Rescue Your Children
Posted by BradHarrington 9 years, 9 months ago to Politics
Child abuse, that's the only thing the "public" system of education deserves to be called any longer. I'm glad I spared myself the additional two years of brainrot by quitting early... So, in order to attempt to try to protect some other youth from the same agony today, I penned this as an "Open Letter" to Laramie County parents.
Brad Harrington
brad@bradandbarbie.com
********************
May 14, 2014
Rescue Your Children
By Bradley Harrington
“Learning is a conceptual process; an educational method devised to ignore, bypass and contradict the requirements of conceptual development, cannot arouse any interest in learning.” - Ayn Rand, “The Comprachicos,” 1970 -
You, as Laramie County parents, have entrusted the education of your children to the LCSD1 schools - because you believe that your kids will gain the learning they need in order to satisfactorily grasp reality and successfully live their lives.
Sorry, but you’re wrong. Horribly, tragically wrong.
Just last week, for instance, the WTE’s front page ran this story:
“Only about one-quarter [of students] are performing proficiently or better in math and just 4 in 10 in reading. And they’re not improving, the report says, reinforcing concerns that large numbers of today’s students are unprepared for either college or the workplace.” (“Report: Students lack critical skills, WTE, May 8.)
Nor is LCSD1 itself immune from the wider national tragedy taking place in our government-approved educational establishments. Last year, for example, it was determined that:
“Nearly half of the schools in Laramie County School District 1 failed to meet expectations in a pilot test of new state ratings.” (“Half of LCSD1 schools miss the mark,” WTE, Oct. 26.)
Translation: only 25 percent of high school graduates - your kids, ladies and gentlemen - can properly handle figures, and only 40 percent of them can successfully read the words of this article.
And that’s just the rudimentary stuff of reading and ‘rithmetic, folks; space precludes a discussion of what’s happening in science, the humanities and history. Parents: would you take your children to dinner at a restaurant where poisons were added to the food 50-75 percent of the time?
Are you aware that most of what passes for reading education today (and for many years) consists of “lexical,” i.e., “whole-word” or “Look and Say” methods?
Are you also aware that, in other areas, a great emphasis is placed on percept-based “learning,” i.e., on rote memorization? Instructional methodologies that are best suited for training the concrete-bound, range-of-the-moment consciousness of a parrot, not a thinking human being?
Your children are, in effect, being programmed as little more than stimulus-response machines - and where the ideological content of that programming is dependent, not on the facts of reality, but on the whim of whatever teacher and/or administrator your child happens to be in the hands of.
Human consciousness, however, being abstractive and not merely perceptual in its functioning, demands something more: it requires a conceptual method of educational development. Yet, how many of your children can even define the term “concept,” much less articulate the manner in which abstractions relate to, and are ultimately based on, perceptual concretes?
Yet, this is exactly the knowledge your children absolutely require in order to even function, forget about “college or the workplace.”
And you wonder why your kids drop out, do drugs and join herds of gangs? With what conceptual equipment are they prepared to do anything else?
Yes, I know, you are busy. Too busy to not be scared silly by what is being done to your own kids’ minds, their very tools of survival?
I was once such a victim as well (at a much earlier stage of its disintegration, no less) - until I quit school in the 10th grade, out of self-preservation, and struck out on my own. Do you parents have any idea what this kind of system does to the minds of the misfits, the free-thinkers, the independent spirits? Have you looked at the teen suicide rate lately?
Do you have any idea what I would have given, at 16 years old back in 1975, for some help? Where is the help for your children?
You, as parents, are the key, for it is you who ultimately determine the kind of education your children will receive. You can just “leave well enough alone” and let the brain-rot continue - or you can do something different.
A private school, if you can afford it. Home-schooling is another option. Don’t have the money or time? Band together with other parents and make a common project out of it. The possibilities are limitless, once you’ve made up your minds, for no form of exploitation can continue for long without the consent of the exploited. If enough of you do that, the game’s over.
If the well-being of your own kids has ever meant anything at all to you, I beg you, I plead with you, to jerk your children out of the public schools as fast as you can - as if the very fate of the country and their very lives depended upon it.
Because, you see, it does and they do.
Brad Harrington
brad@bradandbarbie.com
********************
May 14, 2014
Rescue Your Children
By Bradley Harrington
“Learning is a conceptual process; an educational method devised to ignore, bypass and contradict the requirements of conceptual development, cannot arouse any interest in learning.” - Ayn Rand, “The Comprachicos,” 1970 -
You, as Laramie County parents, have entrusted the education of your children to the LCSD1 schools - because you believe that your kids will gain the learning they need in order to satisfactorily grasp reality and successfully live their lives.
Sorry, but you’re wrong. Horribly, tragically wrong.
Just last week, for instance, the WTE’s front page ran this story:
“Only about one-quarter [of students] are performing proficiently or better in math and just 4 in 10 in reading. And they’re not improving, the report says, reinforcing concerns that large numbers of today’s students are unprepared for either college or the workplace.” (“Report: Students lack critical skills, WTE, May 8.)
Nor is LCSD1 itself immune from the wider national tragedy taking place in our government-approved educational establishments. Last year, for example, it was determined that:
“Nearly half of the schools in Laramie County School District 1 failed to meet expectations in a pilot test of new state ratings.” (“Half of LCSD1 schools miss the mark,” WTE, Oct. 26.)
Translation: only 25 percent of high school graduates - your kids, ladies and gentlemen - can properly handle figures, and only 40 percent of them can successfully read the words of this article.
And that’s just the rudimentary stuff of reading and ‘rithmetic, folks; space precludes a discussion of what’s happening in science, the humanities and history. Parents: would you take your children to dinner at a restaurant where poisons were added to the food 50-75 percent of the time?
Are you aware that most of what passes for reading education today (and for many years) consists of “lexical,” i.e., “whole-word” or “Look and Say” methods?
Are you also aware that, in other areas, a great emphasis is placed on percept-based “learning,” i.e., on rote memorization? Instructional methodologies that are best suited for training the concrete-bound, range-of-the-moment consciousness of a parrot, not a thinking human being?
Your children are, in effect, being programmed as little more than stimulus-response machines - and where the ideological content of that programming is dependent, not on the facts of reality, but on the whim of whatever teacher and/or administrator your child happens to be in the hands of.
Human consciousness, however, being abstractive and not merely perceptual in its functioning, demands something more: it requires a conceptual method of educational development. Yet, how many of your children can even define the term “concept,” much less articulate the manner in which abstractions relate to, and are ultimately based on, perceptual concretes?
Yet, this is exactly the knowledge your children absolutely require in order to even function, forget about “college or the workplace.”
And you wonder why your kids drop out, do drugs and join herds of gangs? With what conceptual equipment are they prepared to do anything else?
Yes, I know, you are busy. Too busy to not be scared silly by what is being done to your own kids’ minds, their very tools of survival?
I was once such a victim as well (at a much earlier stage of its disintegration, no less) - until I quit school in the 10th grade, out of self-preservation, and struck out on my own. Do you parents have any idea what this kind of system does to the minds of the misfits, the free-thinkers, the independent spirits? Have you looked at the teen suicide rate lately?
Do you have any idea what I would have given, at 16 years old back in 1975, for some help? Where is the help for your children?
You, as parents, are the key, for it is you who ultimately determine the kind of education your children will receive. You can just “leave well enough alone” and let the brain-rot continue - or you can do something different.
A private school, if you can afford it. Home-schooling is another option. Don’t have the money or time? Band together with other parents and make a common project out of it. The possibilities are limitless, once you’ve made up your minds, for no form of exploitation can continue for long without the consent of the exploited. If enough of you do that, the game’s over.
If the well-being of your own kids has ever meant anything at all to you, I beg you, I plead with you, to jerk your children out of the public schools as fast as you can - as if the very fate of the country and their very lives depended upon it.
Because, you see, it does and they do.
