Nicely done.
The dumbing down is so patently obvious to me it’s jaw-dropping.
I graduated high school in 1969. I waited 25 years to take any college - was raising children - and took math and computer classes, so didn’t get a lot of the social crap.
Today, I hire college graduates and it’s quickly apparent to me that I knew more about history, language, and rational thought when I graduated high school than todays college graduates know.
“The right approach is simply stated. Emphasize basic skills, foundational knowledge and mastery. Basics, Knowledge, Mastery. BKM. That’s something we didn’t try for a while.”
I wish they would stick with the basics.
My daughter is doing lattice multiplication. I’ve never seen that stuff before. I thought, “What the hell is that?” when I saw her homework. I agreed with your assessment of this method-that it’s a form of child abuse.
She claims that’s the only way she can understand it but I couldn’t do it. It makes absolutely no sense to me and I want to scream every time I look at it.
The Progressive nursery schools start a child’s education at the age of three. Their view of a child’s needs is militantly anti-cognitive and anti-conceptual. A child of that age, they claim, is too young for cognitive training; his natural desire is not to learn, but to play. The development of his conceptual faculty, they claim, is an unnatural burden that should not be imposed on him; he should be free to act on his spontaneous urges and feelings in order to express his subconscious desires, hostilities and fears. The primary goal of a Progressive nursery school is “social adjustment”; this is to be achieved by means of group activities, in which a child is expected to develop both “self-expression’ (in the form of anything he might feel like doing) and conformity to the group.--The Comprachicos by Ayn Rand (pdf)(For a presentation of the essentials of the Progressive nursery schools’ theories and practice—as contrasted to the rationality of the Montessori nursery schools—I refer you to “The Montessori Method” by Beatrice Hessen in The Objectivist, May-July 1970.)
Home viewing bookmark.
What’s your opinion re: teaching the classics?
One thing which would help would be a decent alphabet for English; we don’t have one at present.
Ping.
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I know a retired teacher who did about 6,000 hours worth of research with the help of another teacher trying to find out what went wrong with our education system.
She’s now of the opinion that sending children to government schools constitutes child abuse.
Government education can NOT NOT NOT NOT be FIXED!
You will not see an effective “BKM” program in socialist-funded, government owned and managed, collectivist school board managed, GODLESS, prison-like schools. It can NOT NOT NOT happen! Why? Because the very purpose of government school is to turn out compliant collectivists and socialists! It was that way from the very beginning in the mid-1800s to early 1900s.
From the very first day that government schools opened in the mid-1800s American education was on its INEVITABLE path toward destruction of the American mind and soul. Socialist, collectivist, welfare schemes **ALWAYS** do this! It doesn't matter what they are.
If conservatives love children, America, and desire to see our nation's experiment in self rule survive, we MUST MUST MUST shut down every government K-12 school in this nation! We MUST MUST MUST get our nation's children into private conservative educational settings that fully and completely integrate the child's family's Judeo Christian belief and our nation's founding principles into every minute of the day.
Please note that I said “educational settings”. I did not say prison-like “schools”.
Yes, our Founding Fathers desired that the American people be well educated. It is likely that they had in mind their **own** educations: homeschool, educational cooperation among families, one room schools, private tutoring, very small educational academies, apprenticeships, and college by the early teens for those who were very bright and well enough off to pay for it.
Get government completely out of education and this nation will soon see BKM.
By the way, if vouchers, tax credits, and charters can lead us out of this mess of government education welfare and toward complete privatization then I support it....BUT...There is a danger with vouchers, etc. They can lead to continually higher and higher tuition hikes that we see with colleges and universities today and government control of the curriculum and programs.
( Yeah! I am shouting. It distresses me that so few conservatives understand that socialism and collectivism can NOT be fixed.)