Education Connection: The Reality of Public School

The Importance of Education

2005-08-19T06:49:00.000-07:00

As parents, grandparents, teachers, and other concerned citizens why should we care about education? We hear that the United States public education system is less than adequate as compared to other industrialized nations worldwide. Why does it seem that the US is behind many of these nations and what is it that we can possibly do about this disparity?

Our children's education is essential to the success and prosperity of our nation therefore it is our responsibility to put forth effort in the pursuit of this. If we concentrate on the importance of our children's education, we can be enlightened as to how we may ensure a continuously prospering nation. With this will come the individual success and happiness of our children. Two categories of the importance of the average citizen and parent's knowledge of education are: benefits for the individual and wide-ranging benefits of the nation and beyond.

BENEFITS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL

A complete and proper education provides the tools for individual success. Particularly, it:

develops the communication skills of the individual: written, verbal, and nonverbal. These skills will help carry the individual to a life of success in both work/career, social success, and success at home.
helps the individual connect material learned in school to real-life situations
attain a successful career
make educated votes toward elected officials; be an informed citizen

WIDE-RANGING BENEFITS

Well-educated citizenry creates a more effective and successful economy
Better educated citizens may result in a more cohesive communities
Informed citizens may find a decrease in crime

We now know what the importance of education is. What we can do to improve it for our children and today's youth:

We can do this by:

Working with our schools to ensure a quality education
Contacting local resources to obtain free and low-cost tutoring and instructional services for our children to supplement the public school education they receive
Establishing a cohesive and encouraging home environment toward the pursuit of education
Avoid excess availability of entertainment which induces passivity

One thing alone will not be sufficient to provide our children with the education they deserve, but a combination of actively pursuing these can indeed.

THE POWER OF EDUCATION - FULFILL DREAMS

Education opens people up to the world: a world of opportunities, adventures, and dreams. Education opens up the minds of young ones to the possibilities of life. It drives people to create new dreams, and fulfill their current ones. It helps one to go after those dreams at full speed. When you are educated and value the pursuit of life-long learn, the possibilities are endless.

Without education, one is static or unchanging and can bore quickly with the limits of life. If one drops out of high school one is forced to work minimum wage and finds it difficult to on such a salary to travel the world (educate one-self in such a way).

First and foremost, education is very individual. Different students need different types of knowledge depending on their personal goals, their career goals, and other factors such as familial desires. To function in this time and society there are certain skills one must possess. But how does one attain a proper education? To answer this, it helps to look at what the public school is responsible for as a starting point for one's education.

What is the job of public schools?

To prepare its students for the real working world, for jobs, for college, and for life. The question is, to what extent?
Learn it, use it, communicate with others about it
Importance of each subject
Math, science, English, history/geography
Education is obtained so that students can do something positive for the world. To have enough knowledge and allows them to take action.
Education is also about gaining the knowledge and skills necessary to pursue personal dreams.
Education is about teaching students to want to learn for themselves, to chase their dreams, to be life-long learners.

Another aspect, not included in the list above, but a very important part of a proper education is that each area of the academic curriculum (math, science, English, social studies) should interconnect. A complete education involves being able to use the information learned in these separated disciplines together. The goal should be to use the information learned in a positive way to interact and improve the world, a community, a family, etc. An understanding of the world from the studying of these disciplines in high school and college should teach individuals enough so that they may uses this knowledge to make positive changes, or take actions, to interact with the world. Although

EDUCATION ALLOWS YOU TO CHOOSE WHO YOU WANT TO BE

It is believed by many that "you can be anything you choose to be." Certainly there are limits to that. Limits people set for themselves and limits others set for other people - such as parents for their children or teachers for their students. With the proper and specialized education I believe that anyway can be who he or she chooses to be. Not only that, but be quite be very successful at whoever that is. But without education, one may be left lost in this world and even controlled by other people. If one does not finish high school one may end up being controlled by the minimum wage job employers with little way to move up unless more education is obtained. If one does not complete college, the same way hold true. Education from formal educational institutions is not the only thing that can one back from being who he/she chooses to me. Plainly, it is education. Not knowing enough about the world and its opportunities is what can hold one back from success and happiness.

The type of education of which I am speaking does not mean a degree or diploma marking education attainment; it is simply understanding and knowledge at a great breadth. School is one of the best places to obtain that knowledge about understanding about oneself, about the world, and about other people.

Clearly the higher the degree one obtains (High School Diploma, Bachelor's Degree, Master's Degree, Doctorate degree, Vocational/Technical degree, certificate) the more money one can make, but education is not all about making money. To some it may be, and that's okay. But education can mean so many different things to many different people.

To get the best education many things must be taken into account: the student's wants and desires, the student's academic needs (enrichment, honors, language-acquisition), the student's career choice(s), the student's goals in life among other things.

A few things a youth's education needs:

Mentors
Teachers
Adults
People who care about the student; who will listen to their problems, desires, and needs
Peer support
High standards
Excellent teachers
A variety of extra-curricular activities that interest the student

Address to the reader: Think about whether you or your child has all these needs met. If not, how can you compensate for them? Look for mentors, gather peer support, find organizations created to help maintain high standards, or find the best schools. There are many things one can do to improve one's education position and attainment.

You may read more about these individual topics throughout Project: Education Connection's Website.

Getting kids and teens to read

2005-08-15T06:51:00.000-07:00

The first step is identifying why child or teen does not enjoy or does not want to read. Below possible reasons and solutions are listed.

Reasons why children may not enjoy/desire reading:

Short attention span. Maybe a child who is very active, needs action to be amused. Sedentary reading may be uninteresting (boring) for the child.
Cannot imagine picture in mind. Get lower level book in vocabulary, show pictures relating to the book's content, story so they can picture the events and people. Cut out people from magazines so they can image what the person in book looks like. GEt picture books.
Difficult, time-consuming to read. It is easier to watch TV. The child has not yet developed enough literacy for reading to be relatively easy, or at least, manageable. Work on reading comprehension and/or phonics. The goal is to get them to imagine picture in mind and find it almost as stimulating at watching the TV. To do this, one must build the ability to read well, quickly, and comprehend. This takes time to develop.

Reasons why teenagers may not enjoy/desire reading:

It is "uncool" to read. A desire for acceptance of peers is typical for adolescents (those 13-18 years of age) because of their biologically driven need to belong and interact with the world. They need social interaction to grow as humans. To make reading worthy, or useful to them , have them start a book club with fellow peers, classmates in or outside of school. If peers enjoy reading and discuss the books they read, they will want to engage in dialogue with them, be part of the group and in turn will be motivated to read to be able to join in discussions with their peers.
A short attention span and need for activity may still be prevalent for young people this age, but not as much as for younger children.
They have difficulty imagining the picture in their mind, with the wide use of the television they may have a need to be visually stimulated. Get books with pictures or books at a lower vocabulary level so they can understand almost all words and work to imagine the picture in their mind. Again, this may be geared more toward children but can occur at the adolescent stage.
Having books relate to their life, their problems and how people their age solve their problems can be an incredible interest booster.

Deliberate dumbing down: Article by Alan Stang

2005-08-12T06:52:00.000-07:00

DELIBERATE DUMBING DOWN

MAKING JOHNNY STUPID

Deliberate Dumbing Down - Making Johnny Stupid - By Alan Stang - Etherzone.com - 11-25-2

Last week, we began to look at a book entitled the deliberate dumbing down of america (Ravenna, Ohio, The Conscience Press, 2000) by educator Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt. The title has no capital letters, to dramatize the deliberate dumbing down of children in the nation's government (public) schools. Again, the thing that makes Mrs. Iserbyt's book so stupendous was her ability to plow through a couple of mountains of garbage extruded by the (mis)educators who are deliberately doing this, so you don't need to guess what they mean. You can see for yourself.

This week, let's look at some things they are doing. Please remember that when I use the word "they," I am not necessarily talking about the teachers. Yes, many teachers in the government (public) schools are part of the problem, but many are not. The ones who are not do try to protect the children, even to educate them, but those good teachers do not run the schools and must do as they are told. No, we are talking about the administrators, the people who do run the schools, the academics who come up with the educational theories, the people in the state and federal departments of education.

For instance, in Conditioned Reflex Therapy, Andrew Salte writes this: "We are meat in which habits have taken up residence. We are a result of the way other people have acted to us. . . . Where there is a conditioned reflex, there is no will. Our 'will power' is dependent on our previously learned reflexes." (P. 49) N.B.: All pagination is taken from Mrs. Iserbyt's book.

This is what the (mis)educators think of your children. Your children are "meat," lumps of quivering protoplasm in a petri dish, without soul, without will, without individuality, without choice. Would you bother trying to "educate" protoplasm in a dish? No, you would condition it, you would create reflexes that bypass the brain.

Another book Mrs. Iserbyt suffered through is William E. Martin's Rediscovering the Mind of the Child: "A science of behavior emphasizes the importance of environmental manipulation and scheduling and thus the mechanization and routinization of experience. Similarly, it stresses performance in the individual. Doing something, doing it efficiently, doing it automatically - these are the goals. It is the mechanization of man .... The result is the triumph of technology: a push button world with well-trained button-pushers." (P. 120)

The "mechanization of man!" Mechanical children who respond when buttons are pushed! Most parents probably still believe that their children go to school to learn "subjects." No, in the government (public) schools today, what you may think of as learning is mere window-dressing, is coincidental, is a cover for the (mis)educationists' real purpose. In his 1981 book, All Our Children Learning, Professor Benjamin Bloom wrote, "The purpose of education and the schools is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students." (P. 160)

Notice, from their own mouths: Academic learning is not the purpose of education and the schools. Obviously, Bloom is unhappy with the thoughts, feelings and actions children learn at home. According to Thomas A. Kelly, Ph.D., in The Effective School Report, "The brain should be used for processing, not storage." (Loc. Cit.) If your brain isn't used for storage, you don't and can't know anything. You have no reservoir of learning. You are an automaton, trained, not educated, to respond to buttons.

Your Intrepid Correspondent was talking in a high school to a class of seniors about the career of Adolf Hitler, but there was a problem. I wasn't discussing Hitler the way I was supposed to. For instance, I was explaining that Hitler was of course a far leftist, a Socialist, a National Socialist, that he believed in total government and therefore that he and the Communists were natural allies, an affinity that found expression in the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact.

The immensely curious and fascinating thing about the confrontation was that these seniors could not understand what I was saying, not even enough to disagree. They never did figure out whether I was a good guy or not. They responded not to the ideas I was voicing but to the names I spoke. Whenever I mentioned Hitler, they booed. When I mentioned FDR, they applauded. I realized that the names were buttons. They had been trained, not educated, to respond when those buttons were pushed.

Much of this training derives from Harvard Professor B.F. Skinner, one of the (dead) gods of the (mis)educationists. Skinner trained pigeons for the military during World War II, and, "I could make a pigeon a high achiever by reinforcing it on a proper schedule." (P. A-143) Skinner thought your child was nothing more than a pigeon. "For the purpose of analyzing behavior, we have to assume man is a machine." (Loc. Cit.) "We want him [the student-Iserbyt] to come under the control of his environment rather than on verbal directions given by members of his family." (Loc. Cit.)

How would all this play out in math, for instance? In December, 1928, O.A. Nelson, then a teacher of math, was invited to attend a meeting. John Dewey, founder of "progressive education" was there. Dewey of course was a Stalinist, as were the other leading "educators" present. Nelson tells us that he objected to the way they wanted to teach math. The man who had invited him responded: "Nelson, wake up! That is what we want. . . . a math that the pupils cannot apply to life situations when they get out of school!" Nelson comments: "That math was not introduced until much later, as those present thought it was too radical a change. . . . The radical change was introduced in 1952. . . . So, if pupils come out of high school now, not knowing any math, don't blame them. The results are supposed to be worthless." (Pp. 14-15)

The result is that The New York Times of August 31, 1986 reported as follows on a study conducted by the Educational Testing Service and the National Assessment of Educational Progress: ". . . In testing basic skills at various levels, the study found that one in three young adults with a college degree from a two- or four-year school failed to answer this question correctly: If one purchased a sandwich for $1.90, a bowl of soup for 60 cents, and gave the cashier $3, how much change should he receive? . . . (P. 238) Could you believe that a full one-third of college graduates can't figure the answer?

Here's just one example of what we're talking about. One of my sons and I were next in line at a checkout counter in a huge chain drugstore. When your obedient servant worked a cash register a century ago, it showed the purchase price and we had to figure out the change. Today, it shows the cashier how much change to give. But it happened that the victimized government (public) high school teenager working the register accidentally hit the wrong button, so the amount of change she was supposed to hand the man in front of us disappeared from the screen. The poor child stared at the cash in her hand that the man had given her and stared at the numberless screen, in a state of helpless terror and frustration. Would she be chastised? Would she be fired? She had no idea how to figure the change. The man ahead of us didn't notice this little, heartrending crisis; he was looking around, oblivious, waiting for the cashier to put something in his hand, so there was a moment of respite before the approaching doom. But soon he would turn to find out what was happening and the sword would fall.

The son who was with me is today a handsome, hulking brute under whom the ground shakes when he walks. Some teenage females even think he's a "hunk." At the time, he was a pipsqueak, whose head barely cleared the top of the counter. At this crucial point in the melodrama, the pipsqueak piped up: "Thirty eight cents."

Wondering, the benighted cashier gave the man ahead of us $.38 and held her breath. He looked at the coins, nodded and left. The pipsqueak had been right! Thirty-eight cents was the right amount! The cashier totaled our purchase, and we paid and walked away. As we did so, she stared at my son in continuing wonderment. How could this pipsqueak, barely tall enough to clear the counter, know the right change? Was he a dwarf? An elf? A disciple of Yoda in possession of occult knowledge? No, he was simply a normal child educated at home, who had never seen the inside of a "school." The country today is full of academically challenged victims such as that cashier, and remember that she has been crippled by design.

What about reading? Thomas Sticht, Ph.D., says as follows (paraphrased from the Washington Post): "Ending discrimination and changing values are probably more important than reading in moving low income families into the middle class. . . ." How would you get into the middle class if you can't read?

Always keep in mind that when George W. Bush talks about leaving no child behind, he is not talking about changing all this. He is talking about spending a lot more money to finance a lot more of it.

Again, to order Mrs. Iserbyt's staggering book, send $39.95 (Maine residents add 5.5% tax=$2.19) plus $6.00 shipping and handling to 3D Research Co., 1062 Washington St., Bath, ME 04530. And be with your Intrepid Correspondent next week for more.

"Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact."

http://www.etherzone.com/2002/stang112902.shtml

Links to relevant public schooling websites, and what we can do to help

2005-08-10T06:42:00.000-07:00

"We are a nation whose high school graduates are barely literate, half of them unable to understand a reasoned argument of more than two sentences; a nation split on the validity, indeed the meaning, of the theory of evolution, and readier to believe an astrologer than the United States Surgeon General. " - Ralph Rami "High School Chemistry, a success story?"

What is the Outrage? A Letter to America - A letter revealing the weaknesses of American public school education.

How bad is public school education? - A rather comprehensive article on the discussion of the deterioration of public schools in America. It states that higher education is generally of little concern, but secondary schools is where disparities exist.

Sleep Deprivation Article - An article discussing the newly found idea that sleep deprived teens are suffering in health and studies. You might also be interested in a similar article: Sleeping the Day Away

High US High School Drop-Out Rate

Links to websites and community resources

Motivation Tools - An excellent, comprehensive, well-designed website on motivating your child to love learning.

http://www.idealist.org/kt/youthorgs.html - A list of organizations run by kids and teens FOR kids and teens.

Parent Advocates - A site for parents concerned about their children's education.

Reality of American Education

2005-08-07T06:56:00.000-07:00

"We are a nation whose high school graduates are barely literate, half of them unable to understand a reasoned argument of more than two sentences; a nation split on the validity, indeed the meaning, of the theory of evolution, and readier to believe an astrologer than the United States Surgeon General. " - Ralph Rami "High School Chemistry, a success story?"

Systematic Failures in U.S. Math and Science Infrastructure Threaten Global Leadership - Research indicates that the problem solving skills of US students is significantly lower than other leading countries.

What is the Outrage? A Letter to America

How bad is public school education? - A rather comprehensive article on the discussion of the deterioration of public schools in America. It states that higher education is generally of little concern, but secondary schools is where disparities exist.

High US High School Drop-Out Rate

	Essay Sample: "The American Education system: A Cause for Rebellion" -
	"Public schools are the cornerstone of America's future. The development of youth's knowledge, skills and social dispositions has always been critical to the country's success."
	The American Education system is being called the "cornerstone" of the nation's future, yet its schools do not seem to be accomplishing their goals, nor upholding their proper duty.
	http://www.essaysample.com/essay/002294.html

	Hidden Bias in American Education
	"As a means of allocating resources for education, the current model is a wobbly, teetering wreck. We can probably limp along with it for a few more years – while it continues to cause immense harm and loss of opportunities. But why should we do this to ourselves and, especially, to our children?"
	Lists and describes a few great things which are problems in American education: big schools, big kids (obesity), low salaries, for status quo against innovation, etc.

	http://www.educationnews.org/hidden-bias-in-american-education.htm

	Teaching Philosophy
	"American primary and secondary public education is in a sorry state. This should come as no surprise, public education being affected so heavily by American cultural values. Where else but in America can one find plumbers, basketball players, garbage collectors, stand-up comedians, grocery store clerks, auto mechanics and police who are more highly paid than teachers?"
	A teacher's philosophy on education and teaching.

	http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/dini/Personal/philosophy.htm

Low level of literacy may be due to second language learners

2005-08-03T06:51:00.000-07:00

The low-level of literacy that the average American possesses is not the sole fault of our schools. Because we are a nation of immigrants, many citizens’ first language has not even been English, and in a world where English is the language of power, fewer people have had experience of reading and working with this expansive language for a large amount of years. Those who first language is Spanish, or Hebrew, or Tag-a-log may have spent much of their youth reading their first language may have a high literacy in that language. Unfortunately, in America, too little material is available in those language. Therefore their literacy and learning is minimized. This can lead them to spend less of their time finding things to learn, and more time working and socializing.

For these people our curriculum and expectations have decreased therefore native English speakers have suffered. At adult age, work or socializing becomes more prevalent and dire and so the average citizen has less time to devote to doing something (reading) that takes up too much excess time. Time they simply do not have to devote to something which takes too long to develop.

Development time is one of the greatest issues distancing second-language learners and low-literacy individuals from higher literacy. The time required to attain a high school level literacy is too great for the amount of time typical working individuals have today, especially when coupled with family responsibilities. Making the time to read anything of interest, analyze texts, and learning from them is key to increasing literacy skills.

Overall, the school system must raise its standards and hold students to those standards regardless of their failing possibility. Accommodations should be made for those with learning disabilities or those who may require more time to learn. But without expectations being kept high, Americans will continue to decrease in literacy leaving our nation vulnerable to deterioration of society and the well-being of its people.

What can we do about this disparity?

Individual Efforts

Individual efforts are what can make this situation leap into improvement. For ourselves as our families we can work to improve our own literacy.

Read the newspaper daily, or simply exchange different stories we read
Have your children as young as possible, and continue to reinforce its importance by showing them you read

Community Efforts

Keep available literature in different languages in our libraries
Hole free English language-learning classes locally