Back when I was in graduate school, after about a year of the usual indoctrination I began to ask, in earnest; in fact, desperate: “But what is REAL LEARNING?” Various “ideas” were continuously drumming into my head, each to be automatically slipped into a preset grid. I wanted to get rid of the grid. HOW? That’s a story for another time.
I voted against our new local school referendum yesterday. Though I had a faint hope that perhaps enough is enough (there was a school referendum last year, too), and the referendum would not pass, unfortunately, it did, by a very slim margin of 108 votes, out of 10,350 votes total cast. Which gives me hope. Nearly 50% of voters now have their thinking caps on! Nearly 50% in this town that is so one-party that only one district even featured a Republican candidate. Mine. I voted for him. He lost, by a margin of 85%.
Not that I’m Republican. What I would like to see is at least two parties present here, rather than the Democratic dictatorship that took over this town decades ago.
Public schools turned into indoctrination centers a long time ago, especially with Obama’s “common core,” and recently made much worse by the inclusion of DEI, CRT, woke-transgender-pronoun nonsense.
Why do you think all the desks line up in straight lines? So you won’t get-out-of-line, that’s why.
Yeah, standardize everything, especially education, where it all begins, with vulnerable children who are easily molded. Plus: corporatize, wherever possible, to mold obedient workers. That’s the real goal of public education.
But something happened during the Covid Con, something wonderful and strange. One of its silver linings. (Another is the number of people who used those two silent lockdown years to review their entire lives and to ask what’s next?) The kids, stuck at home with “remote” learning, had their “education” opened up to their parents, thousands of whom were appalled. Thus:
No Longer Fringe: Home Schooling Revolution Is Reshaping American Education
Thomas Sowell would approve.
As would John Taylor Gatto:
And here, I would say, is the goal: continuous learning, growing, transformation. So that we never get caught long in dogmatic beLIEf systems — which then, when we oppose others different belief systems, lead sooner or later, to war; rather, we utilize every experience as stimulus to learn, about our world, about ourselves, about their interaction which then, periodically, unfolds us into something entirely new, strange, and beautiful.
