Posted on 11/16/2012 3:20:15 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
A parent in Norfolk, Va., complained that a special ed teacher injected Islamic indoctrination into the classroom.
The story broke in the local paper only because the fifth-grade student was slightly injured, and the mother reported it. This teacher spent two days trying to make her students learn a Muslim “hand sign,” according to the criminal complaint.
A spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations said that he had never heard of any hand signs in his faith.
This odd dispute prompted many questions. Local citizens wanted to know why this teacher was trying to make her students learn Islamic doctrine. A bigger question is, why was this teacher bringing religion of any kind into the classroom? What about the separation of church and state?
The broadest question of all was hardly discussed. Why are fifth-graders spending time on something marginal and specialized, when there’s a whole world of information they haven’t learned?
The pattern in public schools, for almost a century, has been that extremists of one kind or another try to push aside essential academic information to make room for their personal ideologies.
This teacher of Muslim hand signs is in a direct line going all the way back to John Dewey. He and his Progressive followers announced that schools were wasting too much time on “mere learning,” as Dewey put it. Instead, schools should teach children to be cooperative members of a new, more collectivist society.
Muslim hand signs, especially given that they don’t exist, are the perfect symbol of what is wrong with our public schools. These schools don’t take care of teaching essential facts and skills because they are so heavily engaged in the trivial and tangential.
To have any chance of success, students must learn to read, write and count in the first few grades. Then the students move on to geography, history, science, literature and the arts generally. Our Education Establishment, notoriously irresponsible, will say, “Oh, we don’t believe in drill and kill.” But they’re all in favor of fiddle and faddle.
Far more than most parents realize, throughout American public education there’s a deep hostility toward knowledge (i.e., actually knowing anything). This hostility needs to be understood, directly confronted, and driven out of the schools. The all-too-common formula is to teach little and to teach it inefficiently. Why not teach more and teach it cleverly?
Arithmetic? Reform Math curricula turn children into basket cases. Reading? Memorizing sight-words nullifies that ability. Knowledge in general? The schools have a variety of evasions: a) such-and-such information is not necessary or too difficult; and b) we need to devote more time, for example, to Muslim hand signs. See how it works? By any pretext possible, public schools create intellectual wastelands.
Instead of driving knowledge out of the schools, we should be bringing more in, singing its praises, and making sure kids learn more, more, more. The human brain is designed to want new knowledge. You could build a world-class school on two principles: facts are fun; and knowledge is power.
Unfortunately, our corrupt Education Establishment believes that facts are too much trouble and knowledge is a waste of time.
Would you like to annoy our Education Establishment? Don’t settle for dumbing-down. Instead, do everything possible to promote literacy for all, real math, and genuine academic, intellectual and scientific content.
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RELATED ARTICLE 1
“45: The Crusade Against Knowledge--The Campaign Against Memory”
http://www.improve-education.org/id70.html
RELATED ARTICLE 2: 60: Smart Content Makes Kids Smarter http:://www.improve-education.org/id88.html
RELATED VIDEO: “Kids Need A Solid Foundation of Basic Facts and Knowledge”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUyLxsabkrU
NEWSPAPER STORY MENTIONED IN PARAGRAPH 2: http://hamptonroads.com/2012/10/mom-says-teacher-hurt-child-during-islamic-lesson
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What is the point of your rant? Specifically with regards to government schools? My wife and I aren’t fighting anything; we’re simply not playing the left’s rigged game. That’s why we homeschool.
More general than that? Have you started shooting yet? If not, why not? You call us cowards yet you don’t seem to offer any tangible solutions/suggestions/actions of your own.
You have contempt for us? I have contempt for FR shit-talkers.
One has to use a little subterfuge.
Get the Feds out of education....
The Common Defense is all they should be doing
Hey, teach, I got yer “hand sign” right here...you take your five fingers, roll ‘em into a ball...follow this very closely...
Another reason to homeschool.
This ping list is for the “other” articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. This can occasionally be a fairly high volume list. Articles pinged to the Another Reason to Homeschool List will be given the keyword of ARTH. (If I remember. If I forget, please feel free to add it yourself)
The main Homeschool Ping List handles the homeschool-specific articles. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping list. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added to or removed from either list, or both.
Pretty soon it's going to be only the homeschoolers who are literate. They'll land in the positions of influence. Hopefully it's in time to save this country.
This ping list is for the “other” articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. This can occasionally be a fairly high volume list. Articles pinged to the Another Reason to Homeschool List will be given the keyword of ARTH. (If I remember. If I forget, please feel free to add it yourself)
The main Homeschool Ping List handles the homeschool-specific articles. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping list. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added to or removed from either list, or both.
Pretty soon it's going to be only the homeschoolers who are literate. They'll land in the positions of influence. Hopefully it's in time to save this country.
This ping list is for the “other” articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. This can occasionally be a fairly high volume list. Articles pinged to the Another Reason to Homeschool List will be given the keyword of ARTH. (If I remember. If I forget, please feel free to add it yourself)
The main Homeschool Ping List handles the homeschool-specific articles. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping list. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added to or removed from either list, or both.
Pretty soon it's going to be only the homeschoolers who are literate. They'll land in the positions of influence. Hopefully it's in time to save this country.
It’s a good thing all those people moved into California. Without them, the massive population on the East Coast would cause the United States to flip and throw everyone from Oregon into the Atlantic Ocean!
PLEASE GIVE IT UP!!!
Our nation's government owned and run, socialist-funded, compulsory, GODLESS, single-payer entitlement schools can NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT be reformed precisely because they are a GODLESS, socialist-funded, single-payer, and compulsory-use entitlement.
The **ONLY** possible way to get the form of education that you seek is PRIVATIZATION!
Yeah! I am shouting, jumping up and down, and having a fit. Someone as smart as you should be tilting at windmills.
Because socialist-funded, single-payer, compulsory-use, and GODLESS schools are a First Amendment and freedom of conscience abomination!
Indeed! We had millions show up for a chicken sandwich, and Christians and conservatives can figure out a way to stop abortion in a legal peaceful manner? Really?
Our godless, socialist-funded, single-payer, and compulsory K-12 schools would cease to exist if Christians and conservatives would remove their children and refuse to fund them...but....they don't! I guess team sports are more important than their children's soul and our nation's freedom.
You are right. We see, hear, and read a lot blustering but personally, I don't much in the way of meaningful resistance. I support and praise homeschoolers but I fear it too little, too late.
Homosexuality - good and normal//Christianity - the evil bane of the planet//Islam - the up and coming world religion and you must be prepared to submit//Working for a living - makes you a sap who doesn’t realize that Uncle Sugar is ready to cater to all your needs.
1) Parents that don't get involved and then just whine about the system that they refuse to take an active role in.
2) Good Conservative teachers (Yes, there is such a beast.) that remove themselves from the equation rather than staying to fight the good fight.
Wintertime, feel free to make an irrelevant comment about "government functionaries" and "Useful idiots" or one of your other thinly veiled insults.
Metmom, feel free to defend him/her when he/she is actually during your cause more harm than good presenting the case for home schooling as part of the "fringe kook" segment of society.
Fine. I’ll defend wintertime.
Wintertime is correct.
While my posting style is different, any parent worth their salt would avoid public schooling at all cost. I’ve pinged out way too many *Another Reason to Homeschool* threads to even begin to think of defending public education or to think that it can be fixed.
It’s worsening exponentially and has reached the point of no return. There is nothing which can compare to a good one-on-one education.
Considering the literacy rate that I’ve seen coming out of the public schools for decades now, the lack of motivation in the kids, and the abysmal graduation rates in some districts, the kids would not be worse off if they didn’t go to school.
Before public education as we know it today was instituted, the literacy rates in this country were higher. People who value an education will get one if they have to do it themselves. People who don’t will not get one even if someone tries to force it on them.
The beast has become nothing more than a corrupt from the top down, immoral, indoctrination center.
As far as those who feel called to teach, well, there has to be a better way to fulfill that calling because as idealistic as someone can be about it, the fact is, if you don’t fall in line, you lose your job. Teachers cannot successfully buck the system and make a difference.
I know many teachers in my tiny community and our schools have a reputation for being good as far as public schools are concerned, teachers who are trying to make a difference, HUGE parental involvement, but still, they are cranking out indoctrinated liberals who, while more literate than the average publicly educated student, are still barely functionally literate.
It’s the nature of the beast. Time to starve it. The Titanic is going down and wishful thinking is not going to keep it up.
Way back in the 70s my wife, a beginning schoolteacher and I determined that public school was a waste of children’s and parents time. Since then I, at least, have come to regard placing one’s child in public school by an aware parent is prima facie child abuse.
YOOHOO pointing to myself as a prime example. WOW you couldn't be more wrong, but you just keep believing that.
While my posting style is different
Yes or no does his/her "style" do more harm or good to your cause?
YOOHOO pointing to myself as a prime example. WOW you couldn't be more wrong, but you just keep believing that.
While my posting style is different
Yes or no does his/her "style" do more harm or good to your cause?
edited to add wintertime as recipient
No...public schools should be demolished, the rubble crushed and plowed under, and the earth where it once stood should be salted, so that nothing may rise on that spot again.
Well, when you bus kids to Timbuktu and consolodate small schools into giant factory schools by closing neighborhood schools (which increses administrative bureaucracy, not the opposite), and keep kids in these secularized and Godless sterile bozes (e.g. Columbine), and then tax families to death so that both parents have to work all day and come home exhausted just trying to stay one step ahead of the IRS, well, then it is a bit fatuous to expect parental involvement.
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