PJ: The Republican field has drifted so far from Ronald Reagan's (their hero's) stand on issues that it's mind boggling. Reagan supported education; Gingrich and Santorum are at war with education...Reagan support Scouting; the GOP is at war with (at least Girl) Scouts...Reagan believed in the seperation of Church and State; the GOP is trying to claim the US as a Christian nation...Reagan was known to have a sunny disposition and had friendships across the isle like his strong friendship with Teddy Kennedy*; today's Republicans are super-partisan and fill their speeches with so much venom for political thought on the other side that a cobra would be proud....
There are members of the GOP who still support the old ways, the Reagan ways, which were far more progressive than those of the current conservative/religious movement. Those people are now called RINOs and are angrily shouted down by people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Andrew Breitbart. Many more long time Republicans have left the party, such as Susan Eisenhower, becoming independent voters because of the GOP's sharp right turn. Reagan started out as a Democrat and given the state of the current GOP I question whether he would have changed his political affiliation to today's Republican party.
* In Nancy Reagan's own words: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTIB96zDGpg
The Economist
It's an act of war!
by M.S.
READING Amy Davidson's review of yesterday's Republican debate, I see that Newt Gingrich is showcasing his historical expertise again.
Gingrich said we were “looking at an abyss,” and suggested that teachers these days were evil (“if a foreign power did this to our children, we’d declare this an act of war”)
Now hold it right there. That phrase sounds weirdly familiar. Actually, I think I can remember my dad saying pretty much the same words, quoting them actually from an article he was reading while looking at me over the top of his Washington Post, sitting at our dinette table in Washington sometime in the early 1980s. What is Mr Gingrich sampling here?
Internet to the rescue! Here's PBS education correspondent John Merrow, in a post written last August about No Child Left Behind's effects on students' appetite for reading.
The apparent outcome of this national policy: citizens who do not know much about history and are unlikely to pick up a book (where they might learn some history).
To echo "A Nation at Risk" (1983), if a foreign power had done this to us, we'd consider it an act of war.
That's it! It's the Reagan Administration blue-ribbon commission report on education, "A Nation at Risk". There it is, right in the first two paragraphs.
We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.
So, is Mr Gingrich aware of the origins of the phrase he's using? Yes, he is; he likes this phrase. In fact, he also used it in May, 2009, when he, Michael Bloomberg, and Al Sharpton (!) paid a joint visit to Barack Obama and Arne Duncan, the education secretary, at the White House (!!) to "remind President Barack Obama that, nearly 55 years after the Supreme Court issued landmark desegregation rulings, the country still has a 'crisis of inequality' when it comes to education" (!!!).
Calling [education] the "first civil right of the 21st Century" [blogger's note: !!!!], Gingrich said the country has to move forward from the No Child Left Behind Act, former President George W. Bush's program to improve the performance of primary and secondary schools.
"We said, 26 years ago, that if a foreign power did to our children what we were doing to them we would consider it an act of war," Gingrich said, in reference to the "A Nation at Risk" report on public education issued in 1982.
"As Americans, we can reach beyond Democrat and Republicans, beyond liberals and conservatives," Gingrich said, and insist on finding practical solutions to fix education. "I am prepared to work side by side" with anyone committed "to getting the job done and not talking about it for the next 26 years."
As the New York Times style guide would doubtless put it: WT*?!?!?!
Newt Gingrich is not going to be the Republican nominee for president. So who cares what he has to say about education reform. But this is just amazing hucksterism. One minute, Mr Gingrich is marching into a meeting with Barack Obama, arm in arm with Al Sharpton, and proclaiming himself the champion of a new bipartisan willingness to move beyond ideological labels and implement solutions to the education crisis; why if a foreign power had done this to us, we'd consider it an act of war! The next, he is reviling the perfidiousness of the Obama administration, liberals, and the teachers' unions, and proclaiming them responsible for the education crisis; why if a foreign power had done this to us, we'd consider it an act of war! Yes, we've got trouble, right here in River City!
Enough of Mr Gingrich. We should be grateful to Mitt Romney for interring him under a mountain of super-PAC cash and pounding the Florida primary through his heart. But to pull one useful point out of this pile of dreck, we should also stop talking about education as war. The logic behind the rhetorical gambit of calling the deterioration in educational standards "unilateral disarmament" and speaking of an "act of war" in 1983 was that at that moment of Reagan-era cold-war militarism, the only way to get attention for what is fundamentally a problem of social underinvestment and inequality was to imagine it as a military confrontation against outside enemies. It seemed a neat trick at the time; it had worked after Sputnik, more or less. It was a bad way of phrasing things. Education is not a war. Education is raising our children. If we are decent people, we ought to be able to conjure up some enthusiasm for that task, for that enterprise, for that adventure, without having to close our eyes and imagine we're shooting bad guys.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/02/newt-gingrich-and-education
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