Tag: public schoools

Virginia parents’ fury as school puts up ABCs display… starting with ‘A is for abortion’

A Virginia high school is facing fierce backlash after putting up an alphabet display for Women’s History Month that highlighted abortion and the transgender flag.

West Springfield High School, in Fairfax County, put up the controversial ABCs display in March, reported The Daily Signal.

Shocking images from the project include a poster that stated, ‘A is for Abortion’ and showed a pregnancy test and a coat hanger. 

The first letter alone prompted sharp criticism online from concerned community members who felt the project was politicizing women’s history.

‘Titled “ABCs to Me,” the letter “A” is not for a notable woman of history such as Aviator Amelia Earhart; rather, “A is for Abortion,” accompanied by an image of a coat hanger and a positive pregnancy test. I am not ok with this, and no one should be!’ one person said.

‘The A is a picture of a hanger and a pregnancy test. What in the H is wrong with this school? Fire this person or shut this place down,’ said another.

A third person added, ‘A is for athleticism or a is for achievement or a is for aspirations. No, they went with abortion. Because that defines a woman?’

‘How about A is for Apple and T is for turtle? We must protect the children’s innocence,’ said a fourth.

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Another Brick in the Walz

Isn’t it curious how some people volunteer their personality’s skeleton key? They tell you, This is the most important thing about me, and, by thunder, they are right. But these kernels of soul-truth don’t necessarily mean what the naïfs think they do.

Tim Walz wants you to know he’s just a regular guy. He’s from a little town in Nebraska, he hunts, he was in the armed services. Most of all, he wants you to know he was a public school teacher. The Mankato Scarlets marching band delivered a musical interlude shortly before the Minnesotan governor and vice-presidential nominee took the stage Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention. “Never underestimate a public school teacher!” he crowed as he recounted his first congressional race. He subjected his audience to the tedium of endless and sometimes mixed football metaphors (although, I will admit, Walz’s record as a coach is pretty impressive).

This has been incorporated into the media campaign to cast Walz as an aspirationally avuncular or paternal character. (It’s gotten kind of weird.) Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), a prototype for Walz, also enjoyed or endured this kind of fawning as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate. President Joe Biden, in the happy days before he became a revenant, underwent something similar too. Kaine and Biden, however, had a serious handicap relative to their Minnesotan successor. They maintained a basic sanity or dignity that told them, at the end of the day, they were politicians, not people’s actual honest-to-God parents. 

That is, they were not teachers. They could only aspire to the self-righteousness of a man who works for two-thirds of the year as a guard at a minimum-security juvie facility, and thinks that gives him the right to have his pension plan bankrupt the state. The fanaticism of the public school teacher is rivaled only by that of the unionized transit official. (Stiff competition. I once met a minor MTA bureaucrat who freely admitted to drawing about $60,000 of falsified overtime annually, and went on to explain in tones of outraged dignity that he was the aggrieved party.) 

These peoples’ professional lives are in fact premised on the idea that they know how to raise other people’s children better than they can—can do a better job of feeding them, sheltering them, and occasionally, when the great white wings of the Pädogogesgeist are spread over the face of the earth, even educating them. The social upheaval of the early 2020s centered on schools for a reason.

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Minnesota’s New Social Studies Curriculum Would Racialize First-Graders, Teach High Schoolers About The Evils Of ‘Whiteness, Capitalism, And Christianity’

The Minnesota Department of Education released a draft of its new social studies curriculum standards, which place a new emphasis on diversity, equity, and gender.

The social studies curriculum is up for state-wide review during the 2020-21 school year as part of Minnesota’s 10-year cyclical curriculum review. The Department of Education’s standards committee has dubbed the new framework a “more inclusive approach to social studies education.”

According to a copy of the standards, the committee wants to begin social studies classes with a land acknowledgment. Land acknowledgments tell students that they are learning on land that was conquered by Americans, though once belonged to Native Americans.

“Minnesota is the contemporary and ancestral home of the Anishinaabe and Dakota peoples, and social studies education on this land will acknowledge and honor their contemporary and historical voices,” the draft reads.

Under the new standards, learning about social justice curriculum begins in the first grade. Six and seven-year-olds may be taught about systemic discrimination and how groups have fought against such discrimination.

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