Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Education Today

This is what passes for education in some of the classrooms in America today:

A Northern California junior high school history teacher is telling angry parents the letter to President Bush he sent home with their children for them to sign may have said they wanted to renounce their U.S. citizenship, but he never was going to mail them and he only meant for them "to start a discussion."

The point was, I wanted to ask parents if they would sign such a letter if conditions that existed prior to the Revolution were happening now," Brooks said. "I just wanted to start a discussion."

Yeah, right. In the right context, that lame excuse might have worked. But according to a student actually in the class, that's not quite how it was.

The letter certainly started a discussion in the home of Michael Hill, whose daughter Kaytlen, 13, told him she was supposed to bring it back to school, signed the next day. When he quizzed her further, she told him about the classroom lessons behind the letter.

"The lesson being taught in class was that the U.S. kidnaps innocent people and takes them to Cuba, where they are kept indefinitely and tortured," Hill said he learned from Kaytlen. When he asked if the teacher had mentioned Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the U.S. is holding terror suspects, she told him, "Yes."

Brooks also told the class illegal wiretaps and other types of government surveillance were being directed at innocent people, according to Hill's daughter, who was in tears when she told her father.

Oh, but he only wanted to start a discussion about the Founders, right? Another whacked-out liberal nutball posing as a teacher. Unfortunately, many parents aren't as involved as Mr. Hill, who transferred his daughter out of that class. The ones who remain will have to sit through a class meant to teach them about American history, but will only teach them to hate their country.