Liberals Ban Conservative Book List. Now You Know the Books to Read!
Gene Ponder, a teacher of Advanced Placement Government/Economics at Spanish Fort High School, compiled a list of 31 books for summer reading. Students only had to choose one book. Nearly every book is of the conservative to libertarian variety.
To no one’s surprise, there was a general freak out by the establishment statist educators.
Baldwin County Board of Education President Shannon Cauley told Gulf Coast News Today that she became aware of the issue through social media and alerted the superintendent.
“As a courtesy, the school principal called to let me know that the list had been removed and assignment canceled,” Cauley said in a Facebook post. “He’ll be sending an email to all senior students/parents to notify them that there will be no summer reading assignment for this AP government class.”
Superintendent Eddie Tyler confirmed that in a statement, saying the teacher had removed the reading list. It is no longer on the school website.
“Mr. Ponder’s reading list that is going around on social media has not been endorsed by the school system,” Tyler wrote. “The list has been removed by the teacher. Baldwin County Public Schools has a process to vet and approve reading lists so that a variety of sources are used. I expect all employees to follow our processes, procedures and policies.” (Miami Herald)
As I was going down the list, I thought I saw one of my books on the list — God and Government. Alas, it was a book of the same title written by Chuck Colson. The list would really have been banned if any of my books were on the list.
Considering the liberal claptrap that public school students get, Mr. Posner’s list is a needed counter balance. One of the basic educational elements missing from our nation’s schools is teaching students to think critically. Making students aware of different opinions and how they are argued is what’s needed today. Instead, “progressive” education is designed to teach a single position as the only position. There can’t be debate over abortion, evolution, climate change, homosexuality, transgenderism, and any number of other leftist positions. Students must be shielded from well-reasoned contrary positions.
Just seeing a list of 31 books might give students the wrong impression of what they’ve been taught for 12 years. “You mean there is another position?”
Liberals have known that controlling a nation’s education system would give them future recruits for the liberal cause for generations. Adolf Hitler understood this. In Mein Kampf Hitler stressed “the importance of winning over and then training the youth in the service ‘of a new national state.’”1
When an opponent declares, “I will not come over to your side,” he said in a speech on November 6, 1933, “I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already…. What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.’” And on May 1, 1937, [Hitler] declared, “This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.”2
Does anyone think that Hitler would have allowed a competing educational system? “[I]n Germany there was Nazi truth, a Nazi political truth, a Nazi economic truth, a Nazi social truth, a Nazi religious truth, to which all institutions had to subscribe or be banished.”3
It’s hard for many Americans to believe, but their schools have been taken over by an alien worldview designed to shape their children into non-thinking wards of the State.
- William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 248-249. [↩]
- Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 249. [↩]
- C. Gregg Singer, From Rationalism to Irrationality: The Decline of the Western Mind from the Renaissance to the Present (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1979), 28. [↩]