However, as #4 points out, the breakdown in family and society dooms a great number of students to a life as unproductive magpies, short of attention span and condemned to a life spent chasing shiny objects.

I had a couple of years of Latin in high school, and though it was useful, I was already in possession of a fine vocabulary and inclination and interest to learn. Kids without the latter will simply see Latin as wasted time, and one more class to skip.

If you really want to fix things, you have to hit them early… rigor in elementary education will make secondary education more productive.

Of course I wouldn’t be writing anything if I agreed with you completely. I do enjoy when people express their thoughts well and this you have done.
Let me begin by saying I am a non-reader. That’s not a wonderful thing but I know the truth. I can read well but I am not inclined to do so when YouTube offers so much. I spent 7 years in a Christian school and memorized many chapters of King James Old and New Testament text. This tongue is as natural to read, for me, as modern English. Even still, I prefer to read short articles online or to watch youtube videos. The current use of our language is maddening to me as someone who took to heart all I learned in High School English class. I did not go to college as I had the first of four children on the way soon after high school.
My wife (one of two National Merit Scholarship finalists from our small northern state) and I had four kids in five years and knew we valued education highly. We also knew we didn’t want to raise robots but independent thinkers who would understand the why’s instead of “because I told you so”. This was fine until Middle School. All my kids were seen as honest and “possessing a huge fund of general knowledge” but not valued for their independent thought which always recognized authoritarian behavior and it’s inherent lack of value for truth and fairness. They did get in some minor trouble but when they had contact with administrators they were always met with arbitrary authoritarianism instead of a leader with the greatest reasoning ability. My innocent 13 year old daughter was accused of being “extremely lewd and sexual” when holding tacks in front of her breasts in the hall and labeled a lesbian for refering to her friend as her “lover”. She used “lover” in the most innocent way and the Principal said, “You need to stop all that lesbian talk.” This is a small snipet of her experience that destroyed all of her respect for her teachers and administrators. They made me make a choice between losing my child’s respect for me by supporting their behavior or calling a spade a spade and supporting my child. That was hard to do as I expected to have partners in the school to work with. I even told the Principle once that my young daughter was a great judge of character, which she agreed with. I then told her that my daughter respects the respectable. She and my daughter clashed constantly for 3 years and the principle always escalated issues as far as possible. No finesse at all.
My 3 sons before my daughter had a couple experiences with this principal, recognized what they were dealing with and managed to stay off her radar. The effects of this administrators behavior could be seen on the faces of the teachers at IEP meets where they said very little and nothing to disagree with this principal who somehow knew exactly what my daughter needed even better than the other professionals. Eventually she got it in her head that my daughter needed an ‘out of district placement’ and we filed a Due Process Hearing form which we had waiting for that eventualality. We kept her in district and all involved with her education have called it a great success. My point is that I think that teachers and administrators believe parents are the problem and don’t listen to parents even while stating “nobody knows the child like the parent”. Also the schools dispose of the respect of the child and try to institute arbitrary rule but fail at that with any child who can think for themselves and realize that using that approach is just lazy, unfair, and not respectable. Without respect in the teacher-student relationship what do you have? Students need to respect and look up to their teachers. It’s important for classroom control and important for student engagement. Control and engagement are two things lacking seriously in our school district which is ranked among the finest in the country. I have one son who has achieved wonderful things and is in Advanced Placement and gifted and talented classes which are noisey also. He is my only child who stays off everyones radar, keeps his mouth shut and his head down, works his ass off and doesn’t question authority. He keeps his independent thinking to himself and does whatever he is told. He will be going to an Ivy League school and I need spell check to spell league correctly! But is that what our schools value most? He doesn’t respect his teachers but he pretends to. He knows he is smarter than they are but he defers to them anyway because he knows they hold the keys to the kingdom and what happens if you speak your mind and try to be an independent thinker in the tradition of those great people who have come before us. I guess that has no place expect after school and a PhD.
Ok, let me have it. I expect it and I can take it.

Rusty Shackleford: you’ve stolen my name!

So, she is yet another poster child for how leftwing academia can eagerly embrace and easily indoctrinate a young person who managed to enter college “not knowing a lot”. Most conservatives like VDH would see a crop pickers daughters as ill-suited for asupposedly elite academic university. Instead, the left, using an all-inclusive, multicultural politics can recruit people like this and make them loyal foot soldiers and propagandists.

In our sort of multi-cultural, pluralistic democracy, any ideology which actually adheres to stubborn “standards” and tries to find real measures of worth and competence, will inevitably lose the all important popularity struggle for power (as De Tocqueville noted). The best way to understand the age we live in is through the fulcrum of the television game show, “Family Feud”. As you may recall, facts and “truth” have no consequence, only what the “survey says” is the arbitor of all value.

You have to remember, that in those days, everyone smoked and that made their voices deeper and more guttural.

It is too bad that the pendulum has swung so far the other way. Smokers are now treated like lepers. No kiding, in the name of a smoke free environment, smokers have to stand a minimum of 50 feet away from doorways at many institutions in this state. That’s a problem here in Fargo, today it is 5 degrees F.

For the record, I’m 48, don’t smoke, never have, and I love Peck, Wayne, Marvin, et. al. Andrew’s picks when you have time are, The Guns of Navarone, Chisum, and the Dirty Dozen.

Cheers,

Andrew

2 & 3. Agreed. I pretty much rely on personal searches on issues to provide me with as broad a perspective on issues as I can find. (And, I do specifically try to find people who disagree with me.) I avoid most contemporary fiction (books or movies) because I just can’t stand it. And, now, even most documentaries are opumentaries. Pretty dismal.

4 & 5. We can’t even tell the difference between decent human beings and criminals. What do you expect when one-fifth of the voting population of California put in office a violent pervert who should be serving 25+ years for sexual battery? What do you except from a population that insists on calling sexual battery “groping” and continually confuses and even equates voluntary, stupid-but-sane sexual idiocy (i.e. Clinton) with VIOLENT, CRUEL, INVOLUNTARY, PERVERTED CRIME? How can you even begin to expect any substantive act from such a perverted, smarmy, low class, disreputable loser? Schwarzenegger’s such a disgusting, pathetic piece of crap, he can’t tie his shoes without stepping on another person’s face in the process.

6. Agreed. And, since when do gay guys know anything about what’s attractive to straight women? Give me a hairy bass any day.

7. (Me, speaking to Al Franken.) “You, sir, are no Bill Buckley.”

8. Ditto manufacturing. How many problems in male unemployment, Chinese civil rights abuses, U.S. econ instability, etc. could be solved by the U.S. making more of it’s own consumer goods?

9. Yeah, but, the Right also believes their ends justify brutal means, i.e. putting a dangerous, pathetic, sickening pervert in the CA Governor’s office. When the GOP publically, LOUDLY, denounces Schwarzenegger, I’ll start to have some hope. Right now, I just feel homeless.

10. One word: vouchers. Even my leftist, not particularly religious friends wound up home-schooling their kids. I don’t know anyone not living in poverty who’s kept their kids in a public school. It’s dead, Jim.