Monday, November 25, 2013

“THE DUMBING OF AMERICA”©

The next Chapter:

Slowly, but surely, the wheels are turning and the American people are learning about the state of their National Education System. The “end-game” being played out has been evident to this observer for quite some time (since 1993). What has eluded me are the actual tactics that have been employed. Now, even those tactics are going to light.

Let me start with a brief re-hashing of my past writing on this subject. I had the opportunity to attend college for a brief time, 1992-1994, to get an Associate’s Degree in an engineering discipline. My degree takes a back seat to my experience with a much younger student body and what I learned were their sort-falls in their educational journey. Much to my amazement, to a man/woman, none of these youngsters could construct a complete thought orally and in writing. Let me just mention that the education afforded me by my parents enabled me to leave even the “brightest” of these students in the dust. I could complete a thought. I could write coherently on the various subjects at hand.
Foe years, I simply shook my head, and wondered what had happened to these poor, unfortunate students. It finally dawned on me that there was something sinister going on behind the educational “curtain”. It wasn’t the Wizard of Oz behind that curtain; it was big business, including Wall St. They were in the process of hijacking our public education system for their own greedy little ends. They obviously wanted to create a Nation of lemmings who would do their bidding with no questions asked.

         Why can't little Johnny  
    do readin', writin', or 'rithmatic?
                                                                                                                                                                                                     
It looks as if this “beast” has grown three heads. One head is concerned with downwardly standardizing the Nation curriculum. The second head is attempting to introduce false competition to our public system. The third head is very busy making certain that private business will be extremely welcoming to the new breed of “dumbed down” graduates. Running through all three of these heads is the tactic of hooking students on the drug they call Student Loans. Now costing a whopping 6.4% interest. These kids will be working the minimum wage until the day they die, and still pass
a remainder  of their student loan debt on to their unsuspecting    
children; who themselves will be shackled to the same loans (most likely at a higher rate of interest than the current 6.4%).

I am not going to get embroiled with quoting statistics. The numbers have already been published, and, by this time, are public knowledge. What I will get embroiled in is calling out those people we currently name as philanthropists to the Nation’s education structure. Watch out for “for-profit” benefactors like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan, Jeffrey Imelt, Jaime Diamond, et alia. These are the folks who seem to be spending a lot of time and money “reforming” our education system. Don’t you be fooled for one second. They are all interested in just how many of your tax dollars they can place in their bank accounts. Take a look very closely at who’s plowing their vast interests into dumbing down (aka standardizing) our National curricula. That wouldn’t be our captains of industry, or the 1%, or the owners of our Nation production, or the money lenders, now would it be?
                                                                                                                                         
                                                          
The theory and practice of Capitalism in its purest form works best when not regulated, or impeded by government regulations, stipulations, mandates, or laws. I sincerely hope this is not where we’re going, but I just get that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that tells me something is going terribly wrong, here. Matt Taibbi and Henry Giroux come as close as you can get to that “voice in the wilderness” crying foul against teaching our children. Look them up, they have a lot to say on this subject.
"If the right-wing billionaires and apostles of corporate power have their way, public schools will become 'dead zones of the imagination,' reduced to anti-public spaces that wage an assault on critical thinking, civic literacy and historical memory." - Henry Giroux, 2013.

Dumbing Down America: The Decline of Education in the US as Seen From Down Under
[Friday, 22 November 2013 09:25, by Niall McLarenTruthout | Op-Ed]
Excerpt: “Social critics regularly blast American public schools as little more than mind-deadening factories designed to propel working class white students into brain-dead jobs and minority students straight into the arms of the prison-industrial complex.”

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