T

imes change, as the saying goes, and it seems nowhere moreso than in the classroom. A few weeks back, Denver high school teacher Jay Bennish achieved international fame when one of his lectures was recorded by a student, and later made public. The 20-minute long feverish rant against Bush, Cheney, America, capitalism (and most of the other standard whipping posts for "radicals") was an astounding piece of ideological indoctrination, even by public schools' standards. Following a brief inquiry, the school retained him in his teaching position, and Bennish returned to his class not promising not to do that again.

When I was a kid, one of the sweetest things we could hear from our teacher was, "Class, today we're going to have a filmstrip." It was the next best thing to a holiday. The film might be interesting, or it might be dull, but it seemed more like entertainment than studying, so we were happy. But I certainly never had a science class like the one Steve White teaches in Alabama. Eighth grade science these days, apparently includes the latest research into BushCheney and HalliburtonAshcroftRice, and their WolfowitzRumsfeld connections with particular body parts (maybe it was a biology class?) -- mainly the one that scatologists are most thankful for, though named in the "filmstrip" by its colloquial rather than proper scientific name.

Now you, too, can get a taste of Steve White's eighth grade science education by watching his "film strip". Bear in mind now, this is not primary school stuff -- this is eighth grade stuff. So I shouldn't need to warn you, but.... WARNING: THIS LINK IS NOT WORK SAFE, AND NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN. (Wai The People's Blog)

The host site, "Film Strip International" has many more educational films for anti-American indoctrination of students, surely a valuable resource for today's discerning education professionals. The teachers in my youth certainly never had such esteemed resources to draw from, and had to rely on films supplied by their school boards, or if we were lucky, the National Film Board of Canada. We normally had to make do with tedious, information based material, similar to another educational film inexplicably found on the same glorious, proletarian vanguard of peoples' information services ^h^h^h I mean website. Despotism (1946) Encyclopedia Brittanica Films. Harold D. Lasswell, a professor at Yale University demonstrates various means of determining the strength of democracy or the creeping presence of despotism.

[SLAP FOREHEAD] Of course, that's why this 60 year old film is included with the rest of the agitprop on that site: to prove that America is under the boots of despotism! I wonder what Professor Lasswell would make of that. I did watch the whole thing (it's pretty cool too, for a 60 year old classroom film), and wasn't left with any impression but that America has surely advanced a long way since those days. And so have most of the rest of us.