Come September, public schoolkids could be receiving a tea party-fueled tutorial in the Constitution—or at least, the movement's version of it.
In 2004, at the urging of the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), Congress required any school accepting public money to teach students about the Constitution during the week of September 17. Most people are unaware of this "Constitution Week" requirement, and few schools have apparently complied with the mandate.
Enter the Tea Party Patriots, one of the nation's largest tea party umbrella groups, which has seized on this obscure congressional mandate, urging its members to "adopt a school" during Constitution Week. The group recently blasted out an alert to supporters that included instructions on how to pressure school officials to follow the congressional requirement. If they refuse, TPP advocates staging a protest and alerting the media to the school's failure to adhere to the law. "Patriots should not have to remind schools to teach the history of the most important document in our country," TPP's leaders write on the group's website explaining the new campaign. "That we have to do so is an indication of how awful the public school system has become with regard to teaching U.S. history."
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Democracy Gone Astray
Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.
All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.
[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]
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