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Wally: Your administrators are to be lauded and you are a brave fellow. Kudos!
Thank you, but very little to do with admin, I was about as far from the office as I could have been. Ag dept was further but not by much. Only time the admin cared what I did was when the union sent me to the bargaining table. ::)[yes… I was a loose cannon :o]
There are places in this country where if you tried to teach the tenants of Communism you would run the riskof being fired. This is probably less true now than when I went to High School. We were taught almost nothing about the beliefs of “the adversary” except that it was bad, un-American and we would probably be drafted to provide a shield against Communist ambitions to challenge our hegemony.
Too true; one of those places was just up the road from where I grew up; the teacher in question prevailed but not w/o struggle and cost. Years later I ran into a guy that was in the class in question… her inflammatory statement? “Communism looks like a wonderful thing until you compare the reality to the concept.” Or words to that effect.
Also: Many people think George Orwell was a Communist just as many people think our President is not a citizen, ossibly a muslim and perhaps the anti-Christ. I read most of Orwell's books and find his prose to be lucid and thought provoking. Years ago there was a TV program with Jan Sterling and Edmund O'Brienin a teleplay of 1984. Scared the living daylights out of me, but I did go and get the book which was even better if less scary.
Not having read Orwell (sheltered life, eh?) I cannot comment. However, on the questions surrounding the President… JMO, mind you; Mom was a citizen so he is a citizen by birth (regardless of where Dad was from or where he was born for that matter… he has gone to christian churches for many years and says he is a Christian, I'm not going to ask him or anyone else to do a polygraph over an issue like that… he's got a long way to go to be the anti-Christ, Hugo Chjavez might like to be or which ever Ill Kim is running N. Korea but I'd have to vote for Bill Clinton as the a-C before I'd even consider Obama.
Good ideas. I didn't have the tenth graders read the Manifesto but did a lesson based on the 10 point program at the end. It was an eye opener for them. 😮
–you must have a “wonder stick” to find the answers to all these obscure questions. Actually it is a medal given to me by a friend. I affixed it to my iMac and try to fool visitors–I usually fail despite the fact that it covers the Apple logo perfectly. Kudos again!
No just that things like this are fun for me; esoteric factoids are not worth much but really cool none-the-less. The medal on the Mac is a terrfic gag, your friends are missing the boat if they don't think it's funny.
To what movie do you refer? Is Lee still alive? I though Clint killed him!
It was just a hamburger. Lee died in Dec of 89; heart attack. Another under-appreciated talent.
… he was convinced that man was perfectible and in his own self interest would agree that a classless society would not only be fair, but less dangerous, more benign and do away with all thepesky rules imposed by government.
Something we all would like to agree with.
…I found it strange that when I first read in him–not too much as he is really dense as you know–he made no provision, once the dictatorship of the Proletariat had withered away, for any police force to….
Too convinced that man was perfectible; an idea(l) man, not a detail man, IMHO.
… perhaps he spent too much time in the British Museum and not enough in the slums of London examining the raw material for his workers paradise here on earth.
A place where the draining of the swamp would definitely be trumped by being hip deep in alligators; people would be far too busy surviving to care much about anyone's interests but their own.
Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, leader of Cheka, later called GPU… ultimately the KGB. [to be played by Lee Van Cleef in the movie… ;D]
Willy, I thank you for agreeing that teaching the warts is good… it is also honest; if we want good voters / citizens out the end we need to tell them the whole story.Having dealt with many parents that ask questions like this (the difference being most of them really thought my politics mattered and were part of my teaching… I hope you don't)… the answer is:Not as much as we'd like. What I mean by this is if all the people were thoughtful, dedicated citizens that truly wanted the best for the whole nation (and we lived on an island) total direct democracy would be the way to go. Given that only a small % of the population meet these guidelines (BTW, who judges this and by what standards?) and we live in a geographically huge country where we cannot stop everything and get the whole electorate in one place at one time, we're sort of stuck with what we've got. We need to make it work by making better voters otherwise it's a mobocracy… that's where I come in trying to break the cycle one kid at a time.Yes I live in the PR of CA; Land of the Fruits and Nuts.The concept of direct voter action is fine, when all other means of having the voice of the people heard fails. I have a problem in that it has become the way around the process whenever someone has an ax to grind (and the money to pay signature gatherers) and doesn't want to wait for the process or thinks that they can stir up the population (read mobocracy). The idea that the legislative process is broken and the initiative process has to fix the ills of all is part of the reason the legislative process is in the state it is… the legislators can't win. Granted they, at one time, were so far out of touch that the people needed to rein them in (sounds like now doesn't it?) hence initiative, recall, and referendum. Consider these tools, they can be used with skill to accomplish a task or they can be used as a weapon to bludgeon an opponent.
+1. Will is terrific. Also likely right… I don't see the gov't giving up one source of revenue for another when they can have both.
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… in 1776 We the People consisted of those free, white, property owning males who supported the revolt against the legally constituted government of Great Britain.
Yes basically the same We that called the shots. I made the point in another thread earlier that the AmRev was more evolutionary (some call it a Civil War) than revolutionary as the movers and shakers of the colonies were the movers and shakers (mostly) for independence and again (mostly) the ones that formed the government.
As I recall that would be abut 1/3 of the population–am I correct?
That jives with the numbers I've seen and gave to the kids in the lesson. 1/3 against the split with Britain and 1/3 just wanted to be left alone.
I have no problem with them denying votes to slaves and women. To advocate that at the time would have you sent to some asylum for the insane.
Perhaps but it was considered by some or at least the possibility that it would be addressed later.
I guess the problem is that we have a minority of a minority deciding to revolt–a non democratic method of setting up a nation based on liberty and democracy.
That is, however, the case. The majority knew little as the media sources took weeks to get news of anything out. We are thinking like 21st century folks again when we forget that and that fully 1/3 of the population didn't really care who was in charge as long as they were left to their lives.
In 1787 they then proposed a document that clearly was based on fear of the mob (the people?), and so constructed the government to guarantee that the will of THE PEOPLE could be tamed and altered by having an electoral college and election of Senators by State Legislatures. Did this come up in your classes?
Yes. Why wouldn't it? The founders were products of the Enlightenment and as such realized that the people must have a role in their own governance but at that point it was to be limited, indeed, to protect from a mobocracy.I taught about the warts too. I wouldn't have been doing my job otherwise.
We (free, white, property owning, of age, males), at the time, were going to make the rules for all; those not in our group would be given certain protections and rights under the Constitution. This was pretty liberal at the time… turn Enlightenment thought, as far as it went (not as far perhaps as it should have but good for the time. Never meaning to obfuscatate, my qualifiactions seem reasonable as it is wobbly point (some bring up) when we continued to have slaves and disallow votes to women.
