Posted on 01/26/2013 12:46:21 PM PST by wintertime
Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity in America Indoctrination
Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity in America Indoctrination
This video is 2 minutes 43 seconds. The title is self-explanatory. Our nation's children are not attending religiously neutral schools. They are forced to attend (and taxpayers are under police threat to fund) government owned and run ATHEIST schools.
Government owned and run, socialist-entitlement, single-payer K-12 schools have never been, and are not now, religiously, politically, or culturally neutral.
Please remember that it is ***impossible** to live in a philosophic state of religious neutrality. All humans must choose between either a godless or God-centered worldview. All schools must choose one of these religiously non-neutral worldviews in which to develop their curriculum and school policies. Government schools, must as well.
Government school indoctrination threatens our nation's freedom. Organize with others. Work to shut down the government owned and run socialist-entitlement, single-payer, and godless schools. Let's begin the process of privatizing K-12 education in this nation. Work toward complete separation of school and state.
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
Second I did belong to the union when I worked in New York, (It was a condition of employment) and the Beck decision came down after I left.
I did consider belonging here in Va, but found personal insurance at a cheaper rate than the union dues.
Sadly it was people like you that caused people to have insurance that cost a fortune.
As Softballmominva said in her reply to you. I make no bones about my conservatism in or out of the classroom and my Principal leaves me alone as to the content of my subject area.
I set high standards and my students achieve them. In my technical drawing classes the standards are higher than the ones that the community college sets. I teach there as adjunct one semester per year.
If you are good at what you do, consider going to private schools to teach.
Parents have a duty/ responsibility to insure that the next generation has an education. As I have said for many home schools, private education, vouchers, etc... are not an option.
If you are good at what you do, consider going to private schools to teach.
Very few (if any) Private schools offer the Technology courses I teach, and none in the area I live.
Sorry it has taken me a while to respond but I am busy neck-deep in indirect statement an adj/noun agreement with 3rd declension nouns and 1-2nd declension adjectives.
So, since I was mentioned, I thought to respond.
It is true that the progenitor of this thread has told many of us in not so many words how we are all destined for hell and are not conservative but marxist and useful idiots.
Recently, the vitriol has increased because rather than focus on the issues, as I have tried to do and provide empirical evidence, the progenitor ignores those of us who teach.
I have considered a private school to work at but frankly, the children are typically worse than the students I currently have - based on my personal observations. The last private school we had in our county closed in 1991 because there were better educational opportunities in the local public school, chiefly in science and non-academic elective choices.
BlackElk - I read your cogent and thoughtful replies regularly and appreciate your insights and comments. I would love to share ideas with your wife for my Latin classes since we are a tightly-knit bunch.:)
We few who speak for our jobs and most importantly our children we reach do get passionate about our work and what we do; this is why I go to work Monday - Friday. If I take offense because I am trying to make my community better by getting children to see past living on the street and am condemned for it, I do not see how I cannot be offended.
I have about left FR because there is no support for conservative teachers. I know my loss will not hurt FR or those who feel I am doing ill to children, but I know what good I do for those who need it.
I do not expect a medal or a triumphal like Caesar, but when a kid gets it or praises me independently of my class, it is worth quite a bit to me personally.
Personally, I am skeptical about vouchers because, the money will inevitably have "strings attached." I would not send my kids to the local Catholic High School because I was not convinced that it is REALLY Catholic. No one can reasonably say that private schools are ALL blessed with academic excellence. Nor can anyone say that ALL public schools are devoid of excellence. My late mother-in-law graduated an elite public high school (Stuyvesant?) in New York City and went on to matriculate at and graduate from Sarah Lawrence. For most of her life, she was a socialist and actually worked for Norman Thomas but that was never attributable to her public high school education.
It may not occur to those private schools to offer those Technology courses because many are concentrating on courses in the classics or the Trivium and the Quadrivium. Maybe they would if you suggested it and gave the school an explanation of the value of the course to the students.
I attend a very Traditional Catholic Church in Rockford (Tridentine Mass and everything else). Parishioners include retirees and young families and everything in between united by a love of traditional Catholic Faith. The school at which my wife teaches originated through the efforts of parishioners at that Church. Although we are very much in communion with the Rockford Diocese and with the Vatican, the school is not sponsored by the diocese nor subsidized in any way by the Church. Within the limits of the meaning of "Catholic," the school is free from interference.
Voluntarily, the school is "credentialed" by various well-recognized private school groups and has won the Henry Salvatori award from Hillsdale College for the quality of the education offered by our K-12. Several alumni/ae have attended/graduated Hillsdale. This year, one graduate looks likely to be admitted by Harvard.
Meanwhile, as I type, two of our parishioners are working on a project to create a very Catholic College which would require students to successfully complete courses in theology, philosophy and some liberal arts but would concentrate on giving a first rate education in various practical trades (electrical work, plumbing, carpentry, sheet metal, heating and air conditioning, and whatever). Maybe it will happen. Maybe not. If it does, you can bet that it will be a lot more reasonable and modest in what it charges students than most folks are used to now and that the emphasis will be on education and not on bureaucratic approval.
There are many exiting things happening in private or home school or internet education which were unheard of and probably not yet widely imagined when I and later my wife were in school at any level. We find ourselves along with many other folks having to create education in our country all over again.
Our Catholic colleges and universities which were developed with the financial blood sacrifice of many devout colleges, have largely been stolen from the Faithful Catholics by such disgraces and phonies and leftist enemies of all things Catholic like Frs. Hesburgh, Malloy and Jenkins at what is now Notre Shame University,
When Obozo was invited there to speak at commencement a few years ago and Notre Shame caused the arrest of Catholic priests and others for protesting on the campus, my bishop who was serving on the Church's Signatura (its Vatican supreme court) denounced Notre Shame, called it no longer Catholic and invited Notre Shame to change its name to Northern Indiana Secular Humanist University as a matter of "truth in advertising" and urged Catholic parents NOT to allow their children to attend Notre Shame. Each and every presiding Catholic bishop in Illinois also condemned Notre Shame for inviting Obozo and giving him an honorary degree.
Slowly, painstakingly slowly, this generation of Catholics are developing new colleges and universities to replace the formerly Catholic and now apostate colleges and universities like Notre Shame, Georgetown, Fordham, Boston College and almost all the rest of the old schools that have effectively abandoned Catholicism at the Land of Lakes Conference run by Hesburgh in 1967 in Wisconsin. After that conference, there were only six Catholic colleges and universities that had not apostasized, among them St. John's in NYC, Grenier in Erie, PA, and Belmont Abbey in North Carolina.
We feel, if anything, more strongly that places like Notre Shame and Boston College, Georgetown and the rest of those which apostasized in 1967 should shape up or be abolished than we feel about public education. At least the public schools do not claim, do not perpetrate mail fraud, do not defraud Catholic contributors and parents by CLAIMING falsely to be Catholic. May tumbling tumbleweed be the sole occupant of an abandoned Notre Shame.
Among the newer and actually Catholic colleges and universities created are Christendom in Virginia, St. Thomas More in New Hampshire, St. Thomas More in Fort Worth, Texas and Wyoming Catholic College.
Brick and mortar colleges are beginning their death throes given the legalized extortion of what they charge for tuition, room and board or even just tuition.
Our educational ideas are not for everyone in our damaged society and civilization but they are definitely an option.
Take satisfaction from the fact that you do the good job you do for your students, particularly in a school where living on the streets might otherwise be an option of the students.
No one throws a triumph for my wife either but she comes home steeped in enthusiasm when the knowledge clicks for the student. She has an autistic young man as a student who has become a remarkable classroom authority on Latin grammar and vocabulary and who is visibly thrilled whenever he has a chance to shine in the classroom. She comes home enthusiastic over his every achievement. The other students cheer him on. As a recovering lawyer who practiced criminal law, I had that feeling on occasion.
One client was more than prone to excessive drinking (never mind that he was too drink legally at all). Just before his graduation from the public high school (could just as easily been parochial high school except for legal restraints on the public school), he got thoroughly plastered with a couple of friends and, without details, he alone wound up charged with arson which had resulted in $100,000 damage. The school wanted to refuse him his diploma but there were only about seven days to graduation and state law required that he get his diploma as I demonstrated to the principal, several assistant principals and some assistant superintendents of schools. He and not his parents paid the legal fees by working minimum wage jobs until paid in full. Via an alternative pre-trial program of "rehabilitation" he also spent the entire year after his graduation, scrubbing graffiti off the walls and picking up cigarettes, needless to say, without wages of any kind. His younger friends laughed at him and humiliated him (kids will be kids!) all year. Instead of facing 20 years in jail, he successfully completed that year of labor and was left with a completely clean record.
Given the amount of the legal fees, he did not offend against the law again to the best of my knowledge. I did not see him for at least five years until I ran into him in a store and, by then, I did not remember who he was. He came up to me, re-introduced himself respectfully, told me he was married and had a couple of kids and that he had a humble job working for our hometown which did pay reasonably well as a blue collar job. He told me that he wanted to thank me for the way I represented him and that it had made all the difference in his life and that he was not hanging out in bars and that his wife got his paycheck in full every week. That was an occasion for internal triumph. That was better than mere fees.
Finally, congratulations on being able to teach Latin in a public school. Except for the school where my wife teaches, the Catholic schools around here no longer teach Latin even in a very conservative diocese. In urban Connecticut where I came from, the public schools have abandoned Latin long ago. I went to a Jesuit Prep School (so long ago it was still Catholic) and we translated not only Caesar(sophomore year) but many orations of Cicero (junior year) and the entirety of Virgil's Aeneid (senoir year). We also took two years of Greek but we were not very strong in the sciences either, probably because, despite numerous great Jesuit scientists over the centuries, science was not considered to be very important at the school which offered only chemistry and physics. Math was not that strong either.
We had a very good football and even basketball program but much less entertainment type programs than public schools. However, what we did academically with the noted exceptions, we did verrrry well and would gladly match academic performance and SAT scores with even the elite prep schools in the Northeast.
BTW. the Latin texts were written by by Fr. Robert Henle, S. J., in the 1940s (Henle: First Year Latin through Fourth Year Latin and a wonderful Latin Grammar book. All are still in print with Loyola Press in Chicago in paperback at modest prices. My wife is using my hardcovers that are more than fifty years old. The Latin texts are filled with far too much Catholicism to be acceptable to public schools. The Grammar, however, is a gem that serves all audiences interested in Latin. Henle later served as President of Georgetown and, regrettably, served as Secretary of the infamous Fr. Hesburgh's equally infamous Land 'o Lakes Conference at which most Catholic colleges and universities apostasized in 1967.
I will tell my wife that you would like to compare notes but she is teaching something like ten courses this year, a much larger group of students, and is usually buried under a mountain of ungraded homework, quizzes, tests and papers from Latin, French, English Grammar and Literature, Ancient History, World History and and American History and sometimes Government. There are other teachers, whatever that may sound like, but she is an absolute workhorse. I am retired and get to stay home, playing on the Internet.
Omnia Gallia est in tres partes divisa...ad....Arma virumque cano....and beyond.
May God bless you and yours!
The cost of educating a student K-12 is less than $4,000 per year. Businessmen who depend on schools of whatever kind to educate their future employees might wisely develop a relationship with good private schools and their students, meet the students, experience classes, attend graduation exercises, choir concerts, etc. The school building is a former junior high school purchased at bargain price from the public school district which wanted to get rid of it. Not a palace but adequate to the purpose.
May I amend that statement to "The cost of educating an average student K-12 is less than $4,000 per year."
One of the reasons that the cost-per-student gets inflated is due to the special populations that schools are required to pay for. For instance, I'm writing an educational plan for a student whose doctor wants her placed in an institution for continuing depression. He is fighting tooth and nail to get the schools to pay for it, rather than the family's insurance. The cost will be about $300K... a year...for one student. I wrote another plan last year for a set of triplets who are all in an institution, and have been for years, due to severe MR issues - the county spends about 250k on each of them. And will until the year in which they turn 22.
Put a few of those into any system and the average cost increases to levels that leave people scratching their heads with "Wait...how can possibly cost $10k per student in a classroom?"
In the case of your wife's school, and any school really, it doesn't cost more than about 5k per student - but some students cost way, way more than 5k
If the parents' insurance policy will pay, it should. If not, it sounds to me (without knowledge of whatever Virginia regulations may apply) like a case for Medicaid. What standing does her doctor (presumably her psychiatrist) have to fight tooth and nail to get the schools to pay for it? Is this a case where he wants a blank check from the public schools? In which case, he is hoping that future generations of his descendants, yet to be conceived, will bless the memory of his financial practicality in taking advantage of the system. $500 or more per hour for as many hours as he, in his infinite wisdom, sees necessary to have himself compensated.
I will certainly admit that I have known personally some capable and dedicated public school teachers and even administrators, but the word "psychiatrist" and the word "integrity" or the words "worth his/her fees" do not belong in the same sentence. Freud? Jung? Whoever!
I am a natural born cynic and think far less of psychiatry than I have ever thought of public schools. If I lived nearby, I would gladly seek to free public education of such a burden.
I gather that MR means Mental Retardation. $250 K per year per triplet? Quite likely but what do the triplets get out of that expenditure? This raises a separate question as to "mainstreaming." It is fashionable to view those who are Down's Syndrome folks as needing to be "mainstreamed" for reasons of "self-esteem" (read to allow budget cuts so that the politicians can squander those dollars on other projects like bicycle paths or kayaking facilities). Down's Syndrome folks may well need help but the only reason it comes out of your education budget is this "mainstreaming" fantasy. Likewise those who have serious mental illness.
When those with serious mental illness are "mainstreamed," we get Sandy Hook or Columbine or the Gabby Giffords incident or many other less publicized tragedies. There are mental hospitals that have been abandoned all over the US. Two that come immediately to mind are one at Waterbury, Vermont, used occasionally to hold surplus criminal prisoners and (sit down before you read this) the small town of Newtown, Connecticut of which much smaller Sandy Hook is a subsection. The Newtown facility is used regularly now as something of a prison.
My reference to $4,000 as the cost of educating a student was as to my wife's school not the public schools. The public schools have many more instances of required spending, such as: school nurses, the football program, band, cultural trips to New York or other major metropolitan centers of art, music, sculpture, etc., a taxpayer paid junior year abroad in Europe (Greenwich, CT public schools as long ago as 1971).
That last one is a particular favorite. When leftwingers sued to try to force a judicial decision which might force Connecticut to drastically raise public education spending so as to force the enactment of a state income tax, the plaintiffs argued for essentially EQUAL educational spending whether a public school student resided in Darien, New Canaan, Wilton, Weston (all among America's most affluent towns) or resided in the urban slums of New Haven, Bridgeport, Norwalk or Hartford or destitute towns in Eastern Connecticut. When Greenwich hired an attorney to argue before the State Supreme Court that if Greenwich taxpayers elected officials who ran the junior year in Europe program, that was Greenwich's business. The leftist plaintiffs responded that junior years in Europe paid by taxpayers should be available to every Connecticut student or none which would mean state funding because poor towns in Eastern Connecticut could NEVER afford such frills.
The argument over junior years in Europe gave many Connecticut citizens an entirely new perspective. The State Supreme Court made a decision, IIRC, which said that junior years in Europe were up to any town wanting to grant one but need not be state funded. The court also ruled that educational funding on a state level was inadequate to guarantee to each child a "free public education" under a new constitution enacted in 1965 only six years before the decision, that at least the basics of education had to be equally available everywhere and the state would have to pay a LOT more than it had been paying.
A state tax on wages and salaries (Connecticut's first ever) was enacted in the early summer of 1971 (7/1/71) illegally since the legislature was required to adjourn by June 30. That tax was repealed in a special session in late July before it would have been effective on 10/1/71. That was the result of a genuine political revolution led by then conservative big city newspapers everywhere but Hartford. The state income tax was next and permanently enacted in 1991 and, together with utterly obscene levels of public squander on the things liberals love, has rendered even Connecticut a smoldering economic ruin.
God bless!
Would it surprise you if I told you I found out this morning that the residential center he would like her to be placed at just so happens to have HIS name on the advisory board? Conflict of interest? Nah...can't be. No matter, it looks like we can provide services in a more efficient way.
When it comes to emotional services, there is some wiggle room to have the insurance companies kick in, however in the cases of the autistic, profoundly intellectually impaired, and significantly (read violently) emotionally disturbed, the schools typically foot the bill, until the year in which the child turns 22, because they have a right to an education. This is a part of IDEA - a law re-instated by every Congress and every president since 1977. No one has stood up against the outright tyranny. Of course, it would cut off a lot of revenue to the lawyers, can't have that!
For a child to cost $250K a year, there are numerous issues - mental, physical, and emotional, always with the potential of violence, whether intended or not. These three kids were born with significant impairments due to a short gestation. Nothing that the parents did wrong (or at least it doesn't appear that way, who knows truly) it just happened.
Junior year in Europe! NICE!!! but get Mummy and Daddy to pay for it, not the state!
Still, even in the public school setting, the amount to school a typical kid isn't more than 7k or so a child. As long as they aren't going to Europe on the county's dime!
I have this numerous times. Please don't be surprised if some Freepers begin to see this continuous pestering as stalking.
Up until two weeks ago I was the chair of the Teaching assistance team. Earlier this year I had to send a child for a full evaluation because "Mommy dearest" kept claiming that he was ADD and Learning disabled at the same time. The child is actually L.A.Z.Y.
This required a full psychological, physiological, and Social evaluation. Interviews with the parents, siblings, and everyone else residing in the house.
Total cost $5000.00 to find out that the student is perfectly normal and is just unmotivated.
Only the ones with IQ's in the dull normal range would think that or ever repeat it.
What technology courses do you teach?
Just wanted to throw my two cents in here...(sorry for intruding)
I am a public school teacher who homeschools his own children. I would never, NEVER send my kids to a public school. They are not institutions of learning, but indoctrination centers. They strip away God from the public discourse and exalt the profane.
That being said...I am a born-again, bible-believing Christian and I have been gifted by God with the gift of teaching. I have seen God’s hand on my life calling me to the “challenge” of being a public school teacher (once, even trying, like Jonah, to flee from His call upon my life.) And, so, I teach. I teach in a public school. I do not teach the doctrines of Baal. I do not foster a climate of non-thinking, or of indoctrination in my classroom. Whenever possible (and I make it a point for this to be so), I present Godly examples, use God-honoring texts, challenge godless thought, enable those students who are Christian to feel well within their right (and duty) to speak their beliefs openly, without fear of reprisal.
I have a biblical text (Prov. 3:13) posted in big letters in the front of my classroom. I have copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution on display in my room and regularly point these out to my students (as we have many occasions to discuss contemporary issues touching upon the Constitution. I ALWAYS remind my students that their rights do not come from their government, but from their God.) I have given my testimony to my students on numerous occasions (after being prompted by my students—all within my right AND DUTY as a teacher to do so.) I have counselled numerous students suffering from broken hearts, broken lives, broken homes. I have prayed with students on occasion.
All of this has been challenged here at FR by those who would have everyone simply abandon the public schools. How easy to say, “Withdraw. Come out from among them (an actual biblical principle, though, here, misapplied.) How easy to abandon these “rat holes” and all the corruption that goes on within their walls. In truth, I HAVE abandoned the public schools...but I have not abandoned its students. I am serving my Savior by being there for them, to offer a bit of salt and light, to show them “a better way,” to counter the culture of declension that has propped itself up all around these kids. I have spoken about this here at FR, and have heard those who would say I am as much a problem as the public school itself. That my presence there offers “a form of godliness, but denies the power thereof.” That I must be somehow acting against the wishes of those in authority and therefore serving as a bad testimony.
I have, for the most part, resorted to becoming a lurker on these education threads. I don’t need, nor do I desire the approval of men for my Christian walk and testimony. I seek only to serve the Lord. But, for the life of me, I cannot begin to understand the voices of those here who would look at the issue of our public schools and conclude the answer is to abandon them altogether, given that is why we are where we currently are. We’ve ceded ground time and time again. What we have in public schools today is THE DIRECT RESULT OF ABANDONING our responsibly to ensure that America continues to produce a Godly heritage.
Dear Christian, consider the Commission your Lord and Savior gave to you to go out and preach the gospel. He added, “beginning at Jerusalem.” That meant, begin in your own hometown. You homeschool? That’s great. But, one day your children will be living alongside those lost souls you completely abandoned to the godless system of public education. What kind of neighborhoods will they (and your grandchildren) be growing up in? Not your worry? Not your job? I think you need to go into your prayer closet and ask your Savior, “Who is my neighbor?” But be ready for the answer that stings.
With the govt involved in education, our children's schools become labs for radical social engineering. Every bad idea gets forced FIRST on our children by the courts through the schools. ANd then govt bureaucrats get to try to solve problems on a macro scale that can only realistically/fairly be handled at the personal, micro level.
I hate govt education, not because I don't respect good teachers like you, but because it is a bad idea at its most basic level.
I saw some clips of some of those meetings. Made me want to get up and cheer for the common sense of the conservatives. It was hilarious to see the libs get so agitated, bringing in irrelevant stuff, and losing their temper-generally out of whack/looney, while the conservatives just remained calm and stuck to the subject.
Most positive thing I have seen on TV in the last decade.LOL
One thing that happens to public schools is that they are substantially more regulated than private schools and that those regulations cause substantial costs from school budgets without being truly educational costs?
Likewise, human nature (fallen human nature) leads people to blame everyone but themselves for what goes wrong with their own kids. While teachers in any kind of school have substantial responsibility for the academic success of the children they teach, the parents have the first teaching responsibility.
It is easier (all too easy) for the parent to just blame the teacher, blame failure of the student on some disability like ADD, etc., rather than turn off the TV, put down that beer, get off the telephone and participate actively in seeing to it that the homework gets done and that the student actually understands the work. The parent is the first tutor of the child. If necessary, the parent should hire a tutor in specific subjects.
I would like to say that you are half right on this point. The other victim(s) would be the military. A perfect example is this notion of intentionally putting women into combat units.
I am all for equality, I just believe that this is a bad idea bad is nothing more than pandering. Either that or Obozo is hoping that when female POWs are violated, or killed that we will call for the removal of combat troops from the middle east.
Th basic course is Tech foundations. This is an introduction to technical drawing and woodworking.
The next class is a cabinet making class. Students build a piece of furniture from scratch.
Next year we are adding a manufacturing production class. The students will have to chose a piece of furniture to build and estimate the time and cost to build it. They will log how long each step takes and the final "exam" will be a minute by minute and dollar by dollar cost comparison.
I also teach Basic Technical drawing, Engineering drawing, and Architechiral drawing. hey have the option of taking these for college credit.
They can walk out of my class with some hands on skills, a piece of furniture and 9 college credits for about $100.
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