Virtual Study Hall vs. Hall of Shame of the Mis-Education Saboteurs

Freep | 04-08-2020 | Charles O'Connell

[CharlesOConnell]

Virtual Study Hall is the Best Contemporary Model for True Education. "We're all homeschoolers now." Virtual Study Hall is a contemporary update, for today's conditions, of the highly successful One Room School model of 200 years past, enlarging the scope of Homeschool socialization groups to encompass the primary education enterprise itself, centering on instruction and study.

Study Halls supply a vital, missing element of study progress, for students to coordinate between textbooks and instruction. (The continual demand of junior students for the teacher's attention in the open classroom, tends to limit the effectiveness of the teaching and study enterprise to the lowest common denominator; a group instructor who is both giving the lecture and monitoring students' individual progress, can only go the speed of the slowest student.)

In the Study Hall, elder students help more junior ones, as they did in One Room Schools. The quiet environment naturally promotes studiousness, on the model of virtue as the incremental practice of building up good habits. But the chief difficulty in the current situation is insuring remotely linked study hall participants have the proper environment of quiet and focus to foster concentration on the course of study.

Another vital issue for homeschooled, former public school students, is working around attempts by central school authorities to hobble progress by linking it to the policy of systematic, calculated failure of the past century. So, homeschoolers need to update themselves with a primer on the policy of failure.

The Hall of Shame of the 19th-20th Century of Mis-Education Saboteurs

Consideration of a bullet list of the historical architects of failure can help homeschoolers now to sidestep the futile outreach of the school hierarchy.

• Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the prophet of mis-eduation, was the seminal corrupter of the educational enterprise, pushing the delusory mythology of "natural education" to promote fallacious idealism about "happiness, spontaneity, and inquisitiveness", so students' tendency to lose focus could overturn the natural study hierarchy and attain dominance of the educational enterprise.
• Robert Owen (1771-1858), proprietor of the failed, pre-Marxist utopian New Harmony commune, was able to influence Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, to institute mandatory state education, overriding Homeschooling and the One Room School.
• Horace Mann (1796 -1859) succeeded in spreading the false gospel of mandatory state education to all American states and many world countries. Horace Mann promoted whole-word, non-phonetic reading instruction.
• Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) subjected mandatory state schools to the principles of the dark science of scientific management, instituting standardized testing against the interests of students' individual educational attainment and treating them as factory employment industrial products.
• John Dewey, working with William Kilpatrick promoted whole-word reading after the first long-term reaction against Horace Mann's efforts in that regard. (Four the of five sons of John D. Rockefeller Sr. contracted dyslexia at John Dewey's experimental Lincoln School, which Rockefeller endowed.) John Dewey applied the "box-cutter" to the pandora's box of anti-intellectual miseducation, for the expanding class of leftist "education" planners to dumb-down primary education. John Dewey significantly enabled leftist eggheads to dissolve the traditional education enterprise and spin hairbrained pipe-dreams about how to conduct institutionalized "education" policy--"child-centered education"--without ever taking stock of the actual damage being done to millions of people's lives.

Ideology From the Ivory Tower Down to the Normal Schools. Intellectuals spin etherial theories about how the little people must live, but don’t pick up the tab. John Dewey destroyed primary 1-6 education between 1920 and 1940, from Columbia Teacher’s College for “trainers of trainers”, to mis-educate generations of teachers at Normal Schools across America, effectively jettisoning of the Western civilization legacy of Good and Great Books from America’s schools across the board.

By the first quarter of the 20th century, broad public awareness of socialist mis-educators' destructive plans caused them to veil their actual intentions in smuggled phrases like "democracy" and "progressivism".

At the beginning of the 20th century, education was subjected to the broad action of monopolization of all institutions, cartelizing the educational enterprise that had been the natural domain of families and local towns.

Instead of senior students of the One Room School assuming Headmaster and Headmistress roles at the local level, Teachers must be mass-processed through Normal Schools (Horace Mann). Mega High Schools with thousands of anonymous students must replace the intimate, home and local educational enterprise. School Districts must be combined into larger and larger districts, so that the NEA could dictate Federal Educational policy.

[Leaning Right]

> In the Study Hall, elder students help more junior ones <

I taught for many years in urban high schools. And a study hall assignment was something to be dreaded. Because it was usually elder students taunting and teasing the more junior ones.

Monitoring that room was like monitoring a prison on the brink of a riot.

Oh, and appeals to administration did no good. Their main goal was to keep suspensions down. That’s how they earned their bonuses.

So know you know one reason why urban test scores are so low.

[a fool in paradise]

the rest of us got dentition.

[CharlesOConnell]

At Sacramento City College, I was with hundreds of other students making a infectious, studious environment in the library. At California State University Sacramento, I got an A in calculus after being in Math Lab study hall with a senior student coaching me. Want to truly understand your subject? Explain it to a junior student studying the same subject. Life is not Ferris Buehler’s Day Off.

[otness_e]

Must admit, I’m actually somewhat surprised that you didn’t list Voltaire and Diderot among the Hall of Shame bit, since I’d argue their damage to education was far more severe than even that of Rousseau’s mis-education policies (to say little of the guys who came afterward).

For example, according to Yale headmaster Timothy Dwight in 1798:

“About the year 1728, Voltaire, so celebrated for his wit and brilliancy and not less distinguished for his hatred of Christianity and his abandonment of principle, formed a systematical design to destroy Christianity and to introduce in its stead a general diffusion of irreligion and atheism. For this purpose he associated with himself Frederick the II, king of Prussia, and Mess. D’Alembert and Diderot, the principal compilers of the Encyclopedie, all men of talents, atheists and in the like manner abandoned.

“The principle parts of this system were:

“1. The compilation of the Encyclopedie: in which with great art and insidiousness the doctrines of … Christian theology were rendered absurd and ridiculous; and the mind of the reader was insensibly steeled against conviction and duty.

“2. The overthrow of the religious orders in Catholic countries, a step essentially necessary to the destruction of the religion professed in those countries.

“3. The establishment of a sect of philosophists to serve, it is presumed as a conclave, a rallying point, for all their followers.

“4. The appropriation to themselves, and their disciples, of the places and honors of members of the French Academy, the most respectable literary society in France, and always considered as containing none but men of prime learning and talents. In this way they designed to hold out themselves and their friends as the only persons of great literary and intellectual distinction in that country, and to dictate all literary opinions to the nation.

“5. The fabrication of books of all kinds against Christianity, especially such as excite doubt and generate contempt and derision. Of these they issued by themselves and their friends who early became numerous, an immense number; so printed as to be purchased for little or nothing, and so written as to catch the feelings, and steal upon the approbation, of every class of men.

“6. The formation of a secret Academy, of which Voltaire was the standing president, and in which books were formed, altered, forged, imputed as posthumous to deceased writers of reputation, and sent abroad with the weight of their names. These were printed and circulated at the lowest price through all classes of men in an uninterrupted succession, and through every part of the kingdom.”

Granted, most of this is more predicated on his role in creating the French Revolution, but it still has a direct tie to education and the sabotage thereof of the concept with #4 and #6, especially when in point 4 of the plan, Voltaire and his ilk apparently did the same thing Gramsci did during the 20th century and infiltrated the French Academy, which at the time was considered the most literate institution out there, and take it down from within to reduce the literary society to being little more than a mouthpiece of his, not to mention an outright indoctrination center. This bit is especially important to note given not only the crappy bits of university education as a whole where they’re currently little more than indoctrination centers with “tenured professors” talking about and praising sixties-era free sex in a Chaucer course, for example, but also something that Richard Rorty stated where he claims the jobs of University Professors is “to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own” and “escape the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.” And if American Thinker (https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2008/11/how_the_academic_left_elected.html) is to be believed it’s that degree of mis-education and indoctrination by the education system, and by the likes of Rorty, no less, that are directly responsible for the likes of Barack Obama being elected, and what’s worse, the students’ Conservative parents unknowingly paid for this by even SENDING them to college to be brainwashed. And Voltaire as well as Diderot (and possibly several other French Enlightenment people) were directly responsible for this. Now do you see what I mean by Voltaire and Diderot’s “contribution” to education being even WORSE than Rousseau’s? Those guys deliberately sabotaged it to try and make France atheist overnight, and boasted about it (Voltaire even bragged that the Bible will be forgotten in a century).