The Online Newspaper of Education Rights
This Edition: September 2022
Blockchain in Education:
Building for Lifelong Tracking & Control
Blockchain in education is positioned as a decentralized digital database (or ledger) for the purpose of holding student transcripts, but which also includes personal information such as vaccine history and mental health data. As researcher, podcaster, and former IT professional Lynn Davenport explained in a July video interview with Catching Fire News, blockchain can be described as "blocks of data shared across a chain of computer systems or blocks stored in a virtual chain. It's being sold as something great because it's decentralized; it cuts out the centralized authority, or government, and it's referred to as 'decentralized ledger technology, or DLT.'"
Davenport calls the city of Dallas, where she resides, "a hotbed of blockchain enthusiasts." During her interview with Catching Fire News, she detailed a pilot program involving the Dallas Independent School District (ISD) which shows that just the opposite of decentralization is actually taking place.
MoreComing to a School Near You:
Environmental Social Governance
Although in development for decades, Environmental Social Governance, or ESG, has bloomed in business and higher education circles over the past two years. Like many draconian measures forced on American citizens and institutions since the start of 2020, purveyors of ESG are using the pandemic as an excuse to further their agenda. While the business sector and academia are already involved, K-12 education appears to be next on the list to be conquered.
As with all facets of socialist control efforts, ESG concepts are purposefully nebulous and vague. It is an international movement that appears to have begun in Europe and is spreading over the globe, having made inroads not only in Europe, but in parts of Africa and the Middle East, as well as in some U.S. corporations and universities. ESG invokes the familiar climate change fearmongering: global warming, rising sea levels, air pollution, sea pollution, child labor exploitation, and call for "a greener future." Diversity and inclusion are also part of the picture.
MoreGoing Global with Censorship:
WEF and UN to Police Online 'Misinformation'
The World Economic Forum (WEF) continues its international mischief by setting its sights on electronic censorship, using what it claims is artificial intelligence (AI) to bolster the more fallible human intelligence. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Children's Health Defense noted in its online news vehicle the Defender, one critic of the WEF's plan, blogger Igor Chudov, suggested it "would globalize the search for wrongthink."
As pro-family and other right-thinking observers might imagine, "wrongthink" refers to First Amendment rights, beginning with free speech. Most likely due to the fact that more and more people across the globe are becoming wise to the rhetoric of the progressive left and what it really means for the traditional Western standards of freedom and justice, the WEF distances itself from the article before the first sentence.
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Book Review
The Naked Communist
By W. Cleon Skousen, 1958 (Most recently reprinted by Izzard Ink Publishing, 2017.)
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Briefs
- In an all-too-common occurrence, the Springfield, Missouri public school district conducted a teacher training session in August that forced teachers to identify their racial and sexual "privilege." As writer/editor and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute Christopher Rufo revealed on Twitter, the training promoted "identities such as 'pansexual' and 'polyamorous,' and warned that 'misgendering a trans person is an act of violence.'"
- The Family Institute of Connecticut wants parents to "stop feeding the insanity at local schools" by first opting children out of school surveys. As Phyllis Schlafly often wrote, these surveys, or what she called "nosey questionnaires," collect personal data on children that can be stored and shared.The Family Institute notes that the surveys "feed data about your child and family to school administrators, the State Board of Education, and external data collection agencies".
- A teacher's union and parents are battling in Woodland Park, Colorado for control of the city's public schools. The union wants to force-feed liberal propaganda to students while parents want to return to reading, writing, math, and science. The Epoch Times reported that last November, after a slate of conservative school board members won four seats on the local school board and immediately began delivering on their campaign promises, the Woodland Park Education Association, an NEA affiliate, instigated a recall effort "with help from its state and national allies." More
Be Our Guest:
Contributing Author Essays
Countering disinformation about
Critical Race Theory
Critical Race Theory (CRT) has over the last two years been a topic of enormous controversy. But what is it, exactly? Chapter 4 of my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory is devoted to answering that question at length. I go on in chapters 5, 6, and 7 to spell out the many philosophical, social scientific, and theological problems with the view. (As this breadth of issues indicates, there is much in the book that will be of interest and value to non-Catholics.) But chapter 4 is entirely expository, and quotes extensively from CRT writers themselves, so that there can be no mistake about how extreme and dangerous are the views that the subsequent chapters go on to criticize.
Some advocates of CRT have responded to the exposure of its extremism with what can fairly be described as a program of disinformation. We are told that CRT is merely an abstruse legal theory of little interest to anyone outside the university, and certainly irrelevant to anything being taught to children; or that insofar as it does have influence outside the academy, it is concerned with nothing more than teaching about the history of racism; or that in any event it has nothing to do with the ideas peddled in bestsellers like Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist or Robin DiAngelos's White Fragility. These claims are so easily refuted that it is hard not to see in them a cynical tactic of deliberate obfuscation.
by Dr. Edward Feser
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