"Free education for all children in public schools." - Karl Marx and Frederick Engels - The Communist Manifesto.
When something of supposed value is "free", it usually is worthless to begin with. Government "education" generally falls into this category.
Here is the latest from California (where else?) in the wisdom and superior intellect of those who oversee the preparation of children for the realities of adulthood. Monterey Peninsula United School District has given detention to a 15 year old girl for skipping class. I guess the elementary school children, all 40 of them, and the driver of the bus would have been better off if she had not been there.
This is reflective of a much larger malaise. Mindless pedanticism. Now, this is just indicative of Iowa, but have a looky see on the GRE scores by discipline. Mind you, Iowa is ABOVE average on a national comparison. Which discipline scores lowest? The same trend held for ten other schools that posted their scores, but I am not going to bother you with hyperlinks ad naseum. Education majors, well, educate people, particularly children. Why do we entrust something so essential to, I can't really find another term, a bunch of idiots? Zero-tolerance policies are more prevalent in public education than any other area of society. Why? Because it takes critical thinking out of the equation. It is not so much that we do not trust our public educators to think, but that by evidence they are not particularly good at it. When they attempt to fire neurons, they come up with assinine ideas like this. In other words, now the gifted programs must be "dumbed down" as to not hurt anyone's group identity and make the P.C. multi-cultis feel as though they have accomplished something.
I dearly hope that someone comes forward, as both a gift to that 15 year old girl and an insult (which will probably be incomprehensible to them) to the government indoctrination centers of California, and provide the tuition for private school. God save this child from the public mind-grinders.
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3 comments:
My school began a gifted/talented program when I was in 5th grade and I was put into it (talk about low standards!). About 10 of us were plucked from our classroom twice a week for about 2 hours or so and did a mix of logic games, creative thinking activities, and other random stuff. This continued through 8th grade.
Beginning in 7th grade, we had "tiered" classes where the top performers were in one class, the bottom performers in another, and the rest spread among the middle tiers. There were 7 tiers and each subject had a tier. So, you could be in the "smart" class for math, but maybe only tier 4 in English. The classes were paced accordingly. It worked well. The only complaint from teachers was that they dreaded teaching the bottom tier. Not surprisingly, it wasn't because the students were "dumb." It was because they misbehaved - what a strange correlation!
When I hit 8th grade, the gifted/talented program was scrapped for fear that our peers might feel inferior by not being in the program. The tiered system was also scrapped at the end of that year, for the same reason. Too judgemental!
In 9th grade, in addition to scrapping the tiered system, our curriculum changed from the meat & potatoes topics of math, science, grammar, etc, and were injected with a heavy dose of diversity, multiculturalism, "health" education (aka sex education, including why "alternative" lifestyles were such a wonderful thing), and a watering down of all social studies. For example, we spent at least 4 weeks on the civil rights movement in history class, but about 15 minutes on World War II.
My nieces live my hometown and the schools have really deteriorated since I escaped. My brother and his wife pulled their daughters out of the school after their learning regressed (my oldest niece could read and write a little bit before she enrolled - but she actually got worse after a year in school). They now go to a Catholic school and they're not even Catholic. They now learn algebra and Latin and their handwriting is perfect. They read about 3 grade levels above where they need to be. My brother now works two jobs to pay the tuition at the school AND the property taxes that support the lackluster local public school, even though they were disgusted with it.
Monopolies are bad for consumers but great for the monopoly, especially when consumers do not have the option of abstaining from the market.
Dear Culturalist:
Well, the cat's outta the bag. May I start with an apology. I never should have made the low-blow comment about using your Rosie recipe on you. I'm sorry for making it personal. I was riled up.
Unfortunately, I cannot read your entire response to me. I try to live my life with an 'economy of words' and your response is just too long. I will simply let you know that I'm a card-carrying liberal/feminazi who believes we should just let people live their lives for the short time we are here.
Again, I apologize for taking it to a personal level. I enjoyed responding to your blogs, because I wonder how many people challenge you on your views, or, if you are surrounded by people who believe the same as you. If the latter is true, I was hoping to be a new voice in your world.
Love, Anonymous
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