Posted on 07/04/2013 11:32:17 AM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
One bizarre aspect of any discussion about public education is that everybody tiptoes around the real reason why the schools are mediocre.
We spend billions of dollars. Millions of people work in this area. The whole country embraces public education.
So why do we have low literacy rates, widespread ignorance among ordinary citizens about simple things, etc., etc.??
The people in charge can’t be trying to do a good job. Put another way, whatever it is these people mean by “education” is not what most parents want for their kids.
John Dewey and everybody else in charge of public education from 1900 onward was a socialist, a communist, a collectivist, or something of the sort. This is not a secret. Most of these people used the word “progressive” to describe themselves, and this was a common synonym for socialist.
The only thing that seems to be hidden is the degree to which these people would push their socialist agenda--rather than focus on the educational services they are paid to care about.
Bottom line, it clarifies every discussion about education if we understand that the DNA of this field is far to the left. Socialists want to eliminate private property, religion, family, and freedom. To accomplish all this, they try to dumb down the public through education.
Clearly, the American Revolution was not fought on behalf of these disgraceful goals.
For a longer discussion, see “Socialism versus Education."
http://www.examiner.com/article/socialism-versus-education
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I'd say they've done a pretty darn good job of that.
The country is currently so ignorant it won't last long.
I've been attacked even on this site for daring to criticize government or the government schools. wish I could find the post.
Just like the days when democrats made laws that made it illegal to teach slaves to read. It kept the slaves on the plantation.
In 2010, Barack Obama called for fixing the public education system by giving us the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and “Race to the Top,”
which he said would fix the education system already fixed by the 2001 GW Bush and Ted Kennedy legislation called “No Child Left Behind,”
which was supposed to fix a system supposedly already fixed by a 1994 piece of federal legislation called “Goals 2000,”
which was supposed to fix a system already fixed by “America 2000,”
which was a 1991 response during the Bush administration to a 1983 federal report on education called “A Nation at Risk,
which was published a full four years after Jimmy Carter first fixed the nation’s public school system by establishing a cabinet-level Department of Education in 1979.
Public schools are most certainly NOT mediaocre! They have declined way past mediocre. Mediocre doesn’t mean or imply “totally bad” but it means only “so-so.” Who would say that public schools are merely “so-so?” They have not been mediocre for more than 6 decades.
It’s not necessarily that they WANT to dumb down the schools. It’s only that the principles of the left that they apply to the schools are misguided and result in bad outcomes.
The left believes in equality of outcome and that the educational institutions must teach to that level. They really believe (I hope) that as all outcomes equalize, the educational experience will be better for all. Sort of a rising tide lifting all boats.
When it doesn’t happen according to their pet theories, they want to throw more money into the system to fund ever smaller classes and more equipment for the students at the lower end of the educational scale.
The result is that good to exceptional students get turned off or learn less than they could. The bad students reject learning as being for ‘punks’ and don’t try, but the left believes the reason they don’t learn is that they are deprived and oppressed.
Conservatives drive another nail in the country’s coffin every time they send their child to a public school.
"...Educators unveiled new guidelines on Tuesday that call for sweeping changes in the way science is taught in the United States — including, for the first time, a recommendation that climate change be taught as early as middle school... The guidelines also take a firm stand that children must learn about evolution, the central organizing idea in the biological sciences for more than a century, but one that still provokes a backlash among some religious conservatives.
The guidelines, known as the Next Generation Science Standards, are the first broad national recommendations for science instruction since 1996. They were developed by a consortium of 26 state governments and several groups representing scientists and teachers...
...The focus would be helping students become more intelligent science consumers by learning how scientific work is done: how ideas are developed and tested, what counts as strong or weak evidence, and how insights from many disciplines fit together into a coherent picture of the world.
Leaders of the effort said that teachers may well wind up covering fewer subjects, but digging more deeply into the ones they do cover. In some cases, traditional classes like biology and chemistry may disappear entirely from high schools, replaced by courses that use a case-study method to teach science in a more holistic way...
...“This is a huge deal,” said David L. Evans, the executive director of the National Science Teachers Association. “We depend on science in so many aspects of our lives. There’s a strong feeling that we need to help people understand the nature of science itself, as an intellectual pursuit.” [sic--I have now lost ALL respect for NSTA)
The climate and evolution standards are just two aspects of a set of guidelines containing hundreds of new ideas on how to teach science. But they have already drawn hostile commentary from conservative groups critical of mainstream scientific thinking. [my bolding]
For instance, as the standards were being drafted, a group called Citizens for Objective Public Education, which lists officers in Florida and Kansas, distributed a nine-page letter attacking them. It warned that the standards ignored evidence against evolution, promoted “secular humanism,” and threatened to “take away the right of parents to direct the religious education of their children...”
...The other states that helped draw up the guidelines were Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia. The organizations included the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Research Council and Achieve, a nonprofit education group that helped develop the earlier common standards in mathematics and English. Financing was provided by private foundations, including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Noyce Foundation and the Cisco Foundation, as well as DuPont..."
Basically, it seems that they want to teach less memorized content and teach more "process". My question is, unless you have acquired a thorough understanding of the basic concepts (yeah, with a lot of memorization), how can you synthesize and come to a conclusion when you are confronted with a puzzling experiment? And how will these "new science education" students then understand scientific papers or texts if they've done inquiry-based experiments without a thorough grounding in vocabulary and concepts? They want to eliminate specific disciplines such as biology, earth science, chemistry and physics and go for this "holistic" B.S. approach. I would also like to know how such toney-sounding organizations as the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Research Council signed onto this destruction of science education.
As a veteran science teacher, I'd also like to know how these ivory-tower thinking folks would deal with inner city students who, try as you will, simply seem incapable of grasping "If this, then that". I once taught a Science Research course in a 100% black school. Three-quarters of the way into the semester, we were STILL discussing basic concepts of the Scientific Method and they STILL didn't get it, nor how variables affect the results of the experiment, nor how inadvertently introduced variables could have an effect (such as using 2 different brands of animal feed when you are testing how temperature affects the growth of rats). By the end of the semester, when they were supposed to be finishing up their science projects, only ONE student in the entire class had a completed project. None of the other students had sought out my help with projects or indeed, even done the basic library research to start a project. Yeah, tell me about that "process-oriented science education" again? At least at the end of the semester, the mostly-memory biology course students had clearly learned SOMETHING which was reflected in assessment tests. Not nearly as much as I would have liked, to be sure, but something.
RE: “It’s not necessarily that they WANT to dumb down the schools.”
I’m arguing that they do WANT to.
The number of bad policies and dismal results would NOT be possible without intent.
RE: New science standards.
The gimmick here -– and you also see it in every other subject — is for these pretenders to figure out what they can keep kids busy doing all day, without actually teaching them any science.
Notice the casual way they talk about getting rid of biology and chemistry. It’s almost funny, in a lunatic asylum sort of way.
The National Council of Teachers of Math. The National Council of Teachers of English. And now the National Science Teachers Association. They bring in these people we should be able to trust, and let them do the dirty work.
(I hope everybody in the country fights this thing whenever possible.)
I don’t think it is necessary to demonize those folks. Most are simply true believers in a philosophy that is different from our beliefs. That it doesn’t work is the point that they can’t understand.
There is no reason why the millions of liberals would WANT to dumb down education. They truly have good intentions and think their plans will work.
Ascribing evil intent to all of them in some grand conspiracy isn’t realistic. It’s like some of them calling all conservatives right wing extremists with evil racist underpinnings.
The old adage that “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” is probably applicable here.
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