Tuesday 28 April 2015

CONSOLIDATION

In my home town of Helena we are having a big fight over a bond to CONSOLIDATE our schools. If the school district has their way we will go from eleven elementaries to seven. Almost all of our children will have to take a bus or be driven to school. Amy Yerko from Chicago was brought here not long ago, as a consultant, to show us how wonderful these mega schools are. She had slides with pictures of these mega schools from other states, so we know this is not a Helena idea don't we?

Whose idea is this? Who wants our children going to 500 student mega institutions? I could show you the plan from the Federal Department of Education. I have a copy. In the early nineties when Hillary Clinton introduced us to Goals 2000 she said she wanted schools to become community centers. Her schools would be the central hub where all services would be offered. Now we have Common Core and Century 21 grants. It is the same thing from the same people. The globalists from the Federal Government and the United Nations are in this dream world where they think they are just so much smarter than the rest of us. In their world of dreams they will manage the masses. They will social engineer our children to "the right way" and manage us all into community consensus groups. That's why we need CONSOLIDATION. It's just so hard to manage disparate entities, CONSOLIDATED things are so much easier to control.

The first thing Hillary did in the early nineties was to CONSOLIDATE school districts. In Helena we went from three districts to one.This move to CONSOLIDATION was written into Goals 2000. Have you noticed CONSOLIDATION where you live? In Helena almost all of our private doctor businesses have been CONSOLIDATED into the hospital. It's just so much easier to CONTROL things when they are CONSOLIDATED.

That, in truth, is what the Standards movement is all about. We used to have very general standards, the Carnegie Standards, that said students should have a certain number of units in Math, Science, English, and Social Studies to graduate. What was in those courses, and how they were taught and evaluated was up to the school district and the teachers. We did pretty well under that system. We built a civilized society, even interstate highways, skyscrapers and went to the moon!! We had a reasonably moral society and people were not starving to death in our streets. We were doing better than most places in the world like India or China or Africa. But, Hillary and her friends did not like this. They knew better, there was too much freedom going on out there!! Voila, the standards movement. She would tell our schools what to teach and our teachers how to teach!! She would have grants and programs like gardening (it was in Goals 2000) and artists in residency (in Goals 2000) and so on. I don't know about your school district but ours has tanked since this all happened 20 years ago. Our schools in Helena today are in disarray and our scores have fallen alot. Our school buildings are in disrepair because money for maintenance has gone to programs and paid for Federal grants that do their disappearing act after three years. Our whole town is at each others throats. But what has happened to Hillary?

My, My, she's become a multimillionaire or billionaire and is running for president!! She's been influence peddling all over the world, even gave uranium to Russia which supplies Iran!! Her friend Jeffrey Imhelt, CEO of General Electric, got a contract with Kazikhstan from her while she was secretary of state, and gave ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS to Common Core ( who knew being secretary of state could be such a lucrative job!!)!!What a wheeler and dealer you are Hillary!! You will conrol the world!! Just take from one and give to another and you have the world on a string. Why you are so smart and so compassionate that you have made yourself a mega fortune!! Hillary Machiavelli!! Who cares what happens to America and the freedom it once had? Who cares about all the corruption and lawlessness? Who cares about the moral decay and dissarray in our schools? Who cares if our buildings are in disrepair and students lose their neighborhood schools? These people at the top know what is best for us, everything will be WONDERFUL IN THE END. No it won't. I saw this story play out before in the soviet union. I was in Romania with my relatives in 1975. Everyone was suffering because it was all going to be a panacea in the end. No it wasn't. The people finally revolted and the wall came down in 1989. Ceausescu (Romanian president) was shot dead in the street.

I don't know how long the American people will allow this to play out. How long will they take direction from Hillary while allowing her and Bill to amass their fortune? When children are small and mom says "you have to do your homework" and "you have to brush your teeth" but dad says," Hey- stay up as late as you want and I'll give you candy!", the kids go with dad! Hey- he's a great guy! But when they have a tummy ache and are tired at school and start to fail- they turn back to mom. Hillary and her friends have broken down morals "if it feels good do it!", and offered free everything, and jobs ,and contracts, and grants. As they have gone down this merry path they have enriched themselves as our great America has sighed and shuddered under the weight of debt, lawlessness and corruption, and destruction of our institutions. I don't know how you get integrity back. Some people think we never will. I, however, am an optimist. I believe in this country with all my heart and soul. I will never give up. America will notice it is tired and weak and will rise up AGAINST this monster socialism. America will DECONSOLIDATE AND GET BACK TO OUR FREEDOM!! There are no angels among men that know what it best for all. We can decide for ourselves what is best for our schools and towns and families.


Tuesday 14 April 2015

EDUCATION BY SPECIAL INTEREST

When you bring the Federal Government into schools what you bring with it is politics. Every lobbying effort in Washington from arts to conservation now has a seat at the table in your child's classroom. What the "experts" will tell you is that children don't need a full curriculum anymore. They don't need to memorize things because they can look them up. This is the excuse for all the classroom interruption. They will tell you that children learn through experiences and that of course, it's so important that they be socially engineered with one program after another. How could students ever live their own lives without the government telling them what to eat, what to say and not say, how and when to have sex, that they need exercise, what they should like and not like (like art), what they should believe and not believe (like global warming etc.), teach them to run the governors cup, teach them to work for nonprofits like Food Share, teach them to garden (healthy life style), manage their family with home visits and after school programs and so many other things that the "experts" haven't even thought of yet?

My son often reads the liberal nonsense on this very same internet. He read an article about education the other day hmmm-. Well, this genius he was reading had this thesis, which he did not think up himself of course, that what do you learn more from - experiencing a mountain or having a presentation about a mountain? Just think of that, this poor man wants us to go back to cave man days when all the knowledge a person had was what he experienced!! Well, I of course told my son he would learn more from a presentation- duh. If a person experienced a mountain they would know that it had plants and trees and was rocky and cold at the top. If  they had a presentation they would know that mountains have altitudes in varying degrees and exist in mountain chains in countries across the world and what fossils are and the tree line and on and on. Well, he said, you could look all that up! Well, I said, I guess you would have to know how to read to look it up, and that takes an awful lot of planned learning. In addition it's really not that simple, we can understand what we are reading because we have had presentations of knowledge. I could read a medical article but this does not make me a doctor. Learning takes time and study, it takes presentation, practice, review and evaluation over and over again for years and years. Knowledge builds in a strategic and precise fashion that builds a foundation and then builds on that foundation. This is not rocket science, and it is stupid that we even have to have this converstaion because of these imbeciles in education theory who are bending to the needs of special interests who want to make money off of our schools. Instead of moving forward we are fighting for what is so obvious. My son got it immediately "oh yeah, working smarter instead of harder."

Experience that reinforces learning is fabulous, that's what science experiments and field trips are all about, but experience without presentation is not much more than a trip to Disney Land, lots of fun, but not of real consequence in building a foundation of knowledge. The Federal Department of Defense is now being used in education. They don't teach about national defense, they teach the Star Based program. Kids in 5th grade give up a whole week of education to play with computers and space simulators. The tax payers get to pay for this. This is an example of Disney Land learning. There is no foundation for this learning, it is not part of the 5th grade curriculum. There is no teach, practice, review and evaluate to it. There is no learning that becomes the foundation for the next lesson. It's just fun. So a whole week of learning in 5th grade is sacrificed just for fun. The man who presented this information to the budget committee here in Helena, an elementary principal, wants more of this. Take every non profit in town, Grand Street Theater, Exploration Works, the museum, just any place, and put the kids there according to their interests!! This man has no idea what entails a complete and good education. He has no respect for the learning process.

People often ask me what I think of Montessori. Maria Montessori based her learning theory on a Frenchman's study of how babies learn. Piaget watched babies explore their world. He noted how they repeated tasks over and over again - like buckling or fitting one thing into another. From this he deduced, or others did for him, that children should teach themselves!! This is stupid. What I tell people is that I can't speak to every Montessori class because they are not really Montessori, they are perverted- for example, in Helena they do the Walk To Read program and the Accelerated Reader Program and the Accelerated Math program (along with all the constant interruptions that every class suffers). What I  will say is that I believe Maria Montessori was wrong. Babies are in an explore and discover mode of learning, they don't even have language yet. Small children may still be exploring but they have language and are beginning to do higher level things like reading and spelling. They are exploring their world at a much more complex level. They are beginning to build that foundation of knowledge that does not come from licking something. It comes from listening and reading and practicing and reviewing and evaluation and building knowledge strategically.

As I've said on this blog before, get the dollars back to the classroom and out of Washington. Send the special interests packing and make school what it should be- the opportunity for young people to build a good foundation of knowledge and skills that will allow them the opportunity to pursue their happiness without the Federal Government, in any way shape or form.