You just had to know this was going to come up, sooner rather than later — objections to children re-enacting the basic historical details of Thanksgiving. Click here to watch the story.

A 20-year tradition has come to an end. Kindergartners at Condit and Mountain View elementary schools in Claremont, California, will no longer be dressing up and visiting one another for their Thanksgiving feast. This year, the Mountain View children would have dressed as Native Americans and walked to Condit, whose students would have dressed as Pilgrims.

Michelle Raheja, an English professor at UC Riverside who specializes in Native American literature, believes dressing up as Native American Indians is demeaning. "I'm sure you can appreciate the inappropriateness of asking children to dress up like slaves (and kind slave masters), or Jews (and friendly Nazis), or members of any other racial minority group who has struggled in our nation's history."

It was Raheja who met with her daughter’s teachers and school officials that lead to the canceling of the costumed feast. School officials capitulated, predictable, given the PC nature of the objections, and they did it quickly.

Jennifer Tilton, an assistant professor of race and ethnic studies at the University of Redlands and a Claremont parent who opposes the costumes joined Raheja with some of her own PC verbiage: "Its always a good thing to think about, critically, how we teach kids, even from very young ages, the message we want them to learn, and the respect for the diversity of the American experiences.”

Some have noted that perhaps the costume objectors are actually agenda-driven elitism; "the message we want them to learn," might be a clue to the real motivation behind the objections. Wouldn't acknowledging Indians and Pilgrims in costume be an expression of respectfulness? Most cultures celebrate their own culture and heritage when they dress in their native costumes.

One mother of a student who happens to be of Choctaw descent, Kathleen Lucas, said her son — now a first-grader — still wears the vest and feathered headband he made last year to celebrate the holiday. "My son was so proud," she said. "In his eyes, he thinks that's what it looks like to be Indian."

We hear so much about “teaching moments” these days, but the school administration and teachers didn’t use this situation as such. Thanksgiving, in PC talk, is about two culturally opposite peoples and races coming together to celebrate in peaceful harmony the circumstances and experiences of their past year together.

For those who live in reality, the Indians dressed as Indians did at that time (how could they do otherwise?), and likewise did the Pilgrims. They appreciated the bounty of the earth, after suffering a previous horribly cruel winter, managing to survive through sheer courage and determination with the help of the Indians. They wanted to give thanks to God who they acknowledged and recognized as the Giver of all graces, of which they numbered their food, shelter, and peace as such. And they did it together.

If someone were truly offended, or disliked the message being taught to their child, they would extract their child from the class or the event. But I suspect the objectors are not offended, personally. How could they be? Neither of the professors is Native American Indian or a Pilgrim.

I suspect the purpose and spirit of Thanksgiving is just too God-centered for them. I suspect they have willingly and purposefully developed a hypersensitivity to all diversity issues that are tied to any kind of religious sentiment, and given an opportunity, will pounce on them, in order to make their PC voices heard.

Taking their mentality to its logical conclusion, Halloween is definitely going to have to go — the costumes might offend or mock satan worshippers.  And Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny as well — they’re really lies you know; same for the Tooth Fairy.

They’ve already managed to remove the name of God and Christian religious holidays from public schools, so we won’t have to worry there. Presidents Day? No, that fits in more with the ever expanding presidential power too much; they’ll probably keep that one. Valentine’s Day, being based on the actions of a canonized saint is already on the way out, having been changed to Friendship Day, in the name of PCness. And on and on it goes.

I guess for now, interpreting a historical event through a little creative costuming for five-year-olds is “Out.”

Spoiling the fun of five-year-olds, however, nixing a message of brotherhood and tolerance, infusing the spirit of the liberalism of the day, deciding what is “dehumanizing” for others, even those of different racial heritage, and equating something as positive as Thanksgiving with the Holocaust is “In.”

While at Wal-Mart recently, I witnessed a quiet but rather surprising incident at the checkout.

The total for my purchases at the ubiquitous chain came to $50.43. I gave the beautiful young lady at the checkout, who I estimated to be between the ages of 18-21, a $50 bill, one quarter, one dime, one nickel, and three pennies.

She placed the $50 down on the counter and concentrated on the change now in the palm of her hand. She pushed it around with the finger of her other hand, looking puzzled, while I, at first, waited calmly.

She honestly tried to make sense of it, but her face gave her away. And soon she gave up all together and put the change on the counter as well. She then brought out her calculator and proceeded to add up the quarter, dime, nickel, and pennies!

Maybe I caught her on an off day, but is it really that hard to mentally calculate $50 + .25 + .10 + .05 + .03?

I probably would have embarrassed her if I had asked if she needed help counting the change, and I’m sure I still have dent marks on the inside of my lips from biting them in an effort to keep my mouth shut.

Perhaps this young lady was absent in fourth grade the day they learned to count money. Or perhaps she has only lived in a world of credit and debit cards, missing all the fun of cold hard cash. But I’m really afraid that she was never taught how to add properly; mental computation being a thing of the past now.

This brought to mind a document held by the Smoky Valley Genealogy Society of Salina, Kansas. It is the test administered to eighth-graders at the end of the school term in 1895. and it’s worth checking out and taking it yourself. Most college students – heck, professors – probably couldn’t make it to first base on this one.

The test consisted of Reading and Penmanship; oral for reading, and penmanship to be graded from manuscripts. Also, Grammar, Arithmetic, U.S. History, Orthography, Geography, and Health – all timed tests. Here are the questions from the Arithmetic test, timed to be taken in 1 and 1/4 hour:

1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. per bu, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $.20 per inch?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

Contrast that with the state of Texas’ own tests, the easiest standardized tests in the country, known as the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. On the website you can scroll down, look at the left-hand side of the page, and download the eighth-grade tests. 

All the problems for Math are multiple choice, and of course, oh so relevant to the youngsters’ world, with trendy names, and cool activities used in the examples. But notice at the beginning that a couple of charts are included, giving the students access to a math table, and also to all the formulas they would need to solve problems.

There was no indication of any time limits, but a cover letter provided the information that out of the 50 problems, only 30 correct answers were needed, which, it said, was supposedly around 70 percent.

That got me scratching my head. Stated in the cover letter was also the news that the exact number for passing the test is determined after all the tests have been graded – so it’s a curve.

If the test is any example of what is being taught, and I’m sure it is because there is so much emphasis on teaching to the test these days because of the No Child Left Behind mandates, then it’s not surprising the girl at Wal-Mart couldn’t count the change. There was pattern recognition and spatial reasoning, charting and chart reading, some basic algebra and geometry, but little or no simple computation.

It’s no wonder then politicians can so easily pull the wool over the public’s eyes. In the case of the $700 billion bailout, which will actually cost more than that, up into the trillions, many are simply ignorant of the truly staggering price we are now to pay.

The least anyone can do for their child is to make sure they understand the value of money, and that they can count it, forward and backward.

This is for their own financial security, in a world that permits larceny on a grand scale.

The Georgia Board of Education along with Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue is poised to literally take over the Clayton County School District, eliminating local governance altogether.

For the Clayton County, Georgia, school district, things haven’t been going so well lately. The district recently lost its accreditation due to a “dysfunctional school board,” coupled with, it seems, a very determined school superintendent that resulted in serious infighting.

The intricate details of how the Clayton School District arrived at such a deplorable situation vary. What is certainly eyebrow raising is the action taken by Governor Perdue when, acting on a judge’s recommendation following a hearing that was triggered by citizens who filed legal complaints against the board members, he removed four Clayton school board members from office.

The legal mechanism that allowed Perdue to remove the board members from office is a little used tool under the state’s code of ethics. But it might be that Perdue and the state were quite eager to enter into a local concern. Perdue’s spokesman Bert Brantley said, “When local control fails, there has got to be a way for the state to step in and be more involved.”

What the church had been for medieval man, the public school must now become for democratic and rational man. God would be replaced by the concept of the Public Good, sin and guilt by the more positive virtues of Victorian morality ....

— Horace Mann, “The Father of Public Education”

So-called public education has become such a staple of life in the United States and other Western industrialized nations that it is now a sacrosanct institution. The transition from the small one-room school of yesteryear, often taught by a teacher privately hired by the parents of the children being educated (for an example of how this worked, read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving), to today’s gargantuan education factories is as big a societal change as the well-chronicled Industrial Revolution.

Many people have always rejected so-called public education (the reason for the qualifying adjective will be explained shortly) and opted for private schooling for their children. Their reasons generally fell into one of two categories: 1) To seek academically superior education from private preparatory academies that would help ensure their children’s entry into the colleges of their choice, or 2) to obtain education that reinforced the parent’s religious views, in church-affiliated schools. Though the network of parochial schools established by Catholic parishes represented the largest number of these religious schools, many others exist, including the very large Seventh-day Adventist educational system, schools established by mainstream Protestant denominations such as the Lutherans, and the many nondenominational schools designated simply as “Christian schools.” (Non-Christian religions have also established schools that teach in the context of their faith.)