Simple curiosity inspires me to wonder when the ‘Bar of Standards’ began being lowered. As you know we started writing about this notion of declining standards from day one. We began with standards in the classroom and education and as a result we went further into the family.
Actually there had been so much talk about ‘teaching to the test’ by those who knew nothing about a State’s Standards of Learning that we felt that before parents began participating in the ‘rumor-mill’ they should at least know something about how these standards are manipulated.
And as we continued, readership widened as did participation by just about everyone who read what we had been writing; moreover, our readership began contributing all sorts of wonderful material. In particular, one reader sent us a letter written by Theodore Roosevelt addressing immigration and assimiliation.
“In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American…
There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile…We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language…and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”
…Theodore Roosevelt, 1919
Somehow when President Theodore Roosevelt originally stated this I believe he was politically correct; what do you think?
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