Education vs. Government Indoctrination Centers; Grace Commission

This is from a Linked-in article and a discussion that ensued. I actually agreed with Lloyd’s main point which was that pensions promised should be honored, but he didn’t seem to like my suggested solutions…

L: (Lloyd): You had me roaring with laughter from this one: “People were a lot smarter before there were government mandated schooling”

A–> Here’s another laugh to tickle you some more, an article from a far-left web site that displays a copy of a 1912 eighth grade graduation exam donated to the Bullitt County Schools. It also served as a high school entrance exam.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/12/1912-eighth-grade-exam_n_3744163.html

L: I’ll tell you this much, I learned more from reading books than I did in the classroom. In fact, it’s recommended that children should read what they want to read at least 30 minutes a day on their own outside of school—that’s what I did. Public education is a basic education. There isn’t any country on the earth that created an education system that’s supposed to do it all in school. That’s why outside reading is so important, and it’s what parents emphasize in countries like Finland. If all you do is go to school and ignore the teachers, don’t do the work, don’t read the material, don’t visit libraries and check out books to read, then you are going to be totally ignorant and very easy to fool.

A–> So you admit that students learn more outside the classroom than they do in the classroom. One of my earliest and fondest recollection is from when my Mom took me on my first trip to the library, wow, so many books! I made them let me borrow TWO books instead of the one book for the first day. I read them both and made my Mom take me back so I could borrow two more. The second day I got my permanent library card and took all the maximum six.

BUT ONLY with the Internet have I learned some relevant facts about American history, for example. Like how Alexander Hamilton tried to sabotage the Revolution immediately with first a monarchy, then with his first central bank. Before government money came into the picture with dictated mandatory government-controlled “education”, there were enough people who were smart enough and learned enough to stop the plans for a thieving central bank. It still took them till Roosevelt for enough of them to get dumbed down enough to accept the great massive gold theft confiscation, and then by Nixon to accept giving up the dollar totally to central bank fiat whim and the corruption of legislators and executors of government.

Not to mention the slaughter of many of the American Indians, the abuse by some native tribes of others before the arrival of Europeans, Lincoln’s abuse of the press and orders to shoot protestors and his orders to return a slave to his Missouri master. Or the forcible shut down of abolitionist Lysander Spooner’s alternative to the Post Office.

L: Percentage of persons 14 years old and over who were illiterate (unable to read or write in any language), by race and nativity: 1870 to 1979

A–> I have no dispute with those figures, which must also be compared to the figures for the demographic ratio of agricultural versus urban population. Among the literate, again, try those McGuffey readers on for size. How many of today’s literate population knows how to read?

And how many of those who were graduated from high school today are truly functionally literate? In my urban mission witnessing outings, I met a girl who was a high school graduate who could not read the Gospel tract I gave her, saying she was a victim of NEW YORK PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOLS.

That’s why the poor Hispanic and black parents in those poor New York boroughs scramble by the thousands to get a chance at the lotteries for even a chance at getting the kids into a charter school. There was the movie based on the true story of the Philadelphia parent who organized a parents’ takeover of the local school, furious at the dismal performance of her daughter.

You mentioned the racial comparatives of white and black literacy rates from the era of Democratic Party-dominated Jim Crow laws (and de facto Jim Crow in the north). I went back to St. Louis once, and the church of my childhood had opened a school. That school was jam packed to maximum with black kids from the neighborhood that their parents had scraped together for them.

It was a black single mother who also initiated the movement in Minneapolis, Minnesota for vouchers. She had worked three jobs and put her kids in private school to give them a chance but wanted to do something for other mothers, God bless her, and the results were dramatic.

You want numbers? Private schooled kids consistently outperform public school kids on AVERAGE, religious private school kids outperform non-religious school kids, and home-schooled kids today outperform them all. Patrick Henry College enrollment is dominated by home school graduates, and their students are the consistent winners in moot court competitions. They even won a moot court competition in Britain using British law!

Here you go:
http://mcguffeyreaders.com

L: In fact, the United States has the 5th highest college graduation rate in the world.

A–> So what, if the educational content is counterfeit? No problem, passed the QA test, ey? Here’s another article from the same FAR-LEFT web site on this subject:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/us-students-still-lag-beh_n_1695516.html

From that web page: “A 2009 study found that U.S. students ranked 25th among 34 countries in math and science, behind nations like China, Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and Finland. Figures like these have groups like StudentsFirst, headed by former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, concerned and calling for reforms to “our education system [that] can’t compete with the rest of the world.” (See video below.)”

And what of that college education? With majors like Ethnic Studies (divisive), Political Science, Women’s studies, Asians are concentrating on world-changing technologies. The education that turns out good government-supporting intellectual ideologues with lifetime debts that in no way match their earning potential, are making those kids victims along with (in part) their parents. Student debt has become a nightmare with no bang for the buck, and Obama pushes more extortion from the subjects of the realm to pay for it, and more rhetoric, instead of cutting off the ocean of guaranteed loans that warps the more sensible free-market price points that would occur naturally. Meaning without federal injection of printing-press money, poor-robbing inflationary dollars from nothing, the college education pricing would reflect more what’s reasonable according to the return on the investment.

I learned more outside of all those institutions, just like you.

One author summarized the Grace Commission report:
“The report was primarily authored by James J. Harvey, who synthesized the feedback from the commission members and the memorable language in the opening pages: “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people” and “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” — (quoting from “A Nation at Risk” at http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/index.html.

I read the SELF-SERVING Stanford University report about the OECD PISA tests, and their analysis has gaping gaps that any logician can run a river of Mac Trucks through, or a couple of the biggest cruise ships around. Excuses, excuses. Easy, saying higher American participation of poor schools in the exams warped the results. That’s even a worse testimony against our government-warped government indoctrination system that engages in the false advertising label of “education”.

The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.
“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: ” — Hosea 4:6a

Advertisement