0 comment Sunday, November 23, 2014 | admin
The United States has been called the 'melting pot of the world.' The peoples who make up its population have come from all nations. They have proved without question that peoples of all colors, religions, and national origins can live together peacefully and happily. The American melting pot has been a success, but not a perfect success. In the United States there has been a certain amount of friction between white people and Negroes [sic], and among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.''
Before I continue, a disclaimer: the politically incorrect language in the last sentence above is a verbatim quote from the source, and not my own choice of words.The paragraph is from a half-century old World Book encyclopedia entry on ''Intercultural Education.''
I read it while browsing in this set of 1956-vintage encyclopedias recently, and was reminded of it when I read this
story from the UK Daily Mail, announcing a multicultural curriculum, which will encompass all subjects in schools:
Children will be taught race relations and multiculturalism with every subject they study -from Spanish to science - under controversial changes to the school curriculum announced by the Government.
In music and art, they could have to learn Indian and Chinese songs and instruments, and West African drumming .''
I used to believe that this kind of news story was unique to our own degenerate times, but reading the old 1956 encyclopedia, I found that the PC agenda has been around for decades, albeit under slightly different names, and with a less heavy-handed approach.
The British school plan is not that different from the approach in many schools in our own country, where multiculturalism and 'inclusion' are injected into every subject. Example: multicultural math.
More from the old encyclopedia:
The growth of large cities has brought troubles about housing . The growth of industry and business has caused more intense competition between groups. The Communist Party teaches its members who live in democracies to stir up race hatred in an attempt to make democracy appear ineffective.''
[emphasis mine]
Note: the article writers were correct in pointing out the role of the Communist Party in dividing people along racial and ethnic lines; divide and conquer, divide and rule, is a precept that has been used forever. Marx believed and taught that blacks would be part of the 'vanguard' of the revolution in our country and in Africa. When our home-grown leftists saw that our 'proletariat' was not revolutionary, as the working class became too comfortable and middle-class, the Left began to look to blacks as the revolutionary force in America, and worked at stirring up strife towards this end. Add that to the natural group frictions, and you have today's balkanized America, but further complicated by many, many new ethnic groups.
Educators in the United States have recognized the growth of friction between people of different groups. They have realized that the best way to stop friction is to educate children in the ways of tolerance, brotherhood, and interdependence. So they have introduced training in intercultural relations into the schools.
What Is Taught.
The Declaration of Independence gave the basic rule of intercultural relations. It declared ''All men are created free and equal.'' [sic] The United States Constitution gave equal rights and freedom to all citizens.
It is the purpose of intercultural education to fix in the minds of school children a belief in the American creed of freedom and equality. Anothere objective of intercultural education is to show how this creed must be practiced in daily life. Students are taught that "people are people", and that no man should be denied any rights because he is a Negro [sic], a Jew, an Italian, a Catholic, or a Japanese.
Teaching Methods
Some schools which were the first to teach intercultural education taught the subject as a separate course. The system was not very successful. Teachers soon found that much better results could be gained by including the subject in all courses on which it had bearing. One of the main aims of intercultural education is to show pupils how much their own group owes to others. This can be shown in many subjects. The study of English can show how the language has come from French, German, and Latin.
[...]Art and music teachers can point out that there have been masters in all nations and of all races and religions -- Da Vinci of Italy, Tschaikovsky of Russia, Beethoven of Germany, Chopin of Poland, Marian Anderson the Negro [sic], Mendelssohn the Jew, Rembrandt of the Netherlands, and El Greco, a Greek who lived in Spain. [Wow, a twofer with El Greco.]
Science teachers can show what inventions we have received from the Chinese, such as the making of paper and explosives. They can tell of the wonders perfomed by the Negro [sic] chemistry genius, George Washington Carver.
[...]All teachers can find frequent occasions to explode popular misbeliefs about various groups by presenting the facts.''
Yes, I can recognize much of this agenda in what I was taught in school back in the 1950s, although perhaps the agenda was less zealously pushed in the South, where the True Believers in the educational field were not as numerous back then.
Intercultural education goes beyond the classroom. On the playground, children of the various races and creeds can be taught to play together and show respect for each other.
In 1939 the public schools of Springfield, Mass., started such a program of intercultural education. The program was worked into all subjects and all activities of the school. Some Negro [sic] teachers were hired to teach classes of both white and Negro [sic] children. The sponsors of the plan have reported considerable success.
Outside The Schools.
Intercultural education is not limited entirely to the schools. It has been made part of the programs of churches, young people's clubs, and other organizations. One church in a New England town invited a group of Negro children from New York City to visit the town and live with white families. Later some of the New England children visited their New York friends in their Harlem homes.
Newspapers and magazines have done much to aid intercultural education.
[...] During World War II, most newspapers were quick to tell of the patriotism and loyalty of Japanese-American members of the armed forces. National Brotherhood Week is celebrated each year in the United states. Newspapers, radio, television, and motion pictures give special publicity to questions of group tolerance at this time.''
And the media have become even more gung-ho for political correctness in the intervening decades. But this encyclopedia article does show us that some of these ideas have been around in American society since at least the 1930s, when the Springfield, MA schools instituted the 'intercultural education' agenda. I truly think that leftists have been insinuating themselves into crucial positions in the media, education, and politics for many decades. That was their announced intention and plan, and yet some people still doubt that such is the case.
So much of the leftist agenda has been absorbed into our culture that it has become second nature to many people. Many people don't even realize the source of many of the pervasive ideas in our culture, like the obsession with egalitarianism which the intercultural education proponents cited so often in the excerpts above. Of course it sounds good and noble to say that 'all men are created equal', which Thomas Jefferson wrote, but did he intend for that phrase to be interpreted as justification for multiculturalism and a complete leveling of society? A thorough reading of his written works shows that he did not believe in the idea of erasing distinctions between people, and he did not propose that all cultures were equal, which is the basis of multiculturalism. So much of the leftist agenda is only a twisting and perverting of sound ideas into something else. 'All men are created equal' has been twisted to support Communism and various more benign-sounding leftist theories, as well as multiculturalism and open borders. 'All men are created equal' is also being used to justify things like 'No Child Left Behind', affirmative action, and racial quotas. After all, if all men are created equal, why should they not all have equal outcomes in life?
It all sounds benign and well-intentioned when we read the excerpts from the encyclopedia; who could object to phrases like 'people are people'? Who could object to people treating each other fairly and civilly? Who would favor unkindness or unfairness? The problem is not with that simple intention, but the lengths to which it has been taken, some 51 years later. Now, we not only have schools teaching children about the talented people of various nations or races, with credit given where due, but we have reached the point of absurdity, as in this:
The teachings are sheer fantasy, unsubstantiated by any credible evidence: ancient Egyptians mastered flight with gliders, which they used for both recreation and travel. They invented electric batteries and mastered electroplating, discovered the principles of quantum mechanics and anticipated Darwin's theories of evolution. Furthermore, all Egyptians were black, and their abundance of the dark skin pigment, melanin, not only made them more humane and superior to lighter-skinned people in body and mind but also provided such paranormal powers as ESP and psychokinesis.
Incredible as it may seem, these fallacies are being included in public school multicultural courses in a growing number of U.S. cities and espoused in black-studies departments on some college campuses.''
Afrocentric theory is the basis of such nonsense, but to dispute it is to open oneself to the inevitable charges of 'racism.' I actually had a black professor in college in the 70s who insisted that Beethoven was black. 'Just look at his hair in the pictures', she said, by way of 'proving' her assertion. Not only was Beethoven black, but so were Socrates, Pushkin, (he apparently did have some African descent) and other luminaries. Now we have people claiming that Edward 'the Black Prince' of England, was actually black.
This school web page says coyly,
His nickname probably was derived from the color of his armor, but nobody knows for sure.''
Right. So we leave the door open to the possibility that Edward was actually black, as in African.
If we ask skeptically why this fact was not known in the past, I am sure we would find somebody who would say 'they kept it quiet because of racism', just as my professor said about the cover-up of Beethoven's race.
Such is the arrant nonsense that we have opened the door to, in the name of making everybody feel good about themselves. If the goal of bringing about 'tolerance and brotherhood' and nowadays, boosting that sacred self-esteem, is noble enough, then that makes it permissible to lie and concoct fantasies about the past. If there aren't enough accomplishments by every race and nation, why not make them up? After all, it's in a good cause. But the truth is, achievement, on an individual level or on a national and racial level, is not equally distributed. Yet the truth is not acceptable, because it doesn't support the egalitarian agenda. So let's discard the truth and make up some flattering lies and fairy tales, like Egyptians flying around among the pyramids, and a black prince in England in the 14th century.
I suppose, being generous, we might excuse this as silliness for the sake of putting a good face on things; white lies of a sort. But then there is the darker side of this kind of revisionism for the sake of leveling: the depiction of Europeans and people of European descent as being arch-villains, committers of 'genocide' against the noble savages; this kind of thing is the stock-in-trade of the Aztlan crowd, with their stories of Columbus killing 30 million people, and of their mythical 'Aztlan' being stolen from them. This kind of belief system, irrational as it is, is a danger to us, because it may motivate those who would usurp our country.
In the UK, the sinister elites there seem intent on convincing people that Britain has always been multiracial and multicultural. Is it a coincidence that there has been a spate of stories like this one attempting to establish that there are long-standing African genes among the English? Notice how the article uses scare quotes around the word 'indigenous', as much as to question whether the English people are the 'real' indigenous people. It's all motivated by the multicultural agenda, it seems. Even science is being used for political ends.
The result of all this deceptively benign-sounding 'intercultural education', after decades, is a decidedly less benevolent one. The majority populations of all Western countries are demoralized after generations of being told that they and their ancestors are guilty, and intrinsically 'racist', and that they have no right to take pride in who they are, no right to consider their own interests as a group, while every other group and ethnicity has that right. 'Intercultural education', whether it was intended to do so or not, has had the effect of softening up the West for invasion and submission. The seeming capitulation of much of Europe to Islam seems mostly attributable to this pernicious doctrine of 'tolerance' inculcated in us for decades. When you have one group of people who are heavily indoctrinated to be all-accepting, open, tolerant, and self-blaming, while their competitors are aggressive, hyperconfident, and without restraint, the outcome is sadly predictable.
I see promising signs that people are now aware of some of these things, and awareness is the first step to shaking off the chains of our decades of leftist conditioning.
And to all thinking people with school-age children, home-schooling is an option to be considered.
Before I continue, a disclaimer: the politically incorrect language in the last sentence above is a verbatim quote from the source, and not my own choice of words.The paragraph is from a half-century old World Book encyclopedia entry on ''Intercultural Education.''
I read it while browsing in this set of 1956-vintage encyclopedias recently, and was reminded of it when I read this
story from the UK Daily Mail, announcing a multicultural curriculum, which will encompass all subjects in schools:
Children will be taught race relations and multiculturalism with every subject they study -from Spanish to science - under controversial changes to the school curriculum announced by the Government.
In music and art, they could have to learn Indian and Chinese songs and instruments, and West African drumming .''
I used to believe that this kind of news story was unique to our own degenerate times, but reading the old 1956 encyclopedia, I found that the PC agenda has been around for decades, albeit under slightly different names, and with a less heavy-handed approach.
The British school plan is not that different from the approach in many schools in our own country, where multiculturalism and 'inclusion' are injected into every subject. Example: multicultural math.
More from the old encyclopedia:
The growth of large cities has brought troubles about housing . The growth of industry and business has caused more intense competition between groups. The Communist Party teaches its members who live in democracies to stir up race hatred in an attempt to make democracy appear ineffective.''
[emphasis mine]
Note: the article writers were correct in pointing out the role of the Communist Party in dividing people along racial and ethnic lines; divide and conquer, divide and rule, is a precept that has been used forever. Marx believed and taught that blacks would be part of the 'vanguard' of the revolution in our country and in Africa. When our home-grown leftists saw that our 'proletariat' was not revolutionary, as the working class became too comfortable and middle-class, the Left began to look to blacks as the revolutionary force in America, and worked at stirring up strife towards this end. Add that to the natural group frictions, and you have today's balkanized America, but further complicated by many, many new ethnic groups.
Educators in the United States have recognized the growth of friction between people of different groups. They have realized that the best way to stop friction is to educate children in the ways of tolerance, brotherhood, and interdependence. So they have introduced training in intercultural relations into the schools.
What Is Taught.
The Declaration of Independence gave the basic rule of intercultural relations. It declared ''All men are created free and equal.'' [sic] The United States Constitution gave equal rights and freedom to all citizens.
It is the purpose of intercultural education to fix in the minds of school children a belief in the American creed of freedom and equality. Anothere objective of intercultural education is to show how this creed must be practiced in daily life. Students are taught that "people are people", and that no man should be denied any rights because he is a Negro [sic], a Jew, an Italian, a Catholic, or a Japanese.
Teaching Methods
Some schools which were the first to teach intercultural education taught the subject as a separate course. The system was not very successful. Teachers soon found that much better results could be gained by including the subject in all courses on which it had bearing. One of the main aims of intercultural education is to show pupils how much their own group owes to others. This can be shown in many subjects. The study of English can show how the language has come from French, German, and Latin.
[...]Art and music teachers can point out that there have been masters in all nations and of all races and religions -- Da Vinci of Italy, Tschaikovsky of Russia, Beethoven of Germany, Chopin of Poland, Marian Anderson the Negro [sic], Mendelssohn the Jew, Rembrandt of the Netherlands, and El Greco, a Greek who lived in Spain. [Wow, a twofer with El Greco.]
Science teachers can show what inventions we have received from the Chinese, such as the making of paper and explosives. They can tell of the wonders perfomed by the Negro [sic] chemistry genius, George Washington Carver.
[...]All teachers can find frequent occasions to explode popular misbeliefs about various groups by presenting the facts.''
Yes, I can recognize much of this agenda in what I was taught in school back in the 1950s, although perhaps the agenda was less zealously pushed in the South, where the True Believers in the educational field were not as numerous back then.
Intercultural education goes beyond the classroom. On the playground, children of the various races and creeds can be taught to play together and show respect for each other.
In 1939 the public schools of Springfield, Mass., started such a program of intercultural education. The program was worked into all subjects and all activities of the school. Some Negro [sic] teachers were hired to teach classes of both white and Negro [sic] children. The sponsors of the plan have reported considerable success.
Outside The Schools.
Intercultural education is not limited entirely to the schools. It has been made part of the programs of churches, young people's clubs, and other organizations. One church in a New England town invited a group of Negro children from New York City to visit the town and live with white families. Later some of the New England children visited their New York friends in their Harlem homes.
Newspapers and magazines have done much to aid intercultural education.
[...] During World War II, most newspapers were quick to tell of the patriotism and loyalty of Japanese-American members of the armed forces. National Brotherhood Week is celebrated each year in the United states. Newspapers, radio, television, and motion pictures give special publicity to questions of group tolerance at this time.''
And the media have become even more gung-ho for political correctness in the intervening decades. But this encyclopedia article does show us that some of these ideas have been around in American society since at least the 1930s, when the Springfield, MA schools instituted the 'intercultural education' agenda. I truly think that leftists have been insinuating themselves into crucial positions in the media, education, and politics for many decades. That was their announced intention and plan, and yet some people still doubt that such is the case.
So much of the leftist agenda has been absorbed into our culture that it has become second nature to many people. Many people don't even realize the source of many of the pervasive ideas in our culture, like the obsession with egalitarianism which the intercultural education proponents cited so often in the excerpts above. Of course it sounds good and noble to say that 'all men are created equal', which Thomas Jefferson wrote, but did he intend for that phrase to be interpreted as justification for multiculturalism and a complete leveling of society? A thorough reading of his written works shows that he did not believe in the idea of erasing distinctions between people, and he did not propose that all cultures were equal, which is the basis of multiculturalism. So much of the leftist agenda is only a twisting and perverting of sound ideas into something else. 'All men are created equal' has been twisted to support Communism and various more benign-sounding leftist theories, as well as multiculturalism and open borders. 'All men are created equal' is also being used to justify things like 'No Child Left Behind', affirmative action, and racial quotas. After all, if all men are created equal, why should they not all have equal outcomes in life?
It all sounds benign and well-intentioned when we read the excerpts from the encyclopedia; who could object to phrases like 'people are people'? Who could object to people treating each other fairly and civilly? Who would favor unkindness or unfairness? The problem is not with that simple intention, but the lengths to which it has been taken, some 51 years later. Now, we not only have schools teaching children about the talented people of various nations or races, with credit given where due, but we have reached the point of absurdity, as in this:
The teachings are sheer fantasy, unsubstantiated by any credible evidence: ancient Egyptians mastered flight with gliders, which they used for both recreation and travel. They invented electric batteries and mastered electroplating, discovered the principles of quantum mechanics and anticipated Darwin's theories of evolution. Furthermore, all Egyptians were black, and their abundance of the dark skin pigment, melanin, not only made them more humane and superior to lighter-skinned people in body and mind but also provided such paranormal powers as ESP and psychokinesis.
Incredible as it may seem, these fallacies are being included in public school multicultural courses in a growing number of U.S. cities and espoused in black-studies departments on some college campuses.''
Afrocentric theory is the basis of such nonsense, but to dispute it is to open oneself to the inevitable charges of 'racism.' I actually had a black professor in college in the 70s who insisted that Beethoven was black. 'Just look at his hair in the pictures', she said, by way of 'proving' her assertion. Not only was Beethoven black, but so were Socrates, Pushkin, (he apparently did have some African descent) and other luminaries. Now we have people claiming that Edward 'the Black Prince' of England, was actually black.
This school web page says coyly,
His nickname probably was derived from the color of his armor, but nobody knows for sure.''
Right. So we leave the door open to the possibility that Edward was actually black, as in African.
If we ask skeptically why this fact was not known in the past, I am sure we would find somebody who would say 'they kept it quiet because of racism', just as my professor said about the cover-up of Beethoven's race.
Such is the arrant nonsense that we have opened the door to, in the name of making everybody feel good about themselves. If the goal of bringing about 'tolerance and brotherhood' and nowadays, boosting that sacred self-esteem, is noble enough, then that makes it permissible to lie and concoct fantasies about the past. If there aren't enough accomplishments by every race and nation, why not make them up? After all, it's in a good cause. But the truth is, achievement, on an individual level or on a national and racial level, is not equally distributed. Yet the truth is not acceptable, because it doesn't support the egalitarian agenda. So let's discard the truth and make up some flattering lies and fairy tales, like Egyptians flying around among the pyramids, and a black prince in England in the 14th century.
I suppose, being generous, we might excuse this as silliness for the sake of putting a good face on things; white lies of a sort. But then there is the darker side of this kind of revisionism for the sake of leveling: the depiction of Europeans and people of European descent as being arch-villains, committers of 'genocide' against the noble savages; this kind of thing is the stock-in-trade of the Aztlan crowd, with their stories of Columbus killing 30 million people, and of their mythical 'Aztlan' being stolen from them. This kind of belief system, irrational as it is, is a danger to us, because it may motivate those who would usurp our country.
In the UK, the sinister elites there seem intent on convincing people that Britain has always been multiracial and multicultural. Is it a coincidence that there has been a spate of stories like this one attempting to establish that there are long-standing African genes among the English? Notice how the article uses scare quotes around the word 'indigenous', as much as to question whether the English people are the 'real' indigenous people. It's all motivated by the multicultural agenda, it seems. Even science is being used for political ends.
The result of all this deceptively benign-sounding 'intercultural education', after decades, is a decidedly less benevolent one. The majority populations of all Western countries are demoralized after generations of being told that they and their ancestors are guilty, and intrinsically 'racist', and that they have no right to take pride in who they are, no right to consider their own interests as a group, while every other group and ethnicity has that right. 'Intercultural education', whether it was intended to do so or not, has had the effect of softening up the West for invasion and submission. The seeming capitulation of much of Europe to Islam seems mostly attributable to this pernicious doctrine of 'tolerance' inculcated in us for decades. When you have one group of people who are heavily indoctrinated to be all-accepting, open, tolerant, and self-blaming, while their competitors are aggressive, hyperconfident, and without restraint, the outcome is sadly predictable.
I see promising signs that people are now aware of some of these things, and awareness is the first step to shaking off the chains of our decades of leftist conditioning.
And to all thinking people with school-age children, home-schooling is an option to be considered.
Labels: Education, Multicultural