Thoughts Aloud

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Who deserves the dubious award for this achievement:

Survey finds most Obama voters remembered negative coverage of McCain/Palin statements but struggled to correctly answer questions about coverage associated with Obama/Biden

UTICA, New York — Just 2% of voters who supported Barack Obama on Election Day obtained perfect or near-perfect scores on a post election test which gauged their knowledge of statements and scandals associated with the presidential tickets during the campaign, a new Zogby International telephone poll shows.

Only 54% of Obama voters were able to answer at least half or more of the questions correctly.

The 12-question, multiple-choice survey found questions regarding statements linked to Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his vice-presidential running-mate Sarah Palin were far more likely to be answered correctly by Obama voters than questions about statements associated with Obama and Vice-President–Elect Joe Biden.

…

When asked which candidate said they could “see Russia from their house,” 87% chose Palin, although the quote actually is attributed to Saturday Night Live’s Tina Fey during her portrayal of Palin during the campaign. An answer of “none” or “Palin” was counted as a correct answer on the test, given that the statement was associated with a characterization of Palin.

…

In addition to questions regarding statements and scandals associated with the campaigns, the 12-question, multiple-choice survey also included a question asking which political party controlled both houses of Congress leading up to the election — 57% of Obama voters were unable to correctly answer that Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate.

…the MSM or our Public School teachers? The “view of Russia” question is particularly galling; because not that many people watch SNL, and I heard it attributed to Palin by Democrat pundits repeatedly. I’ll say it again… there ought to be a minimum competency test required before allowing sheeple to vote. ◄Dave►

Homeschoolers seek asylum from Nazi-era law:

The Homeschool Legal Defense Association is helping a family with an unusual, first-of-its-kind application: political asylum in the United States from Germany’s oppressive homeschooling laws.

The Uwe and Hannelore Romeike family fled their native Bissingen, Germany, to escape persecution under a Nazi-era law requiring all children to attend public school to avoid “the emergence of parallel societies based on separate philosophical convictions” that could be taught by parents at home.

…

Speaking of their new life in Tennessee, Mrs. Romeike told HSLDA, “The freedom we have to homeschool our children is wonderful. … We don’t have to worry about looking over our shoulder anymore, wondering when the youth welfare officials will come or how much money we have to pay in fines.”

Mr. Romeike added, “We left family, our home and a wonderful community in Germany. But the freedom is worth it. We hope that our example may pave the way for other families. It is wrong for Germany to persecute homeschoolers. But if they do not want the best and brightest and those who seek freedom, then perhaps the United States will benefit.”

…

“By standing with our persecuted brothers and sisters in Germany,” says HSLDA President J. Michael Smith, “we hope to inspire American homeschoolers not to take their freedom lightly, but to remember that freedom requires sacrifice. We also hope that with our encouragement and support, change for the better can happen. Our freedoms have long been an inspiration to others all over the world.”

Let’s hope he doesn’t have to flee Obamaland for the same reason in the future. The irony is that it was Prussia (now Germany) that started the compulsory public school concept, which was imported to America by the Progressives, as an excellent decade old article entitled, ‘The “Real” School Is Not Free‘ explains. I highly recommend it to anyone who doesn’t understand why our kids are being deliberately dumbed down by government factory schools. Then, it might occur to you that they did it to us too… and if that doesn’t piss you off, you are programmed beyond hope… go back to sleep. ◄Dave►

The Cato Institute has published an interesting essay by an obviously Left-leaning libertarian named Roderick Long entitled, “Corporations Versus The Market; Or, Whip Conflation Now.”

While I would take issue with some of his examples of “corporate welfare” (e.g. Walmart’s competitors use the same roads they do to ship their inventory), I got more out of the essay than I initially expected to. As a devout Capitalist, I used to have somewhat of a knee-jerk defense reaction to Leftist bashing of Corporations of any size, even though I am a small businessman. That business of late (past 12 years) has been a private Montessori school, so the condition of the public school system in America has been a particular focus of mine.

Then, I read a mind blowing (and opening) book by John Taylor Gatto entitled, “The Underground History of American Education,” which is available as a free e-book at that link. The scales started dropping from my eyes. It explains in excruciating detail how and why our children are being deliberately dumbed down. Almost more importantly, SO WERE WE! The process has been underway for over a hundred years! It still pisses me off when I think about it.

The history of the Progressive Movement is covered well in Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” and Amity Shlaes’ “The Forgotten Man“; but if I only had time for one of the three, I would recommend Gatto’s. Further to the detailed history of the Progressives, it documents how the early industrialists like Rockefeller, Carnegie, et al, were very much behind the effort to create mindless little cogs for the tedious chores in their corporate machinery.

There is a reason that public schools resemble factories in so many ways. Humans have to be programmed to accept the tedium of spending the day metaphorically chained to a desk or machine in a cubical or factory, and the younger one starts, the easier the chore. Further, the industrialists didn’t want us to be educated any more than absolutely necessary to perform the required tasks and be easily persuaded to desire their products. Thinkers tend to become entrepreneurs and eventually bothersome competitors who can disrupt their well laid plans with innovation and guerrilla tactics unsuited to the behemoths.

This is the reason that the Montessori Method of education is eschewed by the factory schools in America. Children are given freedom of movement and learn how to think – critically and for themselves – not what to think in a Montessori classroom, and these are dangerous notions to the oligarchy. It almost makes me want to cry when I think of what this nation could be like, if the minds of our children were unleashed, and the government got the hell out of our way.

The thing I got most out of Long’s essay was a clearer picture of how the Right slope, away from individual Liberty in my Political Circle Chart, represents not just the trend toward theocracy; but embodies corporatism, which can be as statist as Marxism, and almost as dangerous to our Liberty. Example:

Consider the conservative virtue-term “privatization,” which has two distinct, indeed opposed, meanings. On the one hand, it can mean returning some service or industry from the monopolistic government sector to the competitive private sector—getting government out of it; this would be the libertarian meaning. On the other hand, it can mean “contracting out,” i.e., granting to some private firm a monopoly privilege in the provision some service previously provided by government directly. There is nothing free-market about privatization in this latter sense, since the monopoly power is merely transferred from one set of hands to another; this is corporatism, or pro-business intervention, not laissez-faire. (To be sure, there may be competition in the bidding for such monopoly contracts, but competition to establish a legal monopoly is no more genuine market competition than voting—one last time—to establish a dictator is genuine democracy.)

I must admit he has a point. Further:

This conflation in turn tends to bolster the power of the political establishment by rendering genuine libertarianism invisible: Those who are attracted to free markets are lured into supporting plutocracy, thus helping to prop up statism’s right or corporatist wing; those who are repelled by plutocracy are lured into opposing free markets, thus helping to prop up statism’s left or social-democratic wing. But as these two wings have more in common than not, the political establishment wins either way.

I hadn’t looked at it that way. Statism to the Left of me and statism to the Right of me, which has nothing to do with the religious Right. And:

In the nineteenth century, it was far more common than it is today for libertarians to see themselves as opponents of big business.[20] The long 20th-century alliance of libertarians with conservatives against the common enemy of state-socialism probably had much to do with reorienting libertarian thought toward the right; and the brief rapprochement between libertarians and the left during the 1960s foundered when the New Left imploded.[21] As a result, libertarians have been ill-placed to combat left-wing and right-wing conflation of markets with privilege, because they have not been entirely free of the conflation themselves.

Another piece of the puzzle falls into place in my mind, and I need to now modify my chart to reflect the economic spectrum. Laissez-faire Capitalism would be at the top, with Marxism / Socialism on the Left and corporatism on the Right. ◄Dave►

Our friend Troy is on the mend from recent back surgery and clearing his head from the painkillers with a vengeance! In a lively screed entitled “Don’t Rein On My Parade,” after some clear thinking on some of the discussion items we have been kicking around in the comment section of my Political Spectrum essay, he suggests that it is time to consider secession as the only option for saving at least a portion of America. By allowing the socialists who prefer Equality to have their half of the country, presumably to be ruled by Obamarx et al, those who prefer Liberty could return to the original Constitutional Republic our founders bequeathed us.

I regard his suggestion as not only serious, but agreeable. I suggest we go over to his place and help him flesh out the idea, and see if there is any way modern patriots could actually pull it off. I reckon we could. If the ragtag Taliban can continue to deny the US government control over vast swaths of Afghanistan, I am sure American Minutemen could deny them hegemony over flyover country. ◄Dave►

Over the years, I have periodically encountered the following list of Communist goals from Cleon Skousen’s book, “The Naked Communist” which was inserted into the Congressional Record in 1963. It is always sobering, and now that we have progressed to the point of electing a Marxist to the office of POTUS, it is worth reviewing once again:

Communist Goals (1963) Congressional Record–Appendix, pp. A34-A35 January 10, 1963

Current Communist Goals EXTENSION OF REMARKS OF HON. A. S. HERLONG, JR. OF FLORIDA IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Thursday, January 10, 1963.

Mr. HERLONG. Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Patricia Nordman of De Land, Fla., is an ardent and articulate opponent of communism, and until recently published the De Land Courier, which she dedicated to the purpose of alerting the public to the dangers of communism in America.

At Mrs. Nordman’s request, I include in the RECORD, under unanimous consent, the following “Current Communist Goals,” which she identifies as an excerpt from “The Naked Communist,” by Cleon Skousen:

[From "The Naked Communist," by Cleon Skousen]

1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.

2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.

3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.

4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.

5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.

6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.

7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.

8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev’s promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.

9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.

10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.

11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)

12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.

13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.

14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

18. Gain control of all student newspapers.

19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.

20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.

21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”

23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”

24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.

25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.

26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a “religious crutch.”

28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the “big picture.” Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture–education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.

36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.

37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].

39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use ["]united force["] to solve economic, political or social problems.

43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.

44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.

45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction [over domestic problems. Give the World Court jurisdiction] over nations and individuals alike.

How close are they to achieving their goals? Do Americans have a clue what is happening to our country? Does Obamarx? How many of us still care? ◄Dave►

I couldn’t find a better example of what is wrong with our public school system than this video:

This is truly disturbing, and why did it take a foreign documentary film crew to expose it? The astounding thing is that she actually thinks she was being impartial and just giving a civics lesson (while wearing her Obama button, no less…). I will admit that she is the first Obama supporter I ever saw ask what Obama meant by “change,” and the young girl is the first one I ever saw even coming close to a cogent answer. It usually stumps them cold. ◄Dave►

I saw this “badge” on another blog and decided to check it out.  When I entered the URL for this blog it returned the code to embed here to produce this:

I found that encouraging, because I have often been criticized for my verbosity and penchant for fifty-cent words. It seemed implausible, however, and I noticed that my last entry was the simple one regarding my new hardware; so I tried it again using the URL for my “About Thoughts Aloud” page. This returned:

Come on… OK, how about my serious essay on Sovereign Rights? This returned:

Ouch! I guess I wasted my time with that one! How many geniuses am I going to entice to read it? I tried several more and a few of the longer posts I have made. They all came out as Jr. High School, High School, or:

Finally, I retested a few of them to confirm that it is consistent, and not just generating a random output. If this thing has any validity, I am pleased; for that means my writing is readable by most nominally educated folks, even if they occasionally need to use a dictionary.

You can try out your own blog, or just about any webpage, by clicking on any of the above images; they all take you to the same test. ◄Dave►

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; But if you really make them think, they’ll hate you. -Don Marquis (1878-1937)

I suppose that it is a good thing that I do not need much love, and don’t mind at all being disliked.

College professor, Lori Roman, has submitted an interesting perspective entitled “We cannot be Ignorant and Free“:

I keep hearing the same question asked:  How could so many Americans vote for Barack Obama, a man who advocates socialist policies and associates with radical people who hate America?

I believe the answer is simple:  We are not teaching our young people to understand and value the American experience and moral relativism has robbed them of their ability to make ethical judgments…

Academically our children are not equipped to appreciate and pursue the American Dream. Many children graduate from high school with good grades, but without fundamental skills…

Uninformed people are easily fooled.  Thomas Jefferson said: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”…

My students believed that “government for the people” means that the government is supposed to do everything for the people.  My classroom would become quiet when I would tell them that the Declaration of Independence only gives them the right to PURSUE happiness–they have to catch it themselves.

This may seem bizarre, considering that my students were usually business majors, but they also had no appreciation or understanding of the beauty of the free enterprise system, or its role in the prosperity and freedom of our country. But the good news is that when I explained Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand Theory and showed them how one person’s quest for personal profit ultimately brings prosperity to others, THEY GOT IT!

I can take a classroom of statists and turn them into capitalists in 10 weeks.  This is not because I am such a great teacher, but because truth and common sense prevail…

My most discouraging day was in an ethics class in which I had asked the students to list the characteristics of an ethical person.  After a few minutes and a lot of silence, they listed: “A person who recycles and who does not make ethical judgments about others”. The reason they had such a difficult time with this exercise is that they have collectively been taught to believe the only truly unethical act is to brand anything that anyone else does as unethical.  That night I thought, “I can turn a socialist into a capitalist, but I cannot, in ten weeks, undo the damage of a lifetime of being taught that there are no moral absolutes.”

…We must reclaim our heritage and pass it on to our children before it is too late.  It is time–it is past time–to take back the textbooks and the classrooms and teach young Americans what it really means to be an American.

Only then will we see an informed electorate that will recognize socialism for the evil that it is–an attack on the God-given human right called liberty.

Indeed… if it is not too late already.  Stunningly, one commenter, “Way2Frank” submitted this gem:

74% of my economics students in a pre-test assessment believe “to each according to their needs, from each according to their ability” is a guiding American principle. Most colleges are not educational institutions, but rather political institutions that squander money on people and programs that offer little educational value. A government-run educational system has a difficult time teaching free market capitalism… because they cannot teach individual thought in a collectivist society.

If that is an accurate statistic, no wonder we are in the mess we are in… and I wouldn’t give you a plugged nickle for our future.  ◄Dave►

I saw this years ago, so it may in fact be a true story. In any case, it earned another chuckle when it just popped into my in-box:

I figured those of you strong scientific/math minds would appreciate the logic of this answer.

The following is supposedly an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so “profound” that the professor shared it with colleagues.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle’s Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed)or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell.

Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell.

With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, ” it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you, and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct…leaving only Heaven thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting “Oh my God.”

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY “A”

I wonder if this could explain the Expanding Earth Hypothesis? ◄Dave►

Having spent the past ten years in the private education industry, including owning and managing a Montessori preschool, I have a very low opinion of our public education system in America. We could enroll a child at 2 ½ to 3 years old and have them reading, writing, and doing four-figure mathematics by the time they were five, when they would normally just be entering Kindergarten.

Alas, only a very few public schools in America have adopted the demonstrably superior Montessori Method of education. Dealing with the anguish of the parents of those about to graduate from our program, with few alternatives in our community to traditional public education where teachers didn’t even hope to be able to teach them to read before the third grade, was always difficult.

Many were eternally grateful for the educational head start we had given their children, the behavioral problems that had evaporated in our program, and many times the nascent cases of ‘ADD or ADHD’ that we averted without (shudder) the use of drugs. Nevertheless, they were faced with the conundrum that their perfectly normal children would now be considered precocious and ‘difficult’ in the teacher-centered classrooms they were about to enter.

In our child-centered environment, they were allowed to progress at their own pace, and encouraged to do so as quickly as their minds were capable of absorbing whatever subject they took an interest in at any given moment.  Now they were about to encounter the stultifying public school arena where subjects are taught in unison on an arbitrary ‘lesson plan’ schedule, whether a child is ready or interested in them or not, at the pace of the slowest student in the class; so “no child is left behind.”

This is no less than child abuse. Boredom is the mother of mischief, and unless these parents were willing to supplement their child’s education at home, if not provide the entire process there, they risked their children’s future in more ways than one. Peer pressure is insidious, and public schools are breeding grounds for out of control youth.

I have added a rant entitled Clueless Academia I wrote almost a year ago. You may be intrigued by the picture, if nothing else.  Enjoy… or wince, as the case may be. ◄Dave►