Thursday, January 28, 2021

FIGHTING FOR REALITY

This is probably going to be all over the place. Maybe I can get a little more focussed later. Ideas have been bouncing around for awhile and then this hits the news. More and worse information is coming out about freshman congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia. Information that should have seen the light of day before the election. Don't know if that would have made a difference. False flag operations? Space lasers controlled by the Rothchilds used to start the Camp Fire in California. And she's been assigned to the house Education and Labor committee. This should be interesting. 

 I want to float something here. It's true that our education system is a patchwork that needs help. Heckin some places it's almost on life support. Unlike many countries public education is controlled at the local level. Part of me believes that's a good idea. And I grew up in a simpler time. In an age before computers and pocket calculators. You know they used to call them electronic slide rules. A lot easier to use than the real thing. I wonder if math books still have log tables at the back. And if there is anyone out there who has no idea what I'm talking about. 

I went to a pretty decent public school. But the schools had almost no competition. We had two TV channels. And the set was off half the time. I had a library card and the school libraries. I can remember when NBC first started a national news program. It lasted fifteen minutes. Fifteen whole minutes. Of course phones were still land lines, no satellites, long distance still went through operators, almost no national radio coverage, most FM stations were low powered. 

Fast forward. Satellite radio, the internet, youtube, Fox, channels I've heard of, never watched and don't intend to. OK. Say between the age of two and five, before kindergarten, at about twelve hours per day a kid is awake. hopefully, and paying attention say thirteen thousand hours. If your folks are playing Fox most of the time. talking about Fox, whatever that's a lot of potential exposure before you hit the public school system. Those little minds are already being bent in a certain direction. Throw in a fundamentalist church background. 

Heck my sophomore Bio class circa 1965 did not discuss evolution. Mr. Owens said we'd get to it in the voluntary summer session. We didn't talk about it then. Either. We didn't really discuss the scientific method until junior Chemistry and Chem was an elective. Even fewer of us took the serior science classes. Still wish I'd tried Physics, took the senior science class, but the math probably would have given me fits. 

So where am I going with this? Oakridge was on the quarter sytem. Summers off. Classes lasted fifty minutes. Over three quarters that is just under 175 hours over the whole year for any class time for science, math, history. Out of all the other hours in the day. We barely got to WWII much less discussed the bloodier details like the Holocaust. World History, so called, barely made it out of the western hemisphere. Much of what I did learn, I learned on my own. 

Church? I was raised Methodist and barely learned much of anything about the Methodists. Next to nothing about anything else. Heck I was raised in a congregation so detached we didn't do Advent or Lent. I would have noticed. I sang in the choir for a lot of years. But, this was and is Oregon. One of the five least "churched" states in the union. I have absolutely no idea what it would have been like to attend a public school in the south. Except that would probably have been segregated. 

What the hell do we do? Heck trying to set up a Common Core of standardas a few years ago put more states than I want to think about into a frenzy. For starters dump the home school movement. I literally did see workbooks in the so called Christian education section of the bookstore. Complete with Adam, Eve, and the dinosaurs. I went and sat in car while mom and sis found the Christmas supplies they were looking for. 

How can reality fight against a system that is almost guaranteed to cut it off at the knees. And demand that the taxpayers bleed funds from the public schools to pay for it. How can children resist being brainwashed before they even know it's happening?

1 comment:

Lisa :-] said...

Home schooling is not a generic term. My sister attempted to home school her kids 40 years ago, and it was a disaster. This was when home schooling was a way for Christians to keep their children from being exposed to the heretical teachings of public schools.

Fast forward 40 years, and home schooling is, in many cases, a way for parents to get their kids a decent education which is not offered in public schools. Public schools have become little more than daycare for parents oppressed by our lame-ass "consumer economy." Hell, some of the stuff I learned in grammar school isn't taught until university nowadays, if it's taught at all. The school system in this country has gone steeply downhill for the past several decades, and is largely responsible for the prevailing ignorance and even anti-intellectualism that feeds the crazy, violent right wing. If I had kids today, I'd definitely find somewhere to educate them that was NOT the public school system.