Thoughts Aloud

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 wrote the following rant in the Spring of ’06 as part of a larger essay entitled and predicting Civil War II during the outrage in the heartland over all the Mexican flags being waved in our streets by illegal aliens demanding their “rights.”  I meant every word, and still do:

Clueless Academics

To the true culprits of our immigration crisis, the Academics who control our defunct educational system:  You are the ones who brainwashed our politicians, journalists, and immigrants to begin with.  I won’t waste my time ranting at the committed Marxists/Socialist, diversity-worshiping. multi-culturist, politically-correct-gibberish-spouting, New-World-Order-dreaming, Globalists among you.  They are beyond redemption and, given tenure, we are probably going to just have to wait for them to assume room temperature to ever be rid of them.

Yet, I have to believe that at least some of you chose your profession because you actually desire to inspire and educate our children.  What is it going to take for you to wake up to the reality that you are failing miserably, and critically reevaluate your curriculum?  The USA, once the most literate nation on earth, now ranks seventeenth in education.  Thanks to your multi-culture / diversity agenda, now 21% of our population can’t even speak, much less read, the English Language well at all.

It now takes sixteen years for an American kid to come even close to learning what my generation absorbed in twelve.  Doesn’t that embarrass you?   It sure ought to.  Explain why we should pay the slightest attention to what you think, when you are such abject failures at what you do!  You have lost all credibility, and won’t regain it until you start turning out great American winners again; instead of the whining losers with a victim mentality that you are producing now.

I notice that many of you have been flirting with wild conspiracy theories of late.  Has it ever occurred to you that you might just be being used to deliberately dumb down our kids?  If you have retained the slightest ability to think for yourself, ponder this: Who benefits most from your incompetence and why?  How would the balkanization of America into enclaves of separate cultures that distrust, dislike, or despise each other possibly further peace in America, much less the world?

It seems to me that, if one truly desired world peace, exporting the concept of our “melting pot” might just be a worthwhile idea.  Defending and even exalting closed, tyrannical, misogynous, religious fundamentalist cultures ruled by cruel dictators, as valuable alternatives to ours, seems counterintuitive; doesn’t it?  What am I missing here?

How can you not see that your persistent denigrating of all that is great about America is destroying our nation?  Is that your intent?  I hope you can understand that we in the heartland love our American culture just as much as those from all these foreign cultures that you exalt while vilifying ours.  Our history is rich with great men who did great deeds, yet you will no longer teach it.  Instead, you prefer to tear down our Founders and belittle our heroes to our children.

How can we avoid concluding your intent is to make them as embarrassed at being an American as you so obviously are?  Sure, our Founding Fathers had a few warts, we all do; but do you actually believe we willingly pay you to expose and dwell on their flaws?  How could that inspire our children?  Shouldn’t you be teaching them about their courage, those great deeds they accomplished in spite of their flaws, and the sacrifices they had to make in order to pass the miracle of America on to us?

Omission is a crime element too, and when it comes to History and Civics you are guilty of incredible malfeasance.  American students should never be permitted to graduate from a taxpayer funded high school before they could pass the citizenship test given to legal immigrants. It is simply disgraceful.

You aren’t educating our children, you are crippling them.  Our country is great because most of us believe we are great, and act accordingly.  Yet you teach that everyone is a victim being oppressed by the very institutions that offer unparalleled opportunity to anyone.  It is unconscionable that our ghetto dwellers aren’t being taught that all they have to do to escape their squalor is get on a bus headed in any direction for a few hours, then get off and apply for a job.

Immigrants from all over the world, of every conceivable color and oppressed heritage, come here with the clothes on their backs, get a job, work hard, play by the rules, save some money, and in a few short years they own a business and are living the American dream.  Equality of outcome, regardless of effort, is no man’s birthright, and your utopian dreams and schemes will never change that; but equality of opportunity, to be all that one can be, exists in our land in amazing abundance.

You should be eternally ashamed for not empowering our youth with that truth at every opportunity.  It is curious how you folks can at the same time angrily dwell on those “mistakes” of our past, which we long ago straightened out, and enthusiastically plan for a glorious Marxist future that all available evidence indicates won’t ever work, while arrogantly ignoring or even denying the realities of the present.  Where I’m from, we call that a serious case of “visualrectumitis.”

Look, I don’t begrudge you your dreams of world peace.  Reasonable minds can disagree about how best to achieve it, and it is a worthwhile debate.  But, why is your default position that all the evil in the world is always America’s fault?  I submit that a lot of our fellow countrymen have shed their blood in foreign wars, not of our making, over the last ninety years precisely for that goal.  Should we have stayed home and let the Fascists rule the world?

Should we have let Stalin and his successors have their dream?  Was Marxism really worth his purges?  In retrospect, perhaps we should have given Hitler more time to sort out the Ottoman Empire, but hindsight wasn’t available yet.  Wake up!  Man’s inhumanity to man has been playing out on battlefields throughout history, and is in evidence all over the globe to this day in ethnic battles that have absolutely nothing to do with US foreign policy.

Darfur, Rwanda, Somalia, Zimbabwe, etc. – how are these endless atrocities our fault?  Perhaps because we prolong the misery, by sending them the food they are incapable of producing for themselves?  Should it be our responsibility to preserve their loathsome cultures, while they are too busy killing each other over petty tribal differences to plant their crops?  We may occasionally be a bit clumsy in the execution, but good grief, America tries to stop genocide and “politicide,” we don’t commit it.

To hear some of you tell it, America is a rapacious Imperialist monster out to conquer the world and destroy idyllic cultures so we can steal their natural resources.  Nonsense!  We have saved the world from Imperialist monsters more than once, and all the real-estate we have ever asked for in return was enough to bury our heroes.

Some cultures are cancers that need to be excised before they can destroy civilization.  America doesn’t steal the resources of other countries; we buy them from willing sellers whose lives are enriched immeasurably by the exchange.

More importantly, why are you so bent on destroying our economic system?  By now, it should be obvious to the least intuitive that Communism has never worked anywhere it has been tried, and Socialism only leads to a slightly slower collapse of a nation.  Unfettered Liberty and Capitalism, on the other hand, not only created this great nation, it has done wonders everywhere it has been tried.

Here, study this satellite photo of the Korean peninsula at night:

There is a Communist tyranny with a centrally controlled Marxist/Socialist economy in the north half, and a free Republic with a free market Capitalist economy in the south half.  You won’t have any problem spotting the DMZ – it is the line beyond which there are NO lights.  I rest my case; if that picture won’t shake your love affair with Marx, nothing will.  You all profess to be looking out for the oppressed, but you will never see real oppression from your lofty perches behind the ivy covered walls of your ivory towers.

I submit that the best thing we could do for the less fortunate people of the world is export our greatest gift – the American Dream – by doing all we can to assist them to oust their despots and establish Capitalistic Republics of their own.  In the end, Capitalism is the best hope for world peace.  As Thomas Friedman observed in “The Lexus and the Olive Tree,” no country with a McDonald’s franchise has ever attacked a neighbor with one.  ◄Dave►