Publick Edjukatione

[apothanein kerdos]

So, the fun things I've learned since I've been teaching since August:

FDR was elected 4 times IN SPITE OF the 22nd Amendment (this little tid bit was announced by a history teacher)

The Cold War was an ice age (this was according to an entire history class of freshmen...it wasn't one student...NONE OF THEM knew what the Cold War was)

What's the Holocaust? (asked by 5 students in a different history class.....of JUNIORS!)

Was Shakespeare gay cause he sold Avon [a makeup product]? (asked my sophomores)

These are regular ed students, not special ed....at an affluent suburban high school.....

[Knight of Christ]

LOL well i can't say much about the trtig class sence math has never been my strong suite. But as for the rest of it espicealy history, man how dum can people get?

You know i was never an strate A student and I was never in an advance class (infact for a short time i was in speical ed becouse of my learning disabilty) But even I could have answerd such simple questions as that.

[Pipit]

I think I know the reason why some of the students aren't just that bright. Look at the watered down misinformation found in text books.

These are things that have been found in text books approved for use in school:

Americans dropped the Atomic bomb... during the Korean War.

That the Plains Indians unprovokedly attacked peaceful American settlers (no mention of how the Indians where treated)

That the Americans won the War of 1812. (Hey... the best the Americans did was raid Toronto. The British and Canadians did better by burning down parts of Washington, including some of the White House! The war was a draw)

That Russia did not fight in World War One.

That Ford invented the automobile.

That birds migrate north for the winter (maybe in the southern equator and their winter... but this was refering to north american birds... and it was repeated a few times!)

and there are others... many others.

Of course, much else is dumbed down, not fully explained if even partly correct in its explaination. So no wonder we have students asking if the Iron Curtain was really made out of iron, and what the holocaust was. And sadly, it doesn't look like things are going to get much 'smarter' any time soon....

[IreneM]

more and more are home schooling just so they can give their kids a good education

In Christ

IreneM

[apothanein kerdos]

The problem is with the schools, specifically the boards and administrations, that hire coaches and place them in a class that they are underqualified to teach. None of the advanced classes have coaches as teachers, these teachers are dedicated solely to aiding the students' growth. Problem is, by the time they get to that point, they've been dumbed down that its not even worth it.

As for what you found in the text books, I wish I could say that's just a rumor found in e-mails. Unfortunately it's mostly true. The text books I've read show Custard as a hero (even though he was in the middle of a genocidal campaign) that Manifest Destiny was an amazing concept and very pure (even though it lead to war with Mexico and the subsequent killings against Native Americans), that America won WWI (even though the British had broken the stalemate...and granted American involvement accelerated the war substantially), and a whole host of other misinformations. All of the history books stop at 1945, do not cover the Holocaust, the Cold War, the Vietnam Conflict, the Korean Conflict, Desert Storm (remember, most high schoolers were born during Desert Storm, so it is history), or anything else. Even the WWII section is utterly small though, in my opinion, it is America's finest hour (as hegomonic as that sounds, it is United States history and that was our finest hour). Yet no mention of the big battles or the events that occured. WWII, by reading these text books, began with Pearl Harbor, turned towards the American side at D-Day (which to the average High School student, they can't name the date [June 6, 1944]), and ended with the atomic bomb over Japan. Suprisingly enough they treat the atomic bomb as an evil and unneeded attack...but they ignore the fact that minimal estimates had 500,000 US soldiers dying in a land invasion and 5 million Japanese civilians. The number of those that died in the initial blast and the subsequent years that followed pale in comparison to the number of dead had we invaded. Yet the text books ignore this.

And people wonder why those around the world think Americans are stupid...we may not be now and that stereotype may be unfai....but we certainly are raising a generation that fits that stereotype.

[Pipit]

It is sad, especially regarding History, that we are losing our depth of knowledge. It seems the more we are exposed to and know and experience, the less we want to learn about it or pass it on to the next generation. And this is a big problem. As a generation grows up not knowing the heritage of the previous generations, it fails to respect the lessons of history that the previous generations learned through struggle and perseverence. And when it fails to respect those lessons, sadly, it will most likely find itself either unable to rationally come to terms with world events that effect them--such as wars, economic fallout, political upheavels, genocide--or they will become the perpetrators themselves of such things.

Winston Churchill was right in his philosophy, and history proves it right. The further back we look into history, the better can understand the future. And the more we understand the past, the better we are to safeguard present from follies.

One only needs to look at Isreael in the Book of Judges to see what can happen when a generation forgets and neglects the heritage it is part of. And we are seeing a similar development here in North America. Maybe not a spiritual neglect (though one certainly sees that!), but a neglect of the lessons already learned.

"We have become smart, but we have destroyed all knowledge and wisdom in order to do so..."

[DaniJ87]

I was homeschooled, but all of my textbooks covered everything all the way up to president Clinton.

Here is a page where you can find out about all the rules about textbooks in CA... politically correct heaven. No wonder kids don't know anything from public schools!

http://www.homeschoolchristian.com/Features/BannedWords.html

[kodischild]

I had a freshman explain to me that the civil war was between the British and the Red Coats.

My uncle teaches at a major university. He says many of his 3rd and 4th year students don't know what he is talking about when he mentions sentence fragments, prepositions, or split infinitives. Now I'm not saying those are things I use everyday, but I would think a kid who has been in college for years would at least know what those things are!

I think it is so sad that so many of these kids have potential that they will never use because of the school system. I think it is even more sad how many of the spec ed kids come out not even being able to write their own addresses because the teachers have given up on them. Some of the special ed kids just sit and play video games at school because the teachers assume the kids will never make anything of themselves anyway.

[RustyAngeL]

I worked with a girl a few years back who didn't even know who or what the Pope was. She was 34 at the time.

[yomotalking]

more and more are home schooling just so they can give their kids a good education

In Christ

IreneM

I'm one of the Home-schooled Kids!