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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I have taught for 20 years . . . in private schools. I gave up writing letters to the editor about government schools (they are not “public”) long ago. They have been “reforming” themselves for decades, and they just get worse and worse. The problem is four-fold, as I see it: (1) teachers unions (which have no place in education); (2) education schools graduating idiots with degrees in certified inferiority (schools which would be entirely abolished in my kingdom except for special ed); and (3) “centralization” of local schools, which, along with busing, has for a long time been destroying the neighborhood concept of schooling (and removing schools that much further from parental control); and (4) Democrats keeping black people on their plantation, thereby destroying the black family. Sorry, but I gave up on “public” schools long, long ago. Their problems are too deeply rooted, and they are not worth the efffort.
This is awful!
But this didn’t start one hundred years ago. I went to public schools from kindergarten, through 7th grade through 12th grade - in a blue state. (Spent 1st through 6th in Catholic school.) I learned nothing but to love America and the Constitution. I only fell down on that Algebra stuff.
Whatever happened to the three R’s Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic.
Maybe it is time to go back to the McGuffey’s reader.
A couple of years back some second cousins were visiting from Virginia (DC area) for a YMCA Gymnastics event and they were talking about having to do a pledge of allegiance the United Nations in the elementary school. the kids mother was a lobbyist, so she was not shocked to hear this practice.
unfortunately contact has been lost with this second cousin over the issue of politics, her politics was to liberal for my taste and I was to conservative for her taste.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/11/Teachers-flock-to-Northwestern-University-Marxist-Conference-journalist-booted
Excerpt – read the ENTIRE article
This Saturday, the Midwest Marxist Conference was held at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. The event was teeming with teachers who spoke about the new found bond between the radical socialists and their Teachers Union. The all-day event, which collected money to support Chicago Socialists and featured a communist bookstore, provided students on-campus along with the radical left community to plan the next phase in their activism.
Becca Barnes, a Chicago Teachers Union teacher and organizer with Chicago Socialists, proclaimed at the beginning of the conference that “the struggle here in the United States has entered a new phase. Nowhere have we pointed the way forward more clearly than here in Chicago with the teachers union strike.”
After the opening plenary, breakout sessions addressed more specific topics like the history of the Democratic party, education, and case studies in Russia.
In these sessions, speakers continued to celebrate the use of education as a mechanism to insert Marxism into public institutions.
In one session, the idea of targeting their message to students, even over “the working class,” was debated.
“What Are They Teaching In Our Schools? Anything??”
They are teaching PLENTY in our schools - that’s why a conservative would be insane to let his kids anywhere near them.
Public schools teach Marxism, Satanism and agitation.
Face it, they won. We hear all the bluster from those who say they aren’t going to take it. So far, all I see is that they are going to take it, even if it destroys their own lives.
Not a real soul or a patriot left. Many people declare they care, but they are still willing to take it. So, when and what will it take?
We have a country over 300 million, and they are willing to allow these commies the keys to the car with less than half voting.
I am sick of them, but I am even sicker of us. We are cowards. More comtemptable than they are.
ugh. I am done wastin’ my time, even 10 minutes going to a fake ballot box.
I have been involved in primary and spec education for years, and the reason teachers are instructed to go down blind rabbit holes instead of basic instruction is simple...
If you succeed you can’t ask for more money.
amen
“This teacher spent two days trying to make her students learn a Muslim “hand sign,”
A more useful lesson would be to teach them about the Caliphate...and a few lessons on the Byzantine Empire to show the futility of “peaceful coexistence” with Islam...
In all levels of education and government they are teaching “sustainable development”. (Agenda 21)
Thankfully I moved to TX, got married (a bit less thankfully) and had a child (very thankfully). The schools in Austin have been surprisingly excellent. I also lived in Baton Rouge and my son's kindergarten and 1st grade were as good as any private school in the area.
My only problem at this point is feeding the union beast. Where I've lived so far, the teachers and schools have been light years ahead of what I suffered through, but the trajectory is not healthy.
I finished teaching “Lord of the Flies” which is a very appropriate metaphor for the Obama campaign - worship the beast.
Algebra is easy - you know more than you think you know.
For example, if X number of children are in the school district, and Y number of liberals are on the school board, then X/Y gives you the Public Education (PE) constant of 666.
And between PE and 666, you can figure out anything you want about government schools.
See? Easy peasy.
I went to my youngest Son’s parent-teacher meeting recently. Sizing them up by what I know, 4 out of the 6 were okay. The other 2? I decided that I could reduce them to a blubbering mess within 5 minutes with a high-powered verbal ass kicking in front of their peers. Fortunately, the other 4 teachers assured me the other 2 wouldn’t be a problem. Education vs. indoctrination, fight it at every turn.
Part of my despair this week is that Romney's words on education will go for nothing, now, and I will never in my lifetime see the dream I have long had, of widespread freedom of kids FROM government schools via vouchers and tuition tax credits. Won't happen now. Very little of what I dream for will happen now. The world seems very bleak.
As a programmer, I became dismayed that my replacements were from India, Pakistan and China so I became a science teacher.
I soon found that perfectly bright high school students could not perform the most basic of mathematical functions. Now I teach basic math to the children of the wealthy.
I feel a little guilty but at least the kids have a chance in life.
Nowadays, being able to do math in your head is kind of like having super powers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdiPHMPiJvE
This man is a US Congressman. He has a Master’s plus he retired as an LTC. DUH?
This was probably an extension lesson from Channel One News. I am appalled at what airs on this mandatory news program that is pumped into govt. school classrooms across America. I complained (to no avail) after this aired in May as part of a week long segment on Islam, the religion of peace:
http://www.channelone.com/news/islam/
I countered with my own lesson on Sharia law so that my students could make their own decisions about the definition of “peaceful religion.”
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