Public enemy #1Posted: 2016-06-26
Don Kennedy 6-22-16
Jesse James? Jeffrey Dahmer? Al Capone? Donald Trump? If you answered "yes" to any of those names, you would be incorrect.
It has to be our education system. Our education system has devolved in the past eighty years into an institution which refuses to teach that the United States is the greatest nation on earth and why it is so.
No longer is a comprehensive history of our Founding Fathers being taught. Very little is taught about the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. And based on the History and Civics textbooks I’ve reviewed since 2007 it looks as if nothing is being done about it. The school boards continue to choose the most left-wing, liberal history textbooks they can find. Worse yet, they don’t review them for content. They take someone else’s word for it, while ignoring any counter arguments. Yet content is most important for the building of young minds.
A few years ago I gave a fifth grade student a copy of the third grade McGuffey’s Reader to read to me. After seeing some of her English Language Arts material, I thought it would be an interesting exercise. Sure enough, it was. She couldn’t read the first page. She said it was too difficult. As a nation, we officially stopped using the McGuffey Reader in 1960.
Some time after that intellectual excursion, a Desert Vista senior student and I were talking about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the founding principles, and our presidents.
When I asked who was our first president, he quickly replied, "George Washington." Then I asked who was the second president? Silence...then "Roosevelt?" I asked which one and the look on his face was priceless. It was a look of confusion and astonishment. He had no idea there were two Roosevelt presidents.
We went from the presidents to the Constitution. We began discussing the Preamble, and I learned he knew nothing about it. I asked when he had studied the Constitution, and he said it had been done in his junior year Civics class. This young man was a "B" student who didn’t sleep through his classes. Is it possible the teacher didn’t properly present the subject?
All of that took place before the Common Core State Standards Initiative was approved. The CCSSI was to be the epitome of the learning experience. But, it was only for Math and the English Language Arts. Nothing was prepared for American History, or any other history for that matter. It’s up to the school districts to devise their own History curricula. From what I’ve seen in the Kyrene and the Tempe Union districts, the curriculum directors are doing a poor job of guiding their schools in teaching how great America is and why it’s so terrific. However, they are doing a fine job of teaching that global warming is man-made and the earth was created from ice, dust and water.
Public enemy #1 is slowly destroying our nation. Pax tecum.
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