Reforming the Republic IV: Educate; Do Not Enstupidate[*]

By: Repair_Man_Jack (Diary)  |  May 9th at 11:00 AM  | 

To make American Secondary Schools worth a monkey’s butt-wipe again, we are just going to have to leave some children behind. Right now, they are yet another precursor of the impending Big Government Chernobyl that could very well destroy American Society as we now enjoy living in it. Implementing a new Common Core of unenforceable and utterly ignored standards is not going to fix this difficulty. While the Obama Administration’s ideal of “fewer, higher and clearer” standards sounds like one of the smarter ideas that this man’s administration has come up with, it will not do the job because it addresses the wrong problem. It is not the content of the standards that is the biggest problem with our schools. The problem is that we lack the institutional courage to actually enforce any standards at all.

What American Secondary Schools need to enact is what I’ll call the Tyler Durden reforms. This is based on the line from the novel Fight Club where Tyler Durden teaches his followers that they are not unique and beautiful snowflakes. If we continue to tell our children that they are special and immune from consequence, they will eventually become seduced into holding that ultimately self-defeating belief. This fatal conceit will lead these children to have an overweening sense of entitlement and a minimal skill-set of abilities that any logical employer would want to hire.

Here’s what my proposed Tyler Durden Standards would look like.

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Education: Just Throw More Money At It!

By: Breeanne Howe (Diary)  |  October 25th at 04:08 PM  | 

In the last Presidential debate, slated to be a foreign policy debate, President Obama made numerous attempts to shift the focus to education.  Yet, his record on education hasn’t improved the situation, and the policies he has quietly put in place only add more to the debt the nation’s children will have to pay. The controversial No Child Left Behind education law has been completely | Read More »

This Week in Washington – October 17, 2011

By: Brian Darling (Diary)  |  October 17th at 11:55 AM  | 

The Senate is in session this week working on a package of appropriations bills called the “Minibus.”  The House is out this week, but will be meeting in pro forma session to block the Obama Administration from making recess appointments.  No Child Left Behind is starting to wind through the committee process in the Senate.

The George Bush-Ted Kennedy Chickens Come Home to Roost in Atlanta

By: Erick Erickson (Diary)  |  July 7th at 11:33 AM  | 

One of the worst trends in modern public education in the United States is using a child’s performance on a standardized test to assess whether a teacher is doing his or her job and whether a school is performing or not performing. The trend was growing before George Bush and Ted Kennedy sat down and drafted No Child Left Behind in the early part of | Read More »