PC Elementary: Public Schools Ignore Veterans Day
For the second year in a row, administrators at my children’s’ school didn’t find Veterans Day compelling enough to interrupt their rigorous curriculum with letters of appreciation to veterans, read-aloud stories of military valor, or assemblies honoring those who risk their lives for us all. I understand things were especially tight for the fourth grade this year at Selby Grove Elementary in Pico Rivera, CA – what with the two weeks they spent on their “Dia De Los Muertos” project.
Huh? Dia de los what?
“Dia de los Muertos,” for the culturally insensitive among you, is a Mexican festival honoring dead ancestors. It might seem odd to many readers that an American public school would devote a chunk of their educational time to a foreign, quasi-religious observance over a unifying, secular, and American holiday like Veterans Day. You’re not alone. I know that it’s at least as strange to the parents of the students – many of whom happen to be veterans – who neither ask for nor expect their ancestors’ native holidays to get three minutes of class time.
Not that the high school where I work did any better on Veterans Day – not one decoration, one announcement, nothing.
Learning about different cultures doesn’t bother me; quite the contrary, in fact. Nor do I want “Battle of the Green Berets” to be the closing slow dance at the prom. It just seems like neglecting this holiday is such a waste of teaching opportunities. After all, where else will children learn about Audie Murphy, Sergeant York, or the many thousands of soldiers who quite literally made California public schools possible?
It certainly won’t be from their textbooks. It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the PC-ness of modern textbooks. When I taught fourth grade, one of the stories in the Language Arts (English) textbook was about a young Hispanic girl who enrolls in a mostly white California school only to go home crying the same day because of incessant teasing. Once at home, her father offers this jewel of wisdom: “You have nothing to be ashamed of. You should be proud. You’re a descendant of the Mayans, the people who built the great pyramids and invented the ‘zero.’”
O.K., now switch “White” and “Hispanic” and substitute “Anglo-Saxons” for “Mayans,” the Panama Canal for “Pyramids,” and “modern physics” for “zero.” It’s not going to make the book.
In the same text, a man awakes from a treeless nightmare world of landfills and global warming (There’s still time, but we must act now!). It also had stories on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thurgood Marshall. History lessons included a story about a girl who made paper cranes in Hiroshima after suffering from radiation poisoning and one on Japanese detention camps.
My ESL (English as a Second Language) textbook from last year had a story about a turn-of-the-century prison in California where American officials held Chinese illegal immigrants. The prison is famous for its graffiti, written by the immigrants in their desperation. Think about this for one minute: An American ESL textbook telling recent arrivals to this country how bad the United States has been to immigrants and how defacing property is a noble form of protest. I can assure you the latter idea is one students have taken to heart at Huntington Park High School.
Wait! Let me open my current textbook, “Perspectives in Multicultural Literature.” The ninth grade edition has stories by or about: Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, the Kennedy assassination, and Japanese internment. It includes various immigrant stories like “American History,” which is about a girl who can’t cry for JFK because her school keeps Puerto Ricans out of honor classes, and “All-American Girl,” whose protagonist wanted:
“stockings, makeup, store-bought clothes”
and
“…practiced foreign faces, Anglo grins,
repressing a native Latin fluency
for the cooler mask of English ironies”
only to realize:
“My face wouldn’t obey- like a tide
it was pulled back by my lunatic heart
to its old habits of showing feelings.
Long after I’d lost my heavy accent,
my face showed I had come from somewhere else.
I couldn’t keep the southern continent
out of my northern vista of my eyes,
or cut my cara off to spite my face.
I couldn’t look like anybody else
but who I was: an all-American girl.”
On the positive side, the book’s two essays on global warming present opposing viewpoints.
The tenth grade book starts with two essays arguing opposite sides of “Good Samaritan” laws and is followed by the Good Samaritan parable from the Bible (One wonders how they managed to sneak a Bible story in there..)
Then we have an essay on that glorious episode in American history, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. This is followed by more MLK, as well as Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, and Cesar Chavez. Since this is a unit on speeches and argument, it includes a “pro-Vietnam” letter home from a soldier who sounds only slightly less sophisticated than Larry the Cable Guy. Moving on: Malcolm X, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, Frederick Douglass, and this poem titled “Legal Alien”:
“American, but hyphenated,
viewed by Anglos as perhaps exotic,
perhaps inferior, definitely different,
viewed by Mexicans as alien…
…by masking the discomfort
of being pre-judged
Bi-laterally.”
Judging by the book, with all of the difficulties immigrants experience in the United States, it’s a miracle so many decide to stay.
And that’s just for now. Arnold Schwarzenegger just signed a bill into law mandating fair representation of gay, lesbian, transsexual, and transgender people in California textbooks.
Now, my point isn’t to knock Martin Luther King, Jr., who has been the subject of some of my most emotional teaching moments, or Cesar Chavez who, by all accounts, was a decent man. Even Malcolm X had some good things to say.
I also don’t want to criticize my colleagues, most of whom are wonderful teachers, or give the impression that dissent isn’t tolerated. (Although I did receive stares from my colleagues when I inserted the Sermon on the Mount and speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan in the speech unit above.)
I’m just asking why we’d want to show children, many of whom are recent arrivals to our fair land, only the worst part of America? Why would we want them to think that America is predominantly a land filled with racism, prejudice, and unfairness? A nation where the only heroes are those that fight against “the Man.” Don’t they get enough of that from movies and their music? If American educators don’t advocate for our own country – at least some of the time – who will?
I’d like to implore parents not to take anything for granted. Chances are that if your child goes to public school, you’re going to have to teach him patriotic stuff yourself. Increasingly, public school seems to be aimed at instilling a sense of grievance.
Nelson Guirado blogs at Asymmetric.
This is going to comeback and bite us on the backside soon. This PC insanity is driving people apart in this country. On some college campuses today it is possible for minority students to never interact with white students in any constructive way. They have minority only study groups, dorms, and classes. We only have to look at the violence in the world today to see that it is the over exaggeration of racial and cultural differences. By themselves none of these things is a bad idea, it is only when you total everything up and see that there is no counter balance that you have the potential for trouble. And trouble, when dealing with different racial and cutural groups, has to long a track record of ending in violence to ignore.
Exactly! Nobody would absolutely exclude these perspectives from school. It’s just a matter of balance. The constant drip-drip of this stuff gives a false impression.
This year at our local elementary they had a wonderful Veterans Day ceremony. The prinicipal spoke eloquently about what we owe the men & women who serve today & equally those who have served in the past. He even mentioned this nations Christian heritage – at a PUBLIC school!!
The children were encouraged to invite any veteran along & provide their details in advance to the school. We brought a family friend who had served at the end of WW2. All the vets were then publically recognised, had photos taken & were given certificates. It was a moving, heartfelt service. Genuine American patriotism is a beautiful thing to behold… & I speak as a British citizen, enjoying life in the Bluegrass. My family wouldn’t be free without this land.
Blessings
David
There is so much indoctrination going on in our public school systems and silence on true American history and the greatness of this countries foundation.
I’ve started a blog called “Education or Indoctrination in Socialism”
if you or anyone is interested in checking it out it is at:
http://indoctrination.groups.vox.com/
Does anyone have any ideas on how to get our public schools back to teaching American History instead of America is bad garbage, and cultural greatness?
It’s a vicious cycle that isn’t stopping. More kids I meet know about anti-war speakers, Hollywood goons and homosexual heroes than they do about the Civil War or Pealr Harbor. Their ancestors would be rolling their graves. Sickening.
And if you disagree, as I did when I was a public schoolteacher, you’re called names and blackballed. So fair.
These people, comparing the military to the SS and telling their kids that the presidents hates children and blacks, are our current educators? Lovely.
Unfortunately for that little Mexican kid, zero was invented by the Hindus. Another lie told for “cultural self-esteem” purposes.
Here in CA there is a movement to make pre-school mandatory. The erroneous assumption is that the earlier the children get started, the better. It hasn’t dawned on them that they aren’t and haven’t been able to teach those 5 years and up; what makes any one think that getting children at three years and four years is going to be any better? Need any of us point out that some are not even house-broken by three or four years? It is an obvious ploy to generate yet more revenue for the Dept of Education and expand their industry.
Almost 50% of our entire state budget goes to schools. Approximately $12,000 per child per school year. An oversized classroom of 30 students will generate approx $360,000 in just about 186 days. What a scam! How many children in your school? Where does it go? For this we get at 40 – 50 percent drop-out rate, sex with the teacher, and or socially stunted children. Imagine the riot if the Dept of Transportation (Cal Trans) took in about 50% of the state budget and 40% of the bridges and roads failed!
In CA teachers “teach” about 186 days a year and earn as much as most full time employees in CA. That’s a part time job anywhere in America, yet they want full time salaries and benefits. When teachers strike pay close attention to what they are striking about; it ain’t the kids.
One of the many things I can’t seem to get my head around is the idea that in America we live in a materialist capitalist society yet our youth can’t explain simple, let alone compound interest. Don’t even ask them to compute the interest rate. They can’t balance a check book, don’t understand that 18 – 24% interest on a charge card should be illegal, or count the correct change back to you at the fast food joint.
Instead the Dept of Education seems to think we want our children to learn how to put condoms on bananas. We have day cares set up on our high school campuses to take care of those that failed putting the condom on the banana.
I should mention that we have homeschooled our three children since our 13 year old was two or three years old. Our first child could read, write, add and subtract, knew colors, shapes etc before she was four and a half. We tried to enroll her in a charter homeschool. We were told she was too young for kindergarten. Our children have taken state and federal tests to ensure they are able to keep up with the public schoolers. Mine tested out in the top 1%, but the local teachers’ union representative told me that when mine were ready for school to bring them over.
That will never happen.
It is the deepest education conviction I have that money, after the essentials (paper, chalk, books, etc) has NO impact on school success. But, why not try failed plan after failed plan if the money’s free?
“Kids aren’t achieving, what should we do?
“Ummm? Well, we could…that might work”
“OK. Go for it, let’s write a grant. “
SCB~
Please don’t begrudge teachers the salaries they get for teaching over the 9 months of a school year. I’m a newly certified teacher in Texas (thankfully, a state in which teachers’ unions are not legal, as would be any teachers’ strike). Teacher put in lots of overtime over the school year in preparing lesson plans and materials, and many likely spend a fair amount of their own money for classroom materials. I don’t have a classroom of my own yet, but I’ve spent quite a bit on books for my future classroom library (you can visit my blog to see the types of books I want to share with/make available to my future students).
One of the reasons I decided to go into teaching (elementary education) is because I refuse to abandon public education to the left.
I agree that more money thrown at the problem is not the solution. The answer is parental involvement. When I did my student teaching, the kids whose parents/guardians came to parent/teacher conferences were, for the most part, the ones who were performing acceptably or better. The students who were not performing to even an average expectation, or were behavior problems? They are the ones whose parents didn’t come to meet with the teacher. Parental involvement is the key. Even a girl who was likely here illegally was one of the better students in the class – her mother, although she speaks only Spanish, came to see the teacher (and the 3rd grade daughter served as translator). Until we can figure out how to get ALL parents involved, we will still have failing schools. That is the $65 million question – how to you get these parents who think it’s all up to the schools/teachers to educate their children to understand they have just as much, if not more, influence on their children’s education…
The story of General Peter Pace should be read in ALL schools during this time of Veterans Day.
I do not understand why our educators hate American culture so much, that they can not tell stories “Of Immigration, Assimilation, Americanism, Service”
Link Here:
http://maxine-log.blogspot.com/2006/07/of-immigration-assimilation.html