And the liberal questions are, "Does it look good?"
That's why they don't ask, "And did it work?"
Eighteen thousand a year spent on students. That's in NYC and Washington, D.C. and other high-paying states. It hasn't helped. Even the smaller classroom expenditures in California caused zero improvement in student achievement.
Prager asks, "Why do we need the Department of Education?"
We don't. It hasn't done a damned thing for education. As a matter of fact, because the bureaucrats entrenched there have NO CLUE what a good education looks like. However, they do know how to take authority away from the people who are actually looking the children in the face. They do know how to think up stupid, silly, nonsensical "theories", impose them on the children, turn glassy-eyed when they don't work, and pronounce that what we need is more of this stuff.
We need to get rid of this horrible, expensive bureaucracy which has presided over a horrible, horrible decline in the quality of education in this country.
Showing posts with label bad education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bad education. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
The Fifty-thousand dollar orgasm and Northwestern University
Prager: This is from their NWU's Human sexuality class. You can graduate NWU without ever having read a line of Shakespeare, but you can get credit for a live sex show.
This is the problem I have with most modern education, the garbage they consider important and the important stuff they've dismissed as garbage.
The decline in modern education didn't begin in the Sixties, though most people think it does. I know in the Twenties a new generation of people calling themselves "Progressives" took over the educational establishment and immediately set to changing the definition of the word. Reaching all the way back to Rousseau, they decided that education should be "child-centered", which is to say, the child's own relationship with his world will determine what his education should consist of.
Thus, a little child's world being little, his educational experiences at this young age will be little ones. He will study his clothing and his family and his pets. Since he's never heard of George Washington, he won't study anything about George Washington. Eventually by the Forties, under the title "expanding horizons", this became enshrined by the educrats as curriculum dogma and every enlightened Teacher's College taught it as the only humane way to educate children.
Not only was George Washington banished from the "social studies" books, but so were the Greek gods and goddesses, the legends of King Arthur and his knights, Robin Hood, Orlando, the Swamp Fox, David and Goliath, and every other hero your grandparents loved and you yourself have never heard of. But for some reason, even though great Western stories were banned, the great non-Western stories were pushed into the curriculum, even though 99% of the students had never heard of them. Anansi, Genji, Siddhartha all will pop into the reading lists. Now, I'm all in favor of adding these to the curriculum, but not when our whiny educrats were busy ripping Western culture out.
It needn't be an either-or issue. In fact it never was. "We only have time to teach 125 historical figures, so we'll throw out these 45 Westerners and add these 45 non-western figures" was NEVER part of the debate. And this is where the hippies got their way as the new Progressives. With them it was much more a matter of, "We've been pushing Western culture down the throats of blacks, Mexicans, Oriental* kids, even the white kids are choking on it. It's good to get rid of so much Western culture** which was seen as a throwback to those evil old patriarchal societies. And thus, we are genuine geniuses because only a real genius could be so enlightened.
There were other Western things on the disposal list. Western lit, for one. On yahoo! answers back in 2010 I posted a question about the "classics" of literature and virtually none of the people who post there, neither students nor teachers, could identify a classic work of literature outside the usual seven: The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, Animal Farm, and that racist manifesto, Huckleberry Finn. Out they all went, good riddance! And did we replace them? Well, I'm positive children only read a few books each year now, instead of the dozen they used to read. They don't read poetry and they never memorize it. They barely touch plays, though they'll likely read one by Shakespeare (which is now available in sissified English) and maybe "Our Town" or "Death of a Salesman".
*Yes, back then it was still "Oriental", not the very stupid "Asian" substitute.
**They actually denied and still deny the existence of American culture, much less the value of a kid who belongs to the West actually learning about the West. Color became the be-all of culture. If your skin was very dark, you were an "African" child. If your skin was olive, you were Latino and of course in both cases you'd only be interested in learning about Aztec gods or Congolese farming practices. Never mind that your ancestors came from Spain and Uruguay, or were Ethiopian Jews. And thus the hippies disproved their own case about ancestry determining who you are--but don't let that stop you.
Gone are Music theory, Music appreciation, Art history, Art practicum (drawing and painting used to be taught, and yes, they are teachable subjects, contrary to what the disciples of Rousseau preached), history (unless it's history of a part of the world you have nothing to do with), and even "western" math (math based on facts instead of feelings) is being done away with.
You've heard the usual complaints about what has taken the place of these subjects. "Self esteem" and "conflict resolution" are huge among the flakes controlling the curriculum. Yet no one feels that self esteem can be taught in a classroom except by being given challenges that the student has to overcome, which has also been removed from the classroom. "To challenge" has become synonymous with "to pressurize" and pressure is bad. We replaced it with "cooperative groups", since cooperation is a virtue and competition is bad. Now the groups of four students meet together, the three who don't know what they're doing leave all the work to the one bright kid and do nothing. This is not a good thing for our children.
And this is why you'll find courses like "Human Sexuality" at so expensive a college as Northwestern University. What strikes me as dumb about that one is that if left to their own devices these students would learn about human sexuality awfully well on their own. It's not as if there were a shortage of information out there. It seems that it's important to offer it as a "subject" so that some teacher can impart "the right values" to the students. Sorry but that's a mainstay of the educrat establishment, making sure that the students get the right values taught to them.
This is the problem I have with most modern education, the garbage they consider important and the important stuff they've dismissed as garbage.
The decline in modern education didn't begin in the Sixties, though most people think it does. I know in the Twenties a new generation of people calling themselves "Progressives" took over the educational establishment and immediately set to changing the definition of the word. Reaching all the way back to Rousseau, they decided that education should be "child-centered", which is to say, the child's own relationship with his world will determine what his education should consist of.
Thus, a little child's world being little, his educational experiences at this young age will be little ones. He will study his clothing and his family and his pets. Since he's never heard of George Washington, he won't study anything about George Washington. Eventually by the Forties, under the title "expanding horizons", this became enshrined by the educrats as curriculum dogma and every enlightened Teacher's College taught it as the only humane way to educate children.
Not only was George Washington banished from the "social studies" books, but so were the Greek gods and goddesses, the legends of King Arthur and his knights, Robin Hood, Orlando, the Swamp Fox, David and Goliath, and every other hero your grandparents loved and you yourself have never heard of. But for some reason, even though great Western stories were banned, the great non-Western stories were pushed into the curriculum, even though 99% of the students had never heard of them. Anansi, Genji, Siddhartha all will pop into the reading lists. Now, I'm all in favor of adding these to the curriculum, but not when our whiny educrats were busy ripping Western culture out.
It needn't be an either-or issue. In fact it never was. "We only have time to teach 125 historical figures, so we'll throw out these 45 Westerners and add these 45 non-western figures" was NEVER part of the debate. And this is where the hippies got their way as the new Progressives. With them it was much more a matter of, "We've been pushing Western culture down the throats of blacks, Mexicans, Oriental* kids, even the white kids are choking on it. It's good to get rid of so much Western culture** which was seen as a throwback to those evil old patriarchal societies. And thus, we are genuine geniuses because only a real genius could be so enlightened.
There were other Western things on the disposal list. Western lit, for one. On yahoo! answers back in 2010 I posted a question about the "classics" of literature and virtually none of the people who post there, neither students nor teachers, could identify a classic work of literature outside the usual seven: The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, Animal Farm, and that racist manifesto, Huckleberry Finn. Out they all went, good riddance! And did we replace them? Well, I'm positive children only read a few books each year now, instead of the dozen they used to read. They don't read poetry and they never memorize it. They barely touch plays, though they'll likely read one by Shakespeare (which is now available in sissified English) and maybe "Our Town" or "Death of a Salesman".
*Yes, back then it was still "Oriental", not the very stupid "Asian" substitute.
**They actually denied and still deny the existence of American culture, much less the value of a kid who belongs to the West actually learning about the West. Color became the be-all of culture. If your skin was very dark, you were an "African" child. If your skin was olive, you were Latino and of course in both cases you'd only be interested in learning about Aztec gods or Congolese farming practices. Never mind that your ancestors came from Spain and Uruguay, or were Ethiopian Jews. And thus the hippies disproved their own case about ancestry determining who you are--but don't let that stop you.
Gone are Music theory, Music appreciation, Art history, Art practicum (drawing and painting used to be taught, and yes, they are teachable subjects, contrary to what the disciples of Rousseau preached), history (unless it's history of a part of the world you have nothing to do with), and even "western" math (math based on facts instead of feelings) is being done away with.
You've heard the usual complaints about what has taken the place of these subjects. "Self esteem" and "conflict resolution" are huge among the flakes controlling the curriculum. Yet no one feels that self esteem can be taught in a classroom except by being given challenges that the student has to overcome, which has also been removed from the classroom. "To challenge" has become synonymous with "to pressurize" and pressure is bad. We replaced it with "cooperative groups", since cooperation is a virtue and competition is bad. Now the groups of four students meet together, the three who don't know what they're doing leave all the work to the one bright kid and do nothing. This is not a good thing for our children.
And this is why you'll find courses like "Human Sexuality" at so expensive a college as Northwestern University. What strikes me as dumb about that one is that if left to their own devices these students would learn about human sexuality awfully well on their own. It's not as if there were a shortage of information out there. It seems that it's important to offer it as a "subject" so that some teacher can impart "the right values" to the students. Sorry but that's a mainstay of the educrat establishment, making sure that the students get the right values taught to them.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Remarkably successful propaganda campaign
"You don't have to think to vote for the Left, all you have to know is that you oppose Nazis."
This is the crux of the whole issue. Many people are too lazy to think. Others aren't particularly lazy, and in fact they care about the issue, but nothing they have ever run into in public school teaches them how to approach anything with logic or with a critical approach. It is the triumph of our liberal educators that they have bought so many votes for the left wing, that for the last hundred years they have deprived succeeding generations more and more of their right to be taught good thinking.
My generation, the generation of hippies, didn't start this. But they sure did exploit it. "School shouldn't teach you WHAT to think," ranted the laziest bunch of people ever to land on planet earth, "but HOW to think!" They pounded the table demanding the schools eliminate every minute of "teaching facts to the kids" that could possibly be eliminated. As for the "how to think" part of the curriculum, they replaced that with iconoclasm. It sufficed for them to tell one another (and their elders) that every generation that had come before theirs was stupid, ignorant, didn't know what Life was, didn't appreciate the virtues of hedonism, and insisted there was no such thing as truth (is that true?) and that therefore there was no way to find truth or help anyone else to find truth. Then they threw out all the books that could possibly teach anything and replaced them with Rousseau's child-centered curriculum, where suburban kids should read about suburban experiences, because that's all that they'd be interested in, and inner-city minority kids were fed garbage about drug dealers and prostitutes, appropriately outraging the mothers of these children, whom the hippies subsequently patronized to death.
This is the crux of the whole issue. Many people are too lazy to think. Others aren't particularly lazy, and in fact they care about the issue, but nothing they have ever run into in public school teaches them how to approach anything with logic or with a critical approach. It is the triumph of our liberal educators that they have bought so many votes for the left wing, that for the last hundred years they have deprived succeeding generations more and more of their right to be taught good thinking.
My generation, the generation of hippies, didn't start this. But they sure did exploit it. "School shouldn't teach you WHAT to think," ranted the laziest bunch of people ever to land on planet earth, "but HOW to think!" They pounded the table demanding the schools eliminate every minute of "teaching facts to the kids" that could possibly be eliminated. As for the "how to think" part of the curriculum, they replaced that with iconoclasm. It sufficed for them to tell one another (and their elders) that every generation that had come before theirs was stupid, ignorant, didn't know what Life was, didn't appreciate the virtues of hedonism, and insisted there was no such thing as truth (is that true?) and that therefore there was no way to find truth or help anyone else to find truth. Then they threw out all the books that could possibly teach anything and replaced them with Rousseau's child-centered curriculum, where suburban kids should read about suburban experiences, because that's all that they'd be interested in, and inner-city minority kids were fed garbage about drug dealers and prostitutes, appropriately outraging the mothers of these children, whom the hippies subsequently patronized to death.
Monday, August 2, 2010
"Imagine that, an American telling a guy who was born in Juarez, 'Chutzpah'."
This isn't so special. You probably ran into multilingual situations, because you ran into multilingual people, all over Europe.
Unlike what we do in America, the Europeans start their school children out on a second foreign language fairly early in their school careers. Then they often add a third and even a fourth later on, though they really shouldn't put it off but set aside a portion of each child's school day for immersion (and for teaching other subjects at the same time) in those languages from the first day they're in school. Immersion is painless (except to the whiny females who gave us "gentle"--and pointless--language acquisition delay in the form of the worthless but extremely expensive bilingual education plan in California.
Unlike what we do in America, the Europeans start their school children out on a second foreign language fairly early in their school careers. Then they often add a third and even a fourth later on, though they really shouldn't put it off but set aside a portion of each child's school day for immersion (and for teaching other subjects at the same time) in those languages from the first day they're in school. Immersion is painless (except to the whiny females who gave us "gentle"--and pointless--language acquisition delay in the form of the worthless but extremely expensive bilingual education plan in California.
Friday, June 11, 2010
How do people graduate college and not know the word "eclectic" ?
It's because they don't read. I've been watching the "homework help" forums and have noticed that only rarely are books assigned that aren't among a tiny list of "favorites":
To Kill a Mockingbird
Catcher in the Rye
1984
Animal Farm
The Great Gatsby
Lord of the Flies
Rarely we see a few other titles:
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre
Pride and Prejudice
Huckleberry Finn
The Picture of Dorian Grey
and once in a blue moon, "Macbeth".
I even asked in the forum (which is supposed to be read by teachers as well as students) whether teachers didn't have any more imagination than to assign these same books over and over, and why didn't they assign the classics?
The answers I got were appalling. To the teachers, these were the classics. They raged at me for "not knowing" that teachers were given a list of books they had to choose from, which isn't the point. The point was that they always choose the same five books. Some teachers asked, "What do you want them to read, Twilight?" because, I suppose, the only books outside the list were either Harry Potter or vampire books.
The kids answered that these were great books; one claimed Great Gatsby for his one-unit list of Greatest Books Ever Written. One kid said he had been assigned some of these books two years in a row, and nobody, neither students nor teachers, even tried to name any other books outside the list.
Not Canterbury Tales, nor Paradise Lost, no poetry by John Donne, nothing by Dickens or Thackeray, no Poe, Swift, or Fielding, not Hawthorne, nor even "Uncle Tom's Cabin"--which is probably why they think our Civil War was fought over economics and not slavery.
What's my point, that the kids are stupid? No, but their teachers are illiterate, and don't mind passing their own ignorance on to the kids. The teachers have three thousand years worth of literary richness, and all they bother to pass on to the next generation is the two great navel-gazing works, Catcher in the Rye and Great Gatsby. The result is that our next generation's information remains scant and their horizons don't extend beyond the ends of their arms. Maybe the remote control comes into play here but as with the reading assignments, they're only taken to where they can stare at their own navels. "Sunny with a Chance" and "Wizards of Waverly Place" do not expand their horizons.
To Kill a Mockingbird
Catcher in the Rye
1984
Animal Farm
The Great Gatsby
Lord of the Flies
Rarely we see a few other titles:
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre
Pride and Prejudice
Huckleberry Finn
The Picture of Dorian Grey
and once in a blue moon, "Macbeth".
I even asked in the forum (which is supposed to be read by teachers as well as students) whether teachers didn't have any more imagination than to assign these same books over and over, and why didn't they assign the classics?
The answers I got were appalling. To the teachers, these were the classics. They raged at me for "not knowing" that teachers were given a list of books they had to choose from, which isn't the point. The point was that they always choose the same five books. Some teachers asked, "What do you want them to read, Twilight?" because, I suppose, the only books outside the list were either Harry Potter or vampire books.
The kids answered that these were great books; one claimed Great Gatsby for his one-unit list of Greatest Books Ever Written. One kid said he had been assigned some of these books two years in a row, and nobody, neither students nor teachers, even tried to name any other books outside the list.
Not Canterbury Tales, nor Paradise Lost, no poetry by John Donne, nothing by Dickens or Thackeray, no Poe, Swift, or Fielding, not Hawthorne, nor even "Uncle Tom's Cabin"--which is probably why they think our Civil War was fought over economics and not slavery.
What's my point, that the kids are stupid? No, but their teachers are illiterate, and don't mind passing their own ignorance on to the kids. The teachers have three thousand years worth of literary richness, and all they bother to pass on to the next generation is the two great navel-gazing works, Catcher in the Rye and Great Gatsby. The result is that our next generation's information remains scant and their horizons don't extend beyond the ends of their arms. Maybe the remote control comes into play here but as with the reading assignments, they're only taken to where they can stare at their own navels. "Sunny with a Chance" and "Wizards of Waverly Place" do not expand their horizons.
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