Have you read the story on Drudge about the 4th grade teacher in Norfolk, VA who set up a mock slave auction in her classroom? The story is copyrighted so I can’t post it here but you can find it at The Virginian-Pilot via Drudge.
This goofy liberal teacher separated her black and mixed race students and offered them for sale to her white students as a classroom lesson in — I’m not sure what. To teach 9 year olds mmmm I can’t really come up with a reason she would do something so stupid, so out of line, so really inappropriate, all in the name of being “well meaning” or “in everyone’s best interest” or “for the good of the children.”
To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, the statist restrict other people’s liberty and peace with a clear conscious because they are doing it for the greater good of those people who just really don’t know what IS good for them. They really see nothing wrong with these behaviors because they are doing what they believe is best for all of us. Never mind that most of us would just like to be left the hell alone.
The Virginian-Pilot goes on to report that last year a guidance counselor resigned her job after giving out 80-100 fetus figurines to elementary students; another left after parents complained that she had anointed a student with “holy oil”; while a third (high school teacher) was reprimanded after it came to light that he/she was teaching from anarchist materials and organizations that were pro-marijuana legalization.
Our tax dollars at work, boys and girls.
Where do you find a fetus figurine? Let alone 100 of them? And more importantly, how is that possibly age approriate for an elementary age child? And whether this counselor was pro-life or pro-abortion, matters not because it simply has no place in elementary school.
I just cannot imagine what these teachers are thinking. I’ll say this, though, they are good promotion for home schooling.
If you haven’t read this story yet, it’s a kill. Due to low enrollment, a NJ elementary school named after TheOne will be closing it’s doors this summer.
At the time that the school acquired its new name, [in 2010] administrators took a lot of flak for ostensibly focusing on the name change instead of the plight of its students. But the city resident behind the movement, Myra Campbell, believed it would “send a subliminal message” to the students.
A subliminal message? How about they send a clear message about, oh say, LEARNING? Hello… anybody in there? How about we teach these kids how to read, write and do simple math, in real easy to understand language?
Subliminal messaging is part of any indoctrination process, by the way.
I have an even better idea. How about we dismantle the Department of Education this year and let the parents and citizens of a given district determine their OWN needs and requirements and finance it themselves? One thing that will be made evident in that scenario is how important the education of their children really is. Why should I be made responsible for the education of kids whose parents don’t give a damn themselves? I’m more than happy to pay taxes for the education of kids in my district, where parents and even I, have a say in what they do, read and learn. But I really don’t like paying for failing schools and teachers in Phoenix or L.A. or Chicago and where the unions and federal bureaucrats control the indoctrination and not the education of our kids.
A born and raised liberal New York Jew, gives you less than an hour of how he learned liberals are wrong and and why their thinking is Anti-American. If you want to understand what moral relativism really means, he ezplains it very well.
This is excellent! If you have some time, please listen.
“After 9/11 I realized my fellow liberals really DID hate America” :
It’s their goal to “leave us nothing else to believe in” :
“Indoctrinated into a cult of indiscriminate-ness” and this is moral relativism by another name :
“If one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter, can we at least agree that they must be fighting for FREEDOM?” :
Eric Schmidt suggested that young people should be entitled to change their identity to escape their misspent youth, which is now recorded in excruciating detail on social networking sites such as Facebook.
“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” Mr Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal.
This is a scary forecast, isn’t it? He’s right, too. We don’t understand the ramifications of what happens when we “put it all out there” for the entire world to see. And our kids especially don’t understand it. They will face an entire lifetime with this kind of lack of privacy, for the rest of us, it’s all still pretty new to our lives.
In an interviewMr Schmidt said he believed that every young person will one day be allowed to change their name to distance themselves from embarrasssing photographs and material stored on their friends’ social media sites.
The 55-year-old also predicted that in the future, Google will know so much about its users that the search engine will be able to help them plan their lives.
Using profiles of it customers and tracking their locations through their smart phones, it will be able to provide live updates on their surroundings and inform them of tasks they need to do.
HAL 9000 from 2001 - A Space Odyssey
“We’re trying to figure out what the future of search is,” Mr Schmidt said. “One idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.
“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”
It sounds like we are looking forward to a future of not one HAL 9000 but a gazillion HALs – all named Google and all inhabiting one giant monolith (pardon the sorta pun, there.) I think I’ve had an epiphany right here and right now! The mystery of the monolith in Kubrick’s movie, and Arthur C. Clarke’s fabulous book, has suddenly made itself known to me. This goes light years beyond cloud computing.
I don’t know that I’m not just a bit bothered that I will have a computer program reminding me that I need to pick up bread and bagels. And I have to disagree with Mr. Schmidt: I DO want google to answer my questions when I have them and I don’t want to be told what I need to do next or more importantly, what I need to PURCHASE next.
Things have become so different since I was in school. We actually used pencils and paper and later on, typewriters. We actually had to look up stuff in — my God — books – some of those were the Encyclopedia Britannica – and take notes. We had to write facts down more than once, which is how we learned those facts.
Now kids have facts at their finger tips and have no need to remember anything, which is what learning is. And it sounds like Google is going to make it easier yet for future generations to remain uneducated.
And one last thing that really disturbs me: I’m finding myself discovering more and more information from the British press than I’m reading from the so-called free press in the U.S.
“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.” –James Madison, Federalist No. 45
In case anyone misunderstands, the Founders did not believe in centralized government. The more centralized and expansive government becomes, the less involvement is allowed by “the people.” The bigger government becomes, the farther away from “the people” it gets.
The Founders believed in local governments, run by the citizens of those locales; that includes education.
The Founders would be appalled by the formation of the Department of Education. Education is, and was to them, a local responsibility. Every community, every county and every state should be and must be responsible for the education of those who live there. That includes not only what they are taught and how, but how it’s paid for.
This goes back to what Mark Levin in Liberty and Tyranny called the “harmonious diversity” of America, which is what the Founders invisioned. If Idaho has an education system that is more compatible with how one person believes, or is more afforable, for instance, he can leave the state he lives in and move to Idaho. This also goes to Reagan’s belief that Americans are free to vote with their feet. They are not stuck in one state with no recourse but can move to another that might have policies that are more appealing. Levin’s example in his book was the death penalty – Texas has an fairly active policy while New Jersey has no death penalty. But anything from abortion to education could be used as an example.
Our mobility has not yet been halted by Ray LaHood and we are still free to move where we choose to. However, that has potential to change if he has his way to “coerce us of our cars” and restrict our movement.
But I digress and I think I made my point.
Education should be and must be a state’s rights issue and there is no question that the Founders intended it to be that way. Every state should have it’s own department of education, funded entirely by the state’s citizens and managed with curriculum established by those same citizens.
That’s the long and the short of it.
Thank goodness my daughter is not a member of the teacher’s union.
I work with a naturalized Romanian and several Filipinas. Last night they brought up the story of teachers being reassigned or laid off because of their accents. Of course when they told me this story, they didn’t mention that it was teachers being let go, because they didn’t know that part of the story. So this morning I looked for the story, online and found it at the Wall Street Journal.
My daughter’s an elementary school teacher. She teaches immigrant children in a program called ELL – English Language Learner.
About 150,000 of Arizona’s 1.2 million public-school students are classified as English Language Learners. Of the state’s 247 school districts, about 20 have high concentrations of such students, the largest number of which are in the younger grades.
Jane is not supposed to speak Spanish in her classroom in order to teach English to these children.
Needless to say, she’s lost some students in the last couple of weeks, since this law in Arizona was passed. Many of these families are fleeing to California. This has been heartbreaking for her. But she also sees the need for these people to do things the legal way.
The Journal story emphasis is on teachers from Latin countries who are teaching in Arizona, and speak with a heavy accent (that’s a subjective criteria and even I don’t see how that can be fair – a heavy accent to me might not be to you) and do not speak in a grammatically correct way (I can see the importance of that.) And Arizona passed a law long ago that English is the language of the classroom and fluency is mandatory: that means grammatically correct.
Ms. Santa Cruz, the state official, said evaluators weren’t looking at accents alone. “We look at the best models for English pronunciation,” she said. “It becomes an issue when pronunciation affects comprehensibility.”
It would be a lot like having a math teacher in the classroom who can’t add or subtract. Teachers must be fluent in English in order to teach our kids. There is no way to be successful in America if you can’t read, write and speak the language. I would never expect to open business or apply for a job in Japan, for cryin’ out loud if I didn’t know the language. This is not hard to understand. A teachers job is to prepare children to be productive members in the American society and if they can’t even speak the language correctly, why would we want to put our children in their hands?
Lengthy (9 minutes) but worth listening to. He talks about screwing with the Tea Party via twitter, how they can’t stop punching O’Reilly in the nose and how net neutrality isn’t dead, among other things.
What was once a beautiful and vibrant city with fabulous architecture, has become a ghetto. It’s heartbreaking and sickening to see what was and now is Detroit and all at the hands of 40 years of statism.
After 40 years of taking personal responsibility away from the people, now they want to make people behave responsibly. Now they want to force parents to actually behave like parents or pay up. A little late in the game for that. These are parents who were raised on entitlements and affirmative action.
[State Rep. George Cushingberry, D-Detroit] wants to do something about the other parents, the ones who are too young, or who don’t read well enough to help their children. He is sensitive to those for whom poverty has been an obstacle.
“Poverty has been an obstacle” to these parents thanks to the do-gooder statists like Cushingberry and other democrats. They have kept Detroiters in poverty for the last 4 decades. As Ben Franklin once said, they have made poverty too comfortable and removed any incentive for these sad people.
This is the scary future that we face from the statist majority in our federal government. This could very well be the fate of all our big cities, our states and our schools.
“Brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun,” 31-year-old Faisal Shahzad told a federal judge. “Consider me the first droplet of the blood that will follow.”
Stop Sharia in America
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Obamas Wisdom and Terror in the Street
"We can absorb a terrorist attack. We'll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever...we absorbed it and we are stronger."
What was once a beautiful and vibrant city with fabulous architecture, has become a ghetto. It’s heartbreaking and sickening to see what was and now is Detroit and all at the hands of 40 years of statism.
Diary of a Mad Conservative 