This is just a less serious post about a rather funny incident that happened to me at school. I have a socialist teacher, a teacher with Obama signs all over, wait make that two Obama poster teachers, and of course a communist teacher. Yes, he is a self proclaimed communist who is for “social roles”, but that is beyond the point. The point is that we had to choose a book to read in his class. I had recently gotten End the Fed and was planning on reading it anyway, so I saw a perfect oppurtunity to kill to birds with one stone. He recommended a book about Buddha called Siddartha to a kid, another kid was approved to read The Audacity of Hope, and I was denied permission to read End the Fed. Of course his reasoning was,“It is nothing against Ron Paul, he has great views ( lie; he is a communist), but that is just a more social studies related book and it would be hard to access you on.” Then why did you approve other books of the same style and genre I thought to myself, but kept it in lest he would use that against me when grading my papers. I just wanted to share that to show just how bias schools are today. I am in 10th grade my socialist World History teacher has taught us how Woodrow Wilson was great and how the Civil War was caused by slavery! Oh yes, slavery, and if you debate it you are racist! Also, my Language Arts teacher taught us how “anarchy” is totally awful and we need government, and mentioned how golf and other sports are terrible because they destroy the enviroment, and he even said, I sware on it, “A revolution is coming and we will eat the rich”.
It is quite apparent that there is a large political bias in our schools today; I desire to go to NYU or George Mason for economics to study Austrian Economics, but my school only offers Keynesian macro classes. I understand it is pretty important to take ecnomics at my school in order to get into a college for economics, but I find it absurd that the classes I need for college are completely wrong and go against what I believe completely. I realized just how messed up public schooling is, and I had never factored this in as much when thinking about privatizing education, but this is a great reason why schools should be privatized.
I had a professor who gave students extra credit points for volunteering as slave laborer at the local Obama for President 2008 call center sweat shop.
Tell the professor that the beloved comrade Zinn disagrees with him.
Is that why they voted for Obama?
For my art history class, most of our lecture on analysis, which was the majority of course, had to do Marxist analysis. What I found hilarious was that she would open every lecture telling telling us that she is not trying to “indoctrinate” us in Marxist ideology. I would ask my self, “then why am I taking this class if not to be indoctrinated?”
Haha, I could not agree more. But since today we must pay ridiculously high taxes so the government can innefficiently pay for public schooling, they practically have a monopoly over schooling, so that private schools must charge large sums that not everyone can afford. If the government would just stay out, it would free the market, and all the people who go to school now would have their needs met by private schools that would open to meet the needs of the market. These schools would then compete and drive prices way down, and the crappy schools would go out of business, and one could choose the school of their choice more easily and freely. This would make it cheaper and more efficient than public schooling today, and the schools would be better. Our Keynesian progressive government sickens me, as does the media that sputes out lies to the mass of the population. What has our country/world come to?
Haha Daniel Muffinburg, I am relieved to no that I am not the only one who suffers it in public schools, although that sounds selfihs lol. It also makes me a litttle sad that it happens everywhere. Also, my commy L.A. teacher also is going to be teaching us Marxist Analysis later on lol. He said we were going to learn a few good literary analysis techniques and focus mostly on Marxist anaylysis. It is also crazy how you got extra credit for Obama help, that is completely ridiculous, but you say it was a college professor? Maybe private schooling can’t eliminate the bias problem as long as teachers are entitled to an opinion ( I am not saying private schools aren’t better).
My last year of school (last year) in global class we were instructed to write a letter to Obama about Darfur (seriously). It was 3 parts, what is going on, why do you (the writer, me) care and what should be done to fix it.
I seriously considered writing a 5 page essay on how the United States should dissolve into a voluntaryist society and then have private organizations help fight the state sponsored massacres in Darfur through voluntary means… And then I just said “screw it” because my teacher wouldn’t have given me any credit for it anyway and I just said that we should invade the plays until the problem gets fixed.
But yea, there are a great numbers of examples of inaccurate school text book arguments given to public school kids. I was even told that FDR’s spending didn’t end the depression and yet me and everyone else still idolized him and pretty much were still lead to believe that his new deal ended the depression. I am not kidding you, 3 years ago I would have said pretty much that FDR’s spending didn’t end the depression but that world war 2 did, and I probably would have said that FDR’s spending pulled us out of the depression first, and then if you brought up WWII then I would have been confused and argued against it, or if I had said WWII did it I probably would have argued against it and supported FDR. It was the ultimate of double think. The statist arguments pulled together by my contemporaries are usually pitifully structured and it is obvious that they barley if ever have truly logically challenged authority in terms of principal… Im sure before the year is out I’ll have more jaw dropping conversations of this nature.
I’d be careful about accusing professors of having an ideological bias in schools. Just because one professor may cover things from a certain angle, or perspective, does not make them a marxist. Nor, just because the text-book they use is from an extremely anti-capitalistic standpoint makes them not a marxist. I will say… that I had a Keynesian biased economics professor in my basic economics class I took this winter. I didn’t like it. But I got to learn what their view was and it helped me understand why people here on this forum are so upset about economic fallacies that are commonly held today.
It’s not so bad. I think you have to know what other people think. Not everyone you’re going to run across is going to be a liberal or a libertarian. Some people might be still very in-tune with statist philosophy. I’ve called out my professors a few times when they’ve talked about what the role of government is, and, I’ve called them out on their biases. But… it’s important to know what other people think from their perspective because you can have better arguments, and, then you might even gain a better insight… from another point of view.
Technically, I go to a private school, although it is regulated and funded by the state (just like all the other private schools). After you apply to college, the first letter you get from a school asks you to apply for government financial aid. They don’t even tell if you’ve been accepted or not. Also, many students nowadays can’t afford to pay $1000 to share a dorm on campus, which means that there is huge vacancy rate. That is also why they ask you to apply for housing, right after they ask you apply for financial.
That’s pretty amazing but not uncommon, expect more of the same if not worse when you get to college.
I was a public school teacher when I started getting into Ron Paul, etc. and I’m sure I had my own bias since I emphasized responsibility and “no free lunches” in a figurative sense. I also had the grand idea of encouraging participation through handing out paper certificates to students after they responded correctly to questions. These little certificates the students could use for exchange, like for snickers or candy or whatever I had. Well I turned out to be a worse central banker than I imagined. I ended up having to print more and more to keep up with the demand for certificates, and ran out of goods (scarcity) thus I had to raise prices! Inflation in my own classroom, and I taught foreign languages!
One day a kid loaned 100 of our classroom currency to another kid so he could buy something that day, who would then repay the first kid with 200 the next week. Time preference! The kids were teaching me economics and I didn’t even realize it.
Your experience sounds strange to me. When I went to school I knew nothing about my teacher’s politics. If they had any they kept them to themselves. They did not go beyond what was in the programme during class.
What sort of opportunity did your teacher find appropriate to reveal himself a Communist?
When I was playing Soccer in Portland a few weeks ago, I saw a painting of Castro on the wall of a highschool. I don’t know whether it was positive or negative because the caption was, like everything municipal in Portland, in Spanish.
I had the same teacher C Le Master is talking about. The problem is, End The Fed isn’t really a novel, he is looking for nonfiction or at least a more novel-like book. Yes he is biased, but so is everyone, he is entitled to his opinion. I made an A in his class (So he doesn’t grade down based on political opinion) and I obviously disagreed with him on many things (I also let him know it). We are cool and I still talk to him, we disagree on about everything, but I enjoy talking policy with him. Christian, I got a book you should consider, “How To Break a Terrorist”, by Matthew Alexander, I enjoyed it. It’s about an interrogator who used non-violent/non-bully tactics to get information in order to track down and kill Zarqawi (The main Al-Qaeda leader of Iraq up until his death, if I’m correct)
Oppurtunity? He revealed it when discussing Lao Tse and his communist beliefs. He said it openly when talking about how golf needs to be illegal because it destroys the enviroment and the government needs to “eat the rich”. He said I am a communist. Also, another example which i cam on here to add before even reading new comments was how he today read us a story he wrote giving a static character dynamic traits. The whole things was comparing santa to capitalism and saying he is deminishing society and hurting the poor, and forcing those with no choice into sweat shops, and how the WTO must end it. At the end my friend, who is the only other austro-libertarian in my school of 3,000 kids, said wow communist propaganda. And he said not exactly communist. And I said it is definately anti-capitalist. And he said “yes, it was, i dont hide it, im communist everyone. This story definately had a meaning. You dont have to buy into it but i hope u will.” He is also the one who revealed my S.S. teacher was a socialist, and it was already quite obvious she was a liberal Obama supporter. He puts communist messages into his lesson everyday. I can understand that if you put urself into what ur teaching, that might happen, but he revealed in that story that he knows he does it and hopes we buy into it. That is just messed up.
I did not say he neccesarily graded down. And why would he let others read liberal content of the same genre and style quinn? I am not arguing if he is a good teacher. Also, Al Qaeda is hardly terrorists. We intruded when they did not want us to, and they said that if we did it more, they would act. They did, and we act like we dont know why and say they are radical and blame Islam. Then we send more people in, exactly what they appose, they become more plentiful ( according to our deceieving governement ), and we dont know why. We are just wasting billions through big government and government inefficiency. I do not care what this interagator claims about people who are not even terrorists, and he probably works for the CIA or FBI, both of which should be ended. I would never waste my time with a neocon book like that.
My english language teacher made us watch a 10-20 minute clip of an Obama speech( another clip we watched was about 3-5 minutes long) and then during the break of that class put on an obama music video.She seems to love him.
Other times she’s said she used to hang around with radical feminist’s when she was younger and has even had a full lesson on political correctness in which she defended it saying the media distort it(which is true,granted sometimes) and that it’s original goals/intentions are honourable.I was just sitting there thinking no their not.
I must’ve shaken her world view when I wrote a 7 page essay type piece on how I oppose political correctness including it’s original intent and I pulled out all the stops to denounce it as much as humanly (and academically) possible.She doesn’t grade me down for these pieces ,she seems to find them interesting(though I am very certain she strongly disagrees) just like she found my piece against drug prohibition interesting.She must be so confused on whether I’m left or right wing.
I remember in high school geography that aside from all the stuff on hurricanes, volcanoes etc we also did alot on ‘fair trade’ ,quotas ,tariffs, foreign aid etc.Georgraphy has become so politicized. Hell, even in psychology class a few months back we were asked to write a report on child day care and what we think the government should do to improve it based on research we studied.
For one, last year I was made to watch Obama’s inauguration ceremony in it’s entirety (instead of, you know, attempting to teach us, I guess they figured this was a good use of time).
My History teacher last year was pretty dreadful (Not to mention she knew nothing about history, for the AP Exam we had only covered two topics out of eight and they were the civil war and the civil rights move. I’ll leave you guys to guess her skin tone). Her definition for Capitalist was a greedy person who exploits workers for profit (Not even kidding). And her solution to poverty was to raise the minimum wage (This was a common complaint she had) so one day I asked her why not raise the minimum wage to $1000/hour, needless to say, she didn’t have to much to say about that.