Posted on 02/03/2005 5:53:21 PM PST by Ender Wiggin
This is true.
Just the basic techniques to suppress dissent shows the communist outlook and methodology.
Let alone using Zinn's book and showing Michael Moore films.
Hudson High School is a First Amendment School!
http://www.firstamendmentschools.org/
Location: Hudson, MA
Enrollment: 980
Grades: 8-12
Type of School: Public
Hudson High School is a large suburban public school that began its work as a First Amendment project school by launching an innovative experiment in school governance. “This past year,” says school Principal John Stapelfeld, “the entire Hudson High School community implemented a new governance model based on democratic town meetings.”
To facilitate the meetings, Hudson first unveiled a new school building, the design of which reflects the school community’s belief in two concepts: First, that a cluster model of organization (approximately 125-150 students per cluster) will engender closer connections among both the students and the staff; and second, that the cluster model will provide an ideal democratic governance structure, and involve more students in the daily life of the school’s operation.
How does it work? The clusters are organized thematically around broad areas of student academic interest. Clusters do not restrict students academically and students still have full access to the school’s curriculum. Weekly cluster meetings, however, provide time for students to develop service projects, hear from guest speakers, attend workshops relative to their cluster themes, and participate in school-wide governance meetings. At the same time, the clusters are meant to be places where a real democratic community can be built, one that affirms First Amendment rights within the context of a larger, expanding school population.
And how has it worked? Teacher Brian Daniels admits that “at times it’s been hard, but it’s hard to be counter-cultural. At first, the kids didn’t really know how to act, and neither did the teachers.”
Student Rita Paulino agreed. “A part of the reason for this is our conditioning in school up to this point,” she said. “We’ve always been taught that what the teachers says goes – so when you’re suddenly given power, you don’t really know what to do with it.”
But as the year progressed, Hudson’s experiment in liberty started to yield some positive results. “And,” Brian added, “the growth of the leadership among students has been amazing. Kids who would have never done so in the past have stepped forward. And four of the six clusters decided on their own to take the time to build in some leadership training.
“The process of democratizing a whole school carries with it the requisite time required for real change to occur,” Daniels added. “And our community is committed to do exactly that.”
Learn more about Hudson High School:
Visit their Web site.
Read this recent article about the school.
Here's a quote from a class in Service Learning (a new way to teach in Massachusetts, one pionnered at HHS). The section is about the responsibilities of citizenship and it's taught by an HHS teacher, whose course is mentioned in the thread article (Todd Wallingford):
UNIT 13 RESPONSIBILITIES OF CITIZENSHIP 148
This unit is aligned with the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks. ...
Ninth-grade students in Hudson High School’s integrated Civics-English course learn that democracy is an ongoing struggle, kept alive by an active and informed citizenry who recognize the rights of others and are empowered to affect change. Through community service-learning projects, the students discover first hand the value of civic engagement. In networking and advocating for themselves and their fellow citizens, they learn about the structure and dynamics of their community and gain concrete experience in their investigation of the abstract concepts raised by their Civics-English course.
...snip..
The Need
At Hudson High School, every freshman takes an integrated Civics-English course that engages students in actively exploring the question, “What are the rights and responsibilities of a citizen in a just society?” During the first half of the year students study the structure and rationale of our democratic form of government. The second semester finds them exploring the conditions that gave rise to the Holocaust. The juxtaposition of these two themes allows students to weigh the benefits of our system of limited government and the value of freedom. At the same time, students recognize that a just society “can easily be lost, but never fully won.” Democracy, students learn, is an ongoing struggle, kept alive by an active and informed citizenry who recognize the rights of others and are empowered to affect change. The course’s community service-learning component allows students to explore their role as responsible citizens.
...snip...
From
http://www.doe.mass.edu/csl/comlesson.pdf
From what I've been told by a reliable source. most of Wallingford's course is Holocaust related.
Note also that he thinks the USA is a democracy!
These are the teachers who are teaching civic to the future leaders of the republic?
This is so vaugue that this teachers bias is exposed by her incompetence as a teacher. She does not understand the difference between teaching argumentation and enforcing indoctrination.
And Service Learning? Being required to perform certain "service projects" to earn a grade, like volunteering in a dog shelter is a better use of time than learning that we don't really live in a democracy, or learning basic math.
Pioneered at HHS by Berman and Stapelfeld, where all the teachers are fair and unbiased.
PING
Yeah, I went to Hudson High School. This really ticks me off. Not that the school was great by any standard, but they did try to do their job without this kind of BS.
I have not yet formed an opinion on whether the links to those web sites with beheading videos should be up there or not.
But I am offended by this teacher Beth Ferns, a self-proclaimed liberal Democrat teacher who, in the words of the article, had "a poster that drew Bowler's ire. In her classroom hangs a poster of President George W. Bush quotes such as, "If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier -- just so long as I'm the dictator."
Yeah, right. It is just my job to teach kids who are impressionable how to think for themselves. Don't pay any attention to that inflammatory poster at the front. That isn't inflammatory, it's the truth. It is the same crap seen on campuses everywhere in this country. Kids are unable to speak out because they are vulnerable. They cannot risk poor grades as a result of an unscrupulous educator, and they do exist. This really raises my ire.
You can be sure I am going to write the principal, school board and teacher on that one. I am also going to find others to do the same. I will get the information and post it here as well.
I went to this high school, see my remarks below. Thanks for posting this.
No problem, rlmorel, when I read the article I thought more people should see it.
Let us know what you get in response to your letter, OK?
The psychological blocks, I believe, are erected through years of being brainwashed by liberal public schools and liberal mainstream media.
Thus, in high school, one is observing behaviors which have already been molded years before that time, on almost all sides.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1332291/posts
Related thread PING
I've heard this from various radical leftist college profs: if you give them a liberally slanted opinion, almost no matter how ill-justified, they will give you a pass. However, if you give them a well-supported conservatively slanted opinion, they will hand it back to you with a poor grade and questions up the wazoo, such as "what is the defininition of this?" (for some number of common terms) and so on, until you give up and change your opinion, or take the flunking grade.
In other words, the proper job of a radical leftist teacher is to harass any conservative students and modify their behavior to that of an incipient radical leftist. Only incipient radical leftists-- or those who behave like incipient radical leftists-- are permitted to graduate from these kinds of classes.
Of course, Skinnerian behavior modification is frowned upon as being obsolete in regards to any other educational context (eg, science and math "drill and kill"). And of course, the US as shown by TIMSS has fallen to 12th place or worse in math and science among the industrialized countries of the world when ed school research is actually put into practice in these subjects in today's US public schools. (But that's OK, since many US public school teachers and education researchers have science-phobia and math-phobia to begin with, and could not affect this particular side effect even if they wanted to...)
Social justice defined
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1294646/posts
“Social justice” has proven indispensable to its proponents because of its ambiguity. If it could generally be understood to mean something like, the “equal protection of the laws,” it would perhaps be tolerable, but the left rarely uses it in that context. They use it because it is much easier to run on a platform of “social justice,” than on the more accurate description: social-ism.
This seems to be code for:
The radical leftist nexus of HHS Social Studies and English teachers who dominate the high school system want to re-educate the 9th grade students and help to shape their opinions into the correct mold: society is comprised of two differing viewpoints, that representable by the concepts of capitalism, meritocracy, and individualism, and that representable by the concepts of community, ethnic-cultural-political divisions within the community, and collectivism. Students will be "encouraged" (in other words, required) to struggle with the latter against the former. Technical subjects such as math and science are deemed less relevant to a student's learning (from a societal-change point of view) than encouraging students to prepare for or find productive jobs in the international technological marketplace.
This fulfills the view of Paolo Freire in his 1970 text (so favored among and adopted in whole by contemporary US education researchers), "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" (see http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0826412769/102-7970999-6338548) in which the viewpoint is expressed that education is a subversive force. In particular education is both subversive and real when it is liberating, and that schools maximize their effectiveness when students are led to become political activists, to transform the society in which they are presumed to be oppressed along class, ethic, race, gender, and sexual preference lines.
Teaching math and science is counterproductive for the left.
First, it teaches that there are absolutes, and measurements, and limits to measurements.
Second, teaching the scientific method teaches critical thinking tools; "if this is true, then this should be true, and I can check that by..." ("Bush tripled the National Debt" becomes a testable hypothesis rather than accepted fact).
Third, it calls into question Gloobal Worming, which is not to be questioned!
"Ongoing struggle" sounds so Maoist, so revolutionary.
I'd expect that from the Sensero Luminoso, not a high school teacher in Hudson, Massachusetts.
And how cynical to bring up an "active and informed citizenry" when the teacher himself believes that we live in a democracy (not a republic).
Civic engagement obviously does not include teachers being questioned by students- that results in a half-page article explaining how wrong the students are.
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