AMERICA Has Been Sold To The Highest Bidder – The Tortoise

Pro 14:34 NASB – Righteousness exalts a nation, But sin is a disgrace to any people.

One of  Aesop’s Fables: The Tortoise and the Hare

Once upon a time there was a hare who, boasting how he could run faster than anyone else, was forever teasing tortoise for its slowness. Then one day, the irate tortoise answered back: “Who do you think you are? There’s no denying you’re swift, but even you can be beaten!” The hare squealed with laughter.  “Beaten in a race? By whom? Not you, surely! I bet there’s nobody in the world that can win against me, I’m so speedy. Now, why don’t you try?” Annoyed by such bragging, the tortoise accepted the challenge. A course was planned, and the next day at dawn they stood at the starting line. The hare yawned sleepily as the meek tortoise trudged slowly off. When the hare saw how painfully slow his rival was, he decided, half asleep on his feet, to have a quick nap. “Take your time!” he said. “I’ll have forty winks and catch up with you in a minute.”

 The hare woke with a start from a fitful sleep and gazed round, looking for the tortoise. But the creature was only a short distance away, having barely covered a third of the course. Breathing a sigh of relief, the hare decided he might as well have breakfast too, and off he went to munch some cabbages he had noticed in a nearby field. But the heavy meal and the hot sun made his eyelids droop. With a careless glance at the tortoise, now halfway along the course, he decided to have another snooze before flashing past the winning post. And smiling at the thought of the look on the tortoise’s face when it saw the hare speed by, he fell fast asleep and was soon snoring happily. The sun started to sink, below the horizon, and the tortoise, who had been plodding towards the winning post since morning, was scarcely a yard from the finish. At that very point, the hare woke with a jolt. He could see the tortoise a speck in the distance and away he dashed. He leapt and bounded at a great rate, his tongue lolling, and gasping for breath. Just a little more and he’d be first at the finish. But the hare’s last leap was just too late, for the tortoise had beaten him to the winning post. Poor hare! Tired and in disgrace, he slumped down beside the tortoise who was silently smiling at him.

“Slowly does it every time!” he said.

New York Students Are Struggling, Reading Test Scores Show!

This is an article headline that was run today in The New York Times. I wanted to share it because I immediately thought about the information I found when researching how the education system in America had changed from its Bible based beginnings. After reading this article, I couldn’t help but think about the corruption that goes on in this arena. Back in 1955, a man by the name of Rudolf Flesch, wrote a book entitled, Why Johnny Can’t Read. What follows is just a snippet of what he discovered…

Only in the U.S., reported Flesch, is there any remedial-reading problem. In Britain, kindergarten children read Three Little Pigs; in Germany, second-grade pupils can read aloud (without necessarily understanding all the words) almost anything in print. By contrast, average U.S. third-graders have a reading mastery of only 1,800 words. Why is the U.S. so far behind? Says Flesch: “We have decided to forget that we write with letters, and [instead] learn to read English as if it were Chinese.”

“Quack, Quack.” Since the 1920s, most American schoolchildren have been taught to memorize the “appearance” of words, one after another, like Chinese characters, without reference to the sounds of the individual letters that make up each word. By this “word method,” largely developed at teachers colleges and schools of education, children must plow through endless illustrated stories, in which words are repeated over and over. How can the teaching of reading be improved? In essence, Author Flesch urges a return to the old phonetic method still used in Europe.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,807107,00.html#ixzz0v0qsPZmn

This is what Leximo had to say about Reading Teacher Preparation Courses offered in our Higher Halls of Learning.

 

Examples abound. One reading course syllabus says, “Knowledge is … constructed by individual learners through social interaction … learning occurs within a collaborative community.” Another says, “Reading and writing are acquired through social collaborative interactions and life experiences.” A popular reading textbook advocates “classrooms that allow children to design their own route to further knowledge about print; the role of the teacher is supportive assistant.”  (Did you read that, social collaborative interactions and life experiences? We can thank John Dewey and his Humanist Manifesto for that. That is why Johnny can’t read he is not being taught how to).

According to the professionals, then, reading teachers don’t really have to teach reading. Like cheerleaders, they can lend sis-boom-ba support while kids magically teach themselves to read through “collaboration” and “social interaction” and “life experiences”—in much the same way they teach each other to reproduce bodily noises with their armpits.
SOURCE: http://blog.leximo.org/2009/03/why-johnny-still-cant-read.html

 

The sad part of this is that taxpaying parents are funding this slide towards social collaborative interactions and life experiences, unaware.  Why is it that the cost of educating our children has quadrupled since 1955 when we found out Johnny couldn’t read, and according to the New York Times, he still can’t read. I have a daughter who excelled in school. I homeschooled her for grades 7,8, and 9. She returned to public school for 10-12 grade. She was an honor roll student in the Public and Homeschool, she is in the honor society, received many awards for high school achievement. But, when she got to college…she said mom, I feel that my education did not prepare me for this.

I Thought About the American Educational System,Pt.2

We already know from (Pt. 1), that the Puritans displayed a special eagerness to provide for education and literacy as bulwarks against religious and cultural decline. However, throughout the colonial period, provisions for schooling remained very much a matter of local, and somewhat haphazard, arrangements. The belief that public, or free, schools and pauper schools were synonymous terms, and that such schools were only for children of the poor, long hampered the acceptance of the idea that publicly supported schools could and should exist for all children, regardless of social class, gender, religion, ethnicity, or country of origin.

The coming of the American Revolution and the influence of Enlightenment ideas began to challenge the laissez-faire doctrines of the colonial period, however. Thomas Jefferson felt that the thought of every man teaching is own children would only work for the economic elite, but would not translate to the masses. In 1779 Jefferson proposed A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge. Jefferson’s general plan envisioned public support for secondary schools and scholarships for the best and brightest students to attend the College of William and Mary. But the foundation of his system was basic education for the mass of the population.

However, in spite of the pleas and schemes of these and other “founding fathers,” the new nation ended the eighteenth century with a patchwork pattern of schools, most of which were conducted under the auspices of private schoolmasters or sectarian religious groups. Schools essentially served private purposes and educational attainment reflected the religious, racial, class, and gender differences in society. Even so, the educational requirements for work and a productive life for most people in the latter half of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century were modest, regardless of one’s background. Skills and knowledge were often learned through one’s labor within the family or through apprenticeship. However, the economic realities and social conditions that ushered in the nineteenth century prompted renewed calls for expanded and better organized approaches to the education of the public.

By 1900 public education was so radically different and far-reaching that the common school movement of the 1800s is widely regarded as the most significant change or reform in nineteenth century American education. This dramatic change was precipitated by a number of factors, including industrialization and the rise of the factory system; labor unrest; the spread of merchant capitalism; the expansion and economic influence of banks and insurance companies; transportation advances brought on by steam travel on inland and coastal waterways and by railroad; burgeoning population growth (including the arrival of large numbers of Roman Catholic immigrants who challenged the social and cultural norms of the mostly Protestant citizenry); and the westward migration of settlers, many of whom sought to establish the eastern tradition of town schools on the frontier.

Religious division was not the only obstacle to universal acceptance of the doctrine of universal public education. A desire to maintain strict local control over schools put many advocates of statewide organization on the defensive. Intermixed with class, race, and ethnic tensions, demands for local control of schools was–and remains–a hotly contested issue. Opposition to taxation rose as an objection to publicly financed schemes of education during the colonial period, continued to provoke resistance. Related to issues of control and taxation were charges that government involvement in education was a repudiation of liberalism and parental rights. Advocates of this position championed the right of individuals to be left alone and responsible for their own lives.

Political consensus and compromise led state after state to adopt systems of common or public schools by the latter half of the nineteenth century. Although a few southern states had made progress in this direction before the Civil War, it was not until after that conflict that the states that had been in rebellion adopted legally mandated–but racially segregated–systems of public education. In 1855 Massachusetts had become the first state to abolish legal segregation; it took yet another full century for the United States Supreme Court to extend that practice to the entire nation by declaring in the famous Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 that the practice of “separate but equal” was unconstitutional. Other twentieth-century court decisions ended religious practices such as Bible reading and prayer in public schools. The ending of religious practices such as Bible reading and prayer happened in 1963. Religion was therefore inclusive in education in the New Colonies from the first successful colony, Jamestown, in the 17^th century until almost the 21^st century, which would have been 300 years, instead of the actual 263 years; and this is through the forming and establishment of the Independence of the United States of America.

 Source:    http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/1871/Common-School-Movement.html#ixzz0uttJfd38

 

This is what happened to God-centered education: Easily the most important of the NEA’s strategies is that concerning the content of education, for the socialist revolution wanted by the Progressives will have to be carried out by a younger generation indoctrinated in progressive, humanist values. The road to a humanist curriculum began in 1918 with the NEA’s Seven Cardinal Principles which stressed humanist ethical values to replace those of traditional religion. The expulsion of the Bible from the public school did not occur all at once. This writer, who attended the public schools of New York City in the 1930s, remembers hearing the school principal open each weekly assembly with a short passage from the Bible, usually a Psalm. When that practice stopped, is not known.

But the undermining of the Judeo-Christian tradition was well underway when in 1933 John Dewey and 33 other liberal humanists drew up and signed that extraordinary document known as the Humanist Manifesto. It reflected all of the influences of science, evolution, and the new psychology which were reshaping American education. It called for the abandonment of traditional religion and replacing it with a new secular religion better able to accommodate the new moral relativism inherent in a man-centered, godless world. That secular humanism is a religion is easily proven by the Manifesto’s own words:       Source: http://www.sntp.net/education/nea_humanist.htm

 

I also found that there are on record founding/forming fathers who had strong Christian convictions.

Interestingly, Washington’s own contemporaries did not question his Christianity but were thoroughly convinced of his devout faith–a fact made evident in the first-ever compilation of The Writings of George Washington, published in the 1830s.    Source: http://www.christiananswers.net/q-wall/wal-g011.html

“The highest glory of the American Revolution was this; it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.” [July 4th, 1821] John Quincy Adams

“From the day of the Declaration [of Independence]…they [the American people] were bound by the laws of God, which they all, and by the laws of The Gospel they nearly all, acknowledge as the rules of their conduct.” [July 4th, 1821] John Quincy Adams          Source: http://www.eadshome.com/JohnQuincyAdams.htm

James Madison is known as the father of the U.S. Constitution. He was also the fourth President of the United States. He was the primary author of the Bill of Rights and engineered the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Madison believed Christianity to be the foundation upon which a just government must be built. Writing on June 20, 1785, he stated:     Religion [is] the basis and Foundation of Government.

On November 9, 1772, Madison wrote to his close college friend, William Bradford:

A watchful eye must be kept on ourselves lest while we are building ideal monuments of renown and bliss here we neglect to have our names enrolled in the annals of Heaven. 

Source: http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/cdf/onug/madison.html

 

Here is some information on the changes that have taken place in the American Educational System since the Bible and Prayer were ruled out, so to speak.

http://www.inplainsite.org/what_happened_when_the_praying.html

http://heartofwisdom.com/blog/when-prayer-was-taken-out-of-school/

 

 

Notre Dame Has First Black Valedictorian

Notre Dame Has First Black Valedictorian.

“A step for racial equality in education will be taken when a 21-year-old black woman becomes the first valedictorian at the University of Notre Dame this spring.”

I elected to include this story for two reasons, the first being that this is a great accomplishment for Ms. Katie Washington, who obviously is an academic wiz kid. The other reason is that Paul Shepard, the author of this story, said that when this young woman has the title of valedictorian bestowed upon her, it will be a  step toward racial equality in education. Is this person saying that this woman’s achievement is a step toward African-Americans receiving an education equal to that of Caucasian Americans? Is he saying that African-Americans are becoming equal to Caucasian Americans in academic ability? I am not certain about his point. But, I am certain that when a conversation is about African-Americans and anything else, there will be misconceptions. One thing that I have learned is that when the playing field is fair all people can do well.  Perhaps Paul meant that the powers that run our great colleges and universities are realizing that the races are equal in intellectual matters. Once we do away with racial discrimination and bias.

Look at this information that I found at, THE JOURNAL OF BLACKS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

“Invariably, the black student graduation rate for men and women is significantly higher at the nation’s selective colleges and universities. This is to be expected since these students enter college with much stronger academic credentials than is the case for less selective schools.

For many years Harvard University, traditionally one of the nation’s strongest and most dedicated supporters of affirmative action, has produced the highest black student graduation rate of any college or university in the nation. The 2007 data shows Harvard’s black student graduation rate is 96 percent, again the highest among U.S. colleges and universities. The black student graduation rate at Harvard increased by one percentage point this year.

A strong case can be made that a better way of comparing the performance of the nation’s highest-ranked colleges and universities in successfully graduating black students is to examine the difference in the graduation rates between their black and white students. Using this comparison, a high-ranking institution such as Claremont McKenna College in California, which has a black student graduation rate of 85 percent — a figure below many of its peer institutions — nevertheless ranks high on a relative basis because its white student graduation rate of 83 percent is two percentage points lower than the rate for black students.

Many academics and administrators will be surprised to hear that there are in fact a few selective colleges in the United States that report a higher graduation rate for blacks than for whites. Six of the nation’s highest-ranked colleges and universities actually have a higher graduation rate for black students than for white students. According to the latest statistics from Mount Holyoke College, Pomona College, Smith College, Wellesley College, Wake Forest University, and the California Institute of Technology, a black student on these campuses is more likely to complete the four-year course of study and receive a diploma than is a white student. JBHE has not been able to identify the reason for the anomaly that occurs at these five institutions, which is markedly inconsistent with nationwide statistics. But it is interesting to note that three of the six institutions are women’s colleges.

Also encouraging is the fact that the black student graduation rate is identical to the rate for white students at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. This is good news because Vanderbilt has been able to reach racial parity in student graduation rates during a period in which it has greatly increased black enrolments.

At some other high-ranking educational institutions, the difference in black and white graduation rates is very small. Washington University in St. Louis has a 90 percent graduation rate for black students, just one percentage point below its rate for whites. At Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, the white student graduation rate is only one percentage point higher than the rate for blacks, which stands at 88 percent. At Harvard University, Claremont McKenna College, and Macalester College, the racial difference is only two percentage points.

At the Ivy League schools Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and Yale, the black graduation rates are relatively high, and in all instances they are five percentage points or less below the graduation rate for white students. At Penn, Dartmouth, Brown, and Cornell, there is at least a six percentage point racial gap in graduation rates.”

HERE ARE A FEW REASONS WHY BLACK STUDENTS DON’T ALWAYS GRADUATE!

“Why are black graduation rates very strong at some high-ranking institutions and considerably weaker at other top-ranked schools? Here are a few possible explanations:

• Clearly, the racial climate at some colleges and universities is more favorable toward African-Americans than at other campuses. A nurturing environment for black students is almost certain to have a positive impact on black student retention and graduation rates. Although often troubled by racial incidents, Brown University is famous for its efforts to make its campus a happy place for African-Americans. In contrast, the University of California at Berkeley has had its share of racial turmoil in recent years. The small number of black students on campus as a result of the abolition of race-sensitive admissions has caused many African-Americans on campus to feel unwelcome. This probably contributes to the low black student graduation rate at Berkeley.

• Many of the colleges and universities with high black student graduation rates have set in place orientation and retention programs to help black students adapt to the culture of predominantly white campuses. Mentoring programs for black first-year students involving upperclassmen have been successful at many colleges and universities. Other institutions appear to improve graduation rates through strong black student organizations that foster a sense of belonging among the African-American student population. The presence or absence of these programs may have some impact on graduation rates.

• Geographic location unquestionably plays a major role in black student graduation rates. For example, Bates College in Maine is located in a rural area with a very small to negligible black population. The same holds true for Grinnell College in Iowa, Oberlin College in Ohio, and Carleton College in Minnesota. Black student graduation rates at many of these rural schools are lower than at colleges and universities in urban areas.

• The presence of a strong and relatively large core of black students on campus is important. Among the highest-ranked colleges and universities, institutions that tend to have a low percentage of blacks in their student bodies, such as CalTech, Bates, Middlebury, Grinnell, Davidson, Carleton, and Colby, also tend to have lower black student graduation rates. Black students who attend these schools may have problems adjusting to college life in an overwhelmingly white environment. And these schools are less likely to have a large number of black-oriented social or cultural events to make black students feel at home.”