All that was missing in a St. Lucie County, Florida kindergarten class was the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao

By Seth Richardson

From 1975 to 1979, Pol Pot and the communist Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia with a bloodied iron fist. Purges of intellectuals and the educated killed some two million people. Part of the Communist manifesto as practiced by the Khmer Rouge included Maoist “re-education camps” where intellectuals and educated persons were forced to “confess” their crimes of intellectualism and stand before the proletariat to be reviled and denounced. After this humiliation, the vast majority found themselves on their knees with a pistol at the back of their necks and ended up as just another corpse in the notorious killing fields of Cambodia.

The mantra of the Khmer Rouge towards those who were insufficiently obedient and collectivistic was “To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.”

Children were deliberately taken from their capitalistically-tainted parents (who were often killed), and brainwashed into Maoist communism and taught torture methods using animals. The Pol Pot regime drew heavily for it’s anti-intellectualism from the French Communist Party, under which Pol Pot studied before returning to Cambodia.

Lest anyone think that communism of the Pol Pot variety has not infected our pubic school systems, the cautionary tale of little Alex Barton of St. Lucie County, Florida indicates otherwise.

Alex is a troublesome child. Diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome, a form of autism, he’s been disruptive in his kindergarten classes. In response to this, his kindergarten teacher, Wendy Portillo, twice sent him to the principal’s office for discipline, but the third time Alex was disruptive, Portillo acted more like Pol Pot or Chairman Mao than a professional educator.

She reportedly stood a five-year-old boy with a learning disability up before the class and encouraged his classmates to revile him and tell how his behavior had affected them. According to the Associated Press, Alex was forced to “stand in front of his peers and be told why ‘they hated him’.”

Then in the finest Maoist tradition, she mandated a “vote” by his kindergarten classmates, who quite naturally voted to expel him from class. Portillo, a “professional” educator obviously knows how cruelly selfish and uncaring other five-year-olds can be, which apparently suited her desire for revenge upon the little reactionary traitor perfectly. The impact of being so thoroughly rejected by one’s classmates in such a fashion would certainly be emotionally devastating to any child, much less one suffering from a mental disability.

All that separates Portillo’s thirst for public humiliation and communist indoctrination from the Khmer Rouge are the killing fields, but the ideological intent is identical; humiliate and torture the victim, and further the conformist indoctrination of the rest of the class in the process. Like the Khmer Rouge, Portillo’s actions show that she cared nothing for the rights or dignity of the child as an individual, but rather she cared only for rigid order and proletarian conformity from her young charges, to be enforced by sacrificing the dignity of the standing nail.

As bad as the soul-searing humiliation she inflicted on Alex is the communist principle she she taught the other children in the class: Those who are different, those who do not conform and obey, those who stand above or apart from others, no matter the reason, will be hammered down into amorphous, cowed conformity or they will be destroyed. She powerfully demonstrated to her charges that they too are in danger of being mercilessly humiliated and driven out if they dare to disobey or disrupt her ideological indoctrination.

Portillo’s actions iconically demonstrate the depth of the infection of the Frankfurt School Marxist/communist educational philosophy in our public schools.

For those who don’t know what the Frankfurt School is, it’s a group of neo-Marxists and communists who formed the Institute for Social Research in Germany before WWII, who then imported this Marxist/communist political ideology to the United States in 1935, during the Progressive upswing of the FDR administration.

The Frankfurt School was first rooted at Columbia University, where it’s pernicious ideology was eagerly accepted by the Progressive academia of the time. The infection continues to spread and eats away at American education to this day, and it has an overwhelming influence on teachers and teacher’s unions nationwide.

Notable among Columbia’s radical revolutionary Marxist/communist educator alumni is Weather Underground terrorist bomber William Ayers, who obtained Masters of Education degrees in Early Childhood Education and Curriculum and Instruction from Columbia. It would be foolish to think that Ayers sought these degrees and spent his academic career affecting public education in this country because he loves children. He’s a hard-line, violence-loving Marxist radical who has said that he is willing to kill 25 million people in the name of his ideology. He alone has caused incalculable harm to the Republic and liberty through his position of academic authority in public education. And that’s no coincidence.

The Frankfurt School philosophy holds that the most effective way to bring about global Marxism and communism, and to destroy capitalism and liberty, is to infiltrate the educational system and progressively indoctrinate and brainwash our children into proper Marxist/communist thought patterns and behaviors.

Portillo’s example of this philosophy is a classic one.

The scary thing is, the Marxists are correct, that is precisely how global Marxism/communism will come to pass, and the evidence of the spreading infection is everywhere in our schools, including St. Lucie County schools, at the hands of people like Wendy Portillo and those who protect her.

The upshot of this event is mixed, but in main it’s a dismal result. Alex’s mother, Melissa Barton, sued Portillo, the school district and the teacher’s union. The case was recently settled, with $350,000 going to Alex and his mother. That’s wonderful for Alex and his mom, but what about the rest of the students in the district, particularly those in Portillo’s classes? Who will protect and de-program them?

You see, while Portillo served a one-year unpaid suspension in the case (some would call it a “sabbatical”), she is now back in the classroom, where she can easily infect more children with her pernicious ideology, and she didn’t have to pay a dime of the settlement out of her own pocket.

Worse, even though Schools Superintendent Michael Lannon recommended that Portillo be placed on a year-to-year contract, the school board reinstated Portillo’s tenure.

TCPalm reporter Colleen Wixon reports that Portillo’s attorney Allen Sang says that Portillo “…just want’s to teach kids,” and that “(Portillo) is just very happy to be back in the classroom doing what she loves to do.”

I’m sure she is very happy. But should she be allowed to do so? Any teacher who inflicts such devastating emotional and psychological harm on an entire classroom full of impressionable children has no business being in a classroom anywhere.

As a result of the settlement, neither the school district, the teacher’s union, nor Portillo admitted any wrongdoing, so there is no official record of a judgment against them, which serves to whitewash Portillo and the union, thereby evading public scrutiny and opprobrium for their Marxist proclivities. This is an all-too-common result.

So, as in most of the rest of the country, where leftist teachers and teacher’s unions protect Marxist/communist ideology and indoctrination techniques however they can, including by settling complaints using taxpayer hush-money, the children of St. Lucie County, Florida, will continue to be taught to be good, obedient little Marxist proletarians, or else, and the Frankfurt School plan to enslave our children will go on unabated and unchallenged.

© 2010 Altnews

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