Is change always good? Obviously NOT, and yet many of us feel some how intimidated by the left to think that we must always throw away what we know to be GOOD, and what we know to be RIGHT, to appease them. Some how we are made to feel that if we do not endorse or take a version of their garbage we just aren't smart or aren't with it or just don't understand. This has got to stop.
If something works well we need to keep it. For centuries cultures have respected their elders and respected the knowledge and experience of the past. Fast forward to today and we are told to criticize and disdain anything that was not invented yesterday. Is there anything that has been taken away from you by "progress" that you miss? Every time I go down to the center part of town I admire their wonderful lamp posts. I don't know how this particular neighborhood was able to keep their beautiful lamp posts while the rest of us had to go to these huge telephone poles that have lights that are too bright and obnoxiously turn off and on, but they did manage to keep some of the beauty and grace of the past. Our schools have given way to every piece of nonsense from the left ,and our school superintendents and school boards have become nothing but puppets on strings managed by Washington. What a shame that we have lost the beauty and wisdom of the past just to accommodate the agendas of crass people that are experimenting with our children's education. Maybe we could find the secret of keeping the past, as they did in the old neighborhood downtown, by just standing up and saying NO - our ideas of the past were better than what you are telling us.
Our schools have been savaged by these "progressives" and somehow they never get blamed for the damage they have done. One of the first things the "progressives" did was to throw out our consumables so they wouldn't have to spend money on them and they could use the money to bring in the artists in residency and other programs to pay off their constituencies. Consumables are the workbooks and spellers that children could work and write in. The reading workbooks were replaced with "whole language" reading. The children just read whole books and talk about them and answer questions or do little assignments that the teacher makes up. Teachers are not curriculum writers and there is a big difference between the two. Curriculum writers spend their time preparing cohesive structured lessons that teach skills. They structure learning from grade to grade to build learning. Good experienced teachers could be hired to write curriculum but this is a FULL TIME JOB. Our students are not getting good structured developmental reading instruction when their teacher makes up assignments hither and yon while she's trying to teach and grade papers and do the other ten thousand things that teachers must do.
Reading workbooks were hard. You could always tell which students were having reading difficulty by how they did with the workbook. Reading workbooks taught and made children practice all of the reading skills from finding the main idea to determining a sequence of events , predicting an outcome or drawing a conclusion. They taught reading of fiction as well as reading of informational text. Students had to alphabetize and read graphs and charts to ascertain information. This was real skill building. But it all went away one day without any input from the teachers. They were just told that there wouldn't be any more workbooks. Well, that made teaching easier, so much less to correct, but what did it do to reading instruction? Is reading a book silently and then writing a paragraph about it building real reading skill the way workbooks did? I don't think so. It does contribute to the rampant grade inflation that's going on- just write something and your teacher will pass you with a good grade. You don't actually have to know anything. So the question remains, ARE THE PROGRESSIVES THAT DICTATE OUR LIVES REALLY ALL THAT SMART?
So the PROGRESSIVES are now going to fix the schools that they have ruined, with their new program called Common Core. In usual fashion the people that wrote this curriculum were not child development experts and had no idea what they were doing but had a great idea of the agenda they
wanted to push into the schools. They did no trials and have no research to back up any of their grand claims, but they practice public relations and propaganda messages superbly.
In Kindergarten they will have little five year olds, that are just learning to be independent and explore their world, sit in groups and "Speak audibly and clearly and present their thoughts, ideas and feelings clearly." They will also" Build on others thoughts and listen to others with care". They will present a piece of written work and listen intently to their peers "constructive criticism" and then incorporate these ideas into their work. Does this sound like a five year old to you? It sounds like they will be taking our little children and putting their lights under a huge burden of self doubt and stress to me. Child psychologists point out that these skills are completely age inappropriate. Once again we must tell our brethren on the left that children ARE NOT LITTLE ADULTS!! Children are children and they need to work individually and be proud of who they are from what they accomplish themselves.
Western civilization has accomplished so much by building on accomplishments of those that came before us- sky scrapers rise from physics geniuses of the past and cancer cures and heart transplants rise out of the sweat equity of Madame Curie and Louis Pasture. We don't throw out what we know- we embrace it and build on it. Be skeptical of every new thing that the "progressives" come up with. They do not research and they spend most of their time on public relations and propaganda. TAKE BACK YOUR RIGHT TO EMBRACE AND LEARN FROM THE PAST AND BE PROUD OF IT. THESE "PROGRESSIVES" DON'T KNOW EVEN HALF OF WHAT THEY PRETEND TO KNOW AND THEIR IDEAS ARE RIDDLED WITH FAILURE AND DESTRUCTION THAT THEY REFUSE TO RECOGNIZE.
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