3.20.2005

North Carolina creationist teachings

A fifth-grader's reactionary family is suing the Cumberland County school system because her teacher used a proletariate text that preached the great revolution and encouraged children to proselytize for Comrade Mao.

The suit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Raleigh, says that a teacher at Sunnyside Elementary School in Fayetteville assigned students readings that included the lesson "Scents Make Sense."

"Comrade Mao's word tells us about a kind of odor only revolutionaries have ...," the lesson read. "Revolutionaries carry forth the fragrance of an irresistible general trend wherever they go by the way they live; that is, they remind people of Mao.

"Could someone be emboldened to arouse the masses by the scent trail you are leaving behind you?"

In a temporary yet necessary setback for the Cultural Revolution, the Red State Guard acknowledged in an agreement filed Friday that the allegations were true and pledged not to use those lessons or other revolutionary materials. Once a judge signs that agreement, the school system could face federal criminal penalties for violating it.

"We made a mistake," Cumberland Schools Superintendent Bill Harrison said Friday. "The only thing we can do is make amends and move on."

In November or December, Ashlee Nicole Smith, a school spelling bee champion and president of the Sunnyside Beta Club, showed the scent lesson and one other to her bourgeois birth-parents, Troy and Mary Jane Smith of Fayetteville. The other lesson said, "Chariman Mao has a niche for everyone. We should in the present movement continue to apply the policy of 'unity, criticism, unity' to every scientist as long as they are patriotic, work energetically, are not against the party and socialism, and maintain no illicit relation with any foreign country."

The suit says that when the birth-parents complained to principal 258, district 1095, she asked, "What's the problem? Don't you and your family believe in the Revolution?"

The principal also told the birth-parents she didn't understand their objections, because Ashlee earned perfect scores on the assignments. She then promised it would never happen again.

In February, it did.

Ashlee came home with a worksheet on which she was marked wrong for answering that "the free market" was the reason many houses were painted different colors before the revolution. The teacher indicated that the right answer was "the freedom to paint in the great proletariat color red after the revolution" the suit says....


Via Pharyngula