Archive for the ‘Education’ Category
by Jim Kouri, CPP
Several police organizations are up in arms over a taxpayer funded college honoring a cop-killer and domestic terrorist.
"The cowardly school administration at the City College of New York have allowed a student community room to be named in honor of a domestic terrorist and cop-killer," said officials from the National Association of Chiefs of Police in a statement.
"You can bet your life they'd never allow the center to be called The Jesus Christ Community Center."
The New York City college students who share the community room named for the escaped cop killer Assata Shakur proclaimed their love for the fugitive murderer.
Members of seven campus groups also commended the school administration for allowing them to work in the name of a domestic "terrorist" now believed to be hiding in Cuba.
"And we consider her a hero and role model for standing up for our people and putting her life on the line."
by Erik Rush
It's amazing what one can learn about politics – and people – from a ten year-old…
My son (the ten year-old) saw the horrible condition of the starving people in Darfur (the Sudanese region in which human rights-related atrocities and ethnic cleansing have been going on since 2003) on a television news report. Every now and then, he will view people in similar condition in other war-torn nations, or ones in which there is political inequity (to put it politely). Obviously, the images of starving children are particularly disturbing to him.
"Why don't we send them food?" he asks.
"Well, we do," I tell him. "America sends billions of dollars in financial and food aid to countries like those every year."
"Billions?!?"
"That's right."
"Then why are they still starving?"
"Good question," say I. "Because the fat, aboriginal scum who run those countries generally steal most of the money and food and share it with the army in order to keep themselves in power."
"What's 'aboriginal' mean?"
"Never mind."
Miyamoto Musashi, the 16th-century samurai and great military figure in Japanese history, wrote about a concept he called "immature strategy" in his book Go Rin No Sho (A Book of five Rings). The basis of this was that one could not be an effective swordsman, military leader – or anything else, for that matter – utilizing underdeveloped, half-baked ideas or techniques.
Hence my son's initial response: Having been raised in a culture in which people ostensibly care about others, he reasoned that throwing a mess of resources at the problem would readily fix it. Then there's the fact that kids of that age still think everything ought to be the way they think it ought to be – just because.
Immature strategy; my ten year-old isn't aware of the political nuances involved, the corruption, greed and lack of concern for life that is business as usual in many cultures, but is anathema to the Judeo-Christian ethic to which he has been exposed. So his solutions are on a par with his maturity as well as his frame of reference.
School choice can transform the teaching profession, study finds
WASHINGTON – Public schools shun the best and brightest teachers, claims a study released today by the Cato Institute. Indeed, the study finds that the best teachers fare worse than their mediocre colleagues due to biases in hiring and compensation practices.
In the study "Giving Kids the Chaff: How to Find and Keep the Teachers We Need," Marie Gryphon, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, reveals serious flaws in the teacher training, selection, and retention practices of monopolistic state school systems, and argues that market-driven personnel policies produce a far superior alternative to the status quo.
In public schools, "teachers are chosen and compensated on the basis of criteria set by teachers' unions and other entrenched interests," Gryphon explains. "Because those criteria do not focus on the qualities that define good teachers, they often favor less-qualified applicants over applicants whose skills could dramatically improve educational outcomes for their students."
While many policymakers advocate across-the-board salary increases, Gryphon finds that such pay raises do not, in fact, improve teacher quality. In actuality, "untargeted, across-the-board teacher salary hikes may lower the overall quality of the teaching workforce, because they may attract more low-quality applicants," she states. "Only new hiring policies that effectively separate the wheat from the chaff can transform the teaching profession."
Give parents school choice, and give schools the autonomy and incentives they need to hire the best teachers, Gryphon recommends. School choice will foster competition among schools, and in turn, "public school administrators seek out higher-performing applicants and work harder to retain them." This effect, Gryphon finds, is "especially pronounced in low-income districts and can meaningfully improve educational outcomes for poor students."
Source: CATO Institute
By Thomas E. Brewton
Progressive educators today proudly declare that they don't warp students' minds by teaching specific bodies of knowledge, by teaching to the test; they teach students how to think. That concept is a meaningless and dangerous abstraction.
Commenting upon a recent posting, a reader wrote:
"…. Now, if you go to college, you learn how to analyze information critically as opposed to reeling with whatever gut, emotional response you get. You learn not "What to think," but "How to think." The only way that education will ever succeed in our times is if it raises a generation of children who can not only read, but read between the lines."
No one would disagree with the sentiment that children should be able to understand the context of what they read and have a sufficient breadth of knowledge to bring critical judgment to what they read.
But the concept of learning how to think, as a stand-alone pedagogy, is meaningless. One has to think about something, and, in order to understand what one is thinking about, is is necessary to learn a great many facts about that something. In many cases understanding comes only with much practice and drill.
One might as well hand an oboe to an untutored music student and lecture him on how to think about playing the oboe, without benefit of being able to read music and without practice to master the mechanics of producing correct notes from the instrument.
This is particularly true, for example, in mathematics. When a teacher presents a concept with a blackboard demonstration, keener students may be able to follow each step of the process. But only later, working alone at home on assignments, will the student discover what he doesn't know and in the process learn the concept sufficiently well to solve similar problems in the future.
When students are allowed to use electronic calculators to solve problems, their minds are not engaged in any meaningful way with mathematics itself. They might as well be playing a video game.
But they are learning how to think about mathematical problems. They just don't really understand what they are thinking about.
Even teachers' unions dominated by progressive liberalism have begun to admit that the various genres of new math fail to teach mathematics to students. When it doesn't matter whether students can solve problems and get correct answers, when it is believed sufficient for students to have some conceptual idea about a problem, we have a nation of students falling each year farther behind Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian students in real scientific accomplishment.
By Thomas E. Brewton
From the beginning of colonial life in British North America, Puritans insisted that every man, woman, and child be literate enough to read the Bible and to discuss theological questions. From this came America's first publicly funded elementary schools and our first colleges.
The Puritans who founded New England were among the most highly educated persons in England, the leaders and ministers being mostly Cambridge University graduates. All of the original colonists, men and women, were able to read and write and were students of the Bible.
Even more important than formal training to read and write, however, was the totality of family, church, and political society in the formation of children's character, which was the original meaning of education. Education was conceived broadly as the transference to its children of a society's culture, the absolute essentiality for the survival of society, particularly for Puritans in the savage wilds of North America in the early 17th century.
I wrote in How Far Have We Fallen?:
"Some scholars have described [John] Locke as the father of modern education in England. His 1692 “Some Thoughts Concerning Education” provides us a base line for assessing present-day educational practices. Harvard at that time was 56 years old. The Pilgrims had landed at Plymouth 72 years earlier.
"Locke begins with a child’s infancy and lays out an educational path through the child’s coming of age. Locke also advises that children’s natural curiosity should be used to engage them in learning. He continually admonishes against the use of punishments in education.
"He brooks no nonsense or bullying by students, however, seeing that as a flaw in teaching morality and decorum.
"Several things will surprise today’s students.
"The first surprise is the order of emphasis Locke assigns to the objects of education. They are virtue, wisdom, breeding (courtesy and decorum), and, last, learning specific subjects."
Since President Clinton, the dumbing down of American students through education has become evident. Our public education system never really intended to truly educate our children. The father of our modern public education, Dewey, was a true socialist who did not have the best of interests in our Children's education.
by Alan Caruba
http://www.anxietycenter.com/
It is an act of thievery to take money to provide goods or services and then fail to do so. Our nation’s schools have become a great criminal conspiracy, promising to educate our children, but more often producing “graduates” without even the most basic skills, let alone a useful, wider body of knowledge.
“My daughter is now 20 years old,” one mother wrote to me recently. “After graduating from high school in June 2005, she enrolled at the local community college. It was necessary for her to take a placement test and it was determined she needed to take Basic Skills Math and English before she could take [college level courses.] After failing both classes twice, she will not be returning. It breaks my heart to see that she can’t pass basic math or English class. How did she graduate high school?”
The answer is that her parents were heavily levied with property taxes, the vast portion of which was then given to the local school system to pay teachers and administrators salaries, along with all the other costs of operation. They, in turn, passed her daughter along, unmindful and indifferent to whether she learned anything. “She has been robbed of a basic education and we have been robbed of our tax dollars for 19 years.”
Early in his first term, President Bush embraced the “No Child Left Behind” legislation that has since been found wanting for its one-size-fits-all approach to education, its over-emphasis on testing, and its punishment of “under-performing” schools. The result has been to expose most schools as inadequate and to encourage every form of administrative cheating necessary for a school to meet the standards set by the law.
The idea was to force some improvement on a system everyone already knew was failing students. Laws, however, do not educate students. Teachers are expected to do that and it is no surprise that the National Education Association—a union—hated the idea of improvement. Indeed, from the 1960s to the present day, the NEA has done its best to undermine, if not destroy, a system of education that served previous generations of Americans quite well.
After a year-long study, the federally funded Commission on the Future of Higher Education reported that U.S. colleges are not giving students “the education that they need.” Pointing to “disturbing signs,” the panel concluded that even though degrees are being awarded, many graduates “have not actually mastered the reading, writing and thinking skills” they should have gained. As can be expected, the report urged wider access to federal grants for those who want to spend four years earning an increasingly suspect degree.
Our colleges are suffering form the same malady as all of our public schools, the dumbing down of the students. This is all because of the government intrusion in operating our school systems. Parents or students no longer have any opportunity for input and are helpless to change the curriculum.
It is no wonder that many graduating students are unable to balance a checking account.