Posted on 07/31/2020 9:15:02 AM PDT by CharlesOConnell
The current blather about whether or not to return school students to physical class or "instruct" them at home using distance-"education", ignores the broader context of the very issue of school itself. A curious thing happened on the way to the forum, parents discover that universal, compulsory schooling is unnecessary and actually harmful to their young peoples' development--the Emperor does have some pants, but it's being discovered by the silent partners, the parents now looking in off-screen, that those pants are down, and there's an embarrassing substance that is leaking out.
The unspoken, prime element of the Covid-19 siege, is that we're at the harvest time of a period in which most jobs and roles in the economy are being rendered obsolete by algorithms, outsourcing and globalization. (It's been pointed out that computer engineers in the H1B "guest worker" program have competition from at least 40 million Chinese and Indian colleagues who get paid about 1/6th of what Americans get, while they're still young enough to work 80-hour pizza at the desk shifts, before Intel and Apple human resources detect that computer geeks now with kids want to curtail the O.T. in favor of soccer and they get summarily dumped.) The customary excuse that Americans have an innate creativity that Chinese and Indian education systems can't instill in their culture, is well past peak and is starting to run out. Welcome to the enforced "leisure-economy" in which everything is up for grabs and we will each individually have to reinvent ourselves.
Ms. Socialist Smarty Pants teacher has been caught on the "class" Zoom meeting with her knickers drooping, by the fact that school districts are in no way prepared for distance "learning", mostly because their school unions are concerned with maintaining their privileges and fending off charter schools, but fundamentally because personal enrichment of individual students was never the point, it was really, from the late 19th century compulsory universal school movement on the Prussian model, about stifling their imaginations, homogenizing students into compliant drones who will present no threat of individualism and competition to the Captains of Industry. (It is said that when Andrew Carnegie "generously" gave pensions to teachers in the new, universal-compulsory school field, the word went out that teachers had better adhere to the dumbed-down curriculum or they would miss that gravy train.)
Champion teacher-of-the-year, John Taylor Gatto, documented how young students going full guns into their first year of school, soon become disabused of their enthusiasm by bells, attendance roster, controls on their exact institutional physical location, deliberately handicapped reading and math instruction, mind-numbing memorization of facts useless to any life career path but only relevant to standardized testing, teachers rewarding conformity and ostracizing those who don't shape up.
None of this can be rendered into a distance-learning program, because "education" was never the point. John Taylor Gatto estimated that minimal competence in reading can be conveyed in 40 hours of properly formulated classroom instruction--read "phonics" rather than "whole-word"--and 42 hours of Saxon Math or Singapore Math, vs. Common Core.
Another technological revolution has slain the windmills of resistance to changes. It's only a matter of time before parents wake up and smell the rot that is oozing out of their kids' school ChromeBooks.
"Now how does that [current-events news item] fit in with racism?"
A crisis is developing in universal mandatory public schooling, unbeknownst to the establishment: Adults will get to overhear what actually goes on while their children are in school, through video conferencing. The naked face of conventional socialist indoctrination will be unmasked. Teachers are so poorly educated, it doesn't even occur to them that their own indoctrination is obvious, so they will show their hand.
This child's "racism" teacher couldn't see that an adult was off to the side inadvertently listening. (Working from home, Covid19 telecommuting while the group "zoom" meeting was in progress.)
The child on a zoom call with its classmates, a child who is a relative but is not mine, goes to a Waldorf-style public school.
"When every child's an honored student, 'dumb ain't down, it’s all around' ". Teachers get to coat the poison pill of thought reform with a calm, soothing voice, no child allowed to any greater attainment than the lowest common denominator, through institutional controls–bells, attendance, standardized testing, esteem ranking.
The assignment had been to get current events topics, presumably from "if it bleeds it leads" local t.v. news. The current-events “news” topics were being discussed on camera. The teacher gently guided the thought-conditioning, indoctrination session with, "now how does that fit in with racism?"
Thought-reform processing really does work. Conversation of these children, 12 and 13, is constantly peppered with the phrase "that's racist". That's Wrong. These children have never been exposed to racism to the slightest extent, they wouldn't know what “racism” is if it chased them down the street and bit them.
Long ago I heard of this type of specious, circular thinking, in an article I read in a 1964 Look Magazine about college students functionally paranoid, not about "racism", but about "Freudian slips", embarrassing or ungainly but innocent remarks made in casual conversation that had to be explained by "you want to go to bed with your mother" (Zorba the Greek), at a time when Behavioral Psychology's empirical research standards had largely discredited Freudianism in upper academia, but a generation of Freud's thinking in popular culture was at its crest.
Socialist indoctrination a year ago would have been centered on the warmist terrorization of children, the bunker mentality that "we've only got 9 years left until the world ends", with Swedish energy sector-sponsored Greta Thornberg as the poster child of a generation of children stuck in a mental rut.
Before "institutionalized racism" became the most effective Marxist bomb for controlling the populace, in the interest of tech billionaires, 10 years ago it was possible for there to be a survey of African-American young men, about whether or not they suffered from racism? Twenty-two percent replied in the affirmative. That leaves 76% who had not experienced racism. Such a survey could not even be conducted today, much less could it be reported on, or anyone discussing it would need to wear a helmet so their heads wouldn't be bashed in.
That title. Eww...
I think he's giving the majority of parents too much credit. I think the majority are counting on the schools for daycare.
At least in my experience... and that's in a slightly red-leaning area.
“I think the majority are counting on the schools for daycare.”
This and most parents are wholly incapable of teaching their kids in a manner that will pass government muster, according to the government anyway. So now we see the emperor has no clothes.
If China manages to kill off public schools in this country with their virus, they will be HEROES in my book.
“John Taylor Gatto estimated that minimal competence in reading can be conveyed in 40 hours of properly formulated classroom instruction—read “phonics” rather than “whole-word”—and 42 hours of Saxon Math or Singapore Math, vs. Common Core.”
I will test to that, FIRST HAND, with my kids (where I did just that), but then again, for most FReepers, the idea of ‘free schools’, where you just dump off your kids, far outweighs the silly notion of their kids getting a good education (as described above), with good values. So I’m kind of talking to myself here.
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