“Did you know that ‘our bodies, being products of eating, are immoral by essence’, and ‘consumption not only bites the world but lessens the leftovers for everyone else’? [...] “procreation has become an unintentional act of aggression against the fellow multitudes already cramming the planet.” ~ from The American Experience, a propagandized high school literature text
Leftist revisionist history is seen through a negative, bleak, self-flagellating prism and it is now permeating our schools thanks to Common Core.
America Now by Robert Atwan is a book of essays from recent periodicals, which is being used in AP English classrooms in numerous high schools and in undergraduate college classes throughout the nation. It is Common Core aligned. It is typical of the type of indoctrination that is becoming part and parcel of the Core. It has less to do with English than it has to do with perpetuating the leftist vision of America – the new America, America Now!
America now is an America that abandons traditional America and takes up a new, improved Leftist America. Common core is the vehicle by which this new America can be rapidly and widely spread.
Parading around as English literature, it is simply leftist propaganda. The theme capitalism is evil runs throughout.
Big Government and government agencies are extolled. The rich are demonized, Southern people are demeaned, man is described as too costly, man is an agent of destruction on earth, and illegal immigration is promoted.
Happiness is something to be attained by adapting to the Marxist perspective.
A telling quote from the book: “One cure–for those who feel that their pursuit of happiness has been sent on a long detour through the labor camps of American and international capitalism–is the institution of a government department that has as its only priority the happiness of all Americans.”
Another article, on the sticky post on our front page, deals with yet another vile, unAmerican book called The American Experience.
A Tea Party leader, Becky Gerritson, who testified before Congress last year and who told Congress “they had forgotten their place,” testified before an Alabama Senate Education Committee in support of a bill to allow local school districts to opt out of Common Core.
Her testimony concentrated on the widely-used literature text, The American Experience: 1900-Present by Prentice Hall. It is Common Core aligned. When she read one paragraph from a recommended novel that was incorporated into the book, it was so pornographic even the senators wouldn’t listen to it. She reminded them that this is being taught to 16 and 17 year olds.
The following is excerpted from Becky Gerritson’s Testimony on SB443 in March of this year.
Terrence Moore, a professor from Hillsdale College, dedicated an entire chapter in his book called The Story Killers to this very textbook.
It’s easy to see the political bias in this book as well as the mediocre teaching of literature. Due to my time constraint I can only list a few examples found in this book.
Students are led to believe that our founding fathers were promoters of slavery. They are not told the truth that slavery had been around for thousands of years and up until the 1700’s our founders and the Quakers were the only distinct voices advocating the abolishment of slavery.
Students are led to believe that Benjamin Franklin thought the Constitution was a bad idea. It’s important to note that the US Constitution is nowhere to be found in this book.
America is portrayed as barbaric murderers when they dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Students not taught about the thousands of pamphlets that were dropped on the city urging people to flee-or that the action was done to save millions of lives, nor are Students told even how the war started.
In this book, students will read Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Yet they have deleted 21 out of the 22 Biblical references.
Even though this is a literature book, students are diverted away from literature and asked to do research activities on how scientists are addressing deep-space travel for humans.
Let me turn the corner and talk about something else. Many opponents of Common Core have serious concerns about the recommended reading list which contains politically biased and obscene books. It is known as “Appendix B” or “Common Core’s Text Exemplars”. AL State Superintendent, Dr. Bice tried to calm our fears about this reading list saying that we had nothing to worry about because he removed it from our course of study. However, removing the list did nothing because these books and their authors are featured and promoted in this very text book.
On page 1095 the featured author is Toni Morrison, she wrote a book called The Bluest Eye.
It’s a story of an 8 year old black girl. This book is about rape, incest and pedophilia. One of the characters is a priest who likes having sex with little girls and the scenes are graphically described.The depictions are from the perpetrator’s point of view. The author wanted the reader to feel as though they were a “co-conspirator” with the rapist. She describes the pedophilia, rape and incest “friendly,” “innocent,” and “tender”, but never as wrong.
You might think I am over exaggerating when I say that this book and others like it are vile and inappropriate. Let me read you an edited excerpt; only 6 sentences, from The Bluest Eye. This is recommended for 16 and 17 year olds.
Pages 162-163: (Again these crimes are perpetrated against children.)
“A bolt of desire ran down his genitals…and softening the lips of his a***. . . . He wanted to f*** her—tenderly. But the tenderness would not hold. The tightness of her v***** was more than he could bear. His soul seemed to slip down his guts and fly out into her, and the gigantic thrust he made into her then provoked the only sound she made. Removing himself from her was so painful to him he cut it short and snatched his genitals out of the dry harbor of her v*****. She appeared to have fainted.”
When Ms. Gerritson, who said the “F-word” is absent from her vocabulary, read the passage from the book, which included that and much worse, there were gasps in the room and she was asked to stop. She made the point that the content is so vile it couldn’t be uttered at a public meeting room full of adults, yet this filth is recommended under Common Core to minor children to read and discuss in class.
Her testimony, which is under five minutes, is worth listening to:
One 6th grade teacher in D.C. recently had to apologize for insisting students compare President George W. Bush to Hitler for homework.
“Now that we have read about two men of power who abused their power in various ways, we will compare and contrast them and their actions,” the assignment reads. “Please refer to your texts, ‘Fighting Hitler – A Holocaust Story’ and ‘Bush: Iraq War Justified Despite No WMD’ to compare and contrast former President George W. Bush and Hitler.”
Then there is the following very problematic assignment out of California: “Did the Holocaust really happen?” or was it “a propaganda tool used for political or monetary gain?”
In a Southern California district, Rialto Unified, eighth graders were told to use three sources — including one that calls the murder of Jews a “hoax” — to research the “debate.” Then they were to write an essay, citing their research, to “explain whether or not you believe the Holocaust was an actual event in history, or merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain.”
The school defended this propaganda. People don’t seem to know what is fact and what is bias any longer. There are no lines being drawn.
Coincidentally, the Rialto students are Latino and the interim Superintendent is Mohammad Z. Islam.
Since when can people draw their own conclusion on this? Joanne Jacobs quotes Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts,”
Expect a lot more propaganda and far fewer apologies. Eventually, we will grow numb to it and propaganda will become the norm unless we stop it now.
Dr. Terence Moore of Hillsdale College, in his book Story Killers, exposes Common Core’s abandonment of our great stories in literature. Not only are they abandoning them, they have abandoned our great story of freedom, fought for and won.
The following is paraphrased or excerpted from a book review by What Is Common Core.
Dr. Moore’s book asks questions like this one: Why does the new Common Core edition of the American literature textbook, The American Experience, by Pearson/Prentice Hall 2012, contain sections on government forms, and an EPA report? Is this the new and “more rigorous” literature that will prepare our children for college? Or is it an attempt to “keep the nation’s children from reading stories, particularly traditional stories that run counter to the political ideology” of the authors of Common Core?
Dr. Moore points out that a widespread, fraudulent adoption of Common Core brought us the fraudulent reading (and math) theories upon which Common Core Standards rest. Common Core was never pilot tested as it should have been, before virtually the whole country adopted it.
“You know how long it takes for a new drug to get on the market before it receives approval from the FDA,” he writes, “Yet here is the educational medicine, so to speak, that all the nation’s children will be taking every day, seven hours a day– and no clinical trials have been done.”
Dr. Moore points out, too, that “most of the money that funded the original writing of the standards came from the deep pockets of Bill Gates. Perhaps related to this fact, the Common Core will have students working far more with computers… the people behind the Common Core also have a hand in running the tests and stand to gain financially…. the other people who stand to make out like bandits are the textbook publishers. If that’s not enough to get one wondering, it turns out that the actual writing of the standards was done in complete secrecy.“
Dr. Moore reminds us that controlling stories (or the lack of stories) is the same thing as controlling people: “Plato pointed out in his Republic– a book never read in today’s high schools, nor usually even in college– whoever writes the stories shapes –or controls– the minds of the people in any given regime.”
The book’s title describes the killing of two important types of stories:
“The great stories are, first, the works of literature that have long been considered great by any standard of literary judgment and, second, what we might call the Great American Story of people longing to be free and happy under their own self-government. The Common Core will kill these stories by a deadly combination of neglect, amputation, misinterpretation…”
Then, “On the ruins of the old canon of literary and historical classics will be erected a new canon of post-modern literature and progressive political doctrine. Simultaneous to this change, fewer and fewer works of literature will be read on the whole. Great literature will be replaced with ‘information’ masquerading as essential ‘workforce training’.”
Moore explains that the proponents of Common Core hold up “the illusion of reform” while continuing to “gut the school curriculum” and to remove its humanity.
Grade school children will only get 50% of their grade from reading literature in English and high school children will get 70%. Instead, they will read informational texts.
Dr. Moore implores others to fight for great literature.
“There has never been a great people without great stories. And the great stories of great peoples often dwell on the subject of greatness. They dwell on the subject of plain goodness as well: the goodness that is to be found in love, marriage, duty, the creation of noble and beautiful things. It is patently obvious that they authors of the Common Core are uncomfortable with these great stories of the great and the good. They are plainly uncomfortable with great literature. And they are even more uncomfortable with what might be called the Great American Story.”
Our stories are becoming like our cars, mundane, common, alike. We are to believe we are not great, we are common to the core. We are meant only to redistribute and exist only to participate in the common good.
At the beginning of The Standards, it says this, “The Standards are intended to be a living work: as new and better evidence emerges, the Standards will be revised accordingly.”
They’ve only just begun, revisionist history and literature will continue to morph.
Oh, goody.
Read more Sara Noble at Independent Sentinel
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