Teaching Our Children That America Was Bad...
This kind of crap really needs to stop. Our children are being indoctrinated to hate our own country. Liberal teachers think teaching kids the exact opposite of conventional wisdom is a great acheivement, when in actuality they are destroying the very country that allowed them to be so liberal-minded. Today's society is so good at apologizing for all the mistakes we've made in the past that we forget all the enormous contributions we have acheived not just for this country - but for the entire world.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Associated Press
Thanksgiving lesson stirs debate
Published November 23, 2006
LONG BEACH, Calif. (AP) -- Bill Morgan walks into his third-grade class wearing a black Pilgrim hat made of construction paper and begins snatching up pencils, backpacks and glue sticks from his students. He tells them the items now belong to him because he "discovered" them.
The reaction is exactly what Mr. Morgan expects: The children get angry and want their things back.
Mr. Morgan is among elementary school teachers who have ditched the traditional Thanksgiving lesson, in which children dress up like Indians and Pilgrims and act out a romanticized version of their first meetings.
He has replaced it with a more realistic look at the complex relationship between Indians and white settlers.
Mr. Morgan said he still wants his students at Cleveland Elementary School in San Francisco to celebrate Thanksgiving. But "what I am trying to portray is a different point of view."
Others see Mr. Morgan and similar teachers as extreme.
"I think that is very sad," said Janice Shaw Crouse, a former college dean and public high school teacher and now a spokeswoman for Concerned Women for America, a conservative organization. "He is teaching his students to hate their country. That is a very distorted view of history, a distorted view of Thanksgiving."
Even American Indians are divided on how to approach a holiday that some think symbolizes the start of a hostile takeover of their lands.
Chuck Narcho, a member of the Maricopa and Tohono O'odham tribes who works as a substitute teacher in Los Angeles, said younger children should not be burdened with all the gory details of American history.
"If you are going to teach, you need to keep it positive," he said. "They can learn about the truths when they grow up. Caring, sharing and giving -- that is what was originally intended."
Adam McMullin, a member of the Seminole tribe of Oklahoma and a spokesman for the National Congress of American Indians, said schoolchildren should get an accurate historical account.
"You can't just throw an Indian costume on a child," he said. "That stuff is not taken lightly. That's where educators need to be very careful."
Laverne Villalobos, a member of the Omaha tribe in Nebraska who now lives in the coastal town of Pacifica near San Francisco, considers Thanksgiving a day of mourning.
She went before the school board last week and asked for a ban on Thanksgiving reenactments and students dressing up as Indians. She also complained about November's lunch menu that pictured a caricature of an Indian boy.
The mother of four said the traditional Thanksgiving celebrations in schools instill "a false sense of what really happened before and after the feast. It wasn't all warm and fuzzy."
After she complained, it was decided that students at her children's school will not wear Indian costumes this year.
Mr. Morgan, a teacher for more than 35 years, said that after conducting his own research, he changed his approach to teaching about Thanksgiving. He tells teachers at his school this is a good way to nurture critical thinking, but he acknowledged not all are receptive: "It's kind of an uphill struggle."
