Sam Sorbo's Blog, page 2

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Teaching Government as “God”

As part of the Common Core curriculum, fifth graders are taught the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Unsurprisingly, to those of us playing at home, it trumps the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. By these teaching standards, the United States is no longer sovereign, in any way , shape or form, just at the member nations of the UN would like things to be.

One young fifth grader brought home her aced exam, on which she had answered:

“Human rights are rights articulated by the government to uphold this country in shape. These rules are inalienable. They protect our country. The human rights are one of the most important rights ever. I think they hold this country together.”

To Britt’s surprise, the teacher gave full credit for that answer, which contradicts the Declaration of Independence, which states that individual rights derive from God, not government.

If rights are derived from the government, then it is reasonable to assume they can be rightfully taken away by the government. The government gives and the government takes away! (Except under the US Constitution, which is why we so laud it, and why young men placed themselves in harm’s way to defend it.)

If this is should come true in our country, as our children are being taught, then the IRS targeting of private citizens because of their political beliefs is not only reasonable, but necessary. How dare you question the authority that gives you the right to life, health, food, clothing and happiness, among countless other UN-annointed “human rights”? It certainly raises the government to the level of a deity, something government, in general strives for. But this kind of deity is petty and cruel, controlling and vindictive. Will you teach your child to worship at the altar of this new god? Or will you stand up and fight this power grab? Call out Common Core for what it is – indoctrination of our children to become good little servants of the state. At least under God they still have a choice. Once the state takes over, kiss your choices goodbye.

Re-right-ing

If your friend lied to you once, would you take everything they said afterwards with a grain of salt? Would you think for a moment (or more) about the things they had said in the past, rehashing how those had worked out, if they had turned out to be true or false, if there were consequences that you could have avoided if you’d know they were lying? Someone who blatantly lies puts a pall over everything they claim after that, and their entire person becomes suspect, at least to a discerning, honest individual.

Unfortunately, these days, lying is commonplace and holding people accountable has become tantamount to racism, the first accusation (there are others) a liar often resorts to when confronted.

But a lie is a lie is a lie, and, “the truth is a very narrow path,” as Goethe assures us. Which is why it is all the more disconcerting when it is an educational institution that is caught in the lie, and their excuse is that it simply isn’t the only lie they are telling. Or are they insisting that two wrongs, do, indeed, make a right?

In Denton, TX, they are using a US History book that incorrectly summarizes the second amendment this way:

The people have the right to keep and bear arms in a state militia.

From: United States History: Preparing for the Advanced Placement Examination

The proper quote reads this way”

Amendment II. A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

This egregious misstatement alone is serious enough to warrant expulsion of the book from their roster. There are good textbooks that teach the truth.

. . . the Denton Independent School District maintains it only uses the book as “supplemental” material and is “disseminating the correct information on the Second Amendment” from other texts.

Oh, well, then, keep the LIE! Muddy the water! Confuse the poor students, so they won’t be able to tell the difference between truth and fiction! Please forgive my aggression on this subject, but this cuts to the very core (pun intended) of what’s wrong with our educational system: political correctness, or the inability to discern.

The school’s protestation that the book is supplemental is embarrassingly stupid and disingenuous. Why the insistence on giving students two versions of a TRUTH? One is the truth and one is a lie, meaning it has  no value. Throw it out!

And why does the book specifically misquote the second amendment? I don’t believe it’s enough to say it was an accident. Writers can be lazy, but mis-copying from an historical document is purposeful. However, if you can get enough people to believe the lie, well, then, what happens to the truth? (I. e. WMD in Iraq, which were documented, but never found, and thus incorrectly determined to be nonexistent. And that lie was repeated so frequently it is now masquerading as truth to those who lack discernment – i. e. probably those who wrote this textbook.)

Upon further review of the book, authored by Dr. John Newman and Dr. John Schmalbach, TheBlaze also discovered a potentially controversial passage on the American Revolution. The text asks the question: “THE REVOLUTION—RADICAL OR CONSERVATIVE?”

The authors call those who fought in the Revolutionary War “revolutionary mobs” and “American mobs.”

“In comparing the three revolutions, a few historians have concentrated on the actions of revolutionary mobs, such as the American Sons of Liberty. Again there are two divergent interpretations: (1) the mobs in all three countries engaged in the same radical activities, and (2) the American mobs had a much easier time of it than the French and Russian mobs, who encountered ruthless repression by military authorities,” the text reads.

Yeah, uhm, the American revolutionaries had a really easy time of it, going up against the greatest military force in the world. It sounds like those “divergent interpretations” originate with those same authors, frankly, and significantly, how are these “interpretations,” which are less divergent than just independent, at all relevant? The real question might be how these revolutions differed in their origins and outcomes – which is, of course, what made America unique and, in a word, great. Those are not questions whose answers interest the educators who espouse this text.

In summary, what we have here is an attempt to equate the American revolutionaries, who fought for freedom from tyranny and freedom for a government of the people, by the people and for the people, with any mercenary or mob radical element that wants to topple it’s own government. They are terribly mistaken, and clearly should not be writing text books, or any books. The American revolution was exceptional – the proof is in the pudding, as they used to say, because America then became, in very short order, the world’s superpower, and a beacon on a hill. The revolutions and mob actions the book wants its readers to view similarly can make no such claims.

We fight a battle for truth and against those who would mutate the truth into lies to serve their own perverse political agendas. It is as simple as freedom versus slavery, democracy versus communism, right versus wrong. The irony here is that to win, the authors and their supporters must also lose in this ages-old battle. If all sacrifice is noble, if our founding fathers were not exceptional, if our country should not stand as a shining city on the hill, for freedom in the storms of dictatorships and tyranny, then there exists no moral superiority, no right, no wrong, and no truth. If the second amendment does not specifically protect the individual from its government, but simply recommends the state militia have arms, we all become slaves to the government, as the government continues to grow itself at the expense of it’s citizenry. That is the lesson of history that our founders sought, and succeeded, for a time, to change.

George Orwell said, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

The lesson that our educators should already know is this: Stop rewriting history, or you’ll destine us all to repeat it.

Common Core Costs Too Much

Common Core is costing a lot more than just our dollars. It’s costing us our dignity.

The Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” funding drove a lot of states to adopt the Common Core Curriculum even before it was written. (With Pelosi’s precedent of voting to make a law in order to find out what was in it, who can blame them?) Blind greed drove them to adopt the standards even before any proof or piloting to prove their efficacy. One might wonder what the incentive was behind the plan. Here is the White House press release:

Adapts the Race to the Top Model of Com­petition to Transform Lifelong Learning. Widely viewed as leveraging more change than any other competitive education grant program in history, the Race to the Top (RTT) initiative spurred States across the Nation to bring togeth­er teachers, school leaders, and policymakers to achieve difficult yet fundamental improvements to our education system.

What is that undocumented, unprecedented, and indefinable change that the administration is so happy about? We still don’t know. What we do know, is that it’s going to cost a lot of money. Thanks to the author of my source for this article, we have specific numbers:

The CCS implementation cost in California will be $2,188 million ($2.188 billion), while the federal awards total $104 million.  When I subtract the awards from the CCS cost, I get $2,084 million ($2.1 billion).  In other words,California will need to find $2.1 billion to fund the CCS implementation.

For Illinois, the CCS cost is $799 million and the federal awards are $66 million.  This means Illinois will lose $733 million on CCS implementation.

Pennsylvania will experience a $647 million loss; Michigan will see a $569 million loss; and New Jersey will have a $564 million loss on CCS.

A lot of citizens, too, are now waking up to the prohibitive costs associated with implementing Common Core, and they are not happy. Concurrently, they are realizing this incredibly dubious installation is beginning without any consultation from the electorate.

In the majority of cases, the state education departments adopted the Common Core Standards without the knowledge and approval of the state legislatures.  Many state legislative bodies are now feeling the pressure of the citizens and are re-examining the states’ decisions.

Are we a voting public or aren’t we? Wouldn’t you like to have a say in how your tax dollars are spent? Because with implementation of this costly, untested new curriculum, they are proving to themselves and even to you that your opinion doesn’t count. Maybe the money aspect doesn’t worry you, but how much is your vote worth? With Common Core inflation, nothing, anymore.

For any proud American, that cost is truly too much.

Uproar Over “Evolution vs. God”

This article appears on TheAnswer-Book.com. Sam Sorbo

“Evolution vs. God,” a documentary by Ray Comfort about disproving evolution (thus bolstering a belief in God), already has more than 480,000 views on YouTube. But a lot of atheists are angry, challenging not only his assertions but his editing. They are calling for his release of the raw footage. Unprecedented, and kinda funny. They are so angry about something that doesn’t exist!

Jaclyn Glenn’s vlog post attempts to discredit Comfort point by point, but the 10-minute rant simply draws more attention to the object of her disdain, and her liberal use of profanity and nasty sarcasm makes him look even more credible by contrast. In the end, her palpable anger at Comfort shows he simply got under her skin, and her taunting invitation to review the “boring ” and “stupid” documentary (though she clearly states her own review should suffice) probably just gets him more viewers. Bring it on; the documentary is clever and entertaining.

Comfort, the founder of evangelical outreach groups Way of the Master and Living Waters, hopes that everyone will watch the film, including atheists who hold evolutionary theory as gospel.

Comfort’s main point is to show how evolution is a theory with gaps in its proof – in other words, it takes a great deal of faith to believe in evolution. Faith in God, however, is seen as stupid by many evolutionists, simply because of the “requirement” of faith. Evolution masquerades as science, even without ultimate proof, while a spiritual God is discredited, even by a body (scientists) not charged with any investigation into spirituality. These scientists would discredit any belief in God before doing any research – wait, is that even scientifically reasonable?

And yet, so many put their faith in “science” because it seems so technologically advanced. But would you go see a dentist to fix your car, or a mechanic to do your root canal? So why trust a scientist to advise you about religion?

Comfort’s impressive penultimate point is his assertion that people avoid religion (that they already know in their hearts is true) because sin is more fun. We call that Suspension of Thought: ignoring the negative consequences of a behavior that offers immediate gratification.

Watch it here yourself, if you don’t believe me…

And Germany’s Supposed to be a Free Country

In Germany, home schooling is not allowed. For that reason, the Romeike family asked for and recieved asylum here in the US. Then our own government sued them, contesting the idea that homeschooling constituted a human right. If you knew what was happening in Germany, to the Wunderlich family, for instance, you might not even pose that question:

“The police shoved me into a chair and wouldn’t let me even make a phone call at first. It was chaotic as they told me they had an order to take the children,” Dirk said. “At my slightest movement the agents would grab me as if I were a terrorist. You would never expect anything like this to happen in our calm, peaceful village. It was like a scene out of a science fiction movie.”

According to the HSLDA, after reviewing court documents, the only reason for the seizure of the children was the homeschooling issue, as there are purportedly no additional charges against the parents. To make matters worse, the organization claims that the judge who issued the order also authorized police to use force against the family — children included — if necessary.

The desire of government is to control, because government officials enjoy power; power that ensures their own future. What better way to secure government’s continuing force than by educating the masses to indiscriminately accept its role as ruler? Oh, what the monarchs of old missed out on in their lack of and education system of their own subjects! No wonder the people rebelled – they hadn’t been taught what to think, how to accept, why statism and the monarchy was their best option. In their self-education, they realized personal potential always trumps governmental control.

How free is a society? As free as its education system.

Germany is forcing families to educate their children in precisely what the government determines is acceptable. Germany, of all places, has a most abysmal record in this arena. It’s no wonder the Romeike family decided to move to the US.

You can read more about the Romeike and Wunderlich family plights on the HSLDA website.

 

Common Core and Mental Health

Now, with back to school, teachers will being reporting their experiences with Common Core, and here already is one. This teacher says she is dedicated to her students in a school that is likewise very supportive of students’ education and their dreams for the future. But they’ve got Common Core, and it’s full-blown now. Last year was a “transition year,” but this year it goes all the way.

She wrote the referenced piece based on her experience, being instructed on the implementation of Common Core in her school, and what is expected of her and her students. It’s worth the read entirely, but here are some highlights:

I was told numerous times that if students did not excel, it was that I was failing the student…

I was told that I need to challenge students by bringing them to their “frustration level”– that doing so would challenge them to work and that they would rise to the occasion.

I envisioned students throwing up their hands in resignation and transforming into behavior problems.

She doesn’t demonize any particular person in her article, but she does question CC’s choice to evaluate the teacher based solely on testing, on a curriculum that itself has never been tested. That does seem a  bit hypocritical, doesn’t it? She also seems to resent the idea that rather than be consulted, as a seasoned professional, she is simply told.

I understand that this is the nature of top-down “leadership.” The only one with the freedom is the one at the very top. All others have some consequence, the outcome of which they seek to determine by controlling the actions of those lower than them in the chain. So I understand why my district is so prescriptive in telling me as an English teacher the specific literature I am to use and why my school administration is telling me not only what to teach but how to teach it, down to the exact lesson template. They are grasping for control.

Because of the ridiculous, arbitrary expectations placed on both teachers and children, by non-professionals who craft and direct Common Core, the author predicts that the number one 21st century job will be that of a mental health counselor. That’s sounds about right.

Common Core: The lie

Friends, I’ve been speaking out against Common Core ever since I discovered what it truly is. Now, I have a homework assignment from a friend in New Yolk, as evidence of the complete corruption of this curriculum and its evil intentions on our children. First, here is the “source” page for the homework assignment:

EXPEDITIONARY LEARNING Grade 5 Module 1: Unit 1, Lesson 1

The paper begins with a justification of the development of these articles – people were poor and disadvantaged, and they needed help. Then it goes into a summary of what the 30 articles of the Declaration do: comprehensibly define the conditions of being human in a God-free world. Why do I write God-free when the paper never addresses God? Because the paper never acknowledges God. That’s just a truth, and while it ignores God, it empowers another in His place. Though this document never identifies the source of any right for anyone, who grants those rights? The government. Who has the ultimate power? The government! Who is the biggest mass-murderer of the past? That’s right: The Government.

But what should we expect when we allow the government to educate our children, that it would relinquish it’s power to God? Government is too power hungry to do that.

Now, here’s the worksheet that accompanies this assignment.

Notice, please, how they don’t teach who secures the rights of “everyone.”

“No distinction shall be made on the basis of political, jurisdictional or inter nation status of the country or territory to which a person belongs…” So, all countries are equal? Then, please explain to me why South Korea is so much more wealthy and prosperous than North Korea. If all countries are equal, why did the Soviet Union fall, after receiving massive amounts of charity from the USA? (And why did they need charity at all?) Countries were not created equal; countries were created by men. America was blessed with an understanding of Judeo-Christian principles, created as a great experiment, testing those principles, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” as Abraham Lincoln so eloquently put it in his Gettysburg Address. He didn’t mention countries being equal, primarily because they’re not. No country has seen the explosion of wealth, created by entrepreneurial Americans in America. We are not equal. But the UN struggles to dissuade us from that belief, and now they are in our schools.

Here’s more:

The good news is – this child didn’t finish her assignment (yet).

Who will enforce all these 30 articles on “rights?” Do I have a right to a body guard? Wouldn’t that be enslaving someone else to protect me? What about the right to life for an unborn, full-term baby, that the pro-abortion movement so callously calls a “choice?”

What other countries can you think of that might try to avoid granting those rights of Article 14? Can the UN bend them to the will of the UN? (Is the UN teaching their kids?) Snowden comes to mind as a great example of our own government not respecting his choice to “seek and enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.”

 

What is marriage? Could we have the UN’s definition, please? Because for millennia it’s been simply a religious institution, not a political or fiscal one. But this document changes that. What is full age? Six? Twelve, Sixteen? In Saudi Arabia, there is no legal limit for a girl to be married. Happy first birthday, and congratulations on your marriage! So much for equality of the sexes, there.

“No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.” Define arbitrarily.

How about, no one shall arbitrarily impose regulations on those who have no say in them? Did Americans vote on these articles? Of course not. That would be too democratic for those in power at the UN. They are too busy handing out rights to any and all comers.

But wait, I’ve saved the best for last:

Because it’s so blatantly false, I must repeat it here: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care…” That would virtually enslave those who would provide those benefits. Slavery. How else can one be entitled to food and health care? This conjures up images of Mammy sewing Scarlett’s dresses. Oh, and by the way, good luck on the heart surgery your slave is performing on you. I hope that goes well, and I’m sure the slave does, too.

The main point here is that our children are being taught an enormous lie – the document is a lie. But that it’s part of the Common Core agenda is the plain truth.

Teaching Ageism

Ever wonder why children are divided by age? This article gives the reasons, none of which have anything to do with serving our kids!

The system rested on grade-specific textbooks. The textbooks had to provide continuity up the grades. The teachers could no longer do this. They did not know what was taught to students above or below their age-specific grades. This removed the teacher from the overall educational program. The teacher became an isolated cog in a bureaucratic machine. It placed administrators in charge. They designed the curriculum. They chose the textbooks. They ran the experiments. They adopted the fads, which came and went.

The one-room school house seems an antiquated system, and yet it was far more effective than our current one at instilling the values and knowledge we prize. Many of the Greatest Generation came from one-room schools. These days, we’d be happy knowing we were at least the “Not the Worst” Generation, if we even care, that is. And frankly, there is no guarantee it’s the case, anyway. But I digress (must like the system, which no longer teaches how to think, but what).

In his indispensable book, The Underground History of American Education, John Taylor Gatto comments on age-graded schools:

The socialization of children in age-graded groups monitored by State agents is essential to learn to get along with others in a pluralistic society. The actual truth is that the rigid compartmentalizations of schooling teach a crippling form of social relation: wait passively until you are told what to do, never judge your own work or confer with associates, have contempt for those younger than yourself and fear of those older. Behave according to the meaning assigned to your class label. These are the rules of a nuthouse.  (Emphasis mine.)

What are you hoping your kids learn from their peers, when you send them off to public school? Does ageism figure into those plans?

Working “Mom”

Reprinted from TrueFeminist.com, by Sam Sorbo

In her article, It’s Amazing to Be a Working Mom in France—Unless You Want a Job, Claire Lundberg makes and breaks her argument already in just the title. But because Slate decided to run her story, indicating that some readers are more obtuse than others, TF felt it was important to dissect its arguments.

Ms. Lundberg is a new “mom” who, while looking for a ‘real’ job finds that having a little baby at home (or, rather, in daycare) seems to be a liability, even in the very progressive France, where legislated maternity leave is four months. During a job interview she emphatically assures her potential employer that she won’t leave at six o’clock every day and could certainly hire a nanny to pick up the extra day-care responsibilities. Imagine! That business was reluctant to hire someone with an eighteen-month-old, perhaps because she doesn’t take her responsibility as seriously as they do.

TF asks, “Why have the kid at all?” And her argument below emphasizes the validity of our question:

French female executives spoke of needing to “neutralize” their personal lives, making sure home life and children didn’t interfere in any way with their work—even if this meant working long hours, being constantly available, reducing their maternity leave, and minimizing the presence of their pregnancies at work.

Ms. Lundberg goes on to wonder at the discrepancies between the female workforce concessions in the US vs. in France, where maternity is dealt with in a much more ‘loving’ (if you’re the woman – not the business) manner. In America, maternity leaves are shorter and it’s easier to fire people. How unfair, she argues. In France, the onus is placed more firmly on the shoulders of businesses. With that shift of responsibility, it becomes imperative for a business to discern whether a female hire will be a greater liability, due to future maternity leaves or other child-related considerations, and that causes understandable discrimination. The author even admits she plans to have more children (though if they are being whisked off to daycare for ten hours a day, one begins to wonder why).

Her subtitle really explains the gist of the matter:

France supports women having children, and then discriminates against them for it.

Yes! That’s economics 101! Is her brain so addled by baby hormones she fails to grasp the obvious?

But seriously, we don’t give birth and raise families for the benefit of society or the government, regardless of what Hillary Clinton’s “It Takes a Village” would have us believe. It’s a personal choice to have a family, and although the government is busy trying to claim authorship of our choices, and therefore control over them, ultimately we are personally responsible for our own decisions. The onus of having a child is on the woman who makes that choice. It was a great step backward when society relaxed its (moral) imperative that the father also shoulder his part of the responsibility, but we did. Now, unfortunately, feminists argue that business should pick up the slack – but that’s illogical and impractical, for the exact reasons the author explains, which simultaneously seem to baffle her.

Of course, being a working mother in the United States is far from easy—without guaranteed maternity leave or health insurance, and without many affordable child care options, American mothers fall out of the workforce at an even greater rate than their French counterparts. However, the United States has done just as well or better than France by most measurements at closing the workplace gender gap. Is it possible that the more Spartan benefits in the U.S. actually contribute to providing more opportunities for women?

This is a question she needs to ask? If the business only risks the loss of the worker during a brief maternity leave, but not the loss of the wages they would be obliged to pay her during a French, four-months-long maternity leave, well, logically, they would have less issue with hiring a qualified woman for any job. Unfortunately, though, the author wants only to see things as she feels they should be, instead of logically and rationally. TF posits that this comes from her own reluctance to acknowledge what it means to be a mother – to be responsible.

Maybe it’s because it’s hard – taking on that huge duty and obligation – that women want to return to the workforce, where they can measure (either fiscally or corporately) their success. After all, when was a mom ever promoted? But as I argue in Do the Hard Thing, uhm, do the hard thing – it’s the most rewarding.

Having kids isn’t something one does and then tries to forget. They aren’t accessories or pets. But that’s the attitude Ms. Lundberg seems to adopt. She ends her lament with a final plea:

What I really want is to find a new job, one where the fact that I’m a parent isn’t a liability.

Parenting is a job, arguably the most important one. It’s only a liability if you choose to think it so.