4 September 2009 @ 8:56AM >> You may have heard about the uproar over President Obama’s desire to address the nation’s schoolchildren. Although the White House has not yet released the text of the speech, many people wondered whether the speech would be pushing Obama’s policy goals.

The idea that the speech would be political in nature is not something that people fantasized; it was related to the fact that the Department of Education’s lesson plan asked students to “help the president” and write about “what the president wants us to do.”

The Obama administration has since removed such language from the lesson plan, and has issued a rather lame excuse. The Associated Press reports:

Critics are particularly upset about lesson plans the administration created to accompany the speech. The lesson plans, available online, originally recommended having students “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.”

The White House revised the plans Wednesday to say students could “write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term education goals.”

“That was inartfully worded, and we corrected it,” [White House deputy policy director Heather] Higginbottom said.

Of course, the only way the “inartfully worded” excuse works is if the new wording is a clearer way of saying what the original statement intended to convey.

In what universe is “what they can do to help the president” even remotely related to “how they can achieve their short-term and long-term education goals”?

One is not a more “artful wording” of the other. The administration’s new phrasing represents a completely different statement altogether.

If the president had intended to deliver a speech asking for students’ help achieving his political goals, I suspect this controversy will dissuade him from doing that.

We shall see.

20 February 2009 >> The Documentary Channel will be airing Indoctrinate U several more times in the coming weeks:

Saturday, February 21st @ 3:00PM
Monday, February 23rd @ 5:00PM
Tuesday, March 17th @ 9:00PM
Wednesday, March 18th @ midnight
Wednesday, March 25th @ 5:00PM
Monday, March 30th @ 2:00AM

(all times Eastern)

The Documentary Channel is available on the Dish Network as well as on some cable carriers. In addition, some public television stations simulcast the Documentary Channel during certain parts of the day.

For example, I found out after the last Documentary Channel run of Indoctrinate U that the PBS affiliate WNYE (cable channel 25 here in New York City) aired the film. WNYE carries the Documentary Channel on Monday nights and Saturday afternoons. One of the other large simulcasters is KBDI in Denver. Check your local listings against the times above for more information.

Also, I’m pleased to announce that Indoctrinate U has been accepted by the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival!

In accepting the film, the festival’s reviewers wrote:

Well-edited, good looking titles, technically pulled together well so there’s no major problems that distract you from looking at it. Content: About the problems of political correctness on college campuses today and how they often impinge on professors and students’ individual rights of expression. Great story and content with plenty of examples to draw from, mostly talking heads interviews with archival footage cut in, well-shot film that could easily play on PBS or something along those lines. A wry, hard hitting documentary about the effect of the campus culture wars on individual rights, diversity of opinion, and the life of the mind in American higher education. Very professionally made. Great subject matter, we found it very interesting.

Indoctrinate U will be shown at the festival on Tuesday, March 24th at 6:00PM at the Village East Cinema at 2nd Avenue and 12th Street.

Tickets are available now via TicketWeb.

13 March 2008 @ 7:06AM >> A bone-headed idea surfaces in Maryland:

State lawmakers are considering a bill that would grant free college tuition for some juvenile offenders. Supporters say it’s a way to encourage troubled youth to get their lives back on track. John Dixon, Deputy Secretary for the MD Department of Juvenile Services says, “The kids the department serves face a lot of obstacles and challenges when they return to the community. This bill will allow kids who are interested in attending public institution to go there tuition free.”

Delegate Norm Conway is sponsoring the bill. As an educator for 39 years, he says it’s important to help troubled teens make a positive transition. “They’re out of their own families in many instances. You’re hoping for the best possible transition and incentives that say hey if you’re willing to do your part there are some opportunities out there for you.”

Under the proposal, committed juveniles under the age of 21 would be eligible for free tuition at any public institution in the state.

30 January 2008 @ 9:37AM >> Sometimes, I wonder:

A story based on the Three Little Pigs fairy tale has been turned down by a government agency’s awards panel as the subject matter could offend Muslims.

The digital book, re-telling the classic story, was rejected by judges who warned that “the use of pigs raises cultural issues”.

[...]

The CD-Rom digital version of the traditional story of the three little pigs, called Three Little Cowboy Builders, is aimed at primary school children.

[...]

The feedback from the judges explaining why they had rejected the CD-Rom highlighted that they “could not recommend this product to the Muslim community”.

They also warned that the story might “alienate parts of the workforce (building trade)”.

The judges criticised the stereotyping in the story of the unfortunate pigs: “Is it true that all builders are cowboys, builders get their work blown down, and builders are like pigs?”

[...]

Becta, the government funded agency responsible for technology in schools and colleges, says that it is standing by the judges’ verdict.

6 December 2007 @ 8:36AM >> Did you know that the radical left-wing group ACORN has its own taxpayer-financed public high school in New York City? I didn’t, until it was reported today that some parents are unhappy with the principal.

Going unasked in all the coverage, of course, is why the City of New York would hand the reins of a public school over to a political organization?

People need to start demanding answers.

20 November 2007 >> The New York Post reports on the educational ramifications of being born to parents from out-of-favor ethnic categories. Apparently, it is the official position of the City of New York to sort citizens into different visual groupings and dole out the government spoils accordingly:

Three Chinese parents in Brooklyn are expected to file a federal lawsuit today challenging a popular city-run tutoring program on the grounds it discriminates against Asians, The Post has learned.

The Specialized High School Institute preps gifted but “underrepresented” minorities to ace the competitive exam to get into top city high schools like Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech.

But the parents say it is unfair - and illegal - for the Department of Education to limit eligibility to blacks and Latinos.

“The program only selects certain kinds of minorities and unfortunately my daughter didn’t fall into that category,” said Peggy Foo-Ching, 47, a mom from Bensonhurst who said her 12-year-old daughter’s application last year was ignored.

[...]

A Department of Education internal memo obtained by lawyers trying the case indicated that eligibility criteria excludes whites and Asians.

“What this memo reveals is blatant and categorical discrimination by race. If you are white or Asian, you’re not supposed to get an application,” said Christopher Hajec, an attorney with the Center for Individual Rights, a conservative advocacy group.

“It’s not the business of the government of New York City to be counting up the Asians or whites in, say, Stuyvesant High School and concluding there are too many of them.”

[...]

The father who initiated the suit, Stanley Ng, said he understood how controversial his challenge may be viewed.

“It’s not something that I take lightly,” he said. “There are many Asian and white kids in this district who can’t pay for tutoring. What is their recourse?”

9 November 2007 @ 2:24PM >> The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education announces another victory:

[A] federal judge has ordered San Francisco State University (SFSU) and the California State University System (CSU) to stop enforcing several unconstitutional speech codes. The codes were challenged in a lawsuit filed by attorneys from the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) in cooperation with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

“This decision is a vital step in the fight against unconstitutional campus speech codes,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “The court’s decision frees hundreds of thousands of students throughout the CSU System from unlawful restrictions on their expression.”

The lawsuit—brought by the SFSU College Republicans and two of the group’s members—came after the SFSU College Republicans were put on trial by a campus tribunal for stepping on makeshift Hamas and Hezbollah flags as part of an anti-terrorism rally they held in October 2006. Despite having the power to dismiss the charges at any time, SFSU dragged the plaintiffs through a five-month investigation and hearing before ultimately clearing the group of baseless “harassment” charges. The plaintiffs’ lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, asks the court to hold SFSU accountable for unlawfully mistreating the plaintiffs on the basis of their constitutionally protected expression and to strike down several unconstitutional speech codes at SFSU and in the CSU System.

Burning the American flag is protected First Amendment speech, on the grounds that actions intended to convey a political message should be treated no differently than actual speech. The Supreme Court made that decision in the 1980s. So it’s good to know that, decades later, stepping on the flags of two terrorist organizations is also protected speech.

But it’s troubling that administrators at a taxpayer-funded university—an entity legally prohibited from punishing students for protected political expression—are so ignorant of the basic parameters of their students’ rights that the school needed to be brought to court in the first place.

You shouldn’t need to hire a lawyer in order to exercise rights enumerated in the Constitution.

16 July 2007 >> Maybe educational standards have increased since No Child Left Behind was signed into law. In Richmond, Virginia, one public school starts preparing kids for college before they’re even freshmen in high school:

Graduates from Richmond’s Binford Middle School get a diplomalike certificate, signed by the teacher and principal.

It is ringed by six graphic marks, including icons of a notebook, an apple, the school mascot and such.

Then there is a picture of a man. And who is this icon of American education?

Not John Dewey or Horace Mann, both of whom were called fathers of American education.

It’s not Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin or George Washington, either.

Nope. It isn’t any of those dead white male oppressors.

It’s...prepare to be shocked:

It’s Karl Marx!

Not exactly the father of education. This is the father of socialism. The father of communism.

20 February 2007 @ 8:52AM >> I don’t often find myself agreeing with the political sensibilities of Steve Jobs, but if there’s one thing the man knows, it’s how to build a successful organization. So when the founder both Apple and Pixar started talking about teachers’ unions, I was pleasantly surprised:

Jobs compared schools to businesses with principals serving as CEOs.

“What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn’t get rid of people that they thought weren’t any good?” he asked to loud applause during an education reform conference.

“Not really great ones because if you’re really smart you go, ‘I can’t win.’”

[...]

“I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way,” Jobs said.

“This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.”

Public education is effectively a monopoly for the portion of the country that can’t afford private schools. And the problem with public education is the same as any other monopoly: the organization functions as though its customers are merely an annoyance only tangentially related to the organization’s survival.

That’s why you hear teachers’ unions oppose school choice on the grounds that it would hurt failing schools. But the point of public education is not to ensure the survival of schools, it’s to ensure the education of students. So what if failing schools are closed? They should close. And the only way that’ll ever happen is if less-advantaged families have an opportunity to vote with their feet and abandon the schools that are failing their children.

24 June 2006 @ 5:50PM >> The sad thing is, these demands will probably be met:

Like generations of citizens before them, California State University, Chico, students Alba Miranda, Hector Najera and Rene Ochoa descended on the Capitol on Monday to petition members of the Legislature.

Except the three honor students aren’t citizens — they’re illegal immigrants, who under state law have a legal right to in-state tuition at California’s colleges and universities, but are not eligible for financial aid.

Dozens of students like them from across California came to Sacramento to urge legislators to support a measure — Senate Bill 160 by Sen. Gil Cedillo, D-Los Angeles — that would allow them to apply for such assistance.

“This legislation would just allow us to be able to fill out applications and compete for a scholarship,” Ochoa said.

The measure has cleared the Senate and is scheduled to be heard Tuesday by the Assembly Higher Education Committee. Cedillo predicts it will land on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s desk later this summer, as immigration heats up as an election year issue.

8 June 2006 @ 5:07PM >> In mid-April, I reported on a website operated by the Seattle public school system that defined racism in such a way that only whites can be considered racist.

According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, increasing attention to that website since then has caused the school system to address the issue:

An outpouring of criticism forced Seattle public schools on Thursday to pull a Web site that viewed planning for the future, emphasizing individualism and defining standard English as examples of cultural racism.

The message had appeared under an “equity and race relations” section of the district’s Web site and was mentioned Thursday in an opinion piece by a Libertarian writer in the Seattle P-I. Criticism of the site has been building in the world of blogs for weeks.

In its place Thursday was a message that the site will be revised to “provide more context to reader around the work that Seattle public schools is doing to address institutional racism.”

So, in other words, the school system pulled the website not because it defined racism as a white-only phenomenon or because it defined individualism as a form of racism, but because the website didn’t describe what the school system was doing to fight those racist individualists and their institutions.

I don’t think that statement resolves the situation; if anything, it proves that the critics of the school system are correct in believing that Seattle schools are pushing a political agenda.

The “explanation” offered by the Seattle public school system isn’t satisfying Andrew Coulson of the CATO Institute, either. A recent critic of Seattle’s educrats, Coulson commented on the new developments:

“It’s a non-apology apology,” said Coulson, an education history scholar and author of “Market Education: The Unknown History.”

“My sense was that the definition was extremely offensive, but there was not much sympathy for those who were offended ...,” he said. “The harm that can come from the Web site is the tarring of the ideal of individualism as racist, while the ideal of individualism is a central principle on which our nation was founded. Liberty is individual, not collective. So for our school district — our official school organ of the state — to tell children it’s racist to believe in a principle on which our nation was founded — is troubling.”

Indeed.

6 June 2006 >> I generally support the idea of charter schools. They allow educational experimentation, which is usually beneficial in an otherwise bureaucracy-strangled public school system.

The downside to the leniency is that it has a way of devolving into complete lack of oversight. Nothing else would explain how Marcos Aguilar ended up running the taxpayer-funded La Academia Semillas del Pueblo charter school in Los Angeles.

Principal Aguilar, who also founded school, seems proud of his contributions in the field of education. But as far as I can tell, he’s using his position to preach the cause of racial separatism:

We don’t necessarily want to go to White schools. What we want to do is teach ourselves, teach our children the way we have of teaching. We don’t want to drink from a White water fountain, we have our own wells and our natural reservoirs and our way of collecting rain in our aqueducts. We don’t need a White water fountain. So the whole issue of segregation and the whole issue of the Civil Rights Movement is all within the box of White culture and White supremacy. We should not still be fighting for what they have. We are not interested in what they have because we have so much more and because the world is so much larger. And ultimately the White way, the American way, the neo liberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction. And so it isn’t about an argument of joining neo liberalism, it’s about us being able, as human beings, to surpass the barrier.

Self-sufficiency is admirable, but rejecting every institution that exists in your country just to prove self-sufficiency is childish. Some of our institutions have worked quite well over time: capitalism and democracy, free markets and classical liberal governments; the fact that the United States has consistently been one of the most prosperous patches of land on the planet is no accident. Students might benefit from learning such things. Understanding what leads to success might actually help kids later in life. It’s too bad Principal Aguilar’s students won’t be learning anything like that at his school.

17 May 2006 >> Only white people can be racist, at least according to the Seattle public school system. Here’s how they define racism:

The systematic subordination of members of targeted racial groups who have relatively little social power in the United States (Blacks, Latino/as, Native Americans, and Asians), by the members of the agent racial group who have relatively more social power (Whites).

By this definition, if a white person were murdered simply for being white, it could not be considered a racist act.

The school system also says that “emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology” is a form of “cultural racism.” In other words, if you believe that group privileges should not be placed above the rights of individuals, you are a racist. The only way not to be a racist is to embrace a “collective ideology,” which throughout history has been better known as communism or socialism.

I’m sure if you asked the teachers in Seattle whether they were indoctrinating their students, they would deny it adamantly. But all you need to do is read their definition of racism to see how they’re steering students into their preferred ideology. Individualism is bad. Collectivism is good. Only whites can be racist.

I wonder what Seattle’s educrats would make of this quote:

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
Ayn Rand

According to the definitions above, speaking in favor of capitalism or individual rights can be considered racist speech. If the Seattle teachers’ union were in a position to decide what constitutes hate speech, a large part of America would be found guilty.

Now you know why I oppose hate speech laws so strongly. The result will not be to stamp out hate, but to impose thought conformity. Hate can’t be eradicated by decree; it can only be eliminated by an awakening of the heart. And I don’t think that teaching a generation of students that only white people can be racist is a good formula for reducing whatever number of truly racist honkies there might be in this country.

27 April 2006 >> Teachers trying to influence the political views of students is not a phenomenon limited to higher education. You’d be surprised what sorts of political displays teachers can get away with in public high schools. Check out this display at Marilla Carillo High School in Santa Rosa, California. While the writing is clearly satire, the photographs, sadly, are real. Your tax dollars at work!

11 April 2006 >> Public schools in Montgomery County, Maryland are granting credit for participating in political protests against immigration reform:

The Montgomery County schools’ decision to grant students community service credit for attending Monday’s immigration rights protest is raising concern among some parents as well as activists who say officials should focus on education, not political advocacy.

[...]

Student participation in the event is being organized by CASA of Maryland Inc., a Silver Spring-based group that works with the Latino community. It is CASA’s role — as organizer — that has some questioning whether the school system is allowing an outside group to push its political agenda on students. “I do understand that CASA offers some worthy services to immigrants and that’s noble, but it’s a stretch to allow students to protest for a particular side of an issue,” said parent Melissa Andersen. “I’m taken aback by it. I think it’s poor judgment.”

[...]

Maryland students are required to put in 60 hours of community service to graduate from high school. They can undertake a number of activities — including working for political campaigns — as long as the work is done for a secular, nonprofit community organization that is tax-exempt and that school officials have approved.

It would be interesting to see what other organizations have been approved by school officials. I think it is unwise to offer school credit in the name of community service for political advocacy. But if the school board insists on granting credit for one type of political activity, then they should be even-handed and give credit without regard to the political orientation of that activity. Otherwise, it is quite obvious that the school system is attempting to encourage students to adopt a particular set of political views.

School board member Stephen N. Abrams [...] said students have the right to express their opinions, and if they choose to do so at a political rally — as long as they abide by the credit rules — they should not be barred from participating.

“The last time I checked, the First Amendment is not a right to question what the speech is,” he said. “I’m sure if students were participating in a tax cap rally, these same people would not be objecting to that.”

Perhaps. But would the school district offer credit for a rally in support of lower taxes? Do such rallies even exist? Maybe that’s part of the problem. For whatever reason, leftists seem more prone to public protesting than others. People who want lower taxes are more likely to engage in other forms of political activity instead of marching around holding signs and chanting slogans.

I’m attempting to find out whether the Montgomery County school system has ever given credit to students for attending other political rallies.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to report my findings soon.

7 April 2006 @ 9:18AM >> In response to yesterday’s story on Rudy Rios, a high school senior writes:

[W]hy is it that school administrators fail to see that there is no difference between using a school copying machine to spread this propaganda and using taxpayer-funded teaching time, for which these people are getting paid, to “teach” students liberal values. What Mr. Rios did was certainly wrong, but teachers that spend entire classes ranting about George Bush rarely face any consequences. People need to understand that situations like this are not just isolated incidents. Liberal educational bias is expanding beyond college campuses and into the world of impressionable high school students.

All I have to add is, Jay Bennish.

6 April 2006 @ 3:23PM >> Rudy Rios is an English teacher at Cesar Chavez High School in Houston, Texas. He also opposes immigration reform, and is now being disciplined for using school equipment to create and distribute political fliers to students.

But perhaps most troubling is that, as a teacher of English, this is the best writing Rios could muster:

We gots 2 stay together and protest against the new law that wants 2 be passed against all immigrants. We gots 2 show the U.S. that they aint shit with out us

26 November 2005 @ 10:07AM >> Your tax dollars at work, in the Vermont school system.

1 November 2005 @ 12:50PM >> While schoolchildren elsewhere were eating candy corn and cutting pumpkins out of construction paper, kids in Toronto public schools were “writ[ing] health warnings for all Halloween candies.” Why? Because Halloween is the latest target of political correctness.

Last week, teachers in Toronto received a memo from the District School Board advising them to “forego traditional classroom Halloween celebrations because they are disrespectful of Wiccans and may cause some children to feel excluded.”

Canada’s National Post reports:

“Many recently arrived students in our schools share absolutely none of the background cultural knowledge that is necessary to view ‘trick or treating,’ the commercialization of death, the Christian sexist demonization of pagan religious beliefs, as ‘fun,’ ” says the memo.

Entitled “Halloween at TDSB Schools: Scarrrrrry Stufff,” the document seeks to clarify for teachers and principals the extent to which Halloween activities should be pursued in multicultural settings. [...]

The memo goes on to remind teachers that, “Halloween is a religious day of significance for Wiccans and therefore should be treated respectfully.”

As is usual, the people who have decided to take offense to Halloween on behalf of Wiccans don’t necessarily have the support of the Wiccans:

Nicole Cooper, a first-degree priestess of the Wiccan Church of Canada’s Toronto Temple, agreed. “Frankly, Wiccans are a minority — an extreme religious minority,” she said.

The Halloween celebrations of North American pop culture, she added, are “not actually threatening to my religion anymore than eggs and cute little bunnies are threatening to Easter.”

[...]

“If I had children I wouldn’t deprive them of that — it’s a really fun thing to do. It’s engaging in the spirit of the season; it’s exciting for kids,” Ms. Cooper said.

That argument won’t get you very far, though. “Fun” is a concept completely foreign to the High Priests of Political Correctness, the mentally disfigured intellectual dwarves who dwell in the twilight of the mind concocting new ways to get upset on behalf of other people who often don’t want the “help” in the first place.

But it makes me wonder: what kind of culture will we be left with if we rid ourselves of everything that makes us unique just so we don’t offend any new arrivals? We bend over backwards to accommodate every foreign and fringe culture, but at the same time, we don’t even show half that respect to the culture that already exists here.

Are the High Priests of Political Correctness really concerned with being open to other cultures? Or is their real goal to destroy ours?

16 September 2005 @ 1:33PM >> “Chanman,” a public school teacher, wrote in to describe his own experience with Islamic prayer in school:

Two years ago, I taught at a high school in the Sacramento area. One day during lunch, I walked to the lounge of the social studies department to make some copies. There were two girls wearing hajibs, standing outside the door of the lounge. They stopped me from entering because, “our friend is praying in there.” Their friend, a Muslim, was using our teachers lounge to pray toward Mecca because she felt funny about doing it outside. Meanwhile, I am stopped from performing my teacherly duties because a Muslim was using the teachers’ area to pray. Of course the head of our department was all for this and was quite tickled with himself at his showing of tolerance and compassion. I couldn’t help but wonder, would he have shown the same tolerance and compassion if a Christian girl had asked if she could use our teachers lounge to pray? To ask the question is to answer it.

14 September 2005 @ 12:54PM >> An e-mail in response to “Prayer in School? Only for Muslims” points out an imprecision in my argument:

From: darwin
Subject: prayer in school
Date: 8 September 2005 5:20:04 AM EDT
To: Evan Coyne Maloney

You wrote: “Everybody knows that prayer isn’t allowed in school—for Christians.”

As I understand it, this ruling is nothing new... Christians can pray in schools, privately, during non-class time. As this case appears to be about a Muslim girl who wants to pray during lunch (not class time) I don’t see what the big deal is.

I’m a fan of Brain Terminal and your movies, but I think you’re overreacting to [this case.]

=darwin

Darwin,

Yes, as I now understand it, voluntary student-initiated prayer is permissible during non-class time. If that were the extent of the case, then I don’t think there would be much discussion. I don’t have any problem with Muslim students praying in public schools, so long as the rules for them are the same as for anyone else. So, if this portion of the original news item is the only salient point, then it seems the Muslim student has a legitimate gripe:

While her classmates were eating lunch, she wanted to go off by herself for a few moments to pray. The 14-year-old was told she couldn’t, and went home distraught that afternoon in October 2003.

However, the same article, entitled “Schools loosen limits on prayers,” implies that some sort of special consideration is being sought:

Her case was part of a nationwide grass-roots effort by Muslim parents to make public schools more friendly and accommodating to Muslim students.

...and that schools are changing their procedures in response to that effort:

“You’re seeing a lot of schools becoming more sensitive this way,” said Michael Yaple, a spokesman for the New Jersey School Boards Association.

If the schools are following the existing rules, then they accommodate Muslim, Christian, Jewish, etc. students equally. If they are not following the existing rules and are somehow treating Muslim students worse than any other group, then that is wrong and it should stop. But it sounds like the problem is that because strict Muslims need to pray five times a day, they are asking for special consideration from the schools beyond what is granted to anyone else.

Should American school schedules be reworked to make it easier for Muslims to pray? That’s a point that can be debated. But it seems to me, over the last 50 years, American schools have become much less welcoming to the practice of Judeo-Christian faiths during school hours. So I find it odd that as our society continues to stamp out any trace of our own religious heritage, we would start bending over backwards to embrace the religious practices of others.

7 September 2005 @ 3:14PM >> Everybody knows that prayer isn’t allowed in school—for Christians. But when the multicultural left goes against the atheist left, things get interesting. Perhaps because Islam has no connection to those racist dead white male oppressors who founded this country, the same standards that keep Christian prayer out of school apparently don’t apply to Islamic prayer:

Yasmeen Elsamra had a simple request: While her classmates were eating lunch, she wanted to go off by herself for a few moments to pray.
The 14-year-old was told she couldn’t, and went home distraught that afternoon in October 2003. Praying five times a day is a cornerstone of her Muslim faith.
“If I wasn’t allowed to pray my second prayer at school, I couldn’t do it at home,” she said. “When school finishes, the third prayer begins.”
Her family contacted the District-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, which asked the school district to reconsider.

[...]

Her case was part of a nationwide grass-roots effort by Muslim parents to make public schools more friendly and accommodating to Muslim students. The movement has gained strength since the September 11 terror attacks.
“The reality for many Muslim students in public schools is very difficult,” said Ingrid Mattson, vice president of the Islamic Society of North America. “It’s highly stressful.”

[...]

“You’re seeing a lot of schools becoming more sensitive this way,” said Michael Yaple, a spokesman for the New Jersey School Boards Association.

Meanwhile, Accuracy in Academia reports that religion is also creeping into required classes in California’s public school system:

“From the beginning, you and your classmates will become Muslims,” the simulation directions that went with the course promised. “During your journey, you will travel in caravans, enact generosity and hospitality, engage in trade, dress up as a desert nomad or Bedouin, eat authentic food from the Islamic world, build Islamic structures, produce poetry, create works of art, and race to be the first caravan to reach Makkah.”

Actually, this is virtually the only course required in the California public school system that uses the name of God with any degree of reverence. At the same time, it is about the only religion that the California Department of Education requires for study in public schools.

[...]

[One student’s mother] asked school administrators whether any of the Judeo Christian faiths, including her own, were offered for study. Her questions left administrators tongue-tied. Other religions were not offered for study, at least in that local school.

It’s like déjà vu all over again!

No word yet from the ACLU when it will start suing to eliminate the menace of religion in public schools.

8 February 2002 >> Religion is banned from public schools...unless the religion is Islam. More >>