Our Future Presidents and Senators

Hah!

Read the article.

This is so funny it's sad.

The *best school*....jocks, who shouldn't be at Harvard in the first place, cheating....a lengthy and costly legal process....rank hypocrisy....all in a class called *Introduction to Congress*!!!

Bubble Girl?

A student of mine the other day told me an almost incredible story.

But really, in this current *reign of inanity*, I guess it's really all too CREDIBLE.

She said there was a classmate of hers at the local high school who is, "allergic to deodorant and body spray."

And that the school tried to ban THE STUDENT BODY (no pun intended) from wearing deodorant and broad-repellents like Axe Body Spray.

Of course they couldn't do that...

So they put the girl in her own room - a *bubble* if you will.

And they bought a robot for her.

Yeah, a robot. She controls it remotely from her *bubble* and directs it into classrooms where she observes teachers via webcams on the effin' robot!

How much does this ridiculousness cost????!!!!

Although by itself it's probably a drop in the bucket given that my school district - or, the one I get assessed for - spends $27,000 PER PUPIL....PER YEAR now.

Big Education = One Big Scam

Read - How Long Island Teachers benefit from Unusual Raise System.

It's not just another article on the *exploitable inefficiencies* of a government school system....some of the stuff is truly outrageous.

The last sentence in the story couldn't sum it up any better:

"When you talk about reform -- good luck," he said.

Slutty Big Media and Skanky School Slaves

This story is running on Drudge and a couple people have already emailed it to me this morning...

Guess what, incidentally, yesterday around 10:45am I walked right through a sea of Stuyvesant students in front of their building....along with my kids and another family on our way to our *homeschool Field Day*.

But all I saw were a bunch of nerdy-looking juveniles burdened with heavy backpacks...

Well, the headline got it to the front page of Drudge....so I guess that's a *winning story*.

Though these kids really ought to *get in line* like the perfect future slaves they are on track to become...

Imagine getting kicked out of this school because you refuse to cover your shoulders, midriff, and tiny Asian boobies???

Taxing School Slaves, And The Rest Of Us!

What's that?

Well I was one of the scant *No* votes this past week.

I voted AGAINST raising the town's school budget a mere *1.7%* or whatever it was sold as.

I figured that the existing $83 million allocation was plenty of money ($26,000 per student!!!)....and they didn't REALLY NEED $85 million, annually!

It's the same $hit in all these wealthy towns.

They run around telling all these gullible parents that their kids will "fall behind" if taxes aren't raised to pay for football, gifted programs, driver's ed, college guidance departments(!), special education, for low student:teacher ratios, etc.

But really it's just to keep paying lavish pensions...

What kills me is that even people who fancy themselves smart/educated are so easily manipulated. It's only the wise 'old coots' who show up and vote against these annual tax hikes, and only some of them. The really wealthy ones here don't even care to vote.

I can get a little confrontational about this stuff, but what's the point, really?

I usually just mock these Morons by yelling at them that *education has NOTHING to do with money* and that they are fools for thinking so.

I heard a great quote the other day, "Education is a process, not an institution."

Indeed.

Competition To Marginalize Harvard, Further

I just posted this to HomeschoolDad.com's Facebook Fan Page....but I think many of y'all will enjoy it from an *economic standpoint* as well:

Military School?

So I just came across an article that must have been hard for the NY Times to publish.

Apparently the government schools on military bases outperform the rest of the country.

Now I'm no fan of either Big Military or that horrible newspaper....but I've always enjoyed delicious irony!

And this news/study, I guess, is sort of a nice response to John Kerry's gaffe from not too long ago.

BTW, I just read that 32% of all homeschooled children are in military families. While I think that number is a little on the high side, it is true that many military families are even smarter than the ones whose kids are impressing the NY Times.

Marveling At (More) Successful Nazis...

Nowadays it's trendy for Big Education fools to sing the praises of Finland's government school system.

I'd like y'all to check out this article - What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success.

Now there's a lot that's *not covered* in all these studies that exalt Finland's schools. For example, how many kids grow up in broken homes? What percentage of kids are *daycared* rather than spend their formative years around complete-sentence-wielding parents? Not to mention the ranking process itself.

But I don't want to talk about that right here, right now.

Watch this interpretation of the article....then the title of this blog post will make sense:



Yeah, that guy is indeed a blithering idiot.

Though do you see what I mean? How the example of *Finland* is just a launch pad for planners and their agitprop?

Ironically, that fat tool is a graduate of UPenn's Wharton undergraduate program (4 years ahead of me at Penn)...

And Wharton undergrad is the most competitive (intro courses graded on a curve, 50% get C's!), most capitalistic school in America!

Half-A$$ed Kindergarten

Some residents of our town - which already spends 26k per pupil! - are petitioning for *full day kindergarten*.

Okay. Whatever.

But check out this dimwitted petition/plea that was just forwarded to my wife:

Hi Ladies,


This came into my inbox this morning and I was so happy to see someone doing something about our outdated Kindergarten program! I would love to see a change happen, if not to directly benefit my family, then to benefit the students and families following (her daughter)'s Kindergarten year.


We all love to spend that extra time with our kids when they are growing up so quickly, but as I already have a child in elementary school, I know that Kindergarten is not what it used to be. Gone are the days of play, singing, painting and nap time on the rug. In my opinion, the skills that our 5 year olds are expected to leave with REQUIRE 5 full days at school.


Please take a look at what is below and take a moment to click and sign if you agree!


Thanks!

Say what???

Did she just say that kindergarten SUCKS now and that the kids need 5 FULL DAYS of it, now???

My wife asserted that she herself is *against the full-day*.

But my opinion is, "...that there should be either 'no kindergarten' or a 'full day'..." because a half-day (2.5 hours!) is nothing more than a logistical nightmare for parents.

After all, a lot of these kids have been day-cared for 7-9 hours per day since almost birth, so there's no transition at all for them to adapt to being raised by new strangers for a *full day* when they are 5+.

REMINDER - Kindergarten isn't even mandated by law.

In other words, you don't even have to send your child - which I, by the way, highly recommend!

'For The Children' Morons

I bumped into some guy from town the other night at a local restaurant's bar.

He said he was on his way to some benefit at the country club.

CaptiousNut - What for?

Dude - It's a fundraiser for the schools...

Hah!

They already spend a mind-blowing $26,000 per pupil, and they need more?

AND these Morons will voluntarily contribute???!!!

CaptiousNut - How much does it cost to go?

Dude - Well as a family we gave five thousand...

Wowsers! (Tickets started at $300 per couple.)

Dude - It's a way around the state cap....if the town spends any more money the state will reduce its aid. All the wealthy towns do this...

Another attendee, the next day explained further:

OtherDude - Last year it was to install WiFi everywhere. This year it's for smartboards...

Apparently the foundation simply picks a sleek new *cause* each year, preying on the misguided fears of these wealthy parents. Yeah, without smartboards....their kids will *fall behind* everyone else. Right.

As I said, they already have PLENTY OF MONEY in town. The superintendent makes $270,000 per year to achieve the worst academic results of all six towns that abut our district!

OtherDude - But how much of that $26,000 per pupil goes to pensions?

CaptiousNut - Not that much, now anyway.

You see, he has an answer on the tip of his tongue, no doubt echoed by the *foundation* and other naive folk that continue to ignore the school district's criminal fiscal irresponsibility, runaway pensions, and ridiculous salaries; naive (guilt-ridden?) folk that just bend over and take the inexorably escalating property taxes.

The most Moronic assumption of all, however, is that they all just equate money spent with educational outcomes.

There's a verse in the Bible - Proverbs 29:12:

If a ruler listens to lies, all his officials become wicked.

While that may be very true right now in Washington....a proverbial spin on it might well read:

He that hath fatal Moronic assumptions, is ripe for rampant exploitation.

It's just too bad they are dragging the rest of us, the remnant who understands what's really going on, down with them.

They think they are subsidizing smartboards....but all they are doing is subsidizing pensions and incompetence.

Shocking Violence In Socialist Schools

Okay, the *Shocking* characterization in my title is tongue in cheek.

Look, even if your kid isn't bullied themself....the odds are that they are actually bullying some other kids beneath them in the pecking order - even if on a psychological level.

Lord of the Flies isn't what happens when kids are taken out of school/society...

No, it's what kids do to each other everyday when sentenced to *forced association*.

I watched two older Asian geeks at chess class yesterday tease my sweet-as-pie son. I mean these kids were certainly outcast dorks in their local government school penitentiary; and I don't even think they were mean kids, relatively speaking, by any stretch. But they were 11 and 12 years old - my son is 7.30 - and they probably just don't get many opportunities otherwise to flick another kid away like a fingertip booger.

The older homeschooled kids never, EVER tease my son; I mean almost everyone loves him.

When you do something as profoundly against the grain as keeping your kids out of school...it's nice to be continually, if not constantly reminded - even if by chess dorks - that you made the right decision.

I was no angel in school myself.

I used to bully the football players, the minority gang leaders,...

The idea that making a *cause* out of the *bullying epidemic* is going to do anything, at all, is absolutely ridiculous.

Government Education - A Crossfire Of Blame

Big Government Has Destroyed The Arts

Artsy people are always whining that no one *supports the arts*...

And they are always panhandling government for subsidies....because, you know, no one will ever paint, draw, write, sing or create anything in the absence of taxpayer funding!

It's total bull$hit of course - akin to saying that *no one will educate poor people*, *no one will perform acts of charity*, "no one will develop alternative energies*,....if the government doesn't do it.

Now if you are a starving artist, bent on your own work....what would be the obvious side-job to help pay your bills???

Yes. It would be TEACHING kids.

But those jobs don't exist for a couple of reasons.

1 - kids learn art in the course of their school curriculum.

2 - parents believe that this *education* actually takes place.

Allow me to explain.

Parents who educate their own, especially those who feel artistically ignorant, are always on the prowl for art classes, resources, and TEACHERS for their children. I speak from personal experience here too.

Now imagine if these 80 million children WERE NOT fraudulently *taught art* in school, and imagine if their parents took the lead in educating them...

Do y'all realize how many art teaching jobs would suddenly become available for these long-haired, coffee-pouring, couch-crashing, starving artists???

Alright I have to include this funny painting of a *starving artist* I just found:

School Apologists = Neo-Nazis!

Here's a terrific read on the sordid, Nazi(!) history of the American government educational system.

Homeschooling - The BIGGEST Threat To Socialism

From that illiberal publication Slate!

Click the link and read the entire Moronic article.

My favorite part was this:

Nor can we allow homeschoolers to believe their choice impacts only their own offspring. Although the national school-reform debate is fixated on standardized testing and “teacher quality”—indeed, the uptick in secular homeschooling may be, in part, a backlash against this narrow education agenda—a growing body of research suggests “peer effects” have a large impact on student achievement. Low-income kids earn higher test scores when they attend school alongside middle-class kids, while the test scores of privileged children are impervious to the influence of less-privileged peers. So when college-educated parents pull their kids out of public schools, whether for private school or homeschooling, they make it harder for less-advantaged children to thrive.

Allow me to translate...

All y'all middle and upper class majorities need to leave your children in those horrible public schools....FOR THE GREATER GOOD! Sacrifice thy own for the sake of Hillary Clinton's *Village*!

What's funny, to me anyway, is how many *secular* homeschoolers will be shocked by this article. Of course most will ignore/dismiss it....but at least a bunch will become annoyed at the aspersion of being *anti-liberal*, *anti-progressive*, or whatever.

The fact remains that educating your own children is the ULTIMATE act of anti-socialism a family can make in 2012 America.

I could even go so far as to turn this around and say....that homeschooling your own kids and not supporting libertarians is a more pronounced demonstration of hypocrisy.

But that would be a little harsh.  I'm pro-anyone who teaches their own despite their false idols, ignorance, misconceptions, latent bigotries,...etc.  After all, some of my best friends (and relatives) are communists!

No School Is Better Than A Sham Education

Hah! Of course all *experts* think they know more than regular folk....they are the high priests of information, and all enlightenment must go through them!

I would love to have asked this *education* priestess, this hideous broad, on the stand, in front of everyone...

What's 7 times 13?

What's the capital of Nevada?

Could you please define *irony*?

Okay. Now you can SHUT UP about *education*.

And I have taken this tack, several times with Morons. Seven times thirteen is my very favorite interrogation!

They invariably respond, "Well I'm not good with numbers/math..." or "I don't know, that's why I send my kids to school to learn more than I did, from more qualified teachers..."

But the fact is, their own basic ignorance is a product of the very same, ineffective educational system. And actually the schools THEY went to way back when were actually more academically demanding.

So, in summary, we have demonstrable Morons eagerly sending their kids to worse institutions than the ones that produced THEM.

It Doesn't Work...

So they just need a higher dose!

In fact it ought to be MANDATED - according to this clown/fascist.

Is this another assault on educational freedom or just more empty, deflective rhetoric?

UPDATE - This almost too funny.

Ironically, Obama's State of the Union address registered at only an 8th grade reading level:

President Obama's 2012 State of the Union address again rated at an 8th grade comprehension level on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test — the third lowest score of any State of the Union address since 1934.

The University of Minnesota's Smart Politics conducted an analysis on the last 70 State of the Union addresses and found that President Obama's three addresses have the lowest grade average of any modern president. "Obama's average grade-level score of 8.4 is more than two grades lower than the 10.7 grade average for the other 67 addresses written by his 12 predecessors," they conclude.

"The Flesch-Kincaid test is designed to assess the readability level of written text, with a formula that translates the score to a U.S. grade level. Longer sentences and sentences utilizing words with more syllables produce higher scores. Shorter sentences and sentences incorporating more monosyllabic words yield lower scores," the University of Minnesota's Eric Ostermeier explains.

I Will Ace Your Kid's SAT For $4,999

So the smart kid gets caught taking the SAT for dumb kids here on Long Island...

Most of y'all have probably heard this HORRIBLE story by now.

While most everyone I have run into thinks this kid is the nothing short of the devil....I happen to find the whole thing HILARIOUS - particularly his *punishment*:

He has heard the notion that deserving students are being left out of those colleges as a result of his fraud, but Eshaghoff is not buying it. “He really wasn’t displacing somebody … I feel confident defending the fact that [my clients] getting into the schools that they ended up getting into didn’t really affect other people,” he says. Eshaghoff regrets the shame his arrest caused his family and says if he could start over, he “never would have done it.” He will serve no jail time. Instead, under a plea deal, he will tutor low-income students on how to ace the exams he received so much money to take for others.

Hah! He has to tutor the dumb low-income students from the Boroughs!

Why are the parents so mad?

Because they spend boatloads of money on SAT prep - at least here in the NYC Metro area - so that their junior and their princess can maybe score 75 points higher and get into a slightly higher esteemed worthless college. And for that privilege they will end up exhausting all of their home equity just so their kid can major in political science, Spanish, or something equally useless like *environmental science* (like my poor niece).

The parents' anger is really, IMO, just poorly articulated, unconscious anger at the whole stinkin' process.

Are you ODD?

I just came across this one in the comments of a wonderful post by dear friend Laura Weldon- School ADD Isn't Home ADD.  Be sure to read that post!

ODD stands for Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

I think it's going to be my new favorite *disorder* - overtaking the ridiculous SAD - Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Here are the dead-giveaway signs:

• Actively does not follow adults' requests
• Angry and resentful of others
• Argues with adults
• Blames others for own mistakes
• Has few or no friends or has lost friends
• Is in constant trouble in school
• Loses temper
• Spiteful or seeks revenge
• Touchy or easily annoyed

Well I've just about got them all covered - except that I don't blame others for personal mistakes!

Of course the certified experts suggest that if your kid/life-partner/MIL is exhibiting these symptoms....that you should have them see a CERTIFIED EXPERT - for medication, to be monitored, studied, etc.

Ever notice how all of today's ridiculous *disorders* are forms of non-conformity?

It's a little one-sided, don't you think?

The thing is....I know tons of people who genuinely suffer from pathological CONFORMITY - people who buy 700k homes with no money down, people who outsource the raising of their children to government agents, blindly dump money in mutual funds, stare at cellphones all day long, buy cars they can't afford, etc. all because their neighbors, the metaphorical Jones', do so.

I mean recently someone was telling me that they were told by their *financial adviser* that they had to save $1.2 million in order to send their three children to college.  Now there's NO WAY they could save that much before their kids were 18....but that's slightly beside the point, incredibly.

All I did was SUGGEST that there's no way college could possibly be worth that much money. After all, it's a staggering amount of $$$$$!

But they all but exploded on me and my mere suggestion.

TerminalConformist - But how are they going to ever get a job if they don't go to college?


Me - You mean like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Michael Dell and the rest of the most successful people out there?


Then there was another outbreak/explosion and I dropped the subject, lest the ambulance with men in white jackets have to be summoned.

How Many Of Them Are There Out There?

This comment just came in on Peter Gray's blog post - Why Children Protest Going To School - More Evolutionary Mismatch:

I am currently 17 years old, have always hated school. I started reading about homeschooling and unschooling some time ago and was absolutely in love with the concept. Unfortunately, it is impossible for me to leave school. Every single day at school is painful and I have to endure a year and a half more of that. It might not seem like much to some, but to me it is. I can't leave school for two reasons - it's not so easy to do in my country and my parents are saying I have to finish school, no matter if it makes me sick. I don't have the strength to. I was recently diagnosed with depression and put on Prozac - it's not entirely school's fault, but I'd say it mostly is.


Yes, some kids don't mind school. But must people like me get their education at the expense of our mental health?

Let's hope this youngster hasn't been so messed up by their *sentence*....that they don't commit suicide (or homicide!)....and that they haven't been irreparably damaged.