The International Baccalaureate--Infiltrating?

I certainly had no intention of rushing to the defense of the International Baccalaureate (IB) program when I read this article on the website of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-Fam), but it was a poor editorial choice for a worthy organization and the IB, though flawed and left-wing, deserves a better shot.

C-Fam is active at the United Nations with its mission of promoting a "proper understanding of international law, protecting national sovereignty and the dignity of the human person." I am familiar with their work just as I am familiar with the IB curriculum. Consequently when C-Fam linked the IB and the UN to the "biggest educational scam perpetrated on American schools today" I couldn't help but take notice.

The problem as C-Fam reports it seems to be that the IB is trying to work its way into American public schools in order to disseminate its UN, internationalist, socialist, left-wing ideas while masquerading as legit education. Leading the charge is a Long Island parent, Lisa McLoughlin, who has her own website, Truth About International Baccalaureate.

One has to wonder just how much the IB's admittedly secular, multi-cultural curriculum differs from what passes for education in many of today's American public schools. (I'm thinking of the young man in California who was told to remove the American flag from his bicycle. I doubt if either the UN or the IB was behind that.) Even if it were the case that the IB and the UN are in collusion to wreak (further) havoc on American public education, both C-Fam and Ms. McLoughlin have been sidetracked from the underlying problem by attacking the IB rather than the American public education bureaucracy.

Among the innumberable ills of our public education system is that it is essentially a government monopoly that dictates to America's parents what their children will be taught and penalizes those of us who choose to opt out of the system by denying us the opportunity to use our tax dollars toward the education of our choice. For those public schools out there that are choosing to adopt the IB curriculum, the decision lies at the feet of America's educators, themselves in many cases so steeped in the culture of relativism, secularism, and multi-culturalism that they no longer know enough or care enough to provide curriculums that teach American history, American exceptionalism, Judeo-Christian ideals and the nuts and bolts of the three Rs. Even if the IB and the UN were beating down the door, these educators have the choice to just say no.

Given that there are so many truly nefarious things that the United Nations promotes and that C-Fam reports on so well, this detour to the IB curriculum is a distraction. Parents like Lisa McLoughlin would do more good by devoting their efforts to exposing the public schools for the failures that they are and crusading for school vouchers, tax incentives for home schoolers and an end to teachers' unions.

(By the way, the IB curriculum is a bona fide school curriculum whose students fare quite well academically. When my own kids took math, chemistry and physics in college, their freshman year college material was largely review. The preparation they had from their IB math and science courses was not the exception. Their IB history and English courses emphasized reading, writing and research. By 10th grade most IB students are accustomed to writing 1200-word essays on a regular basis. In foreign language exams from French to Chinese, IB students are able to score competitively on internationally normed tests. Subjects like anthropology, philosophy, economics and psychology are all taught at a challenging level.)

Catholicity in Higher Education

Oy vey ist mir. It's another Catholic-bashing article from Inside Higher Ed!

The article begins with a false premise that sets up an opposition between Catholic teaching and academic freedom by asking "whether allegiance to church orthodoxy trumps the free spirit of inquiry celebrated in academe."

One has to wonder first of all at the bold claim that there exists a "free spirit of inquiry" on today's campuses. But, more to the point, Catholic orthodoxy by its nature never "trumps free inquiry." It promotes it.

Here are three things Pope Benedict XVI said in his 2008 address to Catholic educators at Catholic University of America:

"I wish to reaffirm the great value of academic freedom. In virtue of this freedom you are called to search for the truth wherever careful analysis of evidence leads you."

"God's desire to make himself known, and the innate desire of all human beings to know the truth, provide the context for human inquiry into the meaning of life."

And the Pope also said:

"[Catholic educators]have the duty and privilege to ensure that students receive instruction in Catholic doctrine and practice. This requires that public witness to the way of Christ, as found in the Gospel and upheld by the Church's Magisterium, shapes all aspects of an institution's life, both inside and outside the classroom."

What this article should have been about is first, the fact that many Catholic colleges and universities are not ensuring that their students receive Catholic-inspired instruction, and, lamentably, many so-called Catholic colleges actually prevent Catholic teaching from shaping their institutions.

Secondly, there is in fact a conflict over academic freedom that warrants discussion though it isn't the conflict that the author sets up. The conflict is between on the one hand, the secular, relativism of academia which denies that truth exists,and, on the other hand, the Catholic Church's teaching which avers that truth does exist, that we are each called to search for it using our intellect as inspired by our faith in God and guided by Catholic teaching. The secularism and relativism of today's culture is the road block, placed intentionally, that "trumps the free spirit of inquiry" and denies us the freedom to search for the truth.

Two Reasons To Elect A Republican Next Time

One can only ask what in the WORLD Secretary of State Clinton had in mind when she donned this outfit during her visit to Australia. Maybe the former First Lady was feeling like a pumpkin and wanted to dress like one? For insightful commentary on Hillary's look, go here.

Meanwhile, in Indonesia, the president makes a point as our current First Lady of fashion strikes a masculine pose and furrows her brow, probably in an effort to keep her headscarf aloft and out of her eyes so that she won't trip over her "soopah-size" green pants suit as it puddles around her ankles. Then again, it looks like maybe the problem is that this threesome is standing around shoeless! For more on Michelle's fashion savvy, go here.

Speaking of, Where Are The Men. . . . . . .

We can read more about men and manliness in two new books, Manthropology and Is There Anything Good About Men? humorously reviewed in this Wall Street Journal article.

Here we can see two men, the Bushes, pere et fils, at the World Series Game in Texas.

HollaBack!

HollaBack! Another mailing from my alma mater Barnard College and its Barnard Center for Research on Women. I flipped the post card over to see phrases like "combat street harrassment" and "ending sexual harrassment." I flipped back to the front of the card to see an angry (or was she hurt) looking young gal holding up her hand as if to say stop . . . or hollaback?

When I actually read the text, the fog lifted at once. No, it's not an obscure word from some Spanish dialect. HollaBack! is about "feminist responses to street harassment." It's about creating safe transit and safe communities by ending sexual assault. It's about getting tough and street-wise. It's about women fighting! We're fighting back. We're HOLLERING back. I finally got it. Forty plus years into the feminist movement and according to the Barnard Center for Research on Women, we lady-folk are still victims. Society still doesn't treat us properly. The feminist movement may be gulping for air, but it hasn't breathed its last. And to prove it, we're going to finally make streets safe for women by using "technology, mapping and community organizing." Heaven help us.

Back in 1971, when the Center was founded, who would have thought that years down the road Barnard would be sending its alums mailings about hollering back, polyphonic feminism, erotohistoriography, economic and sexual justice and other such topics covered by 'sexuality scholars' and those whose area of expertise is 'gender/sexuality/queer studies.'

I'm often told that the current crop of Barnard undergrads is interested mostly in being good students and getting a sound education. Perhaps at this point the Women's Center is an afterthought, a 70s hold-over, a campus anomaly. I certainly hope so, and, in fairness, it should be added that not every mailing from Barnard is about reproductive justice (their term) and feminist art. The campus is also host to Bach concerts and back in February there was a lecture about raising happy and moral children.

Tax Eaters vs. Tax Payers

There is a new book by Steven Malanga called Shakedown: The Continuing Conspiracy Against the American Taxpayer. Read about it here and watch below.

The End of Men?

A few months ago, OrignalMetalChik asked where are the men, the real men, that is. Only slightly more dramatic, Brian Caulfield, in the Winter 2010 issue of The Human Life Review, asks if it's the end of men. Thank goodness, he does predict their return.

Caulfield gives some of the factors contributing to the demise of fatherhood and manhood in our society (the Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade which left men with "no enforceable rights in the continued life of the child in the womb that they helped to create " and in vitro fertilization and donor conceived babies, methods that allow women to "start their pregnancy in a Petri dish" without ever having to deal with a living, breathing man and creating children whose biological father is a mere cipher.)

Caulfield cites the damage the de-masculinization of society has already done. Children in homes without fathers are five times more likely to be poor and 54% more likely to be poorer than their fathers. Child abuse is more prevalent in single parent homes than those where a child is raised by both biological parents.
Infant-mortality rates are almost twice as high for infants of unmarried mothers, and being raised without a father increases the likelihood of teen pregnancy and dropping out of school.

The mainstream media has, naturally, willingly reinforced the image of men as weak and silly creatures further fueling the damage done by a culture that has been swept along by the damnable women's movement of the 70s and the sexual revolution of the 60s.

However, Caulfied gives some indicators of how manliness is hopefully on the upswing again, citing in particular Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body, the Pope's teaching and reflection on human sexuality. As Caulfied puts it, the Pope "draws energy from the very sexual revolution that it seeks to correct. Like a transformer station that takes raw energy and converts it into streams of electricity that are useful to a household, the pope takes the sexual energy unleashed in the 1960s, draws out the positive trends, and adds the tempering perspective . . . of the Christian tradition."

If you can't find this article on line, which I couldn't, you can certainly read more along these lines at Caulfield's website Fathers for Good of which he is the editor. Current wisdom has tried, lamentably with considerable success, to hammer into us that there is no difference between male and female despite appearances, experience and overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Thus, it's uplifting to be reminded that current wisdom is wrong, that "gender" is not a state of mind or an accident of environment, that the complementarity of the sexes is directed by God. As Caulfield writes,

"Men and women togther, equal in dignity and value, yet different in nature and capacities: This is the great model that John Paul sketched in his theology that placed the ensouled human body at the nexus of all history. "