Category Archives: Social Studies

See clip from documentary film 638 Ways To Kill Castro of Cuban-American Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) “welcoming” the assasination of Castro.

Hmm, she welcomes the assasination of any leader “oppressing the people.” Kinda makes you wonder about how else fits this definition.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog: Richard Dawkins Goes Head to Head With Campus Critics of His Attack on Religion

Richard Dawkins, the University of Oxford biologist, powerful defender of Darwinian evolution, and vehement critic of religion, read from his new book, The God Delusion, last month at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. After the reading, he took questions from the audience. Many of those questions came from students at nearby Liberty University, the Christian institution that was founded by Jerry Falwell.

Some of the proceedings were captured on video by C-Span, and the footage is now available from the YouTube.com.

It was a lively back-and-forth, with most of the audience cheering on Mr. Dawkins as he responds to questions about the origin of morality, the beginning of the universe, and so on. At one point he encourages the Liberty students to transfer to a “proper university.” Mr. Dawkins is also blogging about his book tour.

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The resolution below was passed by the College and University Faculty Assembly of National Council for the Social Studies at the annual conference in Washington, DC, November 30 2006. This resoultions draws on numerous sources, including official position statements of the National Council for the Social Studies and the Historians Against the War resolution to be presented at the American Historical Association.

Download pdf version with footnotes here.

Submitted by The Rouge Forum and the following members of NCSS: E. Wayne Ross (University of British Columbia*), Timothy Cashman (University of Texas, El Paso), Rudolfo Chávez Chávez (New Mexico State University), Margaret Smith Crocco (Teachers College, Columbia University), Ron Evans (San Diego State University), Kristi Fragnoli (College of St. Rose), Stephen C. Fleury (Le Moyne College), William Gaudelli (Teachers College, Columbia University), Rich Gibson (Sand Diego State University), Neil O. Houser (University of Oklahoma), David Hursh (University of Rochester), Curry Malott (D’Youville College), Perry M. Marker (Sonoma State University), Valerie Ooka Pang (San Diego State University), Marc Pruyn (New Mexico State University), Cesar Rossatto (University of Texas, El Paso), Alan J. Singer (Hofstra University), Brenda Trofanenko (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Kevin D. Vinson (University of Arizona)

Rationale: NCSS standards documents and position statements consistently identify citizenship education as the primary purpose of K-12 social studies. These statements argue that concern for the common good and citizen participation in public life are essential to the health of our democratic system. If, as NCSS consistently argues, effective social studies education prepares young people to identify, understand, critically analyze and take action to solve the problems facing our diverse nation in an increasingly interdependent world. Then it is incumbent on social studies educators and their primary professional organization to take actions in the public arena that are consistent with the stated purposes of the profession.

Whereas the National Council for the Social Studies’ National Standards for Social Studies Teachers emphasizes the importance of social studies teachers’ knowledge, capabilities, and dispositions to organize and provide instruction at the appropriate school level for the study of Power, Authority, and Governance ;

And whereas the National Standards for Social Studies Teachers state that “understanding the historical development of structures of power, authority, and governance and their evolving functions in contemporary society, as well as in other parts of the world, is essential the development of civic competence;

And whereas in exploring the theme of “Power, Authority, and Governance” the National Standards for Social Studies Teachers encourage teachers to have “learners confront such questions as: What is power? What is legitimate authority? How are governments created, structured, maintained and change? However can we keep government responsive to its citizens’ needs and interests? How can individual rights be protected within the context of majority rule?” ;

And where as the National Standards for Social Studies Teachers state that teachers should: provide opportunities for learners to examine issues involving the rights, roles, and status of individuals in relation to the general welfare; enable learners to describe the ways nations and organizations respond to forces of unity and diversity affecting order and security; have learners explain conditions, actions, and motivations that contribute to conflict and cooperation within and among nations; help learners to analyze and explain governmental mechanisms to meet the needs and wants of citizens, regulate territory, manage conflict, and establish order and security; challenge learners to apply concepts such as power, role, status, justice, democratic values, and influence to the examination of persistent issues and social problems; and guide learners to explain and evaluate how governments attempt to achieve their states ideals at home and abroad.

And whereas the NCSS position statement on “A Vision of Powerful Teaching and Learning in Social Studies: Building Social Understanding and Civic Efficacy” states that “Social studies teachers need to treat the social world realistically and address its controversial aspects” ;

And whereas NCSS’s statement “Essentials of the Social Studies” notes that concern for the common good and citizen participation in public life are essential to the health of our democratic system ;

And whereas the NCSS position statement “Academic Freedom and the Social Studies Teacher,” states: “A teacher’s academic freedom is his/her right and responsibility to study, investigate, present, interpret, and discuss all the relevant facts and ideas in the field of his/her professional competence. This freedom implies no limitations other than those imposed by generally accepted standards of scholarship. As a professional, the teacher strives to maintain a spirit of free inquiry, open-mindedness, and impartiality in the classroom. As a member of an academic community, however, the teacher is free to present in the field of his or her professional competence his/her own opinions or convictions and with them the premises from which they are derived. ”

And whereas NCSS is an endorser of the American Association of University Professors’ “1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure”;

And whereas the NCSS “Revised Code of Ethics for the Social Studies Profession” states that: “The social studies professional should acknowledge the worth and tentativeness of knowledge. He or she should engage in a continuous search for new knowledge, retaining both the right and the obligation as a student scholar to doubt, to inquire freely, and to raise searching questions” ;

And whereas the “Revised Code of Ethics for the Social Studies Profession” also states “It is the ethical responsibility of social studies professionals to foster the understanding and exercise the rights guaranteed under the Constitution of the United States and of the responsibilities implicit in those rights in an increasingly interdependent world.

And whereas during the war in Iraq and the so-called “war on terror,” the Administration of George W. Bush has violated the above-mentioned standards and principles through the following practices:

• excluding well-recognized foreign scholars;
• condemning as “revisionism” the search for truth about pre-war intelligence;
• re-classifying previously unclassified government documents;
• suspending in certain cases the centuries-old writ of habeas corpus and substituting indefinite administrative detention without specified criminal charges or access to a court of law;
• using interrogation techniques at Guantanamo, Abu-Ghraib, Bagram, and other locations incompatible with respect for the dignity of all persons required by a civilized society.

And whereas “The fundamental values and beliefs taught in social studies are drawn from many sources, but especially from the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution with its Bill of Rights. These beliefs form the basic principles of our democratic constitutional order. They depend on such practices as due process, equal protection, free expression, and civic participation, and they have roots in the concepts of liberty, justice, equality, responsibility, diversity, and privacy.”

Now, therefore, the National Council for the Social Studies urges its members and associated groups through publication of this resolution Social Education, The Social Studies Professional and other appropriate outlets, including the NCSS web site:

1. To take a public stand as citizens on behalf of the values and goals taught in social studies and necessary to the practice of our profession; and

2. To do whatever they can to bring the Iraq war to a speedy conclusion.

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Below is an excerpt from a letter my friend Four Arrows (aka Don Jacobs) sent out on this Thanksgiving eve (in the USA).

Here are some facts about this holiday to consider that we tend to ignore at great peril as we allow too similar of events to continue around the world:

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The Boston Globe: Race disparities persist in U.S.

Race disparities persist in U.S.
By Stephen Ohlemacher, Associated Press Writer | November 14, 2006

WASHINGTON –Decades after the civil rights movement, racial disparities in income, education and home ownership persist and, by some measurements, are growing.

White households had incomes that were two-thirds higher than blacks and 40 percent higher than Hispanics last year, according to data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau.

White adults were also more likely than black and Hispanic adults to have college degrees and to own their own homes. They were less likely to live in poverty.

“Race is so associated with class in the United States that it may not be direct discrimination, but it still matters indirectly,” said Dalton Conley, a sociology professor at New York University and the author of “Being Black, Living in the Red.”

“It doesn’t mean it’s any less powerful just because it’s indirect,” he said.

Home ownership grew among white middle-class families after World War II when access to credit and government programs made buying houses affordable. Black families were largely left out because of discrimination, and the effects are still being felt today, said Lance Freeman, assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University and author of “There Goes the ‘Hood.”

Home ownership creates wealth, which enables families to live in good neighborhoods with good schools. It also helps families finance college, which leads to better-paying jobs, perpetuating the cycle, Freeman said.

“If your parents own their own home they can leave it to you when they pass on or they can use the equity to help you with a down payment on yours,” Freeman said.

Three-fourths of white households owned their homes in 2005, compared with 46 percent of black households and 48 percent of Hispanic households. Home ownership is near an all-time high in the United States, but racial gaps have increased in the past 25 years.

Black families have also been hurt by the decline of manufacturing jobs — the same jobs that helped propel many white families into the middle class after World War II, said Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington office.

Among Hispanics, education, income and home ownership gaps are exacerbated by recent Latin American immigrants. Hispanic immigrants have, on average, lower incomes and education levels than people born in the United States. About 40 percent of U.S. Hispanics are immigrants.

Asian Americans, on average, have higher incomes and education levels than whites. However, they have higher poverty rates and lower home ownership rates.

The Census Bureau released 2005 racial data on incomes, education levels, home ownership rates and poverty rates Tuesday. The data are from the American Community Survey, the bureau’s new annual survey of 3 million households nationwide. The Associated Press compared the figures with census data from 1980, 1990 and 2000.

Among the findings:

–Black adults have narrowed the gap with white adults in earning high school diplomas, but the gap has widened for college degrees. Thirty percent of white adults had at least a bachelor’s degree in 2005, while 17 percent of black adults and 12 percent of Hispanic adults had degrees.

–Forty-nine percent of Asian Americans had at least a bachelor’s degree in 2005.

–The median income for white households was $50,622 last year. It was $30,939 for black households, $36,278 for Hispanic households and $60,367 for Asian households.

–Median income for black households has stayed about 60 percent of the income for white households since 1980. In dollar terms, the gap has grown from $18,123 to $19,683.

–Hispanic households made about 76 percent as much as white households in 1980. In 2005, it was 72 percent.

–The gap in poverty rates has narrowed since 1980, but it remains substantial. The poverty rate for white residents was 8.3 percent on 2005. It was 24.9 percent for black residents, 21.8 percent for Hispanic residents and 11.1 percent for Asian residents.

Thomas Shapiro, professor of law and social policy at Brandeis University, said the “easiest answer” to narrowing racial gaps is to promote home ownership, which would help minority families accumulate wealth.

“The wealth gap is not just a story of merit and achievement, it’s also a story of the historical legacy of race in the United Sates,” said Shapiro, author of “The Hidden Cost of Being African American.”

Shelton, of the NAACP, called for more funding for preschool programs such as Head Start, improving public schools and making college more affordable.

“Income should not be a significant determining factor whether someone should have an opportunity to go to college,” Shelton said.

——

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The Boston Globe: Radicalism in the Deaf culture

SINCE LAST MAY, Gallaudet University, the world’s only university designed entirely for deaf and hard-of-hearing students, has been rocked by protests over the selection of a new president.

Jane K. Fernandes was scheduled to take over from I. King Jordan in January. On Oct. 29, after protesters shut down the Washington campus for more than two weeks, the board of trustees revoked Fernandes’s appointment. This fiasco is a striking example of identity politics gone mad.

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The Nation‘s Michael McCaughan on the state of seige in Oaxaca:

Que Pasa en Oaxaca?

A virtual state of siege prevails in Oaxaca City where thousands of military police have occupied the central square and surrounding streets, clearing barricades and detaining dozens of opposition activists. The city’s emergency services are idle while banks and schools remain closed and the city center, usually bustling with tourists, has the air of a ghost town. The hub of activity has shifted to the Santo Domingo church where thousands of activists gather daily to swap news, make plans and denounce police brutality.The federal police occupation began on October 28 with an aggressive push toward the Zocalo (town square) which was occupied in June by teachers, students and workers demanding the removal of discredited state governor Ulises Ruiz. The roots of the conflict go back a month earlier when teachers occupied the city square in demand of better pay. This annual protest dates back twenty-six years and the ritual typically ends with a small wage increase being approved. This time, however, Governor Ruiz violently evicted the teachers from the square, provoking a popular uprising.

Workers and students united to shut down government offices and seized local radio and television stations. The state government ground to a halt and Ruiz has gone into hiding, communicating through paid announcements in the press.

“The conflict in Oaxaca is almost over,” announced Ruiz on Friday–confirmation, if it was necessary, that his hiding place must be a long way from Oaxaca.

The opposition formed the Oaxaca People’s Popular Assembly (APPO), which comprises 200 organizations drawn from 600 villages and towns across the state, all determined to stand firm until Ruiz has left office and with him the federal security forces.

The APPO is a temporary alliance of activists ranging from moderates with links to the ruling party to radicals calling for armed struggle to overthrow the state. In conversation with APPO members this week there was consensus that the time had come to replace traditional political parties with community-based governing assemblies, in keeping with indigenous tradition.

On the eve of the police occupation the teacher’s union signed a wage agreement and agreed to go back to work. The push to topple Ruiz would have continued but the core of the resistance movement was effectively neutralized. On that same day, however, government officials opened fire on a group of protestors, killing US citizen Brad Will and raising the profile of the dispute internationally.

Under pressure to resolve the impasse, President Fox dispatched police with orders to retake the square and dismantle barricades around the city. Mexico’s congress simultaneously pushed for the resignation of Ruiz, to ease tensions. However the plan backfired as Ruiz refused to step down and appears determined to hang on until the bitter end.

The governor represents the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico from 1929 until 2000, combining populism with repression. In recent years the PRI has seen its power base eroded around the country, but Oaxaca, where the party has governed uninterruptedly for seventy-seven years, remains a significant fiefdom.

The situation is further complicated by the upcoming handover of presidential power to Felipe Calderón on December 1. Calderón’s National Action Party (PAN) needs PRI support to govern effectively in congress and legitimize its candidate’s feeble electoral victory. It is believed that Ruiz has demanded the PAN support him in return for PRI cooperation in the coming months.

Meanwhile, the military police have failed to crush the resistance movement. Indeed it is the federal police themselves who now look surrounded and isolated as they camp out in the square. In a dynamic new tactic protestors surge toward the square, chanting slogans and testing defenses at different entry points.

According to internal security documents, the police mission comprises three phases; the retaking of the square and clearing of all major barricades; the seizure of occupied radio and TV stations; and a final phase in which arrest warrants would be served on 200 APPO members and a major clampdown imposed to dampen resistance efforts.

The square was retaken last weekend in a day of violence which saw three people killed, dozens more injured and at least fifty people detained. The APPO militants abandoned barricades rather than clash with heavily armed police, but for every dismantled barricade three more appeared at significant intersections across the city.

On Thursday police engaged in running battles with protestors outside the university campus, where several people were snatched by police and taken by helicopter to a nearby airbase. The local police have also set up a “safe house” opposite a soft drink warehouse, where neighbors have reported cries of torture from “ghost” detainees yet to be formally charged or processed through the courts. There are now seventy-nine prisoners and thirty-seven “disappeared” citizens, sparking a desperate search by concerned relatives.

The authorities believed that by clearing the square, a potent symbol of APPO power, the movement would lose its focus. However, the repression has only multiplied the resistance as students shut down university faculties across Mexico and Zapatista rebels closed down the Panamerican Highway near Guatemala. Radio Universidad, playing a vital role in coordinating APPO activities, has been broadcasting hundreds of declarations of support from around the world.

By the end of the week President Fox had declared that he was leaving the Oaxaca conflict to his successor, Felipe Calderón. At a meeting with stockbrokers this week, Calderón outlined his future strategy for guaranteeing security around the country; “Will it be easy?” he reflected, “No…this is a problem which will take time, money and very probably it will cost more lives. “

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The Independent: Saddam condemnation a guilty verdict on America as well

So America’s one-time ally has been sentenced to death for war crimes he committed when he was Washington’s best friend in the Arab world. America knew all about his atrocities and even supplied the gas – along with the British, of course – yet there we were yesterday declaring it to be, in the White House’s words, another “great day for Iraq”. That’s what Tony Blair announced when Saddam Hussein was pulled from his hole in the ground on 13 December 2003. And now we’re going to string him up, and it’s another great day.

Of course, it couldn’t happen to a better man. Nor a worse. It couldn’t be a more just verdict – nor a more hypocritical one. It’s difficult to think of a more suitable monster for the gallows, preferably dispatched by his executioner, the equally monstrous hangman of Abu Ghraib prison, Abu Widad, who would strike his victims on the head with an axe if they dared to condemn the leader of the Iraqi Socialist Baath Party before he hanged them. But Abu Widad was himself hanged at Abu Ghraib in 1985 after accepting a bribe to put a reprieved prisoner to death instead of the condemned man. But we can’t mention Abu Ghraib these days because we have followed Saddam’s trail of shame into the very same institution. And so by hanging this awful man, we hope – don’t we? – to look better than him, to remind Iraqis that life is better now than it was under Saddam.

Only so ghastly is the hell-disaster that we have inflicted upon Iraq that we cannot even say that. Life is now worse. Or rather, death is now visited upon even more Iraqis than Saddam was able to inflict on his Shias and Kurds and – yes, in Fallujah of all places – his Sunnis, too. So we cannot even claim moral superiority. For if Saddam’s immorality and wickedness are to be the yardstick against which all our iniquities are judged, what does that say about us? We only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of them and murdered some suspects and carried out a few rapes and illegally invaded a country which cost Iraq a mere 600,000 lives (“more or less”, as George Bush Jnr said when he claimed the figure to be only 30,000). Saddam was much worse. We can’t be put on trial. We can’t be hanged.

“Allahu Akbar,” the awful man shouted – God is greater. No surprise there. He it was who insisted these words should be inscribed upon the Iraqi flag, the same flag which now hangs over the palace of the government that has condemned him after a trial at which the former Iraqi mass murderer was formally forbidden from describing his relationship with Donald Rumsfeld, now George Bush’s Secretary of Defence. Remember that handshake? Nor, of course, was he permitted to talk about the support he received from George Bush Snr, the current US President’s father. Little wonder, then, that Iraqi officials claimed last week the Americans had been urging them to sentence Saddam before the mid-term US elections.

Anyone who said the verdict was designed to help the Republicans, Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, blurted out yesterday, must be “smoking rope”. Well, Tony, that rather depends on what kind of rope it might be. Snow, after all, claimed yesterday that the Saddam verdict – not the trial itself, please note – was “scrupulous and fair”. The judges will publish “everything they used to come to their verdict.”

No doubt. Because here are a few of the things that Saddam was not allowed to comment upon: sales of chemicals to his Nazi-style regime so blatant – so appalling – that he has been sentenced to hang on a localised massacre of Shias rather than the wholesale gassing of Kurds over which George W Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara were so exercised when they decided to depose Saddam in 2003 – or was it in 2002? Or 2001? Some of Saddam’s pesticides came from Germany (of course). But on 25 May 1994, the US Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs produced a report entitled “United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences (sic) of the Persian Gulf War”.

This was the 1991 war which prompted our liberation of Kuwait, and the report informed Congress about US government-approved shipments of biological agents sent by American companies to Iraq from 1985 or earlier. These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax; Clostridium botulinum; Histoplasma capsulatum; Brucella melitensis; Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia coli. The same report stated that the US provided Saddam with “dual use” licensed materials which assisted in the development of chemical, biological and missile-system programmes, including chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility plans).

Yes, well I can well see why Saddam wasn’t permitted to talk about this. John Reid, the British Home Secretary, said that Saddam’s hanging “was a sovereign decision by a sovereign nation”. Thank heavens he didn’t mention the £200,000 worth of thiodiglycol, one of two components of mustard gas we exported to Baghdad in 1988, and another £50,000 worth of the same vile substances the following year.

We also sent thionyl chloride to Iraq in 1988 at a price of only £26,000. Yes, I know these could be used to make ballpoint ink and fabric dyes. But this was the same country – Britain – that would, eight years later, prohibit the sale of diphtheria vaccine to Iraqi children on the grounds that it could be used for – you guessed it – “weapons of mass destruction”.

Now in theory, I know, the Kurds have a chance for their own trial of Saddam, to hang him high for the thousands of Kurds gassed at Halabja. This would certainly keep him alive beyond the 30-day death sentence review period. But would the Americans and British dare touch a trial in which we would have not only to describe how Saddam got his filthy gas but why the CIA – in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi war crimes against Halabja – told US diplomats in the Middle East to claim that the gas used on the Kurds was dropped by the Iranians rather than the Iraqis (Saddam still being at the time our favourite ally rather than our favourite war criminal). Just as we in the West were silent when Saddam massacred 180,000 Kurds during the great ethnic cleansing of 1987 and 1988.

And – dare we go so deep into this betrayal of the Iraqis we loved so much that we invaded their country? – then we would have to convict Saddam of murdering countless thousands of Shia Muslims as well as Kurds after they staged an uprising against the Baathist regime at our specific request – thousands whom webetrayed by leaving them to fight off Saddam’s brutal hordes on their own. “Rioting,” is how Lord Blair’s meretricious “dodgy dossier” described these atrocities in 2002 – because, of course, to call them an “uprising” (which they were) would invite us to ask ourselves who contrived to provoke this bloodbath. Answer: us.

I and my colleagues watched this tragedy. I travelled on the hospital trains that brought the Iranians back from the 1980-88 war front, their gas wounds bubbling in giant blisters on their arms and faces, giving birth to smaller blisters that wobbled on top of their wounds. The British and Americans didn’t want to know. I talked to the victims of Halabja. The Americans didn’t want to know. My Associated Press colleague Mohamed Salaam saw the Iranian dead lying gassed in their thousands on the battlefields east of Basra. The Americans and the British didn’t care.

But now we are to give the Iraqi people bread and circuses, the final hanging of Saddam, twisting, twisting slowly in the wind. We have won. We have inflicted justice upon the man whose country we invaded and eviscerated and caused to break apart. No, there is no sympathy for this man. “President Saddam Hussein has no fear of being executed,” Bouchra Khalil, a Lebanese lawyer on his team, said in Beirut a few days ago. “He will not come out of prison to count his days and years in exile in Qatar or any other place. He will come out of prison to go to the presidency or to his grave.” It looks like the grave. Keitel went there. Ceausescu went there. Milosevic escaped sentence.

The odd thing is that Iraq is now swamped with mass murderers, guilty of rape and massacre and throat-slitting and torture in the years since our “liberation” of Iraq. Many of them work for the Iraqi government we are currently supporting, democratically elected, of course. And these war criminals, in some cases, are paid by us, through the ministries we set up under this democratic government. And they will not be tried. Or hanged. That is the extent of our cynicism. And our shame. Have ever justice and hypocrisy been so obscenely joined?

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Here’s and eight minute cartoon collage of The Communist Manifesto by Jesse Drew. A animated look at Marxian socialism, the goals of those with Marxist ideas, what is wrong with current society.

Check it out: Manifestoon

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