Posted on 12/12/2014 6:39:35 AM PST by Kaslin
resident Barack Obama has launched a new initiative to get American schools to teach computer science. Appearing at a Newark, New Jersey, middle school, the president suggested that students, especially girls and minorities, should learn "not just how to use a smartphone but to create the apps for a smartphone."
If we lived in a country where most students were graduating from high school with good English and math skills and with a firm grasp of American history and government, we might be in a position to make time for advanced computer skills. But we don't. Only about 68 percent of Newark's students even graduate from high school.
As for those students who do graduate, not just in Newark but across the country, it seems that smartphone skills come pretty naturally. Who hasn't seen a middle-aged adult getting tutoring on his iPhone from a teenager?
Meanwhile, Obama's progressive allies have been assiduously slanting the teaching of American history and government to produce new generations of left-leaning citizens -- that is, when they teach civics at all.
The Annenberg Public Policy Center conducted a civics survey in September and found that only 36 percent of American adults could name the three branches of government, and 35 percent could not name even one. Only 27 percent knew that it requires a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate to override a presidential veto. Sixty-one percent were unable to correctly identify the party that controls the House, and a nearly identical percentage couldn't name the party in control of the Senate. Leaving aside our middling performance in math and science, this alone should be enough to indict our public school system.
What about more educated Americans? A 2012 survey of college graduates commissioned by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that only 37 percent knew the terms of U.S. representatives and senators. Only 58 percent knew that the document establishing separation of powers is the U.S. Constitution; 25 percent chose the Articles of Confederation, and 7 percent thought it was the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. (Do you get the feeling people were guessing?) Less than half knew that the American general at Yorktown was George Washington -- 48 percent.
Only about 18 percent of American colleges require a survey course on U.S. history or government. Then again, when they do teach U.S. history, they tend to do so in a highly tendentious fashion. As my colleague Jay Nordlinger has observed, "it's all slavery, racism and the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II."
This is deadly serious business. Civilizations are not self-sustaining enterprises. People must believe that their society and culture are worth preserving. If we don't teach our children the fundamentals of American history and government, they will not have the knowledge or perspective necessary to maintain it.
The undermining of the Advanced Placement U.S. history curriculum is typical of the progressives' work in our schools. Like thousands of termites, they are eating away at the foundations of our culture.
The new "framework" for the teaching of AP history, which is studied by thousands of America's top-performing high-school students, emphasizes oppressors and exploiters while scanting liberators and pioneers. Teachers are encouraged to examine the Colonial period by comparing and contrasting the different social and economic goals of the 17th-century Spanish, French, Dutch and British colonizers. The British, students are to be instructed, differed from the rest because of a "strong belief in British racial and cultural superiority," which led to the imposition of a "rigid racial hierarchy."
Larry Krieger, a former high-school history teacher, summarizes: "While students will learn a great deal about the Beaver Wars, the Chickasaw Wars, the Pueblo Revolt, and King Philip's War, they will learn little or nothing about the rise of religious toleration, the development of democratic institutions, and the emergence of a society that included a rich mix of ethnic groups and the absence of a hereditary aristocracy. The Framework blatantly ignores such pivotal historic figures as Roger Williams and Benjamin Franklin and such key developments as the emergence of New England town meetings and the Virginia House of Burgesses as cradles of democracy."
Curriculum is destiny. No one is suggesting that students be indoctrinated or spoon-fed a cheerleading version of American history. The real thing will do very well -- but too few students are getting that.
About the only thing most people living in this country these days know about government is how to play the welfare and “entitlements” systems.
Did you know that the U.S. swapped some interned nisei for American civilians held as POWs by Japan? One of them who came back to America postwar went on to be a key interrogator for the Military Intelligence Service during the Korean War.
By the time these kids graduate phone apps will be as cutting edge as Donkey Kong is today.
If conservatives want this nation to survive the Leftists and thrive they need to become the leaders of the storytelling industries - religion, government, education, and the media.
A very profound insight.
Unless the people act quickly the West is done.
Oh, wait. Never mind.
Then it’s a mud huts, famine, despots and Islam future.
I’d bet on a future speaking Mandarin far more than worshipping Allah.
You got that right, here in what some call the most conservative state in the nation, a university which is named after the most famous revolutionary war patriot the state of SC has ever produced is turning out graduates who could not pass my eighth grade history final, yet they have a major in history. The only thing they seem to be accomplishing in such studies is to become a few years older and run up debt while foregoing the income they might have earned had they taken a minimum wage job for those years. I doubt they could even recite a reasonably accurate description of the great man for whom the school is named.
It’s something I have thought about quite a bit.
Yeah. "IF". Biggest two-letter word in the English language.
Another reason to home school or enroll your kids in a conservative private school.
Newark has a 68% graduation rate? What a shame.
This kind of stupidity can be laid directly at the feet of people like Bill Ayers who hate America and have put policies into place which keep kids from knowing how to think.
Students today do not know how to think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRkFDcX_72c
This will directly go against my efforts to prevent women and minorities from creating smart phone apps. Does the president have any idea how much time and resources I am using to prevent women and minorities from learning these things?
He who controls the conversation controls the people.
He who controls the conversation controls the people. That’s why they dominate the storytelling professions/industries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JcZRQS8WSQ
“Control”
by Mr. Mister
This is about control, it’s about vision
My vision, my mission
Don’t tell me about what you think
‘Cause I don’t care, no, I don’t care
We all want control of our destiny
We all want control of our lives
We all want control of each other
We all see the fear in our eyes
An old man was sitting on a corner
We couldn’t remember where he lived
I felt so sad until he told me
He knew where he was and that was enough for him
We all want control of our destiny
We all want control of our lives
We all want control of each other
We all see the fear in our eyes
Open my eyes to it
I can see that way too
Open your eyes to it
You can see that way too
We all want control of our destiny
We all want control of our lives
We all want control of each other
We all see the fear in our eyes
We all want control
We all want control
We all want control
We all want control
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