The Enemies Within Our Education system
Education Unions (the N.E.A.), School Administrators and Yes - Even Some Teachers
Posted on 10/20/2009 2:17:20 PM PDT by rabscuttle385
We would not have to ask the above question if public education had not become the great, costly, and tragic failure that it is. It has failed the children, but in reality it has not failed the progressives. They were the ones who engineered the dumbing-down process which parents and taxpayers continue to pay for. But it is the children who suffer in terms of becoming intellectually disabled, semi-literate, disoriented, frustrated, and terribly unhappy. But what is even a bit disheartening is that many liberals still believe that government schooling has been a noble experiment.
Perhaps Walter Lippmann, the great liberal pundit, best expressed liberal disappointment in the great experiment when he wrote in 1941, while World War II was raging in Europe: “Universal and compulsory modern education was established by the emancipated democracies during the nineteenth century. ‘No other foundation can be devised,’ said Thomas Jefferson, ‘for the preservation of freedom and happiness.’ Yet as a matter of fact during the twentieth century the generations trained in these schools have either abandoned their liberties or they have not known, until the last desperate moment, how to defend them. The schools were to make men free. They have been in operation for some sixty or seventy years and what was expected of them they have not done. The plain fact is that the graduates of the modern schools are the actors in the catastrophe which has befallen our civilization. Those who are responsible for modern education -- for its controlling philosophy -- are answerable for the results.”
Unfortunately, they have not been answerable for the results. In fact, if you read today’s slick professional education journals, you detect great pride in what they’ve accomplished. And of course, since the time Lippmann wrote as he did, we have had any number of wars — Korea, Vietnam, First Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan — with no end in sight. Not even Lippmann would have foreseen our war against Islamic terrorism. In fact, on September 11, 2001, the United States was attacked in a manner that no one could have predicted. It was worse than Pearl Harbor, and the reason why the terrorists succeeded was because what they planned and successfully carried out was too diabolical to be believed. It required believing the unbelievable. A well-educated people is supposed to believe the unbelievable when warranted.
There were many seductive arguments for free universal public education at the time of its first promotion in the early years of the nineteenth century. Horace Mann spoke of compulsory free education as the means of perfecting humanity, the “great equalizer,” the “balance wheel of the social machinery,” the “creator of wealth undreamed of.” Poverty, ignorance, prejudice, social injustice, and every other evil afflicting the human race, it was thought, would disappear.
Others argued that free education for all would help us preserve our way of life. Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York said in 1826: “I consider the system of our common schools as the palladium of our freedom, for no reasonable apprehension can be entertained of its subversion as long as the great body of people are enlightened by education.”
Daniel Webster, the famous Senator from Massachusetts, eloquently echoed those optimistic sentiments in 1837 when he said: “Education, to accomplish the ends of good government, should be universally diffused. Open the doors of the school houses to all the children in the land. Let no man have the excuse of poverty for not educating his offspring. Place the means of education within his reach, and if he remain in ignorance, be it his own reproach…. On the diffusion of education among the people rests the preservation and perpetuation of our free institutions.”
But of course neither Daniel Webster nor DeWitt Clinton could have foreseen what would happen to public education once atheistic socialists got their hands on it. We have seen a steady erosion of our domestic freedom to an ever growing dependence on government to solve all of our problems. Most Americans, living in a capitalist society, still cannot understand such basic economic concepts as supply and demand, or the meaning of the word profit, or how government can cause inflation with the printing press and thereby destroy the value of our currency. Even the President of the United States, a graduate of Harvard Law School, seems unable to understand some fundamental economic principles that govern a free, capitalist society.
It is important to note that our system of compulsory state-controlled education was not brought about by any spontaneous popular demand, for education was already virtually universal in America before it became compulsory. And most people did not relish the idea of paying taxes to support schools that were not really necessary. But the politicians and professional educators wanted government financed education because running successful private schools was not easy.
According to Prof. E. G. West: “The supplier of educational services to the government, the teachers and administrators, as we have seen, had produced their own organized platforms by the late 1840’s; it was they indeed who were the leading instigators of the free school campaign. Whilst conventional history portrays them as distinguished champions in the cause of children’s welfare and benevolent participants in a political struggle, it is suggested here that the facts are equally consistent with the hypothesis of self-interest behavior as described above.”
It has become abundantly obvious that all of the totalitarian states of the modern world have used the instrument of public education, with the willing cooperation of most public school teachers, to keep their people enslaved. School teachers, even in a free society, are not necessarily freedom fighters. They generally do what the government tells them to do. That’s the way they keep their jobs, particularly in a down economy.
Most Americans are not aware that our own compulsory education system was based on the Prussian model, which was criticized by wary citizens as being inappropriate for a free country. It was suspected that such a system transplanted to our country would not promote freedom. Horace Mann, who was most instrumental in getting America to adopt the Prussian system, addressed the critics. He wrote in 1844:
“If Prussia can pervert the benign influences of education to the support of arbitrary power, we surely can employ them for the support and perpetuation of republican institutions. A national spirit of liberty can be cultivated more easily than a national spirit of bondage; and if it may be made one of the great prerogatives of education to perform the unnatural and unholy work of making slaves, then surely it must be one of the noblest instrumentalities for rearing a nation of freemen.”
One of the great uses of history is to be able to study the foolishness of past leaders who today are upheld as great benevolent statesmen. Horace Mann is certainly one of these moral idiots who gave us an education system that has gradually dumbed-down the American people to the point where their enslavement is virtually assured. If under the present regime in Washington, the American people manage to fend off their enslavement, it won’t be because of anything they learned in the government schools. It will be because of a spirit of independence and love of freedom that is enabling them to rise up in face of a potential dictatorship.
Public education was not only unnecessary, it has become the major destructive force of American culture, a destroyer of academic excellence and moral behavior. The growth of the home-school movement has demonstrated that parents can become better educators than the so-called professionals. Our colleges of education are producing educators who have no idea of how to teach reading, writing, or even simple arithmetic. Their minds have been filled with a collectivist ideology that makes them unwitting accomplices in the enslavement of the American people. Unbelievable, but true. If you want to survive in today’s America, you’d better start believing in the unbelievable.
Dr. Samuel L. Blumenfeld is the author of nine books on education including NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education, The Whole Language/OBE Fraud, and The Victims of Dick & Jane and Other Essays. Of NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education, former U.S. Senator Steve Symms of Idaho said: “Every so often a book is written that can change the thinking of a nation. This book is one of them.” Mr. Blumenfeld’s columns have appeared in such diverse publications as Reason, The New American, The Chalcedon Report, Insight, Education Digest, Vital Speeches, WorldNetDaily, and others.
The Enemies Within Our Education system
Education Unions (the N.E.A.), School Administrators and Yes - Even Some Teachers
900 hrs a year...six to eight hours a day, five days a week, given up to one's mandatory attendance at school, certainly can make a good education virtually impossible. It would take a very unusual individual to teach himself what was missing in an educational regimen consuming a third of every weekday; and determine what was false, and find the truth.
A dear friend of mine, having attended public school from k-12 with almost no gifted track academics despite a genius IQ, said it was like spending those 13 formative years working full-time in the sewers. Except people get paid for that, and have a choice.
If no school can ruin a good education, then no slave labor camp can ruin a good job.
I see what you're saying.
My comment rests mainly on my experience that most good parents instill a limited number of good principles in their kids which end up being learned quickly and well. When the teaching they hear contradicts these principles then the parents explain why or why not they should accept the new teaching.
But as you said, there is SO much time the kids spend in the govt schools - and the left wants them to spend even more - that the parent doesn't get as much of a chance anymore to instill those few but very good principles.
Kids need fewer hours of school studying fewer "social" programs. Govt needs to spend fewer hours passing new laws and trimming the deadwood out of the legal code, too, but it won't happen unless some profound changes are made to the people we put in office.
How dare you use the word “ubiquity” with a public school educated person! (Seriously, I had to go and look it up.)
Ping.
nice article, you might appreciate this one:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1672282/posts?page=1
Funny how Republicans who are so strident against gov money and rules in health care have no trouble with letting the government monopolize education. And notice how the same dire predictions regarding health care have already come true about gov involvement in schools - poor performance, low standards, huge dollars in and crap results out, bureaucrats deciding what's best for you, etc.
Public schools wouldn’t be so bad, but like everything else, they’re increasingly being controlled from Washington.
The second statement makes me doubt the first. You will have a difficult time showing that the location of the government control of a school is decisive.
It would be much easier to prove that the following:
We have a bad education system because:
a) Parents do not directly pay for the education of their children. (this is a consequence of basic economics)
b) Fathers have abandoned the family. (the data for this is overwhelming)
None of the conservatives freepers send their children to public schools.
We have seen this Government socialize our education system and make our schools among the worst in the world. We have seen this Government take over most of our health care system, making private insurance less and less affordable. We have seen this Government socialize our energy resources and bring our Nation to its knees by cutting the development of our own oil and natural gas supplies. And now we see this Congress yielding its constitutional obligations to a Federal bureaucracy, giving it the power to control virtually our entire financial system.Senator DeMint on the Bailout - Oct 1, 2008
VA is a ‘right to work’ state. In a RTW state, unions carry very little weight. However, in an “At Will” state, all employees in a very wide variety of industries are REQUIRED to join the union - as in, being a member of the union is a condition of hire. Dues are forcibly taken from paychecks.
In fact, over 60% of the NEA funding comes from at will states - One has to wonder if one of the ways to defang all of the unions is to push for more RTW so that they become unnecessary.
If there had suddenly been a big change in national test scores, downward, I would believe that NCLB had had an effect like you say. But the schools were not all just peachy until Bush came along. They’ve been useless sewers of ignorance for a long time. NCLB may not have helped but it can’t be the only thing to blame.
And, btw, teachers best be teaching to the test - what else are they going to do? If I know my students will be tested, among other things, on figurative language, why would I not teach similes and metaphors just because they are on the test? That doesn't even make sense.
Besides, teachers cannot teach to the final test as we are only given the guidelines of what to cover - not the test itself.
One more thing before I sign off for the night.When your doctor, your airline pilot, your H/VAC repairman, your mechanic took their various board certifications -- dont you hope they were taught to the test? I would hate to think the airline pilot in whose plane I am in was taught about brain surgery rather than how to fly. I want my H/VAC guy taught how to repair my system, not how to knit doilies just because his teacher had a passion in that area.
Here’s a little story for you. I live in a suburb of the city in Philadelphia, very nice, working middle and upper middle class neighborhood. The City just spent millions renovating our neighborhood public high school that NOBODY living here sends their children to and it has been like that since the sixties. The residents always availed themselves of the parochial and Catholic high schools. That output of money seemed like a total waste to me and the students that attend do not live here.
Anyway, the last testing report published in the papers listed the students at a 95% poverty level; that was shocking; and this particular high school that no one living here sends their children to was just designated for the first time as a dangerous school by the Fed Dept of Education - I called the local community paper and asked if they were going to at least do a story on it - I’m still waiting...they won’t touch it.
So, the effort to change a student’s environment, by transporting them to out of their neighborhood, the ultimate classic progressive BS, does not necessarily change their behavior, and renovating a school does not necessarily mean that the residents will use it...so it was a total waste of time and money, which is the typical progressive result. I do know, though, that if I have to homeschool, my grandchildren will never set foot in a government run school.
The cause of liberty can never die, because humans will keep discovering it.
excellent video.
Thanks for your two cents. The idea that teaching to the test is bad has always seemed weird to me, nice to hear that some who teach in the public schools think the same thing.
It’s like in college when students would ask “is this going to be on the exam?”. If they really understood the course material as a whole and not as discrete parts, that question would be irrelevant in most subjects.
I'm not saying NCLB is the reason many public schools are failing, but I am saying that NCLB is making many public schools, especially challenged inner city public schools, much, much worse.
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