Public School Memories

*ghost posted by matthew, while American Texan’s hand is recovering

From this Sunday’s Luann comic:

The memories are not fond, and their benefit is that they are short.

Achieved: Homogeneous Mediocrity

Watching a British humor bit on politics and the education system (a real gem you’d get a laugh out of along with some insight on how to argue for school choice and a minimized Department of Education, read on for the links), it struck me that the great American Education system is an exercise not in excellence or even equality, but mediocrity.

Pushed upon us with the rationale that forgotten corners of America would be educated, that a standardized system would raise all schools to a uniformity of excellence and achievment on par with the best schools in the nation.

Instead, the poor and those who don’t care languish in the scum of poor teachers and poorer facilities, while those who care and those who can, pay for private schools to do their best upon their children.

There is no basis within a non-competitive system for any to excel. Teachers are protected by Unions from having to strive for real excellence and can instead coast on ignorance while their pupils languish in the squalor of low expectations and high bills.

The centralized system is capable only of moving quickly only in the direction of untested and untried educational philosophy promoted by pawns and peons of pop-culture, and is incapable of modifying itself to special circumstances and situation unique to each neighborhood and city.

The monolithic education system is shown to be a false hope by the very awards it offers. Principles, administrators, and teachers who buck the system, go far beyond the call of duty (or their contract) to achieve real results are rewarded instead of expected. The system has not helped them and only pay lip-service to their triumph over it.

The solution? Privatise and allow competition to take over the system. It may be (slightly) humorous, but the truths you’ll hear in the four videos linked below will encourage you.

The National Education Service - 1 of 4
The National Education Service - 2 of 4
The National Education Service - 3 of 4
The National Education Service - 4 of 4

10,000 Lies

Does the truth we find in this humor scare anyone else?

I’ve had the following images floating around on my computer for a while, waiting for me to actually post them. It seems to me, in their attempt to paint the liberal and Democrat as the loving, caring, truly human leadership, anybody with a mind will recognize the fallacies and dangers of the blanket statements made in this children’s book.

Children reading this book will be cursed with the feeling there is actual truth to be found in the ideas. They will accept without thinking the lies of socialism and liberal socio-political theory and practice.

Read and weep for America.

What parent wants their children to hurt?

What parent tries to protect the children from the pains of life?

What parent can?

Laudable.

But given the current state of Political-Business relations, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say: “Democrats give the Police Officers’ and Firefighters’ Unions the tools they need to keep dead weight and stupid policies in place hampering the heroes efforts, abilities, skills, and desires to serve as they are called”?

And I would want my children to go to those war-zones, indoctrination facilities, stupid-makers, great-levellers of the people they call schools?

I know what they mean is that we can all go to college. But 1) where is that a constitutional right or a universal requirement, and 2) aren’t there plenty of great colleges for cheap?

There are plenty of jobs in which one can work their way up to a comfortable level of pay which require no college. And the government has neither interest nor right to take money from those who aren’t going to college to give to those who are.

Maybe if there were less “free” money floating around from the government, the cost of education would come down, and only those dedicated and intelligent people would stay in teaching as it became less of a lucrative career option.

Democrats are government, not Mommy. This is a legitimate role for Mommy, not government.

To the extent that Democrats seek to usurp this role, they confuse the nature of society and culture. This is immoral.

Pompous, self-aggrandizing, megalomaniacal do-gooders!

Show me someone who believes this and I’ll show you someone certifiably insane.

First, there is no proof the Earth is “sick” with Global warming. There is proof there are regular and natural cycles of warming and cooling, and there is not proof we are even in a warming cycle.

Second, the temerity of the writer and those who agree with him in assuming a political party which has existed a mere 200 years has the might to enact significant change in an entire planet which they believe has existed 4.5 Billion years.

Someone call the nice men in white coats.

False.

The truth is, Democrats make sure schools cannot fire bad teachers. Democrats make sure children know all about condoms and how to have sex with each other, leaving it to the parents to teach reading and writing and true morals.

Individually, Democrats are generally caring people. But are they busy loving people to hell?

UPDATE:

These are not parodies, these are selections from one of two books for children:

Why Mommy Is A Democrat & Why Daddy Is A Democrat

Anyone, Anyone?

Ben Stein is Expelled.

Asking Too Much

Over at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation blog, Lynn Harsh presents a reasonable argument which will be dismissed as all the others which come against the entrenched and combined strength of the public education establishment and the teachers unions.

What is so difficult to see and understand regarding the benefits that competition would bring to education.

Is it that difficult to see that on average private schools can do and have done more with significantly less money than the public schools?

Is it hard to stomach that the system is broken, and that pouring more money into it is NOT the solution?

Yes it is. Because it is lust for power that drives bureaucracies and unions, fueling and feeding their insatiable appetites. Power is as blinding as it is grasping.

My 3rd Essay Topic: American Paradox

I am now on my third essay in my English - so called - critical thinking class and after two previous essays about gender and Hollywood hero-myth I’m onto American culture paradoxes. Such paradoxes would be, “America’s curious dichotomy between cultural Puritanism and a capitalistic tendency,” and “The contradiction between America’s materialistic adoration of money and possessions and its profound commitment to religion and spirituality.” This article, which goes on to list three additional paradoxes, is just more disappointing drivel not unlike the other articles I’ve read in this required school book, “Signs of Life in the USA.”

This article is clearly over-simplistic and unreasonably concludes that it’s a paradox and puzzling. I am concurrently taking Western Humanities 300 which illustrates the cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Ancient Greece and Rome and the same “paradoxes” are clearly in each of these historical cultures. In any culture there is always a necessary and healthy tension between two poles and without this tension and balance the culture becomes very unhealthy. A reasonable example of this would be the Victorian Age of ultra-Puritanism or the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s; these are clearly sexual extremes. Another “paradox” of my own observation would be that of the American desire to be potent in the world’s affairs and a power for justice but then people’s concern and longing for the deployed men and women in arms. However, this is far to general and the fact this is the tension between the love for self and the love for the community. My cousin’s husband is deployed in Iraq currently and while I’m concerned for both of them, I also realize what he’s doing in Iraq is important for America. If I only cared for the individual I’d never condone war (protection of community) and if I only condoned war (at all costs) I’d undervalue the individual.

I am sure there are dozens of other examples but there’s a difference between hypocrisy and cultural tensions. These articles, always found wanting, are such typical liberal oversimplifications of “Signs of Life in the USA.” Another example that comes to mind that they can’t comprehend, due to their lack of moral compass, is the rational for being for the death penalty and against abortion. Nevertheless, if it weren’t for this book I probably wouldn’t appreciate well written books and well articulated arguments.

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, And The Relative

The Good:

Justice Clarence Thomas has been in the news recently because of a book he has written, a memoir of his life heretofore. He’s making the rounds of radio and TV talk shows and Rush and Hannity, Miller and others are uniform in their approbation of his story. And it is not just conservatives enjoying the narrative of this amazing life. Deborah Douglas of the Chicago Sun-Times, a self-described liberal who believes Anita Hill’s story regarding sexual assault by Thomas, has a few wise words of support and agreement with the aims of Thomas’ life:

…my elders always said, “You may not respect the person, but you have to respect his position.”

Thomas strikes me as trying hard to envision the day when race doesn’t matter, and he offers a strict approach to the Constitution that backs that up. He’s a firm believer in a meritocracy, which becomes devalued when clout, patronage and nepotism persistently usurp it.

The problem is that so many people feel that day is so far away, they can’t take a chance on a guy whose misplaced colorblindness could undo years of racial progress. A man who has tried so hard to flee the burden of race has found, perhaps, that burden is inescapable.

Compare this with the New York Times’ printing of a article by Prof. Anita Hill, one-time subordinate of then Mr. Thomas, in which she continues to maintain the veracity of her story against the oft-reviled Justice. For further enjoyment read the Letters to the Editor regarding Hill’s editorial.

The Bad:

Close to home, in Oak Park, IL a school thinks it can prevent walkway roadblocks and last-minute dashes to class by outlawing “group hugs” at the school. Umm… does this even need commentary?

What about punishing lateness to class. Not allowing ‘lip’ to teachers. Teaching academics instead of the worthless garbage required by so much state and federal oversight and union hand-tying. Creating an environment where learning is the method and creating intelligent, functioning humans is the goal.

Good friends of mine teach at a private school where there are few, if any, field trips, and the students learn classical Greek and Latin as regular parts of their curriculum. When asked when they get to have fun the students themselves respond that learning IS the fun.

Reading the article it seems as though assault and molestation seem to be part of the problem. There is not a right to education, if the person decides they would rather be bringing bombs or molesting others or anything which prevents others from getting the education they are trying to get, kick them out, and send their parents to school instead where they might learn how they need to challenge, lead, and discipline their children before sending them to school.

There are plenty of remedial education options for those who find they really need to learn what they thought they didn’t need to know earlier.

The Ugly:

Dad’s abdicating their responsibility in the home. Living a life of half-way fatherhood, being “men” when others are around and being craven power-whores when they don’t think others see. Yelling at wives and children, psychologically abusing those they’ve sworn to honor, cherish, serve and protect. Psychological abuse is as harmful, if not more so, than physical abuse. Scars on the skin fade with time, scars in the heart only heal with mercy, grace, and forgiveness.

Yes, that’s all I have to say.

The Relative:

Dawn Eden, author of “The Thrill Of The Chaste”, a book on the better way of chastity in today’s unchaste world, debated Virginia Vitzthum, author of “I Love You, Lets Meet”, a book on hooking up through personals ads. In response to a question from the audience regarding why Dawn feels as though she needs to “evangelize” Dawn answers that she is speaking from the position of one hurt by the lifestyle and now speaking against it to protect others. Virginia begins her response calling Dawn “sincere” as though she were some little child, but worse than the haughty snub is the relativist thought that what is right for Dawn isn’t right for everybody else.

One of the most pernicious lies of out time is that of relativism. Humans are relative in that we perceive things relative to other things. Darkness is the absence of light, cold feels more pervasive and “cold” when we’ve just come out of a warm shower, listening to loud noises and we have trouble hearing a whisper we could’ve heard without problem prior. Standards are not relative. Humans invent some standards, such as for gaging temperature, noise, and light, in order to empirically relate different things. But just as the pot has no control over the wheel which spins it and has no say with the potter in its construction, there are standards which govern humans and which brook no relativist comparison. One is either right or wrong (we as humans, being inside the system, often do not have the faculty for judging right and wrong accurately, we cannot measure motive, and therefore must rightfully leave such judgment to the one who created both the human and the standard), good or evil, pure or impure.

More On Kozol’s Partial Fast

I last wrote about Jonathan Kozol’s partial fast in protest of the ESED. Another blogger wrote this parody of his experiences… 

Jonathan Kozol’s Diary: Day 68
Slept well last night, rather better than the poor, inner-city children who will attend a rundown, decrepit school this morning with rats in the halls, raw sewage in the bathrooms, and poorly lit corridors that hide the corruption brought on by six years of the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind Act.

Got in the car and tuned in NPR, which had the latest news on the Congressional hearings on reauthorization of NCLB. The poisonous essence of this law lies in the mania of obsessive testing it has forced upon our nation’s schools and, in the case of underfunded, overcrowded inner-city schools, the miserable drill-and-kill curriculum of robotic “teaching to the test” it has imposed on teachers, the best of whom are fleeing from these schools because they know that this debased curriculum would never have been tolerated in the good suburban schools that they, themselves, attended.

I used that yesterday, but it’s still goooood. ☺

Stopped at Denny’s for the Lumberjack Slam®. Sent the third buttermilk pancake back for the demoralized teachers living in a state of siege, as well as the pressure to conform to teaching methods that drain every bit of joy out of the hours that their children spend with them in school.

Read more HERE.

The ESEA Circus Act

The U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor is holding hearings on the “Miller/McKeon Discussion Draft of ESEA Reauthorization.” Everyone has something to say about the law, so the hearings have morphed into a circus, including some of the most entertaining acts.

Announcer: “And so to your right, ladies and gentlemen, we have the epitome of flaming rhetoric, author Jonathan Kozol who has gone for 67 days without eating!”

Kozol: “This morning, I am entering the 67th day of a partial fast that I began early in the summer as my personal act of protest at the vicious damage being done to inner-city children by the federal education law No Child Left Behind, a racially punitive piece of legislation that Congress will either renew, abolish, or, as thousands of teachers pray, radically revise in the weeks immediately ahead.”

September 10, The Huffington Post

U.S.-American? At Least She Got That Right!

Is this a product of our education system?

She knew where she wanted to go, but didn’t quite know how to get there. She just had to get South Africa in there somewhere… and, “…such as, um…,” capitalize on the unpopularity of Iraq (Does she really know why we’re there?). Maybe all the detours distracted her.

But she got one thing right; we’re all U.S.-Americans.

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