Dept. of Ed. Supports Classroom Memorials to Michael Brown

53f7dd490fbb5.preview-620If you are mystified as to why the left strives so hard to make martyrs out of such unlikely role models as Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, both killed in self-defense, just keep in mind Rahm Emanuel’s credo: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

Within days of the shooting of Brown in August, a “Professor of Science and Education” named Christopher Emdin posted (and then updated in October) a piece for Huffington Post entitled “5 Ways to Teach About Michael Brown and Ferguson in the New School Year.” That article was given new life when a link to it was tweeted by the White House Am-Af Ed just after Thanksgiving. It included the acronym for “in case you missed it” – indicating that the administration thought the article’s content important and valid enough to bring to people’s attention once again.

What is Am-Af Ed? It is the U.S. Department of Education’s Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans, an Obama creation designed to improve educational opportunities for blacks in America. But of course, educational excellence doesn’t mean the same thing to the Alinsky protégés in the White House as it does to most Americans. To the radical left, education is about mobilizing, galvanizing, and deploying armies of social justice warriors.

The Am-Af Ed tweet also included Twitter links to: left-leaning PBS; Teaching for Change, whose motto is “Building Social Justice Starting in the Classroom”; and Rethinking Schools, whose mission is “social justice teaching and education activism… to build broad democratic movements for social and environmental justice.” See a pattern developing there?

Teaching for Change devotes an entire page to “Teaching About Ferguson” to help indoctrinators – I mean, educators – enable students to “be proactive in their own communities” – because apparently it’s less important to give students of color an education than it is to pump them up for community action. The page is replete with items about the history of racism in America, along with positive references to Malcolm X, radical historian Howard Zinn, and the Black Panthers. That would be the same Black Panthers whose recent plot to bomb the Gateway Arch and murder the Ferguson police chief and a St. Louis prosecutor was stalled because the racist thugs ran out of EBT credit. What a standard for academic excellence they set.

Emdin’s Huffington Post piece urges that educators “set the appropriate tone for the school year” by focusing on “events and issues that mean something to students,” especially “youth of color” – by which he means the Michael Brown shooting and what he calls “the recent events in Ferguson.” Those “events” now have expanded beyond Ferguson and include rioting, burning, looting, and murdering, and the harassment of Christmas-caroling children for good measure. It is “imperative that teachers find a way to bring this issue into the classroom,” he writes, otherwise “we are loosing [sic] opportunities to make powerful connections” – because successful community organizing depends on ramping up racial grievances and victimhood. Never mind the powerful connections that a good education would instill in students’ minds.

His 5 steps to not letting this crisis go to waste begin with asking students what they have heard or know about Brown and Ferguson. From there the indoctrinators – oops, there I go again – are to connect the Brown shooting to other, similar controversial black deaths such as those of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, to make students “more sociopolitically aware” and to develop “emotional awareness, empathy, and other skills necessary to be informed citizens.” Actually, emotional awareness, whatever that is, and empathy are unnecessary to be an informed citizen; they are, however, necessary in order for youth to be manipulated by progressive race-mongers into believing that feeling trumps facts.

Third, Emdin recommends that students “write letters to all those who are involved in the shooting. This includes politicians, police officers, the families of victims of the violence, and even the deceased.” This apparently helps “students lean [sic] how to write while conveying emotion” – because again, emphasizing emotion is a critical element in community organizing. And while the students devote all this time to writing emotionally-charged letters to everyone involved in a case in which the evidence supports the white officer’s story and demolishes the racially self-serving lies initially spread about the shooting, the rest of their education languishes on the sidelines.

Emdin’s fourth proposal would ordinarily beggar belief, except that by now, nothing that emerges from leftist propagandizing in the American educational system should surprise anyone. He recommends that students create a memorial to Brown on a classroom bulletin board, to “honor Michael Brown and other people who have been victims of police and other violence.” That’s an actual memorial to a man who initiated violence against a cop after strong-arming a local storekeeper in the commission of a crime. That is the man that Emdin and the Department of Education want to hold up as an inspiration to youth of color. This, Emdin claims, helps teachers to “form classroom solidarity” [emphasis added] – because classroom solidarity, and not the development of individual critical thinking skills, is crucial to “rethinking schools.”

Finally, Emdin wants teachers to “carry the theme for the rest of the year” to get the students “beyond meaningless assignments like writing and talking about what they did over the summer… [They] begin to see the classroom as a space where the teaching affects real life, and where assignments have meaning” – because without the transformative goal of racial payback and social justice, readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic obviously have no real life applications.

Are such recommendations really ways in which Af-Am Ed intends to produce educational excellence in students of color? For all of Christopher Emdin’s lip service to the “critical thinking skills” he claims his plan promotes, it will produce not academic excellence but more dumbed-down youth animated by racial anger – just the way the Alinsky protégés want it.

*

Don’t miss Shillman Journalism Fellow Mark Tapson on the Glazov Gang discussing Fighting the Culture War:

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

Subscribe to Frontpage’s TV show, The Glazov Gang, and LIKE it on Facebook.

  • jwmiller

    Never “mystified” by Obama&Co’s obvious Marxist Agenda. What does mystify is the numbers of Americans still kneeling at the altar. The Dept. of so-called Education is as much or more dangerous than the IRS DHS, HHS, EPA, & on & on.

  • PhilByler

    The Edmin article is pure radical socialist propaganda and proselytizing. Thiat the Obama Department of Education is tweeting its virtues reflects the radical socialist nature of the Obama Administration.

  • Cappy1437

    This can’t be for real. How disgusting. Obama’s new best friends forever, Michael Brown’s mother and step father, are such role models for the American public that I think Obama should take them to live with his family in the White House. Obama and Michael’s mother can rant and smoke their cigarettes together out in the rose garden and the step father can stand on the front porch and teach everyone how to yell such obscenities as “burn this ####’n city down.” Michael Brown’s parents obviously know how to raise nice law-abiding citizens so I think the Obama family should take them in and let them be role models for their girls. PERIOD.

  • http://www.clarespark.com/ Clare Spark

    And Arne Duncan set the stage long before the incidents that have provoked opportunistic demagogues. But Duncan was preceded by the white liberal establishment that co-opted rowdy urban rioters in the late 1960s. See http://clarespark.com/2014/12/04/race-relations-as-managed-by-the-left/. “Race relations as managed by the Left.”

  • http://www.apollospeaks.com/ ApolloSpeaks

    kkkk

  • kathy

    both killed in self-defense.THIS IS A OUT RIGHT LIE. and P.S M BROWN WAS IN THE COP CAR BEATING THE COP. Surprised his FACE WAS NOT SHOT OFF!

  • USARetired

    The entire American educational system has been hijacked by socialists who are destroying the minds of our adolescents ! To glorify and honor crimanals as heros should be illegal, It certainly is un American!

    • The March Hare

      And it happened a long time ago. It is just now intensifying and becoming more open. Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School have done a number on our education system and have destroyed the thinking processes of several generations already.

      • Lightbringer

        It goes back more than several generations, and it goes back further than Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. Check out John Dewey’s work at the University of Chicago and the Teachers’ College at Columbia University at the very beginning of the 20th century. That might be considered the beginning of the end for this country.

        • The March Hare

          Columbia has been a hot bed of communism for a long time. In Whitaker Chamber’s book Witness, he wrote how he first found communism at Columbia when he attended in the early 1920s.

      • BenZacharia

        Don’t forget the Fabians/London School of Econ.

        • The March Hare

          There are a lot of players causing this situation and there is no room in this comment section to write a book about it.

  • Erudite Mavin

    The Radical Left took over Public Education over 55 years ago, this is not news except for those who have not kept up with what your kids were or still are being instructed.
    Liberal Left Teachers, Liberal Left Textbooks and controlled by the Left Wing Teachers Union all primed students ready for the Marxist Universities.
    Most Conservatives would rather whine rather than enroll their children in Parochial or Private schools.
    Conservatives are feeding the Liberal Left by keeping your kids in Public Schools
    as each state pays over 10 to 20 Thousand dollars per student to the schools.

  • GSR

    You gotta be kidding? If this happens, it would be a disgraceful politicization of public education. Pathetic.

  • BillG4

    Another reason to do away with the Dept. of Education.

  • Frederick

    Sicker than sick.I cannot imagine how drunk or high I’d have to get to accept anything so twisted…it’s the “Bizarro” world on steroids.

  • Ike Clanton

    Exactly why this unconstitutional department should be dismantled.

  • nightspore

    This is par for the course. Do you remember Mumia? Are you aware of the colleges that invited that cop-killer to give commencement speeches? (To give that story an international twist, there’s also a street named after him somewhere in Paris, I think.)

    I wonder if there will be renewed calls for commuting his sentence because of this brouhaha.

  • whatalife1

    Barely believable… The Marxists are in control of the system…

  • mobuyus

    They’re going to try to criminalize being an American next.

  • Jane Wegener

    WHY on Gods green earth would our education dept support Michael Brown who was a thief a bully who resisted arrest and attacked a police officer??? I do not want any grand children of mine to think this horrible person should be a role model. The Obama administration has set race relations back 50 years and have divided the nation while inciting race riots. That Obama welcomes Sharpton into the WH shows that he is unfit for office.

  • BillG4

    Actually, there is. See the Convention of States Project.