So I really hope that everyone will keep an eye on the public schools. Get involved in the public schools. Meddle in the public schools. Tutor in the public schools. Take an intense look at the candidates for the school board. Write letters to the local paper. Demonstrate and agitate, basically, for genuine education in your nearby public schools.
By saving the public schools, we save ourselves. It’s my big theme these days: we are not going to save this country if we don’t save the public schools.
Would you like some specifics on how to do that? Specifically, get rid of all varieties of Reform Math. Eliminate all non-phonetic reading instruction. Teach basics, facts, foundational knowledge, and content. Teach respect for accuracy, truth, precision, and discipline. It would be very helpful to get rid of Social Studies (read Socialism Studies)...That should almost do it. As a practical matter, I suspect it will be much, much easier to REFORM the public schools than to shut them down. There's a vast infrastructure in place. Why not fill it up with a new spirit? Everyone knows the schools are spending too much money and doing a crummy job. The public wants improvement. The climate is right for the Education Establishment to start thinking about saving its own skin. "Right, reform! That's just what we were thinking about. Honestly! Real education. We're all for it!!!" Could happen.
For sure, in any other human activity, when you have years of failure and waste, there's a universal response. Fire the dumb bunnies at the top. Get people in there who can tell sophistry from Shinola, something the present clueless crew just can't do.
////end of post//
“46: Public Schools Seem To Be Designed To Fail" is here: www.improve-education.org/id72.html
Privatization is the only thing that will work. Government schools will fail.
Perhaps the best way to support those kids is to push for privatization.
Also I always encouraged to hear of FReepers who work within the system.
the politics of low expectations
Government schools are simply government tyranny.
I also like the idea of nearby churches doing after school tutoring.
They can get some religious and moral instruction, homework help, and some classes from a Christian/conservative position.
I like thinking about Hazlitt/Economics courses, patriotic courses in American and world history. . . creation science of course.
(ducks for cover)
Separation of school and state beep
You can’t save things run by the government. Governments are only good at war and infrastructure, if it ain’t blowing up enemies or building roads government will do it poorly. Education, medicine, helping the poor, these things just aren’t in government’s wheel house and the results will always be a colossal waste of money and never improve the situation.
The NEA, Teacher’s Unions in general run Education.
the Unions are Far Left
The Teachers, Adms, etc. are products of Left Wing Universities and this going on for the past several generations.
The Text Books are written by Far Left people
with standard Left Wing propaganda.
Unless you do away with the Left Wing Unions, deprogram the teachers, and throw out the textbooks, the Public Schools
will always be Left Wing.
The parents in most cases are no help. They are either
Left wing also or close their eyes and put their fingers in their ears and don’t want to know or hear about Public Schools.
When a parent says, they can’t afford Parochial Schools,
this is disingenuous.
Many can afford a second car, or 4 bedroom homes.
Scale down and get real.
My 2nd cousin in New Jersey had 5 children , she and her husband and the 5 kids lived in a small 2 bedroom house.
They all went to Parochial School and the kids all worked
their way through Rutgers Univ.
When Conservative parents wonder why their kid became a liberal, dumping them in a Public School got them on their
way.
When they are teaching elementary school kids to be sluts and to sign up for Obama’s OFA and Global Warming and High School nurses are just referals for abortion clinics and the actual curiculum has been dumbed dumbed down....
YES, get out of the public schools as far and as fast as you can.
There is no way to "reform" public education when teachers and administrators are controlled by teachers' unions whose primary expenditure is for lobbying for more union control and more taxpayer funding. These communists are holding 90% of the nation's students hostage to extort more funding and power from parents and legislators.
The inevitable result of state controlled education (“government” run education) is that the values and the knowledge that serves the interests of government (the interests of government bureaucrats and the politicians and their apparatchiks, who control government) will be what is taught. And the interests of the people (if those interests be contrary to what “government” wants) will be ignored.
Government schools must be abandoned. There is no possibility of general "improvement.
That said, do all those things . Work to get good people on the school board, etc., even though even the school board can't do a whole lont in the face of the teachers unions, but get your own kids the hell OUT of the system. If you actually care about your own childrens' education, home school them or get them into a Christian Academy or the like.
Straw man argument. No one is unaffected by or unaware of what the unionized educrat complex does. Another reform of the curricula is pointless. Each reform ends up making schools worse. There are two and only two ways to fix public schools: Bust the unions; separate school and state. Neither is likely. So the only alternative is an exodus.
Yes, we need to try and save the public schools. They are one of the key battlegrounds in the war of ideas. Lose the schools and in a generation you lose it all. As we are seeing.
But your kids are kids for a very short time. However many years its going to take to reclaim the public schools, they don’t have that long. So, while you do whatever is within your power to change the public schools, you have to act now with your kids and grandkids. Get them out of public school. Get them into a decent private school, or school them yourself. Whatever else you were going to do with your life is pretty much for nought if you lose your kids along the way.
Grandparents, you may have to help.
One of the best and most direct things that can be done is for churches to start their own schools. If your church is sending money to missionaries in Africa, good job, but keep in mind that your most important missionary field is your own kids and the kids in your town.
Make use of that building that sits all week, and use it to take control of your kids’ education. Teaching them in Sunday School once a week isn’t going to get it when everything you do one morning a week is being undone every other day of the week. Build the community that reflects your values and other people will join you.
It doesn’t have to be explicitly tied to your denomination, but it needs to be a place where everything you believe in isn’t being torn down. You’ll find people who aren’t of your denomination bringing their kids, even non-christians, so its an excellent outreach. But the most important thing is that you get your kids out from under the control of the Left. You’ll be surprised at the result as your kids grow up without half the complexes that most kids grow up with.
Best way to save the public schools is to neutralize the idiot liberals who run them.
Simply by attending government schools children learn to be very very comfortable with taking their neighbor's money.
**THIS CAN NOT BE FIXED!!**
Then there are the **irresolvable** conflicts government schools have with the First Amendment and freedom of conscience.
Simply by attending government schools children learn to be comfortable with government workers telling them to shut up and be quiet. The government workers determine what the child can or can not publish and distribute. It is the government school worker who forbids free association and assembly but chooses exactly with whom the child will assemble. For most of the school day freely expressed religiously belief is nearly impossible.
It is axiomatic that a religiously neutral education is utterly impossible. At the moment the religious worldview that is being established by every government school in this nation is by law godless.
In many ways children ( who have committed no crime) are treated like little government prisoners. Their First Amendment Rights are utterly trashed. And...It is the government who determines when they can eat, use the bathroom, exercise, and speak. In other words, simply by attending children learn to be good little prisoners of the state.
THE ABOVE CAN NOT BE FIXED! It is intrinsic to government schooling.
The government schools were the progressive Utopian wet dream of the 19th century. Government schools have **always** been socialist. Progressive Utopians have **always** controlled teacher training and textbook and curriculum development. The push since the first government school opened in the mid-1800s has been toward complete atheistic secularism. By the time I was in high school in the early 1960s my school day was absolutely godless in its worldview except for a scripture verse and Lord's Prayer in the morning homeroom. ( Big Whoop!)
Within one to three generations of single payer socialist schools, we had:
** The IRS
** Direct election of Senators.
** Unions
** the federal reserve
** nanny state prohibition laws followed by repeal
** FDR elected FOUR terms with his New Deal
** Social Security
** Johnson's Great Society
** The war on poverty
** the abandonment of the gold standard.
That my great grandparents, grandparents, and parents supported the above was INEVITABLE! They learned to be comfortable with socialism by attending socialist, single payer, government schools!
That we now have a MARXIST ( possible illegal alien) occupying our White House was INEVITABLE! Government schools made Obama inevitable!
Solution: Conservatives must unite to award grants to individual teachers willing to open one room schools in their homes. The conservative foundations would certify the teacher, test the students, approve the curriculum, and organize community-wide sports teams and arts programs.
Could conservatives give every child in this nation a conservative private education and work to shut down every government school in the nation? YES, they could! But.. first they must give up the idea that government schools can be reformed.
ping
A mother and I were sitting this evening complaining about how our sons were being educated in the local schools. Another mother sat with us, she was a teacher.
And as she listened to the first mother and I lament about the principles and the curriculum, the school teacher just sat there shaking her head, like she was disagreeing with us.
When she joined the conversation she was not open to discussion and simply believed that we were wrong, because “She should know, she’s a teacher!”
I ignored her. She couldn’t speak for the education of my son, but she simply assumed that we were speaking falsely. After all, she’s a teacher!