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If our government run schools are so great why do almost half of minority kids not graduate? Why are 30% of HS graduates functionally illiterate, without even the ability to compose a resume? Why are college freshman having to take remedial math classes? Why have the costs per child hit $10K/year while our kids fall further and further behind the rest of the world?
My son is a scholarship student at one of the best colleges in the US DESPITE, not because of, government schools.
I am well aware of the problems we have, still waiting for an alternative that solves the problems, there is no alternative that does not have its own set of betrayals to our kid's education.
Solutions START with getting the Federal government OUT of the education business. It's never been a Federal matter and it isn't one now, it is a State and/or Local responsibility. Next would be to hire, fire and pay teachers based on performance. Then remove all this "Everybody gets a trophy." crap from education. This world has winners and losers, so should our schools and our sports. There is nothing wrong with encouraging children to COMPETE.
Pay close attention to the end of the video. Note the man sitting in the middle of a rabid Nazi rally with his arms folded. More Americans need to be more like that brave man. He wasn't buying their Bullshit, and you shouldn't be buying our Government's Bullshit either.
Is there any argument that actually benefits from a comparison to Hitler and the Nazis?
I am well aware of the problems we have, still waiting for an alternative that solves the problems, there is no alternative that does not have its own set of betrayals to our kid's education.
Solutions START with getting the Federal government OUT of the education business. It's never been a Federal matter and it isn't one now, it is a State and/or Local responsibility. Next would be to hire, fire and pay teachers based on performance. Then remove all this "Everybody gets a trophy." crap from education. This world has winners and losers, so should our schools and our sports. There is nothing wrong with encouraging children to COMPETE.
Just general gripes and no actual suggestions. What the hell does getting the federal government out of education supposed to mean anyway? How is that supposed to help anything except maybe the people itching to bring back prayers and teach pseudoscience.
Solutions START with getting the Federal government OUT of the education business. It's never been a Federal matter and it isn't one now, it is a State and/or Local responsibility. Next would be to hire, fire and pay teachers based on performance. Then remove all this "Everybody gets a trophy." crap from education. This world has winners and losers, so should our schools and our sports. There is nothing wrong with encouraging children to COMPETE.
Just general gripes and no actual suggestions. What the hell does getting the federal government out of education supposed to mean anyway? How is that supposed to help anything except maybe the people itching to bring back prayers and teach pseudoscience.
Eliminating the Department of Education and putting the States back in charge IS AN ACTUAL SUGGESTION. Eliminating an overbearing layer of bureaucracy releases more funds to actually EDUCATE.
Establishing performance-based pay for teachers IS AN ACTUAL SUGGESTION.
Eliminating this "feel good, everybody's a winner' bullshit IS AN ACTUAL SUGGESTION.
You're either responding without reading, or you just want to argue. Which is it?
Just general gripes and no actual suggestions. What the hell does getting the federal government out of education supposed to mean anyway? How is that supposed to help anything except maybe the people itching to bring back prayers and teach pseudoscience.
Eliminating the Department of Education and putting the States back in charge IS AN ACTUAL SUGGESTION. Eliminating an overbearing layer of bureaucracy releases more funds to actually EDUCATE.
Establishing performance-based pay for teachers IS AN ACTUAL SUGGESTION.
Eliminating this "feel good, everybody's a winner' bullshit IS AN ACTUAL SUGGESTION.
You're either responding without reading, or you just want to argue. Which is it?
Still nothing about the two problems that are the basis for every problem we have, budget hawks thinking there is a way to give the kids a good education on the cheap and a lack of parental participation in education for whatever reason. This argument is not even about the good of the kids themselves and more about blame for our failure to pass along what little wisdom and knowledge we have accumulated.
Were you schooled in the public school system?
School does suck, but the alternative sucks a hell of a lot worse.
I watched it and it's jaundiced view of public schools does not reflect the reality, anything that starts out with a Nazi example and then applies it to to modern America is stupidity.
What is your preferred educational system? Church schools? Home school? No possible indoctrination there.
OK, now tell us your solution, what alternative is there that is not in itself another form of religious or political indoctrination.
It talks about how Since Germany was one of the first public school systems and German Nazis were socialist then all public school systems are socialist indoctrination systems meant to create slaves to the state, you know the usual.
I am well aware of the problems we have, still waiting for an alternative that solves the problems, there is no alternative that does not have its own set of betrayals to our kid's education.
Is there any argument that actually benefits from a comparison to Hitler and the Nazis?
Just general gripes and no actual suggestions. What the hell does getting the federal government out of education supposed to mean anyway? How is that supposed to help anything except maybe the people itching to bring back prayers and teach pseudoscience.
"You might have begun to develop an eery suspicion that Americans were schooled in a similar system. It's true. In the 1840s the Prussian System was imported to the United States, by the Father of Public Education, Horace Mann."
It was from James Bryant Conant - president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century - that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching, I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay "The Child, the Parent and the State", and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."
Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
Yeah I watched it. Propagandist crap that does not take into account hundreds of years of aristocratic rule, the cultural mindset of the peoples involved combined with the economic and political changes/strife leading to the rise of Nazism.
Essentially it's a child's view of history.
Yeah I watched it. Propagandist crap that does not take into account hundreds of years of aristocratic rule, the cultural mindset of the peoples involved combined with the economic and political changes/strife leading to the rise of Nazism.
Essentially it's a child's view of history.
The idea that your view of history is "mature" doesn't pass the laugh test. Your criticism is totally worthless. It's nothing but pure baseless pejorative.
