Silence in class

This was a rather boring article from Guardian on the pressure on people working inside the US educational system to be "objective". Nothing new was covered, although I wish someone would finally make a link between David Horowitz's efforts to turn American students into snitches and the hero worship of Pavel Morozov in Soviet Union. Despite all his efforts, I guess Mr Horowitz is still suffering from his communist upbringing.

Since the subject of upbringing came up, this article explains a lot about mine. More specifically it mentions the good old IB and reactions to it from a certain quarter of US society.

[The Guardian: April 4th, 2006]

Since February, the normally sleepy, wealthy district of Upper St Clair in Pennsylvania has been riven with arguments over its curriculum after the local school board banned the International Baccalaureate (IB), the global educational programme, for being an "un-American" marxist and anti-Christian. During their election campaign, the Republicans of Upper St Clair referred to the IB, which is offered in 122 countries and whose student intake has risen by 73% worldwide in the past five years, as though it was part of an international communist conspiracy, suspicious of a curriculum that had been "developed in a foreign country" (Switzerland). "Our country was founded on Judeo-Christian values and we have to be careful about what values our children are taught," said one Republican board member. Similar campaigns have also sprung up recently at school boards in Minnesota and Virginia.

I always wondered where my anti-Christian and un-American tendencies came from, now I know.