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1) there are, not there's [by Anonymous Citizen on September 5, 2008]"There ARE only benefits . . . "
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“Did you know that in Sweden, a country legendary for its quality of life and a nation which beats American school performance in every academic category, a kid isn’t allowed to start school before the age of 7? The hard-headed Swedes don’t want to pay for the social pathologies attendant on ripping a child away from his home and mother and dumping him into a pen with strangers. ... Did you know that the entire Swedish school sequence is only 9 years long, a net 25 percent time and tax savings over our own 12-year sequence? ...
“Did you know that Hong Kong, a country with a population the size of Norway’s, beats Japan in every scientific and mathematical category in which the two countries compete? Did you know that Hong Kong has a school year ten and one half weeks shorter than Japan’s? How on earth do they manage that if longer school years translate into higher performance? ...
“Or did you know that in Flemish Belgium with the shortest school year in the developed world that the kids regularly finish in the top three nations in the world in academic competition? Is it the water in Belgium or what? Because it can’t be the passionate commitment to government forced schooling, which they don’t seem to possess. ...
“If you trust journalism or the professional educational establishment to provide you with data you need to think for yourself in the increasingly fantastic socialist world of compulsion schooling, you are certainly the kind of citizen who would trade his cow for a handful of colored beans.”
How We Do It…..
"Non-intellectual, non-skill schooling was supported by a strange and motley collection of fellow travelers: from unions, yes, but also from the ranks of legendary businessmen like Carnegie and Rockefeller, Ford and Astor; there were genuine ideologues like John Dewey, yes, but many academic opportunists as well, like Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia; prominent colleges like Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago took a large hand in the deconstruction of American academic schooling as well as a powerful core of private foundations and think tanks. Whether they did this out of conviction, for the advantage of private interests, or any hybrid of these reasons and more I'll leave for the moment to others for debate. What is certain is that the outcomes aimed for had little to do with why parents thought children were ordered into schools; such alien outcomes as socialization into creatures who would no longer feel easy with their own parents, or psychologization into dependable and dependent camp followers
it was firmly in place by 1917 - all that remained to reach the target was a continual series of experiments on public schoolchildren, some modest in scope, many breathtakingly radical like "IQ tests" or "kindergartens", and a full palette of intermediate colors like "multiculturalism", "rainbow" curricula and "universal self esteem". Each of these thrusts has a real behavioral purpose which is part of the larger utopia envisioned, yet each is capable of being rhetorically defended as the particular redress of some current "problem".
"Shortly into the 20th century American schooling decided to move away from intellectual development or skills training as the main justification for its existence and to enter the eerie world of social engineering, a world where "socializing" and "psychologizing" the classroom preempted attention and rewards. Professionalization of the administrative/ teaching staff was an important preliminary mechanism to this end, serving as a sieve to remove troublesome interlopers and providing lucrative ladders to reward allies and camp followers."---John Tatto
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The NEA Spells Out Its Policies
Phyllis Schlafly
Monday, July 28, 2008
The nation's largest teachers union, the National Education Association, attracted 9,000 delegates to its annual convention in Washington, D.C. over the Fourth of July weekend. Delegates sported buttons with provocative slogans such as "Gay marriage causes Global Warming only because we are so hot!", "Hate is not a family value," "The 'Christian Right' is neither," and "Gay Rights are civil rights."
The delegates passed dozens of hard-hitting resolutions that now become the NEA's official policy. The resolutions authorize NEA members and employees to lobby for those goals in the halls of Congress and state capitols.
NEA resolutions cover the waterfront of all sorts of political issues that have nothing to do with improving education for schoolchildren, such as supporting statehood for the District of Columbia, a "single-payer health care plan" (i.e., government-run), gun control, ratification of the International Criminal Court Treaty, and taking steps "to change activities that contribute to global climate change."
The NEA fiercely opposes any competition for public schools, such as vouchers, tuition tax credits, parental option plans, or public support of any kind to non-public schools. The NEA strongly opposes designating English as our official language even though such a designation is supported by more than 80 percent of Americans.
The NEA opposes home schooling unless children are taught by state-licensed teachers using a state-approved curriculum. The NEA wants to bar home-schooled students from participating in any extracurricular activities in public schools even though their parents pay school taxes, too.
The NEA wants many additional (job-creating) services and programs to be provided by public schools such as early childhood education (i.e., baby-sitting for preschoolers). NEA resolutions call for "programs in the public schools for children from birth through age 8," and for "mandatory kindergarten with compulsory attendance."
NEA resolutions include all the major feminist goals such as "the right to reproductive freedom" (i.e., abortion on demand); "comparable worth" (i.e., government control of wages according to feminist ideology rather than the free market); full funding for the feminist boondoggle called the Women's Educational Equity Act; and "the use of nonsexist language," i.e., censoring out all masculine words such as husband and father.
The NEA even urges its affiliates to work for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA was declared dead by the U.S. Supreme Court 26 years ago.
The influence of the gay lobby is pervasive in dozens of NEA resolutions adopted by 2008 convention delegates. Diversity is the code word used for pro-gay indoctrination in the classroom.
The NEA's diversity resolution makes clear that this means teaching about "sexual orientation" and "gender identification," words that are repeated in dozens of resolutions. The NEA demands that "diversity-based curricula" even be imposed on preschoolers.
NEA convention delegates were invited to an open hearing by the SOGI Committee in Room 149A on July 1. In case you don't know, SOGI stands for Sexual Orientation Gender Identification.
The NEA urges its members to offer "diverse role models" via the "hiring and promotion of diverse education employees in our public schools." The NEA puts "domestic partnerships, civil unions, and marriage" on an equal footing.
The NEA wants every child, regardless of age, to have "direct and confidential access, without notification to parents, to comprehensive health education. That would include things such as learning how to use condoms for premarital sex, as well as social, and psychological programs and services."
The NEA wants public schools to take over the physical and mental care of students through school clinics that provide services, diagnosis, treatment, family-planning counseling, and access to birth control methods "with instruction in their use." Family planning clinics are called on to "provide intensive counseling."
The NEA wants all sex-education courses, textbooks, curricula, instructional materials and activities to include indoctrination about sexual orientation and gender identification plus warnings about homophobia.
The NEA is very generous with taxpayer money spent on illegal immigrants. The NEA not only favors amnesty for illegal-immigrant students, but also in-state college tuition and financial aid to illegal-immigrant college students.
The NEA is strong for "multicultural education," which the resolution makes clear does not mean studying facts about different countries and cultures. It means "the process of incorporating the values" and influencing "behavior" toward the NEA's version of "the common good," such as "reducing homophobia."
Of course, the NEA supports "global education" to teach "interdependency in sharing the world's resources." It's also no surprise that the NEA adamantly opposes any requirement that schools "schedule a moment of silence."
Will parents be silent about the radical goals of their children's teachers?
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