Filed under: Capitalism, Education, Election 2020, Politics, Progressivism, Socialism, The United States | Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Education, History
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s student government recently approved a resolution that calls for the removal of a statue on campus of Abraham Lincoln. The resolution claims that the statue is “a racist remnant of white supremacy.”
Have you looked recently at the cost of a four year college education? I just did and I was shocked. College professors often express the claim that they should be getting the same amount in wages as corporate CEOs. After all, most CEOs don’t have doctoral degrees!
“In order to create an inclusive and safe environment for all students, campus fixtures with racist remnants should be reevaluated and then removed and/or replaced on inputs from BIPOC students”
Well, most corporate CEOs make lots of money for their shareholders, which usually makes shareholders feel kindly towards CEOs. College students are presumably mostly over 18 years of age. and they have learned absolutely noting about one of our most famous and revered presidents.
Why is he revered, and why is he famous? No, he never owned a single slave. He was Commander in Chief of the Civil War, which was won by the Union, defeating the slave-holding South. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Racist indeed! These 18 to 20 year old students don’t even know who he was. That speaks volumes about the state of American education.
That should send every parent to every school conference and every school board meeting and throw in a few letters to your State education secretary. By the time they reach college level, they should have some basic facts of history down. You can’t expect even the doctoral level professors to go back and fill in what the should have absorbed in their past 12 years of American education.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Domestic Policy, Economics, Education, Free Speech, Freedom, Politics, Regulation | Tags: Bureaucracy at Work, Education, Political Correctness Gone Amok
This delightful short film has the odd feeling that we’ve see this story before, that it is perhaps a little too close to today’s reality. Makes you slightly uncomfortable.
Stolen shamelessly from Maggie’s Farm Do watch the whole thing, it’s not very long and worth every minute.
Filed under: Politics | Tags: A Democrat Problem, Baltimore, Education, Fathers
“No Justice, No Peace!” Is that a threat or an invitation? The scenes of Baltimore set ablaze make us wonder what can be done for families trapped in an inner-city culture of violence? We had our own copy-cat riot here in Seattle last night, emanating from Seattle Central Community College. I have no idea why. Just wanted to join in the fun.
Clearly the breakdown of the black family has a good deal to do with the problems of youth run amok. The left talks of new programs, more money, The President pushes his free community college idea, early childhood education (which doesn’t work) and blames Republicans (why am I not surprised?) presumably because he wants a big influx of money which a Republican Congress would be loth to deliver. Baltimore has been a Democrat-run city for over 40 years. It’s Democrats’ problem, and the result of their policies. Republicans and a big number of African-Americans call for fathers.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Stephen Moore writes of the success of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program which George W. Bush signed into law in 2004.”It has so far funded private-school tuition for nearly 5,000 students, 95% of whom are African-American.They attend religious schools, music and arts schools, even elite college-prep schools.” Moore met with about 20 parents and children who participate in the program.” For the seventh straight year, President Obama has proposed eliminating this relatively tiny scholarship fund,which at $20 million accounts for a microscopic 0.0005% of the $4 trillion federal budget.”
Politics is always Obama’s first priority, And the teacher’s union voters trump black voters. The parents have compelling stories of how the voucher program has turned their children’s lives around. “Democrats say they want to make the 2016 election about income inequality, but they stand united in opposition to one of the most effective ways of reducing the gap between rich and poor: better education. Mr. Obama will not even meet with these parents. Democrats always emphasize empathy. They care (and Republicans don’t). But they empathize with taxpayer money and Big Government programs. When it involves displeasing the teacher’s union empathy goes out the window.
The basic choice open to blacks after the civil rights era, according to the Hoover Institution’s Shelby Steele, was between advancing “through education, skill development, and entrepreneurialism,” or “pressuring the society that had wronged us into taking the lion’s share of the responsibility for resurrecting us.” The second course became all but inevitable when the post-civil rights narrative of white guilt and black victim hood decreed that no black problem — whether high crime rates, poor academic performance, or high illegitimacy rates — could be defined as largely a black responsibility, because it was in injustice to make victims responsible for their own problems.¹ “
“An Education Department-funded study at the University of Arkansas found that graduation rates rose 21 percentage points — to 91%, from 70%, — for students awarded the scholarship vouchers through a lottery, compared with a control group of those who applied for but didn’t get the scholarships.”
The parents who are so passionate about the benefits to their children are opposed by almost every liberal group, including the NAACP, and Eleanor Holmes Norton who represents D.C. in Congress but opposes a program that benefits her own constituents.The DC schools spent $18,667 per pupil. The scholarship amounts are $8,500 for elementary-school children and $12,000 for high school.
The teachers’ unions are doing a lousy job of educating our young people, and our teachers are badly trained. Something needs to change dramatically. There is no excuse for the current situation.
For Baltimore, I would suggest significant numbers of charter schools, and hiring retiring Marine Drill Instructors as teachers. They have a an outstanding record of not only shaping up young men, but of installing a significant code of honor. Start them off with fifth grade. They would shape up the kids, and shape up the teaching profession!
¹Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (New York, Harper Collins, 2006).
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Education, Health Care, Politics | Tags: Education, ObamaCare Facts, Part-Time Employment
From Reason TV, a look at some of the results of the election you may not have considered.
Filed under: Economy, Education, Election 2012, Freedom, History, Progressivism | Tags: Education, Self-Perpetuating Machine, Too Many Teachers
One constant theme on the campaign trail is always education. People care deeply about the education their kids are getting, and about education in general. Often, people think education in general is dreadful, but are fond of their own school.
That gets into the “likeability factor” where you think your kid’s teacher is really nice, but don’t really have all that much information about what your kids are really learning. As a parent, I am sure I have communicated the really important things , but then the subject comes up and you discover they are clueless. I believe I have just suggested a big reason for home schooling.
International test scores show that our kids are not doing well, as does any trip to a fast-food place. There’s a reason why cash registers total everything for the clerk and tell them how much change to give back. They have enough trouble figuring out how many of which coins you need to make 39¢.
Everybody has an opinion about education. We have all experienced something close to 12 years of schooling at least, so we have first hand knowledge. and if we have become parents and sent our own children off the school, we are apt to be opinionated. Politicians are clear. The answer is to spend more money on education.
Stanford economist Eric Hanushek as shown that better-educated students contribute substantially to economic growth. If U.S. students could catch up with the math performance of their Canadian counterparts, it would add roughly $70 trillion to the U.S. economy over the next 80 years.
Obama wants an army of new teachers, and a federal government curriculum, and federal control. My response is easy: 1) Washington DC schools are usually rated as the worst in the country— and the capitol city spends $30,000 per pupil. 2) Since 1970, the public school workforce has doubled, to 5.4 million from 3.3 million, and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers’ aides. Enrollment over the same period has grown only 8.5 %. Employment has grown 11 times faster than enrollment. We have too many teachers.
You know what the problem is. We all know. Republicans want to encourage charter schools (which are public schools) but the innovation underway will change schools as we know them anyway, and that’s online education. Long way to go, but the potential is clearly there.
As David Gelernter says:
Where is the politician who’s willing to say that this nation demands public schools and public colleges without political bias, without anti-American bias, without anti-Jewish or anti-Christian bias? That this nation demands public schools and colleges whose first mission is to produce patriotic American citizens, who know who they are — who know their own history and culture, the history and literature and culture of this country and this Western civilization that belongs to them, that will stand or fall based on their stewardship of the future?
We make a big deal about bigotry and bias in this nation, and it’s right we should; but it’s crazy to ignore the biggest bigotry engine in the nation today, the US Education Establishment — our school systems and text books and some — not all, but too many — of our school teachers and college professors.
Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Education, Politics | Tags: Democrat Corruption, Education, Politics, The Stimulus Bill
Let’s all fix education with stimulus dollars. The Detroit Free Press has reported that Detroit Public Schools, one of the nation’s most chronically corrupt school systems, will receive $355 million from the federal stimulus package — with no strings attached.
The Detroit Public Schools have a $1.5 billion annual budget, but they are currently running a $150 million deficit, with finances so tangled that the state of Michigan has recently appointed an emergency financial manager to oversee its operations. Since the declaration of emergency, DPS has failed to hand over at least five financial reports required under the state’s consent agreement.
The Brookings Institution has ranked Detroit as America’s worst major urban school district. Detroit Public Schools only graduate 24 percent of its students. The Superintendent was fired in December for incompetence, the second superintendent fired in three years and the eighth in the last 20 years.
A 2001 audit found $600,000 missing or misspent. A 2004 audit of the district’s central warehouse found budget over-expenditures of $1.9 million, and that furniture purchased as part of a $158,000 purchase order is missing.
Expectations of improvement might be a little hasty. Handing out funds with no strings attached sounds more like payback than stimulus. Good politics, maybe, but the kids are, as usual, the ones who really get hurt.
Filed under: Freedom, History, Literature | Tags: Brain Function, Education, Information Retrieval, The Internet
One of the great problems of education has been the desire to make education easier — easier and more interesting for the teacher, who finds it boring to have to do it all over again each year with a new batch of children, smarter or dumber, quieter or more obstreperous. And of course, if a way could only be found to make kids enjoy learning the basics of civilized life, then it would all be so much easier, and more fun. After all, things should be fun, shouldn’t they?
When television first arrived on the scene, everyone was sure that we had found the magic key. Symphonies, uplifting plays, history as it was being made. That turned out well.
The computer and the Internet are still thought to be some sort of magic in the education of children. President-elect Obama apparently believes that much good will come from greener school buildings and more computers in the schools.
An elementary school principal noted that “fifth graders proceed as follows when they are assigned a research project; go to Google, type keywords, download three relevant sites, cut and paste passages into a new document, add transitions of their own, print it up, and turn it in.” This is not knowledge formation, but information retrieval.
Anyone who has Googled for information knows the difficulty of separating the valid websites from the junk. Keywords get you keywords, not necessarily deeply informed information from a reliable website, and not even correct information at that. Discernment is not much taught in fifth grade. That takes long education in reading and history and the other basics.
A number of writers are suggesting that reading on the web is changing the way we read and the way we think. Nicholas Carr has written recently in a piece titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in The Atlantic Monthly that he is now having trouble with lengthy reading. The deep reading that used to be so enjoyable has now become a struggle.
[M]edia are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it’ in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances — literary types, most of them — many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.
James Bowman expands on Mr. Carr’s essay in The New Atlantis with his recognition of the changes in his own reading patterns, and evidence from other authors that there is something going on here that is as yet untested by those who explore and test the functions of the brain. If you have children and are concerned about their education, these two essays provide food for thought.
I would suggest that schools have it backwards. Students need to learn deep reading, discernment, judgment and how to cope with the overflow of information characteristic of our age before they learn about how to retrieve information. In elementary school math classes, students are taught with the assumption that they will always have a handy calculator. Cursive writing is no longer taught in many schools, for it is assumed that students will always have a handy keyboard. Is there a relation here to declining math and science scores and the decline in SAT scores?
There is, however, plenty of time to teach children of the dangers of global warming and the importance of recycling and the pressing need to save the polar bears. Go figure.
Filed under: Domestic Policy, Education, Politics | Tags: Affirmative action, Civil Rights, Education, Liberal lies, Politics, University policy
The idea of “affirmative action” is widely misunderstood. Philosophy Professor John R. Searle of the University of California at Berkeley explained it very well in an article in Reason Magazine in February of 2000.
[A]ffirmative action had a disastrous effect. We created two universities during affirmative action. We had a super-elite university of people who were admitted on the most competitive criteria in the history of the university, but then we had this other university of people who could not have been admitted on those criteria, and who had to have special courses and special departments set up for them.
Now affirmative action meant two completely different things. When it first started out the definition was that we were going to take affirmative actions to see that people who would never have tried to get into the university before would be encouraged and trained so that they could get admission. I was all for that — that we were going to get people into the competition. What happened though, and this was the catastrophic effect, is that race and ethnicity became criteria, not for encouraging people to enter the competition, but for judging the competition.
Filed under: Domestic Policy, Education, Foreign Policy, History, Politics | Tags: Democrats, Education, Election 2008, Global Warming, Iraq, Obama, Republicans, Support the Troops!, War on Terror
Barack Obama sure talks a pretty talk.
To me, however, and almost anyone I’ve encountered who no longer has the suffix “teen” included in their age, it has been almost universally decried as empty, vapid and disturbingly ignorant. Even my staunchly liberal friends tell me they are frightened by his utter lack of qualification and the cult-like following he has developed in spite of it.
Obama loves to talk about hope. Hope and change, and change and hope. Hope, hope, change and hope. He uses the word “hope” like the Monty Python players use the word “Spam“.
And his followers eat it up.
He likes to talk about uniting America. “We are not red-states and blue-states,” he says to deafening cheers, “but the United States!” And yet, as the non-partisan National Journal has verified, Barack Obama has the singular most liberal voting record of anyone in the senate. Which by implication also means he has among the most, if not the most partisan voting record of anyone in the senate. Indeed, despite all his flowery rhetoric, Obama hasn’t co-sponsored one single bill with a Republican.
He has flatly refused to reach across the isle, he has zero experience uniting anyone but the far-left wing of the Democrat party, and has proven he is as partisan as they come. Yet his followers believe he will change Washington and unite America.
Which finally made me understand Obama’s appeal. (Aside from the fact that he’s the first viable candidate Democrats have had in 12 years with any semblance of a personality.)
Obama is the candidate who won’t make you feel bad that you don’t know anything about anything — because he doesn’t talk about anything. He doesn’t talk policy, he talks about feelings.
He is Oprahbama.
When Obama recently held a rally for 20,000 people in my area (Seattle), reporters asked a supporter what she thought the average age of attendees was. She guessed 16-22. Judging from the footage, and other reports, I would say she was right.
A recent survey shows that two-thirds of people in this age group can’t even find Iraq on a map after three years (at that point) of war. Yet Obama’s supporters are universally certain we should not be there — wherever there is. Twenty-nine percent couldn’t locate the Pacific Ocean, yet are convinced man is causing global warming.
No wonder they love Obama! He doesn’t require them to know anything about the issues, he only asks them to “hope” and “believe“. There won’t be any knowledge of math or history required and no one will ask them to find anything on a map!
Everyone will prosper if only we raise taxes enough! The reason healthcare is so expensive is because government doesn’t regulate it enough! Everything would be better if only we would abandon our fledgeling democratic ally in Iraq and allow terrorists to take it over!
These are the fantasies people believe when they “hope” instead of think.
And yet, if his naive followers get their way, with his $900 billion in new spending proposals (thus far), mammoth tax hikes, his Carter-era advisers, and dangerously naive foreign policy prescriptions, if Obama were to get elected, it will be the rest of America, and the world, that will be in very serious need of hope.
Do you like quizzes? I can’t resist. Not the kind where you’re sweating it out for a grade, but the fun kind in magazines in the doctor’s office. Just a little series of questions to see what you know. Here’s one, just for fun. What do you know about the famous ships of the world, and why they were famous? I’ll bet it’s more than you think. Identify as many as you can (click links for answers):
- HMS Victory
- Speedwell
- HMS Repulse
- USS Lexington
- Graf Spee
- USS Hornet
- Mayflower
- USS Enterprise
- USS Constitution
- USS Arizona
- Monitor
- Pinta
- RMS Titanic
- HMS Prince of Wales
- Akagi
- USS Maine
- Rainbow Warrior
- Flying Cloud
- Mary Rose
- Soryu
- Lusitania
- Empress of Ireland
- Andrea Doria
- Edmund Fitzgerald
- HMS Bounty
Filed under: Foreign Policy, News | Tags: Asia, Education, Europe, Military, Support the Troops!
Paul Tibbetts is a hero.
Most often referred to as, “the man who bombed Hiroshima,” the pilot of the Enola Gay would be better remembered as, “the man who ended World War II,” for that is precisely what his famous mission accomplished, saving millions of lives.
The war against Japan had to be won, but the Japanese were prepared, and determined, to fight to the death. President Truman had approved invasion plans that conservative estimates conclude would have resulted in the deaths of approximately 1 million American servicemen and up to 10 million Japanese.
Paul Tibbets’ heroic mission, no matter what detractors say, prevented that much more horrific outcome.
He died in his home last Thursday at the age of 92. He is survived by his wife, three sons, and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
It is shameful, however, that America has allowed its citizenry to become so misinformed and ignorant that Tibbets requested no funeral and no headstone lest protesters use his grave as a place to demonstrate. This man’s dire mission saved millions in what would have been a long, protracted and very bloody invasion. That our children are being taught differently by ignorant liberal activists and that we allow it is truly shameful.
Paul Tibbets should be buried and remembered with the highest of honors. America, and the world, owe him a debt of gratitude.
God rest Paul Tibbets’ soul. And may He bring comfort to his family and loved ones.
The following is an excerpt from The Los Angeles Times. I encourage you to read it in it’s entirety.
By late summer 1942 — nine months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that thrust America into World War II against the Axis powers of Germany, Japan and Italy — Tibbets was flying some of the first U.S. bombing raids over German-held targets in Western Europe. Two months later, he led the bombing runs supporting the American landings in North Africa.
In early 1943, Tibbets was recalled to the United States to begin testing a new super bomber, the B-29. Within months, he was one of the nation’s most experienced B-29 pilots.
In September 1944, Lt. Col. Tibbets was summoned to a secret military conclave in Colorado, where he was told that he had been selected over dozens of other candidates to head a unit called the 509th Composite Group.
“My job, in brief, was to wage atomic war,” he wrote in his book, “Flight of the Enola Gay” (1989).
Tibbets searched for the perfect airfield to train his men and knew he had found it in Wendover, Utah. “It was remote in the truest sense,” he wrote. “Surrounding the field were miles and miles of salt flats.”
The arriving crewmen were told nothing about their mission, according to “Ruin From the Air,” a 1977 history of the project by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts.
“Don’t ask what the job is,” Tibbets told his men. “Stop being curious. . . . Never mention this base to anybody. That means your wives, girlfriends, sisters, family.”…[read more on Paul Tibbets’ historic mission]
Filed under: Politics, Pop Culture | Tags: Culture War, Education, Political Correctness/Multiculturalism, Socialism
Despite getting hundreds of thousands of requests for screenings (far more people than have viewed the major motion picture, Redacted, for example), the documentary, Indoctrinate U, can’t seem to find a distributor.
This is a film that Americans need to see.
Universities are supposed to be institutions of higher learning — where differing views compete in the marketplace of ideas. Such is not the case.
There is no marketplace of ideas, as a gentleman says in the film, there is a monopoly. The extent of which is frightening and is the antithesis of everything higher education is supposed to be. What is happening on college campuses is indoctrination and its detrimental to the health of society.
Watch the trailer, and if you agree the subject is an important one, then visit the film’s website and voice your interest in seeing the film.
American Elephants 