Do You Know What Your Children in US Public Schools Are Being Taught?

At first glance the connection between 1) the above NEVER AGAIN IS NOW podcast with Holocaust commemorative advocate Terry Swartzberg in Germany and 2) education and democracy in the US might not be clear.

Read on, though, to learn the important connection:

Swartzberg’s efforts in Germany and elsewhere are focused on ordinary people understanding that the Nazis murdered real people – six million Jews and millions of other “undesirables” – only because the Nazis decided these individual human lives could be snuffed out with impunity.

I mentioned to Swartzberg that I am reading the 1933 book GERMANY PUTS THE CLOCK BACK by Edgar Mowrer and that chapter 14 – “Students of the Third Empire” – was chilling in its relevance to today here in the US.

(What happened to American foreign correspondent Mowrer in Germany in 1933 is so interesting that I will include the relevant part from his Wikipedia bio at the end of this post.)

For now let’s talk about Mowrer’s chapter 14:

… Encouraged by the more nationally fanatic among their professors and by the evangelical meekness of the Republican authorities, the German students began to distinguish themselves by their manly resistance to those of their professors who fell under their displeasure. In one case, the young men at the engineering Academy of Wismar demanded the dismissal of an instructor because they suspected that the name of Weingarten could only be carried by a Jew. But this was a minor matter. Historical were four other instances, the “cases” of Gumbel, Lessing, Nawiasky and Dehn.

I will spare you the details of these cases except to say that I felt I could have been reading incidents from today here in the US. What is perhaps most relevant for this post is that Mowrer describes what was secretly being taught in German schools.

Critical race theory secretly being taught in US schools:

The Sept. 2, 2022, Wall Street Journal article by Nicole Ault and Megan Keller – “How Teachers Are Secretly Taught Critical Race Theory: A Pennsylvania’s father’s determined effort to find out what’s being taught to his children’s instructors” begins with this paragraph:

Randi Weingarten left no room for doubt. “Critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools or high schools,” the American Federation of Teachers president said in a speech last year. Even if that’s true, a Pennsylvania father’s battle with a school district demonstrates that public-school teachers are being trained in the deeply divisive racial ideology—and defensive administrators are playing semantic games to allay parental concerns.

The article talks about Benjamin Auslander, the parent of a high schooler in the Tredyffrin-Easttown School District near Philadelphia who eventually resorted to suing the district to try to overcome the obstacles placed in the way to his viewing the materials used to train the teachers.

The article’s reporters conclude: “Our examination of those materials indicates that Tredyffrin-Easttown staff are being trained in critical race theory.”

“Liberated” ethnic studies curriculum in California:

Perhaps I could have convinced myself that the article was exaggerating the threat to democracy if my NEVER AGAIN IS NOW podcast co-host Evelyn Markus and I had not recently interviewed Lori Lowenthal Marcus, a lawyer in private practice in Philadelphia who is also the legal director of the Deborah Project. In the podcast interview Marcus (no relation to Evelyn Markus) describes her lawsuit against “liberated” ethnic studies curriculum being secretly taught in California.

I highly recommend listening to this podcast to learn about the antisemitism deeply embedded in “liberated” ethnic studies curriculum.

BOTTOM LINE OF THIS POST:

If you have children in public schools in the US, ask to see what they are being taught. And if you don’t make any headway, do as Pennsylvania father Benjamin Auslander did, keep demanding even if it means suing to get access to the supposedly public instructional material.

And then when you find out the truth – if it is against the stated policies of the school district, SPEAK UP!

And now for those of you who want to know more about American foreign correspondent Edgar Mowrer as presented in Wikipedia:

In 1933, Mowrer won the Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence for his reporting on the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany …In his dispatches from Germany he had managed to cut below the patina of normalcy to capture events that challenged the belief that Germany’s transformation was democratic and natural; he was therefore a target of Nazi ire. In addition to reporting for the Chicago Daily News, Mowrer wrote a best-selling book, Germany Puts the Clock Back, published in 1933, which had angered Nazi officials to the point where Mowrer’s friends believed he faced mortal danger.

The German government openly pressured him to leave the country, with Germany’s ambassador to the United States notifying the State Department that because of the “people’s righteous indignation” the government could no longer hope to keep Mowrer free from harm.

When the Chicago Daily News learned about the threats, Frank Knox, the owner of the newspaper, offered Mowrer a position in the paper’s bureau in Tokyo. Mowrer, who did not want to leave Germany, agreed to leave [after] covering the annual Nazi Party spectacle in Nuremberg set to begin 1 September 1933.

After American diplomatic missions to Germany refused to guarantee his and his family’s safety … Mowrer agreed to depart immediately, in return for the release of Paul Goldmann, an elderly Jewish correspondent for the Austrian newspaper Neue Freie Presse, who was being held by the Gestapo for high treason.

A Nazi official, assigned to make sure Mowrer actually left Berlin, approached him as he was boarding the train and asked when he was coming back to Germany; Mowrer answered: “Why, when I can come back with about two million of my countrymen.