"The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves." --John Locke
- As long as we're questioning public schooling, we should question whether there really is an abstraction called "the public" at all, except in the ominous calculations of social engineers. As a boy from the banks of the Monongahela River in western Pennsylvania, I find the term insulting, a cartoon of social reality. If an institution that robs people of their right to self-determination can call itself "public", if being "public" means it can turn families into agents of the state, making parents spy on and harass their sons and daughters because a schoolteacher tells them to; if the state can steal your home because you can't pay its "public" school taxes, and state courts can break up your family if you refuse to allow the state to tell your children what to think - then the word public is a label for garbage and for people who allow themselves to be treated like slaves.
GRusling - 01:29pm Feb 11, 2007 Central (#2 of 13)
"The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves." --John Locke
Once called "Head Start" in Texas, what good is kindergarten (and now pre-k) for a child from a healthy family who speaks fluent English? It doesn't teach them to socialize, it teaches them the bad habits of other small children they're forced into close, daily contact with. It teaches them to listen to their "Teacher" and transport his or her commands to their parents. It teaches them that the "Teacher" is the person best qualified to answer all their questions while their parents are usually wrong, even about what is and isn't important in their lives, like family, heritage and individual accomplishment. What good is memorizing "facts" which are already written in reference books, available to anyone with a desire to discover them? If the "fact" is of some practical use a person might want to remember it, but in the abstract world of study for the sake of uniformity and conformity, memorizing it is nothing but training in doing what you're told and has nothing at all to do with education.
GRusling - 02:04pm Feb 11, 2007 Central (#3 of 13)
"The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves." --John Locke
The myth that "schooling" has some relationship to education is only that, a myth! To be educated requires the ability to think independently, not simply to recite what someone else has already discovered, a "pre-thought thought." No allowance is made in our Public Schools for independent thought, much less action. There simply isn't time and it disrupts the schedule.
What is the purpose of true education? As an exercise for the young it would teach them to inquire into the unknown. That would require them to follow "the road less traveled" since goldmines are never discovered in the middle of a well-worn track! Simple "knowledge" is much better learned from the necessity to do a certain thing, then just learning how.
What is the purpose of sorting children by age in our public schools? It can't be "education" because how much can one 5 year old learn from another 5 year old? Children, like adults, learn a lot more from their peers than from any instructor. Do you really want your son or daughter to learn anything from that mean little brat down the street? When you send them to school with him or her, locking them in a closed environment with them day after day, rest assured that is what will happen!
Have you ever watched an inquisitive child? If you have you'll find them following their older siblings, never those of the same age or younger, always underfoot of their parents, trying to understand what those they admire and look up to are doing. They're "learning," all by themselves at their own pace, in their own time, when their curiosity prompts them to learn about and try to understand some particular activity. Their minds are being stimulated to discover and that almost never happens in "school" because they're not allowed to stray from the "prescribed course" long enough to follow their instincts and learn about whatever has caught their attention at the moment.
Jaime Kenedeno - 04:56pm Feb 14, 2007 Central (#4 of 13)
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
The Parent requires the child to attend school if the child is present at beginning of the day!
TEXAS EDUCATION CODE Sec. 25.094. FAILURE TO ATTEND SCHOOL
The fallacy of this law is that it does not differentiate between a student that is absent and a student that is skipping or tardy.
An absent student is one who does not arrive at school in the morning and is absent for the WHOLE Day. The student was never on campus. The Parent is responsible for the student getting to school (requiring the student to attend school). If the student does not get to school it is the Parent’s responsibility not necessarily the Parent’s fault. There are circumstances where the student will walk in the front door and out the back door without attending a single class. This is where the attendance officers need to improve their due diligence like the old days.
Once the student is counted present in the morning; the Parent has required the student (child) to attend school. Once the student is verified in attendance at the beginning of the school day the student is in the custody of the School.
If the student is tardy or skips class (on campus or off campus) this happens on the watch of the school. The Parent if informed should cooperate and communicate with the School Counselors Administrators and the Attendance Officer to correct the behavior. The Security and Attendance officer should take notice and tighten the belt. This is a security issue as well; there is no excuse for students coming and going outside of the lunch period and it is imperative that attendance irregularities be dealt with within 24 hours. This is easily done with our modern technology.
Instead, what we are seeing is the Attendance Officers documenting the absences as they accumulate and filing on the Parent and student when the number of absences are achieved.
Another fallacy resides in the Parental notification outreach process. There are parts of the law that dic
Jaime Kenedeno - 04:58pm Feb 14, 2007 Central (#5 of 13)
dictate certain steps be taken,
A warning is issued as required by Section 25.095(a)
25.095(a) refers to the Issuance of student handbook at the beginning of the school year that informs the reader of the Non Attendance law and the student's parent is subject to prosecution under Section 25.093 and the student is subject to prosecution under Section 25.094 if the student is absent from school on 10 or more days or parts of days within a six-month period in the same school year or on three or more days or parts of days within a four-week period.
(b) A school district shall notify a student's parent if the student has been absent from school, without excuse under Section 25.087, on three days or parts of days within a four-week period. The notice must:
(1) inform the parent that:
(A) it is the parent's duty to monitor the student's school attendance and require the student to attend school; and
(B) the parent is subject to prosecution under Section 25.093; and
(2) request a conference between school officials and the parent to discuss the absences.
But if these steps required (by the very same law) for the School under 25.095 (a) or (b) are disregarded by the School this is not a defense to the prosecution.
(c) The fact that a parent did not receive a notice under Subsection (a) or (b) does not create a defense to prosecution under Section 25.093 or 25.094.
So the Parent is prosecuted regardless of whether the rules applying to the school responsibilities are followed or not.
The School has no responsibility.
http://ccisd-kenedeno-edu.blogspot.com/2007/02/parent-requires-child-to-attend-school.html
dannoynted1 - 10:07pm Feb 14, 2007 Central (#6 of 13)
We talked to a "truancy officer" today and he said he would be happy to document and testify to the criminal hook this law has/is detrimental to the students at CCISD..."in five years when i retire."
The selective prosecution is done selective and on the directives of the principal of the school.
since there is no "superintendent"there is no boss, so these principals operate as a fiefdom unto themselves.
well i guess the "consultants at the "waste of money" "waters group' teaches the "pro business" how to become a specialist in "working" the education code of texas to be subjective in their "waste of water group"
GRusling - 09:38am Feb 16, 2007 Central (#7 of 13)
"The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves." --John Locke
I appreciate that there are many ways and theories for "working the system" but the fact is, the system itself is a failure if it's true intent is to educate children. The very real question is, is that what it was designed to do?
Our form of compulsory schooling was first initiated here (in America) in the State of Massachusetts from the 1830's till the 1880's. It was resisted, sometimes with guns, by an estimated 80 percent of the Massachusetts population. A senator's office contended not too long ago that prior to compulsory government schooling the literacy rate in Massachusetts was 98 percent, but after it the figure never again reached above 91 percent.
The "system" was imported, wholesale, from Prussia! That was accomplished in the 19th century so the question is, what are our schools really designed to accomplish? What was this "Prussian" system designed to do?
James Bryant Conant - president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century, directs the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, "Principles of Secondary Education."
GRusling - 09:40am Feb 16, 2007 Central (#8 of 13)
"The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves." --John Locke
Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the growing democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals of reading, writing and arithmetic:
GRusling - 09:41am Feb 16, 2007 Central (#9 of 13)
"The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves." --John Locke
1. The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2. The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3. The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4. The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5. The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
GRusling - 09:43am Feb 16, 2007 Central (#10 of 13)
"The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves." --John Locke
6. The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
The preceeding are the words of Alexander Inglis, not myself. I lifted them wholesale from his work.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, certainly understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating, not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force, but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific, difficult tasks."
GRusling - 09:45am Feb 16, 2007 Central (#11 of 13)
"The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves." --John Locke
And so, we find ourselves today, caught in a net of irrelevance because our early "training" demands it. Our public schools, of which almost all of us are a product are exactly that, "training" and not education at all. Just as the Captains of Industry in the 19th and early 20th century expected, we sort ourselves according to the categories they put in place and by the time anyone realizes what has occurred they're just like me, old, irrelevant and impotent to correct the problem.
I give you a quote from John Taylor Gatto, New York State and New York City "Teacher of the Year" (on more than one occasion), author of "The Underground History of American Education" which gave me my first insight into the "real" problem in our public schools:
- "I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were."
- "Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those
GRusling - 09:46am Feb 16, 2007 Central (#12 of 13)
"The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves." --John Locke
- even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?"
Jaime Kenedeno - 03:53am Feb 17, 2007 Central (#13 of 13)
I agree that the teachers are placed in hard to win but precarious position. In the case with the compulsory attendance laws and ongoing legislation, the teachers only document the daily attendance of the students for each class block or period. It is a simple roster sheet that the teacher bubbles in if the student is absent or tardy. The roster is collected 5 or 10 minutes after the bell rings and the period begins. They are fed into a scan tron type of machine and immediately record and spit out the data. It is a simple task for the computer to perform analysis for irregularities such as students who were in attendance for the first two or three classes and now they are absent in 4th and 5th but back for 6th etc etc......
The issue is not addressed but it is documented and tallied up for the prosecution for non attendance. Where is the attendance officer and the attendance staff, the administrators and most of all the security?
Yet, the parent is blamed for not requiring the child to attend. The child is testing the boundaries and there is no redirection so the behavior continues as the Principals and the Attendance Officers lay and wait for the magic number to file against the student and the parent to initiate prosecution for not complying with the compulsory attendance law. It is generation of extra revenue for the district and it draws praise approval and rewards to the money makers who tally the absences and do nothing the intercede. It is like a speed trap but worse.
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