jeffreymark

REJECTING HISTORY REJECTING MEMORY

A former UPI reporter reminds us of why we must study history. 

It became clear to me that by separating yourself from history, and especially the history of the church and Christianity, you become woefully shallow. And if you become woefully shallow, all sorts of things can happen, with the demise of the Protestant church in Germany as one example. Other examples are the "German Christian" heresy in World War II [when certain biblical critics rejected everything in Scripture they deemed too Jewish], and the incredible homosexual and feminist heresies that now abound. If you don't have something to relate things to, you are certainly at a loss.

Rejecting history means we reject our memory. Imagine yourself minus a memory. Yet, our school systems place history on the back burner and determine the subject a non essential. Look at the teachers who get stuck with the burdensome task of delivering mindless, seemingly useless facts to the little urchins. My history teachers were always coaches who needed something to do before they went to their real job. 

A PROGRESSIVE REVISIONIST JULY 4TH 1776

Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries progressive/liberal/socialist types have sought to revise American history. Nothing remains sacred to these pseudo intellectuals whose ivory-towerism keeps them faithfully repeating a narrative indubitably indicative of their adolescent, utopian world view. David Horowitz posted a cartoon that wistfully illustrates the absurdity of the progressive's lofty pedagogical vision. (click on Picture) 

HATS OFF TO 2009 ACADEMIC ALL BIG-12 FOOTBALL TEAM

Each year the Big-12 publishes a list of football players who made the Academic All Big-12 Football team. First teamers consist of those players whose classroom performance consists of a 3.2 GPA and higher. The academic team forced me to take a more humbling view of  Texas Longhorn football. For ages I have addressed their team as the "Longhorn thugs." I based the moniker not on facts but on appearances impelled by my repugnant feelings toward their arrogance. UT graduates often haughtily refer to themselves as graduates of "The University," as if we mere mortals from Texas Tech ought to worship at their feet. And, UT athletic teams consistently win big. Any astute observer must realize the reason for this. They recruit superior athletes year after year. The Longhorns, with all their baggage, offset their adversities with placing the highest number of football athletes, sixteen, on the academic first team. Texas Tech placed 9 on the team. Every single scholar from both UT and Tech hail from the great Lone Star State.

Furthermore, the list of scholars shoots us between the eyes with a dose of perspective. While we love champions and all Americans, we must acknowledge the seminal purpose of collegiate football is to offer a free education to those who entertain us. Few of them move on to the next level of play. For most, education not football, determines success in life's endeavors. Hat's off to all who made the team. You are the true all Americans. You are the future leaders of our nation.

View the list here.

EXPRESSING PERCEPTIONS

Corporate takeovers, nationalized health care, excessive bailout packages, spread the wealth; inquiring minds certainly smell a European Socialist rat. Glenn Foden's latest cartoon may seem a bit over the top, but he indeed expresses our perceptions. (click on picture)

Michelle Malkin eloquently augments Foden's perceptions with this retrospective glimpse into Obama's problematic past associations.

Obama served with Weather Underground terrorist and neighbor Bill Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge education initiative. Downplaying academic achievement in favor of left-wing radical activism in the public schools is rooted in Ayers' pedagogical philosophy. Obama served as the program's first chairman of the board, while Ayers steered its curricular policy. The two oversaw grants to welfare rights enterprise ACORN and to avowed communist Michael Klonsky -- a close pal of Ayers and member of the militant Students for a Democratic Society. SDS served as a precursor to the violent Weather Underground organization.

A LESSON ON EVANGELICAL EDUCATION

For decades a partially informed public maintained the notion that evangelical education has more to do with arguing about monkeys and evolution than with objective critical thinking. Columnist Richard Beattie gives us a cameo look at his journey through secular vs. evangelical education. His analysis is accurate, illustrative of the evangelical experience, and enlightening. Drawing similarities between his experience and secularist Kevin Roose, Beattie opines concerning the essence of evangelical education:   

 Evangelical education provides something more than Biblical, theology, and dogmatic teachings, what many  find is a respect for psychology, science, philosophy, sociology, the arts, and a pure, honest look at history. The Home School Movement which was started mainly since the public school system in lower grades and high schools extract the Christian influence of history and insert social agendas such as "declaring what a child's sexual orientation is," by the time they are in second grade. The Teacher's Union also protects the more relativistic philosophies that came out of the liberal arts colleges in the 1960's and since then. Evangelical education is founded on an absolutist philosophy and a classical education. When you boil it down to the roots, the  Biblical Worldview Education takes the distractions out, limits the choices down to what is the right and wrong answer, in any given situation and allows for truth to rise to the top. What Roose found is a strong, relational, group of students who struggled with their faith, and looked for answers, took their studies seriously and were mission minded, rather than party minded. They are not't, in his terms "hostile demagogues, they are normal college kids." 

If critical secularists cared to look at the credentials of faculty members at many mainline schools they would discover that many of the professors have more prestigious degrees than a legion of their secular comrades. Go here, and here for examples. 

HIGH SCHOOL HISTORY TEACHER OFFERS OBAMA A LITTLE HISTORY LESSON

When a high school history teacher has to remind a Presidential candidate who graduated from Harvard of the increasing goodness of this great country, all I can say is, "Houston, we have a problem."

Occasionally, Obama has indicated that he has a weak sense of American history. He didn’t seem to know that the Cold War was not a time when the world was standing as one. He didn’t know the history of presidential summits and seems to think that FDR and Truman met with our nation’s enemies. He didn’t know how the Nuremberg Trials worked. And I’m not even talking about his mistake that Americans liberated Auschwitz.

But I think his remark when the little girl asked him why he decided to run for president and he gave this response.

“America is …, uh, is no longer, uh … what it could be, what it once was. And I say to myself, I don’t want that future for my children.”

As you watch the video, it’s clear that he formed his words carefully and was thinking about how to answer the little girl.

I’m wondering when is the time that Obama thinks that we were what we could be. It couldn’t have been when we had slavery. So that takes us to 1865. It couldn’t be when we had states divided by terrible Jim Crow laws that segregated society and disenfranchised an entire race. So that takes us to the mid-1960s. It probably wasn’t when we were divided and torn apart by the Vietnam War and racial violence. So that takes us to the 1970s. I doubt that it was when we were suffering devastating stagflation and seeing our hostages being paraded in front of the cameras. So that takes us to 1980. We’re left with the Reagan-Bush years. Is Obama yearning for Morning in America? Many conservatives remember that period with nostalgia; does Obama share that feeling? No, certainly not the 1980s, that decade of greed.

Or is he talking about the Clinton years? Was that the time when we were what we could be? Why then run against Hillary Clinton? And that was a time when we were supposedly being divided by bitter partisanship. Is he yearning for the time when the Republicans controlled Congress? The days of impeachment? Or is he thinking about when we had our heads in the sand regarding the growing development of Al Qaeda terrorism? If that was the one period in our time when we were what we could be, then wouldn’t he have wanted to put that team back in the White House? And we know that he isn’t talking about the Bush years. So what was he talking about?

Continue reading the entire schoolmarm's lesson here.

ALL THAT JAZZ

One of my favorite online learning tools is the Teaching Company. On numerous occasions I have purchased their lectures and listened to them while I drive. The discs provide an abundance of entry level courses designed to inspire students to launch out into the deep. Recently I purchased the course on Jazz. This particular series provides an introduction and history to the development of the Jazz genera. One can go here to discover more about this American phenomenon whose roots sprouted from the African-American culture. Provided in this link are other links to rare Jazz recordings.

US CITIZENSHIP TEST

Even citizens fared poorly on this test. Go here to learn more and test your knowledge.

SO WHO CARES ABOUT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY?

Let the inmates have the university. Do we really need this communist-atheistic fraternity? So a person graduates from that place, what do they prove? They work their butts off and spend an exorbitant amount of money for a ticket to the communist party. Someone ought to bust school officials for aiding and abetting the enemy and harboring a dangerous fugitive. The whole affair not only sheds light on the corruption at many of our liberal universities, it also is indicative of how far a liberal education (I use "liberal" in the traditional sense of the word) has slid down the moral abyss. Our immorality blinds us to the truth about good and evil. We no longer possess the wisdom to know the difference between the two.
Red State further comments on Columbia and Iranian President Ahmadinejad here.

ACADEMIA HITTING A NEW LOW?

Even the academy is not immune to a self consumed agenda. Thomas Lifson of American Thinker posts his take on the sad state of affairs entrenched within the halls of our great institutions of higher learning:

I used to wonder how German universities, among the most distinguished in the world back then, fell into lockstep behind Hitler. How could the supposedly the best minds allow that?

I wonder no longer. The signs are very discouraging, and it isn't the outlier marginal campuses where the problem is greatest. Not just the University of California and Duke. Harvard, fresh off the disgrace of hounding Lawrence Summers from its presidency, is embracing the madness. Scott Johnson of Powerline writes today:

At Harvard, President Drew Gilpin Faust is proving herself to be immune to concerns about intellectual standards or racial discrimination. Indeed, she seeks "a different Harvard" -- one with so many black professors and staff that it could fill Harvard's stadium.

Read for yourself the sort of faculty enjoying President Faust's embrace, and follow the links provided by Scott.

I devoted more than two decades of my life to a career in academia, the majority of that time at Harvard. I am quite simply nauseated at the level of anti-intellectualism rampant at America's most elite academic institutions. Harvard, with its age, prestige, and $35 billion endowment is leading the academy into a vortex.

The barbarians are not just at the gates or even inside the gates, they are in command.

The academy tends to provide the philosophical animus behind a nation's social actions. In my opinion, solutions my lie in creating scholarships for the best and brightest young conservatives with the hope of their returning as faculty members, particularly targeting the departments of history and humanities. Perhaps too, a more concerted effort to establish conservative chairs within these liberal institutions would provide a fair and balanced curriculum. I may, however, be engaging in nothing more than a naive idealism here. Just a thought, that's all.