You Didn't Build That: Obama-Style Tough Love Parenting

Obama's approach to tough love parenting is illustrated below, in an average American family setting. Observe, and learn.

And just to reinforce that you will not be building anything in the future -- and that everything will be built by replicators -- this Wired feature spotlights The Replicator 2 by Makerbot.

Imagine children learning to program such 3D printers to create all kinds of objects and machines. As children grow older, the "toys" they create can grow more sophisticated -- and more dangerous.

As replicating "inks" grow more varied and more capable, the limits on types of objects which can be created will retreat into the horizon. From weapons to vehicles to adventure toys to shelters and more, the list of things "you didn't build" is apt to grow very, very long.

California's Big Problems in Higher Ed.

This is a nice summary of California's higher education bubble, in the days prior to its imminent collapse.

If you take a broader look at California, you will learn that things are hard all over.

The entitled classes ensconced within California's universities are matched by entitled classes at every level of California's state and local governments. It is unlikely that the people will stand for this nonsense for much longer -- particularly when dysfunctional government policies of spending, regulation, and taxation, are driving more and more profitable businesses and employers out of the state.

Video H/T Boots and Oil blog

US College Tuition Racing to Infinity and Beyond!

We are inundated with news stories about the costs of gasoline and medical care. But take a look at the chart below, and see the expense that is truly shooting through the ceiling -- the cost of a university indoctrination and academic lobotomy!

College tuition and fees today are 559 percent of their cost in 1985. In other words, they have nearly sextupled (while consumer prices have roughly doubled).

...“If you’re a state legislator, you look at all your state’s programs and you say, ‘Well, we can’t make prisoners pay, but we can make college students pay,’” said Ronald Ehrenberg, the director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute and a trustee of the State University of New York System.

College students do end up paying more. But in the past, after the economy recovered, most states did not fully restore the funds that were cut. As cuts accumulated in each business cycle, so did tuition increases...States will soon have to pay out trillions in public pensions for the retiring baby boomer generation — squeezing the funds for training the next generation of workers even more. _NYT

The New York Times article is being oh, so politically correct. The real reason for sky-rocketing university costs is the bloating dead-weight corpse of university administrations.

Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18 percent. Inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student increased by 61 percent during the same period, while instructional spending per student rose 39 percent. Arizona State University, for example, increased the number of administrators per 100 students by 94 percent during this period while actually reducing the number of employees engaged in instruction, research and service by 2 percent. Nearly half of all full-time employees at Arizona State University are administrators.

A significant reason for the administrative bloat is that students pay only a small portion of administrative costs. The lion’s share of university resources comes from the federal and state governments, as well as private gifts and fees for non-educational services. The large and increasing rate of government subsidy for higher education facilitates administrative bloat by insulating students from the costs. _Report from Goldwater Institute

Read the full report (PDF)

Universities have taken as their primary mission the indoctrination of young minds into a dysfunctional leftist ideology. By doing so, they are reducing the future productive options of these young people, who will be less inclined to promote an opportunity society and more inclined to support a redistributive welfare state -- which tends to reduce long term opportunities for all, except insiders and preferred recipients of government spending.

Clearly this trend in skyrocketing university costs cannot go on much longer. Thus it won't. Alternative methods of learning and certification of knowledge and achievement are likely to divert large numbers of would-be university students into more productive and less indoctrinating learning paths.

It cannot happen too soon.

Update 10 March 2012:

The Student Loan Debacle

Higher Education Bubble Exploding in Taxpayer's Faces

Grading Student Loans -- New Report

Making Student Loans Invisible, or when what you can't see can still do you unimaginable harm.

A Downward Spiral with Obama at the Wheel

The US EPA has invaded Texas in an attempt to energy-starve the Lone Star State into submission. Talk of secession is beginning to circulate once again.

The US government is in no position to lecture anyone on the topic of competency, as the Obama Depression probes the depths of joblessness.

A new batch of documentary films are exposing government schools for their corruption and incompetency. Generations of students have already been lost. How many more will be sacrificed to government ineptitude?

No matter how bad government schools get, you simply cannot shut them down. No matter how bad union teachers get, you cannot fire them. It is a Catch-22 for those who pay their taxes -- and ultimately pay for the corrupt system.

Corruption in the America of Obama Pelosi is beginning to approach the corruption in Russia -- one of the most corrupt nations on Earth. No wonder Obama wants much closer political and economic relations with Russia.

If Obama can stack the Supreme Court with a few more hand picked statists, it will become difficult to distinguish the downward trajectories of the two nations.

Truly, it is amateur hour in Washington DC these days. America is sinking in a quagmire of debt and deception.

The US continues to lose jobs, and Obama hasn't a clue what to do about it. So he does exactly the wrong things.

Under Obama Pelosi, the US is experiencing an unprecedented divisiveness and sense that the nation is being mismanaged out of an innate incompetency residing in Washington DC. If you add the "radical seed" component to the Obama Pelosi plan, you can see more clearly that such a profound level of incompetence could not have occurred totally by accident.

Obama Pelosi has been busy inserting an autopilot into the machinery of government, just in case. This autopilot will make sure that the government continues to run itself into the ground with the same Obama Pelosi level and style of designed incompetence -- regardless of who gets elected to fill the figurehead elected offices and political appointments of government. The ruin is becoming irrevocable. As some of us knew it would.

Finding the Best Way to Learn and Taming Government Schools

Chronicle
Salman Khan studied math, engineering, computer science, and finance at MIT and Harvard. He began creating video tutorials on the topics that he was most familiar with, and has gone on from there. The Khan Academy is rapidly becoming legendary in the field of online education.

The most popular educator on YouTube does not have a Ph.D. He has never taught at a college or university. And he delivers all of his lectures from a bedroom closet.

This upstart is Salman Khan, a 33-year-old who quit his job as a financial analyst to spend more time making homemade lecture videos in his home studio. His unusual teaching materials started as a way to tutor his faraway cousins, but his lectures have grown into an online phenomenon—and a kind of protest against what he sees as a flawed educational system.

"My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me," he told me recently.

The resulting videos don't look or feel like typical college lectures or any of the lecture videos that traditional colleges put on their Web sites or YouTube channels. For one thing, these lectures are short—about 10 minutes each. And they're low-tech: Viewers see only the scrawls of equations or bad drawings that Mr. Khan writes on his digital sketchpad software as he narrates.

...Mr. Khan calls his collection of videos "Khan Academy," and he lists himself as founder and faculty. That means he teaches every subject, and he has produced 1,400 lectures since he started in 2006. Now he records one to five lectures per day.

He started with subject matter he knows best—math and engineering, which he studied as an undergraduate at MIT. But lately he has added history lectures about the French Revolution and biology lectures on "Embryonic Stem Cells" and "Introduction to Cellular Respiration."

If Mr. Khan is unfamiliar with a subject he wants to teach, he gives himself a crash course first. In a recent talk he explained how he prepared for his lecture on entropy: "I took two weeks off and I just pondered it, and I called every professor and everyone I could talk to and I said, Let's go have a glass of wine about entropy. After about two weeks it clicked in my brain, and I said, now I'm willing to make a video about entropy." _Chronicle

Thousands of students tune in to Khan Academy's YouTube channel every day, and many of them have left testimonials at the website. For the most part, Khan Academy is used by students enrolled in ordinary schools -- to help them get past the "sticking points" in conceptualisation that most technical topics can contain. But anyone can watch the videos -- and get a very broad education at the same time, for free.

The second topic of this post -- taming government schools -- deals with the increasingly critical way in which teachers' unions are being seen by parents, taxpayers, and some politicians.

What's missing every time this debate comes up is any actual defense of the basic and 100 percent undeniable trend line–we are paying much, much more money to deliver government services that (with few exceptions) are not performing any better, and the single biggest line item in that cost increase is employee compensation. The burden of proof is on the people pocketing our taxpayer dollars, and yet they continue to dissemble, whine, and change the subject (and sometimes even shrug), rather than robustly defending the public policy mess they have been instrumental in creating. As long as We Are Out of Money, they (and their apologists) will rightly be on the defensive._Reason

Public sector unions have gone way too far in stuffing their pockets with tax-supported benefits, future obligations to taxpayers, and mainly Democratic Party politicians who back up the public sector unions in their raping of the taxpayers.

Perhaps a bit of light thrown on the topic in the upcoming state and national elections will help to tame the savage public sector union predators on the public purse.

Child Liberation: Trying to Bypass the "Teacher Monopoly"

University schools of education -- teacher training colleges -- have a virtual monopoly over the training of government school teachers in the US. This privileged monopoly has led to curricula for government schools that produces more indoctrination than education. The resulting incompetence and psychological neoteny of government school graduates has not gone unnoticed by US universities nor US employers. Can the US find a way to break the government education indoctrination school monopoly?

Not long ago education schools had a virtual monopoly on the teaching profession. They dictated how and when people became teachers by offering coursework, arranging apprenticeships and granting master’s degrees.

But now those schools are feeling under siege. Officials in Washington, D.C., and New York State, where some of the best-known education schools are located, have stepped up criticisms that the schools are still too focused on [indoctrination (AF)] and not enough on the craft of effective teaching. _NewYorkTimes

Government schools in many cities have become dangerous places for -- mostly female -- teachers, who are sometimes beaten, raped, and even murdered by students. For such tough districts, a tougher type of teacher would be more than appropriate. What about retired military special forces operatives or drill instructors? Or retired inner city cops or firefighters?

As US inner cities collapse around their uneducated, welfare-dependent tenants, their schools continue to degrade into corrupt cash cows for unscrupulous officials and insiders. Teachers' unions play along with the scam, receiving their own cut of the tax booty. The children are burned on the pyre of politically correct bureaucratic paper-shuffling and insider mutual back scratching.

The Obama - Pelosi administration has made a few token moves toward school reform, but has delivered nothing of substance. Instead, it has taken some huge backward steps in favouring teachers' unions against school choice for parents and students. Actions count, words wank.

Parents who care are an uncommon commodity inside many US cities -- or so it seems. Or perhaps the dependency mentality is too strong for parents to break away and attempt a strong effort on behalf of their own children.

If alternative teaching certification programs are to succeed in bringing strong and effective teaching to government schools, they will need the support of concerned parents and other citizens and civic leaders. Otherwise, business as usual will just dig everyone deeper into the foul quagmire of corrupt "education."

10% of all US Colleges to Fail Within 10 Years

Futurist Thomas Frey has had a lot to say about US education over the past year. Here is an interview with Frey, where he discusses the future of higher education.

GREENE: You predict that within the next ten years 10% of all colleges in the U.S. will fail. Why do you think this will happen?

FREY: Colleges see themselves operating in a closed system where their main form of competition comes from other colleges. However, the disruptive forces that will launch the next-generation learning revolution will necessarily happen outside existing colleges.

Once a college course is converted into a recorded form of online education it becomes a commodity. And, as a commodity, it can be reengineered with better graphics, better audio, improved styling, delivered through hand-held devices, and marketed more effectively to different demographic groups.

Corporations will quickly invent a faster, better, cheaper model for delivering college education.

Colleges are like slow moving whales about to get attacked by saltwater piranhas. While department heads in colleges are off studying the mating rituals of Komodo Dragons in Indonesia, corporate managers are working day and night, ruthlessly focused on opening new markets and uncovering new revenue streams. The pace and intensity of the work is radically different.

The attacks will first take on the appearance of partnerships for handling the IT infrastructure, and the distribution and marketing of courses, but will quickly deteriorate into the tail wagging the dog.

Those attacking colleges, albeit indirectly, will be companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and IBM. Many colleges already have working relationships with these companies.

Colleges have long enjoyed the government-sanctioned protections of accreditation and degree-granting ability. This too is about to come under attack. Companies are playing for major stakes, and very little is off-limits in corporate America.

What’s at stake is the possible development of a singular website capable of creating and distributing the vast majority of all courses in the world. It has the potential for becoming the largest and most influential website in the entire online universe.

In business terms, the online education arena has the potential to connect every living person on the face of the earth and become the largest and most profitable company in the world. That’s what’s at stake.

For colleges that get the lifeblood sucked out of them, victims of collateral damage, it’s not that the corporate world has set out to destroy them. Rather, as the intensity for gaining new market share heats up, the gloves come off, and the ensuing wake that follows will leave behind a tidal wave of destruction.

GREENE: So, in the long run, will this lead to a better educated society?

FREY: Students will have far more options to match up with the appropriate style and form of education that clicks with them. They will also have the option of taking the course they are most interested in at the time they are interested in taking it.

The needs of the student will stop evolving around the needs of the college, and [with] the cost of learning plummeting, most barriers will go away, making education far more accessible.

My thinking is that this will lead to a far more educated society, with people far more prepared to handle the demands of the future. _ImpactLab

More at Da Vinci Institute.

A great deal of college and university infrastructure is devoted to wasteful and counter-productive outlays: dormitories and cafeterias segregated by race, special studies departments devoted to indoctrination into left-victimist dogma, entire staff departments dedicated to granting special preferences to preferred groups by ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation etc etc. Universities must return to the core purpose: education and empowerment of individual students. At some point, indoctrination and special preferences became priorities over a good education. Instilling ideology grew more important to faculty and staff than the assisting of individual students in finding, pursuing, and magnifying their strengths and special interests.

Rather than for 10% of all colleges to fail, much better for every college to fail that is not willing to get back to the empowerment and education of individual students and assisting in their individual growth irregardless of race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, philosophy, or political ideology.

Universities have been stewing in '60s garbage for too long. Either get over it, or go away.

Help Us, Homeschool - Won - Kenobi: You're Our Only Hope

US voters chose "Hope and Change", but unfortunately they are about to receive a level of corruption and power politics unheard of, before the recent exposure of Illinois and Chicago - style mob politics. Obama owes organised labour (and thus organised crime) much of his success. He cannot afford to offend labour unions, including teachers' unions that are responsible for the abysmal failure of US government education. Obama will do nothing to enlarge school choice, not even for the millions of young African Americans who supported him throughout his campaign and election. That leaves homeschooling as one of the few hopes for students who want to avoid the government education cesspool:

But there is a ray of hope for those who favor freedom of choice in education: home schooling. A report just out in Education Next (by Milton Gaither) shows that in the face of the continuing failure of the public school system and the roadblocks to freedom erected by the public school special interest groups, parents are increasingly home schooling their children. From 1999 to 2003, the number of children being home-schooled jumped by 29 percent (from 850,000 to 1.1 million). It is currently estimated that there are nearly 2 million home-schooled children, with some researchers putting the current figure as high as 2.5 million.

Especially striking is the growth of home schooling among African American households. The U.S. Department of Education reported 103,000 black children were being home-schooled in 2003.

...No doubt the public school monopoly will continue to use its force (fueled by millions of dollars in union dues) to keep its stranglehold on American education. We can anticipate major efforts to stop home schooling in its tracks. Here in California, Justice H. Walter Croskey ruled last year that home schooling was illegal unless the parents had teaching credentials (as if that were any indication of teaching competence!) The ruling was reversed, but it is just a matter of time before another move is made. However, the millions of home school parents are getting well organized, and have proven capable of defending their rights. _WashTimes

Obama has chosen mob - politics, the political style of corrupt Illinois and Chicago. He has declared war on independents - thinking parents and small business. Given that some of Obama's best friends are terrorists and mobsters, none of this should come as a surprise.

The take-home message: look out for yourselves and your families, network with like-minded individuals, and make yourselves heard. Do not expect the government under the narcissist-elect to be of any help whatsoever.

Madrasas for Leftists: PC Universities Doomed?

There once was a time when the university environments of North America were not ones of indoctrination and brainwashing, as they often are now. Professor Alan Kors remembers those days:

I was taught at Princeton, in the early 1960s—in history and literature, above all—before the congeries that we term "the '60s" began. Most of my professors were probably men of the left—that's what the surveys tell me—but that fact was never apparent to me, because, except in rare cases, their politics or even their ideological leanings were not inferable from their teaching or syllabi. Reasoned and informed dissent from professorial devil's advocacy or interpretation was encouraged and rewarded, including challenges to the very terms of an examination question.

...In grad school at Harvard, while a few dates left in the midst of dinner on discovering my free-market and hawkish politics, and while I did get thrown out of a party for opposing, when asked, Eugene McCarthy's view of Vietnam (this should have been a warning), the classroom remained open and, by design, intellectually pluralistic....When I went off on job interviews, I was not once asked a question, ever, about my worldview, but only about my historical research and notions of teaching. Politics were simply not in the category of appropriate inquiry.

...What has changed? In terms of the university in loco parentis, which has been restored and expanded with a vengeance, the revolution has been breathtaking....From diverse motives of ideological sympathies and acute awareness of who can blackball their next career moves, they have given over the humanities, the soft social sciences and the entire university in loco parentis to the zealots of oppression studies and coercive identity politics. In the latter case, it truly has been a conspiracy, with networking and common plans. In the former case—the professoriate and the curriculum—it is generally, with striking politicized exceptions, a soft tyranny of groupthink, unconscious bias and self-inflated sense of a mission of demystification. Most of the professors I meet are kind, indeed sweet, and certainly mean no harm. It is profoundly sad to see what they have become.

There also has been, compounding academic problems, a dumbing down of the professoriate that quite numbs the mind—best seen not in the monographs that earn people their degrees, but in the egregious nonsense, crude meta-theorizing, self-indulgence and tendentious special pleading that are not merely tolerated without criticism, but rewarded at the highest levels.

...Academia also has become a place where professors can achieve the highest rewards, except in the protected fields, for acting out their pathologies. In higher education, to paraphrase the Woody Allen stand-up line, we increasingly send our students to schools for learning-disabled and emotionally disturbed teachers....

Academics, in their own minds, face an almost insoluble problem of time. How, in only four years, can they disabuse students of the notion that the capital, risk, productivity and military sacrifice of others have contributed to human dignity and to the prospects of a decent society? How can they make them understand, with only four years to do so, that capitalism and individual- ism have created cultures that are cruel, inefficient, racist, sexist and homophobic, with oppressive caste systems, mental and behavioral? How, in such a brief period, can they enlighten "minorities," including women (the majority of students), about the "internalization" of their oppression (today's equivalent of false consciousness)? How, in only eight semesters, might they use the classroom, curriculum and university in loco parentis to create a radical leadership among what they see as the victim groups of our society, and to make the heirs of successful families uneasy in the moral right of their possessions and opportunities? Given those constraints, why in the world should they complicate their awesome task by hiring anyone who disagrees with them? __WSJ__via_BelmontClub

In fact, Kors is understating the case--pulling his punches. The reality of the modern university is worse than he describes.

Richard Fernandez thinks that the age of academic indoctrination may be nearing its end. He draws that reassurance from J. Richard Gott's "doomsday argument. It is an interesting argument, related to the "anthropic principle" argument in nature. Thought-provoking, but not conclusive.

I sincerely hope that Fernandez (aka "Wretchard") is right. Universities of indoctrination are spewing out minds that are increasingly incapable of standard reasoning and logic. Too often a graduate of a liberal arts or social science program has never been exposed to divergent points of view--never learned to confront intelligent and reasonable people whose deeply held and closely reasoned ideas differ substantially from their own. Naturally he goes out into the world believing that all right-minded persons will believe as he does, and that all others are either dishonest, corrupt, or stupid.

All of that, before his pre-frontal lobes have even completely myelinated--before his powers of judgment have even come close to maturing. How could he possibly know better, unless someone at some point was willing to force him to delve deeply into diverse disciplines of thought and reason?

As Kors explains in his piece above, those halcyon days of intellectual diversity in the university are as good as gone. But is Fernandez right in supposing that this monolithic thought structure, this incompetence, this intolerance, is soon to meet its doom?

Society--in the form of the news and entertainment media, popular culture--has bonded itself to the PC worldview monoculture of the universities. Government bureaucracy increasingly adopts the same forms, and the bureaucracies of corporations and non-profit foundations have been increasingly moulding themselves according to PC intolerance.

There is no doubt that civilisation is attempting to transition from a religion-dominant culture to a secular-dominant culture. But it is not that easy. Society abhors the moral vacuum of the "middle ground." Secular morality has not truly stepped into the gap to provide a firm foundation for sound child-raising or a decent society. Leftist ideology has attempted to fill the void via many universities and much of the media, but for some reason, it has only done half the job. It has torn down most of the traditional moral icons of the civilisation, but its own moral forms have not been widely taken up by the society at large.

So instead of a culture confidently stepping out into the wide-open future, you see a fearful and insecure society full of self-doubt, questioning its own right to exist in the face of widespread poverty and misery elsewhere in the world. Entire nations are shrinking into the moral void, choosing anti-natalist ideas or going after comfort and security instead of taking risks on a wider future.

The human extinction movements are merely the extreme end point toward which a large part of the university educated are shuffling. Choosing to avoid children, or avoiding marriage altogether are other points along the same scale.

The quasi-suicidal carbon hysteria movement is a mere symptom of the basic intellectual nihilism that has followed university graduates into the culture at large. The true problem underlying the symptom is an inability to test hypotheses and theorems. If the hypothesis meets the long-term requirements of your ideology, put your emotions behind the idea, avoid the rational testing stage altogether, and use all the tools of human persuasion in your bag to put the idea over.

There are many other symptoms of the underlying problem, and it would be nice if we could deal with them all, one by one. That will be left to others, such as FIRE. Al Fin's emphasis will continue to focus on efforts to bring the "next level" into reality. The dumbing down of university students and graduates--and thus the dumbing down of society in general--does not help Al Fin's task.

Derived from a previous posting at Al Fin

The Modern North American University Statement of Purpose?

The revolutionary and progressive characteristics of this university are due to the revolutionary and progressive characteristics of its staff and its courses.

The educational principles of the university are: ‘Correct political orientation, plain, hard-working style, flexible strategy and tactics’.

We must overcome difficulties, contact the masses, and heighten our militancy. Anyone who is not politically correct does not deserve to be a student of this university, for he acts against the rules of this university.

To the class of graduates: ‘You must be brave, resolute, and tenacious. You must learn through struggles and be prepared to sacrifice your freedoms for the liberation of the world.

Written for the Production Drive of the university ‘Study on the one hand, agitate on the other; overcome ideological adversaries and unnerve the enemies.’ ‘Now study and agitate. In future you will rule over the counter-revolutionaries.’

The style of the university: ‘Unity, alertness, earnestness, and political correctness.’

Paraphrased from Mao's words of wisdom.

Well, anyway, it seems to be the accepted approach to education at the University of New Mexico Law School.

Strong Leftist Bias in University Threatens Ability of Schools to Educate

Education is meant to instill in the student both the love of learning and the ability to sort through ideas and evidence in order to arrive at the most workable solutions and systems of thought and action. But if the information available to students in university is so skewed toward a particular point of view--excluding the broad spectrum of ideas prevalent in the real world--the university cannot perform its vital function for the student.

This 2005 study by researchers at Smith College, University of Toronto, and Center of Media and Public Affairs, should put to rest the claims by leftist professors that the university is not skewed to the left.

The study shows that in the arts and social sciences, and soft sciences, the faculty is almost certain to consist of mostly leftists. The proportion of leftist to mainstream is closer to 50:50 in the harder sciences and engineering faculties--where competence must be demonstrated, and where training is more rigorous and demanding.

It is no surprise that leftists tend to flock to areas where competence-testing is rare, and based upon subjective peer appraisal rather than unforgiving objective criteria, as in harder sciences and engineering. This allows them to pretend to be knowledgeable and expert in an area without actually needing to demonstrate any competence--except to other members of their in-group. Circular jerkulating is the rule in those departments of university.

Read the study before commenting, as a favour to others.

Brainwash U--A Tour of America's Universities

If you haven't been on campus for a while, you may be unaware of what universities in North America have become--indoctrination centers.

The active suppression of conservative (non-leftist) ideas extended to extra-curricular speaking and activities programs which supported almost exclusively leftwing viewpoints, and to required freshman reading programs, which assigned only leftwing texts, and to supplemental course offerings – the “house” program at Duke University is a striking example -- where professors voluntarily provided students with training sessions in Marxism and other radical creeds under the guise of enriching their academic “education.”

Another form of ideological suppression conducted by faculty ideologues was the abusive treatment of conservative ideas and conservative students in the classroom itself.

Source.

Go ahead and take the tour. The brainwashing tour.

I would not be as concerned about the heavy-handed leftist takeover of the universities if not for one thing--there is no room on campuses now for the diversity of ideas. Without this exposure to a diversity of ideas--the only kind of diversity that is important to students--today's students will never learn to think for themselves. Perhaps this is what the brainwashers want--it certainly appears so.

But the western world must face a serious outside threat posed by a fascist and bloody religious extremism from the middle east, if it is to survive. Handicapping the minds of the brightest youth does nothing to increase the strength of western societies--just the opposite.

Young people are expected to be leftists, naturally. But as they gain experience in the real world, the more intelligent will curb their leftism as they acquire wisdom and perspective. When their higher education is so strongly biased to a caricatured left, as it is today, many students will lose the opportunity for true independence that university is supposed to present.

Schools vs. Juvenile Detention: Is There a Difference?

I recently learned about a growing trend in western schools: attacks on teachers, called "happy slapping."

A female teacher from a high school in Porcheville was attacked by one of her students, while another one was recording the scene with the cam on his cell phone.

Suddenly, with no reasons, a "jeune" (= young man = criminal, usually with extra-european origins, not necessarily young - copyright political correctness) throws himself on the teacher, and attacks her violently. Another student doesn’t miss anything of the scene, and records it with his cell phone’s camera.

The video was instantly spread in the neighborhood’s cité (France’s Islam’s colonies) Val-Fourré, and caused an unhealthy excitation.

Recently, French teachers working in high immigration suburbs went on strike due to rising rates of attacks against teachers by immigrant children. The article is interesting, pointing to teacher's union complicity in maintaining an atmosphere conducive to attacks on teachers.

Violence against teachers is ongoing in the UK, the US, and even in Canada.

Government schools are less and less places of education, and more and more places for babysitting overgrown children with no useful skills or knowledge, or more explicitly--juvenile detention centers. Busy working parents need a place to plant their children while they work and commute, and if they feel they cannot afford to send them to a school to be educated, they "place" them in a government school, for "safekeeping". In the short term, this saves them money.

A family, like a society, gets back what they put in. In a world where North American graduates must compete with increasingly sophisticated graduates from India, China, Eastern Europe, and other countries, allowing the schools to continue on their present dysfunctional course does not seem wise. Realistically, though, the education system is completely entrenched--it cannot be reformed. The system is standing in the way of progress and will not be moved.

Dead Poets Society--School as Suicide Pact

One of the most stimulating and enlightening books on education is freely available online--"The Underground History of American Education." It has been praised by persons from almost every conceivable ideological viewpoint. It is uncomfortable to read, sometimes painful. Similar to childbirth, in a way.

Soon after I began teaching Moby Dick I realized the school edition wasn’t a real book but a kind of disguised indoctrination providing all the questions, a scientific addition to the original text designed to make the book teacher-proof and student-proof. If you even read those questions (let alone answered them) there would be no chance ever again for a private exchange between you and Melville; the invisible editor would have preempted it.

The editors of the school edition provided a package of prefabricated questions and more than a hundred chapter-by-chapter abstracts and interpretations of their own. Many teachers consider this a gift—it does the thinking for them. If I didn’t assign these questions, kids wanted to know why not. Their parents wanted to know why not. Unless everyone duly parroted the party line set down by the book editor, children used to getting high marks became scared and angry.

The school text of Moby Dick had been subtly denatured; worse than useless, it was actually dangerous. So I pitched it out and bought a set of undoctored books with my own money. The school edition of Moby Dick asked all the right questions, so I had to throw it away. Real books don’t do that. Real books demand people actively participate by asking their own questions. Source.

Those lines are similar to scenes from "Dead Poets Society," with the same rejection of standardisation and manipulation to conformity.

Part of the book is history of education--going back millenia--and part is autobiography of a rebellious teacher. Gatto displays the people who built the educational establishment into its present monument to fossilized conformist mediocrity, displays them in their own words.

If you have ever looked at the dysfunctionality and counterproductivity of schools and wondered, "why?", you should take a good look at this history of education.