By
Investigating Journalist Jon Rappoport
December 27, 2010
NewsWithViews.com
There is a hidden reason, among many other reasons, why American schools no longer teach the detailed meaning of the Declaration and the Constitution and the Republic for which they stand.
And that hidden reason is: schools in this country are no longer American. They are looked at, by “professionals,” as universal schools.
That is, these schools service children, many of whom don't speak English or write English as their first language. And there is no major push to teach English thoroughly and rigorously to kids who don't speak it or write it.
When you look at a school, moreover, as a multi-cultural institution, and you glorify the notion of “ethnic diversity,” you are basically saying that integration into the great melting pot is no longer a priority. So, under that banner, why would you consider a major grounding in the Constitution important? You wouldn't.
What you're left with is essentially a social event, not an educational event.
And within that social event, there are various causes allied as a cluster of favored issues: greening; the environment; global warming; recycling; cleaning up pollution; a vague “equality”; helping those in need.
These trump freedom, individuality, independence, competence, achievement.
This isn't even training people to become cogs in the machine of society; it's training people to become educational zeros.
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This is newer than the social engineering concept of John Dewey and others. It's training people to become, at best, community organizers.
It's “the group is everything” and “the individual is passe.”
Am I exaggerating a bit? Yes. On purpose. But I'm pointing to the major trend. This is where education is heading. Fast.
What was once the celebration of the individual who achieves at a very high level of competence, skill, intelligence, and effort has become a reward for being “a good person,” a “sharer,” a “helper,” and the outcome is predictable. Kids who are uneducated.
It gets even worse, because this overarching socialization of kids really, in the end, emphasizes cliques and elites and a Lord of the Flies syndrome. You go for socialization as the highest virtue, and that is what you get.
You begin with the notion of a school being composed of a number of groups (not individuals), you foster the idea of the group, you teach about groups, you enlist students in group causes, and that's what you get. Children at their worst.
Learning doesn't work unless you place it on the highest pedestal.
Learning fosters differentiation among individuals based on degrees of achievement. That differentiation isn't punitive. It's just a reality.
If you crack the pedestal and pull down the ideal of learning, then achievement becomes a crime, open to all the barbs and arrows that can be directed at it by confused, self-entitled, spoiled, resentful, and unattractive children.
And the individual goes begging.
The final blows are delivered by television and the internet. If a kid who can read compares what he finds on the internet with the sanitized passages of text in the classroom—Jimmy and Gloria, the multicultural buddies who pick up discarded tissues on the beach—what do you think he's going to choose and what is he going to ignore?
Bring them home and teach them there. Let them read Marx and Lenin and Mao and get them to dig in and really analyze what these men are saying. Assign them Maurice Strong and Al Gore and Prince Charles and make them take apart the elite level of the environmental movement and see what's really there. Have them read Jefferson and Madison and prove they understand those texts. Study a plane geometry text and then teach it. Make your kids derive the theorems from start to finish with complete proofs...
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Opt out. Decentralize. Bring it all back to the individual and what he can do. It turns out there is no ceiling. Put him in an environment where there is no grade curve, no median, no average, no need to saddle him with the group and all that that implies.
� 2010 Jon Rappoport - All Rights Reserved
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Jon Rappoport has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize early in his career, Jon has published articles on medical fraud, politics, alternative health, and sports in LA Weekly, CBS Healthwatch, Spin, Stern, and other magazines and newspapers in the US and Europe.
He is the is author of several books, including The Secret Behind Secret Societies and The Magic Agent (a novel).
Jon is the author of a new course for home schoolers, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS.
E-Mail: qjrconsulting@gmail.com
Web site, www.nomorefakenews.com
Web site, www.insolutions.info
