Last night at the annual gala fundraiser for the Columbus Area Arts Council, I received the Mayor’s Arts in Education award.
I’m awed, humbled and honored. You just never know who’s observing you as you make your way through life. And to have such an observer conclude that you’re making a contribution. Now, that’s the really good stuff.
Remember, during the Chicago Annenberg Challenge days, Obama shoveled all kinds of grant money into Bill Ayers’s programs.
There are a lot of important aspects to the whole Annenberg Challenge story, and there are several places around the web covering them. The best one-stop place I’ve found to get a conscise overview, and follow relevant links to one’s satisfaction, is this Thomas Lifson post at The American Thinker. He can steer you to the latest developments in what Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online and Steve Diamond at the blog Global Labor and Politics are pursuing, among others.
A few observations:
1.) This is a classic case of a bunch of lefties tapping into a money stream, setting up a bureaucracy, holding endless meetings and pushing a lot of paper around rather than actually doing something productive in the world.
2.) To pull this off, you of course need some noble-sounding cause, like “school reform,” to serve as your smokescreen
3.) It’s kind of pathetic to see old Maoist federal-building-bombers like William Ayers reduced to this kind of doo-dah. It’s a little like aging rockers playing a perfunctory run-through of their hits.
4.) Remember that this is the height of Obama’s administrative experience so far in his life. Do we really want to give him the world’s top administrative job?
5.) The U of I Chicago library people had better reverse course and let Kurtz see those documents soon, or it’s going start smelling really bad.
I think I’ll let her know that I, too, am one of those “few teachers in humanities departments who must hide their views and work on the fringes.”
UPDATE: I’m putting this update at the top of this post because it’s the most egregious example of all. Don’t let anyone you know ever apply to the University of Maryland. It’s a reeducation camp that brainwashes students into thinking they’re racists because of their skin color or bigots because of their straight sexual orientation.
Today’s evidence that we’re getting close to the flatlining of our civilization is from the eductional front. Two columns on Townhall look unflinchingly at the advanced stage of rot in the realm of higher-education policy-making and public high school curriculum, respectively. Allison Kasic tells of a Congressional hearing on the relatively scant representation of females in the sciences and how the freedom-and-truth-haters want to look past the obvious explanation in order to impose social engineering and government largesse on the situation. Michelle Malkin looks at how Needham High School in the Boston area is requiring seniors to take - are you ready for this? - yoga. Mind you, the principal who came up with this nonsense recently did away with the school’s honor roll.
UPDATE: Then there’s this little item in which the University of Maryland has asked a speaker scheduled to be a panelist in a discussion on ant-Americanism in the Middle East to step down because another panelist - an Arab - objected to the fact that the first panelist had once served in the IDF.
Last night I gave my blues-history students their first quiz of the semester. One of the questions I asked was multiple choice:
Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and Charlie Parker all played
a.) banjo b.) saxophone c.) quills
I realize this is a blues class and not a jazz class, but Lester Young and Charlie Parker are important to a discussion of the territory-band circuit, and Coleman Hawkins performed and recorded with several 1920s clasic blues singers, such as Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith. (Actually, he started out in a very early territiry band with blues-history implications: Jesse Stone’s Blue Serenaders.)
Anyway, it really floored me to see how many people answered “quills.”
One guy said, “Well, right before the quiz, during review, you asked us about somebody plaing the quills, and I figured, when I saw that on the test, that was the reason why.”
I replied, “Yes, but recall that the guy who played the quills was Texas songster Henry Thomas, who was quite a bit earlier and musically a world removed from Hawkins, Young and Parker.”
How does anybody get to age twenty or whatever in America and not know who these towering contributors to our culture are? What has been filling their heads instead? I don’t care what your major is, at some point in your experience, some music teacher, other teacher, parent, cousin, friend - somebody should have brought them into your cognitive field.
It’s evenings like this that convince me that I have important work to do.
John Leo has a Townhall column today on the National Association of Scholars paper called “The Scandal of Social Work,” detailing how the social-work-education field has politicized its code of ethics. He then uses that example to launch to a broader look at how the education field in general - he cites the way English teachers are indoctrinated, for example - has been turned to rot by hard-left ideologues.
Disturbing but imprtant reading.
