Erasing borders in the classroom
By Julie M. Quist
Issues and Action in Education
An e-letter produced by EdWatch, a nonprofit organization.
November 3, 2006
Political battles rage across America over unbridled illegal immigration on the southern border. Some build fences while others march for full rights for illegals. The Columbia University Teachers College, however, leapfrogs over the entire debate.
Columbia’s Teachers College Record recently published a Michigan State University Professor’s approving review of The Line Between Us: Teaching About the Border and Mexican Immigration, a book by Bill Bigelow. Bigelow’s and the reviewer’s premise for school curriculum is this: "The border between the U.S. and Mexico was not a natural occurrence, but instead, was the result of an act of aggression that created a new artificial line in the mid-19th century."
Bigelow doesn't present this as an opinion, mind you, but as fact. Book reviewer Jerry Garcia calls the book, “a timely publication.” Indeed. Its curriculum and teaching activities are for high school and middle school teachers. There’s no hint of evenhanded discussion of the intense political controversy over illegal immigration. Their view of our southern border as an “artificial barrier” is presented as firmly established fact, like the discovery of DNA.
“Transformational education” is the generally accepted belief in educational circles that schools are to “transform” students, and good education truly does transform. While schools were formerly viewed as an extension of the family, however, today’s transformers admit that they mean to undermine belief in the traditional and majority culture’s laws, values, traditions, history, and beliefs. In this case, teachers are being equipped in how to teach our kids that our sovereign borders illegitimate.
At what point does the public, no matter where our kids are schooling, charge teacher’s colleges with treason?
Teachers colleges treat the debate over illegal immigration as settled. They’ve taken the side of the illegals, and the teachers unions reflect that same political agenda in their annual platforms. Within the entrenched education establishment, no political controversy over illegal immigration exists. Of course, this extends to other political controversies, as well: global warming, same sex marriage, redistribution of wealth, the sacredness of the earth, etc all paid for with your tax dollars and mine.
Teachers colleges have been bastions of radicalism for generations. They have finally “progressed” to training our teachers to oppose the very boundaries of our nation and the laws that establish them, to deliberately rewriting the history of the Mexican-American War, to aggressively guiding our children into identifying with the lawbreakers and those who would erase our borders, to charging Border Patrol law enforcement with "de-sensitization," and to engaging our indoctrinated children in social/political activism to support these ideas.
“Follow the money.” Any serious political effort to staunch the flow of illegal immigration into our nation that fails to address the tax money spent to teach the young generation to undermine America cannot be successful in the long run. Genuine education accountability begins with the teachers colleges. Why are we funding treason?
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See also Brave New Schools, Chapter 2: The International Agenda