dangerous liberty

Be afraid. Be very afraid. It’s coming to a public high school or middle school near you and it has been coming here for a couple of years now. What is “it”? It’s “Challenge Day” and if you feel your child’s school experience hasn’t been emotional enough to date, you’re going to be one very happy parent because the tears and snot quotient is about to rise precipitously. On the other hand, those of you who are privy to enough emotional trauma with your teenager had best gird your loins and, perhaps more importantly, hide your wallets. Challenge Day, in a nutshell, is meant to heal the wounds suffered by young adolescents who are victims of bullying in school, and ostensibly, to heal the bullies themselves who, after all, are just misunderstood. It does this by dividing kids up into groups and encouraging them to feel sorry for themselves.

Let’s talk a little bit about what “Challenge Day”, the organization, is. A cursory look at this program’s “Global Leadership Council” reveals some interesting characters. The site itself doesn’t tell you anything about them, but the Google search engine does. I’d love to tell you about all of them, but that would take up too much space, so I’ve selected just three. We have, for instance, Brenda Blasingame who is, among other things, an activist for bi-sexuals and bisexuality and whose book on the subject is entitled: “Power and Privilege Beyond the Invisible Fence” Debbie Ford’s ‘best-selling’ book is entitled: “The Dark Side of the Light Chasers“. Her mission is described as being “…to empower people to become the conscious designers of their lives and create the external circumstances that most clearly reflect their heart’s desires.” Good grief! Another member of the Global Leadership Council is Alanis Morrisett who, I trust, needs no introduction.

Here’s how Challenge Day describes its raison d’etre: “For millions of young people every day,” it intones, “violence and alienation has become deeply ingrained in his or her school experience.” I feel an almost unholy need to correct this poorly written sentence. It should read more like this: “For millions of young people every day, violence and alienation HAVE become deeply ingrained in THEIR school experienceS”. I’m not trying to be petty. I’m pointing out what sure as heck looks to me like an irony (although Alanis might disagree with me): that irony being that in the very first sentence on its homepage, the sentence that is meant to hit us between the eyes, we find such a poor example of grammar and syntax. You’d think they’d want to be very careful not to draw attention to what it looks like when people don’t write well…since, you know, they’re taking kids out of their classrooms to participate in this stuff. And just to make the irony (or whatever it is) a little bit more pronounced, hasn’t there been a good deal of hand-wringing around here regarding whether teachers can be expected to prepare our kids for the FCAT after all the unscheduled “hurricane days”? This program usually takes two full days. One for Challenge Day and another for Challenger Day. Have we got the time to spend on what amounts to sensitivity training from an organization that can’t manage to formulate a decent opening sentence on its own homepage?

And there are more problems with this business than just that it is time-consuming or that its message may be badly written or politically skewed. While Challenge Day, itself, is a not-for-profit organization, it has been run jointly, apparently, with a for-profit organization which calls itself “Resource Realizations”. RR is connected to what Michelle Malkin (April 19, 2002 “See Dick and Jane Weep”) refers to as “kiddie rehab” programs. She tells us that it has also been a defendant in several law-suits alleging claims of emotional abuse at its facilities. What seems to be the drill is that following Challenge Day and the emotional upheaval foisted on students, it is suggested that more (rather expensive) work may need to be done. At which point, Resource Realizations enters the picture.

As reported in the Seattle Times of April 10, 2002: “A letter from Resource Realizations founder David Gilcrease to the parents of Challenge Day participants said “the next step for your teen” is the company’s three-day, $295 Teen Discovery seminar. Brochures were provided for a May 3-5 seminar at the Ramada Inn on Northgate Way.”

“While Challenge Day is a critical first step, a one-day learning experience only goes so far,” Gilcrease wrote. “To create truly lasting transformation in their lives, most teens need more.”

I can’t tell you if the two organizations are still connected in any way, but I can tell you to keep an eagle eye out for people trying to get your kid into some pricey programs as a follow-up to Challenge Day. I can also tell you that our district has seen fit to support this program without a “by your leave”, or any attempt at all to inform parents as to its contents, or its rather sketchy past. Thus far, a few parents who’ve tried to inquire about it have met with a blank wall. Nobody, not the school principals, nobody at the school board, nor the teachers seems to be able (or willing) to give inquiring minds any sort of definitive idea what a child attending this program might expect to find.

All of this has been organized and paid for locally by a group called “Circle of Change”. I am assuming that there are “Circles of Change” being set up locally around the country in order to help promote this program in their districts. This would be worth looking into more deeply, as well. Although about half of the workshops will be held off-campus (at The Martin Luther King Center), the rest are being held on school campuses. The program wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t being set up via the public school system and endorsed by it. I get a very creepy feeling about this. It feels to me like a form of emotional blackmail being perpetrated on kids in the name of political correctness, and I don’t like it a bit. Worse than that, it seems to me to encourage a sense of victimhood. I’m put in mind of something I saw on the Simpsons not too long ago. Bart asks Homer: “Am I the only one who’s in terrible pain?” and Homer answers, “No, but you’re the only one who won’t shut up about it.” Kids having undergone this sort of program are likely never going to shut up about how they’ve “suffered” at the hands of bullies. I don’t know what bullied kids did before there was a Challenge Day…I guess they did as I did, sucked it up, and steered clear of the little thugs.

Look, I hate to seem like a Scrooge, especially as we approach the holiday season, but why is it that I don’t see anyone on the list of responsible people at Challenge Day who is likely to be promoting the values that *I* hold dear? What business has our school system got…a system designed to accommodate people with values of all sorts…trucking in an organization of this ilk to spend school time on what amounts to an encounter session? I’m sorry folks but that ain’t representative of what I consider to be important and I pay my taxes, too. Doesn’t what I want count? Since when is it a function of public education to indulge in sensitivity training or, as one student referered to it, “..a psycho cry-fest” ?

I highly recommend that parents investigate this further before allowing their children to become involved. I highly recommend, further, that the school district stick to academics and making sure that kids can pass the FCAT. I think our school board is skating on thin ice with this one, and needs to reign in the “good-for-you” social programming in favor of some “better-for-you” old-fashioned scholarship. And they’d best do it before their support for this kind of thing blows up in their faces.

Read Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual, (via insta) in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

No active or noisy elimination need occur, and no explicit queries about political orientation need be posed. Political orientation has been embedded into the disciplines, and so what is indeed a political judgment may be expressed in disciplinary terms. As an Americanist said in a committee meeting that I attended, “We can’t hire anyone who doesn’t do race,” an assertion that had all the force of a scholastic dictum. Stanley Fish, professor and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, advises, “The question you should ask professors is whether your work has influence or relevance” — and while he raised it to argue that no liberal conspiracy in higher education exists, the question is bound to keep conservatives off the short list. For while studies of scholars like Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri seem central in the graduate seminar, studies of Friedrich A. von Hayek and Francis Fukuyama, whose names rarely appear on cultural-studies syllabi despite their influence on world affairs, seem irrelevant.

I noticed the same thing years ago when I debated a Professor of History about economics. He had never heard of von Mises and the sum total of his rebuttal to the ideas I put forward was “he’s an unknown”. He dismissed all intellectually conservative arguments I had because the scholars weren’t in peer reviewed journals of his liking.

A few months before the election he ceased communication because he felt he could not be friends with anyone who supported Bush. He’s now totally isolated from challenges to his orthodoxy.

It seems that lately every time I see an article about public education in our beloved local newspaper, it’s specifically about the FCAT, and most of the time it amounts to a whole lotta belly-achin’.

People can’t seem to believe that this test is necessary. Well, I can.

I’ve been writing about the problems with public education since 1993. The business of imparting to children what I believed to be empty self-esteem became, through the years, a recurring theme in my articles, along with such issues as the dumbing down of curriculum, grade inflation and social promotion.

The responses I got from teachers on the editorial page and in person were usually defensive. I was often accused of hating all things having to do with public education. Apparently, it is impossible to criticize public education without hating it. I don’t hate public education. I want it to be better than it is.

And so, here we are today, and educators and Democrats are using the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test as their whipping boy as if the fact that this remedy was deemed necessary comes as a total shock to them; as if there were no red flags, no warning bells, nothing whatsoever to alert them to the fact that our kids have, for a long time now, been in serious academic trouble and that the policies of government schools have, for a very long time, been the agency of this trouble.

Let’s talk a little bit about FCAT, this test that has surprised and dismayed so many people.

Educators should have foreseen something like the FCAT. The National Assessment of Educational Progress has been showing us a more and more dire picture over the last decade or two. More kids are dropping out. Fewer of them can write or read well enough to hope to prosper in the real world. More people have begun to notice and to complain.

And yet, when we get the wonderful news that of the 230 kids who repeated third grade after failing the FCAT once, 147 passed it, the entire focus is on the 83 who failed the test again and hand-wringing abounds. The concern is for these children’s sense of self-esteem, but what self-esteem can they have if they get out of school unable to read?

What we have are 147 kids who can read when they couldn’t before, and another 83 that we’re not going to let fall between the cracks. That’s progress, people!

And then we get the story that the “FCAT is frustrating seniors’ plans” (May 10). We learn that a student with a B/C average in high school “has yet” to pass the test.

“It’s like you went to school for twelve years of nothing,” says this high school senior.

The observation hits ya right between the eyes, doesn’t it? If she has a B/C average and still cannot pass the FCAT after two years and four more opportunities to take the test, she evidently did go to school for 12 years of nothing! What does it mean, anymore, to make a B or even a C? Apparently, not all that much. And so, one of my old bugaboos, grade inflation, is still a problem!

Let’s take a gander at what kinds of figures we’re talking about here. Apparently, only 6.4 percent have yet to make a passing score in the reading section of the test, and 5.4 percent on the math section. That’s a small number. And the kids can take the test again. And again. And again. And again.

Bear in mind, this is essentially the same test they took in the 10th grade, and they get two years and five chances to pass it.

And still we hear about what a bad idea this test is without any analysis from the people doing all the complaining as to what led us to this pass or any acknowledgement of the progress that’s been made. What we hear instead is that tired old mantra: “teaching to the test.” If there were no FCAT, what would the focus be, instead? What would our kids be getting that they aren’t getting now?

On May 12, I finally read an article that didn’t complain about the FCAT. It says that Union County’s 10th-graders’ combined reading scores have caused that county to rise from 61st in the state last year to first in the state this year! Please, tell me again what all this brouhaha over the FCAT is really about.

I understand that any test is going to be imperfect and that there are bugs to be worked out of the system, but we’re seeing some real gains happening that moves me to wonder what the true problem is here. Could it be simply that teachers and schools are not used to being held accountable?