Kids in Ferguson, Missouri have had quite a challenge in the last couple of years with people flooding in to hijack their town to make political points off the death of Mike Brown.
Unfortunately, they don’t even have to go outside their school room door to be indoctrinated.
Here’s the beginning of an article that fifth graders at the Vogt School in Ferguson were given recently. The article bashes Trump for ‘body shaming’ Miss Universe, and cites the question raised by a girl to Hillary Clinton at a town hall event.
In particular, the article notes this:
Fifteen-year-old Brennan Leach said body image was an important issue for girls her age. “I see with my own eyes the damage Donald Trump does when he talks about women and how they look”, Leach said.
Clinton told the teen that people need to ‘stand up’ to this kind of body shaming.
The fifth graders were then given a quiz based on the article, to test their reading comprehension.
Leaving aside the fact that the quiz is poorly constructed so that if I were a poor fifth grader in that class, I would go “huh?” for a couple of those questions, there is more indoctrination within the questions.
Check the first one. What are we supposed to conclude? That Trump meant to insult Miss Universe (he couldn’t be legitimately concerned about her weight as a beauty queen representing the organization). Leach obviously was bothered by his words. Most important of all, “Kids are not able to just ignore comments like Trump’s”.
In all honesty, kids probably ignore a huge chunk of what schools push at them. But this answer is to signal to the child that if he/she isn’t upset, he/she should be, that the evil words from the evil bad mad have such power over them.
If one were to look for balance there doesn’t seem to have been an equivalent effort to point out the problems of Hillary Clinton.
Even in the ‘news service’ which the school used for their ‘reading comprehension’, Newsela, seems weighted against Trump. Among their stories considered appropriate for fifth graders, every story pertaining solely to Trump was negative. There is the above story, another one attacking him for saying he would not necessarily accept the results of the election, and a third dealing with a boy who wore a Make America Great Again hat, but that was bad because it made people upset and bully him, with the rest of the article dealing with how Trump’s positions made children worry if they would be deported.
Newsela ran two stories solely on Hillary in that time, one that she was having difficulty getting millennial votes that had some negative content, and one saying how she was making history because she was a woman. This was between July and October. They didn’t cover her interview with the FBI, the FBI comments on her ‘extreme carelessness’, or anything in this past week about the FBI re-opening the case. They did note however how she won the student election run by Newsela in a landslide.
The Ferguson school, in using this Trump-bashing story, could have found some balance with a follow up on the body-shaming story, however. As we noted when we ran the story of the question asked at the town hall, it appeared that Brennan Leach may have been a plant for Hillary Clinton, to serve her up a question for which she was prepared and which attacked Trump. As has now been confirmed in the case of Donna Brazile, we know that Clinton is not above cheating and having the questions ahead of time.
The school could have run that as a question for the students, is it right to cheat and deceive people to get the position you want in politics? Is it right to use and manipulate teenagers to do your will to make the other candidate look bad?
Somehow, though, I suspect the school wouldn’t have done that follow up…