Posted on 11/05/2013 7:34:41 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
A Pennsylvania father objected when his daughters middle-school history teacher assigned a project about a New York Times article blaming Republicans for the government shutdown. His complaint apparently made him the target of an orchestrated response by faculty at Camp Hill Middle School, and an English teacher named Cydnee Cohen left a voicemail message for one of the parents Facebook friends:
Were having some problems with a parent in our school district and on his page you are one of his friends but I would like to know, some of it seems like he is a neo-nazi call me
Bonus absurdity: The allegedly neo-Nazi parent, Josh Barry, is Jewish. Cohen is president of the local teachers union. Barry told the Daily Caller, Her method is to go after the concerned parent and discredit and slander them. He called it big-time union thuggery on display.
Whats happening here? Well, for one thing, we have further confirmation of what every intelligent American already knew: Public schools are staffed by Democrats, who not only vote Democrat and contribute money to Democrats through their unions, but consider it their professional duty to teach children to be Democrats, too.
But what about Cohens tactics? Whats up with that?
What Cohen was doing is consistent with a method of consensus building known as the Delphi technique. Originally developed as a way of organized discussion among experts, this method has been adapted and taught to school administrators. It is used to quell criticism of school policy by isolating and marginalizing critics, while creating the appearance of consensus in support of the policy.
Heres what happens: You, the concerned parent, raise a question about some element of the curriculum or pedagogy. You contact the teacher who will then tell you theres nothing to worry about, and that youre the only parent who has complained. (Isolation.)
Suppose youre not satisfied with the teachers answer, so you arrange a meeting with the principal. By the time you get that meeting, the teacher has already briefed the principal, so that he has a prepared defense of whatever it is youre complaining about. The principals goal for the meeting is to placate you by convincing you that you are over-reacting because, after all, youre the only parent who has complained.
Its at this point that you start feeling like youre in the Monty Python sketch, trying to get a refund for your dead parrot and being told by the pet shop owner that the Norwegian Blue is pining for the fjords.
You will encounter variations of this tactic no matter how far up the chain of command you take your complaint the superintendents office, the PTA, the school board, etc. and no matter what it is that you are complaining about. If you persist in your criticism, you will be labeled a troublemaker, an extremist, a kook, because the bureaucratic imperative is to marginalize critics, so that the bureaucracy can operate without scrutiny or opposition. (About 10 years ago, a slightly eccentric lady named B.K. Eakman published a book about this, How to Counter Group Manipulation Tactics: The Techniques of Unethical Consensus-Building Unmasked, which you might wish to examine.)
What every concerned parent eventually learns is this: The American public education system is profoundly undemocratic. The system is organized for the benefit of those who run the system. Its not about teaching kids, its about providing lifetime employment, generous benefits and extraordinary political influence for education majors.
Keep this in mind: Whatever it is youre complaining about whatever specific grievance you have with the system is merely a symptom of the disease. The problems of public education are not episodic, but systemic in nature. Public schools are not about teaching facts and skills, but rather are about teaching attitudes and beliefs, and the most important lesson they teach your kids is that you, the parent, are an ignorant idiot who should be ignored. No matter how many degrees you have, no matter how competent and skilled you are in your own profession, if your opinion about what constitutes an appropriate education differs from what the education system wants to provide, you will find you are regarded as inferior to the credentialed experts whose job is to undermine your authority as a parent.
You are only a good parent if you agree with the experts. You can have no autonomous influence over your childs education, because your child exists only for the benefit of the system.
In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.
William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)
Why arent you homeschooling your children yet?
Well, Cohen must be Jewish as well. His last name is about as popular for Hebrew as Smith for English-speakers.
Should be posted in every newsroom around the country.
bfl
>> a method of consensus building known as the Delphi technique.
Study up on this, boys and girls.
There are quite a few teachers here at FR.
This is my last year of teaching (32 years)
I've got to head off to school. Thanks again.
To put it more bluntly, most of them should never be allowed contact with any children. I thank God I never had children because I would be the kind of parent you read about that ends up being arrested due to interaction with a teacher.
Do I have a bias against teachers? To a certain point, yes. My first four years in school, I was sent to the special ed class only because at the time I had trouble with s and th words. Not one teacher tried to work with me on that. For years and years my handwriting was atrocious. Only between my junior and senior year did it improve because my oldest brother saw I was holding my hand wrong. He corrected it and set up a system for me to write/print better. No teacher ever tried to correct that - just gave me bad grades. I had teachers make fun of me in front of the class because I did not know the answers to math problems. I had a teacher in the 5th grade that would angerly throw chalk and erasers from the front to the back of the class, hitting the wall. When I started school in Maryland, the bathrooms were labeled lavatories. In 67 I started going to a Virginia school and the students - led by the teacher - laughed when I asked to go to the lavatory.
I could go on and on. And I think the main reason this occurred is because I came from a dirt poor family, a broken home. Teachers knew that, put me in the discard box, and concentrated on the students from stable, middle-class and up, two parent households.
School was a hellhole for me. I started reading and learning on my own, picking up more information than the teachers knew. I have an excellent memory, able to remember what I read. I started coming to school only a couple days a week, read the assignments, pass the tests.
This crap about stuff being placed in your record is just that - crap. I did 20 years in the Navy, made rank, worked and set up equipment that my teachers would have to hire people to set up for them. None of the stuff from my past ever came back to bite me. And I firmly believe if you cannot do, you teach. And if you cannot teach, you become a librarian. And if you cannot be a librarian, than you get appointed to the education board where you make up rules to suit your socialist utopion fantasy world and make life more miserable for students and eventually the public.
Most teachers are dumber than dirt and by their very stupidity, cause evil to happen.
My pleasure, take care.
I’m sorry to hear about all your negative experiences with schooling. I personally had good experiences with schooling. I guess it shows just how much our childhood experiences influence our thoughts even as adults.
As an aside, thanks for your service.
***************************************
The unvarnished truth.
“Most teachers are not doing evil things at work.
What do you suggest teachers should do? Not accept the paycheck...quit?”
Yes,Quit! - before an outraged public has them tried for assorted legal offenses and then all their ill-gotten pensions, policies, assets, etc are subjected to forfeiture upon conviction.
What should anyone do if their employer turned out to be part of a vast illegal enterprise devoted to destruction of the Republic?
“I was just teaching the curriculum” will work little better than did the “Good German” plea “I was just following orders.”
Homeschool PING!
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