Unfailingly inaccurate O'Reilly claims to understand education
By Lee Russ
Wednesday, June 14, 2006 at 05:08 PM
Bill O'Reilly claims to understand public education--what's wrong, what we need, the whole ball of enlightened wax. That wouldn't be surprising except that this is the same guy who:
--blamed the Malmedy massacre in WWII on the wrong side; twice
--cited a nonexistent economics journal to bolster his claims about French labor laws
--accused a dead man of having smeared him
--called the central Mexican state of Jalisco a city, and claimed that it was on the U.S. border
--cited the wrong man as the Secretary of Energy
{+}Assuming you believe for one minute that O'Reilly writes the zillions of columns that appear under his name, in addition to handling his radio and t.v. shows, and appearing as a guest on all those other objective television shows.
Having a gay time in schoolHere's some sobering information: According to a National Election Study, 25 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 could not identify Dick Cheney as vice president of the United States, and 63 percent of them could not find Iraq on a map of the Middle East.
That might be because 80 percent of the younger set in America does not own a world map and therefore 90 percent of them could not find Afghanistan, either.
In the face of that depressing situation, the state of California is taking action. Earlier this month, the state Senate voted 22 to 15 to prohibit textbooks or instructional materials that "contain any matter that reflects adversely" on persons because of their ethnicity, gender, disability, nationality, sexual orientation or religion.
In addition, the proposed law would mandate textbooks include the study of "people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (and who have contributed) to the economic, political and social development of California and the United States of America ..."
In other words, California kids might soon be studying Gay 101.
....
The educational madness in California is part of a secular strategy to de-emphasize academic discipline in the classroom and replace it with an imposed worldview of tolerance and diversity. No longer are facts the primary focus in many public school lesson plans. Now, it's not what you know, it's how tolerant you are.
....
The future of America's public schools may well involve deep-sixing academics and creating a student body nourished on the achievements of homosexuals and other minorities. Was Columbus gay? If not, some California kids might never know who discovered America.The left continues to scream about the great economic divide between wealthy Americans and everybody else. Do you think this insane school situation is going to cure that? Many affluent parents will take one look at the California public school landscape and immediately put their kid into private school. There, he or she will be forced to learn the three R's instead of the three T's: Tolerance, Totalitarianism and Total Failure.
...
For a guy who doesn't know where Jalisco is, he's awfully tough on young people who can't find Iraq on a map.
For a guy who didn't know who the Secretary of Energy was--in the middle of a story on that very office--he's pretty hard on kids who don't know who Dick Cheney is (especially since they may simply have been trying to block Cheney out of their minds, in order to preserve a modicum of sanity).
And I assume that O'Reilly never really became good friends with logic. Because you're trying to prevent texts that incorporate bias, you're emphasizing gayness at the expense of academics?
Here's a good test for O'Reilly: see if he can find the map. Or a book. Or at least a good fact-checker (he certainly earns enough money to afford it). Or at the very, very, absolute least, maybe he can find a conscience somewhere, maybe just rent someone else's--that would be consistent with the right's incredible faith in outsourcing.
Bill Oreilly: drastically in need of Competence 101 and Honesty 101.