Late Night Laugh: When Language Matters
May 8, 2008
The Road To Educational Perdition
May 8, 2008
From Mamacita, of Weekly Scheiss:
Most teachers who leave the profession, leave because almost all of the attention, most of the perks, most of the privileges, and most of the allowances are given to the students who least deserve it: the disruptive kids. In other words, these loud, bratty, obnoxious kids are being rewarded for their disgusting behavior, so why should they clean up their act? I wouldn’t. Not if doing my own thing meant I’d still get to have and do everything little goody two-shoes next to me got to have and do…
Secondly, many of the parents who are involved with the school are the parents of these same brats. School administrators fear negative PR, and to a principal or superintendent, negative PR is when a loud-mouthed parent with a shitty kid calls the newspaper office. Entitlement is the bane of our society’s existence, and it’s alive and well in our public schools.
“You WILL accept my child and you WILL give him/her a special lunch and you WILL treat him/her on a different level than all these other peon kids and you WILL hold his/her hand and you WILL allow him/her to break any rules we as a family do not believe apply to us. . . .”
Me, personally, I think that if there are any perks to be handed out, they should go to students who have earned them. No earn? No get. Ever.
Why would a student exert himself to do any work, or allow anyone else in the classroom to do anything either, if he knows he’s going to be passed to the next grade anyway? Yes, I am a firm believer in holding back any student who can’t do it, won’t do it, or any combination thereof…
In other words, disruptive bratty obnoxious kids are mostly a product of their home.
Teachers who say things like this are few and far between. Not because they aren’t thinking such things 24/7, but because it’s dangerous to speak out. Ethnicity, race, gender, and social levels have nothing whatsoever to do with this issue, but teachers who recognize the actual problem and try to do something about it are often accused of being racist, sexist, un-PC, heartless, “in possession of inappropriate knowledge,” etc. And often the biggest brats belong to the parents with the most political pull.
In other words, somebody screams “prejudice,” when the truth is, these teachers are speaking truth.
Until the bullies and the disrupters and the violent and the kids who have no respect for learning are removed from our schools, our schools can not be what the free public schools were meant to be: places where all who wish to learn, may learn all they wish.
Mamacita’s post is a must read for every parent, teacher, school administrator and student. To be clear- she has the educational and classroom bona fides that are sans pareil. We have noted many times that she is the kind of teacher every parent prays for.
Mamacita’s post isn’t only a look into the state of education. Her observations also indict a culture and society for whom such an educational morass is acceptable. Dr Sanity, in The Corruption And Curriculum looks at the complexity of the situation that arises and extends beyond the classroom environment:
Have you looked at what your children’s teaches say in the brochures they send home in the kids’ backpacks? It is sure to be some variant of the above multicultural, politically correct nonsense that is sucking the substance right out of every subject area…
The health of our educational system–from K-12 through college– is absolutely essential to the long-term welfare and competitiveness of the United States. American education used to be the strongest on the globe, and to the extent that remains true, it is because the hard sciences in this country (e.g., math, engineering, computers etc.) have been largely resistant to the political taint that runs rampant in the humanities. The latter subject areas, which include literature, philosophy, and history, have become unabashedly ideological over the last two decades; and the “social justice” advocates of today’s collectivists have taken over our K-12 education system and are determinedly undermining American values with their politically correct, multicultural and anti-capitalist curriculum.
Make no mistake about it, what many teachers today are doing is indoctrinating their students minds into an unquestioning obedience to the collective. This they cannot do unless they also can manage to corrupt even the hard sciences with their dogma.
There can be no area where a child is allowed to think freely and without the proper political perspective. That is far too dangerous for the underly ideology they are promulgating…
Make no mistake- the ideologies and behaviors that are so prevalent today among children have their genesis in toxic classroom environments.
See also Dr Sanity’s From Education To Indoctrination. Good educators are not being bullied and intimidated for no reason. Good educators are being forced out of the system, only to be replaced with less competent but more politically sympathetic and pliable teachers. There is a very real political agenda involved.
“…a student attains ‘higher order thinking’ when he no longer believes in right or wrong“. “A large part of what we call good teaching is a teacher´s ability to obtain affective objectives by challenging the student’s fixed beliefs. …a large part of what we call teaching is that the teacher should be able to use education to reorganize a child’s thoughts, attitudes, and feelings.” - Benjamin Bloom, psychologist and educational theorist, in “Major Categories in the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives”, p. 185, 1956
“This is the idea where we drop subject matter and we drop Carnegie Unites (grading from A-F) and we just let students find their way, keeping them in school until they manifest the politically correct attitudes. You see, one of the effects of self-esteem (Values Clarification) programs is that you are no longer obliged to tell the truth if you don’t feel like it. You don’t have to tell the truth because if the truth you have to tell is about your own failure then your self-esteem will go down and that is unthinkable.”- Dr. William Coulson, explaining Outcome Based Education (OBE)-1964
“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well – by creating the international child of the future”- Dr. Chester M. Pierce, address to the Childhood International Education Seminar, 1973…
“Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished … The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at: first, that influences of the home are ‘obstructive’ and verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective … It is for the future scientist to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”
Bertrand Russell quoting Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the head of philosophy & psychology who influenced Hegel and others – Prussian University in Berlin, 1810…
Progressing from education to indoctrination, postmodernism has ushered in an age of educational nihilism that seeks to destroy the minds of the next generation of Americans. The good news is that the biggest impediment to their grandiose plans is that they earlier suceeded in destroying their own minds on the bullshit they now force-feed the children of today.
What happens in the classroom has ramifications that extend well into society at large.
Parents are ultimately responsible for what goes on the schools their children attend. Schools are not institutions developed solely for baby sitting reasons. Schools, by definition, are meant to be reflective of the values and social morality of the community at large.
A free society is not a society free to abandon it’s responsibilities. As we noted earlier today an a column published at Pajamas Media, Welcome To The Age Of Psychopathy,
Psychopathic behaviors enter the picture when individuals, confronted by the painful truth about themselves, refuse to acknowledge and deal with that truth and are unable to see others except as extensions of their own wishes, feelings, or needs…
We are living in an Age of Psychopathy when entire populations imagine that because they have certain beliefs and feelings, those beliefs and feelings are entirely appropriate and their consequences in the real world are perfectly acceptable…
When we abandon and our schools and allow ‘professional educators’ to take the lead, we are shortchanging our kids. Those professional educators,’ as competent and well meaning as they may be, work for us. They are there to serve our children and the needs of our communities. We do not exist to serve their desires and political agendas. Nor do we exist to cede control of what our children learn.
Let’s be clear: If you want to know what an education system that is controlled by a political agenda looks like, one that cares little for the best interest of the child and even less to what concerns parents might voice, turn to the Arab world.
Portions of this post have been previously published.
When Teachers Scream, Does Anyone Hear?
May 8, 2008
Mamacita has forgotten more about kids, schools, education and teaching than most of you will ever know.
As the school year winds down, we thought we would remind you who spends more time with your kids than you.
Teacher’s unions are the devil. Public schools, which were once the lifeblood of our nation and the reason many immigrants came here in the first place, have become a joke with no satisfactory punchline to wrap it all up.
Teacher prep in college is a joke, too.
Here in Indiana, we now have a Transition to Teaching program for older people, long out of college, who have been working out in the real world, who want to become teachers. They bypass all the stupid busy-work, take a couple of teen psychology courses, do an internship and then student teaching in a public school, and they get a license.
It’s wonderful.
The School of Education sat back on its haunches and howled in protest but this time they did not succeed in removing the program.
To think that an adult could find incredible success in teaching without taking ten courses consisting of “everybody draw a card and whoever gets the tens are the class problem makers” while they take turns teaching a ten-minute lesson complete with six pages of lesson plans? Unthinkable.
Heh.
I do think every teacher should have a grounding in psychology of young people, but the baby shower games we could all have done without.
I say, let a pro take the psych courses, spend some practice time in a real classroom with a teacher who doesn’t resent the fact that the student teacher is going to get a license without taking all the years of crud all the other teachers had to take, and give him/her a classroom where he/she can share that wealth of knowledge and experience.
Too many teaches have never known any life outside of a classroom, first on one side of the desk and then on the other. Too many teachers have never been out in the real world, done anything, been anywhere. Life in an ivory tower might be easy, but it does not equip anyone to give anything back to the students.
I also think that often the teachers who were naughty little thangs themselves, make the best educators later on. There were few behaviors my students could exhibit that I hadn’t already seen, been there, done that, or otherwise dealt with. Ho, hum. Try again, Bozo-boy. And of course they did. Who wants to be taught by Goody Two Shoes? She doesn’t know anything.
That was an allegory. I was a good little girl in school. Heh.
Our schools will not improve by having money thrown at them. Money just pays for the latest round of theories and the paperwork thereof.
Good teachers know how to do this. Why can’t we just step back and allow them to do it? Give them back their authority and the power to do something with it. Eliminate the “students” who come to school because the law demands it, and who use that time to abuse, defy, distract, bully, crush, kill, destroy, cheat, smirk, vandalize, harass, threaten, mug, rape, intimidate, and otherwise bring down the planet. And I really couldn’t care less about the letters of the alphabet written in their files that they’ve been using as a crutch and an excuse all these years. And I also think many parents should be laughed out of the principal’s office when they try to make excuses for deviant behavior. There ARE no excuses. Judges should throw their lawsuits out, and laugh at them again.
Families who send their children to school shaking with hunger, filthy, and reeking of smoke, should be investigated and the children removed. Once a child is removed and the family is found guilty of neglect or abuse or intimidation or anything bad, there should be no sending that child back, ever. The promises of such people mean nothing, and the child is usually abused even more because they ‘told.’ Do you really think this child will ‘tell’ again?
I am really sick and tired of the ‘rights’ of abusive adults. They lost their ‘rights’ the moment they laid a violent hand on a child. And why doesn’t the child have any rights in such cases?
I’m digressing, sorry.
The ’system’ sucks and ‘the man’ stinks.
It wouldn’t be difficult to fix it all if we just bucked up and refused to allow the bad people to run the show any more. When did we start allowing this, and why?
Any school that allows an illiterate child to graduate or be promoted, is a bad school. A school that allows parents to intimidate and change the rules, is a bad school. A school that allows a teacher to NOT do his/her job is a bad school. A school that won’t permit a teacher to his/her job is a bad school. A school that will not do whatever it takes to maintain a safe environment is a bad school, and I don’t care if they have to permanently expel half the student population. Get those kids the hell out of there so the decent kids can learn and feel safe in at least one aspect of their lives.
“Oh my, we can’t DO that, where would those expelled children GO?”
Honestly? I don’t give a shit. Just remove them so the decent kids don’t have to deal with them.
Jail, maybe, with Uncle Daddy.
If any of THOSE kids learns a hard lesson and wants to come back to school, let him come on probation, and one strike and he’s back out. No excuses, no reasons, no ifs ands or buts. Behave, learn to read and write, and the kid might be surprised at how many other doors will suddenly open up, leading to things like science and philosophy and history and geography, and maybe the kid will learn that there are other worlds besides the trailer-park world of his parent(s) and arguments in the kitchen about who her baby daddy be.
Sorry about the novel. These things simmer in me and sometimes they boil over.
I mean, a gym teacher who screams “I hate kids” every single day is still there in my building, and a teacher who got in trouble for cooking breakfast for some poor hungry students before giving them a huge ridiculous test, isn’t.
I should have quit years ago, but I really thought if I kept on trying, things would change. I was wrong. That’s a heartbreaker, that is.
Now that we have your attention, read this, by Mamacita. An excerpt:
…there’s a time and a place for everything. Sleeping, eating, rollerblading, driving, leaving home, movies, red wine, golfing, websurfing, and, yes, sex. Try any of these things when you’re too young or too old or too tired or at work or at someone else’s house or ovulating or angry or with the wrong person or just having an off day, well, let’s just say that things won’t go as they should, and that’s an understatement. And to try and persuade or even, heaven forbid, force, someone to do any of these things when they really don’t want to, is to be the opposite of a friend, and worse even than an enemy.
When, then, should these things, and others, be done? They should be done when the time is right, and the place is right, and the people are right. When do we know that? I don’t know. We just know. But what if everybody else is doing these things and they’re making fun of me because I’m not? Ignore them. They’re not you, and they can’t make decisions for you. But, but, but, I WANT them to! No, you don’t. Not really. But, but, but, people are doing these things everywhere. All the coolest celebrities are doing them and they look awesome.
Uh huh. Is this what it’s come down to? Celebrities are our young peoples’ mentors now? Actually, as long as parents give in and give in and kowtow, celebrities rule. Fashion, music, behavior. . . . .besides, many kids nowadays see celebrities more frequently than they see their parents. Kids spend long hours home alone in front of the tv, and lifestyle examples are rampant all over the networks. All of them look like more fun than their parents’ lifestyles.
You know, just like us, when we were their age.
Portions of this post have been previously published. As the school year winds down, we thought this would be a good time to reflect on exactly what it is going on in schools.
