Experimenting with Education

[redcliffsw]

The State Thinks It Owns Your Kids--does it? by Al Benson Jr.

Back in the very early days of the Unitarian/socialist inspired public brain laundry movement, there were some men like Robert Owen the socialist and Amos Bronson Alcott, the meandering Transcendentalist, who firmly believed that public education was the best way to reform society, and the best way to do that was to get the children out of the hands of their parents at the earliest possible age. 

These men and others became avid supporters of something called the Infant School Movement, a program designed to get children out of the home as early as two years of age. The poor kids supposedly learned all their nasty habits at home during those early formative years. So, if you could get the kids out of the home and into the infant schools of the public school promoters, you could then get rid of all those bad habits, and by the time the youngster was six years old, the public "educator" (change agent) basically controlled him body and soul. 

Even though such men, and women, did succeed in foisting their radical government school program on a mostly Christian populace that should have known better, they had somewhat less than spectacular results with their infant school program. A few years later, one of their spiritual contemporaries came up with the kindergarten program, designed to get children out of the home at about five years of age. Who, you might ask, came up with this "new" kindergarten program? None other than Margaretta Meyer Schurz, wife of the 1848 socialist revolutionary Carl Schurz. Mrs. Schurz established the first kindergarten in this country in Watertown, Wisconsin in 1856. Kindergartens were private at that point. However by 1873 the first government-run kindergarten had been established in St. Louis, Missouri, another area strongly influenced by the Forty-eighter socialists in the Midwest. The possibility of using such schools to advance a socialist agenda had not been lost on these radicals. It apparently had not been lost on the Prussian government in the German states either, because the Prussian government, in 1851, a short three years after the socialist revolts there, outlawed kindergartens. That being the case, the socialist revolutionaries simply brought the concept to America. Now kindergartens are pretty much mandatory all over. 

continue:

http://albensonjr.com/doesit.shtml

[pamsback]

Can't believe I just wasted 3 minutes I'll never get back reading that..............................you think I'd have learned better by now.

[flintauqua]

I think Steve can find his manure by clicking on that link!

[Diane Amberg]

And where did the author learn to read and write? Public schools were started to break illiteracy and keep only the wealthy from having an education. Even people who home school learned somewhere. Cheap shots.  

[greatguns]

I don't know what that dude was smelling, but it sure wasn't the coffee!

[Varmit]

Red, I think that was one of your better posts.  Good work.

Just a quick question for the rest of you...if our public school system is so great then why is it that the education our children recieve today is of a lesser standard than what kids got 50 years ago?  Why should the public school system foster a loyalty to the state in our kids?  Why should a parent have to have "teaching credentials" to homeschool their kids?  What does it matter where the author learned to read and write? 

[redcliffsw]

You're raising some excellent questions there, Billy.

Certainly, the gov't and public schools will never get
better.  To think otherwise will require more gov't money
and interference - what a waste.  Gov't money is on the
side of public education but there's better options and
more folks are seeing the advantages of better education
outside the gov't circle everyday.

[Varmit]

Red, you are right.

Everyone else, two days and no answers...??  This isn't a classroom, you don't have to raise your hand, just shout them out...anybody??

[Diane Amberg]

Why should I answer when I don't accept your premise in the first place? I know a baited hook when I see one. So have you offered any workable solutions to what YOU  have defined as problems? You have no respect for my previous comments and answers and I've been teaching for more than 40 years, so I couldn't possibly know anything about the learning process.....speaking of respecting one's elders.

[pamsback]

Red, you are right.

Everyone else, two days and no answers...??  This isn't a classroom, you don't have to raise your hand, just shout them out...anybody??

I didn't answer because I don't sit around and bitch about what the public school system is or isn't teachin. Like I said, I ask my kids what they are learning and then fill in the blanks. But I guess that's too easy....