Uh-oh, did you know that elementary school teachers—who get their orders, mind you, beamed directly via radio wave from Democratic party headquarters—could be in the business of teaching our nation’s five- and six-year-olds radical and subversive thoughts? Um, no, me neither. But David Horowitz apparently seems very worried. Apparently not satisfied with his lunatic censorship crusade at the college level, he’s now gunning for younger kids:
Concerned that public schools are becoming sites of liberal indoctrination, activists have generated a wave of efforts to limit what teachers may discuss and to bring more conservative views into the classroom.
“The last six months [have] been kind of a watershed for the academic-freedom movement,” says Bradley Shipp, national field director for Students for Academic Freedom, a group founded by conservative activist David Horowitz in 2003. “It is going to filter itself down to the K-12 level.”
It’s an important battle front, proponents say, because younger students are more impressionable. They are concerned about multicultural lesson plans that go into detail about the Muslim faith, and cite incidents such as a young child being reprimanded by a teacher for writing about wanting to become a soldier.
Now I think we can all understand the grave danger in teaching anyone in America anything at all about the Muslim faith—after all, our stark ignorance has served us so well up until now—but admittedly, the soldier story seems odd. Of course, given the actual track record of the Students for Academic Freedom, and given how many stories about left-wing “bias” in the academy they tend to just make up out of thin air, forgive me for being just a wee bit skeptical.
Nevertheless, the broader attack here is ridiculous. Are the Students for Academic Freedom really worried that too many high-school and elementary-school teachers are Democrats? Hey, here are two quick and easy solutions. One, they could all stop their whining and sniveling about “conservative oppression” and go sign up to be a teacher—that’s one surefire way to get more conservatives in the classroom. Alternatively, they could try to convince Republicans across the country to stop under-funding our schools and trying to dismantle public education. Just a wild guess, but maybe if that ever happened more public-school teachers would become Republicans. But this crybaby stuff really needs to stop.
