Portland Parks Held Hostage by Occupy

Portland Parks Held Hostage by Occupy
DAY 141

Friday, January 27, 2012

UPDATE: Viva la Education! Educationistas! Target Portland's Three Year Olds with "Social Justice" Instruction

First in a Series
What is social justice? Like the word 'sustainability,' no one seems to know the definition. The term is ping'd like a pinball between people who, when hit with it, robotically nod.  No one gives thought to what it means--least of all the left.

And the social justice crowd wants to make sure your Portland Public School student is steeped in it. They call it "Re-thinking" the schools. It's a misnomer, however, because no thinking is required by you or your little bots who sit in the seats in government schools.

But social justice isn't justice at all. Justice allows for equal treatment under law. Social justice strives for equal outcomes.



As Dennis Prager outlines here, there's a chasm of difference between real justice and jerry-rigged social justice:

From "ReThinking" Website
Social justice means left wing equality. So there is no social justice if there are rich people and poor people. Definitionally that is social injustice. Justice has no problem with [people] being rich and poor. Social justice has a problem with there being rich and poor. If the rich got rich justly there is no problem with it, but social justice distorts the meaning of justice in the name of the egalitarian ideal that motivates the left.
In Portland a cadre of "social justice" educators is holding a series of "training" sessions for teachers on inculcating our kids with their idea of "social justice." The latest one is tonight.

TGIF: Teaching and Organizing for Social Justice

 Dear Portland Area Rethinking Schools friends,

Please join us for our next Rethinking Schools event:
  Teaching and Organizing for Social Justice
  When: Friday, January 27th; 4 pm - 6 pm
  Where: The Subud House (3185 NE Regents Dr. -- at Mason. Take NE 33rd, turn at the light at Mason, opposite Wilshire Park.)
Here's what they plan for your three to nine year old children:
Geared toward early childhood/primary teachers (pre-K through 3rd), childcare workers, parents and anyone with a stake in the education of young children, this workgroup will focus on ways to teach 3 to 9-year olds with an orientation toward social justice. We'll collectively select topics and our discussions will involve sharing experiences as well as engagement with readings. Initial readings will be drawn from Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves and Rethinking Early Childhood Education. Depending on the particular interests of the group, themes might include: developmentally appropriate ways to help children understand/explore race, gender, class, ability and family structure; creating an anti-bias learning community;

Here's their stated purpose:
Modeled after the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) that has transformed the Chicago Teachers Union, Social Equality Educators (SEE) is a new rank-and-file organization of educators inside the National Education Association. The first chapter of SEE formed in Seattle in 2009 and there is now an effort underway to start a Portland-area chapter. SEE seeks to transform education in terms that empower students, teachers, and the communities that our public schools serve.  As members of the NEA we understand that the union has a vital role to play in creating an equitable education system.  As educators, we understand the importance of using culturally relevant and holistic curriculum to empower our students. We come together to fight the corporate reform of our schools and to organize for a socially just education system.
They're especially oriented toward fill-in-the-blank justice such as "environmental justice:"
especially focused on environmental justice issues--climate change, water, “extreme energy”-

Why not American values and American exceptionalism? Because you can't sell Marxism and sameness with individualism and exceptional behavior.

In fact, according to the Education Action Group this is where this group of believers come from:
traces the migration of the extreme left from economic Marxism to “cultural Marxism,” replacing the theory of class warfare with a cultural war which pits revisionism against our best values and traditions. Freed from the moorings of our shared history and outlook as a nation, this cultural Marxism replaces the values of the melting pot with those of a stubbornly maintained cultural and linguistic diversity. It mocks the motto E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one) and emphasizes division, conflict, and competing interests.

More on the program today. More to come at Victoria Taft blog. 

UPDATE: ON THE PROGRAM TODAY12:45 kyle olson author of Indoctrination: How ‘Useful Idiots’ Are Using Our Schools to Subvert American Exceptionalism.

6 comments:

  1. There is some really scary stuff here. Did you know that as part of this, they are explicitly teaching that the "Privilege of Whiteness" is the root cause of all minority issues today? Apparently a good part of this Social Justice is restitution for past crimes supposedly committed by the white race. See my blog at http://seligman4schools.blogspot.com for details -- there I talk about the Hillsboro schools, but in the comment fields you will see links to the same teachings at the PPS site.

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  2. yes. We've talked about it on the program and I'm glad you've brought it up again.

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  3. Tell us Victoria, how this indoctrination of public school children to the left's social justice agenda differs from the right's long standing attempt to indoctrinate the children to creationism masquerading it as science? Both are wrong, yet the GOP religious fanatics have been doing this for decades and you have said NOTHING.

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  4. Hi dj,

    I don't know nationally, but I'm unaware of Creationism being taught in Oregon public schools unless you count PPS's old afrocentric program which taught kids that african amercians flew around the pyramids on flying carpets (thanks, Matthew Prophet) before white people stole the secret from them evidently before the could write it down.

    The problem with this issue dj, is it's not just equal outcomes, it's equal outcomes based on cultural references. Just as in Portland's shiny new Office of Equity, cultural competency and these other terms are not defined, but I suspect reparations and racial quotas could be synonyms. It's really an admission by the progressive education establishment that they have failed over the last 40 years and can use these new metrics to justify turning out more ill educated kids. Like the late Seantor Daniel Patrick Monyhan's phrase of "defining deviancy down". If you have problems getting people to meet the goal, lower the bar...so much easier than confronting poor parenting and child behavior.

    Now this all sounds well and good (especially if your in a government job making the changes and immune from them) until you try to make it work in practice. Wonder if teachers are willing to take a pay cut for "social justice" or make the teaching staff refect the "community" at teh cost of their jobs? Or even better, use the PERS fund to pay for their sins.

    Imagine just as your going under anesthesia, you learn your neurosurgeon's cultural reference is smoking weed and playing X Box.....but he got all A in high school and college... but perfectly adjusted for his race, sexual identity, socio economic status, orientation, victimization quotient, and an elective of their choice to personalize it. Or the cop writing you a ticket, your attorney, a jury, or any person in life that has power over you or you depend on.

    One of my fondest memeories of Mayor Katz was when she got into a heated argument with Derry Jackson, black PPS school board memeber and wife beater, over who's group had been shafted more by white people. That's what you can look forward to in school, but don't worry they sell those small bottles of "White Guilt" in the teachers' lounge to get you through those afternoon lulls in conscience or independent thought. : )

    While merit is not a perfect metric, it's miles ahead of a system based upon envy, hate, and government sponsored racism.

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  5. Mike, out school system is so screwed up from a multitute of directions it may never recover. I still hold parents ultimately responsible for the ills of their children. How is Mike, that the children of today are fatter and lazier than ever in US history? Did they learn eating and video games from public school starting in pre-k? I think not.

    And I am with you on this bar lowering trend to satisfy racial balance in employment. It wreaks of stupidity and caused danger and lowers the standard of living for everyone. I experienced it firsthand in 1976 when IBN hired me. A number of minorities were hired along with me that couldn't pass the training on their own merits, yet management allowed it to satisfy the unwritten quotas and not get the attention of the EEOC. Then, once I began working, I noticed the trend of minority employees to slack, take time off for just about any reason, paid BTW, and still "earn" high performance appraisals. Indeed Mike, one of my minority peers couldn't even identify a broken on/off switch on a copier to fix; complete and total incompetence. Yet management described his work record as good as mine. Worse, managers aware of this BS were not allowed to fire minorities, they just transferred them to another department or promoted them out of their own. Then we ended up with incompetence in decision making positions. Is it any wonder IBM had it's worst years in the 1980s with all these incompetents?

    I also strenuously object to standards being lowered for public safety positions such as firefighter or law enforcement. Before this age of "enlightenment" policemen were big, football sized men of intimidating presence. Scuffles happened,bones were broken, however, shooting were few. Lower the physical standard and what do you get? A meek looking woman or small man with a gun trained to shoot first instead. And firefighters? NO way in hell should those physical standards ever be lowered. I want someon capable of carrying me out of a fire single handedly, not some politically correct hire that has to call for backup.

    And Derry Jackson was the epitome of a local maggot.

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  6. Hi dj,

    The public schools should be the last bulwark against this kind of thinking. Its staggering to think that in the richest, most technologically advanced country in the world, you have millions of parents who have passed through the public schools and can't even figure out how to feed their children, let alone properly.

    I understand teachers are caught in the middle of this societal decay, but a lot of teachers buy into this philosophy as well. Just drive by any school and read the bumper stickers. Not surprising as those teachers are also products of the failing public school system.

    There are lots of reasons for this, television and other forms of media are pervasive. Their productions value and offer of fun and distraction are hard for teachers and schools to compete with. A constant refrain of narcissism and that outrageous behavior should be a character value rather than responsibility and work responsiblity that is positively corrosive. Minorites were the first victims, but the rest of us are not far behinjd. All you have you have to do is look at Occupy for a glimpse of selfishness and slackness masquerading as "social justice".

    This is no different than almost any other form of addiction except more people are suseptible to its effect. I'm a pretty optimistic person, but this has me nervous.

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