Excellent, because he's right. My generation thought that critical thinking was denying everything your parents and any other authority figure ever thought.
"We want to learn how to think, not what to think," they said as they progressed through college, and gave themselves the right never to have to teach anything again. No alphabet, no addition or multiplication tables, no grammar, no historical dates or time line. All that went out the window on the excuse that "It doesn't matter if you don't know something, as long as you know how (where) to look it up."
This sounds lovely. Everything the hippies said sounded lovely. It's one of the stupidest lies I have ever heard. If you don't know that eight times seven is fifty-six (and these days, most kids don't, trust me), then how will you know whether eight marbles for seven cents is a better bargain than a dozen marbles for ten cents? You lose.
The upshot of having our kids this ignorant is that this generation of teachers, who were educated in the Eighties by failures from the Sixties, actually believe and teach to their students that "white invaders practiced germ warfare on the native Americans because they wanted to wipe them out." You have to be a hateful and extremely ignorant fool to believe this, but it's so ingrained in the culture by America-haters that no one questions it any more.
And as Dennis Prager asks, "If you believe this, how can you stay in such an evil country? How can you not pick up and move out of here as fast as you can? That's what I would do." He's right.
Anyway, the kids are incapable of questioning this germ-warfare hypothesis because they don't know anything. They don't know when germs were invented. They've never even seen an old movie set in the Renaissance in which doctors knew nothing about germs and were incapable of practicing "germ warfare". They've never been outside of their crappy little constricted horizons, which includes movies up to four years old, at which point they turn into "old movies" and are thus unwatchable. In fact, the only movies they've seen were about teenagers and pre-teens having their crappy little episodes of emotional diarrhea. It's The Suite Life and I, Carly or it's nothing.
There is so much wrong in so many ways here. This is one good place to start--turn ON the TV and watch TCM movies from the Thirties as the kids are growing up. Explain what century this story is in. Notice when you see something that's different from today and comment on it. "Look at that heavy clothing, I guess they didn't have fine looms to weave lightweight stuff."
Actually I'm betting you're in pretty much the same boat your kids are in, and you've probably barely ever thought about a loom in the entire course of your existence. Well, there's no time like NOW to start thinking about such things, because you're as sad as your kids are.
As for the germ-warfare story, I asked a politics board if they knew what was wrong with it. Everyone on that board was under forty years of age, and the average IQ was probably around 120 or even more. They didn't know how to look it up.
So screw the hippie crap. Get some stuff to carry around in your head. At the very least, you'll be less likely to get Alzheimer's.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Schools
I am watching a program in which the host has fifty studio guests, probably all of them teachers. I missed the first 10 minutes so I can't tell you, but they're commenting as if they are insiders.
This one refers to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) as a problem because it means that every classroom is forced to slow down to the speed of the slowest child. One lazy kid who refuses to learn and the whole classroom of children who might otherwise have wished to learn are forced not to.
Sorry guys but this is nothing new. We had this in public schools in the Sixties. It was so important to them to keep every child in the same "social development bracket" (my term for whatever their miserable thinking was) and not to let any child suffer the consequences of his laziness.
NCLB may be a joke (it's not a horror unless you can blame Bush for it, regardless of the fact that Teddy Kennedy and his staff are the ones who wrote it) but it isn't a new joks. My thoughts on it? That at least the kids were getting tested once every few years, which was generally a step up from never getting tested at all, which had been the norm for the prior thirty decades.
This one refers to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) as a problem because it means that every classroom is forced to slow down to the speed of the slowest child. One lazy kid who refuses to learn and the whole classroom of children who might otherwise have wished to learn are forced not to.
Sorry guys but this is nothing new. We had this in public schools in the Sixties. It was so important to them to keep every child in the same "social development bracket" (my term for whatever their miserable thinking was) and not to let any child suffer the consequences of his laziness.
NCLB may be a joke (it's not a horror unless you can blame Bush for it, regardless of the fact that Teddy Kennedy and his staff are the ones who wrote it) but it isn't a new joks. My thoughts on it? That at least the kids were getting tested once every few years, which was generally a step up from never getting tested at all, which had been the norm for the prior thirty decades.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Race to the Top
And so another administration makes up another program that is miraculously goint to improve our schools.
Here is what education analyst Neal McCluskey says about the real impact of this $4 billion paperwork circus: "States must say how they would improve lots of things, but they actually have to do very little. It is decades of public schooling -- from the Great Society to No Child Left Behind -- in a nutshell."
Our education regime is loaded with fraud. They have no idea how to teach, or rather, they have the wrong idea. Their image of what a "finished" student should look like comes out of their own wild imaginations and the imaginations of "social progressives" of the past five generations. An educated eighteen year old will be "actualized" and "socialized" but not have a broad foundation upon which to base his interpretations of things he encounters which no teacher anticipated for him and for which he is completely unprepared. He knows nothing so he believes anything he is told, so long as it is cloaked in emotional language that makes him feel good. "You care, you're opposed to racism or cigarettes or sexual hangups or that old fashioned crap your grandparents used to get force fed in school, you know how to think, you know more than regurgitating what you're told in school, you're so smart you question authority, people used to believe this old garbage but now we're enlightened and we know better; you don't need someone to tell you how to think, you're smarter than that..."
All these stupid slogans mean absolutely nothing, but are eagerly lapped up by people with no education. They make you feel good, they make you feel superior to the Thomas Aquinases and the Saint Augustines and even the Galileos of our world, simply by labeling ourselves "smarter than them."
And that's all this generation has to go on--silliness. And by "silly" I'm using the word as it used to be used, referring to sheep who have not a single thought in their heads. They will vote for silly policies and silly politicians who impose destructive policies through silly, meaningless slogans like "Yes we can."
But that's what our educrats intend, because silliness and silly beliefs and silly followers and silly ego-stroking are what keep in power the party that has the most entrenched opportunists in the education profession.
Something has got to change, and I'm hoping to be one of the voices responsible for "CHANGE!!! YES WE CAN!!!"
Here is what education analyst Neal McCluskey says about the real impact of this $4 billion paperwork circus: "States must say how they would improve lots of things, but they actually have to do very little. It is decades of public schooling -- from the Great Society to No Child Left Behind -- in a nutshell."
Our education regime is loaded with fraud. They have no idea how to teach, or rather, they have the wrong idea. Their image of what a "finished" student should look like comes out of their own wild imaginations and the imaginations of "social progressives" of the past five generations. An educated eighteen year old will be "actualized" and "socialized" but not have a broad foundation upon which to base his interpretations of things he encounters which no teacher anticipated for him and for which he is completely unprepared. He knows nothing so he believes anything he is told, so long as it is cloaked in emotional language that makes him feel good. "You care, you're opposed to racism or cigarettes or sexual hangups or that old fashioned crap your grandparents used to get force fed in school, you know how to think, you know more than regurgitating what you're told in school, you're so smart you question authority, people used to believe this old garbage but now we're enlightened and we know better; you don't need someone to tell you how to think, you're smarter than that..."
All these stupid slogans mean absolutely nothing, but are eagerly lapped up by people with no education. They make you feel good, they make you feel superior to the Thomas Aquinases and the Saint Augustines and even the Galileos of our world, simply by labeling ourselves "smarter than them."
And that's all this generation has to go on--silliness. And by "silly" I'm using the word as it used to be used, referring to sheep who have not a single thought in their heads. They will vote for silly policies and silly politicians who impose destructive policies through silly, meaningless slogans like "Yes we can."
But that's what our educrats intend, because silliness and silly beliefs and silly followers and silly ego-stroking are what keep in power the party that has the most entrenched opportunists in the education profession.
Something has got to change, and I'm hoping to be one of the voices responsible for "CHANGE!!! YES WE CAN!!!"
Very much worth reading
Casabianca
Early nineteenth century poem about an event during the Battle of the Nile (1798), rather famous for its heart-breaking theme. Incidentally, written by a woman, for those who believe the feminist propaganda about how we had all been kept in captivity until 1920.
Early nineteenth century poem about an event during the Battle of the Nile (1798), rather famous for its heart-breaking theme. Incidentally, written by a woman, for those who believe the feminist propaganda about how we had all been kept in captivity until 1920.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Please allow me to introduce myself
Let me introduce myself. I was nominally educated in the American public schools, to some degree. I started in 1958. My mom had asked them to let me stay out of school because she knew I had one helluva brain, but the Las Vegas school officials insisted. The state law said mandatory attendance began at age six but I was forced into kindergarten at age five. Mom demanded an IQ test, hoping they'd leave me alone. Score: 185. Much to her surprise they pushed even harder to put me in school when they saw I was such a genius.
Kindergarten would have been a bore if I had not so outshone the other kids. I had been reading on my own since age 2. I had known the alphabet and how to count and add. One of my favorite toys was the map of the United States, with the new 50 states, in individual pieces. And no, I didn't lose Rhode Island nor Connecticut nor Massachusetts. My other favorite toy was the globe. I sat and studied the shapes of the countries on that thing and could eventually tell you the names of all the countries in the world based on their shape and location.
I knew the days of the week, I knew the names of the colors. No one taught me the color wheel but I seem to have picked that information up myself. I had a lovely book on geology and have always been interested in that subject. Dinosaurs, Greek mythology, Aesop's fables; all have been pet subjects all my life. So have foreign and ancient languages, especially word origins, and through my interest in stories I have always been fascinated in history. There have always been dozens of other interests as well.
At any rate, back to kindergarten. We sat at desks. Yes, we had wooden chairs, rectangular tables, we raised our hands for permission to speak. The teacher stood in front of the room and taught. She even asked questions and when my hand shot up she tried to avoid calling on me, but as it was often the only hand in the air, she was obliged to do so. That's how I knew I knew everything.
Everything but one thing: how to tie my own shoes. I went home and learned it overnight but not before I had exposed my ignorance to the other kids. A couple of them picked on me the next day but I tied my laces (saddle shoes, they were, also known as oxfords) and they made fun of me while I did. Nothing stops a bully. But I adored my teacher, she was a sweet lady whom I don't remember too much of, just that I really liked her. Maybe because I always knew the answer to her questions and was praised to the other kids.
Well, we didn't stay in Las Vegas long after that. My father wanted to be rich and long ago had realized he wasn't going to get rich dealing craps, so we moved to San Diego where he got a job as a stock broker. Same profession, different label. He was a gambler and will be till he dies. Too bad he didn't understand the population explosion that he and his wife were sharing in (the Baby Boom was in full swing). He owned six acres on The Strip, sold it for five thousand dollars more than he had paid for it (or so says my mom, who was begging him not to sell it), and thought he had made a killing. A twenty-story bank stood on that lot twenty years later.
So I was forced into kindergarten in the magnificent schools in California. Another IQ test demanded by my mom. I apparently was given something very similar to the Vane Kindergarten test, and scored higher than their stupid scale would allow. That is to say, Wechsler (and I suppose the author of this test, too, whoever he was) assumed no one would ever have a higher score than 150 and that's where the scale stopped. I was off it, much to the consternation of the school psychologist.
In the half-day classroom we sat on the floor. Teacher taught us only one thing the whole year: how to read a calendar, and she got it wrong anyway, tracing the X's over the dates by going from the top of the page down the line to the bottom of the column of X's, as if this Tuesday were the successor of the last Tuesday. I'm absolutely positive that though she may have been intending to show the relation of all the Tuesdays to one another, she only confused all the kids who didn't understand the nature of the numbers on the calendar--especially as she was DETERMINED not to allow the children to become confused by those nasty things called "numbers". So she studiously avoided showing that the next day got X'd after the previous day "in this way, from left to right."
Maybe she thought we didn't know left from right and shouldn't have to be burdened with that concept till we were six or seven. More likely she had studied Piaget and there was something in his stinking writings about not being able to understand any graphic representation of the passage of time until age twelve. Or possibly there was something in Dewey about calendars not being child-centered. I don't know but I do know this: You do not confuse someone deliberately like that, because an idea learned that young will stick in your head if it isn't corrected immediately.
This is another reason I'm opposed to sex ed for preschoolers but that's going to wait for another day. Remind me if I forget to get around to it before I finish my biography.
Please note that California has bragged about its schools being "the best schools in the country" since the 'Twenties. They are not. While Nevada was determined to teach us some beginning skills that would do us good next year, California taught us nothing. Well, if you consider raising your hand for the bathroom (some peed on the floor while they waited to be recognized) and putting toys away at the end of playtime to be "learning something", then I guess we learned "something". I believe most kids learned that much at home, though, not there at school. Besides, as any wife who has a husband who takes his dishes to the kitchen at his mom's house but leaves his crap all over the house at home can tell you, learning one behavior for one place doesn't always generalize to another site. So, while what we learned may have made life easier for the teacher in first grade, we didn't really learn one thing academic.
In first grade we were blended with the second grade. Since I could already read, write, and do some math, I was put into the second grade side of the room to sit with the readers. I remember that poor class very well. They were struggling along with the second-grade version of "Dick and Jane". I believe I remember pictures of a stupid, purposeless family that rolled around in their back yard and were chased after by a spotted dog, but I could be mingling my own old images with some that I have seen since then. At any rate, I hated that horrible family, mainly because they didn't ride across the western plains in a covered wagon, they didn't go into outer space with bubble-headed space suits, they didn't defend the walls of Troy or sail across the ocean on a caravel. They didn't know any bearded old men in embroidered silk robes who threw powder onto a brasier and brought fiery dragons down upon our village, or talk with enchanted musical birds who foretold the future. In short, they were boring as hell, and by the looks of my fellow students, I wasn't the only one who thought so. But thanks to the "expanding horizons" curriculum we were forced to read about ourselves and our families, even though these shitheads were nothing like my family. At least my family went on some car-tour adventure on Sunday afternoons, sometimes to the mountains, sometimes through farmlands, and often to the beach. We may have been boring but we were far less boring than Dick and Jane.
Let me stop this post here, I want to talk about how they taught reading.
Kindergarten would have been a bore if I had not so outshone the other kids. I had been reading on my own since age 2. I had known the alphabet and how to count and add. One of my favorite toys was the map of the United States, with the new 50 states, in individual pieces. And no, I didn't lose Rhode Island nor Connecticut nor Massachusetts. My other favorite toy was the globe. I sat and studied the shapes of the countries on that thing and could eventually tell you the names of all the countries in the world based on their shape and location.
I knew the days of the week, I knew the names of the colors. No one taught me the color wheel but I seem to have picked that information up myself. I had a lovely book on geology and have always been interested in that subject. Dinosaurs, Greek mythology, Aesop's fables; all have been pet subjects all my life. So have foreign and ancient languages, especially word origins, and through my interest in stories I have always been fascinated in history. There have always been dozens of other interests as well.
At any rate, back to kindergarten. We sat at desks. Yes, we had wooden chairs, rectangular tables, we raised our hands for permission to speak. The teacher stood in front of the room and taught. She even asked questions and when my hand shot up she tried to avoid calling on me, but as it was often the only hand in the air, she was obliged to do so. That's how I knew I knew everything.
Everything but one thing: how to tie my own shoes. I went home and learned it overnight but not before I had exposed my ignorance to the other kids. A couple of them picked on me the next day but I tied my laces (saddle shoes, they were, also known as oxfords) and they made fun of me while I did. Nothing stops a bully. But I adored my teacher, she was a sweet lady whom I don't remember too much of, just that I really liked her. Maybe because I always knew the answer to her questions and was praised to the other kids.
Well, we didn't stay in Las Vegas long after that. My father wanted to be rich and long ago had realized he wasn't going to get rich dealing craps, so we moved to San Diego where he got a job as a stock broker. Same profession, different label. He was a gambler and will be till he dies. Too bad he didn't understand the population explosion that he and his wife were sharing in (the Baby Boom was in full swing). He owned six acres on The Strip, sold it for five thousand dollars more than he had paid for it (or so says my mom, who was begging him not to sell it), and thought he had made a killing. A twenty-story bank stood on that lot twenty years later.
So I was forced into kindergarten in the magnificent schools in California. Another IQ test demanded by my mom. I apparently was given something very similar to the Vane Kindergarten test, and scored higher than their stupid scale would allow. That is to say, Wechsler (and I suppose the author of this test, too, whoever he was) assumed no one would ever have a higher score than 150 and that's where the scale stopped. I was off it, much to the consternation of the school psychologist.
In the half-day classroom we sat on the floor. Teacher taught us only one thing the whole year: how to read a calendar, and she got it wrong anyway, tracing the X's over the dates by going from the top of the page down the line to the bottom of the column of X's, as if this Tuesday were the successor of the last Tuesday. I'm absolutely positive that though she may have been intending to show the relation of all the Tuesdays to one another, she only confused all the kids who didn't understand the nature of the numbers on the calendar--especially as she was DETERMINED not to allow the children to become confused by those nasty things called "numbers". So she studiously avoided showing that the next day got X'd after the previous day "in this way, from left to right."
Maybe she thought we didn't know left from right and shouldn't have to be burdened with that concept till we were six or seven. More likely she had studied Piaget and there was something in his stinking writings about not being able to understand any graphic representation of the passage of time until age twelve. Or possibly there was something in Dewey about calendars not being child-centered. I don't know but I do know this: You do not confuse someone deliberately like that, because an idea learned that young will stick in your head if it isn't corrected immediately.
This is another reason I'm opposed to sex ed for preschoolers but that's going to wait for another day. Remind me if I forget to get around to it before I finish my biography.
Please note that California has bragged about its schools being "the best schools in the country" since the 'Twenties. They are not. While Nevada was determined to teach us some beginning skills that would do us good next year, California taught us nothing. Well, if you consider raising your hand for the bathroom (some peed on the floor while they waited to be recognized) and putting toys away at the end of playtime to be "learning something", then I guess we learned "something". I believe most kids learned that much at home, though, not there at school. Besides, as any wife who has a husband who takes his dishes to the kitchen at his mom's house but leaves his crap all over the house at home can tell you, learning one behavior for one place doesn't always generalize to another site. So, while what we learned may have made life easier for the teacher in first grade, we didn't really learn one thing academic.
In first grade we were blended with the second grade. Since I could already read, write, and do some math, I was put into the second grade side of the room to sit with the readers. I remember that poor class very well. They were struggling along with the second-grade version of "Dick and Jane". I believe I remember pictures of a stupid, purposeless family that rolled around in their back yard and were chased after by a spotted dog, but I could be mingling my own old images with some that I have seen since then. At any rate, I hated that horrible family, mainly because they didn't ride across the western plains in a covered wagon, they didn't go into outer space with bubble-headed space suits, they didn't defend the walls of Troy or sail across the ocean on a caravel. They didn't know any bearded old men in embroidered silk robes who threw powder onto a brasier and brought fiery dragons down upon our village, or talk with enchanted musical birds who foretold the future. In short, they were boring as hell, and by the looks of my fellow students, I wasn't the only one who thought so. But thanks to the "expanding horizons" curriculum we were forced to read about ourselves and our families, even though these shitheads were nothing like my family. At least my family went on some car-tour adventure on Sunday afternoons, sometimes to the mountains, sometimes through farmlands, and often to the beach. We may have been boring but we were far less boring than Dick and Jane.
Let me stop this post here, I want to talk about how they taught reading.
Okay, so I've pretty much ignored this blog for the last year
Sorry!
I am a person who is passionate about education.
I'm not referring to schooling, nor am I agreeing with our modern definition of "education" as "the process of getting our next generation ready to earn a good salary."
If you think the most serious problem facing todays K12 students is whether or not they will earn a good salary you can either keep reading with your lips sealed tight or you can go away. As someone who is interested in education, I love a good discussion. If you're here to see about job preparation for the next generation, you're not able to participate in a "good discussion" anyway.
This idea that education is for "job preparedness" came upon our society as the GI Bill sent tens of thousands of unprepared young men and women to college, without the proper attitudes, without the proper background about "knowledge" and "broadness", but the price was right (college suddenly was free to so many of them) and white collar jobs were suddenly available for the improvement of blue-collar men.
You, too, could go from "I'm Dickens, He's Fenster" to "Leave It to Beaver" ... and completely without the benefit of Plato or Milton.
Well, the education I'm talking about was a Classical education. The kind you only get at Catholic colleges, or those nasty old conservative colleges named after nasty old conservative Protestant ministers. NOT job-training centres. NOT centres of cultural relativism, but an education in our own culture, yes, Western culture.
I am a person who is passionate about education.
I'm not referring to schooling, nor am I agreeing with our modern definition of "education" as "the process of getting our next generation ready to earn a good salary."
If you think the most serious problem facing todays K12 students is whether or not they will earn a good salary you can either keep reading with your lips sealed tight or you can go away. As someone who is interested in education, I love a good discussion. If you're here to see about job preparation for the next generation, you're not able to participate in a "good discussion" anyway.
This idea that education is for "job preparedness" came upon our society as the GI Bill sent tens of thousands of unprepared young men and women to college, without the proper attitudes, without the proper background about "knowledge" and "broadness", but the price was right (college suddenly was free to so many of them) and white collar jobs were suddenly available for the improvement of blue-collar men.
You, too, could go from "I'm Dickens, He's Fenster" to "Leave It to Beaver" ... and completely without the benefit of Plato or Milton.
Well, the education I'm talking about was a Classical education. The kind you only get at Catholic colleges, or those nasty old conservative colleges named after nasty old conservative Protestant ministers. NOT job-training centres. NOT centres of cultural relativism, but an education in our own culture, yes, Western culture.
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