Digital Journal -by Justin King
A student in Bryant School District in Arkansas brought home a worksheet that presented her with a scenario that referred to the Bill of Rights as “outdated” and that as part of a special committee she would need to throw out two of the Amendments.
The worksheet was handed out to Sixth grade students in a History class. According to the girl’s mother, Lela Spears, she has not received any government or civics classes and this was the first assignment dealing with the Constitution or Bill of Rights. The school district is participating in the embattled Common Core curriculum.
When asked if there was any portion of the Bill of Rights she would be willing to give up, the mother said
No, never.
The Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States. The amendments recognize a person’s inalienable rights to things such as free speech, due process, trial by jury, and the right to bear arms, as well as many other staples of traditional American values. They also establish limits on Federal power.
Question and Answer with Lela Spears:
How does the assignment make you feel about the type of education your child is receiving?
After she brought it home and explained her assignment to me, it made me question exactly what she was being taught. Where I can see a class using critical thinking skills to modernize the words, as to help them better understand the Amendments, giving an assignment to remove two then add two with little explanation as to why is upsetting. When I asked my child what the assignment was to teach her she had no idea. Only that she was TOLD to do it. She didn’t even understand what the Amendments meant. How can she make an informed decision when she doesn’t understand what she is “throwing out”? That was new to me. I also did not like the fact her teacher used, “you have been selected to help a special committee” bullshit.
Do you feel the Bill of Rights is “outdated?”
I wouldn’t say outdated in the sense that we need to throw out the Amendments and start fresh. I do think some of the wording could be modernized along with clarifying parts where there has been/can be misinterpretation.
Do you think that after this assignment your child might have believed that the government has the ability to change the Bill of Rights by some special committee, rather than by a 2/3 majority vote in the House and Senate?
Funny thing, she was never told how the Bill of Rights is amended; I do not believe that amended was even used in the class language, only “changed”. I read through the handouts she was given (they do not use a book for this class, nor take one home to study from, only handouts that are put in a box for their table to share and place in their binders), around 6 in total, and nothing about how an Amendment is ratified. I believe that, with the wording of the assignment, many children will think that the Bill of Rights is amended and can be changed by a “special” committee instead of an act of Congress. I know that my child will not think this is true since I have made it my mission to be very much involved in her education.
As more anecdotal evidence emerges concerning what will be taught under the Common Core, states are beginning to rethink their position on the program.
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/359714#ixzz2h8d7COob
Teachers are the frontline in the assault on our nation. It is called indoctrination and the outcome will be a collectivist quasi communist country ruled by oligarchs. Take back the educational system or abolish it all together. we can teach our own children. And yes I said our children the gov thinks they own them now. In fact they own nothing, not one spec of sand.
This is beyond treason and I’m with Henry. Get your kids out of school and teach them yourself. They are destroying our future children and making them the next version of Idiocracy and creating their Communist government in the next generation while killing off the veterans and older generation with their police state tactics and Obamacare.
Actually you should be nice & take no shit! Use your baseball bat for your robust conversation with the issuer/enforcer of this work sheet!
You have no choice! Or be ready for the reeducation camp for you & your family being kept safe by the DHS/SS/GESTAPO!
Is it just me, or did anybody else notice that the interviewer does not understand the constitution either? 2/3 of the house and senate cna only propose a change to the constitution. The proposed change must then be adopted verbatim by 3/4 of the states.
Kathy, you don’t quite understand either.
The Constitution can be amended but the Bill of Rights cannot. The Bill of Rights was the FIRST TEN ARTICLES for our original Constitution. It is absolute. It is unalienable. It cannot be altered by anyone and the government has absolutely no authority to define or regulate the people’s Bill of Rights. It is separate and apart from the government. It is indeed the people’s authority for the Constitution contract for services and upon the first infringement, that contract was breached and the government became illegitimate. We are living in a failed state, absolutely without law as the structure has fallen with the foundation removed.
The DOE’s purpose for federalizing education under the Common Core is not to prepare future leaders, critical thinkers, and innovators, but to build a docile, dumbed-down, easily controlled herd of intellectual zombies. Judging by declining proficiency of American public school kids versus their home or private-schooled peers, the program has been a huge success.
Their main tactic is the redefinition of common truths into half-truths and lies. For example: “our country was established with a democratic form of government”. We’re even supposedly bombing other countries to spread this very idea. But it’s wrong. The Founders eschewed democracies as brutal “mob rule”, where 51% of the population mandated how the other 49% live. They knew such democracies invariably descended into tyranny and despotism. Which is why they chose a constitutional republic, inspired by Greek and Roman republics, the Magna Carta, and contemporary with their time, the Iroquois Confederacy.
All of these vested the majority of rights, freedoms, and responsibilities in the individual, with decreasing amounts allocated to state and federal government, respectively. Under such, the true purpose of government is mainly to safeguard individual rights, not “award” them like Scooby snacks. This is why we pledge allegiance to a republic, and why our military, civil servants, and politicians all swear an oath to “protect and defend” the document which spells everything out in plain language- the US Constitution. Unfortunately, what was common sense then requires armies of lawyers and judges to “decipher” today, as if reading tea leaves. Coincidentally, every new ‘interpretation’ hands more power to the federal government, such that today virtually all authority, “in matters great and small” flows from Washington. But at least your state can still choose which picture to put on it’s license plate, right?
So definitions are pretty dang important. They put flesh on the bones of our ideas, and adorn our dreams with tangible substance. Consider that the next time someone says it “doesn’t matter” what they call our form of government.
You are goddamn right.
I quite agree that those rights are morally unassailable, but where does the constitution prohibit repealing them? Amendments have been repealed before: prohibition for example.
What aren’t you getting about this, Kathy?
Our rights existed long before the Constitution. Americans were killing redcoats for over a year before the Declaration of Independence and the establishment of any f#@king government. They belong to us as individuals. They are God given and the government was established only to affirm our rights and has absolutely zero, zip, zilch authority of any kind to alter, define, or regulate them.
As unalienable, we cannot even give them away if we want to. That is what the f#@king word means and that is why our founders used it.
No collection of us, hence collective, can get together and take the rights of any individual. One man, standing by a thousand, has equal rights to any one of them or all of them combined.
They are not amendments. They are articles and to refer to them otherwise is to perpetuate a fraud that has been going on in this country since a pack of traitors in Washington DC attempted to rewrite our Constitution after the Civil War and institute absolute slavery over we the people.
We stand apart from this fraudulent government and in full possession of our rights under our Bill of Rights, said rights which were percured at the barrel of a gun and which will be reinstated free of infringement and maintained in the same manner.
I simply made an observation about what the constitution actually says, since the interviewer appeared to suggest that it saiid something else. What you’re talking about is something else entirely, and I’m not arguing the point. The constitution does, lamentably, contain a loophole that would allow for the legal repeal of the bill of rights. That does not mean that they would cease to be rights. It simply means we’d have to fight the revolution all over again. Law is a tool, not a moral authority. Like any tool; it can be used to build, or to destroy. Lately it has been used more for the latter purpose.
You still aren’t f#@king getting it. You are arguing the contents of a fraudulent document with a fraudulent loophole.
Our contract has been breached and we are at war, period.
I would have to agree that the constitution is somewhat fraudulent–a constitutional convention never having been authorized in the first place. That being the case, the loophole would also have to be called fraudulent. I just don’t understand how that alters what it says. Nor do I see that righteous indignation and profanity will change it. Are we at war t preserve those rights? Yes. Has it become a violent revolution yet? Not really. Will it? Quite possibly. The government is certainly issuing an open invitation to it; may even be trying to instigate it so martial law can be declared. I don’t know. In the meantime, have a nice day.
The Constitution died when the patriot act was signed into law in 2001