| The Teaching Establishment is Bad for Our Schoolchildren | Equal Opportunities or Institutionalised Envy | by Frank Ellis

[Frank Ellis]

The Teaching Establishment is Bad for Our Schoolchildren

© Frank Ellis 1999

It is 1999, yet it seems as if 1979 was only yesterday. For, a vast and largely unaccountable bureaucracy still wields enormous power over the destinies of our schoolchildren. Wilfully blind to the failures of “progressive” education, teachers’ training colleges and educational theorists continue to churn out the latest fads dressed in scientoid jargon. In this unholy task, they are aided and abetted by far too many teachers and lecturers in colleges of further education and universities, the majority of whom are members of the other powerful educationally-related bureaucracy, the teachers’ unions. In the longevity of these vested interests and their ability to resist change there is an eerie reminder of the Soviet communist party.

Education was a failure of the Thatcher and Major governments. To be fair, there were more pressing items on the agenda: winning the Cold War; taming the unions; privatization; and winning the Falklands and Gulf Wars. The trouble is that political victories are not the same thing as cultural victories. As Justice Robert Bork points out in Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline: ‘Even when conservative political leaders have the votes, liberal cultural leaders operate and exercise influence where votes do not count. However many political victories conservatives may produce, they cannot attack modern liberalism in its fortresses.’ Or perhaps one might say that they can, but that it is not easy. No matter, education is one such left-liberal fortress whose walls do have to be knocked down if our cultural degeneration is to be arrested and reversed.

Destroying seeds of our future: SA's Welfare State of Moral Degeneration & Teenage Pregnancy & Educ. Mediocrity Tsunami

Destroying seeds of our future

We tolerate an education system that robs our children of opportunities, writes Mamphela Ramphele

Mar 5, 2011 11:42 PM
Mamphela Ramphele, Sunday Times

Successful societies focus on ensuring that future generations perform better than past and present ones. The crisis of underperformance of our education and training system lies at the heart of the growth of inequality, continuing poverty and dependence on welfare transfers.

We have descended into an unsustainable situation, with 15 million welfare grant recipients supported by six million taxpayers. The majority of these welfare transfers are child grants extended to those under the age of 18. Child grants amount to R35.6-billion - 16% of the social protection budget allocation, in 2011, of R146.9-billion.

Some analysts are warning that our society is being hit by a teenage pregnancy tsunami. The Times reported recently that, in Gauteng alone, 5000 schoolgirls are preparing to give birth in 2011. For every age cohort of 1.5 million starting school each year, just over 500000 end up sitting for final year examinations. Less than 70% of these candidates get a high school diploma - of which only 20% are good enough to give the pupil access to higher education.

Crazy Like a Fox: One Principal's Triumph in the Inner City

Crazy Like a Fox: One Principal's Triumph in the Inner City; By Dr. Ben Chavis, Carey Blakely [*Amazon**Kalahari*]

I used to live in the Oakland ghetto, I was the only white woman stupid enough to do so, for the surrounding five blocks. At first my neighbours left me alone, cause they thought I was an undercover cop. After my neighbours got used to me, they asked me 'What's a white bitch doing living in the ghetto?" I said, "Saving up money to get the fuck out of here; whats a black nigger doing living in the ghetto?". Everyone was silent... While most of my neigbhours spent the little they earned on alcohol and drugs; I saved mine, and left the ghetto. They are still there. Luckily for the few who want their kids to get out of the Oakland ghetto, there is the tough love, straight talk express no excuses, no victim stories, just hard work and discipline, of Dr. Ben Chavis; whose book Crazy Like a Fox, begins like this:

Before I became principal, people called American Indian Public Charter School the zoo. … The students smoked cigarettes, fought, drank, and broke beer and liquor bottles on Magee Avenue, the road lining the school. There were old, dingy mattresses nearby where they had sex. A staff member allegedly sold drugs to the students, some of whom snuck into a tool shed on campus to smoke pot. Students threw water balloons off the roof and computers out the class windows.

Crazy Like the Fox is described as:

The inspiring true story of one man's determination to make a difference- and the school he changed forever.

"If you act like a winner, you'll be treated like a winner. If you act like a fool, you'll be treated like a fool."

This is the golden rule set forth by Dr. Ben Chavis, the highly unorthodox principal of Oakland, California's American Indian Public Charter School, which was hailed as an "education miracle" by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger after it was transformed from a failing "nuisance" into one of the best public middle schools in the nation.

This is the story of how one man, in daring to be different, effected such stunning change. With his rigorous, no-nonsense approach, Dr. Ben Chavis debunks the myth that poor, minority, inner-city schools have little chance at academic excellence. Focusing on back-to-basics ideals, he has created a structured educational model that, combined with the enthusiasm of his students and teachers, delivers astounding results.

Nine Assumptions of Schooling & Twenty-one Facts the Institution Would Rather Not Discuss ...

By John Taylor Gatto
www.johntaylorgatto.com


John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year and the author, most recently, of The Underground History of American Education.

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling; By John Taylor Gatto [*Amazon**Kalahari*]

I'll start off bluntly by giving you some data I'd be shocked if you already know. A few simple facts, all verifiable, which by their existence call into question the whole shaky edifice of American government compulsion schooling from kindergarten through college and its questionable connection with the job market.

The implications of this data are quite radical so I'm going to take pains to ground it in the most conservative society on earth, the mountain world of Switzerland. You all remember Switzerland: that's where people put their money when they really want it to be really safe.

The Swiss just like us believe that education is the key to their national success, but that's where our similarity ends. In 1990 about 60% of American secondary school graduates enrolled in college, but only 22% did in Switzerland; in America almost l00% of our kids go to high school or private equivalents, but only a little over a fifth of the Swiss kids do. And yet the Swiss per capita income is the highest of any nation in the world and the Swiss keep insisting that virtually everyone in their country is highly educated!

70% of Law graduates ‘barely able to read’; 70% Black matrics ‘functionally illiterate’

Feb 22, 2010 11:17 PM
By Andile Ndlovu, Sunday Times

Some of South Africa's law graduates have been so badly educated that they can barely count, operate a computer, or read and write in English.

That's what some experts said in support of an investigation by the Council on Higher Education on the effectiveness of the Bachelor of Law degree which, they say, does not prepare students for the profession's demands.

The four-year LLB degree previously took five years to complete, but 12 years ago the Department of Justice reduced it to four years to accommodate previously disadvantaged matrics, allowing them to complete the course and save a year's tuition fees.

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling; By John Taylor Gatto [*Amazon**Kalahari*]

Nic Swart from the Law Society of South Africa said the situation was "a great concern".

"There are certainly graduates who come out prepared for practice, but the greatest concern is that many have extreme difficulty in writing properly. One of our tasks is to teach students to draft legal documents, but we find that they struggle to do that in English," he said.

"We were also commissioned by the University of Cape Town to do research with their students, and we found that 70% of them couldn't calculate even simple tasks. They emerged without the ability to research legal documents or use a computer and the Internet."

Do Sowetho kids need Blackwash Black Consciousness; or Crazy Like a Chavis' Discipline Tough Love?

Crazy Like a Fox: One Principal's Triumph in the Inner City; By Dr. Ben Chavis, Carey Blakely [*Amazon**Kalahari*]

I used to live in the Oakland ghetto, I was the only white woman stupid enough to do so, for the surrounding five blocks. At first my neighbours left me alone, cause they thought I was an undercover cop. After my neighbours got used to me, they asked me 'What's a white bitch doing living in the ghetto?" I said, "Saving up money to get the fuck out of here; whats a black nigger doing living in the ghetto?". Everyone was silent... While most of my neigbhours spent the little they earned on alcohol and drugs; I saved mine, and left the ghetto. They are still there. Luckily for the few who want their kids to get out of the Oakland ghetto, there is the tough love, straight talk express no excuses, no victim stories, just hard work and discipline, of Dr. Ben Chavis; whose book Crazy Like a Fox, begins like this:

Before I became principal, people called American Indian Public Charter School the zoo. … The students smoked cigarettes, fought, drank, and broke beer and liquor bottles on Magee Avenue, the road lining the school. There were old, dingy mattresses nearby where they had sex. A staff member allegedly sold drugs to the students, some of whom snuck into a tool shed on campus to smoke pot. Students threw water balloons off the roof and computers out the class windows.

Crazy Like the Fox is described as:

The inspiring true story of one man's determination to make a difference- and the school he changed forever.

"If you act like a winner, you'll be treated like a winner. If you act like a fool, you'll be treated like a fool."

This is the golden rule set forth by Dr. Ben Chavis, the highly unorthodox principal of Oakland, California's American Indian Public Charter School, which was hailed as an "education miracle" by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger after it was transformed from a failing "nuisance" into one of the best public middle schools in the nation.

This is the story of how one man, in daring to be different, effected such stunning change. With his rigorous, no-nonsense approach, Dr. Ben Chavis debunks the myth that poor, minority, inner-city schools have little chance at academic excellence. Focusing on back-to-basics ideals, he has created a structured educational model that, combined with the enthusiasm of his students and teachers, delivers astounding results.