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.
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.