Posted on 02/16/2024 7:27:55 AM PST by Heartlander
In recent decades the quality of American education has plummeted.
When you scan the headlines related to education, you realize how far we have fallen:
Needless to say, there is a battle over education today.
But when you look at early American education, there is no question that the Bible in one way or another was the chief textbook for the first 200-300 years. This led to widespread literacy.
In fact, I have produced a documentary for Providence Forum entitled, “The Beginning of Wisdom.” The title comes from the Scriptures, which say that, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” This film aims to show what was right about early education, and how did it get that way.
At one time, America was among the best educated nations in the world. James Madison of Virginia, a key architect of the Constitution, said, “A well-instructed people alone...
(Excerpt) Read more at stream.org ...
Close the government’s so-called “public schools”.
[[A Seattle high school teacher, who praised Hamas in class, failed a student on a quiz. Why? The student said men can’t get pregnant. ]]
The student should,sue his teacher for being an idiot and for being too dumb to teach.
AND include the charge of “depriving students of a sound education”
The Holy Bible was once the main text book of most American schools for over a century. People became qualified to become lawyers with that education.
When we homeschooled our kids, we used mostly books from 1830 to 1850.
Teaching isn't some complicated "rocket science" until you involve the crazy "education" "teachers" are saddled with. Then they think they know it all, when they know so little they don't know what they don't know.
The reason we used books from that era, is that Americans were the best readers and writers, with the highest vocabulary in the Victorian era. I figured the best school books would be from the era in which they were educated.
A fifth grader could read and understand a P&L statement (profit and loss). You''l be lucky to find a college grad who isn't a business major person who even knows what that is, much less any modern "teacher".
I have a friend, who if there was such a thing as "white privilidge" would be a perfect example of it. Two PHds. Brilliant fellow. Sat on Harvard think tanks on how to teach reading. An avid reader and writer. But IMHO, functionally illiterate.
He couldn't read and comprehend words he didn't already know, such as those used in books on computers. It took years for another friend and me to get him to realize his problem and that the methods of teaching reading the Harvard guys came up with were unworkable.
For teaching reading there are the forgotten phonics rules I found in 1840s books. I did them in cheat sheet form to make it easier to learn. The ones you use all the time, you remember eventually. For the seldom used ones, that's why you have a cheat sheet. Maybe someday you'll remember them all (I don't). That's why you have the cheat sheet to refer to.
You need a 1934 or earlier Webster's Collegiate dictionary too. They have proper phonics instead of the horrid mess in modeern dictionaries. $1 to $5 at flea markets, antiqe shops, yard sales. Try not to pay more. You can print out the cheat sheets from my web site for free.
During our years of trying to get through to him, I told him I'd bring in my daughter, a third grader being homeschooled, and she would read and comprehend from any book in his considerable library. She would need a dictionary for some words. We came to his office and when he had us in, she had been reading a Calvin and Hobbes comic book. He asker her to read from that.
I spouted, come on, challenge her, that's just a comic book.. He said he wanted her to read from that. As she read and laughed at the appropriate times, he quizzed her on what things meant. She understood.
He was amazed. He asked me if I knew what grade level Calvin and Hobbes was written for. I said, I don't know,it's a kid's comic book. He responded, no, it is written at second year college level.
I told him if that is the case, we didn't just prove my daughter was a great reader. We proved our country is in deep trouble.
Here's the link to my site. Scroll down to the a"other stuff" and click on "phonics"
Years ago I read some pages from the journal/diary of a school girl, probably 13 or 14 years old. The pages were recovered from debris left on Galveston Island after the hurricane of 1900. I was amazed at the way this young girl wrote about her life in beautiful prose and sounded much more educated and intelligent than our current college graduates.
Government run education, so called public education, has never been anything but indoctrination camps. The only way Americans can be free is if education is totally privatized and for bidden to take government money.
Sadly our public schools have become what a friend of mine calls “failure factories” churning out barely literate students who are incapable of doing simple math and who are ignorant of history and geography. Today schools are indoctrination centers where young skulls full of mush are filled with wokism and gender bending ideology. Worse still our colleges and universities are no longer bastions of critical thinking and scholarship, but too have become wastelands of wokism. It is telling when those college kids waving Palestinian banners and proclaiming “from the river to the sea” are clueless about what river and what sea.
There are lots of young people at the place where I work. Reading a tape measure and understanding fractions are a struggle. I have very intelligent, capable co-workers who write e-mails with such poor grammar it makes them sound like they’re illiterate. Sad. I do have one co-worker who asks me to go over her e-mails with her before sending to management. I wish I could address it tactfully with others.
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