VOUCHERS NOW, PART 472 :

Lesson Plans for Sept. 11 Offer a Study in Discord (KATE ZERNIKE, August 31, 2002, NY Times)

"For some kids, school may be the only place they have where they can find a listening ear," said Jerald Newberry, director of the Health Information Network for the [National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union], which produced the lesson plans.

The criticism to the lessons on tolerance, Mr. Newberry said, is thinly veiled bigotry. "If you boil down the concerns of the opposition, what I would call the far right, ultimately it boils down to is: `I am not comfortable with my child being in school with someone who's different. I want to keep my child surrounded by people who are identical to me. The world is getting too diverse, and I'm scared.' " [...]

Among what Mr. Newberry called "100 gentle lessons" in the N.E.A. curriculum is one where middle school students make color wheels to relate color to how they feel. A tolerance lesson suggests talking to high school students about their definition of "terrorist." How many times in defining it, the curriculum asks, do the terms "Muslim" and "Middle East" come up, and how does that compare with the characterization of Japanese-Americans who, as the students learn, were sent to internment camps in World War II?

The N.E.A. Web site also included a link that urged teachers to avoid blaming Muslims for the attacks.

Actually, Mr. Newberry, I'm not comfortable with my child being in a school with a fact-warping, America-hating, self-loathing nitwit like you. Who do you think we should blame for the attacks, Zoroastrians? Posted by Orrin Judd at August 31, 2002 8:47 AM