Posted on 11/08/2012 3:22:53 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
A teacher in Florida summed up the educational situation in her state: “There is an obsession with the worse-off students.”
School officials there proclaim: “But what about the people with pathologies? They can’t advance very far. It’s fairer if we bring everybody along together.”
Notice there is no obsession with curing the pathologies, or with devising better methods to help disadvantaged kids rise above their disadvantages. No, the answer is to reduce the better students to the level of the worse students. Where does this go?
Suppose that half of the people in your city are sick. Do we best help them by making the other half sick? Yes, according to leaders in our Education Establishment. To me this is a repellent sophistry.
When all are sick, who is going to solve the crisis and lead everybody back to health?
Schools cannot be in the business of trying to predict winners and losers. Nobody knows what will unfold 10 or 20 years from now. Why not give each child the best possible education that human ingenuity can devise? In this way, students are better off, no matter each one’s destiny. Society is better off. Quite simply, the proper goal of public education is to push every student as far as each student can go.
Unfortunately, many in the Education Establishment have exactly the opposite goal. They follow the Progressive (that is, Socialist) teachings of John Dewey. They believe in leveling; they are working to achieve “equality of outcomes.”
Elite educators speak a great deal these days about “fairness” and “social justice.” When you hear these phrases, be very afraid that millions of students will be given a shabby education on purpose.
After all, what’s the easiest way to achieve equal outcomes? You educate downward. You give everybody the same inferior education...
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I lived in Germany for a number of years, and my son ended up in the German system. They are kinda practical about this. By the end of the 4th grade, they place the kid into one of three categories. They are reasonably sure about the kids who will end up going to university....so they lead them off to a better educational system, which challenges a kid. The second group....are mostly kids who show some abilities, but aren’t as ‘keen’ as the first group. They occasionally forgot homework or just lost attention in class. Then the third group comes up...the kids who show that they don’t have much interest and rarely show any talent at things other than average abilities.
The money and resources are split up. The lesser kids will end up as truck-drivers, clerks, or general skill people.
If you look at this from a practical standpoint....it ends up making sense. Most parents don’t want to hear that junior is a loser by the 4th grade, but the truth is that you only have a certain amount of resources for education. You might as well use them as best as you can.
I’ve often felt a huge amount of effort, time, and money was wasted on Special Education, especially in terms of documentation, but also in the resources. We expend next to nothing on gifted students. This, to me, is backwards. But that’s not something you can say without sounding like a brute.
Yes. The classical education system in America worked much like that till the 1890's when the nascent Progressive movement decided to "democratize" education. A small percentage of people are truly educable. The rest, though, can be trained to do something worthwhile.
We've allowed our entire system to become training -- in the name of fairness and democracy. The smart kids either suffer or are home-schooled.
Brave New World.....you are assigned by Big Brother to your place in life. Top Down determination by self-appointed “gods” who can see the “future”. They decide....no individual freedom and initiative and uniqueness, since rigid rules control and dictate. What a system for slaves of the state.
The flaw is, of course, that each person is unique and not a termite and people make mistakes and are biased or easily bribed. Certain children—as proved throughout history look “dumb” until they blossom—and some blossom considerably late—like 18, like a St. Thomas Aquinas.
The Prussian school system of Germany was reviled by Pastor Bonhoeffer’s mother -—breaking the souls of the children—so she made sure her children were never in the “System” until after 7 years or 8 years of age where their worldview was sound (Belief in God). She didn’t want her values that she wanted in her children to be erased in those fragile earlier years where time away from parents destroys, not only parental bonds and values, but, IQ and Faith in a Higher Power than the State. All her children were brilliant.
The Prussian schools made Hitler king. All those Hitler Youth “thinkers” were nothing but brainwashed ideologues-— socialists who are devoid of rationality. No logic and reason-—just blind allegiance to “mass conformity” which is the purpose of the Prussian system of “education”.
Creative, problem-solvers, who believe in strong principles and God, like Lincoln, never was in a brainwashing, conditioning system where you are forced to “group think” and learn that all humans are animals-—the same as termites. The uniqueness in the US system—before John Dewey—produced moral, God-Fearing people who had no trouble standing up to the mob thinking.
Prussian system is mass indoctrination. It is designed to destroy individuality and uniqueness in man—and belief in God. It is absolutely evil.
There is a connection in the fact that supposedly conservatives send their children to public school and that Obama got reelected.
But I know, I know - your public school is good - it’s not like all the others. </sarc>
As a former gifted student, I agree. The experience of being held back, stifled, blocked because everything is geared towards the middle is like torture. There is antagonism towards excellence - unless its in math - I became so bored and frustrated that I left after tenth grade.
Same sort of thing happens to the mentally ill mentally deficient kids. They have 1on1 care at school and in residetial facilities. these are kids who have little to nothing for a future. Mental hosptials and residential care facilities. Spending millions so they can possibly do their laundry. Some are dangerous and need the are not medicated because of laws.
These kids once were in congegant care, given tranqulizers and kept clean and fed. Now a bulk of our education dollars and healthcare dollars go to managing them behaviorally and without medication.
To make some lib happy and provide jobs programs.
I swear, when things get tough and our country can no longer afford this level of care for these poor souls, instead of remanding them to basic custodial care the libs will kill them. Our own Nazis will kill these least instead of caring for them in practical, cost effective ways.
I may sound like a monster or a brute, but caring for people in realistic ways instead of with unrealistic spending that must meet the needs of the child, when the childs needs are so limited is a recipe for disaster.
People think that the old State Regional Centers that cared for these children were abysmal. Actually they were in my area, clean, and more or less like an all day kindergarden. Families who chose were relieved of the burden of caring for these children, for people may not remember but many times they were killed or neglectd by overburdened families.
This was compassionate care.
In the past year I am aware of 3 murder suicides of a parent and a low functioning MR child for the parent had them the 16 hours a day that the “in home supports’ did not show up.
compassion is more than monies.
I am reminded what Jesus said on the teaching of children:
“As for whoever causes these little ones who believe in me to trip and fall into sin, it would be better for them to have a huge stone hung around their necks and be drowned in the bottom of the lake.
Faith in the public school system is the single most crippling idiocy in today’s America.
The modern state is the enemy of human society; the school system is the state’s chief weapon against us.
There is so much wisdom in the Bible.
There is; I really ought to get back into reading it regularly. :/
That's the dirty secret no one wants to admit. I'm a teacher, and of the 120 or so kids I see every day (middle school) I'd say about 30 are truly curious, academically inclined, capable of understanding, retaining, exploring, analyzing, and abstract thought. The other 90 just want gossip and games. It takes very little to satisfy them, so frankly, little is what they should get.
The first project of the Progressives was to restructure the American education system to a more democratic one. That took place in the 1890's and still goes on.
Now, the ineducable are trainable and our education system has been reduced to a network of training schools. The educable get shortchanged in such a system.
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