education

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THE EDUCATION BLOOPER -- MEDIOCRITY ORDAINED -- AMERICAN PIMPLES -- THE PEDAGOGIC CALAMITY -- TEACHING BY EXAMPLE -- PIGS AND THE PEARL -- HIPPOPOTAMUS PIANO CONCERTO -- THE RIGHT/WRONG MIRAGE --

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THE EDUCATION BLOOPER

John F. Kennedy announced that USA would land a man on the Moon within 10 years from 1960.

He addressed the goal, not its bureaucratic means.

He did not announce that he was going to negotiate rights, salaries and retirement plans -tageslichywith the space personnel unions for some "best space program possible". That would have crippled the program.

The statement "creating new jobs" only means hiring people and giving them noney (for work of generallly 8 hurs a daysalary ). For what? Just to receive payments, joining a union and sharing the salary with them?
From which pproductive source of income?
Starting a business or whatever just to employ  and pay some people wirhout a realitic plan to producing the profit needed and/or requested procucts ane/or services that earn enough so that the profit can support the emplotees and the employer who myst continue to pay them? Politicians who promise jobs should FIRST desscribe the jobs' nature, utility, productivity and profit, benefit and utility.

Inxidentally, we have crippled our 20-30-year programs to educate our children by spending vastly more for school buildings and teacher salaries, without any mationally debated plans, evidence, methods and programs to teach our children, teachers benefits, larger buldings an fewer pupils per classroom (which only produce more teacher jobs), are produving incredibly lower quality educational results than Japan (with even over 40 pupils per classroom) and virtually all European schools.

That is: more school buildings, more equipment, better-paid teachers, plenty of books, educational services and toys, busing, PTAs and more money than ever before...

Yet, they will learn less than the Russians, the Japanese, German, English, French, Italians... who are using less money, less buildings, less equipment, less resources per pupil, lower teacher salaries, many more pupils per classroom...

"The World & I", December 1988 (still valid now, in 2008) :

"In an international assessment of mathematics education completed in 1982, students from 20 countries were evaluated in several categories.

Among 8th grade students, the Japanese came in first in every category tested.
U.S. students were 8th in statistics, 10th in arithmetic, 12th in algebra, 16th in geometry, and 18th in measurement - a poor showing among 20 countries which included both industrial and Third World nations.

The same is true of science.
In an international assessment of scientific knowledge completed in 1986, U.S. 9nth graders ranked 15th among 16 countries analyzed.

Even the best educated American students did poorly.

Among 17-year-old, students from the U.S. who studied advanced science and math scored 9th among students from 13 countries in physics, 11th in chemistry, and last in algebra, calculus, and biology.
Even more disheartening, the top 5 percent of American math students scored lower than the average Japanese 17-year-old taking comparable classes".

Those same Japanese students come from class sizes averaging 41 pupils...

Educators and public officials keep talking of teacher compensations, class sizes, new schools, funding for more educational projects, psychology offices to find more "learning disabilities" and "special education" to spawn more jobs for special teachers and psychologists.

We hear about bold initiatives, innovative approaches to seniority and hiring incentives, new teaching facilities, new anti-dropout measures that will revolutionize the American schooling system.
The new mind-boggling measures receive nationwide acclaim and official praise...

Still, 40% of the high school graduates cannot read at the 9th grade level.
As of 1988, 21 million adults in U.S.A. read below 4th grade level.

Johnny still cannot read, count and reason.

September 2001: nothing to indicate that the situation has improved.

We throw money at the problem, raise teacher salaries, finance more courses for teachers on motivating and bargaining procedures.

What our teachers need are: courses in English, history, math, geography, literature, philosophy, science, foreign languages...

A mediocre teacher who uses poor ways to convey that 3³ = 27 is obviously better than the sophisticated pedagogue who teaches that 3³ = 9 with superb skill.

Any mediocre child of mediocre parents without any teaching skills can learn to speak his mother-tongue fluently from simple exposure to his peers, better than a child who learns it from a sophisticated teacher in a perfectly equipped school room with computerized video-audio language devises and less than 15 pupils.
I have learned 8 languages far beyond the tourist level (I started learning English, the last one, at age 31): no sophisticated devises or special teachers were able to help me as much as simple exposure, a good grammar, a good dictionary, plus motivation and interest. More than that does no more than cover up teacher's inade­quacy.

My children learned fluent German and Italian by simply speaking them at home with me. Later, I had to protect them from the incorrect German and Italian vocabulary and grammar imposed to them by public school teachers who knew how to teach, but knew very little German and Italian.

The same happened with music, history, geography and math.

Correcting the teachers was a problem, for their learning ability was lost in teaching without previous adequate learning.

School and community leaders, as well as parents, don't discuss the very object of education, which is instruction, information, articulation and explanation of the subjects to be learned.

When this is brought to the attention of the education professionals, they deign to assure us it is not true, and the plight worsens like a sickness that is protected from diagnosis.

We need local and national minimum standards.

Before discussing the teachers' requirements and salaries, we must decide what is necessary for our children to know, as a minimum at various levels, for any diploma or degree.

Educational experimentation and optional courses should be undertaken only after the minimum requirements have been satisfied, not in their place.

Worldwide experience shows that parents, employers, civic and religious leaders, politicians... everybody can come to the rescue of students, apprentices, trainees of any category, when needed. In our country, the learning task has been removed from the living world and entrusted to a teaching establish­ment schooled in the teaching requirements but not in the subjects to be learned.

Just as a 2-ton cargo cannot be allowed on a 1-ton truck, a promotion cannot be granted to a student that has not met the minimum standard of knowledge for the pertinent diploma, regardless of the teacher's contribution or student's efforts.

When an educational goal is missed, measures are to be taken to correct the results, not to reward failure with higher salaries and funds.

If funding were enough, rich people would consistently show the best educational results.

How many Nobel-prizes have been bestowed to children of millionaires?

The purpose of teaching is not a display of pedagogic theories but the assimilation of knowledge by the student.

A national consensus is needed that any diploma can only be granted to students with not less than a certain minimum of prescribed knowledge for each corresponding subject and level.. kkk

Students who don't know the required minimum must learn more and try again, until they pass the highest grade they can.

Anything else is pompous prattle from pedagogues, politicians, union zealots and misled do-gooders.

Teachers, parents and everyone must measure their own usefulness in the total project from the results, not from the willingness to increase spending.

Almost anything is better than the present system.
Even arbitrary examin­ation-tests for each diploma on any level, could be sent simultaneously from Washington (or from wherever) to all schools in the nation, for an examination the same day from Alaska to Florida, Atlantic to Pacific coast...

The same in Anchorage, Key West and New York? Why, almost the entire student body in some towns could be flunked ruthlessly!..

Maybe, for one or two years, but it would be immensely better than a lifetime of sub-education consequences.
It is better to be flunked in school than in life. Many achieved success in life only after being flunked in school opened their eyes. That is precisely what happened to me in history and philosophy. Only after this accomplishment I pursued chemical engineering etc.

This proven system, even in a simple form, would raise our country beyond our deficient standards.

It could be harsh. Yet, by far not as harsh as the present disgrace, in which our entire national student population is flunked for life in the competition with Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Holland, Great Britain, Switzerland, Sweden, Korea, Taiwan, and other nations who outperform us whether we know it or not.

Would it infringe on local educational liberty? Not at all, because it would merely establish a minimum above which every school can use all the freedom and creativity they are capable of.

It would certainly be less tyrannical than the methods that brand with truancy children who receive a better education at home instead of cultural and moral decomposition by the public schools.

A national or state minimum standard would free parents to educate their children further at home or in any other system.

We do it with the driver license, and Americans are probably the best drivers in the world.

In education, we are falling behind more nations every year.

Politicians who state we are still better than the rest of the world deceive us to get votes.

What is the Japanese, Russian, German secret?

First, they focus on results before teacher rewards, rather than on teacher rewards as a condition for uncertain results.

 

Then, they let the pupils work on the subjects of learning.

Some say that the main advantage of the Japanese, Russians, Germans, Italians, etc. is that their society is ethnically homogenous.

Only to a degree, for all industrialized societies have disadvantaged ethnic or racial minorities.

None of those societies lowers the national standards to accommodate the "minorities".

The "minorities" are offered all possible helps, but they have to be assimilated into the higher mainstream, just as the dominant "majority" had to in the past.

This pattern has been successful for thousands of years.

We can improve on it, like on everything else, but rejecting it would be disastrous.

Our educational waste is most evident with children who come home with little, if any, homework.

They spend their time in TV-watching, loitering boredom, or worse.

Their frustration is so corrosive that there are no words to describe the waste of potential talent.

An explanation by frustrated teachers is that the rule of no-homework is union prescribed, to avoid the burden of correcting papers.

A fatuous rationalization is that homework can be dangerously oppressive.

A fact is that Japanese, German, Russian and other high-achieving students are improved, not hurt, by the high pressure they are subjected to.

When I mentioned it to a school principal, she observed: "Yes, but look how many Japanese students commit suicide..."

No use informing her on Japanese ways of suicide. But even Americanized Japanese suicides could be taken as a clue of how much more seriously education is taken in Japan.

Our high incidence of dropouts, drug problems and debilitating TV-watching by bored pupils is a worse endemic plague.

She could have thought of Toyota, Mitsubishi, Canon, Toshiba, Sony, just to mention some popular Japanese clues.

In the school run by that same principal, a system is being used to obtain more money, increase salaries, hire more teachers and keep the superfluous teachers on the payroll:

They create sub-groups of special-level pupils to spawn additional "needs", union teachers, salaries and funds.

I saw a second grade with 4 groups "below-grade-level", 3 groups at "grade-level", 2 groups "above-grade-level" in a prosperous community of upper-middle class people with all the typical "head-starts".

 

The children get no more than occasional 10-minute home-work consisting of tasks that require no teacher correction.

Indeed, the teacher who causes any home-work to be corrected is suspected of anti-union tendencies.

This method borders on the criminally callous, when we consider the low mental and self-esteem level thus engraved in a child in his crucial years for the rest of his life.

Our teachers and politicians keep talking of increased salaries, taxes, smaller classes, busing, integration, civil rights, sex education,...

And more money...

And Johnny cannot read, cannot write, cannot talk. He is taught to "adjust" to a permanent mediocrity and low self-esteem.

Far from a competition knight in shiny American armor.

Our deficit in the international trade increases as our competence decreases.

The worse the situation, the more demands crop up to raise the teachers' salaries, decrease class sizes, over-build more schools, issue more taxes, and make our failure only more expensive.

Good teachers are good at any salary level. Their performance may be enhanced by better facilities and salaries, but they don't become poor teachers if their salaries are not increased.

We may still have the most creative, competent and dedicated teachers in the world, but they have been muffled by gooey incompetence and union-supported zealotry.

There are no salary increases or funds that can compensate for patronizing incompetence.

Increasing salaries of teachers who keep the requirements low "to protect disadvantaged minorities" is like injecting more debilitation in hapless patients.

Funding teaching theories that are against higher expectations is like building water towers and filling them with sand to prevent drowning.

For every Newton, Shakespeare, Lincoln, Edison, educated in poor schooling systems, we can find literally thousands of wealthy intelligent people who enjoyed much more expensive education by much better teachers, in much richer schools, far better class-rooms, books, tutors, and obtained much lower results.

The important questions are: what did Einstein or any good achiever study, how much of it, what did he learn, at what age, what other subjects was he exposed to...

Not: how many were in his class room, what was his teacher's salary, pension plan, job security, seniority, how well heated was his school room, did the bus pick him up at home, did his books say "his-or-her" instead of "his"?

MEDIOCRITY ORDAINED               

In 1776, the "Maryland Journal" announced the arrival of a ship in Baltimore with "...various Irish commodities, among which are school masters, beef, pork, and potatoes" FOR SALE.

So much for the American populace of the time versus teachers and formal education.

Much has changed, in 200 years, but the underlying American anti-intel­lectualism has not lost much ground.

American colleges and other schools are still geared toward jobs and material success rather than the pursuit of knowledge.

The consequences of this approach are typified in our pride for our material/technological progress without any concurrent cultural/social development.

Too many, conformists or rebels, illiterate or PhD-holders have been denied the intellectual means to even perceive the problem.

The American educational "revival" spurred by the Russian Sputnik did nothing but confirm our cultural ailment: our motivation was to beat the Russians rather than improve our cultural level as such.

Furthermore, our goal was political rather than cultural.

To make things worse, after one-upping the Russians in the unscientific but glamorous Moon race, we are about to blaze new trails in educational regression.

While many countries focus more on the essence and quality of educational fundamentals, we focus on bureaucratic, technocratic, financial, racial and political intricacies that make us lose sight of the real educational goal.

At the very bottom, we find only a vague non-committal mention of the "best-possible" students' educational levels for our teachers to reach.

It started with the reasonable ideal of preventing the formation of oppressive elites, like some European aristocracy and the genteel callousness toward the unfortunate by some refined rich Americans (or rich people of any country), who displayed a class narcissism rather than social concern.

American anti-intellectualism ensued, also on the basis of the threat of possible evil uses of the intellect.

This was no more rational than outlawing water on the basis of drowning and floods; but it was powerfully supported by business and religious interests who were intolerant of analysis, criticism and doubts originated by intellectuals.

Intellectual power causes more fear and hatred by those who don't possess it, because it cannot be taken away or simply acquired, like material power and riches.

The child, therefore, had to be considered not as a thinking human being to be developed, but as a citizen to be adjusted to the dominant environment.

Since the Establishment needs these adjusted conformists, the high ideal of comprehensive mass education, in America, is achieved in the wrong directions and for the wrong reasons.

As education of the masses is conceived by the educationists (who replace the scholars) as education of the mediocre for the mediocre by the mediocre, school must be geared to mediocrity and political require­ments, rather than to the pursuit of knowledge.

In this light, both mentally handicapped and brilliant children are disturbing freaks.

This position is dear to the majority of teachers, which, like any majority built by the unions and bureaucracy, is mediocre in intelligence and talent.

For them, any attempt to free the general tone from mediocrity would produce independent creativity and evolutionary tendencies no bureaucratic establishment could tolerate.

Good teachers, meanwhile, feel it is a crime not to enthuse some children to higher subjects for which they could have a creative affinity.

Such children could become great contributors to cultural and social evolution. Yet, as it is, those same children don't even suspect what they could do (or could have done), if given a chance...

Why risk failure in such task, when it is so much easier to adjust people to any of the numerous menial activities so useful to the System?.

After all, great minds are much more uncomfortable -even dangerous- to the system than routine workers, bureaucratic executives and the like.

Many modern teachers are intimidated by the real knowledge of English, History, Math, Geography and other fundamental subjects.

So, let the children choose "shop", "typing", "home-making", "driving instruction" instead of fundamental subjects unionized teachers find harder to learn than to pontificate about.

True education could eliminate the reasons for segregation and render integration an obvious evolutionary process.

Instead, since the levels of knowledge and honesty available for the task are deplorable, the reigning educational politics lets the nation focus on egregious integration and busing, rather than true education...

The teaching establishment is unable to educate youth toward true integration; so, it passes the buck to the politicians for counterfeit integration by decree. Which worsens the problem.

The present "intellectuals" find the new gilded endeavors easier and more profitable than the traditional goals.

How can a nation of contented cows cope with situations requiring much more that well-adjusted mediocrity?

Would contented cows elect a Lincoln or a Clinton?

How many teachers are now left who can really understand (not just state that they do) the creative importance of cultural speculation, theoretical and applied science, ancient and world history, foreign languages beyond Berlitz...

Historically, this makes the difference between progress and decadence.

AMERICAN PIMPLES                   

People have been killed over disputes on how many angels could dance on the head of a needle.

Wars massacred millions over hairsplitting of one religion or another.

Just as seriously, century-long disputes have raged about improving the methods of transmitting knowledge to the younger generations.

These disputes are more intense than ever before in every nation with ambition to compete with the rest of the world.

It could not be otherwise, because the present technology requires much more complex apprenticeship than ever before.

Language syntax must be mastered. Mathematics, science, art, humanities and virtually every aspect of knowledge have reached a complexity of unfor­giv­ing dimensions.

Those who don't master the intricacies of the new developments will be simply left behind.

No excuses.

There was a time in which knowledge was a privilege rulers could bestow to their favorites.

It remained within the aristocracy's control and was not freely available to the commoners.

Later, printing and the industrial revolution made the spread of knowledge possible and necessary.

As knowledge became more complex, it could no longer be limited to one social class.

It became like a difficult mountain that could only be conquered by those who could climb it, rather than by those who merely had the right to climb, birthright or not.

Nowadays, the complexity of knowledge is so demanding that birth- and class-advantages have become almost irrelevant.

The most crucial of all problems is raising new generations of intel­lectuals, astronomers, nuclear physicists, genetic engineers, systems analysts, cybernetists, programmers, managers, researchers who can pull us out of the present cultural, socio-economical, political and psychological inadequacy.

It would be disastrous to neglect any available human resource.

No one who is competently involved in any knowledge field would dream of closing the door to anyone on account of race, religion, politics or anything unrelated to knowledge.

On the other hand, as there are exceptions in everything, there are bigoted decision-makers in the way of talented people.

Such people are found in any field.

They are mostly incompetent executives that appear here and there like pimples on a teenager's face.

We also know that we have to be patient with pimples: they may become a tragedy in the teenager's emotional makeup, but they are no more than a temporary cosmetic nuisance to be eliminated by normal growth processes.

A premature attack on the pimples can cause permanent scars or other damages.

Rather than wasting themselves in pimples-fighting, teenagers progress by focusing on diet, exercise, development of knowledge, personality, talent, character.

To paraphrase the above in our schools, we concentrate on the pimples and take the rest for granted.

Our schools concentrate on integration, unisex, sex education, and take the subject of knowledge-transmitting education for granted.

Thus, those who promote integration or sex education are the ones who understand them the least.

The educationists are very jealous about education.

This may contribute to detour our focus toward integration and other matters that have nothing to do with the teaching of knowledge.

The most they allow the public into is the domesticated P.T.A.

Years ago, I innocently decided to join the P.T.A. to give my contribution to the local schools.

All I could experience was elections of new officials, applauding praises of departing officials, making and selling cookies, minutes of previous meetings, collections of contributions, reports on money spent and money needed to buy something...

All under the benevolent eye of a watching teacher.

No discussion of educational curricula and methods. Parents were presumed to be too incompetent for the subject...

My delusion was the hope that we would deal with the possibilities, cutticula, problems and results in the education of our children.

Education is too important a matter to be left up to the teachers alone, just like war is not a matter only for generals.

All over the civilized world, the debate is intense on the latest findings about the knowledge to be transmitted to the young.

New methods are developed, experimented, corrected, and refined.

Watchful parents, public officials and the general public try to spot curricula weaknesses and new possibilities as soon as possible, so that the children benefit the most and are harmed the least.

Everyone knows that educational deficiencies can damage children for life in ways we hardly understand.

We don't concentrate on improving the teaching of good English, history, science, math, any important subject, self-discipline...

We are not focusing on raising leaders, scientists, scholars, researchers, managers, creative minds.

We leave it up to the Russians, Japanese, Germans, French, Italians...

What we want to develop are well integrated mediocrities.  

All we hear about is integration and civil rights that benefit only politicians rather than any child in any manner.

We will know the disastrous results only when they are so bad that even the politicians will be able to see them.

THE PEDAGOGIC CALAMITY                

A teacher who knows more about education than the subject he is to teach is more dangerous than useful.

The subject of study is what our students go to school for. No one enrolls in any learning institution to absorb pedagogic radiations.

Methods of teaching are arbitrary theories based on psychological, philosophical, political, folkloristic, religious and other notions that rarely stand the test of time.

They are closer to brainwashing than transmission of knowledge.

They specialize in transmitting conviction, rather than knowledge, independently of its value and competence.

In this light, true concern with the quality of knowledge can only be an interference with the true flow of pedagogic processes teachers were trained for.

In reality, the subject-competence of the teacher (independently of teaching theories) is decisively more important than the teaching method, class size, equipment and budget.

A subject-competent teacher of a poorly financed class of 40 is certainly more beneficial than a mediocre prosperous teacher of a tidy class of 10.

A teacher with faulty knowledge in the subject to be taught, but trained in teaching theories, can harm a class of 10 more deeply than a class of 30.

Unfortunately, this is the kind of teachers our educational Establishment is producing now.

Predictably, teacher unions demand smaller classes, higher salaries and more funds, not higher teaching standards, as a condition for better education.

The politicians, then, want to know: are there more union-influenced or knowledge-oriented votes?

Salary doesn't solve the problem. Whenever educators fail, they contrive to convince the public that higher salaries, more teachers and better equipment are the answer.

We are expected to reward those who fail and give them more means to fail more expensively.

Throwing money at educational problems is a good way to make sure that they become chronic:

that money finances the problems, not the solutions.

When  educators,  politicians and other concerned people face education  by subject of learning (which is rare, for they prefer to talk about  salaries, funds, benefits, facilities and working hours), they handle it like a Pandora-box no one is willing to open.

Take mathematics, for instance.

One hears about requiring a number of hours, teachers, workshops or aids in high school.

Of course, never forget salaries, equipment and budgets.

But what math? Addition and subtraction with optional multiplication?

"New math"? What about ratios, percentages, roots, powers, algebra, trigonometry, logarithms, determinants, analytical geometry, calculus etc?

How much of each, how fast, to what level and degree, with what method?

Those subjects are discussed in other countries, not in USA.

In my business, we have an elemental test for job applicants: calculating simple percentages (e.g.: find 51%, 43.9% of 375).

The number of college science-graduates that fail that test is not less than stunning.

Large sums are spent to hire consultants to help raise more money for the consultants, for the teachers, etc. etc...

Or take history. Why do they hide it inside of "social studies"? 

Why does most history for our children start with the Pilgrims and a foggy Biblical notion before that?

The general American public believes that the Roman empire consisted of orgies and Christian  persecutions,  that all monarchies were oppres­sive, Europeans are decadent, the whites introduced slavery, and similar nonsense.

How many history teachers really know history?

What is the use of knowing how to teach history when they know no history worth teaching?

Take the frequent phenomenon of a German or French teacher who hardly knows the language he is teaching; if he is adept in educational theories and is put to teach a small class, he is considered a good learning experience for his students.

To the contrary, he will ruin the chances his pupils have to learn German or French, and very efficiently so, because his destructive influence is concentrated on a few students.

One who masters German or French, rather than teaching theories, is much more useful, even if his class has 40-50 students per session.

American, German or Italian children learn fluent English, German or Italian almost only by osmosis from relatives, friends and neighbors who simply use the language, without any pedagogic skill whatsoever.

I never learned to be a teacher, but, on many subjects, I had to correct my children's teachers' instructions so frequently that it was embarrassing.

The only way we could handle it was to instruct the children to do as the teachers said, just for the grades, but ignore it later, because the teachers could not be taught...

Today's protected teachers are artisans of a unionized craft which contrives to look professional.

On the other hand, there are many really excellent teachers who are held back by politicized union rules.

In the past, teachers adopted an intellectual posture on the subject they were to teach. Thus, in the worst cases, they ended up transmitting their knowledge by osmosis, just like a parent who teaches a child to speak.

That is remarkably better than the present unionized incompe­tence.

Children and other students need exposure to the subject to be learned rather than to an educator who only knows how to teach a subject he hardly knows.

Today's activists are misinformed people with the fervor of pioneers in the midst of an indifferent population.

Like children, they need to believe in somebody.

They are the modern system's "groupies".

Our unionized teachers have become adept at the bureaucrat's game of extracting money from the taxpayers.

They have swept the true goals of education under the rug.

Like the apparatchiks, they cultivate the skill of over-budgeting and overspending with the appearance of under-financed distress.

Like the apparatchiks, the more inefficient they are, the more money they obtain.

The more incompetent they are, the more intolerant they are of criticism.

They flaunt their blunders as virtues.

For instance, they suffocate the quality of education in frivolous courses, lavishly-printed glib books and silly educational materials and present them as "enriched and progressive methodology".

As they have no self-discipline, they cannot instill it in their students. Thus, they have no choice but to adopt the method of teaching through "fun".

Subjects that should be recognized as necessary are transformed into "fun" to learn.

Pleasure takes the place of "old-fashioned" duty. They consider the idea of duty to be harmful to the child.

The child is conditioned to accept "fun" and reject necessity, let alone the unbearable "duty".

If the new pedagogues are successful, the new America will be run by a generation of spoiled brats.

The euphemism for them may be "free spirits", "uninhibited individuals".

The decay is more insidious than contributing to the delinquency of minors, because it injects an incurable disease as if it were health.

Even pirates are less dangerous, for pirates do not pretend to promote virtue.

It is easy for them to get their groupies going to drum-up more funds from taxes or other means.

This increases their power to debase education.

With the enormous means at their disposal, they finance an educational "scientific" research slanted to select supporting evidence for their pet ideas.

They become as dogmatic as intolerant high-priests.

They develop a sacred jargon that is supposed to denote professionalism, just like the intellectuals of past centuries used Latin as a high-level standard.

However, whereas Latin was used to facilitate commu­nication, the new educationalese tends to be pompous, impressive and cautiously incomprehensible.

The visible evidence is: American education is the richest, best financed and best equipped in the entire world. Yet, its medio­crity is clear, documented, impossible to hide.

The solution proposed by the teaching establishment: American education needs more money...

Culturally, rather than pursuing the truth, the educators have become like a state-church which prescribes the new dogmas and fetishes.

One of their fetishes is an indoctrinating feminism that distorts girls as well as boys.

They don't eve permit any investigation in the matter.

They have settled beyond any discussion that differences between boys and girls are only artificially imposed by male-dictated traditions, in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Both teachers and students must be unisexualized.

Just as civilrightniks impose pro-black racism in the name of "equality", so do the pedagogues impose multimedia programs with feminist obsessions.

The teaching establish­ment has been able to worsen the situation even beyond the imagination of public enemies.

The City of New York, for instance, prescribes homosexual propaganda for first graders in books titled "Heather Has Two Mommies", in favor of lesbianism, "Daddy's Roommate", for male homosexuality, "Gloria Goes To Gay Pride"...

Then, it promulgates the "Teenager's Bill Of Rights: "I have the right to decide whether to have sex and who to have it with... I have the right to buy and use condoms... Condoms can be sexy!...Guys can get used to the feel of condoms while masturbating."

They also give lessons on oral sex to teenagers... [I can hardly believe it is true…]

The American Civil Liberties Union strenuously opposes the encouragement of abstinence in California schools, on the basis that abstinence and marital fidelity are "religious concepts".

Many years ago, when society was more tranquil, the worst common disturbances in schools were "running in the halls", "not paying attention to the teacher", "talking too loud"....

In 1993: murder, drugs, guns, violence, rape, hate-crime, multiple pregnancies, openly displayed sex perversion, sexual harassment...: all in the name of the new liberation, feminism, "civil rights", "equality" and, of course, to protect the children from competition and lack of self esteem...

In 2001: I am reluctant to find out…

If that is education, our only salvation is a revolution against the pedagogic oppression of the American people.

TEACHING BY EXAMPLE

One of the normal tasks of a teacher is to show how something is done, by doing it himself in the present of the students.

This, however, is not possible in some cases in which the teaching is of a coaching or other guiding nature.

In these cases, the task of the guiding person is often impeded by unreasonable requirements that the person who cannot perform what he teaches cannot expect to be followed.

Obvious cases are those of criminals who want to raise their own children to a higher level of morality and competence.

To deny them the right to achieve that goal because they break the rules they want their children to live by would do injustice to their innocent (or at least "not-guilty") children.

For instance, it would be weird to tell a thief or a prostitute they have no right to raise a daughter into virtuous living...

When a thief or a prostitute, or a murderer claims: "I don't want my daughter to become what I became", we should understand and believe.

On the other extreme, the cases of coaches or trainers are also clear.

One who is training an Olympic champion only needs competence, not the ability to do himself what he is teaching.

He may even be physically handicapped, as long as he can evaluate, teach, direct, correct and advise his athletes.

PIGS AND THE PEARL

TV is not the wasteland it is claimed to be for our children.

True, its programs can be vastly improved, but, as a medium, TV is a godsend, if used properly.

Never before have children been offered a better entertainment.

Those who delight in deprecating television simply fail to evaluate a superb opportunity.

They remind me of the ancient tale about pigs unable to use pearls.

When I was a child, I had a truly caring nanny. She did a lot to entertain and educate me. I liked her and her genuine concern, but I was hopelessly bored. My interests were outside her world.

Most of the other kids I knew were not less lonely than I. Our parents were loving and available, but they were not the result of some magic wand we could have used.

The best that could happen was for us kids to meet without supervision, which was rarely feasible.

Books became the long-sought solution when I learned to read.

But what about those who are not interested in reading? What before one learns to read?

What about the unexpected discoveries that are not offered by books?

What about unimaginative parents and teachers, limited financial means, limiting environments of all sorts?

TV can compensate for many of those limitations.

At worst, TV could be considered the best non-supervising babysitter available.

It is not only a marvelous entertainer, but it can be a superb source of information and discovery.

No parent, teacher or nanny can be such a vivid source of encyclopedic information.

Its effectiveness is of historical significance.

Its possibilities not only go beyond anything could be imagined before, but they are already within our daily reach.

Unfortunately, however, our educators and politicians are contriving to drag TV and other media down to their level.

TV programs have one thing in common with computer input/output: garbage in, garbage out. “GiGo”.

It must be suspected that the networks are under some kind of extortio­nist pressure to serve 2 main purposes: free sex and racial integration.

These purposes are so clumsily displayed that they become repellent for tastelessness.

There is an overanxious obsession with showing interracial couples, vapidly imperious black leaders and intellectuals, ridiculously refined sex bombs, white males constantly straightened out by females or blacks, commercials regulated by badly disguised racial or feminist rules....

Cartoons for children don't escape the integration and feminism and homosexual obsession.

The adults ignore the programs or watch them with resentful resignation.

The children are much more deeply harmed by them.

Instead of learning useful notions, they are brainwashed with the present fetishism that will make them misfits in a future that will have a much higher level of values and culture than they are trained to appreciate.

First, their souls are desensitized, then their intellects crippled with counterfeit notions.

At the end, they will have lost the ethos, pathos, drives and inspira­tions that could have energized them if they had been raised in the traditional love for the truth, beauty and goodness the National Education Association, the feminazis, the American Civil Liberty Union, the racial integration maniacs, and, of course, the leftist liberals don't allow our educators to believe in any more.

It is diabolic that our children are first lobotomized in the schools, then they are consigned to the TV brainwashing.

HIPPOPOTAMUS PIANO CONCERTO

My 8-year old son was practicing in a group karate class conducted by a 30-ish "black belt" lady who seemed very devoted to the martial art.

As the turn came for a 7-8 year old girl, the instructor tried to inspire the little one: "Now, imagine a man is trying to rape you...".

"What's that?"

"Well, it's something nasty men like to do to women"

"What do you mean?"

"Think he is going to hurt you bad. He grabs you and tries to undress you"

"Why?"

"Oh, you are too little to understand it. Anyhow, think of something really bad. It hurts a lot and can ruin you for life... Just know that you are trying to defend yourself against something terrible, real bad, like a man who tries to hurt you. Men can be very mean with women..."

And on and on the black-belt lady went, unaware that she was making an unnecessary mess of an unnecessary matter that she (let alone the child) was not mentally and emotionally equipped to handle.

The same and worse bungling results from instructors of sex education, drug prevention, teenager birth control centers, "battered" women and children havens, and other social help centers that are spawning faster than we are aware.

Those instructors handle the various subjects with little more skill or knowledge than a hippopotamus can play piano.

Handling these matters would require knowledge and sophistication very few have for the purpose.

On the other hand, it is not necessary to make people swim in a cesspool to teach them how to be clean.

But this is the equivalent of what our teachers, social workers, therapists and demagogues do with sex education, drug prevention, "abused" women or children havens, birth control instruction, civil rights classes.

Teaching honesty and virtue is not only inspiring, but incomparably more effective than courses in politicized history, homosexuality, dishon­esty, prostitution, homicide, theft and anti-Western-Culture.

People go to church to worship God and God's law. As a consequence, they avoid and fight evil.

They don't go to church to learn mainly about evil, its manifestations, intricacies and dangers in order to worship God and God's law.

Our sex and drug education courses teach about sex and drugs, and how to avoid the consequences of their abuses. This negative approach is futile, and short lived when useful, because it is not the consequence of teaching virtue, self-discipline, and goals that can inspire the strength needed to avoid promiscuity and drugs.

Without those goals, made stronger than any vice attraction, one is left in a limbo, with nothing to be inspired by, after winning the battle against vice.

Teaching virtue is the most effective protection against vice.

Describing vices, how they work and how they may attract us can only generate curiosity and a negative motivation to fight an evil as the ultimate goal. There is nothing beyond that which we can dwell upon or be inspired by.

We need to explore and master virtues, skills, possibilities, what we can reach, achieve and build with them.

Many teachers and other educators really wouldn't know beyond platitudes about what to do with virtue, skill, knowledge and culture.

The National Education Association does not allow teaching virtue, knowledge, skill, competition, culture.

Teaching values has become unfashionable. Therefore, all educators can do is to expose their victims to the temptations of vices and weaknesses, in as many details as they can come up with, and then tell the hapless listeners what they could do against what they have heard or seen.

We should first show the educators and leaders what virtue, knowledge, skills, talents, self-discipline, working for needs rather than just fun,  are really like, what they can do..., and how it is really possible to spent a whole life inspired by them.

The task is gigantic, considering our present status, but America did it in the past, most civilized countries are doing it now...

THE RIGHT/WRONG MIRAGE

There are still some cultures now, in Africa, Asia and Sudamerica, where young men go out, find a man (or woman) of another tribe, kill him, cut his head and parade it at home as a prove of valor and full-fledg­ed manhood.

Respect and honors accrue to the hero, accor­ding to their society's concept of justice and virtue.

In our culture, nothing could be worse. Justice would execute, or jail for life, the one who would be an honored hero in the other culture.

I have never discussed his philosophy with a head hunter, but I should try to rationalize it to members of our culture:

First, no one can choose his way to die, outside of suicide.

Second, death by unexpected decapitation, with or without a fight, is immense­ly more merciful than death by sickness, by old age, or following our gruesom "due process" of law.

Third, we exaggerate the meaning of life: no matter what our ideals and achievements are, all becomes nothing with death.

Even "immortal" fame or tradition perish or change beyond recognition.

Reasoning can create and destroy whatever concept of justice or truth anyone has come up with so far.

Therefore religion took over in most societies.

Ours is also explicit, if only by metaphor, about Adam and Eve's unleashing all evils by eating from the Tree of Know­ledge.

Since only Evil results from our interminable discussions about Right and Wrong, religion gives us a dependable revealed, sacred, undis­putable belief in Good and Evil, Virtue, Justi­ce, Truth.

We cannot escape the judgement (=justice) of our all-seeing God, who knows everything we do, think and feel.

We know nothing safer.

No police or system of justice can control us as thoroughly as religion. But evolutionary culture has given us the level of education to understand that religion was created for cultures where the general level of education was unable to understand higher concepts than religious commandments.

The trouble is that we are reluctant to admit that our culture has not yet reached beyond that level.

We are probably reaching the end of the "great religions era". But we  cannot find a substitute for religion yet.

All we can understand, so far, is that our social organization, with its system of justice, is like a game with its rules.

Our laws are our game's rules. We have finally understood that our "courts of justice" are no more than "courts of law", that is: places where our laws (rules of the game) are arbi­trated on the bases not of who is right, but on the basis of the skills of the litigants: the same as in any game.

The questions: "What is Truth?", "What is Justice" remain still unresolved.

Therefore, living by undisputed religious laws, or command­ments, is far more reliable than living according to our continuously debated interpre­tations of truth and justice.

The trouble is that too many of our religious leaders are snake-oil barkers.

With them, theology has become a hopelessly hollow and loud drum.

The more the theologians strut in their imaginary garbs, the more they expose their nakedness. 

The various secret schools of wisdom that revealed the "truth" only to the "initiated", and only after a long period of supervised learning, were based on the experience that revealing the truth to the non initiated was like giving gasoline and matches to a little child.

In fact, it is easy to understand how the revelation that religion is no longer sufficient in our culture would unleash the most dangerous hordes of unfettered criminals and depraved do-gooders on our society. It has already started to happen.

To wit: the 1992 Rodney King hideous riots and their lunatic justifiers in Los Angeles.

Their depravity and infamy is irreversibly consigned to history.

The closest we have toward a reasonable solution could be inspired by  a crossbreeding of behavioral psychology, "Gestalt" procedures, and Confucianism, but with the Confucian dedicated belief in devotion to family, parents, friends, cultivation of the mind (in a sense of style more than knowledge as such), self control, social manners.

That is not a definite solution (probably better so), but a good start far superior to the present disastrous implementations by hippie-liberals of presumptuous interpretations of superficially acquired half-knowle­dge of rococo images of primitive utopian dreams.

Solution? Get politics and unions out of education, and rely on truly competent teachers and dedicated parents.

Unrealistic? Everything is unrealistic for an instant equal-results-with-everyone solution.

But gradual evolution is efficient.

A privatized educational system without unions and politics is possible, and we have enough talent for it.

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- Much of the puzzle of education is hidden in the fact that teaching is much easier than learning.

A surprising number of effective teachers are poor learners. They may be good students, but only in the sense of expanding what they know to confirm their own convictions. Thus, instead of learning something new, they merely add more fuel to the old fire.

The bottom-line irony is that the students are expected to acquire knowledge from educators who must teach an homogenized form of the old because they cannot learn the new.

- Our educators use a schizoid approach with the new generation.

They intend to eliminate feelings of superiority toward other cultures by making children study the other cultures in a diluted "social study" form.

A deeper examination of other cultures would show that they are self-centered, proud and convinced of their own superiority against us.

In other words, examining other cultures on their own terms would tend to convince us of our "inferiority"...

Our educators not only disagree with that conviction, but they are deeply convinced of their own superiority, on account of the superiority of their "non-superiority" approach, which the rest of the world must learn from them.

The result is that our children are immunized against what they study about other peoples.

That is, they learn that they are superior because they profess to deny that they are superior.

Until they consider their teachers' theories as frivolous as commercials...

- A crippling blow was delivered to the American culture when history was removed from public school curricula and substituted with "social studies".

History is the main component of knowledge, just like experience and evidence. It has to be used as the building elements of our edifice of culture.

Instead, the "social sciences" approach has emptied history of all its meaning and reduced it to an embalmed data bank.

From this data bank, information is retrieved that receives meaning from the opinions it is supposed to corroborate.

In other words, the same history that used to be the teacher of life has become a collection of puppets that receive life by the puppeteer who brings them to life to say what he puts in their mouths.

This system renders the falsification of reality as damaging to our culture as the falsification of charts to a navigator.

The picture of the damage to the American culture is even worse when we consider that also geography was emptied of its true meaning when it was buried with history in the "social sciences".

- The irresponsible arrogance of do-gooding educators forbids our teaching a left-handed child to use the right.

The consequences can be devastating or even fatal for the "protected" lefthander.

It is true that we have found no evidence that left handedness is a disability.

That does not mean, however, that we must refuse to be realistic. One thing is to defend the equal rights of a lefthander, which is obvious, and another is to deliver a lefthanded child to a world which is partial to righthanders.

Telephones, cars, weapons, instruments, cameras, tools of all kinds are made for right-handed people, simply because they are the majority. To condemn a parent or educator who trains a lefthander to be also righthanded is not only an arrogant presumption, but a cruel sentence to deprive the hapless child of a capability that would enable him to fit where lefthanders cannot. Reports of deaths caused by lefthan­d­ed misuse of righthanded tools in emergency are not too rare.

It should occur to educators that a lefthander should be allowed and helped to use his lefthandedness to his best advantage, but also to use his right hand where lefthandedness could be a hindrance.

Another abomination is the encouragement of interracial marriages for the sake of human equality and freedom rights. The consequences to the innocent spouses and their children can be not less than disastrous in an environment that is hostile to some interracial combina­tions. Even when the racial prejudices are repressed, the ordeal of the interracial victims is a lifelong handicap.

Damaging consequences of rules dictated by people with "politically correct" knowledge are surprisingly frequent and a plague in our educational system.

Counter-current behavior is sometimes good and should be encouraged, but only at the proper time, in proper cases, and with individuals who have what it takes to blaze trails.

Then, and only then, we may carefully lead all the world into the blazed trails...

- Our teaching establishment has discarded teaching all values coming from religion and tradition.

Really? Only sex restraint and related rules.

Like the feminists, they are primarily dedicated to freedom of the crotch: sex (call it "sexuality": it sounds better) freedom, contraception, abortion... Indeed, no teacher would dare to give Aspirin to a child without parental consent, but they would go to war for the right of minors to use contraceptives, condoms, and to abort without parental knowledge and consent.

Other values are being sneaked in, under other names, to be sure: irresponsibility (= rights without duties) for those who are dedicated to sex, parasitism; and responsibility only for those (the "exploi­ters") who work and produce.

- Once upon a time there were good teachers. Then, they were unionized.

-

 Parents and educators are further behind the competence they need than the bushmen behind nuclear physics.

- Today's education is propaganda of fads that cannot be taken more seriously than frivolous commercials.

- Our schools are dangerous when they form our children. The school function should be to inform, not to form.

Forming imparts opinions, not knowledge.

The opinions available from the present public school system aim to make children accept sexual perversion, homosexual and heterosexual promiscuity, reject Western culture, family, parental authority, marital fidelity, competition, pursue group rights to replace individual rights, demand "entitle­ments" without responsibilities..: the new Sodom and Gomorrah.

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