American Progress
I have written extensively about the master narrative that dominates the teaching of U.S. History in post-civil rights America throughout this website. The mobilizing of pro-government workers unions has put this issue front and center. The purpose of this blog is to remind our visitors that the humanities curriculum as it was adjusted after the assassinations of MLK Jr. and Malcolm X could have done nothing else but to intensify already existent divisions in our country, thence to under-educate the students most in need of high quality education that would prepare them to compete in the job market in fields where there is high demand for skilled labor.
I refer of course to the focus on Native Americans as victims of westward expansion; the Mexican War; slavery, the slave trade, the Civil War and Reconstruction; the Chinese Exclusion Act; the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII; and the exclusionary policies of labor unions until the establishment of the CIO. Not only these events were and are deployed by leftists and liberals to insure the hatred of “the dominant culture” (including the “racist” white working class), but these events that did of course happen, are said to linger in the present, despite a congeries of government programs at all levels, including preferential treatment in the race for college admissions, hiring in government employment, separatist ethnic studies programs in universities and colleges, and in corporations.
1960s activists against the Viet Nam war and “the system” have taken over the command posts of education and media, always in the name of a higher law than those “bourgeois” rules that constitute the basis for our democratic republic. Such high dudgeon is then used to justify lawless actions against “the system” that has tortured and dispossessed the minorities who comprise so much of the base of the Democratic Party. So although we see mostly white faces in the Wisconsin protesters, I suggest that their “civil disobedience” is experienced by them as a link to abolitionists and others who argued for “the higher law” that abrogated the Constitution, seen as a slaveholders’ document. OTOH, recall that Charles Sumner, the antislavery Senator from Massachusetts and a founder of the Republican Party, did not appeal to a higher law, but rather argued that the case for antislavery lay in the Declaration of Independence and in the Preamble to the Constitution; that the individual States were akin to Republics that should insure the promised equality in our founding documents, hence could not use “state’s rights” to justify slavery and its expansion. After the Civil War, he pleaded that the hatred must stop. For this, along with his “radical” even “Jacobin” proposal for compensating the freedmen (along with patriot soldiers and poor whites) with confiscated land and full civil rights, he has been diminished by some key academic authorities as harsh and extreme.
Already, government and other unions are mobilizing across the nation to strengthen their collective hands against an insurgent Republican Party. It is to be hoped that the public will use this opportunity to examine every phase of our educational system, including the demoralizing curriculum that is hurting everyone, indeed, that in tandem with much of the mass media, is inspiring cynicism on a massive scale, threatening to bring down the Republic, a Republic that is our “last best hope” for the future of our species.
The Clare Spark Blog 
[…] Dr. Spark: We can’t talk about schools and teachers unions without inspecting the current curriculum, which is negative about America NOW, as opposed to a straightforward account of achievements and failures. […]
Pingback by Dr. Clare Spark: Inflaming minorities in the universities « The IUSB Vision Weblog — March 16, 2011 @ 4:03 am |
I believe the answer will be found in the properties of Liberty. Most of us make Liberty synonymous with freedom but it is not. It has the elements of rights, compassion, flexibility and constraint. While Liberty is concderned with my rights it is also concderned with your rights so we sometimes have to take turns to protect both our rights. In some cases we must “give Liberty” for you to take action.
If you come to my door you knock for permission to enter. I do not have to give that permission. Under dictatorial rules I do not have the power or the ability to tell the government to back up and use a warrant. Yet the government must have power to breach my right to privacy under certain circumstances.
Our nation has the right to breach Obama’s privacy but have let him get away with not revealing his records. We should not do that for it is a breach of our liberty. We do not allow criminals that right and deal with it by due process. Obama has a right to privacy but it is not an unalienabgle right.
The Democrats and Labor union in Wisconsin are demanding that our government bow to their authority as any dictator would. They do not believe in individual liberty. It is all colllective under the full authority of union officials with no actual input from the rank and file. There is adequate history that testifies to this.
All this goes quite deep so it takes study more than a passing glance. We need more debate on this.
Comment by whit — February 25, 2011 @ 1:12 am |