A Tucson, Ariz. educator made an alarming discovery when he entered his classroom recently. He found a poster hanging on the wall stating that the Second Amendment only grants Americans the right to keep and bear arms “in certain situations.”
The teacher, Brad McQueen, now observes that it’s “not only textbooks, but even posters [that] need careful scrutiny,” according to an article he wrote for EAG News.
The Arizona Foundation for Legal Services and Education created and distributed the poster with the intent to explain the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights in a way that was “kid friendly.” But the group distorted the Second Amendment’s meaning in the process.
“You have the constitutional right to, in certain situations, [to] ‘keep and bear arms’ without government interference,” the full text reads.
McQueen wrote:
The description of the Second Amendment should have read, “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Exactly who will be determining the “situations” in which U.S. citizens will be able to bear arms? Why were the original words of our Founding Fathers not good enough for this poster?
McQueen, who authored the book, The Cult of Common Core: Obama’s Final Solution for Your Child’s Mind and Our Country’s Exceptionalism, is no fan of the Common Core standards of instruction and testing. He observed:
When I was working on the Common Core test last year, the PARCC [Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers] exam, I was told that the new Common Core way of writing and thinking demands that kids cite the “experts” in the texts that are presented to them on the exam when writing their essays and not rely on their own thinking or opinions.
I was told that if they wrote about their own opinions or their own thinking that they would fail the Common Core test.
The “experts,” in this instance, I would argue would be the framers of the Constitution itself–particularly the Second Amendment. But “What if a teacher used the ‘expert’ opinion put forth on the erroneous U.S. Constitution poster?” McQueen asked.
“With a few small changes in wording to our founding documents, kids would be presented with quite a different view of their rights guaranteed in those same documents,” he concluded.
He caught the error in time and brought it to the attention of his class. He wrote:
The kids in my class were furious and I liked that they were furious. It shows that our kids are still independent thinkers. However, as Common Core takes hold that will all be changing soon and perhaps in just one generation.
While it’s admirable that McQueen took steps to correct the erroneous wording on the poster, one can’t help but think of the hundreds of other teachers who have the same poster hanging on their classroom walls.
