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Old February 15th, 2008 #1
Alex Linder
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Default #1 Public Schooling Thread: Public Schooling: History, Aims, Global & Anti-White Agenda

Thread for getting you up to speed on what public schooling is really all about: turning free White men into ZOG slaves.

Authors to read are

Charlotte Iserbyt
John Taylor Gatto
Samuel Blumenfeld

Google these names and you'll find their books

Here, free and online, is Charlotte Iserbyt's "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America":

http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/
 
Old February 15th, 2008 #2
Alex Linder
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This simple ten-minute video will stand your hair on end, as Iserbyt describes how the nostrums and psych techniques of a jew named Benjamin Bloom are used to train idiot educations majors (who become public school teachers) to play on your child's natural sympathies in order to brainwash him into NWO-congenial dogmas.

 
Old February 24th, 2008 #3
Sword
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Smile Public Schooling: History and Aims

Assuming this brainwashing in public schools, high schools and universities has been going on for decades, now we know why so many white people will vote for Barack Obama. Now we know why so many whites will send money to Africa to help the little niglets there who will grow up to be our biological enemies.
One remedy is to form a European-American educational society then work to teach our children about European-American history and principles.
A positive teaching of European-American principles will counteract the Jew brainwashing that is now firmly entrenched.
 
Old March 4th, 2008 #4
Wagner
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Default Against School

Excellent article from John Taylor Gatto. His website is http://www.johntaylorgatto.com.
Be sure to read his Underground History of American Education.


AGAINST SCHOOL

How public education cripples
our kids, and why
By John Taylor Gatto


John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the
Year and the author, most recently, of The Underground History of American
Education. He was a participant in the Harper's Magazine forum "School on a Hill,"
which appeared in the September 2003 issue.


I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?

We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.

The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover t~at all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, 1 had more than enough reason to think of our schools-with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers-as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insightsimply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.

But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?

Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?

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.

Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.

The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens 11 in order to render the populace "manageable."

It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.

Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

Tre you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, lib, erty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.

There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing.

Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are ... factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."

It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.

Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
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Old March 18th, 2008 #5
Alex Linder
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[History of federal involvement in K-12 funding]

10 Facts About K-12 Education Funding

1.

The U.S. Constitution leaves the responsibility for public K-12 education with the states.

The responsibility for K-12 education rests with the states under the Constitution. There is also a compelling national interest in the quality of the nation's public schools. Therefore, the federal government, through the legislative process, provides assistance to the states and schools in an effort to supplement, not supplant, state support. The primary source of federal K-12 support began in 1965 with the enactment of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).
Annual Secondary Education Expenditures per Student

ESEA authorizes grants for elementary and secondary school programs for children of low-income families; school library resources, textbooks and other instructional materials; supplemental education centers and services; strengthening state education agencies; education research; and professional development for teachers.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) is a reauthorization of ESEA. The law's express purposes are to raise achievement for all students and to close the achievement gap. This is done through accountability, research-based instruction, flexibility and options for parents, so that no child is left behind.
Top

2.

Total taxpayer investment in K-12 education in the United States for the 2004-05 school year is estimated to be $536 billion. [ * ]

Even in this current time of the war against terror, taxpayer investment in education exceeds that for national defense. In addition to the K-12 money mentioned above, taxpayers will spend an estimated $373 billion for higher education in the same school year. As depicted on the chart below, the United States is a world leader in education investment. However, nations that spend far less achieve higher levels of student performance.
Top

3.

States and localities are the primary sources of K-12 education funding and always have been.
Total U.S. Expenditures for Elementary and Secondary Education

In the 2004-05 school year, 83 cents out of every dollar spent on education is estimated to come from the state and local levels (45.6 percent from state funds and 37.1 percent from local governments). The federal government's share is 8.3 percent. The remaining 8.9 percent is from private sources, primarily for private schools. [ * * ] This division of support remains consistent with our nation's historic reliance on local control of schools.
Top

4.

The federal share of K-12 spending has risen very quickly, particularly in recent years.

In 1990-91, the federal share of total K-12 spending in the United States was just 5.7 percent. Since that time, it has risen by more than one-third and is now 8.3 percent of the total.
Top

5.

Total education funding has increased substantially in recent years at all levels of government, even when accounting for enrollment increases and inflation.
Total Expenditures per Pupil (for Fall Enrollment)

By the end of the 2004-05 school year, national K-12 education spending will have increased an estimated 105 percent since 1991-92; 58 percent since 1996-97; and 40 percent since 1998-99. On a per-pupil basis and adjusted for inflation, public school funding increased: 24 percent from 1991-92 through 2001-02 (the last year for which such data are available); 19 percent from 1996-97 through 2001-02; and 10 percent from 1998-99 through 2001-02.

Importantly, the increase in funds has been linked to accountability for results, ensuring taxpayers get their money's worth.
Top

6.

Federal funding for two main federal K-12 education programs will have increased by $9.3 billion since 2001, under the president's proposed budget.

Under the president's proposed budget for fiscal year (FY) 2006, 65 percent of the U.S. Department of Education's elementary and secondary school funds would go to help schools with economically disadvantaged students (ESEA, Title I) and to support children with disabilities (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act [IDEA], Part B, Grants to States). If the president's FY 2006 request is enacted, the increases in these programs over the past five years will have substantially exceeded any previous increases over a similar period since the programs were created.
Top

7.

Most federal funds are sent directly to states and local school districts for their use in schools.
Title I Grants for Disadvantaged Children

The president's FY 2006 budget would provide $37.6 billion for K-12 education. Of that amount, 95 percent would be distributed either directly to local districts or to schools and districts through their states. Individual schools would then use these funds for the purposes defined in the programs. Major programs include:

* ESEA, Title I: $13.3 billion
* IDEA, Part B, Grants to States: $11.1 billion
* Improving Teacher Quality: $2.9 billion
* 21st Century Community Learning Centers: $991.1 million
* English Language Learners: $675.8 million
* Impact Aid (schools impacted by military bases and other facilities): $1.2 billion
Top

8.

There are no unfunded federal education "mandates." Every federal education law is conditioned on a state or other grantee's decision to accept federal program funds.

Federal education program "requirements" are not unfunded mandates because the conditions in federal law apply only when a state (or other grantee) voluntarily chooses to accept federal funds. Any state that does not want to abide by a federal program's requirements can simply choose not to accept the federal funds associated with that program. While most states choose to accept and use federal program funds, in the past, a few states have forgone funds for various reasons.
Top

9.

The federal commitment to education can be found in the actual dollars earmarked for education.
Federal Spending Under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act

Like all laws passed by Congress, many federal education statutes include limits on how much future Congresses can spend. These are called "authorization caps." Actual amounts spent on education are called "appropriated levels," and they represent the actual federal commitment to education. Authorization caps are occasionally claimed to be "promises" or "goals" for federal education spending. Failure to meet these levels is sometimes claimed to demonstrate that an "unfunded mandate" exists.

The claim is simply untrue. In the history of the United States, actual appropriations have rarely matched authorization levels. If this were the standard, nearly all federal programs supporting agriculture, health, safety, construction, job training and transportation would be below their congressional "goals."
Top

10.

K-12 education is funded at the federal level through a variety of laws and programs.
No Child Left Behind Funding: 2002-06

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) gives our schools and our country groundbreaking education reform based on stronger accountability for results, more flexibility for states and communities, an emphasis on proven education methods, and more options for parents. Passed with bipartisan support in Congress and signed by President Bush on Jan. 8, 2002, the law represents the most comprehensive revision of federal education programs since the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. NCLB programs in the president's FY 2006 proposed budget include:
*

Title I, the largest federal K-12 program, would provide over $13 billion to local districts to improve the academic achievement of children in high-poverty schools.
*

Reading First would supply over $1.1 billion to states to promote the use of scientifically based research to provide high-quality reading instruction for grades K-3.
*

Improving Teacher Quality Grants would provide states with $2.9 billion for teacher professional development and training.
*

English Language Acquisition would provide $675.8 million to states to assist schools in improving the education of limited English-proficient children by teaching them English and helping them meet state academic standards.
*

Other NCLB programs include those to support charter schools; strengthen high school education; improve math and science education; support after-school learning programs and assist American Indian, Alaska Native and migrant students.
Federal Grants to States for Special Education *

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) assists states and local schools in educating children with disabilities. Grants to States under Part B—the second largest federal K-12 program—would provide over $11 billion to states and local schools to assist their efforts.

The Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA), passed in 2002, created the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which replaced the Office of Educational Research and Improvement. The law requires more rigorous standards for the conduct and evaluation of education research. NCLB requires that federal funds support educational activities that are backed by scientifically based research. Through sustained programs of research, evaluation and data collection, IES provides evidence of what works to solve the problems and challenges faced by schools and learners.

http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/index.html
 
Old March 19th, 2008 #6
Alex Linder
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'To Train School Children in ... Loyalty to the State'

by Vin Suprynowicz

Don't you love it when a member of the ruling class slips up and admits to the peasants what they're really up to?

For years, I've called for the complete shutdown of America's massive archipelago of mandatory government youth propaganda camps. The defenders of this Largest Jobs Program in History shriek and bellow that I must be "against education," which is sort of like charging those who opposed slave galleys with being against ocean navigation.

Read de Tocqueville for his amazement at the high level of literacy – including an ability to discuss complex political issues – found among American workingmen of the 1830s – 20 years before Dewey and Mann launched today's government-run youth camps on the Prussian model in Massachusetts in 1852.

The New York Times reported Feb. 27 that fewer than half of American teenagers know when the Civil War was fought, and one in four believe Columbus sailed to the New World some time after 1750. About a quarter of the teenagers were unable to correctly identify Hitler as Germany's chancellor in World War II, instead identifying him in a multiple-choice test as a munitions maker or premier of Austria.

Why is anyone surprised? The academic curriculum is the "cover," the "front." The real goal is not to ensure education, but rather to ensure against successive generations developing a cohesive philosophy of self-sufficiency, a code of ethics appropriate to a free people living under a government of limited powers. The goal is to make sure successive generations are powerless to muster the historical and economic context, logic and critical thinking skills necessary to see through the latest scheme to seize yet more of our wealth and use the loot to hire more bureaucrats to regulate yet another portion of our lives, our industry, our commerce.

California's 2nd District Court of Appeal on Feb. 28 declared the parents of most of that state's 166,000 home-schooled children to be outlaws, ruling the law requires parents to send their children to full-time state-certified public or private schools or else have them taught at home by "credentialed" tutors – which most home-school parents, presumably, aren't.

"California courts have held that ... parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children," Justice H. Walter Croskey said in the 3-0 ruling, which makes it clear those parents can be criminally prosecuted for failing to comply.

And did Judge Croskey and his black-robed ruling-class pals say this was because the home-schoolers weren't doing as well at teaching reading, writing and 'rithmetic?

Of course not. They couldn't say that, because tests consistently shows home-school kids, taught by parents without state "certificates" or licenses, score 30 to 37 percentile points higher than their public school peers across all subjects.

So why ban home-schooling, if the academic results are far better?

Judge Croskey obligingly explained: "A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare."

Imagine that. "Loyalty to the state." Almost as if what they're running are, I don't know ... mandatory government youth propaganda camps, or something.

K.G. writes in: "Dear Mr Suprynowicz, I wasn't always a homeschooler. I stumbled upon J.T. Gatto while researching school reform after dealing with my local school district and getting nowhere but Delphi'd and a SLAPP letter.

"I read 'Underground History' – in fact, I was unable to put it down. It explained HOW IT HAS BEEN DONE, how Americans have been turned into stupid, apathetic, self-absorbed, toadying sheep. ... At this stage of the game the social engineers no longer even pretend to educate. They 'socialize', they 'mold minds', they decide who will go to college and 'lead' and who will dig ditches for the local business-government or the national corporate state.

"After finishing that book I had to get my kids out, pronto. I regret that they spent their most formative years in the govschool gulag learning to take orders and stand in line, raising their hands to go to the toilet. In fact, when I told my youngest daughter, starting '3rd grade', that we would be homeschooling, she asked me if she would be allowed to go to the toilet whenever she wanted. I almost cried. ..."

A local attorney writes in: "Mr. Suprynowicz – Government schools are liberal indoctrination camps, nothing more. My son was shown 'An Inconvenient Truth' during 4th grade and now berates my wife for using plastic bags. He is a GATE student (gifted) but curiously received a 'C' after he disagreed with his teacher that global warming was caused by human activity. He said no humans were around when the last ice age melted and for that he was punished.

"His teacher went on to teach the class that President Bush used cocaine and that the moon landing was staged. She had white students apologize to black students for slavery and (said) that taxpayers should pay reparations because slavery destroyed the black family. He was also taught that a perfect electric car was made many years ago but the oil companies killed those responsible. ...

"My cousin home schools his children. His son who is 15 ... is taking college level classes through independent study. He is showing an affinity for geometry and physics. ... He is reading books about maritime history ... non-stop even though his reading 'level' is below what some standardized test says it should be.

"When he attended a public school in Belmont, Calif., he was put in special classes for learning disabled children. No doubt his teachers had high hopes he would become a dishwasher. ..."

J.B. writes in from upstate New York that John Taylor Gatto's "book, Dumbing Us Down was instrumental in helping me make my decision to homeschool my two children, and we are in our fourth year of doing so. ...

"Anyway, just wanted to take a moment to thank you for helping to get the word out on the largest crime ever perpetrated on the human race: the locking away and dumbing down of our beautiful, vibrant, smart, loving children.

"I dream of a day when the parents rise up, en masse, and scream for their release!"

March 19, 2008

Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/suprynowi...ynowicz78.html
 
Old June 23rd, 2009 #7
Alex Linder
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Pep Rallies and Public Schools: How the State Programs Us for War

by J. L. Bryan

Anyone who attended those giant child-processing centers the state insists on calling "schools" will recognize the scene:

You walk into the million-dollar cinderblock gymnasium, immediately dwarfed by the size and sound of the crowd. The school's thousands of students have been herded together to cheer the glory that is "their" team as it prepares for "the big game." Teachers and students dress in school colors, wave the school pennant, and join in the school fight song.

All this is a Very Big Deal, and woe unto he who questions any of it. There may be a speech from the principal, or from that annoying kid who successfully rode a wave of apathy into the student council presidency. The cheerleaders dance and praise the team. The team members themselves run out to thunderous applause, the crowd cheering for whatever it is they presumably accomplish for the school community – and never mind that the biggest jerks in the school are invariably found within their ranks.

Here and there you may notice small, dark clumps of the disaffected, those dour punk/goth/whatever kids who don't seem impressed by any of this. They will be treated harshly by teachers for being negative, antisocial, or – heaven forbid! – lacking in proper "school spirit." There is something wrong with them, most would agree, or they just want attention. And these malcontents are all freshmen or sophomores. Upperclassmen of their ilk have long since learned that such rallies are the perfect time to sneak behind the school for a cigarette or a few bong rips.

Of special significance is the rally against the major rival school down the road, the archenemy who must be denounced, ridiculed, and defeated. No one can tell you why that particular school is the big rival. "Because they're the Broncos (or whatever the rival mascot might be)" is a typical, circular answer. Some don't even bother moving in a circle: "They just are," such people say, probably convinced, after a lifetime of learning to accept such answers from teachers, that this would appropriately resolve the question.

In my experience, one revealing answer came from my high school Latin teacher: "You must support the home team. Support the home team. Support the home team." (Also, teaching Latin by rote had apparently programmed her to repeat all statements three times. Not kidding.) She didn't follow up with any explanation of the virtues and benefits to accrue from home-team-supporting behavior. It was just crazy to think that, although the state forced us into this ridiculous institution, with its ridiculous rules and overlords, we would ever consider the school to be anything but our "home." We were certainly intended to identify it as such. The football team was there to defend our honor (against what, nobody knows).

Having read some Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Jefferson, I concluded that the entire culture and organization of public schools must be a mistake. There were so many authoritarian attributes, I thought, they weren't teaching kids to be responsible citizens of a republic, but subjects of a police state. Serious reforms were clearly needed. (Years later, having studied John Taylor Gatto and Austrian economics, I realized that a) the state raises kids this way deliberately, not by mistake, and b) a free market in education would quickly find and disseminate the best methods for teaching children.)

The whole weird culture of government school still puzzled me when I graduated in 1996. A little more than five years later, starting on 9/11/2001, I began to discover what all the weird ritualism and pressure to conform had really accomplished for the state.

Flags went up everywhere – you had flag bumper stickers, flag lapel pins, flag t-shirts, flags draping homes and buildings, flag-colored bunting. Across the South, people even traded their defiant Confederate flags for Old Glory – swapping out their scrimmage jerseys for the team colors. The Pledge of Allegiance took on a new, more sacred quality, as did the drinking game that is our national anthem (from the article: "If you could sing a stanza of the notoriously difficult melody and stay on key, you were sober enough for another round").

President Bush, until then known for his questionable election, the Enron scandal, and taking long vacations, suddenly became the great leader, warrior, and protector. (Yes, the same guy who completely didn't protect anyone from the attacks was now going to keep us safe – but let's not digress into reason). We had Britney Spears and Ann Coulter to cheerlead the Prez. Men and women in any sort of government-issued uniform became hallowed saints. Our wise and noble leaders, all in their matching lapel pins, sat down at their desks and led the charge to war – war in Afghanistan, war in Iraq, and a hoped-for war in Iran, if they could squeeze it in.

Sure, here and there were clumps of the disaffected, those left-wingers and libertarians who didn't support the Patriot Act, the Iraq invasion, or the general sense that our politicians and thinktankers would kill anyone who stood between them and the oil supplies of the Middle East and Central Asia. But these were not serious people, not people who had TV talk shows and columns in the New York Times. Not people who held high office. Thanks to public education, we all knew that these were just that predictable handful of fringe weirdos, who are probably even now sneaking out back for a cigarette or a few bong rips. The serious, sober-minded folks were out buying little flags to pin on themselves.

Question the war in those days, and many people would just give you a puzzled look, as if asking why they hated the Broncos. "Because they're our enemies!" According to whom? Had Iraq attacked us? "What are you, on their side? You're either with us or against us!" And the countless innocents who would die from the invasion? Probably fans of the other team, the jerks.

Even if you didn't support the war, you should of course "Support the Troops," preferably with a yellow magnet on your car (don't use a sticker, it could scuff the paint). Naturally, they're fighting for us, and it's important to support the home team, don't you know, even if the game itself seems pointless to you. And support them only by keeping them at war, no matter what, for years and years and years, because quitters don't win the championship ring. We need to bring home the gold. For our country, our honor, etc.

And when it comes to politics, the same logic applies. You can choose "your" team – there are two big ones – and then cheer for them, wear their t-shirts, wish harm upon the opposing team, and feel as if something's been accomplished when someone from your team wins a major office. Between the shouting matches at bars and the flaming blog posts, you'll barely notice how truly powerless you are.

Gatto's work reveals many ways government schools are designed to break human beings into mindless, obedient machines. There's the common teacher tactic of insulting and humiliating the kid who acts differently, or asks too many questions. There's the charming custom of begging for permission to carry out basic bodily functions, which many a teacher gleefully denies – and you must have that hall pass so you can show your papers to the hall monitors, proving you have a right to pee.

Possibly most effective is the practice of age-ranked classes. Every child naturally looks to older children and adults as role models. The school denies us this, forcing kids to look to other kids their own age as role models. Everybody strives to be like everybody else, the source of the common teenage lament that "Everybody else dresses this way!" or "Everybody else is going to the party!" After more than a decade of this, we become adults desperate to prove to everyone else that we are just like everyone else. Much character development is also lost in the other direction – older kids never learn the responsibility of looking out for younger kids, the understanding of subject matter that comes from helping to tutor them, or the fulfillment that comes from helping someone smaller and weaker than yourself.

All of this is useful for training obedient subjects who constantly adjust themselves to whatever they are told. When it comes to the martial virtues, however, there's nothing quite like a properly managed team-sports program. Kids can learn loyalty, teamwork, obedience, aggressiveness, and an animosity toward the "enemy" that can be snapped on at will. Some of these may sound virtuous by themselves – but what about the German soldier who remains steadfastly loyal to Hitler, or engages in teamwork by helping operate a concentration camp? Those soldiers were several generations into the Prussian school system on which the American system is based.

Clearly, the individual needs an inner core of principles that he values more highly than the approval of the team, the coaches, and the rest of the school community. Such fierce individualism is at the heart of what it means to be American, and what it means to be human, and it is something government schools will never teach.

June 23, 2009

J. L. Bryan [send him mail] lives in Atlanta. His novel Dominion is free at his website.

A Novel Response to LRC by JL Bryan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/bryan10.html
 
Old June 23rd, 2009 #8
Anne
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I guess the Victorian Industrial based model of public education started off with noble intentions, ie, widespread literacy. Unfortunately, it just became a place to churn out products. In centuries past, if you had money, a scholar/tutor would educate your kids, or you'd hire a governess--IOW, kids were homeschooled.
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Old June 23rd, 2009 #9
Alex Linder
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Anne View Post
I guess the Victorian Industrial based model of public education started off with noble intentions, ie, widespread literacy. Unfortunately, it just became a place to churn out products. In centuries past, if you had money, a scholar/tutor would educate your kids, or you'd hire a governess--IOW, kids were homeschooled.
Not Victorian. Prussian. Aimed to deny intellectual education to all but the top one percent. Everybody else a cog or enforcer. This is the model the American government school system is based on. The solution is to get rid of it. Which is, not coincidentally, exactly what the government needs to do in every other area - dissolve itself.
 
Old August 22nd, 2009 #10
Alex Linder
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[section of Gary North article]

PARENTS SURRENDER CONTROL

At some point, parents surrender control over the content of their children's education. Some parents hold out longer than others.

Normally this takes place when the child reaches the age of six. Compulsory attendance laws take over. The parent must either send the child to a tax-funded school that his taxes pay for, or send him to a private school, or educate the child at home.

The first decision is easy and uncontroversial. The second is expensive in terms of money. The third is expensive in terms of the mother's time. If she works outside the home, she must quit in order to stay home and teach her children.

The father bows out at this point. He is only rarely involved in the education of his children. Farmers were the last to surrender this freedom in the late 19th century. Only Old Order Amish fathers still teach their sons today, at least after the sons graduate from the eighth grade. The states allow them to go home at this age. It took a Supreme Court case to give the Old Order Amish this exemption. ("Wisconsin v. Yoder," 1972).

The second decision – putting the child into a private school – is rarely resorted to. The parents assume that the school system is trustworthy, at the prevailing price. The parents at this point surrender to the New York City-based textbook publishing companies.

This is where New York and Washington take control over the inheritance. The goal is simple: to shape the agenda of the children. If they can do this, they gain the inheritance. The money flows down government-approved channels.

For over a century, they have gained this inheritance. This is by far the longest-term plan that the New York/Washington axis has – the true axis of evil.

In Great Britain, it is one city: London. In France, it is one: Paris. In Germany, it is one: Berlin. In Japan it is one: Tokyo. In Russia, it is one: Moscow.

This system has led to the so-far unbreakable control over the West by bureaucrats. The heirs cannot think apart from a series of slogans. These slogans place limits on the terms of political discourse. These limits channel the forces of politics down approved paths. The debates take place within a framework that does not threaten the Powers That Be. It allows different factions of these powers to gain temporary control.

Let us consider a few of the more widespread slogans. These are inculcated in the textbooks, the state-accredited classrooms, and the media.

1. FDR saved capitalism from itself.
2. It is better to have a little inflation than a depression.
3. Deficits don't matter.
4. We owe it to ourselves.
5. Society's great complexity requires government planning.
6. If the government did not take action, poor people would starve.
7. Society needs a government-supplied safety net.
8. The U.S. Supreme Court has the final say.
9. The solution is more education.
10. Everybody deserves. . . .
11. Everyone should pay his fair share.
12. Criminals should pay their debt to society.
13. There oughta be a law.

Not one of these is true. All are either actively promoted by the public or at least grudgingly accepted.

The conservatives love this one. "Criminals should pay their debt to society." This is the first judicial step toward tyranny. It denies justice to the victim. It substitutes the State for the victim. The injured party is not the victim; rather, it is the State. The State therefore must tax the injured party to incarcerate the criminal.

Think "disinheritance of the victim."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north749.html
 
Old August 28th, 2009 #11
Alex Linder
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[Anyone who gets control of the federal government can force his lies into the textbook. So it is increasingly with jewish atrocity fabrications like the 'holocaust.' The following article shows the kind of garbage your kid is immersed in if you send him to a government school.]

Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission established

08/27/09

Governor signs bill with Houston survivors, HMH leadership and co-sponsors
Gov. Rick Perry, on Aug. 18, ceremonially signed Senate Bill 482, establishing the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission. The legislation, authored by Sens. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, and Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, and sponsored in the House by Reps. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, and Ellen Cohen, D-Houston, sought to ensure broader and deeper understanding regarding the Holocaust and other genocides of the 20th century.

SB 482 creates an unpaid, 18-member commission to help ensure that educators in Texas have the guidance and resources necessary to teach children the lessons of the Holocaust and other contemporary genocides. Of the commission’s members, 15 will be appointed collectively by the governor, lieutenant governor and House speaker. The other three members will be commissioner of education, commissioner of higher education and executive director of the Texas Veterans Commission acting as ex officio members.

The bill was initiated and backed by Holocaust Museum Houston and was passed unanimously by both the Texas House of Representatives and Texas Senate. The legislation takes effect Sept. 1, 2009. The new commission will work with organizations, agencies, museums, survivors and liberators to provide information and experiences, as well as to coordinate memorial events in the state. In addition, it will give schools and organizations in smaller communities access to resources and information about the Holocaust and genocide that otherwise might not be available.

Houstonians in attendance for the signing ceremony included HMH Executive Director Susan Myers; former HMH Chairman Peter Berkowitz; Holocaust survivors Chaja Verveer, president of Child Survivors of the Holocaust-Houston; and Ruth Steinfeld, president of the Houston Council of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. Austin resident Gregg Philipson, a member of HMH’s advisory board, also was present. After signing the bill, the governor gave the special commemorative pen to Steinfeld.

“As a state and nation, we are compelled to prevent future episodes of genocide and oppression by casting the light of truth on their history and educating our citizens on the circumstances that allow their occurrence. Ultimately, that truth and the willingness to defend the vulnerable among us will lead to greater justice. I believe this bill is an important statement of the values we hold dear in this state – those of respecting human life and valuing freedom for all men and women,” Perry said.

“As a child of Holocaust survivors, I have lived the lessons of that horrific event all my life, but there are generations of people who have no access to the lessons and teachings of this historic tragedy. The intolerance of that period remains a contemporary issue today that young people need to learn about. It is my hope that this legislation will help provide the information necessary to ensure that we never forget,” Sen. Shapiro said.

Sen. Ellis said, “I am very proud to have authored this bill with my good friend Sen. Shapiro. We must all stand up and recognize that genocide continues to take place all over the world. Sixty-four years ago, it was Eastern Europe. Today, it is Darfur. The Holocaust and Genocide Commission is Texas’ effort to ensure that our schools and communities have the resources they need to teach our kids and neighbors to do what is morally right when faced with such atrocities.”

Rep. Ellen Cohen said, “This bill means that all communities, and particularly rural areas across Texas, will have the opportunity to learn about what can happen if good people do not stand up to be counted. It will help educate young people, who will be the future leaders of their chamber of commerce, school board or Girl Scout troop. That, while we may take exception to the views of others, we can and must do so in a respectful and civil manner.”

Texas now will join 12 other states that have established similar councils or commissions. The idea for the Texas commission was supported by other museums in the state, including the Dallas Holocaust Museum/Center for Education & Tolerance, El Paso Holocaust Museum and Holocaust Memorial Museum of San Antonio.
 
Old October 12th, 2009 #12
Alex Linder
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It’s a Fork, It’s a Spoon, It’s a ... Weapon?
Mustafah Abdulaziz for The New York Times

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Zachary Christie with his mother, Debbie, his father, Curtis, and the Cub Scout utensil that got him suspended from school.

By IAN URBINA
Published: October 11, 2009

NEWARK, Del. — Finding character witnesses when you are 6 years old is not easy. But there was Zachary Christie last week at a school disciplinary committee hearing with his karate instructor and his mother’s fiancé by his side to vouch for him.

Zachary’s offense? Taking a camping utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. He was so excited about recently joining the Cub Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch. School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary was suspended and now faces 45 days in the district’s reform school.

“It just seems unfair,” Zachary said, pausing as he practiced writing lower-case letters with his mother, who is home-schooling him while the family tries to overturn his punishment.

Spurred in part by the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings, many school districts around the country adopted zero-tolerance policies on the possession of weapons on school grounds. More recently, there has been growing debate over whether the policies have gone too far.

But, based on the code of conduct for the Christina School District, where Zachary is a first grader, school officials had no choice. They had to suspend him because, “regardless of possessor’s intent,” knives are banned.

But the question on the minds of residents here is: Why do school officials not have more discretion in such cases?

“Zachary wears a suit and tie some days to school by his own choice because he takes school so seriously,” said Debbie Christie, Zachary’s mother, who started a Web site, helpzachary.com, in hopes of recruiting supporters to pressure the local school board at its next open meeting on Tuesday. “He is not some sort of threat to his classmates.”

Still, some school administrators argue that it is difficult to distinguish innocent pranks and mistakes from more serious threats, and that the policies must be strict to protect students.

“There is no parent who wants to get a phone call where they hear that their child no longer has two good seeing eyes because there was a scuffle and someone pulled out a knife,” said George Evans, the president of the Christina district’s school board. He defended the decision, but added that the board might adjust the rules when it comes to younger children like Zachary.

Critics contend that zero-tolerance policies like those in the Christina district have led to sharp increases in suspensions and expulsions, often putting children on the streets or in other places where their behavior only worsens, and that the policies undermine the ability of school officials to use common sense in handling minor infractions.

For Delaware, Zachary’s case is especially frustrating because last year state lawmakers tried to make disciplinary rules more flexible by giving local boards authority to, “on a case-by-case basis, modify the terms of the expulsion.”

The law was introduced after a third-grade girl was expelled for a year because her grandmother had sent a birthday cake to school, along with a knife to cut it. The teacher called the principal — but not before using the knife to cut and serve the cake.

In Zachary’s case, the state’s new law did not help because it mentions only expulsion and does not explicitly address suspensions. A revised law is being drafted to include suspensions.

“We didn’t want our son becoming the poster child for this,” Ms. Christie said, “but this is out of control.”

In a letter to the district’s disciplinary committee, State Representative Teresa L. Schooley, Democrat of Newark, wrote, “I am asking each of you to consider the situation, get all the facts, find out about Zach and his family and then act with common sense for the well-being of this child.”

Education experts say that zero-tolerance policies initially allowed authorities more leeway in punishing students, but were applied in a discriminatory fashion. Many studies indicate that African-Americans were several times more likely to be suspended or expelled than other students for the same offenses.

“The result of those studies is that more school districts have removed discretion in applying the disciplinary policies to avoid criticism of being biased,” said Ronnie Casella, an associate professor of education at Central Connecticut State University who has written about school violence. He added that there is no evidence that zero-tolerance policies make schools safer.

Other school districts are also trying to address problems they say have stemmed in part from overly strict zero-tolerance policies.

In Baltimore, around 10,000 students, about 12 percent of the city’s enrollment, were suspended during the 2006-7 school year, mostly for disruption and insubordination, according to a report by the Open Society Institute-Baltimore. School officials there are rewriting the disciplinary code, to route students to counseling rather than suspension.

In Milwaukee, where school officials reported that 40 percent of ninth graders had been suspended at least once in the 2006-7 school year, the superintendent has encouraged teachers not to overreact to student misconduct.

“Something has to change,” said Dodi Herbert, whose 13-year old son, Kyle, was suspended in May and ordered to attend the Christina district’s reform school for 45 days after another student dropped a pocket knife in his lap. School officials declined to comment on the case for reasons of privacy.

Ms. Herbert, who said her son was a straight-A student, has since been home-schooling him instead of sending him to the reform school.

The Christina school district attracted similar controversy in 2007 when it expelled a seventh-grade girl who had used a utility knife to cut windows out of a paper house for a class project.

Charles P. Ewing, a professor of law and psychology at the University at Buffalo Law School who has written about school safety issues, said he favored a strict zero-tolerance approach.

“There are still serious threats every day in schools,” Dr. Ewing said, adding that giving school officials discretion holds the potential for discrimination and requires the kind of threat assessments that only law enforcement is equipped to make.

In the 2005-6 school year, 86 percent of public schools reported at least one violent crime, theft or other crime, according to the most recent federal survey.

And yet, federal studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and another by the Department of Justice show that the rate of school-related homicides and nonfatal violence has fallen over most of the past decade.

Educational experts say the decline is less a result of zero-tolerance policies than of other programs like peer mediation, student support groups and adult mentorships, as well as an overall decrease in all forms of crime.

For Zachary, it is not school violence that has left him reluctant to return to classes.

“I just think the other kids may tease me for being in trouble,” he said, pausing before adding, “but I think the rules are what is wrong, not me.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/ed...line.html?_r=1
 
Old October 14th, 2009 #13
Nick Apleece
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It's all fun and games until someone gets Sporked to death.
 
Old October 18th, 2009 #14
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[The state does not want any non-state-preferred belief, whether about religion or anything else. The point of public schools is to tax-enslave the parents in order to mentally-enslave the children.]

Secretary of Education Robert Reich: "If parents can control every aspect of the kids’ education, shield them from exposure to things that the parents deem sinful or objectionable, screen in only things which accord with their convictions, and not allow them exposure to the world of democracy, well the children grow up then basically in the image of their parents, servile to their own parents’ beliefs."

http://www.chalcedon.edu/blog/2007_0...01478165939969
 
Old November 20th, 2009 #15
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How Did We Get Into This Mess?

by James Ostrowski

[Note: This is the introduction to Government Schools Are Bad for Your Kids]

“Socialists, who were very active in the public school movement, began operating covertly in secret cells in America as early as 1829, before the word socialism was even invented.”

~ Samuel L. Blumenthal [1]

A quick history lesson

This isn’t a history book. It is a book about why you should take your kids out of government schools. Yet, misconceptions about history may discourage some readers from fairly considering the evidence and arguments that are to follow. What I ask is that you keep an open mind. Put your preconceptions aside and take a fresh look at this important subject. That will be easier to do after a brief review of the origins and nature of the government school as we know it today.

Were government schools established because private society and families refused to educate the children, resulting in lifelong ignorance and illiteracy? Were the motives of the reformers pure, selfless and concerned only with the well-being of the children? Surely, after these reforms were in place, school attendance rose, illiteracy disappeared and the quality of education vastly improved.

None of those things happened!

Contrary to myth, government schools were not immaculately conceived. The common mindset with respect to this or that government program is that it always existed and must always exist or the end of the world would be nigh. However, government schools did not always exist. Before compulsory, tax-supported government schools became the norm around 1890, American society had survived and thrived without them for over 200 years [2] while creating one of the most successful and literate societies in human history. The United States was well on its way to surpassing prior world leader Great Britain in per capita GDP before even half of its states adopted compulsory education. In fact, as late as 1900, when the United States had unquestionably become a world power, only “10 percent of teenagers were enrolled in high school,” [3] and just six percent graduated. [4]

James Tooley, a researcher who has studied the shift from private to government schools worldwide, writes:

“A broad range of evidence from Victorian England and Wales and nineteenth century America shows that near-universal schooling was achieved before the state intervened in education. The evidence suggests that the impact was to curb what was already flourishing―so much so that the picture of education in this and previous centuries seems far bleaker than it would have been had the private alternative not been suppressed and supplanted.” [5]

In sharp contrast, today in Western countries with compulsory free schooling, as much as twenty percent of the population is functionally illiterate. Schooling may be universal; education is not. [6] Even universal schooling is a myth. As many as ten percent of government students are absent on the average day, more than twice the rate of private school students. [7]

If government schools were not founded on necessity, what was their genesis? There were a number of political, religious and ideological forces behind the institution of compulsory government schools. Notably, none included the widespread failure of private schools and families to educate children.

Here is a quick review of the main historical roots of compulsory government schools in the Western World. It starts with Martin Luther who urged the German princes to “compel the people to send their children to school” in 1524, because “we are warring with the devil.” [8] Historian Murray Rothbard explains:

“The Reformers advocated compulsory education for all as a means of inculcating the entire population with their particular religious views, as an indispensable aid in effective ‘war with the devil’ and the devil's agents. For Luther, these agents constituted a numerous legion: not only Jews, Catholics, and infidels, but also all other Protestant sects. Luther's political ideal was an absolute State guided by Lutheran principles and ministers. The fundamental principle was that the Bible, as interpreted by Luther, was the sole guide in all things. He argued that the Mosaic code awarded to false prophets the death penalty, and that it is the duty of the State to carry out the will of God. The State's duty is to force those whom the Lutheran Church excommunicates to be converted back into the fold. There is no salvation outside the Lutheran Church, and it is not only the duty of the State to compel all to be Lutherans, but its sole object. Such was the goal of the initial force behind the first compulsory school system in the Western world, and such was the spirit that was to animate the system.”

John Calvin was the second major religious figure to endorse compulsory schooling. Like Luther, he did so to spread his religious doctrine by government force. And like Luther, he offered the political authorities this inducement: his schools would preach “the duty of obedience to rulers.” [9] That must have been music to the ears of the political authorities of the time.

Next comes Prussia. Under Luther’s influence, the militaristic and authoritarian Prussians pioneered compulsory education in Europe. [10] Rothbard writes,

“Modern Prussian despotism emerged as a direct result of the disastrous defeat inflicted by Napoleon. In 1807, the Prussian nation began to reorganize and gird itself for future victories. Under King Frederick William III, the absolute State was greatly strengthened. His famous minister, von Stein, began by abolishing the semi-religious private schools, and placing all education directly under the Minister of the Interior. In 1810, the ministry decreed the necessity of State examination and certification of all teachers. In 1812, the school graduation examination was revived as a necessary requirement for the child's departure from the state school, and an elaborate system of bureaucrats to supervise the schools was established in the country and the towns. It is also interesting that it was this reorganized system that first began to promote the new teaching philosophy of Pestalozzi, who was one of the early proponents of ‘progressive education.’ Hand in hand with the compulsory school system went a revival and great extension of the army, and in particular the institution of universal compulsory military service.”

The American “reformers” would later look to Prussia as a model for an American system. Professor Richard M. Ebeling summarizes how the Prussian model lives on today:

“[M]odern, universal compulsory education has its origin in the 19th century Prussian idea that it is the duty and responsibility of the state to indoctrinate each new generation of children into being good, obedient subjects who will be loyal and subservient to political authority and to the legitimacy of the political order. Young minds are to be filled with a certain set of ideas that reflect the vision of the official state educators concerning ‘proper behavior’ and ‘good citizenship.’

“Over the generations, the content of what proper behavior and good citizenship means has changed, with changes in prevailing political and cultural currents in America, but the fact remains that the essence of the system was designed with that purpose in mind, and still operates on that basis. The parent is viewed as a backward and harmful influence in the formative years of the child’s upbringing, an influence that must be corrected for and replaced by the ‘enlightened’ professional teacher who has been trained, appointed and funded by the state. The public school, therefore, is a ‘reeducation camp’ in which the child is to be remade in the proper ‘politically correct’ image.” [11]

Compulsory education in America also came in through religious machinations. Scholar Diane Ravitch describes the pro-government school forces:

“The reformers launched a campaign known as the common school movement from about 1830–1860. Its leaders were mainly aligned with the Whig Party and with organized Protestant religions. Neither Catholics nor Jacksonian Democrats liked the centralization aspects of this movement. . . . The common school movement shared the rhetoric and fervor of evangelical Protestantism; many of its leaders were ordained Protestant ministers who saw themselves as men with a mission.” [12]

Part of the mission was anti-Catholicism. One of the leading promoters of government schools “inspired anti-Catholic riots” in Baltimore. [13] “The Nativists . . . believed that foreigners and especially Catholics were a threat to the American tradition of liberty.” [14] Ravitch writes that the reformers were “eager to prevent Catholics from obtaining any public funding for their schools and require the use of the Protestant Bible in the public schools.” [15] The Protestant political majority was concerned that Catholics were being educated in their own religious schools. Thus, states began to subsidize Protestant schools with tax dollars. The “mission” was finally accomplished when the “evangelical Protestants prevailed in their efforts to exclude Catholic schools from any participation in public funding. . . . the leaders openly and boastfully made anti-Catholicism the dominant theme of their attacks.” [16]

Later of course, the Protestants would be hoisted by their own petard when the Supreme Court banned prayer from the government schools in 1963. Those who live by politics shall perish by it. Just as Edward Ross had predicted in the 19th century: “While the priest is leaving the civil service, the schoolmaster is coming in. As the state shakes itself loose from the church, it reaches out for the school.” [17]

Murray Rothbard agrees with Ravitch:

“It was the desire of the Anglo-Saxon majority to tame, channel, and restructure the immigrants, and in particular to smash the parochial school system of the Catholics, that formed the major impetus for educational ‘reform.’” [18]

Catholics of course stubbornly retained their own school system in response to the Protestants. So successful were these schools that states started to ban them. They survived this second concerted attack by the nativists including the Ku Klux Klan when the Supreme Court in 1925 held that parents had the right to send their children to private schools. [19]

For 150 years, subsistence-wage nuns, brothers and priests allowed the Catholic schools to compete by keeping tuition low. However, because of a sharp decline in their numbers, and their replacement by lay teachers paid at market rates, the government school system is finally beginning to realize its original mission: to knock off Catholic schools. The religious orders fought the good fight for 150 years. Without a major change in policy that levels the playing field, Catholic schools, with one-half of all private school students, will soon be in deep, deep trouble. Projecting out current trends, they will dwindle down to a few schools for the children of bankers, corporate executives and doctors that will hardly deserve the name “Catholic” which means universal.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/ostrowski/ostrowski93.1.html
 
Old June 20th, 2010 #16
Alex Linder
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John Taylor Gatto - "Against School"
http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm
 
Old April 9th, 2012 #17
Eire
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I came here because I thought that Alex would be strong in the homeschool movement.
He is educated and has good ideas and so many resources for Whites. I read a post by him a while ago that said he was interested in writing a White homeschool curriculum. I am curious as to what is the delay. That was years ago.
 
Old November 9th, 2013 #18
Alex Linder
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Valentines? Valentines?
Notes on the Pussification of America

By Fred Reed

October 29, 2013

It is time to get women out of the schooling of boys. It is way past time. Women in our feminized classrooms are consigning generations of our sons to years of misery and diminished futures. The evidence is everywhere. Few dare notice it.

The feminization is real. More than seventy-five percent of teachers are women; in New York state, over ninety percent of elementary school teachers are women; in the US, over seventy percent of psychologists are women, with (sez me) the rest being doubtful. This is feminization with fangs.

I have just read Back to Normal: Why Ordinary Childhood Behavior Is Mistaken for ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, and Autism Spectrum Disorder, by a psychologist, Enrico Gnaulati, who works with children alleged to have psychological problems in school, usually meaning boys. I decline to recommend it because of its psychobabble, its tendency to discover the obvious at great length, and its Genderallly Correct pronouns, which will grate on the literate. (I mean constructions resembling “If a student comes in, tell him or her that he or she should put his or her books in his or her locker”) However, a serious interest in the subject justifies slogging through the prose. (The statistics above are from the book.)

The relevent content is that women are making school hell for boys, that they have turned normal boyish behavior, such as enjoyment of rough-housing, into psychiatric “personality disorders.” They are doping boys up, forcing them into behavior utterly alien to them, and sending them to psychiatrists if they donīt conform to standards of behavior suited to girls. The result is that boy children hate school and do poorly (despite, as Gnaulati, says, having higher IQs). This is no secret for anyone paying attention, but Gnaulati makes it explicit.

As a galling example he cites one Robert, an adolescent responding badly to classes and therefore suspected by his teacher of having a “personality disorder.” From the book:

“She required all forty students in the class to design Valentine’s Day cards for each other. She was emphatic about wanting them personalized. Names had to be spelled correctly and compliments written up genuinely.”

Valentines? This was eight-grade English. Students, who by then once knew grammar cold, should be reading literature or learning to write coherently. In my eighth-grade class, we read Julius Caesar: “I want the men around me to be fat, healthy-looking men who sleep at night.” Valentines? Compliments?

This, the author assures the reader, did not take place in an asylum for the mildly retarded, but in one of the ten best high-schools in California. What must the rest be like?

Of course Robert was having trouble putting up with the girly drivel, this feminized ooze, devoid of academic content. ”Oooooh! Letīs have a warm, emotional bonding experience.”

This is why women should not be allowed within fifty feet of a school where boys are taught. A boy, especially a bright one, will want to drop out of school through the nearest window, run screaming to a recruiting office for the French Foreign Legion, anything to get away from inane, vapid, and insubstantial feel-good compulsory niceness inflicted by some low-wattage ed-school grad.

Get these ditz-rabbits away from our sons. Let us have separate schools for the sexes, with each being taught by teachers of the same sex. I do not presume to tell women what they should teach girls—astrophysics, valentine design with sincere compliments, whatever they like. Just stay away from the boys.

The thrust of current social propaganda is that the sexes are identical in all important respects. They are not. The differences are great. It is time we stopped pretending otherwise.

First: By their nature, females are far more interested in social relationships than in academic substance. If you are a man, ask yourself how often you have serious intellectual discussions of politics, science, history, or society with women as compared to men. Seldom. Degrees and exceptions, yes. Stiil, seldom.

Second: Women are totalitarian. Men are happy to let boys be boys and girls be girls. Women want all children to be girls. In school this means emphasizing diligence—neat homework done on time, no matter how silly or academically vacuous—over performance, meaning material learned. Women favor docility, orderliness, cooperation in groups, not making waves, niceness and comity. For boys this is asphyxiating.

If women wanted to start a bar for women only, men would not care. If men want a private club in which to enjoy male company, women go explode in fury. Totalitarian.

In common with the keepers of the Russian gulag, women are more than willing to drug little boys into submission. There is a Stalinist mercilessness in this, a complete lack of understanding of, or interest in, what boys are. (“Ve haff vays of making you….”)

Third: Women prefer security to freedom, males freedom to security. In politics, this has ominous implications for civil liberties. In the schools this means that wrestling and dodge ball are violence, that tag might lead to a fall and scraped knees, that a little boy who draws a soldier with a rifle is a dangerous psychopath in the making. This is hysteria.

(Stray thought: If I wanted to create a murderous psycho, I would Ritalinate him into a little speed freak, repress his every instinct, and humiliate him by having the police drag him away. It would work like a charm. In his trial, his defense would be justifiable sociopathy.)

Fourth: “Therapy.” This disguised witchcraft is very much a subset of the female fascination with emotional relations. It allows them to talk endlessly about their feelings. Men would rather be crucified. Thus everything becomes a “disorder.” Among these absurdities are things ilke Intermittent Explosive Disorder (appropriately, IED), and Temper Irregulation Disorder. These disorders have only been discovered since women took over the schools.

The list could go on. Boys, like men, are competitive, physically and intellectually, delighted to play hours of intensely competitive pick-up basketball. Women in the schools prefer a cooperative group game led by a caring adult. What a horror.

Even the ways in which men get along with each other differ sharply from the female approach. (Thus the desire for venues for men only.) For example, when I once broke a leg in a sky-diving accident, the women in the news room were sympathetic and concerned. At a Special Forces party I attended, there was laughter and sarcasm. “Goddam dumbass Marine canīt even do a PLF right. (Parachute landing fall). Hey, letīs break his other leg.” Translated from the male, this meant (a) that they accepted me as one of them, and (b) that to them a broken leg was not a tragedy but an inconvenience. Which it is.

Fifth: In the United States, women simply dislike men. Saying this causes eruptions of denials. If you believe these, Iīd like you to meet my friend Daisy Lou the Tooth Fairy. Check the ranting of feminists, the endless portrayal on television of men as fools and swine, the punitive political correctness and the silly anti-rape fantasies on campus.

In the schools this hostility takes the form of the passive aggression behind the predatory niceness. “Weīre boring him to death, keeping him miseable, and sending him for psychiatric reprogramming because we care so much about him.” Uh, yeah.

Outside of the US, fewer women buy this. My stepdaughter Natalia, Mexican, is working on a degree in clinical psychology, and sees students—read “boys”—sent to her by teachers to determine whether they have ADHD. “They donīt have ADHS,” she says. “Theyīre bored.”

Finally: Women display a pedestrian practicality alien to males. If a woman needs to use a computer, she will learn to do it, and do it well. She wonīt learn assembly-language programming for the pure joy of it. She can drive a car perfectly well, but has no notion of what a cam lobe is or the difference between disk and drum brakes. This is why men invent things, and women seldom do.

Boys schools, male teachers.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/10/f...ation-of-boys/
 
Old November 9th, 2013 #19
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More on Schools
Opinions from the Cretaceous

By Fred Reed

November 7, 2013

Last week I fulminated about the calamitous effects of the feminization of the schools, of turning the school into an emotional infantile crčche aimed at the fundamentally female goals of psychological conditioning, conformity, and totalitarian niceness. A lot of mail arrived, pro and con. Since schooling is of importance to the US, perhaps it is worth looking at.

Predictably, I was accused of hating women. Actually it is not women that I find objectionable, but American women, who are a small part of the world’s women.

My saying “American women” is of course a wild generalization subject to degrees, exceptions, and qualifications. A more sober statement would be something like this: There are enough American women overtly hostile to men, enough snarling feminists teaching semiliterate misandry in academic departs of sexism (Women’s Studies), enough little boys being drugged at female recommendation, enough repression of normal behavior of small boys by female teachers, enough bias against men in divorce courts, enough depiction of men as fools and knaves by females in the media, that it seems to me wise to avoid the species. I mean none of this to apply to women to whom it does not apply.

Now, if I were the only one who thought the foregoing, I would dismiss myself as a crank expat living in Mexico. Among American men however there is a great deal of agreement if my personal experience, countless websites, and a lot of email are any indication. It matters, methinks, that so much very real ill will exists between so many men and women.

Further, my objection was not to female teachers per se, but to the current crop of feminists who donīt like boys, or understand them, or want to, and are ruining them. All of my teachers in grade school, and perhaps half in high school, were women. They were fine. The reason was that they accepted the masculine view that schools existed to teach content. They did: first arithmetic and then math, and history, English grammar and composition, literature, Latin, and so on. Bless them.

What I dislike is the feminized, therapeutic view of schools as places not to teach anything but to engage in Pavlovian conditioning of kids to female norms of syrupy goodness, non-violence (tag, dodge ball, and wrestling) docility, conformity, and warm interpersonal glop. Learning anything gets short shrift.

An examination of the intellectual qualifications of teachers, such as rankings against those in other fields on the Graduate Record Exams, will show them to be at the bottom. These are averages, of course, and there are exceptions. Still, people of low voltage do not naturally have much interest in academics. They easily become prey to a pedagogy focusing on “interpersonal relations.”

The effects show. Maybe fifteen years ago I went into a middle school in mostly white, moderately upscale Arlington, Virginia, and found on the wall a studentīs project celebrating the contributions of Italians to science—specifically those of of Enrico Fermi to, so help me, “nucler physicts.” On the wall. Without correction. I have seen other examples.

These malfeasances spring from favoring self-esteem (when I am dictator I will have anyone who uses that word hanged) over knowledge. It is not a masculine approach. Nor will it produce the thoughtful, intellectually competent citizenry the country desperately needs.

In a Marine Corps day room I once saw a coffee mug inscribed, “To err is human, to forgive divine. Neither of which is Marine Corps policy.” (Why did that come to mind, I wonder?)

Something strange is happening in the United States. A Canadian friend recently said, “I can remember when Americans weren’t afraid of everything.” Just so. Donīt run on the playground because you might fall. Donīt roughhouse because you might get a bruise. Don’t go outside at high noon because you might get skin cancer. Don’t swim after eating, because you might get a cramp. If a child draws a soldier, call a SWAT team because he is a murderous psychopath. Don’t ride a bicycle without a helmet. Fill in the deep end of the pool because someone might drown. Supervise everything. Control everything. Fear everything.

If these are not the neurotic fears of women and capons, please tell me what they are. Such run the schools. They make policy.

Is everything so dangerous? In my first eighteen years, three kids I knew died—one in kindergarten of appendicitis and two in high school, one of cancer and the other a suicide, probably because of hideous sebaceous acne over most of his body. Deaths by dodge ball: 0. By falling down while running: 0. By murderous seven-year-old psychopaths: 0.

Yes, I realize that the schools face many other problems, chief among them that much of the country no longer takes schooling seriously. Pious slogans like No Child Left Behind of course mean No Child Allowed Ahead. Discipline a child and his parents sue. Suspend serious troublemakers and you face charges of racial profiling. Disguising the gap in performance between ethnicities takes precedence of teaching. The stupidest fad is grading teachers on how well their students test, it being impossible to get a class of unintelligent, misbehaving, culturally uninterested students to perform well.

I wonder whether I and some of my correspondents are not talking past each other. Being in my late sixties, I remember a world that any but the most antediluvian of current teachers cannot. It may be that therapy, drugging, and fear of everything have been around so long now that they are thought normal. Maybe even the idea of schooling as I knew it no longer exists except among ancients. “Nucler physicts”? No teacher in my sixth-grade school (Athens, Alabama) would have tolerated that for a moment. I suppose, though, that if I objected to illiterate spelling today, I would be told of the danger to the childīs self-esteem.

When my daughters were in high-school some fifteen years ago, a history teacher (I think it was) was warned to stop correcting her studentsī grammar: That was for the English teacher to do. When I noticed that their science handouts had common chemical terms badly misspelled, I contemplated going to the school and asking why the hell they had teachers of such surpassing incompetence. Sand against the tide. It would have been racist, and my daughter would have paid the price.

And when my eldest graduated, all of the academic awards went to girls. Since girls have always been diligent and made good grades, it follows that either boys have become less intelligent, or that they have been pushed under by a hostile feminocracy. I am not imagining this. It is documentable. There will be a price for this.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/11/f...ment-feminism/
 
Old November 22nd, 2013 #20
Alex Linder
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on John Dewey
http://www.improve-education.org/id42.html
 
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