Remember the phrase “the Bigotry of Low Expectations.” Then replace that with Equity in any situation.
That is what has happened to Education in Dothan, Alabama. What has happened in Dothan is pretty much the same that has happened around the country, but this is what I know. I attended Mrs. Grubb’s Kindergarten. Then for elementary school I attended Girard Elementary (1-6) and then Girard Junior High School (7-9) and then Dothan High School on North Oates Street.
In high school we had six subjects: English (not Language Arts), Math (Algebra I and II, Geometry, or Calculus, not social justice Math), History (American or World History, not Social Studies), Latin, Spanish, or French, Science (Biology, Physics and Chemistry), and Political Science. We also took Physical Education and sometimes had a Study Hall.
The material in those subjects was presented sequentially as per school board policy. In English we learned the structure of a word, how sounds came together to make a syllable and syllables came together to make a word and words came together to make a sentence and sentences came together to make a paragraph and paragraphs came together to make a story or an article.—or maybe a book. We conjugated verbs and learned the difference between present, past and future tense and how verbs changed to show those tense changes mostly regularly and sometimes irregularly. We diagrammed sentence to actually see the structure of sentences.
We had a group of parents who read the literature books and books that would be read by students to see if they passed community standards.
Parents were involved not just in making cookies for the teachers’ lounge or purchasing a microwave or running off copies or reading books to children to “inspire them to read.” They knew the teachers. They knew the standards for hiring those teachers.
Goals 2000 changed things. The liberal teachers’ unions and powerful “progressives” got appointed to positions within the Department of Education who promoted programs meant to “help” those “less fortunate” -- eduspeak for our Minority students, basically Black children, by using our schools for social engineering.
And this is where the “Bigotry of Low Expectations” comes to the fore. We once called it Outcome Based Education because we want all children to achieve the same outcome. Unfortunately, that costs gifted children of all races. And it is an assumption that Minority children are not as capable of achievement and must be given advantages to lift them up.
Grading has changed. Children graduate from elementary school and come to Middle School unable to read their textbooks. They have been taught reading as if it were Mandarin which has words in pictographs. They memorize a rolodex of words and then cannot sound out unfamiliar words in their secondary textbooks. And yet they have As throughout elementary school.
History is no longer presented chronologically, building year upon year with fact upon fact. A theme is presented like “the atomic age.” The bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima is presented as one of many war crimes of the United States. Language Arts teachers ask students write an essay sharing their feelings about the event. (A part of SEL, Social Emotional Learning as well). The children lack the foundational knowledge of Hitler’s near win over England and the Allies before the Americans entered the war, the impact of the attack on Pearl Harbor on America, or what might have been the consequences of a Nazi win on the rest of the world. Science teachers focus on the environmental impact rather than the lives actually saved from a war that would have continued and lives lost under the Axis regimes. They do not learn the consequences of socialism whether through the fascism of Hitler or the communism of Stalin, or Mao, or Kim Il-sung.
Through thematic learning, a string of single events in human history are presented in order to achieve the goal of the teachers’ unions that have become so critical of the United States. Who were the leaders at that time? White men? And thus we have Critical Race Theory. But that is only the beginning. Rather than look at our history with the perspective of those who then lived, the critical judgement of those who label themselves “progressive” dominate the Department of Education, the colleges of education, the administrators and teachers who those colleges of education produce and therefore the impact on our children. That goal is revolution. And it is working from the inside out.
God got exiled from public schools and the demons who found the schools empty brought home legion. Meditation is accepted as a form of Social Emotional Learning (SEL). Every yoga pose is a prayer to a different God. The mind, emptied for meditation, visiting the happy place, is an invitation for “Ascended Masters” -- like “the Tibetan” who guided Alice Ann Bailey who was one of the first writers to use the term New Age. She describes a wide-ranging system of esoteric thought, covering such topics as meditation, the destiny of nations, and prescriptions for society in general. She described the majority of her work as having been telepathically dictated to her by a Master of Wisdom, initially referred to only as "the Tibetan" or by the initials "D.K.", later identified as Diwal Khul, an “Ascended Master.” Her writings are among the teachings often referred to as the “Ageless Wisdom.”
Robert Muller served in UNESCO for forty years and rose to the rank of Assistant Secretary of the United Nations. He founded a School of Ageless Wisdom in Arlington, Texas, and the University of Peace in Costa Rica. He is considered the “father of global education” by the United Nations. Mullers’ education programs are based on the teachings of Alice Bailey who first called her publishing company, the Lucifer Trust. Therefore the father of global education has based his curriculum on “an ascended Master” -- or what Christians would call a demon.
Bailey taught that the practice of meditation is one of the most important means of recognizing one’s own divinity and tapping into the wisdom of the universe. She founded the Arcane School, which brings together groups of three people in a New Age triangle to meditate and study together. She organized meditation groups to meet on the full moon “to create lines of spiritual force” She described meditation as the transmission of spiritual energy from mystical realms (A Treatise on White Magic, p. 90). She considered it as a means of communicating with her Ascended Masters.
This is what and who has replaced traditional education that sent our first astronauts to the moon.
Education has now evolve into Social Justice and the teachings of the defrocked Jesuit priest who began with Liberation Theology and then with Marxist friends became Liberation Pedagogy (also known as Whole Language) founded on Paolo Freire's book the Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Ergo Outcomes Based Education and Equity.
Social Emotional Learning in Dothan, Alabama, now uses Meditation as its center. Meditation is founded on the teachings of Ascended Masters through Alice A Bailey who inspired Robert Muller of the United Nations Education Science and Education Organization (UNESCO) considered the Father of Global Education” who created World Core Curriculum.
And yet, because we are all afflicted with the “bigotry of low expectations” we buy the claims of administrators who ask us, “Do you realize how many free lunches we distribute?” blaming the high illiteracy rate, declining ACT scores and low national standing in Math on our minority students and not our monstrous curriculum.
Establishment educators will continue establishment curriculum as long as the establishment public endorses them.
I invite you to research all that I have written.
