imagine living in such an entitled, hallucinatory bubble that you could say this out loud and expect people to agree with you.
just because they are your kids, your responsibility, and attend a school you paid for, why should you get a say in what they learn?
we are the experts and we know best.
the last 2 years have provided quite a potent taste of rule by dictatorial technocrats.
how did you like it?
so how about waking up to the fact that the schools have been permeated by this for decades?
because it has become one of the great problems of our time.
this is, of course, classic marxist/authoritarian doctrine. the children are not your children, they are the state’s children and their education is to serve the collective. the state shall decide their “consciousness” not their regressive parents and certainly not the children themselves.
it’s worth remembering a couple things:
this is always and everywhere true,
so is this:
government and voting alone is not going to fix this.
we must. the real solutions lie with us.
make school choice THE issue of our time. tie the money to the kids and let every family choose where to spend it. let a free market in education flourish. build, from the bottom up, the system of schools we need.
top down educational diktat is a grotesque failure.
every year we spend more and get less.
every year, the schools become less about learning and increasingly about indoctrination.
this is the way a civilization dies when it should be thriving and unlike many of the world’s problems, this one is EASY to fix.
the money is all there. the technology is there. the teachers are there. all we have to do is stop wasting it all and allow choice and competition to restore competence and focus.
we spend over $250,000 a year per class of 20 on public education in the US.
try to tell me with a straight face that this is not enough money for an incredible education.
all that is lacking is the will to roll up sleeves and make this happen.
sure, it will take some doing and comprise real work, especially early on, but consider the alternative.
how has “waiting for the government to fix education” been working out for you?
We homeschooled our kids - I’ve been “retired” now for nearly a decade. I had one graduate at 15, one at 16. Both were in Honors at college. (While they’re bright they aren’t geniuses or anything!) Both have been excellent employees - one is now an entrepreneur with her husband, the other (the youngest) still working but he’ll end up an entrepreneur too, if the government doesn’t totally disincentivize it. My son in law was also homeschooled. My kids never went to public school, and even though our property taxes went to the system, weren’t allowed so much as a school library book. It was worth it.
The school systems are broken. This has been the case since the 80's and it has become critical. My grandchildren are in what many believe to be good schools and I swear they are illiterate (ages 12 and 13) but receive good grades. Home schooling or small community schools (not public) are the only answer.
Recently read that Oregon public schools are no longer required to teach reading, writing or math. California public schools can no longer give D or F grades.
All of our metrics are broken. Human capital has dropped off a cliff but we measure it by years in school so it has never appeared higher. We are at peak idiocracy right now.
Education is a goods and service, NOT a right. Founding Fathers wanted all of us to have Allodial Property Titles for good reason. Taxation is theft. Prior to Victory Tax, which was repealed in 1944 as unconstitutional, we had roads, police, schools, etc. Property taxation ensure no one owns anything, which reinforces the Marxist plan.
"Although Marx advocated the use of any means, especially including violent revolution, to bring about socialist dictatorship, he suggested ten political goals for developed countries such as the United States. How far has the United States -- traditionally the bastion of freedom, free markets, and private property -- gone down the Marxist road to fulfill these socialist aims? You be the judge. The following are Marx's ten planks from his Communist Manifesto.
1. Abolition of private property in land and application of all rents of land to public purpose.
The courts have interpreted the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (1868) to give the government far more "eminent domain" power than was originally intended, Under the rubric of "eminent domain" and various zoning regulations, land use regulations by the Bureau of Land Managementproperty taxes, and "environmental" excuses, private property rights have become very diluted and private property in landis, vehicles, and other forms are seized almost every day in this country under the "forfeiture" provisions of the RICO statutes and the so-called War on Drugs..
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
The 16th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, 1913 (which some scholars maintain was never properly ratified), and various State income taxes, established this major Marxist coup in the United States many decades ago. These taxes continue to drain the lifeblood out of the American economy and greatly reduce the accumulation of desperately needed capital for future growth, business starts, job creation, and salary increases.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
Another Marxian attack on private property rights is in the form of Federal & State estate taxes and other inheritance taxes, which have abolished or at least greatly diluted the right of private property owners to determine the disposition and distribution of their estates upon their death. Instead, government bureaucrats get their greedy hands involved .
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
We call it government seizures, tax liens, "forfeiture" Public "law" 99-570 (1986); Executive order 11490, sections 1205, 2002 which gives private land to the Department of Urban Development; the imprisonment of "terrorists" and those who speak out or write against the "government" (1997 Crime/Terrorist Bill); or the IRS confiscation of property without due process.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
The Federal Reserve System, created by the Federal Reserve Act of Congress in 1913, is indeed such a "national bank" and it politically manipulates interest rates and holds a monopoly on legal counterfeiting in the United States. This is exactly what Marx had in mind and completely fulfills this plank, another major socialist objective. Yet, most Americans naively believe the U.S. of A. is far from a Marxist or socialist nation.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transportation in the hands of the state.
In the U.S., communication and transportation are controlled and regulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) established by the Communications Act of 1934 and the Department of Transportation and the Interstate Commerce Commission (established by Congress in 1887), and the Federal Aviation Administration as well as Executive orders 11490, 10999 -- not to mention various state bureaucracies and regulations. There is also the federal postal monopoly, AMTRAK and CONRAIL -- outright socialist (government-owned) enterprises. Instead of free-market private enteprrise in these important industries, these fields in America are semi-cartelized through the government's regulatory-industiral complex.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
While the U.S. does not have vast "collective farms" (which failed so miserably in the Soviet Union), we nevertheless do have a significant degree of government involvement in agriculture in the form of price support subsidies and acreage alotments and land-use controls. The Desert Entry Act and The Department of Agriculture. As well as the Department of Commerce and Labor, Department of Interior, the Evironmental Protection Agency, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Mines, National Park Service, and the IRS control of business through corporate regulations.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of Industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
We call it the Social Security Administration and The Department of Labor. The National debt and inflation caused by the communal bank has caused the need for a two "income" family. Woman in the workplace since the 1920's, the 19th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, assorted Socialist Unions, affirmative action, the Federal Public Works Program and of course Executive order 11000. And I almost forgot...The Equal Rights Amendment means that women should do all work that men do including the military and since passage it would make women subject to the draft.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
We call it the Planning Reorganization Act of 1949 , zoning (Title 17 1910-1990) and Super Corporate Farms, as well as Executive orders 11647, 11731 (ten regions) and Public "law" 89-136.
10. Free education for all children in government schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc. etc.
People are being taxed to support what we call 'public' schools, which train the young to work for the communal debt system. We also call it the Department of Education, the NEA and Outcome Based "Education" . "
indeed, education is not a right. you cannot have a positive right that requires the actions of others and thereby violates their negative rights to self determination.
but we must also work within the realm of the possible if we would seek change and if you think there is any chance whatsoever at this point to get americans to stop funding schools and offering paid education to kids, i then i suspect you're badly out of touch.
school choice is a way to inject the market back into the system and at least generate choice. it's an outcome that's possible as opposed to the sort of "let's not have public education budgets" edge lording that's never going to go anywhere.
is it ideal? no.
is it a huge step in the right direction that will set us up for the next steps after? yes.
making the perfect the enemy of the better is no way to create progress.
It amazes me that we pay "property taxes" at all. But, people get scared that if they get to keep their own money and pay for services themselves their garbage won't get picked up or the firemen won't show up when their house is burning. As someone who spent a lot of my life in *very* rural America, we paid low taxes and had to deal with things on our own and somehow we did just fine. In my opinion, property taxes (like many other taxes) are to pay for government worker's salaries and retirements while offering substandard service (in a most cases) at inflated prices. What a disgusting scam. And yet, when offered to get rid of property taxes (as North Dakota did some years back) the people reject it.
i pay for my own garbage service to a private local company that picks up like clockwork! it's quite inexpensive too vs gov fleecing and associated subpar quality of services in general. at least the post office, insolvent as it is, charges for postage on a per usage basis and does a decent job vs public schools.
Yep. We used to pay for our own here where I am is well. Unfortunately, we got some monsters in charge that changed everything "for the earth". Now, if we roll the dumpster to the curb once every month or once a week it costs the same insane amount. Government destroys everything it touches.
When my kids were young we lived in Santa Monica, which is its own city within LA County. We had to pay property taxes to both Santa Monica and LA schools. My son could read at 3. Our local public school said they would do everything they could to slow him down and discourage his reading until he was along the same level of his peers, usually by age 8 or 9. So, we paid for public schools in 2 districts and for private school until we decided to homeschool.
unbelievably sad... this is so upside down... your story is mind blowing... totally broken system... also love you for your pursuit of your child’s best interests!💕🐱💕
...ever inflating property taxes do contribute to the problem... during COVID, never remind ‘remote’ learning, the public high school down the street completed a multimillion dollar renovation including huge new performing arts center, new football stadium and solar panel array covering entire student body parking lot... these were ‘WANTS’ not ‘NEEDS’... must STARVE THE BEAST... back to the basics and prep for the insane challenges that lay ahead for these kids
prop taxes are wholly the problem here as per your "starve the beast" sentiment. without property tax theft the parasitic progressives running these public skool would not have access to plasma, and as such would migrate to other hosts (ie gov positions). and their thirst for blood only increases = budgets only ever increase. you get the drift.
edit: and imagine all that additional disposable income from not getting mugged via taxes, and how that could be effectively deployed for education, and other freedoms?
Part of this is linked to another big problem in this and many other countries: intensely overregulated professional licensing schemes mostly by state governments that ensure a guild-like monopoly on, and control of the content of, professional services.
I'm a great teacher. I've been told this a million times- I'm not bringing it up to brag. I've taught humans of almost every age about English, us history, psychology, research methods, public speaking, you name it.
I do all of it under the title of "instructor" or "tutor" or "staff development," because I don't have a teaching license.
To get one, I would have to ignore the two graduate degrees I already have, attend another 4 years of school for a curriculum containing about the most heavily-laden political indoctrination of any captured area of academia, and in some states sign an agreement that I believe in and will advance an ideological agenda that I would literally sooner die than advance.
They only let their cultists teach now, and unless the cult gives you the license to teach, your students gain no credentials from your education.
Now look at what cowards millions of our doctors are when their licenses are threatened for merely speaking out of turn.
And how many of them have to sign agreements that breastfeeding is chestfeeding and men give birth before being allowed to have a career.
We can't have a revolution in education unless we can have educators that can provide educations that "count" credentials, but you have to willingly or unwillingly join the cult to be granted that grace.
Very important points you bring up! The rot is systemic. Nothing but starving the beast will solve this, and by starving the beast I mean cessation of all property taxation, and using those monies to fund local schools for parents with school aged children. The direction local funding of schools, the direct local vetting of teachers that the community approves of is the only way out of this.
Begging for school "choice" from the very same governments that are perpetrating these mind numbing progressive curriculums is as naive as it is inane. The same governments that you so insightfully point out control the (leftist) teacher credentialing, those "magnanimous" governments will offer you a choice, if forced to: crt skool a vs crt skool b. Oh, you don't like it? You don't even have any school aged children? Well, tough fucking shit. Oh, you don't agree with us and don't want to pay us whatever we demand? Expect armed men to arrive at "your" home and eject you from what is now OUR HOME.
that seems like the lazy edge lordy argument of a guy who wants to profess ideological purity but accomplish nothing (and thereby not have to do any work)
it's easy to demand the perfect to which others will not accede.
doing the work to move the overton window of what is possible so that we might get there eventually is harder, but has the advantage of actually being possible.
yours is the attitude that consigns one to be a heckler in the audience instead of player in the game.
that seems a poor pretext for self-congratulation.
Carter broke education when he created Dept of Education. Gotta shut it down first so everybody knows we are serious. Unless their only job is to divy out $$ to parents to send kids to schools of their choice.
except you are being presumptuous in what i may actually be doing, yes? everything starts with getting ones own house in order, and i am acutely aware on the local level what fuckery transpires at the school board level, and what is being done to combat that. so really check yourself there, because you have no idea the level of work being done here.
there is no self-congratulation here, it's just that you don't like my take because it's so much more than what you have proposed. i do get that incremental steps are vital here, and to that end it is as i wrote a local level endeavor, but seeing the big picture and working toward that is equally as important.
again, i'd say to you study how this nation was conceived and you will better understand how to implement real change with a clear vision of where we need to end up. but maybe you think ideological impurity, imperfection, and incremental half-measure steps is how the og patriots defeated the Brits?
Remember, many of the people we need to reach...have been educated by the very system that needs to be torn down. Imagine trying to convince Red Sox fans that they really should be Yankee fans.
IMO, this will require the same kind of incrementalism that THEY employed for the past century+ that got us to where we are today.
Virginia may be an example of this. McAwful lost, but just barely. The election turned on education, but 49% (or whatever) of Virginia voters STILL voted for education tyranny and zero parental input in kids' education.
People tend to be loyal to whoever supports them in times of need, crisis, illness or disability, whether it be a family, community, church, or state. Disabled folks, and there are a lot of them, tend to depend on the state, since nobody else is likely to help them.
I agree that this is critical--at least, as soon as we stop trying to maim and kill them with vaccines they do not need. OTOH, the "Suburban Moms" (read "single parent children, 'college-educated' women") voted for Biden in large numbers. THAT'S the prerequisite problem that needs to be solved. As long as young women give birth to and raise 40% of their children outside of wedlock, the cultural Marxist brainwashing they received in college will keep them firmly in the NEA/AFT camp (how many of them are teachers themselves?).
John Muir said, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." Government school indoctrination is huge, self-reinforcing problem that has roots in the coarsening of culture and the perversion of morality. There exists a large block of parents who think that the education of their children by experts is just fine.
I used to be on that block of parents who thought teachers knew best. I've learned better and most importantly that our kids education is our responsibility, not any government's.
I came here to point out Lindsay's recent work as well. One important thing I got from James Lindsay, where I'd differ from Gato, on the post title: our government schools are not "indoctrinating" kids so much as "programming" them.
What is occurring now isn't just a particular set of claims being drilled into kids' heads (indoctrination); instead it is a holistic LENS of interpreting the world with intention to practice the theory (praxis) toward a large-scale dismantling of the system.
’Twas always thus with totalitarian regimes. From Plato advocating abducting children from their parents for inculcation to Hitler Youth to cult leaders, authoritarians always want to sink their fangs into those tender, malleable developing brains for maximum indoctrination potential:
Reminds me of the Jesuit maxim, “Give me the child for the first seven years, and I'll give you the man,” which was the inspiration behind Michael Apted’s brilliant “7 Up” series.
my father and his brother went to high school in Ecuador and Hitler had satellite office / youth group there which aggressively attempted to indoctrinate the kids... my grandfather was furious...
i think about this with what’s happening in the schools... parents better wise up and stay involved in their kids’ lives.
the indoctrination brigade was relentless... would follow them home, knocking on their door at dinner time... ours was the last family out of Czechoslovakia after Hitler invaded... my grandpa had to sign documents of allegiance to the government just to get out... it almost didn’t happen.
Canada has recently undertaken the project of finding all the mass graves of the native children it had kidnapped and tortured to death in its state and/or church run "Residential Schools" and returning their bodies to the communities and families they were originally stolen from.
Unfortunately too little too late. At least the truth has come out. I am sure same thing happened in the US and is still on going in Australia, where the aboriginals are being treated worse than animals.
The US has been no better than 30th in world education rankings for at least 40 years. Yet, policy seems to make things worse. The thought that everyone should go to college is also some utopian nightmare. I'm all for getting the government out of education.
I don’t have kids but as I like to say ‘ I don’t have to know how to lay an egg to smell a rotten one’. We are a failing children terribly.
I so admire parents that take on school boards, that home school. If I could help with that - I would. My main assistance seems to come from voting for school choice and voting to defund any education initiatives - government education doesn’t deserve one dime more. The teachers unions are the top of the heap of systemic racism - past time to abolish the unions, the idea of tenure and the National school Board. Get rid of the Department of Education and you’ve got Yahtze!!!
You left out an important part, el gato. The self- serving teachers unions will have to be abolished before school choice, especially in blue states, becomes widely available. Right now, they're willing to fight a cage death match at the first whiff of parents' ability to take their kids out of their terrible schools.
No accountability and brainwashing the public into thinking they're invariably hard working heroes has served them well the last few generations. Kids and families, not so much. Now we have kids who graduate high school illiterate and innumerate, not to mention unable to think for themselves.
please enlighten us as to what would change on YOUR local level if you were granted by this magnanimous gov a "school choice". let's say you were "allowed" to take your children out of the current local school they are attending to another one. which one would you put them into on the local level?
do you see what a naive pipe dream you are advocating in the short and medium terms? all while you are being stolen from via prop taxes to pay for it all.
if i am wrong, please set me straight, if you can.
What you're saying is that just allowing this, you're still choosing between one rotten run school versus another. I think the author is correct, it will start a movement in the right direction, but as a cure, it falls short. Baby steps, I suppose. They have set-up many dominoes on the table over the decades, this removes one. Many more to go after this. I think what each of you are saying has merit, I see the authors POV and it's not wrong, but it is one step of many. At this point, any win back in the direction we want it to be in is a plus. Bickering beyond this and creating our own internal division and battles only makes it more difficult to get back on track. Just my two cents, maybe I'm like the second dumbest guy in the world tho, so who knows... LOL.
All I am saying is that what the author is proposing is not a bad thing. It solves on piece of the big puzzle. A multifaceted approach to this is key. That's all. You can't dump out the puzzle box and have all the pieces magically come together, rather, you need to laboriously put each one in the right place. If we all works towards putting this puzzle back together rather than arguing about one piece, it gets pit back together faster. The divide and conquer strategy works for a reason, don't be division, be addition or multiplication, and if this doesn't work, be self subtraction and let those who have the heart to take on the tasks at hand work on them. My fight is not with you, I'll state you win any reply you rebut with. We have nearly 160 years of undoing the wrongs against us. I've chosen to take the fight on by changing my political status, it doesn't require huge numbers, rather, enough intelligent people to reinstitute our de jure govt and return to their birthright land and soil jurisdiction, becoming free of all this absurdity. I wish you well.
that is also true for the most part, yes. the scourge of progressivism may also be seen on the university level, and it is nearly impossible to clear out, which again brings me back to the fact that property taxation to fund this insanity is the first step to dialing said insanity back. school choice in this context is a naive pipe dream when your choices are mostly between CRT skool a vs CRT skool b.
also, no person should be forced under threat of losing "their" home to have to pay for someone else's child's education, or food, or health for that matter.
Even our Governor Kelly of Kansas has said that parents should NOT have any influence over curriculum.Kelly has been told by the legislature that her days are numbered by virtue of her handling of the Covid crises over the past two years. She will probably be the last democrat governor for a while in a predominately red state.
Changing modes here. Our local schools are intimately scrutinized by the parents. We know for a fact that there are two districts near KC that teach crap to kids. They are slowly being pressured to stop by parents. No one in Kansas that I know of, except for the minority schools in KC, want crap taught to their children. Our legislators this next year will pass educational reform to get rid of commies on the boards of schools.There is an overwhelming interest of parents of kids to rid the systems of socialist BS.
I'm 64 and they were "reforming" education when I was in elementary school. They never get it reformed and I think it is time to start over with a different approach. How worse could it possibly get? It is the state monopoly on credentialing that has perverted what an educated individual means.
The greatest thing in the 'crisis' was parents realizing that they could simply pool their money and hire a pod teacher. And then, the teacher realizing they could get paid more for actually teaching instead of going through the system.
The problem has been, unfortunately, that until recently parents didn’t give a damn about what their kids were or were not learning in school. The kids, by and large, were out of sight and out of mind while both parents worked so they could live the lifestyle to which they thought they were entitled. Oh, sure, they would say that they “couldn’t afford to live on one income” but they leave out the bit about their lifestyle expectations. It’s been a similar story with government: ignore it completely and then vote for “your party” just like you cheer for “your team” in the Super Bowl. The front line could all be child killers, but hey, they are MY child killers.
Sadly a couple of generations have been stupefied by beer and football/spritzers and fancy handbags and consequently the nation sleep-walked into this nightmare. The vicious, power-hungry sociopaths weren’t, however, quite as sleepy. It’s our own doing. Time to wake up and take the country back.
And no, you’re not going to get it done at the ballot box. Voting is the last step — the culmination of the hard work that goes into selecting worthy candidates and disciplining them for deviating from well-considered policy platforms of which the constituents themselves have played a major role in developing. Government is NOT to be outsourced.
Yes I didn’t mean to give the impression that it was binary but I think I did because there’s a limit to what I have the patience to type with my thumbs. I will stipulate that it’s never black-and-white.
But I think my main point is that, until there is school choice (my daughter was educated in Australia where there is, and she got a far better education than most American kids do, at probably less than half the cost) parents need to be heavily involved with their school boards and PTA’s to make sure that they are adequately supervised. Same with local and state government. Otherwise the crooks and agenda-pushers get a foothold and then it’s tough to retrieve the situation.
Definitely nothing wrong with professional educators. Much wrong with professional propagandists posing as professional educators.
Top down anything is crap. Easy to tell this is so because the fruitcakes want it so desperately. Too many sentient adults can see through the BS, so time to indoctrinate the kids. Old enough to remember that Pink Floyd had something to say about this in 1979. Hey! (Globalists) Leave us kids alone!
Good article, but I'm going to have a hard time caring about anything but covid biofascism until it stop dictating every move made including where, how, and whether our children go to school and whether they're killed by experimental, shitty vaccines.
No, you're right, I get that they're the same thing. I just have a hard time seeing school choice as "the issue of our time" when we can currently have our rights taken from us instantly in the name of a virus and it's STILL GOING ON.
if we do not handle it now while we have the energy and the impetus, the schools will remain a fetid swamp and the question will be when not if they launch the next plague upon us.
what happened over the past 2 years is what happens when you let the schools indoctrinate 25 years of children into marxist/authoritarian thinking.
this axis of socialist/collectivist/woke/social and climate and health justice thinking is all of a piece.
if we do not cut out the rot, we cannot cure the patient, merely delay the inevitable.
the covidiots are more and more on the run. this is falling apart around them.
the bigger goal will be preventing their next manifestation.
You're right, of course. I'm just in a bad place about some stuff going on. Had to fight with a nurse to let my heart-damaged, bolstered dad leave his fucking mask off.
Agree, must takedown of all the noxious interconnected narratives at once. This was planned... don’t think for a minute that they are done... or that it couldn’t get any worse.
Aww, but it's so cute to hear my son's stories when he comes home from school! Kids vandalized the bathrooms using screw drivers, all the girls are changing their names and turning to boys and now use the boys locker room, I can't call people "he" and "she" I have to say "they" and "them", we learned about George Washington's gay commander who got kicked out of the army because he was gay
(Thanks History Channel!), my teacher hasn't graded my writing for a month and when I emailed her she didn't respond, I can't go back and see what mistakes I made on my math because it's an online form so once it's graded it disappears, duh Mom, I don't have a textbook to study from!
‘school choice’ brings the authority & responsibility back where it belongs... with mom & dad who care more than anyone else about the results. This is way, way, way overdue.
Well I would hope it could help families who feel like they need to move to another state to make a difference in their kids lives, such as us. Families should feel more in control of some doable, common sense options, like you said.
School was like this 50 years ago, just different indoctrination. It was BS then, still is BS, just different BS. "Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people.
2) To make good citizens.
3) To make each person his or her personal best.
These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. . . . Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States . . . and that is its aim everywhere else." https://wesjones.com/gatto1.htm - "Against School: How public education cripples our kids, and why, by John Taylor Gatto
Having created a charter school and fighting a system that did not want alternative education I wonder how many parents will actively take on their childrens education. My experience is damn few.
I don't believe that the 'schools' will change until there is serious competition... AKA: successful Home Schooling groups. What's better... tuning in to a world class teacher of a subject via a Home School Group... or sitting in a classroom with someone who has a degree, but is not so talented ?
And, who cares more about their contract than outcomes for students. My parents used to talk about a favorite teacher who boarded in the home of a local family. In our school district they are some of the wealthiest. A calling? Not so much.
I'll second the notion that the schools are broken. The school is a system, and the heart of the system is the people. Administrators and teachers. That is what is broken beyond repair. They are by and large is not very smart. They do not by and large share the values of the people who put public education in place. They are owned by the Democrat party.
This is true of the Department of Education, the state education associations, every College of Education of which I am aware, and a great number of local school boards and parent-teacher associations. Public and most private as well - see the Brearley brouhaha. Get rid of it all.
I write this as a former parent of private and public school children, trustee of elite private schools, substitute teacher and classroom teacher in Washington area private and public schools, And sometime student of the University of Maryland College of Education.
It cannot be fixed. I do not trust most parents to handle home schooling. I think the best of bad alternatives is school choice among tuition charging institutions, with government money going toward that tuition. Any system will be corrupt – this says the possibility of being somewhat less so.
I write this as the parent a second family of three young children in a country with a fairly honest system of education, Ukraine, where I have nonetheless decided to homeschool.
It’s not just the teacher’s unions, but most professional associations. I finally dropped membership to my professional association when they were censoring any dissenting opinion other than ‘v@x for all.’ My New Years Resolution is a pure focus on conscientious consumerism and any company that actively is against what I stand for gets the 🥾
True education and the ability to develop and use of critical thinking skills are one of keys to most of our problems. In modern societies we do not have education but many forms of indoctrination, brainwashing and social conditioning techniques, which in return it then breads weakness, delusions and ignorance. All to create the obedient and conforming masses.
"When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think." - Bertrand Russell
Just saw a school teacher friend of mine on FB worrying that her elementary school students are going to give her COVID and kill her and her family. I'm thinking, "And they let you around these kids at all, you nut?"
Ugh, shut the whole system down and start from scratch.
Just one thing, please try not to use the "R" word or any memes containing this word. It is extremely offensive to people with intellectual disabilities and their families. Using this word encourages people to mistreat those who have these kinds of disabilities. Furthermore, there is a silent genocide going on against people with Down's Syndrome and similar conditions--in Iceland, for example, the government announced the abortion rate of fetuses with Down's is now 100%, which they see as a good thing. Should a couple decide to defy the government and bring such a child to term, I doubt they will see much, if anything, in the way of social services. In the US it isn't much better. Maybe some people don't have a problem with targeting such children for extinction using prenatal search and destroy methods. After all, they are just "retards" and not worth anything, right?
My son is downs. I would share both our outlooks with you. Neither of us are offended or affected by the words or labels of others. My son and I both hold the power of our lives. Words do indeed have power, but only that which WE allow. Words only have the power we give to them.
It has helped both of us. I hope this helps. Or not.. That is up to you 😉💕
I am glad that it helped both of you. But that word has had a terrible effect on my life and on those around me. It was a word that taught me to HATE people like your son. It was a word that taught me to HATE myself because I was in special ed for a learning disability (probably undiagnosed aspergers). It was a word that taught me to HATE and DESPISE a sibling with a physical handicap. To this day I struggle to keep my feelings in check when I am around people with certain disabilities. They must never know what I am thinking and feeling inside. But I was taught, and taught well by my peers and by the school system, by a teacher that encouraged the other students to pick on me, what it meant to be labeled with that word. It did not teach me acceptance or tolerance or compassion. I had to HATE in order to distance myself from that label. I have to distance myself from those with disabilities so as not to be considered "one of those people." When you have had a certain label follow you around all your life despite your best efforts to shed it, when even now when I am in my sixties I have coworkers make remarks like calling me "short bus" and other similar terms, it leaves a mark. And please don't tell me that I don't come across as being learning disabled or autistic or whatever because of my ability to write and express myself. You don't interact with me on a daily basis. All I can say is that there is something certain people pick up about me, something that has to do with my mental ability, and while some of them will say "I am only joking" when they say these things, it is not a joke. It has affected my outlook on life; it has affected the kinds of medical decisions I make or want made for me in the future. And no, I am not proud of this. But this is what one little word has done.
About 20 years ago, I found a lump and went to the doctor and was told, quite callously, that yup, it could be cancer, before he walked out of the room. The nurse found me in tears. That night when I got home, I received a phone call. From a teenager. "Retard, retard, you're a retard!" she sang out and hung up before I could identify the voice. To this day I don't know who it was but I have my suspicions. It was not a random call. It was targeted. Sort of like calling up the only Black family on the street and saying the n-word. What this person does not know and will never know, is that I was at probably one of the lowest points of my life. I made a decision right then and there that I have told very few people about. I said, if this is cancer, I will not fight it. I will ask for palliative measures only. Because I am tired of this sort of thing. That was 20 years ago and I have not changed my mind. I am here writing this only because it was not cancer. This is what this word does.
I believe as civilized humans, we have an obligation to not gratuitously give offense -- especially to people whose circumstances may have rubbed their feelings raw. So I ask this not in a confrontational way, but out of genuine curiosity and a desire to make communication better -- what words or terms should be substituted, when we are trying to label stupid behavior? "Retarded" was introduced into the clinical literature post WWII as a kinder, gentler replacement for terms like "idiot", "moron," "imbecile", and "cretin" -- which before 1950 were actual medical terms defined by specific IQ test ranges, but were viewed as demeaning and insulting. (And which still appeared in high school health textbooks in the 1970s, because I saw them with my own 9th grade eyes.) What should we use instead?
As I mentioned recently... eventually we will have our "little red book of allowable sayings". I understand TAM's concern of course, but something said without malice or ill will should always be allowed. We *choose* to be offended just as we choose to blow something off. Egg shell walking has become a mandatory skill in the world anymore, and is "expertly" taught... in our school systems.
Why not simply say stupid behavior? Or doesn't have the brains God gave a rock? The bigger question is, why do we even have to label people by intelligence? Why do we have to single out an entire group of people? If it's not ok to say of a shoddy job that it was N-rigged, then it should be equally not ok to use any of these terms.
Leftists encroachment in the educational system have turned Schools and Universities into corrupting indoctrination camps.
Any place where leftists have majority is not only the end result of a constant political purge in hirings and workplace practices that filter out dissenting voices, but these places use their services as a political tool to promote leftists agenda or to undermine their political opponents.
Places where leftists have overwhelming majority are already defacto totalitarian enclaves where wrongthink can get you fired: Universities, scientific institutions, Big Tech companies, Media companies, even government agencies are already under this social dynamics.
Leftism is totalitarianism/fascism with a neverending political purge.
One of the benefits of the past two years is the proliferation of home schooling and homeschooling materials AND people seeing that it isn't as hard as it seemed to educate their kids AND that they might be able to make things stretch well enough to be home. For some.
I'd love for the DOE to go away and money to be assigned to individual. Charter schools with a well laid out vision and detailed plan. Some of those pissed off mamas might be the start of a revolution.
I'm thinking about starting a homeschool resource center. I work in public ed and have loved it until the last 2 years. I work in special education so I have a wonderful and satisfying job. My district has been more conservative but that is changing. It's sad. I want better for students.
Check around first and test the waters. There's a good chance your area already has a homeschool resource center, and if you've spent a substantial portion of your last several years loving your job in the school system... you may find a somewhat cold welcome. Just sayin'. People who've been homeschooling for a decade are likely to see that as "public school droids coming to tell us what to do". Be careful!
Another great post. I know the reasons/excuses for not fixing this system are many. But how can we not see by now just how important this issue is? We may never personally benefit from fixing this system, but future generations *will* benefit. To me, sacrificing my children to this despicable school system in the name of materialism or convenience is almost exactly the same as marching them down to get a "shot" because "they are dirty little kids that infect people." It's selfish and abusive as hell. I'm not being mean here. I'm just stating the facts as I see them/live them. It's difficult to make the sacrifices necessary to provide *real* education to our children. But the future we are creating by not making those sacrifices is going to be *much* more difficult and won't be fixed for generations if education isn't fixed as soon as possible. IMHO.
The Fabian Society always understood this... They applied this principle--indoctrination of children--through gradualism and subversion, always stealthily, progressively, and through many generations.
Your post is also very timely, as my friend Alison just published a guest post on her blog, addressing the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between those that get it, and those that don't... A chasm, sadly, that often yawns wider and wider between members of the same family :(
Pertinent excerpt:
..."the fact is, we are at war. Your parents are defending humanity. You should be very proud. Don’t worry that you don’t see it now. This is, after all, a war of deception, but later you will understand that you came from parents who stood up to tyranny.
Understand that when children, the elderly, along with other people are being attacked, parents cannot sit idly. They are not wired that way. True, a lot of parents don’t fight this fight. For whatever reason, they cannot, or will not decipher this war. It doesn’t mean the war doesn’t exist. We don’t know the answer to why some people see it, and some don’t. I believe this is a spiritual battle. Maybe some of us come with information that other souls don’t have. Once a parent sees it, they CANNOT let it go. It would be to go against our soul’s mission, our deepest truth, and our deepest instinct to protect humanity."
I see a lot of comments on the school systems and rightly so. I would encourage parents to see tv and social media as the more immediate problem. If you are not in control of this (and most parents are not) it doesn't matter what school your kids attend...they will be indoctrinated into the body of "mass media" and will be unable to think for themselves. First, unplug.
Our 20 month old son will be homeschooled. We’re going to have to form a pod with other parents, but that’s the way it has to be. WA gov has mandated CRT. I think if enough parents pull their kids out school, that’s a big part of the solution. Though I fully expect severe restrictions to come down on homeschools that make it more difficult than it already is.
I calculated my district spends $16k per child per year, k-12. That is more than the $15k the elite private high school charges! Public school is a bloated joke with no accountability.
I agree with funding students not systems. However. I have been struggling the last few years with understanding why the semi free market university system is rotting with indoctrination and falling standards of education quality. There are a ton of options, but all are crap. Why havent high quality institutions that are not full of woke crap come into existence? Is there really no market for a decent school? So, will it be any different for k-12 school choice? If so, why?
because it is entirely and utterly captured by federal money, tax breaks, and regulation.
it's not remotely free. title 9 alone has ravaged them.
this is why the key to vouchers is to make them grants. here's the money, spend it on whatever you deem to be education. no limits, no accreditation, no "lists of approved schools and curricula" etc
once you start down that route, you land in total capture.
sure, some people will do some dumb stuff. that's the price of freedom (and it's a helluva lot lower than the price of having the government decide what schools are OK)
Accreditation is a hoop that private schools (also colleges and universities) have to jump through every couple of years. The theory is that they make sure that the curriculum is in step with other similar schools. In practice they look to be sure that your standards for indoctrination are up to snuff. You are absolutely right – unless it is totally divorced from government and even professional standards bodies it will not work.
One of the delights of our "backward" Ukraine is that the private school my son attended had absolutely no oversight. The teachers use the standard public school textbooks, which are not rife with indoctrination. I use them to teach my son at home. The major problem here, as everywhere, was that teachers have to handle students of varying levels of ability. The upside here is that there are no minorities to take offense.
The university has been awash money in loans to students that are guaranteed to have to pay them back, even with social security money when they retire if it comes to that.
This has causes a growth in administrations and treating universities like a business to see who can get the most of this loan money... The incentives of the market have changed to creating mega institutions with useless departments to get the most admissions from every conceivable student type.
But why haven’t a few schools tried to woo students and federal $$$s by offering a quality education? Or tried to get the conservatives through a less woke atmosphere?
The bad cat, as usual, is spot on: Our children’s education is THE issue of our time. Andrew Brietbart famously said that politics is downstream of culture—but both are downstream of education.
It wouldn’t be my school—it would be the community’s school. And ideally, it would welcome anyone of any political persuasion, as long as they didn’t try to foist their beliefs on everyone else.
I'm NOT on the side of the parents protesting at school boards who are largely idiots and Jesus freaks; however, they are useful idiots because the teachers are always the worse enemy.
Enjoying vacation in Florida after the last 3 out of 4 weeks my kid’s school was closed “out of an abundance of caution as several students and faculty were in close contact with ‘cases’”. Chatting around the pool and beach, Rumor has it that our district along with others in urban areas will do another “two weeks to stop the spread” that will likely last all of January. Time to move and help Keep Florida Great - will not forget why I came back.
Sorry, much earlier. When women were encouraged to become more like males and move into business we started a change that now results in teachers being some of the least educated and caring people. Back in the '60's as feminism took hold, women's rights arrived. It was no longer meaningful to center life around nurturing a family, instead they were to enter the dog-eat-dog business world. Many did and it has benefitted some businesses. OTOH, the best and brightest decided on business and businesses were eager to hire them to build inclusivity. Never mind that history major in a woman hired but a similar man became less employable. In time, the quality of teachers declined. Not to say some brightest women are still highly motivated to attend to children in school, bless them, but they are now many fewer compared to days of old. Men rarely have the patience for children, not all, of course, but historically our best teachers have been women who are biologically attuned to nurture.
Business loves women (except at the top). For the same work they can pay 85% less. This exploitation removed the brightest women from the classroom. The promise of feminist freedom has helped business, perhaps at the expense of the children. Worse, some women imagine nurture is beneath them. The lower birthrate eventually will correct the future.
Very much on the money. A very distinguished and well-read person I know, who got degrees at Ivy League universities, frequently told me he learned everything he really needed to know (the three R's) at PS 117 in New York. This was in the 1950s, and his gratitude to the ladies that taught him has only grown with the years.
And it's true that business adores women. Not just for cost-effectiveness or for the competencies they bring to the table, but also because most businesses are run by men. And, who can deny it, men generally love having women around. As we see every day in the metoo pages.
IMHO the best stock brokers are women. They are often less emotional about beating their peers and typically are a bit more cautious about prospects. My experience, however, is really limited to a few money managers. I don't have that much money but enough to rely on managers along with the fund that owns everything.
Here is the entire Chuck Todd interview of the communist Nikole Hannah-Jones committed to destroy our country with her hogwash. Scary that she is considered acceptable to be on the "legacy media".
I wonder does the Chinese Communist Party own them all? Rewriting history to destroy the past and create a new narrative is classic Mao.
I agree with all in theory but in practice the marxists already have this one sewn up in the bag. School Choice as the Hegelian Marxist technocrats have enshrined it in the ESSA act 2015 will enslave and not free children. Think about it: what the state pays for ( back pack money -with your taxes) the state controls. That means curriculum . That means ideology . And that includes testing. So whether you attend a school with one state approved ( for credentials) curriculum or home school with a state approved ( credentialed ) online curriculum the kids and their parents are still controlled . Little Johnny MUST show proper habits of mind and” quality” ( collectivist thinking and behaviors ) thinking to pass any or all tests.
"the state shall decide their 'consciousness' not their regressive parents and certainly not the children themselves."
The last six words of that sentence point the way to the next two preventive goals after school choice. To raise a thoroughly freedom-loving generation, don't treat children and teenagers as the de facto slaves of adults. How can it not teach submission to arbitrary authority? Every good libertarian should support youth rights and self-directed education. (I admit there are lots of leftists in those movements, but if we ally with them for drug policy reform, why not also for other goals?)
We homeschooled our kids - I’ve been “retired” now for nearly a decade. I had one graduate at 15, one at 16. Both were in Honors at college. (While they’re bright they aren’t geniuses or anything!) Both have been excellent employees - one is now an entrepreneur with her husband, the other (the youngest) still working but he’ll end up an entrepreneur too, if the government doesn’t totally disincentivize it. My son in law was also homeschooled. My kids never went to public school, and even though our property taxes went to the system, weren’t allowed so much as a school library book. It was worth it.
Beautiful. My family has similar stories. It is very difficult financially and in other ways, but *well* worth it in the long run.
👏👏👏
Impressive! Congratulations!
The school systems are broken. This has been the case since the 80's and it has become critical. My grandchildren are in what many believe to be good schools and I swear they are illiterate (ages 12 and 13) but receive good grades. Home schooling or small community schools (not public) are the only answer.
Recently read that Oregon public schools are no longer required to teach reading, writing or math. California public schools can no longer give D or F grades.
All of our metrics are broken. Human capital has dropped off a cliff but we measure it by years in school so it has never appeared higher. We are at peak idiocracy right now.
yeah, maybe, maybe there's a blow off top coming
Education is a goods and service, NOT a right. Founding Fathers wanted all of us to have Allodial Property Titles for good reason. Taxation is theft. Prior to Victory Tax, which was repealed in 1944 as unconstitutional, we had roads, police, schools, etc. Property taxation ensure no one owns anything, which reinforces the Marxist plan.
"Although Marx advocated the use of any means, especially including violent revolution, to bring about socialist dictatorship, he suggested ten political goals for developed countries such as the United States. How far has the United States -- traditionally the bastion of freedom, free markets, and private property -- gone down the Marxist road to fulfill these socialist aims? You be the judge. The following are Marx's ten planks from his Communist Manifesto.
1. Abolition of private property in land and application of all rents of land to public purpose.
The courts have interpreted the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (1868) to give the government far more "eminent domain" power than was originally intended, Under the rubric of "eminent domain" and various zoning regulations, land use regulations by the Bureau of Land Managementproperty taxes, and "environmental" excuses, private property rights have become very diluted and private property in landis, vehicles, and other forms are seized almost every day in this country under the "forfeiture" provisions of the RICO statutes and the so-called War on Drugs..
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
The 16th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, 1913 (which some scholars maintain was never properly ratified), and various State income taxes, established this major Marxist coup in the United States many decades ago. These taxes continue to drain the lifeblood out of the American economy and greatly reduce the accumulation of desperately needed capital for future growth, business starts, job creation, and salary increases.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
Another Marxian attack on private property rights is in the form of Federal & State estate taxes and other inheritance taxes, which have abolished or at least greatly diluted the right of private property owners to determine the disposition and distribution of their estates upon their death. Instead, government bureaucrats get their greedy hands involved .
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
We call it government seizures, tax liens, "forfeiture" Public "law" 99-570 (1986); Executive order 11490, sections 1205, 2002 which gives private land to the Department of Urban Development; the imprisonment of "terrorists" and those who speak out or write against the "government" (1997 Crime/Terrorist Bill); or the IRS confiscation of property without due process.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
The Federal Reserve System, created by the Federal Reserve Act of Congress in 1913, is indeed such a "national bank" and it politically manipulates interest rates and holds a monopoly on legal counterfeiting in the United States. This is exactly what Marx had in mind and completely fulfills this plank, another major socialist objective. Yet, most Americans naively believe the U.S. of A. is far from a Marxist or socialist nation.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transportation in the hands of the state.
In the U.S., communication and transportation are controlled and regulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) established by the Communications Act of 1934 and the Department of Transportation and the Interstate Commerce Commission (established by Congress in 1887), and the Federal Aviation Administration as well as Executive orders 11490, 10999 -- not to mention various state bureaucracies and regulations. There is also the federal postal monopoly, AMTRAK and CONRAIL -- outright socialist (government-owned) enterprises. Instead of free-market private enteprrise in these important industries, these fields in America are semi-cartelized through the government's regulatory-industiral complex.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
While the U.S. does not have vast "collective farms" (which failed so miserably in the Soviet Union), we nevertheless do have a significant degree of government involvement in agriculture in the form of price support subsidies and acreage alotments and land-use controls. The Desert Entry Act and The Department of Agriculture. As well as the Department of Commerce and Labor, Department of Interior, the Evironmental Protection Agency, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Mines, National Park Service, and the IRS control of business through corporate regulations.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of Industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
We call it the Social Security Administration and The Department of Labor. The National debt and inflation caused by the communal bank has caused the need for a two "income" family. Woman in the workplace since the 1920's, the 19th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, assorted Socialist Unions, affirmative action, the Federal Public Works Program and of course Executive order 11000. And I almost forgot...The Equal Rights Amendment means that women should do all work that men do including the military and since passage it would make women subject to the draft.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
We call it the Planning Reorganization Act of 1949 , zoning (Title 17 1910-1990) and Super Corporate Farms, as well as Executive orders 11647, 11731 (ten regions) and Public "law" 89-136.
10. Free education for all children in government schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc. etc.
People are being taxed to support what we call 'public' schools, which train the young to work for the communal debt system. We also call it the Department of Education, the NEA and Outcome Based "Education" . "
indeed, education is not a right. you cannot have a positive right that requires the actions of others and thereby violates their negative rights to self determination.
but we must also work within the realm of the possible if we would seek change and if you think there is any chance whatsoever at this point to get americans to stop funding schools and offering paid education to kids, i then i suspect you're badly out of touch.
school choice is a way to inject the market back into the system and at least generate choice. it's an outcome that's possible as opposed to the sort of "let's not have public education budgets" edge lording that's never going to go anywhere.
is it ideal? no.
is it a huge step in the right direction that will set us up for the next steps after? yes.
making the perfect the enemy of the better is no way to create progress.
let's not have properties taxed for public schools is the first step, actually.
It amazes me that we pay "property taxes" at all. But, people get scared that if they get to keep their own money and pay for services themselves their garbage won't get picked up or the firemen won't show up when their house is burning. As someone who spent a lot of my life in *very* rural America, we paid low taxes and had to deal with things on our own and somehow we did just fine. In my opinion, property taxes (like many other taxes) are to pay for government worker's salaries and retirements while offering substandard service (in a most cases) at inflated prices. What a disgusting scam. And yet, when offered to get rid of property taxes (as North Dakota did some years back) the people reject it.
i pay for my own garbage service to a private local company that picks up like clockwork! it's quite inexpensive too vs gov fleecing and associated subpar quality of services in general. at least the post office, insolvent as it is, charges for postage on a per usage basis and does a decent job vs public schools.
Yep. We used to pay for our own here where I am is well. Unfortunately, we got some monsters in charge that changed everything "for the earth". Now, if we roll the dumpster to the curb once every month or once a week it costs the same insane amount. Government destroys everything it touches.
I also pay for garbage service and a fire subscription to the volunteer fire department.
When my kids were young we lived in Santa Monica, which is its own city within LA County. We had to pay property taxes to both Santa Monica and LA schools. My son could read at 3. Our local public school said they would do everything they could to slow him down and discourage his reading until he was along the same level of his peers, usually by age 8 or 9. So, we paid for public schools in 2 districts and for private school until we decided to homeschool.
unbelievably sad... this is so upside down... your story is mind blowing... totally broken system... also love you for your pursuit of your child’s best interests!💕🐱💕
...ever inflating property taxes do contribute to the problem... during COVID, never remind ‘remote’ learning, the public high school down the street completed a multimillion dollar renovation including huge new performing arts center, new football stadium and solar panel array covering entire student body parking lot... these were ‘WANTS’ not ‘NEEDS’... must STARVE THE BEAST... back to the basics and prep for the insane challenges that lay ahead for these kids
prop taxes are wholly the problem here as per your "starve the beast" sentiment. without property tax theft the parasitic progressives running these public skool would not have access to plasma, and as such would migrate to other hosts (ie gov positions). and their thirst for blood only increases = budgets only ever increase. you get the drift.
edit: and imagine all that additional disposable income from not getting mugged via taxes, and how that could be effectively deployed for education, and other freedoms?
Part of this is linked to another big problem in this and many other countries: intensely overregulated professional licensing schemes mostly by state governments that ensure a guild-like monopoly on, and control of the content of, professional services.
I'm a great teacher. I've been told this a million times- I'm not bringing it up to brag. I've taught humans of almost every age about English, us history, psychology, research methods, public speaking, you name it.
I do all of it under the title of "instructor" or "tutor" or "staff development," because I don't have a teaching license.
To get one, I would have to ignore the two graduate degrees I already have, attend another 4 years of school for a curriculum containing about the most heavily-laden political indoctrination of any captured area of academia, and in some states sign an agreement that I believe in and will advance an ideological agenda that I would literally sooner die than advance.
They only let their cultists teach now, and unless the cult gives you the license to teach, your students gain no credentials from your education.
Now look at what cowards millions of our doctors are when their licenses are threatened for merely speaking out of turn.
And how many of them have to sign agreements that breastfeeding is chestfeeding and men give birth before being allowed to have a career.
We can't have a revolution in education unless we can have educators that can provide educations that "count" credentials, but you have to willingly or unwillingly join the cult to be granted that grace.
Very important points you bring up! The rot is systemic. Nothing but starving the beast will solve this, and by starving the beast I mean cessation of all property taxation, and using those monies to fund local schools for parents with school aged children. The direction local funding of schools, the direct local vetting of teachers that the community approves of is the only way out of this.
Begging for school "choice" from the very same governments that are perpetrating these mind numbing progressive curriculums is as naive as it is inane. The same governments that you so insightfully point out control the (leftist) teacher credentialing, those "magnanimous" governments will offer you a choice, if forced to: crt skool a vs crt skool b. Oh, you don't like it? You don't even have any school aged children? Well, tough fucking shit. Oh, you don't agree with us and don't want to pay us whatever we demand? Expect armed men to arrive at "your" home and eject you from what is now OUR HOME.
Thanks for playing, slave.
i am only out of touch as direct function of society being totally brainwashed and reduced to mindless slavery. but hey, dream big, right?
that seems like the lazy edge lordy argument of a guy who wants to profess ideological purity but accomplish nothing (and thereby not have to do any work)
it's easy to demand the perfect to which others will not accede.
doing the work to move the overton window of what is possible so that we might get there eventually is harder, but has the advantage of actually being possible.
yours is the attitude that consigns one to be a heckler in the audience instead of player in the game.
that seems a poor pretext for self-congratulation.
Carter broke education when he created Dept of Education. Gotta shut it down first so everybody knows we are serious. Unless their only job is to divy out $$ to parents to send kids to schools of their choice.
except you are being presumptuous in what i may actually be doing, yes? everything starts with getting ones own house in order, and i am acutely aware on the local level what fuckery transpires at the school board level, and what is being done to combat that. so really check yourself there, because you have no idea the level of work being done here.
there is no self-congratulation here, it's just that you don't like my take because it's so much more than what you have proposed. i do get that incremental steps are vital here, and to that end it is as i wrote a local level endeavor, but seeing the big picture and working toward that is equally as important.
again, i'd say to you study how this nation was conceived and you will better understand how to implement real change with a clear vision of where we need to end up. but maybe you think ideological impurity, imperfection, and incremental half-measure steps is how the og patriots defeated the Brits?
There is a way, and it goes back to whence it all began and is historically supported. tasa.americanstatenationals.org
All of what you seem to describe and then some is here.
Remember, many of the people we need to reach...have been educated by the very system that needs to be torn down. Imagine trying to convince Red Sox fans that they really should be Yankee fans.
IMO, this will require the same kind of incrementalism that THEY employed for the past century+ that got us to where we are today.
Virginia may be an example of this. McAwful lost, but just barely. The election turned on education, but 49% (or whatever) of Virginia voters STILL voted for education tyranny and zero parental input in kids' education.
People tend to be loyal to whoever supports them in times of need, crisis, illness or disability, whether it be a family, community, church, or state. Disabled folks, and there are a lot of them, tend to depend on the state, since nobody else is likely to help them.
I agree that this is critical--at least, as soon as we stop trying to maim and kill them with vaccines they do not need. OTOH, the "Suburban Moms" (read "single parent children, 'college-educated' women") voted for Biden in large numbers. THAT'S the prerequisite problem that needs to be solved. As long as young women give birth to and raise 40% of their children outside of wedlock, the cultural Marxist brainwashing they received in college will keep them firmly in the NEA/AFT camp (how many of them are teachers themselves?).
John Muir said, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." Government school indoctrination is huge, self-reinforcing problem that has roots in the coarsening of culture and the perversion of morality. There exists a large block of parents who think that the education of their children by experts is just fine.
I used to be on that block of parents who thought teachers knew best. I've learned better and most importantly that our kids education is our responsibility, not any government's.
James Lindsey's latest podcast is an excellent recap of what they are up to: https://youtu.be/P8pHloB5qb4 These are groomer schools.
I came here to point out Lindsay's recent work as well. One important thing I got from James Lindsay, where I'd differ from Gato, on the post title: our government schools are not "indoctrinating" kids so much as "programming" them.
What is occurring now isn't just a particular set of claims being drilled into kids' heads (indoctrination); instead it is a holistic LENS of interpreting the world with intention to practice the theory (praxis) toward a large-scale dismantling of the system.
Setting their “worldview”. Exactly.
’Twas always thus with totalitarian regimes. From Plato advocating abducting children from their parents for inculcation to Hitler Youth to cult leaders, authoritarians always want to sink their fangs into those tender, malleable developing brains for maximum indoctrination potential:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgL2XvqhX-Y
Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.
Vladimir Lenin
Reminds me of the Jesuit maxim, “Give me the child for the first seven years, and I'll give you the man,” which was the inspiration behind Michael Apted’s brilliant “7 Up” series.
my father and his brother went to high school in Ecuador and Hitler had satellite office / youth group there which aggressively attempted to indoctrinate the kids... my grandfather was furious...
i think about this with what’s happening in the schools... parents better wise up and stay involved in their kids’ lives.
Oh my goodness, it sounds like the “Boys from Brazil,” only with real children instead of Hitler clones!
the indoctrination brigade was relentless... would follow them home, knocking on their door at dinner time... ours was the last family out of Czechoslovakia after Hitler invaded... my grandpa had to sign documents of allegiance to the government just to get out... it almost didn’t happen.
😲
not forgetting the native children that are taken from their homes to re-educate them
Canada has recently undertaken the project of finding all the mass graves of the native children it had kidnapped and tortured to death in its state and/or church run "Residential Schools" and returning their bodies to the communities and families they were originally stolen from.
Unfortunately too little too late. At least the truth has come out. I am sure same thing happened in the US and is still on going in Australia, where the aboriginals are being treated worse than animals.
The US has been no better than 30th in world education rankings for at least 40 years. Yet, policy seems to make things worse. The thought that everyone should go to college is also some utopian nightmare. I'm all for getting the government out of education.
Separation of Church and State.
Separation of School and State.
Separation of Economy and State.
If only. But yes.
Most other countries don’t educate everyone
Cuba does.
Schools were bad when my father attended them in the late 50's
“make school choice THE issue of our time”….YES! Now is our best chance in decades.
I don’t have kids but as I like to say ‘ I don’t have to know how to lay an egg to smell a rotten one’. We are a failing children terribly.
I so admire parents that take on school boards, that home school. If I could help with that - I would. My main assistance seems to come from voting for school choice and voting to defund any education initiatives - government education doesn’t deserve one dime more. The teachers unions are the top of the heap of systemic racism - past time to abolish the unions, the idea of tenure and the National school Board. Get rid of the Department of Education and you’ve got Yahtze!!!
You left out an important part, el gato. The self- serving teachers unions will have to be abolished before school choice, especially in blue states, becomes widely available. Right now, they're willing to fight a cage death match at the first whiff of parents' ability to take their kids out of their terrible schools.
No accountability and brainwashing the public into thinking they're invariably hard working heroes has served them well the last few generations. Kids and families, not so much. Now we have kids who graduate high school illiterate and innumerate, not to mention unable to think for themselves.
i would argue that school choice will see to that. who would choose schools run by such people?
all we need is to give kids and parents the right to say "no" and take their kids and funding with them.
please enlighten us as to what would change on YOUR local level if you were granted by this magnanimous gov a "school choice". let's say you were "allowed" to take your children out of the current local school they are attending to another one. which one would you put them into on the local level?
do you see what a naive pipe dream you are advocating in the short and medium terms? all while you are being stolen from via prop taxes to pay for it all.
if i am wrong, please set me straight, if you can.
What you're saying is that just allowing this, you're still choosing between one rotten run school versus another. I think the author is correct, it will start a movement in the right direction, but as a cure, it falls short. Baby steps, I suppose. They have set-up many dominoes on the table over the decades, this removes one. Many more to go after this. I think what each of you are saying has merit, I see the authors POV and it's not wrong, but it is one step of many. At this point, any win back in the direction we want it to be in is a plus. Bickering beyond this and creating our own internal division and battles only makes it more difficult to get back on track. Just my two cents, maybe I'm like the second dumbest guy in the world tho, so who knows... LOL.
I asked the author a very simple question, and he of course will not answer it.
All I am saying is that what the author is proposing is not a bad thing. It solves on piece of the big puzzle. A multifaceted approach to this is key. That's all. You can't dump out the puzzle box and have all the pieces magically come together, rather, you need to laboriously put each one in the right place. If we all works towards putting this puzzle back together rather than arguing about one piece, it gets pit back together faster. The divide and conquer strategy works for a reason, don't be division, be addition or multiplication, and if this doesn't work, be self subtraction and let those who have the heart to take on the tasks at hand work on them. My fight is not with you, I'll state you win any reply you rebut with. We have nearly 160 years of undoing the wrongs against us. I've chosen to take the fight on by changing my political status, it doesn't require huge numbers, rather, enough intelligent people to reinstitute our de jure govt and return to their birthright land and soil jurisdiction, becoming free of all this absurdity. I wish you well.
On the cover of the puzzle box is the entire image solved. The big picture first.
that's why private schools exist. but you still get raped for the public school which is why prop taxes are a most pernicious theft.
Private schools have gotten more ideologically leftist than the public schools under the guise of a better core education.
that is also true for the most part, yes. the scourge of progressivism may also be seen on the university level, and it is nearly impossible to clear out, which again brings me back to the fact that property taxation to fund this insanity is the first step to dialing said insanity back. school choice in this context is a naive pipe dream when your choices are mostly between CRT skool a vs CRT skool b.
also, no person should be forced under threat of losing "their" home to have to pay for someone else's child's education, or food, or health for that matter.
Meow!, i mean Yes!🐱funding must follow the child. School Choice Rules!💕🎯💕
Public schools are just like any other government program. A grift to steal taxpayer money.
The Great Reset is about blowing up society and rebuilding it in the Fourth Reich's image..
I'm ok with the blowing up part but let's rebuild it our way, not Schwab's way.
These shots are another way of getting to them. They're calling kids "new customers." 😠
Get your booster, little child, or Omicron is gonna get you!
Monsters Inc
Even our Governor Kelly of Kansas has said that parents should NOT have any influence over curriculum.Kelly has been told by the legislature that her days are numbered by virtue of her handling of the Covid crises over the past two years. She will probably be the last democrat governor for a while in a predominately red state.
Changing modes here. Our local schools are intimately scrutinized by the parents. We know for a fact that there are two districts near KC that teach crap to kids. They are slowly being pressured to stop by parents. No one in Kansas that I know of, except for the minority schools in KC, want crap taught to their children. Our legislators this next year will pass educational reform to get rid of commies on the boards of schools.There is an overwhelming interest of parents of kids to rid the systems of socialist BS.
I'm 64 and they were "reforming" education when I was in elementary school. They never get it reformed and I think it is time to start over with a different approach. How worse could it possibly get? It is the state monopoly on credentialing that has perverted what an educated individual means.
The greatest thing in the 'crisis' was parents realizing that they could simply pool their money and hire a pod teacher. And then, the teacher realizing they could get paid more for actually teaching instead of going through the system.
The problem has been, unfortunately, that until recently parents didn’t give a damn about what their kids were or were not learning in school. The kids, by and large, were out of sight and out of mind while both parents worked so they could live the lifestyle to which they thought they were entitled. Oh, sure, they would say that they “couldn’t afford to live on one income” but they leave out the bit about their lifestyle expectations. It’s been a similar story with government: ignore it completely and then vote for “your party” just like you cheer for “your team” in the Super Bowl. The front line could all be child killers, but hey, they are MY child killers.
Sadly a couple of generations have been stupefied by beer and football/spritzers and fancy handbags and consequently the nation sleep-walked into this nightmare. The vicious, power-hungry sociopaths weren’t, however, quite as sleepy. It’s our own doing. Time to wake up and take the country back.
And no, you’re not going to get it done at the ballot box. Voting is the last step — the culmination of the hard work that goes into selecting worthy candidates and disciplining them for deviating from well-considered policy platforms of which the constituents themselves have played a major role in developing. Government is NOT to be outsourced.
Yes I didn’t mean to give the impression that it was binary but I think I did because there’s a limit to what I have the patience to type with my thumbs. I will stipulate that it’s never black-and-white.
But I think my main point is that, until there is school choice (my daughter was educated in Australia where there is, and she got a far better education than most American kids do, at probably less than half the cost) parents need to be heavily involved with their school boards and PTA’s to make sure that they are adequately supervised. Same with local and state government. Otherwise the crooks and agenda-pushers get a foothold and then it’s tough to retrieve the situation.
Definitely nothing wrong with professional educators. Much wrong with professional propagandists posing as professional educators.
Top down anything is crap. Easy to tell this is so because the fruitcakes want it so desperately. Too many sentient adults can see through the BS, so time to indoctrinate the kids. Old enough to remember that Pink Floyd had something to say about this in 1979. Hey! (Globalists) Leave us kids alone!
In the meantime...vote the commies off the school boards...and make noise about commie teachers.
This nation grew to greatness when schools were single rooms and one teacher taught everything to all students of every age.
Good article, but I'm going to have a hard time caring about anything but covid biofascism until it stop dictating every move made including where, how, and whether our children go to school and whether they're killed by experimental, shitty vaccines.
and just what do you think set up the sort of indoctrinated society that allowed such fascist programs to find fertile root?
if you think these are 2 separate issues, you're not seeing the bigger picture.
No, you're right, I get that they're the same thing. I just have a hard time seeing school choice as "the issue of our time" when we can currently have our rights taken from us instantly in the name of a virus and it's STILL GOING ON.
if we do not handle it now while we have the energy and the impetus, the schools will remain a fetid swamp and the question will be when not if they launch the next plague upon us.
what happened over the past 2 years is what happens when you let the schools indoctrinate 25 years of children into marxist/authoritarian thinking.
this axis of socialist/collectivist/woke/social and climate and health justice thinking is all of a piece.
if we do not cut out the rot, we cannot cure the patient, merely delay the inevitable.
the covidiots are more and more on the run. this is falling apart around them.
the bigger goal will be preventing their next manifestation.
You're right, of course. I'm just in a bad place about some stuff going on. Had to fight with a nurse to let my heart-damaged, bolstered dad leave his fucking mask off.
Agree, must takedown of all the noxious interconnected narratives at once. This was planned... don’t think for a minute that they are done... or that it couldn’t get any worse.
Aww, but it's so cute to hear my son's stories when he comes home from school! Kids vandalized the bathrooms using screw drivers, all the girls are changing their names and turning to boys and now use the boys locker room, I can't call people "he" and "she" I have to say "they" and "them", we learned about George Washington's gay commander who got kicked out of the army because he was gay
(Thanks History Channel!), my teacher hasn't graded my writing for a month and when I emailed her she didn't respond, I can't go back and see what mistakes I made on my math because it's an online form so once it's graded it disappears, duh Mom, I don't have a textbook to study from!
‘school choice’ brings the authority & responsibility back where it belongs... with mom & dad who care more than anyone else about the results. This is way, way, way overdue.
Well I would hope it could help families who feel like they need to move to another state to make a difference in their kids lives, such as us. Families should feel more in control of some doable, common sense options, like you said.
Yes! competitive pressure on BOTH teachers and states to perform to parental expectations.
School was like this 50 years ago, just different indoctrination. It was BS then, still is BS, just different BS. "Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people.
2) To make good citizens.
3) To make each person his or her personal best.
These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. . . . Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States . . . and that is its aim everywhere else." https://wesjones.com/gatto1.htm - "Against School: How public education cripples our kids, and why, by John Taylor Gatto
Having created a charter school and fighting a system that did not want alternative education I wonder how many parents will actively take on their childrens education. My experience is damn few.
I don't believe that the 'schools' will change until there is serious competition... AKA: successful Home Schooling groups. What's better... tuning in to a world class teacher of a subject via a Home School Group... or sitting in a classroom with someone who has a degree, but is not so talented ?
And, who cares more about their contract than outcomes for students. My parents used to talk about a favorite teacher who boarded in the home of a local family. In our school district they are some of the wealthiest. A calling? Not so much.
I'll second the notion that the schools are broken. The school is a system, and the heart of the system is the people. Administrators and teachers. That is what is broken beyond repair. They are by and large is not very smart. They do not by and large share the values of the people who put public education in place. They are owned by the Democrat party.
This is true of the Department of Education, the state education associations, every College of Education of which I am aware, and a great number of local school boards and parent-teacher associations. Public and most private as well - see the Brearley brouhaha. Get rid of it all.
I write this as a former parent of private and public school children, trustee of elite private schools, substitute teacher and classroom teacher in Washington area private and public schools, And sometime student of the University of Maryland College of Education.
It cannot be fixed. I do not trust most parents to handle home schooling. I think the best of bad alternatives is school choice among tuition charging institutions, with government money going toward that tuition. Any system will be corrupt – this says the possibility of being somewhat less so.
I write this as the parent a second family of three young children in a country with a fairly honest system of education, Ukraine, where I have nonetheless decided to homeschool.
It’s not just the teacher’s unions, but most professional associations. I finally dropped membership to my professional association when they were censoring any dissenting opinion other than ‘v@x for all.’ My New Years Resolution is a pure focus on conscientious consumerism and any company that actively is against what I stand for gets the 🥾
True education and the ability to develop and use of critical thinking skills are one of keys to most of our problems. In modern societies we do not have education but many forms of indoctrination, brainwashing and social conditioning techniques, which in return it then breads weakness, delusions and ignorance. All to create the obedient and conforming masses.
"When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think." - Bertrand Russell
Just saw a school teacher friend of mine on FB worrying that her elementary school students are going to give her COVID and kill her and her family. I'm thinking, "And they let you around these kids at all, you nut?"
Ugh, shut the whole system down and start from scratch.
🎶 Paranoia …self-destroia 🎶
Way too fragile to be trusted with a group of students.
Just one thing, please try not to use the "R" word or any memes containing this word. It is extremely offensive to people with intellectual disabilities and their families. Using this word encourages people to mistreat those who have these kinds of disabilities. Furthermore, there is a silent genocide going on against people with Down's Syndrome and similar conditions--in Iceland, for example, the government announced the abortion rate of fetuses with Down's is now 100%, which they see as a good thing. Should a couple decide to defy the government and bring such a child to term, I doubt they will see much, if anything, in the way of social services. In the US it isn't much better. Maybe some people don't have a problem with targeting such children for extinction using prenatal search and destroy methods. After all, they are just "retards" and not worth anything, right?
My son is downs. I would share both our outlooks with you. Neither of us are offended or affected by the words or labels of others. My son and I both hold the power of our lives. Words do indeed have power, but only that which WE allow. Words only have the power we give to them.
It has helped both of us. I hope this helps. Or not.. That is up to you 😉💕
I am glad that it helped both of you. But that word has had a terrible effect on my life and on those around me. It was a word that taught me to HATE people like your son. It was a word that taught me to HATE myself because I was in special ed for a learning disability (probably undiagnosed aspergers). It was a word that taught me to HATE and DESPISE a sibling with a physical handicap. To this day I struggle to keep my feelings in check when I am around people with certain disabilities. They must never know what I am thinking and feeling inside. But I was taught, and taught well by my peers and by the school system, by a teacher that encouraged the other students to pick on me, what it meant to be labeled with that word. It did not teach me acceptance or tolerance or compassion. I had to HATE in order to distance myself from that label. I have to distance myself from those with disabilities so as not to be considered "one of those people." When you have had a certain label follow you around all your life despite your best efforts to shed it, when even now when I am in my sixties I have coworkers make remarks like calling me "short bus" and other similar terms, it leaves a mark. And please don't tell me that I don't come across as being learning disabled or autistic or whatever because of my ability to write and express myself. You don't interact with me on a daily basis. All I can say is that there is something certain people pick up about me, something that has to do with my mental ability, and while some of them will say "I am only joking" when they say these things, it is not a joke. It has affected my outlook on life; it has affected the kinds of medical decisions I make or want made for me in the future. And no, I am not proud of this. But this is what one little word has done.
About 20 years ago, I found a lump and went to the doctor and was told, quite callously, that yup, it could be cancer, before he walked out of the room. The nurse found me in tears. That night when I got home, I received a phone call. From a teenager. "Retard, retard, you're a retard!" she sang out and hung up before I could identify the voice. To this day I don't know who it was but I have my suspicions. It was not a random call. It was targeted. Sort of like calling up the only Black family on the street and saying the n-word. What this person does not know and will never know, is that I was at probably one of the lowest points of my life. I made a decision right then and there that I have told very few people about. I said, if this is cancer, I will not fight it. I will ask for palliative measures only. Because I am tired of this sort of thing. That was 20 years ago and I have not changed my mind. I am here writing this only because it was not cancer. This is what this word does.
I am sorry for you, then.
I believe as civilized humans, we have an obligation to not gratuitously give offense -- especially to people whose circumstances may have rubbed their feelings raw. So I ask this not in a confrontational way, but out of genuine curiosity and a desire to make communication better -- what words or terms should be substituted, when we are trying to label stupid behavior? "Retarded" was introduced into the clinical literature post WWII as a kinder, gentler replacement for terms like "idiot", "moron," "imbecile", and "cretin" -- which before 1950 were actual medical terms defined by specific IQ test ranges, but were viewed as demeaning and insulting. (And which still appeared in high school health textbooks in the 1970s, because I saw them with my own 9th grade eyes.) What should we use instead?
As I mentioned recently... eventually we will have our "little red book of allowable sayings". I understand TAM's concern of course, but something said without malice or ill will should always be allowed. We *choose* to be offended just as we choose to blow something off. Egg shell walking has become a mandatory skill in the world anymore, and is "expertly" taught... in our school systems.
Why not simply say stupid behavior? Or doesn't have the brains God gave a rock? The bigger question is, why do we even have to label people by intelligence? Why do we have to single out an entire group of people? If it's not ok to say of a shoddy job that it was N-rigged, then it should be equally not ok to use any of these terms.
The free market model won't be much better if it's anything like real estate and other markets...
There will be a huge chasm... Run by corporate charter schools...
Leftists encroachment in the educational system have turned Schools and Universities into corrupting indoctrination camps.
Any place where leftists have majority is not only the end result of a constant political purge in hirings and workplace practices that filter out dissenting voices, but these places use their services as a political tool to promote leftists agenda or to undermine their political opponents.
Places where leftists have overwhelming majority are already defacto totalitarian enclaves where wrongthink can get you fired: Universities, scientific institutions, Big Tech companies, Media companies, even government agencies are already under this social dynamics.
Leftism is totalitarianism/fascism with a neverending political purge.
One of the benefits of the past two years is the proliferation of home schooling and homeschooling materials AND people seeing that it isn't as hard as it seemed to educate their kids AND that they might be able to make things stretch well enough to be home. For some.
I'd love for the DOE to go away and money to be assigned to individual. Charter schools with a well laid out vision and detailed plan. Some of those pissed off mamas might be the start of a revolution.
I'm thinking about starting a homeschool resource center. I work in public ed and have loved it until the last 2 years. I work in special education so I have a wonderful and satisfying job. My district has been more conservative but that is changing. It's sad. I want better for students.
Check around first and test the waters. There's a good chance your area already has a homeschool resource center, and if you've spent a substantial portion of your last several years loving your job in the school system... you may find a somewhat cold welcome. Just sayin'. People who've been homeschooling for a decade are likely to see that as "public school droids coming to tell us what to do". Be careful!
I will consider that. Thank you
Another great post. I know the reasons/excuses for not fixing this system are many. But how can we not see by now just how important this issue is? We may never personally benefit from fixing this system, but future generations *will* benefit. To me, sacrificing my children to this despicable school system in the name of materialism or convenience is almost exactly the same as marching them down to get a "shot" because "they are dirty little kids that infect people." It's selfish and abusive as hell. I'm not being mean here. I'm just stating the facts as I see them/live them. It's difficult to make the sacrifices necessary to provide *real* education to our children. But the future we are creating by not making those sacrifices is going to be *much* more difficult and won't be fixed for generations if education isn't fixed as soon as possible. IMHO.
The Fabian Society always understood this... They applied this principle--indoctrination of children--through gradualism and subversion, always stealthily, progressively, and through many generations.
Your post is also very timely, as my friend Alison just published a guest post on her blog, addressing the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between those that get it, and those that don't... A chasm, sadly, that often yawns wider and wider between members of the same family :(
Pertinent excerpt:
..."the fact is, we are at war. Your parents are defending humanity. You should be very proud. Don’t worry that you don’t see it now. This is, after all, a war of deception, but later you will understand that you came from parents who stood up to tyranny.
Understand that when children, the elderly, along with other people are being attacked, parents cannot sit idly. They are not wired that way. True, a lot of parents don’t fight this fight. For whatever reason, they cannot, or will not decipher this war. It doesn’t mean the war doesn’t exist. We don’t know the answer to why some people see it, and some don’t. I believe this is a spiritual battle. Maybe some of us come with information that other souls don’t have. Once a parent sees it, they CANNOT let it go. It would be to go against our soul’s mission, our deepest truth, and our deepest instinct to protect humanity."
https://wrenchinthegears.com/2021/12/28/guest-post-a-letter-to-our-children/
I see a lot of comments on the school systems and rightly so. I would encourage parents to see tv and social media as the more immediate problem. If you are not in control of this (and most parents are not) it doesn't matter what school your kids attend...they will be indoctrinated into the body of "mass media" and will be unable to think for themselves. First, unplug.
Our 20 month old son will be homeschooled. We’re going to have to form a pod with other parents, but that’s the way it has to be. WA gov has mandated CRT. I think if enough parents pull their kids out school, that’s a big part of the solution. Though I fully expect severe restrictions to come down on homeschools that make it more difficult than it already is.
I calculated my district spends $16k per child per year, k-12. That is more than the $15k the elite private high school charges! Public school is a bloated joke with no accountability.
the difference being you don't lose "your" home if you don't pay for the private school. that's the real insanity!
I agree with funding students not systems. However. I have been struggling the last few years with understanding why the semi free market university system is rotting with indoctrination and falling standards of education quality. There are a ton of options, but all are crap. Why havent high quality institutions that are not full of woke crap come into existence? Is there really no market for a decent school? So, will it be any different for k-12 school choice? If so, why?
because it is entirely and utterly captured by federal money, tax breaks, and regulation.
it's not remotely free. title 9 alone has ravaged them.
this is why the key to vouchers is to make them grants. here's the money, spend it on whatever you deem to be education. no limits, no accreditation, no "lists of approved schools and curricula" etc
once you start down that route, you land in total capture.
sure, some people will do some dumb stuff. that's the price of freedom (and it's a helluva lot lower than the price of having the government decide what schools are OK)
Accreditation is a hoop that private schools (also colleges and universities) have to jump through every couple of years. The theory is that they make sure that the curriculum is in step with other similar schools. In practice they look to be sure that your standards for indoctrination are up to snuff. You are absolutely right – unless it is totally divorced from government and even professional standards bodies it will not work.
One of the delights of our "backward" Ukraine is that the private school my son attended had absolutely no oversight. The teachers use the standard public school textbooks, which are not rife with indoctrination. I use them to teach my son at home. The major problem here, as everywhere, was that teachers have to handle students of varying levels of ability. The upside here is that there are no minorities to take offense.
The university has been awash money in loans to students that are guaranteed to have to pay them back, even with social security money when they retire if it comes to that.
This has causes a growth in administrations and treating universities like a business to see who can get the most of this loan money... The incentives of the market have changed to creating mega institutions with useless departments to get the most admissions from every conceivable student type.
But why haven’t a few schools tried to woo students and federal $$$s by offering a quality education? Or tried to get the conservatives through a less woke atmosphere?
The bad cat, as usual, is spot on: Our children’s education is THE issue of our time. Andrew Brietbart famously said that politics is downstream of culture—but both are downstream of education.
For el gato readers in the US, I have a solution that I believe would work very well in many places if tried. If you’re interested in making it happen in your area, let me know and we can connect off line. https://townhall.com/columnists/robjenkins/2021/06/13/a-new-kind-of-private-school-n2590896
I looked at the language on your link and know that your school would not welcome me due to my political leanings. Maybe that is intentional. Best
It wouldn’t be my school—it would be the community’s school. And ideally, it would welcome anyone of any political persuasion, as long as they didn’t try to foist their beliefs on everyone else.
I'm NOT on the side of the parents protesting at school boards who are largely idiots and Jesus freaks; however, they are useful idiots because the teachers are always the worse enemy.
Here is full Chuck Todd interview. Why is this Communist even of interest to the legacy media?
Are they both owned by the Chinese Communist Party? Rewriting history is right out of Mao playbook.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF6wuD9cJOo&t=23s
Enjoying vacation in Florida after the last 3 out of 4 weeks my kid’s school was closed “out of an abundance of caution as several students and faculty were in close contact with ‘cases’”. Chatting around the pool and beach, Rumor has it that our district along with others in urban areas will do another “two weeks to stop the spread” that will likely last all of January. Time to move and help Keep Florida Great - will not forget why I came back.
Random observation: many of our current problems started when women started hyphenating
Sorry, much earlier. When women were encouraged to become more like males and move into business we started a change that now results in teachers being some of the least educated and caring people. Back in the '60's as feminism took hold, women's rights arrived. It was no longer meaningful to center life around nurturing a family, instead they were to enter the dog-eat-dog business world. Many did and it has benefitted some businesses. OTOH, the best and brightest decided on business and businesses were eager to hire them to build inclusivity. Never mind that history major in a woman hired but a similar man became less employable. In time, the quality of teachers declined. Not to say some brightest women are still highly motivated to attend to children in school, bless them, but they are now many fewer compared to days of old. Men rarely have the patience for children, not all, of course, but historically our best teachers have been women who are biologically attuned to nurture.
Business loves women (except at the top). For the same work they can pay 85% less. This exploitation removed the brightest women from the classroom. The promise of feminist freedom has helped business, perhaps at the expense of the children. Worse, some women imagine nurture is beneath them. The lower birthrate eventually will correct the future.
Very much on the money. A very distinguished and well-read person I know, who got degrees at Ivy League universities, frequently told me he learned everything he really needed to know (the three R's) at PS 117 in New York. This was in the 1950s, and his gratitude to the ladies that taught him has only grown with the years.
And it's true that business adores women. Not just for cost-effectiveness or for the competencies they bring to the table, but also because most businesses are run by men. And, who can deny it, men generally love having women around. As we see every day in the metoo pages.
IMHO the best stock brokers are women. They are often less emotional about beating their peers and typically are a bit more cautious about prospects. My experience, however, is really limited to a few money managers. I don't have that much money but enough to rely on managers along with the fund that owns everything.
Here is the entire Chuck Todd interview of the communist Nikole Hannah-Jones committed to destroy our country with her hogwash. Scary that she is considered acceptable to be on the "legacy media".
I wonder does the Chinese Communist Party own them all? Rewriting history to destroy the past and create a new narrative is classic Mao.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF6wuD9cJOo&t=23s
I remember all the grief given to Betsy DeVos who was pushing school choice. I wonder how school choice could clean up inner city schools.
I agree with all in theory but in practice the marxists already have this one sewn up in the bag. School Choice as the Hegelian Marxist technocrats have enshrined it in the ESSA act 2015 will enslave and not free children. Think about it: what the state pays for ( back pack money -with your taxes) the state controls. That means curriculum . That means ideology . And that includes testing. So whether you attend a school with one state approved ( for credentials) curriculum or home school with a state approved ( credentialed ) online curriculum the kids and their parents are still controlled . Little Johnny MUST show proper habits of mind and” quality” ( collectivist thinking and behaviors ) thinking to pass any or all tests.
The money follows the students in Denmark. But that’s a small country. It’s not a corrupt country.
"the state shall decide their 'consciousness' not their regressive parents and certainly not the children themselves."
The last six words of that sentence point the way to the next two preventive goals after school choice. To raise a thoroughly freedom-loving generation, don't treat children and teenagers as the de facto slaves of adults. How can it not teach submission to arbitrary authority? Every good libertarian should support youth rights and self-directed education. (I admit there are lots of leftists in those movements, but if we ally with them for drug policy reform, why not also for other goals?)
https://www.youthrights.org/about/what-are-youth-rights/
https://www.self-directed.org/sde/