This appeared here and I wish to thank Mary for allowing me to publish here work. RK
The pundits may have thought
that Barack Obama’s efforts to exploit the Sandy Hook School tragedy on
December 14, 2012, where a mentally ill young man killed 20
elementary school students and 6 teachers, had been tabled for lack of support. Now we
learn that Obama’s Organizing for Action super pac is exploiting the one-year
anniversary with fake memorials in order to resume the push for gun control.
Along with the efforts to
reach adults are those to reach children in schools. The Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, a major funder of Obama’s education initiative called Common Core
(recently admitted to be an “Obama initiative” by David
Axelrod) is aiding in the effort to eviscerate the Second Amendment by
emotionally manipulating and indoctrinating students.
An Education Week
article touts free “anti-violence” lesson plans for students in grades 4-12 to
commemorate the one-year anniversary of the shooting. Education Week is
full of handy “tips” and “news” for teachers, but is really a Gates
Foundation-subsidized Common Core propaganda outlet, as I noted in my report on Common Core for Accuracy
in Media. Education Week articles are frequently linked in the U.S.
Department of Education’s newsletter, The Teachers Edition.
The “anti-violence” Common
Core-aligned lesson plan that Education Week is promoting could hardly be more
propagandistic. It is written by shooting victim Gabby Giffords, the former
Arizona Congresswoman, and Nicole Hockley who lost her son Dylan at Sandy Hook.
It claims the ostensible purpose of “turning our tragedy into a moment of
transformation” and “To be open to all possibilities.” It says students should
be “Open to those with the most opposing views.”
But the only views teachers
are told to give are those that advance an anti-gun rights agenda.
To prime students
emotionally, teachers are asked to show a School Tube video from Roma High
School to demonstrate how a student-led vigil can “show how people can come
together after tragic events to make the world a better place.” (No empirical
evidence is given about the cause and effect.)
There is very little reading
required in the lesson, but what there is a USA Today article by Giffords and
her husband Mark Kelly, chiding “special interests,” like the NRA, which they
claim is “advancing the interests of an ideological fringe” and “cow[ing]
Congress” into refusing to take action on “common sense reforms.” The other is
an article linked to Giffords’s and Kelly’s lobby group called Americans for Responsible Solutions.
(There is an attachment for additional reading from Slate Magazine for “older
students” that unscientifically aggregates the number of gun deaths by asking
readers to send in news about gun deaths in their towns.) Teachers are advised
to have students read the “Sandy Hook Promise” from the website and discuss
“why they feel the promise was created.”
Teachers are told that the
first two paragraphs of the promise are “most helpful.”
These are the first
two paragraphs:
“Sandy Hook Promise (SHP) is
a national, non-profit organization led by community members and several
parents and spouses who lost loved ones in the tragic mass shooting at Sandy
Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012. . . .
Our intent is to honor all
victims of gun violence by turning our tragedy into a moment of
transformation.”
Teachers are told to have
students “brainstorm” on the question, “How can we work together to make the
United States a safer place?”
Teachers are offered the
suggestion of having students trace their hands on construction paper and then
making cut-outs.
On these they should write
one-sentence statements, beginning with the words, “I hope.”
As models, photographs of the
lesson plan writers’ own construction paper hands are presented: ”I hope for a
country that can work together to prevent gun violence,” wrote Gabby Giffords
on her hand. “I hope parents can come together to build a future for our
children safe from gun violence,” wrote Nicole Hockley on hers.
Finally,
Show
students the other postings on UClass [a “global lesson exchange”
for teachers]. Have them comment positively on other students’ hands that have
been posted on UClass. Urge them to do at least one thing to make the United
States a better place.
Teachers are assured that the
lesson plan follows the new Common Core education standards.
For grades 3-8, the
“Correlating Common Core Standards” are:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.3.1
Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in
groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grade 3 topics and texts,
building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly.
It gets a little more
rigorous for high school students:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.11-12.1
Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions
(one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 11–12
topics, texts, and issues, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own
clearly and persuasively.
In case the difference in
these two academic standards is not obvious, students in upper grades are asked
to “create a plan for their own anti-violence campaign” (words in bold
in original). In other words, high school students should become activists.
The promoters of Common Core
have repeated sales points about “high standards,” “rigor,” “close reading,”
and including “critical thinking.” Really? Do you remember tracing your hand on
construction paper in high school?
The lesson on Sandy Hook is
typical of those now being produced and advertised as meeting Common Core
requirements.
Of course, we know that many
teachers have been using classrooms to indoctrinate students for decades now.
What is different under Common Core is that the lessons are even more
ideological. They profit the multinational
publishing companies as they rewrite materials to adhere to Common Core. And
they advance the agendas of left-wing non-profits and the federal government.
The construction paper hands
being produced in grades 4 through 12 to commemorate Sandy Hook show how
Obama’s Common Core initiative is working (pardon the pun) hand in glove with
his political pac.
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