3rd Quarter Report

We are in strange times.  The state of the schools, current affairs, and the economy are so odd, that they beggar description.

School: As I've probably mentioned in previous posts, this year has been a difficult one.  The intellectual curiosity of this crop of 9th graders is at an all time low.  The strange part is that it hasn't been a gradual decline, this year I have seen a cliff like drop of curiosity and academic performance.  I graded an exam as I would have graded an exam in 1998, and the class average, for both sections, was a 54.  I took into account spelling, grammar, content and appropriate answers.  As I do not give multiple choice exams (they have been proven to be useless, and the Power Elite school abolished them years ago), the writing was not only substandard, it showed a lack of awareness of the story we read and the English language.  There were misspellings of the main characters, obvious facts were incorrect, and the cheaters cheated off of someone who had no idea what happened in the story, so the answers all reflected the same incorrect nonsense.  It would be funny if it weren't so tragic.

Additionally, and tellingly, one of my top students told me that "I don't want to offend you, but, well, the reason that we didn't do well, is that, like, the times you were reading the story to us, we were talking because, well, I don't mean to offend you, but the story was boring."  This was told to me by one of the top students in my morning class.  The sad part is threefold, the guise of 'caring' about my feelings, the fact that a 'boring' story is license to talk while the teacher is reading the it to the class, and this was from one of the top students in the class - a young woman with a first class mind.

Current Affairs:  The Boston shooting and its aftermath is difficult to watch.  That a tragic event would be used to turn a major U.S. city and its environs into a tyrannical police state is sad.  The Herd cheers their oppressors as the police lockdown the area to catch - a 19 year old.  Only the online libertarian community and a few conspiracy minded people seem to notice what is transpiring.  I guess the words of a gov't official ring true:  "Never let a good crisis go to waste."  The American Herd, ahistorical and lacking a basic understanding of Human Rights or the Bill of Rights, tolerates scenes like this while they cheer the 'police' for keeping them 'safe'.  The works of Benjamin Franklin, a figure dimly familiar with the average American public school student, ring truer than ever:  "Those who give up their liberty for more security neither deserve liberty nor security.”

The Economy:  The FED continues its operations of printing money, Congress continues to make rules for the people yet immunize itself from harm.  The gold price is crushed, simply hammered in a way that has not been seen in 30 years, and the depositors of Cyprus, the regular people, have their money simply taken from them as a way to pay back banker and government debts.  All the while, the economy is in the tank and the people, who have been trained in such a manner, beg for their overlords to 'do something!'

It is education that solves many of these problems, as the electorate has been schooled to extinction.  The free market, which allows for trial and error, mistakes to be made and then solved, is vilified and laughed at by the Power Brokers.  It's easy for them to maintain a stranglehold on minority wealth and power as they make the rules and regulations, thereby never needing to worry about any pesky little people crawling to the top.  Sometimes, someone breaks through and does this.  It is time to rip the cover off of the Educational Establishment, look at how and what they teach, so we can see how they created this unholy mess we're in now.

This is a good place to start: