Reviews by Hubie Goode: Education, Capitalism, Competition, Schools, Learning, Public Schools, Monopolies

Stupid, Capitalism 
and Education

 
part 5

It wasn’t always the case that America had state run schools. Once upon a time it was the communities that set up their own schools, and many parents home schooled. Back then, of course, teachers made very little money, but then it was the kids education and the future of society that mattered more, so there was plenty of volunteering. It wasn’t until around the 1830’s that the drive for state run schools was instituted.

Back then there was plenty of justified suspicion as to this matter. When the Massachusetts State Board of Education was formed, it was then promptly abolished. It was obvious that the organization was to lead to a centralization and monopoly of power in a few hands, and thus “anti-democratic” in its inception. How true!

Horace Mann, the so called Father of Public Education, believed that public schooling could cure all sorts of social ills. All in the name of reducing crime, he touted that 9/10ths of the penal code would soon be eradicated. Is that what happened?

These dreaming collectivists created a system that became the adversary of the good. Left to their own devices, private schools would have expanded. The money they saved could have been used to help the charities of the day.

Literally, we are protecting our kids from the benefits of competition by forcing them to exist inside of the system of a monopoly. I get a pretty good regular cup of coffee from a local Starbucks for about $1.50. The surrounding coffee service providers are forced to keep their coffee prices down in order to maintain a competitive edge. Their coffee had better be competitive too, or they won’t even make that margin. If you could only get coffee in one place, you’d be paying taxes on the coffee and have a limited choice as to what would be served... then what sort of service would you receive?

Monopolies don’t innovate. In much the same way as they hand out drab olive colored clothing to citizens in communist countries, these monopolies have “Orwellian” overtones contained in their prime directives. Why does school run from September to June? The Farm calendar from the early 1830’s is the template for this schedule.  Back then, the summer was for planting crops. Today we are no longer agrarian in our efforts on a major scale as a nation. But the public school system is one of blind obedience, not a responder to changing times. Year round schooling might even create shorter school days for kids and increase the amount of covered studies, many parents would indeed support the change. Less than 2% of our country lives by the farming cycle now, but has public education responded? You tell me.

We’re finding today that teenagers actually perform better on a later schedule than the early morning start, due to their unique physiology, but schools have done nothing to adjust to the findings. This should tell you something about the response they have to outdated methods also.

If you believe that America has the best education system in the world, you must be living under a rock. But, its not your fault, you’re not allowed to see anything better.

It would be nice to abolish government involvement in education all  together, but American’s are addicted to feeding at the teet of the Government. Sadly, there is simply no courage to move out on your own when mom and dad are willing to pay your bills for you.

The difference however, is that Government funded would be a better alternative than Government run. Our schools should have that “Starbucks” look, where we have a choice to go somewhere else for a low priced, excellent product. Customers get to decide where they want to have their coffee, and they should also get the choice of where they want to get their kids education. Vote with the feet. Vote with the wallet. It makes for superior choices.   

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Education, Capitalism, Competition, Schools, Learning, Public Schools, Monopolies

Stupid, Capitalism 
and Education

part 4

It has been reported that teachers in New York City can be paid somewhere in the amount of 60 to 70 thousand dollars. For a nine month job, that’s not too shabby. But if you ask teachers they will tell you they work hard enough to be paid 85 to 90 thousand. And why not? Indeed they are given a huge responsibility for bringing up the next generation of our society. NYC teachers also have a pension plan with a government guarantee of an 8.25 per cent return. They are not taxed and the teachers also get ten days per year sick leave.

In the national sense, however, most teachers do make less. Most of the K-12 teachers make around 45 grand a year, but they only work nine months a year. For three months they receive paychecks and are free to do as they please every day. They make more than a chemist and computer programmer on an hourly wage basis.

But just imagine a free market of education. Parents would demand a bigger share of that government spending of $250,000 per classroom for great educators for their kids. Demand would make the value of teachers go even higher, and they could challenge entertainers and athletes for outrageous salaries.

How Much Money Does it Take?

 

Are they really underpaid? Why would you keep teaching if other opportunities arose that you could succeed at and make more money with. Are there that many sacrificial heroes in teaching? Do they all have Machiavellian type paradigms as they spend their own money to see to it that their kids have books and pencils? If teachers were paid too little, then they would never be able to retain teachers, we would have shortages all over the country. But statistics prove other wise. Many schools have multiple applications for each available position. At charter schools, teachers often make about 15-20 percent more than the government public school counterparts. One size fits all contracts reward bad teachers and punish good teachers. It’s a crying shame is what it is.

The Truth About Home schooling

A growing number of parents fed up with public schools are opting for home schooling their kids. The numbers are still comparatively low, but they make headway every year.

The argument of course, is that socialization suffers in the home schooled child. But a lot of that is just assumptions of those who march in lock step with the establishment. School is where you are supposed to pay attention to the teacher, not have concerns over your classmates and their presence around you.

Home schooled kids have about four hours a day of real school. The rest of they day, usually spent trapped in the school system of regimented daily routines, can be spent for all the social involvement one needs. And that social involvement can be controlled. There is no need to remind parents of the horror that many kids go through as they step from a social environment of the home, where they are loved and accepted (hopefully) to an environment of neurotics and ego insecure strangers.

Everyone knows how puberty can ruin a perfectly sweet and good kid, why subject them to a society of children all being effected? As an added note, just keep in mind the success of Asian children as they practice a common theme for themselves on the way to school achievement. They often get together with friends to actually do the study and homework, and this is a trait that has made many an Asian child a top performer. They don’t struggle with the social paradigms of “giving into the man” if they are a good student, and the results have us all looking for doctors and lawyers and professionals from all walks of life who are Asian. Not because they are Asian, but because of the stand they take on studying throughout their scholastic careers.

It’s a statistical fact that home schooled kids consistently score 15-20 percent higher than kids in a school system setting. They also score higher on the ACT, about 10 percent higher. Schools held at homes have  freedom and love of the learning experience that has until now been crushed by the regimen of the system, and it shows in the results.

The “great thinkers” of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s  who wanted to create a society of piece meal workers who only knew how to repeat the same job over and over until the day they die, have sent us all into a hell no one could ever have foreseen. Home schooling is re-awakening the human spirit that was crushed with industrial maneuvering over the scholastic lives of America’s children. Only with the continual destruction of a system meant to enslave our kids can we see the true benefits of doing away with a system that has made our kids stupid all in the name of big money men who wanted to socially engineer their own workforce.

Voucher anyone?

But what if we gave parents education vouchers? One of these could be as much as $5,000 a year and would be attached to the child so that the parent could send the child to the best school that they could choose.

Critics say that these could destroy public education. (And your point is?......) Public schools would then be overrun with nothing but problem kids and this would turn them into public detention centers and they would not longer be schools. Sure, money would disappear from the system with a big sucking sound you could hear all across America.

This would in turn force the government to make long needed changes to maintain their own position as a school and not a detention center. What would they do? I think that perhaps they have no clue what would happen then. Just keep your kids in our unproductive system, it’s the good kids and the involved parents that keep them the way they are, for without them, the bad kids and uninvolved parents would have no leg to stand on. Remember, teachers and kids who give a dam are punished and the converse are kept afloat. It’s the American school system way. 

The school system in Milwaukee has actually tried the voucher system and the results proved that students everywhere did a better job, those who were pulled out of the public school and also those who remained. The public schools were forced to try harder and be more competent as the money went in other directions, and the kids improved in their performance.

Amazingly, organizations like “People for the American Way” have actually filed lawsuits over the voucher program, stating that it violates the separation of church and state. They say this because lots of parents with vouchers send their kids to religious schools. This was a huge threat, since most schools who are not government schools are indeed religious organizations. However, the ruling was that as long as parents chose those schools and as long as the government did not force them to go to those schools, then the violation was not present. The U.S Supreme court agreed.

Allowing for school choice is nothing new. The G.I. bill sent over 2 million soldiers to college after World War II and some of those colleges were the likes of Notre Dame and Bringham Young. Soldiers could choose whatever school they wanted. American colleges were sparked by the competition for government money from vouchers and in the end result, American colleges are now sought after institutions all over the world. 

more on this next time

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Education, Capitalism, Competition, Schools, Learning, Public Schools, Monopolies

Stupid, Capitalism 
and Education

part 3

All over America thousands of Catholic schools outperform government schools. They spend less than half as much money. Average teachers make more than the top they are paid at Catholic schools, but Catholic schools get the job done. Why? Because they want to be there. They are not as well qualified, they don’t have fancy degrees. But, they are successful in ways public schools can only dream about. 

There are those who will tell you that Catholic schools succeed the way that they do because they have a choice of students. Public schools must take everyone. Catholic schools are able to throw out the trouble makers, but they rarely do. The parents and the students both know that expulsion could happen at any time. Catholic schools involve the parents in ways that public schools simply don’t bother with. Problem kids get the education that is coming their way, they have no choice in the matter.

The Catholic school system has the freedom to fail students without interference and this is one of the main reasons they are as successful as they are. New York City’s CHS system serves the same disadvantaged population as the government does, but they graduate 99% of their students. Government schools hover around the 50% range for student graduation. A huge difference that continues despite the obvious results of the two systems. Whom does the public school system serve? Whom do they REALLY serve?

Of course, there are always the charter schools to go to if Catholic school is not your thing. But try to open one. For many who try to open charter schools, or perhaps, switch out a government run school into a charter school, the headaches are enormous. There are massive amounts of government regulations that attempt to limit and control the abilities of charter schools. There have been instances of the public schools fighting the development of charter schools all the way to the Supreme Court. The bottom line here, is of course, the money being lost to charter schools. It seems the development of future generations of educated kids comes at a price. 

A Governor of a southern state was once offered to place his kids in the best schools in his area by the school board. The local school was sub par, and if he had not been Governor, his kids would have been required to attend that school because of the location of his residence. But for the Governor, the rules didn’t apply. 

He then decided that he would institute a plan that would help all kids with their education and called the plan: Put Parents in Charge. Parents could choose any school they wanted and if they wanted to go to a private school, then they would receive a tax credit to assist them with the choice. 

Competition makes everything better. No one would settle for just one kind of product these days, not when production moves us all ahead in various ways in the relentless pursuit of the top profit spot. With kids falling through the cracks right now, how can we continue to ignore the process of competition? But the school boards are locked into their testament of fear, despite the obvious results in every other facet of life. 

The Governor’s plan of Putting Parents in Charge was voted down by the legislature as being a “victory” for education. The claims being that they system is too accountable to allow competition to ruin our education system, it’s just not a proven commodity, at least not where education is considered. But that commodity is proven in every other area of life. Never mind that, though. 

Accountability is the very reason Private and Catholic schools do better than public schools. Everyone there works to make sure the product, an educated human child, is what is produced. If they don’t produce them, the administrator is out of a job.   

The USSR was a government monopoly, and we all know what has happened there. The only thing worse is a unionized government monopoly. If teachers are all paid the same, and they can’t be fired, then they can fart around all day and the kids don’t matter anyhow. Just deliver the health benefits and let them have their coffee lounge.

New York City has something called the NTE, the National Teacher’s Examination. Many teachers refuse to take these tests, even though they are used to determine benefits and pay scales. Teachers in the system are mediocre because it is tolerated. They are all paid the same. 

(Just take a look at the Movie: Waiting on Superman, for an inside look at how these things happen.)

Teachers are ferried around from school to school in the dance of the lemons because excellence is barred by contract. In this contract there are 205 pages of rules to follow. Union monopolies create these kinds of things. The rules forbid paying excellent teachers more than others and they also prohibit firing of teachers who rarely show up for class or maybe have a thing for one of their students. Teachers who are violent, incompetent or sexually aggressive to students make big bucks, and the litigation to fire them is cost prohibitive... so they say.

Tax payers pay millions every year for unproductive teachers in the public school system. Many are put in holding, throwing their own lives away each day as they DO NOT teach, but might as well be watching TV for a living. The system keeps them even though they are afraid to let them near a student. The contract demands that. Avoiding getting in trouble with the union creates an atmosphere where the lazy people drag everyone else down. 

In contrast, it is competition that always stimulates innovation. At KIPP charter schools, kids may stay in class until 5pm every day. They have school on Saturday every other day of the week. Kids and parents have the cell phone numbers of teachers who are always on call to help students with class work. People are involved in these types of schools and the difference shows. Everyone has a jobs here, and the students are the ones who benefit. The student has the job of succeeding in school. The Teacher has the job of turning out high graduation rates for kids who have actually done the work and succeeded, and the parents are the supporters and nurtures of the process.

more on this next time

This is an interesting website, it has some great points to make about what is going on in the world of teaching.  

http://www.belch.com/blog/category/why-homeschool/

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Education, Capitalism, Competition, Schools, Learning, Public Schools, Monopolies

A Sylvan Learning Center

Stupid, Capitalism and Education


part 2

Those who administer the international tests to students at about the age of 15, say that the freedom to choose a school and the act of schools governing themselves, matters more than the people who run those schools. It is increasingly obvious that the freedom for parents to choose and the freedom for schools to create the type of school they want is more important than the ability to create a uniformed, “lock step” type society within schools which produce more and more inferior educational results. Since 1989 Belgium and France have shown marked differences with divergent types of schools on each side of the country. The kids on the Flemish side of the country do remarkably better in the international tests  than the French side, and they have a greater autonomy. 

Better for the Disadvantaged?

The Public School officials will tell the public that the school system levels the playing field.  According to them, the poor and minorities are given better opportunities to succeed. It’s a load of hogwash. Public schools are regularly more segregated than private schools. Studies have shown that 54% of public school students were in classrooms that were 90% white or more than 90% minority. Only around 40% of private school students had the same experience.*

*Education Myths, Jay Green

These statistics are the result of the wealthy being able to move near good schools, and the poor being stuck with what they can get. Washington DC has a school called, Ballou High; a place where teachers often don’t even show up. And why should they since they can’t be fired? The kids have no where to go, hanging in the hallways, they know they are stuck and it seems no one cares. Of course, she and her parents could try to pretend that they live in another school district, but then the school zone border patrol might exercise their right to control trespassers. 

Where Liberals Run Wild and Free

Even in California, “the left coast”, school detectives go around making sure kids in schools of the Freemont district actually live where they say they do. Freemont schools are markedly better than the surrounding schools in the area, and kids and parents who want better have to become clandestine to do so. One grandmother who created a room and address for her grandson was “caught” as she tried to give her grand kid a better education. Big Brother saw to it that a better education was denied as they “corrected” the situation. Can you say, “Papers please!” 

I can remember my own high school experience of being forced into a remedial reading class my freshman year, all of us were, even the kids who were in the “A” class. So pervasive is the poor education that is being produced, that even the “brains” have to be screened. One might think that all is the fault of the kids themselves, their parents, or maybe the media influence upon them. You would be right, of course, to claim that parents who read to their kids create better readers. Parents who take an interest in the school work of their kids, make better students for teachers, and the teacher’s job is much less insurmountable. Many parents however, have no option but to send their kids to these horrific schools created by the government system.

Ah, well... someone has to work for the Government

The U. S Department of Education says that  25% of American high school students can’t read at a basic level. They tell the kids to just go home and read on their own, the kid plays video games instead, and the system passes them to the next level anyway. Some of these kids were taken by a private investigative party to the Sylvan Learning Center and in 72 hours of instruction the reading comprehension jumped two grade levels. The government system loves to have meetings with parents and throw around all sorts of high sounding words and existentialist philosophy, then deny the reality of kids who graduate from their schools that still cannot read, but the final statistics show that private institutions succeed in teaching kids even the basics of reading at an alarmingly more efficient rate over the long term.

Is there an answer?

Sylvan learning centers are an example of accountability. They have to do what they say they will do, if not: no business, no income. A Sylvan program may cost upwards of about $3,000 dollars, the government spends about $10,000 on a child’s education. Why not just fund the parents for going to private instruction? Perhaps the bloated costs are not all they have to be. 

Supposedly, the public schools have no money. Just study the abject failure of “No Child Left Behind”, an exercise in government excess at the planning stage with no execution afterward, due to “lack of funding”. When one asks school officials if more money would be the answer, they always reply in the affirmative. More money would indeed fix the problem. How much you ask? Millions. They tell you millions would fix the school system.

Right now they spend about 10,000 per student. In a class of 25 that’s $250,000, and that’s per classroom. That’s all operating money, not capital expense. The surrounding infrastructure are all paid for. With $250,000  a lot can be done to make the student experience radically different than it is at this point.

The stats don’t lie though, America spends more on education that it does on the military, and we still score lower than most countries that spend less. It makes one wonder if the education system isn’t just a store front for another kind of organization in the shadows.  Spending billions on “country clubbing” up the schools has only made the education system results worse. 

Spending from 1971 to 2001 went from $4,479 per student to $8,996 per student. High school graduation rates from ‘71 to ‘01 went from 75.6% to 72.2% during the same duration. The facts are irrefutable, one can give the American school system all the money it wants, and things just don’t get better. 

And yet, all that money goes ..... somewhere....

All over the country there are schools that outperform the government public schools. In South Carolina, there is a school where kids jump from their chairs to answer math questions in a “math game” exercise. They play relay math. They play bingo. They play “phonics around the world”. 

This school, called “Middleton” charges about $3,000 per student, less than half of the money the government gives to the public schools in the surrounding area. Students there do better there with less money spent. Parents pay for the extra, despite the fact that they already are taxed and paying for the surrounding public schools; because their kids are fundamentally superior students.

more on this next time

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Education, Capitalism, Competition, Schools, Learning, Public Schools, Monopolies

Students of the Wildly Successful European School System

Stupid, Capitalism and Education

When one looks at the histories of nations in the last 2,000 years or so, there is a definite dichotomy of progress that is readily observable. Some may point out a racial divergence as the source of this progress, but they would be over simplifying cause and effect. The bottom line is that when we consider the countries of Western Europe, we see a progress that the rest of the world still has not been blessed with.

One can observe the histories of African nations, Samoan nations, and even the Middle East, and there is a consistency of action among these nations that has held them at bay from the beneficial onset of Western European type progress, which is more than skin deep. Britain, France, Spain, Italy and surrounding nations in the late 18th century and beyond all competed for the larger piece of the “world pie”.

The Real Tool of Motivation

 

Competition was the name of the game, and its fanatical use was instrumental in the changing of the face of the world, for better or for worse. The evidence of the benefits of competition is undeniable. Evidence of the lack of it, in the nations that have stayed behind, living in the former centuries even today, is also ubiquitous.

This has also worked toward the benefit of mankind in the smaller arena of business and entertainment. How many creative ideas have come from the imaginary stage of Hollywood, searching for the next big money draw, only to end up as a similar reality in the world of business. My grandfather would be amazed at our society wide use of hand held devices whereby one can even chat live with another person face to face, much like the old Dick Tracy wrist watches. This is not the only part of the result of competition, but inclusive is also the speed at which innovation is taking place. Those who have passed away only in the last 25 years or so, say in the ‘80’s, knew nothing of the internet, cell phones, electric cars, artificial limbs that respond to brain waves, and any number of innovations brought about by invention in just the recent years of mankind’s history. An yet how many of us fondly remember the 80’s as though it were yesterday?

Sadly, much can be said about the lack of competition and it’s stifling effects when it comes to education and our schools. Much like those anachronistic nations I have mentioned, our schools have not just floundered, but they have fallen behind and deteriorated. Hijacked by those with business and sociological agendas, our kids have become intellectual anathema in the scholastic realm.

Stupid is a hard word. It carries with it certain judgements and requirements for plausibility that may or may not have real world applications. It is also relative, as many of our popular beliefs will lead you to believe that we, today, are OF COURSE, intellectually superior than any group of people who has ever lived.

We're Smarter, but closer to annihilation

I recently saw the movie Thor, and they even mention this type of thinking in relation to Norse mythology. The statement is made that primitive people such as the Vikings would have worshiped Thor as a god, clearly implying that we today are way too smart for that sort of thing. Yet, how ignorant can this concept be when we consider the gross dilapidation of our educational system. Vikings may have not discovered the atom, but they were far from stupid cave dwelling types. In fact, over history, nobody was a stupid cave man type. Stupid people die quickly, they don’t survive to make more stupid. They just didn’t have the educational progress that we today supposedly have, although much of what we are taught in school is now subject to scrutiny as revisionist in compliance with industrial agendas of the past.

Science must be observable, unless it happened millions of years ago

An example of this would be carbon-14 dating. Wholly believed to be evidence that substantiates such things as a Paleolithic period by droves of students who attend grade schools and on into college, little is mentioned, if ever, of the intrinsic need for atmospheric conditions to be conducive to the rate of carbon-14 atom creation. Simply because there is a certain amount of carbon-14 in a dinosaur bone, an imaginary extrapolation about the term of age of said bone is produced and then expanded in to “what must have been”, based upon the “evidence”. However, had the environment been such that carbon-14 production was inhibited until radical atmospheric change took place, then the rate of carbon-14 in ANYTHING is a result of that change and not a result of great age. But you never hear this from grade school history books.

For a better explanation on carbon-14 dating problems please see this link: http://contenderministries.org/evolution/carbon14.php

You would, however, hear about this sort of thing if there were competition over money and power involved. So why the intellectual political slant? Why are out of date “truths” taught to our kids despite the updated advances in our knowledge about such things as carbon-14 dating, which we owe to the progress of competition?

Monopolies. Basically, our education system has gone nowhere fast due to the death grip of monopolies. The monopoly in education is the government itself. If you concede my examples of entire nations throughout history as an example, then you understand the prescriptive point toward the results our education is reeling beneath. A pejorative word for both stupid and union-dominated monopolies that run our school system would be redundant in its essence.

Unionized monopolies create ossified, bloated bureaucracies that do little to help the people they are supposed to serve. One may move from the grass hut to the adobe home, but you’ll never see a skyscraper.

Competition, however, made Europe great. It has made our technology better in leaps and bounds, thanks mostly to Microsoft and Apple. And yes, I have to give credits to the movie industry for blazing a trail of innovation in contributing to technological advances.

We're number two, we try harder

When there is a battle for the almighty dollar, those in competition have to try harder. It often seems that all one needs in advertising is a pretty girl in a bikini. No real need for all the advertising research that is done, since everyone has a firm grip on what sells an audience. But if all advertising was only focused on sex, then where do you go next? Therefore, advertisers must try harder.

Take also as an example of this: the U.S. Postal service. The stigma of lousy service due to ineffectual government employees has remained with them despite their best efforts to compete with private industry such as UPS and FedEx. Today we do have a better postal service than our grandfathers had, but they are still not better than UPS and FedEX. They are still government.

Cell phone companies offer tons of different plans in the hopes of covering an entire market of needs. Education should be doing the same. If people get to choose their kids school then the options would be endless. There would be schools everywhere, for the general to the specific. You could have Wal-Mart type schools, sports schools, music schools, and all of it right at home on the computer. In fact, we have lots of this sort of thing happening already. But not with the public school system.
 

Mark of the Best? hmmm...

Kids from around the world, scratching their heads in disbelief

 
Belgian kids and New Jersey kids were given the same test in one experiment. The Belgian kids thought that the test was easy and believed that the American kids given the same test would have no trouble. Not so. The schools the kids came from were comparable in their performance, but the Belgian kids scored 30% higher in the test scores. The American kids were shocked at the rate of advancement of those Belgian kids.

At the age of ten, students from twenty five countries take the same test and kids in America place eighth in ranking. (Singapore. Guess who is number one? Finland.) But by the time they reach fifteen, American kids are in the bottom of the chart at 25th place. The longer American kids stay in school, the worse they do in international competition. Poorer countries like Korea and Poland score much higher and spend less on education.

But government education in America is a monopoly. Families who send kids to public school must take what they are given. Is your school terrible? Do the teachers get moved around from school to school no matter how bad they are? Tough. Taxes pay for it, that’s what you get, government employed teachers. Just like the post office, teachers in government employ become a part of the substandard system. And why not? They can’t be fired.

The government often fails to live up to the market need in many facets of life. Instead of being a regulator of private industry (God help us!) or a delegate to private industry, it attempts to offer the “yellow box” product  or service to the public. Government airlines and automobiles like the “Trabant” are prime examples of this grade C type of production.

Can anyone remember the government phone company? Every phone was black, and an answering machine was an “illegal device”. Once the monopoly was broken up and competition was introduced, the phone market took off. Just take a look at old phones and compare the usage we have today since the introduction of competition. That is only in a little over 60 years and it won’t be long at this rate before “Star Trek” type communication is considered quaint in the face of the new technological reality.

Other countries have government run schools, but the money from the government is given to the kids and their parents so that they may choose where they want to go.  Schools are forced to innovate in order to appeal to parents so that business comes their way, even if that business brings in the government’s own money. The funding comes from the customer, so to speak, not from an office in City Hall and the like.                  

   
More on this next time

rbhg: home school, social programming, social engineering, education, fascism, christianity, teaching, employment, James Bryant Conant, high school,

Secrets of Our

Educational System

part 5

James Bryant Conant, President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, is a school name that resonates through the central third of the twentieth century. He once wrote a book called; The American High School Today (1959), which was one of the important things that pushed secondary schools to gigantic size in the 1960’s and forced consolidation of many small school districts into larger ones. Conant was a poison gas specialist in World War I, a reward for family lineage that had all the right stuff. He also worked on the World War II atomic bomb project, and was U.S. High commissioner for Germany during the occupation in 1945.

In his book, he addressed men and women of his own snooty class who were beginning to doubt the veracity of forced schooling and turning their opinions toward a return to the old style American methods of education. “No!” He fervently told them. “The clock cannot be turned back. The total process is irreversible!” Severe consequences would certainly follow if this carefully contrived behavioral-training machine were broken up. “A successful counter revolution would require reorientation of a complex social pattern. Only a crazy person would undertake such a project.”

Reading Conant’s book is like seeing a conversation in writing that was not meant for you but has major implications to you personally. Conant believed that schooling was a triumph of Anglo/German pragmatism, a pinnacle of the technocrats social planning art. It had sharply ruined the American entrepreneurial spirit. This made perfect sense to do if you stand in the shoes of management. As long as capital investment was at the mercy of millions of self-reliant, resourceful young entrepreneurs with a magic gleam in their eye, where would the money come from to continually tool and retool the commercial/industrial and financial machine? If the entire population could become producers, young people could always be loose cannons crashing around the deck of a ship teetering and tottering out of control. This was a threat to the corporate ship, however, if they were controlled as employees, then a dependable domestic market could be established.

But how to mute the urge for innovation in the population of tomorrow, that was the question. Conant tells us that the answer was in “formulation”, much in the same way he mixed gasses to create death for the enemy in a war situation. By the time 1905 came along, the call to formulation was followed en masse by the entire nation. “Keep all youth in school full time through grade twelve.” All youth, even those who didn’t wish to be there, and especially those who would take vengeance on their jailers.

Conant knew good and well that practical minded kids paid the biggest price for forced schooling and enforced confinement. But what could be done? The genie was out of the bottle so to speak. For Conant, it was a worthy trade off. Any mind complex enough to calculate a way to short circuit entrepreneurial energy, and ideology driven enough to make this happen all in the service of a corporate takeover of the economy, is sharp enough to see the side effects of a band of prisoners forced to remain in school against their will along with the docile and compliant. The net result of intellectual possibilities of class instruction was predictably a wipe out, as we have seen for 40 years now.

Going back for a moment to Cubberly, the Stanford education dean, he too had written about the serious decline of class work caused by early experiments in forcing universal school attendance. Therefore it was no surprise to insiders when academic integrity was destroyed. Cubberly’s House History of American Education refers directly to this episode. Conant and Cubberly both knew each other and spoke frequently. They knew what they were doing, but maintained their heroic stance in the service of corporate America all the same. Kids would be forced to do duty for the state, the brainwashing and social engineering of their innocent lives and the abject rape of their freedoms would be something difficult to explain to the general public.

A book called: “Philosophy of Education” by Robert Ulich, a prominent Harvard professor, put it this way: “ We are producing more and more people who will be dissatisfied because the artificially prolonged time of formal schooling will arouse in them hopes which society cannot fulfill... These men and women will form the avant garde of the disgruntled. It is no exaggeration to say people (like these) were responsible for World War II.” (Remember, I have talked a lot about fascism in our schooling.) This is, of course, nothing new, for Toynbee in his tome Study of History claimed the same thing and has been used as a guide for the speculation of the events of history for a long time now. This concept, that serious intellectual schooling of a universal nature was a sword pointed at the established order, has been a common theme in the west since the Tudors, and has also been openly discussed since 1890.

After World War I, the German people found themselves with an inexcusable high rate of unemployment. These people all went back to school, college specifically. Like the G.I. Bill, this was a short term solution to the problems of high unemployment. What happened as a result still leaves a mark on us today. Germany found itself with a general public that was well educated and resentful. Try to imagine homeless people with degrees and no where to use them, with no work to pay for their tuition. The dramatic rise of tent cities all across America of entire families without work and homes should raise serious concerns in us all.

This is no easy issue to deal with. From a management perspective it is no less cynical than it is pragmatic. Most continuing education beyond a college degree is easy to earmark as a temporary solution to the fact that most employment in the U.S. is now part time or short term employment, in fact, the figures I believe are about 50-60%. In an increasingly centralized workplace, one with no end in sight,

all employment is categorized into four branches: corporate, governmental, institutional, and professional. Once work has been channeled in this fash

ion, one that mimics a true monopoly of employment, fear of too many smart people is a real and present danger. Smart people revolt. Just ask France. Both history itself and Senator Ulich would bear witness to this fact.

Debate over public schools and the overwhelming reality of what our kids are now subject to (just consider the lottery for an education scenes in the movie Waiting for Superman) become academic themselves when we understand the ideas of people like, Inglis, Conant, Ulich, and Kotsching. If we don’t address the philosophies, the atheism, the existentialism, the government social engineering which sentences the largest part of our population to lives that are practically devoid of meaning and turns them into unwitting gerbils on a treadmill for corporate America, we might as well just stop complaining.

Liberty, equality,

fraternity, or death.

Some end notes:

1) U.S. Office of Education

OEC-O-9-320424-4042 (B10) 2) Th

e Cloning of the American Mind (Huntington House 1998) 3) The National Adult Literacy Survey : the disaster of a change in the teaching of reading methodology. The ability to parrot information instead of being able to understand difficult text had a dramatic rise, and this happened on purpose. 4) Reduced Recidivism and Increased Employment Opportunity Through Research Based Reading Instruction, Michael S. Brunner, (United States department of Justice 1992) 5) Retarding America, Michael S. Brunner (Halcyon House 1993) 6) Reading Failure and Juvenile Delinquency (Reading Reform Foundation) 7) The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne, schooling chosen for the characters child

no coincidence for the author writing at this time.

I would like to thank the sources I received information for this series of blogs from. It’s my wish that the information be out there, circulating among a public that is clearly upset and doesn’t understand why, that is the only motivation for blogs like this one. Your help is invaluable.

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Secrets of Our Educational System Part 3

Secrets of Our
Educational System

part 3

“It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, than to see their real importance and value.” ~Author: Georg Hegel

Let’s say that you have a difficult time believing that all the information I have gone over isn’t just a conspiracy theory. May I introduce Mr. William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906. Harris had a profound effect on all of our schools, he standardized them and also Germanized them. Here’s a few words from Mr. Harris himself:

“Ninety nine students out of 100 are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident, but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.”

- The Philosophy of Education (1906)

Harris, “Lord of American schooling”, German philosophy major, publisher of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy (which trained a generation of American intellectuals in the ideas of Kant, transcendental metaphysical idealist philosopher, and Hegel, atheist existentialist equivocator. Hegel being the man who gave us scientifically age graded classrooms to replace the successful mixed age school practice.) Harris is quoted as saying:

“The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop power to withdraw from the external world.”

- The Philosophy of Education (1906)

Alone in the Crowd

Nearly a hundred years ago Harris believed that self-alienation was the secret to successful industrial society. When you stand at a machine all day, or sit at a computer, chatting with all your stranger/friends on Facebook, you require an ability to withdraw from life. How else could human beings tolerate this except to having been prepared for it by Birkenhead drills? For Harris, school was successful preparation for a life of alienation.

Harris was the main formative voice in America for what school was to be in a modern, scientific state. Historians commonly treat him as an old-fashioned defender of high academic standards, but this is an overly simplified analysis. As a philosophical Hegelian (AEE), he believed that children where the property of the state, a state that had a vested interest in disposing of them as it pleased. Some of these children would receive intellectual training, most would not. Any distinction that can be made between Harris and later weak-curriculum advocates (those interested in stupefication for everyone) is far less important than the substantial agreement in both camps that parents or the local tradition could no longer determine the child’s future.

Not until the days of Conant, would anyone else have access to important salons of power as Harris did. Over his career he gave inspiration to the fixations of Andrew Carnegie, the steel man who not only has a finger in building the nations library system, but he also first imagined the unlimited power of making income by having the entire economy drafted to cradle-to-grave schooling. If you would like to see how American society arrived at the place where it is today, one need only read The Empire of Business (1902) or Triumphant Democracy (1886).

Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” idea took his peers by storm at the same moment the great schooling re-structuring had its beginning. The concept that the wealthy owed the public a duty to control everything in the public interest was an uncanny echo of Carnegie’s boyhood experiences watching the elitists of Britain and the teachings of its State religion.

The Thought Police, They Live in my Head

Every upper class in history has specified what can be known. History is written by the victors. The establishment of a grammar and vocabulary for the common folk is a trademark of the class control by the upper class. If we unwittingly accept a concept such as “globalization”, then we have committed ourselves to a blue print for future society. It’s a future that brings with it an irresistible curriculum.

Ever since the days of Aristotle, those who study such things have understood that work is the vital self-theater of knowing one’s self. Schooling in concert with the controlled workplace is the best solution to discourage imagination. Where did these “Orwellian” ideas come from? How did they become a part of the paradigm of the times for those who believed in progressiveness? Walt Whitman had this to say: “Only Hegel is fit for America”. That’s Hegel, the atheist. Hegel, the existentialist. Hegel the protean Prussian philosopher capable of being “Karl Marx” like on one hand and J. P. Morgan on the other. He believed that history itself could be controlled by the deliberate provoking of crises. (9/11 anyone?) William Torry Harris was a big believer in what Hegel had to say. Hegel was a big believer in Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard was a spoiled rich kid brat who never held a job but wanted to become famous by writing books on philosophy that had many words but really said nothing. Harris made it his “raison d’ etre” to make forced schooling the tool by which the ideas of Hegel could direct history and change America to fit their ideals, and then of course to infect the world.

What Has a Million Legs and Can't Walk?

Harris was inspired by the idea that forced schooling would create a population so dependant on leaders that schism and revolution would become things of the past. If a “World-State” could be constructed by Hegelian tactical manipulation, and school plans imposed upon it, history itself would stop. Man would be in control, well, at least those men and their cohorts would be. We’d all be a society of people just waiting around for someone to tell them what to do. I’ve heard sales training spout the same diatribe: “People are just waiting around for you to tell them what to do, and what they should do is buy our product.” The psychological tool is alienation. Turning kids away from themselves and any individual strength they may refer to, also their families, and their culture and also God himself. No countervailing force could intervene in the life of each child that made up a society and thus before people even knew what was happening, because they were innocent children, they had been directed and controlled from outside forces they have no clue even exist.

If you have read my other blog post on “Neo-Think” or “Neo-Tech”, you know that this material; from which the movie series “The Matrix” was inspired promotes and “sells” the same Hegelian ideas. It’s no small coincidence that their huge atheist volumes include an entire novelized example of a school teacher who tried to enlighten her class that God doesn’t exist, and then suffered terribly at the hands of mean old Christian believers who came together to stop her. The writers of these tomes are Hegelian controlled too, and I would imagine they have little idea as to the extent of their situation. (...maybe)

Big money steel man Andrew Carnegie used his wealth and influence to keep Harris the Hegelian as the U.S. Commissioner of Education for approximately sixteen years, long enough to set the stage of an era of scientific management in American schooling, or “Fordism” as the Soviets put it. (Neo-Think is a big purveyor of “Fordism”, also.) This brought about the rise of the multi layered school bureaucracy. But it would be wrong to think of Harris and his kind as merely a tool of business interest. What they were about, as Neo-Think will tell you, is the creation of a living breathing NEW FAITH to replace Christianity. This Christianity, of course being the one which was turned apostate in the 20’s-30’s, and failed them as World War II proved their utopian ideas of man’s progress as false. Was it a coincidence that this all happened at just the time when dreamers of the empire of business for an Anglo-American world state were beginning to consider worldwide schooling as the most direct route to their destination? Nope. It’s the oldest battle in the history of mankind, going all the way back to Genesis.

Both movements, the centralization of the economy and the centralization of schooling were aided in a big way by the lack of effectiveness of old-line protestant denominations to combat this rising tide in a meaningful way. The “Social Gospel” ideology, financed by important industrialists, mixed God and church with standards of business, entertainment and government. Religion became something about social programs. The idea of money being able to buy your salvation is an old social control tool that anyone who knows history can recognize, but few did.

The dean of Chicago’s school of divinity, Shailer Matthews, and president of the federal council of churches wrote a tome called Scientific Management of Churches (1912). He believed that American Protestants should sacrifice independence and autonomy and adopt the structure of corporations. “If this seems to make the Church something of a business,” he wrote. “Then so be it!” The corporate message was now the way to Jesus he told them. In the years before the first world war, a consortium of private foundations drawing on industrial wealth began slowly working toward a long range goal of lifelong schooling and a thoroughly rationalized global economy and society. Their plans, however, due to their being atheists, didn’t include the interference of the owner and creator of the universe, and this is where they went wrong from the get go.

And Speaking of that Neo-Think Teacher Scenario

In an interesting twist, the start up of public school mass education actually did bring about an uprising of parents of all classes. Around 1850, the main topic of conflict in the reports of school committees was between the state and the general pubic about the inception of public schooling. The old “yeoman class”, those people who were used to taking care of themselves and providing meaning for their lives, lead this charge. A little town in Cape Cod, called Barnstable, was the standard bearer for this revolt. The school committee mourned the absence of a governing or controlling body on the part of the parents and also the resulting “wild wood weeds” that their children were becoming. Parents had become apathetic, and therefore the schools were rendered inefficient.

In much the same way as national health care has been forced down the throat of America’s citizens, most who lived in the mid 1800’s rejected the notion of forced schooling. Building the Education State, by Bruce Curtis (1836-1871), recounts the intense aversion to forced schooling that flooded across the national scene like a plague. Schools were burned to the ground and many teachers run out of town by torch and pitchfork mobs. If students were kept after school, parents would break them out, so to speak.

In Saltfleet Township, students rebelled and locked a teacher in the classroom. They pelted him with mud and mire from the surrounding area in an unprecedented attack, and the parents showed up to provide a cheering section. Why did this all happen? Well, Miss Annabelle can tell you for sure. The parents and students were motivated by the sudden transformation of intentions of schools - a change from teaching literacy to one of molding social identity. They weren’t stupid, just uneducated.

(Miss Annabelle is the atheist teacher from Neo-Think books who was “sadly victimized” for her stance against God.)

The first effective American compulsory schooling in the modern era was a reform school movement which know nothing legislatures of the 1850’s put into the hopper with their radical new adoption law. Objects of reformation were announced as follows: respect for authority, self control, self discipline. The properly reformed boy acquires a “fixed” character, one that can be planned for in advance by authority in keeping with the efficiency needs of business and industry.

Resistance is Futile, You Will Be Absorbed

Reform meant the total transformation of character, behavior modification, a complete makeover. By 1857, a few years after stranger adoption was kicked off as a new policy by the state, foster parenting was now considered a major strategy for the reform of youth. The first step was for the state to become the de facto parent of the child.

The 1850’s marked the beginning of a new era in schooling. It was believed that for the first time in history the State was now acting in the role of a parent by taking lost children under its wing and restructuring them. The State set out to prove by its efforts that delinquency was caused by deficient homes, not external conditions, and therefore industry and slumlords everywhere got off the hook. Schooling was to be the best family structure system and replace the “weaker” home life family of the child.

Most don’t realize that it is no matter of chance that teachers are mostly female in our day and age. In the early 1800’s, beginning around 1840 or so, male teachers were purged from the system on purpose and replaced with female counterparts. Women were paid slightly more than men in order to shame men into seeking other avenues. This was all part of a well conceived stratagem: “Experience teaches that these boys, many of whom have never had a mother’s affection, need the softening and refining influence only a woman can give, we have, therefore replaced men with female counterparts wherever we can.”

Public document for the State of Massachusetts, (1864) tells of the increasing occurrence of parents coming to school to collect their own children only to find that their children had been given away to others. This was something called the “parens patriae power”. The State was quoted as saying, “We have felt it to be our duty to decline giving them up to their parents and have placed as many of them as we could with farmers and mechanics.”

I would imagine that for the small farming communities of the day, this was a horror story beyond belief. Well, of course, it would be... for anyone... anywhere.... at anytime.

more on this in part 4