By The Cranky Housewife -
There is an excellent exploratory series being featured on EAGNews.org this week. It focuses specifically on Chicago Public Schools' Jones College Prep High School and its advocacy of an event called "Social Justice Week." Per Kyle Olsen of EAGNews, Social justice Week is being promoted by JCP as an opportunity for community organizing groups to come into the school and teach students about the importance of community awareness by providing instruction on civil disobedience and peaceful protesting methodologies.
Sidebar: It replaced the now defunct "Gender Bender Week" which was a school sponsored event that encouraged students to cross dress as a way of understanding gender identity issues. That event was scrapped because it resulted in gender-confused students feeling ridiculed and humiliated.
Jones College Prep has the following statement on its website in discussion of the scholastic merits of "Social Justice Week":
"Social Justice Week was created to promote community advancement through dialogue and community service based activism. Moreover, we hope to unify the voice of various JCP and community organizations in which to facilitate collaboration for the betterment of the community at large and promote a unified human rights advancement initiative."
Two of those community organizations that were invited to unify with JCP for the betterment of society were Black Start Project and Peace in the Hood project. These organizations used their opportunity to teach students by deriding the Second Amendment and advocating for increased gun controls. The YouTube video is a stunning example of advocacy run amuck as featured speakers zero in on their disagreements with the National Rifle Association by suggesting that the NRA used emotionally charged epithets in their promotion of Conceal and Carry. Quoting Camille Williams from Peace in the Hood who was addressing students:
"Don't just give everybody guns so they can go crazy because right now that's what the NRA wants. Seriously. They will tell you. Okay, I have received emails [paraphrasing the email] and I'm telling you – I'm going to Hell for this – for what I am doing and that these porch monkeys deserve to die."
Since no representative from the NRA was in attendance of this Social Justice Week event, no rebuttal of these most serious accusations was made available to the pupils. Students were then left on their own to deal with the charge that the NRA not only accepts the killing of innocents but prefers it. Instead of a dialog, refutation or any kind of serious debate of this issue, the students were treated to additional instruction on how to best protest the Conceal and Carry bills being debated in Springfield. Phillip Jackson of Black Start guided them through how to create a mock graveyard on the school's front lawn. He explained how the graveyard could have headstones listing the names of the students who have been victims of gun violence in Chicago.
So, in point of fact, students were not simply being instructed on the importance of community awareness and involvement. They were being specifically directed not only to which causes they should take up as a student body but also in the exact way that the protest should be conducted. Contrary to the schools stated objective for Social Justice Week:
"Our students, if they want something, need to learn how to advocate for themselves because non-violent protest training is at its roots advocacy for yourself and for your group. So I believe in teaching our teenagers – who are inherently going to protest something – to teach them how to do it so they can ultimately get what they want and need."
There is nothing spontaneous, no creative energy involved, no angst. Further, they are not being taught how to advocate for themselves. They are being instructed in group-think. Astroturfing. On the taxpayers dime no less. And it never apparently occurred to community organizers, educators and administrators that a much larger mock graveyard might be constructed on the front lawn of JCP showing the names and ages of all the young victims of gun violence, drug use and poverty because too much of the school day is being wasted teaching social justice and gender bending rather than the quadratic equation, history and physics.
Never mind that math and science foster the critical thinking which will lead these students into actual paying jobs…social justice and gender bending will lead them into tents in Zuccotti Park with degrees in sociology, $40,000 in student loans and no job propositions that would help them to pay off their debt, which is infinitely more productive because then these young people can then act as willing pawns in the War on Prosperity.
An EAG producer attended and filmed the JCP social justice events with permission of administrators and then followed up with an interview with Dean of Students Grace Moody. Here's that video:
More videos are on their way. I encourage you to check them out. Like it or not, this is a Chicago-based problem that is being cultivated in Chicago schools with the funds confiscated from Illinois taxpayers. This pervasive rent-a-mob mentality has been ingrained in minds of Chicago students and has now spread into state and federal jurisdictions as a result. We the taxpayers of Illinois are the financiers of this movement and we will need to be part of a rigorous effort to curtail its effects on society as a whole.
