Posted on 10/30/2019 9:34:29 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
The whole point of American education was preparing people to pursue their interests, and their version of the American Dream. This blueprint has faded. Many kids today don't learn enough to have vivid, inspiring dreams, nor do they master abilities needed to fulfill dreams if they had any.
Jimmy Kimmel sent a crew to the street with a map of the world and the challenge, "Point to a country and name it." Many people could not name even one country, even though the USA was in the middle of this map. At Notre Dame, Professor Patrick Deneen concluded that many students were "know-nothings." He realized with a shock that a lot of them didn't know who won the Civil War. Less educated than that is hard to imagine.
What, in the age of Ignorance, is reality like for most people? A sort of sleepy gray fog you drift through? Are is it like the exploding world in the movie Inception, hyperactive and vivid but incomprehensible? Either way, how do you make smart plans in a world where there's so little coherence? Lots of people give up trying. That seems to be the new normal in K-12 education.
Public schools, years ago, had a clear mandate to ensure that kids learn basic skills and foundational knowledge. Reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, and science, that's what you need to start. News flash from the education wars. American students today don't learn much reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, and science. Apparently our Education Establishment has walked off the job. Why?
If candid, they would tell you they had a bigger job, a higher calling. Their new responsibility is to create a different country and new kinds of citizens; and they can accomplish all that by reinventing the schools. The formula now is simply stated. Teach as little as possible. Indoctrinate as much as possible.
Our education officials are obsessed with propaganda but indifferent to knowledge. This inversion is killing us.
For one small example, if teenagers don't know where Japan or China is, not even within a thousand miles, what sort of conversation can they have about current events, modern history, new movies from the Far East, weird weather in the Pacific, economic upheaval, and threats of war?
Once upon a time, people learned enough to think for themselves. Doesn't that sound quaint? There seems to be more going on than ever before in history; but people understand less. How can they think for themselves? They don't know much.
According to our Education Establishment, there are new rules. You don't need to learn facts because they are all on Google, and because everything in the digital world is fast-changing and ever-new, so why bother?
Meanwhile, in the absence of any commitment to the learning of academic content, schools offer a smorgasbord of fluff. Instead of History and Science, students will learn Collaboration and Creativity. What we have is amnesia by design. People know so little, it’s just a faint background noise.
YouTube has dozens of videos extolling the wonders of 21st Century Education. Kids today are said to need heavy doses of: Critical Thinking, Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, Innovation, plus the such 21st Century concerns as Interdisciplinary Themes, Global Awareness, Financial Lliteracy, Civic Literacy, Health Lliteracy, Global Literacy, plus Life and Career Skills, and Higher Order Thinking; and invariably a complex project where third-graders solve a problem that local experts cannot handle.
Truth is, Progressives always loved scenarios where children pretend to be engineers, scientists, inventories, government officials, and so on. What valid information do children take away from these make-believe worlds? Wouldn't it be more constructive if children learn something real, historical, or factual? But then, you see, students would be acquiring knowledge. And that's not helpful.
The country needs to stage an innovation on itself. Our public schools are the equivalent of an overweight alcoholic who cannot do a push-up. What do you tell people like that? Stop drinking so much, don't eat so much, start exercising. Let's return to vistas that work. Facts are fun, knowledge is power.
Grappling with reality should be education's main focus. What is real, what is true, aren't these the big questions? Look at what our Education Establishment does to kids in public school. They know very little about the world. They can hardly do basic arithmetic without a calculator. They can hardly read a real newspaper.
Consider our roots, Rome, Greece, European Renaissance, the flowering of sciences, and then tapping into knowledge from around the world. This is the mother lode. Isn't it curious that our Education Establishment is so fixated on ignoring what came before? Professor Deneen speaks of our schools deliberately producing amnesia.
What about solipsism? So much of what children learn today ultimately refers back to themselves. If they never grapple with reality, they retreat into the unreality called solipsism. It's a kind of mental illness. The cure is learning about the world that was there before you were born, will be there after you die, and is there now if you will but look.
That is the great sin of our Progressive educators. They encourage children to focus on the ephemeral and to remain permanently childish.
Never forget that none of these developments is accidental or inevitable. Progressive educators want to take over the country. The first step is to make everyone else is ignorant. And so the public schools flail and fail.
---------------------------------------
Bruce Deitrick Price's new book is “Saving K-12"
Communist “teachers” and their sick, degenerate agenda.
Soros, Ayers, muslims.
Leno used to do a segment called “Jaywalking” which was similar. He or staffers would go into the streets and query people on various subjects. The ignorance was astounding. Some say it was staged or only the most egregious were shown.
It's more important to have two brand new cars in the driveway than it is to pay for private education or have one parent stay home and teach their own children. You can't expect someone else to care more about your children than you do but that is exactly what we do.
I think it was the comic strip philosopher named Pogo who said, "I have met the enemy and he is us." Or it may have been Ziggy.
That is all. Commence with the excuse making.
Lazy ignorant teachers paired with do-nothing parents that get angry when their lazy kids are asked to do homework.
Believe it. I’m a homeschooled millennial; there are college graduates my age who can’t do basic aritmetic, spell, or even read, never mind knowing any history or geography.
It’s communism. The teachers unions are basically commie front groups. They need to be destroyed.
The denial, removal, and extinguishing of Biblical principles from schooling and church conduct, hence blotting out the basis upon which our government was founded.
Lack of engineering teaching
Plain as day
They build the Hoover dam and the Golden Gate bridge in the 1930s
seriously I don't blame only them....although I can count on one hand how many teachers I thought really cared about the kids and not just summers off and tenure and a fat pension..
but teachers do vote in large numbers for rats, and rats have allowed stinking judges to force the homosexual agenda on our schools, kicked God out, and along with that discipline, values, and achievement..
You don’t need to write a book. Number one, government takes the power of parents away and replaces it with indoctrination centers that function as day care. Then they spend as much time testing as they do teaching. The biggest thing in my opinion is that people who have no children of their own are deciding what your children should know, and also what they should think and believe. They are in it for the money.
Some are so dumb, it is hard to comprehend how they even get up in the morning and function in life.
Liberalism.
At age 50, I thought I would change careers from manufacturing engineering, so I decided to teach. My subject Engineering Technology at a well regarded high school in Florida. Grades 9-12. Class size was 40+ students per class as I was an elective with no class limits. OK, no problem, I could rise to that challenge. Kids didn’t know how to read a ruler. Fine, taught a week on the history of measurement ( What’s a cubit?). Had them do basic drafting, then design on computers, build a scale model home, built co2 powered racers etc.., Some of my kids came in the top 10 in National TSA competitions. Volunteered to coach the swim team when the planned coach got really sick. Great reviews from Assistant principal observers my first year, Why am I not teaching now? Department head had a little scandal involving his wife, his girlfriend,and a teacher who was his subordinate, problem was he couldn’t keep them straight when talking on the phone to them and they found out about each other. Solution, the school got rid of the subordinate for saying something to him where students could hear it. One day I was asked what I thought of the resolution. I responded that in business the Department head would have been the one let go. Next review was not recommended for rehire. What a snake pit.
Illiterate peasants are easily led to vote Left.
Yes, but why?
Equality is why.
You are sooooo right!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.