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Scholastic Shenanigans: Is There a Fairy Tale for Political Indoctrination?
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A tip from a reader lead to this story about a Metropolitan State College of Denver adjunct professor, Andrew Hallam, who was using his position to bully students. (As if mandatory Multiculturalism classes weren't awful enough.)
"I was shocked, I thought holy cow, this is just an open door for him to discuss politics with us," Jana Barber first told CBS4 Wednesday, a student in the class.
Barber shared the class' first assignment with CBS4 Wednesday. Hallam asked students to write an essay to contradict what he called the 'fairy tale image of Palin' presented at the Republican National Convention.
Hallam also allegedly allows Republican students to be singled out and pilloried, while Democrat students are given a fair airing of views.
But on to the assignment.
While some 19th century German women wrote fairy tales that had a more feminist twist, the Fairy Tale Canon - as compiled and edited by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm - doesn't have much in the way of a woman outsmarting and out-campaigning men in her own clan to rise from being a mother of multitudes to a governor of a state with an approval rating near 86%.
But Grimm's Fairy Tales does give us models. On the downside they are either shrews or naifs. Neither of which applies, and wouldn't be the case, anyway, unless we are now to believe that Mr. Hallam was trying to talk up Ms. Palin.
On the upside, Grimm's women are models of virginal virtue, and while Ms. Palin may rightly be considered virtuous (it's not easy to keep and raise a Down Syndrome child), one could hardly call her the other.
And no one has, so no fairy-tale / real-life contradiction there.
Many fairy tale women are objects of beauty waiting for the right man to come save them. Certainly Ms. Palin is even more pretty than the Junior Senator from Illinois.* but the woman can shoulder a weapon quite nicely and looks rather fetching doing it. You can be fairly sure Mr. Obama's Palmolive hands have never seen a handgrip, and in spite of gun-grabbin' Joe Biden's recent claim that he loves him some sidearms, my bet is Ms. Palin easily gets a tighter pattern.
In Grimm, the hunters are men. But Ms. Palin doesn't need to wait for the woodsmen to kick in the door - she advocates shooting wolves from the air.
Lastly, Grimm offers us a woman regarded for being saintly in suffering.
Ms. Palin has suffered an endless series of lies, smears, distortions and scurrilous attacks on her character (some possibly supplied via Mr. Obama's own Chief Media Strategist in coordination with a staunchly Democratic-leaning PR firm, an act which if proven true is in violation of FEC laws), she has maintained an almost unheard of ability to keep smiling and campaigning.
She is certainly less flummoxed by personal attacks than, say, the Junior Senator from Illinois.
So, again, no contradiction there.
Perhaps Mr. Hallam could be more clear about which fairy tales he had in mind, being an adjunct professor of English. But then, that would cut into his time being a political inquisitor.
*Is it just me, or does Mr. Obama's allergic reaction to Ms. Palin resemble a metrosexual who finds himself in the company of a more comely woman - one who isn't attracted to pretty talkers with shea butter softened hands?
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