If A Conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and no liberal is there to hear him, is he still an “extremist?”

Over this past eight years or so, the Minnesota DFL has deprived the word “extremist” of all meaning.

“Blue Man In A Red District” writes about Glenn Gruenhagen, who won a close race in House District 25A over DFL apparatchik Mick McGuire.

Blue, not unpredictably, refers to Gruenhagen as “extreme“. 

But what does that mean?

How extreme is Gruenhagen?
At a statewide school board association meeting Gruenhagen pushed his extremist agenda.
Resolutions:

Let’s run through the list of “extreme” resolutions and their vote totals from the “State School Board Association” – of whom more later:

Stop labeling and drugging students – 2 for; 103 against.  The empowerment of teachers to make sweeping mental health and behavioral judgments with a power that borders on a medical diagnosis – with none of the expertise or experience or judgment required to make those “diagnoses” – has been an unmitigated disaster for a generation of children, especially boys.  Especially mine.  Anyone who voted against that resolution can rot in hell. 

Emphasize rote learning – 2 for; 130 against: Not sure what Blue means by this; he doesn’t favor us with a link to any original context.  Most of us agree “Rote Learning” – regurgitating factoids on command – is a Bad Thing.  But students today are woefully deficient in some just plain basic facts; I learned the multiplication tables by “rote” – as in, endless hours of drills in fourth grade; my kids did not.   Are they better off for having to find a calculator to find that 9 times 7 is 63?

Implement phonics reading – 8 for; 94 against. It seems to work for many kids.  So sue us.

Teach principles of patriotism – 13 for; 88 against.  THE HORROR.  Seriously –  would it kill kids to know that there’s a reason most of the world wants (or wanted, until 2008) to come to the US?  The changes we wrought and the good we brought to this world?  It’d spawn fewer little DFL drones, but other than that, what’d be the problem?

Oh, wait.

Implement abstinence – 7 for; 95 against.  Wouldn’t wanna stop encouraging teenage effing pregnancy, would we?

Separate classes by gender – 16 for; 86 against. Never mind that it works.  There are not a few charter, and even public, programs that get excellent results by separating the genders.  It’s a politically inconvenient truth that boys and girls are differnet.  They learn differently.  Girls are verbal and social; boys, spatial and competitive.  Both genders do better when they learn in environments that play to those strengths.   The only reasons not to separate genders, indeed, are the inconvenience of teaching teachers who came up through the feminized education academy to deal with boys as boys, and the PC imperative.

Teach fallacies of macro evolution – 7 for; 100 against. That’s one of those extreeeeeemly broad subjects where, again, context might be useful.  Does it mean “teach creationism?”  Or does it mean “show them that the scientific method really has nothing to say about philosophy”, and “science still has no idea how life as we know it really originated”?  We dont’ know.  Is it because the original resolution really was the single line “Teach fallacies of macroevolution”, or was it because Blue didn’t bother to favor us with the original context? 

It’d be fun to know.

All children are gifted – 12 for; 89 against.  Again, not sure about specifics.  Clearly, all children are not “gifted”.  But all children have some “gift” or another.  The public schools aren’t interested in “gifts” that go much beyond “sitting on ones seat and doing homework really really well”, other than tolerating a well-regulated interest in music or art or sports.  The kid whose “gift” is mechanics?   Cooking?  Raising his/her siblings while the parents are at work, and doing it really really well?  Not as much.

Blue:

At his best, 14% of school board association members supported his proposals. And this guy is going to get things done for Greater Minnesota?

Looking at the eight “extreme” resolutions, I’d almost respond “I wonder who the real extremists are…”

…until I remember that in Saint Paul, the monolithic politburo that is the Saint Paul School Board probably would have voted a straight ticket against all of those – and most Minnesotans on the street would have supported five or six without breaking a sweat.

If you’re not an EdMinn/SEIU/DFL drone, your mainstream is what they call “extreme”.