I don't know if the data in this commentary is still true as entitlements and taxes are changing. Perhaps the inequality gap is bigger or smaller than this article suggests, but the premise remains - it is not the amount of "income" that defines one's wealth but how much remains after taxes are paid and benefits are received - what do people have left to spend?
Wall Street Journal, Opinion
After perusing some of my favorite quotes from a wise, long-dead white man, I am certain that we are on a path set for us not by our current political leaders, but by our collective, fallible human nature. Otherwise, how could Alexis de Tocqueville know almost 200 years ago how American liberty would be struggling in 2021? We seem to be heading toward this perilous fate at an ever more rapid pace. Will Americans wake up to the continuing loss of their individual liberty in time to revive it? Or will we see some form of authoritarian bureaucracy (soft or hard tyranny) controlling our lives?
On Human Nature or Why Education in the Tenets of Liberty is Essential
“When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.”
― Democracy in America Volume 2
“Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”
―
“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.” ―
Maintaining Political Power
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”
―
August 16, 2921
For Parents and All Citizens of Lake Oswego - Support education and support local students, but do not support corrupt educational practices no matter where they occur.
My kids graduated from Lake Oswego schools a couple of decades ago, but even then I saw the rot creep into the curriculum - the dumbing down of math and English, and an anti-American sentiment that had crept into history and Social Studies. I worked to keep my kids out of the classes I deemed to be academic sink holes and lessons I thought ran counter to our family values.
Luckily I had a background as a teacher and knew what to look for and how the system worked. I also did a little bit of substituting in LO and nearby districts to see what was happening with evolving education practices. Luckily there were still older teachers around who did not bend to passing fads and taught a straight academic curriculum. I sought out these teachers, avoided the woke, used PCC and other sources for alternative learning, formed learning groups for grammar and vocabulary taught by friends with experience in the subjects, and taught a couple of art classes in my garage. When needed I filled in gaps in my kids’ education by home schooling in science, essay and creative writing, math and reading. I was on various school and district advisory committees and learned the law regarding student rights to an appropriate education. It was a lot of work. But I fear the effort would be many times harder today, because instead of just filling in curriculum gaps, I would have to unteach the social indoctrination that has infiltrated the schools. The older teachers are gone - replaced by those who have a different idea of what public education is meant to achieve.
Oregon education is a bad joke in the national news. The complete surrender to wokeness has left Oregon’s public school students without a defense against bad policies and unaccountable teachers and administrators. As colleges are abandoning standardized tests, grades and demonstrable academic skills will become more important for admissions. Oregon students will be entering the fray with a black eye, not through any fault of their own, but because the so-called adults in the room believe that leveling the playing field means lowering the ladder of expectations and success. According to Forbes, Oregon ranks 43rd in quality of public education among the states.
A few weeks ago I visited the Lake Oswego School District website to see what is being done regarding Critical Race Theory indoctrination. I had hoped, but did not really expect, that Lake Oswego had somehow escaped the insanity of wokeness sweeping the country and that the site would be filled with information on academic topics touting rigorous standards for all students. Instead I found the depressingly common references to Diversity Equity and Inclusion (aka Critical Race Theory), including a page devoted to books and resources on the subject. All the popular, radical tomes are there, but none of the moderating voices of Black academics and intellectuals who do not agree with the narrative of America being systemically racist.
Until 2019 I had no personal experience with DEI instruction. Then the Metro Master Gardeners’ annual training session introduced a half-day course on White Privilege. It was an eye-opening view into how degrading and racist this ideology is. I cannot fathom how any organization can justify this kind of racist, hate-filled teaching. This is not white “fragility” talking, I just don’t have the white guilt that others seem to project. Numerous studies have proven the damage that teaching White Privilege can have on students and the population at large.
Then I started reading. I found that many wise, intelligent black, white and other voices have the same thoughts I do and still believe in the morality and fairness of a color blind society. Unfortunately, their voices are not being heard and are nowhere to be seen on the LO School District resources website
I have prepared a list of resources to counter what the mainstream education establishment offers. I present the list here and invite readers to send me their suggestions for additions to the list or tell about their experiences with CRT or other woke assaults being perpetrated on our kids.
I encourage parents and district taxpayers to let the school board know what they think about what is happening in our schools and support parents who choose alternative learning for their children when they encounter a curriculum they do not agree with or find inadequate. I did it 20 years ago, but the task is much harder today. Government schools don’t have control over the children in their care, parents do.
The Problem
MSN News
Oregon promoting teacher course on 'dismantling racism in mathematics'
Jake Dima 2/12/2021
The Oregon Department of Education is promoting and encouraging its educators to register for a course that likens modern math instruction to the "toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture..
"White supremacy culture infiltrates math classrooms in everyday teacher actions," the course description stated. "Coupled with the beliefs that underlie these actions, they perpetuate educational harm on Black, Latinx, and multilingual students, denying them full access to the world of mathematics."
The course continued in a section on "white supremacy culture" in math classrooms, saying, "This reinforces the idea that there is only one right way to do math. The history of mathematics, its colonization, and what is deemed as 'acceptable' knowledge is rich and complex, therefore, the way that mathematics is taught in the United States needs to be interrogated because it currently centers Western, Eurocentric ways of processing and knowing information. When students are required to learn in this way, they either have to unlearn their learned native traditions to meet teacher expectations, or they are deprived of learning math in their ancestral history. For teachers, teaching the way they learned also reinforces the right to comfort for teachers because to conform is easier than to challenge themselves to teach math differently."
The program insisted that educators "identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views." It added that it is "unequivocally false" to assume math is an "objective" discipline.
"The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so," it said. "Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict."
The course instead encouraged teachers to "come up with at least two answers that might solve this problem." The course is also riddled with guidance to reject "individualism" in favor of "collectivism."
From 2021 Regular Legislative Session,
Oregon Senate Bill 744:
(d) The determination of whether the requirements for a high school diploma in this state are equitable and inclusive.
(2) Notwithstanding any rules adopted by the State Board of Education, a student may not be required to show proficiency in Essential Learning Skills as a condition of receiving a high school diploma during the 2021-2022 or 2022-2023 school year.
(b) Notwithstanding paragraph (a) of this subsection, the State Board of Education may not require a student who has successfully completed the credit requirements prescribed by paragraph (a) of this subsection or by rule of the board to demonstrate proficiency in any skill or academic content area.
The Solution
From The Heritage Foundtion Report:
Rescuing Math and Science from Critical Race Theory’s Racial Discrimination
Critical race theory is overt racial discrimination. Theorists claim that America is systemically racist, despite the Civil Rights Act and state and federal agencies designed to stop and prosecute racist acts. And despite the enormous and obvious progress on race that this country has made.
Educators have used CRT to redesign history, civics, and English instructional content to focus on the critical obsession with oppression and power. Now, school officials are also changing classroom content in the hard sciences and math away from facts and skills and focusing on racial activism. (In math!) Parents, teachers, and policymakers should oppose any form of racial discrimination in schools, and reject these insidious efforts to inject prejudice and racial bias into technical subjects that should be used to help children—of all backgrounds—to develop skills and abilities that will help them to be successful in school and in life.
Jonathan Butcher is the Will Skillman Fellow in Education in the Center for Education Policy, of the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity, at The Heritage Foundation.
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RESOURCES
American History
Book
The 1776 Report
The 1776 Report is the official report of The President's Advisory 1776 Commission. Submitted to the President and released as a public document on January 18, 2021, the report explains the core principles of the American founding and how they have shaped American history, considers the leading challenges to these principles at home and abroad, and calls on all Americans to “restore our national unity by rekindling a brave and honest love for our country and by raising new generations of citizens who not only know the self-evident truths of our founding, but act worthy of them.” This edition features the original text with the addition of notes and commentary by Chair Larry P. Arnn, Vice Chair Carol Swain, and Executive Director Matthew Spalding.
The 1776 Curriculum
American History and Civics Lessons for K-12 Classrooms
https://k12.hillsdale.edu/Curriculum/The-Hillsdale-1776-Curriculum/
The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum is a complete collection of lesson plans for teaching American history, civics, and government to K-12 students. Students who study using this curriculum learn about American history from the colonies through the Civil War at four different times during their K-12 years, each time increasing in depth. The curriculum also includes American history since the Civil War and American government and civics for both middle and high school students.
1776 Unites
https://1776unites.com/our-work/curriculum/
Contact: educate@1776unites.com
The 1776 Unites curriculum offers authentic, inspiring stories from American history that show what is best in our national character and what our freedom makes possible even in the most difficult circumstances. 1776 Unites maintains a special focus on stories that celebrate black excellence, reject victimhood culture, and showcase African-Americans who have prospered by embracing America’s founding ideals.
Created by a team of independent scholars, counselors, and role models, the 1776 Unites curriculum equips students to seize the opportunities afforded them today. These lessons are grounded in the Woodson Center Principles and help educators bring their K-12 students encouragement, enrichment, and the genuine empowerment that comes with personal agency.
As 1776 Unites founder Robert L. Woodson put it, America’s founding generation built the new nation “upon a set of virtues and values that would create a truly free society, the freest the world had ever seen. They even knew at the time it was falling short of truly delivering on that promise for all, but they knew what they were working toward.”
1776 Unites Library
Suggested books to read and to purchase.
https://1776unites.com/library/
Race
Video
Uncle Tom
In a collection of intimate interviews with some of America’s most provocative Black Conservative thinkers, Uncle Tom takes a different look at being Black in America. Featuring media personalities, ministers, civil rights activist, veterans, and a self-employed plumber, the film explores their personal journeys of navigating the world as one of America’s most misunderstood political and cultural groups: The American Black Conservative. In this eye-opening film from Director Justin Malone and Executive Producer Larry Elder, Uncle Tom examines self-empowerment, individualism and rejecting the victim narrative. Uncle Tom shows us a different perspective of American History from this often ignored and ridiculed group. Features intimate, candid interviews with some of the leading African American voices in the conservative community.
Video
Created Equal, Clarence Thomas in His Own Words
Although Clarence Thomas remains a controversial figure, few know him beyond his contentious U.S. Supreme Court confirmation battle. But behind the headlines, Thomas life is a classic American tale: born poor in the segregated South, only to become one of the most influential justices in the highest court of the land. Created Equal tells Thomas life story truly and fully, without cover-ups or distortions.
Documentary
Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World, A Personal Exploration
By Jason Riley
Traces Thomas Sowell's journey from humble beginnings to the Hoover Institution, becoming one of our era's most controversial economists, political philosophers, and prolific authors.
Documentary
The Great American Race Game
https://greatamericanracegame.com
It is said that “All Whites Are Racist”. There is still plenty of racial bigotry in America, as there is elsewhere in the world. It is a terrible thing, and should be exposed, fought and condemned. Racists should be attacked and shamed. But is it helpful, or fair, to accuse people of being racist who are not, to find racism where there is none, and to use the accusation of ‘racist’ indiscriminately as a lazy political insult?
Book
Black Eye for America: How Critical Race Theory Is Burning Down the House
By Carol M. Swain and Christopher Schorr
In schools and workplaces across the United States, Americans are being indoctrinated with a divisive, anti-American ideology: Critical Race Theory (CRT). Based in cultural Marxism, CRT bullies and demonizes whites while infantilizing and denying agency to blacks, creating a deep racial rift. As Abraham Lincoln famously observed, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." CRT aims to divide the American nation against itself and burn down the house.
In Black Eye for America: How Critical Race Theory Is Burning Down the House, Carol Swain and Christopher Schorr expose the true nature of Critical Race Theory, and they offer concrete solutions for taking back the country's stolen institutions. They describe CRT in theory and practice, accounting for its origins and weaponization within American schools and workplaces; explain how this ideology threatens traditional American values and legal doctrines, including civil rights; and equip everyday Americans with strategies to help them resist and defeat CRT's pernicious influence.
Book
Discrimination and Disparities
By Thomas Sowell
“In this provocative book, Thomas Sowell turns the tables on those who automatically link disparate outcomes to discrimination. He begins by focusing instead on the myriad of factors that need to come together for success. Before we can explain why people fall behind in life, we must first understand what life demands for success…. Native intelligence by itself does not guarantee success. Hard work is important, but nature can be capricious. Who knew that being first born is a persistent factor for success in life? The book is chock full of such pertinent observations, none of which reflect discrimination by anyone. The book is a wonderful short introduction to the thought of one of our most important social thinkers.”―Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr., Senior Fellow, CATO Institute
Book
White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era
“With his characteristic honesty, clarity and hard-won wisdom, Shelby Steele exposes the social hypocrisies and racial lies that transformed the once promising post-civil rights era into a period of cultural decadence and mediocrity. We owe Citizen Steele our thanks. On questions of race in America—white guilt, black opportunism—he is our twenty-first century Socrates: the powerful, lucid and elegant voice of a refreshingly independent thinker who desires only to see us liberated from sophistry and self-destructive illusions.” -- Charles Johnson, author of MIDDLE PASSAGE, National Book Award winner
Book
Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers
By Robert L. Woodson Sr.
In the rush to redefine the place of black Americans in contemporary society, many radical activists and academics have mounted a campaign to destroy traditional American history and replace it with a politicized version that few would recognize. According to the new radical orthodoxy, the United States was founded as a racist nation—and everything that has happened throughout our history must be viewed through the lens of the systemic oppression of black people.
Rejecting this false narrative, a collection of the most prominent and respected black scholars and thinkers has come together to correct the record and tell the true story of black Americans in all its complexity, diversity of experience, and poignancy.
Book
Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism's Looming Catastrophe
By Dr. Voddie M. Baucham Jr.
“I believe we are being duped by an ideology bent on our demise. This ideology has used our guilt and shame over America’s past, our love for our brethren, and our good and godly desire for reconciliation and justice as a means through which to introduce destructive heresies.”
“I want this book to be a clarion call. I want to unmask the ideology of Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality in hopes that those who have imbibed in it can have the blinders moved from their eyes, and those who have bowed in the face of it can stand up, take courage, and ‘contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.’”
See also YouTube videos of lectures by Dr. Voddie Baucham:
“Biblical Justice vs Social Justice”
“Cultural Marxism”
Article
What Does Teaching ‘White Privilege’ Actually Accomplish? Not What You Might Think (Or Hope)
By Zaid Jilani
When activists and academics invoke the phrase “white privilege,” they typically are speaking of advantages that whites, on average, have over members of other ethnic minority groups in our society. But there is a danger that, by talking about this inequality as an all-consuming phenomenon, we will end up creating a flattened and unfair image that portrays all whites in all situations and all contexts as benefiting from unearned advantages. Indeed, it’s possible that we will cause people to confuse a structural inequality that exists on the level of group average with the circumstances of every individual within a particular racial group.
Article
The Fallacy Of White Privilege — And How It’s Corroding Society
By Rav Arora
https://nypost.com/2020/07/11/the-fallacy-of-white-privilege-and-how-its-corroding-society/
None of the statistics in this piece discount racial prejudice, unequal opportunities or the privilege of not experiencing racism. They simply point to the glaring fallacies of the all-consuming white-privilege narrative which has degraded our national discourse into identity politics and racial tribalism. White people are now one-dimensionally seen as an undifferentiated mass of privilege and wealth whereas minorities are seen as powerless victims oppressed by a society ingrained with white supremacy and racial bigotry.
Article
Language and Thought
https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2020/09/23/language-and-thought-n2576593
Seventeenth-century poet and intellect John Milton predicted, "When language in common use in any country becomes irregular and depraved, it is followed by their ruin and degradation." Gore Vidal, his 20th-century intellectual successor, elaborated saying: "As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate." Sloppy language permits people to get away with speaking and doing all manner of destructive nonsense without being challenged.
Article
The Devil and Karl Marx
https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2020/09/16/the-devil-and-karl-marx-n2576177
The world's intellectual elite readily focus on Adolf Hitler's murderous atrocities but ignore those of the world's socialists. Keep in mind that one does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one must believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights.
Website
Critical Race Theory
Critical race theory (CRT) makes race the prism through which its proponents analyze all aspects of American life, categorizing individuals into groups of oppressors and victims. It is a philosophy that is infecting everything from politics and education to the workplace and the military.
Many Heritage Foundation Reports on CRT on this website.
View the Critical Race Theory Legislation Tracker to see what's happening in your state.
CRT: Knowing It When You See It and Fighting It When You Can
Rescuing Math and Science from Critical Race Theory’s Racial Discrimination
Climate Change
Book
Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts
Us All
“We must protect the planet, but how? Some strands of the environmental movement have locked themselves into a narrative of sin and doom that is counterproductive, anti-human, and not terribly scientific. Shellenberger advocates a more constructive environmentalism that faces our wicked problems and shows what we have to do to solve them.” -- Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Enlightenment Now
Book
Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters
By Steven E. Koonin
“Essential reading and a timely breath of fresh air for climate policy. The science of climate is neither settled nor sufficient to dictate policy. Rather than an existential crisis, we face a wicked problem that requires a pragmatic balancing of costs and benefits.”
—William W. Hogan,professor of Global Energy Policy at Harvard Kennedy School
| —Aldous Huxley |
