grace many American bookshelves, mine included, are sadly no longer taught at Harvard or at other American Universities.

Those who believe that nothing good has come from America, like Howards Zinn, author of the anti-America screed “A People’s History of the United States” seem to control the agenda. NAS thinks it is time for a change. They offer the following recommendation:

We Offer Ten Recommendations:

1.      Review the curriculum. History departments should review existing curricula, eliminate inappropriate over-emphases, and repair gaps and under-emphases.

2.      If necessary, convene an external review. If history departments are unwilling to undertake such a review, deans, provosts, or trustees need to consider an external review.

3.      Hire faculty members with a broader range of research interests. Hiring committees should employ new faculty members who have a solid understanding of the broad narrative of American history.

4.      Keep broad courses broad. Survey and introductory courses should give comprehensive overviews.

5.      Identify essential reading. As a safeguard against overlooking essential material, history department members should collaborate to develop lists of readings that the department expects students at a given course level to study.

6.      Design better courses. Departments should promote the development of courses that contribute to a robust, evenhanded, and reasonably complete curriculum.

7.      Diversify graduate programs. Graduate programs in U.S. history should ensure that they do not unduly privilege themes of race, class, and gender.

8.      Evaluate conformity with laws. Other states should enact laws similar to the Texas requirement that students complete two courses in American history, but better accountability is needed to ensure that colleges’ teaching lines up with legal provisions

9.      Publish better books. Publishers should publish textbooks and anthologies that more adequately represent the full range of U.S. history.

10. Depoliticize history. Historians and professors of United States history should counter mission creep by returning to their primary task: handing down the American story, as a whole, to future generations.

 

The NAS suggestions are excellent, but it will take hard work and diligence to implement them. Yet doing nothing is not an option. To request a copy of the NAS study, go to www.nas.org

(editor’s note: Paul Horton, American History Teacher at my Alma Mater The University of Chicago Laboratory School does not use history textbooks. The Lab school, as it is known, was listed by the Wall Street Journal as one of the top four schools in America for Ivy League and other top level college placement. He teaches from real history books. These pages have commented on today’s bloated 1000 page 8 lbs. history and political science textbooks. Political correctness and multiculturalism have engorged these books beyond any true historic value, particularly concerning American history. Not only would kids learn how to read and write, the schools could save significant money by not having to pay the $100 per copy of these second rate textbooks). Most first rate history books are under $30.00. As schools go digital, prices will drop even further. Bill Korach www.thereportcard.org).

University of Chicago Lab School: No Textbook-Real History Books

by Paul Horton, Teacher of American History at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools

I will never forget the reaction of my students who carried James McPherson’s The Battle Cry of Freedom into their first class of an elective course on the American Civil War. “We can’t read this,” was the almost universal chorus. Students commented on the weight of the book, on the number of pages, and on the comparative lack of photographs, maps, charts, and illustrations.

I had chosen Battle Cry because it was the best book on the subject, brilliantly written, it was a masterful synthesis of the then best scholarship on the War. It was one of the first volumes in the Oxford History of the United States series that purported to value clear narrative writing by the best scholars.

My students at first dreaded the long reading assignments, “we are not even into the war after 250 pages,” I can remember them saying. As the course moved on, they began to love the reading and respect McPherson as though he was a wizard from a fantasy novel. Over the course of thirteen weeks one fall, my students fell in love with history as they fell in love with McPherson as a scholar.

They learned that history is not something that could be memorized and regurgitated. McPherson had taught them to think about history as he weighed in on each topic. When he discussed dissent in the North and the South during the war, he carefully presented the evidence for each region, and laid bare the thought processes behind his own judgments. McPherson guided my students through the evidence like a very patient conductor standing before a very challenged orchestra.

My kids got it! They struggled, they worked through their anxieties about reading a very long book, and they came away from the experience as better thinkers and as young people who had a respect for scholarship in the pursuit of knowledge.

My colleagues report similar experiences. World History students reading John Darwin’s, After Tamerlane, struggle at first, but learn to read difficult prose full of crackling conceptual insights.

The point that I want to make is that the Common Core standards, while admirable, aim much too low. Students definitely benefit from reading documents and short works of nonfiction and analyzing them. Close reading is a skill that our students need to acquire.

I have a sixteen year old in my house that used to read books. When he wanted to learn about World War II, he read Gordon Prange’s, At Dawn We Slept in a week. Since he was given his own computer, however, he prefers watching YouTube videos and reading Wikipedia. His reading habits have deteriorated. He tends to scan information rather than reading to get the big picture. In short, our computer obsession is changing the way that our students read. Students tend to “go fish” with their computers, to scan for discreet facts rather than read to acquire the big picture. The computer is replicating the textbook in this sense. A boring textbook is not something to read, but it is something that will provide answers to possible test items that correspond with specific content objectives.

“Fishing” is no way to learn, reading is. My son learned more from Gordon Prange about history and knowledge than he will ever learn from fishing for discreet test items.

If we want our kids to learn to think and to respect knowledge as knowledge, and, better yet, to learn to respect the sacrifices that previous generations have made to create our Republic, we need to encourage students to read gracefully written narrative history. The Oxford History of the United States is a good start as are the beautifully written works of David McCullough.

Paul Horton, History teacher University High School, the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools; State Liaison, Illinois Council for History Education

Will Fitzhugh The Concord Review

 Skip the Knowledge.

 Will Fitzhugh

The Concord Review

For www.thereportcard.org

 (Editor’s note: Last night at the RNC, Jeb Bush spoke with passion about educational reform. He is 100% right, but lets make sure that the curriculum reflects a thorough grounding in American History, and civics. There is much talk about a “common core standard in education today.” But our friend Will Fitzhugh of the Concord Review question weather the common core standard is not the “hollow core standard.” Mr. Fitzhugh makes the argument that the educational establishment’s idea of a common core standard is not knowledge, but the far more misty and ephemeral “thinking skills.” The removal of knowledge from the common core is tantamount to a removal of American History. Mr. Fitzhugh suggests that those how have decided to substitute thinking skills for knowledge may themselves lack “thinking skills.”)

Poor James Madison, back in the day, spending endless hours reading scores upon scores of books on the history of governments, as he prepared to become the resident historian and intellectual “father” of the United States Constitution in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia! If he had only known what we know now thanks to the new Common Core, he could have saved the great bulk of that time and effort if he had only acquired some Thinking Skills instead!

 Our schools of education have long understood that if a student teacher can acquire enough pedagogicalistical sophistication and the right Thinking Skills, she will be able to teach anything, from Mandarin to European History to Calculus to Home Economics, to classes with any number of students.

The Harvard College faculty wasted many hours in the 1980s trying to derive a Common Core of knowledge which every undergraduate ought to acquire. No one on the faculty wanted to allow any other member of the faculty to tell her/him what knowledge students needed to learn at Harvard, and none wished to give up teaching what he/she was currently studying to devote any time to a survey course in the general knowledge of their field or any other field. So they agreed, thirty-odd years ago, on a Common Core of Thinking Skills instead. (1)

It is not clear whether the knowledge-free curricula of the graduate schools of education, or the Core experiences at Harvard College, in any way guided the authors of our new Common Core in their achievement of the understanding that it is not knowledge of anything that our students require, but Thinking Skills. They took advantage of the perspective and arguments of a famous cognitive psychologist at Stanford in designing the history portion of the Core. Just think how much time they saved by not involving one of those actual historians, who might have bogged down the whole enterprise in claiming that students should have some knowledge of history itself, and that such knowledge might actually be required before any useful Thinking Skills could be either acquired or employed. If we had followed that path, we might actually be asking high school students to read real history books—shades of the James Madison era!! Think also that removing real knowledge, real facts permits the educational establishment to substitute any of their own personal opinions. Why not since there are not facts with which to contend?

Just think of all the time and effort that was expended by Professor Hirsch and all those who worked to develop, and are now working to offer, a Core Knowledge curriculum to thousands of our students. If they had only had the benefit of the cognitive psychology undergirding at least the history portion of the new Common Core, they could have skipped all that and gone straight to the Core Thinking Skills now being promoted across the country.

The whole idea that knowledge is so important, or should precede thinking about anything, is so antediluvian (which means—oh, never mind—just more of that knowledge stuff!). What is the value of being 21st Centurions and right up-to-date, if we can’t ignore the past and skip over its history?

Our advance into the brave new world of thinking skills was anticipated by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which, as far as I can tell by looking over the research interests of the faculty, long ago left behind such mundane matters as the chemistry, foreign languages, history, literature and mathematics that students used to (and some still do, I suppose) study in our high schools. The Education faculty has moved boldly on beyond all that academic knowledge to, in addition to lots of psychology/diversity/poverty/sociology/disability studies, the new bare essentials of Thinking Skills.

During the discussions over Harvard’s Common Core decades ago, one physics professor pointed out that in order to think like a physicist it is important to know quite a bit of physics, but then, he would say that, wouldn’t he? He had spent his whole career in the pursuit of a knowledge of physics, so naturally he would think that knowledge is more important than Thinking Skills, or, at least, should come first in the study of physics or anything else.

We have finally come to realize that, after all, Google has all the knowledge we will ever need, and so, with keyboarding skills, and some time in Common courses on Thinking Skills, our students will be well prepared to launch their careers as ignoramuses, and make their own unique contributions to the disappearance of knowledge, understanding and wisdom in the United States, and to the decline of our civilization (which means—oh, never mind—just look it up!).

Let those history-minded Asian countries continue to ask their students to acquire lots of knowledge. Our students will have their new Common Core Thinking Skills, and all the pride and self-esteem that the ignorance we have given them can support.

(1) Caleb Nelson, Harvard Class of ’88 (Mathematics) “Harvard’s Hollow Core,” The Atlantic Monthly, September 1990

Scott Rasmussen

(These columns have been critical of textbook bias and school performance. Recent Rasmussen polls suggest that the American public agree. The latest Rasmussen Poll on education are a harsh indictment of the performance of America’s public schools).

The Rasmussen Poll, as highly credible national poll continues to show that Americans are unhappy with K-12 public education.

The newest poll shows that a majority of Americans continue to feel school textbooks focus more on political correctness than on the accuracy of the information. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 54% of Adults think school textbooks are more concerned about presenting information in a politically correct manner. Only twenty-two percent (22%) think most textbooks are more concerned with accurately providing information. (24%) are not sure.

According to Rasmussen, Americans have serious concerns about political correctness in general. Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 79% of American Adults think political correctness is a serious problem in America today, up five points from a year ago.  Just 16% feel it’s not a problem for the country.

So, Americans are concerned about political correctness in schools and for America in general. A great majority of Americans, concerned about what is taught in schools, want to be able to choose schools based upon factors like school prayer, length of the school year, and what children wear to school. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 76% of American Adults think parents should have a choice between sending their children to a school that allows in-school prayer and one that does not. Thirteen percent (13%) do not believe parents should have that choice, but another 11% are undecided

Americans still don’t think too highly of the public education system in the United States, but they continue to give much higher marks to the school their own child attends. A new Rasmussen Report national telephone survey finds that just Thirty-six percent (36%) give public education in the United States poor marks. Only 23% of American adults rate public schools excellent or good.

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Tom Rivers

Tom Rivers spoke with The Report Card this week about his candidacy for the District 5 School Board seat in St. Johns country where beautiful and historic St. Augustine is located.

Rivers was a public school teacher in Clay and St. Johns Counties from 1969 to 1978 and served on the St. Johns County School Board from 1980 to 1984. He was its chairman from 1983 to 1984.

“I still have a passion for education and would love the opportunity to again serve on the school board,” says Mr. Rivers.

He said he feels that his previous experience on the school board gives him an advantage over his opponent Patrick Canan, the tort attorney. Although the school board position is supposed to be non-partisan, Mr. Rivers is a Republican while Mr. Canan is a Democrat. Mr. Rivers says: “I’d like voters to know that I am the conservative choice. I oppose instruction in sexual politics including the gay agenda. I believe that that kind of thing is best discussed at home among the family.”

Mr. Rivers main concern is money: “Right now, the main issue is funding, of course. With the legislature reducing the amount of money paid to the district, the biggest challenge is going to be finding a way to prevent cuts that could hurt instruction. I would like to see the cuts done in such a way that would not cut teachers. I am also concerned that music and art are often the first to go in times of budget difficulty, but I believe these are important programs and would like to see them protected.

I asked Mr. Rivers if he agreed with the Cato Institute’s statement that America has too many teachers. Andrew Coulson, of Cato stated that over the past 40 years, schoolteachers have doubled nationally, but the school population has increased by only 8.5%. Mr. Rivers said: “I don’t believe that is the case in St. Johns County because schools have been expanding just to keep pace with the growth of the school age population in St. Johns. Many parents have moved in from neighboring counties because of the quality of our schools as measured by FCAT.

I asked Mr. Rivers if he felt that FCAT was the right way to measure student learning. His answer was ambivalent: “I have heard complaints that teachers just train students to pass the test, and if the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) is the only focus of learning, then there needs to be change. However, FCAT does measure performance, so that is a good thing.”

I asked Mr. Rivers of he was familiar with the Citizens for National Security and Act for America studies showing that there are 25 textbooks with Islamic bias in Florida and over 35 nationwide. He said: “I am not familiar with these studies, and it is not possible to read every word of all of our history and political science textbooks, but if the studies are true, the school board should take steps to edit or eliminate the misleading textbooks.

Rivers, who had five children go through St. Johns County Schools and now has grandchildren doing so, offered praise to the current school board for the job it has done and for the district being number one in the state for the fourth year, based on the results from the FCAT. He also singled out Carla Wright in that appreciation.

I asked if the Board of Education was right to settle the Webster School lawsuit for $140,000 paid to the plaintiff. (note: in 2010 teachers at the Webster School lead the class in singing the old Diamond Reo song: “In God we Still Trust.” A family said they were offended and retained the ACLU to sue the school. The school settled the case and agreed not to sing the song again). Mr. Rivers said: “I’d like to be able to say: ‘Let ‘em sue.’ But School Board attorney often will not risk a court case. I feel that there needs to be some kind of tort reform to indemnify schools from frivolous lawsuits.”

Tom Rivers said in conclusion: “My three top priorities are:

1. Limit the damage from the budget cuts
2. Advocate for teachers whose morale has been hurt from the FCAT changes, and increase in paperwork.
3. Work as a team player. I don’t mean that I just agree on everything, but I don’t think grandstanding and confrontation is the best way to accomplish worthy goals.

And I want to remind voters again that I am the conservative choice.”

Congressman Andre Carson (D) Indiana

U.S. Congressman Andre Carson, (D) Indiana the second Muslim elected to Congress – has declared that America “needs Muslims” and U.S. public schools should be modeled after Islamic madrassas, “where the foundation is the Quran.” This is the same congressman who said that the Tea Party “would love to see blacks hanging on a tree.” Rep. Carson has accepted political campaign contributions from the Council on American Islamic Contributions (CAIR). CAIR has been identified  by the FBI, the CIA and former Army Special Forces Commander, Lt. General William Boykin as the American policy/PR arm of Hamas a recognized terrorist organization. Rep. Carson, in fact, accepted campaign contributions from Y. Yaqub Mirza who has been investigated for terrorist activity against America. In June 2011, Rep. Carson was the keynote speaker at a CAIR conference in Michigan. CAIR has been working hard to penetrate American public schools with Islamic propaganda. CAIR affiliated groups have had a hand writing in over 35 pro Islamic, anti-Israel, anti-Christian biased history and politcal science textbooks according to ACT for America and Citizens for National Security. So when Rep. Carson says he wants to turn American Public Schools into madrassas, CAIR is sure to help him attempt to accomplish his goal.

On May 26, U.S. Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., addressed an Islamic Circle of North America convention, saying the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was hard on Muslims and that Americans should look to Muslim schools for guidance. Yes, hard on Muslims, but the other 3000 murdered in the 9/11 attacks and their families? I guess it must have been hard for them as well.

So here Carson says, in violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution he swore to uphold, that American Public Schools should become Madrassas. Why is it ok for a Democrat to call for Muslim Madrassas, but the Democrats always seem to be the party that opposes Christmas Trees, Nativity scenes and the Ten Commandments in American Schools? The Democrats are the party that always backs funding for the ACLU. Many feel that our schools were better when prayer was allowed and of Judeo-Christian heritage was taught. But now, if Carson has his way, the Madrassa and the culture of Jihad will be put in its place.

Here is what Carson had to say in his own words.

“America will never tap into educational innovation and ingenuity without looking at the model that we have in our madrassas, in our schools, where innovation is encouraged, where the foundation is the Quran. And that model that we are pushing in some of our schools meets the multiple needs of students.

“Most of us are visual learners. Some of us are auditor learners – we learn by hearing. Many of us are kinesthetic learners. We learn by doing, touching, feeling. I have found … that we need an educational model that is current, that meets the need of our students. America must understand that she needs Muslims.”

He adds, “There are over 7 million Muslims in this country. And while we are under attack, we cannot retreat.”

Carson is married to Mariama Shaheed Carson, public-school principal of Snacks Crossing Elementary School in Indianapolis, Ind.

What is the nature of these Madrassa schools Carson is so keen to see emulated? Well, they are most financed globally by the Saudi Royal Family, and they are well known incubators of anti-Jewish anti-Christian and ant-Western hatred. The Saudis prefer that stealth approach to proselytizing Islam in American public schools.

Stanley Kurtz profiles Saudi meddling in American Public schools in a July2007 National Review story:

Sandra Stotsky came to feel that the Massachusetts Education Department’s efforts to achieve balance in its teacher training seminars were giving way to Harvard’s “distorted” and “manipulative” political agenda.

APPOINT IMAMS
Whereas Stotsky and the Massachusetts Department of Education had asked for seminars covering Islamic history, and including balanced discussions of contemporary Middle Eastern problems, Harvard’s outreach program delivered seminars that virtually promoted Islam as a religion, while sharply criticizing alleged American prejudice against the Muslim world.

Harvard’s outreach training prompted K-12 teachers to design celebratory treatments of the life and teachings of Mohammad and the “revelation” and spread of Islam, with exercises calling on students to “appoint imams,” memorize Islamic principles, and act out prayer at a Mosque. According to Stotsky, if Harvard’s outreach personnel had designed similar classroom exercises based on Christian or Jewish models, “People for the American Way, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the A.C.L.U. would descend upon them like furies.”

Instead of training teachers in the history and contemporary challenges of the Muslim world, Stotsky concluded that Harvard’s outreach program was “manipulating” apolitical teachers with a “barely disguised” attempt to “shape…attitudes on specific political issues.” The lesson plans designed by K-12 teachers who participated in these Harvard-run seminars included exercises in which students were asked to watch newscasts and spot out instances in which Muslims were stereotyped as violent or barbaric. Lesson plans proposed discussion questions like, “Why have so many groups wanted to control the Middle East?” and “How might the history of repeated invasions influence the history of people in this area?”

Stotsky was taken aback by one of the key teaching resources pushed by Harvard’s outreach program: “The Arab World Studies Notebook.” The “Notebook” has been widely denounced as a “practically proselytizing” text offering uncritical praise for the Arab world. Stotsky calls it, “a piece of propaganda.” Even the Notebook’s editor, Audrey Shabbas, acknowledges that its purpose is to provide “the Arab point of view.” One analysis quoted by Stotsky says that the “Arab World Studies Notebook” is designed to “induce teachers to embrace Islamic religious beliefs” and to “support political views” favored by the Middle East Policy Council (formerly the Arab American Affairs Council). The “Notebook” even claims that Muslims actually beat Columbus to the New World, supposedly sailing across the Atlantic in 889. This is the sort of history being pushed on our K-12 educators by Harvard’s federally approved Center for Middle East Studies — at American taxpayer expense.

Citizens for National Security’s Dr. William Saxton recently released a report detailing pro-Islamic, anti-Israel anti-Christian bias in 25 Florida public school textbooks. The report, organized by textbook title, shows the specific misleading or incorrect quote and then provides the corrected historically accurate information. The report is available at no charge at www.cfns.org

So, there is no need to wait for Congressman Carson to implement his plans about Madrassas, Islam is already aggressively infiltrating American public schools.

Mat Staver, Chairman of the Liberty Counsel, stated in an interview with “The Report Card” that the Giles County School Board agreed to keep a display of the Ten Commandment in The Narrows High School. Staver said that the ACLU sued to remove a Ten Commandments display, but lost the fight on Constitutional grounds. Staver said: “The continuing display of the Ten Commandments should be an encouragement to parents and schools across the country who believe that the foundation of American Liberty is built upon our Judeo-Christian traditions.” So what legal precedent won the case?  Staver said:

In 1980, The Supreme Court, in Stone vs. Graham, suggests that the Ten Commandments may be displayed if it is integrated into the school curriculum. For example, if a world history in a high school course talks about the influence of Judaism or Jesus  Christ on morality, then the Ten Commandments may be displayed.

Judeo-Christian Roots

The Values found in the Bible including the Ten Commandments, and the Teachings of Jesus, inspired American ideas about government and morality.

What can schools and families do if they are threatened by the ACLU for the display of the Ten Commandments? Staver said: “They should contact The Liberty Counsel at 800 671 1776.”

Following the suit and discovery, the private donor of the Foundations display proposed, and the board agreed, to exchange the frame of the text of the Ten Commandments with the framed “Roots of Democracy”page from the American history textbook.  At the top of the “Roots of Democracy” graphic is the Ten Commandments tablets with Mount Sinai in the background with the following words underneath: “The values found in the Bible, including the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Jesus, inspired American ideas about government and morality.” The Roots of Democracy traces the history of our modern Republic in pictures and words beginning with the Ten Commandments and including the Magna Carta, Roman and Greco law, Enlightenment thinkers with Montesquieu and John Locke, and English Parliamentary Traditions.

The ACLU of Virginia sued the Giles County School Board after the board adopted an open forum policy, which permits the display of historical documents by private individuals or groups. A privately sponsored Foundations of American Law and Government display consisting of the Ten Commandments, in equally-sized frames, was posted in Narrows High School. The display also includes the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, Mayflower Compact, Bill of Rights, George Mason’s Declaration of Rights, and Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom. Additional historical documents were later posted at the request of a local citizen, consisting of the First Charter of Virginia, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, a depiction and quote of Patrick Henry, a depiction of Minutemen, a depiction of George Washington, Washington’s Farewell Address, a depiction of Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson’s letters to the Danbury Baptists and to Reverend Samuel Miller, Jefferson’s 1779 Thanksgiving Proclamation, and the Northwest Ordinance. In total, there are 29 frames.

The Virginia Standards of Learning requires students to know about the foundational principles of civilizations, including the Hebrews, and the foundations of law and government. Secular textbooks published by Prentice Hall and McGraw-Hill trace the roots of democracy and law and specifically refer to the Ten Commandments and many of the documents posted as part of the display.

As a result of the settlement, the open forum policy will remain, along with all the documents mentioned above. The ACLU received no attorney’s fees as part of this settlement. Staver said:

The school board is very pleased with the settlement. The open forum for private citizens and the displays on law and government will remain, including the Ten Commandments tablets as part of the ‘Roots of Democracy’ frame. The displays are visual teaching tools about law and government, which the students in Virginia study as part of American and world history. These display documents are good models for other schools to follow. As we celebrate Independence Day, we are reminded that we enjoy a rich history of law and government on which America was founded.