Saturday, December 12, 2009

A People's History of People's Movements

Michelle Malkin reports that Hollywood and Marxist thinkers have team up to produce star-studded propaganda for our nation's schools. The project is called "The People Speak."

I agree that there's a large number of skeletons in our's nation's closet. What "The People Speak" is likely to miss is that pretty much all of the great atrocities (from the slavery, the slaughtering of buffalo to to the killing of Indians and abortion) were all the results of progressive people's movements.

There are progressives in both parties. George Bush (who attended two of the most liberal schools in America) had an extremely progressive agenda with the federal government taking the leading role in curriculum design with the No Child Left Behind policy.

Conversely, the rare occasions where Americans stuck to the classical liberal roots of the founders, led to prosperity.

The damage of propaganda efforts like "The People Speak" is not that they criticize the United States, but that it frames the criticism in ways that fail to teach students the source of our nation's problems.

I've said in past posts that critical thinking only works when applied to one's own belief system. Critical thinking aimed at one's partisan opponents is thinly veiled criticism.

The problem with Howard Zinn's rethinking education project is not that the project holds up "peace and social justice" as ideals, but that the intellectually dishonest techniques favored by the left undermine society and have a long history resulting in war and widescale injustice.

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