Via DaisyLuther.com,
Anyone who has ever had a toddler knows that when your little one falls down, often, they look to you before deciding whether they should cry or not. If you rush over and say, “Oh you poor baby, you’re hurt” then the wailing commences. If you glance over and say, “You’re okay. You’re a tough cookie. Get back up,” then you’re teaching them that the proper response to falling is shaking it off and getting up again. We’re instilling courage and resilience when we do this.
We teach children how to respond to almost everything by modeling a healthy response for them, but our school/indoctrination system seems to have missed this crucial concept of Dealing with Disappointment 101. Their overly nurturing and politically biased response to Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton is making everything worse.
Basic psychology tells us that when we bolster someone’s fear by our response, we’re actually reinforcing that they have grave reason to be fearful.
By babying these kids because their favored candidate lost and constantly discussing the fears, the education/indoctrination system is teaching kids that the proper response to a Trump presidency is abject terror, disappointment, and donning the cloak of victimhood. The meetings for a primal scream, the delaying of midterm exams, the counseling, and the excused absences to protest all say to kids, “Oh my gosh, this is serious. We’re all be spending next Christmas in a Death Camp.”
Here are some ridiculous examples of anti-Trump bias being taught in schools. These tactics aren’t education. They’re indoctrination.
One school system introduced an anti-Trump curriculum
The San Fransisco Chronicle is reporting that lesson plans in the Bay area include such instructions as:
“Let us please not sidestep the fact that a racist and sexist man has become the president of our country by pandering to a huge racist and sexist base,” wrote Fakrah Shah, a Mission High School teacher, in the introduction to her lesson plan. “DO NOT: Tell (students) that we have LOST and that we have to accept this.”
Let’s look at two things in the introduction to this program.
First, “DO NOT: Tell (students) that we have LOST and that we have to accept this.”
Who are the “we” in that line? It seems to presume that all students were Clinton supporters. Would this have been acceptable if a school was teaching the children that they didn’t have to accept a woman as a president? Or a black man? Or a person of a religion other than Christianity?
Not only that, but the plan demonizes anyone who voted for Trump. The curriculum says that the only way Trump won the office was by “by pandering to a huge racist and sexist base.” That means that anyone who voted for Trump will be, in the eyes of the children being fed this garbage in a tax-payer funded classroom, considered a racist and a sexist.
I took the liberty of downloading the lesson plan from Google Docs. You can read the whole thing here.
An English teacher in North Carolina made her students do an assignment comparing Trump to Hitler
English students at Cedar Ridge High School in North Carolina got an earful from their teacher, Amanda Harder, who used the election and her distaste for Donald Trump as the impetus for classroom assignments. She made the kids watch videos of translated speeches by Adolf Hitler and compare them to speeches by Donald Trump.
A with a cell phone caught the teacher saying,
“Basically, the only people who seem to be safe from this guy are white Christian males. Am I missing anything? Oh, American – white, Christian, male Americans.”
But then the teacher discovered that kids were recording her and took pre-emptive action, according to a report on Fox News.
After the teacher found out she had been recorded, she demanded that students turn over their cell phones, one parent alleged.
“She made the kids drop their phones in a basket by the door,” the parent said. “So we just told the kids to either take notes or record her on their laptops.”
Here’s a recording of the “lesson” recorded by a student.
Schools across the country are enhancing the fear.
An essay published (surprisingly) on US News and World Report gave other examples of this fear enhancement:
…schools and colleges treated a victory by the Republican presidential nominee much as they did the deadliest attack on American soil since the Civil War. Colleges canceled classes. At others, professors ignored their syllabi to explain their hatred of Republicans. Schools and school districts took dramatic steps to comfort their presumptively terrified students, an undertaking that allowed anguished teachers to fan every feverish rumor.
Educators talked in quavering voices about the horrors of the impending Trump administration. One school administrator lamented to the PBS NewsHour: “We won’t be able to teach math if they feel scared and if they feel like they are at risk.”
The superintendent of schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, wrote to the constituents of his sprawling suburban district: “We must reassure our staff and students that our school buildings are safe places where we truly value and respect every single individual and do not tolerate bullying or hate speech.” The superintendent of the Denver Public Schools responded to Trump’s victory by flagging the “deep differences and bias in our country around race and ethnicity and class.”
A thousand such missives criss-crossed the nation’s schools and colleges. The president of the University of Michigan told a campus vigil last Wednesday that students had voted overwhelmingly for Clinton: “Ninety percent of you rejected the kind of hate and the fractiousness and the longing for some sort of idealized version of a nonexistent yesterday.”
Of course, it’s important to discuss current events and allay fears, but the sympathy and endless discussions are only making it worse.
Back to raising small children as an example: If you tell your kids that darkness is scary, make sure there’s always a light on in the bathroom, and slink around with a flashlight yourself, then they will become scared of the dark.
If you teach them how to handle darkness, how to let their eyes adjust, how to put your hand against the wall and take small steps, then they’ll learn the coping mechanisms necessary to function and will be less fearful.
If you explain that there really is no monster in the closet and open the door and show them, it will allay their fear. If you say, “Oh my gosh, run to my room! That monster is going to get you!” and teach them that panic is the appropriate response, they’ll also be terrified.
What the school system should be doing is investigating the truth and explaining it to children. No, Muslim kids aren’t going to be rounded up. No, gay marriages aren’t going to be dissolved. No, black families won’t be “sent back to Africa.”
Instead, they’re creating a generation of people who will be even more fearful and easily offended than the current batch of snowflakes. If you aren’t homeschooling or unschooling, now might be the time to consider it.