FAILING PUBLIC SCHOOLS -- Why Little Billy Feels Good About Himself But Can't Read or Write!

Iconoclast.ca ^ | by Hans Zeiger

[BurkesLaw]

"All men by nature desire to know," said Aristotle. Either Aristotle was wrong, or public education is failing to awaken the academic desires of American students.

According to a new Manhattan Institute for Policy Research study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, only 32 percent of recent high school graduates were qualified to attend a four-year college. In addition, the report showed that the high school graduation rate remains depressingly low at only 70 percent.

For years, American education experts have been alarmed at the growing inability of public school students and graduates to compete academically with peers in other industrialized democratic countries. As Charles Sykes wrote in his revolutionary 1990s book, Dumbing Down our Kids: Why America's Children Feel Good about Themselves but Can't Read, Write, or Add , "When the very best American students -- the top one percent -- are measured against the best students of other countries, America's best and brightest finished at the bottom."

While Sykes may have exaggerated the problem, it is true that America's students are average at best.

According to the most recent academic comparison study by the Program for International Student Assessment, of students in 32 developed countries, 14 countries score higher than the U.S. in reading, 13 have better results in science, and 17 score above America in mathematics.

It isn't as though American students aren't scoring first places any more. A survey by the Princeton Testing Service shows that American students rank highest amongst industrialized democracies for amount of time spent watching videos in class. And William Moloney, chairman of the Washington, D.C. based Education Leaders Council -- a coalition of reform minded political and educational leaders -- writes that American students feel better about their math skills that any other country in the free world, while Korean students (who feel worst about their math skills) outscore everyone else in math.

The characteristics of self-esteem-obsessed, video-watching schools are manifested in the frustrations of America's higher education system. According to the Evergreen Freedom Foundation in Olympia, more than 40 percent of recent Washington State high school graduates attending community college enrolled in remedial courses to prepare them for college-level work. But a public-school system that transfers responsibility for learning basic knowledge to higher education isn't giving taxpayers and parents a return for their money. More damaging, the failure of elementary schools to prepare students for their future hurts America economically, socially, and intellectually.

Over the past century, public education has devolved from the classical approach of character plus basics (reading, writing, arithmetic, respect, and responsibility), to skills, to psychological-social engineering....

[dirtbiker]

It wasnt me, it was my son. I taught my son all that in 5 days....

[dirtbiker]

It wasn't me, it was my son. I taught my son all that in 5 days....

I was an honor student all through high school, graduated with a 3.65 GPA, and maintained a 3.7 through college, graduating cum laude. My son was diagnosed with ADD 5 years prior, and was either on Ritalin or Adderall at the time. He is now out of school, working in a manufacturing plant nearby. Very responsible, very hard working young man now.

[HIDEK6]

You shouldn't have relied on the teacher for the preceding 90 days. Just think what he could learn if you worked with him every night (like my dad did).

[Freedom4US]

Shamelessly stolen from Usenet: (Ask yourself who the real "authoritarians" are)

Gramsci \ The Frankfurt School

With respect to the subject of the undermining of the American family, and to
many other aspects of the Gramscian technique, let us explore briefly the story
of the Frankfurt School. This organization of leftist intellectuals, also known
as the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, was founded in the 1920s in
Frankfurt am Main, Germany. There it flourished amidst the decadence of the
Weimar period, both compounding and feeding off the decadence, and extending
its influence throughout the country.

With Hitler's acquisition of the chancellorship in 1933, the leftist stalwarts
of the Frankfurt School fled Germany for the United States, where they soon
established a new institute at Columbia University. As is characteristic of
such men, they repaid their debt to the U.S. for sheltering them from Nazi
brutality by turning their attention to what they regarded as the injustices
and social deficiencies inherent to our system and society. Immediately they
set about devising a program of revolutionary reform for America.

Max Horkheimer, one of the notables of the Frankfurt School, determined that
America's profound allegiance to the traditional family was a mark of our
national inclination towards the same fascist system from which he had fled.
Explaining this connection between fascism and the American family, he
declared: "When the child respects in his father's strength a moral
relationship and thus learns to love what his reason recognizes to be a fact,
he is experiencing his first training for the bourgeois authority
relationship."

Commenting critically on Horkheimer's theory, Arthur Herman writes in THE IDEA
OF DECLINE IN WESTERN HISTORY: "The typical modern family, then involves
'sadomasochistic resolution of the Oedipus complex,' producing a psychological
cripple, the 'authoritarian personality.' The individual's hatred of the father
is suspended and remains unresolved, becoming instead an attraction for strong
authority figures whom he obeys unquestioningly." The traditional patriarchal
family is thus a breeding ground for fascism, according to Horkheimer, and
charismatic authority figures--men like Hitler and Mussolini--are the ultimate
beneficiaries of the "authoritarian personality"instilled by the traditional
family and culture.

Theodor W. Adorno, another notable of the Frankfurt School, underscored
Horkheimer's theory with his own study, published in book form as THE
AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY, which he authored together with Else
Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford. Upon closer
examination it became apparent to critics that the research on which THE
AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY was based was pseudo-sociological, flawed in its
methodology and skewed in its conclusions. But, the critics were ignored.

America, Adorno and his research team pronounced, was ripe for its own,
home-grown fascist takeover. Not only was the American population hopelessly
racist and anti-Semitic, but it had far too acquiescent an attitude towards
authority figures such as fathers, policemen, clergy, military leaders, and so
forth. It was also far too obsessed with such "fascist"notions as efficiency,
cleanliness, and success, for these qualities revealed an inward "pessimistic
and contemptuous view of humanity," a view that leads, Adorno held to fascism.

Through such unmitigated balderdash as one finds in the writings of Horkheimer,
Adorno, and the other luminaries of the Frankfurt School,, the structures of
the traditional family and traditional virtue have been called seriously into
question and confidence in them blunted. Elected government officials and
bureaucrats have contributed to this problem through government taxation
policies, which mulct the traditional family while subsidizing anti-traditional
modes of life.

Additionally these officials are inclined more and more to the elevation of
abominations such as homosexual and illicit heterosexual unions to the same
level as marriage. Already, in many localities throughout the country and in
numerous private corporations, benefits previously reserved to married couples
are now granted to unmarried sexual "partners." Even the word "family" is
slowly being superseded by the vague euphemism "household."


A Lawless Land
Americans have long boasted that their nation is a government of law, not of
men. American law is derived directly from English common law and from the
biblical and Christian principles that are at the root of English common law.
One would therefore expect law to constitute one of the chief barriers against
the subversion of our society. Instead, in the field of law, revolutionary
change has become the order of the day, change so astounding that it could not
have been imagined by Americans of 50 years ago. None would have dreamed of the
outlawing of prayer and any expression of religious conviction on public
property, the legalization of abortion as a constitutionally guaranteed
"right," and the legalization of pornography, to mention but three.

Clearly expressed principles embraced by the Founding Fathers and set forth in
our Constitution are now routinely reinterpreted and distorted. Those that
cannot be reinterpreted and distorted, such as the Tenth Amendment, are simply
ignored. Worse yet, the ideological agenda underpinning the radicalization of
American law is blithely accepted by millions of Americans, who have themselves
been radicalized without ever realizing it.

Crucial to the Gramscians'success is the disappearance of all memory of the old
civilization and way of life. The older American of unregulated lives, honest
government, clean cities, crime-free streets, morally edifying entertainment,
and a family-oriented way of life is no longer vivid in the minds of many
Americans. Once it is gone completely, nothing will stand in the way of the new
Marxist civilization, which demonstrates as nothing else that through the
Gramscian method it is indeed possible to "Marxize the inner man," as Malachi
Martin wrote in THE KEYS OF THIS BLOOD. Then and only then, writes Fr. Martin,
"could you successfully dangle the utopia of the 'Workers'Paradise'before his
eyes, to be accepted in peaceful and humanely agreeable manner, without
revolution or violence or bloodshed.

It must be evident to all but the most simple souls that after the passage of a
generation or two, such ceaseless social conditioning is bound to alter the
consciousness and inner-substance of a society, and it is bound to produce
significant structural crises within that society, crises that manifest
themselves in numberless ways in virtually every community throughout the
country.

Crucial to the Gramscians' success is the disappearance of all memory of the
old civilization and way of life.

---

The New American Magazine
July 5, 1999