Barack Obama is both a highly credentialed but very uneducated man. Have been inflicted by indoctrination in lieu of education, Obmaa now seeks to indoctrinate our youth.
From Shelby Foote [1]:
The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth — not a different truth: the same truth — only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.
From Paul Mirengoff Powerline [2]:
Controversy is brewing over new Common Core State Standards in English that call on public schools to emphasize the reading of “information text” instead of fictional literature. According to the Washington Post, English teachers across the country are upset by what they consider the government’s effort “to drive literature out of the classroom.”
[…]
Consider that one of the “informational texts” recommended as a replacement for, say, Great Expectations is “Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management.” Students would thus study government propaganda in English class (this Executive Order was issued under President Bush, but it is still propaganda — a political sop to the environmental left, as Stanley Kurtz shows).
Reax from Rob Port, Say Anything Blog [3]:
So, in exchange for federal dollars, schools are being forced to replace Huckleberry Finn and Silas Marner with readers of political essays about the virtues of government health care.
Education is supposed to be about teaching kids how to think, and literature is an important part of that process.
This policy is about teaching kids what to think.
States need to take back education.
Education can only strive to teach how to seek the truth and hopefully find it. As Foote not4d above the truth may be figurative or literal. One such figurative attempt to find the truth, from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain a.k.a. Samuel Clemens (1835-1910), About [4]:
I didn’t rightly know what to say, because I didn’t know whether the boat would be coming up the river or down. But I go a good deal on instinct; and my instinct said she would be coming up — from down towards Orleans. That didn’t help me much, though; for I didn’t know the names of bars down that way. I see I’d got to invent a bar, or forget the name of the one we got aground on — or — Now I struck an idea, and fetched it out:
“It warn’t the grounding — that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.”
“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
“No’m. Killed a nigger.”
“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt. Two years ago last Christmas your uncle Silas was coming up from Newrleans on the old Lally Rook, and she blowed out a cylinder-head and crippled a man. And I think he died afterwards. He was a Baptist. Your uncle Silas knowed a family in Baton Rouge that knowed his people very well. Yes, I remember now, he DID die. Mortification set in, and they had to amputate him. But it didn’t save him. Yes, it was mortification — that was it. He turned blue all over, and died in the hope of a glorious resurrection. They say he was a sight to look at. Your uncle’s been up to the town every day to fetch you. And he’s gone again, not more’n an hour ago; he’ll be back any minute now. You must a met him on the road, didn’t you? — oldish man, with a –“
Alas poor Huck may be a bigot. However through his words, he does reveal the truth of his time. There much more truth to gleamed from Juck, that from a USDA list of invasive species. The purpose of reading of Huck Finn is not to agree with him or admire his, but rather to think and form opinions of him.