start wi the teachers union
Posted on 10/30/2019 9:34:29 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
The whole point of American education was preparing people to pursue their interests, and their version of the American Dream. This blueprint has faded. Many kids today don't learn enough to have vivid, inspiring dreams, nor do they master abilities needed to fulfill dreams if they had any.
Jimmy Kimmel sent a crew to the street with a map of the world and the challenge, "Point to a country and name it." Many people could not name even one country, even though the USA was in the middle of this map. At Notre Dame, Professor Patrick Deneen concluded that many students were "know-nothings." He realized with a shock that a lot of them didn't know who won the Civil War. Less educated than that is hard to imagine.
What, in the age of Ignorance, is reality like for most people? A sort of sleepy gray fog you drift through? Are is it like the exploding world in the movie Inception, hyperactive and vivid but incomprehensible? Either way, how do you make smart plans in a world where there's so little coherence? Lots of people give up trying. That seems to be the new normal in K-12 education.
Public schools, years ago, had a clear mandate to ensure that kids learn basic skills and foundational knowledge. Reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, and science, that's what you need to start. News flash from the education wars. American students today don't learn much reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, and science. Apparently our Education Establishment has walked off the job. Why?
If candid, they would tell you they had a bigger job, a higher calling. Their new responsibility is to create a different country and new kinds of citizens; and they can accomplish all that by reinventing the schools. The formula now is simply stated. Teach as little as possible. Indoctrinate as much as possible.
Our education officials are obsessed with propaganda but indifferent to knowledge. This inversion is killing us.
For one small example, if teenagers don't know where Japan or China is, not even within a thousand miles, what sort of conversation can they have about current events, modern history, new movies from the Far East, weird weather in the Pacific, economic upheaval, and threats of war?
Once upon a time, people learned enough to think for themselves. Doesn't that sound quaint? There seems to be more going on than ever before in history; but people understand less. How can they think for themselves? They don't know much.
According to our Education Establishment, there are new rules. You don't need to learn facts because they are all on Google, and because everything in the digital world is fast-changing and ever-new, so why bother?
Meanwhile, in the absence of any commitment to the learning of academic content, schools offer a smorgasbord of fluff. Instead of History and Science, students will learn Collaboration and Creativity. What we have is amnesia by design. People know so little, it’s just a faint background noise.
YouTube has dozens of videos extolling the wonders of 21st Century Education. Kids today are said to need heavy doses of: Critical Thinking, Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, Innovation, plus the such 21st Century concerns as Interdisciplinary Themes, Global Awareness, Financial Lliteracy, Civic Literacy, Health Lliteracy, Global Literacy, plus Life and Career Skills, and Higher Order Thinking; and invariably a complex project where third-graders solve a problem that local experts cannot handle.
Truth is, Progressives always loved scenarios where children pretend to be engineers, scientists, inventories, government officials, and so on. What valid information do children take away from these make-believe worlds? Wouldn't it be more constructive if children learn something real, historical, or factual? But then, you see, students would be acquiring knowledge. And that's not helpful.
The country needs to stage an innovation on itself. Our public schools are the equivalent of an overweight alcoholic who cannot do a push-up. What do you tell people like that? Stop drinking so much, don't eat so much, start exercising. Let's return to vistas that work. Facts are fun, knowledge is power.
Grappling with reality should be education's main focus. What is real, what is true, aren't these the big questions? Look at what our Education Establishment does to kids in public school. They know very little about the world. They can hardly do basic arithmetic without a calculator. They can hardly read a real newspaper.
Consider our roots, Rome, Greece, European Renaissance, the flowering of sciences, and then tapping into knowledge from around the world. This is the mother lode. Isn't it curious that our Education Establishment is so fixated on ignoring what came before? Professor Deneen speaks of our schools deliberately producing amnesia.
What about solipsism? So much of what children learn today ultimately refers back to themselves. If they never grapple with reality, they retreat into the unreality called solipsism. It's a kind of mental illness. The cure is learning about the world that was there before you were born, will be there after you die, and is there now if you will but look.
That is the great sin of our Progressive educators. They encourage children to focus on the ephemeral and to remain permanently childish.
Never forget that none of these developments is accidental or inevitable. Progressive educators want to take over the country. The first step is to make everyone else is ignorant. And so the public schools flail and fail.
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Bruce Deitrick Price's new book is “Saving K-12"
If you want an idea...There’s a tentative agreement in the Chicago teacher’s strike.
If you want an excellent case in point relating to everything that’s wrong with American education, read the 41 page document.
Kids are just grist for our so-called public servants’ diploma mills.
Teacher Unions
Federal Government
You need an editor. Third paragraph - using “are” when you meant “our.” Third bold paragraph - the term you were looking for is “stage an intervention”, not “innovation.” I agree with your thesis but writing this sort of article puts you in the position of Caesar’s wife.
Our public schools are organized around a false premise, and as reality diverges further and further from their ideal, they are drowning in lies.
Government schooling was the nation’s first socialist entitlement.
Maybe, just maybe, socialism is the problem and a capitalist free-market is the solution.
Administratively, large bureaucracy’s eventually all manage to convert their entire budgets to salaries and benefits.
Its the nature of the beast. Its what at an administrative level, ObamaCare is all about.
that phenomenon is universal in governance. And as long as we insist upon trying to govern with 20th century social statist institutional structures, it will continue.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome.
I agree with your assessment regarding government schooling. It’s a mess.
I, too, want a solution. Socialist-based government schooling cannot be reformed. It must be abolished and replaced with a free-market system.
We know what the problems are and what the solutions should be.
But there are not enough of us to win the local elections required to change the school boards nor the state educations departments.
Administrators, teachers...yes I do blame many of them, and parents are becoming equally ignorant and as time goes on there are simply more and more ignorant people voting.
It ain’t a good formula for change.
It is going to take a massive and gut wrenching campaign to turn things around that isn’t going to happen, at least not peacefully.
And no one wants to contemplate those ramifications. So we as a country sink into the stupid.
Damn shame.
One of the outcomes of the myth associated with the Vietnam War.
Federal and, in some instances, state control of Education. The problem is unsolvable so long as the federal government has any involvement at all in education. In California there is no remedy available before total economic collapse.
Remove ALL federal money and the rest of those problems will resolve themselves.
John Dewey.
L
start wi the teachers union
We are faced with three things here:
(1) A parent or parents who do not want a child of an accountable age to come home from school and face up that parent(s) with their debilitating acts contrary to moral or ethical Judeo/Christian standards they might be learning at school or in church.
(2) School administrators and/or classroom instructors (local or university-level) whose lifestyle and communicated personal philosophy is not consistent with Judeo/Christian morality and/or ethics, who do not wish to be held accountable to their students or their parents for the devastating decontruction of values they are deliberately engaged in.
(3) Elected, appointed, religious, or genetically designated sources of authority who will not stand up to the task of rebuking and disciplining individuals and groups that seek to destroy righteousness in thought and act.
The whelming of these three core community leadership initiators by radical deviation from rresponsibikity and accountability has proceeded so far as to be essentially gangrenous and ineradicable except perhaps by amputation and cauterizing of the infection they are propagating.
Robert Bork in "Slouching Towards Gomorrah" essentially says so.
Easy answer.
1. Unions
2. Democrats
3. Communists in Academia
4. Dr. Spock parenting
5. Moral relativism
6. Wokeness to the point that only white kids can be disciplined when they act-up.
7. Breakdown of the traditional family
Agree, though I would change the order a bit.
1. Unions,
2. Bureaucratization of the state & county education systems,
3. Democrats,
4. “Wokeness” to the point that only white kids can be disciplined when they act-up. Its been going on long before they had the term “wokeness” to describe it!,
5. Communists in Academia,
6. Breakdown of the traditional family,
7. Moral relativism,
8. Dr. Spock parenting.
Easy answer.
1. Unions
2. Democrats
3. Communists in Academia
4. Dr. Spock parenting
5. Moral relativism
6. Wokeness to the point that only white kids can be disciplined when they act-up.
7. Breakdown of the traditional family
8. Affirmative action teachers
Illiterate disarmed peasants are easy to rule over.
Valerie Jarret: “Obama is ready to rule from day one”.
9. No administrative backup for teachers, which makes discipline impossible. In Latin, “discipulus” means “student.” Alas.
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