Paul, my boo boo as I meant fiction but since the book is about the “future”, you can never really be sure that it won’t have a basis in reality. BTW, “credulity”? I didn’t say the article was true so your really stretching to justify this.

So teachers ARE giving the test! …just not for the reasons that the conspiracy people suggest. Of course just because the intended context is for Julius Caesar doesn’t mean that every teacher uses it for that reason…

Don’t I know that, but still I try and put my view forward as much as possible even though I’m in the minority here.

A well known fable is called Peter and the Wolf. As I’m sure everyone is aware of the story, I won’t repeat it. The moral of the story is to NOT claim there is a danger just for a whim. It might backfire on you. An example of this was, I believe in 2004, when the Attorney General, Ashcroft advised us that there was a terror alert. He suggested we barricade ourselves in a room, cover it with plastic sheeting and cover all cracks with duct tape. As soon as it became apparent that this would asphyxiate you in a short time, depending on the room size did people start realizing that this was a farce. Now people will not believe any warning from the government unless they see actual terrorists outside their window.

By publishing a hoax, it lessens the impact of the true violations of our civil liberties. Soon, people will ignore true infringements of their freedoms because they won’t believe it or have become too numb to care.

The subject matter should be why would someone make up a story like this in the first place. Save your wrath for the true stories.

What’s most ironic is that in the early days of our Constitution, the right answers would have been to overthrow a bad nonrepresentative government but now anything less than full support of everything the government does is considered negative. The right answers all depend on who is asking the question and not the question itself.

Let’s try a little logic here. There are four possibilities stemming from the information in the blog.

1. The student fabricated the story for unknown reasons.
2. The mother fabricated the story for unknown reasons.
3. The blog fabricated the story to generate controversy and hits.
4. The school did indeed submit such a survey to its 10th grade students.

So just using straight probability, there is only one chance in four of this story actually being true. Given the total absence of any outside corroboration (do you really think CNN would fail to cover it was it true?) and the nature of the website reporting it (prisonplanet.com), I apply my own subjective intelligence and conclude: hoax.

Now maybe your threshold for incredulity is far below mine. Or maybe you just wanted to generate your own hits by posting a likely fabrication. But why did you slander an entire state for the alleged incident involving one school?

“Washington State Schools Give Weird Patriotism Tests to Students?”

Had you simply dropped the plural, I wouldn’t have had a problem with the “interesting” post. By expanding the alleged incident to the entire state and then including the Nazi reference photo, your site was deliberately sending its own political message based upon what I perceive as a lie. I guess that makes me a stiff.

As a side issue, John, why did you place my name in quotes? Do you refer to all those who comment in quotes — “Mike,” “dvorak reader,” “Jim,” “Rob,” “darkmane” — or were you inferring (LOL) that I was hiding behind a fictitious moniker?

Smith is my name. I could include my first, but you still wouldn’t know who I am. However, someone at work might and I would hate to flag the IT police. I suppose I really could just sign in under a fictitious name … Steve, is “Imafish” available?

Also, the handwriting on that test is WAY to good to belong to your average student.

paul t

I am unfamiliar with zim’s History text books. What is wrong in them? I couldn’t find any history texts by anyone named zim during a quick search.

This doesn’t smell like a hoax, it smells like someone is doing a sociology study or something on the side as a prelude to a book or a research paper. Of course if we were to take “Smiths” advice we wouldn’t run it. Needless to say, we are running what we think is interesting whether stiffs like Smith like it or not. Reality sorts itself out by itself as these events unfold.

An individual teacher imposing her agenda on her students, and other isolated incidences, has an entirely different issue from have the government controlling the curriculum.

The tendency of people with power is to want more power. This is unavoidable and recognized truth that drove the desire to place Constitutional restraints on the government. What better way to increase the size and power of government than to have it in charge of educating all children? Once you have taught a few generations of citizens that the government is the solution to all problems, while de-emphasizing the self-sufficient nature of early Americans, you will be almost certain to have an exceptance of an ever-expanding governmental power, married with the restring of individual freedoms those powers require.

If true then how do you explain the story of a school teacher who made all her student write anti war letters.