Balanced or Biased? Marxism in Education – Part 2

In my last post, I listed some of the authors, primarily philosophers, that the high school students used in their essays for the Ethics in Education Symposium. Then I began to think, am I over-reacting? Are these men really contributors to the philosophies of Marxism? Is it really a bad thing if Pine Richland high school teachers present these philosophers in a positive light to their students, thus impressing upon their minds that their ideas are acceptable, favorable, and beneficial to society? Are the students really projecting a secular humanistic worldview in 14 of 16 essays that I read? Hmmmmm…

Of course, as stand-alone readings, Aristotle and Kant are fairly innocuous, speculations on ethics and morality. Freire's work is not, however, it is a setup for open Marxism, calling actual instructive teaching "oppression" and the students the "oppressed". One reading by an environmentalist, Wendell Berry, would hardly change one's worldview. But there is so much more revealed in the essays themselves (I hope the rebuttals are posted at some point, or the whole event televised). Because someone with ties to the district said the required reading choices were balanced, I decided to revisit the kids' writings. Here are some more examples of the results of a PRHS education:

• Abortion is not wrong, and author could not even call it a "death" but fighting to stave off experiencing non-life. Also cited as fact that the unborn baby could not really feel pain because it did not have emotions, but many studies – including ultrasound of procedure – show otherwise, yet student used one biased source for this info.
  
• Sources for bioethics argument were an atheist, Joshua Green (argues man has no soul) and an self-avowed atheistic anarchist (or is that an anarchistic atheist?), Steven Pinker (evolutionary psychologist)
  
• One said the pursuit or desire for wealth is unethical.
  
• One says we have a "basic primate morality" as a result of evolution.
  
• One said the U.S has no strong alliances with any other countries and would not be obliged to supply troops to aid in any war they might instigate; a very interesting, faulty and unsubstantiated statement considering the plight of Israel, one of our staunchest allies, the only democracy in the Middle East, and under severe threat of attack from Iran.
  
• Same author said that the administrations in the 21^st century were more ethical than the John Adam's administration because they allow people to apply knowledge and make suggestions for improvements, and mentioned how people are liberal.
  
• One said it was "the right decision" for Obama to discontinue the European missile defense – many would say renege on our country's pledge – but had nothing to support this. How about using the phrase "in my opinion" for that's all it is – an opinion.
  
• One was discussing how we humans shouldn't tamper with evolution.
  
• Same author says religions are "painfully constant even in the face of broad social liberalism", and that society's ethics were very different than Judeo-Christian values, e.g in accepting pre-marital sex and open homosexuality.
  
• Says "we need to keep religion out" of the bioethics debate. There are too many "fanatical believers".
  
• One advocated a nationwide education reform because PRHS education is unethical (because of the criterion based grading system).
  
• One thought if man was free of societal constraints primarily imposed by Christian religion, we would not even need laws because of man's natural goodness.
  
• One could not possibly have understood the irony when writing about educators imposing their "politicized knowledge in the classroom" and the students are "free from the teacher's imposition of his or her deceptive or explicitly biased point of view" when a variety of perspectives is possible – No Kidding!
  

I wonder if this is the worldview shared by the majority of Pine Richland parents, and I wonder if this is the worldview that parents of 8^th graders, for example, would like to see in their children after a few years of high school higher learning.

A Marxist Indoctrination of Teenagers – here? Part 1

Last Friday, I was glancing through the Pine-Richland school district e-newsletter and something caught my eye – "secretary of education to attend Symposium". I clicked through, thinking, wow, Arne Duncan will be in Gibsonia…only I didn't read very carefully, its only the PA sec. of ed. Oh well, may as well keep reading. It's called a Symposium on Ethics in Education, and says our U.S. Representative Jason Altmire will be a guest, among others. Sounds interesting, so I click through again and wow! The new-age eastern spirituality of the cover art (done in a proficient manner by a sophomore) that greeted me was a foreshadowing of things to come (see for yourself www.prsymposium.info). I let it go…for a day. Then I googled a few of the required reading books:

Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (chap 2)
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Wendell Berry, The Long Legged House
James Baker "Islam without Fear" (not referenced in any essays)

Well, I almost fell out of my chair when I found two of the "required reading" books available for free reading on the website http://www.marxist.org/, Freire and Kant. Being unable to find peace, I eventually printed out the readings (except for To Kill a Mockingbird, which I recall reading in HS), and also the 160 or so pages of essays written by the best and brightest students of Pine-Richland.

Here is what I found. No one used James Baker's work at all. The majority of papers used Kant, Aristotle and Freire. No one seemed to know that they were reading opinions, that these were these men's personal views, no matter how high in esteem the school and certain left-leaning persons hold them. Many used John Dewey's book, Democracy in Education, - Dewey was recently profiled in The New Republic as one of the "Four Horsemen" of progressivism, and here is an interesting note:

Finally, Dewey arguably did more than any other reformer to repackage progressive social theory in a way that obscured just how radically its principles departed from those of the American founding. Like Ely and many of his fellow progressive academics, Dewey initially embraced the term "socialism" to describe his social theory. Only after realizing how damaging the name was to the socialist cause did he, like other progressives, begin to avoid it. In the early 1930s, accordingly, Dewey begged the Socialist party, of which he was a longtime member, to change its name. "The greatest handicap from which special measures favored by the Socialists suffer," Dewey declared, "is that they are advanced by the Socialist party as Socialism. The prejudice against the name may be a regrettable prejudice but its influence is so powerful that it is much more reasonable to imagine all but the most dogmatic Socialists joining a new party than to imagine any considerable part of the American people going over to them." (from the article "John Dewey and the Philosophical Refounding of America" by Tiffany Jones Miller on National Review http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=OTY0MjA1YzVjNjVkOTViMzM5M2Q5M2Y0ODk0ODc0MmM=)

One student used Friedrich Nietzsche extensively as a source of inspiration. A couple of her shining moments are as follows:

• "More simply explained, institutions of society, religion in particular, seek to destroy the very characteristics which dominate humans and human nature, and instead intend to replace them with unachievable ideals of perfection."
• Quotes Whichcote from Michael Gill's book: "…if we would just follow our true nature we would live as we should." Oh really? She also did not like the Catholic church or Calvinism, apparently.

She also quotes Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, another star in the http://www.marxist.org/ Encyclopedia of Marxism, as well as Kant and Freire.
The next author's main source is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
One kid writes: "philosopher Georg Hegel". Ouch. Here is what my new favorite source says about Georg: "The greatest philosopher of "German Idealism," theorist of modern dialectics and the most important influence on Marx and Engels and essential to Marxism." (http://www.marxists.org/archive/index.htm)
One kid actually studied Adam Smith's work The Wealth of Nations, but he concluded that it had an overall negative effect on ethics.
One girl, who did well in using the Bible as a source of ethics, mentioned that "An example of an unethical law or government would be one where the people are oppressed and cannot make decisions about their own life without going through the government." Later she says, ironically, "Teachers must be careful not to let their own opinions get in the way when educating children about ethics." Amen.
I could go on and on, but the fact is that one worldview is basically conveyed across the essays that I read, and that is secular humanism.
So I questioned the teacher in charge of the Symposium:
Hi Mr. XXX,
I had seen the announcement for the Symposium on Education in the announcements on Friday and have a few questions. Is this event open to the public? Will the video be shown on PRTV?
I also have some concerns with the subject matter. the artwork on the home page is excellent, but it certainly represents eastern or pagan spirituality (it did not strike me as Greek, which may flow with the idea of a symposium, but as a goddess in a Hindu worship pose and a triangular labyrinth). Even more disconcerting is the fact that I can find two of the required readings on the website marxist.org (Paulo Freire and Immanual Kant). Presenting these authors as credible sources of the viewpoint on "Ethical Considerations for the Twenty-First Century" is simply unfathomable to me. Can you explain these choices?
At another time, I would like to explore last year's writings - being a left-brain person with a left-brain child, I find it troubling that the schools concentrate entirely on the attributes of the right-brain individuals as the entire future of our society.
Sincerely,
He replied:

Due to the number of concerns that you bring up, I think it would be appropriate for us to discuss this face to face. I have students working with myself and Mrs. xxxxx after school on Thursday and Friday in room xx. That way you can speak with both of us. Please let me know when you would like to meet.

Of course a meeting precludes putting your views in writing. Well, we met yesterday. I learned that the symposium was only open to students in honors/pre-AP or Advanced Placement (AP) classes, it involves about 150 students, and it included English, Social Studies and Science classes. It is open to the public. Participation was optional except for at least some classes of 12^th grade AP English students. The required reading list was from various teachers' suggestions. The teachers claimed these weren't Marxist authors…I told them I read the works, read the essays and found the essays agreed with these works. The students quoted more progressives as sources, and none at all disagreed except possibly the gal using the Bible as a source. I asked why use these materials, and why not provide alternative viewpoints. We discussed Freire's assertion that the "banking method" (which I prefer to call "direct instruction" or more simply, "teaching") was oppressive, but I maintained that kids do need to learn facts first, then analyze and discuss, and that it does not seem like there is much emphasis on mere memorization here anyway. Eventually the English teacher got mad and left abruptly. The other teacher did not explain the rationale behind the selection of authors, said participation was optional (except for the kids for whom it was required, apparently) and the kids were free to disagree. But no one did disagree or even seem to realize that these were opinions, and the secular humanistic worldview shone through (wow I did learn something in high school!). But when the school presents one viewpoint, and does not inform the students that this is controversial and there are other views, and does not provide sources of opposing information, and it's a view that many if not most of the parents in our conservative upper-middle class school district would find objectionable, that is not acceptable. I hope I implied they were brainwashing our best and brightest. I did remark how appalling I found the universal adoration of Dewey, she replied that public education is a prograssive idea, and I thought - but did not say - that government control of public education is one of the ten planks of Marxism. To be continued...

Social Justice in Math??

Glenn Beck is right. As he said on his program this week, the two words we need to know are "social justice" (defined as "the distribution of advantages and disadvantages within a society"). But who would have thought those words would apply to the math curricula across the United States – and may well be the reason we are losing our competitive edge as a nation.

This year in third grade math, we fell off a cliff! Thanks to our new program, enVisionMATH by Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley (Pearson), every homework page was taking an hour to complete with a parent helping – and the pages only had at most 10 new problems and 8 review. Every math test had what we suspected would have been a failing grade, except that our rather progressive district (Pine-Richland) had decided to replace real grades with indicators (e.g. D for developing a skill). But after a bit of research, I found that enVisionMATH could be considered a constructivist program - also called reform, fuzzy, progressive, with much discovery and student-centered teaching methods – as in all-word-problems-all-the-time, as in every concept must be presented as something you can visualize. I never knew there have been "math wars" engaged throughout the country for many years now, between angry parents who realize the math their kids are learning is not the same math they learned and not of the quality needed for future college-level math success, and their school districts, who seem to believe they know best, that everything must change, and to hell with the will of the parents. Traditional math includes practicing, memorizing and learning abstract concepts first before applying them to the concrete, and is often derided as "Drill and Kill". Constructivist math has taken over the educational system and is math based upon solving real world problems and developing conceptual understanding, but largely neglecting the teaching and practice of foundational skills (such as addition and multiplication): more words than numbers (e.g. write your own word problem…explain why 3/5 is greater than 2/5…). The schools oftem implement supplemental programs to compensate for the lack of arithmetic rigor. Some kids – the geeks, introverts, left-brain, Asperger's (think Bill Gates and Albert Einstein) – struggle with and sometimes even fail constructivist math programs.

But this is not about using a new and better way to teach math to ensure success for our country. Or the result of a bunch of liberal arts majors screwing around with our math. According to the Investigations in Math (or TERC by Pearson) website, teachers are aware that some children struggle mightily with their reform math, but because their goal is "equity" they have to address these kids' needs too. Unfortunately the publisher and school districts across the country have not yet done so (even though this post is from 2001) and the establishment is displaying a cynical satisfaction at the impact:

Equity is a core principle of the current mathematics education reform movement. "All students, regardless of their personal characteristics, backgrounds, or physical challenges, must have opportunities to study -- and support to learn -- mathematics." (Principles and Standards for School Mathematics, p. 11.) Much has been written about our need to reach minorities, girls, and inner city children -- populations that have been underrepresented in advanced math classes in high school and college. But there is another population that I think we are in danger of leaving behind, a population that used to do well in school mathematics: tidy math fans.

What is tidy math? Worksheets containing orderly rows of computation problems, all essentially the same problem, but with different numbers. Textbooks or teachers that cleanly demonstrate a method step by step and then ask students to do thirty problems using that same method. These are examples of tidy math.

Who are tidy math fans? Students who are neat and well-organized. Students who may not be too creative, but who pay attention and follow directions well. Students who are satisfied with knowing how and who are not bothered by not knowing why. Students who grow up, meet math teachers like myself at parties, and say "Oh, I've always liked math. I love how there's always one right answer to a problem." These are tidy math fans.

Tidy math fans do well in what we now call "traditional" math programs. But as some schools adopt new programs like Investigations, some of these students face a sudden drop in status, from one of the best math students in the class to an average, sometimes struggling student. Their self-esteem about their math ability plummets. It's no wonder that some of their parents (who themselves grew up with tidy math) put up a fuss about the new program and teaching style that is causing their children's loss of confidence...

We need to recognize how hard the adaptation to "messy math" is for a few children. To achieve our vision of equity, we must support these children too, but how? I would love to hear from Investigations users on this issue. (emphasis added)

How common is this theme of social justice in math? Well, the Pennsylvania Council of Teachers of Mathematics (PCTM) annual meeting in November 2009 had three workshops about "social justice" and three workshops about "equity". A total of six workshops were devoted to this topic at this one event. How common are the constructivist math programs in school districts today? According to Pearson, enVisionMATH is the number one selling elementary math curriculum in the country

Is "social justice" a good idea in math? Does math really discriminate against minorities, or is math a universal language transcending race, color, creed, and gender? And what is the impact of this new way of doing math? Hung-Hsi Wu, a professor of mathematics at Berkeley, writes:

"The reform also raises a grave concern in a different context. The economic and social well-being of our nation is critically dependent on the existence of a robust corps of technicians in science and technology: the competent mathematicians, scientists, and engineers who evolve from school students gifted in science and mathematics. Because the reform favors weaker students, the top students end up being shortchanged, and the continuous supply of this technical corps is put in jeopardy. This problem is becoming so serious that it has alarmed the U.S. Department of Education. In a refreshingly straightforward document [17], it offers a criticism of the reform:

Ultimately, the drive to strengthen the education of students with outstanding talents is a drive toward excellence for all students. Education reform will be slowed if it is restricted to boosting standards for students at the bottom and middle rungs of the academic ladder. At the same time we raise the "floor" (the minimum levels of accomplishment we consider to be acceptable), we also must raise the "ceiling" (the highest academic level for which we strive). (emphasis added)

Wise people have been warning of the dumbing down of America for decades now, which may be the main thing that math equity has accomplished. In Pine-Richland school district, 21% of the students going to community or state colleges need remedial math and/or English.
And as discussed on the website for the Pennsylvania Coalition for World Class Math Standards, 43% of all students at public two-year institutions had enrolled in a remedial course and 29% of all students at public four-year institutions had enrolled in a remedial course. While the Government will say we need more standards and more tests (e.g. high school graduation exams, national standards), and new curricula to exactly match the new standards and tests, it seems to me that further reform in education will only continue the downward spiral.

References:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/social+justice

http://investigations.terc.edu/library/implementing/qa-1ed/tidy_math_fan.cfm

http://www.pctm.org/conference/conferencebooklet2009.pdf

http://www.pearsoned.com/pr_2008/102708.htm

From "THE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION REFORM: WHY YOU SHOULD BE CONCERNED AND WHAT YOU CAN DO" by H Wu, (Amer. Math. Monthly 104(1997), 946-954)

http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/education/18873477/detail.html

http://paworldclassmath.webs.com/