Tag Archives: education

Anything to Avoid Controversy

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The Montgomery County school board voted Tuesday to eliminate all references to religious holidays on school calendars, beginning in the 2015-16 school year. That includes Christmas and Easter, as well as Jewish holidays like Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.

Their excuse? The board superintendent, Joshua Starr, said the board should remove all religious holiday references because local Muslim leaders had requested equal billing for Eid al-Adha.

The Muslim leaders’ request might hold water were there a significant number of Muslim students in the district. However, in response to these leaders’ own request that “families…keep students home on Eid al-Adha,” the absentee rate on the appointed day wasn’t different from any other day’s absentee rate.

Aside from that, though, this board simply chose to surrender the community’s Judeo-Christian heritage in order to avoid controversy.

What lesson is these folks’ timidity teaching those children?

A School District Apologizing

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…for expecting a child to show respect for our country and its symbols of patriotism.

A Southern California school district will apologize to an 11-year-old atheist who says his teacher questioned him because he didn’t stand during the Pledge of Allegiance.

[The student] says he kept his seat during the morning pledge at Monte Vista Middle School in San Jacinto earlier this month because the words “under God” in it violate his beliefs.

He could have stood with his hand over his heart and remained silent. He could have stood and recited the pledge, remaining silent while the phrase was being spoken by his fellows.

The binding nature of the pledge is questionable with children of this age; they’re unable to make decisions on their own, both legally and nearly always from a practical/maturation perspective. But that’s why they’re in school—to learn. Besides, the simple rehearsal of the pledge would have had its own value.

The Pledge of Allegiance, after all, is about much more than just a phrase about God, a phrase whose role in the Pledge merely is an acknowledgment of our national heritage. The Pledge is all about patriotism and fidelity to our country and the liberty for all which our country defends. A liberty which includes the freedom to worship, or not to worship, as each of us pleases.

Here was an opportunity to teach the child something about respect, something about our country, something about patriotism.

Instead, San Jacinto’s school district is going to teach a lesson of an entirely different sort.

This is shameful.

Disappointing

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An understatement. These indicators of the failure of our education system are via Three Percenter; the list of all 50 is here.

  • only 36% of all Americans can name the three branches of government
  • only 25% of all Americans know how long US Senators are elected for (6 years), and only 20% of all Americans know how many US senators there are
  • 1% of American young adults in the 18 to 34-year-old age bracket are currently living with their parents
  • 25% of all employees that have Internet access in the United States visit sex websites while they are at work
  • 30 million Americans are on antidepressants [that’s roughly 10% of our total population]
  • Americans account for about five% of the global population, but we buy more than 50% of the pharmaceutical drugs
  • 60 million Americans have a problem with alcohol addiction
  • small business ownership in the United States is at the lowest level that has ever been recorded
  • approximately one out of every three children in the United States lives in a home without a father
  • Americans in the 15 to 24-year-old age group account for about 50% of all new STD cases each year

Notice that: both children currently in our “education” system, and adults recently passed through it.

Hmm….

Excessive

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The Dearborn Heights District 7 Board of Education chose a less severe punishment for the honor student who was initially expelled after a pocketknife was found in her purse at a football game.

On Monday, after two hours of deliberation, the board voted 6-0 to allow [the high school senior] to take online classes. She then will be able to graduate with her class in 2015.

A lesser punishment than originally imposed? She still was punished, severely. Because zero tolerance. Because, the Board of Education persons claim, state law.

State law or bureaucratic timidity, it makes no difference. This young woman, who maintained her status as an honor student while working two jobs (how many of our young people have the initiative to do that? How many of our young people in the broader 16-25 demographic can find any job?), was thrown out of school—her path to a better life—because she had a knife (all 3¼” of it) given her by her grandfather for protection, since she bicycles to and from those jobs.

She forgot it was in the bottom of her purse, else she would have honored the state’s law of no knives in school longer than 3″. Think of an earlier time, when personal responsibility mattered more than responsiveness to government. An American general in WWII was messaged an order to stop a movement on Sicily that was a deviation from the battle plan. He decided the message was garbled in transmission and asked for a retransmittal. He continued his movement, meanwhile, which contributed critically to capturing the island far ahead of the plan’s original schedule and with far fewer overall casualties.

The Dearborn Heights Vice Principal Cheryl Howard, who was conducting random bag searches and discovered the knife, could have said, “That knife looks real close to exceeding the allowed size limit. Get it home and be more careful.” But no. Because zero tolerance. Because personal responsibility is so 20th Century.

Think, also, of the larger implication of this. This toy knife was given to this young woman by a well-meaning grandfather so she could protect herself as she bicycled to and from her jobs. Or in any other situation in any other location.

What the Michigan law is saying, what the Dearborn Heights District 7 Board of Education is saying, is that we’re not supposed to protect ourselves. Government will do that for us. Authority figures placed over us will do that for us. When the bad man comes…. But no, we’re to leave it to our survivors to seek justice for us since our Betters are to be responsible for our safety—which means only for the safety of our survivors. Which, to unroll this one more step, means no safety for them, either, since the police are only minutes away from them, too.

The Left and “Free” Speech

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On the matter of Common Core,

Employees of at least one school have been directed not to express opinions in public or by texts, email, social media or traditional media, according to notes taken at a faculty meeting last week that were obtained by The Town Talk.

[Rapides Superintendent Nason “Tony”] Authement said there is not a district policy about social media.

“We are not communicating any procedures, policies or expectations about posting on social networks,” he said.

Of course. Instead,

Local teachers who agreed to speak to The Town Talk anonymously said these directives normally are given orally rather than in writing. The notes came from a faculty meeting after teacher Cher Wilson spoke to a TV news outlet about what she called a “dishonest” grading system.

One teacher said she was “written up” by school administration for writing a comment from her personal Facebook account on a negative post about the Common Core State Standards. The comment was against the standards.

She said she was shocked when asked to remove her comment, which she did, and then was written up.

“We are not to voice our opinions in any public forum,” she said. “We are to be neutral or in favor of…. This is a hot national debate. Why can’t I comment?

And

She said teachers have been told not to talk to the press without going through the chain of command, which begins with the principal and ends with the superintendent.

Plainly, the plebes are free to speak only what has been approved by their Betters for them to speak.