The Tea Party can reform the Right, but not the Left. It’s not moot if you want to change the Left into a form the Right can work with that has the best interests of the nation at heart. Real progressive liberals can do that.

and that is where a big part of the problem is for me. i grew up on those things. I started reading at a high level at a very early age, and used to read the children’s books of the past, which tend to have a high reading level. i was voracious, and tested college level in grade school. so i read Joyce, and the greek and roman classics, pop classics, all of shakespeares works, horation hornblower, chaucer, Leatherstocking and mohicans, twain… by the time i was 13, i had read all funken wagner encyclopedias, two unabridged dictionaries, the large edition of the brittanica. cousins would give me their college texts which varied depending on which cousin. after 13, dad was working for philips, and so i would read all the patent published books of issues as they discarded them, manuals, textbooks, and really got into wider harder texts, and often older and mostly unknown. i read all science fiction i could, which spanned everything that was written, and i stopped when they started reprints in new covers as i would buy the same books again. then i would move to another category and just read everything in that section of the library… tolstoy and others…alexander dumas (who if i remember is black), proust, neitsche, marcuse, adorno, wittgenstein, faulkner, then got into histories…

so my earliest learnings to write are from some of the greatest writers… but my problem is that i think so fast, that i can type fast enough to get it down, and because everything is connected to everything else, i cant find the boundaries to excise and compartmentalize. then there is the issue of including information that the other doesnt know, vs does know and you can make a reference too.. (and doing lots of science where empiricism of quoting, and all that comes into play… not to mention debating team).

short sentences are fine, and compared to roman times, we have refined language symbol systems and they are much better.

but i do get your point as to how a run on sentence with a timing and a meter can keep going and will never end and therefore becomes a fun challenge to create and to compose for any one to read when i can. 🙂

the older texts did not use punctuation as much. the idea was to write in a way, so that when a person read, they knew where those things would go.

just look at shakespeare, peoples minds were much more on the ball in listening to what was said, understanding it, and doing so well they could speak indirectly aobut a direct thing making it sound all pretty.

today, that same thing makes people confused.

it requires more thought to read, understand, and so on. and our society has be progresing bacwards… which is what PROmoting reGRESSIVE means… in this way, the winners can role back the advances of self governance to a political system in time that DOES allow them what oppresses them now.

its not the minorities or women, or gays, etc.. that are being liberated, its the political class who has been shackled since magna carta, and so on..

the larger problem is that there is no way to short sentence the knowlege they need to learn and know without blind trust.

this is the whole point of it… once your language is stunted, then certain concepts and realities become farther from you. there is no way to really know this unless you have gone past this point yourself. everyone defaults to themselves as tops, and used to know their location over time… (but on many measures which all are different).

the left gets to have that blind trust and can talk in sound bites because through media, and so on, they have been there with the person since they were a child. what they say resonates from sesame street, to mowtown, to hollyweird, to their newspapers, to even things like Nickelodeon… then here comes these old outsiders, talking long sentences of wa wa, wanting to tell stories to convince them that what has resonated all their lives is not right.

ultimately, short sentences also put a gate keeper in front of them, that they are too lazy to overcome, and too boring to pass… so they wont read the past and wont know it. its not exciting hollyweird stuff most of the time, its reams of dry things that with the names come across like reading the hobbit for the first time.

those great old texts are just too much trouble…

but dont worry…
ultimately the whole thing is self correcting
though how so, is probably not going to be to their liking… (but with what such stunting does, what other choice can they make? getting huffy at others just means they wont change the outcome, and wont become a resource that then influences others who may ask questions they cant address, because you cant learn principals and such in sound bites)

As for your observation “[public school teaching is] a huge part of the machine that propels leftist Democrat politics,” I absolutely agree.

You and I can agree to disagree on this. IMO the fact that a 60 hr work wk is the “norm” for any other given profession is, in my mind, a meaningless comparison. Because someone else works 60+ hrs per wk, teachers should also be expected to do so? You may have practiced law for 20+ years at 60+ hrs per week, but I’d hope that your compensation was substantially greater than a K-12 teacher for such travail.

Your comparison to teaching in a private college and reading papers after hours is also IMO invalid. What does one teach at a college level, 4 courses per week, 5 courses? That’s 12 to 15 hours of weekly class time which leaves a lot of after-hours time for grading and other teaching related pursuits. By contrast K-12 teachers are in class, before students generally 5-6 hours per day (i.e., 25-30 hrs per wk).

Let me repeat, I write this as someone who is quite unsupportive of the current K-12 system and who is a former university professor himself. There are many many reasons to criticize and even condemn the current output, teaching and administration of our K-12 system; IMO the 9 month work year is not one of them and it’s constant appearance dilutes other more pointed and substantive arguments.

Most of us do after hours work, except we do on a 12-month basis. I practiced law for 20 years, and 60+ hour work weeks were the norm. Now I teach at a small private college. Not nearly as onerous, even with reading student papers, writing and correcting exams, etc., most of which is also after hours.

Public school teaching is a gravy train, pure and simple. And it’s a huge part of the machine that propels leftist Democrat politics. I cut them no slack whatsoever.

I am no fan of teacher’s unions or the current state of education. Having said that, the constant complaint about teachers’ 9 mo work year is mostly unfounded. I know many teachers. Between the out-of-class monitoring of a school’s extracurricular activities (debate club, drama club, etc.), the fact that they oftentimes grade tests on their own time, and other out-of-class acitivites, IMO the 9 mo class session balances out.

On the other hand, I completely agree with you regarding the current work product of most schools. I will go one step further and note that sabbaticals (time off for research) have absolutely no place in the K-12 world. K-12 teachers are teachers, not researchers plumbing the depths of a particular field of knowledge. K-12 sabbaticals are just paid vacations at taxpayer expense in a system that can ill afford them.

To me at the core of the opposition to home schooling has always been those with vested interests– public teacher’s unions and career pubic school administrators. Couple them with Democrat politicos pandering for votes from the public employee sector, and voila!, organized and well-funded pushback.

Liberals get all warm and fuzzy about public school teachers, imaging them as selfless underpaid saints, nevermind the 9-month work year and generous pay/benefits, and the diminishing quality of their work product. Hey, it’s for the children.

“. . . as the studies came out showing the superiority of the homeschool paradigm, the pushback became more intense.”

Two responses: 1) the inertia of the status quo, and 2) the intent of the current scholastic power structure to relinquish its control only through their “cold, dead fingers” (to borrow a phrase).

And I agree about the ripple effect. See my earlier response to Neo above @ 2/12 3:10.