Voddie Baucham Ministries

The Continuing Collapse: November 2009

Monday, November 30, 2009

WELCOME TO THE CONTINUING COLLAPSE!

By Bruce N. Shortt, J.D., Ph.D.

Exposing Government Schools: The Youth Ministry of the State Church
of Secular Humanism

November, Anno Domini 2009


"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies."
(Groucho Marx)      Here richly, with ridiculous display,The Politician's corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.
(Hilaire Belloc)

YET ANOTHER REASON WHY YOUR GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS AREN'T "DIFFERENT"

    Disagreeable though it may be, The Continuing Collapse periodically ventures into the precincts where credulous minds are deformed in preparation for becoming highly trained education professionals - schools of "education".

The Continuing Collapse regrets the necessity for these forays, but they are a necessary evil for keeping The Continuing Collapse's readers abreast of the latest developments in government education.

On this particular occasion, The Continuing Collapse was accompanied by two little Collapses, who were required to enter the Heart of Darkness for three hours in order to take a foreign language examination. As The Continuing Collapse and the little Collapses roamed the hallways marveling at the colorful and loathsome folkways of the lavishly funded education establishment, our attention fell upon a bulletin board touting masters and doctoral degree programs in "Social Education".

Apart from marveling at the bulletin board design, which appeared to be intended to appeal to the brighter sort of government middle school students, the little Collapses noted that the Social Education program advertised Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Theodore Adorno, Howard Zinn, and other assorted hard left figures as "foundational thinkers" or otherwise important figures for the program.

Said the little Collapses to The Continuing Collapse, "Why are taxpayers paying for a program that claims to be based on the writings of men who mainly seem to inspire sociopaths and psychopathic mass murders?" To which The Continuing Collapse could only sigh and mumble something about the universities having been captured by the left and that this is one of the reasons why the little Collapses need to be engineers, scientists, mathematicians, or physicians and to CLEP out of anything that looks like a "general education" course.

But I digress. As The Continuing Collapse's readers know, no lie is more robustly repeated by parents and pastors addicted to aid-to-dependent-parents than "our schools are different."

The obvious truth is that meaningful local control disappeared long ago. Federal and state legislators, judges, and bureaucrats have reduced school board members to minor functionaries who run bond elections, choose textbooks from a limited list compiled by the state, pick out the color of the "green" carpets for classrooms, and ask "how high" when government functionaries, the unions, and other special interests ask them to jump.

Often overlooked in discussions of "local control", however, is that the overwhelming majority of teachers hired by school districts arrive with their minds imprinted with a worldview shaped by the very same people who were responsible for the lovely bulletin board that sought to entice students into programs in "Social Education".

Today, the typical new teacher is not only a product of government schools, but his mind has received extensive and relentless additional conditioning to accept implicitly a worldview shaped by the radical leftists who control schools of education and the teachers' unions. That conditioning continues to be reinforced throughout his career by "in service training", professional development courses, graduate study, school policies, and various kinds of "professional" communications.

Yes, even teachers and administrators who attend your church and profess to be Christians have been indoctrinated with this worldview. Moreover, they spend their work weeks teaching curricula and enforcing rules and policies that pour into the minds of children the same anti-Christian worldview that they were indoctrinated with during their time in government school and college.

Christian parents and pastors should stop deceiving themselves. The number of church going, Christ professing teachers and administrators who are witnessing for Christ to all of their students and who are forthrightly pointing out the deceit and false values in school curricula and policies is infinitesimal. The vast majority are, wittingly or unwittingly, enablers of a corrupt institution that is destroying our children, our families, our churches, our culture, and our country.

But bear in mind these double-minded government school employees are far less culpable for the spiritual, moral, and intellectual destruction of Christian children than the parents who institutionalize their children in government schools and the pastors who refuse to teach about this issue because they fear the government school tares in the congregation.

AND NOW, BACK TO TALES FROM THE
GOVERNMENT SCHOOL CRYPT...
Let us begin with a review of The First Fundamental Truth of Government Education:
The Government education system is above all about maintaining or increasing the money flowing to education special interest groups and providing certain leftist groups with privileged ideological access to children.
Despite the evidence all around us, The Continuing Collapse occasionally receives communications excoriating The Continuing Collapse for suggesting that our highly trained education professionals are something less than paladins of learning and good character.
Here is yet more therapy for the terminally naive.

THIS SORT OF THING USED TO BE ILLEGAL....GRADES FOR SALE.
Selling candy didn't raise much money last year, so a Goldsboro middle school is selling grades.
A $20 donation to Rosewood Middle School will get a student 20 test points - 10 extra points on two tests of the student's choosing. That could raise a B to an A, or a failing grade to a D.
Susie Shepherd, the principal, said a parent advisory council came up with the idea, and she endorsed it. She said the council was looking for a new way to raise money....
Shepherd, the Rosewood principal, said her school needs more technology. She said any money raised would help buy digital cameras for the school's computer lab and a high-tech blackboard.
Shepherd said no donations have been collected so far, as far as she knows.
Kids have until Nov. 20 to get their money in.
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/education/story/185460.html
Could there be a more perfect example of the The First Fundamental Truth of Government Education and of the implementation of the "transvaluation of values" (getting people to call good "evil" and evil "good") that Gramscians such as Herbert Marcuse have so successfully urged?

IT IS ALL ABOUT MONEY, AND THERE IS NEVER ENOUGH MONEY

From Michigan we have a familiar story: Too many snouts and not enough "food" in the government school trough.
GRAND RAPIDS -- Gov. Jennifer Granholm told Kent County educators Friday the state's school financing system "clearly is not working" and said lawmakers must agree to both a short-term fix as well as long-term changes by the end of the year.

But the gathering of superintendents and school board members also gave Granholm an earful, especially after she said lawmakers are "battle weary."
"If elected people are weary, my level of sympathy for them is zilch," Catherine Mueller, Grand Rapids school board president, told Granholm. "They ran for these jobs and put themselves in this situation."
Granholm appeared before educators across the state Friday, a day after announcing public schools could face a $127-per-student cut in state aid on top of the $165-per-head cut already announced.
Those combined cuts could force schools to eliminate 600 jobs in Kent County,, Northview Superintendent Mike Paskewicz said.
Ripple effects would be felt far beyond the classrooms.
Ottawa County schools estimate they could lose 225 teaching jobs....
Granholm said lawmakers are worn out.
"They're feeling fatigued, beaten down by bad news that has affected Michigan more than any other state," she said. "I know people are battle weary. I'm battle weary."..."We can't keep cutting, cutting, cutting if we want to speak about education being the way to rebuild our economy. We cannot continue to see you slash teachers, counselors, innovative programs and the kinds of things that build well-rounded students."...
http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2009/10/gov_jennifer_granholm_tells_sc.html
Did you note the anger and angst created by small reductions in available funding? Imagine the gnashing of teeth, the rending of garments, and the wailing that would occur if Christian parents refused to render their children to Caesar and defeated school bond levies.

ANOTHER TRIUMPH BY OUR HIGHLY TRAINED EDUCATION PROFESSIONALS
In the last article, Michigan's highly trained education professionals suggested that with more money they could "build well-rounded students". Perhaps they should visit Chicago's schools, where diligent efforts at teaching postmodern sex "education" are producing record numbers of "well-rounded" students.
It is a Chicago public school full of energy and spirit. It has about 800 girls, and 115 of them have something in common – something you might find disturbing....

All those young ladies are moms or moms-to-be at Paul Robeson High School. It's not a school for young mothers, it's a neighborhood school. And all of the pregnancies have happened, despite prevention talk...
http://cbs2chicago.com/local/Robeson.High.School.2.1251642.html

YET FURTHER CONFIRMATION OF THE SECOND FUNDAMENTAL LAW OF GOVERNMENT EDUCATION
(Government Schools Are Unreformable)

Dedicated readers of The Continuing Collapse will recall that in December 2008 The Continuing Collapse introduced its readers to the latest school reform "wunderkind", Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of the D.C. schools. Indeed, at that time this darling of "conservative" government school reformers and alleged scourge of the teachers unions had just been featured on the cover of TIME Magazine in a photo in which she was standing in a classroom holding a broom.

At the time The Continuing Collapse was amused by the broom symbolism because it wasn't clear whether the point was that Miss Rhee was going to "clean house" or was about to be cleared for take-off. In any event, The Continuing Collapse predicted that the TIME cover article was the beginning of the end for Miss Rhee, and it appears that the end may be coming sooner than expected.

Assiduous followers of the news will recall that Gerald Walpin, Inspector General of Americorps, was fired by Dear Leader after Walpin discovered that Kevin Johnson - former NBA player, friend of Dear Leader and Dear Leader's wife, and now Mayor of Sacramento -was involved in financial "irregularities" and sexual misconduct in connection his operation of a private school, St. Hope, that he had founded and which had received $850,000 in Americorps money.

How, you might ask, does this involve the squeaky clean, school reforming Miss Rhee? Read on...

On June 27, 2008, Michelle Rhee, head of the Washington, D.C., school system, paid a visit to Gerald Walpin, who was inspector general of the government volunteer organization AmeriCorps.
At the time, Walpin was investigating a California private school known as St. Hope, which was founded by Kevin Johnson, the former NBA star and friend of Rhee's who was running for mayor of Sacramento. St. Hope had received about $850,000 in AmeriCorps money, and Walpin's investigators were looking into charges that Johnson had misused those funds by assigning paid volunteer tutors to run errands for him and wash his car, as well as making them take part in political activities.
In the course of the investigation, some young female AmeriCorps volunteers also charged that Johnson had made inappropriate sexual advances toward them and offered one of them $1,000 a month to keep quiet.
Rhee, who later became engaged to marry Johnson, had been on St. Hope's board of directors before taking over as chief of the District of Columbia system. Her apparent goal, as she visited Walpin, was to vouch for Johnson.
"The basic point of her meeting with me was to tell me what a great guy he was," Walpin recalls, "and what wonderful work he has done, and that maybe he had made mistakes administratively, but that she thought I should give as much consideration as possible to his good work in deciding what to do."
Rhee's visit wasn't a big success. Not long after the meeting, the Corporation for National and Community Service, which is the agency that oversees AmeriCorps, banned Johnson from receiving any more federal money. Walpin referred the financial allegations, as well as the accusations of sexual misconduct, to the U.S. attorney's office in Sacramento. St. Hope was eventually ordered to pay back $425,000 of the AmeriCorps cash. Prosecutors took no action on the sexual allegations. Johnson, meanwhile, won the mayor's race.
In June of this year, President Obama abruptly fired Walpin. The White House was apparently unhappy with the zeal with which he conducted the St. Hope probe.
Rhee's June 2008 visit to Walpin's office wasn't her first talk with him. Shortly before that, she had called Walpin, apparently to see how the investigation was going. It was widely reported at the time that Rhee was planning to include St. Hope in a group of educational organizations that would be hired to run 10 of the District's most troubled high schools.
"Because she knew we were investigating Johnson, she called me to find out whether there would be anything coming out that she should take into account in deciding whether to contract with Johnson," Walpin says. "I told her I could not give her any bottom line as to what we were doing, but she knew that we were looking into the St. Hope matter."
At the time of her conversations with Walpin, Rhee was not only aware of the financial misuse investigation; she appears to have known about the sexual misconduct allegations, too. According to a new report by Republican investigators in the House and Senate, a former St. Hope employee told Walpin's staff that Rhee "learned of the allegations and played the role of a fixer, doing 'damage control.'"
That was in 2007, well before Rhee visited Walpin. So it appears she knew about both problems, yet was still contemplating having St. Hope take part in running some D.C. high schools.....
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Inspector-general_-Rhee-intervened-for-Johnson-8577747-71924762.html

Leaving aside Miss Rhee's atrocious taste in men and the likely soap opera storyline involving her divorce, there is no doubt that the education establishment and the Linda Darling-Hammond wing of the Obama administration's education operation have Miss Rhee just where they want her. Will she a few months hence decorously announce that she is leaving the D.C. schools to "pursue other opportunities and spend more time with her children", or will she quietly get right with the education establishment? We will check back in on this in a few months. But in the meantime, it is clear that Miss Rhee has lost her broom.

That's a wrap for this edition of The Continuing Collapse. So, TCC bids you a fond "adieu" and asks you to:  REMEMBER:
   1. Feel free to circulate The Continuing Collapse.    2. If you aren't hearing about at least some these government school problems from your pastor, why is he your pastor?   3. FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS SEND THEIR CHILDREN TO GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS.
“I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.” (Aldous Huxley [evolutionist, leftist, and grandson of T.H. Huxley, known as "Darwin's bulldog"]: Ends and Means, pp. 270 ff).
 “Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm – but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
T.S. Eliot

For I rejoiced greatly when the brothers came and testified to your truth, as indeed you are walking in truth. I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in TRUTH

-3 John 3,4 ESV