Barack Obama opposes education funding for poor students

Jennifer Rubin comments on the story from the Washington Times:

School-voucher proponents confronted police Tuesday morning outside the U.S. Department of Education, where the protesters demanded that federal officials restore scholarships taken away from 216 D.C. students. . . .

“You may not lock us up, but we’ll be back,” Mr. Chavous said. “We will make sure that we do everything in our power to give our children the education they deserve. I am disgusted by the fact that they can go to great lengths to stop or muzzle the voice of freedom.

“It is fundamentally wrong for this administration not to listen to the voices of citizens in this city.”

The protest against President Obama’s refusal to reauthorize the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program came the same day that Mr. Obama addressed the nation’s classrooms in a televised speech about the importance of taking personal responsibility for one’s education.

There is, of course, legislation with bipartisan sponsorship to restore the funding. In late July, Sens. Joe Lieberman, Susan Collins, Diane Feinstein, George Voinovich, Robert Byrd, and John Ensign introduced the Scholarships for Opportunity and Results (SOAR) Act, which would provide reauthorization for the program for five years. So it seems that the only thing standing in the way of giving D.C. parents what they want—funding for a successful program for kids trapped in one of the worst school districts in the country—is the Obama administration. And the teachers’ union, of course.

Had the Bush administration killed a program like this, the OSM would have been howling about “racism” and “not caring about our children” and whatever else they could think of. But in fact, this was a Bush-era program killed by the Obama administration in partial repayment of the debt they owe the teachers’ union, and so Big Media says nothing. It doesn’t change the fact that a number of poor minority students are now getting a much worse education because the Obama administration cares more about political payback than it does about them.

Parents, children, and sin

Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 7
Q. Then where does this corrupt human nature come from?

A. From the fall and disobedience of our first parents,
Adam and Eve, in Paradise.1
This fall has so poisoned our nature2
that we are born sinners—
corrupt from conception on.3

Note: mouseover footnote for Scripture references.

Our first ancestors fouled the well, and poisoned our inheritance. Kuyvenhoven puts it well, I think, when he says (27),

[The catechism] intentionally calls Adam and Eve our “parents,” thereby teaching that, just as black parents get black children and white parents get white children, so sinful parents get sinful children, whether they are yellow, red, black, or white. None of us can escape this poison, for all of us have parents. That’s the teaching.

And none of us can avoid passing it on, for all of us are sinners. As the father of three, I can testify that I am far more aware of my own depravity now than I ever was before they came along.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord! O Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!
If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.

—Psalm 130:1-4 (ESV)

I found myself, upon reading this psalm (along with Psalms 131 and 134) to my older girls this evening, explaining to them the whole concept of the fear of the Lord. It’s rather a difficult one, especially for an eight-year-old and a five-year-old, since obviously I don’t want them to go around terrified of God—and yet, they need to understand this. I need to understand this. I’m sure there are many who could do a much better job than I did, but here (more or less) is what I told them.

  • Awe. A couple years ago at Thanksgiving, we took a trip through Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, and the Grand Canyon. The kids absolutely loved it. I reminded them of how they’d felt looking out across those great canyons—including the element of fear of what would happen if they fell in. In the same way, only far, far more so, God is great and glorious and beautiful—and not safe.
  • Holiness. Our God is a consuming fire, as Deuteronomy and Hebrews tell us; if we as we are, unholy, impure, and frail, were to enter his presence, we would burn like moths in a flame. There’s a reason Isaiah was terrified at even just a vision of the holiness of God: it’s more than we can bear.
  • Wrath. Along with this goes the wrath of God against sin, which is the mainspring of his judgment on sin, which we have richly earned for the waywardness of our hearts—even the best of us. God is the one who cannot and will not tolerate sin, and the judge of all the earth; we should feel in our bones the truth that we deserve only his judgment.
  • Discipline. To be sure, you might well say that those who are in Christ have been given instead his grace, and that is true; and yet, our sin still deserves his wrath, and just because we have received grace does not mean we’ve been given a “get out of punishment free” card. Rather the contrary: “The Lord disciplines the one he loves.” As Hebrews notes, discipline is painful rather than pleasant, even though it brings good fruit.
  • The untamed God. We cannot control God; we cannot make him do what we want, or keep him from doing what we do not want, and we cannot ensure that he will only ask us to do what we want to do and feel comfortable doing. As Mr. Beaver says of Aslan, God is good, but he isn’t safe—and there is nothing less safe than surrendering control to him that he may call us and lead us where and as he will. (Not that our control is ever anything more than an illusion anyway, but it’s an illusion to which we cling desperately for all that.) We fear what he may do to us, and where he may take us; we fear the loss of all we’ve ever known and wanted—and quite reasonably so, for God may indeed require all that of us and more, even to the point of asking us to lay down our lives in his service. Of course, he promises to give us a far better life in exchange, but that’s an unknown quantity, and we fear the unknown.

As we are, we could not bear the full presence of God; we could not even survive a glimpse of his face. In Jesus Christ, he has made a way for us to enter his presence, he has opened a way for us through the veil—but he is still the Lord of the Universe and the Creator of all that is, his glory is still a light to blast our eyes out the backs of our skulls and his holiness is still a fire that would burn us beyond even the memory of ash; if he has made it safe for us to come to him, it’s not because he himself is safe or because we are somehow worthy to stand in his presence, but rather because he paid the price in himself for us to do so.

Even with all that Christ has done for us, it remains true that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom—because the beginning of wisdom is not to take God lightly, or to take his grace for granted.

Listen to the dream

My children are in school today; our school district is using holidays as snow days, which doesn’t exactly seem kosher to me. So, as a tribute but also as a bit of a protest, I thought I’d post Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech this morning; this is the whole thing, not just the famous peroration, and if you’ve never heard it, it’s more than worth the time to listen. For that matter, even if you have heard it, it’s still more than worth the time.

Not a holiday for introverts

Halloween isn’t, that is. For all that, I’m pretty sure I enjoyed it as a kid, if only for the candy; but when the candy lost its charm (I have a sweet tooth, but for pastries), so did the holiday, for it’s a rather exhausting process. In recent years, I’ve discovered that it’s all the more so for parents. This year was easier; living someplace where we actually get trick-or-treaters, and with our daughters going around together with their friend from the neighborhood and her mother as well as their own, I got to sit on the front porch, read Dorothy Sayers, and hand out candy.Now, to a lot of folks, the idea that that might be preferable to going around extorting candy from neighbors probably sounds strange; those folks are, with (possibly) a few exceptions, extroverts. To extroverts, who are the loud majority of the human race, they are normal, and those of us who are introverts are “moody loners” who should be treated with some care because “some of them are serial killers.” My thanks for that phrasing goes to New Reflections Counseling, Inc., of western Ohio, for their “Introvert’s Lexicon,” which they describe as “a humorous look at the world from an Introvert’s point of view”; if you’re an extrovert and there’s an introvert in your life, I suggest you read it (and the material which follows it on that page), as it could be helpful to you. (If you want further information, you might also check out Jonathan Rauch’s 2003 piece in The Atlantic titled “Caring for Your Introvert,” as well as the sidebar materials.)HT: cranekid

The Ayers/Obama campaign to radicalize education

Maybe this is why the Obama campaign tried to stop Stanley Kurtz from delving into the records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge—they didn’t want him telling people what the CAC was all about:

The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland’s ghetto.In works like “City Kids, City Teachers” and “Teaching the Personal and the Political,” Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? “I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, “Sixties Radicals,” at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.CAC translated Mr. Ayers’s radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with “external partners,” which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn). . . .The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC’s first year. He also served on the board’s governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative. . . .Mr. Ayers’s defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.Mr. Ayers is the founder of the “small schools” movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to “confront issues of inequity, war, and violence.” He believes teacher education programs should serve as “sites of resistance” to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his “Teaching Toward Freedom,” is to “teach against oppression,” against America’s history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming “guilt by association.” Yet the issue here isn’t guilt by association; it’s guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.

The fact that Ayers did plant bombs, and remains unrepentant about doing so, only makes it more of a story; this is why, before a national audience, Sen. Obama and his media subsidiary have done their best to keep it out of sight. It’s worth noting, however, that when he was just running in Chicago, Barack Obama offered his work running CAC as a major qualification for office:

Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, and Chicago schools

Via Hugh Hewitt, I’ve found an interesting piece on Barack Obama’s relationship with the Ayers family and his involvement in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The author, Steve Diamond, is a California law professor and no conservative—more like a Naderite liberal, by the sound of it—but he expresses considerable concern over authoritarianism in the global labor movement and its links to authoritarian movements and tendencies in the political arena. Per the author’s expressed wishes, I won’t excerpt the piece here—I’ll simply recommend you read it, and consider the ramifications of the answer he offers to the question “Who ‘sent’ Obama?” It offers an interesting angle on the Obama campaign’s efforts to suppress any inquiries into the details of the Annenberg Challenge.

Who’s lying here?

I never cared for the McCain campaign’s “Education” ad; throwing in the Illinois sex-ed bill and calling it his “one accomplishment” was a cheap shot, in my book. (It was also bad politics, since it took all the attention from the actual point of the ad.)

That said, I also don’t care for the Obama campaign and the MSM getting away with labeling Sen. McCain a liar when the ad’s description of the bill is, in fact, accurate—as Brit Hume points out, quoting from the bill itself:

HT: Jennifer RubinAs Byron York points out,

Obama’s explanation for his vote [that he voted for it because of his concern over inappropriate touching] has been accepted by nearly all commentators. And perhaps that is indeed why he voted for Senate Bill 99, although we don’t know for sure. But we do know that the bill itself was much more than that. The fact is, the bill’s intention was to mandate sex education, especially concerning contraception and the prevention of sexually-transmitted diseases, for children before the sixth grade and as early as kindergarten. Obama’s defenders may howl, but the bill is what it is.

Update: Here’s what Sen. Obama told Planned Parenthood last year about this:

sex education for kindergarteners, as long as it is “age-appropriate,” is “the right thing to do.”

Teach your children well

The title, of course, comes from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but the theme is as old as history, going back at least to Deuteronomy 6. Unfortunately, too often the church does a poor job of this. It’s not that the curricula we use aren’t effective—most of those that I know are; nor is it that they don’t teach children good things, for those which I’ve used certainly do. Nor am I saying that churches use them poorly, for though I’m sure a notable percentage of churches do, I have no reason to think that that’s broadly true. I can, however, second the point that John Walton recently made on the Zondervan Academic blog: most of our curricula in the American church do a brutally lousy job with Scripture. Dr. Walton does a good job of laying out the ways in which common American curricula misuse, misinterpret and misapply the Word of God, and especially of hammering home the reason why we should care:

If we are negligent of sound hermeneutics when we teach Bible to children, should it be any wonder that when they get into youth groups, Bible studies and become adults in the church, that they do not know how to derive the authoritative teaching from the text?

We all have a working hermeneutic, even though most have never taken a course. Where do we learn it? We learn it from those we respect. For many people this means that they learn their hermeneutics from their Sunday school teachers. Teachers in turn teach what is put into their hands. Perhaps we ought to be more attentive how Sunday school curriculum is teaching our children to find the authoritative teaching of God in the stories.

 

Photo of The Magic Hour by Dirk Joseph © 2019 Elvert Barnes.  License:  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.

Children as buying machines

That’s one of Heather McDougal’s complaints about TV on Cabinet of Wonders, in her post to which I linked last week:

2. People are trying to sell me stuff the whole time and are counting on me not noticing that they are trying to sell me stuff.2a. When people are trying to sell me stuff, they are willing to do anything they can to get me to buy it, including working really hard at making me hate myself so their product can be the solution.2b. The people who want to sell me stuff are also thinking of my children as a commodity to be bought and sold, and have absolutely no compunction about trying to turn three-year-olds into buying machines (or using the whine factor to try to get little ones to turn me into their own personal buying machine). Also, they want to make my daughters feel bad about themselves so they will buy things. Yuck.

This isn’t a secret, of course; anyone who pays attention (and especially anyone with children) can see it. Still, it’s no end galling how shameless media companies are about it; and perhaps the most galling thing is that the worst of all of them that way is Disney. Condé Nast Portfolio (an excellent magazine, btw, and a great read even if you don’t read business magazines) has an article up titled “How Mickey Got His Groove Back” which makes this appallingly clear. If you’ve never run across any of the Mouse’s cynical exercises in making money off so-called “tweens” (do we have to keep slicing childhood up into ever-smaller marketing segments?), Karl Taro Greenfeld’s opening paragraph should give you the idea:

Perhaps it was my daughters singing along with Hannah Montana—“Get up, get loud, we’re pumping up the party now!”—eight times in a row that morning. Or maybe it was the 16 times I overheard High School Musical and High School Musical 2 playing on the television in the living room, or the several hundred dollars my wife and I spend on Disney tween products—aimed at nine- to 14-year-old girls—every year. Or the fact that a magazine (thankfully, not this one) asked me to profile a Disney tween star and then, almost before I could ask “Who?,” told me that another publication had beaten them to it. Finally, after my eight-year-old daughter pointed to a picture of Hillary Clinton and said she was supporting her for president “because she’s named Hillary, like Hilary Duff,” I decided I had to know: Who is doing this to me?

I wonder what Walt would think.