All three of the essays excerpted below were recently reprinted in Phyllis Schlafly’s Education Reporter.

Judged by all the billions of dollars now flowing into “education reform,” it appears that Washington, and especially the Obama administration, is obsessed with improving academic achievement. The billions are certainly real enough, but the intent is just the opposite. Rhetoric aside, the Obama administration, like Bush II’s before it, is profoundly opposed to brainpower. Our “commitment” to academic excellence is a cruel joke — we love stupidity and hate smart kids. Tellingly, not even “conservatives” who bemoan America’s educational decline will admit this awkward reality — they, too, are passengers on this reform gravy train heading to the bottom. – Robert Weissberg, “The War on Academic Achievement”

To sum up, we have little to show for the $2 trillion in federal education spending of the past half century. In the face of concerted and unflagging efforts by Congress and the states, public schooling has suffered a massive productivity collapse — it now costs three times as much to provide essentially the same education as we provided in 1970.

Grim as that picture may seem, it fails to capture the full measure of the problem. Because as productivity was falling relentlessly in education, it was rising everywhere else. – Andrew J. Coulson, “The Impact of Federal Involvement in America’s Classrooms”

In the 1960s, America’s education schools began conditioning teachers to peddle impossible social and economic theories to captive human sponges in K-12 classrooms. Since then, teachers taken in by progressive indoctrination have been planting fallacies in students’ minds using a pernicious device: the “deconstruction” of reality.

Deconstruction aims to disassemble traditional Western culture and replace that culture with a collectivist utopia operated under rules set by the deconstructors. – Chuck Rogér, “The Toxic Influence of Progressive Education on K-12 Curricula”

“Husband” and “wife” are out and “partner” is in. Also out: “man” and “woman.” “Gender” is the word of choice today. Want to say “contraception?” Try “reproductive health.” With these and similar word games, combined with an extreme interpretation of “anti-discrimination,” international institutions are imposing ideologies across the globe . . . – Zenit

When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less. — Humpty Dumpty

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, issued a scathing staff report [Monday] charging that the White House has “used the machinery of the Obama campaign to tout the president’s agenda through inappropriate and sometimes unlawful public relations and propaganda initiatives.” – Jerome Corsi, WND

Sign up for regular doses of socialist agitprop at BarackObama.com.

The late CBS Evening News anchorman Walter Cronkite is named in a just-released FBI document from 1986 as being targeted in a Soviet “active measures” campaign against President Reagan’s anti-communist foreign policy. Cronkite is named as a possible member of a U.S. delegation that would sign a pro-Soviet “People’s Peace Treaty.”

Cronkite, once known as “the most trusted man in television news” because of his influence during the time when three network news programs dominated the national dissemination of news and information, bears a great deal of responsibility for the American military defeat in Vietnam and the communist conquest of that Southeast Asian country. – Cliff Kincaid

Mainstream Media Propagandists

The Real Walter Cronkite

Here’s an interesting post on the Cliff Notes for The Education of Henry Adams. A passage in which Adams is clearly lamenting the stifling of the religious impulse is perversely interpreted as being a celebration of the same. The poster notes that she has encountered such anomalies in Cliff Notes before and wonders if others have noticed this phenomenon.

I can remember having this same reaction as a kid, experiencing it with ever greater frequency as I got older. The teacher says the story is about such and such, but it really seems to be about quite the opposite. The news reader on TV says something means this, but it really seems to mean that. It got worse in college and graduate school.

But it didn’t even begin to dawn on me that I was being flat out lied to until I listened in on the radio broadcast of the Democratic Convention in 1976 (I didn’t own a television at the time). I had been a liberal in high school and college, a radical even, and had not yet begun my reluctant move to the right. I tuned in to the Democratic Convention because I was, or thought I was, a Democrat.

Barbara Jordan was giving the keynote address. I listened — for 20  excruciating minutes — to the most pompous, stilted, overwrought, platitudinous address I’d ever heard in my life. Finally, I turned the radio off in disgust. It was an aesthetic reaction, mind you, not ideological. I have no recollection of the content of the speech.

I waited 20 minutes or so before turning the radio on again. When I did, I was shocked to hear the anchor people marveling at what a magnificent speech they’d just heard. At first, I thought they must be talking about someone else. Barbara Jordan must have finished and the person following her must have been quite the orator. But no, they were talking about Jordan.

How could that be? Hadn’t we heard the same speech? How could our wildly different reactions be a simple difference of opinion? Were they insane? Was I insane?

In retrospect, it seems so obvious to me; but, back then, I honestly didn’t know the answer. I didn’t realize that we were being conditioned to have the “acceptable” opinion: The favored people are wonderful, no matter how they may seem lacking; the disfavored ones are awful, regardless of their apparent merits. As I commented on the post linked above, “They tell us what to think and most of us oblige.”

I’m not one of the obliging ones. I fight back, whenever and wherever I can. When I find a politically correct definition in our dictionary, for instance, I amend it. I cross out the misinformation and write an honest entry in the margin. I do this in ink, because it’s my book and I have a right to fix the errors in it.

When I encounter an ideologically motivated commentary in our movie review book, I make the necessary changes to bring it into compliance with truth and decency.

To my great delight, I’ve discovered that my older children have adopted my tactics. These are little things, of course, and only a sampling of my efforts as a counter-change agent — but, little by little, we’ll counter-change the world and the Truth will out.

The shameless denial with which major newspapers and networks have treated “Climategate” layers even more scandal on top of the original one: Mainstream media now co-conspirators with scientific hacks and big government. – IBD Editorial

They’ve been co-conspirators going all the way back to Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. Thank God for the internet and talk radio! Maybe now all the programmed idiots in America will come to their senses.

We continue to see a growing disconnect between what is going on in the country and what the media are covering. If we only had the so-called “mainstream media,” would we know about the uproar at townhall meetings? Would we know about the tea party protests that draw tens of thousands to a single site? Would we know about all of Barack Obama’s czars or the endless corruption at ACORN? We all know the answers to those questions. – Bobby Eberle

How many people who voted for Obama would have done so if the mainstream media had reported on his subversive and criminal connections? By covering up these connections, they, like ACORN, are operating as an organized criminal enterprise.

Famous Lost Words

Remember when . . .

• “Gay” meant happy?
• “Bad” meant bad?
• “Aids” was the plural of aid?
• “Liberals” opposed the expansion of government?
• “Masculine” and “feminine” were compliments?
• “Marriage” was the union of a man and a woman?
• “News” excluded opinion?
• “Science” excluded propaganda?
• “Discrimination” and “judgment” were intellectual abilities?
• “Thongs” were flip-flops?

Politickles.com

Bob’s Other Lists:

• What Bosses Really Mean
• How to Interact with Humorless People
• Why Ordinary TV is Better than Cable
• Funny Things to Say at Work
• Things that Made Playing More Fun
• Lying Words and What They Mean
• Benefits to Homeschooling
• Drawbacks to Homeschooling
  

Homophobia is damaging people’s health and careers * the problem may be worse than reported * police . . . incapable of dealing with homophobic crime * anonymous reporting of homophobic crime * people denied refuge because officials did not believe they were fleeing persecution due to their sexuality * discrimination can mean people   . . . were treated as if their sexual orientation were a “disturbance or sickness” * being hostile towards “gay pride” rallies * stereotypes prevail . . . enforcing the idea that sexual orientation is about sex alone. — Reuters

Where to begin? The article excerpted above is a real piece of work, and qualifies Reuters as the official mouthpiece of the Lavender Lobby. A few questions:

• Isn’t it homosexuality, rather than homophobia, that is “damaging people’s health and careers”?
• Is the problem “worse than reported,” or greatly exaggerated?
• Do police have trouble “dealing with homophobic crime” because it’s a nebulous concept?
• Won’t “anonymous reporting” encourage false and frivolous accusations and intimidate decent people?
• Why should a country increase its deviant population by providing refuge to people “fleeing persecution due to their sexuality”?
• Proper diagnosis of gender confusion is “discrimination”?
• People with moral and religious convictions should not be “hostile” toward public celebrations of immorality and anti-religious hatred?
• “Sexual orientation” is not about sex?