The George Orwell Day Care Center
Cultural self-perpetuation is on my mind today. I’ve posted before on this Civics Literacy Quiz, which was given to freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities. By and large, they failed miserably, with the Ivy League students doing the worst. (I scored 55 out of 60, an A-.)
The QOTD post below, “I’ve heard of that,” links to a brief introduction to the problem.
Now go over to Kevin Baker at The Smallest Minority and read the long version. I’m not even going to bother to quote from it. It is infinitely worth your time, particularly you home schoolers out there, who are facing state execution, because you are doing the job that state teachers are specifically trying to eradicate: turning your kids into functional, literate citizens. (Hi, Chanda!)
Oh, OK, fine then, fine. Here’s your quote:
I am of the carefully considered opinion that both our media and our educational system have been largely taken over by people who are acolytes of the Holy Grail that Socialism promised, and who put themselves in those positions in the belief that it is up to them to help create the New Men that Socialism cannot succeed without. Our schools, especially, have become centers for the teaching of collectivism, “identity politics,” and for want of a better term, “rage against the machine.”
And to some extent, it has worked.
To a larger extent, it has not.
What has resulted are the unintended consequences of declining standards, high dropout rates, functional illiteracy and innumeracy, almost no general knowledge of geography, history, or civics, and nearly complete ignorance of science - both general and applied.
Schools should be the foundry through which the raw material of our youth is run, coming out the other end with strong and tempered minds well prepared for the world. The ore hasn’t changed, but the ratio of dross to valuable product has grown precipitously.
OK, I gave you the quote. Now do your share and read the whole thing, where Baker backs it up with statistics, with quotes, with news articles, with cold hard logic.
Public schools aren’t simply incompetent. They’re doing an excellent job of creating a people fit for socialist tyranny, which means a people unable to govern themselves.
Tags: education, home schooling
June 16th, 2008 at 2:37 am
Danny T….
I declare war on thee….
June 18th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
[deleted as spam, since the comment was generic and nearly meaningless, and the URL linked to an unrelated site that promptly opened up a new window with four count them four frames of advertising.
[Spammers. Ugh. ]