Let's toss out grades and give all a loving cup for Participating!
Posted on 12/09/2016 5:00:20 AM PST by Kaslin
Whenever we recall Book VII of Plato's Republic, the "Allegory of the Cave" that many of us studied in college, we remember that the chained population in the cave was always looking at shadows on the wall of the cave and mistakenly believed that those shadows were reality. Shadows of unreality are being reflected today by the policies and practices of many school systems. Vague talk about improving our schools, becoming more competitive globally, and opening doors of opportunity becomes rubrics that express "shadows" of the reality that managers of education are in fact implementing progressive – i.e., totalitarian – social engineering.
The implementation of this social engineering is closely tied to getting non-educators and inexperienced educators into the schools as teachers and administrators and getting older, experienced teachers and administrators out. These younger individuals will not have the deep inculcation of educational values, those values of learning and of relationship established at the nexus of humanism and Judeo-Christian values. They are persons who do not see and do not wish to see that curricular innovation, creativity, knowledge, teacher morale, school tone, the family of man, student character building, and caring and love of all for all (said list can be summed up as "the pursuit of happiness") are in direct opposition to and are the antidote for the social engineering agenda now sweeping the country.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I don’t really disagree. I think Sputnik provided an excuse to accelerate what the Marxists had long been working on. I don’t mean to imply that Sputnik was a true Beginning. This problem began long before the 1950s.
A note of interest: When I was in school in the 1960s, early 70s I was young and didn’t focus much on the world. I had a number of teachers who would rant and rave about the John Birchers. Those guys were crazy! And stupid! And wrong! I just sat there over the course of several years in school thinking “Who the heck are the Birchers? No one ever talks about these guys. I have no idea who they. But my teachers seem super upset about them.”
Yeah: The Birchers were mostly right. Teachers hated that.
And for their trouble, the Birchers got their name turned into a leftist cuss-word almost as nuclear as "racist".
And that too is part of the Marxist plan - so well articulated by more recent adherents like Saul Alinsky.......
Same lies worked on Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee too......and few historians note that they were in separate and different houses of Congress, treating them as if they were one........
Though Wikipedia and other leftist historical sites will never show it - they too were mostly correct.........
IMO, The American school system started breaking down when the ‘school board’ members were drawn from the ranks of the teachers-—instead of the PARENTS.
When I was a kid—the annual school board meeting was a meeting no one missed. The PARENTS chose the books—the teacher—her salary—and everyone had a stake in how well us kids were taught.
Current School Boards which are made up of ‘TEACHERS’ represent a situation that is NOT an ARM’S LENGTH TRANSACTION. It cannot be. Too many conflicts of interest. The school board members are ‘teachers’ or ‘educators’—and they have convinced America that THEY know best.
I say BS—and lots of it.
The school boards today have created an empire which is out of control & the parents are treated like crap. The kids are NOT learning a trade—they are all being pushed into ‘STEM programs. College isn’t for everyone.
Today’s students are as varied as they were when I was in school. We had classes in Agriculture—shop—home economics—business machines—even print shops where school items were printed in house. Kids learned a trade & costs were cut....and WE ALL had to take Physical Education & MOVE ourselves at least 5 times a week.
Today- no vocational classes—no PE—& we have serious obesity & other health problems with the students.
Chucking thousands of books because they want a book with 5 changes from last year’s books is stupid & very expensive. Feeding kids in the cafeteria a menu designed by the FLOTUS—who has no experience—is more costly than any of us can imagine. The kids won’t eat it & the food gets trashed.
We didn’t have a ‘school police force’ ever in the schools. Now—every school district has a police force-—just for the schools. How much more useful could those trained officers be in the general population—keeping crime down?
Don’t even get me started on ESL teachers-—
The cost of ‘building’ new schools or remodeling existing schools is out of control. Reno wants to build a new high school-—and they are ESTIMATING the cost at $700 PER SQUARE FOOT !!!!!!! They are bringing in Temp classrooms—2 rooms & one bathroom & 2 doors—trailers like construction trailers-—Guess what they cost? $$70,000 +++ each. 2 rooms & 2 doors & a bathroom!!!
My house is 1350 sq ft. At $700 a sq ft, my house is worth $945,000 !!!! What the devil are these school boards thinking?> Money is being printed in the back room??? WELL-—NOT any more—there are no more printing classes!!!
Our public schools were pretty good until the early 1960s. Then the Supreme Court threw God out of the schools. It has been downhill ever since.
Also- IF a kid was a bit slower, they got held back & the parents & the teachers conferred on such. Those kids did well- but were just a year out of sync.
We all learned to read-write —actual WRITING—and math.
I had lots of classmates who achieved a very high standard of living & education.
I am pretty sure those students don’t ‘owe’ anything to the ‘University’. The schools have been paid.
They owe it to a bank—or, since Obama snatched up all the students loans—to the Fed Govn’mt.
This was a very interesting article that I have emailed to a few colleagues. I don’t agree with every point in the article, but it certainly gave me new pathways of thought to consider about what the BIG picture is, in operation. A lot of the abuse I’ve experienced as a teacher from administration was because of minutiae imposed on teachers starting with the Bloomberg administration. Bloomberg was strictly a businessman, absolutely clueless about education. That did not stop him from imposing his new value system (very eerily similar to the one described in this article—I wonder if they had him in mind while writing it) on the schools, from curricula to penalties imposed on teachers for violating new libtard chalk lines they crossed which never existed before Bloomberg.
Some years ago I was at a public forum which -- ostensibly -- would allow parents to comment on the proposed curriculum in the elementary schools.
A teacher stood up and proudly explained that kids in the Second Grade would be given calculators and taught how to use them to solve math problems.
I stood up and commented that kids at that age need to learn and understand arithmetic. A calculator would hold them back and perhaps permanently damage their ability to really do sums in their heads.
The teacher became very condescending and "explained" to me that current education theory "proved" that my point was invalid.
Another parent immediately stood up and said, "No, that guy is right. Calculators are ridiculous in Second Grade. You people need to actually teach our kids how to do math!"
Well, at that point, the principal stood up and stopped the whole thing: "We have a lot of material to cover and we can't spend time discussing each point, so let's move on."
Yeah, parents are treated like dirt. Our concerns don't matter. The education professionals make all the decisions, and the decisions suit them very well -- the decisions don't suit either the kids or the parents, but who cares about that?
(We pulled our kid out the school.)
Let's toss out grades and give all a loving cup for Participating!
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