Coming soon to a school near you?
Here’s an interesting article by commenter Geoffrey Britain.
And it ties somewhat into this piece of news.
Stop the Gramscian march through the schools!
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
Here’s an interesting article by commenter Geoffrey Britain.
And it ties somewhat into this piece of news.
Stop the Gramscian march through the schools!
First link is broken, neo.
There is an interesting article (http://www.ctmirror.org/story/career-put-hold) on the results of a new test for aspiring teachers. This test is intended to measure skills in teaching reading to elementary school kids. It even includes (Gasp!) phonics!
An embarassingly large number of test takers failed from the Ed Schools. The comments from the students are amusing. They are victims, how can anyone expect them to know all this, its just test, test, test!
It is much easier to slip in political teaching if you don’t have to teach the subject. A return to skills based curricula would not only help kids, but shut out most of the extraneous politics from the classroom.
when you read things like this… then so much becomes clear as a bell…in a way that previously, could never be without it.
FROM 1936 TO 1938 I was involved in so many activities I had little time for my family and old friends. I devoted myself more and more to the new friends who shared my fanatical sense of dedication. I found little time to read anything except Party literature. This was necessary to hold leadership in a union where many of the leaders were trained and established Communists.
The Teachers Union was growing rapidly in numbers and influence…Together with the WPA Local Number 453, our membership grew to almost nine thousand and we extended control to many upstate locals. At its peak the Union boasted ten thousand members, and in it the Communist Party had a fraction of close to a thousand. Among them were Moscow-trained teachers and men and women who had attended the sixth World Congress of the Comintern. Chapter Eight Bella Dodd School of Darkness…
its hard to stress how everyone around these people cant fathom the degree they were sociopathically orchestrating the reality for people.
Attending conventions took much of my time. No convention of teachers in the United States ever went unnoticed by the Communist Party. The national office would call the leaders of the teacher Communists and discuss with us the nature of the organization and inquire if we had Party members in it. If we had, we would decide which resolutions they were to introduce and which they were to oppose. If we had no members, observers would be sent to make contacts. Particular attention was given to pushing federal aid to the public-education program and to the issue of separation of church and state at these conventions.
We also carefully prepared for meetings of learned societies, such as mathematics and modern-language associations, and those composed of professors of physics, history, and social studies. A careful search of Party members and friends of the Party was made, as well as of liberals and special-interest groups. This was all done months in advance. Then a campaign began to get certain people elected or to have them volunteer to go to a convention so that we would have a core of dependables. Finally we drew up a plan of action to put through certain measures and to try to defeat others.
here is something that stands out
Every night thousands of men and women combed the East Harlem district house by house. The voters were visited many times. On the first visit they were asked to sign pledges to vote for Marcantonio on a specific party ticket. Next they were reminded by a caller of the date of the primary. And on the day itself they were visited every hour until they went to the polls. Squads of automobiles waited to take them. Teachers acted as baby sitters. People who would have scorned working for a Republican or Democratic leader, willingly and without recompense, did the most menial tasks because the Party had told them that this was the way to defeat the “fascists.”
Call it mass hypnosis if you like, but the important thing is to recognize this appeal to the good in human beings and to realize how it can be used.
chapter 10
[edited for length by n-n]
No US history before Hayes! I am speechless.
CV: the links work when I try them.
No one should be too surprised at this stuff. There’s been good evidence for quite some time that these guys are engaged in subverting the entire education system. They’ve laid a lot of groundwork, and while the North Carolina move is a bit stunning, my guess is they’re prepared for a little flurry of backlash, will weather it, and after indulging some kind of a pro forma “comment period,” they will implement the change and it will be mostly forgotten. But their work will go on.
I think one of the greatest successes the American Left has ever achieved was the reduction of American anti-Communism to joke/mental illness status. I remember the days when it became fashionable to mock and demean people “who saw Communists under every bed.” Just a bunch of nuts, don’tchya know. Communists are no threat, nothing to see here, chuckle and then move along move along.
I taught university-level geology at a pretty fair state school for a while after I completed my MS, and education majors were pretty consistently among the least sharp of my students. Some of us in the natural science faculties joked about the archetypal elementary education major, “Patty El. Ed,” whom we sometimes just referred to as “Patty.” Once I was teaching map scale interpretation, and I made the point that the scale is simply a ratio, a problem in long division. One of the ed majors came to me after class and declared that she couldn’t do those operations because she wasn’t “gifted in math.” I was stunned, couldn’t think of anything to say. This young lady had obviously been taught that everyone has gifts, and if you don’t grasp something effortlessly it’s probably because your gifts lie elsewhere. I finally pointed out to her that it didn’t require a gift, it’s just a memory chore, learn the multiplication tables and reverse the processes to do division. But no, she declared herself defeated by a task that required mere work. Everyone has different gifts, don’t you know. Of course it’s just an anecdote, but still telling, and more typical of Patties than not–there were others.
I’ve known a good number of well-educated people in maths and the sciences who would have been quite happy to teach–I’m one of them myself–but couldn’t muster the stomach for going through the huge stack of requisite dim-bulb education courses. You can’t teach in a government K-12 classroom without them, and they are utterly witless. My guess is things will get worse, and I’m not sure the worse will not ultimately come to worst. It may in spots, and for short periods, but the trend is set and the fix is in at the highest levels. These wizards have been set in for the very long haul over the last couple of generations now–their control is only set to increase. And a great many Americans won’t even know anything about it until it is all over.
Sorry–I of course meant, “It may improve in spots. . . .”
I can remember seeing this happen back in my college days. I had two friends working toward degrees in elementary education while the rest of our circle of Dungeons and Dragons playing nerds worked toward our science and math degrees.
Anyway, there came a point, somewhere around junior year that it was almost like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Soon, we were being lectured about how oppressed our fellow students were and it was worse in the lower grades and they were being trained to fix it.
They kept trying to get us to read “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (We preferred our Monster Manuals).- “Here! Try our free literature!”- I eventually read it, by the way, (to get one of the girls to sleep with me) and, well, bleh. (On both counts, actually, but D&D players can’t be picky).
They were completely different people after; brainwashed. And then they went off to shape young minds. One went to be a math teacher (she failed 3 out of 5 math courses she took) and the other became a school psychologist.
My kids are only 10 months old but when the time comes, I’ll be damned if I turn them over to the public education system.
How does one get in college without being able to do simple long division? I think I got that in 4th grade.
I do have a suggestion on the history problem: What if people in local historical societies, museums etc. got together and organized something like history bees? They could be pretty local and offer modest scholarships to winners. But in doing publicity for the events, organizers could say they are motivated by the proposed curriculum changes, that they just want to make sure that future generations still know who the founding fathers were, why the constitution is as it is, and what the civil war was about. This could get quite a bit of air time on local TV and radio and great pix in local papers.
Good for you, Jim Sullivan. Remember that home schooling is an option, at least for now. I have some friends who do it. It’s not easy, but once you get the thing set up and are into the swing of it, you will find a large, active, and committed support group who have been doing it for some years now. Many of them are aware of the multi-front action they are undertaking. The down-side is that the wizards are aware of the threat with which the home-schooling movement presents them, and are moving on several fronts against it. There are actions in progress to deny home-schooled kids admission to accredited higher-learning institutions, and other anti-home-schooling measures. The fight will be intense and constant, I’m thinking, even if it’s a bit below the larger radar. But then we are beginning to understand that this is going to have to be a multi-front effort, aren’t we.
I wish you the best of success with your kids.
Remember John Paul Jones: “I have not yet begun to fight.”
expat,
You’d be surprised at the low educational level required for university admission these days. Just ask yourself why there is now such a proliferation of remedial curricula in large numbers of colleges and universities. And the answer is, it’s because admission carries very few achievement requirements, and the higher-level institutions have set up entire programs whose mission is to teach university students that which they were not taught in K-12.
This is what happens when a college/university credential is determined to be a universal necessity. The credential itself becomes devalued. Just as a high-school diploma has become essentially worthless as an achievement indicator, a higher-education credential is moving towards becoming the same. When everyone has one, it will tell you nothing about anyone.
expat,
Incidentally, your idea about local-focus history competitions and bees is excellent. It’s the kind of thing we are going to have to undertake.
Betsybounds,
Thanks. I’d looove to be able to homeschool, even with all of the difficulties. My wife and I work opposite shifts so that we don’t need to pay for daycare. I love my one on two time with the kids everyday. I’d love to teach them too. But I’m not sure if it will be economical for us. I’d have to quit my job and we just can’t afford that.
In the end, I’ll probably end up paying for them to go to our regional private catholic school (Uniforms. Yes!) and I’ll consider it worth every penny, even though there are no longer any nuns there. I know from experience (being a good old Irish Catholic boy), when a nun is teaching you, you learn. Or you don’t live long, to paraphrase Heinlein.
And not to interject into your discussion with expat, but I remember that the education program was the fallback program for students that couldn’t cut it in whatever their initial major was. Say 3 out of 10 Ed. majors went into it specifically to be teachers. The others started out as engineering majors or something demnding a certain amount of rigor. When they realized they weren’t cut out for it, they went off to be a teacher. I had a calc. professor remark on it once saying ,”Give it a generation. This won’t end well.”
Jim Sullivan,
Well I don’t have a lot of familiarity with Catholic parochial schools these days, but when I was in my mid-to-late teens they were very fine. My sense, based on reading a bit about outcomes, is that they are yet continuing in that tradition. And I’m with you on the positive value of uniforms–they do serve, do they not, to limit the areas of natural competitiveness to those which actually result in lasting gain.
It’s not easy being Mom and Dad. But no one ever told us it would be, did they. . . .
Barry Rubin at Rubin Reports also discusses the leftism being taught in the 4th grade in our schools in lieu of history. I witnessed it with my children’s high school readers which can only be described as journeys in Liberal guilt trip land. Even the US Coast Guard Academy used Zinn’s silly A Peoples History of the US in lieu of a real history book.
The good news is that is that teaching lies does not seem to work in the long run. If it failed in the Soviet Union, Iran and elsewhere it is certainly going to fail where the truth is readily available.
There will be damage done, thanks not so much by the lefty indoctrinators but by parents, educators and community leaders who through shear laziness do not speak out against them.
who through shear laziness do not speak out against them.
its not that.
with others calling them nuts for saying somethign that is not agreed, and the ones that know better not willing to stand and fall.
you get the final scene to william wallace.
one man standing up for truth, abandoned by all others, and left to face the fight and die by himself, crucified by the people he opposed, and betrayed by the people he wanted to help.
sound like a repeating famililar theme?