92 replies to this topic

[Mangala]

Without vouchers, most public high school students who live in the lower income school districts in Los Angeles are not getting access to the core courses in the public education system unless they enroll in two year college. Because of this fact, the reality is that the students in those lower income public school districts, in general, are not getting an equal opportunity under the current system.

But you speak of ignoring the schools from which these kids go to in the first place. You are talking about destroying a bad public high school, then forcing parents to choose the best education (the local private school) and thus turning the private school into an overloaded virtual public school. Access will still be limited, and thus private schools will want to raise prices to the point that still only the wealthy parents can send their children off to better education.

I do know of some lower income single parent families who have prioritized their family budget so that they can provide a private education for their children.

I am sure such success stories can be found for some children. I myself have experienced such an instance. My parents borrowed money to put me through a private school so I would not have to "deal" with the low academic standards of the local public school. But these instances are still indepedent, and the whole of the uneducated will not be able to fit into a private school without getting rid of the element that makes the school so efficient, the fact that it is private.

Not every family can "prioritize" (whatever that means) and if they could (with these vouchers) private schools would become public schools with a private label, and would thus descend into inner-city school decay. Thats why education and capitalism do not mix: inflation.

I must admit this was a surprise (because she did all the work and I just said a few words), but it was also very gratifying.

Well gladly some make it through. Also vouchers would not solve everything anyway, even if they worked. How would a child succeed in life if he went to a school with high academic standards but came home only to not be motivated to do his schoolwork. The home is also a place where education needs to be nurtured. Do you know why private schools do so well? Either they have to be more authoritarian, or they need to have a higher teacher to student ratio. Which means dollar signs. Private schools are only good because they have a smaller amount of children paying a higher amount of money. Vouchers only turn private aducation public by letting the goevrnment pay for education.

Private schools are businesses and will raise their prices to deal with the oevrwhelming demand. Any smart school headmaster would, as I know I would to give my kids the best education.

Why would the class size of the private schools increase if the private schools would be getting "tons of money from the federal government"?

Because this money would simply eventually turn into public funds turning private into public. The same amount of money would go to each kids whether they attend a private school or a public, to make sure that things are economical no matter who is running the school. Vouchers run on bad logic. Private schools are good, I want to attend a private school. But they are only good because they make sure YOU cannot get in.

If you reduce cost of operaton Public schools will both need less money and waste less money and if the alternatives establish methods that imrove efficiencies then these can be adpted into the Public School system to improve cost effectiveness. That is one advantage of competition and adaptation to methods develope in localized social experiments with regional cultural input.

But if private schools are dumbed down with my previous statement given, public schools will go up, meaning that you just want to get rid of private education altogther, letting the government pay for virtually all education. So really you are just extending the public problem to make way for more students over the years. The problem is that more students have come to public schools without these schools having the money to expand.

Where will the wealthy go if they know their children are receiving the same amount of education as all others? How will they know their money is being put to use? Vouchers just show a sense of socialism without the planning in my opnion by balancing out the rich and the poor. So are you saying that the rich shoudl not receive a better education than the poor?

Public schools will only receive more money to spend if money is not diverted away from them to use for vouchers, or if taxes are increased, putting more pressure on already poor people.

[thefirstimmortal]

I am sure such success stories can be found for some children. I myself have experienced such an instance. My parents borrowed money to put me through a private school so I would not have to "deal" with the low academic standards of the local public school.

But you said that you live in Scarsdale, one of the wealthiest hoods in New York. How bad can the public school system be, and perhaps your parents should move to a less expensive hood, and with the reduced overhead they would not have to borrow for your education.

And if the wealthiest community government cannot create a superior educational product (as evidenced by the fact that you don't want to deal with the public school) what does that say in general about government run schools?

[Lazarus Long]

Mangala do you understand the impact of Federally Mandated Unfunded Programs on local Systems of Education?

These are often defined and order by competing branches of government and operate at cross purposes bleeding resources off for a specific goal while ignoring larger issues of impact on the local communities, particularly inner city communities.

[Mind]

Here is an article on this topic by Walter Williams

"Fiddling Whilst Rome Burns" was my column several weeks ago. It looked at the disastrous state of education in the nation's capitol, where at only one of the city's 19 high schools do as many as 50 percent of its students test as proficient in reading. At no school are 50 percent of the students proficient in math. At 12 of 19 high schools, more than 50 percent of the students test below basic in reading, and at some of those schools it's almost 80 percent. At 15 high schools, over 50 percent test below basic in math. In 12 of them, 70 percent to 99 percent do so.

One of the points I made is that you'll find performances like these in many predominantly black schools across the land, but what seems to be the primary concern of black politicians and civil rights organizations? It's what Sen. Trent Lott has said and whether the Confederate Flag is publicly displayed.

Recent news about the Washington education establishment makes this story even more sickening. According to The Washington Times and D.C. Watch (dcwatch.com), the FBI, IRS, Department of Labor and the D.C. Inspector General's Office have been looking into suspected criminal conduct by officers of the Washington Teachers Union (WTU). While a complete accounting has yet to be done, the FBI's affidavit for a search and seizure warrant reveals that WTU officers converted "well in excess of $2,000,000 in union funds to their personal use by, among other things, (1) charging personal expenses to union-paid credit cards ... (2) writing union checks to themselves; and (3) writing and causing the writing of union checks to persons other than themselves, who then cashed the checks and made the cash proceeds available to union officers."

Among the union-paid purchases of Barbara A. Bullock, recently resigned president, were: a $20,000 mink coat, $500,000 worth of custom-made clothing, $20,000 worth of art and thousands of dollars worth of jewelry. Her union-paid purchases totaled in excess of $1 million.

Then there's James Baxter, WTU treasurer. He received thousands of dollars in direct payments and tens of thousands in American Express charges for restaurants, bars and nightclubs, gas for multiple vehicles, vehicle repairs and maintenance, art, flowers and other purchases.

The affidavit of Katherine L. Andrews', the special agent for the FBI, reports hundreds of thousands of dollars Washington Teachers Union funds embezzled by other union personnel for items ranging from personal household furniture to a $10,000 vacation in the Bahamas and supplying gifts for friends.

While Washington's criminal education establishment robs its teachers, the damage to teachers pales in comparison to the damage to the children of the district. That the undying and unquestionable support that Washington teachers gave to their unions is unwarranted is beyond question. Through educational vouchers, there's opportunity for changes that benefit both teachers, students and taxpayers.

Suppose parents were to receive a $6,000 voucher, that's less than the $10,500 per student expenditure now, for each school-age child? A group of teachers themselves might start their own private school. If the school enrolled 400 students, its revenue would be close to $2.5 million. Schools would emerge that tailored their education programs to differing needs.

Teachers, rather than administrators and union officials, would be in control and set the agenda. Parents would be empowered through choice. Students would get a much better education. Finally, taxpayers would be less burdened. It's a no-brainer that everyone benefits if we can get children out of high-cost, low quality schools into lower-cost, higher-quality schools. The only losers I see are teacher unions and the board of education.

Anyone who defends public education "as is" should be horrified by the shape of inner city schools in America. African Americans (who are the vast majoroty of the population in D.C.) should be leading the revolution...maybe even an armed revolution...to stop the destruction of their younger generation. The Klan could have never concocted such a grand scheme to destroy African Americans. The Education Establishment (mostly socialists, leftists, democrats, Teachers Union Leaders) have taken the place of the Klan and are leading the destruction. THIS CANNOT GO ON. SOMETHING MUST CHANGE. Vouchers, Charters, Homeschooling, privatizing, something, anything, would be better than what is happenning now.

[bobdrake12]

http://images.google...nstein-scan.GIF

Had Albert Einstein graduated from one of the high schools that did not offer the 16 core courses, he would not have been admitted to a number of universities such as Notre Dame no matter what his SAT or grades were; unless, he first took the remaining core courses at another instituion.

Anyone who defends public education "as is" should be horrified by the shape of inner city schools in America.

Mind,

I believe this issue goes way beyond the "inner cities" but also includes the lower income public school districts in general.

This issue is that most of the "rich" that defend the current public educational system don't seem to want to understand that many of the high schools in the lower income areas do not offer the 16 core courses. Thus, "equal opportunity" does not exist within the current system.

One "way out" for the students in those high schools that do not offer the 16 core courses is for them to take their remaining core courses at the two year colleges; otherwise, they will be ill-equiped for college provided that they are even admitted to college. Luckily, in California the tuition for courses offered at the two year colleges is relatively reasonable.

Unfortunately, many high school students don't understand this reality while in high school; thus, are sometimes economically damaged for life because they do not take the core course that aren't offered at their high school.

In discussing this issue with one of the high school teachers out here (after listening to his mantra of how "underpaid he was), he agreed with the problem I addressed but provided no solution other than he as a teacher should be paid more money. With all due respect, this teacher would be considered "rich" compared to most of those lacking a college degree. Unfortunately, this mentality does not just exist with that specific school teacher but manifests itself throught the country. When this issue (core courses not being offered in select high school districts) is brought up, we usually get the "sound of silence" from those that defend that status quo.

Also in discussing this issue with one of my friends, who definitely fits in the lower income bracket; my friend's solution is sending her two children to a private school. Thus, my friend goes without so that her children can get a proper education.

Finally, my wife, who is a minority, was victimized by the current educational system as described above. After we got married, my wife needed to take the pre-requisite courses prior to pursuing her degree. Luckily, my wife received considerable encouragement from her friends and myself, and I am proud to say that she earned her degree in four years while maintaining a full time job in the daytime. Thus, I can speak from personal experience that this current educational system is flawed since the prerequisite courses were required due to the high school education my wife received.


I believe in providing a proper "education" for all people of all economic backgrounds. The current system does not do this for all people. Thus, the current system needs to be corrected to provide an equal opportunity for all students no matter what their economic or ethnic backgrounds are.

Vouchers, Charters, Homeschooling, privatizing, something, anything, would be better than what is happening now.

Mind, have you heard of the term "redlining" as a form of discrimination? Some insurance companies would reportedly draw a red line on a map around the borders of poor neighborhoods and prohibit agents from selling insurance in these areas. The logic was, poor people represented a "moral hazard" for the insurance company. How might this practice relate to our current educational system?


bob

[bobdrake12]

Why would intelligent superior private schools want dirty trash from some inner-city public school?

I believe that the quote shown above is an example of the term "redlining" as a form of discrimination. Specifically offensive to me is the term "dirty trash".

How I see it, some don't want to provide an equal opportunity for a proper education for all Americans (e.g. not providing the 16 core courses in certain public high school districts). This paradigm can be disguised, but it unfortunately is still there.

bob

[bobdrake12]

Is there a dumbing down of America?

If true, could poor curriculums (e.g. ones lacking in mathematics and science) possibly account for this?

Could there be truth to the statement that "public education has become a warm, fuzzy, soft, mushy, touchy-feely experience, where its purpose had become socialization, not learning"?

As along as the "elitists" get their proper education, could they have a vested interest that some others in this country might not be provided with an opportunity to also get a decent education? In other words, if some Americans are not given the opportunity to get a proper education, could the "elitists" be better off since they will be better equipped to get the quality jobs than those who do not have access (or are not encouraged or perhaps even discouraged) to take mathematics and science courses?

Is just throwing more money at education the solution?

Check out the article directly below (as well as the three others following it in this thread) and please let me know your feedback.

Thanks,

bob


http://www.deliberat.../pages/book.htm



PREFACE

Coexistence on this tightly knit earth should be viewed as an existence not only without wars...but also without [the government] telling us how to live, what to say, what to think, what to know, and what not to know. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from a speech given September 11, 1973.

For over a twenty-five-year period the research used in this chronology has been collected from many sources: the United States Department of Education; international agencies; state agencies; the media; concerned educators; parents; legislators, and talented researchers with whom I have worked for at least twenty-five years. In the process of gathering this information two beliefs that most Americans hold in common became clear:

1) If a child can read, write and compute at a reasonably proficient level, he will be able to do just about anything he wishes, enabling him to control his destiny to the extent that God allows (remain free).

2) Providing such basic educational proficiencies is not and should not be an expensive proposition.

Since most Americans believe the second premise-that providing basic educational proficiencies is not and should not be an expensive proposition-it becomes obvious that it is only a radical agenda, the purpose of which is to change values and attitudes (brainwash), that is the costly agenda. In other words, brainwashing by our schools and universities is what is bankrupting our nation and our children's minds.

In 1997 there were 46.4 million public school students. During 1993-1994 (the latest years the statistics were available) the average per pupil expenditure was $6,330.00 in 1996 constant dollars. Multiply the number of students by the per pupil expenditure (using old-fashioned mathematical procedures) for a total K-12 budget per year of $293.7 billion dollars. If one adds the cost of higher education to this figure, one arrives at a total budget per year of over half a trillion dollars. The sorry result of such an incredibly large expenditure-the performance of American students-is discussed on page 12 of Pursuing Excellence-A Study of U.S. Twelfth Grade Mathematics and Science Achievement in International Context: Initial Findings from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study [TIMMS], a report from the U.S. Department of Education (NCES 98-049). Pursuing Excellence reads:

Achievement of Students, Key Points: U. S. twelfth graders scored below the international average and among the lowest of the 21 TIMSS nations in both mathematics and science general knowledge in the final year of secondary school. (p. 24)

Obviously, something is terribly wrong when a $6,330 per pupil expenditure produces such pathetic results. This writer has visited private schools which charge $1,000-per-year in tuition which enjoy superior academic results. Parents of home-schooled children spend a maximum of $1,000-per-year and usually have similar excellent results.

There are many talented and respected researchers and activists who have carefully documented the "weird" activities which have taken place "in the name of education." Any opposition to change agent activities in local schools has invariably been met with cries of "Prove your case, document your statements," etc. "Resisters"-usually parents-have been called every name in the book. Parents have been told for over thirty years, "You're the only parent who has ever complained." The media has been convinced to join in the attack upon common sense views, effectively discrediting the perspective of well-informed citizens. Documentation, when presented, has been ignored and called incomplete. The classic response by the education establishment has been, "You're taking that out of context!"-even when presented with an entire book which uses their own words to detail exactly what the "resisters" are claiming to be true.

The desire by "resisters" to prove their case has been so strong that they have continued to amass-over a thirty- to fifty-year period-what must surely amount to tons of materials containing irrefutable proof, in the education change agents' own words, of deliberate, malicious intent to achieve behavioral changes in students/parents/society which have nothing to do with commonly understood educational objectives. Upon delivery of such proof, "resisters" are consistently met with the "shoot the messenger" stonewalling response by teachers, school boards, superintendents, state and local officials, as well as the supposedly objective institutions of academia and the press.

This resister's book, or collection of research in book form, was put together primarily to satisfy my own need to see the various components which led to the dumbing down of the United States of America assembled in chronological order-in writing. Even I, who had observed these weird activities taking place at all levels of government, was reluctant to accept a malicious intent behind each individual, chronological activity or innovation, unless I could connect it with other, similar activities taking place at other times. This book, which makes such connections, has provided for me a much-needed sense of closure.

The deliberate dumbing down of america is also a book for my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. I want them to know that there were thousands of Americans who may not have died or been shot at in overseas wars, but were shot at in small-town 'wars' at school board meetings, at state legislative hearings on education, and, most importantly, in the media. I want my progeny to know that whatever intellectual and spiritual freedoms to which they may still lay claim were fought for-are a result of-the courageous work of incredible people who dared to tell the truth against all odds.

I want them to know that there will always be hope for freedom if they follow in these people's footsteps; if they cherish the concept of 'free will'; if they believe that human beings are special, not animals, and that they have intellects, souls, and consciences. I want them to know that if the government schools are allowed to teach children K-12 using Pavlovian/Skinnerian animal training methods-which provide tangible rewards only for correct answers-there can be no freedom.

Why? People 'trained'-not educated-by such educational techniques will be fearful of taking principled, sometimes controversial, stands when called for because these people will have been programmed to speak up only if a positive reward or response is forthcoming. The price of freedom has often been paid with pain and loneliness.

In 1971 when I returned to the United States after living in the West Indies for three years, I was shocked to find public education had become a warm, fuzzy, soft, mushy, touchy-feely experience, where its purpose had become socialization, not learning. From that time on, and with the advantage of having two young sons in the public schools, I became involved as a member of a philosophy committee for a school, as an elected school board member, as co-founder of Guardians of Education for Maine (GEM), and finally as a Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) in the U.S. Department of Education during President Ronald Reagan's first term of office. OERI was, and is, the office from which all the controversial national and international educational restructuring has emanated.

Those ten years (1971-1981) changed my life. As an American who had spent many years working abroad, I had experienced traveling in and living in socialist countries. When I returned to the United States I realized that America's transition from a sovereign constitutional republic to a socialist democracy would not come about through warfare (bullets and tanks) but through the implementation and installation of the "system" in all areas of government-federal, state and local. The brainwashing for acceptance of the "system's" control would take place in the school-through indoctrination and the use of behavior modification, which comes under so many labels, the most recent labels being Outcome-Based Education, Skinnerian Mastery Learning or Direct Instruction. In the seventies I and many others waged the war against values clarification, which was later renamed "critical thinking," which regardless of the label-and there are bound to be many more labels on the horizon-is nothing but pure, unadulterated destruction of absolute values of right and wrong upon which stable and free societies depend and upon which our nation was founded.

In 1973 I started this long journey into becoming a "resister," placing the first incriminating piece of paper in my "education" files. That first piece of paper was a purple ditto sheet entitled "All About Me," next to which was a smiley face. It was an open-ended questionnaire beginning with: "My name is _______________." My son brought it home from public school in fourth grade. The questions were highly personal; so much so that they encouraged my son to lie, since he didn't want to "spill the beans" about his mother, father and brother. The purpose of such a questionnaire was to find out the student's state of mind, how he felt, what he liked and disliked, and what his values were. With this knowledge it would be easier for the government school to modify his values and behavior at will-without, of course, the student's knowledge or parents' consent.

That was just the beginning. There was more to come: the new social studies textbook World of Mankind. Published by Follett, this book instructed the teacher how to instill humanistic (no right/no wrong) values in the K-3 students. At the text's suggestion they were encouraged to take little tots for walks in town during which he/she would point out big and small houses, asking the little tots who they thought lived in the houses. Poor or Rich? "What do you think they eat in the big house?...in the little house?" When I complained about this non-educational activity at a school board meeting I was dismissed as a censor and the press did its usual hatchet job on me as a misguided parent. A friend of mine-a very bright gal who had also lived abroad for years-told me that she had overheard discussion of me at the local co-op. The word was out in town that I was a "kook." That was not a "positive response/reward" for my taking what I believed to be a principled position. Since I had not been "trained" I was just mad!

Next stop on the road to becoming a "resister" was to become a member of the school philosophy committee. Our Harvard-educated, professional change agent superintendent gave all of the committee members a copy of "The Philosophy of Education" (1975 version) from the Montgomery County schools in Maryland, hoping to influence whatever recommendations we would make. (For those who like to eat dessert before soup, turn to page ____ and read the entry under 1946 concerning "Community-Centered Schools: The Blueprint for Education in Montgomery County, Maryland." This document was in fact the "Blueprint" for the nation's schools.) When asked to write a paper expressing our views on the goals of education, I wrote that, amongst other goals, I felt the schools should strive to instill "sound morals and values in the students." The superintendent and a few teachers on the committee zeroed in on me, asking "What's the definition of 'sound' and whose values?"

After two failed attempts to get elected to the school board, I finally succeeded in 1976 on the third try. The votes were counted three times, even though I had won by a very healthy margin!

My experience on the school board taught me that when it comes to modern education, "the end justifies the means." Our change agent superintendent was more at home with a lie than he was with the truth. Whatever good I accomplished while on the school board-stopping the Planning, Programming and Budgeting System [PPBS] now known as Total Quality Management [TQM] or Generally Accepted Accounting Procedures/Generally Accepted Federal Funding Reporting [GAAP/GAFFR], getting values clarification banned by the board, and demanding five [yes, 5!] minutes of grammar per day, etc.-was tossed out two weeks after I left office.

Another milestone on my journey was an in-service training session entitled "Innovations in Education." A retired teacher, who understood what was happening in education, paid for me to attend. This training program developed by Professor Ronald Havelock of the University of Michigan and funded by the United States Office of Education taught teachers and administrators how to "sneak in" controversial methods of teaching and "innovative" programs. These controversial, "innovative" programs included health education, sex education, drug and alcohol education, death education, critical thinking education, etc. Since then I have always found it interesting that the controversial school programs are the only ones that have the word "education" attached to them! I don't recall-until recently-"math ed.," "reading ed.," "history ed.," or "science ed." A good rule of thumb for teachers, parents and school board members interested in academics and traditional values is to question any subject that has the word "education" attached to it.

This in-service training literally "blew my mind." I have never recovered from it. The presenter (change agent) taught us how to "manipulate" the taxpayers/parents into accepting controversial programs. He explained how to identify the "resisters" in the community and how to get around their resistance. He instructed us in how to go to the highly respected members of the community-those with the Chamber of Commerce, Rotary, Junior League, Little League, YMCA, Historical Society, etc.-to manipulate them into supporting the controversial/non-academic programs and into bad-mouthing the resisters. Advice was also given as to how to get the media to support these programs.

I left-with my very valuable textbook, Innovations in Education: A Change Agent's Guide, under my arm-feeling very sick to my stomach and in complete denial over that in which I had been involved. This was not the nation in which I grew up; something seriously disturbing had happened between 1953 when I left the United States and 1971 when I returned.

Orchestrated Consensus

In retrospect, I had just found out that the United States was engaged in war. People write important books about war: books documenting the battles fought, the names of the generals involved, the names of those who fired the first shot. This book is simply a history book about another kind of war: * one fought using psychological methods; * a one-hundred-year war; * a different, more deadly war than any in which our country has ever been involved; * a war about which the average American hasn't the foggiest idea.. The reason Americans do not understand this war is because it has been fought in secret-in the schools of our nation, using our children who are captive in classrooms. The wagers of this war are using very sophisticated and effective tools:

* Hegelian Dialectic (common ground, consensus and compromise) * Gradualism (two steps forward; one step backward) * Semantic deception (redefining terms to get agreement without understanding).

The Hegelian Dialectic4 is a process formulated by the German philosopher Fredrich Hegel (1770-1831) and used by Karl Marx's in codifying revolutionary Communism as dialectical materialism. This process can be illustrated as:

Synthesis (consensus)

Thesis Antithesis

The "Thesis" represents either an established practice or point of view which is pitted against the "Antithesis"-usually a crisis of opposition fabricated or created by change agents-causing the "Thesis" to compromise itself, incorporating some part of the "Antithesis" to produce the "Synthesis"-sometimes called consensus. This is the primary tool in the bag of tricks used by change agents who are trained to direct this process all over the country; much like the in-service training I received. A good example of this concept was voiced by T.H. Bell when he was Secretary of Education: "[We] need to create a crisis to get consensus in order to bring about change." (The reader might be reminded that it was under T.H. Bell's direction that the Department of Education implemented the changes "suggested" by A Nation at Risk-the alarm that was sounded in the early 1980's to announce the "crisis" in education.)

Since we have been, as a nation, so relentlessly exposed to this Hegelian dialectical process (which is essential to the smooth operation of the "system") under the guise of "reaching consensus" in our involvement in parent-teacher organizations, on school boards, in legislatures, and even in goal setting in community service organizations and groups-including our churches-I want to explain clearly how it works in a practical application. A good example with which most of us can identify involves property taxes for local schools. Let us consider an example from Michigan:

The internationalist change agents must abolish local control (the "Thesis") in order to restructure our schools from academics to global workforce training (the "Synthesis"). Funding of education with the property tax allows local control, but it also enables the change agents and teachers' unions to create higher and higher school budgets paid for with higher taxes, thus infuriating homeowners. Eventually, property owners accept the change agent's radical proposal (the "Anti- thesis") to reduce their property taxes by transferring education funding from the local property tax to the state income tax. Thus, the change agents accomplish their ultimate goal; the transfer of funding of education from the local level to the state level. When this transfer occurs it increases state/federal control and funding, leading to the federal/internationalist goal of implementing global workforce training through the schools (the "Synthesis").5

Regarding the power of gradualism, remember the story of the frog and how he didn't save himself because he didn't realize what was happening to him? He was thrown into cold water which, in turn, was gradually heated up until finally it reached the boiling point and he was dead. This is how "gradualism" works through a series of "created crises" which utilize Hegel's dialectical process, leading us to more radical change than we would ever otherwise accept.

In the instance of "semantic deception"-do you remember your kindly principal telling you that the new decision-making program would help your child make better decisions? What good parent wouldn't want his or her child to learn how to make "good" decisions? Did you know that the decision-making program is the same controversial values clarification program recently rejected by your school board against which you may have given repeated testimony? As I've said before, the wagers of this intellectual social war have employed very effective weapons to implement their changes.

This war has, in fact, become the war to end all wars. If citizens on this planet can be brainwashed or robotized, using dumbed-down Pavlovian/Skinnerian education, to accept what those in control want, there will be no more wars. If there are no rights or wrongs, there will be no one wanting to "right" a "wrong." Robots have no conscience. The only permissible conscience will be the United Nations or a global conscience. Whether an action is good or bad will be decided by a "Global Government's Global Conscience," as recommended by Dr. Brock Chisholm, Executive Secretary of the World Health Organization, Interim Commission, in 1947-and later in 1996 by current United States Secretary of State Madeline Albright. (See p. ___for quotes in entry under 1947.)

You may protest, "But, no one has died in this war." Is that the only criteria we have with which to measure whether war is war? The tragedy is that many Americans have died in other wars to protect the freedoms being taken away in this one. This war which produces the death of intellect and freedom is not waged by a foreign enemy but by the silent enemy in the ivory towers, in our own government, and in tax-exempt foundations-the enemy whose every move I have tried to document in this book, usually in his/her/its own words.

Ronald Havelock's change agent in-service training prepared me for what I would find in the U.S. Department of Education when I worked there from 1981-1982. The use of taxpayers' hard-earned money to fund Havelock's "Change Agent Manual" was only one out of hundreds of expensive U.S. Department of Education grants each year going everywhere, even overseas, to further the cause of internationalist "dumbing down" education (behavior modification) so necessary for the present introduction of global work force training. I was relieved of my duties after leaking an important technology grant (computer-assisted instruction proposal) to the press.

Much of this book contains quotes from government documents detailing the real purposes of American education: * to use the schools to change America from a free, individual nation to a socialist, global "state," just one of many socialist states which will be subservient to the United Nations Charter, not the United States Constitution; * to brainwash our children, starting at birth, to reject individualism in favor of collectivism; * to reject high academic standards in favor of OBE/ISO 1400/90006 egalitarianism; * to reject truth and absolutes in favor of tolerance, situational ethics and consensus; * to reject American values in favor of internationalist values (globalism); * to reject freedom to choose one's career in favor of the totalitarian K-12 school-to-work/OBE process, aptly named "limited learning for lifelong labor,"7 coordinated through United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Only when all children in public, private and home schools are robotized-and believe as one-will World Government be acceptable to citizens and able to be implemented without firing a shot. The attractive-sounding "choice" proposals will enable the globalist elite to achieve their goal: the robotization (brainwashing) of all Americans in order to gain their acceptance of lifelong education and workforce training-part of the world management system to achieve a new global feudalism.

The socialist/fascist global workforce training agenda is being implemented as I write this book. The report to the European Commission entitled "Transatlantic Co-operation in International Education: Projects of the Handswerkskammer Koblenz with Partners in the United States and in the European Union" by Karl-Jurgen Wilbert and Bernard Eckgold (May 1997) says in part:

In June, 1994, with the support of the Handswerkskamer Koblenz, an American-German vocational education conference took place...at the University of Texas at Austin. The vocational education researchers and economic specialists...were in agreement that an economic and employment policy is necessary where a systematic vocational training is as equally important as an academic education, as a "career pathway."...The first practical steps along these lines, which are also significant from the point of view of the educational policy, were made with the vocational training of American apprentices in skilled craft companies, in the area of the Koblenz chamber. [emphasis added]

Under section "e) Scientific Assistance for the Projects," one reads:

The international projects ought to be scientifically assisted and analyzed both for the feedback to the transatlantic dialogue on educa- tional policy, and also for the assessment and qualitative improvement of the cross-border vocational education projects. As a result it should be made possible on the German side to set up a connection to other projects of German-American cooperation in vocational training; e.g., of the federal institute for vocational training for the project in the U.S. state of Maine. On the USA side an interlinking with other initiatives for vocational training-for example, through the Center for the Study of Human Resources at the University of Texas, Austin-would be desirable.

This particular document discusses the history of apprenticeships-especially the role of medieval guilds-and attempts to make a case for nations which heretofore have cherished liberal economic ideas-i.e., individual economic freedom-to return to a system of cooperative economic solutions (the guild system used in the Middle Ages which accepted very young children from farms and cities and trained them in "necessary" skills). Another word for this is "serfdom." Had our elected officials at the federal, state, and local levels read this document, they could never have voted in favor of socialist/fascist legislation implementing workforce training to meet the needs of the global economy. Unless, of course, they happen to support such a totalitarian economic system. (This incredible document can be accessed at the following internet address: http://www.kwk-koble...nd/trans-uk.doc )

Just as Barbara Tuchman or another historian would do in writing the history of the other kinds of wars, I have identified chronologically the major battles, players, dates and places. I know that researchers and writers with far more talent than I will feel that I have neglected some key events in this war. I stand guilty on all counts, even before their well-researched charges are submitted. Yes, much of importance has been left out, due to space limitations, but the overview of the battlefields and maneuvers will give the reader an opportunity to glimpse the immensity of this conflict.

In order to win a battle one must know who the "real" enemy is. Otherwise, one is shooting in the dark and often hitting those not the least bit responsible for the mayhem. This book, hopefully, identifies the "real" enemy and provides Americans involved in this war-be they plain, ordinary citizens, elected officials, or traditional teachers-with the ammunition to fight to obtain victory.

1 Noted Soviet dissident, slave labor camp intern, and author of The Gulag Archipelago and numerous other books.

2 Statistics taken from The Condition of Education, 1997, published by the National Center for Educational Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, NCES 97-388. Internet address: http://www.ed/gov/NCES.

3 OBE/ML/DI or outcomes-based education/mastery learning/direct instruction.

4Dean Gotcher, author of The Dialectic & Praxis: Diaprax and the End of the Ages and other materials dealing with dialectical consensus building and human relations training, has done some excellent work in this area of research. For more detailed information on this process, please write to Dean Gotcher of the Institution for Authority Research, 5436 S. Boston Pl., Tulsa, Oklahoma 74l05, or call (918) 742-3855.

5 See Appendix ___ for an article by Tim Clem which explains this process in much more detail.

6 ISO stands for International Standards of Operation for manufacturing (9000) and human resources (1400), coordinated through the United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

7 "Privatization or Socialization" by C. Weatherly, 1994. Delivered as part of a speech to a group in Minnesota and later published in the Christian Conscience magazine (Vol. 1, No. 2: February 1995, pp. 29-30).

Edited by bobdrake12, 11 January 2003 - 04:29 AM.

[bobdrake12]

With all the money spent on education in the United States, how do the results of the current educational system rank (on reading, mathematics and science) compared to other countries in the world?

Check out the article below.


bob


http://www.cbsnews.c...ain530872.shtml




Poor Marks For U.S. Education System


AP) South Korea has the most effective education system in the world's richest countries, with Japan in second place and the United States and Germany near the bottom, a United Nations study said Tuesday.

The ranking "provides the first 'big picture' comparison of the relative effectiveness of education systems across the developed world," the UNICEF study said.

"It is based not on the conventional yardstick of how many students reach what level of education, but on testing what pupils actually know and what they are able to do," UNICEF said.

It said it based the study on five different tests of 14 and 15 year olds to determine their abilities in reading, math and science.

The scores of the tests were disclosed individually in 2001 and earlier. What is new about the study is that it averages the results to give "the most comprehensive picture to date of how well each nation's education system is functioning as a whole," UNICEF said.

Dewayne Matthews, vice president of the Denver-based Education Commission of the States, said the U.S. showing in the UNICEF ratings was expected by people who follow international rankings in education and emphasized the need for reform.

"A lot of that has been driven by this perception that our schools are simply not good enough and they don't compare well with systems in other countries," Matthews told The Associated Press.

The blame or credit for the results does not go exclusively to a nation's schools, said the 36-page study, part of a series of "report cards" produced by UNICEF's Innocenti Research Center in Florence, Italy.

"It is clear that educational disadvantage is born not at school but in the home," said the report. "Learning begins at birth" and is fostered by "a loving, secure, stimulating environment."

UNICEF spokesman Patrick McCormick said the study had been unable to draw conclusions on a range of factors, such as how much was spent on education. Some countries spent less and did better.

The study also didn't get into whether extreme competition was a factor in Japanese or Korean results.

"We didn't really get into why. We found out that there was no one answer," McCormick said. "We tried linkages with the teacher-student ratios, with various things, and it didn't work.

"The biggest thing is obviously the socio-economic background of the child and how well-educated their parents are."

The study said that "South Korea and Japan sit firmly at the head of the class."

"Germany, with its strong educational and intellectual tradition, occupies 19th place out of the 24 nations," just behind the United States in 18th place.

Germany is unusual in that it sorts children at an early age into professional, white-collar and blue-collar curricula, the study said. The German labor market's demands for particular qualifications "meant that the track a child ends up in has a particularly strong impact on later life," it said.

Germany and Denmark finished in the bottom half of tests on reading and math, but scored high in a separate evaluation of adult literacy, "again illustrating the danger of treating any one survey with undue reverence," the study said.

The United States, however, finished low in each test and in adult literacy.

McCormick said the study had not attempted to explain why the United States had fared badly.

"That's for them to pick up and run with," said McCormick. "It's that sort of country. The countries that economically are very diverse, with big immigrant populations, with lots of moving around, with a huge poverty gap, probably are going to show these sorts of results with education itself."

UNICEF said it based its conclusions on combining results of tests conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, conducted in 2000 and the Trends in International Math and Science Study, or TIMSS, given in 1995 and 1999. TIMSS is backed in the United States by the Department of Education and the National Science Foundation and globally by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement.

UNICEF said it also factored in results of the International Adult Literacy Survey of 1994 and 1998.

UNICEF said combining the tests produced "a more reliable overview" that helps meet criticism of any given test that may have been questioned for its cultural neutrality.



By Alexander G. Higgins
© MMII The Associated Press.

Edited by bobdrake12, 10 January 2003 - 11:37 PM.

[bobdrake12]

How does a solid understanding of science and mathematics relate to the job market?

Check out the article below.

bob


http://www.ailf.org/press/n090700a.htm


The Nation's 'Help Wanted' Crisis

Thomas J. Engibous and Edward B. Rust Jr.

The Washington Post

September 7, 2000


Today America's robust economy is described as going through a second industrial revolution--one powered by the free flow of information based on science, math and engineering. The problem is that we have a critical need for employees with the expertise to sustain our momentum.

Our need is real. The education system is not turning out enough American scientists, physicists and engineers to meet our needs. In 1998 U.S. colleges and universities awarded only 12,500 bachelor of science degrees in electrical engineering, less than half the number that were graduating a decade earlier. Students from overseas make up approximately 40 percent of the masters

Without enough highly trained people, we put at risk our present and future prosperity. We will jeopardize America's leadership role in the world economy and undermine the growth of the high-tech industry. Jobs will go south, east or to any one of a dozen places around the globe.

This grim scenario has a remedy, however, if Congress acts before it adjourns this fall. The Senate will be considering the Hatch-Abraham bill and the House the Dreier-Lofgren bill. Both would increase the number of H-1B visas available to highly educated foreign professionals equipped to work in American high-tech industries. The bills would also make modest changes in the permanent residency program enabling top-flight talent to stay here.

In an era of often bitter partisanship, this is one issue that has produced broad consensus. The president, the Republican and Democratic leadership of both houses and both presumptive presidential candidates support an increase in the number of visas, as do Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, numerous economists and academics and nearly all the CEOs of America's high-tech companies.

The problem addressed by these bills is one of simple supply and demand. The Information Age has created an explosion in the need for professionals with degrees in math, science and engineering. At the same time, record low unemployment rates, particularly in these disciplines, coupled with the decline in the number of graduates with high-tech degrees from American universities, has put extraordinary pressure on the ability of companies to attract and recruit enough qualified people. Hundreds of thousands of jobs in these critical industries are going unfilled this year because of the lack of suitable candidates.

The short-term remedy is to raise the cap on H-1B visas to permit companies to hire a limited number of qualified foreign nationals--many of them new college graduates with a freshly minted U.S. education--for up to six years in "specialty occupations" such as engineering and biotechnology.

The current ceiling of 115,000 was reached in March, less than halfway through the fiscal year. If Congress fails to raise that cap, the number of H-1B visas will drop to 107,000 in 2001, then fall back to 65,000 in 2002, a woefully inadequate number.

The artificially low cap on H-1B visas is likely to force many foreign professionals to return to their country of origin, where our competitors will take advantage of their highly prized U.S. education.

The long-term solution, of course, is education. We must do more to encourage Americans to prepare for a high-tech future. Indeed, one of the reasons we support the pending legislation is because, in addition to increasing the number of visas for foreign professionals, it directs fees raised by the H-1B program to math and science education and training initiatives for Americans.

The unfortunate reality is that in math and science, U.S. students trail their overseas contemporaries. According to the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, which compared the knowledge of high school seniors in 21 countries, Americans scored better than their counterparts in only two countries--Cyprus and South Africa.

The situation must change. Texas Instruments, State Farm Insurance Cos. and hundreds of other companies are working collaboratively with educators and policymakers at all levels of education to help ensure that we are preparing American students for 21st century careers. As part of a continuing program within the Business Roundtable, many of us have pursed systemic reform in states across the country. The goal is to promote academic achievement, particularly in core areas--reading, math and science--and prompt our schools to be more accountable for preparing students.

American companies will always want to recruit the top professionals they can find. But there is no reason why we have to choose between hiring the most qualified employees now for our immediate needs and supporting long-term excellence in our schools and our work force. We can do both.

Thomas J. Engibous is chairman, president and CEO of Texas Instruments Inc. and a member of the human resources task force of the Business Roundtable. Edward B. Rust Jr. is president and CEO of State Farm Insurance Cos. and chairman of the education task force of the Business Roundtable.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright © 2000 Washington Post

[bobdrake12]

http://images.google...ssets/room2.jpg

If students are not taking or not allowed access to more advanced mathematics classes, how do we expect them to score well in International Mathematics Testing?

bob


http://www.hobel.org/lwved/id23.htm


The Performance of American Students In International Mathematics Testing Has Long Been a Subject of National Concern


DISAPPOINTING TIMSS RESULTS


In December 2000, the New York Times and other papers reported on how poorly U.S. students did on recent TIMSS international testing. TIMSS which stands for the Third International Math and Science Study, gives an international test of multiple choice and open-ended questions in math and science. Countries from around the world participate, and the results show how U.S. students do compared to their peers, internationally. When the U.S. participated four years ago, American fourth graders did appreciatively better than American eighth and twelfth graders.


So, for the most recent TIMSS testing, U.S. educators welcomed the opportunity to participate because many were hopeful that their successful group of fourth graders would fare well four years later as eighth graders. There was high expectation that American eighth graders would place extremely well.


Unfortunately, it was not so. The New York Times reported that “(f)our years after American fourth-grade students scored high on an international test of science and math, their performance declined.” U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley commented that American children are learning, but children in other countries are learning at a “higher rate.” Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan were the leading countries.


The American results were especially disappointing when it was learned that some high scoring European countries that participated four years ago----like Switzerland, France, Austria and Germany----did not participate in the latest TIMSS. Some developing countries----like Philippines, Morocco, Chile and Indonesia----joined TIMSS and pulled the average down with their low scores. What this means is that not only did the American students’ relative performance drop, but when one considers that the sample of students included more low scoring countries and less high scoring European countries, the comparative rankings of American children really declined further than the statistics indicate.


The differences between students in the high scoring countries and in the U.S. were significant. For example, in math, 9% of American eighth graders reached the highest levels compared to close to half the eighth graders in Singapore.

American educators and journalists were quick to come up with explanations like these . . . . On average 71% of students in other countries had math teachers who majored in math in college, while only 41% of American students did. Teachers in other countries have more professional development and preparation time. Nations with higher rankings teach subjects like geometry, chemistry and physics before high school. American students use calculators and computers far more than their international peers. American schools “abide by” lower standards than European and Asian schools.


But the bottom line remains, American students did not do as well on international mathematics testing as American educators expected them to do. As Rita Colwell, director of the National Science Foundation that funded the study, said, it’s “a little bit depressing.”


A LONG STANDING AMERICAN INTEREST IN INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS


Historically, Americans have been very concerned with international comparisons, and seminal events have brought the issue squarely into the public eye. Most recently, besides the results of international testing mentioned above, the issue was raised in conjunction with the vote in the U.S. Congress to significantly increase the number of visas for foreign engineers and other like foreign professionals to work in this country. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, about 843,000 skilled jobs in technology went unfilled out of nearly 1.6 million jobs because of the lack of qualified workers. The United States does not produce enough technically trained citizens to fill technical positions, and the real fear is that the jobs will go to those countries who prepare their citizens for careers in math and science,

But this issue of international comparison and national panic over the preparation of American students has been raised before. Going back to 1957 when Sputnik was launched, Americans were very fearful of being outsmarted by Russian mathematicians and scientists---- and that was during the height of the cold war, only a little more than a decade after the close of World War II. It was a time when Americans understood that engineering and technical prowess could lead not only to a man in space, but to weapons that might save democracy as they knew it.


Following Sputnik, numerous international comparisons were made, but one of the most memorable was in 1983, during the Reagan Administration, when “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform” was issued by The National Commission on Excellence in Education. The report discussed the serious problems of ill-prepared, ill-educated American students. It noted how poorly American students did on international testing, how gifted American students were not challenged, and how the “(a)verage achievement of high school students on most standardized tests is now lower than 26 years ago when Sputnik was launched.”

The report essentially blamed lower standards, “homogenized” classrooms and lack of teacher training. Challenging the country's gifted students played a prominent role in the solution to American educational woes, along with increased challenge and content for everyone. The authors noted that in California, “a study of individual classrooms found that because of poor management of classroom time, some elementary students received only one-fifth of the instruction others received in reading comprehension.” The report concluded with specific recommendations for content, standards and expectations, time spent in school, teaching practices and training, leadership, and fiscal support.


A decade later, in 1993, these issues were again raised in a well publicized report by the U.S. Department of Education called “National Excellence: A Case For Developing America's Talent.” Its point was that for America to compete globally, it must challenge its top students. The report noted that compared to students in other industrialized countries, America's top students perform poorly on international tests, are offered a less rigorous curriculum, read fewer demanding books, do less homework and leave high school less prepared. This report suggested that American classrooms and standards match those of high performing countries (including teacher training), that children learn more advanced materials at their own pace, that gifted programs for disadvantaged children be added, and that access to early childhood development be increased.


The current TIMMS findings that made the news this past December are not “news” but a reiteration of a national theme, one that dates back many, many years.

Edited by bobdrake12, 11 January 2003 - 04:46 AM.

[bobdrake12]

http://www.catholice...24&art_id=17025



Study Reveals Five Decades of 'Dumbing Down' in American Education

1/6/03

By Jim Brown and Jody Brown


(AgapePress) - A new poll finds that American college seniors today are just slightly more knowledgeable than high-school graduates of half a century ago.

The Zogby study was commissioned by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), one of the nation's foremost advocates of reform in higher education. The study reveals that current college seniors did better than 1950 high-school grads on questions relating to literature, music and, to some extent, science. On questions relating to geography, both averaged about the same. But today's college seniors did significantly worse on history questions.

NAS president Stephen Balch says overall, the general knowledge of 1950 high-school graduates is nearly identical to that of 2002 college seniors.

"We are seeing here the result of about 50 years of 'dumbing down,' in which students are less and less asked to acquire a broad-based factual knowledge and instead are told that the important thing is not their specific understandings about the world, but rather they can think," he explains.

Balch says it is apparent that many educators today are not teaching the basics, but instead are involved in all sorts of esoteric specializations.

"One of the phenomena we've seen, and in part it's been due to 'progressive' education -- what John Dewey and his colleagues launched back at the beginning of the twentieth century -- is a retreat from the idea that people should learn specific facts," Balch says. "And as far as it's been taken, [it has been] quite damaging. There's also ... been a deterioration in the quality of the people who teach [in] our schools."

Balch says when education is extended over a longer period, there is the risk of diluting its content and quality. And according to Balch, to some significant extent, that has happened.

In summarizing its findings, the Zogby study states: "By almost every measure of cultural knowledge in our survey, today's college seniors appear to rank far below the college graduates of mid-century." The survey included questions such as: "What composer wrote the Messiah?" and "In what country was the Battle of Waterloo fought?"

[bobdrake12]

http://washington.bi.../26/focus2.html





From the March 23, 2001 print edition

Tech firms worry as math, science skills lag

Phyllis S. Robinson


Junction, Md., to international giants IBM, Microsoft and Intel, business executives are concerned when they see the scores of American students in math and science.

So concerned they're devoting an increasing amount of corporate resources to educational programs in those subjects.

The hundreds of millions of dollars corporate America is pumping into math and science education reflects an emerging consensus among business leaders, educators and lawmakers that the declining number of scientifically educated Americans is threatening U.S. economic leadership. Math and science skills are critical to sustainable employment during the next decade and beyond, they say.

Math problems, science too

The weak standing of American students is evident in the Third International Math and Science Study, funded by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics and the National Science Foundation. The study (http://nces.ed.gov/timss) was conducted in 1995 in the fourth, eighth and 12th grades (with a follow-up study of the eighth graders in 1999).

The 1995 results showed U.S. 12th graders scoring 19th out of 21 countries in math and 16th out of 21 in science.

Part of the problem, some observers say, is the lack of teachers adept in technical subjects.

"We are not producing enough teachers because it is harder to get an education degree, and teachers are not paid enough," says Stephen Thornton, a physics professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. "There is an extremely high turnover rate among teachers qualified to teach technical subjects."

The problems are especially severe in some schools with minority populations, where lack of opportunity to learn computer skills is widening the "digital divide," says Edna Mora Szymanski, dean of the College of Education at the University of Maryland in College Park.

"We have a minority achievement gap that is striking down the score of the entire nation," she says. "If we don't tackle the digital divide, we will lose this thing."

The industry's response

As university and government officials begin initiating programs to increase the number of well-trained math and science teachers, many corporations are taking steps on their own to improve education in technology-related subjects.

IBM's Reinventing Education program, which encompasses a variety of technological approaches to education improvement, includes customized lesson plans to help teach math and science.

Microsoft's Encarta Class Server, slated to be available in April, will help teachers with nonscientific degrees find content that correlates to state standards in particular subjects.

"We want to ensure teachers are prepared to teach to the standards that schools are setting," says Marcia Kuszmaul, group manager for industry relations in the Microsoft Education Group.

Meanwhile, Microsoft and Intel have a joint program to train teachers in kindergarten through 12th grade in the use of technology in the classroom. Teach for the Future's goal is to train more than 100,000 teachers, the companies have stated. Intel has committed $100 million and Microsoft more than $300 million for the program, Kuszmaul says.

Locally, Annapolis Junction's Scientific and Engineering Solutions is joining with other companies to build a school that will provide students with technological resources, says Reginald G. Daniel, the company's founder, president and CEO.

"SES will provide hands-on resources to work with students and ensure they are prepared to meet the needs of the work force," he says.

High-tech trade associations also are getting involved.

The Washington-based American Society for Engineering Education (http://www.asee.org) plans to launch the Center for Best Practices, which will evaluate and disseminate information about all programs that address math and science incompetence and provide a comprehensive list of projects are that working and why.

Manufacturers that belong to AeA (http://www.aeanet.org), formerly the American Electronics Association, are working with community colleges to develop programs that train students for their plants, says Thom Stohler, director of work force policy for the association, based in Washington and Santa Clara, Calif.

Government acts

On the federal level, Rep. Vernon Ehlers, R-Mich., and Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., have introduced bills proposing incentives to companies and teachers for technology education.

Ehlers' National Science Education Incentive Act of 2001 (H.R.102) would give companies tax breaks for providing externships -- similar to paid internships -- to science, math, engineering and technology teachers.

A provision in Holt's National Improvement in Mathematics and Science Teaching Act (H.R.117) would give grants to states to increase the number of students that enter technology, math and science fields.

Although a number of programs and proposals are in the works to improve technology education, real improvement requires a broad-based effort over a number of years, many industry experts say.

"[Financial] contributions are not enough to help students make the grade," says Stanley S. Littow, vice president of corporate community relations for IMB. "It's what you're doing and how it is connected to a long-term, systemic plan."


Phyllis S. Robinson is a Beltsville-based freelance writer.

© 2001 American City Business Journals Inc

[bobdrake12]

When it comes to money spent, it appears that proportionately more money is currently being spent on "education" with less favorable results than before. Note: By less favorable results, I mean both poorer preparation for the college level and less marketable job skills.

Where does all that money go?

bob


http://www.empoweramerica.org/stories/stor...Reader$236

Twenty troubling facts about American education (excerpts)

06/21/1999

William J. Bennett


Student Performance

1) American 12th graders rank 19th out of 21 industrialized countries in mathematics achievement and 16th out of 21 nations in science. Our advanced physics students rank dead last.

2) Since 1983, over 10 million Americans have reached the 12th grade without having learned to read at a basic level. Over 20 million have reached their senior year unable to do basic math. Almost 25 million have reached 12th grade not knowing the essentials of U.S. history.

3) In the same period, over six million Americans dropped out of high school altogether. In 1996, 44% of Hispanic immigrants aged 16-24 were not in school and did not hold a diploma.

4) In the fourth grade, 77% of children in urban high-poverty schools are reading “below basic” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

5) Currently, average black and Hispanic 17-year-old children have NAEP scores in math, science, reading and writing that are equivalent to average white 13-year-old children.


School Spending and Use of Resources

6) Average per-pupil spending in U.S. public schools rose 212% from 1960 to 1995 in real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) dollars.

7) In 1960, for every U.S. public school teacher there were approximately 26 students enrolled in the schools. In 1995, there were 17.

8) In 1994, fewer than 50% of the personnel employed by U.S. public schools were teachers.

9) The average salary of U.S. public school teachers rose 45% in real dollars from 1960 to 1995.


Readiness for College and Work

10) In 1995, nearly 30% of first-time college freshmen enrolled in at least one remedial course and 80% of all public four-year universities offered remedial courses.

11) According to U.S. manufacturers, 40% of all 17-year-olds do not have the math skills and 60% lack the reading skills to hold down a production job at a manufacturing company.

12) 76% of college professors and 63% of employers believe that “a high school diploma is no guarantee that the typical student has learned the basics.”


Teacher Quality

13) Only 38% of U.S. public school teachers majored in an academic subject in college.

14) 40% of public high school science teachers have neither an undergraduate major nor minor in their main teaching field and 34% of public high school math teachers did not major or minor in math or related fields.

15) Only one in five teachers feels well prepared to teach to high academic standards.

Student Behavior

16) In 1996, 64% of high school seniors reported doing less than one hour of homework per night.

17) 57% of public schools reported moderate to serious discipline problems in the 1996-97 school year.

The Federal Role

18) In Florida, it takes six times as many people to administer a federal education dollar as a state dollar: 297 state employees are responsible for $1 billion in federal funds while 374 employees oversee $7 billion in state funds.

19) In Arizona, 45% of the staff of the state education department are responsible for managing federal programs that account for six percent of the state’s education spending.

20) After spending $118 billion since 1965 on Title I, the federal government’s largest K-12 program, evaluations conclude that the “program has been unable to lift [the] academic level of poor students.”


Copyright 2002 Empower America

Edited by bobdrake12, 12 January 2003 - 08:36 PM.

[bobdrake12]

With more money being spent proportionally on education while in general the current high school student are less adequately prepared for college and the competitive business world, one needs to question where is the current emphasis being placed in our public "education" system.

bob

http://www.compete.org/benchmarking/



Understanding competitiveness requires continual assessment of economic data and trends from around the world. Since its creation, the Council has remained a leader in producing definitive studies of the U.S. competitive position, benchmarking efforts that identify key weaknesses and strengths in the U.S. economy.

Data Central provides up-to-date economic data on important competitiveness issues, highlighting economic strengths and vulnerabilities.

Workforce Skills

The Goal of High School Education for All Students Has Not Been Met

Without a High School Education, Workers Are Far More Likely To Be Unemployed and in Poverty

Substantial Numbers of Entering Freshmen Require Remedial Education

Many Companies Are Providing Remedial Education

Student Achievement in Math and Science Declines with Years in the System

8th Grade Students Underperform in Math and Science

High School Senior Students Underperform in Math and Science

The Large Majority of Urban Schools Report Teacher Shortages in Math and Science

A Substantial Share of Math and Science Teachers Lack Adequate Preparation

The Number of Students Per Computer Is Nearly Double in Poorer Areas

Racial and Ethnic Minorities Remain Underrepresented in Higher Education

Wide Gaps in Educational Attainment Persist by Race and Ethnicity

The Ability of Students from Low-Income Families to Afford a College Education Has Fallen - Tuition Rising as a Share of Household Income

The Ability of Students from Low-Income Families to Afford a College Education Has Fallen - Need-Based Aid Programs Declining

Socioeconomic Status Has a Major Impact on the Likelihood of Pursuing a College Education

Wage Disparities Grew by Level of Education

Increased Skills Boost Productivity

Training Is Most Prevalent among More Educated Workers

Training Programs Are Reaching Too Small a Share of the Workforce

Edited by bobdrake12, 12 January 2003 - 10:02 PM.

[bobdrake12]

How does education relate to freedom?

Can an uninformed (only being exposed to one or two sides of an issue), unquestioning (blindly believing the "official" story without utilizing their critical thinking skills) general public retain a free society?

What are the potential consequences if the overall school curriculum has been softened?

bob

http://www.geocities...son_quotes.html

Jefferson on Education (excerpts)


No Freedom Without Education

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
--Thomas Jefferson to C. Yancey, 1816.

I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource most to be relied on for ameliorating the conditions, promoting the virtue and advancing the happiness of man.
--Thomas Jefferson to Cornelius Camden Blatchly, 1822.

I feel ... an ardent desire to see knowledge so disseminated through the mass of mankind that it may, at length, reach even the extremes of society: beggars and kings.
--Thomas Jefferson: Reply to American Philosophical Society, 1808.

And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government or information to the people. This last is the most certain and the most legitimate engine of government. Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
--Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787.

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government. --Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Price, 1789.

Whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, the people, if well informed, may be relied on to set them to rights.
--Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Price, 1789.

It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that, too, of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This is the business of the state to effect, and on a general plan.
--Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, 1786.

[I have] a conviction that science is important to the preservation of our republican government, and that it is also essential to its protection against foreign power.
--Thomas Jefferson to -----, 1821.

The value of science to a republican people, the security it gives to liberty by enlightening the minds of its citizens, the protection it affords against foreign power, the virtue it inculcates, the just emulation of the distinction it confers on nations foremost in it; in short, its identification with power, morals, order and happiness (which merits to it premiums of encouragement rather than repressive taxes), are considerations [that should] always [be] present and [bear] with their just weight.
--Thomas Jefferson: On the Book Duty, 1821.

The Content of Education

What are the objects of an useful American [college] education? Classical knowledge, modern languages, chiefly French, Spanish, and Italian; Mathematics, Natural philosophy, Natural history, Civil history, and Ethics. In Natural philosophy, I mean to include Chemistry and Agriculture, and in Natural history, to include Botany, as well as the other branches of those departments.
--Thomas Jefferson to J. Bannister, Jr., 1785.

In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.
--Thomas Jefferson to David Harding, 1824.

Freedom [is] the first-born daughter of science.
--Thomas Jefferson to Francois D'Ivernois, 1795.

Edited by bobdrake12, 12 January 2003 - 10:07 PM.

[Mind]

Great Articles Bob, although reading them makes me quite sad and mad. One thing I have seen that gives me hope is an increase in homeschooling in my area. Several groups of them come to my workplace for tours that I give. A few years back there were none. Hopefully people are starting to take their childrens' education into their own hands. The government is obviously doing a terrible job. Anyway here is another article about the sad state of American Education:

This is from Phyllis Schlafly:

Can more money make schools better?

President Bush is celebrating the first anniversary of his No Child Left Behind Education law and hopes it will give a significant boost to his re-election in 2004. Speeches about improving public schools are always crowd-pleasers because it is common knowledge that they desperately need major improvement.

The public school establishment, however, is developing acute paranoia as accountability deadlines in the plan start creeping up on them. By the end of January, states must give the U.S. Department of Education their plans for holding schools accountable and for reporting progress in student proficiency. Under the plan, states are required to test students three times in reading and math during their K-12 schooling.

Beginning in the fall of 2005, states must give reading and mathematics tests to every child each year in grades three through eight. Schools with scores that don't measure up will get more money, but their students must be offered the option of transferring to other schools. If the school is judged to be failing for three years, the school district must pay for tutors (called supplemental service providers) chosen by the parents. The bill was far and away the most expensive federal education bill ever passed, but Sen. Ted Kennedy. D-Mass., refers to it as a "tin cup" appropriation and claims public schools cannot overcome their problems "on the cheap." He would make the same complaint if No Child Left Behind doled out double the money.

Billions of dollars of federal money poured into public schools over the last 20 years show no correlation to improved performance or better scores. The government's own evaluations report that Title I, the mammoth program for disadvantaged children, is a failure. Congress created a program called E-Rate in 1996. It offers subsidies of 20 percent to 90 percent for schools to buy telecommunications services such as Internet connections and wiring for classrooms.

The E-Rate program is paid for by a tax on everyone's telephone bill, dubbed the Gore tax. According to a new report by the Center for Public Integrity based on Federal Communications Commission investigations, the $2.25 billion program is "honeycombed with fraud and financial shenanigans."

The current passion for accountability doesn't seem to cover how money is spent. But quite apart from who may or may not have been lining his pockets with easy E-Rate money is the question, did it advance education?

Did computers improve students' performance or grades? We can't find any report about that.

England's Department for Education, however, has just completed a comprehensive study on this very subject and found that equipping schools with a million computers connected to the Internet has had little if any impact on education standards. Despite the government spending more than a billion pounds over the past five years, "no consistent relationship" was found between computer use and pupil achievement in any subject at any age in primary or secondary schools. Technology is wonderful, but it's not the key to remedying the problems within U.S. public schools or raising students' scores. The crucial, overriding problem with schools is that they fail to teach children to read in the first grade.

Teaching children to read in the first grade doesn't even appear on the agenda of education reform! It was not one of the famous education goals of Goals 2000, and all Republican and Democratic politicians pontificating about school reform consistently say that they want children to be able to read by the third grade.

So what are they doing in kindergarten, first and second grades? Spending their time on sex education or playing with computers? Teaching children to read is not rocket science and it doesn't require expensive equipment, materials or professionals. Any parent can teach his child to read with a good $50 phonics system.

Teaching a first-grader to read requires teaching the child the sounds and syllables of the English language so he can put them together like building blocks and read multi-syllable words like hamburger or toothbrush. For decades, schoolchildren have been taught to guess at the words by looking at the pictures, a fraud called "whole language."

That's why third-graders can't pass reading tests and why students fall farther behind each year as their schoolbooks contain more and bigger words. Of all the injustices that have been perpetrated on minorities, none is as devastating to their chance to live the American Dream as keeping them in failing schools for 12 years without teaching them to be good readers. No Child Left Behind requires schools to administer reading tests to students in the third grade. Yet no real progress will be made in improving scores until schools teach children to read in the first grade by a systematic, logical, straightforward phonics system.

[DJS]

A very complex problem. Sadly, most of the poor test result come from children in the inner cities. Yet another indicator of how we are under utilizing such a large segment of our society. Thanks for the articles, they were informative. [!]

[bobdrake12]

Mind, Kissinger thanks for the comments! [B)]

Mind,

Phyllis Schlafly's article nails it! For example:

Teaching children to read in the first grade doesn't even appear on the agenda of education reform! It was not one of the famous education goals of Goals 2000, and all Republican and Democratic politicians pontificating about school reform consistently say that they want children to be able to read by the third grade.

So what are they doing in kindergarten, first and second grades? Spending their time on sex education or playing with computers? Teaching children to read is not rocket science and it doesn't require expensive equipment, materials or professionals. Any parent can teach his child to read with a good $50 phonics system.

There is a problem and that problem doesn't just exist in the inner cities if we consider the successful (actually, the lack thereof) teaching of reading skills in elementary school and the availability (actually, the lack thereof) of making available the 16 core courses in high school. Thus, a couple of questions are:

1) Why not place an emphasis on reading skills in every elementary school district throughout the United States?
2) Why no make the 16 core courses available in every public high school district throughout the United States?

bob

Edited by bobdrake12, 31 January 2003 - 10:18 PM.

[bobdrake12]

The basic question remains: Is there a deliberate dumbing down of America?

Check out the excepts from the article below and feel free to state your opinions.

bob


http://www.deliberat...s/reviews4.html



(excerpts)


I'll bet you think that the problems with our nation's schools are a fairly recent phenomenon. Wrong. It dates backs to the 1960's. Those that have implemented the subversion of our educational system have sought to fly well below the radar of public awareness, depending on stealth and duplicity to achieve the wreckage that has already stunted the lives of thousands who have passed through it.

No other topic has evoked as much email as did our weekly "Warning Signs" commentary, "Indoctrination, Not Education." Good. Time to wake up America!

As Iserbyt points out, in the 1960's "American education would henceforth concern itself with the importance of the group rather than with the importance of the individual." The purpose of education would shift to focus on the student's emotional health, rather than academic learning.

In 1965, there were two major federal initiatives developed with funding from The Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed that year. One was the 1965-1969 Behavioral Science Teacher Education Program and the other was the publication by the government of "Pacesetters in Innovation", a 584-page catalogue of behavior modification programs to be used by the schools.

Let me repeat that: a catalogue of behavior modification programs! We're not talking of programs to teach students anything. We are talking about programs to indoctrinate children passing through the system to believe in values contrary to those on which this nation was based.

Iserbyt writes that, "In 1960, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's Convention Against Discrimination was signed in Paris. This convention laid the groundwork for control of American education, both public and private, by UN agencies and agents."

Now connect the dots. In 1960, "Soviet Education Programs: Foundations, Curriculums, Teacher Preparation" was published under the auspices of the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare. It was the blueprint for the US school-to-work restructuring that would take place and it would rely on the "Pavlovian conditioned reflex theory." The mastermind of mind control and conditioning was a psychologist, Dr. B.F. Skinner who was the guru of the mess that passes for education in America today.

Though hard to believe even now, the US adopted the Soviet Communist approach to education. In 1961, Rep. John M. Ashbrook tried to alert Congress to what was happening. Citing a document published by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare called "A Federal Education Agency for the Future, " he called the new education programs "a blueprint for complete domination and direction of our schools from Washington. Guess what? He was right.

That is why the educational reform this nation really needs is the complete elimination of the US Department of Education. It won't happen.

Just how did education in America turn from being a system that imparts knowledge to one that uses behavior modification techniques to influence the attitudes and beliefs of those passing through it?

To achieve this, beginning in the 1960's, the perpetrators of the subversion have employed deception to achieve their goals. Earlier this month, a New Jersey daily newspaper ran an editorial, "Let board members speak", noting that members of a local school board had been restricted from speaking to the press to avoid "confusion" about the board's programs and objectives. "But this isn't about 'confusion'," said the editorial. "It's about control", adding "And it is insulting to the public and the idea of open local government."

There is nothing "open" about the effort to subvert education in America. It only has that appearance because it takes place at presumably local school boards or in a state education department. Always, the vehicle is a governmental agency. The controlling player, however, is the US Department of Education.

The objective of those who control our educational systems has long been to produce poorly educated, little world citizens, ready to forego the liberties guaranteed by the oldest living Constitution. The system introduced into American schools mirrors the Soviet and Communist Chinese systems that produce a compliant and complacent population.

In 1976, Catherine Barrett, then president of the National Education Association, gave a speech in which she said, "First, we will help all of our people understand that school is a concept and not a place. We will not confuse "schooling" with education. The school will be the community, the community the school." This predates Hillary Clinton's "it takes a village" concept, but it reflects a communist view that all of society must be employed to form the views of students. Individualism is bad. Conforming to the group is good.

Barrett went on to say "We will need to recognize that so-called basic skills, which currently represent nearly the total effort in elementary schools, will be taught in one quarter of the present school day. The remaining time will be devoted to what is truly fundamental and basic---time for academic inquiry, time for students to develop their own interests, time for a dialogue between students and teachers, more than a dispenser of information, the teacher will be a conveyor of values, a philosopher. Students will learn to write love letters and lab notes."

You may want to read this again. The then-head of the NEA was talking about turning the school day into one devoted to just about everything other than the teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic. Teachers were, instead, to become "agents of change."

Edited by bobdrake12, 31 January 2003 - 10:37 PM.

[DJS]

We'll personally, I received a great public education. In my mind there are a few things that need to be done to effectively educate our children.

1) Parents need to take time to start educating their children before their children ever attend school. My mother was reading to me when I was a toddler. She had an activities program laid out for me. By the time I was in preschool I was light years ahead of kids my age. Study after study has proven that a child's cognitive abilities and even their IQ (yes, IQ is a measure of intelligence) directly correlate with the educational instruction they were given during their formative years. I firmly believe this. Parents can't sit their children in front of a TV to occupy their mind. It is a measure of commitment on the part of the parents.

2) The excuses need to stop. This is one of those things that the Bush Administration is absolutely correct on. The carrot and stick method must be used on all public schools. If a school's test scores stink then they must be held accountable. Inner cities get more federal funding than suburban schools. That is a fact. Why can't they compete? I think one of the answers is that the educational system of America has turned into a socialist state. Whenever unions get involved they create complacency. Same with teachers unions. Why should a teacher get tenure after two years of teaching? They should be held to the same market forces that create such tremendous prosperity in our private sector. Come on, we all had one of those really bad teachers in high school who couldn't teach to save his life but was tenured.

3) Competition needs to be encouraged, not discouraged. Nothing angers me more than to hear a liberal college professor say that competition doesn't matter, only learning. Don't get me wrong, I love to learn and I often learn for the sake of learning. However, in high school I checked my class rank every month. That's how I was. I actually changed guidance counselors because my first one refused to tell me my ranking monthly. He was one of those spaghetti spined liberal guidance counselors who couldn't make it in the real world so he decided to become a guidance counselor and help me with mine. Competition does matter because it is how the real world works. Also, having your children be competitive gives them an additional motivational factor.

[bobdrake12]

We'll personally, I received a great public education. In my mind there are a few things that need to be done to effectively educate our children.

Kissinger,

I also am very happy with my public education. The only private education I was exposed to was at the University of Notre Dame.

o My elementary education placed significant emphasis on reading, writing, math, science, and history.

o My high school education included the 16 core courses.

I agree on all three of your points:

o  Parents need to take time to start educating their children before their children ever attend school.

o  That is a fact. Why can't they compete? I think one of the answers is that the educational system of America has turned into a socialist state. Whenever unions get involved they create complacency. Same with teachers unions. Why should a teacher get tenure after two years of teaching? They should be held to the same market forces that create such tremendous prosperity in our private sector. Come on, we all had one of those really bad teachers in high school who couldn't teach to save his life but was tenured.

o  Competition needs to be encouraged, not discouraged.

My only additional comment is that they didn't have teachers unions when I was in school.

A general comment is that when I was in school, ad hominem attacks and non sequiturs were not allowed in discussions. Also numerous solutions were discussed rather than the Hegalian dialectec which is so common these days .

bob

Edited by bobdrake12, 31 January 2003 - 11:56 PM.

[DJS]

The only private education I was exposed to was at the University of Notre Dame.

You went to Notre Dame! Lucky bastard lol . My cousin went to Notre Dame law. Such a beautiful campus.

[DJS]

Ok, I agree with you, but what's their end game? And more importantly, how do we fight back? Do you think that the voucher program advanced by the Bush Administration was a first step in the right direction? I would tend to think so based on the stiff resistance it received.

Isn't it odd that the Left, which is supposedly fighting for the rights of the urban minorities, is so against them having any freedom of choice? The reason is that they want to keep them enslaved to a failed educational system. If minorities start to feel independent and successful they will no longer feel obliged to support the Democratic party--because they will have a will of their own! And this isn't just postulation on my part. When vouchers were being promoted, prominent members from the African American community came out in support of it--in direct defiance of their party line! That never happens.

[bobdrake12]

You went to Notre Dame!  Lucky bastard lol .  My cousin went to Notre Dame law.  Such a beautiful campus.

Kissinger,

Great to hear that your cousin is a fellow alumnus!

Click on the following Link if you like ND football:

http://www.imminst.o...t=ST&f=15&t=116

ND is a tough to get in. I believe it takes something like a 3.5 GPA and 1300 SAT plus all 16 core courses.

The reason why I am placing the significance on the core courses is that about 2/3rds of the perspective football recruits are unable to pass ND admissions because they lack the 16 core courses (ND football scholarships allow for a lower GPA and SAT but the requirement for the 16 core courses remains.) Another way of saying this is that about 2/3rds of the high school graduates did not take the 16 core courses.

bob

Edited by bobdrake12, 01 February 2003 - 04:24 AM.

[bobdrake12]

Ok, I agree with you, but what's their end game?

Kissinger,

Perhaps, the following might lend some light to your question:

The quote below is an actual one from someone who posted earlier on this thread.

My original response to his quote follows. (Note: The term "redlining" is used to describe a form of discrimination. Some insurance companies would reportedly draw a red line on a map around the borders of poor neighborhoods and prohibit agents from selling insurance in these areas. The logic was, poor people represented a "moral hazard" for the insurance company. How might this practice relate to our current educational system?)

bob

Why would intelligent superior private schools want dirty trash from some inner-city public school?

I believe that the quote shown above is an example of the term "redlining" as a form of discrimination. Specifically offensive to me is the term "dirty trash".

How I see it, some don't want to provide an equal opportunity for a proper education for all Americans (e.g. not providing the 16 core courses in certain public high school districts). This paradigm can be disguised, but it unfortunately is still there.

Edited by bobdrake12, 01 February 2003 - 04:09 AM.

[bobdrake12]

Isn't it odd that the Left, which is supposedly fighting for the rights of the urban minorities, is so against them having any freedom of choice? The reason is that they want to keep them enslaved to a failed educational system. If minorities start to feel independent and successful they will no longer feel obliged to support the Democratic party--because they will have a will of their own! And this isn't just postulation on my part. When vouchers were being promoted, prominent members from the African American community came out in support of it--in direct defiance of their party line!

Kissinger,

It is a form of redlining. Education cannot just be defined as "good" or "bad" but rather in shades of gray. For example, some of the inner-city high schools in Los Angeles only offer 7 of the core courses while some of the suburban districts offer up to 13. The elite districts always offer 16 core courses.

One way to retain power is to keep others from getting power. In this case, the power-stick is the opportunity to get a quality education.

Stating this a different way, if people are dumbed down, they are easier to control. For example, if students are not taught about the Constitution and Bill of Rights, they probably will not understand their significance. If people don't understand the significance of something, it is usually much easier to replace it.


bob

Edited by bobdrake12, 01 February 2003 - 04:30 AM.

[bobdrake12]

Kissinger,

Check out the excerpts regarding the balance of the article and let me know what you think.

bob


http://www.deliberat...s/reviews4.html



(excerpts - part 2)

By the 1980's (see the previous two editions of Warning Signs for a look at the 1960's and 1970's by clicking on the Archives below) the effort to turn schools from places where students actually learn something to places where their values, beliefs, and cognitive skills were determined by "Outcome Based Education", behavior modification programs. The objective of these programs is to turn students in to little citizens of a one-world government where they are mere economic units, not individuals, nor people who give much thought to individual liberty.

Individual liberty was the reason the American Revolution was fought and is the philosophical basis for every word in the US Constitution. A generation or two of Americans who are systematically robbed of any knowledge of this are ripe for an authoritarian takeover.

The father of this movement is Prof. Benjamin Bloom and his book, "All Our Children learning." Published in 1981, it is the bible of OBE. In it he says, "The purpose of education and the schools is to change the thoughts, feelings, and actions of students." No, the purpose of education is to provide students with a sufficient knowledge of basic skills in writing, reading, arithmetic, as well as history and the sciences. Thus prepared, they are likely to be the kind of citizens that will question efforts to deprive this nation of its sovereignty in favor of a world government run out of the United Nations.

It gets worse. Writing in The Effective School Report, Dr. Thomas A. Kelly, Ph.D., stated that "The brain should be used for processing, not storage." This is the view of education that says you prepare students to take a test determined by federal standards of what they should know. The student is merely to process predetermined bits and pieces of information. The best example of this is the rat's maze where the rat learns to follow a specific path to get a piece of cheese.

This is a simplified explanation of why today's children have difficulty acquiring and retaining a body of useful, long-term information such as multiplication tables or who the nation's presidents have been, the 50 States of the Union, when the Civil War was fought, where India can be found on a map, the names of the earth's oceans, et cetera!

In her book, "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America", Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt, says, "The real purpose of this project was to propose a radical redesign of the nation's education system from one based on inputs to one based on outputs." It switched, in other words, from a curriculum of content a student was required to learn, to a series of answers the student was supposed to repeat when tested. Or as Iserbyt explains it, the system turned away "from one oriented toward the learning of academic content to one based on performance of selected skills, necessary for the implementation of school-to-work" The schools, with direction from the DOE and grants from major foundations, as well as input from corporate leaders, were redesigned to produce workers.

In the 1980's the DOE says Iserbyt, "effectively transformed the essential character of the nation's public schools from 'teaching'---the most traditional and conservative role of schools---to 'workforce training'---perceived as liberal and 'progressive.'" It is a particular irony that one of Ronald Reagan's campaign platforms was the abolishing of the Department of Education. He was right. He didn't do it.

What, in fact, happened was that control of the schools and their curriculums increasing moved up the decision-making ladder away from local school boards and even state education departments. Administrators and teachers were delighted with this because it eliminated the "meddling" of locally elected and locally responsible school board members.

By the 1990's the decades of effort to overturn an education system that taught specific bodies of information and the skills to use them. Arithmetic, spelling, history, civics, science'had effectively been transformed into today's touchy-feely system. It is a place where a student's feelings of self-esteem are more important than whether they actually know anything other than the specific answers to the test. Thus teachers now "teach to the test" (their paycheck depends on it) rather than provide a broader body of knowledge. It is a place where competition is discouraged as unfair to those less qualified for any reason. It is a place where socialist attitudes and values are the priority, not knowledge.

The "voucher" program exists to give the federal government control over private schools because, whoever pays the piper, chooses the tune. Schools that accept voucher students will soon find themselves required to accept federal education regulations as well.

Goals 2000 and School-to-Work programs introduced to transform our schools reflect what Iserbyt describes as "the internationalization of education with exchanges of data systems, curricula, methods, et cetera, all essential for the implementation of the international socialist management and control system being put in place right now."

Everything, including the SAT college entrance tests, has been degraded to mask the dumbing down those who are passing through our schools. Today's SATs permit students to use electronic calculators, ask fewer questions in general and fewer multiple-choice math questions in particular. Reading passages now ask definitions from context and the formerly difficult antonym section, calling for linguistic and intellectual subtleties, has been dropped entirely.

My hometown's parent who could not get any answers from his district's school board could not know that this is repeated across America in school after school. Parents are routinely lied to. Worse, today's parents are often required to put their child put on a regimen of Ritalin, a mind-altering drug. We've got seven million government-approved drug addicts going to school in drug-free zones!

To the individual parent, there seems to be no way to resist the juggernaut of a system that routinely turns out thousands of "educated" morons. Some choose to home-school their children. Others who can afford it send them to private schools. Still others shell out for after-school tutoring services. Why? Because the schools have been "restructured."

Education is not about national standards and national testing. It's about individual schools in individual school districts, all answerable to their communities and to the parents of the children entrusted to them. It's not about how the child feels, but about how well the child learns. There is pride in learning, but if there are no grades, how does anyone, parent, child or teacher know what, if anything, is being learned?

Edited by bobdrake12, 01 February 2003 - 05:10 AM.

[DJS]

I have read through all of the articles you have posted. It scares me. I never really thought about it in the way you presented it. Who isn't in on this? When do they intend to reap their harvest? And the most important question in my mind, how do we fight back? Or is it hopeless?

The more I think about it the more it makes sense. Have you noticed that with the current push to war a large segment of our society has ignored the requirements made by our Constitution to defend the people of the United States. I find myself shouting at the TV, "Not the people of the world, the people of the United States!" There is also this belief going around that we need the United Nation to grant the US moral legitimacy. To me, the UN has always been a political body, not a moral body. I'm going to post an article by Charles Krauthammer that just came out today titled UN RIP. Please give it a read.

Anyway, thanks for the info and for supplying the awareness. Sometimes I am so focused on certain battle grounds (foreign affairs, economics, etc.) that I drop the ball in other areas. One day I might wake up to find that I have won the battle and lost the war.

As a side note, I wanted to give you a personal story about when I was in High School. This is not that long ago (I graduated High School in 97). When The Bell Curve first came out I took it out from the town library. I have always had an interested in sociology so this was not unusual for me. One day I brought the book to school to read during my breaks. When I got to my US History class I left the book on top of my desk while I went to the bathroom. When I got back my teacher came over to me and took the book away. He said the book was "controversial and not appropriate for the classroom." Yet another example of censorship in our schools.

[bobdrake12]

Have you noticed that with the current push to war a large segment of our society has ignored the requirements made by our Constitution to defend the people of the United States. I find myself shouting at the TV, "Not the people of the world, the people of the United States!"

Kissinger.

Many of the "outcomes" of the current educational system have not read the Constitution much less know where the Bill of Rights is located in the Constitution and the reason for them being placed in the Constitution. These "outcomes" are unaware of the meaning behind phrases such as "liberty," "freedom," "natural rights," "pursuit of happiness," "consent of the governed and "informed citizenry,"

When The Bell Curve first came out I took it out from the town library. I have always had an interested in sociology so this was not unusual for me. One day I brought the book to school to read during my breaks. When I got to my US History class I left the book on top of my desk while I went to the bathroom. When I got back my teacher came over to me and took the book away. He said the book was "controversial and not appropriate for the classroom." Yet another example of censorship in our schools.

Perhaps this is the point your teacher was trying to "teach": Do not stray from the hive. In other words, do not stray from the goal to develop a working class that was merely trained to do a particular job, not think about social or political issues. Thus, the students are to accept the passive role impressed on them just like worker-bees in a hive.

Education in many school districts avoids developing three essentials of intelligence:

o Critical thinking - Critical thinking relates to challenging the status quo and looking for alternative methods that might result in improvement.

o Self-awareness- Self-awareness would consist of you unique belief system rather than one imposed upon you along with the freedom to express your beliefs.

o Critical consciousness - Critical consciousness is the ability to perceive social, political, and economic oppression and to take action against the oppressive elements of society.

I believe one of the examples of the "successful outcomes" of the current "educational" system is Joshua's present thought process. The following is a quote from Joshua from another topic in this Forum:

http://www.imminst.o...t=ST&f=67&t=784

Joshua Says:

What do you mean, "What if there is nothing after death?"

This statement is egocentric, you see: Even if you die, your work can be the shoulders that someone else stands on. Mankind will continue, dear Bruce. Personally, I have inclinations towards the judeo-christian mythos, but - I have my own reasons. Not so much Fear, per se. At any rate, if I grope around a bit I still find that I can find my atheistic humanist hat and *ahhhhh, yes* it still fits rather snugly.

You see, immortality is actually something quite dangerous for *any* life. The mechanisms of the universe need to be fluid. Consider our constitution, for example. If it were not written in such a fasion as to be mutable - then, my friend, future generations would not be able to adapt its content to suit their times. So as it is with life. If we end death, we also end the mechanisms that allow us to adapt into the unknown. We need genetic diversity to insure our survival. This means dying and fucking, I am afraid.

But, such is life. N'est pas?

Now - insofar as ego is concerned. . . I do admit a sadness at not being able to fit my mind around all that is - but dear Bruce, that is why we have language and division of labour. We are a macrocosm for life on a cellular level. Our society is an organism. It will endure your death just as your body will endure the death of millions of your columnar cells. Fear not - you can leave your mark.

Individuality is a spiritual construct. You are a man in a tribe. Your tribe is what matters - not you.
*shrug*

joshua

Note the point Joshua is making when he states:

You are a man in a tribe. Your tribe is what matters - not you.

In other words, the individual does not matter just like the individual worker-bee does not matter. Only the hive matters.

Joshua very clearly advocates this hive-mentality in another post under the same topic:

Joshua Says:

If anything will save mankind or bring upon us a new golden era, it will be a 99% decrease in population. Like so many starved dear.

Thus, individuals are de-humanized and therefore expendable for the "greater good".

bob

Edited by bobdrake12, 01 February 2003 - 02:54 PM.

[bobdrake12]

Or is it hopeless?

Kissinger,

Nothing is hopeless.

It is important to remember not to fall into the following trap:

Problem > Reaction > Solution

Rather than using that kind of sound bite, knee jerk reaction; I believe it is better to use a scientific approach in collaborative problem solving.

bob

Edited by bobdrake12, 01 February 2003 - 02:33 PM.