SOME GERMAN HISTORY THAT KIDS DON'T LEARN ABOUT FROM THEIR LEFTIST EDUCATORS

Socialist evil must not be mentioned (Unless you can pretend that it wasn't Leftist -- and that's hard to do where Communism is concerned)

A choir from a suburban Chicago high school came to the Jewish Museum in Berlin not long ago to sing in commemoration of the 68th anniversary of Kristallnacht ("the Night of Broken Glass"), recalling the pogrom in 1938 when the Nazis broke into houses and stores, destroyed more than 1,000 synagogues, murdered 91 Jews and arrested over 30,000 Jewish men. It was a brutal foreshadowing of the Holocaust to come.

The Chicago teenagers sang songs in Yiddish, Hebrew and English, interspersed with narrated recollections of Jews who survived the Holocaust, talking of their lives and losses. Beautiful young voices soared on hymns and spirituals from slave times, powerful modern protests against prejudice old and new. German schoolchildren peppered the Americans with questions in a lively dialogue after the singing.

The German hosts described the occasion as "sensitive and evocative," but one of them told the American teacher who accompanied the choir that it was too bad that the kids hadn't taken note of another important date that fell on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Nov. 9-10 marked the 17th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The visiting teacher conceded ruefully that he had been unaware of all that.

These bright and earnest Americans had studied minute details of anti-Semitism in Germany during the decades of the '30s and 40's, but were ignorant of the history of Germany in the years after the war, of the yearning for freedom that led ordinary people to confront communist tyranny and that eventually led to the tumbling of the wall.

How unfortunate that classroom time is rarely given to the history of a divided Germany before the Iron Curtain finally collapsed. All over Berlin, tourists are reminded of the fate of the 6 million Jews who died in Hitler's "final solution." But the grim history of Soviet tyranny in East Germany -- and specifically in East Berlin -- is only now getting the tourist attention it deserves, as many German museums have begun to document life in the police state from 1949 to 1989.

The Berlin Wall museum exposes the chilling effects on Berliners on both sides of the wall, as well as those murdered trying to escape from East Germany. After the wall fell, the Germans planned a permanent exhibition of 2,000 years of their history, to replace a tawdry East Berlin museum whose mission was to guide the German Democratic Republic (GDR) toward a national identity shaped by the "virtues" of socialism.

In June, the German Historical Museum at last opened in the beautifully renovated Armory on Unter den Linden in the heart of Berlin. Its exhibitions begin with portrayals of the Celts, Romans and early German tribes, and move forward through the 20th century to the present day, dealing with the contrasting ways of life in the communist East and the democratic Federal Republic in the West. The pain of national unification gets its due.

A small museum a few blocks away on the River Spree is devoted entirely to life under socialism in East Germany, including the terror inside the commonplace. One exhibition illustrates the work of the Stasi, the secret police who spied on everybody. Books by Orwell and Kafka were banned because they cut too close to reality. Visitors can even eavesdrop on conversations as the Stasi did, with hidden microphones. The Stasi, according to some estimates, employed more than 90,000 full-time employees and more than twice as many as informers. (Other museums expose the sinister Stasi bureaucracy and prison.)

Visitors to the GDR museum can also sit in the cramped socialist car of metal and plastic called the Trabant ("Trabi"). Junk though it was, there was a waiting list for six years, and the car cost 7,400 German marks in 1962, a price equal to the annual salary of a skilled industrial worker. East German adolescents who couldn't get coveted American jeans had to be satisfied with baggy synthetic imitations made with typical socialist skill.

In one sad photograph illustrating socialist day care, five tiny girls and boys sit in a row on a collective potty, where they must stay until all have finished their "business." A Freudian criminologist blames this potty ritual for an outburst of adult "right wing extremism" in 1999, but you don't have to misread Freud to recognize cruel collective conformity.

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Report Finds Rampant Censorship at American Colleges and Universities

A report released today by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reveals that burdensome restrictions on speech are commonplace at America's colleges and universities. The report, entitled Spotlight on Speech Codes 2006: The State of Free Speech on Our Nation's Campuses, surveyed more than 330 schools and found that an overwhelming majority of them explicitly prohibit speech that, outside the borders of campus, is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

"There is a common misconception that `speech codes' are a thing of the past-a relic of the heyday of political correctness of the 1980s and 90s-but the public needs to know that speech codes are perhaps more pervasive and restrictive than ever," FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said.

FIRE's report is the most comprehensive effort to date to quantify both the number of colleges and universities that restrict free speech and the severity of those restrictions. The report surveyed publicly available policies at the 100 "Best National Universities" and at the 50 "Best Liberal Arts Colleges," as rated in the August 29, 2005 "America's Best Colleges" issue of U.S. News & World Report, as well as at an additional 184 major public universities. The research was conducted between September 2005 and September 2006. All of the policies cited in the report are available on FIRE's searchable speech codes database, Spotlight: The Campus Freedom Resource. The report's findings include:

* Public colleges and universities are disregarding their constitutional obligations. More than 73% of public universities surveyed maintain unconstitutional speech codes, despite numerous federal court decisions striking down similar or identical policies.

* Most private colleges and universities promise free speech, but usually do not deliver. Unlike public universities, private universities are not legally bound by the First Amendment. However, most of them explicitly promise free speech rights to their students and faculty. For example, Boston University promises "the right to teach and to learn in an atmosphere of unfettered free inquiry and exposition." Unfortunately, it also prohibits speech that would be constitutionally protected in society at large, such as "annoying" electronic communications and expressions of opinion that do not "show respect for the aesthetic, social, moral, and religious feelings of others."

Overall, the report reveals that more than 68% of the colleges and universities surveyed maintain policies that "both clearly and substantially restrict[] freedom of speech." Overbroad and vague speech codes from the 2005-2006 academic year include:

* Macalester College bans "speech that makes use of inappropriate words or non-verbals."

* Furman University bans any "offensive communication not in keeping with community standards."

* At the University of Mississippi, "offensive language is not to be used" over the telephone.

* The University of North Carolina-Greensboro prohibits "disrespect for persons."

At the report's conclusion, FIRE suggests several potential solutions to the problem of speech codes. As the report notes, many of the speech codes cited at public universities would likely not survive a legal challenge. FIRE's Speech Codes Litigation Project has already led to the demise of similar codes at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, Texas Tech University, Citrus College, and the State University of New York at Brockport. The report also suggests that public exposure is a highly effective weapon against speech codes, since "neither our nation's courts nor its people look favorably upon speech codes or other restrictions on basic freedoms."

"Speech codes have lost in the courts whenever they have been challenged, and they are a failure with the public who rightfully believe that colleges and universities rely on free speech in order to function. Speech codes should be relegated to the dustbin of history, and FIRE will keep fighting until they are gone," Lukianoff said.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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