One way that our administration feels that teachers could improve their teaching is by having them observe other teachers. Today I was lucky enough to watch a civics teacher teach a lesson on the Presidency. One of the ways that this teacher taught the Presidency was to spend a day or two reviewing each President and some notable features to their Presidency, and it is in doing these types of lessons that the strong liberal bias comes out of most teachers.
The first thing that I noticed as the teacher went through these lessons is that instead of focusing on all the highlights of our ancestors in an attempt to strengthen some of the myths about them and give students something to revere and emulate, she mostly ran them down and spewed forth the revisionist crap that goes for education in today's Education Schools. After the lesson, students could tell you that Madison was short, Washington owned slaves, and Jefferson had an affair, but could tell you who was the Father of our Country or wrote the Constitution or Declaration of Independence.
Next getting into the more modern Presidents, I increasingly noticed the disparity of time that this teacher spent on each President. It was subtle, and if I wasn't tuned into the bias in schools, I may have missed it, but after a while I began to time her based on the clock at the front of the room, and noticed that the Democratic Presidents, most notably FDR, Kennedy, Johnson, and even Clinton, had ten to fifteen minutes spent on each, while the Republicans only had a couple minutes spent on each. If a parent asked or a student noticed, the teacher would say "I taught the students about both Republicans and Democrats"- but in honesty, the lesson was slanted, with more time given to Democratic Presidents.
The other thing that jumped out at me about this teacher's lesson was the type of issues that she focused on with each President. Her discussion on Nixon focused on Watergate, on Reagan it was the national debt and Contra affair, and Bush was Iraq. Now, those are notable features of each Presidency, and it is okay to teach those- but when she mentioned FDR, it was 'saving us from Great Depression and winning WWII,' Kennedy was 'taking us to the moon,' and Clinton was 'booming economy and peace around the world.' Those might be true, but this disparity of the content of the discussion was not lost on me- it was a clear attempt to portray Democrats in a positive light and Republicans in a negative light, and these impressions will stick forever in these students minds (or else they won't, which isn't good either, because that means the students learned nothing about any President).
The next day, students would be quizzed about this material, and would have a reading out of the textbook that would also build on these ideas. I only saw the lecture- just one day out of many- from one teacher out of many, but as I demonstrated, the liberal bias in education is clearly evident.
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