Education Enabling Cultural Decline

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2016

Trying to have a rational discussion based on facts with a College of Education graduate who uses Common Core teaching methods, how children learn, and the dumbing down of America's education, is like trying to reason with a petulant child who happens to be a member of the Communist Party USA.

They take everything very personal and in a fascistic way, it's their way or the highway. If we don't do it this way, children will be doomed forever. Since 1979 when Jimmy Carter established the College of Education (which alone gobbles up close to $75 billion a year), our children's education has gone down significantly as evidenced by test scores and a shameless lack of general knowledge.

Just because you are able to use technology expertly and know how to look up information does not make you smart, you just know how to use a search engine. What you are able to do with that information is another story. I've had technological savvy students who actually knew very little, were awkward, lacked common sense, and social skills.

On the other hand, I’ve had students who did not care that much for technology, were talented and creative, but were not exactly top scorers on the standardized ACT or SAT tests. Yet these students became quite successful in life.

According to Howard Gardner (Harvard Graduate School of Education), there are eight intelligence types and we all have some percentage of musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic abilities, weaker in some, stronger in others. It is because of this nature of the human being that we should not box student into testing molds, one size fits all, particularly when public education has a strong component of indoctrination by those who write the textbooks, the curricula, the teaching materials, and the standardized tests.

Teaching to a standard determined by progressive academia is a disservice to the wonderful talent in our schools. Teaching is an art and the fly-by-night teaching methodologies that have come and gone since 1979 prove that they were invented by control freaks that had one goal in mind, a pliant society of busy bees under the guidance of academia in service of the ruling elites who fund their secular ideas and methods.

I’ve heard progressives for decades vociferously demanding the separation of church and state, even though our country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles and God and prayer always had a place in the classroom and in government. But now, the same progressive academics are teaching in every grade, through Common Core Standards, indoctrination into Islam, forcing Christianity and prayer out of schools and out of extra-curricular activities. What happened to their cries of separation of church and state?

Patrick Deneen wrote about the loss of our cultural identity in his essay, ”How a generation lost its common culture.”

“My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.” https://thelogcollege.wordpress.com/2016/02/23/how-a-generation-lost-its-common-culture/

As a retired teacher of thirty years, I am certain that the concerted effort to mindlessly indoctrinate students into the progressive PC construct, a political correctness that has constrained everybody’s freedom of speech, turning students into whiny ninnies who need a safe space from their inner real or imagined fears of divergent opinions, and to distort and rewrite history in the vein of Howard Zinn’s very popular textbook that is widely used around the country, has contributed to the decline and loss of cultural identity to such a degree that students are ashamed of their own history, of their nation’s exceptionalism and accomplishments, of their common citizenship, and of their own culture.  

Sadly, these students are busy destroying and replacing their own culture with the culture of other primitive societies they were told in schools to admire and venerate, simple cultures that are invading western civilization with the blessing of the United Nations and regressive western governments. It is baffling to think that these are generations of children and grandchildren of great Americans who conquered space and made flight possible.

The chickens of intolerance and communist social justice have come home to roost on the American campus. Decades of Marxist indoctrination by the vaunted communist academia are finally paying off -- our cultural heritage is replaced by cultural Marxism and by primitive cultures that are deemed superior to ours and worshipped.

Our mis-educated youth, who can barely read or write a complete and coherent paragraph, but their fingers fly on Twitter in hashtags and 140 characters, staring constantly like robotic drones into illuminated smart devices, are now chasing Pokémon-Go.

Young people don’t seem to care if their culture survives or not. If they are given everything free, tiny housing units, Internet, smart devices, food, education, Netflix, pot, and public transportation passes, they will remain on the globalist environmental social justice train forever as anonymous global citizens.

Butler on Business, Common Core Education Standards, October 9, 2013

My 11 minute commentary today on Butler on Business. Topic: Common Core education standards.
Who is paying the bill, who wrote the standards, and why. A second installment will be aired next Monday which will include actual examples of school districts and why this nationalized education is a threat to the future of our country.
http://host1.cyberears.com//21865.mp3

Too Late to Reverse Indoctrination?

Scanning the newspaper today, I was wondering what else would shock me in the education section, knowing that we are a few decades too late to do much about it even if we tried.

A teacher in Virginia has ordered a student to turn his shirt inside out because the message content was offensive. The t-shirt pictured Si Robertson, the jocular sage uncle of the Duck Dynasty clan, a tight-knit family with traditional American values, who believe in God, country, and hunting. The wonderful Robinson family members are the type of Americans who made this country great.  

Progressives have labeled and derided real patriotic Americans who are proud of our history, of our exceptionalism, of our way of life, the “cling to your guns, Bible beating, and fly over country” Americans.

Conservative Americans’ healthy values are being challenged by self-loathing, dumbed down indoctrinated progressives who hate their country and everything it stands for. Liberal teachers and administrators do not bat an eye when their students show up for class in Che Guevara, Karl Marx, and Fidel Castro t-shirts – those are enlightened garments and it would violate their freedom of speech to tell them to change into more appropriate clothing.

Does it surprise me that the whole country is now adopting Common Core educational standards that introduce revisionist history on purpose, praise wrong answers if the students feel good and justified in their incorrect calculations, and “educators” teach Ebonics instead of proper English? It does not surprise me because the decay and rot have been coming for years – it has accelerated since the introduction of the State Department of Education in 1979-1980. Carter was such a terrible president but his crowning achievement was the toxic Department of Education.

A Maryland school board meeting recently turned into bullying of parents when they tried to ask questions about the adoption of Common Core standards without community input. One father was assaulted by a man wearing a white t-shirt with the words “Security” written on it. This parent was later arrested after being physically forced out of the meeting while the superintendent droned on.  Why were the rest of the parents silent and not jumping to help him? Is this America anymore? You be the judge. http://michellemalkin.com/2013/09/20/parents-you-need-to-question-these-people-shock-video-of-dad-arrested-at-school-meeting-after-challenging-common-core/

Common Core standards do not represent just abject mediocrity; they indoctrinate students into community organizing and the collective mindset, the hallmarks of socialism/Marxism. Michelle Malkin said, “Stanford University professor James Milgram, a prominent dissenting member of the Common Core math standards committee, has exposed how the muddled standards would leave American students at least two years behind the rest of the planet.” http://hoosiersagainstcommoncore.com/james-milgram-testimony-to-the-indiana-senate-committee/

One particular English lesson in Common Core for beginning 9^th graders is clearly designed to corrupt human decency, presenting perversion as a norm and as an individual choice. The selfish, evil woman in Guy de Maupassant story, “The Mother of Monsters,” deliberately binds her body to give birth to 11 grotesquely deformed children, “monsters,” which she sells to carnivals. The first born is a mistake; she is just a shopkeeper girl who tries to hide her pregnancy by binding her body tightly. The subsequent ten babies are deliberately deformed for financial gain.  

Instead of presenting her evil side which most decent humans would revile, the Common Core standards present her as “bourgeois,” (alluding to making money), and “a woman who expressed her individuality in the face of outside pressure.” This story is not about individuality, this woman was pure evil, and she chose to deform her children for her own selfish financial gain and vanity. Yet the Common Core assignment asks students to write an essay on how this character demonstrates individuality in the face of outside pressure. http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/08/monstrous-story-monstrous-curriculum-ugly-heart-common-core/#cvZ4F6vwdybl7Mos.99

Back to stark reality, in a small town in the south, the single conservative teacher was denied a retirement party because of her politics. The local paper that held a tight liberal monopoly over all the mass media, refused to even print a student’s paid ad about the teacher’s retirement. At the same time, an entire page was dedicated to the retirement of the very liberal local principal who thought that the liberal guru, Thomas Friedman, was a great economist and his advice should be emulated and his writings studied in depth.

The darling of the school system, a young woman who taught science in the public schools, was a nut case who pretended to have cancer and walked around with a chemo pump, luxuriating in the attention and pity her colleagues lavished upon her daily. Several teachers took time off to drive her weekly to a town sixty miles away to get her infusion drugs. They would wait patiently for three hours in the waiting room, while the supposed cancer stricken teacher would walk out the back door and go shopping. After a few months of this deranged game, people caught on that she was not sick. It did not stop them from electing her teacher of the year for the entire state. She was transferred quietly to another town’s school system with glowing recommendations. Such is the liberal dementia in our public schools.

Is there any wonder that Common Core standards are taking over our school system in exchange for federal grants?  It starts with first grade textbooks such as “Voices, Literature and Writing.” The book is meant to be part of the English Language Arts curriculum but instead, it prompts students to “use their voices to advocate solutions to social problems that they care deeply about like social role models, social advocacy, and developing a Democracy Plan to help people in need.” The first graders I know only care about play and recess, they don’t understand social advocacy. First graders don’t think about ways to organize people in their communities to fix social problems, this is community organizing indoctrination, this is communist indoctrination 101, the brainchild of moneyed liberals with fundamental transformation goals for our society.

 

Shaping America into Progressivism

Teaching or substituting in America of the early 1980s was not easy. As a Superintendent of Education had told me, they “did not just take anybody off the street. You had to be highly qualified.” That did not necessarily mean well versed in a subject matter. You had to belong to the “rarefied” group of licensed teachers.

I was interested in Latin and he had told me that he did not need Latin teachers because he had a person from Latin America who taught Spanish. As I looked at him, I was thinking of the Vice-President who told a crowd in Latin America that, had he paid more attention in his Latin class, he would have been able to speak to his audience in their native language.

The newly formed (1979) Department of Education had instituted stringent rules and regulations that school districts had to follow in order to receive federal funding and state certification. The National Education Association welcomed all dues-paying teachers, eager to indoctrinate them into the master educational plan.

Teaching elementary, middle, and high school required jumping through certification bureaucratic hoops that only the College of Education graduates could easily meet. It was not important if teachers performed well in the classroom, on the National Teacher Exam, or knew their subject area of expertise - they had to be licensed.

Many mediocre students eked out a diploma after four years of easy courses and became distributors of revisionist knowledge and shapers of generations of American students. As they gained tenure, no matter how inadequate their teaching, school districts could not get rid of them. The NEA vehemently defended their rights to a life-long career.

Many former coaches and physical education teachers went back to school for Masters Degrees in School Administration and became principals and superintendents, cheerleaders and supporters of their former colleagues and peers. If they played by the Department of Education rules, the rewards were plenty. Objective teachers who followed their conscience were marginalized as not being “team players.” Non-Education graduates could teach college with a Master’s Degree but not in the public schools. Membership in the club had its rewards and prevented better teachers from entering the system.

Liberals took control of education and imposed political correctness, which silenced conservatives and any possible opposition lest they be labeled racists and anti-children.

The curriculum changed from year to year, becoming more secularized and socialist, pushing religion completely out of the public schools. Prayer at football games, singing the national anthem, and the recitation of the pledge of allegiance to our country were scorned. Atheists objected to traditions that made this country great but interfered with their agenda. Being Green, the worship of Gaia, Mother Earth, and activist environmentalism became the new religion.

Teaching methodologies changed yearly, according to the latest fashion from teacher colleges in New York, Boston, California, like a new dress, more outrageous and less conducive to learning but easy on testing and highly experimental. The curriculum became more “socially just.” Standards were so relaxed that some students graduated who could not read or write on an elementary level. Education was dumbed down to include even the laziest students, test results worsened, dropouts increased, while knowledge retention declined.

Multilingual education and multiculturalism were forced upon schools in order to accommodate the burgeoning illegal immigrant student population.

A wave of anti-Americanism dominated the lectures of liberals. Everything that America did in its history or stood for became evil and open to negative interpretation. Conservative teachers were silenced by the threat of job loss. Performance boards ignored them but awarded constant praise and “I love myself” certificates to mediocre teachers who played by the progressive rule.

When expressing honest opinions, conservative students were intimidated and ridiculed by socialist activist teachers. Some students received lower grades when their opinions clashed with the teacher’s “America is evil” platform. Certain assignments crossed the line of objectivism and had nothing to do with the subject at hand but few parents paid attention or were vigilant enough.

I was shocked when the entire student body was required to attend two-hour indoctrination into the peaceful religion of Islam, presented by a Palestinian imam. A rapt audience of innocent and ignorant high school students was told how respected and cherished Muslim women were. The faculty did not protest but sat stony faced although they all knew the lack of rights and worth of Muslim women. Nobody asked questions about the hangings, stonings, decapitations, and cutting limbs of women under Islam. The religious presentation had been organized by the principal, the same person who said repeatedly that there is a separation of church and state, and refused to allow students to wear crosses to school because it might make students uncomfortable who did not believe in God.

Instead of teaching students that in 235 years of exceptionalism, America rose to become the world’s greatest power and revered society, an AP English teacher in Montgomery County, MD was asking students to explain how “Thoreau’s extolling the virtues of individualism and self-efficiency can jeopardize the community.” They were talking about community in Marxist parlance, as in “communis,” Latin for “shared.”

We were not allowed to be individuals in the totalitarian regime I lived under for 20 years. We shared a lot of misery, poverty, and despair under communism because self-reliance and rugged individualism were discouraged. Instead, we were told to be sheep under a benevolent government with omnipotent, god-like powers. As Marx said, “A people without a heritage are easily persuaded.”

Our children are taught that private property, the lynchpin of liberty, is bad. Thomas Jefferson began the Declaration of Independence with the words, “the pursuit of life, liberty, and property.”

Few American students pay attention to what Thomas Jefferson wrote anymore. Distributing condoms to elementary school children and setting up nurseries in high schools across the country for illegitimate babies take precedence over serious education.

American children have been brainwashed to reject the fundamental values of this country and of civilization. The Pew Research Center showed that more Americans age 18 to 29 have a favorable view of socialism over capitalism, 49 percent positive for socialism and 46 percent positive of capitalism. (December 2011)

The United Nation’s 150-page “World Happiness Report” promotes European socialism as the path to well-being. Fabian socialism must be imposed on the entire world through social and environmental justice. It is no coincidence that Maryland was the first state in the U.S. to pass The No Child Left Inside Act, forcing environmental literacy as a condition of graduation from high school. The reading and math test scores for some areas in Maryland are pathetic yet students must be environmentally literate in order to protect Mother Earth from the destructive economic activities of man. The education system is clearly pushing the religion of Gaia to the detriment of traditional education.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution lists the items over which Congress has the power to legislate and education is not one of them, neither can education be logically included under the commerce clause. It would be a stretch to consider the Department of Education constitutional. President Carter signed the DOE into law on October 17, 1979 and it began operating on May 16, 1980. President Reagan tried unsuccessfully to dismantle it.

Title 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 authorizing $1 billion annually to upgrade schools attended by students of low-income families has grown to $19 in 2010. No Child Left Behind is part of Title 1, an attempt to bring all students to proficiency level in math and reading by 2014. “More than half the states have asked the U.S. Department of Education for a waiver from No Child Left Behind.” The Obama’s administration will grant the waivers, ten years after President Bush signed the NCLB law, if those states adopt a new set of requirements established by President Obama, Common Core State Standards, a nationalized k-12 program of instruction. Title 1 funding would be tied to the Common Core. The “Race to the Top” grants in 2009 already emphasized “college and career ready” style of teaching and learning. Common Core national standards and tests require states to “surrender control of their classroom” to the federal government. (Heritage Foundation)

The federal government has spent $7 billion a year on Head Start, a program created by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 to serve almost a million low-income children across the country.  Taxpayers have spent $168 billion since its inception yet the National Head Start Impact Study released by the Department of Health and Human Services in January 2010 showed that three and four year olds who were followed into first grade were not impacted positively at all on cognitive skills when compared to those children who did not participate in Head Start.

Congress mandated in 2006 another study of Head Start participants after third grade. Have their cognitive skills perhaps improved then? Health and Human Services concluded the study in 2008 but has not released the study results, four years later. Senators Tom Coburn, Mike Enzi, Lamar Alexander, Richard Burr, and John McCain have asked HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to release the results of the study. (Lindsey Burke)

It is safe to say that the existence of the U.S. Department of Education has had no positive effect on American education in spite of its $70 billion a year budget and its extensive bureaucracy.

Parents disenchanted with public education have proliferated home schooling and charter schools in spite of the vociferous protests of public school teachers, administrators, and NEA. 

The worthless Bachelor of Arts has become a piece of paper necessary to get an easy job. Students are disappointed when the six-figure salary job promised by their college advisor does not materialize, after having spent $7,000 per year in a public college on tuition alone.

After taking easy courses and the bare minimum of work, often times hiring other students to write papers for them or do their work, the B.A. degree is not worth the paper it is printed on. Employers request a transcript to verify graduation, but grades and courses taken are rarely scrutinized. Perhaps the students show promise in the perseverance department as potential on-the-job learners.

According to Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, eight million Pell Grants were awarded in 2010, totaling more than $32 billion. New loans of $125 billion were issued by the federal government in the same year.

The sad reality is that college graduates are experiencing 25 percent unemployment in the Obama administration that promised them “hope and change.” The hope is gone, there are no jobs in sight, and there is little change left in their pockets when college loans come due.

Common Core and Universal Design for Learning

I was having a cup of inflation-stricken chili that looked a few ounces smaller than before – the Michelle food-police with her holier-than-thou dictates of nutrition must have convinced the owners of the chain to change portion size while increasing the price.

I became privy to the loud conversation of three young women in their early twenties from the nearby table. One was bemoaning the lack of a raise in three years to her $44,000 a year teaching job – she had had enough and was going to look for another job. I was wondering if anybody sent her the memo that 25 percent of college graduates in her age group, 25 and younger, are unemployed and would gladly take her job.

High school teaching and a library science degree were the source of their displeasure and the list was quite long. Who decided that filing books in a library by the Dewey system is a science?

Dealing with a liberal education curriculum, demanding administrators, unruly students who challenge any authority and come unprepared to school every day, placating helicopter parents who hover at school all day, objecting to anything American, demanding progressivism, multiculturalism in teaching methodology, or parents who only care if their children have three free meals a day away from home, can be challenging. Complicating the problem is the lack of subject matter knowledge of some teachers and the political correctness required in the classroom. All can make someone’s life quite miserable at work.

Making only $44,000 in early twenties is certainly an outrage for young people in the Obama-entitled society.  After all, they were promised a six-figure salary by their college advisor and plenty of jobs in spite of their unemployable field of study. Such overt “social injustice” can only be rectified by confiscating wealth from the rich and distributing it to the young. It is a right now to have everything that someone else has, regardless of effort or age. Why wait and build up a career and experience when you can demand full rights here and now?

You can always take to the streets with the Occupiers and burn American flags, deface buildings, cars, and squat in the middle of a busy city or a beautiful park to make your demands known. If you are a nuisance to the taxpayers who must dodge your flea-infested camp daily on their way to work while they can no longer use the park they are paying for, and you cause millions of dollars in public property damage, so be it, America is rich and can afford it.

We no longer teach a common culture, common identity, common true history, or values such as hard work, charity, morals, virtue, and the rule of law. The new freedom among the youth is anarchy. Secular education and “green” environmentalism in support of mother earth has become the new religion.

Greek universities are offering protection to the young anarchists and rioters. If they make it to campuses, the police cannot arrest them without a warrant from the university presidents who, of course, refuse to issue them. Education is encouraging anarchy and lawlessness in Greece.

Goethe, a classical liberal, warned us that democracy is incompatible with liberty. “Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time are psychopaths.” Political centralization would lead to the destruction of culture. (Hans Hermann Hoppe, Ludwig von Mises Institute)

Common Core national standards, another President Obama brainchild, will implement among schools a Race to the Top competition through federal grants. If states adopt his Common Core standards, they will be exempt from the onerous provisions of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandates.

According to the Brookings Institution, “The empirical evidence suggests that the Common Core will have little effect on American students’ achievement. The nation will have to look elsewhere for ways to improve its schools.”

The authority to create and set standards belongs to states and school districts, not the federal government. Better yet, parents should have the power to give their children the type of education that best suits their children’s needs and abilities.

The Department of Education does not know best – it paid two Washington, D.C. organizations, the National Governors Association’s Center for Best Practices and The Council of Chief State School Officers, to come up with the Common Core national standards. (Pioneer Institute)

According to Lance Izumi, author of “Obama’s Education Takeover,” the President “strong-armed the states into adopting these standards through a number of devices, principally through the Race to the Top competition through federal grants.”

Awards in Race to the Top $4 billion “historic” grant scheme will go to states “leading coherent, compelling, and comprehensive education reform.” It was authorized under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. 

“Assessments have to be developed that are valid, support and inform instruction, provide accurate information about what students know and can do, and measure student achievement against standards designed to ensure that all students gain the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in college and the workplace.” (Race to the Top)

My translation is, dilute education, water down curriculum, force everybody into one “successful mold,” and receive an undeserved pass, a high school diploma and a worthless college degree. Exceptionalism is discouraged; poor students are rewarded, while achievers are punished.

In my 30 years experience as a teacher, the College of Education came up with many experimental programs that promised to be a breakthrough in education and ended up as another giant waste of taxpayer dollars.

“As the nation seeks to maintain our international competitiveness, ensure all students, regardless of background, have access to a high quality education, and prepare all students for college, work and citizenship, these standards are an important foundation for our collective work.” (Arne Duncan on Core Standards)

Searching deeper into the Core Standards, the true intent is clear, “all children can and should learn to high achievement standards.” Policymakers must “endorse, fund, and recognize assessment regimes that accomplish this goal,” Universal Design and Universal Design for Learning. Really? All children can learn to high achievement standards? Our minds, IQs, learning styles, and God-given talents are so equal now that everything is possible by government fiat?

Apparently, standardized tests “fail to produce a valid and reliable measurement of what significant minorities of students actually know, especially students with disabilities, English language learners or those from varied cultural backgrounds. Without accurate measurement, accountability systems are not only ineffective, they are unethical.” (Core Standards)

It will be a fascistic world in which every person will be forced into a government-dictated and enforced, dumbed-down mold, where everybody is equally intelligent, equally capable, equally trained, equally able, and equally educated with a diploma on the wall that is not worth the paper with the fancy intaglio printing.