Letters

Under a new New York State plan, education officials will drop student requirements to pass traditional Regents exams to graduate high school.

Last Monday, Education Commissioner Betty A. Rosa lauded this brainstorm, years in the making, as a “bold vision.” Adding insult to injury, Commissioner Rosa added that students will be required, because of federal mandates, to take exams in science, algebra and English, but not in history or government, since they are not mandated requirements.

This relentlessly pervasive dilution of our education standards has accelerated since the failed COVID policies. The continuing education degradation in our schools is creating a lost generation of learners.

One need look no further than our current crop of college students, who are so lacking in history and geography education, many have no clue what their protesting slogan “river to the sea” implies. The Israelites have occupied the Gaza region since before the Iron Age, over three millennia ago, yet today’s Palestinian occupants, led by Hamas, are sworn to eradicate a 3,000-year-old culture.

History and the recent atrocities perpetrated by Hamas are of no consequence to too many of these uninformed or sadly misinformed students. Their moral compass, powers of logic, reasoning and deduction are compromised by the liberal indoctrination of our schools and universities. Removing educational rigor and the basics of history and civics from our school curriculums will further accelerate this educational decline.

Our current educators are rapidly becoming activist ideologues, much to the chagrin of parents, with an ever-growing parental awareness of the inadequacies of our school curriculums. Revealed during COVID, when online classes were observed by parents, they were shocked at what their children were being taught at schools. Critical race theory and recent sweeping transgender policies secretly being promoted while deliberately hidden from the parents reflects the serious decline in responsible education.

Progressive educators and policy-makers rail at conservatives for limiting reading materials to age-appropriate bookshelves, a reasonable demand given the sexual content that is now being allowed in school libraries. The irony here is that those most responsible for our children’s education — the liberal educators, librarians and libraries — are accusing the offended parents and conservative politicians of censorship and fascism.

These educators are the same folks who removed such childhood classics as “Huckleberry Finn” and Dr. Seuss from their bookshelves. Political correctness required that Dr. Seuss’s publishers stop printing six of the author’s classics. You couldn’t make this up and have it believable, but the liberal woke are once again trying to rewrite history to suit their diversity equity and inclusion agenda. To facilitate their warped agenda, they readily shout the epithet “fascist,” those evil monsters from history, imagining themselves as the virtuous defenders of truth.

John Porta

Westhampton