GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS THEN AND NOW
Dick Bachert
“GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS THEN AND NOW” VIDEO AT:
(For those with poor eyesight or suffering TV induced “SASS” or Short Attention Span Syndrome)
(Time: 5 ½ minutes)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0lR1KQq2-U
“The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” Abraham Lincoln
“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community’.”
Adolph Hitler Speech November 1933
Until the decent, traditional values folk rise up and clean up the freaking government schools, nothing else we do will make much difference.
I am a product of the government schools (GS). I graduated from high school in 1957 and was exposed to several hundred teachers. Most were dedicated professionals. And I can STILL name the EXCEPTIONAL ones.
Edna Kleinmeyer who didn’t just teach English: She imbued us with a love of language I carry to this day. It was Ms. Kleinmeyer who told me I had a gift for writing;
Charlie Kluckholn, the tough old wrestling coach who taught chemistry and gave me some of the best advice I had received to that time;
Charles Huffman, the homeroom teacher who helped me over a very rough spot in my life;
Franklin Jefferis, a “lowly” shop teacher, whose love of a job well done was wordlessly communicated to his kids in thousands of subtle ways. Mr. Jefferis died soon after I graduated. One October night, I “visited” him – alone — at the funeral home and wept as I thanked him one last time.
But the current GS are radically different from the system through which I passed 50 years ago. Know that my concern and hostility are NOT directed at those who still TEACH — really teach, really want the best EDUCATION for the kids, want to prepare them academically for the future.
Those feelings are reserved for SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS who have socialist/collectivist agendas or quietly acquiesce to the agendas imposed on them from above. They know that what is going on is wrong, but say nothing lest they jeopardize their careers. Author Thomas Sowell calls these folks “the anointed.” And as the title of his book on the subject, “The Vision of The Anointed,” indicates, they HAVE a vision!
That it is NOT the PARENTS’ vision is of no concern to them.
When my kids were still in the GS, my wife and I were quite active. The Principal of their elementary school chose me to represent the school in something called the LSAC (Local School Advisory Committee) program. I attended several meetings held at the County Board of Education headquarters. I came away from the VERY FIRST of those meetings with these impressions:
1. Those folks DID NOT speak English. Through tight little smirks clearly indicative of the low esteem, indeed, contempt, they had for the uninformed and ignorant gaggle of parents arrayed before them, they spoke in buzz words and technobabble code only they comprehended. At one point — to the visible relief of the other parents — I stopped one woman’s presentation and asked for a translation of what she’d said. She was NOT pleased!
2. They DID NOT want parents involved! Cookie sales and PTA? OK. Serious criticism of a course or textbook? Verboten! Your option was private or parochial school. There very little home schooling then.
3. Most of these people MAY have once been educators. They were now bureaucrats guarding their turf.
4. Many of those administrative folks were making over $50K and, though I looked for signs of it, I saw little evidence of anything resembling “work.” And this was 20 years ago when the average classroom teacher earned less than $25K.
5. There were WAY too many administrators in the GS. It is a perfect opportunity to provide make-work sinecures for “anointed” members of the educational fraternity. Four years as an Air Force instructor taught me how to spot the signs.
Here’s the “bottom line:” Simply hurling more money into the black hole of the GS WILL NOT WORK. Most of that money will NEVER get to the classroom or into the pockets of DESERVING teachers who actually TEACH. And teach what any sensible human being – REGARDLESS of race, faith or ethnicity — instinctively understands to be correct, morally defensible material.
Bush is right about one thing: We need accountability! Perhaps you recall Clinton’s asinine plan to send 100,000 PAID Americorps “volunteers” into the grade schools to TEACH KIDS TO READ. Why hadn’t their PREVIOUS teachers – OR THEIR PARENTS! — taught them to perform that rather basic skill???
Think about what you just read as YOUR local government schools continue to raise YOUR property taxes.
Another encounter with “The System”
In 1978, my wife and I came to know a young woman named Patty. She
was a devoutly religious young mother who’d become more devout when her
husband and father of her two small sons aged 2 and 6 informed her that he
was leaving. In dire economic straits, I offered to let her stay in our
former home in Chamblee — which was not rented at the time – rent-free until she got back on her feet. She had been clandestinely home schooling the 6 year
old for about 2 years using very well done Christian course materials from
an organization in Texas the name of which escapes me. The lad had recently been tested and had placed at least a year ABOVE his chronological age. As required by the government school authorities at the time, she dutifully apprised the authorities of his scores.
For reasons which would become clear in a moment, Patty had been harassed by the DeKalb County school authorities for about 6 months and, by the time she moved into the Chamblee house, had been — unbeknownst to us — ORDERED to put the 6 year old into the nearest government elementary school or suffer the consequences. Because she wanted the boys to be educated Christians, there was no way she was going to do that and she told them so.
At approximately 2 am one morning, a loud knock on the door announced the
arrival of the aforementioned “consequences.”
Dressed only in a nightgown, she was confronted by several burly police officers who thrust an arrest warrant in her face. With the now awakened 6 year old watching and the 2 year old wailing in the other room, she was handcuffed and led out the door to jail. She was tossed into a large cell with a couple of hookers and a junkie who spent much of the rest of that morning vomiting in the corner. The two young boys for whom the educational authorities professed such great concern were just left AT THE HOUSE — ALONE! Patty was later told that the bureaucrats from Children Services who were SUPPOSED to accompany the cops were late and, in their haste to get this dangerous miscreant behind bars, the cops just missed the fact that the Children Services people were, well, missing. The CS folks showed up an hour later to find two terrified kids, one of whom had just seen his mother hauled off in cuffs.
Patty was ultimately brought to trial under the Georgia Truancy Statutes. Her pro-bono attorney tore the school authorities to shreds and hers has been called THE case that opened the floodgates to home schooling in Georgia. Once they had all the facts, the jury didn’t take long to acquit her. I’m proud to have played a small part in that.
At Patty’s trial, a previously overlooked aspect of the government schools was put into sharp focus for those paying attention: The Director of Instruction for DeKalb County testified that the then current 7 hour school day consisted of an average of approximately 3 hours or less of instruction. At that time, Patty was devoting 4 to 5 hours a day to direct instruction.
He also as much as admitted that the REAL reason they wanted ALL these kids in school was the $3,000.00 per kid per year (I’m sure that number is higher in 2001!) they then got from the state and federal government. Empty seats = lost funds. As in most things, follow the money.
Patty home schooled these two boys through high school.
And how did the boys turn out?
One is now a physician and the other a budding journalist.
But that now seems to be the norm for the growing legions of home schooled kids – which most likely explains why the NEA and the government school folks feel justifiably threatened. And home-schooled kids routinely win national academic competitions.
One of Reagan’s key platform planks was to dismantle the horribly misnamed Department of Education (the Department of Educational MEDIOCRITY would be more descriptive). When he got to Washington, his effort was defeated by the NEA and the federal educrats. Reagan’s 1983 report “A Nation at Risk” declared that if a foreign power had done to government schools what was been done to it by the establishment bureaucrats and teachers’ unions, we would have CONSIDERED IT AN ACT OF WAR!
Sadly, that war goes on – and our kids and the future of this nation are the casualties. Barack Obama is a direct manifestation of how badly America has lost that war and how effectively generations of kids have been indoctrinated.
Thomas Jefferson believed an EDUCATED PUBLIC to be the cornerstone of the system he and the other Founders TRIED to leave behind. He would NOT, I feel certain, be a big fan of the current government education system. If he returned today, he’d home school just as he did before.
And here’s something else to think about: Nothing else we do to try to turn this country away from the Marxist path Obama and his mendacious minions have set us upon will count for much until we clean the utopian leftist idiots out of the system and insist that our kids learn the natural laws and how the physical world works. And putting a condom over a cucumber or the PC definition of hate speech is NOT real learning. The kids in China, India and elsewhere are learning reading, math, physics, chemistry, etc. Until we do that, there’s no way the America envisioned by the Founders can be restored. We simply cannot compete with millions of new young socialists coming on the scene each year.
GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS THEN AND NOW VIDEO AT:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0lR1KQq2-U
excellent. bookmarked.
Excellent post.
Excellent post. Thank you.
Very sobering post. Bookmarked for later reading.
I went to school in the ‘70’s. In the 8th grade I had a ‘science’ teacher, that wasn’t teaching, but sharing way too much of his personal life daily in class. I was hungry for an education and wrote a petition to get rid of him. I distinctly recall putting into the petition that this ‘teacher’s’ salary was a waste of tax-dollars because he was not giving us an education, but tales of his personal life. I had a number of students sign the petition,until the administration got wind of what I was doing. In typical ‘70’s fashion, I was sent to ‘counseling’-come to find out that particular ‘teacher’ was the brother-in-law of the principal(can you say nepotism). In hindsight, I see that was the early days of the deterioration of public education. I now live in a very small town, with a school system of approx 930 students K-12, with 14 administrators each earning $100,000+. When the Board of Ed is questioned on ANYTHING, it’s met with disrespect, disdain, and contempt. Oh yeah, and the BOE never answers specific, closed-ended questions. In typical liberal fashion the BOE plays us vs. them, pitting taxpayers versus parents—divide and conquoer. A parent, who’s heart may have been in the right place, but is terribly misguided at a public meeting about a defeated budget was sooo proud her 9yr old knew a big word—that word, ‘entitled’. It’s very sad, but we must not be deterred, on the contrary, individual citizens need to get involved. I’d suggest starting in your own backyard—go to public meetings in your own town, start asking questions. It’s a pretty safe bet if you start to ask questions, you’re likely to experience disdain, but again do not give up. It’s likely that most of the folks on a Board of Ed and administrators in the school have never been questioned—all the more reason to get involved.
Bill Butthead Bennett constantly brags about his Secretary of Education position - but NEVER mentions the administrators. A willfully blind fat fool.
bump
The problem with the video you suggested is that it implies that if we only went back to schools as they were in 1957 that somehow the schools would be fixed.
WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!!!!!
The Utopian Progressives were the force behind government schools when they opened in the mid-1800s and the Utopian Progressives have **always** been directing teacher training an curriculum. The Utopian Progressives have **always** been pushing our nation toward socialism and atheistic secularism.
By the early 1960 ( not long after the author of the video graduated from high school) the curriculum in my semi-rural government high school was entirely secular atheist in its worldview with one or two minutes of the Lord's Prayer and one scripture verse during homeroom ( big Whoop! for Christianity there!)
Another reason government schools can not be reformed is that they **are** socialism and socialism can not reformed. Also simply by attending children become comfortable with taking money from their neighbor for a service their parents want tuition-free. Well...If the government can force their neighbor to pay for their schooling, then why not a thousand other socialists wants and needs?
Then there is the First Amendment! **All** government schools ( even if the district were the size of a city block) are a First Amendment and freedom of conscience abomination! ALL government schools trample every First Amendment Rights. In fact, children ( who have committed no crime) are treated like prisoners. **ALL** government schools teach children to be compliant prisoners of the fascist state. This was the very goal of the Utopian Progressives and industrialists who championed compulsory government education in the mid-1800s to early 1900s.
No government school can be religiously neutral. All schools must choose between a godless or God-centered worldview. At the moment all government schools in our nation teach children how to think godlessly. This is hardly religiously neutral.
Even when government schools opened in the mid-1800s the curriculum was based on a bland generic Christianity so that it could acceptable to the majority and offend the fewest. The Utopian Progressives have never ceased in their push to secular atheism.
Finally, since simply by attending children become acclimatized to accepting other people's money ( collected by threat of force by the government), within one to three generations of socialist government schools we had:
**the IRS
**the federal reserve
** unions
** the feminist movement
** the failed League of Nations and the U.N.
** FDR's New Deal for **four** terms
** Johnson's Great Society
** the abolishment of the gold standard
** the Department of Education
** and thousands of socialist offices and programs, and regulatory agencies
All of the above came about because our parents, grand parents, and great-grandparents were made to feel comfortable with taking their neighbor's money to pay for their socialist schooling. In fact, their Utopian Progressive trained teachers taught these children that it was their **RIGHT** to have government take their neighbor's money.
Again...Government schools can NOT NOT NOT NOT be fixed!!! Socialism can not be fixed and **all** government schools are socialist.
I call these people well meaning Useful Idiots! Yeah they are really sweet people who love their cats but they are HURTING ( in fact ***abusing**) children!
If these so-called caring and "good" teachers **were** any good they would be fired already! If they haven't been fired or haven't quit yet it is because they are going along with evil to get along with evil.