The United States of Stupid ... Alan Caruba

 

The United States of Stupid

By Alan Caruba

In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education released a report titled “A Nation at Risk” that documented nationwide failure in American schools. Not much has changed since then and the federal takeover of school curriculums and testing methods has mercilessly continued with the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind and the Obama administration’s Race to the Top.

They are the top-down approaches to learning that have played a large part in the continual “dumbing-down” of American education. Once the province of local school boards, innovative schools, and individual teachers, the education of children has been taken over by Big Government.

Making matters worse, amid the confusion of federally mandated education requirements, state legislatures are now straying beyond their traditional roles to tinker with schools in unprecedented ways.

A recent example of this involves two bills making their way through the North Carolina legislature – House Bill 766 and Senate Bill 479 – which focus on testing in that state’s public schools. While the motive behind these identical bills may seem to be to “improve” testing, the bills serve only to further dumb-down education through legislative micromanagement.

In the case of North Carolina, the bills not only order schools to administer a specific college admissions test to all students in the 11th grade—the ACT—it also mandates “diagnostic tests” for students in grades eight and 10 that will “align” with the ACT.

In effect, the North Carolina legislature is using the force of law to compel classroom teachers to teach to the test rather than providing a solid education.

Since there is a long established, respected alternative---the SAT---it further reduces the element of choice for local boards.

It begs the question, when does a legislative body possess the requisite knowledge to decide which test is in the best interest of students and their education? Isn’t that a pedagogic, not legislative, question?

Even the uninitiated could be forgiven for thinking that this legislation was rigged from the outset and reflects the best bill writing that special interest money can buy, but it gets even worse.

The North Carolina proposal requires that “students who do not pass the tests adopted for eighth grade shall be provided remedial instruction in the ninth grade.” Using legislative fiat to push weak students from eighth to ninth grade and expecting them to learn new material when they don’t know the old material is a sure fire recipe for utter failure.

Common sense says that not all students at all ages learn at the same pace. Some learn faster than others. Some students come from lower income brackets, are raised by single parents or even their grandparents, and face other socio-economic factors that lead to greater obstacles and fewer incentives to study.

Rather than face this simple truth and deal with it through an effective, flexible policy, North Carolina lawmakers would let struggling students sink even further behind as they are pushed to the next grade level with a vague promise of remedial teaching.

The real problem with such top-down, one-size-fits-all legislation is that, once passed in one State, it spreads to others and, of course, it has its origins at the federal level. That makes it attractive to lawmakers beyond the Tar Heel State where politicians are juggling shrinking state budgets and teacher layoffs with their need for popular poll numbers and reelection.

Education has become highly politicized, providing opportunities for special interests to inject themselves into policy debate. This deliberate dumbing down of education and students has afflicted the U.S. since the 1960s. It shows no signs of being reformed.

Former Attorney General, Edwin Meese III, said, “We must always evaluate policy proposals in light of principles like rule of law and the logic of our constitutional system. The Education Department’s sponsoring and funding of national curriculum runs counter to both laws of Congress and the wisdom of the Founders.”

The Founders who wrote the Constitution, knowing that the best education was locally determined and directed education, did not even mention the word “education” in that document. If for no other reason than this, the North Carolina legislature should scrap these education proposals and make a fresh start.

© Alan Caruba, 2011
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Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" his popular blog and thereafter on dozens of other websites and blogs. If you love to read, visit his monthly report on new books at Bookviews. To visit his Facebook page, click here For information on his professional skills, Caruba.com is the place to visit.

The Sorry State of Education in America

The Sorry State of Education in America

J. D. Longstreet

I was somewhat busy yesterday, along with many other Tar Heels, dodging our second attack of tornadoes in less than a month.  As a result, I had little time to think and write a commentary suitable for publication. But, as I continue to be troubled by the state of our public education system in the US, I decided to re-submit to the editors an article written back in 2005 that addresses my concerns about the horrible state of public education in the US. 

Even though this piece was written six years ago, it could have been written today. 

A great disservice is being done our youngsters today and until the parents of our kids decide enough is enough -- and demand an overhaul of the American public education system -- that disservice will continue and we will continue to produce graduates who simply do not measure up to the graduates of education systems around the world. It places America at a distinct disadvantage in, well, everything.  It is, in fact, a matter of national security, let alone national survival.

Here now is the commentary I wrote six years ago.  I hope it will stir parents to evaluate the quality of their child’s education in the existing public education system of America and pledge to take action on the behalf of their children’s future -- and the future of America.

Please – read on.

The American Public School System Is A Failure And Should Be Trashed!
By: J. D. Longstreet
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The Public Schools system of the US has crashed and burned! No longer are our children the best educated in the world. Now our scholars rank among the LESS well educated even among a few of the third world countries. This is a shame we have brought upon ourselves by inviting the Federal Government and the Unions into our schools.

One-room schoolhouses turned out scholars of unequaled accomplishment when compared to today’s graduates. A high school education, just 50 years ago, is the equivalent of a college degree today. Our Public School teachers are barely qualified to teach. But, they have a Union to see that they are paid well, whether the can teach or not! Oh, you thought teachers unions were for the welfare of the students??? Surely you jest!

Our local school boards have gorged themselves from the federal trough at the expense of local control of the curriculum and the rules and regulations.

Pupils are not challenged by the courses they study and fall short of goals set by the federal government. So, the schools are now “teaching the tests.” Indoctrinate the students in the questions and answers on the test in hopes of attaining the sought after number of students passing the tests. A well-rounded education is lost to the efforts to make a good showing on the tests.

Students are forced to remain in school even though they have no interest in what is being taught and are a distraction to that handful of youngsters who really do want to learn.

Self-esteem is the number one course of study. Our students are dumb as fence posts but, by golly, they think highly of themselves! They can’t read their diplomas but they sure do feel good about it!

So what do we do about it?

Take back our schools for a start. Refuse federal money and all the strings that go with it. If we have to teach school, again, in one-room school buildings, then so be it.

Test the teachers. If they have no business in a classroom, see to it that they are removed.

Make school voluntary. If a student does not want to be there, then don’t make them. This will allow those students who do wish an education to get one without the continuous interruptions by the bored kids who’d rather be someplace else.

Having a small percentage of illiterate Americans is preferable to an entire population of semi-illiterates!

Discipline? Yes. Expulsion. Period. Expel troublemakers for a few days, a few weeks, or a full school year, or even forever, depending on the infraction. Make school a serious business again. We owe an environment, suitable for learning, to those students who are there for the purpose of learning and making a better life for themselves, their families, and for our society.

We can take our schools back. We have to want to do so and we have to be ready to make the sacrifices necessary to insure our children a good education, not the pitiful excuse for an education they are getting now.

One of a parent’s primary obligations, as a parent, is to see that their children have a shot at the brass ring in life. The first, and most fundamental, step in that process is a solid education.

Government vouchers were killed by the teachers unions because they rightly understood that the public school system would crumble, and collapse, as parents pulled their children out of those near useless institutions and placed them in private schools where they, the parents, had some say, and some control, over the quality of education their kids were getting.

In my opinion, the public school system is near collapse -- right now. I don’t think a collapse of the US public education system would be a bad thing, actually. When an institution is so badly damaged, that it no longer serves it’s primary purpose, it should be trashed and a new institution begun in its place. We desperately need to create an institution to educate our kids.

Parents, we owe our kids that! We owe them a chance to make the best of their talents. We owe them a shot at a good, solid, education. Get them out of the public schools and into a private, or parochial, school where there are qualified teachers who still have an incentive to teach our kids, the will to teach our kids, and the desire to teach our kids.

The public school system in America is a failure. It should be put out of its misery.

J. D. Longstreet

Living Through History ... Alan Caruba

Living Through History
By Alan Caruba

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We live our lives one day at a time and, at best, understand them only in hindsight. The chief advantage of old age is the ability to look back and, hopefully, to draw some lessons from the history through which we have lived.

My chief regret is that so many among the generations coming up behind me have so little real knowledge of America’s or the world’s history, be it recent or long past. Indeed, history books in our nation’s classrooms have become a battleground between competing ideologies because those who determine what history is taught will shape what history is to come.

The destruction of our education system since the 1960s is not an accident. It has been deliberate.

I have lived through seven decades of history. Born in 1937 in the midst of the Great Depression, I have lived to see a comparable Depression.

Anyone who persists in calling our present economic crisis a Recession is whistling passed the graveyard. You cannot have as many unemployed people as we do today, owe as much as we do to foreign central banks, and continue to spend as senselessly as the federal government, and not call this a Depression.

The main difference, as I see it, is that while Franklin D. Roosevelt and his advisors were sincerely, but ineptly, trying to turn the economy around, the Obama administration sees it as an opportunity to totally destroy the nation by bankrupting it, by refusing to seal off its southern border from an invasion of illegal aliens, by imposing a healthcare act that nationalized one sixth of the economy, and via other comparable abuses.

I have been thinking about the seven decades of my life because I have been reading about them in an excellent book, “American Dreams: The United States Since 1945” by H. W. Brands ($32.95, Penguin Press).

What struck me most forcefully and personally was the fact that I was so utterly clueless throughout much of my early years, despite having graduated from university, served in the U.S. Army, and been a working journalist until I approached my thirties. Even then, jobs with the New York Housing Finance Agency, followed by a stint with the New Jersey Institute of Technology, did not connect me with the events swirling around me.

It was not that I was unaware of events. My childhood coincided with the Cold War that had shaped national policy under Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. I graduated university the same year Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959 and I finished out my Army service waiting for the outcome the Cuban missile crisis, grateful that it passed like a quick storm. The only thing I knew with certainty was that Communism was evil.

My politics were not particularly nuanced. My parents were Democrats and liberals. I followed suit because I knew no better. To their credit, they both began to have doubts with the advent of the Vietnam War and the Great Society spending. They had, however, benefited from the tremendous prosperity that followed the end of WWII, owned their home, had happily purchased all the new appliances that enhanced everyone’s lives, and raised my older brother and me in comfort.

I, along with other Americans, had seen the nation put a man on the Moon, had seen the enormous productivity of our manufacturing sector and assumed it could not end. It not only could end, it began to end as globalization undermined domestic growth. America has increasingly become a service industry economy, one dependent on easy credit, and an ever-expanding federal government.

I was into my 40s by the 1980s and only beginning to connect the dots of the history happening in the nation and the world. By then I was enjoying a career in public relations that took me all over the nation and introduced me to a wide variety of people in business, industry, and agriculture. Until then I had not realized the enormous inhibiting effect the federal government had on the economy through its intensive, expanding regulatory powers.

The environmental movement had gained momentum by then and in time it would determine how much water a toilet could use, how many miles per gallon autos must provide, and the soon to be enforced edict that literally bans the incandescent light bulb! Significantly, the Greens have seen to it that more and more of the nation’s vast sources of energy were put off limits.

The era of Ronald Reagan transformed my thinking. I became a Republican. Others did too, but it was the Clinton years in the 1990s that confirmed my distaste for the Democrat Party. When the GOP regained control of Congress in 1994, Clinton was smart enough to adopt much of the legislation they proposed and take credit for it.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was followed by the most transformative event since WWII. September 11, 2001 and the subsequent military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq flowed from that Islamic treachery. I suspect that history will judge George W. Bush less harshly than his peers. The financial crisis in 2008 plunged the nation into a downward economic spiral that brings us to today. The election of Barack Obama has only served to exacerbate it.

The Internet loosened the grip of the “mainstream” news media as Americans with access to information as no previous generation, discovered they had been betrayed for decades by the liberal “spin” the news included. The advent of talk radio was a revelation for many.

At a time when what is most needed is serious investigative journalism regarding a virtually fictitious President, Americans must depend heavily on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News to inform them of the damage being inflicted on the nation.

You cannot be, as I was, indifferent to who is in public office, intent only on your personal life as if some mysterious force will intervene to make things turn out right.

There is nothing mysterious about “the consent of the governed.” There is nothing mysterious about the ability of Americans to put things on the right path again. The American Dream can be made to work if we elect the right people to represent us and begin to shrink the federal government. That is the lesson I have drawn from my years and one I hope to see reignited in the years to come.

© Alan Caruba, 2010
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Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

A College Degree Is Not A Human Right!

A College Degree Is Not A Human Right!
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

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Whether you want to admit it or not, there are some people who have absolutely no business going to college.

Back in the day, there were “trade schools.” There were schools where certain trades were taught. If a young person wanted to be, oh, say, an auto mechanic, the school would teach them the fundamentals and depending upon the school, much, much, more. It set the student on a path, in his or her young life that would ensure them a trade from which they could make a living, support a family, and contribute to their community. Trade schools were GOOD things.

We have all heard the stories of the high school teacher who assures certain students that they have no business attending college. We tend to recoil in horror at such presumptuousness by anyone, let alone a teacher. But wait! Have you considered the possibility that the teacher might be right? Has it occurred to you that the teacher is in a far better position than you or I to form that conclusion?

Come on, folks. We all know there are, in fact, some folks who only take up space in the classroom whether in high school or college. There are some youngsters for whom life is one continuous party. You cannot honestly believe that THEY deserve to be there, taking the place of a hard working scholar determined to learn as much as he or she can in the four, or more, years they will industriously study to better themselves and the world they occupy and contribute to society.

But in the politically correct world we live in this bit of common sense is frowned upon. In fact, to voice such a stance might get you driven from the room. You have just bumped into the great wall of “inclusivity.” We must be “fair.” We must be “inclusive.” EVERYONE MUST have a chance at a college education and, if at all possible, the government should pay for it.

Of course, when we say the government should pay for it we are really saying the taxpayers should pay for because the government has no money of its own. It takes money from us, the taxpayers and, much to our chagrin, blows it!

Very soon now, I expect to see some sort of bill introduced in our national legislature, which will insure that every American who wants to go to college will be able to do so at taxpayer expense. That is a wrong-headed idea and must be stopped before it ever becomes law. Such a law will only make academia far richer than it is now and will do little, if anything, to better educate the American populace. In fact, one can already see that postsecondary college degrees have been, shall we say, dumbed down?

Let’s face it. There are students who would do far better for themselves, and society, if they studied at a vocational school or a technical school of some variety. We always NEED trained technicians and tradesmen. Every society does.

There is, currently, no RIGHT to a college degree in America. Not yet, at least. But, left to their own devices, the dunces who currently lead our country will certainly make it so. And THAT is wrong! To insist that the taxpayers of America foot the bill for this politically correct act of “inclusivity” is also wrong.

J. D. Longstreet

2010’s Top Anxieties.... National Anxiety Center

2010’s Top Anxieties
National Anxiety Center Lists Top Ten Fears

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Founded in 1990, The National Anxiety Center, a clearinghouse for information about “scare campaigns” designed to influence public opinion and policy, has periodically issued a list of the top anxieties Americans will experience in the coming year.

“The list,” says founder Alan Caruba, “is subjective; based on an analysis of the past year’s headlines and anticipated events. It incorporates on-going, often long term concerns that Americans have expressed.”

1. Out of Control Government Spending. It is evident to everyone except the White House and Congress that America cannot spend its way out of the deepest recession since the Great Depression, but both have embraced programs that will increase the level of taxation facing Americans, while engaging in “stimulus” programs that only stimulate more anxiety. The lack of job creation in the private sector will be the major anxiety Americans encounter in 2010.

2. Iran. It is evident to Americans and the world that Iran is intent on acquiring nuclear weapons that can be used in a missile attack on Israel and which can reach Europe and other nations throughout the Middle East. The only option available is an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and there is considerable anxiety regarding its timing and outcome.

3. Afghanistan War. Eight years after the initial effort to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban, Americans are war weary and increasingly wondering about the benefit of further involvement, its costs, and the possibility that leaving would embolden Islamist enemies there, in Iraq, and worldwide. The Middle East remains a powder keg of instability.

4. The Economy. There is anxiety concerning how long it will take for the American economy to recover from the housing and credit bubble created by Congressional programs such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. No steps have been taken to eliminate these programs and, indeed, other federal programs have been introduced to assist imprudent mortgage holders already in default.

5. Inflation. The raising of the nation’s debt limit, the printing of vast amounts of paper currency by the Federal Reserve, and other comparable actions portend an inflation of prices and a possible default. Moody’s Investor Service has warned both the U.S. and British governments they are in peril of losing their triple-A ratings.

6. Medicare. Medicare, like Social Security, will be insolvent within a few years and Americans of all ages are worried, not only about solutions to this prospect, but about proposals to vastly expand Medicare at the most inopportune time.

7. Illegal Immigration and Amnesty. The drain on the nation’s economy and problems associated with illegal immigration, now estimated to number more than 12 million, as well as yet recently proposed amnesty program continue to worry Americans.

8. Education. The continued failure of the nation’s school systems to meet international standards of scholastic achievement has resulted in the decline in the ability of American’s children’s to acquire basic skills and the knowledge required to compete in a global economy.

9. Diet and Health. The growing number of overweight and obese Americans is a personal and national concern for the overall health of everyone struggling with weight problems and their potential for diabetes and other diseases.

10. American Culture. The increasing vulgarity found in films, on television, in music, fashion, and other elements of American culture remains a concern for many, particularly as it affects the younger generation.

“The good news is that more Americans are no longer concerned about ‘global warming’ and carbon dioxide, as they become aware that the claims justifying these fears are based on deliberately falsified computer models and the fact that the nation and the planet are now a decade into a natural cooling cycle,” says Caruba.

“2010, the end of the first decade of the 21st century, is likely to be seen in retrospect as a tipping point that will determine either a return to traditional standards of fiscal prudence,” says Caruba, “or will plunge the nation and the world into a Depression of cataclysmic proportions.”

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Caruba, an author, business and science writer, resides in South Orange, N.J. The National Anxiety Center maintains a website at http://www.anxietycenter.com/. Caruba blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/.

Democrats Intent on Creating Good Little Socialists in Government Schools!

Democrats Intent on Creating Good Little Socialists in Government Schools!
Can “Obama Youth” Be far Behind?
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

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"Give me the children, I will give you a nation." "When an opponent declares 'I will not come over to your side', I calmly say 'your child belongs to us already. What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community." — Adolph Hitler (1939)

I, along with a few million other parents and grandparents, are troubled by Obama’s speech to the school kids tomorrow.

It is a known fact that if you can reach the kids with your propaganda you can mold their malleable minds into practically any kind of adult you want. They are young, they are impressionable, and frankly, they are not very smart -- not YET, at least. Obama’s speech to the students of America smacks of a propaganda machine in high gear. It is all a part of the “Obama Cult Machine”.

The parents in my state are raising a considerable amount of “Cain.” They don’t like it. As a grandparent, I don’t like it, either. Whether Obama’s minions deny it, or not, it IS an indoctrination speech. The very nature of it’s “setting” renders it that.

Here in North Carolina, parents are up in arms about it. There will be many kids staying home from school, entirely, tomorrow, and, in my opinion, that is the correct thing for parents to do. A number of schools have declared their intention of recording Obama’s speech and playing it back at a later time. The question, then, is -- will parents be alerted in time to get their kids out of school for that day? I don’t have the answer to that question but I have my suspicions.

Many parents in my state have been busy over the past few days attempting to ascertain whether or not their children’s school will be allowing Obama’s speech in their school -- and when. It has been akin to hitting a brick wall. It seems as if each school district has a different answer to the question. Frankly, none of them are satisfactory.

Look, anyway you parse it; Obama’s speech to the student’s smacks of an Orwellian tactic and it is a rotten idea. For a President who is said to have the creame de la creame of intellects around him, this has to be the dumbest idea to come out of the White House in a while. There has been so much objection raised by parents that reports now say the speech has been rewritten and plans to televise Obama’s speech have been dropped and instead it will be streamed live on the Internet at the Whitehouse website. That means anyone can watch and listen to Obama’s golden oratory, including Homeschoolers. How thoughtful -- what? Somehow, I doubt many homeschoolers will be allowing their students to listen to the indoctrination speech. Isn’t this sort of thing one of the reasons those same homeschoolers pulled their children out of the government school systems in the first place?

If there was even the slightest doubt in your mind that the public school system in American is now the “Government school system,” then these antics, by the Obama Regime, should remove all doubt.

This is the sort of thing one expects in a socialist society. It is not the sort of thing one expects in a free republic. But, as we have been warning, even before the election in 2008, the socialists now in charge in Washington are disassembling the democratic representative republican form of government in America.

If I still had school age children they would be at home tomorrow. They would certainly not be in school where they will be exposed to socialist propaganda as espoused by the nation’s leading socialist, the President of the US, Obama.

As the President's popularity wanes and his standings in the polls drop like a stone, it is time for conservatives across the nation to turn up the heat. The elections of 2010 are not that far away. We must make every effort to defeat as many of the socialists in the Congress as we can and increase the clout of conservatism in the national legislature. We must return the US to its former status as a democratic representative republic.

Conservatives must stay alert. This is only the beginning. There are still approximately 3-1/2 years of the Obama Regime left. That is plenty of time for all sorts of leftist/socialist mischief. That is a sobering thought – is it not?

J. D. Longstreet

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Socialist+Education+Americsa+Obama+Indoctrination

Teaching U. S. Kids the U. N. Way

US Schools Will Teach Americans Students to Embrace A “One World Government!”

US Constitution out, UN’s Earth Charter is IN!

Under Obama’s Dept. of Education The UN Will set Curriculum of US Schools!!

Socialism at the top of the curriculum

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Public Education in the United States is a disgrace. There is just no way to sugar coat it to make it taste better and still be truthful. Our kids are incredibly undereducated when they are handed a diploma from high school these days.

Why? How did our system of public education plunge from being the best in the world to being, well, embarrassing? To begin with, a left-wing President, Jimmy Carter, created something called the Department of Education, which was not needed, at all. From that point, public education in the United States was doomed!

Alan Caruba has zeroed in on the problem with public education in the US and how Obama intends to completely ruin what is left of it and then turn it over to the United Nations in his quest for global governance, or as we common folk like to refer to it: “A One World Government.”

If it sounds eerily like what the government is trying to do to healthcare, you’d better pay attention - because - if Obama is successful in his takeover bid of healthcare in the US we can expect the exact same results with healthcare as we are experiencing today with education in the US.)

Scroll down now and read what my friend has to tell you about how the Obama Administration intends to see that YOUR kids are taught the UN way!

JDL

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Teaching U.S. Kids the U.N. Way

Alan Caruba

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It’s horrible enough to think of the way school children have been deliberately and unnecessarily frightened by the teaching in American schools about “global warming.” Since the 1980s it has been part of the curriculum in schools throughout the nation, convincing a lot of children that the Earth was doomed.

It was difficult enough to grow up as I did knowing that the Soviet Union could annihilate most of the population with nuclear missiles or that their brand of communism could destroy the liberties Americans take for granted.

Ever since Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education, the nation’s educational systems, once among the best in the world and answering directly to local school boards, have produced a dismal record of general failure to teach the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic. It was taken over by the National Education Association, a union, and a curriculum of liberalism has existed ever since.

American children grew up learning that the Founding Fathers were slave owners. They were forced to learn “fuzzy math” and “whole words”, two systems that left them unable to add or subtract sums without a calculator in hand and to read without some difficulty.

Schools became increasingly dangerous places, often requiring the fulltime presence of a police officer. In sum, schools, i.e. administrators and faculty, increasingly sought to place themselves between the student and his parents as the primary authority.

Now we learn that the Obama administration is imposing “education reform efforts” that will adopt “internationally benchmarked education standards.” They will become national standards. The incentive will be federal “stimulus” dollars. There’s more to learn about this at http://www.edwatch.org/,

It’s worth keeping in mind that “No Child Left Behind” is widely regarded as a failure and that all children do not learn at the same rate. Albert Einstein was deemed a dimwit because, for his first years, he did not speak much to anyone. NCLB became a “teach to the test” monstrosity that eliminated any creativity from the teaching process and produced results that, along with previous “reforms” left American students ranked way behind many other nations.

Instead of expecting children whose first language was Spanish or some other to learn English, bilingual education was introduced at considerable expense that ensures those most in need of learning English would have one more obstacle to overcome. Then schools were saddled with mandates for “special” students with disabilities who often cost local school boards hundreds of thousands of dollars to meet their needs.

What this indoctrination is all about is “a de facto federal curriculum” that will financially reward states that adopt what the DOE wants taught. Here’s where it really gets ugly. As Allen Quist of EdWatch points out, the curriculum will be “internationally benchmarked” which is a way of saying American educational standards will be determined by UNESCO, the United Nations education arm.

In practice this means children will be taught about the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but might not get much or any instruction regarding the U.S. Constitution. As Quist puts it, “American schools used to teach the fundamentals of the United States, including the inalienable, God-given rights of life, liberty and property, as guaranteed by our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Not any more. Our children will be taught that they only have those rights the UN says they have.”

Then, for good measure, throw in the UN’s Earth Charter which includes the “promotion of the equitable distribution of wealth within nations and among nations.” It also endorses nuclear disarmament, gay marriage, legalized abortion, and a general curriculum of flat out Earth worship.

The UN is unquestionably the most corrupt international institution on the face of the Earth. President Obama has just ensured future generations of American students will be indoctrinated with its belief system instead of the one our Founding Fathers gave us.

Is it any wonder that home schooling has become such a fast-growing trends among parents who do not want to turn their children over to a system that denigrates American values?If you think this nation is being sabotaged by the White House, add education to the list of its handiwork.

Alan Caruba

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Conservative+US+UN+Education+Obama+DOE

Blame America's Parents For This Mess!

Blame America’s Parents For This Mess.

J. D. Longstreet
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When a village raises your children, and those children reach voting age, you get a country with a government just like the US government today. You get a country with an economy just like the economy the US has today. You get a country with morals just like the morals the US has today, in other words - you get a socialist country, which is imploding, caving in, upon itself – just like America in 2009.

I submit to you that much, if not most, of what’s wrong with America today is a direct result of the way America’s children were raised. American parents abdicated their role as parents and teachers and instead allowed the village to do THEIR job for them.

There is no denying it - we allowed a village to raise our children and now we are paying the price. I am convinced our failure at child rearing is the cause of most of the crime and vandalism done in and to our towns and cities today. It is also the root cause of street gangs rivaling the murderous gangs of the old west -all because a village raised those kids.

In actuality, it takes a mom and a dad to take responsibility for their offspring and raise those children in the way they should go. It is the most important duty of every parent. As Solomon said: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is grown he will not depart from it.” The scriptures also teach us that: “as the twig is bent, so growth the tree”! There it is, folks. Child-Rearing 101!

Did you see anything about a village raising your child? I didn’t, either. A village raising a child is strictly a socialist idea. They know that if they can get hold to that young mind they can indoctrinate that child and create another leftist clone. And they are correct. They can. It has happened, already. If you need evidence to convince you all you need do is look at our government today. It is a socialist government.

If you are going to bring a child into this world… be prepared to raise that child and teach that child what it means to be an American. Teach him, or her, the freedoms, the privileges, and most importantly the responsibility, one has as an American toward his fellow Americans.

Daycare has caused more damage to the American family and the American society that an atom bomb would have caused! Mothers, going off to work and dropping their children off to be raised by a stranger. That stranger spends more time a week with their children than they do. And they wonder why they have discipline problems when they have their child at home? Think about it. The child is just a visitor in his own home. His real home is at the daycare center!

I remember that my mother decided she would go to work, soon after my younger brother was born. He was a toddler and I was no more than five years of age. The company provided a nursery school for the employees, so my mother and father dropped us off there on mother’s first day at work. It lasted almost an entire day. By the end of the day, I had managed to cuss out the lady in charge of the place, got slapped across the face so hard the full imprint of the lady’s hand was plastered all over the left side of my face… all because I did not like the way she was treating my brother and I went to his defense. She decided she would treat me the same way; I rebelled and told her to take her hands off me and called her a” white-headed old Bi-ch”! That’s when I got smacked. The lady was fired and my parents nearly sued the company… but for fear of losing my father’s job, they did not. Thus, ended my one, and only, personal experience with daycare! I remain proud of it to this day! And… I detest over zealous authority figures to this day.

No, a village cannot raise a child properly. Oh, sure, they can raise a child, but you get … well, what we have today, socialists, and young barbarians!

Young parents, if you want your child reared properly, with the values YOU believe in, and with the core beliefs of YOUR family, then YOU raise your child YOURSELF! If, on the other hand, you trust someone else’s values above your own, then you allow someone else to raise your kids. It’s as simply as that.

J. D. Longstreet

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Education+Children+Parenting+Socialism+Morals

Stupefying America ... By Alan Caruba

Stupefying America
By Alan Caruba
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If you have a suspicion that many of your fellow Americans are too stupid to trust with the great affairs of this nation, you might just be right, but you might not know why.

Take a look at the choices television offers. Do you ever wonder why shows featuring stupid people or animated characters are so popular? I cite The Simpsons, Family Guy, Two and a Half Men, My Name is Earl, et al. Why do we enjoy laughing at stupid people? Does it make us feel smarter?

Does the shallowness of so much that passes for entertainment or even passing itself off as educational actually reflect the lives of those watching? The answer is probably yes and they didn’t get that way by accident. The education system of America has been deliberately fashioned to create a docile, easily controlled population. And that means YOU.

There is a book available that explains why “Every single school day in America, 7,000 students drop out, some confused, some angry, but all are brave…What does it say to us that a million and a quarter young people a year don’t want to be in classrooms, don’t want to be there so much they’re willing to endure scorn, insult, and constant discrimination as the price of escape?”

The book is John Taylor Gatto’s “Weapons of Mass Instruction: A School Teacher’s Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling.” ($24.95, New Society Publishers).

“The rigid stupidities of forced schooling, its linear logics, its bell curves, its buzzers and tests and multiple humiliations, its resort to magical spells, fills me with rage these days as an old man,” wrote Gatto, a former acclaimed teacher of the year.

Today’s (and for several generations yesterday’s) schools are factories of boredom. They don’t exist to educate, but to produce students who will obey rules, dutifully move from class to class when the bell rings, and accept nonsense like “fuzzy math” and “global warming.” The No Child Left Behind Act of 2009 includes $500 million for the teaching of ‘Environmental Literacy’ when real literacy rates—the ability to read—have been dropping like a stone in water for decades. They are a national disgrace.

Why can’t our schools teach reading or arithmetic skills when even pre-school toddlers can learn these things if given the opportunity? Why are we spending $10,000 per student, per year, to produce such poor results? Why would anyone willingly spend their youth cooped up in classrooms when they could be out in the “real world” learning real skills of their own choosing, learning from open sources of information?

And why wouldn’t they flee schools where life is dangerous? Since last September, 20 Chicago Public School students have been killed, 18 by gunfire. Last year, 24 of the more than 30 students killed were shot to death. Nationally, homicide is the second leading cause of death for young people ages 10 to 24 in 2004. Elsewhere in the nation bullying is widespread. School in America is too often a very unpleasant experience dominated by boredom.

The American school system as we know it today was imported from Germany in the 1850s. As America’s industrial base boomed in the years following the end of the Civil War, the need was for millions of immigrants to do the often difficult manual work involved in making steel, building railroads, and manufacturing the first automobiles and countless other inventions that burst on the scene. Industrialists, men like Rockefeller and Carnegie, decided that compulsory education was the best way to produce not just a functional work force, but people conditioned to purchase the bounty of new goods.

The bible of the compulsory educational system was Benjamin Bloom’s two-volume “Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.” Gatto describes him as “an academic madman” in whose system “children would be forced to learn ‘proper’ thoughts, feelings, and actions, while ‘improper’ attitudes from home were ‘remediated.’” In other words, schools were to be laboratories of social change designed to serve business and industry.

This has led to schools where students are literally drugged if they show any vitality or curiosity. The more docile are simply on a treadmill, so much human sausage to be processed. Indeed, why should we wonder why drug addiction is such a massive social problem in an America filled with people who were either trained to be cogs in some faceless corporation or told early in life they were failures?

Since you no doubt passed through this process, it may in retrospect become more clear why schools as often fail to educate the students entrusted to them, than not. The excuses for this are many, but the most popular is that less privileged students in urban centers are virtually doomed to failure from birth. This is not true. Given the opportunity to learn in charter or parochial schools, they do as well or better.

The best of our students today are home-schooled. They win the spelling and geography bees. Some of the nation’s great leaders of the past never attended school. They include George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. They self-schooled themselves with great success and they did it early in life, often before they reached their teens.

In modern times, the secrets of the Human Genome Map were cracked by a surfer named Craig Venter and a born-again Christian home-schooler named Frances Collins. Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Airlines and other ventures dropped out of high school. The examples of those who self-schooled themselves to success are numerous and put the lie to the jails, often with on-site police, that we call modern schools.

Our nation’s schools have been failing generations of Americans, particularly since around the 1960s and, despite no mention in the Constitution, education is now totally controlled by the federal government and by the powerful teachers union, the American Education Association.

It is truly no laughing matter when Jay Leno asks simple questions of people in the streets to reveal time and again how little actual knowledge they possess. They are the products of our school system.

The United States is falling behind many other nations in educating its citizens.

Tellingly, China takes schooling and learning seriously. Its students all learn English, knowing they may become part of their nation’s international legion, likely to be the next great world power. While China builds coal-fired plants for energy and locks in deals for oil, our government calls coal “dirty” and refuses to permit exploration of our vast offshore continental shelf for oil and natural gas.

It takes a special kind of stupidity to deny one’s own nation the energy it requires to grow, to force corporations to move overseas, to take control of industries such as banking and automobile manufacturing without having the slightest idea how to run them.

It’s the stupidity that is the result of a nationwide school system that prolongs childhood while making learning an unpleasant chore.

To learn more, read my four part series:

http://www.anxietycenter.com/subversion.htm

Alan Caruba writes a daily blog at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/ and a weekly commentary at http://www.anxietycenter.com/, the website of The National Anxiety Center.

© Alan Caruba, June 2009

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Conservative+US+Education+Dunce+Dumb