PC DEGRADES EDUCATION

A disillusioned American mother wants her kids to get a real education

"[Public] schools are hardly places devoid of worship. Indeed, "religious" is probably the best adjective to describe their fervent allegiance to the beliefs and precepts of what is known as "political correctness" on display in classrooms across the nation. Maybe it is this new religious devotion to a leftist cultural ideology--which today's schools preach and which yesteryear's schools did not--that Baptists now find "anti-Christian."...

I'm not a Baptist, but I added my twin fifth-grade daughters this past year to the estimated 1.7 million to 2.1 million students who, according to the Oregon-based National Home Education Research Institute, are educated at home....

The excellently rated, wealthy and very white public elementary school in Montgomery County, Md., that my daughters attended last year... eventually inspired in me a deep and abiding faith: I came to believe there was no way on, er, God's green earth that I could possibly teach my girls less than they learned in that school....

For me, the decision to educate the kids at home didn't crystallize right away. Truth be told, I was almost willing to give a pass to the Maryland public-school teacher who taught a storybook version of Christopher Columbus through the eyes of a native girl who peered through a palm frond at the "awkward" Spaniards setting foot on the New World only to laugh at their "funny" clothes. Given the triumph of the PC order, there is an argument to be made that the Klutzing of Columbus, and worse, has become an unavoidable part of modern-day education--a requirement that may be balanced by intense de-programming sessions at home.

But Columbus was just the beginning. Thanksgiving, as described in a holiday assignment to read "multicultural stories of family and immigration," became "a time when families get together to celebrate their traditions and their heritage." It was the "their-ness" of the formulation--as opposed to the "our-ness" of the holiday--that could make any happy thanks-giver choke on the stuffing. Defining the holiday as an occasion for families to celebrate "their" separate traditions and "their" separate heritage gives the day of national thanksgiving an unmistakable international-night-at-the-community-center flavor.

Which was typical of the way the school framed all subjects, cropping anything universal for a clear shot at the ethnic label. Book reports for young readers, only just delving into decent chapter-books, were pegged to race or gender--never writerly merit or imagination--in such assignments as "Hispanic book month."...

One daughter's big fourth-grade history project was to portray Tiger Woods in a "living wax museum" that the class created to mark Black History Month. (A handout went home prohibiting face paint and wigs in the children's costumes.) An honors unit in English--sorry, language arts-- focused on Japanese internment during World War II. A "poetry" project lavishly turned classrooms into both a 1950s Greenwich Village coffee house and a "People's Park"--children were asked to wear black-- but generated only lousy haiku. Colonial history morphed into a unit on immigration that included a field trip to a social-services center to "interview" mainly Hispanic immigrants".

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