Letters to the Editor - Sept. 11

Dear editor,

I was a former resident and not just visiting at Sanders County Fair time this year.

I was so disappointed in the fair!

I hear more complaints then compliments.

First of all, who does the pricing for the fair? Forty dollars for one person’s booth and then charging a non-profit organization $500.00 for theirs.

Hello? What’s up with that? Have you noticed that we have less and less vendors each year? Vendors don’t like the way they have been mistreated! Didn’t anyone notice the gyro people weren’t here?

And my goodness, what is with these men who want to keep our vets from getting a new van? Hiding sings and reporting false reports, ling to keep a benefit from making money for their cause plus yelling at vendors who walked across the street to get something to eat.

Well veterans, you can thank your troublemakers for not helping by their childish actions and temper tantrums.

What? Are you willing to take our veterans to their doctor appointments? Whatever happened to the golden rule? It does not say do unto others before they can do unto you. How childish.

Grow up and put your big boy pants on. The town of Plains, Montana is tired of your antics. There will be no new van soon for Sanders County Veterans Transportation. It will take some time for them to raise the money they need.

You have accomplished what you have set out to do.

As a veteran myself, I appreciate all the rides to my doctor appointments and all the help I receive from the great drivers who volunteer their services and time. Thanks.

A United States Army Veteran,

Linda Meherg

My name is Linda Hohenstein. I live in Plains in NW Montana. I was an elementary teacher for eleven years in Corvallis, MT. Although I am retired and have no children, I am still very interested in, and concerned for, American education. I have been on textbook selection committees twice. Most texts seemed to have a liberal slant, and I thought it must be a result of the writers’ biases. Never did I think it was the calculated result of over 80 years of work on the part of the NEA – National Education Association.

During the past year, I have been researching the various aspects of the Common Core State Standards. I happened onto A Grab for Power – A Chronology of the NEA by Dennis Lawrence Cuddy, PhD. What I found was chilling. I had been in a profession in which the leaders and guiding forces were enamored with the Soviet model of education. Since the 1930’s, progressive (socialistic) educators have been planning for an American educational system that de-emphasizes basic academic subjects such as history, geography, civics, and classic literature. Instead, the focus would be on creating acceptance for a one-world government, a pseudo-religion of environmentalism, social justice and the redistribution of wealth, and an anti-capitalistic economic system.

At the 72nd annual meeting of the NEA, Willard Givens who became the executive secretary for the NEA in 1935, and served 17 years in that position said:

A dying laissez-faire must be completely destroyed and all of us, including the ‘owners’, must be subjected to a large degree of social control… an equitable distribution of income will be sought… the major function of the school is the social orientation of the individual. It must seek to give him understand of the transition to a new social order.

In 1946, the editor of the NEA Journal publishes “The Teacher and World Government” in which he proclaims:

In the struggle to establish an adequate world government, the teacher…can do much to prepare the hearts and minds of children for global understanding and cooperation…At the very top of all the agencies which will assure the coming of world government must stand the school, the teacher, and the organized profession.

Another area that sounds very similar to the Common Core testing and assessments was an article in 1963, in a special supplement of the “AV Communication Review” published with the March/April issue. Dr. Bertram Russell of the UCLA psychology department was working on a project contracted with the NEA under the authorization of the National Defense Act of 1958. The article explained that he was:

In the process of building a computer-based device for changing attitude….(It) will work on the principle that students’ attitudes can be changed effectively using…an appropriate series of leading questions logically designed to right the balance between appropriate attitudes and those deemed less acceptable.

The Common Core is a culmination of decades of planning by the educational progressives from the top down, not locally as they would have us believe, and the incremental enacting of their socialist agenda. The standards and assessments will be aligned with the curriculum, educational materials and methods. They must be. That is how they were designed.

The Common Core curriculum will indoctrinate students to become community organizers and activists, to accept that religion is an impediment to progress, morality is relative, America’s founding, unique Constitution-based government and history is not exceptional nor worth of study. The goal will be to produce workers to feed the global economy, which will result form data-mining, programming, and tracking from cradle to work.

Is this the America you want your children and their children to inherit? Is this the kind of freedom that made America great? Please defund Common Core now before it’s too late.

Linda Hohenstein,

Plains