Back To School Blues - Victor Davis Hans (EXCELLENT!)

[HomeschoolrsRUs]

Back to school blues::By Victor Davis Hanson (http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/VictorDavisHanson/2007/08/24/back_to_school_blues?page=full&comments=true)

Last week I went shopping in our small rural hometown, where my family has attended the same public schools since 1896. Without exception, all six generations of us — whether farmers, housewives, day laborers, business people, writers, lawyers or educators — were given a good, competitive K-12 education.

But after a haircut, I noticed that the 20-something cashier could not count out change. The next day, at the electronic outlet store, another young clerk could not read — much less explain — the basic English of the buyer's warranty. At the food market, I listened as a young couple argued over the price of a cut of tri-tip — unable to calculate the meat's real value from its price per pound.

As another school year is set to get under way, it's worth pondering where this epidemic of ignorance came from.

[Wolfcounsel]

As another school year is set to get under way, it's worth pondering where this epidemic of ignorance came from. --from HomeschoolrsRUs' link

Start by asking these two dumbasses:

"I think there's no way they should have to teach it, now. We have computers. We no longer need to know why 3X equals 2Y over 4. Or if a bus leaves Utah at 4 pm, how many blonde-haired people [are] on it? I mean, how the hell do you figure that out?"[Mary Stuart] Masterson: "And why? Why would you want to know? Leave some things up to chance, you know?" (From the March 23, 2001 Rosie O'Donnell show.)

Education needs to be revamped. First eliminate teaching as a liberal's choice of careers.

[Timberwolf]

What then can our elementary and secondary schools do, when many of their students' problems begin at home or arise from our warped popular culture?

We should first scrap the popular therapeutic curriculum that in the scarce hours of the school day crams in sermons on race, class, gender, drugs, sex, self-esteem or environmentalism. These are well-intentioned efforts to make a kinder and gentler generation more sensitive to our nation's supposed past and present sins. But they only squeeze out far more important subjects.

The old approach to education saw things differently than we do. Education ("to lead out" or "to bring up") was not defined as being "sensitive" to, or "correct" on, particular issues. It was instead the rational ability to make sense of the chaotic present through the abstract wisdom of the past.

So literature, history, math and science gave students plenty of facts, theorems, people and dates to draw on. Then training in logic, language and philosophy provided the tools to use and express that accumulated wisdom. Teachers usually did not care where all that training led their students politically — only that their pupils' ideas and views were supported with facts and argued rationally.
Amen to that! This is EXACTLY what path we must take, and the ideology we must embrace, if our nation is to survive more than a generation (two at the most). If we reject the common sense laid out in this piece, we are doomed to become the next "has been" society of history.

[Wolfcounsel]

And each new generation continues to turn out dumber than the preceding one.