>[Disgusting. From the NY Times:]
This article has the stench of Rightnut Press Release as the basis for a story idea all over it.
my very brave son has been contending with some incredible Huzzah attitudes among his classmates. I was pretty shocked to read the results of his survey. All of them (95% of what turned out to be a sample of 200 highschool students) supported the war. Most did so strongly, about 35% somewhat strongly. My son gets only few words of encouragement for his positions in classrooms, though there is a strong vocal minority of students opposed to the war. He mentioned the lies exposed in the Pentagon Papers, as well as the lies about GW 1. The best his teacher could do was wink at him and tell him he was right after class.
One teacher caught him with a print out from the web, of the site that compares Shurb photos with monkeys, apes, chimps, and orangutans. She confiscated it and told him that it was wrong to make fun of the president. He went back the next day and recited a few historical factoids for her about a long standing tradition of mocking presidents throughout US history.
I think I must have seethed for about three hours the afternoon he came home and told me about that one. I had to laugh when a friend of a friend refused to do the survey b/c he thought he was a subject matter chosen by my son's teacher. It was not, it was my son's. However, this person was sure that the only reason it was being done was because most high school teachers are liberal propagandists and useful idiots. Riiiiiiiiiiiight.
Cursed be, but my kide's going to be going to an academically oriented, mostly white high school next year because they unified the school district. I can only imagine it's going to get worse. If the mostly black/Latino/immigrant high school he now attends is conservative... WTF is going on at a mostly white school? Will higher academic standards make a difference?
Otherwise, Carl, I think you are glorifying the past. The campuses didn't radicalize right away during the Viet Nam war, either. Compared to that stage of the war, today's campuses are pretty radical.