The Education Trap and How to solve a major problem in one easy step

h/t to @michellemalkin for the photo: I wanted to share this REFRESHING sign. I love this hardworking kid, whoever he/she is!

When other major stories are not crowding it out, the media occasionally gets around to a story or two on student loan debt.  The college graduates of the last ten years or more are drowning in student loan debts.  There is a radical solution to this problem.

What is it?

Abolish the student loan program.

Liberals will immediately scream that I am anti-education.  I want to see the great masses of Americans stuck with 6^th grade educations, forced to work the fields and flip burgers or hit the highlight of their career by being able to say, “Welcome to Wal-Mart.”

Actually, nothing could be further from the truth.  I do object to state funded colleges and universities being used to indoctrinate students in liberalism and I do object to stupid programs like gay studies.  But I believe the state university and college secondary education system is one of the best things that state government does.   I believe the state college secondary education system should do what it was designed to do, namely provide a reasonably affordable college education to the tax paying residents of a state.

The unwashed liberals, in the case of Occupy Wall Street, that is literally true, just want student loans forgiven.  There is irony in Bill Clinton endorsing the Occupy Wall Street anarchy and their demands for complete forgiveness of student loans. He was the President who signed the law making student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.

In wanting student loans forgiven, the left is focusing on the symptoms and not the cause of the problem.  Student loans are the problem.  The easy access to student loans distorts and destroys the free market.   Students to not realize the cost of what they are getting.   They don’t write the check.  They just fill out the paperwork.  Sometimes instead of writing a check, they get a check back.   The money they receive back is then spent on, hopefully living expenses.  Back in the day when I was a college student, pizza and beer were considered living expenses.   Somehow I doubt that has changed.

For colleges, the student loans take the sting out of the market place.  Who cares if they have to raise tuition by twenty percent?  Instead of students talking about alternatives to State U., they just ask for more student loans.

The student loan program is probably one of the worst programs for encouraging bad behavior.  Since the federal government guarantees loans, it is a no lose proposition for banks.  They can make the loans and make a profit when people pay them back and if they fail to pay them back, the government covers the loss.

What if banks made those loans without the government guarantee?   For one thing, there would be many fewer loans.  That is not a bad thing, as the banks would be asking some important questions.

For example, if someone wanted to borrow $100,000 to get a nice Ivy League degree, the bank might ask, what are you going to major in and what are you going to do after college and how much will you make?  If the student said, well I am going to major in social work, become a social worker and probably make about $30,000 a year, the bank is going to turn that student down.  With guarantees, the bank doesn’t care whether the risk is good or not.  After all, the taxpayer will pay the bank back if the loan defaults.

The state college systems have a lot of affordable options.  Maybe a student wants to go to State U., but does not have the money.  Every state has affordable regional junior colleges where someone can start.  Students can work and help pay for their college.  There are many options if we abolish this really bad program.

One of the other benefits of abolishing Guaranteed Student loans is, it will deflate the education bubble and tuition will come down.  Market factors will start to play a role in the cost of education again.

The Guaranteed Student Loan program is the classic case of a well intentioned government program that has destroyed the market, cost the tax payers a lot of money and is now hurting the very people it was intended to help.

Ronald Reagan was right when he said the most feared words in the English language are, “I’m from the Government.  I’m here to help.”

Posted by Judson Phillips on TPN

The Education Trap

Oct 14th, 2011 | By Jeff Berwick

For decades, governments have been promoting school as being necessary. Celebrities, probably thinking they are doing the “right thing,” often promote the message “stay in school,” from people like Mr. T. and NBA players and rappers.

No one ever thinks to ask, “Hey, Mr. T., did you learn to be an actor and how to work out and grow a mohawk in school?” Nor do they ask the same questions of a bunch of multi-millionaire basketball players and rappers. Did Michael Jordan learn to play basketball “in school”? For the rappers, I don’t remember there being Hip Hop 101 in college.

All public schools in the U.S. today are prep camps for jail or for being a cubicle rat for the rest of your life.

THE SCHOOL “SYSTEM”

Jim Rohn said, “formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune.”

Today, however, formal education, often, does not even make you a living, as the cost of schooling has increased dramatically ever since the government subsidized it with grants, loans and tax benefits.

But education is not the real goal of the education system. As William Torrey Harris, U.S. commissioner of education in 1906, said, “Education… scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, head of philosophy and psychology at Prussian University in Berlin, said it even more clearly: “Education should aim at destroying free will, so that after pupils are thus schooled, they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished.”

THE 99% HAVE HAD THEIR FREE WILL DESTROYED

The saddest thing I have seen in a long time is the “We Are the 99%” page.

And it’s not necessarily sad because of the tough situation these thousands of people have found themselves in.

What is sad is that you can see how broken they are as individuals. How they bought into a system and have had all their free will drained from them. This is particularly shown by the fact that thousands of people would take the time to write out on a piece of paper all of their concerns and unhappiness with the expectation that this will CHANGE anything!

I estimate over 90% of the people on that site appear to be in rough shape due to student loans. But not one of them sees the truth. They’ve all been brainwashed to think a college education is not only a good thing, but is a guarantee of having a great life.

One starving artist had $175,000 in student loans. $175,000 in student loans? To become an “artist”? But he sounds as though it is the system that let him down. He takes no responsibility for his massive error in judgment.

Another 99 Percenter is 47, penniless and in debt after her “college education,” yet what does she want for her daughters? To put them through the same system! She has been brainwashed to believe that a “college education” is a necessary and good thing despite all the evidence in her own life that has provided that it was not.

Rather than realizing their errors, many of these people figure that writing their problems on a piece of paper on the Internet may help! Or by chasing down rich Wall St. bankers (a symptom of the problem) with pitchforks while admonishing the government (the real problem) to play a bigger role in the economy.

STUDENT LOANS ARE SLAVERY

Rather than hoping the government helps them, many of these people with student debts should be looking at ways to get out of the country.

Why? First of all, student debt is the only debt in the U.S. that is not able to be defaulted on in a bankruptcy. In other words, the starving artist above with $175,000 in debt will never be able to remove that chain from his neck as long as he lives in the country. If he were to expatriate, he could at least start fresh somewhere else.

And now the U.S. government has dropped many hints that in order to get a passport in the future, you will need to have your government debts (taxes, loans, etc.) up-to-date.

It is not much of a stretch of the imagination for the U.S. government to demand that all those behind on their student debt will be ordered to report to duty with the military. Any opposition will be met with unlimited prison sentences.

There are plenty of opportunities in the world. Look for employment in places like the Canadian oil sands, where they can’t even find enough employees. Or in booming places such as the Middle East (try Qatar) or in Asia (plenty of finance-related jobs in Hong Kong — and a 15% income tax rate).

But remember, in life, there are no “sure things” or guarantees. The government fooled you into thinking there are, but there aren’t. In real life, you just have to get out there and do it.

KEEP YOUR KIDS OUT OF SCHOOL

For those with children, keep them out of school. Any school.

Real education, today, is all free and can be done via the Internet from anywhere. All you have to do is ensure your child can read and from there they can self-educate.

MIT’s entire curriculum is available online for free via MIT’s OpenCourseWare. As well, University of the People is a tuition-free online university. Not to mention there is a YouTube video or a Wikipedia article on any subject matter you’d ever want to know.

BE A COLLEGE DROPOUT… OR DROP-IN

I am not a college dropout. I’m a college drop-in. I dropped in to college, at the behest of my mother, for a few days and quickly got out of there. Consider doing the same.

Don’t get caught in the education trap.

Regards,

Jeff Berwick

The Dollar Vigilante

JEFF BERWICK

Jeff Berwick, a self-described financial freedom fighter, is the founder of Canada’s largest financial website, Stockhouse.com.  He now writes the libertarian, Austrian-economics based newsletter, The Dollar Vigilante and is a regular speaker at many of the world’s most important investment, resource and freedom-focused conferences where he is known as the most dangerous man in finance.

View articles by Jeff Berwick

**Glenn Beck produced a personal preparedness and solution list and did a show based around it last week that he feels was given to him (divinely) as a warning.  One of the things on it was Apprenticeships.  We need to get back to having an apprenticeship system for the trades and stop pushing every child who really has no need, can’t afford it or isn’t college material to want, expect or feel they must attend college.  Most of us are for or letting our kids go into major debt for a college degree that will never compensate them in salary or job status for the debt or cost and have allowed our kids to become indoctrinated in anti-American if not down right Marxist doctrine. 

They have been dumbing us and our kids down for years in the public school system and then indoctrinating our kids in the college and universities.  The indoctrination process is now starting in Kindergarten!

Under the school/education section of Beck’s list was:

COLLEGE/SCHOOL

APPRENTICESHIPS ARE THE FUTURE.
DISCUSS THE VALUE OF SCHOOL FOR WHAT YOU CAN EARN.
DO NOT LOOK FOR LABELS THEY WILL BECOME MEANINGLESS (YALE, HARVARD, Stanford…)
FIND OTHER FORMS OF SCHOOL. ON LINE, JR COLLEGE, STATE SCHOOLS
TEACH YOUNG CHILDREN NOW THAT COLLEGE IS NOT A GIVEN
DEMAND MERIT FROM SCHOOL AND STUDENT OR PULL YOUR TIME AND $
EDUCATE YOURSELF AT ALL TIMES. ALWAYS READ.
HAVE A HARD COPY OF IMPORTANT BOOKS AND DOCUMENTS
LEARN OLD AND OR LOST PRACTICES.
MENDING/CANNING/FARMING/
LEARN TO FIX AN ENGINE
RE-LEARN READING A PRINTED MAP
KNOW WHATS IN THE NEWS (AND WHAT’S BEHIND IT). LIFE CAN CHANGE QUICKLY.
BE ABLE TO DEFEND YOUR POSITIONS BY KNOWING THE OTHER SIDE

Ask Marion~

Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System

Originally Posted on Apr 11, 2011

Photo illustration by PZS based on an image by Lin Pernille Photography

By Chris Hedges – Author of “The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress”

A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.

Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.

“Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? How are such ‘academies’ accredited? What quality of leader needs a ‘leadership academy’? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children’s schools? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the school systems, instilling fear and creating a rationale for corporate takeover. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires.”

Teachers, under assault from every direction, are fleeing the profession. Even before the “reform” blitzkrieg we were losing half of all teachers within five years after they started work—and these were people who spent years in school and many thousands of dollars to become teachers. How does the country expect to retain dignified, trained professionals under the hostility of current conditions? I suspect that the hedge fund managers behind our charter schools system—whose primary concern is certainly not with education—are delighted to replace real teachers with nonunionized, poorly trained instructors. To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside. 

“It is extremely dispiriting to realize that you are in effect lying to these kids by insinuating that this diet of corporate reading programs and standardized tests are preparing them for anything,” said this teacher, who feared he would suffer reprisals from school administrators if they knew he was speaking out. “It is even more dispiriting to know that your livelihood depends increasingly on maintaining this lie. You have to ask yourself why are hedge fund managers suddenly so interested in the education of the urban poor? The main purpose of the testing craze is not to grade the students but to grade the teacher.”

“I cannot say for certain—not with the certainty of a Bill Gates or a Mike Bloomberg who pontificate with utter certainty over a field in which they know absolutely nothing—but more and more I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply leave while they still retain a modicum of self-respect,” he added. “In less than a decade we been stripped of autonomy and are increasingly micromanaged. Students have been given the power to fire us by failing their tests. Teachers have been likened to pigs at a trough and blamed for the economic collapse of the United States. In New York, principals have been given every incentive, both financial and in terms of control, to replace experienced teachers with 22-year-old untenured rookies. They cost less. They know nothing. They are malleable and they are vulnerable to termination.”

he demonizing of teachers is another public relations feint, a way for corporations to deflect attention from the theft of some $17 billion in wages, savings and earnings among American workers and a landscape where one in six workers is without employment. The speculators on Wall Street looted the U.S. Treasury. They stymied any kind of regulation. They have avoided criminal charges. They are stripping basic social services. And now they are demanding to run our schools and universities.

“Not only have the reformers removed poverty as a factor, they’ve removed students’ aptitude and motivation as factors,” said this teacher, who is in a teachers union. “They seem to believe that students are something like plants where you just add water and place them in the sun of your teaching and everything blooms. This is a fantasy that insults both student and teacher. The reformers have come up with a variety of insidious schemes pushed as steps to professionalize the profession of teaching. As they are all businessmen who know nothing of the field, it goes without saying that you do not do this by giving teachers autonomy and respect. They use merit pay in which teachers whose students do well on bubble tests will receive more money and teachers whose students do not do so well on bubble tests will receive less money. Of course, the only way this could conceivably be fair is to have an identical group of students in each class—an impossibility. The real purposes of merit pay are to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated students and to further institutionalize the idiot notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at work in both of these.”

“If the Bloomberg administration can be said to have succeeded in anything,” he said, “they have succeeded in turning schools into stress factories where teachers are running around wondering if it’s possible to please their principals and if their school will be open a year from now, if their union will still be there to offer some kind of protection, if they will still have jobs next year. This is not how you run a school system. It’s how you destroy one. The reformers and their friends in the media have created a Manichean world of bad teachers and effective teachers. In this alternative universe there are no other factors. Or, all other factors—poverty, depraved parents, mental illness and malnutrition—are all excuses of the Bad Teacher that can be overcome by hard work and the Effective Teacher.”

The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business. Thought is a dialogue with one’s inner self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not want asked. They remember who we are, where we come from and where we should go. They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power. And they know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness. The capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience. There is a huge difference, as Socrates understood, between teaching people what to think and teaching them how to think. Those who are endowed with a moral conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to live with criminals—themselves.

“It is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself,” Socrates said.

Those who can ask the right questions are armed with the capacity to make a moral choice, to defend the good in the face of outside pressure. And this is why the philosopher Immanuel Kant puts the duties we have to ourselves before the duties we have to others. The standard for Kant is not the biblical idea of self-love—love thy neighbor as thyself, do unto others as you would have them do unto you—but self-respect. What brings us meaning and worth as human beings is our ability to stand up and pit ourselves against injustice and the vast, moral indifference of the universe. Once justice perishes, as Kant knew, life loses all meaning. Those who meekly obey laws and rules imposed from the outside—including religious laws—are not moral human beings. The fulfillment of an imposed law is morally neutral. The truly educated make their own wills serve the higher call of justice, empathy and reason. Socrates made the same argument when he said it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.

“The greatest evil perpetrated,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”

As Arendt pointed out, we must trust only those who have this self-awareness. This self-awareness comes only through consciousness. It comes with the ability to look at a crime being committed and say “I can’t.” We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the flimsy structure of blind obedience. We must fear those who cannot think. Unconscious civilizations become totalitarian wastelands.

“The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back,” Arendt writes. “For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.”

Source:  TruthDig  

The Dumbing Down of America Series

Deliberate Dumbing Down of America - E Book download is NOW FREE TO ALL!!!
Right click and "Save Link As"
Click here to begin download
File is 6.75 MB

Flunking the Citizenship Test

One-Party Classroom  and Indoctrination U - Informative Reads, as well as: Whoever Controls the Schools Rules the World

Expelled – DVD with Ben Stein

Preschools Are Using a Marxist's Theories to Manufacture Collectivists

The room buzzes with little voices. Little children engage in "mature, dramatic play." An adult helps the children "regulate" and "monitor each other's compliance" with "rules and assigned roles."[1] Each child knows his or her place. Each child does the group's bidding, nothing else.

Orwell's 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four)? No, a scene played out in thousands of classrooms across America. The drumbeat of collectivism begins in preschool. And a long-dead Soviet psychologist helped define that drumbeat.

Months ago, an email from a teacher spurred me to investigate the theories of Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934). My research revealed starry-eyed academics enamored of collectivism.

Vygotsky contended that "creative play" could provide relief to children dealing with "tension" caused by unsatisfied desires.[2] The psychologist expounded on Soviet activity theory, an offshoot of "cultural-historical theory."[3] Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist whom I've discussed in previous articles, also drew on cultural-historical theory. Gramsci's "cultural Marxism" called for the intentional erosion of Western society. Since the 1980s, early childhood education has increasingly incorporated Vygotskyian techniques that answer Gramsci's call.

Embracing Vygotsky's cultural-historical approach, University of New Mexico psychology professor Vera John-Steiner and Santa Fe's Little Earth School director Ellen Souberman marvel at the Russian's fixation on "the Marxian concept of a historically-determined human psychology."[4] Progressives drool over such concepts, for instance demanding "social justice" for historically oppressed minorities.

The obsession with social versus equal justice parallels a learning theory called constructivism. A devotee to the theory, Vygotsky viewed knowledge as each person's individual "construct." The notion, contemptuous of reality, led the man to conceive methods that trap children in progressivism's central struggle: the rejection of said reality. Preschools, which use Vygotsky's creative play to relieve the tension between pretend and real worlds, implant fairy-tale realities in children. The progressive K-12 system then supercharges the Pollyannaish programming.

A self-described Marxist thinker,[5] Vygotsky maintained, "[In] play it is as though [a child] were a head taller than himself."[6] The psychologist upended the idea that "play is imagination in action," insisting that imagination constitutes "play without action."[7] Children subjected to methods arising from such thinking believe as adult progressives believe, that anything imaginable must be possible. Progressive preschools embrace Vygotsky's nonsense and breed dreamers who equate wishful thinking to feasible outcomes. Stop global warming. Erase inequality. Establish a new world order, one classroom at a time.

As one researcher notes, Vygotsky theorized that by changing "the tools of thinking available to a child, his mind will have a radically different structure."[8] At Metropolitan State College of Denver, the "Tools of the Mind" organization develops Vygotskyian curricula and trains teachers to wire radically different thinking into the brains of children in 18,000 preschool and kindergarten classrooms throughout America. And the number is growing.

What constitutes "radically different" thinking? To answer, we examine Vygotsky's motivation.

Two prominent psychologists find that Lev Vygotsky's "Marxist orientation" determined "his scientific preoccupations," in other words, his education theories.[9] Revealingly, nine years after Vladimir Lenin violently seized power and fathered the USSR, Vygotsky lauded "the cleansing threat of social revolution." Furthermore, Vygotsky cheered the crumbling of "the very foundations of bourgeois morality," insisted that the achievement mentality "be swept clear out of our schools," and anointed educators with the job of instilling a new morality. To Soviet Vygotsky, the best morality was Soviet collectivism.

Vygotsky intended to "create the new Soviet Man, the kind of being that would be needed in the Soviet society of the future." The psychologist conceived the "Zone of Proximal Development" (ZPD), a tool for reconditioning young minds and forming a new society from the old. Vygotsky aimed to deliver young collectivists to ruling class elites intent on "societal reconstruction."[10]

Ignoring Vygotsky's motives, the authors of America's early childhood education curricula train teachers in techniques based on the ZPD. A bit of investigation shows that education students are fed "grand" arguments and kept in the dark concerning "numerous underdeveloped ideas and contradictions."[11] The Tools of the Mind organization even admits that Vygotsky's theories are but "a specific set of beliefs." [Emphasis added.] The TOTM curriculum's effectiveness was tested only by a "quasi-experimental study" plagued with sloppy methods.[12] The truth is that there is simply no trustworthy proof that Vygotskyian techniques develop superior cognitive skills in children. Indoctrinated and misled, America's teachers are unwittingly using tactics conceived by a Marxist to spawn USSR-minded kids in the USA.

Teachers are also not informed that Vygotsky detested "capitalist culture," rejected Western society, and cherished the "tribal village." The psychologist prescribed a "moral education" blended "imperceptibly into all those general modes of behavior that may be established and regulated by the social environment." To accomplish the blending, Vygotskyian-trained teachers rigidly control the classroom environment and allow only authoritatively prescribed behaviors. Individualism is verboten. Gene by gene, the collectivist virus erases children's predisposition for achievement. Neuron by neuron, the bug weakens traditional morality. And teachers aren't even aware of having injected the pathogen.

Indeed, teachers faithfully condition children in Vygotsky's "new ways of interacting with people," unaware that those "ways" conform to totalitarian visions. Vygotsky sought to banish the "'pedagogical singsong' which prevails between teacher and student" and elicit behavior "that originates from...the group, and which is directed likewise to the entire group..." Utopian collectivism, pure and simple. The cunning in Vygotskyian methods lies in the manipulative use of the peer pressure inherent in children's play. The stratagem creates the "regulated" environment of collectivism. In Educational Psychology, Vygotsky wrote,

The school routine should be so organized that the child finds it best to go in step with the group, in the same way as when he is at play; that any departure from the group seem just as meaningless as quitting a game. Just like playing a game, life should demand a constant straining at the leash, a constant joy in concerted activity.

Play the "game." Stay "in step with the group." Mind "the leash." In one illustration of how these collectivist metaphors are set into action, a Tools of the Mind counting exercise requires children to take turns regulating and inhibiting each other's behavior. In TOTM's "mature, dramatic play," teachers "help children plan, and stay true to their plans in a way that emphasizes inhibitory control..."[13] The Vygotskyian method exploits little minds and turns play into a job performed to communal specifications. Children comply. Acclimation to the centrally planned society begins at three years old.

Vygotsky's presence in America's classrooms has grown over the last thirty years. This presence, an increasingly left-ideological media, and the burgeoning nanny state have disfigured the national psyche. A 2010 Rasmussen poll found 47 percent of Americans -- an appalling 63 percent under age thirty -- supportive of, or open to, socialism. While the poll doesn't prove that Vygotskyian schooling caused Americans to fall for lethal ideas, such distressing numbers do suggest that the Marxist's ghost has helped render millions of children receptive to collectivist falsehoods.

In kindergarten and preschool classrooms all over America, tiny young humans are being taught to regiment each other's behavior. Obedient little collectivists are learning to submit to group wishes in order to be judged "correct" -- politically correct. Resistance is futile.

A writer, physicist, and former high tech executive, Chuck Rogér invites you to visit his website,www.chuckroger.com. Email Chuck at swampcactus@chuckroger.com, Posted at the American Thinker

---

[1] Diamond, Barnett, Thomas, and Munro, "Preschool Program Improves Cognitive Control,"Science, Vol. 318, Nov 30, 2007, p. Supplemental Online Material, p. 7.

[2] L.S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society, Harvard University Press, 1978, p. 93.

[3] Mariane Hedegaard, "A Cultural-historical Approach to Learning in Classrooms," Outlines, No. 1, 2004, pp. 21-34. (Notice to Reader: The "study" referred to in this citation exemplifies the incomprehensible gobbledygook that impersonates education methods research. The paper exudes the sweeping nonsensicality typical of the "cultural-historical" teaching method, the Introduction alone containing multiple false and unproved claims stated as facts.)

[4] Vygotsky, p. 126.

[5] Uwe P. Gielen and Samvel S. Jeshmaridian, "Lev S. Vygotsky: The Man and the Era,"International Journal of Group Tensions, Vol. 28, Nos. 3/4, 1999, p. 276.

[6] Vygotsky, p. 102.

[7] Ibid, p. 93.

[8] Ibid, p. 126.

[9] Gielen and Jeshmaridian, p. 273.

[10] Ibid, pp. 275, 282, 279.

[11] Ibid, p. 297.

[12] Diamond, Barnett, Thomas, and Munro, pp. 13-16.

[13] Ibid, pp. 6, 8.

30 Comments on "Preschools Are Using a Marxist's Theories to Manufacture Collectivists"

PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE RETURNS TO NYC SCHOOL AFTER PARENTS COMPLAIN DAUGHTER HAS NO IDEA WHAT IT IS

Imagine, for a moment, you’re sitting next to your child and video of a class reciting the Pledge of Allegiance flashes across the TV. Your child tugs on your shirt and innocently asks, “Mom, what are they doing? What are they saying?” Shocking, you might say. It would never happen. Guess what? It happened in New York City.

Joe and Winnie Fleischer of Brooklyn, NY were flabbergasted when they realized recently their daughter Brianna, 8, had no idea what the Pledge of Allegiance was. They thought it was common knowledge, especially in the classroom.

“I was shocked that she didn’t know the pledge,” Joe, a NYC firefighter, told the New York Daily News. “I thought she’d been doing it in school.”

They thought wrong.

So they went to the school, PS29, to change that. After spirited meetings with parents, teachers, and an “educational unit for kids,” the principal agreed to have the Pledge broadcast over the school’s loud speaker “for the first time in years.”

But here‘s what’s interesting. In New York, reciting the Pledge daily in schools is the law. The principal, then, isn’t doing anything revolutionary — she‘s just complying with what’s been mandated since just after 9/11.

Others, however, aren’t. The Daily News called 10 New York-area schools asking if they recite the Pledge regularly. Only half do.

Despite the law, not all of the school‘s parents share the Feischers’ affinity for the patriotic statement. One father told the Daily News he was worried his kids would be harassed for refraining and called it “social coercion.” Another branded it as unnecessary.

Related:

Myths of Public Education

Michigan Teacher Threatens Tea Party's Children: Posted on CraigsList

Michigan Teacher Threatens Tea Party's Children

This is a message from a Teacher to all the Tea Bags here in Michigan. It was posted on Craigslist yesterday, during school hours.

Little tea bags (capitol)

Date: 2011-03-11, 10:46AM EST Reply to: comm-vzqqj-2259517268@craigslist.org

So you Tea Bags want to take away my hard earned blue ribbon bennies. Well guess what you scum sucking Tea Bags, I got your kids all day long in my classroom and with just a few slick questions I know who the little tea bags are! And you think you'll have the last laugh HA-Ha-Ha

Location: capitol it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

PostingID: 2259517268

Copyright © 2011 craigslist, inc.terms of useprivacy policyfeedback forum

This reminded me a bit of the Wisconsin Teacher’s Union consistently pushing the idea of their great concern for their students being the reason they weren’t in the classroom but rather out in the street protesting during school hours… and then we find out that 2/3 of 8th graders in Wisconsin could not pass their proficiency tests… and can’t sufficiently read.

Andrew Klavan: Behold! Your Public Sector Unions at Work

Video:  Andrew Klavan: Behold! Your Public Sector Unions at Work

h/t to Rose and Hello Michigan Blog

Hollywood and Howard Zinn's Marxist Education Project

The two most important questions for society, according to the Greek philosopher Plato, are these: What will we teach our children? And who will teach them? Left-wing celebrities have teamed up with one of America's most radical historians to take control of the classroom in the name of "social justice." Parents, beware: This Hollywood-backed Marxist education project may be coming to a school near you.

On Sunday, Dec. 13, the History Channel will air "The People Speak" -- a documentary based on Marxist academic Howard Zinn's capitalism-bashing, America-dissing, grievance-mongering history textbook, "A People's History of the United States." The film was co-produced and bankrolled by Zinn's Boston neighbor and mentee Matt Damon. An all-star cast of Bush-bashing liberals, including Danny Glover, Josh Brolin, Bruce Springsteen, Marisa Tomei and Eddie Vedder, will appear. Zinn's work is a self-proclaimed "biased account" of American history that rails against white oppressors, the free market and the military.

Zinn's objective is not to impart knowledge, but to instigate "change" and nurture a political "counterforce" (an echo of fellow radical academic and Hugo Chavez admirer Bill Ayers' proclamation of education as the "motor-force of revolution"). Teachers are not supposed to teach facts in the school of Zinn. "There is no such thing as pure fact," Zinn asserts. Educators are not supposed to emphasize individual academic achievement. They are supposed to "empower" student collectivism by emphasizing "the role of working people, women, people of color and organized social movements." School officials are not facilitators of intellectual inquiry, but leaders of "social struggle."

Zinn and company have launched a nationwide education project in conjunction with the documentary. "A people's history requires a people's pedagogy to match," Zinn preaches. The project is a collaboration between two "social justice" activist groups, Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

Rethinking Schools recently boasted of killing a social studies textbook series in the Milwaukee school system because it "failed to teach social responsibility." A Rethinking Schools guide on the September 11 jihadi attacks instructs teachers to "nurture student empathy" for our enemies and dissuade students from identifying as Americans. "It's our job to reach beyond this chauvinism." And a Rethinking Schools guide to early childhood education written by Ann Pelo disparages "a too-heavy focus on academic skills" in favor of "social justice and ecological teaching" for preschoolers.

Teaching for Change's objective, in Obama-esque fashion, is to train students not to achieve actual proficiency in core academic subjects, but to inspire them to "become active global citizens." Today's non-achieving aspirants are tomorrow's Nobel Peace Prize winners, after all.

No part of the school curriculum is immune from the social justice makeover crew. Zinn's partners at Rethinking Schools have even issued teaching guides to "Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers" -- which rejects the traditional white male patriarchal methods of teaching computation and statistics in favor of p.c.-ified number-crunching:

"'Rethinking Mathematics' is divided into four parts. The first part is devoted to a broad view of mathematics that includes historical and cultural implications. Part Two includes nine classroom narratives in which teachers describe lessons they have used that infuse social justice issues into their mathematics curriculum. Included here … an AP calculus lesson on income distribution. The third part contains three detailed classroom experiences/lessons. These include a physical depiction of the inequitable distribution of the world's wealth, the results of a student investigation into how many U.S. presidents owned slaves, and a wonderful classroom game called 'Transnational Capital Auction' in which students take on the role of leaders of Third World countries bidding competitively for new factories from a multinational corporation. …

"Short lessons, provocative cartoons and snippets of statistics are scattered throughout 'Rethinking Mathematics.' A partial list of topics includes racial profiling, unemployment rate calculation, the war in Iraq, environmental racism, globalization, wealth distribution and poverty, wheelchair ramps, urban density, HIV/AIDS, deconstructing Barbie, junk food advertising to children and lotteries." (from a review by James V. Rauff of Millikin University)

Our students will continue to come in dead last in international testing. But no worries. With Howard Zinn and Hollywood leftists in charge, empty-headed young global citizens will have heavier guilt, wider social consciences and more hatred for America than any other students in the world.

Michelle Malkin

They might not be getting the traditional 3-R’s, but what they are teaching them is not good. In addition to the above… checkout the information below:

Explosive Update: The not safe for school reading list of the safe schools czar; GLSEN sponsors gay Santa play; and a "Fistgate" flashback

Safe Schools Czar Passed Out Gay Bar Guides to Teens

Breaking News: Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar” Is Promoting Child Porn in the Classroom – Kevin Jennings and the GLSEN Reading List – ~~ Warning on Content ~~

Sign petition to get Safety for our Schools CZAR fired at www.grassrootsnation.com

The Dumbing Down of America Series

The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher's Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling

Everywhere in life there are numbers: questions for social justice educators in mathematics and everywhere else.('Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social ... article from: Journal of Teacher Education