The Coming PC Crack-up

Up until now there's been an uneasy truce between people of faith and the public schools. If you really object to liberal proselytizing you can take your children out and put them in religious or private schools. That is, if you can afford it.

But that will soon come to an end. Already we have the spectacle of the NY Regent's exam watering down passages from literary classics so they won't offend anyone. And in Britain the politically dominant Wahhabist Muslim purportedly "moderate" group is making a move to cram their view of Islam down the throats of real moderate Muslims and other believers and non-believers in the public schools. Guidelines here. (Ah, yes, they claim they are working for the "common good". Where have we heard that before?)

It's the Taliban approach to culture, only this time, instead of blowing up Buddhas, they want to push us back to the dark ages by eliminating most music, dance and art for starters. Girls should wear the hijab. We know our kids don't really learn history anymore, the curriculum has been dumbed down, but we haven't reached this point yet. The Muslim Brotherhood is infiltrating Egypt's education system, discriminating against Coptic Christians and encouraging intolerance. It's happening in Kuwait too. And we have swimming pool shenanigans in Sweden and Canada. Yup, they want "separate but equal". Guess who would be the second class citizens in this scheme. Note current Muslim practice, most notably in the Middle-East, also here, of demanding an unbeliever tax or jizya. And do we want our kids to have report cards like this?

The UK is starting to make some rulings to address this attempt to abrogate every one else's rights. It'll be here soon.

Obviously this has broad implications for society, but the immediate effect may be to give political correctness a brain cramp. This may be what finally pushes the US to adopt widespread school choice. And let's have some academic courses on religion in the public schools, so we understand the value of tolerance as a bedrock of our Judeo-Christian heritage, and study other major religions substantively as well, so our children are literate about religion. Enough of the ignorant, patronizing, and superficial multiculti mantra the left loves. Of course, in the universities we have secular creationism, masquerading as "Women's Studies", but at least there students have a choice about whether they want to take such a brainless approach to history and society.

It's the coming PC crackup, taking the straightjacket off thought and speech, heading off a burka on the brain.

UPDATE: Related stories on education at RCP Buzztracker. One-third of DC residents are functionally illiterate, the biggest obstacle being English is a foreign language. We have to get better at integrating, not separating. The melting pot, not the salad bowl. One of the standards that must hold is learning civics and English in public or private schools. And a liberal says he has seen no evidence teachers' unions are detrimental to education. Teachers' unions are not interested in education. They are interested in job security, a point which he illustrates in his same post. Laughable.

UPDATE: Powerline on the new anti-Semitic Palestinian textbooks, and the cynicism of Democrat candidates for president who ignore the Palestinians' refusal to recognize Israel.