The time-honored ranking of high school students, with the valedictorian award granted to the top ranking student by Grade Point Average (GPA), is entering the dustbin of academic history. According to the National Association of Secondary School Principals, about half of the nation’s high schools have already done away with class rankings. The association’s spokesman Bob Farrace explained, as reported by the Associated Press, that there are "concerns about intense, potentially unhealthy competition . . . "
There are many more serious issues in America today than whether high school grade rankings continue. Particularly following Wednesday’s tragic attempted assassination of members of a Republican congressional baseball team by a deranged left-wing Trump hater. Whether Johnny or Jane will continue to have a chance of becoming the valedictorian of their senior high school class seems laughably trivial on its face.
Yet it merited a story by the Associated Press the day after the shooting, which has been picked up by various news outlets.
The story says something about the debasement in our schools of a core principle of American capitalistic society — that successful achievement in a competition on the merits is a virtue to be rewarded, not ignored or downplayed.
The elimination of class rankings is one example of egalitarianism run rampant. Another is the granting of so-called "participation trophies" to avoid hurt feelings among the members of the losing sports team.
Sooner or later, the students of today will have to learn that in the real world there are winners and losers. Of course, that assumes the continuation of a capitalist-based system in our country, which the left is trying its hardest to water down or eliminate.
To this end, the high school curricula increasingly in use today contributes to their students’ ignorance of basic American history and civics. Instead, students are often exposed in these areas of study to principally the leftist perspective.
In one high school in Illinois, for example, what was billed last February as an All-School Seminar Day consisted of such programs as 21st Century Voter Suppression, Trans-People of Color Navigating the U.S., and Appropriate Alliances: Working in White Spaces workshops.
At a high school in Oregon last year, students were sent home with an assignment to rank themselves on a "White Privilege Survey." After all, why rank students on the basis of their GPA when top rankings are evidently believed to be tainted by white privilege?
When high school students imbued with the spirit of extreme egalitarianism and armed against the evils of so-called white privilege enter college, they will gravitate towards the leftist professors so prevalent on campuses today. They will also retreat into safe places created on campus to avoid engaging in a rigorous debate of ideas with those whom hold different opinions than theirs. Some will go further in trying to suppress the speech of others with whom they do not agree. We have already witnessed this all too often on college campuses, encouraged by the left.
Bad education is contributing to the dumbing down of America. This phenomenon is evidenced by a recent survey conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which found that only "a quarter of Americans can name all three branches of government, the poorest showing on that question in a half-dozen years." Nearly a third of those surveyed could not even name one branch.
Hate merchants thrive on such people, whose intense emotions replace logic and fact-based analysis and can be easily manipulated. The left has been particularly adept at peddling false histories in our schools that paint the U.S. and its capitalist system as institutionally racist and oppressive, our Founding Fathers as privileged whites who wrote a racist constitution, and our political system as hopelessly corrupt. The left has used indoctrination in our schools to nurture an entitlement society built on the ideology of extreme egalitarianism, and to create a victimhood mentality fed by propaganda, blaming our elected officials for all actual and imagined grievances.
Even a play by William Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar," which used to be required high school reading in the form written by Shakespeare, has been transformed by the left into a modern day anti-Trump vehicle. The Trump-like Caesar’s brutal slaying by representatives of various minorities gets a standing ovation in New York’s Central Park. The play’s director admitted that his version of Julius Caesar represented "a progressive nightmare vision" of "our current state."
The undermining of our education system by the left goes against what Thomas Jefferson warned was necessary for "the preservation of our republican government." Perhaps "Julius Caesar" as Shakespeare originally wrote it is a good metaphor for what can happen when violent forces are unleashed.
Wednesday’s horrific shootings by a deranged left-wing Trump hater, and the left-wing tweets celebrating the shootings that followed, make it all too real.
Joseph A. Klein is a featured author for FrontPage Magazine and the United Nations correspondent for Canada Free Press. He has also authored the books "Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom" and "Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations & Radical Islam." Klein, a Harvard Law school alumnus and practicing attorney, has been a guest on many radio shows as a commentator and has appeared on several TV shows including "Fox & Friends." For more of this reports — Click Here Now.
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