In a nutshell, it goes something like this...
What does this have to do with this over the top politically based blog you may ask ?
Well, it seems that the far left, or "Progressive" agenda being crammed down our throats for the past forty years has been stolen directly from College Football Hall of Fame Coach Amos Alonzo Staggs' dusty old playbook.
The moral majority (you and I), have been compromised by the progressive left now for almost 100 years.
They also have been using the art of misdirection to near perfection...
It goes something like this...
You convince (pay) the progressive teachers unions to deem that the pledge of allegiance violates the childs 1st amendment rights and crosses the line of church and state,
And is therefore unconstitutional,
With financing from union dues and in some cases our own tax dollars,
They defended their decision endlessly, in the court systems for decades, through the unions and the ACLU.
and while the moral majority is distracted with debates about it in the courts for forty years,
they replaced it with this...
While you are busy living your life, working, raising a family, paying your taxes, playing by the rules, and setting examples for your children...,
you sent your children to school everyday...,
and as a "reward for scholastic achievement",
your child has the honor of being invited to see Al Gore
give a speech about global warming,
at the University of Maryland Presidential Youth Inaugural Conference...,
In this speech he says to children as young as 12...,
"...when I was your age and the civil rights revolution was unfolding, And we kids asked our parents and their generation, ‘Explain to me again why it’s OK for the law to officially discriminate against people because of their skin color?’.... our parent’s generation couldn’t answer that question, that’s when the law started to change...”
"There are some things about our world that you know that older people don't know. Why would that be? Well in a period of rapid change, the old assumptions sometimes just don't work anymore because they're out of date. New knowledge, new understandings are much more widely available sometimes to younger people who are in school and aren't weighed down with old assumptions of the past..."
- Al Gore Jan. 19, 2009 University of Maryland Presidential Youth Inaugural Conference
In a sense, don't listen to "out of date" bigoted "assumptions" of your "old" parents,
listen to the "new" assumptions of your "old" teachers.
Well since we don't seem to teach history to our children anymore,
where has this been done before...
Then the National Socialist Party also known as the Nazis', with their "Progressive" agenda of "Social and Economic Justice" (sound familiar) took this even further,
and after telling them not to listen to their "old" parents, they then asked the youth party to tell them...
"what are your old parents telling you."
I think anybody smart enough to read this blog knows where those "progressive" ideals lead.
So what happened ? Where did it all go wrong ?
Maybe we can start with the "new" math, the elimination of the grading system, and the obsession with the childs ego, instead of the content of the childs education.
Enter John Dewey, a self proclaimed liberal "Democratic Socialist", and his "experiment" of "experiential education".
Basically learning through the use of classroom projects, emphasising learning in groups to stifle individuality,
and promote "community", obedience and cooperation.
Mr. Dewey, also known as the "Father of Modern Education", was a progressive and educational reformer, who promoted the progressive populist philosophies of schooling during the first half of the 20th century.
John Dewey was a professor at (coincidentally) the University of Chicago (just as President Obama), and Columbia University (President Obamas' alma mater).
Dewey once said...
"The true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the childs' own social activities."
and that "the plea for the predominance of reading in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature, seems to me a perversion".
This snippitt is long, but it shows where the the change happens,
What is striking to me is that in the beginning of the video we see the basics...math, geography, reading, and writing,
with an emphasis on individual achievement.
The very things we rely and need our educators to teach.
In the end we see groups of kids playing with cars, going on field trips, learning how shop, and make lunch,
as a collective and deemphasizing the individual.
The things we don't need our educators to teach...,
and ironically,
the things and values of everyday life WE personally take pride in teaching our own children....cooking, sharing, shopping, and daily life experiences.
Something else ironic is the portion about the teacher...
"Keystone of the progressive education is the teacher. Necessary qualifications: ingenuity, patience, a thousand eyes, great physical endurance."
I guess knowledge of the subject you are teaching is irrelevant.
Don't misunderstand me,
It's not about the teachers.
It is about the systems, methods, and philosophies they are taught too teach,
and the (union) associations that they have chosen to keep.
All of these elements combined has produced educators with an emphasis on things like..
"whole word", "cooperative learning", "psycholinguistics",
"creative curriculum approach", "dolch words",
"invented spelling", "comprehension strategies", and on and on and on.
If you don't know what these teaching methods are,
Google them and see why our children are struggling to learn the basics...
But just for fun we'll take a crash course on "Dolch Words", or the "Whole Word" method,
because reading is the foundation of all learning...,
You can't learn history without reading,
you can't learn math without reading,
You can't learn science without reading,
You can't learn much of anything without being able to read.
Dolch Words, Sight Words, Look-Say, Memory Method, and Sight-Reading, are all one and the same.
It is the reading system developed by progressive educational reformers to replace phonics.
We all know phonics, the process of learning to read by learning the sounds of letters, thus the ability to "sound out" strings of letters to identify words and phrases....
Good enough for William Shakespear, Abraham Lincoln, Sophoclese, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens, to name but a few.
Dolch Words, Sight Words, Look-Say, Memory Method, and Sight-Reading, replace this method with the symbolic identification and MEMORIZATION of thousands of words and sounds.
Basically the memorization of tens of thousands of symbols, one by one...
like remembering a face, a symbol, or a landmark and associating it with a string of letters through memorization.
In the last four sentences you just read more than 60 words...
do you think you could remember 60 faces, symbols, or landmarks in the same amount of time ?
probably not...
The English language has over 1,000,000 words and names.
A literate person is considered to know at least 25,000 words,
a high school graduate typically knows 100,000 words,
and a college graduate generally knows 200,000 words and names.
Dolch Words, Sight Words, Look-Say, Memory Method, and Sight-Reading, consist of lists of the most frequently used words that they believe cannot be sounded out because they don't follow any "decoding rules", so they must be memorized.
Words like this from a 2nd and 3rd grade "Dolch List"...
...always, if, cold, fast, pick, or tell...
This method then aims for the memorization of 800 words per year.
So by 5th grade an A+ student will have memorized 4000 words.
That means that our brightest 5th grade students, knowing less than 10,000 words are considered "functionally illiterate", and will struggle to read a newspaper or magazine at the age of 11.
In the end, the Memory Method is all about how many words your child can memorize,
If you haven't been taught to phonetically sound out words,
what do you do when you get to words you haven't memorized yet ?
It is this struggle at about 4th and 5th grade that slows down the learning.
Instead of being able to sound out the new words in Science class, History class, or Math,
they spend their time struggling to read and understand learning new words,
while trying to learn the Science, History, or Math at the same time...,
which shows up later as frustrated students,
increasingly falling behind,
with 30% of students dropping out of the school system completely according to national statistics.
If you struggle early on at reading,
You will struggle to learn history,
you will struggle to learn math,
You will struggle to learn science
You will struggle to learn anything...,
Maybe that's why a stunning 40 percent of America's 4th graders continue to read below the basic level on national reading assessments.
Historians believe that the alphabet is one of mans greatest inventions...
Before the alphabet people had to remember hundreds and thousands of symbols...
called hieroglyphics....
kind of like Dolch Words, Memory Method...
Now that is what I call "progressive".
A few weeks ago, an interesting quote was left in the comments section at the end of the blog...
"They want a country full of immoral, over medicated, over-worked, underpaid, and uninformed Americans that cannot discern Truth from Lies.
They want you just the way you are."
Maybe we shouldn't be so surprised when we see this...
Again... where does the problem lie ?
It can't be money...
In California alone, almost half the state general fund is consumed by education. Kindergartens through 12th grade are spending more than...
...$40 BILLION A YEAR,
That's BILLION with B..., in ONE state.
75% of it from the state and 25% from local property taxes.
In Louisiana alone, over 40 percent of public school kids were illiterate, and half drop out before graduation.
Today, a stunning 40 percent of America's 4th graders continue to read below the basic level on national reading assessments.
On international tests, America's 12th graders rank LAST in advanced physics compared with students in 18 other countries.
And one-third of all incoming COLLEGE freshmen enroll in a REMEDIAL reading, writing, or mathematics class.
It seems pretty obvious....
During the 60's and 70's they stood for "peace" and "love",
burned their bras, protested "big government" and "the man"...
then they "turned on, tuned in, and dropped out"....
and then they had to get jobs.
So...,
many became teachers,
like Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn,
who co-founded the Weather Underground, a self-described communist revolutionary group...,
(coincidentally)the University of Illinois at Chicago,
holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar.
He also frequents Venezuela and Chavez, and said at the World Education Forum in Venezuela...
That's right...
the World Education Forum...IN VENEZUELA !!!
"...we, too, must build a project of radical imagination and fundamental change. Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education- a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation...."
His wife Bernardine Dohrn, is an Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law and the Director of Northwestern's Children and Family Justice Center.
Coincidentally, their adopted son, Chesa 'Che' Boudin (as in Che Guevera)
I guess the "NUT" doesn't fall far from the "progressive" tree.
Mark Rudd is now a retired math instructor from a community college in Albequerque New Mexico.
How ironic that now these very same people, who protested against the government intervention into their lives, have seemingly hijacked our education system...
They have decided that the government should now control education.
And the teaching methods used to educate them to be teachers, professors and authors,
are "old", "outdated" and need to be fixed.
They just aren't good enough for your children, and have convinced YOU the parent, that they know better than you and that "the old assumptions sometimes just don't work anymore" as Mr. Al Gore put it.
The last 50 years of test scores are proof.
That is why The Department of Education has concluded that U.S. schools have shown little to no “significant difference” in the performance of children in the early grades since 1992,
and literally no differences in the math and reading scores of high school seniors over the past 34 years.
While we have been preoccupied with Democrats and Republicans, red versus blue, American Idol, wars, bills, Survivor, working, raising a family paying our taxes, playing by the rules, setting examples for our children, and tolerating public education failures...
Self-proclaimed liberal "Democratic Socialist", in the name of "progressive educational reform"...
KNEW they couldn't change YOUR mind,
so they faked the pass...,
and decided to change the hearts and minds of your children...
Because they could "teach" "Educational Progressivism" to the next generation...,
while YOUR tax dollars paid them to do it.
Like an ingenious deal with the devil,
they have been hiding behind one of the strongest unions,
and lining their administrators and union pockets with exhorbanent salaries and pension funds,
unchecked for about 40 years, with obscene amounts of our tax dollars.
All while telling our children that our founding fathers were bigots and hypocrites,
that the constitution is an "old out dated living document that needs to evolve".
That America is evil and responsible for most of the bad things in the world today, like pollution, racism, the exploitation of natural resources, and war.
That YOU the parent should be disregarded because you are just "weighed down with old assumptions of the past".
While we were looking at the quarterback
and preoccupied with just getting through everyday...,
They handed the ball off to the education system,
took your money,
and sent your children to the back of the education line.
As an "experiment"
in Professor Deweys' "experiential education" method.
The progressives secured their future voting block by teaching our children at every level to believe the United States should be more like Europe, a "Democratic Socialist" system.
They switched the roles and responsibilities of parents and teachers by making school fun,
and spent their time teaching your children cooking, shopping, complacency, cooperation and life experiences...
While sending HOME the "homework" of math, geography, reading, and writing...
and then blamed you for not participating in the education of your children.
Those parents who chose to "homeschool" their own children have been demonized by the progressive administrations for years...
like Clintons Attorney General Janet Reno stating that ...
One of President Obamas first acts was to eliminate school vouchers,
assuring that only the elite will be able to afford private schooling....
like his own children...
who will not be a product of the public education system.
Why ?!?!?!?
If its good enough for your children,
why do the elite go out of their way to PAY private tuition fees for their own children ????
Instead of the education system teaching our children how to pass the tests,
or to be satisfied with doing just enough to move on,
and encouraging them to be an obediant collective group of cooperative followers....,
Maybe we should try....
teaching our children the great things about our society, instead of "I pledge allegiance to the earth"...,
encouraging the individual and the responsibility to succeed, instead of group therapy projects...,
Maybe keeping score at little league games,
instead of everybody receiving "participation trophies"...,
learning there are winners and losers with rewards for hard work...,
using a grading system, and eliminating tenure...,
by paying and promoting teachers according to results, just like everybody else...,
allowing parents the freedom to send their children to the school of their choice through tax breaks...,
or simply running the education system like a business, and infusing some competition for your tax dollars...,
Maybe that will change some numbers...,
oh yeah,
that's that evil free market, conservative capitalism stuff,
and it's just "weighed down with the old assumptions"...,
of our founding fathers.
like Al Gore said...
What was I thinking.
Ahh..the "Old Statue of Liberty Play"...
Works everytime.
Here's a sample of a progressive education reforms "new math"
And here is rare footage of Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner explaining to Congress and the President,
how His plan is going to fix the economy...,
Thanx for being here,
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