Posted on 07/10/2007 6:31:26 AM PDT by kellynla
Ping
After teaching in public schools and college for 45 years, this VDH essay needs to be sent to all 435 House Reps and 100 Senators. The USA is now an ignorant nation which allows such pacifist socialist views as expressed by the Kosites, the DNC, and the MSM to be inculcated without dispute. Perhaps the Second Coming is just around the Bend.
Liberals have been successful in their quest to dumb down the population enough to be controlled.
Saved, Forwarded and a BUMP!
Matthew 7
24 ¶ Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock:
25 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.
26 And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand:
27 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.
Our Founding Fathers from over 200 years ago had a better education. Ah, progress...
Let me know if you want in or out.
Links: FR Index of his articles: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=victordavishanson
His website: http://victorhanson.com/
NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp
Pajamasmedia: http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/
BTTT
Cultural narratives are always complex. Each contain enough truth and history to establish legitimacy among their subscribers. Mutual ignorance abounds between cultures but it is their interpretations of shared historical and contemporary events that determines a culture's durability in conflict. That's really what the war on terror is about isn't it? It's about ending a culture of death, at home and abroad. But we don't know how to do that do we...? Instead we rightly fear that we are fostering it. IMO, propagating a culture of death is best done by dismissing its cult members as ignorant or incompetent, particularly when they are just that. As a result of being spurned by the culture of life - they will assert our irrelevance with more zeal than they assert their own irrelevance. Validation of their culture is equally damaging. In my opinion, there are only two cures for the culture of death:
In Iraq and Afghanistan we are finding the first prescription more difficult than we imagined. That's because we've not played favorites, empowering our enemies and allies alike. Empowering an enemy simply validates their culture - validates their perception of history - validates the culture of death. Empowering your enemies destroys your allies perception of events. Doing so sets your allies adrift on an intellectual road to conspiracy. But then again, what could we expect our allies to make of us when we harbor our own culture of death - made popular by lucrative media deals? Our own political inconsistencies are making the second prescription more likely.
In terms of our own hypocrisies... what could be worse than the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation.
Tupac Amaru Shakur was born in the The Bronx in New York City.[4] He was named after Túpac Amaru II, an Incan revolutionary who led a Peruvian uprising against Spain and was subsequently sentenced to death. "Shakur" comes from the Arabic word thankful (to God). His mother, Afeni Shakur, was an active member of the Black Panther Party in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s; Shakur was born just one month after her acquittal on more than 100 charges of "Conspiracy against the United States government and New York landmarks" in the New York Panther 21 court case.[5] Although officially unconfirmed by the Shakur family,[6] several sources list his birth name as either Parish Lesane Crooks[7][8] or Lesane Parish Crooks. Afeni supposedly feared her enemies would attack her son, and disguised their relation using a different last name, only to change it three months[7] or a year[9] later, following her marriage to Mutulu Shakur.
On September 7, 1996 at approximately 11:15 p.m., while stopped at the intersection of East Flamingo Road and Koval Lane, Shakur was shot several times in a drive-by shooting. Shakur was struck by four bullets out of the twelve shots that were fired at him; he was hit twice in the chest, and once each in his left arm and thigh. Shakur was later placed on life support until his death six days later, on September 13, 1996, at 4:03 p.m. PDT at the age of twenty-five.
Later read
Classical education is popular among home schoolers.
Academia serves to pacify the masses. Nothing works better. But Americans, by definition, cannot be pacified. We were born to start righteous fights. Look at our history. Our insular decadence is sinusoidally married to our ambition to redefine the world. Maybe you haven't looked over the horizon lately. Even if you have, I don't think we are seeing the same things. My compatriot, we are not safe in this world because of who we are.
https://www.maa.org/reviews/humansurvival.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/05/26/eveningnews/main2855775.shtml
http://www.onenewsnow.com/2007/06/yaf_brings_leftist_campus_bias.php
http://www.thefire.org/index.php/redalert?PHPSESSID=fa49b156911114fe730ce75421fd8cb4
http://www.noindoctrination.org/
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/index.jsp
Sigh. Estimation and mental math techniques are good in some situations, but rarely in isolation. These folks are misguided; this line of thinking was can result in stupid errors like the Mars spacecraft that failed due to a unit error (centimeters and inches are not equivalent units).
As for the "Mathematics for Human Survival"...it's a lame and pathetic excuse for a college textbook. The fact that the book is even being recommended for use in teaching such concepts as percentages in a college-level class is a sad reflection of the dumbing down of the U.S. education system. I learned and mastered both concepts in elementary school, but then again, that was in the early 1990s.
Propaganda doesn't get us anywhere. Neither does statistical manipulation or dumbed down mathematics.
Our ignorance of "the same mathematics that we did years and years ago" will, however, reduce America's competitive advantage, relative to such rising powers as India and China.
“Propaganda doesn’t get us anywhere.”
It gets the anti-US left everywhere they want to go - destroying America’s superiority.
There’s nothing wrong with RateMyProfessors; it’s an informal course and teaching rating system.
No wonder I only got a 660 on the SAT II Writing yet have been complimented as a “very good writer” by my professors.
Then let’s make sure that if we go down, they come with us.
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