Hating America and Loving Marxism: Pine-Richland Symposium Essays Show Bias

Here is my brief analysis of the essays written by Pine-Richland High School students for the 2011 "3^rd Annual Symposium on Education: An Interdisciplinary Consideration of Global Issues and Awareness" - a link to the actual doc is here (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zrUxt7o7XMuD-FV-YxVFoKWq0EvU8WsH1murV27lUJY/edit). Get out your Advil and some Tums, because you will find these students think that:

• Our education system is terrible, especially compared with Japan (but panelist response made great point favoring individualism over collectivism);
• We should become socialists like Holland and have government run healthcare and require all colleges to charge the same amount with a higher national property tax (where does the money for "free" socialized healthcare and cost-controlled universities come from? Taxing the people of course); also American colleges have a lot of immigrants not because our colleges are good but because these immigrants were rejected from the "better" colleges in their own country (really? there are not any sources cited for this opinion; but the panelist response questioned the idea that we should adopt the intensity of the Japanese culture and the way career paths for students in Germany are determined in the 5^th grade);
• Overstates the prevalence and impact of discrimination in the United States against those in poverty and particularly against Muslims;
• North Korea is isolated from most of the world because people are uneducated and just forgot that North and South Korea were joined before the Korean Conflict (never mind that it was influenced by Communist China and the Soviets, invaded South Korea, its Communist dictator starves and oppresses his people, and recently sunk a South Korean ship; I suppose this enlightened author would like South Korea to surrender to North Korea and have its population live in poverty and darkness, with no access to the free world) and it is perfectly understandable that North Korea makes and sells weapons ("Since the 1980s North Korea has sold missile systems to Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen, the International Crisis Group said in a report" Reuters, June 2009) it only does it to provide food for its soldiers (more likely to buy goods overseas to reward the ruling elite). Mind-blowing;
• Our "critical thinkers" do not acknowledge that Global Warming/Climate Change is far from settled science -that many scientists, climatologists etc. have presented evidence that there is no such problem and that fraud has been exposed among the leading proponents of this theory – and present a diehard fanatical view that we must do something now before our food, trees, and water are destroyed and insects and disease become rampant; kids quote words like "likely" in their global warming catastrophe predictions and do not even realize that the sources are just speculating in accordance with their political views; cites the debunked propaganda film "An Inconvenient Truth" among many sources but none present an alternate view of Global Warming. Panelist response reflects same view;
• In an essay on "Science and Radicalism" the student mis-characterizes both "progressives" and "conservatives" and seeks to portray conservatives as ignorant hillbillies who oppose all scientific discoveries and advancement; in his view "conservatives" persecuted Galileo, religious and Christian disagreement with scientific theories like Evolution are radical and un-enlightened, and asserts that if life was found on another planet it would threaten Christianity or prove it is untrue. He is right about all the bias and opinion among intellectuals, only he doesn't see the irony that progressives are as likely (if not more so) to twist "science" to fit their worldview as "conservatives".
• Colonization is evil and genocidal, and Christopher Columbus is responsible for harming Native American Indians and stole all their gold (there was no gold); he "took all their money and exploited them (Native Americans) for his own personal gain". Westerners only came to America because of GREED (not religious freedom? Not political and economic freedon? Not opportunity?). Immigrants had to save up their money to come here but Ellis Island was unpleasant and they still struggled mostly due to hateful discrimination. We still hate and oppress immigrants because we are afraid of having to speak Spanish (she must have read Scholastic Books' socialist "Dear America" series).
• Our kids should spend many more hours in school (so money to pay for this must grow on trees); Mexicans "move into" America daily and we are afraid of having to speak their language and thus keep them down with poor education (perhaps being an illegal immigrant plays a role in not getting the best opportunities?). We are ethnocentric and we commit crimes because of it (can we have national pride, a belief in American Exceptionalism, without being ethnocentric pigs? Not in Pine-Richland).
• And finally, we cannot be trusted to make good food choices, we need to stop companies from processing food. Natural healthy food is too expensive. All preservatives are bad (I thought they kept food from spoiling). The student almost discovered a real problem with genetically modified seeds but skipped past it.

So once again, while avoiding a direct attack on Capitalism as was mentioned by outgoing Director Rich Herko in the November 2010 School Board meeting, these writings demonstrate an extreme leftist worldview being imposed upon our students. I have never said that I think right-wing propaganda should be inserted in place of the Marxist Socialist stuff. I think the students should be presented factual, unbiased material, and the last 3 years of Symposium essays proves that they are not learning the truth or even how to think critically. And the animosity towards Independent and Conservative thinkers just proves why we need to stop this leftist indoctrination, so that these kids will not grow up to be angry, hate-filled adults.