Homeschool list ping. He’s running for Congress in Oregon’s 4th District.
bttt
Besides the FACT that the US K-12 system has become an expensive/costly assembly line, I am sure that the implimentation of ‘teaching to test’ or the fact that unionized teachers and tenure have had absolutely nothing to do with our education system being so fraked huh, Dr. Robinson?
I have college freshman students, year after year, who have no clue how to write a sentence let alone a paragraph and fail miserably at understanding concepts that they should have had or did have in middle or high school. Care to explain that one to me, as well as many of my university collegues throughout the US? =.=
I hope he wins. He understands key points very well. One of the most important points he makes is the following:
“Teachers and parents worked together on the content of curriculum, student discipline, and all aspects of school life. In addition to being academic institutions, public schools became centers of sports competition, social events, and other aspects of community life.”
This is missing to a GREAT extent in our present culture. ONE of the reasons it is missing has to do with the breakdown of the family. And many political activists have been responsible for advocating policies that further damage families.
Of course, we must all share in the blame ... because, as a nation, we began to ignore God and His Wisdom. I am encouraged to see that this economic/political crisis has been a catalyst for several people to realize this...and begin to remedy it....for themselves as individuals AND their families. The family is the most crucial building block for any healthy society. Sound education springs from healthy families.
Don't stop there. The STATE department of education should likewise be closed. Return the control of education to local school boards. 99% of the money spent by taxpayers outside of the local school district on state and federal educrats is a complete and total waste.
Oh! Forgot:
“Both universities would, however, be much better off if they were not completely dependent upon politicians for their immediate existence.”
Don’t think Oregon is completely dependent - they got the Nike guy...
I could tell, from their sucky unis and atrocious b-ball floor.
hahaha!
Cheers!
Dr. Art Robinson has a great homeschooling program and I hope he wins in his bid for Congress. However, his understanding of the history of public education is not correct. By the 1950’s public schools were already seriously compromised along the road to statism by Dewey’s theories. Every school teacher was trained in his methodology and curriculum was planned accordingly. The elites had already decided in the late 19th century to socialize the education system and began their program in teacher training. The fact that not every school district was yet reorganized is not a true reflection of how socialized the education had already become.
In the 50’s the elites had already institutionalized kindergarten with its goal of removing phonetic reading instruction and delaying reading instruction until lst grade. History was being changed to social studies. Memorization of math facts, indeed any facts, was being challenged and limited. Grading of students had already been accomplished so that children were grouped according to age and not ability, as had been done in the one room schoolhouse. High school was also now mandatory in the 50’s whereas in 1900 most students had finished high school level material by the “8th level.” If you doubt that, just skim one of the original McGuffey readers designed for the last class of elementary school. It’s reading on what is now in the 21st century reserved for the advanced classes of high school.
A great book to read on this subject is: JOHN DEWEY AND THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN EDUCATION: HOW THE PATRON SAINT OF SCHOOLS HAS CORRUPTED TEACHING AND LEARNING by Henry T. Edmondson III.
Couldn't agree more. Our school just spent who-knows-how-much on a set of iPads for the kids. Half of them will be broken in 2 years and they'll all be obsolete in 4. Meanwhile, we are on a rationing system for xerox copies and white paper. Does this make ANY sense? Not to me....
>>Is it any surprise, therefore, that in the 2010 election, OSU facilities and personnel were mobilized in favor of the incumbent Congressional candidate in District 4 and against the challenger? OSU courses often contain partisan political content, even science courses with no logical political purpose. OSU has become a very partisan political institution, which can lead to reprehensible injustices to students, as evidenced by my own family.
This is the guy whose three children were expelled from OSU because he ran against Fazio in 2010, correct? The outrage where OSU stole their work and gave credit for it to more favored socialist students?
As local control diminished, so did the academic quality of our schools. U.S. schools are now rated as among the worst in the developed world. This is more than a tragedy - it is child abuse.
It's one of the planks of the Communist Manifesto. It's not an accident that control has shifted away from localities, and to a central agency.
The trick is to have the people think they have control; and for that all that is necessary is create some sort of false or trivial conflict, then declare the people get to choose by voting.
He needs to go study the roots of the government schooling movement in this country (and others). It may have looked nice in the 50s. He may have gotten a good education. But the seed was planted in poisonous ground and even then the motives of the people behind “public” schooling - not the teachers, but the administrators and visionaries - has been incompatible with a traditional conservative American viewpoint.
If the schools next door started producing world class graduates better than what I could do at home I still wouldn’t put my daughter there, because I disagree with institutional Prussian-style schooling.
Great timing, could ya’ll also take a look over here at the issue of Standards Based Grading creeping into middle schools and high schools?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2814935/posts
He doesn’t say so, and it would probably be election suicide for him to say so, but I think public colleges and universities need to be audited thoroughly to determine why costs keep going up. I expect that professors are spending less time per class/student and so more teaching staff is used than necessary. Likewise, the administrative staffs are hugely bloated.
They suffer the same problem that any government bureaucracy does — larger staffs justify higher pay for supervisors, so there is a disincentive to improve productivity.
Basically, they spend more money because they CAN, because students are so desperate and student loans are so easy to get, that universities raise their fees and tuition and the students keep paying. Students complain, but keep coming and paying. The government should stop guaranteeing student loans. Public universities should not be using price to try to decrease demand, they should be using merit to fill their spaces and then either expand the school or reject the extras. Charging people up the wazoo and then just blowing the cash on lighter workloads for professors and bloating admin is bad policy. Especially when every extra $1 the student pays is matched by $3 the taxpayer must pay.
The unavailability of student loans and leaner operating costs at public universities will lead to lower fees at both public and private schools as they must compete with the public schools.
conservative teacher here, FL. . .its tough. I could easily spend my entire day, every day, all year trying to UN-do the crap some of these liberal teachers fill your kids head with. You have no idea.
Furthermore, what we are NOT teaching anymore is far more detrimental to our society. History classes are watered down to PC love-fests. Like our history was made by holding hands and singing kum-bay-yah??? ridiculous.
Money$$ I spend on average, 2,000-2,800 on necessary supplies for my classroom and students every year. If you think your kids benefit in any way from your tax payer dollars you are highly mistaken. High-paid babysitting my friends. Not at all, the schools we grew up in before unions ruled the world. I say, cut the head off and let it bleed.
Local control is still local socialism.
1) The children who attend risk becoming accustomed to accepting a tuition-free socialist service. Well?...If the government ( local or not) can use the threat of police action to take money from a neighbor to give them socialist schooling, why not use that government power to get lots of socialist goodies
2) It is **IMPOSSIBLE** to have a culturally, politically, and religiously neutral education. Even if school districts were the size of a city block or a suburban housing division, there is no way to reconcile the various worldviews of even those few families. In the end, the largest political bully group gets to dictate the worldview of the area's children and they have the government police force to make other citizens pay for it.
3) Ok....Let's say all socialist K-12 schooling were returned to the town level. How many generations would it take to reproduce the federal and state monstrosity that we have now? One? Two? Three generations? Socialism's natural course is to move toward greater and greater centralization.
4) Finally...Secularism is NOT NOT NOT religiously neutral! In a secular school a child must think and reason godlessly merely to cooperate within the classroom! How can that be religiously neutral? It can't! The point is that it is impossible to have a religiously neutral education, and no citizen should be forced to pay for the establishment of the religious worldview of the biggest political bullies in the town.
Socialist schooling is a First Amendment and freedom of conscience abomination!
Solution: We must begin the process of privatizing universal K-12 education. What's needed is complete separation of school and state.
By the way....It only took one to three generations of modern locally controlled socialist education to produce **four** terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
( Not proof read)