The Granite Sentry
Political correctness is a non-stop gusher of joylessness; a humorless dark cloud. Yet, the Granite Sentry manages to find the silver lining of a smile in the state of Georgia’s latest contortions over “slavery education.” See what happens when the forces of political correctness clash with each other.
January 11, 2011
THE GRANITE SENTRY
Fred and PC Curriculum Designers Take a Beating
It’s always a hoot when one branch of mindless political correctness gets cross-wise with another. Watching women’s libbers try to squeeze “empowered” sex workers, genital mutilation and the burka under the same red tent with Gertrude Stein and Bea Arthur, for example, can give you a charlie-horse from laughing.
Chuckles of the same sort popped up this week in Gwinnett County, Georgia, when parents flew into an anti-racism snit over test questions brought home by their kids. Here are a few samples cited by ABC news in its report.
“Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?”
“If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?”
Another question referred to Fred’s production of cotton in a given period.
Hold it right there, howled parents, always quick to spot the sadistic overseer lurking in the background.
“I was furious at that point,” one told the local ABC affiliate after she reviewed the test questions.
“This outrages me because it just lets me know that there’s still racists,” said another.
“Something like that shouldn’t be imbedded into a kid of the third, fourth, fifth, any grade,” insisted another. “I’m having to explain to my 8-year-old why slavery or slaves or beatings are in a math problem. That hurts.”
The media duly stampeded over to the school system for an explanation of the outrage and delivery of the skulking KKK member for public destruction. No doubt they expected some relic named Clem to be produced, somehow still clinging to the public payroll from the old separate-but-equal days.
The school system, confused to find themselves under attack, conceded that the questions were “not appropriate” but said they were part of a broader curriculum effort to teach about the evils of slavery.
“The teachers were trying to do a cross-curricular activity,” a nonplussed school spokesman said. In other words the questions were inserted by well-meaning liberal “educators” intent on squeezing the horrors of slavery into every nook and cranny of the school program.
A persistent education fad of the past several years is the inclusion of the same material across several study areas, so that students will encounter the same concepts in their course work on social studies, science, spelling, even math. In this case the concept was slavery, and the underlying principle was the continuing need to foster racial resentment among African American students and shame and guilt among Caucasian students.
Of course, the reader and viewer of these news reports had to sort this element out for themselves, as the report was something of a stub. It ended rather quickly after the short explanation by the school system. Behind the scenes, one can imagine the newsroom discussion. “Well, we’ve got all these parents worked up, but the schools are really just trying to do the right thing, education-wise, slavery-wise, and PC-wise. What are we going to do?”
MORE @ DBKP from the Granite Sentry:
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* Facebook: Social Media for the Hive Mind
* Ayn Rand on NPR: Leviathan Radio Shrugged
* Art of Deception: A Rogue Bunco Game for Fleecing the Public
* Herman Cain: Leader of the Anti-PC Revolution
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* Lady Gaga, Bill Clinton: Sad, Sick Icons of a Sadder, Sicker Culture
* Mainstream Media: A Dumbed Down Press for Dumbed Down Readers
* Beware of the Ravenous Locavores: Government Busybodies and Locally-Grown Food
* Death Penalty Divide: The Executioner’s Song and Dance
* Death by Flaming Water Skis? There’s a Code for That!
* Surgeon General: Nice Hair Worries Stop Minority Women from Working Out
The answer, plainly, was to run a short version of the story, so the parents wouldn’t feel put off. But any deeper exploration of exactly why the schools are still fostering racial resentment at this late date was clearly out of bounds.
Some will say this is intentional on the part of the schools, but I’m not sure that’s the case. Some educators are committed propagandists, but it’s more concerning that most just adopt and pass this stuff along without question or any special intent. It’s the water in which they swim, the air that they breathe. In the long run, that sort of default radicalism will do us a lot moredamage as a society than the intentional agit-prop.
It’s fortunate that Americans tend to be suspicious of radicalism of nearly every stripe; it has protected us from extremists all across the spectrum, until recently. But it reflects a tending-to-business philosophy that leaves us vulnerable to the kind of subtle undercutting of our principles that the Left has been engaging in for decades.
And then when we’re confronted by a candidate like Barack Obama, who builds his general appeal on a kind of undifferentiated, “yes we can” nice-guyness that camouflages a deep commitment to profound social change, many people find themselves without the philosophical foundation they need to recognize what he’s really saying.
And that blase acceptance of surface appearances begins in the schools, which specialize in feeling good instead of being good.
by Granite Sentry
images: dbkp; dbkp
The Granite Sentry writes regularly at The Granite Sentry (where “The ruling class hates backtalk and sass. Let’s get started.”).
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