Friday 18 May 2012

SCHOOL DAYS AND PUZZLES FOR GROWNUPS

 I was just thinking about the liberals calling themselves progressives. What does that make everyone who disagrees with them- regressive? Are you tired of the liberals deciding words and terminology? I sure am. What's progressive about someone who wants us to give up our cars and go back to the days when the buffalo roamed the plains? The free enterprise system that liberals hate so much is where all the progress comes from. From new drugs and medical treatments to new technology, our future is made in the free enterprise system. So I have to wonder what is in store for our students under the new NATIONAL CURRICULUM designed by "progressives". I doubt it's going to teach real science and the free enterprise system (and yes, they are developing Science standards). It's very concerning that David Coleman, the supposed architect of the Common Core Standards, just got himself appointed as president of the Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT) board. The "progressives", with their new NATIONAL CURRICULUM, now want to control who goes to college. Apparently if a state is not on board with the NATIONAL CURRICULUM, David Coleman will try to keep their students out of colleges by making the college entrance exams specific to his NATIONAL CURRICULUM!! Add to this Obama's new Federal Control over student loans and you can see where this is all headed. Is the centralized government going to decide careers now too? Will they decide who can go to college and what courses of study are available to them? The centralized power is certainly structuring itself to be able to do just that.

A centralized government that indoctrinates students attitudes in school and then determines who will go to college based on what they want them to think sounds REPRESSIVE to me, definitely not PROGRESSIVE, as they call themselves in their little dream world. I don't have children in school anymore but it's sure frightening to me to see our schools move to SOVIET STYLE CENTRALIZED CONTROL. I'm sure our "progressive" friends would be shocked that I would think this! Just TRUST them, they only want a more rigorous curriculum! Yeah right, and I believe in the tooth fairy too.

From time immemorial free republics have turned to serfdoms as the people were pacified by government promises and propaganda. Will America be any different? Will we stand up to this massive USURPATION OF POWER? One can only hope so. Our founding father's made us unique when they gave us our wonderful CONSTITUTION. If anything will save us, this is the document that will. Today I gave out awards for the Big Sky Tea Party. They had a contest asking students to write an essay on "What the Constitution means to me". The students wrote about all these rights of freedom of religion and freedom of speech, all these rights that are under attack today by those among us who think they are smarter than the rest of us, certainly smarter than our founding fathers whom they demonize. Why do the "progressives" demonize people, including our NATIONAL HEROES? They demonize because they can't win in the arena of ideas. It's easier to say Lincoln had mental illness, George Washington really did tell a lie and he had slaves, Thomas Jefferson was an atheist and impregnated a slave,  and the conservatives are all regressive ignorant racists, than to actually stand up and defend their ideas against the genius of our founding fathers, facts, history and the character, intelligence and ideas of people who disagree with them.

Maybe that's why the centralized government is using the Delphi method in all these forums now. Have you noticed that when you try to participate in the government process lately that you might as well have just stayed home? No matter how many people stand and speak, hundreds in the case of the recent school board sex education fight, the board, be it the school board, city council or county commission,  just waits until you're finished and then votes against you ? Have you noticed that all these listening sessions just somehow come out with a consensus of the latest "progressive" agenda ? In a way it's like gambling, only the odds are worse, the house holds the cards and the house always wins. The  moderators sum up what everyone thinks and it always goes the way they planned.

The Helena School District planning meetings are all like this. First they establish what you think by having groups, comprised primarily of people they have called and preselected, answer questions made up by them. Low and behold, the whole community wants their agenda! When they listed survey results at the last planning meeting, low and behold, we all supposedly wanted a Community Resource Center as our first priority!! More than repairing our schools!! Repairing our schools was about the fifth priority!!The purpose of the Community Resource Center is to give free space for nonprofits in the community such as Youth Connections. This center will expand school way beyond the school day and beyond school responsibilities of educating our youth. These socialist hubs will provide everything from mental health services to recreation and food. Who signed up for this? Apparently you did. Do you see how the Delphi method works?

Part of the Delphi method is not to give you complete information- that's where the puzzle comes in- literally. At the planning meeting we were given schematics and then puzzle pieces to place. Supposedly we ALL wanted collaboration centers, open school concept, small group rooms, kitchen tables, outdoor spaces and on and on - you get the idea, so those were the names on the puzzle pieces to go into our school( each table had a schematic of a particular school). Where was the curriculum that went with this? How do we know what we want in a school when we don't even know the curriculum? Wouldn't you want to know what you were going to teach before you decided what spaces you needed? One of the spaces was for an art and science lab- hmmm- who will use this lab and how often? Why do we need it? What do we know about the structure of the building and the lot it is on? NOTHING. So--we're making planning decisions and we don't even know where the bearing walls are or how much space is available on the lot, what code is or what sewer or septic problem there may be. We don't even have any idea what things cost or how much money we have available to spend. Does this whole thing seem like a manipulated farce to you? They took pictures of all the completed puzzles. You see? Now they can tell us at the next meeting what we said we wanted-BUT WAIT A MINUTE ! I DIDN'T WANT THAT!!

Whether you have children or grandchildren in school or not you need to get involved, these people are eating your lunch, serving up your property taxes, and setting you up for a new socialist tomorrow. As I've said on this blog before, this fight has only just begun,and I'll add one more quote from Yogi Bera, "It ain't over until it's over.", and it AIN'T over!!

Monday 14 May 2012

ARE PUBLIC SCHOOLS HARMING OUR CHILDREN?

I guess the quick answer for parents of over a thousand children, just from the Helena schools area, to the question of whether public schools would be harmful to their children, would be yes. These parents are paying more than $300 a month per child to get their children educated in private education even though they already are forced to pay property and income taxes for the state schools. They are paying even more than the more than $300.00 a month, by having one of the parents stay home, if they are doing  homeschooling.

Why would parents feel they could not trust the Helena Public Schools? In all my dealings with the Helena Public Schools in the last two years, I've had two really heart rending moments. One was at the end of a VERY LONG public hearing about teaching sex to little children. It was late and I thought I'd heard it all and nothing at all could move me, but I waited for the last speaker. His voice was just a little broken as he spoke. He said "I used to be over on that side" and he pointed to the microphone which had long gone silent, the microphone where Planned Parenthood and all their supporters for this sex program had run out of speakers more than an hour earlier , "But now I'm on this side". He said ,"I'm 35 years old now and my daughter is 19. I will never get over the regret that I have because I did not get to be a part of her life growing up. I realize now that programs like this sex education influenced me to be sexually promiscuous at the age of 16 . I don't want this to happen to anymore children, and that is why I am here tonight." His testimony was compelling. I felt so bad for him, and I knew he was right. Sexualizing children early with too much information is harmful to them.

The second most heart rending moment was at the school board meeting on Tuesday night. It came at the end of the meeting when a lady got up to speak during public comment. She got up to speak, and then she was crying so hard she could hardly speak.Her daughter is only 14 years old and she found drugs in her locker.Her daughter is being influenced by friends who do drugs.She wanted to know why the school wasn't doing searches of lockers. I want to know where these drugs are coming from and why our public schools seem to have these problems and our private schools don't. One of the student board members confirmed the culture of smoking and drugs on campus at Helena High. I got up once again to point out the obvious, DARE is not an effective program. Familiarizing our students with drugs does not discourage the use, it encourages it by making it more common and almost a challenge for some. If you don't want young children to play with your very sharp knives, you don't take them all out and show them to the child, this would only give him/her the idea. You put them away.

So, yes, sadly I would have to say I think public schools today can be harmful to children, but it's not just the sex and drugs. Do parents send their precious children to school to advocate for special interest groups? As I was passing by the reader board at Four Georgians Elementary School the other day they were advocating to "wear pink" for breast cancer. I know the children train for the Governors Cup Run every year. Maybe this is just for exercise, but there are many other runs and they don't train for them. Should kids have to worry about cancer? Sadly some young lives are impacted by this, they or their parents get cancer, but this is rare. I grew up in a time when many children were getting polio, I hardly knew about it. I went out and played and didn't have to carry this burden. It's only now that I realize it could have happened to me. I'm so glad I grew up in a time when children were allowed to be kids. You didn't have to worry about all these grown-up things. Now advocacy seems almost constant. Every fall the football players and all the kids are pressured to wear pink advocacy T shirts for breast cancer awareness or just to wear pink, now it's in the spring too. Let's be honest, this isn't about raising awareness, this is about raising money, and the schools are allowing our children and our public facilities to be used for this purpose.Should schools have the right to decide what we advocate for or is this a personal matter?

Are there other advocacies in our schools?You bet there are. How about animal rights? One year the elementary school I worked at had the white tailed dear as our school animal. Children whose parents hunted deer were confused by that. How about rain forests, recycling and global warming? Should children have to worry about environmental crisis that probably don't even exist or are exaggerated?
How about mental health? Should elementary students have to worry about schizophrenia ,paranoia and bipolar personalities? It's in their new health curriculum. How about starvation? Should children be constantly collecting food for food share as if the population around them were all dying of hunger?

Not only are all these advocacies stressors on our youngsters, they take away the time they need for a full and rigorous education. When the president from Montana State University Bozeman came to my daughters campus to speak to the professors his talk was on holding the line. That's right, our colleges have had to dumb down there curriculums and relax their standards over and over again to accommodate all the barely educated students they are getting from the public schools. The president of MSU says they just have to hold the line- they can't continue relaxing their standards. Are public schools harming our children? When they don't give them an adequate education and instead use them for advocacy they surely are.



Monday 7 May 2012

THE GLOBAL ECONOMY AND OUR SCHOOLS

I have some news for the big industrialists who are behind the new national curriculum, the "Common Core Standards", American values are good the world over and for all time. They (the industrialists) not only don't know education, like the rest of us, they don't know what the future will bring. No matter how much they profess to know the 21st century they don't know. Remember when they wanted all the kids to learn Japanese? The Japanese were going to take over the world economically and we better get on the bandwagon. Yeah right . Japan's economy has been in the pit of despair for at least 20 years!!

Sure, technology has opened up communications the world wide, all the more reason to know what your national values are so as not to get confused. Good values, a good mind and the ability to read will take our students into the 21st century, whatever it may bring. I always go back to Apollo 13 when those men had to get their friends home. No one gave them lessons on perseverance and taking leadership in an emergency but they had the values they needed when the emergency occurred. They didn't have the technology we use today, they brought their friends home using a slide rule.

A few people in a room do not have the keys to our future in America. They don't know what the future is, only what they want it to be. This nation will not be changed to reflect their ideological biases. Sorry boys and girls, this trick has been tried many times before, and as the Catholic Bishop says, you lose.The enduring truths in our Declaration of Independence,"We hold these truths to be SELF- EVIDENT that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness---"will prevail. No small group of individuals will decide what Americans will believe, now or in the future. They may make a good run at destroying public education, but they will not determine the future of this country.

I notice all the liberal groups that name themselves as the "American Way". No one is fooled, the American way is not socialism. Pursuit of Happiness means your right to your private property , the General Welfare Clause in the constitution restricts the Federal Government from treating one state or region differently from another( IT DOES NOT GIVE THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT THE RIGHT TO COLLECT PEOPLES PROPERTY AND REDISTRIBUTE IT),  and Justice means simply fairness under the law, there is no Social Justice. And for the people doing the planning survey here in Helena, I feel I must inform you that there is no GLOBAL LANGUAGE  or GLOBAL CULTURE ! Countless dictatorships from the Communists to the Nazis have tried to change culture and enduring truths with their own form of propaganda, it has never worked and it won't work this time either.

A national curriculum such as the Common Core is a national disaster. It is a huge and shameful, to say nothing of UNLAWFUL, usurpation of power from the states and local school districts. The ideas in it up to this point, are pretty bad. Seriously, reading Martin Luther King's letter from the jail in Birmingham (which is a beautiful piece of literature) in an inner city classroom and asking the teacher to get the kids to concentrate on what the word tension means in this letter for a week, and then to discuss the points in it as Socrates would, are not going to happen. Frankly, most teachers are not versed in teaching Socratic thought. Taking all pre-reading skills away is a big jump, a big risk with no proven results. Combining Algebra and Geometry is also a big gamble. Where are the pretrials on all these things? The liberals have wanted a national curriculum almost as bad as national healthcare for a long time- all tenets of Marx and the centralized state.They want it, as Marx wanted it, to propagandize for their wonderful "new world order", so they think. What they are really doing is taking away the rights of local school districts to educate and creating a national disaster.

The industrialists such as Bill Gates who have been led down this primrose path will soon realize that they have not created a panacea in our schools that will give them the workers of tomorrow. Strong societal values and respect for this country as it was founded is what will allow America to build a strong economy that will give everyone a chance. Teachers in classrooms and local schools are the place to build curriculums that will work, not centralized wizards who think they (for some reason) are smarter than the rest of us and have an inside track on the future. God Bless America, and this fight, as our great Naval hero John Paul Jones declared, has only just begun!

Tuesday 1 May 2012

ANOTHER ROLE TAKEN ON BY THE SCHOOLS

Did you know that the schools are now responsible for determining if your children are mentally ill? Yes, and lo and behold, they're finding quite a few children that are "mentally ill"!Several "non profits" are busy doing behavior modification in our schools and determining which children they deem to be "mentally ill". "Non profits" are businesses and they seek to grow just like any business does. Just look at the hot lunch program. They started with lunch, moved to lunch and breakfast, then to snacks and barbecues, then to summer lunch programs, then to giving all kids breakfast,lunch and snacks with no income requirement. Who knows where it's going next??So are the "non profits" in the "mental health" business going to seek to grow like the free food programs? Are we going to see the number of children labeled as "mentally ill" skyrocket?!!

The principal at Rossiter School disclosed at the April 24th board meeting that they now have 46 mentally ill students as identified by the "non profit" Intermountain which is working in the school. She reported 485 students total at Rossiter, so that would mean that close to 10% of her students are identified as "mentally ill"!! She did report that she was having some trouble convincing at least some of the parents that their children were "mentally ill"!!

I taught in the public schools for 30 years, including 9 years in Special Education, and I will tell you that I did come across my share of "brats". These are kids that act up in class. They're not mentally ill. They may need some discipline or to straighten out their attitude. Mental illness is things like paranoid-schizophrenia and psychosis.  I'm not a Psychiatrist, but then again, neither are the people doing all of this diagnosing! I don't like labeling kids-not even as a brat- sometimes you get frustrated for a moment. But seriously- mentally ill? This is serious stuff. I had kids with some pretty good emotional problems, but I never had a mentally ill student. As mentioned on this blog earlier, Youth Connections, another "non profit" is surveying kids at the high schools and determined last year that 27% of the kids they surveyed had "mental health" issues.

The number of behavior programs in school has now reached critical mass, let's see, there is the Montana Behavior Initiative which  has everyone going to workshops and assemblies, putting signs up everywhere and chanting, the Bully program which tries to keep everyone in a politically correct box, Youth Connections which behavior modifies for all students in kindergarten- I'm guessing they'll want to be moving on up, growing their program for all, counseling programs during class time, for all sutdents at every grade level in the elementary, Dare programs, Resource Officer programs, Power programs which track every single thing a child does in his school career from bus behavior to attendance, mental health "surveys", health teachers coming in to teach about contraception and barriers for all kinds of bizarre sexual acts, I'm probably missing some things but you get the idea.

We were sitting at Hardees the other night and two families with young children came in. The first family had two three year olds, mom was ordering and holding one of them, Dad put one in a booth and went to fill up their drink. We looked over and the little one in the booth smiled and said hello to us! Then another mom came in with two little ones about the same age and everything was crazy. They were yelling, climbing and running everywhere. She was trying to talk to them, trying to get them to be quiet, trying to get them to sit down, etc. etc. You get the idea? When you parent right it doesn't take so much. Do you think maybe our schools are expending more now and getting a lot less? Have you seen the garbage in the parking lot at Capital High School lately? Have you heard the statistics about 25% drop out rates and 25% of the kids being on marijuana? How about premarital sex and babies born out of wedlock? With all the behavior programs things have gotten worse. So what's the answer?

Not everything that was done in the past was right or perfect but they seem to have done a much better job with students than what is happening today with gobs of money and a seemingly unlimited amount of programs put in place at the expense of classroom academic time. I think that the answer is that there is no replacement for societal rules. Rules that come from home and are not challenged by social engineers at school, but instead, are reinforced. Like the first family at Hardees, it's not that hard when society has universal rules. You don't have to have chants, assemblies and posters everywhere. The children know what the expectations are and they meet those goals. It's just the way it is. When I was in   school we had one film on drugs. It was in black and white and it showed these creeps hanging out outside the school chain link fence. The message was clear. People that take drugs are frightening losers, run away and call the police, period. There was no question about it, no relativity. No one would do it. Drug users were criminals and social outcasts. The same with sex. You could enjoy dating because premarital sex was a taboo. Girls who did it were sluts, and no one wanted to be talked about as a slut. No relativity.

Our children are not mentally ill, they are growing up in a society that has allowed politically correct social engineers with a profit motive to destroy the morals and ethics that built a strong America. We need to send these people packing and raise our own children with the enduring values of all time. Schools are for educating and that's all, once they realize that, our academic scores will improve too. Parents need to see to it that the schools are put back in their place as educators and leave the child rearing to the families! No more new roles for the schools, just educate and that's it!