Experimenting with Education

[pamsback]

I'll be right here at your disposal if you would like to trade some insults about my character or lack of said character....or whatever

[pamsback]

 I'm still here.......but I ain't got all day to wait.............

[Sarah]

?? ??
How humorous......she doesn't agree with me so attack her character.......ssdd there.....
Am I talkin with my mouth full of mush or something? I mean seriously.....how is saying we need BOTH make me lack some character trait or mean I am "attacking your whatever blah blah blah"
Don't make the mistake of thinkin I don't know what you are talking about with your "dumbing down of america" stuff. I deal with the stupidity of people every day of my life. I just choose to go AROUND it and TEACH my kids the REST of the story. People only get "dumbed down" if they ALLOW it and that goes for home schooling OR public education.

I don't know you so guess I won't speculate on YOUR character......................or lack.....
LOL guess I'm gettin better,,was a time I would've just told you to f off LOLOLOLOLOLOL

Hmmm......trading insults?  I think not.  Do we NEED public education?  You'll always need public schools.   I think private schools, charter schools and homeschools fill in quite nicely.  Public school is fine for some.  Not everyone has the money for private schools, not everyone has the time or even the desire to homeschool.  In some areas public schools are still awesome schools.  But in a large chunk of the areas they're not and as a whole, the whole government system and the whole America way of thinking is going down hill and it is true that "public education" was never provided for in the constitution and was to be a private matter.  It should still be that way.  But public education was started by one man who got the idea from another country as they took the kids early and figured that if they were taught by the state, they were then controlled by the state and if Obama gets his way of longer school days and longer school years, of which I know of schools that are already going to year around schooling, then parents will have less and less influence on their children and be at whatever the public schools are teaching.  

The book?  If you took that as a personal insult, I am sorry.  It is an excellent book on what is going on in the public schools and the media around the country.  Read it.  You might like it.  It's very good.  You can find out a lot of what is going on around the country.  Maybe not in your neighborhood.......yet.  Maybe not here.  But it is going on.  

[srkruzich]

State-sponsored schools were not part of the original make-up of this country. None of the Founders – all of whom were educated at home or privately – saw providing compulsory, state-sponsored education as a proper function of the central government, which is why education is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. There were no government schools in any modern sense of that term until the 1840s, when Horace Mann's Unitarians started them up in Massachusetts as what were then known as common schools. Mann had been to Prussia where he learned of a far different view of the relationship between central government and its citizens than our own tradition which sees the individual as special both morally and economically. Prussian schools just like American schoolsconsidered children property of the state, and educated them accordingly. They were raised to be obedient to the state, their purpose being to advance the interests of the state.
Vast difference from our forefathers who believe exactly opposite of this mantra.

Shortt also cites Robert Owen, one of the Anglo-American world's first influential socialists, who developed a similar philosophy of education. Owen believed that children should be separated from their parents as early as possible and raised by the state. He believed people were exclusively the products of their social environments, and that if nurtured properly by the state, could be molded into whatever was desired. A key to the thinking that went into forming the official ideology of state-sponsored education was that human beings are innately good, not sinful, and that human nature could be perfected by the right kind of educational system. The ideology that eventually developed would hold that children could be molded into willing consumers of the products of big business and obedient servants of government. In short, the aims of state-sponsored schools were to transform thinking, highly individualistic and very literate citizens into an unthinking, collectivized mass. The slow but steady decline in literacy of all kinds was a by-product.
The official philosophy of state-sponsored education gradually became a materialistic humanism, protected by statism. When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), it made the federal courts arbiter of what the states could do regarding religion in government schools. This opened the door to the eventual court-ordered removal of officially-sponsored prayer (even, in some cases, prior to athletic events), by virtue of the Court's new "wall of separation" doctrine. This misreading of the Constitution holds that Establishment Clause in the First Amendment means the need to remove Christianity from all public institutions.

Various forms of ethical subjectivism, relativism and nihilism become unavoidable. They took forms such as "values clarification," which urged children to talk openly about "their values" but provided no direction. "Everybody has their own morals," teenagers learned to say (complete with grammar mistake). While the dialogue over moral theories may captivate career academics, the absence of definitive moral guidance in young people's lives has proven catastrophic. During the past half-century, with materialistic humanists more and more in control, we saw the rise of teen pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections, a cavalier and casual attitude toward sex (and at ever-younger ages), the break-up of families – and epidemics of cheating and other forms of academic dishonesty. In the last analysis, what needs to be said about humanist ethics as that they don't work. Humanism's message, essentially, is: we are responsible for our own moral lives, and one should never be judgmental (and never mind the contradiction here). Humanistic approaches to morality, combined with opposition to "judgmentalism," leads to the idea that all "lifestyles" are morally equal. Shortt adds to the burgeoning literature on the incursions of radical homosexuals in government schools. Their methods, predictably, have assumed and attempted to inculcate the moral equivalence of gay and straight "lifestyles." Inroads have been made into elementary schools, affecting grade school children who, not long ago, were considered too young to know what sex was.

The plummeting levels of literacy have been even more pronounced. Shortt reiterates how government schools are graduating legions of seniors who cannot construct grammatical English sentences, do arithmetic beyond a rudimentary level, and have little or no knowledge of the history of this country or its Constitutional foundations. These results are hidden by grade inflation, recalculations of GPAs, and the dumbing down of standardized tests, often in accordance with the politically correct need to remove "cultural bias." This ought to concern everyone worried about the status of our liberties in what little is left of our Constitutional republic. Shortt is addressing mainly Evangelicals. But it ought to be clear to anyone that we are in serious trouble when a sufficient number of students graduate from schools not knowing anything about our founding documents or their authors, or what rights the Constitution was written to encode and protect, or how our government is put together and what functions it is supposed to serve.

The situation is even worse. Children are actually in more danger in government schools than they could ever be from terrorists. Back in the 1990s government schools were witness to an epidemic of well-publicized shootings, the most dramatic being the Columbine killings in 1999. One root of the problem of violence in government schools is the collapse of discipline, resulting in a "blackboard jungle" where not just children but teachers must fear being assaulted, robbed, or even raped. Shortt cites two more Supreme Court decisions, Tinker v. Des Moines School District and Goss v. Lopez, as watersheds events leading to the end of discipline in government schools.

[Sarah]

State-sponsored schools were not part of the original make-up of this country. None of the Founders – all of whom were educated at home or privately – saw providing compulsory, state-sponsored education as a proper function of the central government, which is why education is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. There were no government schools in any modern sense of that term until the 1840s, when Horace Mann's Unitarians started them up in Massachusetts as what were then known as common schools. Mann had been to Prussia where he learned of a far different view of the relationship between central government and its citizens than our own tradition which sees the individual as special both morally and economically. Prussian schools just like American schoolsconsidered children property of the state, and educated them accordingly. They were raised to be obedient to the state, their purpose being to advance the interests of the state.
Vast difference from our forefathers who believe exactly opposite of this mantra.

Shortt also cites Robert Owen, one of the Anglo-American world's first influential socialists, who developed a similar philosophy of education. Owen believed that children should be separated from their parents as early as possible and raised by the state. He believed people were exclusively the products of their social environments, and that if nurtured properly by the state, could be molded into whatever was desired. A key to the thinking that went into forming the official ideology of state-sponsored education was that human beings are innately good, not sinful, and that human nature could be perfected by the right kind of educational system. The ideology that eventually developed would hold that children could be molded into willing consumers of the products of big business and obedient servants of government. In short, the aims of state-sponsored schools were to transform thinking, highly individualistic and very literate citizens into an unthinking, collectivized mass. The slow but steady decline in literacy of all kinds was a by-product.
The official philosophy of state-sponsored education gradually became a materialistic humanism, protected by statism. When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), it made the federal courts arbiter of what the states could do regarding religion in government schools. This opened the door to the eventual court-ordered removal of officially-sponsored prayer (even, in some cases, prior to athletic events), by virtue of the Court's new "wall of separation" doctrine. This misreading of the Constitution holds that Establishment Clause in the First Amendment means the need to remove Christianity from all public institutions.

Various forms of ethical subjectivism, relativism and nihilism become unavoidable. They took forms such as "values clarification," which urged children to talk openly about "their values" but provided no direction. "Everybody has their own morals," teenagers learned to say (complete with grammar mistake). While the dialogue over moral theories may captivate career academics, the absence of definitive moral guidance in young people's lives has proven catastrophic. During the past half-century, with materialistic humanists more and more in control, we saw the rise of teen pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections, a cavalier and casual attitude toward sex (and at ever-younger ages), the break-up of families – and epidemics of cheating and other forms of academic dishonesty. In the last analysis, what needs to be said about humanist ethics as that they don't work. Humanism's message, essentially, is: we are responsible for our own moral lives, and one should never be judgmental (and never mind the contradiction here). Humanistic approaches to morality, combined with opposition to "judgmentalism," leads to the idea that all "lifestyles" are morally equal. Shortt adds to the burgeoning literature on the incursions of radical homosexuals in government schools. Their methods, predictably, have assumed and attempted to inculcate the moral equivalence of gay and straight "lifestyles." Inroads have been made into elementary schools, affecting grade school children who, not long ago, were considered too young to know what sex was.

The plummeting levels of literacy have been even more pronounced. Shortt reiterates how government schools are graduating legions of seniors who cannot construct grammatical English sentences, do arithmetic beyond a rudimentary level, and have little or no knowledge of the history of this country or its Constitutional foundations. These results are hidden by grade inflation, recalculations of GPAs, and the dumbing down of standardized tests, often in accordance with the politically correct need to remove "cultural bias." This ought to concern everyone worried about the status of our liberties in what little is left of our Constitutional republic. Shortt is addressing mainly Evangelicals. But it ought to be clear to anyone that we are in serious trouble when a sufficient number of students graduate from schools not knowing anything about our founding documents or their authors, or what rights the Constitution was written to encode and protect, or how our government is put together and what functions it is supposed to serve.

The situation is even worse. Children are actually in more danger in government schools than they could ever be from terrorists. Back in the 1990s government schools were witness to an epidemic of well-publicized shootings, the most dramatic being the Columbine killings in 1999. One root of the problem of violence in government schools is the collapse of discipline, resulting in a "blackboard jungle" where not just children but teachers must fear being assaulted, robbed, or even raped. Shortt cites two more Supreme Court decisions, Tinker v. Des Moines School District and Goss v. Lopez, as watersheds events leading to the end of discipline in government schools.

Yeah.  Remember that law they tried to pass to lower the  school age to like 4?  Now Obama is wanting to lengthen the school day and the school year.  Already they only have like 2 1/2 months off and the kids don't arrive home out here till like 4:30-4:45.  That's a long day for any child.  Hardly any time to just "be a kid". 

[srkruzich]

State-sponsored schools were not part of the original make-up of this country. None of the Founders – all of whom were educated at home or privately – saw providing compulsory, state-sponsored education as a proper function of the central government, which is why education is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. There were no government schools in any modern sense of that term until the 1840s, when Horace Mann's Unitarians started them up in Massachusetts as what were then known as common schools. Mann had been to Prussia where he learned of a far different view of the relationship between central government and its citizens than our own tradition which sees the individual as special both morally and economically. Prussian schools just like American schoolsconsidered children property of the state, and educated them accordingly. They were raised to be obedient to the state, their purpose being to advance the interests of the state.
Vast difference from our forefathers who believe exactly opposite of this mantra.

Shortt also cites Robert Owen, one of the Anglo-American world's first influential socialists, who developed a similar philosophy of education. Owen believed that children should be separated from their parents as early as possible and raised by the state. He believed people were exclusively the products of their social environments, and that if nurtured properly by the state, could be molded into whatever was desired. A key to the thinking that went into forming the official ideology of state-sponsored education was that human beings are innately good, not sinful, and that human nature could be perfected by the right kind of educational system. The ideology that eventually developed would hold that children could be molded into willing consumers of the products of big business and obedient servants of government. In short, the aims of state-sponsored schools were to transform thinking, highly individualistic and very literate citizens into an unthinking, collectivized mass. The slow but steady decline in literacy of all kinds was a by-product.
The official philosophy of state-sponsored education gradually became a materialistic humanism, protected by statism. When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), it made the federal courts arbiter of what the states could do regarding religion in government schools. This opened the door to the eventual court-ordered removal of officially-sponsored prayer (even, in some cases, prior to athletic events), by virtue of the Court's new "wall of separation" doctrine. This misreading of the Constitution holds that Establishment Clause in the First Amendment means the need to remove Christianity from all public institutions.

Various forms of ethical subjectivism, relativism and nihilism become unavoidable. They took forms such as "values clarification," which urged children to talk openly about "their values" but provided no direction. "Everybody has their own morals," teenagers learned to say (complete with grammar mistake). While the dialogue over moral theories may captivate career academics, the absence of definitive moral guidance in young people's lives has proven catastrophic. During the past half-century, with materialistic humanists more and more in control, we saw the rise of teen pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections, a cavalier and casual attitude toward sex (and at ever-younger ages), the break-up of families – and epidemics of cheating and other forms of academic dishonesty. In the last analysis, what needs to be said about humanist ethics as that they don't work. Humanism's message, essentially, is: we are responsible for our own moral lives, and one should never be judgmental (and never mind the contradiction here). Humanistic approaches to morality, combined with opposition to "judgmentalism," leads to the idea that all "lifestyles" are morally equal. Shortt adds to the burgeoning literature on the incursions of radical homosexuals in government schools. Their methods, predictably, have assumed and attempted to inculcate the moral equivalence of gay and straight "lifestyles." Inroads have been made into elementary schools, affecting grade school children who, not long ago, were considered too young to know what sex was.

The plummeting levels of literacy have been even more pronounced. Shortt reiterates how government schools are graduating legions of seniors who cannot construct grammatical English sentences, do arithmetic beyond a rudimentary level, and have little or no knowledge of the history of this country or its Constitutional foundations. These results are hidden by grade inflation, recalculations of GPAs, and the dumbing down of standardized tests, often in accordance with the politically correct need to remove "cultural bias." This ought to concern everyone worried about the status of our liberties in what little is left of our Constitutional republic. Shortt is addressing mainly Evangelicals. But it ought to be clear to anyone that we are in serious trouble when a sufficient number of students graduate from schools not knowing anything about our founding documents or their authors, or what rights the Constitution was written to encode and protect, or how our government is put together and what functions it is supposed to serve.

The situation is even worse. Children are actually in more danger in government schools than they could ever be from terrorists. Back in the 1990s government schools were witness to an epidemic of well-publicized shootings, the most dramatic being the Columbine killings in 1999. One root of the problem of violence in government schools is the collapse of discipline, resulting in a "blackboard jungle" where not just children but teachers must fear being assaulted, robbed, or even raped. Shortt cites two more Supreme Court decisions, Tinker v. Des Moines School District and Goss v. Lopez, as watersheds events leading to the end of discipline in government schools.

Yeah.  Remember that law they tried to pass to lower the  school age to like 4?  Now Obama is wanting to lengthen the school day and the school year.  Already they only have like 2 1/2 months off and the kids don't arrive home out here till like 4:30-4:45.  That's a long day for any child.  Hardly any time to just "be a kid". 

They don't want kids to have time to be kids. They might become individuals.

[pamsback]

if Obama gets his way of longer school days and longer school years, of which I know of schools that are already going to year around schooling,

they've been trying to do that since I was in grade school, it's not Obamas baby. (and no for the ten billionth time I did NOT vote for obama so spare me)
 

screw it, I had a long reply to your "moral decay" blah blah blah but figured what is the point. So yall just teach your kids and I and the public school system will teach mine and yall just have a great life yhear?

Just as a side note, my daughter gets home off the bus at 4:15, she leaves at 7:15, we still have plenty of time to talk and for her "to be a kid". Been the same since the fifth grade. LOL she ain't "indoctrinated" in any way shape or form LOL

They don't want kids to have time to be kids. They might become individuals.

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL......

[Anmar]

Interesting stuff from all sides.  I think a public education system is good to have for people to fall back on, but parents should take responsibility for the education of their kids.  The bottom line is that everyone has a choice.  The government won't teach (or indoctrinate) anyone who doesn't volunteer.

[srkruzich]

Interesting stuff from all sides.  I think a public education system is good to have for people to fall back on, but parents should take responsibility for the education of their kids.  The bottom line is that everyone has a choice.  The government won't teach (or indoctrinate) anyone who doesn't volunteer.

Well that does make it easier for the kids that are homeschooled or private schooled by cutting down the competition for the leadership positions and good jobs out there.

[Sarah]

Interesting stuff from all sides.  I think a public education system is good to have for people to fall back on, but parents should take responsibility for the education of their kids.  The bottom line is that everyone has a choice.  The government won't teach (or indoctrinate) anyone who doesn't volunteer.

Excellent post and you said in 3 lines what I've been trying to say in many posts.  We're free to decide!  :-)