2017 Feb 11^th

Mona Charen is indignant once again…or maybe still indignant. I have never seen a non-indignant Mona Charen column. This time a high school program at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois elevates her dudgeon. Ms. Charen claims this program is “far- left brain washing.”

This program, which has so aroused Charen was, in fact, designed by the high school students themselves and by their parents. Now that is simply awful; parents ignoring the proclivities of a political columnist like Charen to design a school sponsored program all by themselves. The program focuses on discussions about some of the country’s shortcoming when it comes to equal opportunity. She says that one invited speaker has written an objectionable song. She doesn’t assert that this speaker is planning to present this song at the school’s program, just that he has written it. Is she desperately seeking a rationale for her invective?

She writes, “The program that is being imposed on Winnetka, Illinois,…is a hard left indoctrination that could have come straight from the pages of Howard Zinn.” This “imposed program” is being imposed by the parents and the students themselves. Charen simply cannot imagine a political view different from her own being voluntarily produced.  Then she writes, “…straight from the pages of Howard Zinn;” and what does Zinn write that is false to fact? Charen doesn’t say. I guess she just hates that he emphasizes inequality.

Charen says that with a program “dedicated to civil rights and mutual understanding, the guests might steer clear of racism and anti-Semitism...” Charen conflates anti-Israeli sentiment with “racism and anti-Semitism.” It may be that her enthusiastic support for Bibi Netanyahu and all things Israeli, is responsible for her blast at this high school program’s desire to push civil rights for everyone. Charen needs to remember that Israel contains less than half of the world’s Jews; being anti-the current hard right government of Israel is no more being anti-Semitic than being anti-Trump is being anti-American.

There are some who object to this program: what a surprise! Any parent is free to pull their child from school that day so Charen’s notion that this is forcing an unwanted program on poor helpless parents and their kids who don’t like it is silly. There is a petition supporting the program that now has 3700 signatures; a petition opposing the program has several hundred signatures. (The high school has 4000 students so this whole thing may be a big deal only to Charen who needs column fodder.)

If Charen were truly concerned about pushing falsehoods onto students, she should look at the Texas school book disaster. Five million public school students in Texas will began using new social studies textbooks a while back based on state academic standards that barely addressed racial segregation. The state’s guidelines for teaching American history also did  not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws.

And when it comes to the Civil War, children are supposed to learn that the conflict was caused by “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery” — written deliberately in that order to telegraph slavery’s secondary role in driving the conflict, according to some members of the state board of education.

Slavery was a “side issue to the Civil War,” said Pat Hardy, a Republican board member, when the board adopted the standards in 2010. “There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states’ rights.”

Anyone can retrieve the Texas Statement of Secession from the internet. The statement makes it very clear that the problem was indeed state’s rights, the right of people in Texas to own black slaves. Why doesn’t Charen write about that?