Posted on 08/01/2020 5:41:17 PM PDT by CharlesOConnell
On no pretext of benefit to Students, Teachers are united in beating back Charter Schools, the Gig Workers of K-12 education, like Dr. Seuss' Sneetches with Stars against those without. Empty Public Schools will get full funding; Charter Schools will get nothing.
Teacher Unions imagine they are otherwise secure in keeping their strangle-hold over Federal education money. Labor Unions overall are almost dwindled down next to nothing along with their old Bluebeard marriage to American Corporate dinosaurs gone to extinction with globalism. But the Teacher Monopoly Unions, like the Post Office, imagine they can have the secret of immortality, perpetually able to resurrect themselves into a new crop of zombies with the current pandemic crisis.
But Distance Learning, already at a high pitch of development at a few visionary Universities, may finally drive the stake into the NEA Dracula.
I broke all the rules when I got a Distance Learning A+ in Java, never having met the teacher. He tried to enforce the old ways by forbidding us to use Eclipse, the active tool-tip application interface that can host any coding with correct syntax. I had already used Eclipse with Adobe Dreamweaver, a predecessor to WordPress, so I just brushed by. It was the teacher's last class; he was retiring. The current tech tsunami just swept him away.
Distance learning is the rumbling of the NEA's extinction, like the asteroid to the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Teaching will finally become the victim of dumbing down that was mandatory at the founding a century past.
When universal compulsory schooling was new a century ago, designed to stifle the imagination and eliminate the threat of economic innovation to the Captains of Industry, Andrew Carnegie offered pensions to the new graduates of the Normal Teachers' Schools--on the proviso that they adopt the dumbed-down, whole-word vs. phonics, social levelling, the equivalent then of Common Core, the customary school drivel pushed by socialist teachers at the behest of their capitalist masters, the Morgans, Carnegies, Rockefellers, Gates', Buffetts' & Soros'.
The trouble with distance learning is that the teachers aren't physically present to rope the kids into the customary mediocrity of bells, attendance, physical-tracking, mind-numbing memorization of useless "facts" for standardized testing to produce factory drones–who's going to work in a factory after graduation?–and granting selective esteem for conformers while denying it to self-starters.
Distance learning doesn't respect any of that. The School Curriculum Programmers are working overtime to keep the fine old Common Core tradition of mediocrity, but Saxon Math and Singapore Math, and phonics are menacing in the wings, threatening to enforce meritocracy.
As soon as Parents watching the kids' Chromebook from the side, see the customary but updated drivel being pedaled by the NEA cohorts, they will be able to jump ship and head for fairer harbors.
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 competing against imports from 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.
(My grand kids are doing this) More Parents Are Considering Microschools Amid COVID-19: Here's What They Entail
Across the US, the concept of "pandemic pods" are picking up steam as an alternative to both full-on virtual learning and sending children back to class amid COVID-19. Otherwise known as microschools, each "pod" is composed of roughly between three-to-six children of ideally similar ages and abilities who will gather at one family's home to learn from a teacher. Using this system, each parent will chip in to cover the educator's fees.
Is it finally apparent even to low information voters that the teachers union doesn’t give a damn about the children or whether they learn anything??
What A Great Pic!
What is apparent are the vast number of parents who don't really give a damn about their kids education. All they really care about is the baby-sitting services public schools provide. If they really cared, they would have engaged in private school or home schooling decades ago.
They are following DNC orders, screw the kids.
Sounds like a plan to infect homeschoolers with the ideas taught by University of racism, sexism, homo-amIboringya and of course privilege of crackers.
Great post, I read every word. Well, except when into the micro schooling, it sounded like teachers do not want to get far away from the crapola of Government school indoctrination plans.
1 thing kills the teachers unions and public schools, serious wide spread actual competition. Whether it is DL or private schools, the end of the teachers union monopoly is coming. The sooner competition is inserted, the sooner it’s over for failed public schools.
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