Time for Thorns

Just in case the clips of school children being taught to sing praises to obama,   now you have a new target — the enviro-Nazis.     Paul Chesser at American Spectator has a  post with all the info and a creepy clip.

If I had children,  I would home-school them.    As it is,  I pester the local school board offices with questions,  and go to meetings when I can.   You should too,  because the liberals/progressives are rooted  deep into the education system.    And there are many schools with administrators who will be fooled by all the smooth prose and have not the slightest idea what they are actually getting.

There’s a new study showing that certified teachers don’t educate children any better than the child’s parents can,  and in some instances may actually be harmful.     While there are certainly parents who are themselves incapable of being educated,  on the whole I think the study is correct,  particularly  in light of the fact that government-run schools have become little more than  day care and child services centers.

I can say truthfully that my own father taught me far more than I ever learned in any school,   and my mother began encouraging me to read at an early age.    She succeeded,  so well that I read far above my grade level in the first grade,  which meant I spent a considerable portion of my school career bored silly.

Read this article, and try telling yourself it couldn’t happen here.  It already has in a few places.    This is what European democratic socialism turns citizens into.

In fact, I am surprised only by the fact that some of the bystanders actually were prepared to help at all, even if they weren’t prepared to ignore the police.

Is this where you want to end up?    Is this what you want to end up being?    Well, this is the destination envisioned by His Oneness.   Your children will be dressed in uniforms and told what public service, er, good works, to perform by the federal government.    If you run a business — any business — you will be told not only the minimum you must pay, but the maximum you may pay.  We are already regulated half to death.

The liberals mean to turn us all into sheep, obedient but dumb, which is why I laugh whenever any of them claims to want a first class educational system.    They’ve worked tirelessly for over 40 years to take it from your grandparents being able to read a First Year McGuffey’s Reader in the first grade, to your parents struggling to do so in the second, to you maybe conquering it in the 4th grade,  to your children being lucky to manage it by the 8th.    And there are more than a few inner city high schools where the graduating seniors would stumble through it.

Sit back on your haunches and do nothing, and you will be like the acquiescent British sheeple, except that you won’t have big soccer matches to vent your spleen at.

Remember campaign-Obama touting public education?    Or First Lady Michelle’s little speech to the Education Department,  lavishing praise on them for being such a help to her  –  never mind that it mostly didn’t exist when she was a student?    Remember the couple’s high-flown rhetoric about the importance of school choice,  and voucher systems?

Well, no, because there wasn’t any praise of school choice or vouchers.     It mystifies me why Democrats never suffer for their pretense to care about students,  when their sole interest in education is how much money teachers’ unions are willing to pony up for elections,  and how many volunteers they can provide.

The current $410 billion budget bill has a lovely poison pill, provided by Sen. Dick Durbin  (D-IL),  which would allow the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program to die unless Congress re-authorizes it.  Read the details.

His Oneness has made no comment on the fact that his party will,  by doing NOTHING,  force 2 of his own daughters’ classmates to leave Sidwell for the horrors of  the D.C.  public school system.    Will he be bold enough to rescue Sarah and James Parker  –  and thousands just like them  –  for whom voucher programs represent a helping hand up the ladder of opportunity?

I’m betting he won’t.    After all,  it should,  in his eyes,  be up to the government to determine how well you succeed in life,  not your own efforts, unless,  of course,  you have made it into the elite section.  Vouchers represent an unfair advantage over the millions of students suffering in government schools,  which are now too often  nothing more than day care centers and social service providers.

The rich and the elite will always be able to obtain better arrangements,  but the rest must join the collective.   You must learn only what the government determines you should,  since an uneducated,  uninformed citizenry is far less likely to ask awkward questions,  much less take inconvenient actions.

UPDATE:  Education Secretary, Arne Duncan,  is against vouchers, but suddenly claims to wish to save this one program,   conveniently providing cover for his boss to be of at least 2 different minds.

Bill Kristol points out the obvious, that Obama is not a  war president.

On his first outing to a joint session of Congress,  it’s odd Obama barely mentioned foreign policy.    Once again,  I find His Oneness to be a curiously detached President.    When he wants to appear passionate about something,  he simply speaks louder and makes additional gestures.    It’s all theater, isn’t it?

Much to my astonishment, MSNBC did  some fact-checking on The Speech.

I found the text of Gov. Jindal’s response fine,  but the delivery was off.    Granted, it’s hard to follow a presidential speech,  but he’s capable of much,  much better.

I forgot to mention that His Oneness claimed America invented the automobile.    The earliest ancestor was made by the French, the more modern one by the Germans.    We deserve credit for mass production and affordability.

He also said the transcontinental railroad was built during our Civil War,   more properly called the War Between the States.    The Late Unpleasantness ended in 1865,  which is when construction of the railroad began.

I am reminded yet again that this man,  widely claimed to be brilliant and well-educated,  repeatedly displays either an astonishing ignorance of history or a total failure to comprehend it.    I lean towards the latter,  but find it very troubling in any event.

His self-confidence is that of the true believer.    He’s unruffled that none of his high-tech whiz kids did a basic fact check on the Net.    He is deeply anti-business,  holding that government should direct all health care and all education.    How could he presume that the same programs which have failed everywhere else will be made to work by a government  which has long botched Medicaid and Medicare?    This isn’t confidence,  but arrogance,   and it’s typical of the socialist mindset.

And that is another reason why I say that the stimulus bill achieved Obama’s real goal, which was not to rescue the economy.    Nor do I believe the tax troubles of Geithner,  Daschle and others were unknown to him  –  they were simply unimportant.

For those wondering why a stimulus package includes a big chunk for education, the Flypaper blog has the simplest, most concise summation of The One’s education strategy:

http://www.edexcellence.net/flypaper/index.php/2009/01/the-obama-education-strategy-hire-the-reformers-bail-out-the-states-buy-off-the-unions/

Kiss ANY ed reform good-bye!

Arne Duncan, yet another Harvard grad,  seems to have an acceptable background for an Education Secretary, but he is a product of Chicago.  Lest we forget, Obama and Bill Ayers spent huge amounts of money on “education” in Chicago, and the public school system went steadily downward.

Obama  employed his campaign rhetoric on education, which rings as hollow now as it did then.  Do you believe he’s going to buck the teachers’ unions or the educrats, much less demand that children actually be taught real math and science and history instead of the junk they’re fed now?

Most troubling is Obama’s litany that college is not affordable enough, and all children should be able to attend college.  Statistics show colleges habitually raise costs to absorb any increase in the cheap loans and grants Congress keeps pushing to students.  Universities might stop providing day spas and other amenities which have nothing to do with learning if the government spigot were throttled back.

A wise man once said that a society which does not value its plumbers as much as it does its philosophers is doomed.  Hmm…

UPDATE:  I knew Duncan had to have a problem — turns out he recommended a school for gays.

http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/obama_duncan_gay_school/2008/12/16/162561.html