Education is paramount in our life and the presence of a good education or a poor one will have an impact over a lifetime. When one considers their education and how it has impacted them they may not even know the implications. How can one know what they don’t know? How can one determine if they should have been educated better or if it was sufficient? It may well be that the education that we received was horrible and wholly inadequate. A deeper dive into the search of results of American education reveals a sad reality, without an easy fix.
“As of 1991, only 11% of the 8th grade students in California’s public schools could solve 7th grade math problems.” (1)
As of 2012, high school students were reading at a 5th grade reading level.
“When nearly 1/3 of American 17-year-olds do not know that Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, when nearly half do not know who Josef Stalin was, when about 30% could not locate Britain on a map of Europe, then it is clear that American educational deficiencies extend far beyond mathematics” [and reading].(2)
When parents are making the life altering decisions in education for their children how can they navigate the landscape of American education? This may be one of the most difficult tasks of parenting. After a deeper understanding of the public schools and their agendas it is easy to conclude that to avoid the public school institution at all cost is preferred if educational results are important to you. When this is not possible it is critical to keep a close eye on the education and instruction your little ones are receiving. “Parents who send their children to school with instructions to respect and obey their teachers may be surprised to discover how often these children are sent back home conditioned to disrespect and disobey their parents.” (3) “Too many American schools are turning out students who are not only intellectually incompetent but also morally confused, emotionally alienated, and socially maladjusted.” (4) Anyone willing to take an honest look at the results of education and the profound affect it has can see this. “An international study of 13-year-olds showed that American youngsters fell further and further behind, the more they were required to think.”(5) “As Professor Ravitch concludes: “Having opinions without knowledge is not of much value; not knowing the difference between them is a positive indicator of ignorance.” In short, it is not merely that Johnny cant read, or even that Johnny cant think. Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is, because thinking is so often confused with feeling in many public schools.”(6)
There is simply to much involved to discuss it in length. With governmental red tape and tax money being lobbied and payed out from the federal level down to the local level where the results may be different from one local to another. It is difficult, if not impossible, to know where to begin. There are many excuses given for the deficiency in American public schools, but mostly we hear it has something to do with money. Money for teachers, money for curriculum, for supplies, transportation, busing, and everything under the sun. Though evidence is rarely asked for or given to support that. “Looking at money input and educational output over time makes the education establishment’s claim of inadequate financing look even more ridiculous. “Our schools are already turning out some of the most expensive incompetents anywhere. Making them still more expensive will not change that.” (7)
Lets begin with the teachers. Remember that this is information in general and does not apply individually to each and every teacher. ESPECIALLY TO YOU READING THIS.
“There are well more over 2 million school teachers in the United States- more than all the doctors, lawyers, and engineers combined.” (8) This was true in 1988 and it would appear that teachers are still one of the most desired occupations. With one of the largest national unions and virtually iron-clad job security, why not desire it? After all, upon entering this career one usually has a desire to do something positive and, in general, feel that they are contributing to society. Also, it is one of the easiest fields to get into to with an education that does not require one to be the highest achiever in their class. “Consistently, for decades, those college students who have majored in education have been among the least qualified of all college students, and the professors who taught them have been among the least respected by their colleagues elsewhere in the college or university.” (9) “In short, some of the least qualified students, taught by the least qualified professors in the lowest quality courses supply most American public school teachers.” (10)
And just how iron-clad is a teachers job security? It is virtually impossible either financially or legally to terminate a teacher. The NEA has set up rules and regulations for handling a troubled teacher. One might wonder what a teacher must do to be terminated. The biggest alarm that has to be notified are parent’s complaints, without parent complaints, the teacher is left alone. There are rooms in unoccupied school building in New York City that are for housing teachers that have been deemed inappropriate to teach in front of a classroom. But, before teachers are sent to unoccupied schools they are passed around from one class to another or from one school to another. “These multiple transfers are so common that they even have nicknames, such as “the turkey trot” or “the dance of the lemons.” (11)
If one were wanting to influence another and get them to question their thinking, a classroom would provide a sufficient source. With the help of truancy laws, we are required to have the children in a classroom for a certain amount of hours a day/year. Therefore, classroom brainwashing is common place in America. “A variety of programs used in classrooms across the country not only share the general goals of brainwashing-that is, changing fundamental attitudes, values, and belief by psychological-conditioning methods-but also use classic brainwashing techniques developed in totalitarian countries.”(12) These methods have gone under the radar for so long because of fancy sounding names- “values clarification”, “decision making”, “affective education”, “Quest”, “drug prevention”, “sex education”, “gifted and talented” programs. (13) “A parent who visited a 5th grade classroom in Oregon testified at U.S. Department of Education hearings as to what she saw: I was present when a plastic model of female genitalia with a tampon insert was passed around to the boys so they might understand how tampons fit.” (14) The real world implications can hardly be argued given the usefulness of a young boy needing to understand tampons, or how they fit. “The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1979 produced a questionnaire for “health education” which included these questions: How often do you normally masturbate (play with yourself sexually)? How often do you normally engage in light petting (playing with a girl’s breast)? How often do you normally engage in heavy petting (playing with a girl’s vagina and the area around it)?” (15)
“As an article in the Humanist magazine put it: These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the educational level-preschool day care or large state universities.” (16) From this pulpit some teachers are passionately and exuberantly spreading propaganda in climate theory, population control theory, death education, socialist/Marxism, and much more. The religious organization known as Planned Parenthood has made disciples of most the staff in education and government that have promised to spread the good news of truth and hope that all people can choose to murder their children at will. Before birth or immediately thereafter. Whether these programs help accomplish their said goal is another question entirely, while no one offers evidence or asks for it. Perhaps their goal was to increase abortions exponentially, since that was the result, I would say they have far surpassed their goal.
As with many things today racism is blamed for the many inadequacies of education. If one were to define racism as acting like one race is superior or better than another then perhaps racism can define some of the problems in the following programs. Terms like “multicultural diversity” can disguise racism and even encourage it, leading to bilingual education that forces students to spend time in class of a foreign language, even when those very students are fluent in English. “A landmark on the road to bilingualism was the 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lau v. Nichols that it was an unconstitutional denial of equal protection to provide only an English-language education to non-English-speaking school children.”(17) What results can you expect from a government program like this? “A large-scale national study of bilingual programs found that two-thirds of the Hispanic children enrolled in such programs were already fluent in English, and more then four-fifths of the directors of such programs admitted that they retained students in their programs after the students had mastered English.” (17) It seems this programs was designed to give jobs to teachers that can speak a foreign language. The results this programs was designed to seek were not even measured as several school districts kept children for years beyond their need, or even entered the program already fluent in English. A bilingual teacher in Massachusetts, explained her frustrations when she explained that the school district would not let children out of her class even when she recommended they should. “The department head argued that they must remain in the bilingual program as long as they were not yet reading at grade level. It did not matter when I countered that many American students who speak only English do not read at grade level.”(18)
Discussing the “flow of racism” as if one can determine where racism originates and will flow to or from. Sensitivity training and role models are also under the disguise of racism claiming that we must focus on a different culture instead of the one the students live in and giving the excuse that students must see a role model that looks like them in order to better learn a concept. Of course, this is nonsense and can lead to a culture where the color of ones skin is more important than what they know or whom they are. Going even further, this type of thinking and teaching can divide people instead of uniting them. A student may see racism outside of school in the real world, but in the real world racism is starved and cannot survive in public under scrutiny. In the cover of the classroom focusing on what separates us and that one culture is better than another breeds racism and allows it to flourish. Of course, division has been their goal the entire time. Without polarization racism dies, it stagnates and cannot continue in public. Now that students are graduating with a healthy distrust of their parents coupled together with a healthy trust of schools and teachers that taught them since pre-school all of this nonsense what can we expect their next phase of life to look like. It would appear that college will just reinforce these lessons and go on to deepen the racism and polarization that has been instilled in them.
Notes: (1) Inside American Education -Thomas Sowell, Page 1. (2) Inside American Education -Thomas Sowell, Page 3. (3) Inside American Education -Thomas Sowell, Preface ix (4) Inside American Education -Thomas Sowell, Preface x (5) Inside American Education -Thomas Sowell, Page 4. (6)Inside American Education -Thomas Sowell, Page 4. (7)Inside American Education -Thomas Sowell, Page 12 (8)Inside American Education -Thomas Sowell, Page 22. (9) Inside American Education -Thomas Sowell, Page 23 (10) Inside American Education -Thomas Sowell, Page 25 (11) Inside American Education -Thomas Sowell, Page 31 (12) Inside American Education -Thomas Sowell, Page 36 (13) Inside American Education -Thomas Sowell, Page 34 (14) Inside American Education -Thomas Sowell, Page 38 (15) Inside American Education -Thomas Sowell, Page 46 (16) Inside American Education -Thomas Sowell, Page 59 (17) Inside American Education -Thomas Sowell, Page 74 (18) Inside American Education -Thomas Sowell, Page 79
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