The “Let’s Brainwash American Children Club” Has a New Member

Venerable Scholastic has joined progressive educators and teachers unions in an effort to indoctrinate and radicalize American school children.

Scholastic, a student magazine that has been in business for over 90 years, has caught the progressive fever. (H/T Mary Grabar.) This malady affects common sense and good judgment and leads the afflicted to report news from a biased, progressive viewpoint.

In its December issue, Scholastic, which purports to “believe that all sides of the issues of our times should be fairly discussed — with deep respect for facts and logical thinking,” gets all gooey-eyed about the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, mentioning that OWS concerns itself with “protesters,” “voicing concerns,” “Americans wanting more opportunity to share in company’s prosperity,” and “workers that they feel that they can never get ahead.” To be sure, some of these types are present at OWS events.

But, Scholastic omits a few inconvenient details, like the fact that the OWS camps have been a magnet for Communists, anarchists, street hustlers, and common criminals and have been breeding grounds for murder, rape, vandalism, robbery and anti-Jewish sentiment. The filth left by many of these criminals — I mean protesters — has taxed municipal sanitation systems at great cost to taxpayers. As of December 9th, there were 417 incidents in all. You would think that Scholastic could have managed to mention that all is not sweetness and light in OWSland.

How did Scholastic treat the Tea Partiers? Not so well. Tina Korbe at Hot Air quotes from the October 2010 Scholastic,

“Tea Party candidates also had some surprise wins in primary elections, which determine who will represent their political parties on the November ballot. Christine O’Donnell, a candidate for Vice President Joseph Biden’s Senate seat in Delaware, was backed by the Tea Party. She has since become known as the candidate who has had to declare publicly that she is ‘not a witch.’

“’If any time in your life you make an important decision when you’re mad, there’s an 80 per cent chance you’re going to make a mistake,’ Clinton said at a rally for Reid. ‘I don’t want people to abandon their anger. I want them to channel it so they can think clearly.’”

So, the OWSers have “concerns” but the Tea Partiers are “angry.” Christine O’Donnell is reduced to her unfortunate “Not a witch” comment, but Harry “Taxes are voluntary” Reed gets only positive words. (Just a personal note – I have been to many Tea Parties and have spoken at a couple and never saw or heard about any rapes robberies, assaults, vandalism or Jew hatred. And the area the Tea Party was held was in pristine condition after those involved held their event and went home.)

We would be lucky if it were just a student magazine like Scholastic that is spreading the bowdlerized OWS message to kids, but this is just not the case. Just a few examples of other offenders are the people behind the Facebook page Teach • Occupy Wall Street which claims,

“Teach Occupy Wall Street is for educators to share ideas, lesson plans, resources, website, youtubes, classroom practice etc. as we teach about the Occupy Wall Street movement. It is important for teachers to model civic courage to their students — the notion that we should act as if we live in a real democracy. One way to do that is to engage students in deep thinking about what is going on in the world around them. Spread the word. Teach OWS!”

Where to begin? “…we should act as if we live in a real democracy.” Don’t these “educators” know that our founders gave us not a democracy but a republic? Benjamin Franklin put the reason for this succinctly, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.”

Then there are the teachers unions that have done their best to take advantage of the class warfare sentiment inherent in the OWS movement, whose motto could very well be “I’m poor because you’re rich.” As I wrote back in October,

“A couple of weeks ago, United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten made sympathetic statements about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Now the California Teachers Association has jumped in with a full endorsement and suggestions on its website as to how teachers and others can get involved in OWS activities.

“Stunning in its mendacity, CTA issued a press release (H/T Mike Antonucci) which announced its “support of the nationwide ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement for tax fairness and against corporate greed.” It goes on to say, ‘…a stable tax structure begins with everyone paying their fair share.’”

Additionally, when OWS fever was peaking last month, teachers actually called in sick and encouraged their students to join them in solidarity with other protesters on the frontlines.

At the end of the day, school children are being manipulated, lied to and taught a one-sided, distorted view of the world. From the mainstream media, many of their teachers and their unions and “educational” magazines, kids are getting hit foursquare with highly politicized, progressive propaganda. Its purveyors have no interest in education or the truth, only presenting the “facts” that fit their worldview. It’s disgusting and everyone involved in this enterprise should be ashamed of themselves.

About the author: Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.