I’ve heard these two words, American Exceptionalism, repeated for most of my life, and it is often used to support the claim that the United States is God’s country. In its classic forms, Ian Tyrrell says, “American exceptionalism refers to the special character of the United States as a uniquely free nation based on democratic ideals and personal liberty.”
What does American Exceptionalism mean when we take into account the following facts?
- The United States has the largest prison population in the World. China, with almost five times the people, is ranked number two with 74% of the U.S. prison population. Russia is in third place with 29%. One industry where the U.S. is the number one producer in the world, according to Family Media.com, is pornography and 89% of the world’s pornography web pages are hosted in the United States. Germany is in second place with four percent…
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Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 
Susan Lee Schwartz
February 7, 2016 at 09:32
You know the truth, Lloyd and I know it, and where I write at Oped News, everyone has watched the take-over of our nation for a long time, but the ignorance of the people is monumental.
Holding 2 jobs, and worrying about whether to pay the rent, or the medical bill or buy food our people spend their only ‘down-time’ watching football and celebrity news. Drug abuse in mainstream populations in New Hampshire shows that people are beyond caring and just want to escape the pain. A beer and a tv remote and the country can go to hell in a hand basket.
The oligarchs did it — by buying the Congress, and ensuring that the people believed the lie –that overriding problem was government spending; they underfunded EVERYTHING, and have caused utter collapse, but nowhere as great as in the destruction of PUBLIC schools. And the lies keep coming– such as the one that we have the highest taxes in the world,– not even close. As Bill Maher said recently, ‘LIES ARE THE NEW TRUTH,” and one can see that in the debates by politicians who want to lead the country as PRESIDENT!
The liars win because Americans are ignorant and likely to be more-so ,now that the schools are in free-fall, being taken over by the legislatures behind the scenes.
With 15,880 school systems, and a media that tis totally controlled by the very people you named , our citizens are TOTALLY unaware how fast this is happening. At the Ravitch blog, where the reality of what is happening to PUBLIC EDUCATION (not merely the topic of “schools) if you put legislature into the search field you get a run down of the war on our democracy by ending local control of schools.
http://dianeravitch.net/?s=legislature
Local control is essential because parents are the only ones who know if the child is learning, and the voices of the parents can make a difference in a school, when they support the professional who KNOWS WHAT LEARNING LOOKS LIKE, and cannot be fooled by fake panaceas an magic elixirs.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html
“Reform” killed our schools, because the plan of the Education Industrial Complex ( you will recognize the names, Broad, Gates, Walton Pearson) https://greatschoolwars.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/eic-oct_11.pdf
was to deform the INSTITUTION of public education so that this can happen… here, read this and SHIVER! http://dianeravitch.net/2014/12/05/north-carolina-plans-to-adopt-koch-funded-social-studies-curriculum/
Yes, because shared knowledge is the foundation for democracy , and the Koch, barons and kings want to re-write history (and science and ethics and …) http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/winter2009/hirsch.pdf
The deliberate dumbing down of America http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com actually began in the 1980s when they demonized the ‘real’ experienced teacher-practitioners and threw the professionals out of the schools. http://dianeravitch.net/2015/04/19/anthony-cody-when-teachers-voices-are-silenced/comment-page-1/#comment-2312947
I know, I was there, a celebrated teacher: http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html when the war on teachers (and thus public education) began, so Gates could institute a pseudo-curriculum that does nothing to ensure the LEARNING of real thinking skills but ensures that teachers will be sent packing if kids test badly on the bitter crap that he gives them to memorize. 28 non-educators wrote his Common Core., which has nothing in common with real curricula.
The people have been bamboozled!
http://www.opednews.com/articles/BAMBOOZLE-THEM-where-tea-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-110524-511.html
IF YOU wish to hear what GENUINE educators have to say about what needs to be done, go to the NPE conference in April http://networkforpubliceducation.org/category/npe-national-conference/npe-2016-annual-conference/ or follow theREAL education news at: http://www.networkforpubliceducation.org
I will be talking there, about REAL CURRICULA OBJECTIVES for LEARNING, and I will offer a look at the GENUINE NATIONAL STANDARDS RESEARCH in which I was the NYC cohort; so if you are confused by the babble put forth by Duncan and want to know what a curriculum really is, or what must BE IN PLACE FOR LEARNING TO OCCUR the REAL standards for LEARNING, go to this conference or the site of the NETWORK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION, for the answer to the liars!
A reader at the NY Times wrote today, “We have embarked on a more visceral era in which emotion supersedes political discussion. A reasonable argument is no longer enough. Somehow, we must address those anxieties to reclaim the place of reason in our political life. We must abandon the idea that there are only two sides to our politics, a left and a right. Politics becomes something better when we look above the divide and see problems not from two sides but from all sides.”
Chomsky weighs in:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/16651-noam-chomsky-on-democracy-and-education-in-the-21st-century-and-beyond
I end with this from E.D. Hirsch: “It cannot be emphasized too strongly, nor repeated too often, that the most important cause of our educational shortcomings is not laziness, unionism, waywardness, stupidity, or any moral fault among the leaders of our educational enterprise. Rather, it is a system of attractive but unsound ideas. According to Thomas Jefferson, an educational system that offered equality of opportunity would ‘avail the commonwealth of those talents and virtues which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as rich.’
“Leaders of the public education system should exemplify the highest ethical standard and should hold themselves accountable to the public they serve, ” yet today, the leaders of the system are political hacks, because in every state where the legislature ha usurped ‘failing schools,’ not a single educator is on board a the top of state legislatures. Their agenda is to turn public education over to private industry, like they did health care… and the public is more interested in who wins the Super Bowl!
Lloyd Lofthouse
February 8, 2016 at 08:06
“The liars win because Americans are ignorant and likely to be more-so ,now that the schools are in free-fall, being taken over by the legislatures behind the scenes.”
Not all Americans are ignorant, gullible, foolish, naive, biased and just plain stupid as a stump. There is a growing resistance and a quote from Abraham Lincoln predicts the future: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
Once enough Americans stop being fooled, then the foolish, greedy, power hungry billionaire oligarchs will either have to back off and find some other fraud to chase or face the inevitable rebellion that will sweep them off of history’s stage and into the bloody dust bin where all the other monsters have eventually ended up.