It appears that a good deal of my blogs address the life messages targeted at today’s youth.  It may seem repetitive at times but it is important to note all the different directions from which our youth is being imperceptibly brainwashed.  The article discussed below is a step in the right direction but hardly a success.  While we are constantly being “nudged”, we have to be persistent on shoving back in order to establish an educational system that is balanced and unbiased and get our youth back on track.

Last week the Los Alamitos Unified School District ordered schools and teachers to give an annual presentation on the instruction of ‘controversial’ advanced placement (AP) courses for the next school year. As defined by the article, a topic is ‘controversial’ if there is “more than one widely held view’ on the issue (according to Assistant Superintendent Sherry Kropp).  The effort to assess the stance from which subjects are taught was headed by conservative school board member Jeffrey Barke over a new course covering environmental science and global warming (other topics in the course include population dynamics, evolution and biodiversity, pollution, ozone depletion and human health and toxicity).  Barke stated, “Most teachers are left to center, and if we leave it to teachers to impose their liberal views, then it would make for an unbalanced lesson…Some people believe that global warming is a crock of crap, and others are zealots.”  Barke claims he simply wants both sides of the argument to be presented throughout the class.

Thankfully, the board vote 4-0 that this was a necessary measure, especially since the class is expected to be popular and reach upwards of 15,000 students during the next school year.

Like I stated above, the request and vote in-favor of ensuring a well-balanced course is a step in the right direction, but we’re not there yet.  It’s a little reassuring to see that people are taking note that education is skewed and students deserve a balanced upbringing in this instution. However,  it still leaves the questions of how will the school board guarantee that the teachers remain unbiased about the side they don’t necessarily agree with? And how, at the end of the year, will students be assessed to ensure that both sides were covered equally, and not as one side -fact and one side-opinion?

The point of school is not to TELL students what and how to think, but to introduce facts and allow students to think critically for themselves and establish their own thoughts and opinions. There has been such a ruckus to keep God and religion out of public schools, to make sure all textbooks are politically correct as not to include certain terms from the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement and now we are even trying to impose feminism on everyone to ensure that a woman is called a waiter not a waitress. Where do you draw the line? It seems to me that schools have extracted any trace of conservatism and implemented all forms of liberalism, so much so as to push the limits of progressivism.  If extraction is the course we are going to take, it must happen on both sides of the spectrum.  Same goes for employing both sides in an argument.  But whether you take it or leave it, it’s like algebra….what you do to one side, you must do to the other.  And by doing that, you are left with one thing: facts.

Here is the link to the textbook that will be used for the course: http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&q=textbook+:,+%E2%80%9CLiving+in+the+Environment,%E2%80%9D&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=shop&cid=11141072175406725121#

You can read the article here from the Los Alamitos Patch here: http://losalamitos.patch.com/articles/global-warming