"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
Here’s a wild and crazy idea for one arrow to add to the “educational reform quiver”:
Vouchers for home schooling. . . with a twist.
Preconditions: pubschools have achievement testing at end of year for EVERY GRADE, no exceptions, no excuses. Period. Kids pass to the next grade based on test scores. No exceptions, no excuses.
Vouchers provided parents who wish to homeschool equivalent to whatever the district spends per pupil for ALL expenses. BUT, the vouchers cannot be redeemed unless the student for whom they are issued passes, IN A FORMALLY PROCTORED SETTING, the SAME achievement test as their pubschool counterparts must pass.
In other words, equivalent expenditure of public funds for what must be assumed to be an equivalent public good, except that homeschooled kids wouldn’t be spending most of their childhood in a prison environment.
At least it wouldn’t provide an incentive for those lame brains who count the daily trip to WallyWorld as a “field trip” for their (fake) “homeschooled” kids. . . unless they required the kids to read and (intelligently) discuss nutrition labels, do math to determine “best buys” and be quizzed on geography based on place of manufacture of different goods, etc.. *heh*
[Note: I have family members who are REAL teachers and know at least a few more REAL teachers. Heck, I have even known three–THREE–pubschool administrators who were actually worthwhile uses of the oxygen they consumed. Really! Still. . . ]
Pubschool isn’t entirely “prison for kids”. . . but it’s usually the next worst thing. Pubschool certainly was no picnic for me. People kept interrupting my learning to “teach” me things that were on THEIR schedule. . . *heh*
“. . .the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.”
Well, especially for boys, for whom pubschool is often a kind of prison camp designed to make them into girls1, or ANY kid who’s in the second standard deviation above the norm or better on any standard IQ test. “Odds” of all kinds find pubschool to me mind-numbing torture as they are REQUIRED to fit into the box. . . and find the box to be far, far too small.
But. . . the problem is this, though: how can a society educate2 its population in such a way as to maximize the number of useful, productive citizens? Assembly line “prisons for kids” has been the answer for many years, though good teachers–REAL teachers–do everything they can to minimize the “prison” and “assembly line” aspects and encourage real learning. Oh, but that’s another problem: where does one find REAL teachers in numbers great enough to overcome the disadvantages of the system itself, the “millstones” of pubschool administrators *gag* and the plethora of remote-educrat-meddling they implement?
“Sommers, a philosopher by education and a mother of two boys, shows that the trend she identified in the late 1990s to see boys as defective girls and therefore somehow in need of retooling has continued, and its effects have spread.”
2“Educate” has come to mean, more and more, simply “propagandize, brainwash.” Real education leads from darkness to light. What is created by the system of remote educrats promulgating rules for pubschool administrators to use cutting oxygen from the brains of teachers and students alike being implemented in a system of regimentation, indistinguishable from a prison regime, INTENDED (see Dewey, et al) to turn children into useful little cogs in an industrial machine is a kind of software lobotomization that seems to be designed by a conspiracy of dunces to make the lowest common denominator universal. *sigh* I am in awe of teachers–REAL teachers–who can do battle against this monstrosity day in and day out–actually bringing light to some students!–without going out of their everlovin’ gourds. Such people are amazing.
I occasionally see/hear frustrated people writing/muttering (or louder) about revolution as the solution the “feddle gummint” seems to be pushing its citizens subjects towards.
Better think long and hard on that, is my first council. We’re a loooooong way from needing a “solution” that, urm, revolutionary. Besides, as a “Dwarven Rifleman” (interesting fictional character) observed,
“It may seem a fine thing in song or story to be ankle-deep in the blood of your enemies but in reality it’s slippery, smells bad and is nearly impossible to get out of your socks afterwards.”
Yeh. Think long and hard before electing to pursue a course that would likely ruin every pair of socks you own. . . Just reconsider, mmK?
“Obama assures the public he only collected this information to uncover wrongdoing and protect civil liberties. Clearly he would want us to use it to investigate this case, because otherwise he’d be lying,” said Stockman.
“If Obama has nothing to hide he has nothing to fear,” said Stockman.
About time at least one Republican located a workable testosterone therapy.
For those excoriating Edward Snowden for “breaking the law” I’ll say this: I don’t know and I don’t care. I don’t know, because I haven’t–and probably won’t–research the relevant laws, because I do not care whether he broke any in revealing the NSA’s surveillance of ordinary citizens.
Here’s why that is: ANY time a citizen shed’s light on government mistreatment of its citizens’ rights it is a Good Thing, no matter what his motivation, no matter what laws he breaks to do so. Any laws that even ALLOW the government to cover abuses are anathema to me, and should be to every citizen who lives; they are nothing short of being bad faith with the social contract the Founders recognized which establishes that government exists to protect our rights, not abuse or deny to us the free exercise of them. ANY law or regulation that provides cover for government abuse of citizens’ rights is illegitimate and has no moral force whatsoever, no excuse for existence save for the vile, reprehensible, utterly abhorrent excuse of defending that abuse of power, and that’s a raison d’être that in itself gives adequate cause to sneer at and openly flout disobedience to any such law or regulation.
Apparatchiks in the same party that gave us the death toll of Fast and Furious and Benghazi, the trampling of the First and Fourth Amendments in the AP scandal and the blatant IRS abuses of power have talked with relative comfort about disappearing Snowden. Yeh, what’s a little banana republic terrorist tactic between friends, eh? In the toxic atmosphere of an overweening, anarcho-tyrannist “feddle gummint bureaucrappy” that views everything with an US (the “gummint”) vs Them (former citizens, now subjects) it becomes obvious to anyone who’s not dumber than a sack of Shiite that the “feddle gummint” is cast adrift from a constitutionally-informed social contract designed to protect the rights of citizens and not the turf of politicians *gag-spew* and “bureaucraps” *gagamaggot*.
In such an environment, as I said, ANYONE who for ANY REASON brings government abuses of power into the light of day has done right, no matter what their motivation, no matter what any CYA laws or regulations say.
Doing the right thing, even for wrong reasons, is doing the right thing, no matter what.
One last thing: Edward Snowden may be weird. He may be distasteful in his personal habits, lifestyle or morality. I don’t know and I don’t care. I have seen hints about such things written by people condemning him, though hints only, as I skip over and simply note another ad hominem attack designed to discredit him in the eyes of stupid people. I don’t know Edward Snowden, and I do not particularly care to; not only that, I do not have to know ANYTHING about him apart from the fact that the information he revealed has so far checked out and that it reveals massive abuse of power by the federal government. THAT is ALL that matters in this brouhaha. Period.
Overwhelm your congresscritters’ and state reps’ inboxes with calls to completely shut down the IRS and salt the legislative and bureaucrappic ground it rests on.
When you’re finished with that, besiege their inboxes with calls for special prosecutors for Fast and Furious, Benghazi and the NSA. Add links wherever possible. Here’s one for NSA crimes against humanity (and make no mistake: NSA’s “Boundless Informant” is just that):
I pulled this from a comment I made in answer to another commenter on a post shortly after last Tuesday’s hijacking of the election.
I cannot count the number of, well, not conversations exactly but whatever passes for one with leftards that all had the same dynamic:
Leftard spouts Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind/Dhimmicrappic talking points as though they were graven in stone and delivered by a secular humanist commie bastard Moses.
I present verifiable facts.
Leftard calls said facts lies, because they do not match his talking points.
Therein lies the central disconnect, IMO. Leftards are delusional (or deliberate, witting liars. It’s often quite difficult to tell which is which), while the REAL reality-based folks are left wondering who screwed up the leftards’ p-sych meds, whenever they encounter one or more of them…
The political “middle” is now composed of
1. The stupid, gullible and ignorant: sheeple who are the natural “base” of the Dhimmicrappic Party.
2. The greedy, which is of two classes. a. Those who just want the government to give them “free cake”. b. Those who are busy bilking the public purse with massive fraud (at best).
3. The unconscious, those who wander the earth from one prodding stimulus to the next.
Moving to “the middle” is societal suicide. Waking the unconscious, excoriating the corrupt and weaning the “free cakers” is the only way to save society.
This is, of course, an extremely simplistic (and hence “wrong” on detail) model, but it’s roughly true, for all its shortcomings.
One last appeal to anyone who may be considering a “protest” vote today: Bill Whittle’s “Falling on Principle”
Consider carefully who and what you vote for today, from local races all the way to DC.
Here in America’s Third World County™, polling places were open at 6:00 this morning, and parking places at our polling place were thin on the ground. All the voting “booths” were filled when we walked in, but there was almost no waiting (apart from having our drivers licenses scanned and signing the electronic “register”), because people were, for the most part, voting quickly and getting back on the road to work.
Yep. No Odumbo bumper stickers on the cars outside at all, at all.
I know a number of Ron Paul die-hards America’s Third World County™ who were planning on sitting this one out, but the sheer weight of Makers here in the county as opposed to Takers (many of whom around here cannot legally vote anyway, since they’re illegals*) means that I’ll be hugely surprised if Dhimmicraps receive more than 10% of this county’s votes this year. Seriously.
Would that this county were a microcosm of the rest of the country, third world infrastructure and jury-rigging tightwaddery and all…
In a more perfect world, Frank J. Flemming’s views of government–which are more in line with the goals the Founders had in mind (as the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, et al point to) than those any politician now on the stage declares–his views would hold a strong majority of the electorate, but in our real world, we must fight the fight we have.
If you want to vote against statism, make your vote count. Yeh, the Republicans on your ballot are still very likely drawn from the shallow end of the pseudo-conservative swamp that has, for the most part, given us wannabe elite country club Repugnican’ts since the G.H.W. Bush camp’s slaying of the Reagan revolution lion, but driving toward a cliff at 75mph still gives us more room for maneuver and time to salvage something than driving toward a cliff at the Dhimmicrappic Party’s current 120mph.
Throwing some bubblegum at the vehicle’s tires by casting a protest vote just isn’t going to help anything, and saying, in whatever principled fashion, “All the candidates from the two major parties are scoundrels, so I’ll not vote for any of ’em. Let the country get what it deserves. Maybe when it all crashes down, we can resurrect something worthwhile from the ashes,” is just a libertarian/liberal embrace of the socialist Cloward-Pivens principle that Obama and his ilk have instituted with a vengeance.
Seriously. A “principled” protest vote is nothing more or less than an attempt to do the same ruinous things Obama and his co-conspirators, fellow travelers, cronies and useful idiots have spent the last (nearly) four years doing: burn the house down in a belief that YOUR views will emerge from the ashes.
Obamanoids–dupes in general, the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind (A.K.A. “Bylines for Barry”), The Zero’s campaign mouthpieces (TOTUS, Cwazy UNka Joe and all the other usual suspects) and the whole gaggle of leftard loons have invested tons of disingenuity into the meme that Romney doesn’t pay his “fair share” of taxes. Their argument, such as it is, is that his nominal 14-15% income tax rate on his investment income–the sum total of his income–is “less” than the average person pays. Leaving aside the 47% who receive more in benefits from the “feddle gummint” than they pay in taxes, if they pay any income taxes at all, what about that claim?
The corporations Romney receives his investment income have to make a profit. Those profits are distributed after taxes and reinvestment in the business to investors. So, say a company makes $100 in before tax profits. Yeh, yeh, a ridiculously small amount, but one that makes for easy numbers. After paying JUST the federal corporate income taxes, that number is reduced to about $72 available to return to investors who are then taxed a nominal 15% of that. So, assume only one investor, for simplicity. That investor would then receive about $61. All told, the “feddle gummint” has just gobbled up 39% of the income.
Average Joes don’t pay that sort of income tax rate, unless they’re too stupid to be able to use Turbotax and misfigure everything on their own. (ABOVE average–in income and privilege–“Timothys” however Do use Turbotax and fail to properly pay their federal income taxes for years, but the law only applies to the little people.)
And Big Bird is a loser of an “issue”. Aside from Big Bird, all The Zero’s campaign has left is lies. Just a standard response from UNliberal leftists.
Always, always, ALWAYS remember: “slanderer”=”devil”. Literally. (“Devil” is transliterated from Koine: diabolos—>devil. “Diabolos” means slanderer, false accuser, traducer. So, anyone choosing to say The Zero and his co-conspirators are “sons [and daughters] of Satan” could be viewed as making an arguably fair statement. Just sayin’.)
