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Old November 22nd, 2013 #21
Alex Linder
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Rant Four Reasons Why Educators Hate Geography
Posted 40 months ago|4 comments|5,395 views

Written by

BruceDPrice
Virginia Beach, VA

It's easy to point out that public schools don't teach much geography. Explaining why is more complex. Here are four reasons why our Education Establishment scorns geography:

1) THEY ARE ANTI-KNOWLEDGE: For more than a century, there was a prejudice among our top educators against foundational knowledge (that is, basic facts everyone should know). John Dewey in 1897 preached: "We violate the child's nature and render difficult the best ethical results by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of reading, writing, geography, etc....The true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, not literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social activity." Note that Dewey slams geography twice, just to be sure.

2) THEY ARE ANTI-HISTORY: Our so-called educators also scorned history. In 1929 two of the biggest (Thorndike and Gates) echoed Dewey when they decreed: "Subjects such as arithmetic, language and history include content that is intrinsically of little value."

Of little value? When people know history, they can make decisions and deductions about where they came from, how other societies handled similar problems, and how we should respond to challenges now.

But our elite educators wanted uninformed, dependent children who would fit better into the new Socialist world that Progressive Educators hoped was coming. These ideologues wrapped history inside a containment-device called Social Studies, suppressing as much of it as possible, and making the rest shallow.

Geography and history go hand in hand. Diminishing one hurts the other. You can't study history if you don't first learn the names of oceans, rivers, states, mountains, etc.

3) THEY ARE ANTI-READING: Starting in 1932, American public schools taught reading with a bogus method variously called Look-say, Sight Words, Whole Word, etc. This gimmick required that children memorize the English language one word-shape at a time. A long, slow process.

Look at Dolch lists for fourth grade and you find easy words like "bug," "sea," and "pen." What you don't find is a single proper name or place name. The pretext for the phony Dolch lists was that these were the most common words, and in learning these words, the child was advancing rapidly toward literacy. But when does a child learn to read words like Nevada, Texas, Chicago, Hawaii, or Kansas, not to mention Benjamin Franklin?

Geographical names, anywhere in a child's life, would provide a warning bell that this child did not actually know how to read. How could the schools silence that warning? Geography must die.

4) THEY ARE ANTI-PRECISION: The most striking thing about geography is its intellectual purity. A city is in a certain location, it has a particular name, and there are many specifics one can learn about that city.

In geography, there is no ambiguity, no vagueness, no fuzziness, no aspect where one could say, well, you should guess. In short, geography is everything that Progressive Educators hate. Consider that the capital of France is Paris. There is no way Constructivism can construct this. No way Self-Esteem can pretend you know it when you don't. No way that Cooperative Education will make it easier for children to know this fact. No way to think "critically" about this fact. It's just a fact. It is.

(Properly, a student starts by learning many little nuggets of information. At some point, the student can discuss these facts, compare them, relate them, and prioritize them. That's what critical thinking is. This phrase is meaningless, however, unless the student first learns many little nuggets.)

THE GLORY OF GEOGRAPHY

Geography is a foundation not just for history but for the study of geology, anthropology, archaeology, world trade, finance, government, environmental science, military history, surveying, early mathematics, and much else. Any school that skimps on geography is a phony.

Francis Parker is a famous educator who died in 1902. I want to close with a quote from his book "How To Teach Geography" (1885). Probably you never heard a teacher rhapsodize about ANYTHING the way Parker can carry on about a topic that many think is dull and dry:

"Geography explains and illuminates history...To know and love the whole world is to become subjectively an integral factor in all human life; the resulting emotion arouses the only true patriotism, the patriotism that makes the world and all its children one's own land and nation. Geography is one essential means of bringing the individual soul an appreciation of the universal and eternal."

We need more geography; more precision; more foundational knowledge; and more passion for learning. We need a lot less of the foolishness that undermines these four.

(For related analysis, see "43: American Basic Curriculum" and "45: The Crusade Against Knowledge" on Improve-Education.org .)

http://www.rantrave.com/Rant/Four-Re...Geography.aspx
 
Old March 18th, 2014 #22
Alex Linder
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[a simple and memorable way to look at it, and dovetails with our WN knowledge of the frankfurt school and its setting race against race, sex against sex, class against class, and generation against generation, and so on]

Youth Culture and Compulsory Schooling
Michael S. Rozeff

The most viewed videos on youtube in 2013 (150 million + views get you there) are mostly music groups for adolescents:

PSY
Justin Bieber
Jennifer Lopez
Eminem
LMFAO
Shakira
Miley Cyrus
Lady Gaga
Michel Telo
Carly Rae Jepsen
Don Omar

Why?

In 1961, James Coleman identified the cause of youth culture as compulsory schooling. Wikipedia says “One historical theory credits the emergence of youth culture to the beginning of compulsory schooling. James Coleman argues that age segregation is the root of a separate youth culture. Before compulsory schooling, many children and adolescents interacted primarily with adults. In contrast, modern children associate extensively with others their own age. These interactions allow adolescents to develop shared experiences and meanings, which are the root of youth culture.”

Compulsory schooling merely by the mechanics of it (enforced separation, outsiders teaching, value inculcation by outsiders, grades, schools like prisons, compulsion, loss of parental control of curriculum) is obviously anti-family and pro-state.
 
Old March 20th, 2014 #23
Alex Linder
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Public School Maven Predicts Public School-Free Cities in Ten Years

Gary North - March 18, 2014

Diane Ravitch says that America's urban public schools are about to go belly-up, killed by the Right (charter schools) and the Left (the Common Core curriculum).

I dearly hope she is correct.

Ravitch is the #1 maven of public education. She loves the system. She believes that badges and guns are crucial for education, as well as for democracy. She assures us that we cannot have education without badges and guns. She says: "Public education is one of the foundational institutions for a democracy." She is this generation's #1 defender of the messianic character of American public education. You can read about her here.

She earned a Ph.D. from the academic institution which, more than any other, gave us progressive education: Columbia University.

George H. W. Bush appointed her to a high office. So did Bill Clinton. So did George W. Bush.

Now she says the whole system is at risk. We read on the liberal Salon site:

Quote:
Once a George H.W. Bush education official and an advocate for greater testing-based accountability, Diane Ravitch has in recent years become the nation's highest-profile opponent of Michelle Rhee's style of charter-based education reform (one also espoused by Barack Obama).

In a wide-ranging conversation last week, Ravitch spoke with Salon about new data touted by charter school supporters, progressive divisions over Common Core, and Chris Christie's ed agenda. "There are cities where there's not going to be public education 10 years from now," Ravitch warned.
Ravitch is the consummate public education weather vane. She gets on board one fad after another, only to be left in the dust when it fails. They all fail.

"No Child Left Behind" is clearly a failure. Ravitch supported it. Now she opposes it.

These well-paid bureaucrats become cheerleaders for one reform after another. But their team -- tax-funded education -- has not had a winning season since 1940.

Dr. Ravitch was Assistant Secretary of Education when the Department's report was published, 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait. She wrote the introduction. Most Americans are unaware of these facts:

Quote:
In 1940, more than half of the U.S. population had completed no more than an eighth grade education. Only 6 percent of males and 4 percent of females had completed 4 years of college (table 4). The median years of school attained by the adult population, 25 years old and over, had registered only a scant rise from 8.1 to 8.6 years over a 30-year period from 1910 to 1940 (p. 7).
Look-say reading techniques of the 1940's have produced millions of functional illiterates. Dick and Jane can't read. One estimate is that 20% of Americans cannot read.

No major national educational reform has worked since the post-Sputnik reforms, which were supposed to create a nation of scientists and engineers. Today, over half of all Ph.D students in engineering are foreign students. American taxpayers are educating the world's best graduate students in science and engineering.

The new math was a bust in the late 1960's.

One after another, reforms are heralded as the solution to declining student test scores. None of them ever produces the promised successes.

The SAT scores started falling in 1963, and they have not reversed. Other tests showed similar declines.

Ravitch continues:

Quote:
There are many states that are cutting the budget for public schools at the same time that they're paying a lot out for testing… Texas, for example, a couple of years ago… cut $5.3 billion out of the public schools, and at the same time gave Pearson a contract for almost $500 million… They said that there would be 15 end-of-course exams in order to graduate high school and caused a parent rebellion: There were so many angry moms, they organized a group called TAMSA -- Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment -- better known as Moms Against Drunk Testing…
Look at what schools are buying.

Quote:
Los Angeles just made a deal a few months ago to spend $1 billion to equip every student and staff member with an iPad. The money was taken from a 25-year bond for school construction, to buy disposable equipment. The iPads will be obsolete in three or four years… Meanwhile, the schools have unmet repair dates…
It's great for Apple. Meanwhile, school buildings rot.

Buying iPads for students is just another fad. New school construction is an old fad. It has been discarded. Fads come and go. This is constant: Test scores decline.

What about Common Core?

Quote:
The fact is, we have no evidence that the Common Core standards are what we say they are until we've tried them. They haven't been tried anywhere, they've been tested -- and we know that where they're tested, they cause massive failure. So I would say we need to have more time before we can reach any judgment that they have some miracle cure embedded in them.
When she says "massive failure," what dies she have in mind? This:

Quote:
In New York State when they gave the Common Core testing last spring, 3 percent of the English [language] learners passed it. 97 percent failed it…
I say this. Let's call Common Core what it really is: "Most Children Left Behind . . . Asians Excepted."

Common Core will fail. The politicians who promoted it will find themselves in another line of work if they don't abandon the experiment. Moms Against Drunk Testing will vote them out of office.

Teachers are being blamed for the failures. Well, what else would they expect? The system has been in decline since 1940. But Ravitch refuses to blame them.

Quote:
The teachers across America are being crushed… Experienced teachers, veteran teachers, excellent teachers, are feeling that it's not a profession anymore -- it's just become a testing technician. It's not the job they signed on for.

I was in North Carolina a couple of weeks ago -- they're having a massive brain drain of teachers. Florida just released the results of their teacher evaluations, and almost half of their Teachers of the Year were called "ineffective teachers." I mean, there comes a point where, who would want to be a teacher in this country?
If the teachers are not to blame, then who is? She did not say.

I have two suggestions: (1) the system of tax funding; (2) the system of compulsory attendance.

In other words, blame the system as a whole, not just one component. Stop calling for reforms. The reforms do not work.

I have a slogan: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It is broke, fix it. If it can't be fixed, stop funding it."

She hates charter schools. She does not mention the #1 fact of charter schools: They are funded by taxes. So, she targets this practice: they kick out rotten students.

Quote:
Charter schools [are] allowed to throw out the kids they don't want. They're allowed to throw out the kids with low scores. They're allowed to exclude the kids who have severe disabilities. They're allowed to not accept the kids that don't speak English. And then you're going to compare them to… the schools that take all those kids? I mean, really -- this is ridiculous.
In short, charter schools raise the lowest common denominator. This is elitist, she says.

Quote:
…This is trending toward a dual school system: One school system for the privileged kids, or the kids who don't have big problems… the charters, that are allowed to choose their students and exclude those they don't want. And the other one, that's required to take everyone.
What is the solution? You already know her answer: more tax money. Subsidize failure.

Quote:
To insist that every school offer children a full education that includes not only the basics of reading and writing and mathematics, but science and the arts, and for language and history and civics. Make sure that every school in this country is appropriately funded. That is, that it has the resources that it needs for the children it enrolls. That's just basic. We don't do that now.
I see. There has never been enough funding.

When you subsidize failure, but you promise success, there cannot be enough money.

Quote:
There are schools that are being starved of funding, and more and more of the funding is being directed to vendors. And there are cities where there's not going to be public education 10 years from now. That's not good. Public education is one of the foundational institutions for a democracy. And yet there will be cities without public education. Their schools will be run by private management. And the private managers will be free to choose their students and exclude ones they don't want.
Then the charter high schools will adopt the Khan Academy, which is free. They could then decide to have classes with 80 students, one low-paid 25-year-old with a B.A., and one high school graduate to help her keep order. They will be profitable. Khan is self-teaching, which is the way to do an online curriculum. It is what the Ron Paul Curriculum uses.

Quote:
Teachers are leaving the profession in large numbers… Back in the 1980s, the modal year of teaching was 15. It's down to one to two years… The research is very clear that first-year teachers are not the strongest teachers…
But they're cheap! And with Khan Academy, they will be good enough.

She ends with this:

Quote:
Why destroy public education so that a handful of people can boast they have a charter school in addition to their yacht?
This is the rhetoric of political envy.

This is the rhetoric of a defender of a failed system.

Common Core is dead in the water. But it is going to take a decade to kill it. It will tear up the public schools. It will undermine support for the public schools. It will divide the bureaucrats.

Meanwhile, "There are cities where there's not going to be public education 10 years from now."

Then there will be private education for parents who want it for their children.

We are seeing the death throes of the messianic character of American education.

http://www.garynorth.com/public/12234.cfm

Last edited by Alex Linder; March 20th, 2014 at 12:55 PM.
 
Old March 20th, 2014 #24
Xerxes
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Implement the Harkness method of learnin', teaching the logical functions of basic reasoning, and wherein it wouldn't ever be necessary to remain in the system for 12 billion fucking years in order to learn the 1000+ facts to know for the general purpose of adult literacy and function once the kid reaches the legal age. Why, oh why</sarcasm>, won't the liberal educators see this simple solution and civil lawsuit the DoE to force all the nations' public schools to reorder themselves?
 
Old March 25th, 2014 #25
Alex Linder
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Xerxes View Post
Implement the Harkness method of learnin', teaching the logical functions of basic reasoning, and wherein it wouldn't ever be necessary to remain in the system for 12 billion fucking years in order to learn the 1000+ facts to know for the general purpose of adult literacy and function once the kid reaches the legal age. Why, oh why</sarcasm>, won't the liberal educators see this simple solution and civil lawsuit the DoE to force all the nations' public schools to reorder themselves?
Public schooling exists to serve:

1) the central state (the ideology of the people behind it, which is globalist and anti-white)

2) provide sinecures to supporters (NEA members - education majors, styled as 'change agents' who will bring about the New World Order)

What's good for white children never enters the discussion at any point.
 
Old March 25th, 2014 #26
Alex Linder
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Science teacher suspended for homophobic rant about his school's club for homosexual students

Parkersburg South High School teacher David Foggin was put on suspension last week after writing a homophobic comment on Facebook

The West Virginia science teacher made a negative statement about the school's gay-straight alliance club

Most of the school community are in support of Mr Foggin, and held a rally on his behalf last Friday morning

The protesters held up signs reading 'Freedom of Speech' and 'We Love Foggin' while wearing shirts with 'Team Foggin' printed on them

Only a small group of students turned out to protest against the teacher

His suspension will be reviewed by the school board after Spring Break, and they will decide whether the suspension is paid or unpaid

By ASHLEY COLLMAN



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...-Facebook.html
 
Old April 2nd, 2014 #27
Alex Linder
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What Can Educators do to End White Supremacy in the Classroom?
458 Comments | Posted in News | By Nick Novak | Posted April 1, 2014 3:00 AM

Highlights from the National White Privilege Conference in Madison

April 1, 2014

***Language Warning***

by Nick Novak
MacIver Institute Director of Communications



[Madison, Wisc...] The city of Madison hosted the 15th annual national White Privilege Conference last week at the Monona Terrace to discuss issues of white supremacy, social justice, education and the Tea Party. The MacIver Institute attended multiple breakout sessions and will be releasing our highlights over the next couple days.

Our first account comes from the breakout session titled Stories from the front lines of education: Confessions of a white, high school English teacher.

The session was facilitated by Kim Radersma, a former high school English teacher in California and Colorado. Radersma is currently working toward her Ph. D. in critical whiteness studies at Brock University in Ontario, Canada.

Radersma argued that teachers must fight against the oppressive structure in education and society. She said anyone who is going into teaching and education must be a political figure.

Teaching is a political act, and you can't choose to be neutral. You are either a pawn used to perpetuate a system of oppression or you are fighting against it," Radersma said during the session. "And if you think you are neutral, you are a pawn."

She said educators need to challenge the system, otherwise they are giving in to white supremacy. Radersma also argued the first step is realizing that all white people are carrying the signs of oppression.

"Being a white person who does anti-racist work is like being an alcoholic. I will never be recovered by my alcoholism, to use the metaphor," Radersma said. "I have to everyday wake up and acknowledge that I am so deeply imbedded with racist thoughts and notions and actions in my body that I have to choose everyday to do anti-racist work and think in an anti-racist way."

[simple deranged, with, as has been said, whiteness being the christian equivalent of original sin. this mode of thinking was introduced to the world by christianity.]

She argued that until white people admit they have a problem, they will not be able to fight against white privilege.

"We've been raised to be good. 'I'm a good white person,' and yet to realize I carry within me these dark, horrible thoughts and perceptions is hard to admit. And yet like the alcoholic, what's the first step? Admitting you have a problem," she told the session attendees.

Multiple educators attended the breakout session of about 50 people and seemed very interested in how to bring the ideals of social justice and white privilege into the classroom. One attendee, a teacher and the diversity director at his school, spoke about the activities he is implementing and said it is important for teachers and administrators to discuss social justice with their students. Radersma echoed his sentiment.

"If you don't want to work for equity, get the fuck out of education," Radersma said. [by equity she means, of course, discriminating against whites] "If you are not serious about being an agent of change that helps stifle the oppressive systems, go find another job. Because you are a political figure." [it's tyranny that this mindset is funded out of the pockets of disagreeing parents. this is the type of crap religious wars are fought over. radersma's a perfect example of why public schools must be abolished. to speak of reform is pointless. get rid of them.]

During the session, Radersma also discussed the problem of growing achievement gaps between white students and students of color in schools across America. She told a story about her time as a teacher in Denver, Colorado.

Radersma said she taught a lower-level English class at the high school and her students were exclusively people of color. However, she said the Advanced Placement course in her school was almost all white and Asian students. Her principal observed class one day and commented on the difference in students between the two courses.

That experience, and the fact that her boss did not know how to tackle the problem since when is a natural difference between species a problem? it's only a problem for reality-hating anti-white leftist ideologues, led her to leave the classroom and work toward her Ph. D. Radersma told the group she realized the problem was the institutionalized racist structure of education and her white privilege was causing the racial achievement gap.

"I came to higher ed to study. What is this problem that I'm scared of? I don't know what to do. My principal is scared of this. Where do I point? Who's at fault? My white body is at fault," she said. "My racial identity, as a white person who believes that I am somehow better or more deserving, is the problem. The white supremacy, the structure is the problem." That simply doesn't make sense. It isn't coherent, even.

Since discovering her white privilege was the problem leading to the achievement gap, she said that she is now working to get more minorities into the education profession. Radersma told the group she thinks that students of color cannot learn as well from white teachers.

"My partner, who is a man, can't tell you about feminism. He knows a lot about it. He considers himself a feminist, but you want to learn feminism from him? No," she commented during the session. "You need to learn feminism from a woman. You need to learn what it is like to be a woman from a woman. He can't teach that. I can't teach students of color nearly as well as a person of color can." Since they can't beat the white (men) on objective tests or other measures of achievement, they are forced to posit special abilities that only the particular subset they're trying to champion possesses. This mentality is why civilization is a white-male construct: they are the only subset of what is very loosely called humanity that routinely produces members capable of objectivity. The other groups let their emotions override whatever intellect they have.

Another topic of discussion was how white people's actions, like donating to charity or helping a family in need, are inherently racist. A white attendee of the conference told a story about how her family donated school supplies to one of her classmates when she was in first grade because the family could not afford them.

The receiving family had moved from India, according to the attendee. While she was happy to be helping when it happen years ago, she was now questioning her family's motives.

"It was like 'well why don't you swoop in and save the day and give her all this stuff because we can afford to do that for them' kind of mentality," she said in the session.

Radersma agreed and said the family that was helped likely felt discriminated against.

It's that savior mentality, like 'save them, because they are not like us,' and that normalization of whiteness. Wow, talk about a lack of self-insight. Whiteness is best and those poor others aren't as good as us," she said. "So, we need to think of them and give them our sympathy and our charity and our generosity, which is so demeaning to the people on the receiving end. It's so demoralizing and disempowering to be receiving it." But of course if we withhold it, then we're racist too. Can't win. White is wrong. White is guilty. Always.

Before ending the 90-minute breakout session, Radersma encouraged current and future teachers to use an organization called Facing History and Ourselves as a resource. She said it is a non-profit that offers curricula on the topics discussed for middle and high school students.

The White Privilege Conference aims to provide "a challenging, collaborative and comprehensive experience," and "empower and equip individuals to work for equity and justice through self and social transformation," according to its website. Learn to hate yourself and your own kind, and teach others to hate their race too. White others.

It hosted more than 100 breakout sessions including: Stories from the frontlines of education: Confessions of a white, high school English teacher (discussed above); Against the Tea Party Movement; If You Build It, They Will Come: Developing a Pre K-12 Curricular Scope and Sequence for Whiteness and Anti-Racisim; and others which can be seen here. As always, anti-white leftism is funded out of white-right pockets.

The conference was paid for in part with taxpayer dollars. According to the Wisconsin Reporter, the conference received at least $38,000 from hotel room tax revenue, University of Wisconsin schools, and the City of Madison.

In addition to taxpayer and private funding, individuals had to pay upwards of $440 to attend the four-day conference.

Continue to check MacIverInstitute.com for updates as we highlight more breakout sessions from the White Privilege Conference.

Check out Part Two of our coverage of the White Privilege Conference: "The Longer You are in the Tea Party, the More Racist You Become."

http://www.maciverinstitute.com/2014...cher/index.php

Last edited by Alex Linder; April 2nd, 2014 at 05:21 PM.
 
Old April 7th, 2014 #29
Alex Linder
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Old May 2nd, 2014 #30
Alex Linder
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[the point here is to show you that blacks could do better than they currently do - in all ways. but they are deliberately held down by jews, who need them angry/stupid as possible, and by their own jew-approved leaders, who advocate what's bad for the race to line their own pockets.]

Politics Versus Education
By Thomas Sowell

May 1, 2014

Of all the cynical frauds of the Obama administration, few are so despicable as sacrificing the education of poor and minority children to the interests of the teachers’ unions.

Attorney General Eric Holder’s attempt to suppress the spread of charter schools in Louisiana was just one of the signs of that cynicism. His nationwide threats of legal action against schools that discipline more black students than he thinks they should are at least as damaging.

Charter schools are hated by teachers’ unions and by much of the educational establishment in general. They seem to be especially hated when they succeed in educating minority children whom the educational establishment says cannot be educated.

Apparently it can be done when you don’t have to hire unionized teachers with iron-clad tenure, and when you don’t have to follow the dogmas in vogue in the educational establishment.

Last year, there was an attempt to shut down the American Indian Model Schools in Oakland, California — schools that had been ranked among the top schools in the nation, schools with the top test scores in their district and the fourth highest scores in the entire state of California.

The reason given was that the former — repeat, FORMER — head of these schools was accused of financial irregularities. Since there are courts of law to determine the guilt or innocence of individuals, why should school children be punished by having their schools shut down, immediately and permanently, before any court even held a trial?

Fortunately, a court order prevented this planned vindictive closing of this highly successful charter school with minority students. But the attempt shows the animus and the cynical disregard of the education of children who have few other places to get a comparable education.

Attorney General Holder’s threats of legal action against schools where minority students are disciplined more often than he wants are a much more sweeping and damaging blow to the education of poor and minority students across the country.

Among the biggest obstacles to educating children in many ghetto schools are disruptive students whose antics, threats and violence can make education virtually impossible.

If only 10 percent of the students are this way, that sacrifices the education of the other 90 percent.

The idea that Eric Holder, or anybody else, can sit in Washington and determine how many disciplinary actions against individual students are warranted or unwarranted in schools across the length and breadth of this country would be laughable if it were not so tragic.

Relying on racial statistics tells you nothing, unless you believe that black male students cannot possibly be more disruptive than Asian female students, or that students in crime-ridden neighborhoods cannot possibly require disciplinary actions more often than children in the most staid, middle-class neighborhoods.

Attorney General Holder is not fool enough to believe either of those things. Why then is he pursuing this numbers game?

The most obvious answer is politics. Anything that promotes a sense of grievance from charges of racial discrimination offers hope of energizing the black vote to turn out to vote for Democrats, which is especially needed when support from other voters is weakening in the wake of Obama administration scandals and fiascoes.

Eric Holder’s other big racial crusade, against requiring identification for voting, is the same political game. And it is carried out with the same cynical promotion of fears, with orchestrated hysteria from other Democrats — as if having to show identification to vote is like a revival of the Ku Klux Klan.

Blacks, whites and everybody else can be asked for identification these days, whether cashing a check or using a credit card at a local store or going to an airport — or even getting into some political meetings called to protest voter ID laws.

But to sacrifice the education of children, especially children for whom education may be their only ticket out of poverty, is truly a new low. As someone once said to Senator Joe McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

Demonizing the Helpers

It is not easy to demonize people who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars of their own money to help educate poor children. But some members of the education establishment are taking a shot at it.

The Walton Family Foundation — created by the people who created Walmart — has given more than $300 million to charter schools, voucher programs and other educational enterprises concerned with the education of poor and minority students across the country.

The Walton Family Foundation gave more than $58 million to the KIPP schools, which have had spectacular success in raising the test scores of children in ghettoes where the other children are far behind in academic performance.

D.C. Prep, in Washington, whose students are mostly poor and black, has also received grants from the Walton Family Foundation. Its test scores likewise exceed those of traditional neighborhood schools, as well as the test scores of other local charter schools. Other wealthy people across the country have been doing similar things for years, including high-tech tycoons like Bill Gates and Michael Dell. It is one of the great untold stories of a unique pattern of philanthropy that makes America truly exceptional.

Yet these philanthropists have been attacked by the teachers’ unions and by others in the education establishment, including academics.

It was painful to watch a well-known historian of education on a TV talk show recently, denouncing people from “Wall Street” who have promoted alternatives to the failing public schools. Apparently, in some circles, you can just say the words “Wall Street” and that proves that something evil is being done.

You can listen in vain for any concrete evidence that these philanthropic efforts to help educate poor children are creating harm.

Instead, you get statements like that from the head of the American Federation of Teachers, saying, “they’re trying to create an alternative system and destabilize what has been the anchor of American democracy.”

If government-monopoly schools, with iron-clad tenure for incompetent teachers, have been an anchor, they have been an anchor around the necks of American students, who consistently score lower on international tests than students from countries that spend half as much money per student, and yet have students who outperform our youngsters, year after year.

It is not written in the stars that youngsters in ghetto schools have to score miles behind everybody else.

Data from the 1940s show test scores in Harlem schools comparable to test scores in white working class schools on New York’s lower east side. (See “Teachers College Record,” Fall 1981, pages 40-41.)

Even today, particular minority schools — sometimes charter schools, sometimes Catholic schools, and sometimes even regular public schools headed by principals who defy the prevailing educational dogmas — turn out black students who can compete with other students academically.

Teachers’ unions and others who defend the public school establishment decry competing schools, on grounds that they are somehow undermining the public schools.

One of the claims is that these alternative schools drain money from the public schools. But expenditures per pupil in the public schools have risen during the era of the spread of alternative schools.

Of course, if there were no alternative schools, the total amount of money going to the public school system might have increased more. But this would not necessarily produce more money per student, since charter schools typically do not get as much money per student as the public schools get.

Then there is the claim that alternative schools “skim the cream” of the students, and that this explains why their test results are better. But many, if not most, charter schools select among their applicants through a lottery.

Lots of things need to be done by lots of people to improve our education system, especially for schools in minority neighborhoods. Demonizing those who are trying to help is not one of them.

Will Dunbar Rise Again?

Dunbar High School in Washington is becoming a controversial issue again — and the controversy that is beginning to develop has implications for American education well beyond the District of Columbia.

There has not been much controversy about Dunbar High School for a long time. Since sometime in the late 1950s, it has been just one more ghetto school with an abysmal academic record — and that has been too common to be controversial.

What is different about the history of Dunbar is that, from its founding in 1870 as the first public high school in the country for black students, until the mid 1950s, it was an outstanding academic success.

As far back as 1899, when tests were given in Washington’s four academic high schools at that time, the black high school scored higher than two of the three white high schools. That was the M Street School that was renamed Dunbar High School in 1916.

Today, more than a hundred years later, it would be considered Utopian to even set such a goal, much less expect it to happen. In 1954, the Supreme Court declared that separate schools were inherently unequal, no doubt in ignorance of Dunbar, which was within walking distance of the site of that sweeping pronouncement.

The test results in 1899 were no isolated fluke. Over the next several decades, four-fifths of Dunbar graduates went on to college — far more than for either black or white high school graduates in the country at large during that era.

Most went to inexpensive local colleges but, among those who went on to Ivy League and other elite colleges, a significant number graduated Phi Beta Kappa. At one time, Dunbar graduates could get into Dartmouth or Harvard without having to take an entrance exam.

That was when Dunbar was controversial.

Some in the black community were proud and grateful that there was such a school where any black youngster in the city, no matter how poor, could go to get an education that would equip him or her to go on to college anywhere and compete with anybody.

But others decried Dunbar as an “elitist” school with academic standards that many black youngsters could not meet and a set of attitudes and behavior that some in today’s world would call “acting white.”

Nor was this accidental.

A handbook issued to students entering Dunbar prescribed behavioral standards and values, not just for the school but for life outside as well. Without saying so, those standards and values were an implicit repudiation of the way many poorer and less educated blacks behaved.

It would be hard to exaggerate the hostility, and even bitterness, toward Dunbar by some of those who never went there — and who saw, and resented, the differences in attitudes and behavior between Dunbar students and themselves.

The late William Raspberry once wrote in his Washington Post column that you could turn any social gathering of local blacks into warring camps just by saying the one word “Dunbar.”

What destroyed more than 80 years of academic achievement at Dunbar High School, virtually overnight, was changing it from a selective school, to which black youngsters from anywhere in the city could apply, to a neighborhood school, located in a poor ghetto neighborhood.

Now there is a new controversy brewing as some have suggested that the new Dunbar High School building be made a city-wide selective high school, rather than remain a neighborhood school.

All the talk about elitism, and about abandoning neighborhood youngsters, in order to serve others, has been revived and another poisonous issue now added — race.

Those black spokesmen who see all issues through a racial prism see the proposed change as a way to accommodate whites who want to send their children to a public school that keeps out many ghetto blacks. But the issue of selectivity was controversial even when Dunbar was an all-black school.

With or without racial issues, there is no way to provide a good education for youngsters who want to learn when there are less able and more disruptive kids in the same classes. Are those who came to learn going to be sacrificed until such indefinite time as it takes for us to “solve” the “problems” of those who don’t?

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/05/t...-vs-education/
 
Old May 2nd, 2014 #31
Alex Linder
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The Heat Death of Democracy
"In a Closed System, Stupidity Tends to Increase Until It Reaches a Maximum"


By Fred Reed
May 2, 2014

In something called Upshot, apparently the love child of the New York Times, I find a piece by a negligible robot happily chronicling the failures of boys in school. This has become a ritual for feminists and pussy-whipped male Sonderkommandos. If smugness and condescension were oil, these tali-wagging unmen would be gushers, maybe a gas field.

This particular dropping rattles on (if droppings rattle) about the superior “social skills” of girls, which in fact they have. (“Social skills” is illiterate sociobabble. It is plural, so I ask, what are these skills? Bright smile? Curtsey? Subtle flattery? “Sally has a really good bright smile, but her subtle flattery needs work.”)

After running on about the superior social skills of girls (meaning that they are docile, obedient, easily managed, and seek approval from teachers), the author, David Leonhardt, points out that girls are getting far more four-year college degrees, etc. All true.

He does not point out is that schools at all levels have been made (deliberately, I think) so hostile to males (the endless sexual-harassment propaganda), with so heavy an emphasis on procedure complied with instead of material mastered (neat homework, pretty pictures pasted into projects), and so much emphasis on socialization to feminine norms and on inculcation of Appropriate Values, that boys are asphyxiated. It is intellectual water-boarding. And has produced the desired result.

There is in all of this much schadenfreude from women who enjoy seeing boys fail, and a great deal of passive aggression: “Bobby, we are making your life miserable and doing our best to turn you into an involuntary lesbian for your own good. Now keep quiet, take your Ritalin, and don’t move an inch, you little bastard.”A thread running through it all is the notion that boys are just, well, to put it frankly, not very smart, good perhaps for carrying heavy objects but not suited to a modern world founded on intelligence. A couple of quotes catch this:
“As the economy continues to shift away from brawn and toward brains, many men have struggled with the transition.” And “’Boys are getting the wrong message about what you need to do to be successful,’ Ms. Buchmann says. ‘Traditional gender roles are misguiding boys. In today’s economy, being tough and being strong are not what leads to success.’”

Women of feminist stripe have always resented the physical strength of men and have argued that either it doesn’t really exist or that it doesn’t matter (women in the infantry), and that anyway women are more intelligent if not held back by oppressive etc. It may well be true that women are more suited to a bureaucratic society in which order, procedure, following rules, and placidity are paramount. However, in the matter of brains and their importance for the economy, it is interesting to check the facts.

Boys are not less intelligent than girls. In post-pubertal IQ, males have only a small advantage in mean IQ, perhaps because of their slightly larger brains or perhaps because it is an artifact of testing. What is not debatable is that men have higher variance in intelligence, meaning a broader range of scores—i.e., there are more very smart men than women, and very stupid men than women. The math predicts that at two standard deviations from the mean, IQ 130, there should be two men per woman. Checking Mensa membership by sex (Mensa requiring 130 for membership, the top two percent) we find—who would have guessed it—that the membership is 66% male. Two to one.

The Graduate Record Examination is a high-end test given to college graduates, usually because they want to go to grad school. The scores are broken down bycareer field (the chart is worth a glance) and by verbal and mathematical ability. The eight highest-scoring fields—physics, mathematics, computer science, economics, chemical engineering, materials science, mechanical engineering, and electrical engineering—have blistering math scores, and are all…all…dominated by men.

The two lowest-scoring careers are education, overwhelmingly female, and public administration. Thus we have morons, administered by slightly worse morons, trying to teach boys who, at the high end, are so much smarter than the teachers as to constitute another species.

I suspect that the psychologists, ed majors, therapists and suchlike clutter who hold forth on schooling on boys simply have no idea of what high intelligence is or why it matters. In the foregoing I mentioned standard deviation:

\sigma = \sqrt{\frac{1}{N} \sum_{i=1}^N (x_i - \mu)^2}, {\rm \ \ where\ \ } \mu = \frac{1}{N} \sum_{i=1}^N x_i.

For the little boy who one day will pop 710 on the math GREs, such things are neither frightening nor off-putting. They are fascinating. Such kids could certainly grasp the notation above while taking eighth-grade algebra. From these boys—they are almost always boys—come the things that make for international competiveness. We would be very wise to keep this in mind. We will not.

For decades and decades, America has made pandering to political groups—teachers’ unions, racial lobbies, feminists—more important than quality in schooling. In 1980, in a piece for Harper’s, I wrote, “Evidence of this appears periodically, as, for example, in the results of a competency test given to applicants for teaching positions in Pinellas County, Florida, cited in Time, June 16, 1980. To pass this grueling examination, an applicant had to be able to read at the tenth-grade level and do arithmetic at the eighth-grade level. Though they all held B.A.’s, 25 percent of the whites and 79 percent of the blacks failed. Similar statistics exist for other places.” Morons to the left, morons to the right, and not a drop to drink.

Thus did we, and thus do we. We have dumbed down tests, simplified curricula, and debased grading to make various groups look better than they are.

Boys flourish, as do men, when they are allowed to compete, preferably in the company of other males, in fields of their choosing, without strangling social rules. Silicon Valley is the wild west of such endeavor. Consider the following start-ups, and who started them:

Google (Sergei Bryn, Larry Page), Intel (Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce), Apple (Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak), Microsoft (Bill Gates), Dell Computer (Michael Dell), Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg), YouTube (Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, Jawed Karim), Netscape (Mark Andreesen), Yahoo (Jerry Yang, David Filo), AMD (long list of guys from Fairchild Semiconductor), Twitter (Jack Dorsey), Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger), PayPal (Peter Thiel), Ebay (Pierre Omidyar). Et very cetera.

Forgive me for laboring the point, but I think it important for the country’s future to understand who we need to encourage. Who invented the following?

Euclidean geometry. Parabolic geometry. Hyperbolic geometry. Projective geometry. Differential geometry. Algebra. Limits, continuity, differentiation, integration. Physical chemistry. Organic chemistry. Biochemistry. Classical mechanics. The indeterminacy principle. The wave equation. The Parthenon. The Anabasis. Air conditioning. Number theory. Romanesque architecture. Gothic architecture. Information theory. Entropy. Enthalpy. Almost every symphony ever written. Pierre Auguste Renoir. The twelve-tone scale. The mathematics behind it, twelfth root of two and all that. S-p hybrid bonding orbitals. The Bohr-Sommerfeld atom. The purine-pyrimidine structure of the DNA ladder. Single-sideband radio. All other radio. Dentistry. The internal-combustion engine. Turbojets. Turbofans. Doppler beam-sharpening. Penicillin. Airplanes. Surgery. The mammogram. The Pill. The condom. Polio vaccine. The integrated circuit. The computer. Football. Computational fluid dynamics. Tensors. The Constitution. Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Homer, Hesiod. Glass. Rubber. Nylon. Roads. Buildings. Elvis. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. (OK, those are nerve agents, and maybe we didn’t really need them.) Silicone. The automobile. Really weird stuff, like clathrates, Buckyballs, and rotaxanes. The Bible. Bug spray. Diffie-Hellman, public-key cryptography, and RSA. Et cetera.

Enough. Leonhardt ends on a note of almost kinky submissiveness:“The problem doesn’t simply involve men trying to overcome the demise of a local factory or teenage boys getting into trouble. It involves children so young that most haven’t even learned the word “gender.” Yet their gender is already starting to cast a long shadow over their lives.”

Just so. But it is not their own gender casting the shadow.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/05/f...-are-anti-boy/

Last edited by Alex Linder; May 2nd, 2014 at 09:02 AM.
 
Old May 8th, 2014 #32
Alex Linder
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http://dailycaller.com/2014/05/06/in...ht-gets-fired/

must see video - exactly what they have planned for all of our schools, all of our communities, all of our children...... plan is proceeding apace...
 
Old August 6th, 2014 #33
Alex Linder
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'sex education' is a propaganda term.

http://jezebel.com/study-sex-ed-need...ier-1616384762

PlasticMergery
"Sex education" = brainwashing very young kids that homosexual and pedophilic behavior are good things and don't at all lead to early physical death after lives of mental anguish.

PlasticMergeryCallie Beusman
8/06/14 10:17am
"Sex education"? Ok. While we're telling five-year-olds how great homosexual behavior is, can we also discuss its incredible rates of morbidity? No? That would be homophobia, not education. Oh, I see.

Last edited by Alex Linder; August 6th, 2014 at 09:22 AM.
 
Old November 1st, 2018 #34
Alex Linder
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John Taylor Gatto has died. Read his book.

An interview with LLewpus
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/11/...lor-gatto-rip/

Quote:
Mr. Gatto quit as a public school teacher in order to stop harming kids. He had discovered that institutional schooling is designed to prevent the natural genius of children from emerging. Public schools impose a state of permanent incompletion to our kids, by teaching habit-training, not intellectual development. The power elite deliberately suppresses independent and critical thinking, to make us obedient citizens and consumers. Gatto, author of the best-selling Weapons of Mass Instruction, Dumbing Us Down, and The Underground History of American Education, discusses how the twenty elite boarding schools teach their students according to ancient principles, and homeschoolers and unschoolers are doing the same.
 
Old January 10th, 2024 #35
James Radov
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another White kid suicide over bullying in school..
the system dont give a shit about you or your kids, never has never will ;
the dad looks to be a green nigger, so no surprise..

 
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