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Comments on our school system!
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Warning! You're probably not gonna like what you read here! |
Some pelple can't handle it. Some people get insulted because they're proud of their "education." After all, they spent a fortune on it -- and they and still owe a ton of money and interest. Frankly, I wouldn't blame you for getting very upset. You might just want to click away to another site.
You might say, "Mike, this is so negative!" Yes, the comments below are VERY negative. These comments are made by professors & teachers, authors & journalists, judges, business owners, and more.
If you're like me you'll say, "The school system has become evil and corrupt. It's time to take back OUR school system from government, politicians, career criminals, and union thugs!"
Read on! Look it over and you'll know why my bumper sticker says:
PROUD PARENT:
My kids don't go to government schools!
(PS: I am not anti-government. We need government as spelled out by the Constitution FOR the United States of America. But, I am anti-crime-syndicate.)
"If you trust journalism or the professional educational establishment to provide you with data you need to think for yourself in the increasingly fantastic socialist world of compulsion schooling, you are certainly the kind of citizen who would trade his cow for a handful of colored beans." -- John Taylor Gatto
NINE ASSUMPTIONS OF SCHOOLING -- and Twenty-one Facts the Institution Would Rather Not Discuss by John Taylor Gatto
Find out how Establishment Education works - and WHY! Click this link (PDF file) --> how mind control is as pervasive and commonplace as those bright yellow school busses that come for our children each weekday morning. An Interview with John Taylor Gatto, Teacher of the Year, (New York, 1989), Author of Dumbing us Down.
"Rather than fostering a climate of open inquiry, college campuses have become fascist colonies of anti-American hate speech, hypersensitivity, speech codes, banned words and prohibited scientific inquiry."-- Ann Coulter
"Academic freedom is not only meant to protect professors; it is also supposed to ensure students' right to learn without being molested. When instructors use their classrooms to indoctrinate and propagandize, they cheat those students and betray the academic mission they are entrusted with. That should be intolerable to honest men and women of every stripe -- liberals and conservatives alike."
--Jeff Jacoby
"We live in a time of great school crisis. Our children rank at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic. At the very bottom..."
Why Schools DonÕt Educate (PDF file) by John Taylor Gatto
"If you don't like living in a divided country, all you have to do is get yourself appointed to the university faculty somewhere and you will be able to experience the joys of living in a one-party state."
--James Taranto
How might we dull a glistening nation?
(from The Monday Morning Memo by Roy H. Williams)1. Pay the dullest and least impressive to educate the children.
2. Create a system of teaching that judges everything as "correct" or "incorrect." This will allow the dull and unimpressive to easily grade the children's tests.
3. Discourage exploration.
4. Reward conformity. Teach that inside the box is good.
5. Celebrate sports. Make sure the children understand that taller, stronger kids have natural advantages that cannot be overcome. Build stadiums and hire announcers to shout the names of students who display physical dominance.
6. Minimize school concerts and science fairs and art shows. Treat them as though they're for losers. Have them in the school cafeteria.
Follow these 6 Simple Steps and you can expect:
1. Drop-Outs. Currently, 38 percent of America's children are dropping out of high school and that number is rising.
2. Cloned Repetition. Have you noticed that every mall has exactly the same stores as every other mall and that every city has all the same restaurants?
3. Death of Industry. The cars of once-mighty GM and Ford no longer excite us. We want cars designed by the children of foreigners.
4. Street Gangs. If school taught us anything, it's that physical dominance is the key to reward. More
"The single most prevalent form of child abuse in this country is the act of sending a child to a government school. We worry incessantly about the separation of church and state. We would do well to devote half as much attention to the separation of government and education. I absolutely believe that the biggest crisis facing this country today is government education.
"American parents have surrendered their responsibility for the education of their children to government -- and increasingly to the Imperial Federal Government. The results aren't good."
-- Neil Boortz
"Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers."
-- Thomas Hodgskin 1823
"Our freedom is not being destroyed by terrorists, but by ignorance, apathy and complacency. Our government schools are to blame. ... Our dumbing down is not accidental but a very well organized plan."
--Kelly McGinley
"Politicians have a field day misleading Americans who, as a result of having been dumbed down by our education system, can't think, reason or analyze."
--Walter Williams
Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
-- Joseph Stalin
"...countries which, like the United States, have set up a considerable popular instruction without any serious higher education, will long have to expiate their error by their intellectual mediocrity, the vulgarity of their manners, their superficial spirit, their failure in general intelligence..." The Theory of Education in the United States by Albert Jay Nock
A must-read. (Click the link to download the PDF file.) Read how mind control is as pervasive and commonplace as those bright yellow school busses that come for our children at 8 AM each weekday morning.
An Interview with John Taylor Gatto, Teacher of the Year, (New York, 1989), Author of Dumbing us Down.
Indoctrinate U: The Ugly Truths About Academia
Legal Award-winning filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney's new documentary film, Indoctrinate U, reveals the ugly truths about academia that you won't see in glossy admissions brochures. Speech codes. Censorship. Sensitivity training. Enforced political conformity. Intolerance. Hostility to religion. Violations of freedom of speech and conscience. Kangaroo courts.
We usually associate such things with the repressive regimes of North Korea, China, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union. But instead, this assault on free thought is taking place all over America -- right now -- on our nation's campuses. Hard-hitting and humorous, the film tells the story of how, in the name of education, schools from coast to coast ruthlessly compel conformity of thought. By exposing the dirty little secrets of higher education, this film has the potential to force the kind of change academics have long pretended they don't need to make. You can help to bring about this change by watching the movie trailer and signing up for a screening in your area. Watch the trailer and sign up to help bring a screening of Indoctrinate U to your home town now.
"Now there are literally tens of thousands of "hard-line Marxists" in academic sinecures. They have made universities 'a subsidiary of the political left and the Democratic Party.'"These hard-core leftists have no shame about using the classroom podium for political speechmaking. They may be teaching a course in biology or Shakespeare, but that doesn't inhibit them from launching into tirades against American policies or in favor of the Communists in El Salvador, or assigning students to write a paper on why George W. Bush is a war criminal.
"These radical leftists have redefined the mission of universities. Instead of the pursuit of knowledge and truth, universities today see themselves as agencies for social change.
-- Phyllis Schlafly
"A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body."
-- John Stuart Mill, 1859
"Too many suburban parents may be too easily satisfied that their schools are doing a good job because the students there score in the top 10 percent or 20 percent on standardized tests. Suburban schools may look good compared to inner-city schools, but both look bad compared to their counterparts in other countries."
--Thomas Sowell
"True education makes for inequality, the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius; for inequality, not mediocrity, individual superiority, not standardization, is the measure of the progress of the world."
-- Felix E. Schelling (1858-1945), U.S. Educator
"Instead of the liberating force it can be, public education is treated as a prize in a tug of war, one more monopoly to be protected against competition, just another source of political patronage."
--Paul Greenberg
"It's well past time for [Leftism] to be declared a religion and banned from public schools. Allowing Christians to be one of many after-school groups induces hysteria not just because liberals hate religion. It's because the public school is their temple. Children must be taught to love Big Brother, welcoming him to take over our schools, our bank accounts, our property, even our toilet bowls."
-- Ann Coulter
Washington's education establishment Posted: January 8, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
"Fiddling Whilst Rome Burns" was my column two weeks ago.
It looked at the disastrous state of education in the nation's capitol, where at only one of the city's 19 high schools do as many as 50 percent of its students test as proficient in reading. At no school are 50 percent of the students proficient in math. At 12 of 19 high schools, more than 50 percent of the students test below basic in reading, and at some of those schools it's almost 80 percent. At 15 high schools, over 50 percent test below basic in math. In 12 of them, 70 percent to 99 percent do so. [...] MORE
It was in 1983 that members of the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued a brutally honest report entitled "A Nation at Risk." The members of the commission wrote, "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might have viewed it as an act of war."
They are not "public schools." They are government schools. They are owned and operated by government. Every employee, from the superintendent to the dishwasher in the cafeteria, is a government employee. So, let's call them what they are. Government schools.
-- Neal Boortz, WorldNetDaily: Brainwashing 101
"Now, however, the educational system has become the weapon of choice for modern liberals in their project of dismantling American culture."
--Judge Robert Bork in "Slouching Toward Gomorrah."
THE VICIOUS GOVERNMENT-CONTROL CYCLE:
Government-controlled schools
use government-controlled teachers
to produce government-controlled students
who breed government-controlled families
that demand government-controlled schools.Government "Standards" are sub-standard.
Government schools vaccinate students with a lame virus called "education" to immunize them against real learning. For example: "Democracy" is a code word for socialism. "Peace" is the absence of resistance to socialism.
Government schools are not only breeding illiteracy among students, they are obviously subsidizing it among teachers and administrators.
Socialist Security System (SSI):
Being looted your entire life,
Rewarded late in life with loot,
Stolen from your own children.
Your kids are being deceived by government propagandists. They are being misled by statist evangelists. They are being corrupted by moral relativists. They are being seduced by the popular culture.
--Joseph Farah
"The per-pupil cost of public schools averages $6,000, compared with $3,100 for private schools. In other words, all else being equal, we could abolish all public schools and the taxes that support them tomorrow, let the market replace them with private schools, and cut the total cost of education by nearly half. Why isn't this done? The short answer is that there are many people on the payroll of the education bureaucracy who would be unhappy."
--Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Attorneys General sued and fined prominent banks and universities ... widespread collusion and conflicts of interest ... to sell college students high-priced student loans... to give students a "preferred lenders" list [meaning] the private institutions the university preferred you to use because it meant kickbacks, gifts and expense-paid trips for them in referral rewards... the students were often not informed of the array of Federal loans that should be exhausted first. Seems some universities slept through their own Intro to Ethics classes. (Can you say, "Economic Slavery"?)
"In one century we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to offering remedial English in college."
--Joseph Sobran
"Parents who spend $30,000 or more a year to provide their offspring a prestigious education at an Ivy League school are almost certain to be buying their sons and daughters a first-class indoctrination into radical left-wing ideology -- from which they may never recover. It is not exactly news to find that many of the professors at schools such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton don't think like most mainstream Americans, and make no effort to disguise their contempt for Western culture, religious faith, patriotism and capitalism. They fuzzily believe that Communism or something like it should probably be given another chance."
--Linda Bowles
[...] For example, there is no provision in the entire Constitution for the federal government to be engaged in any way in the education of "We The People" living within the several states. None. Zippo. Try to find it. Time's up. Don't bother looking. It ain't there.
But in spite of that clear fact, every weekday morning millions of yellow government trucks hijack millions of young and highly impressionable future production units and ship them to thousands of government processing centers where trillions of neurons are carefully rearranged to conform to patterns predetermined by benevolent Central Planners. [...]
Standing behind the children are teachers, the true perpetrators of the crimes abounding in the nation's educational system.
What is the crime? American children can't write, according to a giant national study released by the U.S. Department of Education. Only one in four can put together a paragraph or two proficiently enough to succeed in school or future jobs.
The report was issued by the Education Department's National Assessment of Educational Progress and contained the results of testing 60,000 students in public and private schools at the 4th, 8th and 12th grade levels. Supplementing this sample, 100,000 8th graders in 35 states, the Virgin Islands and schools operated around the world by the Defense Department were separately tested.
California did less than average and scored lower than Texas and New York, states that are comparable in population diversity.
"The Average or typical American student is not a proficient writer," summed up Gary W. Phillips, acting chief of the National Center for Educational Statistics, an office in the U.S. Department of Education.
Even below the average incompetent writing American student is the California student. 56% of California students wrote at basic level and 24%, 25% worse...
The proof is massive and overwhelming that Whole Language has caused a literacy catastrophe among the school children of California. The March 7, 1996, issue of L.A. Weekly reported,
"In the eight years since whole language first appeared in the state's grade schools, California's fourth-grade reading scores have plummeted to near the bottom nationally, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Indeed, California's fourth-graders are now such poor readers that only the children in Louisiana and Guam -- both hampered by pitifully backward -- are worse.
A true monopoly has government force behind it
(like government schools)
and can charge highest prices for shabbiest goods
(like government schools).
The wrong path to reform
The big conundrum after the collapse of the Soviet Union was how to move from socialism to capitalism.
The U.S. faces the same problem now with the public-school system...
With the newest report that most high school graduates can't even write a coherent sentence, what else are we to conclude? ...how are we to manage the transition from a communist system of education to something else? ...
"You know the National Education Association (teachers union) and all the state affiliates are gnashing their financial teeth over the success of students not subjected to the NEA, et al., dumbing down agenda. I repeat: Get government OUT of education and everything else it has stuck its unwanted tentacles into.
"The 'helping hand' of government is the one that helps you into the pit of slavery and stupidity."
--Jackie Juntti
"The NEA, which has demonstrated high marks only for dumbing down an entire generation of government school students, now wants to license parents to teach their own kids... The DNC apparently agrees wholeheartedly with the NEA fascists... the DNC is warning that 'Texas is lenient on home-schoolers.' ...[that means] home-schooling has not yet been criminalized in the Lone Star State."
--Joseph Farah
American public schools glamorize AID education, death education, sex education, and suicide education--instead of educating children by demanding that they learn to read, write and do arithmetic. The result is what one would expect.
--Thomas Szasz in The Untamed Tongue, p. 35.
Why is it that today's public schools increasingly offer -- in place of the rigorous academic and moral instruction of yesteryear -- multiculturalism, situational ethics, drug education, sex education, death education, sensitivity training, gay studies, condoms, look-say rather than phonics, behaviorism, cooperative learning, outcome-based education, Skinnerian mastery learning, magic circles and transcendental meditation?
Why is it that, according to the U.S. Department of Education, 90 million American adults can barely read or write?
And why is it that, in 1996, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) was re-normed because scores had dropped so dramatically since the average (or norm) was established in 1941 that the disparity became embarrassing to the educational establishment?
"The lies will continue as long as we have a system that perversely encourages the worst among us to rise to positions of power. As long as the government monopoly on education continues, the lies of the State will continue to be drilled into the soft, mushy heads of our nation's youth. No tactic will be considered verboten as long as it seeks legitimacy among the "docile and gullible."
MBA programs can cost more than $100,000
ANALYSIS: 40 YEARS RESEARCH ON MBS'S ECONOMIC VALUE"A business degree does not guarantee a successful career or a higher salary... Little of what is taught to students in business school prepares them for the corporate workplace... Rather, students are paying for prestigious names to add to their resumes and the opportunity to network with like-minded colleagues... The simplest advice is that if you don't get into a leading business school, the economic value of the degree is really quite limited... "
-- Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford University business professor
Our public schools are filled with substandard math teachers who never took math in college, French teachers lecturing about biology, art teachers masquerading as history teachers, and other instructors who have absolutely no expert knowledge or intellectual curiosity about the subjects they've been assigned to teach.
This is a system whose first priority is self-preservation of its tax-subsidized employees, not academic enlightenment of its captive charges.
And they dare to accuse home schooling parents of educational malpractice?
-- Michelle Malkin, Crusading to keep kids clueless
In a July 16 memo, Deputy Superintendent Joanne Mendoza decreed that homeschooling is "not an authorized exemption from mandatory public school attendance."
Without the proper credentials, according to the missive, parents will no longer be allowed to homeschool their children and will be considered truant by local school districts.
The proper credentials? Think about this. They want parents, who are already doing a fantastic job educating their children, to descend to their level of incompetence by acquiring "professional teaching credentials."
"[...] The establishment wants to retain control over what goes into children's heads. In far too many cases, it teaches whole-language reading instead of phonics, multiculturalism Š which often means the evils of Western Civilization, political correctness, "diversity" and "tolerance," weird math and a distorted, anti-American view of American history.
Its byword should be "getting away from the basics."
The "enlightened" educators of California, for example, have no problem offering courses in the wonders of Islam, while strenuously blocking any utterance about Christianity. [...]"
-- David Limbaugh WorldNetDaily: Public education vs. homeschoolers
In fact, public schools are permeated with a philosophy summed up in the phrase, "Accuracy is not the name of the game."
Those are the actual words of Julia Palmer, president of the American Reading Council, an advocate of the whole-language approach to reading. She said that it was OK if a child read the word "house" for "home," or substituted the word "pony" for "horse." "It's not very serious because she understands the meaning. Accuracy is not the name of the game."
-- (Washington Post, Nov. 29, 1986) WorldNetDaily: How public schools are destroying the American brain
People have been trying "kinder and gentler" and "working within the system for modest rational reform" of the mandatory government youth propaganda camps for 100 years.
The camps just get bigger, more expensive, more arrogant, and less interested in passing along even basic historical literacy.
They have become the reproductive organ of the welfare/political state. They are the greatest enemy, bar none, to our desperately endangered traditions of liberty.
-- Vin Suprynowicz, The Ballad of Carl Drega (p. 458).
From Hypocrisy in 'American rights' groups © 1999 WorldNetDaily.com
"...It's apparent that the "American taxpayer" isn't getting a good deal when it comes to the nation's public schools. They're dangerous, unproductive, and little more than liberal/socialist indoctrination centers churning out thousands of new entitlement supporters every year. That's progress for you...
"If schools were run like businesses, where results-oriented CEO's replaced life-tenured and unmotivated school officials, most of them would have long since abandoned all the politically correct garbage being mandated by Washington, D.C.'s education bureaucracy.
They would have abandoned it because study after study has shown that those "teaching guidelines" simply don't work.
Kids graduating high school can't spell, can't form complete sentences, can't read, can't do math, and have little basic understanding of the arts, the classics, and the sciences.
Many don't do much better after graduating college; several large corporations have had to initiate remedial language arts and mathematics classes because their new college recruits couldn't function..."
The wire services are trying to drum up hysteria about a shortage of public-school teachers and school principals. It turns out that young people have developed other aspirations besides being slaves to the government and its brainwashing schemes.
They especially have no desire to enter into the administrative bureaucracy of a decaying system. The wages are tolerable and secure, but it's an awful way to fritter away one's talents.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste working for the government.
1999 -- BACK-TO-SCHOOL
"Since 1983, over 10 million Americans have reached the 12th grade without having learned to read at a basic level. Over 20 million have reached their senior year unable to do basic math. Almost 25 million have reached 12th grade not knowing the essentials of U.S. history. .. American 12th graders rank 19th out of 21 industrialized countries in mathematics achievement and 16th out of 21 nations in science. Our advanced physics students rank dead last."
--Former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett
Years of bad leadership produced KC school crisis, state official says By PHILLIP O'CONNOR - The Kansas City Star 10/14/99 22:15
Missouri Education Commissioner Robert Bartman admits he's a little fuzzy on what the future would hold for an unaccredited Kansas City School District.
But Bartman is crystal clear on how the district sank to this point.
He blamed unstable leadership, a bloated bureaucracy, a school board more interested in patronage than performance ... focused on integration rather than education.
"I know there is a lot of concern about the impact of having an unaccredited district," Bartman said Thursday in Kansas City. "But I would have hoped the concern would have been just as heightened knowing ... generations of kids who have gone through the schools without having the kind of intense focus on student performance.
"I know that the position of the state Board of Education is that the current levels of performance are unacceptable.... "
From: Title I: Not making the grade,
by Samuel L. Blumenfeld © 1999 WorldNetDaily.com
"...The government should get out of the education business.
"It has created a stranglehold monopoly that gives the American people the worst possible education at the highest possible price.
"Over $118 billion has been squandered on so-called compensatory education that has been a total bust as education, and there is no public outrage. Why?
"Because too many people in America have become as dishonest and hypocritical as their government. Or maybe they believe that with such good people as Bill Goodling in charge, Congress must know what it's doing...."
From WorldNetDaily.com
Monopoly education By P. Andrew Sandlin © 2000 WorldNetDaily.com
"...The modern state has become the largest legalized cartel in the world...Let's keep Microsoft intact...split up the modern state...
"...The secular statist elites believe that they know better than you do how to instruct and otherwise rear your children.
"They believe you are unfit. They believe that only education "professionals," the same ones who were indoctrinated in and certified by their own monopolistic secular schools, are qualified to teach your children.
"You are not qualified, because you do not have a degree in secondary education from Secular Statist Teachers College. They are contemptuous and patronizing...
Complete article at: Monopoly education
From News/Current Events News Source: repost from Washington Times Published: 9/28/99 Author: Michael Farris Posted on 10/16/1999 18:47:58 PDT by cornelis
Government Intervenes Too Often in Family Life What's the final verdict on HSLDA?
Neither the academic success nor the increasing popularity of home-schooling has deterred government officials from taking an incredibly aggressive approach at the beginning of this school year.
The Levittown, N.Y., school district reported the names of many home schoolers-including many who had complied fully with the burdensome paperwork requirements of New York law-to Nassau County Department of Social Services. In turn, the department mailed letters to the home-schooling families, advising them that they were being investigated for child abuse.
New York isn't the only place that officials donít seem to understand what constitutes child abuse. In Hickory, N.C., a 2-year-old girl slipped outside her family home about 7 a.m., apparently while searching for her pet cat. She had been alone in the yard for about four minutes when her older brother discovered his sister had acted with the typical 2-year-oldís lack of inhibitionóshe was naked at the time and brought her back inside. She never left the familyís property. She was not in the street. But, social services workers insisted on coming into the familyís home and interrogating this little girl concerning the incident.
It makes me wonder whether these social services workers have ever had a 2-year-old. They improperly assume that a parent is neglectful if a 2-year-old wanders and that they can get reliable information from a child this age.
To test this, I asked my 10th child, Peter, who is 2, if he remembered wandering outside naked chasing his kitty cat a few days earlier. Peter said, yes, even though we have no cat, and he has never wandered outside naked. I asked him if his daddy and mommy failed to watch him that morning. He said, ìOKî and started jumping across the kitchen floor, kangaroo-style.
In Edgemont, S.D., Paul and Debbie Nabholz were arrested, photographed, fingerprinted, booked, and then released. For what, you ask? For failing to give copies of their childrenís birth certificates to the school district. State law requires the parents to give a copy of a childís birth certificate to the childís school. Private schools keep the certificates for their students. In South Dakota, home schools are considered private schools and the Nabholzes believe they are in compliance with the law because they operate the childís school. I can understand a legal dispute over this issue, but arresting parents for it is the worst case of overkill I have seen in more than 17 years of defending home schoolers.
The superintendent in Watertown, S.D., wins an award for presumptuousness. Even though he has no authority under state law to subjectively evaluate the teaching ability of parents, he rejected one motherís application before she even filed it! He said, "I know her, she canít teach."
We are familiar with the classic fable of the man who murdered his parents and then threw himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan.
West Virginiaís Paw Paw Public Schools system seems to have adapted this lesson to its own use. Sharon Fravel withdrew her son from the public school on April 28 because he was simply not making suitable academic progress. He took a standardized achievement test on April 16-before to beginning home-schooling-and scored very low.
Even though his years of public schooling are the reason for his low scores, the school district has demanded that the boy return to the public schools for remedial education.
But why? It was public school instruction that failed.
The Vermont Department of Education is frustrating many families this year by refusing to approve academic programs deemed acceptable in previous years.
As you can see, at the Home School Legal Defense Association, we have our hands full. And there are other stories I could tell. If our experience is any indicator, many of these situations will be resolved when higher officials with cooler heads respond to our intervention on behalf of the families. But some of these cases will end up in court. I guarantee it. The association will sue some of these officials for civil rights violations.
It looks like an exciting school year ahead. I'll keep you posted. Michael Farris is the father of 10 home-schooled children and president of the Home School Legal Defense Association
REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES Tuesday, September 28, 1999 Page E5
What your kids should know
With public education what it is and American mainstream society teaching our children that mediocrity is king, here are a few rules that you might consider relaying to your kids, in order to combat the destructive nature of today's PC environment:
Rule 1: Life is not fair; get used to it.
Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will not make 40,000 dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping -- they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes. Learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes, and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades; they'll give you as many opportunities as you want to get the right answer. This, of course, doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.*
*From the book, "Dumbing Down Our Kids," by Charles Sykes; © 1996 St. Martin's Press.
Public schools are beyond reform and redemption
by Charley Reese, July 10, 2001Public education, or, more accurately, compulsory government education, is a failure. It should not cost half a trillion dollars a year to teach people to read and write, especially when even that effort is far from successful.
Back in the late 1800s, when compulsory government education was still a topic of debate, R.L. Dabney, a great Southern theologian, remarked, "If all you mean by education is teaching people to read and write, then all you will accomplish is to create a mass market for trash literature."
Fairly accurate prediction, I'd say, because America is the largest market in the world for trash literature, trash television and trash movies.
Some of the nation's highest paid heroes are barely literate, which can be verified by listening to almost any sports interview.
I have observed this process of decay since 1955. Certain things have always been constant. The cry is always: Give us more money and we will do the job. The educational bureaucracy has always been given more money, and it has a done a worse, not a better, job. Another constant has been that blame has been placed on everybody but the responsible parties -- students and their parents.
Learning, which is what students do or at least are supposed to do, is a subjective process. A child cannot be force-fed an education. If the desire is not there, if the willingness to work hard is not there -- yes, Virginia, learning is hard work -- there's not much the teachers can do about it.
Of course, the decay in the system is so pervasive that 60 percent of the college graduates in Massachusetts flunk the teacher-qualification exam. I have no doubt that Massachusetts will react in the typical way: either abolish the examination or water it down to the point that a moron can pass it.
I do not believe that compulsory government education can be reformed. I have long advocated that parents get their children out of it if they can find an alternative. I'm well aware that, in a nation with more than 15,000 separate school districts, there are some schools that do a fair job -- relatively speaking. Not one, I'm convinced, could stand a comparison with a typical school of 75 years ago.
The system today is a political system and, like everything else in our society, has been strangled by laws, rules and court orders. If you look at the areas left where a school-board member could actually make a decision, you find there practically are none. Hence, elected school boards have become, in effect, a cover for a bureaucracy that runs itself without any democratic input whatsoever.
Contributing to the unlikelihood of serious reform is the disunity in a country that is being destroyed by immigration and by a moronic native population conditioned to despise its own heritage.
Consequently, there is no consensus even on what education should accomplish. Business wants it to produce docile workers and mindless consumers. Various fanatics want it to produce cannon fodder for their respective ideological wars. Many parents just want public schools to baby-sit their brats so they can enjoy their soap operas in peace. In the meantime, colleges of education, better called institutions of no learning, are spreading the poison that education should be effortless and under no circumstances should any child have to earn self-esteem.
And, at the same time, in our litigation-mad society, teachers and administrators alike are paralyzed into inaction.
I have a friend, or at least an ex-friend, who is upset at my position on public education. He keeps sending me clips about good teachers. All he is doing is reinforcing my position.
The people in the gigantic educational bureaucracy who have the least influence on the system are the classroom teachers. There isn't a one of them who doesn't know that if they speak about what's wrong with the system, they do so at the jeopardy of their jobs. They will either be fired or exiled to some educational equivalent of Siberia, and every school district has such a place.
I wish I could just say: Put your children in a private school. Unfortunately, when a culture is poisoned, the poison spreads to all its institutions, both public and private. In other words, not all private schools are any better than the public ones.
In the meantime, don't be fooled by cries for more money or promises of more reforms. Unless you see colleges of education (the source of a lot of nonsense) shut down, the federal Department of Education abolished and the compulsory-attendance laws repealed, you will know the reforms are a sham.
There are simply too many people with a vested interest in getting their share of that half-trillion dollars. They aren't about to change the gravy train, and to hell with what it does to your children.
Reach Charley Reese at 407-420-5315 or creese@orlandosentinel.com.
Copyright © 2001, Orlando Sentinel
THE STATE LOTTERY CON JOB
State lotteries were sold to voters as a means of raising revenues -- often to help fund government schools without raising taxes. After lottery fever cooled, however, most states found themselves spending heavily on advertising to lure new players ~and~ raising taxes.
And in the end, government schools are no better off for having state lotteries, according to economist Michael Heberling.
"In spite of all the rhetoric to the contrary, the states have been unable to deliver on their promise to increase spending on education by adopting the lottery," writes Heberling. "Ironically, states ~without~ lotteries actually maintain and increase their education spending more than states ~with~ lotteries," writes Heberling in the spring 2002 issue of THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW.
Heberling also found that:
- "The state lotteries spent $400 million on advertising and other promotion costs in 1997." State lottery slogans include such idiocies as "Work is nothing but heart-attack-inducing drudgery" (Massachusetts), "How to get from Washington Boulevard to Easy Street" (Chicago's Washington Blvd. is located in a depressed Westside neighborhood) and "His [Martin Luther King's] vision lives on . . . honor the dream -- D.C. Lottery" (Washington, D.C.).
- "State lotteries seldom list the odds of winning and encourage players to minimize regret. "The lotteries can get away with misleading advertisements because the state governments serve as both promoter and regulator; hence, there is no one to protect that consumer from abuses by the state. With respect to the lottery, government is no longer even pretending to 'stand up for the little guy.' Instead, it is preying on the elderly and the poor with a state-sponsored get-rich-quick scam." States are exempt from fraud prosecutions by the Federal Trade Commission.
- "The short-term influx of lottery revenues leads to wasteful spending that is later funded by tax hikes after lottery fever cools. "Legislators keep their fingers crossed and hope that nobody remembers that the lottery was supposed to have made additional taxes unnecessary." Connecticut, in fact, "enacted the state's first income tax even though lottery sales had reached $671 million in the previous year."
See "State Lotteries: Advocating a Social Ill for the Social Good," by Michael Heberling (THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW, Spring 2002)
How Government Prevents Education
To the editor:
My phone has been busy lately with inquiries from local parents about why the schools are so bad, so secretive and almost impossible to communicate with intelligently.
The answer, of course, is that the public school system has an agenda that is the opposite of what parents want for their children. I've prepared a list of concepts for the parents of our town that may help them to fathom the situation. I call it "How the Government Prevents Education."
Preventing education, or the dumbing down of America's children, is the primary function of the public school system. It follows several simple concepts that comprise the overall program, as follows:
It begins in kindergarten...
1. Sit down, be quiet. You will do only what we tell you to do. You'll think what we tell you to think.
2. Your interests are not important. Any knowledge you may already have is of no value. We will tell you what the state wants you to know, nothing else. We can arrange to drug you if you don_t behave as we require.
3. We do not answer your questions, but you are required to answer ours.
4. We do not trust you or your parents. We demand obedience no matter how absurd our requests. We know better than parents how to raise children. You have no rights in school. We can arrange to drug you if you don't behave as we require.
5. You will not learn phonics, therefore you will not learn to read well nor enjoy reading.
6. You will not learn the basic facts of arithmetic, therefore any advanced mathematics will be almost impossible for you.
7. There is no right or wrong. Traditional morality is old-fashioned and therefore is ridiculed. We are "progressive" here.
8. We consider you to be "disabled" and therefore "at risk," therefore we have reason to "treat" you. We will "diagnose" and label you so that you will always feel incomplete, inadequate, and dependent on us in school and on other institutions hereafter.
9. You will be kept in a state of confusion, self-doubt and stress. You will be watched, tested and judged constantly. You will have no time to yourself to create an identity other than what we choose for you. You will be fearful always.
10. You do not belong to your parents or guardians, therefore we are insensitive to their wishes for you. You are the property of, and a resource of the state, and we will use you as the "global economy" (whatever that is) dictates to us.
In those areas and more, the local school board is the willing accomplice of the school system since, as the CT state law says, the board "is not the agent of the town, but is a creature of the state."
What does the state want for children? For them merely to become employable.
That fact makes it easier to understand why the administrators are defensive and why the school board is so obstinate in the face of criticisms of the quality of the schools: the schools are not intended to educate.
The board does not represent the community, but instead, it represents the interests of the state. There's no one protecting the community or the taxpayers or the parents or especially the children. Children are the hostages of the system.
Families and communities would never do this to themselves.
The public school system is the creation of the government, and the only way to correct it is by taking it (really, the children) out of the hands of government.
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