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Yesterday morning as kids across Washington State and the nation prepared to walk out of schools, Paige Cornwell, writing in the Seattle Times, quoted students who said, "We have nothing to lose..."
Really?
Cornwell wrote, "They also want to amplify their voices to call on legislators to pass stricter gun laws."
And she quoted Beatrice Cappio, who attends University Prep in Seattle: "We have nothing to lose, but the people in Washington DC and Olympia do if they vote against bills that would prevent another tragedy. Come this November, come 2020, we're going to be the ones filling out the ballots to decide who represents us."
I think she actually believes she and other students "have nothing to lose."
Public education has become so politicized, it has, for the most part, set aside actual learning in favor of social engineering and activism---thus becoming a favored tool in the hands of the secular progressive Left adults who also control Olympia. And elsewhere.
There is also a note of sadness, helplessness, and desperation in the words, "We have nothing to lose."
There is embedded in those words a sense of "we don't know what to do" so we'll try anything---that's better than nothing.
And educators are exploiting these kids to advance their own political and social agenda in too many cases.
A new survey out yesterday by Inside Higher Ed and Gallup reflects these attitudes exist not only in colleges and "higher ed," but in the high schools who prepare the kids for "higher ed" and the entire state-run education complex.
The Washington Times said yesterday in review of the survey, "Public confidence in American universities has eroded in recent years, and campus administrators have taken notice, blaming not only the high cost of a 4-year degree but the impact of liberal bias in the academy."
In fact in the survey, 86% of university presidents cite negative effects due to "liberal political bias on campus."
They know what the public knows. Campuses too often attack, sometimes physically, conservative speakers and their views, while celebrating the most bazaar social and political notions. And tolerance, inclusiveness, and freedom of expression is a joke.
However, 55% of these same presidents admitted they were more politically active in 2017 than ever before.
Probably energized to defeat Trump.
Nearly all studies show conclusively that college administrators, including presidents, are progressive liberal Left---not conservative. So they advance the very thing they claim is creating a negative effect on education.
Liberal, progressive Left relativism. Intellectual totalitarianism.
When "truth" is fluid---like human gender and sexuality, at least in their minds---there can never be a concrete basis on which to have hope and assurance and optimism. It's always elusive.
So in desperation they march. And in relative moral ignorance those who lead, help destroy our culture, our institutions, and even our children.
Our teenagers march out of their high schools, our young adults march out of our colleges, and eventually they all march into the real world-- unprepared to deal with its realities.
While tenured teachers prepare for the next class of students to be indoctrinated. And to protest. And to march.
That's the way secular progressive ideology works. Doing the same thing over and over and over, claiming "next time it will work."
Insanity.
A suggestion.
Instead of using our children as pawns to advance a very liberal, progressive Left agenda---in this case, the confiscation of guns--- how about eliminating one program instituted by the Obama administration that was directly responsible for Nikolas Cruz being able to buy a gun.
"Restorative Justice," sounds good, but that policy provided the track for a series of events that caused Nikolas Cruz to never show up on any police records, and therefore be qualified to buy a gun.
"Restorative Justice" was championed by the Obama administration "to decriminalize school discipline" and was "designed to help rule-breaking students avoid permanent blots on their records by reducing referrals to law enforcement."
While Obama folks may have "meant well," in the end, their scheme has miserably failed.
By not reporting "rule-breaking" students to law enforcement, Broward County Public Schools reduced school-based arrests by 63% from 2012 to 2016.
School District Superintendent Robert W. Runcie, who previously worked for Obama appointed Education Secretary Arne Duncan in the Chicago Public Schools, implemented these policies designed to derail the "schoolhouse-to-jail pipeline."
Jeff Bell, a deputy sheriff in Broward County, now says, "Mr. Cruz is a perfect example of someone just falling through the cracks that we create through bad policy."
School records show that Cruz was transferred 6 times in 3 years, but never expelled, taken into custody or arrested.
Under this agreement, which was developed in partnership with the NAACP, the hands of the resource officers in schools were tied, because the restorative justice program and its ancillary programs listed 14 misdemeanors no longer subject to school-based arrests.
Obama A/G Eric Holder and former Ed. Secretary Duncan led in creating this program, then pushed it forward to at least 50 districts nationally.
The real goal of the program was to bring some kind of ethnic parity to the number of school arrests and provide deceptive reports that show things are getting better in public schools.
In fact, these participating schools received a "Dear Colleague" letter on "nondiscriminatory application of school discipline," warning that federal officials would "investigate schools that failed to address disparate discipline rates for minority students."
And investigate they did. Max Eden, Manhattan Institute senior fellow, says, "They investigated hundreds of schools serving millions of students and these investigations were for the purpose of changing policies---They were for the purpose of making schools adopt Broward-esque policies."
Peter Kirsanow, a Republican member of the US Commission of Civil Rights, called the program "galactically wrongheaded."
He says, "Many districts that have adopted this approach have seen stunning increases in the number of offenses, with negative consequences for learning and safety."
And he says, "Racial disparities in disciplinary rates are not solved by cosmetically changing an assault into an 'encounter:'; or calling a robbery 'an appropriation'. That's not just fantasy, it's dangerous."
Indeed. With 18 calls about young Nikolas, many involving guns, threats, and violence and 39 officer visits to Nikolas' home in the past 7 years, he still was off the radar and had no problem buying a gun.
Classmates talked about his disturbing pictures and threatening statements, even death threats, but he remained off the radar.
Until that terrible day in last month.
This program of "restorative justice" continues in at least 50 major school districts today.
Perhaps these well-meaning, but misled children who "walked" against guns yesterday, could be told the truth and helped to see the benefit of marching against the deception in modern public education.
To do so, they wouldn't even need to leave the classroom.
And that's not fantasy.
Be Informed. Be Vigilant. Be Discerning.