School Is Hell

Norman Mailer and Parade Magazine

2008-05-14T11:07:00.000-07:00

Last year, the writer Norman Mailer spoke to Parade Magazine about the deplorable condition of children's reading ability in this country. The magazine asked for readers' responses. I wrote to them as follows:

To the editor of Parade Magazine:

Your lead article for Jan. 23, “One Idea,” asks: 1. Do you agree with Norman Mailer? and 2. What one idea will change America for the better? My reply is as follows:

I disagree. Mailer correctly identifies a huge problem – the poor reading skills of America’s public school children – but he mistakenly blames TV commercials, when the failing school system itself is the true culprit. (If anything, commercials help people to learn English.)

The public schools have the children captive for twenty thousand hours over twelve years or so. Despite that opportunity, they fail to teach millions of children to read or calculate well. The failure is the schools’ – not TV.

Mr. Mailer is among millions of people who think that all the school system needs is a tweak here, or more money there, and it will educate us well. However, he and those others are wrong. In terms of its own goals, the school system is working just as it is designed -- to indoctrinate and to offer only a minimum of learning. Early documents show that the mediocrity of the state-run schools is intentional. If the government wanted high literacy, that is what it would produce, but it wants something else entirely: a workforce – a dumbed-down populace that will be predictable, docile, and dependent on government and other institutions.

What’s going on? The system employs a reading instruction method (whole language) that prevents many children from learning how to read adequately, and it also employs math instruction programs (called "fuzzy math") that ignore the teaching of basic algorithms – the tools for calculating accurately and the steps needed in order to learn more advanced math. One result of such poor methods of instruction are the recent scores on international tests (PISA, TIMSS, et al) that show how poorly American schools rank when compared to those of other industrial countries. (for specific reasons why the US methods are ineffective, go to the website of Fordham Foundation, www.edexcellence.net, and see their piece, “The State of State Standards.”)

The failure of the school system does have a solution, and that is my One Idea for changing America for the better. It is as follows: Education is in the wrong hands. The central fact of the public school system is that it is not owned or run by “the public,” but instead it is owned and run by government. Therefore, despite what we are told about "local control," there is no such thing. Education in America is under federal and state control, and that is its problem.

For education to improve, it must be separated from government control and be allowed to enter a free market of privately owned, privately operated, and privately (parent) funded schools that will offer what parents want for their children and are willing to pay for. For those who cannot afford direct payments for education, the private sector has many ways of providing the needed funds, such as scholarships and tuition grants. When school taxes are no longer collected, the great majority of families will have (retain) that money to spend for the amount and quality of education they want for their children.

The future of education is the free market where the internet and private schooling compete for students. Today, a million or more are homeschooling with great success, and thousands of websites offer learning of all types from many of the world’s best teachers and experts. Meanwhile, the public schools are getting worse every day in comparison, because of their bureaucratic and political entanglements, the teacher unions, their archaic methods, poor programs and culture of corruption.

Education is too important to leave in the hands of a coercive monopoly run by politicians and bureaucrats. We have choice in everything except the most important thing: education. That must change through privatization.

Thanks for the opportunity to comment.

Ned Vare, Guilford, CT

Homeschool or Unschool?

2008-05-09T13:39:00.000-07:00

My wife and I are advocates of homeschooling in all its forms, but for our son we chose Unschooling which might be described as letting the learner choose what, when, where and with whom he learns.

The big advantage our son had, thanks to UNschooling throughout his youth, was that he learned to be in charge of his learning, and really his life to a great degree. In contrast, kids who attend schools learn to wait for others to tell them what to do, what to think. After twelve years of that, they become completely dependent on others for direction. In our son's case, he learned to be in charge of his own life to the degree he was able.

In general, that does not prepare young people for college. Colleges prefer people who have initiative and can motivate themselves, who know what they want to learn, and most important, know how to find information when they need it, and are not afraid to make decisions for themselves. Those characteristics are the opposite of what public schools teach. The government schools have the goal of turning out a "workforce" of dependent predictable people. The government does not want people to be well educated -- just enough, but no more. The "economy" needs lots of sheep, not too many shepherds. Lots of spectators, not many players. Our son, and many homeschooled children we know, learned to be independent and creative thinkers, to do what was right for them, not necessarily for the "economy."

School does not prepare children for life. Each year of school merely prepares them for the next year of school. Our motto is, "Live with your children as though there were no such thing as school." Let your kids know that they are responsible for their lives and for their learning, no one else is.

Our son never did lessons, never looked at a school book. We did not teach him school stuff at home. He learned what he was interested in, which was almost everything. He scored incredibly high on the SATs and got into college easily on his own and breezed through happily graduating Magna Cum Laude. He was well prepared for college without doing any of the school stuff. He was prepared for life, not just college. He is grateful for his experience growing up and we are still his best friends. What more can we ask?

Postscript: Cassidy met a wonderful lady in Seattle and they have moved back to Brooklyn, NY to live. The couple have asked to be married at our house in CT and the fiancee also asked Luz to be their minister and perform the ceremony in June. How sweet it is!

Letter to a Worried Parent

2008-05-06T17:00:00.000-07:00

To a mother of a bright child in New Hampshire:

Ever since its inception (around 1850), the government school system has waged a constant war against both children and parents, and against all communities. The war is between the desires of parents for their children and the opposing needs of the State to produce a docile, predictable (not-too-well educated) "workforce" to serve the economy and the military.

Once a parent places a child in government school, the differences appear, and the longer the child stays, the more apparent they become. Quite simply, the school is not on your side in the war over your child's mind. Homeschooling begins when a parent realizes that the state has goals for children that are opposite to their own. Thus, homeschooling is almost always for positive reasons since it reconciles the child's needs (and interests) with his/her life experience. In homeschooling, the child serves his/her own needs, not primarily those of the state.

Your bad experience with the schools regarding your son is typical of many. The public school system, whatever its employees may tell you, is not interested in individuals and their progress toward their "personal best." That is all hype. The system is designed from the top down to be a "one-size-fits-all" factory style grinder turning out a pre-designed mass of citizens, not individuals inspired to reach their individual potential. Dumbing down is not a catch phrase or an accident; it is the national policy. (You can look it up in John Taylor Gatto's great book, "The Underground History of American Education"). Remember, the employees do not work for you or your children; they all work for the state, and serve the state's needs only.

In general, public schools ignore bright children. Helping high achievers is simply not on the agenda of the public schools. A student who wants or needs special attention must depend on individual employees -- in some cases breaking school/union rules. Luckily, such employees exist and are helping a few children, but it is at the risk of their jobs in many cases. The state wants a middle mass of citizens coming from its schools -- not exceptional, creative independent thinkers.

Start homeschooling now. Have no fear. You do not need a particular motive or reason, they are all good.

All best wishes,
Ned Vare
send for info packet: nedvare@ntplx.net

Six Billion Dollars Later

2008-05-02T10:24:00.000-07:00

6 Billion Dollars Later, a Lot of Children Are Left Behind

As if you weren't convinced enough that the public school system is a failed one, a recent study has again proven the flaws in the No Child Left Behind program. According to the U.S. Department of Education (ironically, a champion of NCLB), studies show that schools using the Reading First program performed no better than schools that did not.

Reading First is an early phonics program designed by the government. $1 billion dollars of our taxes have gone to Reading First each year since the 2002 No Child Left Behind law was passed. Classrooms that use Reading First spend about 10 more minutes a day on reading lessons… resulting in no marked improvement as far as reading comprehension is concerned across the board.

One thing did improve in Reading First schools, however… their annual funding. They weren't the only ones who were being rewarded financially, either. According to the 2007 written testimony of John P. Higgins Jr., the Reading First program has been rife with corruption:

Through our work, we found that the Department:
1) appeared to inappropriately influence the use of certain programs and assessments;
2) failed to comply with statutory requirements and its own guidance;
3) obscured the requirements of the statute; and
4) created an environment that allowed real and perceived conflicts of interest.

It seems that the Three Rs now stand for revenue, revenue, revenue.

This post was contributed by Heather Johnson, who is an industry critic on the subject of university reviews http://www.universityreviewsonline.com/ . She invites your feedback at heatherjohnson2323@gmail.com.

BusRadio

2008-05-01T16:59:00.000-07:00

The road to Hell starts with a school bus ride.

Children’s Advocates Ask Companies Not to Advertise on Bus Radio and Channel One
Following is today’s letter from a group of child advocates to the leading national advertisers and ad agencies.

Dear Corporate/Ad Agency Leader:

As you know, advertising is now commonplace in the public schools. Yet, many advertising and marketing professionals have deep misgivings about marketing to school children. According to a 2004 Harris poll of youth advertising and marketing professionals, only 45% “feel that today’s young people can handle advertising in schools.” Not surprisingly, 47% believe that “schools should be a protected area” and that “there should not be advertising to students on school grounds.”

We are writing to ask for your help to turn your industry’s conscience into a reality, and to protect our children and their education from aggressive marketers.
Channel One is a highly controversial in-school marketing company that delivers televised content to nearly 11,500 schools throughout the nation. In exchange for video equipment, these schools now spend one full school week each year watching television, including one full school day just for the ads. According to the Harris poll, 61% of youth marketing professionals believe that it is “inappropriate” for companies like Channel One to “provid[e] instructional material that integrates brand names and products into the lessons.”

BusRadio is the newest foray of advertisers into public schools. It seeks to install special radio equipment into school buses that will carry that company’s offerings, including eight minutes of ads per hour. In its contract with school districts, BusRadio does not rule out advertising any particular type of products. If Channel One is any guide, we might expect BusRadio to advertise junk food, soda pop, violent and sexualized entertainment, and movies that encourage school children to smoke tobacco.

Whatever BusRadio advertises, children as young as six will have no choice as to whether to listen or not. Nor will their parents be able to exercise any control over their children’s exposure. The sales pitches will fill the bus and interfere with those children who want to read, study, talk, pray, or do almost anything else other than listen to the programming. According to the Harris poll, 69% of youth advertising and marketing professionals believe that “advertising on school buses” is “inappropriate.”

We agree with these professionals. We believe it is wrong for a company to use compulsory school attendance laws to force a captive audience of children to listen to advertising. As most practitioners in the field recognize, successful advertising depends on the willing participation of both advertiser and consumer. BusRadio and Channel One violate this fundamental principle.

We are asking your [company/agency] to pledge by October 15 not to buy advertising on Bus Radio or Channel One. We hope you will join with us and affirm that school children should not be compelled to listen to or watch advertising.

We will follow up with you in the next two weeks about whether your [company/agency] will make this pledge. We would welcome the opportunity to discuss at your convenience the issues in this letter. Please feel free to call Jim Metrock of Obligation, Inc. at (205) 822-0080, Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert at (503) 235-8012, or Monique Tilford of the Center for a New American Dream at (301) 891-3683. We look forward to your reply.

Sincerely,

[various orgs]

The letters were endorsed by 40 organizations and 64 children’s advocates. Endorsers include the American Family Association, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Consumers Union, Eagle Forum, Global Exchange and the National PTA, as well as the National Council of Churches Committee on Public Education and Literacy and the Presbyterian Church (USA) Office of Child Advocacy.

The letters are the first step in a new campaign to remove BusRadio and Channel One from every school in the United States. The campaign is organized by Commercial Alert, the Center for a New American Dream and Obligation, Inc.

Meanwhile....in California,

2008-04-30T11:16:00.000-07:00

Does anyone know what happened to this idea?

Students ordered to wear tracking tags
Parents protest school mandate on RFID badges
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6942751/

Dawn and Mike Cantrall's daughter, a seventh-grader at Brittan Elementary School, poses at her Sutter, Calif., home, wearing the RFID tag mandated by her school.
By Lisa Leff

Updated: 8:02 p.m. ET Feb. 9, 2005
SUTTER, Calif. - The only grade school in this rural town is requiring students to wear radio frequency identification badges that can track their every move. Some parents are outraged, fearing it will rob their children of privacy.

The badges introduced at Brittan Elementary School on Jan. 18 rely on the same radio frequency and scanner technology that companies use to track livestock and product inventory.

While similar devices are being tested at several schools in Japan so parents can know when their children arrive and leave, Brittan appears to be the first U.S. school district to embrace such a monitoring system.

Civil libertarians hope to keep it that way.
"If this school doesn't stand up, then other schools might adopt it," Nicole Ozer, a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union, warned school board members at a meeting Tuesday night. "You might be a small community, but you are one of the first communities to use this technology."

The system was imposed, without parental input, by the school as a way to simplify attendance-taking and potentially reduce vandalism and improve student safety. Principal Earnie Graham hopes to eventually add bar codes to the existing ID's so that students can use them to pay for cafeteria meals and check out library books.
But some parents see a system that can monitor their children's movements on campus as something straight out of Orwell.

"There is a way to make kids safer without making them feel like a piece of inventory," said Michael Cantrall, one of several angry parents who complained. "Are we trying to bring them up with respect and trust, or tell them that you can't trust anyone, you are always going to be monitored and someone is always going to be watching you?"

Cantrall said he told his children, in the 5th and 7th grades, not to wear the badges. He also filed a protest letter with the board and alerted the ACLU.
CONTINUED:

A Letter to a Skeptic

2008-04-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

The most common description of school today is "Boring." Ask anyone -- kids, parents, even teachers. There are many articles, even whole books, telling the sad tale of how school is not merely a waste of time, but is actually damaging.

While public schools are required to "offer instruction" in a few basic subjects, there is no legal requirement for children to be forced to attend classes in which they are bored silly and where they are not even given the basic skills. For example, reading instruction has been changed from learning how to read using phonics, to guessing at words using a farce called Whole Language, resulting in massive reading failure. The same is true in Math. The schools use "Fuzzy math" instead of teaching how to calculate for correct answers. The business world and the professions are appalled at the massive failure.

Some people still believe that the government schools are offering real education. They have not been paying attention to those schools for a long time. Their primary purpose is no longer (if it ever was) academic learning; it has become indoctrination with a generous helping of psycho-therapy. All you need to do is observe them in action. Today's state-run schools are still, as ever, the training ground for the military, factory work and other repetitive jobs requiring blind obedience. They are not the places to learn independent thought or creative action. Dumbing Down is not just a catchy phrase, it's the national policy.

Teachers majored in "education," a content-free course that attracts mostly those who have not been academically successful in either school or college. Thus, the staffs of public schools are crowded with people who are neither of high academic ability, but are not even academically oriented.

A study by the Thomas Fordham Foundation (and others) provides a key to why so many people are choosing alternatives such as homeschooling for their children. It is that the Standards of teaching in the public schools of America have long been poor and are steadily getting worse. What that means is that the quality of the teaching and the teachers has been falling for fifty years and continues today. (Microsoft is forced to hire 200,000 people from overseas because American high school grads cannot read or write English adequately or do simple math)

Ask Arthur Levine, head of Columbia Teachers College, the "leading" teacher and administrator mill, about the quality of the teacher colleges across the country. In his four-year study of those colleges (that did not include Columbia) he described them as "between unacceptable and embarrassing, with low standards and irrelevant curricula." Thus, we are left with mostly inferior instruction, low academic standards and inadequate administrators at best.

When parents discover those problems for themselves and are interested in their own children's education, they are voting with their feet, by looking for private schools or homeschooling. That group has always been professional people. In years past, doctors were the most likely group to send their kids to private schools. Today, they have been replaced by public school teachers as the occupation with the largest percentage of children in private schools. A recent report, also by the Fordham Foundation claimed that 21% of public school teachers send their own children to private schools. They should know why....ask them. Some are homeschooling.

The average college graduate is both more intelligent and better educated than the average public school teacher. Parents who choose to homeschool their children -- and I mean all but a negligible percent -- are, in my considerable experience with them, not only the most knowledgable about their own children's needs, but are far more dedicated to their children than the strangers that public schools employ. My wife and I were teachers; she in public school and I in private schools. She calls her certification a joke. We both saw the mediocrity and waste.

One thing we learned from our years of involvement in our own son's self-education (we call it unschooling -- no schooling at all unless requested by the learner) and with families is that whatever schools offer is available to everyone -- more easily, more quickly, with better quality, and on our own schedule -- in many other places. Yes, homeschooling is a form of protection of children -- from stupidity and mediocrity, bullying and coercion, boredom and time-wasting. Life is a good teacher; homeschoolers learn from real life, not in artificial, synthetic second-hand teaching environments.

We have also learned that the public schools are huge government jobs programs for adults at taxpayer expense. Their true (social and economic) purposes have little to do with either education or children. They are run today for the benefit and convenience of their employees, not for the community, not for the students who trustingly show up but who are, in droves, left behind. They are driven by political agendas, silly teaching fads, and controlled by teacher union rules.

Next time you knock homeschooling, spend some time in a public school first. Judge the secrecy, deception and corruption for yourself and then consider whether you would put your own children in there. Just don't look too close or ask too many questions -- they'll throw you out. And to your question about whether or not the schools would change "if we just hang in there and work for reform," life is simply not long enough. Sadly, the schools are working perfectly for their employees and show no signs of improvement, or even listening.

The Ideal VS the Reality

2008-04-23T11:50:00.000-07:00

Not so long ago, when towns reached a population with fifty children and its people wanted to start a school, they got together and hired a teacher. A teacher would be expected to teach up to about fifty children of different ages and abilities. In those days (until the early 1800s), America's literacy rate was the highest the world had ever seen.

But a strange thing happened. The federal government, in about 1840, started its push to bring universal schooling to the entire population. It was begun with forcing the people of Massachusetts to send their children to government-run schools. There was much protest there and in many other places that lasted well into the 20th century, but the feds finally gained control over the great majority of our children. The goal was never education, but it was uniformity and docility in the creation of a dependent "workforce" to serve industry and the military. Plain and simple: the government wanted slaves. It still does.

Today, in government schooling, the schools hire approximately ten employees for every fifty students, and the literacy rate is far below earlier levels, even though the children attend the school for more hours a day and more days per year than in earlier times. What is going on?

Not only is public school designed as an indoctrination program, primarily teaching children to be obedient to authority, but it is also serving as an employment scheme, hiring millions of not-well-educated people in dozens of capacities, only a few of which are educational. In the process, the academic part of schooling has been all but eliminated, resulting in what today is called "dumbing down."

Thus, public school has taken on its true purposes: baby sitting, social engineering, job training, and a hiring kingdom, with its goal: an entire society working toward government control over society. Yes, that is the dream of Socialist planners in the last century. It is coming true. And the truly remarkable part is that the planners have, all along, sent the bill to us. The tab is now over ten thousand dollars per year per child.

Kids Are Smart; School Is Stupid

2008-04-12T09:40:00.000-07:00

Luz and I subscribe to Life Learning Magazine, edited by Wendy Priesnitz. In her article, Challenging Assumptions In Education, she gives many reasons why public school is bad. In the Introduction, she tells us, "Schooling impedes learning and enslaves children." (how's that for starters...?)

She then lists several false assumptions that are made about government schools.
The main false assumptions she lists are these five:
1. Education is something that's done to you.
2. Knowledge belongs to a cult of experts (teachers); therefore, schools teach us to be emotionally and intellectually dependent, not independent or self-assured.
3. Others know best what children should learn. (Here, Priesnitz quotes Einstein: "It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.")
She adds another false assumption schools teach: Others know better than we do how we should spend our time. She recommends this: education must be organized around learning rather than around teaching.
4. Schools provide effective training. Simply not true; the experience is totally synthetic/artificial.
5. Schools have a noble purpose...such as, social justice, tolerance, democracy, equal opportunity, etc.

Priesnitz states: "The chief function of state-run education has never been to empower citizens...the purpose of schools has been, at its most benign, to imprint a social script or, at it worst, to achieve mass social control."

I have a few more ideas for the list:
* Public schools operate for the benefit of their employees, not the children or their families or society. The rules are made by the teacher unions; therefore, the schools need children; not the reverse.
* School does not prepare us for life, but only for more school. It is a culture unto itself.
* Schools operate on the principle that says, children's experiences, opinions, interests, and thoughts are of no value.
* Schools also try to convince us that parents are not capable of providing adequate instruction for their own children, even in basic skills.
* A resident of my town, Armand Fusco, a former superintendent of two districts, is author of the book, "School Corruption, Betrayal of Children and the Public Trust". In it, he says, "...Public school is a culture of corruption and deceit." The more I learn, the more I agree with him.

The Makers and the Takers

2008-04-10T09:57:00.000-07:00

When the government established its school system -- gradually, state by state in the 1800s -- its goal was to provide a minimum of academic learning while training children to be obedient to authority and predictable as consumers in a "mass market." Government wanted soldiers and factory workers. It also wanted a market for the products of the industrial revolution and political support from the masses for its policies and candidates. The school system provided both.

Nothing has changed, except that academics have been dumbed down while the indoctrination has expanded by new techniques of psychology and new goals of social engineering.

The schools now believe they can get away with almost any outrage, because, as we discover every year at budget time, they have the votes. The people who work in real world jobs -- producing goods and services that society needs and wants -- earn the money and produce wealth. They are called the Makers. Those who work inside the government system produce nothing, and (together with their families) are called the Takers. The number of Takers has now reached critical mass whereby they can vote for whatever they want, and get it.

The big trick was that, long ago, the public were convinced that it was our duty to pay for this system of education.

"Private enterprise maintains and expands itself by continually offering people things they want. Government maintains and expands itself by depriving people of things they want, by means of seizing their goods (taxation) and preventing them from trading and living as they choose (regulation). Thus, private enterprise continually increases the prosperity and well-being of its customers, while government continually decreases the prosperity and well-being of its citizens." *

*from the book, The Market for Liberty, by Morris and Linda Tannehill

Freedom Is Not Free

2008-04-06T17:33:00.000-07:00

note: this post is taken from our book, Smarting Us Up (see sidebar)

There are only two ways that people can interact. One is voluntarily; the other is by force. Either we are free, or we are someone's slaves. In our relations with “authorities,” we are either free to interact with them and associate with them, or we are not. If they create laws that force us to educate our children by their methods and/or rules, then to the degree they do that, we are their slaves.

Granted, homeschooling is merely a part of our lives, and therefore, we are not true slaves, and homeschooling regulations do not comprise total slavery. But the distinction is only a matter of degree. The regulations are backed by force, and it's the force that we need to acknowledge. Force is what takes away our freedom and our choice and our sovereignty as individuals.

If we are forced to homeschool our kids according to the dictates of anyone else, then to that degree, we are their slaves. On the other hand, if a friend persuades us to UNschool or to use another method, that is our voluntary and free choice.

The word ‘slavery’ naturally brings to mind the most drastic deprivations of freedom, so it makes people uneasy when we refer to certain state homeschooling regulations as slavery. But that is what it is -- the opposite of freedom to live as we choose.

Freedom is not free. If we are not vigilant and ready to stand against tyranny -- no matter how small or how ‘reasonable’ its demands may seem, we will move further down the slippery slope to slavery. In order to be a truly free people, we need to eliminate all the little rules of enslavement (rules backed by force) that control our lives.

Luz and I are libertarians -- yes, members of the Libertarian Party (www.lp.org). That means that we believe in liberty: Unless we harm someone or take advantage of someone or use force against others, then the foundations of this country declare that we are free to choose how we live our lives. We need to keep it that way. Nobody said it would be easy.

If the Children Don't Learn, the Schools Didn't Teach

2008-03-31T10:56:00.000-07:00

Today, public schools merely go through the motions instead of actually transferring knowledge from one generation to the next. Yes, there are exceptions -- mostly because of individual teachers' efforts -- but what matters is the general failure. It is allowed because of how the school system describes itself at the state level. The schools are not responsible for learning. All that the government schools are asked to do is, "offer instructional experiences." There is no requirement for learning; no specific expectations upon the students. Thus, there is no accountability in the system.

The law says that parents are responsible for their children's education, and that applies whether or not they send them to a school. Therefore, in the eyes of the public schools, if the child does not learn, the schools blame the child or the parents or "society" or TV or something else. Thus, to the schools, failure is always the child's fault, never the schools, even though it is often the case that the schools did not provide proper instruction.

When a business does not achieve its mission, it loses its customers, lays off its employees and goes out of existence. In short, it fails. It must pay off its creditors and dissolve. But when a government agency -- say the school system -- fails to provide the service that it is expected and even claims to provide, what happens? Nothing.

In fact, failure to achieve their mission is the easiest route for public schools to increase their revenues. All they need to do is say, "We are failing because we don't have enough money." It works every time. Never mind that America spends more per pupil than virtually all other countries and in recent decades has among the worst performing schools.

According to international and US Dept of Ed reports, the school system is a monstrous failure, yet not only do none of its schools go out of business, but they are rewarded more and more each year for their failure.

We are forced to wonder why this happens, and the answer might just be that the business of the school system is not education, but other things entirely. We are hearing more and more that public school has the purpose of turning out a "workforce." Well, a workforce is best if it is well schooled in basic knowledge, and yet the schools have all but eliminated the teaching of skills and knowledge that former generations were taught -- basic arithmetic facts and phonetic skill for reading. Therefore, the schools are failing in their fundamendal purpose.

Schools Teach Sex, but not Math and Reading

2008-03-27T16:50:00.000-07:00

How schools merely go through the motions instead of actually transfer knowledge from one generation to the next. Yes, there are exceptions, but .... what matters is the general failure. It is allowed because of how the school system describes itself at the state level. It is not responsible for learning. All that the government schools are asked to do is, "offer instructional experiences." There is no requirement for learning; no requirements for learning; no specific expectations upon the students. There is no accountability in the system.

The law says that parents are responsible for their children's education, and that applies whether or not they send them to a school. Therefore, in the eyes of the public schools, if the child does not learn, the schools blame the child or the parents or "society" or TV or something else. Thus, to the schools, failure is always the child's fault, never the school's, even though it is often the case that the schools did not provide proper instruction.

When a business does not achieve its mission, it loses its customers, lays off its employees and goes out of existence. In short, it fails. It must pay off its creditors and dissolve. But when a government agency -- say the school system -- fails to provide the service that it is expected and even claims to provide, what happens? Nothing.

In fact, failure to achieve their mission is the easiest route for public schools to increase their revenues. All they need to do is say, "We are failing because we don't have enough money." It works every time. Never mind that America spends more per pupil than virtually all other countries and in recent decades has among the worst performing schools.

According to international and US Dept of Ed reports, the school system is a monstrous failure, yet not only do none of its schools go out of business, but they are rewarded more and more each year of failure.

We are forced to wonder why this happens, and the answer might just be that the business of the school system is not education, but other things entirely. We are hearing more and more that public school has the purpose of turning out a "workforce." Well, a workforce is best if it is well schooled in basic knowledge, and yet the schools have all but eliminated the teaching of skills and knowledge that former generations were taught -- basic arithmetic facts and phonetic skills for reading. Therefore, the schools are failing in their fundamendal purpose.

"Standards" -- What Standards?

2008-03-24T09:11:00.000-07:00

Below, I'm using information about my state, Connecticut (CT). If you live somewhere else, your schools probably have similarly bad "standards."

School administrators often mention their school's "Standards," but no one in the public knows what they are talking about. Here's why: The administrators don't know either, because, in CT and other states, there really are no standards. "Standards" is just a word they like to use.

My dictionary defines "standard" as follows: "A degree or level of requirement, excellence or attainment."

There is an organization, Thomas B. Fordham Institute, that looks into all the states' standards for English and Math. Its findings are on its website www.edexcellence.com . Every five years, they report on the standards for every state. The Connecticut Standards for both of those subjects are rated F (the worst).

Fordham: >>Two-thirds of school children in America attend class in states with mediocre (or worse) expectations for what their students should learn. <<

also Fordham: >>The Unfortunate Influence of 1990s-era National Standards. The standards developed by professional associations such as the National Council of Teachers of English and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics continue to create havoc, as states embrace their faulty fads and anti-knowledge orientation. << Got that? "anti-knowledge orientation."

The following is what Fordham says about CT's English curriculum standards:
"The standards suffer from systemic vagueness. For example, one suggests that students "maintain a multimedia portfolio that provides opportunities for reflection and dialogue regarding creative processes." These are empty words, unwelcome anywhere, but are particularly insufferable in English standards. Vocabulary development is ignored, and the state fails to outline a core literature for its high school students. Connecticut recently updated its English standards and, from our perspective, managed to make them worse.

"Despite having updated their standards since 2000, Connecticut's overall grade has gone from C to F. Many features are not clear, specific, or measurable, while the language is also pretentious and vague. Meanwhile, there is little on vocabulary development through the grades.
"Language Art, as taught in CT schools, is undefined and unteachable and content-free. Therefore, if districts do not have their own standards, they are merely passing along a poor program.

Math
>>CT gets an F for its math standards, which are a mishmash of trendiness and vacuity. CT places on its students the burden of "constructing" the number system, eschewing memorization and mathematical reasoning for a reliance on technology, manipulatives, and "real life experiences." When the standards do get to the task of defining skills to be learned, such as the K-4 directive to "develop proficiency with basic addition," the state gives teachers and students little guidance as to how this amorphous goal is to be realized, and relies on calculator use throughout the grades as a crutch.<<

2005 State Report Card
Connecticut
Clarity: 0.67
F
Content: 0.33
F
Reason: 0.00
F
Negative Qualities: 1.00
F
Weighted Score: 1.37
Final Grade:
F
2000 Grade: D
1998 Grade: D
Connecticut’s standards are marked by vagueness and ambiguity. For example, the Common Core goals and standards, which are also repeated in the Framework, are no more than broad aspirations for all of the grades K-12, as in this example: 'Students will use mathematical skills and concepts with proficiency and confidence, and appreciate the power and utility of mathematics as a discipline and as a tool for solving problems.'Laudable, surely, but this is not a standard, strictly speaking. To be fair, the Framework does include more specific performance standards, but they mostly serve to highlight Connecticut’s constructivist approach to mathematics education:>> Connecticut students are not expected to have automatic recall of basic number facts, nor are they required to master computational algorithms.
The standard says: "Instructional activities and opportunities need to focus on developing an understanding of mathematics as opposed to the memorization of rules and mechanical application of algorithms.

>> . . . Technology plays an important role in developing number sense. Students should have opportunities to use the calculator as a teaching and exploration tool. Young children can use the constant feature of most calculators to count, forward or backward, or to skip count, forward or backward. . . . At the 5-8 grade level, students continue to need experiences that involve the regular and consistent use of concrete models. Ambiguity Abounds Still, the Framework is not completely devoid of arithmetic and computation requirements. In K-4, for example, students “develop proficiency with basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts through the use of a variety of strategies and contexts,” while in grades 5-8, they “develop, use, and explain procedures for performing calculations with whole numbers, decimals, fractions, and integers.” A promising start, but in keeping with the amorphous nature of Connecticut’s standards, no procedures or strategies are identified.

>>The ambiguity of these standards works against the careful development of fractions and credible preparation for algebra. The Pythagorean Theorem is mentioned only once, in a convoluted standard for grades 5-8: Describe and use fundamental concepts and properties of, and relationships among, points, lines, planes, angles and shapes, including incidence, parallelism, perpendicularity, congruence, similarity, and the Pythagorean Theorem. Quadratic polynomials and the quadratic equation receive no mention in these standards. Finally, the Goals 2000 sample activities do little to clarify the mathematical content of the standards and are at best suitable as classroom enrichment activities.

Surely, CT has enough academic talent to do better. a local group -- perhaps the school board itself -- could come up with standards that a) are true standards, b) make sense, c) include specific requirements for learning, and d) demand accountability from employees.

School Corruption: Here and Now

2008-03-17T12:37:00.000-07:00

The words School and Corruption are seldom, if ever, seen together. Why? Because most people simply refuse to believe that something so sacrosanct as school can be connected with illegal and immoral acts. We just do not expect those who are responsible for the education of our children to be capable of being irresponsible, let alone guilty of corruption. However, that is exactly what is going on.

It is time to address this huge problem. School budgets have reached the point where too many people have their hands in the pies, and when people mix with other people’s money, we should always expect problems.

Armand Fusco, former superintendent and author of “SCHOOL CORRUPTION,” writes, “School corruption takes many forms, but it falls into three main categories: I: cheating and deceit, II: waste and mismanagement, and III: fraud and stealing.” He should know. Many people sense that the schools are dishonest, but few will admit it about the schools in their community. Take a look at ours.

Category I: cheating and deceit. Let me count the ways:
About 60% of my town’s tenth graders fail the state test of basic skills based on information taught up to eighth grade, but the employees tell us that they are delivering “excellence in education.” The terrible results tell us that the school system has the children for ten years to provide an eighth grade level schooling, and still only 40% can pass according to the state. Are we being deceived about the quality of the schooling offered? Is 60% failure a high quality result?

Next, who benefits when 75% of middle schoolers are placed on the honor roll? If we know that only about 40% are at their grade level, then we know that a large portion of the kids on the honor roll are below their grade level. What’s going on? It’s called cheating by the schools, just like the times when teachers change the students’ tests in order to show a higher percent of achievement. I’ll get back to this a little later.

Are we justified in calling it cheating by the employees? You bet. It deceives the children; it deceives the parents; it deceives the community. This practice of putting failing students on honor rolls is fraud, and fraud is a form of corruption. The same goes for all the occasions when courses are dumbed down and children who do little are given passing grades. Maybe the worst example: the brightest students are ignored. They are cheated and used by the employees. Is that corrupt? You bet.

“Edspeak” is the language of school employees. It is a language designed to deceive.

There is another big category of school corruption. It is the corrupting of the very purpose of school-- that is, the education of our children. The government has never been interested in truly educating our children. Its schools’ original purpose, back in 1840 was to turn out the millions of factory workers for the industrial revolution, plus a good supply of soldiers. Government officials were clear in their requirement that the masses should not be too well educated…their goal was to train obedient workers and predictable consumers. That has not changed, in fact, academic instruction has been steadily watered down over the years while psychological conditioning has emerged as a main goal today, training our children to have certain government-approved attitudes and opinions, but not to have the creative intelligence to become leaders or innovators.

The result is a total corruption of the very idea of education. Conditioning to certain ideology is the opposite of education. Education is training children how to think; while the methods our state-run schools use are therapy, or mind-changing methods.

I'll get to catagories II and III later.

The Big Betrayal

2008-03-13T14:08:00.000-07:00

"For every action, there is an equal and opposite government program."
-- Main's Law

From the "Mission" statement of the public school district in my town, we read that "excellence" is now the reason for the existence of the school system. But, excellence at what? They don’t say. Let me simply say, excellence, by itself, is not a mission. It could be called a standard, however, if we look closely, the public school system has no standards or even goals.
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What Is the mission of the school system?

Under the schools’ multi-page Strategic Plan, there is no mention of schooling. Nowhere is there any hint that people are expected to teach basic skills and/or knowledge that children might need in their lives. Nowhere is any mention of what those skills or knowledge might be. No subjects, no teaching methods, no goals, no expected results are offered. How can a forty-million-dollar-a-year agency get away with having no aims, no desired outcomes, and no stated purpose?

The plan includes this: “There will be a “challenging academic environment.” How strange, when the curriculum and books are dumbed down. In both the Mission and Guiding Statements, there is the claim of a “respectful environment.” Again we wonder, respect for what? The school environment is one of distrust, coercion and fear, with a good dose of bullying. We also know that some teachers degrade people’s traditions, religions and parenting practices. To me, it looks as though they want respect for themselves, even though they neglect their educational duties and often disrespect the students and parents. Let them show respect, before demanding it from others.

Why don’t the schoolers simply say that they intend to run the schools as well as they can, teaching the 3Rs and the few other subjects that the state requires, and leave it at that? Why don’t they say that they will try to run the schools honestly with well-trained employees and will do so with the least possible waste of taxpayers’ money? Why is it, that instead of running the schools with transparency and openness, they seek to keep them closed and secret?

And besides, isn’t teaching respect the domain of families and the mission of the churches that set the moral and ethical tone for society, those who actually guide our civilization, our common culture, our civic institutions, our traditions, our way of living? Isn’t it the job of the school employees to demonstrate respect rather than to preach it? Why can’t they do that?

Government educationists claim parents have abdicated their duties to the government schools. How self-serving of them, to blame parents for an alleged lack of moral training. Of course, no matter how inept they are, the school employees are all too happy to take on the role of surrogate parents since it allows them to increase their control over the community’s time, energy and resources. For them, the system is about empire-building. While enrollment has been flat for years, employment has ballooned and spending has doubled, and doubled again. Has it helped achievement? Not a bit.

The schools have reduced their emphasis on academic instruction while adopting psychological and political correctness agendas. The schools no longer offer knowledge of facts and basic skills. They now offer “moral guidance,” but in the form of psycho-therapy. The schools no longer are interested in what our children know; they are now primarily concerned with what they “are like.” I remember a former superintendent saying, “I don’t care about test scores, I just care how the kids feel about themselves.” He wasn’t kidding. We are being conned into believing that the government knows – better than we do -- how to raise our children.

And what does the government want? Soldiers and a docile workforce, not thinking, educated individuals. The training begins in K, now pre-k. It consists of “sit down, be quiet, do what you are told, your interests are not important, your questions do not matter. You belong to the state.” They want our children for twelve or more years, because that is how long it takes the government to thoroughly dumb down a once-intelligent child.

Here’s Thomas Sowell, author of Inside American Education: “They have taken our money, betrayed our trust, failed our children, and then lied about the failures with inflated grades and pretty words.” Or this: “They have used our children as guinea pigs for experiments…or just to be warehoused until labor unions are willing to let them enter the job market.” He calls the education establishment, “Morally and intellectually bankrupt.” Considering all their lies and adulteration of values and their inability to state their own purpose, who can disagree?

War Against Intelligence

2008-03-13T13:53:00.000-07:00

“According to a 1993 national survey by the Educational Testing Service
of 26,000 adults with an average of 12.4 years of schooling, only 3.5% of the sample had the literacy skills to do traditional college level work.”-- Bruce N. Shortt, The Harsh Truth About Public Schools

Are your children bright? Most kids are. Chances are that you see their intelligence and strengths. You are aware of their interests and inclinations. You sent them off to school at a young age with the hope that the school would inform them of needed facts and knowledge as well as encourage their strengths and feed their interests. However, the public schools no longer do what parents expect, and that fact is the reason for the school wars.

Today’s schools have reduced the content of all instruction by about four grade levels, compared to fifty years ago. Teachers are now “facilitators” while the children reach “consensus” about their subjects. The CAPT test, Connecticut’s high school “exit exam,” is based on material offered only up to eighth grade. The courses, textbooks and tests have been dumbed down to that level. International testing shows that, compared to students in other advance countries, “The longer our students are in school, the lower their comparative performance,” says Gordon Ambach, former head of the Council of Chief State School Officers. He should know.

It gets worse: The schools have changed in purpose from education to political and social indoctrination, with “equality” as the goal. Schools don’t care how much children learn, they are primarily interested in what kids “are like.” The school’s goal is to transform children’s varied attitudes, values and opinions from those of traditional families to those desired by the government. The government seeks to turn a population of diverse children into a mass of predictable citizens who know the same things and believe the same things, with no one ahead or behind too far. That is why today’s public schools spend lots of our money trying to raise the bottom children up to the middle mass, but nothing to help high-achievers. In fact, they are designed to prevent the brightest kids from reaching their full potential. Now you know why “one-size-fits-all” and “dumbing down” are the major policies of public schools. The only way they can achieve “equality” of outcomes is by lowering their standards.

Today, the schools have a far different agenda for our children from the one we expect of them. They are failing to provide the children with the needed basic skills, knowledge and information, but, worse, they are interested in finding children’s weaknesses and psychological “needs” instead of their strengths and interests. The school system makes the basic assumption that all children have “disabilities” and need the school to provide “treatments” for them. The result is that school has become therapeutic and psychological even to the point of requiring many children to take mind-altering drugs such as Ritalin, in order to control their behavior.

The school system has several reasons to do this – all of which work directly against most parents’ hopes and wishes for their children. The government is seeking to mould the citizens of our country into a docile, easily controlled mass that can be employed or will become soldiers who do exactly what they are told to do, and nothing else. What does this all mean? It means that government school is no longer for the benefit of children. It is for the benefit of a government that seeks to control, instead of being controlled by, the people.

Unfortunately for America, our country needs well-educated people now, not dumbed-down people. There lies the School Wars, pitting the government school establishment against the rest of us. Government school offers Artificial Stupidity – turning bright kids into ignorant robots; our children need the exact opposite. The schools are turning intelligent children into stupid adults by the millions simply by not offering them what they need, while offering them large quantities of what they do not need, or want. I believe the situation is well described by Thomas Sowell: “In an age of artificial intelligence, too many of our schools are producing artificial stupidity.”

Letter to a Worried Parent

2008-03-10T08:41:00.000-07:00

My wife, Luz, and I get emails and calls from parents who are anxious about their children. The kids are miserable in school, but the parents often do not know how to offer an alternative. We try to calm them while encouraging them to try homeschooling. One such letter last year was the following:

Dear Martha,

The big advantage our son had, thanks to unschooling throughout his youth, was that he learned to be in charge of his learning and, really, his life to a great degree. In contrast, kids who attend schools learn to wait for others to tell them what to do, what to think. After twelve years of that, they become completely dependent on others for direction.

In general, that does not prepare young people for real life or college. Colleges prefer people who have initiative and can motivate themselves, who know what they want to learn, and most important, know how to find information when they need it, and are not afraid to make decisions for themselves. Those characteristics are the opposite of what public schools teach. The government schools have the goal of turning out a "workforce" of dependent predictable people. The government does not want people to be well educated -- just enough, but no more. The "economy" needs lots of sheep, not too many shepherds, lots of spectators, but not many players. Our son, and many homeschooled children we know, learned to be independent and creative thinkers, to do what was right for them, not necessarily for the "economy."

School does not prepare children for life. Each year of school merely prepares them for the next year of school. Our motto is, "Live with your children as though there were no such thing as school." Let your kids know that they are responsible for their lives and for their learning, no one else is.

Our son never did lessons, never looked at a school book. We did not teach him school stuff at home. He learned what he was interested in, which was almost everything. He scored 1390 on the SATs and got into college easily on his own and breezed through happily and graduated Magna Cum Laude (top one percent). He was well prepared for college without doing any of the school stuff. He was prepared for life, not just college. He is grateful for his experience growing up and we are still his best friends. What more can we ask?

Suggestion: If your daughter is unhappy in school, take her out for a while at first, say, for the rest of this school year. See if she is happier with you. Make sure she has a friend her age to talk to sometimes, if she wants. Your job will be to give her access to the world...to see where her interests lie. Do things with her. Give her responsibilities, real work. The idea is to let her have a real life as much as possible, to share your real life, not have an artificial life such as schools create.

Best wishes,
Ned

I heard back, as follows:
I asked my daughter at dinner why she doesn't like school. Not surprisingly she doesn't like talking about the subject very often! She replied with all of the wisdom that only a six year old has, "Because all we do is work...for hours." When I told her that I plan to teach her at home she said, "But what will we do?" I replied, "Paint, grow a garden, plan your birthday party, swim, cook, and anything else you would like to do." She looked at me with wide eyes of excited disbelief and said, "You mean, That is learning?"

Evelyn Russo is above average !

2008-03-07T14:49:00.000-08:00

Evelyn Russo (see my previous post) is above average ! She was given a doctorate in instruction even though she had no idea how to teach reading, didn’t know how, and obviously did not teach the children how to read. We have the kids’ results. To call it failure is being kind. She and those thousands of others who are doing what she was doing are creating the disaster that has been going on for decades in the public schools of our state, and our town.

We can’t allow ourselves to think that because we live in a relatively affluent town, the teachers here are better trained than those who work anywhere else. They are all trained exactly the same ways, and they are teaching in the schools of their affluent towns without a clue how to teach children to read.

The reading problem is just a symptom of what is happening in all the other areas of instruction. We know that the Math program (Everyday Math) is just as much a failure as the reading program is. How can we expect any of the programs to be effective when the two most important ones are such documented failures? There is no way.

About MATH, here’s columnist Laura Maniglia who writes a bi-weekly apology for the public schools. On Nov. 23, 05, she wrote about what she calls the Math Debate, admitting that US students rank 29th out of 34 nations – ahead of only four Mediterranean countries and Mexico while China, Japan and Korea rank at the top.

She describes the debate between proponents of “traditional” math and the new “constructionist” math, including Connected Math and Everyday Math used in Guilford. She says that traditional math would teach the foundations of computation and number facts (you know: adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing) which provides them with the skills needed in more advanced math and problem solving. No surprise there. It’s what everyone needs. It’s what we all use in our lives.

On equal footing, she puts something called the “constructionist approach” -- “it emplasizes an enquiry program for pupils to construct their own knowledge through ‘reasoning.’ This approach,” she continues, “often intruduces calculators as early as first grade with the HOPE that the students will learn math in the process.”

There you are: just like in the Whole Language reading instruction in which they HOPE the children will learn to read even though they do not teach them how to do it. The new new math program – Connected Math or Everyday Math flies on the HOPE that the children will learn actual math even though the teachers do not teach it.

And we wonder why American jobs are being exported by the millions…
Here is your answer: the American public schools are not teaching American children even the basic skills they need in order to survive in the world today.

It’s another part of the national crisis. The schools refuse to hire people who are well educated in the fields they are supposed to teach. It’s true of reading; it’s true of mathematics; it’s true of all the subjects. Dumbing down starts at the top. What can you expect at the bottom?

It’s your money. They’re your children.

“Experts” Without a Clue

2008-03-04T16:53:00.000-08:00

Americans are gradually becoming aware of how poorly our students are doing compared to those in the rest of the world. In reading English, we are at or near the bottom in every international test. Same for math and science.

For some insight into the problem, let me quote from a recent article: “She studied to be an elementary teacher, taught in New Haven, CT public schools for 10 years and got a doctorate in curriculum and instruction, but Evelyn Russo says she was missing one crucial skill. She didn’t know how to teach children to read.”

That is the first paragraph of the lead article in the Hartford Courant on May 1, 2006. Ms. Russo says, “I had no clue how to teach them to lift words off a page, to increase their vocabulary…I didn’t know anything about fluency.”

This person taught elementary grades in CT public schools for ten years and had no clue how to teach children to read. Why? Because she went to a college where people like her “study” something called “education” but do not learn how to teach children to read. In fact, they don’t learn much of anything. They come out of those places believing they are experts and professional educators, but they have very little knowledge and do not have a clue about learning. Ms. Russo must have had at least 250children in her classes over those ten years and she did not know how to teach them to read.

It gets worse. During that period, she got a doctorate degree in something called “curriculum and instruction,” and yet she still had no clue how to teach the most fundamental skill in all of schooling – how to read.

I hope you understand what this means. It is this: None of the people who teach in public elementary schools in CT know how to teach children to read. Ms Russo is just one out of thousands of CT elementary teachers who have no clue how to teach children how to read.

The State department of education doesn’t know how to teach a child to read, and if someone told them, they would not pay any attention. Some of the world’s most knowledgeable reading specialists – even Sally Shaywitz, Yale’s noted brain researcher on reading skills -- have been telling them for years, but they stick to the methods that have always failed. The same is true for math, science and history.

Do you smell the crisis now, and do you sense that this astonishing fact is at the root of the crisis? I hope so. The problem has finally floated to the top of the first page of the state’s biggest newspaper. The people in charge of our children's education do not want to know. The horror for our country is that CT pretends to have “the best” school system in the nation. Is it possible that most other states can be worse? Yes.

Dumbing Down in Seven Lessons

2008-03-02T18:00:00.000-08:00

Dumbing down has been the major public school policy for a few decades now, and from all indications, it is working well. Local, State, National and International test results all show that while our kids are still as intelligent as ever, their essential knowledge and skills are on a steep downward incline with no change in sight.

So we must assume that the schools are operating as they are intended, and that their purpose is not to turn out well informed citizens, but people that the government calls "human resources" who will be obedient, docile, and dependent. How does the government do that? The process is described in John Taylor Gatto's classic book, "Dumbing Us Down, The Hidden Curriculum" While the schools claim to be educating, the seven lessons teach quite the opposite. They are as follows:

1. Confusion. Everything is out of context, disconnected and unrelated to real life. Confusion is thrust upon kids by strange adults, each working alone, pretending to an expertise they do not possess. All information is fragmented -- the opposite of cohesion. It's like TV programming. Gatto says, "I teach students how to accept confusion as their destiny."

2. Class Position. Children learn their place in the grand pyramid. School teaches children to accept being numbered; not to imagine themselves somewhere else; to fear the better classes and to have contempt for the dumb classes; to stay where you are put.

3. Indifference. This is taught by the bells and buzzers and other distractions. Nothing is so important that it can't be interrupted or stopped. Years of bells condition children to know that no work is worth finishing. They, "innoculate each undertaking with indifference."

4. Emotional Dependency. Kids must surrender their will to others. They learn they have no rights in school, unless school authorities say they do. There is no individuality in the classification system. They become dependent on gold stars, prizes, "honors," smiles, frowns and even disgraces. They are hostages.

5. Intellectual Dependency. Children must wait for others to tell them what to do, and to make meaning of their lives. Teachers and other school employees decide what children study, regardless of the child’s interests or desires. Whether or not they “learn” it, means their “success” or “failure.” Curiosity has no place; only conformity.

6. Provisional Self-Esteem. This lesson is that a kid’s self-respect should depend on the opinion of others. Children must be evaluated and judged, and found wanting, imperfect, “learning disabled,” ADHD or some other fictitious abnormality. Self-evaluation is never accepted. Gatto: “The lesson of report cards, grades and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should rely on the evaluation of ‘certified’ officials.”

7. You Can’t Hide. Students learn that they must always be under surveillance by teachers and other staff. The lesson here is that children are not trusted and their privacy is not legitimate. The purpose is to maintain constant central control over society. The State cannot allow too many citizens to listen to any drummer other than its uniformed marching band.

Middle class parents, having been through the school mill, seldom believe that their child’s school is one of the bad ones. They learned all seven lessons, most important of which is waiting to be told what to think and do. Our society is made up today largely of what Gatto calls, “psychic invalids” who must be fed, clothed, entertained, medicated, educated and otherwise served by “others.” In fact, the economy would probably fall apart if a large portion of us suddenly did not feel helpless but became more self-sufficient.

Gatto concludes, “The seven lessons are prime training for people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.”

The Disability Racket

2008-02-28T10:16:00.000-08:00

How schools cash in on false diagnoses and a bounty system.

“Thousands of children are suffering from being placed in LD classes, and the labeling of children at an early age becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The children learn to see themselves as disabled in some way and they act out the part.” – Terry Endsley, The Myth of Learning Disabilities

I have several blind spots. I had them in school and still have them. For example: Algebra, Latin, History, Chemistry, Physics, Literature. In some cases, it was the teachers who made the information seem uninteresting. My response was to create minor disturbances like fidgeting in my seat or throwing spitballs. In others, I simply was bored and not learning anything except how to avoid doing the work, and that was most of the time.

Today, a child's disinterest in school subjects is viewed by the schools as a "disability" --a kind of disease. And, sure enough, the schoolers have all sorts of ways to "prove" that a child has a disability -- even a brain disorder -- when s/he is merely bored or unhappy or rebellious at being cooped up in an ugly classroom.

Parents who are not well informed can easily be frightened by the "diagnoses" that come from teachers and school psychologists. They are often intimidated by the school "experts" who claim that their child is "learning disabled" or "mentally disordered," when no such problem exists. Many children are labeled and stigmatized for life by “diagnoses” that are often wrongly made to benefit only the school, not the children.

Yet, this is how schools take the focus off their programs and place it upon the child's alleged "disability." How convenient for the schools. It provides the excuse to never examine themselves or their own activities to see if those might be causing the symptoms of unhappiness (boredom, stress, fear) and rebellion among the children.

Making matters worse is an incentive for the schools to make such a huge mistake. It's called the "Bounty System." For every child who is "diagnosed" with a so-called Learning Disorder, there is a large cash reward from the state (around $4K in CT). Thus, every diagnosis of a disability means more money for the school employees. It is no wonder that the schoolers have invented a multitude of "diagnoses" that enable them to collect the bounty. The second stage of this racket is that the children are then placed in "special" classes that pretend to help the children with their false diagnoses of disabilities. It's no surprise that along with the many spurious diagnoses has come a huge increase in school employment in this new area. It has been major cause of higher school budgets, but it has little, if any, success to show.

Why don't the schools look to their own instruction methods or programs for the source of children's problems? Because they would then probably have to admit that they use bad methods of instruction and would need to change, but mostly it is because there is no financial incentive. The bounty system only pays for diagnoses of children's disabilities (true or not); it doesn't pay for finding fault in the schools themselves.

Schools have been turned into psychological clinics where amateur psychiatrists roam the halls in search of children they might be able to garner as "clients" for their "therapies.” Teachers are supposed to teach; playing amateur psychologist is against the law. Besides, education is a separate field from therapy. School students should never be treated as "patients," and yet, that what the disability racket is all about.

If a school has diagnosed your child, be sure to get a second opinion from an independent source because chances are good that the school wants to use your child to gain a financial bounty while increasing its payroll at taxpayers’ expense.

Real Education Is Free; Public School is Expensive

2008-02-26T08:21:00.000-08:00

Want to learn something? It’s free!
Education is free, except when it’s run by government.

Here are a few expert opinions:
"The more subsidized it is, the less free it is. What is known as 'free education' is the least free of all, for it is a state-owned institution; it is socialized education - just like socialized medicine or the socialized post office - and cannot possibly be separated from political control." -- Frank Chodorov, Why Free Schools Are Not Free

“A common reason for the creation of a government school system is to prepare the boys to go to war and the girls to cheer them on.” -- Marshall Fritz, Founder of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State

"Schools will become clinics whose purpose is to provide individualized, psycho-social treatment for the student, and teachers must become psycho-social therapists." -- National Education Association, "Education for the '70s," Today's Education, January 1969

Public school is free in only one limited sense: the families who use it do not pay directly for it. In that sense, it is socialized schooling which, in fact, is incredibly expensive and the cost burdens everyone. The trick is that it spends "other people's money."

Instead, I refer to the fact that true education -- learning of all sorts -- is available to all of us without cost, all the time. That has always been so. It means that anyone who charges others for teaching basic skills and knowledge is a fraud, simply because the knowledge is all around us and free for the asking.

Consider how most of us like to share our opinions with others. It’s a sign of how we wish to share our knowledge.

We come to think of public schools as places that offer basic instruction to all children at no cost to their families. How nice, how noble, that schools have been arranged that do not charge for what they offer. Indeed, today we know that they charge the maximum possible amount – far more than needed – and often do not even offer what we expect them to provide.

The public schools are called “Free and Compulsory” and yet who takes responsibility for the results? No one. To whom can a parent complain when his child fails to learn or even be instructed in basic skills? How “free” is that? In the public schools, no one is responsible for any child’s learning – not teachers, not administrators, not the school board, nobody. And if a child fails, they blame the child, not themselves.

MIT has just announced that all of its courses are now available on the internet. Yale has made many of its lecture courses available on tape and those are now distributed at no charge. The largest University in the US (in terms of number of students) is the U of Phoenix. The on line registration is huge, and the cost is relatively low. Go to “College Degrees on Line” and you will find 63 million links with information.

No frills, real degrees, useful info, at your own pace, start any time. Convenient, no hassles. no intrusive questions, cheap.

Public Schools Have No Accountability

2008-02-22T10:19:00.000-08:00

Today's public schools merely go through the motions instead of actually transfer knowledge from one generation to the next. Yes, there are exceptions, but what matters is the general failure. It is allowed because of how the school system describes itself at the state level. It is not responsible for learning. All that the government schools are asked to do is, "offer instructional experiences." There is no requirement for learning; no specific expectations upon the students. There is no accountability in the system.

The law (in CT) says that parents are responsible for their children's education, and that applies whether or not they send them to a school. Therefore, in the eyes of the public schools, if the child does not learn, it's the child's fault, never the school's, even though it is often the case that the school did not provide proper instruction.

In the real world of competition and free trade, both sides -- sellers and buyers -- benefit from all transactions. With each purchase, both parties increase their worth. When a business does not serve its customers by offering high quality products or services at reasonable prices, it loses patronage, lays off its employees and goes out of business. In short, it fails. It must pay off its creditors and dissolve.

But when a government agency -- say, the public school system -- fails to provide the service that it is expected to provide, what happens? Nothing. In fact, it often is given more money without penalty. The school system is a monstrous failure, yet not only does it not go out of business, it is rewarded more and more each year for its failure.

Failure to achieve their mission is the easiest route for public schools to increase their revenues. All they need to do is say, loudly, "We are not achieving our goals because we don't have enough money." It works every time. Never mind that America spends more per pupil than virtually all other countries and in recent decades has among the worst performing schools. In fact, public schools spend about twice the amount that successful private schools charge per student.

According to international and US Dept of Ed. reports, the school system is a monstrous failure, yet not only do none of its schools go out of business, but they are rewarded more and more each year for their failure.

We are forced to wonder why this happens, and the answer might just be that the business of the school system is not education, but other things entirely. Years ago, John Holt wrote that the purposes of public school are, 1. Custody (babysitting), 2. Labeling children for employment (meatstamping), and 3. Jobs for adults (an employment empire at public expense).

Maybe those reasons are what the schools like to call "socialization."

The Freedom Connection

2008-02-18T16:16:00.000-08:00

To me, the most beautiful thing in the world is the US Declaration of Independence. Just reading the title makes me shiver. I believe that Thomas Jefferson's document is meaningful to all Americans, even if they are not aware of it, because it is what makes our country unique and so truly great. It distinguishes this country from all those that ever existed before, by acknowledging that freedom is the birthright of every person. To be an American is to believe in what it says.

No country before had ever acknowledged to individuals the dignity and respect that ours does -- sovereignty over their own lives, the natural right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." No country had ever dedicated itself to the idea of protecting all its citizens, instead of exploiting them.

We Americans have the right to do anything we want. There is only one condition: that we do not interfere with the same right of ALL others. That statement is a political Golden Rule. It humbles me to remember that I was lucky to be born here, where freedom and liberty are not just the privilege of a few but a right guaranteed to all.

With little knowledge of politics, I was elected to the City Council of Aspen, Colorado in 1970. I served one term. That experience combined with the social and political turmoil of the Vietnam War era made me realize that our government, despite our constitutional protections, dominates the personal lives of citizens in many ways -- too many. I did not like being manipulated by "big brother" Therefore, I became a member of the Libertarian Party, a supporter of freedom and limited government, and am no longer politically homeless.

From the libertarian perspective, it is easy to see that the government uses its schools to control citizens' lives to a startling degree. In his book, Is Public Education Necessary?, Samuel Blumenfeld wrote, "The American public educator is quite willing to do whatever the government bids him or her to do -- today in favor of racial integration, tomorrow in favor of something else. This does not bode well for American freedom, but we ought not be surprised, since totalitarian governments have long considered public education as their most important tool for indoctrinating and controlling the young." In the same vein, Cathy Duffy writes in her book, Government Nannies, "My concern and purpose...is to stimulate more people to value their freedom and autonomy enough to stand against the encroachment of benevolent government-nanny programs that would keep us all as perpetual children."

While our government seems to be doing everything it can to deny us our natural right to freedom, privacy and property, I still believe in our founding principles and as long as those documents exist. I know we can, and should, continue to seek and defend a life of self-determination with individual liberty and personal responsibility.

My Son, the Homeschooler

2008-02-14T17:58:00.000-08:00

In 1979, soon after my youngest son was born at our ranch in Colorado, my wife, Luz, informed me that she wanted to try homeschooling. What? Hold on! I had been a private school teacher; she was a certified public school teacher. I was disturbed, even shocked by her intentions. I had never heard of homeschooling and, like many people, I could not imagine a child growing up without going to school. She knew better.

Luz handed me two books by John Holt, and I soon learned that she was right. Holt showed me that if there is one thing that holds children back as they mature and often turns them against learning, it's schooling -- sitting in unfriendly, often uncaring schools where children’s intelligence and interests are ignored.

For their first several years, children do not need schooling, but nurturing -- the natural care and feeding that most parents provide. As Cass reached “school-age” we remained inspired by Holt's words: “Children do not need to be made to learn, or shown how. They want to and they know how.” We decided that Cassidy would determine what, when, where, how much and with whom he would learn. We never used school books or taught lessons. We answered his questions when he asked and helped him gain access to the real world when he wanted it. We called it unschooling -- no school books, no curriculum, no teaching (unless he asked for it), no testing, none of it. Today, unschooling is surprisingly popular, with magazines and egroups devoted to it.

Unschooling did not mean un-education. It simply meant that we would be aware and supportive of our son's interests and would be paying close attention to his desires for information as well as his gains in essential knowledge. I carried Cass on my shoulders around our town, reading the signs, talking to the shopkeepers, bank clerks and others. He soon was speaking in long sentences and, at four, he could read virtually any book. He proved Holt right; he did not need urging in order to learn. He once told a librarian, "I'm interested in everything."

We did not believe, as schools claim, that it is more important to "feel good about yourself" than to know how to read, write and calculate. The reason is simple: if you can do those things well, you will feel good about yourself, no matter what others tell you.

All through his growing years, people observed that Cass was bright, confident and capable. They remarked, "He must be incredibly smart to have learned so much so young." I could only answer, "Children are born smart. It's just that nobody is dumbing him down." I truly believed that because we didn’t send him to school, he was able to easily acquire all the essentials while he avoided the many negative lessons that schools teach. Our job was to encourage his curiosity and to help him gain access to the world. His life was the polar opposite of sitting in boring classes and being told that his interests are not important.

Cassidy liked responsibility. He earned his own money with jobs he found. He became an expert in dinosaurs and fossils, so much so that the Peabody Museum used him as its Information Officer in the Great Hall of Dinosaurs when he was eleven. He also became a teacher at the Eli Whitney Museum, once giving an “enrichment” class to public school teachers when he was fourteen. He became world class at origami. He took the SAT, and scored higher than half the valedictorians in the state of CT, without ever looking at a school book.

Cass got himself into the college he chose, Hunter College, because it was in the middle of his favorite place, NYC. He lived in his own apartment downtown and took the subway to school. His friends told Luz and me that he always seemed to know the right thing to do. That was when we knew that our experiment was a success, because he had always chosen his own path, instead of being directed by others.

He breezed through – always in the top one percent of his class. He held jobs both in and out of the college; was president of the film society, and graduated Magna Cum Laude. For this one young man, school was not just unnecessary, but irrelevant and, we believe, would have been damaging to his mind and spirit.

Who's to Blame? Teacher Unions

2008-02-13T14:37:00.000-08:00

It is ironic that the biggest obstacle in the path to better schools is the teachers' unions. How outrageous of them to work their diabolical magic against the very people whom they should benefit: the students and the community. But no, the unions have created a situation that has now reached a point at which the schools cannot be fixed.

Before about the year 1960, the NEA was an association of teachers who worked in the public schools. But that year, it became a labor union instead. Its purpose changed from trying to do a good job to trying to take the maximum money from the community. Since then, while teachers' pay has risen sharply, the biggest winners have been the negotiators and union staff who work behind the scenes, jacking up the price of everything the schools do, while having zero interest in the quality of education that results. Unions want one thing: more money for less work. In public schools, they are performing flawlessly.

For example: the unions have arranged for the inability of schools to fire the worst teachers while preventing the creation of incentives for decent teachers to improve their skills and knowledge, and thus their pay. The result of those twin measures is that the schools are moving steadily in what has been called, "The race to the bottom." The bad teachers stay while the best ones routinely quit, resulting in the steady decline in the quality of the public schools.

The micromanaging of teachers' days, the insistence on "certification," the constant pressing for more and more counter-productive rules, stonewalling all reforms, and more drive up the costs of public schooling. To prove my point, the CT NEA printed its list of one hundred seventy-four demands that its negotiators had ready as they went into teacher-pay negotiations with local school districts. The local school boards have literally no chance in negotiations with union pros when their meager requests (such as "will the teachers accept a little accountability for their work, please?") are met with such force.

Julia Steiny, a columnist for the Providence Journal (RI), shed much light on the problem this week. She noted that the roots of the problem go back to the early days when teacher unions asked the advice of automotive industry unions. She wrote, "In an unfortunate accident of history, the labor contracts that won decent pay for teachers also cemented into place a factory-model design for schooling. Blue-collar labor contracts spell out and limit a worker's obligations on the factory floor, or in this case a classroom, as if teachers were as interchangeable as die-press operators."

Little has changed. Steiny quotes a former superintendent in RI: "The unions...are running the whole country into the ground because they can't get it through their heads that the reason for our financial problems is at least in part due to us trying to keep up with their demands." She concludes, "The whole negotiating process, using a model designed for blue-collar jobs, is painfully obsolete, seriously impeding academic improvement and, most important, stealing resources from the kids."

It just might be time to start over in education.

The ADD Connection

2008-02-12T09:02:00.000-08:00

What follows is from EducationRevolutionNews: www. www.educationrevolution.org Used with permission. I am a friend of the owner, Jerry Mintz.

I remember when one of our children was not doing well in school and he was 12, 13 years old, something like it. First year of middle school as I recall. And the teachers were all freaking out, and all, you know, all, you know how it goes. And it was that ADD thing, right? Put him on medication! And we actually tried that for a short while. Didn't seem to do much good.

And so we decided to go looking for a school for him, a better school, you know, a better educational environment. Let's find a place where he can flourish and there are a bunch of schools in Atlanta in the phone book advertising that they specialize in kids with Attention Deficit Disorder or learning disabilities, and so Louise and I went shopping. And what we found was that most people were of the opinion that because these kids were impulsive and distractible and not particularly well structured and organized, they "needed lots of discipline and structure. Let's just slap it into 'em." The schools that were purporting to be good places for ADHD kids were like variations on military academies.

So we finally had given up on all the ADD specialty schools, and we found this school in downtown Atlanta called the Horizon School which was a leftover remnant of the Summerhill experiment in some ways. Part of the alternative school movement. "Summerhill" was a book by A. S. Neill published back in the 1960s as I recall in which they created a school where the kids ran the school. And this school was actually run by the student council in everything except academics. The teachers had final say in academics but the kids had a student council and they ran the school, and they made all kinds of rules for themselves, it was quite remarkable.

So then I went out and walked around the school and I remember walking into a classroom. This was seventh graders as I recall, seventh or eighth graders. And it looked like absolute chaos. Kids were not sitting at their desk. They were standing up, they were walking around, one kid was sitting on his desk. There was a kid sitting on the teacher's desk. Kids were running up and marking things on the blackboard. The teacher was having a knock down drag out argument with the kids. And I'm standing at the back of the room and you know, keep in mind, a decade earlier, I'd been the executive director of a program for abused kids that had a school! And I'm standing in the back of the room, you know, with my arms folded across my chest, thinking, "This is a classroom out of control." This would never happen in a school I ran.

And you know how sometimes when you just listen for a few minutes more, all of a sudden you hear something that completely turns your world upside down, that completely changes the way that you view things. And as I stood there, in this very kind of critical, judging posture, I started listening to what the kids and the teacher were arguing about.

What these kids were arguing with this teacher about was that Einstein had suggested in his theory of relativity e=mc2 that you can't exceed the speed of light. That if you exceed the speed of light, you can get to .999% of the speed of light, but if the value of the speed of light becomes one or one point anything, once you hit or exceed the speed of light, then time becomes infinite and mass collapses to zero. Or is it the other way around? Time collapses to zero and mass becomes infinite. I forget which it was. I used to have memorized the time and mass dilation theories but that was when I was a teenager. Anyway, and therefore it's impossible in the physical universe to exceed the speed of light. You can approach it but you can't exceed it. And if that's the case, these kids were saying, then why is it that Einstein in his own theory of relativity, his oh most famous theory, said e (energy) equals mass times the speed of light squared? e=mc2 (c is the speed of light). How can you square something that can't even have as a value of one? How is that possible? How can you square something you can't exceed? They are pulling out Einstein's General and Specific theory of relativity and they're talking about his story about being in the train going away from the clock tower in downtown Austria and as the train approaches the speed of light the hands start to slow down and all this stuff.

And all of a sudden, I got it. That all my life, I had thought that education was about pouring things into kids. Yeats's quote. The filling of a bucket. And that what they understood at that school was that education was about lighting a fire. And so we put our son in that school and not only did he do well, but he was doing work two grade levels above his grade level. He was getting As in senior physics as a freshman or a sophomore. He all of a sudden just caught on fire, he fell in love with learning, and all of this with no drugs, which leads us to the question.

You got a person who has a psychiatric illness in a public school that requires medication from a multibillion-dollar industry, but when you put him into an alternative school environment, not only does he not require the medication, but the disease seems to vanish and he does very well. The question is, then, where is the disease? And I have firmly, solidly come to the conclusion that the disease is in our schools. It's not in our kids. END OF ARTICLE

Homeschooling has seen similar results from kids diagnosed with ADD, ADHD, "learning disability" and the rest of the excuses that public schools use to cover their own incompetence and insensitivity.

Galloway breaks Down, Part 2

2008-02-09T10:41:00.000-08:00

Tony Galloway's outburst was a defining moment in the thirteen years I spent at that college prep day school in the comfortable shaded suburbs of Philadelphia. There were other similar eruptions -- crying fits, corridor fights, swearing and throwing tantrums, but this threat of suicide in a blind rage was the topper. And yet, it made complete sense. During the several minutes Bergstrom was out of the room collaring our classmate, we children decided that while Tony's reaction was overcooked, it was justified. We all knew what he meant and we all felt some of his outrage at our situation and treatment. We agreed that Bergstrom should have been more sensitive to the boy's limits, and should never have pushed them.

No one else in that class would have threatened to kill himself over one more incomplete homework assignment or reprimand or insulting comment by a teacher. Tony was, we agreed, strung a little tighter than the rest of us. He was odd, eccentric, focused on things we couldn't know about. He was not self-absorbed, but preoccupied and content with another set of ideas that he could not share easily with us.
Galloway had been chased into the office for a tense conference and the inevitable phone call and silent ride home. We never saw him again, but heard that he might have been sent to a military school for further torture.

We were all repressed children. Our school was not enlightened about children or learning beyond the neanderthal techniques of government schools. After all, they get their rationales from the same sources. We were trained to obey, to believe in an established order, not to question authority, not to think for ourselves, not to make our own decisions. In fact, our school did all the things to us boys that its literature would say it did not do, that it would never do or even intend. Its founders and leaders were blind to the contrast between what the school said and what it did. This, despite its motto: ESSE QUAM VIDERE - Be rather than seem to be.

Moral: Most, if not all, of what fifth grade children do in school and what teachers do in order to coerce them to do it, is a boring waste of everyone's time, if not intentional cruelty.

Back to the future:
Nothing has changed. School is as hellish now as then. All the children feel its torture in varying degrees, but only a few boil over in rage. Today, the reactions are more forceful. Kids have weapons.

Galloway Breaks Down

2008-02-07T18:52:00.000-08:00

(I wrote the following eleven years ago while rambling around in my memory)

Starting in fifth grade, the inhumanity and pointless tedium of school began to show. As I think back, most of us kids felt it, but we couldn't define it, and even if we had recognized it for what it was, we were powerless.

It was a private school. We were good boys from middle class two-parent homes where managerial and professional careers were common and where much was provided for, and expected from, the children. I collected cans, bottle tops and tin foil for the war effort. Many families, including ours, had "victory gardens." We didn't know about rebellion. That our parents were well-off, privileged, influential and often arrogant and bigoted was not our business. Our job was school.

On a Friday in February, Tony Galloway broke. He had shown cracks and signs of discontent for months, but on this day, when our home-room teacher called him down for one small infraction -- one more deviation from an imaginary norm -- Tony blew. He got up from his desk, flailing his arms and yelling, "I hate this place and I hate you," and added the equivalent of today's, "I'm up to here with your shit, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!"

Tony ran up to Mr. Bergstrom's big oak desk and kicked it hard on his way over to one of the large windows. Still bellowing his objections to the whole school experience, he flung up the sash and prepared to throw himself out.

Our classroom was on the second story of a tall-ceilinged converted victorian mansion. The ground was far below, maybe twenty feet. Tony, still complaining, was alternately crouching inside and lunging his body halfway out the open window, as if practicing for the final suicidal head-first leap.

We were all dumbstruck, and for most of this display, so was Bergstrom. Outbursts like this were simply unheard of in private day schools full of "proper" boys from socially prominent families. We were all relieved when Bergstrom at last had the presence to move quickly on our classmate, grab him wih one hand and close the window with the other. In a moment though, Tony squirmed away and, still yelling, threw the door open, ran out into the hall and down the creaking wooden staircase with Bergstrom running and calling after him.

That's all for today. I'll finish the story tomorrow or when I can, after dental surgery.

If Parents Ran the Schools...

2008-02-05T09:34:00.000-08:00

"I do not believe in a child world. It is a fantasy world. I believe the child should be taught from the very first that the whole world is his world, and adult and child share one world, that all generations are needed."
--Pearl Buck, in To My Daughters, with Love, 1963

No community would ever do to its children what the government does to them in the name of education. If parents ran the schools, would we, for example, insist that all children learn the same things at the same time?

Would we create a bleak and artificial environment, separated from real life, and lock our kids up in it for twelve years, knowing that most of what is taught there is unnecessary, unwanted and even wrong? Would we allow them to use poorly written texts to dumb down our kids?
Would we use school for indoctrination to government ideologies and approved attitudes and mass opinions? Would we assign a large part of every school day to non-academic social and psychological conditioning and political correctness instruction?

Would we allow our property to be confiscated if we didn’t pay the ever rising tax bill each year? Would we hire unionized teachers with binding arbitration and tenure and let them vote on their own wage increases, whether deserved or not?

Would we use policies such as social promotion and grade inflation in order to deceive each other about our children’s achievement? Would we use Whole Language which causes reading problems, instead of Phonics which is the only logical method for teaching reading? Would we ever teach "fuzzy math" as public schools do?

Would we let schools give mind-altering drugs, such as Ritalin and Prozac, to our own children in order to control their behavior, as insane asylums (and public schools) do?

Would we hire uniformed, armed, police to roam the halls, acting as agents of force?

Would we allow our children’s and our own lives to be so dominated by school’s synthetic experience that there’s no time left for real life? Would we administer standardized tests that have little educational value and that can even be damaging, and then hide the results from each other?

Would we use school as a government jobs program, both for hiring people and for training students? Would we hire twice as many administrators as are needed? Would we claim that self-esteem is more important than skills and knowledge? Would we use certified staff when private schools avoid using such state-trained people? Would we create rules that make it almost impossible to fire bad teachers? Would we allow teachers NOT to be accountable for our children’s learning?

Would we allow the state to dictate who can administrate our schools? Would we let teachers use our kids as shills for their pay raises and social concerns? Would we pay twice what private schools charge and get half the learning?

The answers are all no. Government school is a fraud. The educationists have learned to hustle us, shake us down in a shell game for control of money and our children’s lives. Public school is a state monopoly that can neither educate our children effectively nor inform the public honestly.

To become responsive and accountable, education needs to be separated entirely from government. Otherwise, it will continue to serve only itself and we will remain its slaves.

It's great to be appreciated!

2008-02-03T12:11:00.000-08:00

Judy Aron, author of the blog, Consent of the Governed, has presented the Excellent Blog award to School Is Hell.
For more about this, and for fine commentary on our too-intrusive, too-expensive too big government, check out Judy's blog at www.yedies.blogspot.com
I am pleased to add that I have been a friend of Judy Aron and her family for many years.

Do the Math

2008-01-31T12:15:00.000-08:00

How many eggs are in seven dozen? If ten people walk nine miles in six hours, what was their average speed?

When people say, "Do the math," these days, they usually mean do the simple calculation needed to understand the situation. However, many people now lack the ability to do the math because they never learned the basic math facts or simple methods of calculation in school. What's worse, the school taught them to believe that making those simple calculations was not necessary. The result is that millions of people today lack the fundamental skills needed for productive lives. They believe it is their own fault for not having basic skills and fundamental knowledge. Many do not even know how little they know, because if they don't master the basics, many doors of learning are closed to them.

We often hear the phrase, "Do the math." Unfortunately for far too many of today's public school graduates, they can't.

"Socialization"

2008-01-30T09:15:00.000-08:00

When Horace Mann, the "father" of American government schooling, started the system, around 1850, his purpose was to turn a diverse population into a "workforce" of docile and predictable masses. Where did Mann look for his model system? In Prussia, where the rulers used state-run schools to turn out factory workers and soldiers to fight their ongoing wars against Napoleon. Well-schooled Prussia became Fascist Germany with its Socialist Governments, and brought us two world wars and the holocaust. Mann copied the Prussian factory system of schooling for this country. Little has changed since that time.

Never in history has government wanted its citizens to become truly educated and inquiring people who might question its authority or power. Government is only interested in indoctrinating us to whatever beliefs, attitudes and opinions are deemed by its leaders as correct for the time being. As yesterday's post attests, the state insists that its teachers offer a tightly scripted curriculum. Therefore, even during the time when public schools in America had a "hey-day," their purpose was to deliver a limited product of information and skills -- just enough to satisfy the army and business.

Did Mann have "socialization" in mind? No, he was, in fact, a puritan who wanted a religious-based society of "good people" and "good citizens." However, influenced by men such as John Dewey, the system was taken over early in the 20th century by those who wanted socialism, and that required a dumbing down of the population. The "Look-Say" method of reading (later called Whole Language) was popularized and Phonics was phased out. Math has been turned into "math appreciation" thanks to an endless series of fads, but leaves out the necessary component of basic knowledge of numbers and the ability to compute. As a result of those fundamental changes, children today are taught neither how to read nor how to calculate.

Today's public schools use the idea that the group is more important than the individual -- perhaps the most fundamental Socialist concept. In contrast, America was founded on the concept that the individual is sovereign.

In recent years, public school standards have been lowered to a point (in many states) of elimination, in favor of political correctness, group thinking and psychological conditioning. We hear their employees say, "We want the students to gain consensus on subjects." I remember a former superintendent in my town saying, "I don't care about test scores so much as how the children feel about themselves." To the schools, socialization means group thinking -- the opposite of critical thinking. Thus, "socialization" has replaced academic learning as the reason for the existence of government schools.

How do you feel about that?

A Former Teacher Writes

2008-01-28T09:35:00.000-08:00

I received the following letter -- edited to protect the writer's identity:

"Ned,
"I went to ___University. It was very expensive but I needed something close since we didn't have a car. Previous to taking my Master in Education I had completed an Honors Bachelor in Chemistry at the University of ___. That program was academically very challenging and I was shocked to see how little was required of me during my Masters.

"Grades were a joke, everyone received an A as long as we showed up. Basically we were taught that we were little nothings who had to dress nice and suck up to the Principals at the schools where we student taught. It was never even suggested to question the government's decisions about content standards and standardized tests. We were simply told that if we ever wanted to find a job we had to make it extremely obvious that we knew the standards inside and out and would teach nothing but those standards to our future students.

"At the same time as preaching about the standards, the teachers emphasized the importance of "student centered and guided learning." The teachers conveniently forgot to mention how exactly you allow for student guided learning if you can only teach the standards. Basically "certification" means that you have agreed to teach what the government wants against your better judgement.

"At both my teacher's college and the school where I taught for one year, all my peers complained about the terrible state of the education system but did not do a single thing to make it better. I guess in reality they were all afraid of the government, afraid of rocking the boat, making too much of a fuss and losing their job. After all, keeping your job and being able to afford your oversized house, car, and life is all thats really important, right? If it wasn't fear that prevented one of my peers from making an attempt to improve the state of the education system it was the feeling of helplessness. One person can't do anything against such a huge buracracy so why bother, right?"

The writer lasted one year in public school teaching, proving that high-achieving people are not attracted to such jobs or, really, even the training for them. My wife, Luz, went through a Masters of Ed. and feels the same way -- that it was a waste of her time and money.

School is hell for the teachers, too. Are the administrators too dumb to notice?

Public Schools VS Public Libraries

2008-01-25T10:08:00.000-08:00

As Homeschooling Grows, What Is at Stake?

2008-01-24T09:21:00.000-08:00

Columbia Teachers College -- launching pad for many public school teachers, administrators, programs and policies -- recently asked for public comment on the question, "What is at stake when more and more of America's students are being homeschooled?" I sent the following:

That the government school system is failing to educate America's children is no longer in doubt. So, by asking that question, Columbia seeks to blame homeschooling for putting the public schools at risk. The premise is patently absurd, first, because the main reason for the growth of homeschooling is the failure of the public schools; and second, it is those schools that put millions of children's education at risk. The presumption -- really, the hope -- that the public school system is providing what America's students need and want is simply false. The failure is massive, and the public school system has the habit of blaming others -- movies, television, even "society" -- for problems that it creates for itself.

If anything is "at stake" (def: "at risk" or "in question") it is the coercive monopoly system itself, and the reason is its poor performance. Its problems have not been imposed from outside; the system is not a victim of forces beyond its control. It has only itself to blame.

The public school establishment has noticed that the canary in its gold mine has died because of its own dishonesty, corruption and wrong-headedness. Instead of cleaning up, the system continues mining for all the gains its employees, unions, and special interests can acquire while denying the problems and, worse, seeking to blame others for the death. Its normal response to the suffering of its students is to make them suffer even more and to force the taxpayers to give it more money. One problem is that the system never admits to its failures. Therefore, it has no self-correcting mechanisms, no way of clearing its own air. It has too many conflicting interests, failing programs and bad practices to get back to its true purpose of education. Some have even suggested that it never had that purpose.

The government school employees and supporters see any and all alternatives as threats to their monopoly, since they view children as their source of revenue. The primary goal of most bureaucratic institutions, especially government controlled ones, is growth. The public schools follow that objective fiercely, seeking ever higher budgets, larger payrolls and wasteful construction contracts while viewing efficiency and thrift as counter to their interests.

Standardized tests that show the dismal failure of America's students are routinely ignored. International tests of basic skills show increasingly worse comparisons between the US and other countries' schools and/or students. Yet, year after year, the schools portray their failure as "success" and incredibly, they get away with it. What is at stake is the credibility of the US education establishment and ultimately, the productivity, even the viability, of our society and our country. At stake also are the public school teachers along with their unions. The pubic, more and more, are discovering that just because someone is "certified" by a state, or is a union member, does not mean that s/he is a good teacher, especially when we find that the best private schools do not seek state-certified teachers nor do they have unions. Meanwhile, teacher unions are obstacles in most efforts to reform the public schools. Today, people are simply too well informed to tolerate an invalid system of education.

At stake for Columbia is that it will need to change how it selects and trains teachers. The system clings to methods, practices and beliefs about learning and teaching that have long been proven wrong. There is no change in sight. By creating so much of what is wrong with the public schools, Columbia is one reason for the growth of homeschooling.

Homeschooling is not part of the failure; it is one of the frontiers of national recovery. More and more parents would turn the original question around to read as follows: "What is at stake if we don't take our children out of the failing government schools?" The answer, of course, is our children's lives, our families, and the future of this country.

A Bit More about Calligraphy

2008-01-23T10:25:00.000-08:00

From Pamela LaRegina:
“Would you like your child to learn how to think and do? Would you like your child to experience the stimulation, challenge, and order that are the three basic requirements needed for right teaching?
Would you like your child to learn to be aware of his own ability to be creative, to coordinate the thought in the mind with the movement of the body? To not only see beauty but to be able to understand it and create it without having to employ complex or expensive tools? Would you like your child to learn to communicate well, to learn the nature of practice and the path to achievement?
THEN MIND WELL HOW YOUR CHILD LEARNS TO WRITE.

“Now the questions in your own mind may be surfacing: What are you saying and why is this news to me? I do not recall anything about my learning how to write, I do not care for my own handwriting and I do not see what relevance hand writing has to do with this computer-based world, anyway.
What is the big deal?

“When you were a child you were not taught to write in the manner that is being proposed here. Nobody was! Whereas a child can apprehend the learning process by learning to play a musical instrument, not all children have to learn to play one, but all children must learn to write. (This is not to imply that a child who does not wish to write should be forced to do so, for that is not teaching, it is coercion, which never works. However, the desire to learn how to write comes naturally most of the time.)

“Because learning to write teaches the learning process, all other learning that comes after will happen more easily. The brain has been ordered, neuronaly, so to speak, so that the grid work is in place and there is now something for the next learning to connect to.

“The process of learning how to write involves the apprehension of a particular form, the ability to imagine that form, and then the ability to use the mind as builder, and the hand, along with a simple tool, to create that form into something that is visible and tangible -- something that can be seen and understood by others. In brief, it teaches Communication, Language, Drawing, and Self-expression.

“Perhaps you may say that your child can learn similarly by learning how to use hammer, wood, and nails to build a bird house. Well this is very true, and it is also true that learning how to write is an excellent primer for the carpentry experience!”

Ned adds: It’s never too late, or early, to learn how to write; therefore, I recommend calligraphy for adults and children. It truly does lead to learning beyond the making of legible letters.

Tomorrow: As Homeschooling Grows, What Is at Stake?

Calligraphy: Beautiful Writing

2008-01-22T10:35:00.000-08:00

Pamela LaRegina, a calligrapher www.supercalligraphics.com , says that her practice of calligraphy provides benefits for her life that are beyond financial, like teachers of dance and music who see their arts as providing character, confidence and joy. Some of her thoughts about her practice are as follows:

The capital I is drawn with a single vertical stroke. Graphically, it represents the "minimum" stroke in our writing system. This means that it carries a lot of responsibility. It is the stroke that is most repeated and therefore deserves to be treated with a lot of attention to detail. If you can imagine it as a "real" letter, that is, with its skin on, it has some messages to relay. It tells how thick and thin the quality of line should be, and where exactly those thick and thin places should occur. Then, when drawing the A, the B, the D, the E, the F, the beard on the G, the H, the J, the K, the L, the M, the N, the P, the R, the T, the U, the V and W, the X, the Y, and the Z, you know what the quality of their strokes will be also. Actually, the more you practice these graceful strokes, the more you can feel the rounded parts of the letters as being in harmony with the movements that it takes to create the capital I, also.

In order for all this to be understood, it really needs to be experienced. This is an idea that you have undoubtedly encountered in other activities, such as playing golf, or a musical instrument.

Of course it goes without saying that the height of the capital I is an indictor of the height the other letters. There are some slight exceptions to this. Although the A comes first, it is actually drawn slightly taller than the I to compensate for an optical principle. Because it comes to a point on top, it needs this extra height to appear the same height. The same alteration is necessary for other letters that have points on top or bottom, and the O, also, is a tad taller.

What is perhaps more important than the height is the quality of verticality and straightness that the I lends to the alphabet. It becomes a sensual experience that reaches down to your toes and inside to your deep-breath belly. A capital I that leans backwards even slightly is going to look like it is falling over. You get to see that you drew it incorrectly, however, and this gives you a chance to deal with your mistake.

This is the way to learn to do anything. The process of learning to draw a vertical stroke takes body awareness. My personal experience, though difficult to verbalize entirely, goes something like this:

Simply put, I become the letter. I must be sitting with a straight back to make the letter straight. I must use a movement that incorporates a relaxed, downward stroke that uses the whole arm. The pressure will vary according to the tool and the surface I am writing on, but generally speaking, it will be an even pressure that may ease up slightly in the middle of the stroke.

You must stay conscious of the whole process. This requires use of mind and body working together with no margin for drift. Thus, it becomes a kind of meditation. As the attention focuses, the letter becomes. There are other considerations, also. For example, as the letter must be placed somewhere, how and exactly where it gets placed must be deliberate. The space around the letter- the negative space, must be designed. Here is where a calligrapher has to make conscious choices based on his sense of space and balance. The space itself has a shape, and becoming aware of and orchestrating this space is part of the game.

When I stated that I become the letter, I was reiterating a dictum that I learned while taking a course in Chinese brush painting. The teacher told us that you have to become the flower or the bamboo.

Questions for Your Local School Board

2008-01-21T09:16:00.000-08:00

Should public schools offer knowledge, skills and factual information or feelings, attitudes, opinion-shaping and social engineering?

Should students learn "fuzzy" math (math appreciation) or real math – you know, facts? (Fuzzy math programs have various names, such as Everyday Math, Constructivist Math, and more) From www.wgquirk.com: "Constructivist math educators want easy, stress-free math, so they reject memorization and practice and thereby severely limit the student's ability to remember specific math facts and skills. Without specific remembered knowledge, students must regularly revisit shallow content and rely on general content-independent skills, such as "draw a picture" or 'make a list'."

Should children learn to guess at words ("look-say, "Whole Language") or should they learn how to read words accurately with Phonics? "Whole Language is the great deception being perpetrated by the professional educators upon the children of America, all of whom want to be taught to read but are being turned into reading cripples condemned to lives of frustration, academic failure, stunted intellectual growth and destroyed ambition."

Are science, history, spelling, geography taught to all, or just some?

Why is special ed so huge? When statistics show that less than one percent of children are truly "disabled" in any way, why are over ten percent of public school children considered so? The true answer is that the schools use a "bounty system" for special ed. The state sends extra money for every child who is diagnosed with a "disability" no matter how flimsy the diagnosis.

Should the teachers offer information, or do we merely want employees to be “facilitators” who hope that our children “share” with each other what little they know?

Why are honor rolls bloated while test scores are poor? Can it really be for public relations reasons?

Who, on the board, is guarding against school corruption? Raise your hands, please.

Why are there no Gifted and Talented classes? The real reason is that the state is not trying to help the gifted and talented, but simply to create a middle mass of mediocrity that will become a workforce in service of government and industry.

Health comes from nutrition and exercise, but the schools offer junk-food-for-profit and no recess – Why?

If money is related to school quality, why has school quality declined in recent years when education spending has risen at rates well above inflation?

Why do private schools not require their teachers to be "certified" as public schools do? The fact is that private school teachers (generally people with degrees in academic studies) are insulted by (and refuse to take) the low intellectual quality of the courses required to become "certified."

The Government School Priesthood

2008-01-18T10:34:00.000-08:00

“The current situation allows the government and big business to manufacture and maintain our culture for us, and in turn, control remains in the hands of the experts and institutions.” -- Helen Hegener, Alternatives in Education

The $600B per year public school monopoly is a hierarchy--a top-down pyramid of control, similar to that of a large church. For its power, it depends on psychological conditioning -- the willingness of those at the lower levels to believe in and obey the tenets and commands of the higher-ups.

Students, of course, are the “congregation.” They are the supplicants, the sheep, at the bottom of the pyramid. Their role is to keep quiet and do what they are told without question. They are trained from the beginning that they are to follow, and not to think for themselves.

Teachers are the choir, singing their assigned hymns and anthems, repeating their mantras carefully taught to them in teacher colleges and "professional development" -- really edu-seminaries and indoctrination camps.

Up the line are principals, managing schools just as parish priests preside over local churches, setting a personal tone, but never varying the lesson plans or orthodoxy. They are the middle-men in the chain of command, doing the bidding of the superintendents. The pyramid, at every level, serves itself first.

Superintendents run districts, with the number of schools depending on the district size. Even though they get pay from local taxpayers, they get their orders from the state Dept of Ed. which sets the policies, attitudes and programs conducted within all districts. Superintendents act as bishops, making sure that the local clergy toe the line handed down from the state.

Local school boards are irrelevant—mere window dressing for the superintendent, making it seem as though the community agrees with the state's policies. Legally, the boards are "agents of the state," and do the bidding of the state bureaucrats and politicians.

Higher still are career education bureaucrats in the federal Dept of Ed. This is the college of cardinals of national schooling where policies become rules and regulations for the rest.

Near the top of the pyramid come the state commissioners of education. They meet under the group name Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and their website tells us that they "organize national influence on education issues." Indeed, they decide the big picture -- the national policies, the "direction" for the national school system. Their discussions and decisions are private, and are handed down as "the word" from on high. Their effect is the dumbing of America.

This pyramid also includes teachers unions, the large special interest which constantly pours sand into the machinery, making everyone’s work more difficult and expensive. Then come teacher colleges, where Thomas Sowell says, “The least respected professors teach the least respected courses in the universities.” How good can the graduates be when the courses attract only the lowest ranks of students?

There are the monasteries and nunneries, too, called “resource centers.” Here, hundreds of teachers who wash out of the schools find employment designing the stealth materials used in the schools. These are the factories of Transformational Education and Values Clarification, where the so-called "facilitators" come from to help superintendents shape local opinion about the schools.

This pyramid of public school is headed, not by a Pope, but a Secretary of Education. The entire structure is designed to teach one thing: Obedience to Authority.

In such a tightly controlled hierarchy, there is no local control. No one is permitted to complain; everyone is scripted; and no one thinks at all. That’s the plan, and it’s working. There’s just one problem: no one gets educated.

Public School: Employment Empire

2008-01-17T11:34:00.000-08:00

"The school system is a place whose primary purpose is to provide employment for teachers and administrators, with students being a means to that end." -- Thomas Sowell; INSIDE AMERICAN EDUCATION

Today's school year is the same length as it was fifty years ago, and the school day is also unchanged. One thing is much different today: twice as many people work in those schools. And yet, with twice as many people to perform virtually the same work as fifty years ago, the educational results are below those of former years. What can we conclude? Government school has become an employment empire at taxpayer expense without regard to teacher qualifications or school quality.

Is more teaching happening? No. Is more learning going on? No, in fact, today there is far less learning than previously. Why? Because content -- the foundation of basic skills and knowledge that once were taught -- has been drastically reduced, lowering the quality of the education that is offered. We cannot expect students to learn if they are not being taught.

Therefore, today's public schools are less effective despite the fact that twice the number of people are employed in them. The teachers are less educated; the subjects are watered down, the teachers are "certified" which really does not mean qualified. Another change is that the government's concerns are social engineering instead of academic learning; that results in the subjects being watered down. therefore, the intent of today's schools is therapy instead of education; feelings instead of knowledge; attempting to "manage" the social fabric instead of educating the masses.

Why are there so many employees in the schools nowadays? Good question, right? I don't believe it has anything to do with education, because, by all indications, the more employees they have, the worse they do what they are expected to do. To me, it looks like the schools are a convenient dumping ground for many not-all-that-well-educated folks who have lost other jobs. By making room for them in government-run schools, Big Brother acts as a sponge in the market place, soaking up employees who once were in private enterprises, and placing them on public payrolls at taxpayers' expense.

The books are poorly written, the teachers are not well educated in the subjects they teach. They go to teachers' colleges to learn "education" instead of real subjects that they might pass on to their students.

It's simple, all Uncle Sam needs to do is announce a new program, such as No Child Left Behind, and bingo, a million people join the government school payrolls across the country. What politician doesn't like "Education" for an issue? And few would ever oppose throwing more money at schools no matter how bad they get or how much they cost?

Does quality schooling really depend on spending more money? Not at all. The quality of a school is entirely dependent on the quality of the programs and the quality of the teachers who offer those programs. Money alone has not been shown to change anything except the budget. Paying teachers more to offer the same programs gets those same programs at a higher cost. The proposed state increase for schools (if it passes) will go entirely into the pockets of existing and additional teachers -- already the highest paid in America -- but will improve nothing.

What we see is that the school system is part of a scheme by which the federal and state governments are using the schools to absorb a portion of the workforce in order to centrally manage the populace and labor statistics for political purposes. In this way, government grows while private companies downsize and modernize. In this way, they keep the unemployment rate at levels "acceptable" to the electorate, but with one kicker: school employment is at taxpayers' expense. Thus, we get the bill when the government wants to hire more people. The feds even send down elaborate programs, such as No Child Left Behind, all with billions in incentives for districts to hire more people with other people's money -- ours. Does it ever improve education? No. That continues to get worse and more expensive.

The winners are the teachers unions (moe members; more dues; more power), the administrators (larger payrolls; higher pay; more control); school bureaucracies (more employees to keep track of more programs and more money) Who are the losers? The taxpayers, the parents, and the kids because the bigger the employment kingdom, the lower the quality of the teaching corps and the less anyone cares about the children.

"Certified" Does Not Mean Qualified

2008-01-16T13:00:00.000-08:00

"By all indicators -- whether objective data or first-hand observations -- the intellectual caliber of public school teachers in the United States is shockingly low." -- Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

Today many, if not most public school teachers are "certified" by their states. What does "certified" mean?

Most teachers attended a college where they chose "Education" as their major. That means that they stopped taking courses in academic subjects such as English, History, science and Math and began a curriculum in "Education." That curriculum dwells on the trivia in which most public schools engage, and little else. In other words, their own education ends and they take up the study of how to teach in public school, but in a huge irony, they stop learning the subjects they should know well if they are going to teach them.

Arthur Levine, head of Columbia's Teacher College, reported (The Education Schools Project, 2006): "A majority of teachers are prepared at the education schools with the lowest admission standards and least accomplished professors." In an interview with the Hartford Courant, Connecticut's biggest newspaper, he continued, "Taken as a whole, teacher education programs would have to be described as between inadequate and embarassing. Arts and sciences faculty complain that education research is simplistic, that education students are among the weakest on campus, and that course work in education lacks rigor."

My wife, Luz, agrees. She earned a Master of Education degree at U. Arizona. But after a year of public school teaching, she realized that the government was not truly interested in educating children, and she soon quit. She considers her time, money and effort spent on becoming certified to have been totally wasted.

Thomas Sowell, in his landmark book, Inside American Education, says, "Consistently, for decades, those college students who have majored in education have been among the least qualified of all college students, and the professors who taught them have been among the least respected by their colleagues elsewhere in the college or university. Education schools and education departments have been called 'the intellectual slums' of the university."

Sowell adds, "The courses...are the filter through which the flow of teachers must pass. Mediocrity and incompetence flow freely through these filters, but they filter out many high-ability people, who refuse to subject themselves to the inanity of education courses, which are the laughing stock of many universities. One of the great advantages of the private schools is that they do not have to rely on getting their teachers from such sources."

Sowell continues, "The futility of attempting to upgrade the teaching profession by paying higher salaries is obvious, so long as legal barrier keep out all those who refuse to take education courses. These courses are negative barriers, in the sense that they keep out the competent (emphasis mine). It is Darwinism stood on its head, with the unfittest being most likely to survive as public school teachers."

More from Sowell: "It should not be surprising that education degrees produce no demonstrable benefit to teaching. The shallow and stultifying courses behind such degrees are one obvious reason." And: "By their virtual monopoly of the credentialing process, schools and department of education determine the caliber of people who enter the teaching profession, and the inadequacies of those people determine the upper limit of the quality of American education."

The Purpose of School

2008-01-15T14:11:00.000-08:00

"In times of change, Learners inherit the earth, while
the Learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal
with a world that no longer exists." - Eric Hoffer

Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman who, through self-education, became a much revered author, social icon and philospher, and was noted for his understanding of how a State can destroy the lives of its subjects, and often does so.

One of the ways a State can keep its citizens from ever living up to their potential is to keep them ignorant. Not only ignorant, but unaware of anything other than ignorance. The purpose behind this plan is the simple maintaince of power over the people...yes, even in societies in which the people are convinced that they, themselves have all the power.

Therefore, the idea of government wanting to deprive its citizens of controlling their own destinies seems most ironic in the case of America, and yet, that is our situation with regard to our system of education.

The government-run schools of America were designed originally, in around 1840, to imitate the system of Prussia which certain leaders believed was the proper model. It had been set up to train the masses to become soldiers and workers in the munitions factories of that country in order to finally defeat Napoleon's army. The system, as Hoffer's line says, beautifully prepared the people to become a "workforce" in the hands of government, but further to be unprepared to control their own lives in a changing world.

We might say that when Prussia eventually became Fascist Germany, it reaped what it had sowed, getting a population that was perfectly schooled, but monstrously uneducated and incapable of dealing with the new reality -- a State that had allowed itself to be taken over by a madman.

Do we want our children to become dependent members of a government-controlled, state-schooled workforce, or do we want them to become independent-thinking, creative, self-governing individuals?

Is There any Doubt that School Is Hell?

2008-01-14T14:41:00.000-08:00

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be
insane by those who could not hear the music." -- Goethe

Is school not hell? Did you enjoy it? What did you enjoy? Try to remember the part(s) you liked. Most of us can think of a few friends, a teacher or two, recess, maybe a certain course that interested us -- only a few things. But out of twenty thousand hours, only a tiny fraction did we enjoy. The rest was boring, frightening, threatening, wasted time, being forced to do things against our will and/or better judgement,etc.

School denied us the chance to learn many things we were interested in, while teaching us things in which we had no interest, or were perhaps counter productive, even harmful for us.

School attempted to indoctrinate us in many ways. We learned that our interests were not important; that our questions or points of view seldom mattered. In recent years, schools teach that the group (including its collective thinking, called "consensus") is more important than the ideas of any individuals. This is training in collectivism, really Socialism.

School kept us captive for many years, telling us how valuable it was for us to stay enrolled while wasting more and more of our lives, both in school and with busywork called homework.

Those are descriptions of hellish conditions.

And when we were finished, did we feel educated? Did you give the school credit or did you realize that whatever the school taught you that had value was also available in several other places and ways, even though the school wanted credit for everything you learned.

I have proof. My youngest son did not attend any school. We did no lessons at home. He used no school books or materials. We called it unschooling, and he learned what interested him from sources he chose. And yet, he scored extremely high on the SAT and was a standout academically in college (Magna Cum Laude).
And we know lots of kids who had similar experiences.
Conclusion: School is a waste of time AND a hellish experience.

What Is School For?

2008-01-11T12:52:00.000-08:00

"Nothing is easier than spreading public money. It does not appear to belong to anybody. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody."
-- Calvin Coolidge

Connecticut's school system takes every opportunity to claim that its schools are the best in the country. Yet, teaching standards for Math and English are the lowest in the US according to the the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (www.edexcellence.net/ ), an independent think tank. Their 2005 report evaluates the standards by which all states offer instruction. CT came in last. A recent US Chamber of Commerce analysis agrees with Fordham on CT's standards. Meanwhile, US stands 24th out of 29 industrial nations in math and science, according to TIMSS, the international math and science watchdog group.

With the US near the bottom in world ranking and CT at the bottom in US ranking, we know that Connecticut public school teaching standards for English and Math are among the world's worst. No matter how much our state and local officials and the teachers' unions promise they are offering "excellence," it is obvious that they are not even close. Instead, we must wonder if they know what excellence is since virtually every other state is doing it better.

Observers have noticed that the school system is not primarily for education, but exists for other reasons, starting with job #1-- babysitting. Job #2 is sorting and labeling children for the job market (some call it "role selection," others call it meat-stamping). Job #3 is employment for adults who are downsized or otherwise unemployed. Thus, the school system acts as a sponge for hiring at taxpayers' expense. There are even places for failed teachers in the system; one such place is called LEARN (in Old Saybrook) -- a sort-of nunnery where up to six hundred people are hired at taxpayer expense to perform unnecessary activities. There are six such places in CT alone, called "regional resource centers."

The state mandates that all CT children are to be offered instruction in a few basic subject areas. Does the state say what, exactly, needs to be learned? No. Does your local school system have a set of information that it requires the students to learn? If so, where is it written? If not, what is the purpose of the school system? If a child can demonstrate that he/she knows an "acceptable" amount of information, can that student be considered to have met the district's basic requirements for graduation? If not, why not? Is there more that is required from students than learning basic subject matter? What is it? Where is it written?

What we'll find is that a student must sit in classes until a certain number of "credits" are earned. A diploma does not depend on any particular amount of learning. It depends on a certain amount of seat time, or "time-on-task;" in other words, attendance. Thus, school is about serving time and obedience -- being psychologically conditioned -- but not learning. That is why many people call public school warehousing.

Recently, I met a startling example of warehousing -- a bright and talented senior who is about to graduate from her town's high school after attending for twelve years. She took the Army's test for general competence in reading and math -- a test set at approximately the sixth grade level. She failed. Her years in public school have not prepared this young woman well enough to join the Army. That is outrageous. For this to happen, the failure of her (typical) school is huge. After twelve years in public schools -- receiving As and Bs -- this young person is not competent in basic knowledge and has little chance to succeed in our society.

The public schools socially promoted her for twelve years while no one raised a flag about her lack of reading skills, which also led to her inability to understand written math problems. The Army considers her illiterate. How bad can it get! Ask at any public school, "Who is responsible to see that children learn to read at least at the sixth grade level before they get a high school diploma?" No one is. I asked if anyone on my school board was knowledgeable of the reading program and its results. No one is. What does that mean? It means that no one in the public school system cares about the results of what goes on.

Whose children are they? Whose money is it? End

Schools Search for Weaknesses, not Strengths

2008-01-09T09:22:00.000-08:00

"The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn." - Cicero

As a former teacher, author of a book on learning and father of several children, I have long believed that most children are bright, gifted, and talented in their own ways. However, the more I learn about the public schools, the more I realize that they are set up to seek out and label children's weaknesses or, as they like to call them, "disabilities," but not to identify or develop children's talents or gifts.

What's going on? The schools are not what they claim to be. The above tells us that the schools are not looking for "Excellence," as they say, but are actively working to prevent children from reaching their highest potential, seeking mass mediocrity instead.

One of the school system's first official priorities (after babysitting) is to sort and label our children for government purposes. Here, the schools work in ways that are opposed to what parents want them to do. Schools make extra money (lots of it) by diagnosing "disabilities." The schools have what they call, "the bounty system" to get thousands per "diagnosis," from the state, even though the diagnoses are often made on flimsy grounds. Corrupt? You bet.

Strangely, there is no incentive for identifying a child's strengths or gifts or talents. Therefore, schools no longer look for those strengths. In fact, if a child is able to read well in first or second grade, s/he is sometimes penalized. I've even heard from a parent who was told by a teacher that for her to teach her child to read at age four or five was "child abuse." How insane can it get!
On examining my own habits, I notice that I have several "disorders." While school was about sitting still, I was about moving and doing things, so my school could have labeled me ADD if that diagnosis had existed back then. I do not remember names well, so am I brain defective? I do not keep a checkbook straight, so am I "sequence challenged?" I tend to begin in the middle of projects and work toward both ends, etc. If I were in public school today, my diagnosis might be, "Learning Disabilities." That would make a bundle for the school, but I believe it would damage me.

Today, we know that there are different kinds of intelligence and multiple ways of learning. Following our strengths leads us to work we enjoy and lives that are fulfilling, while we avoid doing things we are not good at and don't enjoy. For example: I was (among other occupations) a competent and happy farmer, but no amount of training would turn me into an accountant.

But the one-size-fits-all school system wants to turn out uniform and predictable people instead of diverse individuals. It does so by claiming that differences from the norms (even artificial ones) are "disabilities." By today's perverse rules, Edison, Einstein, Churchill, Warren Buffet and a host of other successful creative people would be part of the Special Ed food chain, dying on the vines of boredom and neglect, never to be heard from. As Mark Twain wrote, "Public school does not want the cream to rise." If you have bright children, be warned.

Public school's politically correct motto seems to be: "No winners, no losers; all are part of the mediocre middle." Not only does the government want a middle mass, but those who diagnose children are trained to seek disabilities, but are not trained to find kids' gifts and/or talents. The schools have phased out programs for gifted children and are instead concentrating on, and promoting, their alphabet soup of "disorders."

Is there any good news? Yes. While the schools ignore children's strengths, there is Great Potential, Inc (www.giftedbooks.com/), a publishing company that can help parents find their children's strengths. Their latest offering is about the misdiagnoses that their authors claim happen far too often. Great Potential says, "As a result of misdiagnoses, we are unnecessarily medicating many of our best and brightest youth with drugs like Ritalin, Prozac, Lithium, and Paxil, and counseling them inappropriately. Such treatments may diminish their intellectual potential."

Ned Vare is an architectural designer and author; former private school teacher, businessman, and elected official.

The Disconnect Between Parents and the Public Schools

2008-01-08T08:58:00.000-08:00

“To the extent that producers are able to avoid competition, consumers suffer from the absence of innovation.” – Myron Lieberman, Public School: An Autopsy

The School Wars are, in effect, Producer-Consumer Conflicts. The conflicts arise when producers charge high prices for low quality services or products. The conflicts are common when the producer is a government owned and run monopoly as public schools are. It is ironic that the “public schools” are not owned or run by the public, but by the government, while private schools are owned and run by members of the public.

Most people are both producers and consumers. As consumers, we want improvement in what we buy, whether better quality, lower price or easier accessibility. Such improvements are the result of competition (market forces) among many producers of the products and services we want. But as producers, we try to protect ourselves from competition that would threaten our livelihood. The best situation, then, would be to have a monopoly as a producer and competition as a consumer.

In government schooling, the producers are the state, the school boards, administrators, teachers, and the consumers are the children, parents and taxpayers. The producers have advantages over the hapless consumers -- they have a virtual monopoly with constant income while the consumers must take what they are offered, and pay for it. Unfortunately, it is an inferior product at a high price. The producers determine the product and set the price without regard to market forces. They enjoy guaranteed revenue from taxes regardless of the quality of their product. They have the public over a barrel.

In a town such as mine (Guilford, CT) where there is no private school to offer competition, the school system can, and does, ignore its consumers simply because no market forces are operating. In the face of parental concerns, the administrators get away with remarks such as, “Trust us, we’re professionals” and, “You have no background in education.” Their intent is simply to dismiss parents for meddling in their private kingdom or for being a threat to their control. Their tactic is denial.

What are a few of the potential conflicts? Parents want the administrators to find the best teachers regardless of credentials. Parents also want teachers either to have a major in the subject they teach or to pass a rigorous test on the material. Unfortunately, the teacher unions insist on "certification" even though the certification process does not attract the best people for the jobs available. In fact, the process is repugnant to well-qualified and high-achieving adults.

The unions also fight against testing of its members for their knowledge and/or competence. School boards always agree with the unions. Who speaks for the consumers? No one.

Another conflict exists over merit pay. Most parents accept the free market idea that offers rewards based on achievement and accomplishment. It is a given in the real world that higher productivity gets higher pay…that is the incentive for doing more and better work. If applied to teachers, it would mean that some teachers would be paid more than others based on student achievement. Yet, the unions resist those market-oriented concepts and insist on equal pay based mostly on tenure. Thus teacher salaries are one-size-fits-all for the convenience of school administrators and so that the union can avoid internal squabbles. Nowhere is there a concern for what would be best for children, parents or community.

Many citizens believe that with more taxes or a redistribution of money the schools will work as parents want. However, no matter how much of our money government schools spend, they will not do what parents want. Why? Because the system is designed by government central planners advised by teacher unions. It serves the state, not parents, and its purpose is to turn out a mass of docile employees, not self-governing creative questioning individuals.

The Market for Liberty

2008-01-07T12:04:00.000-08:00

"Private enterprise maintains and expands itself by continually offering people things they want. Government maintains and expands itself by depriving people of things they want, by means of forcibly seizing their goods (taxation) and forcibly preventing them from trading and living as they choose (regulation). Thus, private enterprise continually increases the prosperity and well-being of it customers, while government continually decreases the prosperity and well-being of its citizens."
-- Morris and Linda Tannehill, THE MARKET FOR LIBERTY, Laissez Faire Books, NY 1984

The quotation is a good description of how the public school system operates, reducing our prosperity and well-being by forcibly taking our money and dumbing down most of our children. Meanwhile, private individuals (by creating private schools and homeschooling) do far better in education and force not a penny from anyone, benefiting everyone.

That's all for today.

Evolution of a School Board Member

2008-01-03T18:08:00.000-08:00

"God made idiots. That was for practice. Then He made school boards."- Mark Twain

The school wars rage on -- parents against the establishment. Why? Because school boards seem to work for the employees instead of for the residents and children they claim to represent. What happens to a person in the transformation from innocent resident to a member of the school board?

First, they join a political party. Parties choose candidates who will not rock their boats of political influence. If you believe that politics does not mix well with education, you are right, but you need to keep that to yourself. School boards serve political interests, not children's. The first transition, then, is from intelligent idealist to political survivor.

A typical school board member claims to be "in favor of education," and wants to "work for the children." They start out as creative and independent citizens, but soon learn that their idea of education is not the same as the state's. Local boards are, by CT law, "Creatures of the state, not agents of their towns." Thus. they do not represent the community. And what does the state want? Ironically, the state wants a docile workforce of dependent people who will do what they are told and are trained not to ask questions. So, board members devolve into group-thinkers who use the same nonsense language of administrators called "edubabble."

Some members begin as reformers who believe that the schools must change if they are to improve. But, if a town's schools are particularly bad - as most are -- neither political party will admit to the poor quality for fear of being blamed for it. Therefore, no one does anything to improve them. The school establishment wants no part of change. That's why some people call it, "The Blob." Therefore, a reformer would not be acceptable. Thus, the second transformation is from agent of change to accomplice in the status quo.

Board members often come from the ranks of the PTA or PTO, having "worked hard" to help the teachers do their jobs. They have become indoctrinated to believe that the teachers are overworked, underpaid and, "doing the best they can under the circumstances." They are blind to the fact that the union manipulates both the board and the teachers' workday, striving always to increase its influence at the expense of the town and its children. Thus the board member is changed from creative individual to sychophant.

The teachers union hand picks some candidates. They are often long-time teachers who retire with the notion of continuing to "help the children." These members have built-in conflicts of interests since they are imbued with the establishment "reasoning" and probably still draw pensions from the system. There is no chance that a retired teacher will be openly reform minded. The union has a singular goal: more money for less work. Whatever gains the union makes from board decisions are always at the expense of the children and/or the taxpayers, usually both.

Finally, members become institutionalized. The job changes them from crusaders for improvement to apologists for the status quo, from idealists wanting "better education" to supporters of the current failure, from searching for truth to agreeing with the lies, from part of the solution to part of the problem. The system dumbs down everyone in it.

What does the above mean? It means that residents who want to improve the schools cannot do so. It's a government game and it's rigged at the top. Government wants obedient soldiers; not independent thinkers. That is why mediocrity is set in stone, deceptions are the rule, and the corruptions are permanent. End

"Simon Sez," the School Game

2008-01-01T09:47:00.000-08:00

"A common reason for the government to set up schools is for the boys to go to war and the girls to cheer them on."
-- Marshall Fritz, founder, Alliance for the Separation of School and State

Simon sez, “Stand on your left leg. Raise your right arm.” Simon sez, “Scratch behind your right ear with your left index finger.” How well we remember that game, “You there! You did not raise your arm fast enough. You’re out!” What stress it caused.

School says, “Sit down; be quiet.” School says, “Open your book to page six. Now go to the toilet. Now eat.” That’s the school’s game. The “winners” are the few who comply with the commands. The losers are all the ones who were caught in mistakes and were ushered aside…we might even say they were “left behind.”

The game, of course, is a metaphor for school. School Simon has buzzers, loud speakers, schedules, threats and punishments, even drugs to control the students. The employees even call themselves “professionals.” Simon Sez is an adult’s idea of a good time for children, and yet children seldom choose to play it on their own. The school employees say that what they do is "for the children," even though the public school system is designed to serve the needs of government and arranged for the convenience and benefit of the employees.

Today, many who went to school and took it seriously often find themselves at a loss for what to do. We have become dependent on Simon to tell us what to do. Well, that is because we have been trained not to think for ourselves. The training is done by the schools. It is called, “socialization,” and it breeds ignorance of one’s own needs and aspirations. It is obedience training and indoctrination, not education.

What is the purpose of such a school? Here’s David Alpert, author and homeschool advocate: “The objective is the production of a docile, compliant workforce that will not rebel, and that will seek out life satisfactions solely through the production and consumption of material goods. The first requirement is to become habituated to obedience…if you want to know what you should be feeling or thinking (or consuming), you should go ask Simon.”

Alpert continues, “Schools tell us that doing things that are just plain dumb because you are ordered to, builds character and prepares you for life.” How insane can it get? The truth is that the school game destroys character and prepares children for lives of blind obedience and dependency, denying the need of all youth to develop independence.

Today school employees like to say that theirs is a “democratic” institution, with a “culture of respect.” We have to laugh because it is the exact opposite. They are in fact anti-democratic because the system denies all principles of democratic association. Here’s psychologist/philosopher Erich Fromm: “The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to establish our own individuality.” He is saying that when democracy is perverted to mean that we are occasionally allowed to choose a new Simon, we are actually volunteering to be someone’s slave. The public schools are in fact not democratic but dictatorial, as their game demonstrates.

About one hundred fifty years ago, America copied the system of Prussia (which became fascist Germany) which used its schools to turn out factory workers and soldiers. It demanded total obedience. David Alpert concludes: “Perhaps the best that can be said about American public schooling is that, thankfully, we aren’t very good at it.”

Ned Vare is an architectural designer, artist and author, a former private school teacher, rancher, businessman, elected official.

Democracy vs. the School Culture

2007-12-31T09:28:00.000-08:00

"What is known as "free education" is the least free of all, for it is a state-owned institution; it is socialized education...and cannot be separated from political control." -- Frank Chodorov, Why Free Schools Are Not Free

Several years ago, a group of US teachers traveled to what was then the USSR to exchange information and ideas with their Russian counterparts. What the Soviet teachers most wanted from their guests was guidance on setting up and running democratic schools. Their questions were based on the assumption that a country like the US, so committed to the idea of democracy, surely must involve children in decision-making from their earliest years.

The irony is enough to make us wince, because in this country, students are rarely invited to become active participants in their own education. Schooling is about doing things to children, not working with them. An array of punishments and rewards is used to enforce compliance with an agenda that students rarely have any opportunity to influence.*

There is no democracy in the schools. The students are powerless. When (local superintendent) Forcella talks about a “moral culture” in the schools, isn’t he really talking about rules that the employees make for the students on which the students have no say? And when he talks about an “ethical culture,” isn’t he just putting high sounding terms on his own idea of control over the students. He is not about to give them the opportunity to influence their own social and educational environment? According to Armand Fusco, Ed D., the true culture of the schools is corruption and deceit. Will Forcella discuss that? Never.

The irony of those Soviet teachers is not lost. Today’s American public schools are dictatorial. They use coercion (punishments and rewards) to train students to be blindly obedient to adults and to become compliant predictable cogs in the nation’s economic wheel – not to be self-directing members of a democratic society.

Do we wonder why voter turnout is low? Look no further than the schools, where voting is virtually unknown. (Sure, there are sometimes "elections," but the "offices" are mere popularity contests, not meaningful positions) In fact, making decisions about anything is virtually unknown. The policies and rules come from above; not from the consensus of the governed. Public school is authoritarian, not just over the students, but also over the teachers, the parents, and, as much as possible, the entire community. Its goal is to subsume the individual. When Forcella says, of the teachers, “The group is better than any one,” he’s pushing Marxism. That's the opposite of democracy and, as such, it cannot be a training ground for self-determination, self-discipline and especially self-education.

What is the result of the total absence of democracy in the schools? The students learn to be apathetic and disengaged; resigned to their powerlessness, their lack of control over what they are doing. If any of them express joy at being in school, it is only to please their parents. They are doing time -- counting the minutes, or days, until it’s over. Alfie Kohn, author and lecturer writes, “They are compelled to follow someone else’s rules, study someone else’s curriculum, and submit continually to someone else’s evaluation. The mystery, really, is not that so many students are indifferent about what they are forced to do, but that any of them are not.”

Is there such a thing as a “Democratic School”? Yes. The first one opened in Massachusetts in 1968, the Sudbury Valley Democratic School. It is still going with a long waiting list, while many others have been cloned, two of which are in CT. How do they work? They are run – and I mean totally directed – by the students and staff -- all with equal say in executive decisions on hiring, salaries, tuition, programs, everything. The students also decide their own individual paths of study, or not study. There are no “requirements” other than normal civility. The staff is “on call” for the students. The students are not “on call” at all. Coercion is unknown.

Is such democracy compatible with schooling? By the Sudbury model, the answer is a convincing Yes. Last I heard, every graduate (except one) has been accepted at their college of first choice, and college recruiters are lined up at the gate. What is the benefit of democratic schooling? From the writings of grads, it seems to be that mutual respect and the deep trust in the children to determine their own paths of education has stood those children in good stead in the world beyond, while providing them with an abiding confidence in their knowledge of how to live and, of course, learn.

The Sudbury model is the only one I know of that is not Hell.

*from an article, Choices for Children, by Alfie Kohn, 1993

Ned Vare is an architectural designer, artist and author, a former private school teacher, rancher, businessman, elected official.

America’s Education Diet: Junk Food

2007-12-28T10:54:00.000-08:00

The school wars pit parents who want their children to get decent schooling--at least the basics--against the public schools that refuse to offer what the public expects of them. For the past thirty years or more, parents have been losing badly.

Several organizations that observe the schools and their results on behalf of the public have been notifying us for years that our children are not being educated by the government schools. While such news might seem doubtful to some because they believe we run our own public schools, the sad fact is that we do not run them; they are run by strangers in far away offices and by the teachers unions. Those strangers--not any local school boards--are setting the agendas for public schools. As for parents, they have no say whatsoever.

Recently, the Center for Education Reform (CER) released a report titled, “The American Education Diet: Junk Food.” It begins, “It has been 23 years since the National Commission warned of a rising tide of mediocrity in American education. Since then, little has improved, leaving new generations at risk in an increasingly competitive society.” What follows are some of the sad details.

* Math and Science: “In 2003, America ranked 19th out of 29 nations,” adding, “The US has the poorest achievement outcomes per dollar spent on education. 62 percent of professors and 63 percent of employers say students lack basic math skills.” I asked a local high school science teacher what she teaches specifically. Her reply was, “I want all my students to know my life story.” Maybe that accounts for the poor showing in science content. In Math, CER researchers concluded, "The longer a student is in the US system, the lower his achievement compared to students in other countries.” This result is the fallout from a "fuzzy Math" corruculum.

* Reading: “American students’ reading achievement is steadily declining and the results are being felt both during and beyond the school years.” The report cites the Rand Corporation: “Our schools produce students who lack skills and are ill-prepared to deal with the demands of [college] and the workplace.” Public Agenda reports, “Seventy-three percent of students lack basic grammar and spelling skills and the ability to write clearly.”

Reading is key to most learning. The fact that public schools neglect to teach phonics – the key to reading ability – is the main reason why US students, even in the most affluent communities, are woefully inept in reading. They are simply not being taught the needed skills which come only with phonics.

* Writing: Stanley Fish, Dean at U. of IL, Chicago: “Students cannot write clean English sentences because they are not being taught what sentences are.”

* Language, History and Cultural Studies: “American schools graduate a large majority whose knowledge and vision stops at the American shoreline.” David McCullough, the famous writer of American history, recently lamented, “American students are for the most part historically illiterate.” Surveys show that history and civics is virtually unknown to American students. With test results showing proficiency levels generally in the twenty percent range, it is as though those things were not taught at all.

According to Education at a Glance, American teachers have the sixth highest salaries in the world, but their students have the sixth lowest achievement in the world. This implies deeply entrenched problems with the American system of education.” Studies show that neither more time-on-task nor more money seem to be turning out better educated students. The problems are not time or money, but quality.

* Grade Inflation: “2.4 million American students graduate from high school without necessary skills in the 3Rs.” That means about half of all graduates need remedial help during their first years in college. “Teachers’ low expectations for students result in inflated grades for work that is sub-par, leaving students woefully, and unknowingly, unprepared for life after high school.”

* Teachers: “A growing number of teachers are without qualifications in the subjects they teach. Despite the incompetence of many teachers, the union makes it nearly impossible to fire bad teachers.” If this is allowed to continue, the schools will continue to decline because more and more incompetent people will be teaching while competent teachers will quit in disgust.

CER concludes: “Public schools are cracking down on sugary drinks. Now it’s time for them to stop peddling a junk food curriculum.”

Ned Vare is a designer, author, former private school teacher, rancher, businessman, elected official.

Is Childhood a Disease?

2007-12-27T10:02:00.000-08:00

"Ritalin! So much easier than parenting!" -- anon

The teachers union said: “Schools will become clinics whose purpose is to provide individualized, psycho-social treatment for the student, and teachers must become psycho-social therapists.” (NEA magazine, Education Today, Jan. 1969) Do you want your child to attend a psycho-social clinic for their schooling? Do you want your child’s teacher to be an amateur “psycho-social therapist”? Schools don't seem to care that such practice is against the law.

Is childhood a disease? The public school system and the psychiatry industry want us to think so. Does growing up produce mental illness? Yes, according to many in the psychology business -- especially those in the public schools -- growing up is definitely a disease that they--only they--must treat at taxpayers' expense. In fact, it is such a serious disease that they say it needs to be treated by--guess what--drugs. And those drugs just happen to be manufactured and sold by--guess who--the companies that pay kickbacks to the psychologist and psychiatrists who recommend them (you can look it up). Thus, the people who tell us that our children need to be drugged because they act like children have financial incentives to drug them.

Think about the words, “Learning Disabled,” that we hear so often. Suzanna Sheffer, author of Everyone Is Able, says, “Is that what we really mean to call so many children (around ten percent of the kids)? Is that how we hope they will think of themselves?” Or, is the term really a school alibi or convenient excuse for their own failures to teach? The so-called "symptoms" of "disabilities" are often the natural behaviors of healthy children.

There is a drug-pushing program that is making the rounds of public schools across the country. It's called "TeenScreen." It pretends to be a screening program that is trying to prevent teens from committing suicide. That's the scare tactic it uses to get its foot in the door of public funding. What this program really is looking for are all children who can remotely qualify as "at risk" or “disabled” or simply sad -- signs of maladjustment of any type that the promoters can use in order to recommend prescribing their drugs. An editorial in the Post-Standard of Syracuse, NY says: "Nine out of 10 children who go to see a psychiatrist leave with a psychiatric drug prescription."

"Ritalin -- It's so much easier than parenting!" says the tagline for a picture of a smiling happy family with Dad holding up a pill container. In this drug-crazed culture, have we given up on ourselves as parents or have the schools simply convinced us that they know better than we do? Statistically, the average parent is both smarter and better educated than the average public school teacher, especially administrators.

Then there’s the other problem: our country is becoming “A Nanny State.” We are under government surveillance and “care” from cradle to grave now. But is that making the country better? Quite the opposite: we are getting weaker, more dependent, less educated, dumbed down. The school system has extended our childhood in order to give too many unnecessary employees something to do. The schools have invented childhood disabilities in order to create “services” for them. Children are being over-diagnosed and drugs are being over-prescribed.

In sum, government has created a prolonged childhood for us in order to create an empire of “care” at taxpayers’ expense, while they call it “education.”
The biggest cause of psychological problems in today's children is simply attending a public school. The very routine of school -- its boredom, its dull classes, its coerciveness and stress, its dictatorial power, its blatant unfairness, bullying, etc.-- work against children's basic happiness and self-worth. As a result, far too many children qualify as “at risk” and “disabled.” It is not because they are those things, but it is because that is the way the schools want to see them.

Ned Vare is an architectural designer, artist and author. He is a former private school teacher, rancher, businessman, elected official.

The Socialization Myth

2007-12-26T14:05:00.000-08:00

“It is a rare child indeed who can come through his schooling with much left of his curiosity, his independence, or his sense of his own dignity, competence, and worth.”
– John Holt, The Underachieving School

Honk if you think any of the following are good ways to socialize: Sitting in boring classes with same-age, same-ability children for twelve years; pushing through crowded corridors to beat a buzzer; cheating; bullying; forming cliques; conforming to group pressures; doing busywork; long dangerous bus rides; hectic meals; being drugged for behavior; being diagnosed as "learning disabled" and put in Special rooms to be treated as patients instead of students.

More and more, these days, public schools are coming under criticism for the poor quality of their programs, their methods, and their employees. In response, the school folks do not try to defend their quality, but instead they often say, "But school is where children learn socialization." What do they mean by that?

The employees want the public to think of "socialization" as a version of "multi-culturalism" or racial tolerance. But when we look at what actually goes on in the schools, we notice frustration with petty rules, coercion, administrative secrecy, and retribution against anyone who dares to complain about the schools. We see massive failure on state and national tests, bloated "honor rolls" that include half to three-quarters of the students; grade inflation, social promotion; disrespect of parents. We see conformity, cheating, cliques and bullying, drugging of children, sales of junk food to students, poorly educated teachers, dishonesty and corruption. Are those the elements of "socialization" that we want our children to learn?

School employees try to convince us that children will be better adjusted to "society" as a result of attending their schools. Yet, how do they explain all the bullying and other violence there? How do they explain the suicide rate among children who attend, or the high dropout rate? After all, was socialization the reason for the government to establish the schools? If not, then why is that given as a big element of "education," especially when the original reason -- instruction in basic skills -- has been all but eliminated?

These days, when school employees promote "socialization," they avoid the subject of academic achievement. It is difficult for those employees to claim that children who attend their schools will become well educated there. Test scores reveal that American students are far below other industrial nations in basic skills and knowledge, and in CT, we find that academic standards for math and English are the worst in the country (see www.edexcellence.org)

To government, “socialization” means indoctrination to whatever beliefs, attitudes and opinions are deemed by officials as correct for the time being. Never in history has government wanted its citizens to become erudite people who will question its authority or power. Therefore, the purpose of public schools in America has always been to deliver a limited product of information and skills -- just enough to satisfy the Army and some businesses. It means turning out a uniform, docile workforce--obedient "human resources" who will be predictable voters and consumers.

In recent years, academic standards have been lowered to a point (in many states) of elimination, in favor of political correctness, group thinking and psychological conditioning. We hear the employees say, "We want the students to gain consensus on subjects." Thus, to the schools, socialization means group thinking. Unfortunately, the new low academic level results in more and more young people -- even high school graduates -- failing to pass the minimum testing to join the Army.

Has "socialization" replaced academic learning as the reason for supporting the public school system? To a great degree, it has. Transformational Education has infiltrated every public school, with its emphasis on changing children's freedom of attitudes and opinions to those approved by government. And what does the government want from its students? I believe that its employees and other boosters are using “socialization” as a new rationale for keeping so many children virtually imprisoned at public expense for so many years where they learn so little. End

Learned Helplessness

2007-12-24T10:18:00.000-08:00

"Learned helplessness is a psychological condition in which a human or animal has learned to believe that it is helpless. It thinks that it has no control over its situation and that whatever it does is futile. As a result it will stay passive when the situation is unpleasant or harmful and damaging." -- Wikipedia

When we Americans throw up our hands and say things like, "I know it's wrong, but what can I do?" we are expressing the condition of learned helplessness. We know there are problems, but we have been conditioned to believe that others--officials or "authorities"--are handling them. The officials are all too willing, even eager, for us to believe that they are doing something about the problems when they are not, especially when they probably created the problems and are making things worse every day.

When and where did we come to our condition of learned helplessness? Think back. Our first day in school, we were told the rules: "Sit down and be quiet; if you don't, you will be punished; if you still don't you will be drugged." Those rules were in effect for the next twelve years, just long enough for a complete abrogation of our character, our individuality, our conscience, our self-confidence. Our parents even told us not to disobey school employees, no matter how inappropriate, stupid, or self-serving their commands were. The result is Learned Helplessness -- the inability to deal with our own situation. We have been trained to be controlled by others.

If we give away our liberties voluntarily, are we still a "free people"? Thomas Jefferson wrote: "If you trade your liberty for a little security, you lose both and deserve neither." After spending twelve years in school without liberty, but with the illusion of security, we become willing to submit to more and more reductions in our freedom.

We are also asked to tolerate more and more absurdity by local officials. A few examples: A "Mission Statement" (local Public School) that contains no mission; A Five-year School Plan" that has neither plan nor goals; School standards that have no stated aims or requirements; "Principles of Learning" that are not principles of anything. School employees continually tell us that what they do is "For the children," when in fact, the system is set up entirely for the benefit and convenience of those employees and their union.

We have been trained to throw up our hands in helplessness. Long ago, our government created its national school system in order to condition most of us to be followers instead of leaders; to be passive instead of active or creative; to be obedient instead of questioning; to be timid instead of confident and bold. It has worked perfectly for the government whose leaders are simply taking advantage of our learned condition of passivity and submission and obedience.

The school officials dare to call what they offer "Excellence," while it is easily seen as mediocrity with frequent bursts of absurdity. They dare to call their results, "Success," in the face of massive failure. They dare to demand more of our earnings every year without asking themselves for achievement. While keeping the public's mind on "planning for the future," they avoid telling us about the current failures. In these ways, school officials nurture our feelings of impotence, futility, frustration and yes, helplessness.

All the while, the school board--pretending to work for the public who elected them--nod and smile as the administrators trot out new diversions (the next "big plan"), the latest waste of time and money, all designed to let us know that we, the people, have no control over the government school system.

Ned Vare is an architectural designer and author, a former private school teacher, rancher, businessman, elected official.

Do Schools Use Homework for Social Control?

2007-12-21T12:25:00.000-08:00

Isn't six hours of boredom plus a long bus ride enough school for one day? Isn't thirty hours plus six hours on a bus enough for a week, every week? When a child is required to do a lot more of the same uninteresting stuff every night as homework, I say it is required for reasons other than educational.

School systems have decided that homework is a good thing, regardless of its content, saying: "We are going to give children homework every day, and later on we'll figure out what to make them do." The prescribed amount depends on the grade, but it begins in kindergarten with ten minutes per night, and adds ten minutes for each grade until in high school kids are doing two or more hours per night. But is it worth the nagging, the family conflict and the exhaustion? I say No, there is no advantage.

Who makes such bad rules? Why do some parents demand it? Schools across America are doing this even though there is virtually no research that says there is a link between homework and achievement in the elementary schools, while there is evidence that homework can actually lower achievement. Alfie Kohn, longtime education activist writes: "No study has ever demonstrated an academic advantage for homework at the elementary school level," and at the high school level, "there is no proof that homework has ever led to higher scores." (from Kohn's book, "The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing.")

The usual argument says that homework "reinforces" what is taught during the day. Yet, in many instances, schools expect the parents to do much of the teaching, because the teachers are simply too busy with discipline, or checking homework or other details and do not have the time to actually teach the material. At worst, the teachers simply don't know the material themselves, and are leaning on the parents for help.

Kohn: "Homework isn't merely pointless, it actually undermines children's interest in learning." He adds, "The homework that is being sent home is no better than kids watching TV." At least with TV, they get to learn something new.

"What is behind the schools' push for homework? Social control. Homework keeps the entire family focused on school. It acts to sell school--an artificial life--while undermining a robust family life or a child's own real interests. Thus, homework has a political element, seeking to monopolize the time of families and, of course, the children, even in their homes. Let's stop believing that homework involves learning. It is busywork whose goal is to occupy your child's time, denying them real lives. Parents need to encourage children to find their own ways of spending their time away from school. Let them find hobbies and creative pursuits instead of the drudgery of worksheets of math problems or diagramming sentences or other time-wasting. Kids need a real life, not a synthetic one.

The families might ask the school board to eliminate homework just one day each week - say Wednesdays -- so that children and families can use those evenings for activities apart from school concerns.

Schools often mention that they are preparing children for what they call, a "global competition." And yet, Kohn says that there's a movement in Japan to eliminate homework for elementary grades because it makes them unnecessarily competitive.

Bottom line: The effect of homework is that kids are turned off learning. Homework should be assigned, if at all, on the basis of the importance of the work, not because someone has decided to keep kids busy on worksheets when they might otherwise have real lives. Homework for the sake of keeping kids busy during their home time is a bad idea. Kohn says: "There is no basis in fact for the view that homework is necessary or desirable." Let those who set the homework policy provide research that backs their views. Otherwise, let homework be optional.

Ned Vare is an architectural designer and author; former private school teacher, businessman, and elected official.

Crimes of Obedience

2007-12-20T08:44:00.000-08:00

“The only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.” - G. K. Chesterton

How much pain and suffering would you inflict on a fellow innocent citizen if someone in authority told you to do it? The answer was found by experiments at Yale starting in 1959, as reported in the Jan.'07 Yale Alumni Magazine. It turned out that almost anyone can be manipulated so that s/he will do virtually anything that someone tells them to do, including doing great harm to other innocent people. Such actions are called “Crimes of Obedience.”

The experiments showed how the government of Germany was able to use thousands of its normal citizens during the holocaust to systematically murder millions of other citizens. A psychology professor, Stanley Milgram, advertised for volunteers who acted as "teachers" in a "test of memory." He then used a confederate to act as a "learner." Whenever the "learner" (sitting in a separate room with arms strapped to an “electrode”) gave a wrong answer in a word-association test, the "teacher" administered a shock by pressing a lever on a control board. With each mistake, the shock intensity increased. Hearing the learner’s cries of increasing agony, most “teachers,” with the right urging, would continue to deliver shocks right up to the maximum shock level of "Extreme Danger." Unknown to the volunteers, no actual electric shocks were given.

Over the years, thousands of people have volunteered for the experiment in several countries. Sixty-five percent of the volunteers put their “pupils” to the pain limit of 450 volts. Whenever these "teachers" were told that they were not responsible for anything that happens to the "learner," or if they believed they were part of a "teaching team," the compliance rate rose to ninety percent going to the shock limit.

In essence, the finding is that blind obedience is amazingly common, even easy to get from most of us. It is characterized by the excuse made famous by Adolph Eichmann who arranged for the murder of millions of Jews, "I was only following orders."

The Yale article continues: "From all the evidence we could muster, torturers are not unusual or deviant in any way. Their brief training included being told the simple lie that they were helping research about memory; thus, their minds were carefully prepared to do what is ordinarily unthinkable. Normal men and women become transformed into true believers, capable of sacrificing others for the sake of ideologies." The article concludes: "The most dramatic instances of "mind control" are the systematic manipulation of human nature over time in confining settings." (emphasis mine)

How does this discovery relate to government school? Its teachers are trained to believe they are “change agents on an important mission” and that they are part of a “teaching team” just as we see in middle schools today. Instead of requiring teachers to have high levels of academic knowledge, they are required primarily to obey their superiors and to be familiar with methods of control, using punishments and rewards. Further research shows that the government’s goal has never been education, but training to turn out soldiers, factory workers and predictable consumers.

The psychology industry has taken over public schooling. How do we know that? Its members have found employment there in large numbers; its theories, practices and influence are felt in the words and actions of school spokespeople and even the teachers. The schools have been transformed from a source of learning to a system of manipulating human nature over time in confining spaces.

A century ago, psychology had little credibility and public schools had difficulty convincing the public that they were good places for learning. When the schoolers joined the psychs, their partnership has given both parties the sense of validity and even power that they craved. Schools use psychological methods to manipulate students and the public, while psychs gain stature from being employed by the government school establishment. But has public education improved? No. In fact, it has seen a constant slide in quality from its inception because its focus has always been obedience training, not academic learning.

Ned Vare

School Security: Jumbo Shrimp

2007-12-19T12:48:00.000-08:00

“If I had to choose, I’d rather the state feed and clothe my children than let it educate them.” -- Iowa grain dealer, Max Belz

“School security” is an oxymoron. Despite what school officials might say, no one is safe in public schools. I’m not talking about mad shooters. The primary attack on children comes from within the schools, not from outside, and it is constant. It comes from the staff, the boring classes, the academic mediocrity, the distrust, the coercion, the bullying, the unfair rules and restrictions. Together, those create the culture, the climate of frustration and anger. In turn, that causes some people to commit the violence -- often extreme. Public school makes everyone its victim.

Consider the following:
1. Violence is an ever-present possibility. Bullying is a natural result when humans are trapped against their wills. Anyone serious about doing harm cannot not be stopped. Also, the more schools become armed fortresses, the less educational they are.

2. Civil rights? In public schools, there are none, either for children or their parents. Federal District Judge Melinda Harmon ruled, “When you drop your kids off at Public School, you lose your civil rights.”

3. Freedom from coercion? Are you kidding? Coercion is the bread and butter of government school. We hear from the employees that schools are “democratic,” and yet any teacher or parent will tell you from experience that the schools are petty and dictatorial.

4. Freedom from verbal assault? Sorry. Taunting and harassment are part of public school's pecking order -- the result of forcing people together into ugly impersonal institutions.

5. Academic security? Ha! Only about thirty percent of this year’s sophomores in Guilford (my town--an affluent suburb) are even at grade level according to state standardized tests (CAPT). There are no goals or academic standards whatsoever. The basic skills are virtually ignored. Dumbing down appears to be the guiding principle.

6. Emotional safety? Students are at the mercy of psychological conditioning and peer-group therapy. The curriculum is designed as a feel-good exercise, not a learning path. The children know they are being cheated. Many parents realize that they are being conned.

7. Drug-Free Zone? The schools recommend Ritalin and other mind-altering drugs to kids who are anxious, stressed and bored. Who would call that a safe practice? The drug companies are on an aggressive program to “diagnose” children’s “disabilities” in order to sell their wares on a national scale. If the schools will drug our children for behavior, what won’t they do to them?

8. Integrity? Honor? Virtue? No chance. The system’s culture is corrupt, dishonest and self-serving. The employees constantly seek “respect” and yet, they are the ones who do not respect either the children or their parents. They are the ones who start the school wars, by violating the wishes of parents for their children.
9. Financial responsibility? Not a chance. Management by crisis is the norm. Waste is the rule. The system uses every trick to take more money from taxpayers in order to enlarge itself. For example, smaller classes means more hiring and a bigger union, not better instruction.

10. Local control? There’s no such thing. Public school is a state and federal system. The local school board and the administrators are puppets of the teachers’ union and the state bureaucracy. There is no autonomy. There is no accountability.

There is no safety of any kind in public schools. In fact, what permeates the schools is insecurity and fear. The problem is government control. The solution is local control, possibly by establishing a "charter district." That would at least eliminate the teacher union and burdensome state mandates. Let anyone apply who can, teach. Let teachers and parents control what goes on and most of the corruption would end. The ideal, of course, is private schools and/or homeschooling.

Where there’s no force, there’s no resistance. Where there’s no coercion, there’s no rage, and contentment increases. Happy, free and responsible people don’t harm each other. end

The Homeschool Set

2007-12-18T08:50:00.000-08:00

"If we continue to accept the status quo and act as if nothing is wrong, the effects on our country's economy and culture will be felt for decades." -- Jeanne Allen, president, Center for Education Reform

As the public schools get worse and more expensive, homeschooling is growing. Is there a connection? Of course, because homeschooling offers superior education without the negatives. Parents now realize the fundamental differences between homeschooling and government schooling.

First comes responsibility. The government system is a top-down pyramid of control--a bureaucratic state-run monopoly. While many parents assume that the state is educating the children, the government is actually required only "to offer educational opportunity," but is not responsible for the results, and the results are atrocious, and the trends are downward. In homeschooling, however, parents assume direct responsibility for their children's education. That is significant because the parents know, and pay close attention to, how their child is doing, while the government seldom checks on its quality and never is accountable.

Does the school board in your town know what is being taught? Does the board know what the test scores actually mean? In my town, both answers are no. At one school board meeting I asked if any member had read or examined any of the textbooks in use. Not one of them answered yes.

Who is actually in charge? In public schooling, it is hard to tell because the enterprise is a large political game, run by politicians, unions and bureaucrats. In many ways it is run by the teachers unions for their own benefit. While politicians try to appear concerned for children, and bureaucrats seek to justify their own employment, the unions make the rules governing most activities and costs. Remember, the teacher union has one goal at all times: more money for less work. Thus, public school is a joint effort of self-serving, often conflicting interests. Parents have no control, even though they are required to pay for it.

Another basic difference: homeschooling is piece work; but the public school system is mass-production. "One-size-fits-all" describes the system well. Even though employees claim that some children receive individual and "special" programs, the basic philosophy of the system is to produce uniformity. The government wants a docile, predictable, obedient "workforce" that it can plug into its military and industrial complex. Why else would they use "standardized" tests but to turn out standardized people?

Mass schooling, then, produces a result far different from the individual training and tutoring available in homeschooling. The state’s goal is uniformity and dependency, while the goal of homeschooling is uniqueness and independence. One is obedience-training; the other is for character-building. One is for group thinking; the other is for creativity and decision-making. One trains to "Do what you're told to do;" the other is for "I'll make my own decisions."

Public schooling is a job for children – a job that is becoming more and more like their parents' 9-5 jobs. Unions seek to increase the school day and year and enlarge the schools' payrolls and union membership. However, homeschooling is a life -- an extension of family and community life with which education is combined. Public school separates children from the rest of society in a segregated and artificial environment, while homeschooling integrates children into the society, giving them direct experience with the real world.

Public schooling serves the government's economic and political interests. It follows political mandates with the goal of turning out soldiers and employees to serve industry and business. Homeschooling serves children's need to become educated, informed, contributing members of society. Public school is a government jobs program for adults, also serving the needs of big labor and the state economy. In contrast, homeschooling is parental sacrifice, dedication, responsibility and love, serving the needs of the family along with the children.

Public schools are agencies of government, offering instruction but taking no responsibility for any children's learning. Homeschooling is a practice by parents who take direct responsibility for the education of their own children, as CT state law requires.

One is a huge growing public expense without accountability; the other is almost without cost, but is directly accountable and responsible. One has a socialist ideology -- coercion and authoritarianism -- while the other is an expression of individual freedom. By all honest measurements, the schools are failing our kids, while homeschooling is succeeding.

Ned Vare is a Yale graduate, an architectural designer and author; a former private school teacher, rancher, businessman, elected official.

Connecticut's School Massacre

2007-12-17T09:52:00.000-08:00

"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth." -- Albert Einstein

Is it just a matter of time before CT has a school massacre? The event seems inevitable because the conditions exist. CT has the worst education standards of all the states according to the Fordham Institute (www.edexcellence.org); the highest individual drug use of all states according to the Hartford Courant (4/25/07); arguably the worst city schools in the country according to testing by the State Dept of Ed.; a huge learning gap between poor and rich; etc. Thus, the stage is set for a rage-driven calamity.

Some people blame "evil." Others blame the social maladjustment of the shooters, or the availability of guns in our society, or movie violence, etc. Nobody blames the schools, yet schools are where the killings have been happening. Is that mere coincidence? I think not.

Children have always disliked school, but today's public school environment is far more oppressive than in the past. Far from the "melting pot" of a diverse society, the schools are dangerous and cliquish places, where the culture is coercive, dishonest and corrupt, in addition to failing as an educational enterprise. Petty rules are enforced by petty officials; administrators are preoccupied with "security" as police roam the halls.

Public schools are unionized workplaces arranged for the benefit and convenience of the employees, not for the children or community. Prison-like buildings; bleak corridors, and ugly classrooms tell us our children are merely being warehoused. Add frequent buzzers and loudspeakers' barking and we get the picture of indoctrination and psychological conditioning to a life of compliance and servitude. Add drugging, tedious bus rides and impersonal bureaucracy and you have a package that is wholly anti-child and even anti-education, all at a high cost to every taxpayer.

According to his book, School Corruption, Armand Fusco, a former superintendent, public school is "a culture of dishonesty and corruption." Considering such things as "honor roll" bloat, grade inflation, social promotion, we see a pervasive tendency to defraud the public. Teacher "certification" and school "accreditation" can easily be viewed as scams. In their public statements, administrators spin their jobs as more important and meaningful than they are, always promoting "future successes" while ignoring current failures.

Students are distrusted, their parents are ridiculed; the public is lied to; teachers are mis-educated and ill-trained; the atmosphere is stressful and competitive where only a few can succeed. Children are convinced at an early age that their interests are not important and that they are not capable of deciding their own course of study or evaluating their own work. According to John Taylor Gatto, teacher of the year in NY State and NYC, the purpose of the public schools is dumbing down - turning intelligent children into obedient predictable adults.

In these conditions, most children get the message that they will never realize their full potential. Add the fact that the government seeks to replace the family by becoming the students' surrogate parent, and what's left is an absence of real love and caring for the children and their lives. The government uses its schools for its own purposes -- to turn out a workforce of what it calls "economic units" or "human resources" instead of well-adjusted, secure individuals. And that is the opposite of our own desires for them.

What can parents do? Parents need first to recognize their position of helplessness against the schools. They have no chance of "reforming" the system. Therefore, they must take more responsibility for their children's lives than at present. That includes their education, especially since CT State law says that parents are responsible for that, whether or not they send them to school.

What can be done to prevent the CT school disaster? Should we profile all the students, as some suggest, looking for possible future shooters. Even if we did, it turns out that the profile would fit ninety percent of all students. Yes, it turns out that, if subjected to what schools do to kids, most ordinary people would react with violence. Or should the schools themselves -- with their controlling arrogance, their unreported bullying, their deceptions and secrecy, etc. -- be profiled in search of the most likely place to have mayhem break out?

Ned Vare is an architectural designer, former private school teacher and elected official. He is co-author (with his wife, Luz Shosie) of the book, Smarting Us Up. For your copy, see sidebar

"Public" School Is Government School

2007-12-14T09:52:00.000-08:00

"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." -- George Orwell

The school board is a political body. Therefore, we must not be surprised to hear political language from its elected members. We also need to keep in mind the fact that, even though we elect them, the local board does not represent local residents; it is, by law, an agent of the state. Nevertheless, as long as board members pretend to work for us, we should expect them at least to talk about education once in a while.

Is it OK for the school board to twiddle its collective thumbs, or should it have an agenda for action? Is “good schooling” really the objective of any of our school board members? Surely, after they all campaigned for “improvements,” we should be hearing a few ideas about what that means, but we don’t.

Before a board member can present an idea about how to improve the schools, s/he would have to admit that something is wrong. That is always difficult for school board members, because they do not like to be associated with anything tainted. Remember, their positions are political. They never get around to dealing with the failure that exists.

The system ignores the wishes of parents. In fact, the employees often reject ideas by parents who take an interest in the school operations. The administrators seem to resent any real involvement by parents in decision-making or policy discussions. Thus, when they say they want parent involvement, aren’t they simply lying? Through doubletalk and outright lies, the school boards marginalize parents. They listen only to administrators, and thus work exclusively for their employees.

I suggest that the board use its meetings more constructively than it does. Instead of wasting them on trivial details, they should invite guests (not school employees) to speak on the important educational issues. The meetings could then proceed with discussions about those issues, such as the following:

* Which should the schools teach: knowledge and factual information or feelings and opinion-shaping?
* Should students learn fuzzy math (math appreciation) or real math – you know, facts?
* Should children learn to guess at words (Whole Language) or should they learn how to read words accurately with Phonics?
* Are science, history, spelling, geography taught to all, or just some.
* Why is special ed so huge?
* Should the teachers offer information, or do we merely want employees to be “facilitators” who hope that our children “share” with each other what little they know?
* Why are honor rolls bloated while test scores are poor?
* Who is guarding against corruption?
* Why are there no Gifted and Talented classes?
* Health comes from nutrition and exercise, but my town's schools sell junk-food-for-profit and continue to reduce recess – Why?

If public schooling has truly become therapy (feelings), as many experts are saying, then surely the system’s doors should be closed. The schools offer low quality instruction, parents are conned and the children are cheated. Some board members talk about education as a “village” responsibility. They're wrong; schooling is the schools' job.

Ned Vare is a Yale graduate, an architectural designer, artist and author, a former private school teacher, rancher, businessman, elected official.

Schools Seem Eager to Drug Your Kids

2007-12-13T11:50:00.000-08:00

Here is part of a petition that is being circulated these days:
"To: School Board Members and State and Federal Legislators

"Whereas children as young as 9, who previously had not thought of the concept of suicide, are being asked invasive and leading questions by TeenScreen such as: Have you tried to kill yourself in the last year? Are you still thinking of killing yourself? Have you thought seriously about killing yourself? Have you often thought about killing yourself? Have you ever tried to kill yourself?" and kids are being lured into doing the suicide survey by TeenScreen's offers of free movie passes, food coupons, pizza parties and $50 mall gift certificates;"

What’s going on here? TeenScreen is a state-sanctioned program with an advisory board that has major pharmaceutical company ties, that is infiltrating the public schools of America in a blatant attempt to get the schools to shill for them with the ultimate goal of placing as many kids as possible – millions – on their drugs. It is as simple as that.

So why not just forbid this practice? Well, it’s not that easy, because some believe that the public schools have become adjuncts of the drug industry; they have ties between them and big money is at stake. The more kids they can put on drugs, the more money can be made from selling the drugs, the more people can be employed by the schools, the more, the more.

Here’s more of the petition: " Whereas TeenScreen is based on the controversial and unscientific Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, written by psychiatrists with financial ties to drug companies, and children screened by TeenScreen are not given valid medical testing such as brain scans, blood test, urine tests, X-Rays or any other valid medical tests to detect evidence of any possible physical abnormality that may be contributing to certain behavior;

"Whereas, according to TeenScreen psychiatrist David Shaffer, "TeenScreen does identify a whole bunch of kids who aren't really suicidal, so you get a lot of false-positives. And that means if you’re running a large program at a school, you’re going to cripple the program because you’re going to have too many kids you have to do something about;

"Whereas TeenScreen has screened children across the nation without written parental consent in violation of federal law and state laws and has screened children across the nation without fully informed consent and did not warn parents that after taking the TeenScreen suicide survey, certain children have been and will be labeled with false mental disorders, based upon the unscientific DSM and the "chemical imbalance of the brain" theory, which relies solely upon observation and for which no scientific or medical test exists;

"Whereas an epidemic already exists with children using psychiatric drugs and will further skyrocket if children are referred to psychiatrists after screening. According to a survey of recently trained child psychiatrists it was found that treatment for 9 out of 10 children consisted of prescription drugs. (Journal of the American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry 2002);

"Whereas TeenScreen's leaders and advisory board members have ties to pharmaceutical companies and front groups for pharmaceutical companies;

"Whereas antipsychotic drugs are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration for children; the FDA's "black box warning" states antidepressants increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in children and adolescents with psychiatric disorders; and drug safety experts have recommended additional "black box" warnings be placed on ADHD drugs: for the increased risk of stroke and heart attack;

"Whereas TeenScreen only partners with and seeks to immediately refer students to "mental illness" practitioners and does not refer students to medical disciplines that could test for underlying health problems such as allergies, nutrition, toxicities and physical illnesses;

"Whereas child suicides are very rare and have been on a decline for years; and TeenScreen is very secretive about their suicide survey and refuses to allow parents to obtain a copy and is also very secretive about which schools they've convinced to use their suicide survey." For the petition, go to: http://www.petitiononline.com/TScreen/petition.html

Know your rights: be sure you are informed and that the schools have your consent to do any psychiatric testing of your child.

Ned Vare is an architectural designer and author; former private school teacher, businessman, and elected official.

"Overcrowding!" The Cry of Public Schools

2007-12-12T11:59:00.000-08:00

First, we have the words of Armand Fusco, the former public school superintendent in two districts (MA and CT): "Public school is a culture of dishonesty and corruption." (see his book, "School Corruption, betrayal of children and the public trust," available at Amazon)

Next, we learn how schools determine space "needs" for students. These are devised by architects whose fees are based on the cost of projects built. The cost combines the amount of floor space and how luxurious (expensive) it is. Thus, the architects have incentives to design buildings that are larger and more expensive than are actually required. Certain architectural firms specialize in this practice. Often, no choice of architects is offered to the public. Also, contracts are sometimes let without a competitive bidding process.

Another factor is the "state space guidelines" for school construction. These are flexible, and depend on how much money the architects believe the particular town can afford for a new school building or addition. It often results in extravagant buildings with overly large classrooms, extra amenities, and lavish office spaces for employees, with expensive construction throughout. Waste is often the rule, we can be sure...hey, it's a government contract, paid for by taxes. We all are forced to pay the price.

Then come the teacher unions that bargain every year for more money and less work for their members. In my town, Guilford, CT, they have reduced the teaching requirements for teachers down to five periods out of an eight period school day. During the other three periods, the teachers claim "ownership" of their classrooms, keeping them for their own use, but empty of students. This results in about one third of all classrooms being empty of students for any given class period -- an outrageous waste of space.

That was the case in Guilford four years ago. "Overcrowding was claimed for the Adams Middle School with 37 classrooms. However, a "class loading schedule" revealed that over the course of each day, an average of twelve classrooms were unoccupied (except for an occasional teacher) during every class period. Thus, there was room for an additional 240 students in the building at any given time. Instead of overcrowding, there was an excess of classroom space, but inefficient use of the building. Amazingly, the "authorities" bought the teachers' stories, and spent $600,000 for six "temporary" classrooms to be built in the parking lot.

Class size enters into this equation, too. Smaller classes (thanks to union bargaining) means more teachers (union members) and less work for each one. It also means more classrooms -- all with extra square footage allowances -- for the same number of students.

If your district is making claims of "overcrowded schools," it might be wise to check up on how they make that claim.

Ned Vare is an architectural designer, author and artist. He was formerly a private school teacher, antique dealer, golf professional, elected official, rancher, and ski instructor.

What Children Learn in School

2007-12-12T09:21:00.000-08:00

“If the old saying is true, that what one generation learns in school is the philosophy of the next, then the philosophy of the next generation will be totalitarianism.” -- John Whitehead, Rutherford Institute (2006)

Let's assume that Mr. Whitehead is right, then let’s see what our kids’ generation is learning in school.

From children’s first days in school, they are told, “Sit down, shut up, be still -- if you don’t, you'll be punished; if you still don’t, you'll be drugged.” What do the children learn from that? That they are not trusted, that their desires, interests and needs are not important; that they must obey authority blindly; that they belong to the state.

Public school’s first goal is to separate children emotionally from their parents. Therefore, the training is for obedience to arbitrary rules and dependency on others, including institutions. The goal, we learn, is to turn “human resources” (our children) into soldiers, factory workers and clerks.

Goal #2 is teaching that the group is more important than the individual. The training is for consensus (group-thinking), not individual decision-making. Public schools operate on a socialist philosophy, taxing everyone to benefit the few, with no one paying directly for the services. Traditional values of right and wrong are discredited; ethics is considered flexible; religion is out; parents are deemed old-fashioned and are not respected by the school.

Next, we discover that the schools are not good places for learning. Children hear that reading is good, but they don’t learn how; they are taught to appreciate math, but are not given the tools of calculating. They learn that guessing is better than knowledge, and yet without knowing the basic skills of reading and math, children will always have difficulty learning. School, then, is for therapy, not for knowledge. Its employees believe they are not responsible for anyone’s learning. “Besides,” they say, “teaching basic skills is boring for us teachers.”

Most public schools have eliminated recess with the excuse that it reduces class time. They disregard all the research showing that free play is extremely important to a child’s physical, mental and social development. Without recess, the child has less opportunity to interact with peers, and comes to believe that his/her life must be programmed by others. The children learn not to trust themselves or each other and that they do not control their own lives.

Kids learn that if you’re gifted, public school does not offer you appropriate instruction, but if you’re slow or disinterested you get lots of attention and the system spends lavishly on you. Kids learn that if they’re bored or confused, no one will help them. They learn that their strengths are ignored while the schools look for their weaknesses. The philosophy behind this is that the government doesn’t want winners or losers, it wants mass mediocrity and conformity. In this way, the schools are working perfectly.

Children often realize, when school finally ends, that they learned little there. If they wonder what the school was for, they’ll find three main purposes: Custody (babysitting), Labeling (“meat stamping” -- a sorting mechanism), and Conditioning (life-training to accept the low roles that government selects for them).

John Whitehead puts it this way: “The horrific lesson being taught to our young people -- by the very school officials we have entrusted to shape them into tomorrow’s leaders -- is that the government has absolute power over its citizens.”

Thus, government uses its schools to control the public and its money, and to employ large numbers of semi-educated people. It fails in its stated goal (education), but its true purpose is to turn out a largely predictable workforce that will serve “the economy.”

Ned Vare is an architectural designer, artist and author; a former private school teacher, rancher, businessman, elected official. He lives in Guilford, CT.

Technorati Tags: [education], [human resources], [power of government], [basic skills], [recess].

The "Disability" Racket

2007-12-11T08:46:00.000-08:00

subtitle: How schools cash in on false diagnoses and a bounty system.

"Thousands of children are suffering from being placed in LD classes, and the labeling of children at an early age becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The children learn to see themselves as disabled in some way and they act out the part." - Terry Endsley, The Myth of Learning Disabilities

I have several blind spots. I had them in school and still have them. For example: Algebra, Latin, History, Chemistry, Physics, Literature, and others. In some cases, it was the teachers who made the information seem uninteresting. My response was to create minor disturbances like fidgeting in my seat or throwing spitballs. In others, I simply did not seem intellectually suited to the subject. I was bored and not learning anything except how to avoid doing the work, and that was most of the time.

Today, a child's disinterest in school subjects is viewed by the schools as a "disability" --a kind of disease. And, sure enough, the schoolers have all sorts of ways to "prove" that a child has a disability -- even a brain disorder -- when s/he is merely bored or unhappy or simply rebellious at being cooped up in an ugly classroom. Parents who are not well informed can easily be frightened by the "diagnoses" that come from teachers and school psychologists nowadays. They are often intimidated by the school "experts" who claim that their child is "learning disabled" or "mentally disordered," when no such problem exists. Many children are labeled and stigmatized for life by "diagnoses" that are often wrongly made in order to benefit only the school, not the children.

Yet, this is the way the schools can place blame on the child and avoid being criticized for creating the boredom or for hiring dull teachers or employing failed methods. It's how they take the focus off the school's programs and place it upon the child's alleged "disability." How convenient for the schools. It provides the excuse to never examine themselves or their own activities to see if those might be causing the symptoms of unhappiness (boredom, stress, fear) and rebellion among the children.

Making matters worse is an incentive for the schools to make such a huge mistake. It's called the "Bounty System." For every child who is "diagnosed" with a so-called Learning Disorder, there is a large cash reward from the state. Thus, every diagnosis of a disability means more money for the school employees. Therefore, it is no wonder that the schoolers have invented a multitude of "diagnoses" that enable them to collect the bounty.

The second stage of this racket is that the children are then placed in "special" classes that pretend to help the children with their false diagnoses of disabilities. It's no surprise that along with the many spurious diagnoses has come a huge increase in school employment in this new area. It has been major cause of higher school budgets, but it has little, if any, success to show. After all, if there is no actual disease, there is no cure. The entire business is guesswork.

It's an example of the schools' finding ways to use the children for the benefit of the employees or building a larger payroll instead of benefiting the children. The schools never look to their own instruction methods or programs for the source of children's problems. Why? Because then they would have to admit that they use bad methods of instruction and would need to change, but mostly it is because there is no financial incentive. The bounty system only pays for diagnoses of children's disabilities (whether real or not). It doesn't pay for finding fault in the schools themselves or for finding students' strengths.

Schools have been turned into psychological clinics where amateur headshrinkers roam the halls in search of children they might be able to garner as "clients" for their dubious "therapies." For school teachers to play the role of amateur psychologist is against the law. Besides, education is a separate field from therapy. School students should never be treated as "patients," and yet, that's what the disability racket is all about.

If a school has diagnosed your child as "disabled," be sure to get a second opinion from an independent source because chances are good that the school wants to use your child to gain a financial bounty while increasing its payroll at taxpayers' expense.

Ned Vare is an architectural designer, former private school teacher and elected official. He is co-author (with his wife, Luz Shosie) of the book, Smarting Us Up (see sidebar)

Technorati Tags: [disability], [ADHD], [learning disabilities], [special education], [poor instruction methods].

Why Parents Have No Power Over the Public Schools

2007-12-10T09:44:00.000-08:00

“What seems undeniable is that there is a substantial contrast between the vision of what public education is supposed to be and the reality of schooling itself.”
-- Bruce Goldberg, Why Schools Fail

Some parents assume that the school system is educating children in the basic skills of reading, writing and calculating, but today’s schools are failing to provide that basic instruction. Not only are the skills neglected, but they are obscured by poor teaching methods and inadequately trained teachers. In fact, many call the schools an educational disservice.

Because of the schools’ poor quality, private businesses now remediate children whose schools have failed them. Even more telling, some of those businesses are designed to deal with the psychological problems that children acquire as a result of attending those public schools.

Many people wonder why their children spend so much time where they learn so little of what they need and want to know. Even worse, they wonder why the children are having so many psychological problems. While the schools blame the children, the parents, TV, and society, they never blame themselves. Yet, we now realize that the educational malpractice and the children’s problems come from the same place: the schools.

While parents have the ultimate responsibility for their children’s learning, when they send them to the government schools, a strange phenomenon occurs. The schools do not allow the parents to assume their responsibilities for determining what that learning will include. Administrators repeat their mantra, “Trust us, we’re professionals.” However, today, the public is learning that those employees are not always what they claim to be and the schools are not doing what parents want them to do, but in many cases, exactly the opposite.

What we discover is that the schools are no longer controlled by the communities they claim to serve. Even though the school establishment tells the public that local control exists, the fact is that local school boards are directed by the state, under the control of bureaucrats and politicians. Not only is there no local control, but with new federal laws such as NCLB, even state control is losing ground to the feds.

The results are parent frustration, school board impotence, children being denied their proper skills, political indoctrination, and many more ills. Today, school employees create pretenses and excuses for what some call a culture of corruption and deception . It has become the job of superintendents to hide the many ulterior motives and agendas the government has for its schools, while pretending that its purpose is what parents want – even though it is not. The contrast between what parents want and what schools offer is clear and the gap is large, and every day parents are losing their power to change it.

The superintendent’s job has become spokesperson for the government, often in opposition to the community. Today’s superintendent stands between the parents and the education establishment while also being puppet master of the school board. He/she is ready with a mountain of statistics and a blizzard of spin and nonsense to defend what amounts to fraud, mismanagement and corruption. The message to the parents is that they and their children are helpless pawns in the government game called public school.

We cannot control what we do not own.

Ned Vare is a Yale graduate, an architectural designer, former school teacher, businessman and author. He was the Libertarian Party's candidate for Governor of CT in '98. More articles appear at www.borntoexplore.org/unschool.

Technorati Tags: [local control of school], [learning], [No Child Left Behind], [school mismanagement], [local school board].

The "Real World"

2007-12-09T10:42:00.000-08:00

Schoolers (people employed in government schools) like to think of their school as "the real world." However, it is anything but real. It is artificial and synthetic; it is unnatural and contrived in every way. In fact, it is separated (segregated) from the real world. It is coercive, petty, rule-infested, and forced. It is dictatorial, dishonest, and fear-driven. In his book, "School Corruption, the betrayal of children and the public trust," Armand Fusco, Ed. D., writes, "Public school is a culture of dishonesty and corruption."

Many adults who have been through several years of public school admit that they did not get a good education there. Would they go back and try again? Hell no. Why not? Because what they often remember best is that they hated being there. Their only enjoyment was that they had made friends with other children there. They were bored by most of the classes; they disliked many of the teachers; they were bullied by other students; there were no breaks in the stress (no recess).

In addition, they know that it is still a place that is not suited to learning. It is suited only to teaching, which is definitely not the same as learning, just as prisons are suited to warehousing people, but not to rehabilitating them. Indeed, just because teaching is happening in a school is no reason to believe that any learning is going on. School is designed for the schoolers -- for hiring lots of people and letting lots of contracts. It is not designed for the learners. How come? Because what schools and schoolers do is not what encourages or relates to how children learn.

Put simply, children learn by doing things they enjoy or are interested in. Schools force them to sit still and listen mostly to things that do not interest them.
Thus, schools fail by forcing children to deny their own interests and instead pretend to be interested in what teachers like to do.

Yet, the public schools continue to use the same failed methods such as "fuzzy math" and "whole language." The system is now set up, not by educators, but by the teachers' unions in order to satisfy union demands to get more money for less work, and those demands work against what is needed for learning to happen.

Children need the opposite of what schools offer. They need safety -- not just from violence (bullying) but safety from bad programs such as Transformational Education and Fuzzy Math, and bad methods such as Whole Language; and protection from wasted time and unreasonable demands on their time such as most homework is; and from demands for learning outdated and often counter-productive information, such as DARE and "Values Clarification." They need safety from poorly educated and wrongly trained teachers; they need trust, freedom, time, good food, sleep -- in short, decent parenting.

What they don't need is school as we know it. They need the real real world.

Ned Vare

Technorati Tags: [government school], [school corruption], [school reform], [failing methods], [fuzzy math].

Public School: the Unnatural Life

2007-12-07T08:45:00.000-08:00

"Birds fly, fish swim, man thinks and learns. Therefore, we do not need to motivate children into learning by wheedling, bribing or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. All we need to do is bring as much of the world as we can into their lives; give children as much help and guidance as they ask for; listen respectfully when they feel like talking; and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest."
-- John Holt, How Children Learn

For many children, the Unnatural Life begins early. Most of today's children are raised by "experts" in institutional settings and have little contact with their parents and little care that can be called "natural." The result is a generation with a frightening combination of insecurity, ignorance, self-indulgence, and the arrogance of an entitlement mentality.

Not long ago, all parents were expected to teach their children to read, write and calculate--not difficult skills. Many schools did not accept children unless they had learned those basics. Today, the schools claim to be teaching those skills, but their results are atrocious. What’s worse, school employees often tell parents that we are not capable of it. Imagine! - our own schools want us to believe that we are not educated enough even to teach our own kids elementary universal knowledge. What’s amazing is that many of us believe such rubbish!

The employees claim to have studied "child development" and "curriculum" and other esoteric nonsense. They play on our normal insecurities as parents in order to convince us that they are better suited to raising our kids than we are ourselves. It is nothing but lies. Parents are always (with few exceptions) the best able to raise and nurture, including educate, their own children. When parents do not know something a child wants to learn, most have the sense to find someone who can help. It does not take a village to educate a child; it takes a conscientious parent.

Nowadays, children are given to institutions -- nurseries, pre-schools, schools -- that are paid to partly raise children for the parents. “Child-care” centers are often stressful, even frightening places full of noise and commotion. How can that be a safe or nurturing place for a child? These are places born of the necessity or desire of parents to get relief from their real job of raising the children they brought into the world. They have grown "tired" of being Mommy or Daddy, and want someone else to do it. Conveniently, the centers have employees who claim to be specialists with children, and yet that job title often means little.

Next, the child hits four and, against all common sense, it's time for pre-school to begin. And what goes on there? Well, it is preparation for school -- a mixture of "sit down, be still, be quiet, and listen" as the children learn the primary lesson of public school: obedience. Never mind that the children want, and need, to play among themselves and learn to get along. Never mind that they have no need for, nor interest in academics. Never mind their need for occasional solitude or to relate to just one other child instead of whole groups. Never mind that their parents are absent from such places in times of real need.

At six years old (sometimes earlier) something called "Education" begins, with the arrogant assumption that learning has not been going on up until this time. Never mind that children are born learning, and do a major part of their learning - including the language - before age five without anyone's "teaching."

Schools are unnatural places. They separate children from their parents; they are segregated from the rest of society; thus they offer an artificial environment. While children's natural needs are for parental nurturing, care, trust, and love, schools conduct programs that are mostly alien to children's natural needs. They create synthetic groupings in ugly stark rooms with strangers telling unwanted information. Dangerous bus rides, bullying, and coercion contribute to the children's sense of stress and threat. They are told to obey and not to make trouble. Naturally, they want to please their parents, so that is how it works – against a child’s natural interests.

Homework (a further insult) often has the purpose of controlling family life. It is mere busywork that can intimidate and confuse parents who come to see themselves as "incompetent to raise their own children," just as the schools want them to believe.

Ned Vare is a designer, author, former private school teacher, rancher, businessman, elected official.

Technorati Tags: [public school], [education], [mediocrity], [child development], [school failure].

Why Johnny Can’t Think

2007-12-06T11:08:00.000-08:00

The sad truth is that public education has destroyed the American dream for countless numbers of young people by preventing them from acquiring those academic skills needed to achieve success." - Samuel Blumenfeld , Educator and Author

Homeschooling, of course, was once the norm. Throughout most of history and in all places, children got their learning in the home, through family activities and their natural and cultural surroundings. But there arose a mist, a confusion, a turning point in the purpose of education. That mist was created by government. Following the example of the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and others, political leaders have wanted pyramidal societies with a few elites at the top and the vast majority subordinated to them. The mechanism they all used to create such societies is schools.

Government school today does not want to turn out independent creative individuals; it seeks to create a mass of predictable voters and workers, obedient soldiers and consumers who know their place in the pyramid and will stay there.

It’s no surprise that our government school system does not do what parents want it to do. It never has. Its purpose has never been the strengthening of families or communities, but exactly the opposite: loyalty to the state. While there has been a persistent chorus of discontent from parents, the system routinely ignores their wishes and carries out its programs of state indoctrination of the children and the public in general. The government has enlarged its school system and its tax support to include almost ninety percent of our country’s children, and now there are few people left who can even imagine a different scenario.

Despite this government process of training children for many years to be predictable and dependent, the majority of children’s knowledge still comes from their lives outside the schools. The schooling, no matter how stultifying, has not yet managed to completely dumb us all down. The problem is, it's getting close.

Teaching children essential knowledge was an accepted parental responsibility in this country until the industrial revolution in the 19th century. That event created the need for people to see themselves as economic units -- cogs in the wheels of industry (or bees in the hive) -- instead of individual human beings. The transformation played into the hands of statists (those who believe in state control over society) and social engineers by breaking up families and eroding traditional and community values and replacing them with a secular ("progressive") society dominated by governmental institutions.

The early leaders designed the public schools (about 1840) merely to indoctrinate the masses along with immigrants and freed slaves to become the "workforce," but not to become well educated. Those leaders, and other informed people, have always sent their children to tutors or independent schools to get real education rather than government obedience training and false “socialization.”

Most people have come to accept the idea that the government should be the entity to educate children. It is a big mistake. According to John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down, government schools train our children in three ways -- to follow orders, to do repetitive tasks, and to be consumers. The state only wants compliant citizens who can be controlled. It does not want thinking individuals who will make independent decisions. Government-mandated curricula complicate and confuse the learning of basic skills and limit genuine achievement while offering a
mediocrity of feel-good programs and political correctness training. The slide we are in has been a long time coming.

In the 1960s, the decline became obvious, and books such as Why Johnny Can’t Read, by Rudolph Flesch, began to appear. Among the objections were the watering down of academic subjects, tenure as an obstacle to firing bad teachers, and the vastly increased psychological aspects of schooling that allowed self-esteem to become the main objective instead of learning.

Today, parents realize the perversions and corruptions of the government schools. As a result, many choose private schools and homeschooling. Many new books give us ever more awareness of our government’s intentions for its school system. They are alarming. Johnny can’t read, he can’t even think, but he’s been told to feel good about himself.

In education, government is the problem -- it will only teach what it wants us to know. It’s sobering, frightening, disillusioning to see our government and its employees systematically denying our children the very education we send them to receive, while we foot the bill.

Ned Vare is an architectural designer, author and artist; formerly a private school teacher, rancher, professional athlete, elected official

Technorati Tags: [public school], [parental dissatisfaction], [dumbing down], [secular progressive], [school reform].

Education Lite

2007-12-05T08:56:00.000-08:00

“The difficulty is not that children don’t learn to read, write and do arithmetic very well – it is that kids don’t learn at all the way schools insist on teaching.” – J. T. Gatto

Parents are dissatisfied with the schools today because the schools do not offer what parents want. In fact, the system’s purpose is the opposite of what parents want for their kids. It's called Education Lite, or Dumbing Down, and the process includes parents and the public, not just teachers and children.

First is the annual concern about low scores on the standardized tests. Every year, the number of children who pass the Mastery reading and math combined is about thirty percent statewide. That’s a seventy percent failure rate. And what (joke) are we told every year? “CT schools are doing well.” Mastery tests are not about mastery. They should be called Mediocrity tests. Last year, CT’s Ed. Commissioner was unhappy with the results, so she returned the tests to be re-scored -- twice. Is the system even honest?

If the schools were interested in having students learn basic skills, they could teach them -- all the children, not just some. There are reading and math methods that work; homeschoolers know and use them, as do private schools, but public schools use methods that are certain to fail a majority of students. Why is this so? Because the system is designed to turn out a mass of dependent employees, soldiers and predictable consumers, not independent creative-thinking individuals. If we want education, we must find out how to acquire it; but if we want mediocrity, it’s all paid for and it’s right down the street. It’s Education Lite; it may feel good, but it’s less filling.

There’s a saying: If the children didn’t learn, the school didn’t teach. In my town, Guilford CT, the students have been doing poorly academically for years. Why? Time spent on the basic subjects is low compared to state averages, and they are generally poorly taught. The schools use student musical performances as marketing while neglecting the teaching of basic skills.

If the schools had the goal of teaching reading correctly, they could, and all the children would learn to read well by third grade. The simple method is called phonics. With it, many children learn to read well in a week. But the schools refuse to use the method that works. Test scores reveal it.

Math expert, Dr. Bill Quirk (www.wgquirk.com) analyses a commonly used math program, Everyday Math, and describes it as “fuzzy math” and adds, “It devalues classroom learning and learning from books.” Quirk calls it "math appreciation" because it doesn’t teach the basics on which advanced math depends. In other words, it simply wastes time. I would add that if the purpose is merely appreciation, it’s not education; it’s therapy. How many can enter a trade or profession or even balance a checkbook without knowing the simple facts of arithmetic? How can they learn advanced subjects if they don’t know how to read and calculate well? How can they make informed choices or lead productive lives without those tools?

The quality of teachers is also declining. Here’s the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Sandy Feldman: “You have in the schools, among the teachers who are retiring, very smart people…but we’re not getting in now the same kinds of people.” She admits that many of her union members are not “very smart people.” Add to that the words of Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom from their 2003 book, No Excuses, “[The] structure and culture of public education drive away those who might serve young kids best.”

Most statements by school employees and officials include the message that they are working “for the children.” However, more and more, it looks to many people as though the schools are organized for the benefit and convenience of the employees, not the children at all. Education Lite is what the government schools serve today. Can citizens do anything about it? The survival of our country depends on the answer.

Ned Vare is an architectural designer, former private school teacher, farmer/rancher, golf pro, ski instructor, contractor, politician, businessman, artist, craftsman, author. He is a homeschooling advocate.
His articles appear online at www.borntoexplore.org/unschool
His book, Smarting Us Up, written with Luz Shosie, is available from them directly.

Technorati Tags: [public school], [basic skills], [learning], [mediocrity], [mathematics].

Public School: The Nonsense Industry

2007-12-04T09:13:00.001-08:00

“Children do not need to be forced to learn. They know how and they are good at it.” -- John Holt, How Children Learn

In his book, Insult to Intelligence, Frank Smith, Ph.D. says, “The hardest problem for the brain is not learning, but forgetting. No matter how hard we try, we can’t deliberately forget something we have learned. It is truly catastrophic when we learn that we can’t learn.”

One of the most powerful lessons school teaches children is, "You are not a good learner." Despite the fact that children’s brains are superb learning instruments, schools always claim that "failure" is a kind of sickness, or worse, "bad behavior." Real or imaginary disabilities are given clinical-sounding labels like “dyslexia,” “ADHD,” etc. in order to create the impression that physical abnormalities are involved. And yet, what is it schools expect children to "succeed" in? Classrooms force students to engage in tedious, time-consuming, often-stressful nonsense, while rewarding or punishing them with meaningless marks and grades.

Schools make people dependent and easy to control -- characteristics that are the exact opposite of education. Once this dependent attitude toward learning is absorbed through the schooling experience (including, for some, being drugged), it can last a lifetime, destroying autonomous development or, in the words of the veteran Japanese teacher Yoshio Kuryu, “contributing to the student’s mental suicide -- an end to thinking; a closing down.”Yet, under those insane circumstances, if a child’s behavior does not conform to an arbitrary standard, or if his interest is not engaged, and he does not learn a particular thing, the ‘problem’ is always blamed on the child, never on the school.

The key to learning is interest, not school-induced ‘motivation.’ There has never been a relationship between school and what children are interested in learning. But when children are distracted or seem disinterested or fidgety, schools routinely decide that something is wrong with the child’s brain, even though there is no evidence of it.

Can we avoid any of the above madness? Maybe. Smith wrote a set of conditions that must exist in order to prevent the lesson, “I can’t learn,” from being absorbed. He wrote the following Learners’ Manifesto:

1. The brain is always learning. We learn exactly what is demonstrated by people around us. Schools must stop trying to teach through pointless drills, activities and tests.

2. Learning does not require coercion or irrelevant reward. We fail to learn only if we are bored, or confused, or if we have been persuaded that learning will be difficult. Schools must be places where learning can take place naturally -- by desire, not force.

3. Learning must be meaningful. Schools must change themselves, not try to change us, to ensure we understand what we are expected to learn.

4. Learning is incidental. We learn while doing things that we find useful and interesting. Schools must stop creating environments where we cannot engage in sensible activities.

5. Learning is collaborative. We learn by apprenticing ourselves to people who practice what they teach

6. The consequences of worthwhile learning are obvious [We use what we learn]. Schools, teachers and parents should not have to rely on marks, scores or tests to discover if we have learned.

7. Learning always involves feelings. We remember how we feel when we learn or fail to learn. Schools must not treat learners like machines.

8. Learning must be free of risk. If we are threatened by learning, then the learning will always threaten. Schools must recognize that continual testing [and many other of their practices] are intellectual harassment.

The lesson of Smith’s list is that schools are bad places for learning, especially the public schools. They violate all of those recommendations, with every child, all the time. Smith’s book describes what goes on in the typical school and sums it up best in one chapter, called “The Nonsense Industry.”

It’s little wonder that more and more people are choosing alternative schools and homeschooling for their children, where they can skip the lesson that says they can’t learn.

Ned Vare is an architectural designer, artist and author, a former private school teacher, rancher, businessman, elected official.

Technorati Tags: [public school], [dyslexia], [learning], [child development], [disabilities in students].

Who's Working for the Children?

2007-12-03T08:47:00.000-08:00

"The State...has a vested interest in promoting attitudes that would tend to make us skeptical of our own abilities, fearful of the motives of others, and emotionally dependent upon external authorities for purpose and direction in our lives."
-- Butler D. Shaffer, from Americans for Limited Government. Mar 15, 06

Everybody involved in public school – board members, administrators, teachers, social workers, coaches, etc. – all say they do it for the children. But do they really? The fact is that they work for the government in order to benefit themselves. They do what the government wants them to do. They all work according to the rules and methods that the government sets. They do not work for the kids.

The teachers have union negotiators to do their bidding at contract time. In my town the union bargains for smaller classes (less workload) and has trimmed the teaching day down to five periods out of an eight-period day. If that ever gets down to four, the teachers will only teach half a day, or ninety work days per year. Thus, taxpayers must pay more and more even though the teachers do less and less.

Administrators, by law, are not allowed to have a union, but they have an “association” that does virtually the same things a union does. The result is that the members continue to get huge raises while limiting their responsibilities and liabilities. Does that help the students or the community? And the psychiatrists...does their labeling and drugging help the children? Never.

Superintendents pretend to work for the community. Ours even claims to have a “plan,” and yet he gets his orders from the State Dept. of Ed., and they get them from the federal DOE. Administrators have little tie to their town.

Do the political parties do anything for children? No. They use the children and the schools as pawns in their games. For example, last year’s flap over junk-food sales. The issue is a political football that has little to do with children’s health or doing the right thing. It’s about money and power.

Let me ask, are any of the politicians themselves personally interested in the welfare of children (or anyone else) except when they can appear to be benefactors, giving away other people’s money? No. They are always seeking angles that will help them to get re-elected – a newspaper article or photo holding hands with the elderly sick, or prize-winning children and such. Do they help the children? No. They welcome cash money from the teachers unions. That’s who they work for.

The PTA is required by its own rules to obey the wishes of the teacher unions. (How nuts is that!) Thus, the PTA’s hands are tied even when union wishes are against the interests of the children, as they usually are. Thus, many well-meaning parents are effectively silenced on school policies.

The PTO waves a banner that says, “Gee, the schools don’t have enough money, so let’s all bake cookies to create the appearance of helping the schools. The PTO may offer parents ways to feel “involved,” but it has no effect on how the schools educate or treat the children.

Over the years, local school boards have approved all the bad programs such as whole language, fuzzy math, junk-food-for-profit, child-drugging, tenure, annual pay raises for mediocrity, etc., but have no constructive ideas. In fact, they seldom even discuss schooling or learning. The board is merely a front for deceptive, failing, and corrupt practices. They act as though bad schools are what the public wants.

Here’s an email from a friend: “Hotshot lawyers and others who find their way onto school boards believe that it is a high moral obligation on their part to implement the system that is handed to them. They never step back and ask,‘Is this system good?’ or, ‘Is the system fundamentally corrupt?’ Never having addressed those questions, they congratulate themselves for being supporters of "education." But they are the blind leading the blind.”

That leaves the parents. Do you work for your children? I heard of a man who called his son, “Sir.” When asked why he used that name for the boy, the man said simply, “Because I work for him.”

Ned Vare is an architectural designer, artist and author, a former private school teacher, rancher, businessman, elected official.

Technorati Tags: [politics of school], [education], [school reform], [learning], [teacher unions].

The "Accreditation" Racket

2007-12-02T12:04:00.000-08:00

"If you want to help public schools, give them your money, give them your time, give them your house and your car -- but don't give them your children."
-- Tammy Drennan, Separation of School and State Alliance

School "Accreditation" is a private enterprise. The state has no requirement for accreditation and it has no agency for the purpose. The company that does accreditation for this state (and all New England) is called New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC). It's a private company with no connection to the government of any state. The company hires current and former public and private school employees.

The NEASC spokesperson told me, "The value of accreditation is in the eyes of the beholders." In other words, the service has no value by itself; it sells because enough people believe in it, even though it does not offer anything of measurable value. It is based on fear and the public's need for assurance that their schools are all right. I am reminded of a definition I once heard: "Public Opinion is what people think people think."

The process itself takes about three days, usually during the summer when school is out and its employees are available for a three day paid holiday at a nearby resort while going through their motions. The dozen or so people peruse the school district and the material chosen by the school, presumably to see if the programs are what the schools say they are. The cost is huge. My district of 4 thousand students pays $25K every ten years to create this sham of approval at taxpayers' expense.

The NEASC assessments of schools are based on criteria that the schools themselves select -- not on any standards set by others. In other words, the schools evaluate themselves; they even choose how to evaluate their own programs. Accreditation is what people think gives their school an official "approval," when it is no such thing. It is, in fact, a scam -- just another form of school deception for which taxpayers are forced to pay.

Ned Vare lives in Connecticut

Technorati Tags: [school accreditation], [education], [sham of approval], [deception], [accreditation agency].

2007-12-01T18:18:00.000-08:00

The Religion of the Public Schools

2007-12-01T08:37:00.000-08:00

“For centuries the political control of education has engendered social conflict.” -- Prof. Kevin Ryan, Boston University

…And you thought there was separation between church and state. Think again. Government schooling has been about religious indoctrination ever since Martin Luther called for compulsory state schooling in Germany about 1520. His goal was to inculcate the population with Lutheran principles. (non-believers were often burned to death)

Next came John Calvin, a Swiss, who established state-run schools across Europe to teach Calvinism – characterized by obedience to the state by the masses. Calvin’s personal religious despotism strongly influenced America’s first compulsory schools. Their goals were to promote a theocratic state while suppressing Catholicism.

The American government school system was copied from that of (fascist) Prussia in the early 1800s by Puritans led by Horace Mann, of Boston. Compulsory state-run schooling was established in which “the precepts of morality and religion should be inculcated.” Later, Robert Dale Owen aimed to implant “equality” in the minds, habits, manners and feelings. He believed that the nation would then be ripe for the final step of equalization of property and incomes by means of State coercion. Owen saw American public schooling as training in socialism. He wrote, “It will make but one class out of the many.”

Today’s public schools still carry Owen’s stamp of socialism, hand in hand with the “progressive” notion of teaching the “whole child,” that is, to mold the child’s personality. What we have today is full-fledged “progressivism” that dominates public schooling through its interlocking agencies of conformity and control. Some call it, “One-size-fits-all dumbing down, free to all, paid for by all.” The goal is not to turn out citizens with knowledge and skills, but a mass workforce that will be docile and obedient to state authority.

Thus, the public school system’s religion is Secular Humanism. No, you won’t find churches with that name over their doors, but that is the religion taught in government schools across America. Its closest church is Universalist/Unitarian, as handed down from the Puritans of Boston. It is largely responsible for much of today’s constant war between parents and the schools. Its teaching pervades the entire curriculum. It infuses the courses offered at all teacher colleges. Its goal is to change American society from what our founders envisioned – independent sovereign individuals – into a conformist, semi-educated populace dependent on, and in service to government authority.

The State is the replacement for any traditional sense of God. It seeks to trade loyalty to family for loyalty to the state, and replaces traditional concepts of right and wrong with moral relativism. It teaches children to trust classmates and school employees, but not their parents. Group thinking is the key. This combination of state control and secularism has allowed a marriage between educationists and psychologists. Thanks to the humanist/progressive movement, what has happened is no less than the psychologizing of the public schools. It has undermined patriotism in favor of global government – world socialism. After being indoctrinated at state-run colleges, teachers proselytize their new faith through whatever subject they teach, at all levels of schooling.

Attitude changing is the goal of today’s schooling, while academic learning is secondary. Programs tell kids: sex is just an “activity;” drugs are bad except when school administers them; parents’ values must be “clarified;” the environment is being ruined by greedy corporations; celebrate racial diversity; “world language” bespeaks a global village; etc. These psychological conditioning programs are often anti-intellectual. They deal in children’s feelings instead of their ability to reason and analyze; they ask children to depend on consensus of peers instead of facts, group thinking instead of independent inquiry. The effect is to foster dependence on the group and on the State. “Progressives” believe that the purpose of education is not about what children know, but what they will “be like.”

Here’s Dr. Thomas Sowell: “It may seem strange that people of such marginal intellectual competence as many public school teachers and administrators should take on the God-like role of re-shaping the psyches and values of children. Yet, this is perfectly consistent with the centuries-old observation that fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

Ned Vare is an architectural designer, former private school teacher, rancher, businessman, elected official, and author.

Technorati Tags: [public school religion], [school reform], [progressivism], [dumbing down], [indoctrination].

The State’s (False) Theory of Education

2007-11-30T08:45:00.000-08:00

(Note: this article was originally written by a friend, Bruce Thomas. I have made small changes and additions with his permission.)

“Our schools should not remain places where the enormous potential of the human brain is systematically eroded, and possibly destroyed.” – Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence

Almost everyone seems to agree that the government school system is doing a poor job and costs far too much. That is a huge problem for our county, and our future as a successful society depends on solving it. Many also agree that the system uses every excuse for its bad performance instead of examining its own actions and beliefs and theories. In fact, if we ask the state Dept. of Ed. or the local school district for their theory of learning, we find that it does not exist. So, in order to discover the principles on which public schools operate, we must examine what they actually do, and assume that their actions are based on a set of beliefs that, if combined, comprise the State Theory of Learning. Here are those beliefs:

1. Children must be forced to learn
2. Learning requires teaching
3. Schools are the primary site for learning
4. Learning requires rewards and punishments
5. Children should be segregated by age

Do you agree with the theory so far? Try a few more:

6. Knowledge and skills can be learned without context
7. Children’s work must be continuously judged and graded by others
8. Knowledge is divided into “subjects,” studied in “units” in linear sequence
9. It takes twelve years to learn the needed knowledge and skills

Do you believe any of that? What is going on here? There’s more:

10. Education begins and ends when children enter and leave school
11. Central authority must decide what children should know, and when
12. Uniformity is the goal of education

Is that theory valid? In light of what is known about how humans learn, every one of those “principles” is partly or completely wrong. Therefore, the state’s Theory of Education – the basis for the government’s schools – is totally wrong.

If that isn’t bad enough, the school system also has a bad attitude. Consider: Neither teachers nor students are trusted to make important decisions about their lives in school; legislatures, unions and school boards make them. Another part of the schools’ bad attitude is that they do not trust parents and often treat them insultingly, even though most education experts acknowledge that parents are the children’s primary influence. In sum, we see that the schools operate on a bad theory and with a destructive attitude.

And what is the result of the above? Today, after spending more and more years in schools consuming larger and larger sums of taxpayers’ money, too many children are showing fewer skills and less knowledge than ever. Meanwhile, according to John K. Williams, teacher and writer: “A massive empire has been spawned, ruled by a priesthood of bureaucrats, administrators, curriculum developers, and ‘resource personnel.’ They, not children, are the beneficiaries of compulsory, state-controlled schooling.”

While some teachers actually work against the official theory in order to create a learning environment, the system supports teachers who act as willing emissaries of its theory. It disguises and even rewards incompetence, indifference and dishonesty. This conflict results in teacher frustration and the high turnover rate.

Despite the bad theory and practices, we often hear, “If schools are so bad, how come most children seem to do OK?” The fact is that millions do not do OK. Bruce Thomas, of Children’s Learning Project, in Chicago, says, “One of the most disturbing characteristics of the system is that it does least well by those who most need it.”

Children learn what they’re taught. Instead of useful knowledge and skills, today they learn what Benjamin Bloom calls a latent curriculum of docility, competition, conformity and dishonesty in bleak isolation from the real world. Thomas adds, “Students are cast in the role of apprentices in the schools’ negative culture. They attend to what the adults do rather than what they say; and they learn quickly and thoroughly.” Children suffer the consequences of a system that is not only inadequate but also damaging.

Ned Vare is a former private school teacher, businessman, author; his articles appear on line at www.borntoexplore.org; he is an unschooling advocate.

Technorati Tags: [government school], [school reform], [dumbing down], [poor quality schooling], [school bureaucracy].

Fooling the People Most of the Time

2007-11-29T08:25:00.000-08:00

“Public education as we know it is a lost cause. Claims of school effectiveness will be met with increased skepticism and even outright opposition.”
- Myron Lieberman, Public Education: An Autopsy

The government schools claim to be educating children. Yet, more and more people (and international tests) now say that they are failing to do so. Worse, when they fail, they blame the children, parents or “society,” but never themselves. Not only are they failing, but they are dishonest. Incredibly, their attitude is, “We are not responsible for the children’s learning.” That, in fact, was the legal argument the teacher union used in court a few years back to defend Hartford’s school meltdown. The system seems to want children to be educated before they arrive in school. Today the schools expect parents to do much of the teaching at home.

Dishonesty is the culture of the school system. Their PR says: “We stand for excellence in education.” When parents hear such a claim, they believe that it means the schools teach the essential skills and useful information (3Rs) that children need for productive and satisfying lives--in other words: a traditional schooling. Instead, what do the public schools offer? Sad to say, the public school system has been changed (decades ago) from offering basic skills to one that is used to condition children to approved beliefs, opinions and attitudes that will make the machinery of government run smoothly and create a predictable obedient populace. That purpose– really social engineering--is the opposite of what most parents want for their children. The result is continuous wars between parents and the schools.

The school employees are trained (wrongly) to think of parents as incompetent--unable to educate their own children. Those employees are also trained to consider themselves “professionals” who take responsibility for “the whole child.” But in fact they have less education than the average college graduate, and are no better qualified or trained to be effective teachers than average parents are. Besides, much of what is taught today is deeply flawed and of suspicious origin. Therefore, teachers’ assumptions and attitudes about both themselves and parents are false.

In order to understand the public school system, we need to know its origin. In about 1840, this country’s industrial, political, and military leaders needed an army and a workforce for the coming industrial revolution–soldiers and factory workers. They admired Prussia’s system that turned out obedient soldiers to fight their frequent battles with Napoleon. The US copied the Prussian system of forced schooling and indoctrination including kindergarten intended to separate children emotionally from their parents. Thus, the system sets up conflicts with parents by “pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood,” according to John Taylor Gatto’s Underground History of American Education.

Government schooling has never been about educating the youth. It is about political agendas only. Of course, a certain level of basic skill is needed even by factory workers, but Henry Ford was the first to abandon the hype that robot-like work requires years of “education.” Public schooling has been a watered-down product ever since, becoming more so all the time. Thus, the system became both anti-family and anti-intellect. “Dumbing down” describes it and it’s working perfectly. We have paid the price of becoming a nation of children who consign our own children to state-run factory schooling.

Can a dishonest education system do anything other than constantly attempt to deceive the public about its purpose and intentions, especially when it forces the public to pay for it? No, it cannot. Government schools must constantly tell us that they are serving our interests while doing the exact opposite – turning our kids into a dependent, obedient mass while preventing them from becoming self-sufficient, self-governing well-educated individuals. It seems to fool most people.

Ned Vare is an architectural designer, former school teacher, businessman, author and was Libertarian Party candidate for Governor of CT. His articles appear on line at www.borntoexplore.org; he is an unschooling advocate.

Technorati Tags: [public school], [school reform], [dumbing down], [mediocrity], [indoctrination].

Most Children Are Left Behind

2007-11-27T13:59:00.000-08:00

“The teachers’ unions, and those they represent, are the perpetrators of the failed American public education system.”
- Martin L. Gross, "The Conspiracy of Ignorance: The Failure of American Public Schools"

“No Child Left Behind” is a marketing slogan selling more federal control over education on the pretense that all children will be better educated. Do you believe it? Does anyone believe that because the federal government has a new expensive program children will get more learning than before from the same bad schools? Are we crazy?

The truth is that MOST children are left behind, and it's on purpose. Why? Because the goal is to offer only an eighth grade level schooling to all, no matter how old the children get. CAPT (CT's "exit exam") is an 8th grade level test, but they don’t give it until tenth grade. Dumbing Down is not a joke, it’s the national policy.

First, the government is not interested in providing the kind of education that most parents want for their children. While parents want their kids to be independent creative-thinking individuals, “the government wants children to become compliant human resources to be used by government and industry for their own purposes,” according to Charlotte Iserbyt’s book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. The Feds want uniformity -- a workforce and a military -- not an educated citizenry. When the schools say they are "successful," it means they are turning out obedient group thinkers.

According to the Hartford Courant (Nov.12, 04), “57% of CT Public school 4th graders read below the proficient level.” In other words, the majority are failing; most are left behind. Yet, the state claims CT schools are "#1 in the nation." That’s what people mean when they describe the school system as a culture of dishonesty: Massive failure is called “success.”

Local school boards were set up by the state in order to make sure its schools do what the government wants them to do. That means that there is no such thing as local control — local school districts are not run by the local school boards. The school board members merely masquerade as our representatives while, in fact, they obey the state education bureaucracy.

I’ve heard teachers say, “School is the real world.” Nothing could be more false. School, like prison, is intentionally separated from the real world. In fact, some people call school “day prison.” There is little connection between school and reality. Its rules are unknown in the real world; its deceptive and stressful culture must be unlearned after leaving school. Even most of what has been learned there needs to be forgotten in order to operate in the real world. In public schools, children do not even have civil rights.

Public schools claim to offer “education.” Yet what those schools are supposed to offer is schooling -- the basic academic skills. With those skills, we can get our “education” for ourselves, mostly from learning things that interest us. But schools now fail to do even their part for many kids -- few ever get real education because they are not taught the basic skills. Further, the schools make learning a bad experience and bad memory. That’s what many kids take with them in life – the hatred of learning. Each year in school prepares them only for the next school year, not for real life.

“Self-esteem,” there’s a buzz word. Schools promote self-esteem by false messages of achievement -- inflated grades and meaningless honor rolls -- instead of valuable and lasting accomplishments. It’s just another slogan.

If the government wanted the schools to be better, they would be. After all, there are plenty of decent schools they could copy. But since the system claims to be excellent, it’s clear that the government wants its schools to be exactly the way they are – mediocre and worse.

Because the public does not control “public” schools, they offer exactly what they are designed to offer: a minimum education with the maximum number of employees at the greatest possible expense.

Most children are left behind. That’s the plan. It’s working perfectly.

Ned Vare is a Yale graduate, an architectural designer, former school teacher, businessman, author. His articles appear on line at www.borntoexplore.org; he is an unschooling advocate.

Technorati Tags: [No Child Left Behind], [public school], [dumbing down], [poor quality schooling], [school bureaucracy].

Public School 101

2007-11-26T09:23:00.000-08:00

Connecticut State law says: "Local boards of education are not agents of their towns but creatures of the state." Therefore, the local school board does not represent the people of the town; it gets its orders from the state and federal governments. The same can be said about every superintendent. There is no such thing as local control of public schools, except in trivial details. Bottom line: Public school is a political enterprise having to do with social control. Add to this the fact that the daily operation of the public schools is dominated by the teacher unions, and we have our current septic and ill-fated education situation -- a disaster.

Are the educational interests of the state the same as those of the parents or the children? No, in fact, the goals of the state are largely the opposite of those of parents, children and communities. Parents want their children to learn basic skills and knowledge; but the government wants its schools to turn out a workforce -- masses of docile employees, predictable consumers and obedient soldiers -- not independent, creative-thinking individuals. Thus, we have perpetual conflict -- the school wars.

The "public" school system is not owned and/or run by the public even though we are forced to pay for it. It is owned and run by the government. In contrast, private schools are owned and run, and paid for voluntarily, by members of the public. When there's ownership, there is accountability and control; and with those, there is satisfaction instead of conflict.

How does the government produce this mass populace? The same way states always have: with schools. In 1820 the American public school system was copied from Prussia (which became Fascist Germany) -- an authoritarian, top-down system of obedience training. It was designed to change society from agrarian to manufacturing, from independent farmers to virtual factory slaves, from self-sufficient individuals to dependent groups. Little has changed.

Even though local residents elect school board members who "campaign" for the post by claiming to want "better schools," the fact is that the board is bound by the state, not by any promises made to local voters. Confounding the entire issue are the teacher unions (NEA and AFT) that make constant demands for more money and less work for their members. Those demands, of course, work against the interests of children, parents, and communities.

What about education quality? The schools were never intended to offer more than the basics, and today they have been transformed from academic learning to psychological conditioning; from education to indoctrination. The books have been watered down, the courses are dumbed down; the teachers are poorly educated and trained. The purpose of school is now social engineering -- creating a mass of predictable consumers instead of creative-thinking self-governing individuals.

The result is the worst of all possible worlds: a government monopoly directed by self-serving politicians in concert with special interests (labor unions, business, etc.) with counter-productive agendas prescribed by non-elected bureaucrats in distant offices, all doing the bidding of invisible global planners. Add to that the extreme likelihood that every school district contains large areas of corruption, and you have our sad condition. In case you believe it's for the good of the children, you're wrong. While it serves many political and economic masters, it is designed for the convenience and benefit of its employees, but not our children.

Ned Vare is an architectural designer, and author; a former private school teacher, rancher, businessman, elected official.

Technorati Tags: [public school], [school reform], [dumbing down], [authoritarian school], [mediocrity].

Artificial Stupidity

2007-11-25T09:59:00.000-08:00

Artificial Stupidity

“According to a 1993 national survey by the Educational Testing Service of 26,000 adults with an average of 12.4 years of schooling, only 3.5% of the sample had the literacy skills to do traditional college level work.”-- Bruce N. Shortt, The Harsh Truth About Public Schools

Are your children bright? Most kids are. Chances are that you see their intelligence and strengths and you are aware of their interests and inclinations. You sent them off to school at a young age with the hope that the school would inform them of needed facts and knowledge as well as encourage their strengths and feed their interests. However, the public schools no longer do what parents expect, and that fact is the reason for the many "school wars."

Today’s schools have reduced the content of all instruction by about four grade levels, compared to fifty years ago. Teachers are now “facilitators” while the children reach “consensus” about their subjects. The CAPT test (Connecticut’s high school “exit exam") is based on material offered up to eighth grade. The courses, textbooks and tests have all been dumbed down to that level or below. International testing shows that, compared to students in other advance countries, “The longer our students are in school, the lower their comparative performance,” says Gordon Ambach, former head of the Council of Chief State School Officers. He should know.

It gets worse: The schools have changed in purpose from education to political and social indoctrination, with “equality” as the goal. Schools don’t care how much children learn, they are primarily interested in what kids “are like.” The schools' goal is to transform children’s varied attitudes, values and opinions from those of traditional families to those desired by the government. The government seeks to turn a population of diverse children into a mass of predictable citizens who know and believe the same things, with no one ahead or behind too far. That is why today’s public schools spend lots of our money trying to raise the bottom children up to the middle mass, but little or nothing to help high-achievers. In fact, they are designed to prevent the brightest kids from reaching their full potential. Now you know why “one-size-fits-all” and “dumbing down” are the major policies of public schools. The only way they can achieve “equality” of outcomes is by continually lowering their standards.

Today, the schools have a far different agenda for our children from the one we expect of them. They are failing to provide the children with the needed basic skills, knowledge and information, but, worse, they are interested in finding children’s weaknesses and psychological “needs” instead of their strengths and interests. The school system makes the basic assumption that all children have “disabilities” and need the school to provide “treatments” for them. The result is that school has become psychological and therapeutic even to the point of requiring many children to take mind-altering drugs such as Ritalin, in order to control their behavior.

The school system has several reasons to do this – all of which work directly against most parents’ hopes and wishes for their children. The government is seeking to mold the citizens of our country into a docile, easily controlled mass that can be employed or will become soldiers who do exactly what they are told to do, and nothing else. What does this all mean? It means that government school is not for the benefit of children, but is for the benefit of a government that seeks to control, instead of being controlled by, the people.

Unfortunately for America, our country needs well-educated people now, not dumbed-down people. There lies the School Wars, pitting the government school establishment against the rest of us. Government school is turning bright kids into ignorant robots; our children need the exact opposite. The schools are turning intelligent children into stupid adults by the millions simply by not offering them what they need, while offering them large quantities of what they do not need, or want. I believe the situation is well described by Thomas Sowell: “In an age of artificial intelligence, too many of our schools are producing artificial stupidity.”

Ned Vare is an architectural designer, artist and author; a former private school teacher, rancher, businessman, elected official. He is a Yale graduate.

Technorati Tags: [public school], [educational testing], [indoctrination], [mediocre education], [dumbed down].

How Public Schools Conflict with Parents

2007-11-24T14:30:00.000-08:00

“The mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first
had to be dreamed of; it isn’t real.”– John Taylor Gatto, former NY state teacher of the year -- go to www.johntaylorgatto.com

While some citizens take the public schools for granted, trust their motives, and never question their actions, many do not. Most citizens, especially parents concerned for their children’s future, have conflicts with the schools in many areas.

Who controls the school system? Government school is a political institution and it teaches only what the government wants citizens to know, nothing else. While politicians and administrators claim that there is “local control,” meaning that communities control the schools they are forced to pay for, the fact is that federal and state agencies and teacher unions run the schools. Elected school boards merely rubber stamp the policies of others and make excuses for the many ways the schools fail children. Parents have no control at all.

The teacher union has twin goals: more money and less work. It constantly seeks smaller class size in order to gain more teacher/members to increase its income. It dominates the schools with work rules that limit the teachers in many ways. Thus, while parents often see teachers as benevolent servants of their children, the fact is that teachers are restrained from doing more than the minimum.

Parents want learning – useful skills and knowledge, perhaps even intellectual stimulation. But instead of that, government schools provide three major functions:
1. Custodial, or babysitting (some say, “lockup”)
2. Role selection--rating children for future employment slots (“meat stamping”)
3. Social conditioning, or training to accept their (low) positions in society and in expecting life to be like school – petty, conformist, snobbish, repetitive, cruel, boring (the schools call it “socialization”).

Parents want high standards, but the school system trots out a marketing slogan: “Educational excellence” – words without substance. Today when we hear about "equalization" or “standards” we should think: "standardization: lowest common denominator."

Parents and taxpayers, who must pay the bill, want the schools to be efficient while the schools see the public as an endless source of funding. The teacher unions and state educrats seek always to increase their employment kingdoms without regard to the quality of their product or its efficiency. In fact, we learn more each day about the corruption within the system. Bottom line: the community seeks value for its tax dollars while the schools seek only to maximize their revenue without regard to quality.

Parents want their children’s curiosity to be satisfied, while the schools want the children (and the parents) to be gullible and trusting. Parents want their children to learn responsibility and independence, but the schools' desired outcome for them is to become passive, manageable and dependent.

Most people harbor the dream that the schools will help make the world a better place, and yet one major goal of the establishment is to keep things as they are, despite all its rhetoric about improving its methods. The conclusion is that the school system is a major player in preventing social and economic advances. School, as we know it, is archaic and determined to remain so.

Parents want the teachers to be well educated. Yet certification does not mean that they are truly qualified or sufficiently educated even in the subjects they teach. We hear from many sources that teacher colleges and Ed. departments are not respected institutions. Even the head of Columbia Teachers College, Harold Levin, admited to the Hartford Courant that the quality of teacher colleges in America ranges between “unacceptable and embarrassing.”

Parents want the schools to serve their children. Instead, we read every day how the schools are designed and run for the benefit and convenience of their employees. The teachers’ contract tells the story. Teachers’ days are micromanaged by union rules and regulations that are agreed to by the very school boards that are presumed to work on behalf of children and the public, but do not. Instead of a learning experience, it is likely that the least beneficial part of a child’s day is the part spent in school.

Ned Vare is a Yale graduate, an architectural designer, former school teacher, businessman, author, and was libertarian candidate for Governor of CT. He appears on Guilford cable access programs; his articles appear on line at www.borntoexplore.org; he is an unschooling advocate.

Technorati Tags: [public school], [schools conflict with parents], [dumb down], [corruption], [psychological conditioning].

One Way to Raise a Child: Unschooling

2007-11-22T10:21:00.000-08:00

NOBODY DUMBED HIM DOWN

"A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another." -- John Stuart Mill

Soon after Cassidy was born at our ranch in Colorado, Luz handed me a book by John Holt. It said, “Children do not need to be made to learn, or shown how. They want to and they know how.” Also, that if there is one thing that holds children back and often turns them against learning, it's schooling -- sitting in unpleasant schools where intelligence and interests are often ignored.

In town, with Cass on my shoulders, we read the signs, talked to shoppers and clerks. Soon he was speaking in sentences. Luz and I read stories to him and by age four he could read virtually any book. Holt was right: Cass did not need urging in order to learn. He once told a librarian, "I'm interested in everything."

In Connecticut, we let Cassidy determine what, when, where, how much and with whom he would learn. We did no "lessons" but answered his questions and helped him gain access to the real world. We called it unschooling -- no textbooks, no curriculum, testing, assignments, none of it unless he asked for them. We paid attention to his desires for information as well as his basics. Schools claim it is more important to "feel good about yourself" than to know how to read, write and calculate. Our idea was the opposite: if you have skills and knowledge, you will have self-esteem.

As Cass grew, he was still curious and interested in many things. We did not limit his learning. People observed that he was bright, confident and capable, "He must be smart to have learned so much so young." We answered, "Children are born smart. It's just that nobody is dumbing him down."

I believe that because he did not go to school, Cass was able to easily acquire all the essentials while he avoided the many negatives that schools teach. We encouraged his curiosity and helped him gain access to the world. His life was the polar opposite of sitting with peers in boring classes and being told that his interests are not important. We trusted him.

Cassidy learned about dinosaurs and fossils, so that at eleven, he began to volunteer at Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History. They had a variety of tasks for him. The next year, because of his knowledge of dinosaurs, they put him in charge of the Information Desk in the Hall of Dinosaurs on Family Days. At fourteen, he was a teacher at the Eli Whitney Museum, once giving an “enrichment” class in origami to public school teachers. He earned his own money with jobs he found. The Hartford Courant published the SAT scores of the valedictorians at all CT's high schools. Cass scored higher than half of them, by soaking up knowledge in his own ways.

Cass went to Hunter College because it was in the middle of his favorite place, NYC. He had an apartment downtown and took the subway to school. His friends told Luz and me that he always seemed to know the right thing to do. That was when we knew our experiment had been a success, because he had always chosen his own path, instead of having others direct him. He breezed through college – always on the dean’s list. He held jobs, worked on a political campaign, was president of the film society, and graduated Magna Cum Laude.

For Cass (and other kids we know), attending school had been not just unnecessary, but irrelevant and, we believe, would have been damaging to his mind and spirit. Today, public schools are worse than ever. From the government's viewpoint, school is for obedience training, not for teaching knowledge. Parents need to weigh the "convenience" of school against the dumbing down that goes on there. Do children belong to the state?

Ned Vare

Technorati Tags: [public school], [unschooling], [self-esteem], [basics], [enrichment].

What's Wrong with Public Schools?

2007-11-21T09:00:00.000-08:00

"The sad truth is that public education has destroyed the American dream for countless numbers of young people by preventing them from acquiring those academic skills needed to achieve success."
- Samuel Blumenfeld, Educator and Author

Publishers turn out book after book about the whys and wherefores of the school failure. The latest is "Public Schools, Public Menace: How Public Schools Lie to Parents and Betray Our Children," by Joel Turtel. He tells us not to accept failure as the norm, nor to accept the lies that are so much a part of the system’s betrayal of our country.

For starters, Turtel sees Destructive and Incompetent Teaching Methods. On reading he writes, “Whole language is a prescription for disaster, and is the main culprit behind our children’s appalling illiteracy and plummeting reading skills...a primary reason why 30 percent of Americans are functionally illiterate.” Citing Charles Sykes’s book, "Dumbing Down Our Kids," he says that what is being taught is reading appreciation, where kids are not taught how to read, but are expected merely to “feel good about books.” Part of the Whole Language/constructivist philosophy is Invented Spelling. He says, “Even knowing that a person who doesn’t spell correctly can’t communicate effectively, many public schools no longer think spelling is important enough to spend time on during the school day.”

Next up: New-Math. Turtel says, “If any discipline requires accuracy and clear thoughts, it is math. Numbers should not be subject to interpretation and invention. Five times four will always equal twenty, no matter how a child feels about it.” The philosophy behind New-Math is similar to Whole Language: the odd belief that children will learn basic skills along the way without being taught. In Guilford, I’ve heard that the schools require lots of help at home by (often bewildered) parents. “With teaching methods like these, it’s no wonder that our kids have become increasingly math deficient. New-Math’s bizarre methods can frustrate kids and turn them off math,” says Turtel.

On dumbed-down textbooks and tests, Turtel writes: “One reason public school authorities use incompetent methods is that they want to protect children’s self-esteem...When schools reduce textbooks to easy reading levels, most students pass their tests, get good grades and please their parents. This makes everyone happy, but the children still can’t read very well” or calculate correctly. On history: “The student is supposed to learn by pictures, not words.” On testing and grade inflation: “Often, the goal is to fool parents into believing their children are doing fine [so that] they don’t complain to teachers, principals or their local school board.” When many students fail a test, officials “redefine failure as success, as if their bar of lead is really gold.”

Social promotion: This is another scheme to protect kids’ self-esteem and parents’ opinion of the school. Guilford’s former superintendent, Mrs. Truex, admitted that the district practices social promotion. According to Turtel, “Some students receive counterfeit diplomas that are nothing more than a twelve-year attendance record...setting up students to fail later in life when they apply for college or a job.”

On the Cheaters: As seen on recent TV documentaries, some schools help their students cheat on tests or invent meaningless grading systems. “This is another way school authorities fool parents into thinking that their child’s school does a good job,” says Turtel. Of course, when that happens, it is years after the fact, when no one can ever be held accountable.

On Outcome Based Education: “OBE is a smoke screen.” The goal of OBE is not to improve children’s academic skills or knowledge, but to teach them government-approved attitudes, values and opinions -- “to feel good and get along with others.” But is that education? No, it’s psycho-therapy.

Turtel concludes, “Public schools cripple children’s ability to read and do basic math. They dumb down their tests, testbooks, and curriculum. they commit educational fraud against parents by hiding their failure and incompetence with rigged test scores and report cards. They indoctrinate children with politically correct “outcomes” that have little to do with learning basic academic skills...If a private school did these things, you’d file charges.”

If children are not being taught the math and reading they need, why send them to school? “Socialization,” you say? See my next column.

Ned Vare

Vare is an architectural designer, former school teacher, businessman, author and was Libertarian Party candidate for Governor of CT (1998). He appears on Guilford cable access TV programs; his articles appear on line at www.borntoexplore.org; he is a homeschooling advocate.

Technorati Tags: [public school], [school reform], [dumbing down], [mediocrity], [corruption].

Introduction

2007-11-20T09:41:00.000-08:00

School Is Hell is about the public schools and why they are so bad.

Parents have expressed their dissatisfaction with the schools for years, but they often seem not to know why they are bad. My "job," over several years of writing letters to newspapers and a recent column in my local paper, has been to inform the public of the reasons for the poor quality of the schools. In short, the schools are exactly the way they are intended to be: poor.

The reasons for dissatisfaction are many. Every facet of the schools is an easy target for criticism, from the teaching methods to the lunch services, from teacher certification to the elimination of recess, from homework to the teacher unions. If parents ran the schools, they would look nothing like the state-run disaster we are all forced to pay for with our taxes.

There is no such thing as "local control"

The problem is not "other people's" schools or "big city" schools. All the government-run schools are owned and run by the same people: government employees working in state and federal departments of "education." Those agencies totally control everyone's local public school systems. Thus, the public schools are uniform, and mediocre, everywhere...yes, even in "good" districts.

Yes, I know there are "local" school boards and administrators, but they decide only trivial details of their local schools. The major planning -- the big picture (curricula, rules, etc.) -- is designed and directed by the state education departments, which in turn are directed by Washington. Meanwhile, work rules that govern teachers are written by their unions with virtually no negotiating by local residents.

"The School Wars" -- articles listed in their own section -- describe the constant battle between parents and the schools. The two are always at odds because the purpose of the school system is the opposite of what most parents want. Parents want, and expect, their children to be given the tools of education -- the basic skills and knowledge that they need in order to have productive, meaningful and fulfilling lives.

However, the school system is designed for a different purpose: to turn out a "workforce" -- a mass of docile, dependent workers who will work in the largely government-controlled "workplace" of America. For that purpose, the schools are designed to train, or indoctrinate the children instead of educate them.

Thus, to me, the public school system is gradually destroying the very fabric of our country. It has been doing it for over one hundred years, and it is on purpose. If the schools were intended to be different from what they are, they would be. But unfortunately, the federal Commission that investigated public schools back in 1980 got it right:

"If a foreign power had imposed on us the mediocre school system we have, we would have considered it an act of war.
But as it is, we have imposed it upon ourselves."

Welcome to my blog.
Ned Vare

.........ON TO THE BLOG........

Technorati Tags: [parent dissatisfaction with public school], [teacher certification], [local control], [curriculum], [teacher unions].