Posted on 05/02/2015 2:43:14 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
When you talk about wasted talent, people immediately think of an individual wasting his or her talent. Its always a sad story but an individual story. A person makes bad decisions. Little by little that person is on a road where he will not be able to develop his talents to the fullest.
But what about a society where children have their talents wasted for them? Not by a lobotomy or by drugs. No, their talents are squandered by systematic planning and careful effort. The technical name for this is social engineering. A more popular name is deliberate dumbing down. Savor that melancholy phrase. And now let us ask, but how could it happen? Heres the general blueprint:
If the kids can run a 100-yard dash, you make them walk. If they can dance all day, you make them sit in a chair. If they can learn a new language every year, you dont teach new languages. If they can learn to read and enjoy books, you dont teach them to read or you give them books you know they will hate. If they like math, you find ways that are difficult and cumbersome, until finally they can no longer learn to do math. In short, you use methods that dont work. Thats how you give every child a handicap, a limp, a disability, something that will keep them from reaching their potential.
Public schools in America have been skilled at this for decades. Thats why the 1983 Nation at Risk report could conclude that our public schools are so bad they must have been designed by a hostile foreign power. Very hostile.
When you look at the resulting mediocrity, and the counterproductive approaches used to achieve this decline, you start thinking about what might have been. You realize you are looking at a landscape full of waste and sadness. You think of Bruegels panoramic vistas of dying and destruction. In some of those famous pictures, everyone is visibly wasting away, if not already carved up. Or you think of broken and blasted terrain like the battlefields of World War I, where all the soldiers seem to be walking wounded. Everywhere there is a sense of defeat.
Dont you imagine exactly such images when you read that Nearly Half Of Detroit's Adults Are Functionally Illiterate?
But now weve stepping on the gas. The Common Core has ratcheted the whole process to a new level. Many children start their school years unhappy and never recover. They come home each day depressed or anxious. They mutilate themselves. They fall sleep crying at night. They have nightmares. According to one of the centurys most memorable headlines, Little kids cry and pee their pants. (See short video for why this is happening.)
Louis CK famously summed up the insanity: My kids used to love math. Now it makes them cry.
(Quick memo to our obtuse Education Establishment: school should be fun; youll get better results that way.)
Robin Eubanks maintains a website called Invisible Serfs Collar where she argues that slavery is the insistent motif throughout public education. Children have metal collars around their necks. Perhaps you cant see them. But you will notice that the children are becoming intellectual cripples. One blog post, several months back, was titled Censorship Before the Fact: Prescribing What the Child Does and Believes Invisibly.
Well, isnt that the whole essence of slavery, that humans are not allowed to have a life of their own or thoughts of their own?
Look what we are losing. Americans once prided themselves on their freedom to choose, to develop in different directions. The schools were supposed to enable that individuality. But John Dewey, starting 100 years ago, crusaded against individuality. He wanted all the little children to be similar, even interchangeable. The schools real job is to hammer down the differences, and extinguish the individual sparks.
Naturally there is a great deal of waste. Thats Deweys goal, whether he wants to admit it or not. Imagine millions of children all of whom will be 25% or 50% less than they could be. Try to add up all that loss, in the childs life and societys life.
Thats not to say there is suffering. If a person is brought up in the twilight, they do not miss bright days. They have never seen them. No, the children are just slowly squeezed and shaped to fit a smaller mold.
Behold the mediocrity and unnecessary failure, all created by policies instituted by our Education Establishment. You have to be impressed by how implacable they are. People all over America are lamenting the crazy homework that children bring home. The kids are crying and the mothers are upset. Does the Education Establishment apologize? Does Bill Gates say he's sorry for causing all this pain? Does Jeb Bush back away from Common Core? No, they just make excuses and keep on grinding down the public.
The saddest thing in life is wasted talent. Our K-12 schools are full of it.
Only one policy can save us. We must try to raise every child as high as each child can be raised. Forget Dewey. Dont be fooled by so-called social justice as that is often merely code for leveling.
We can do so much better. Kids have to master the 3 Rs and then they can learn geography, history, science, the arts, and whatever else you want. This is precisely what everyone has been doing around the planet for thousands of years. Its not rocket science. You want rocket science? That would be the weird, perverse voodoo that our Education Establishment uses to slow everything down.
As noted, we can easily do much better. The question really is, how long will Americans put up with the current nonsense?
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For tips on initiating reform, see A Bill of Rights for Students 2015. http://www.improve-education.org/id90.html
“Now yous can’t leave”
Nice work. I take it that private school children are not subjected to common core nonsense?
--John Greenleaf Whitter, "Maud Muller"
One of the best mafia movie scenes ever!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDrYOEhGNbY
Great clip.
Not yet. But I can promise you that the goal is to control not just private schools but homeschooling as well. There must be no escape.
The way they are trying to do this is to institutionalize the testing part so that all curricula will have to produce students who can pass the same tests. So almost by magic, the private schools have to start bending to make sure their kids will be able to do the SATs and so on. The key word in all of this is “alignment,” which is something like pacification in Vietnam.
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