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The Conservative Talk-Show Scapegoat for the Self-Esteem Movement – Part 2/4

17 Oct

If you read Dennis Prager’s often biased, one-sided essays or listen to his radio show, you will discover that Democrats are elite, leftist, liberal, progressive individuals that often get hysterical and emotional about their beliefs, and fear death more than conservatives do.

By the way, John Vasconcellos was born in 1932 and served in the California State Legislature representing Silicon Valley—and yes, he is an advocate of the self-esteem movement, but he is not responsible for starting the movement in 1986.

Vasconcellos served in the California State Assembly from 1966 to 1996 and as a state senator from 1996 to 2004 (when he retired).

In 1986, Vasconcellos created the California Task Force to Promote Self Esteem and in January 1990 issued “Toward a State of Esteem”, which sold 60,000 copies becoming a best seller in California State government publishing history and California was not alone in this political movement. Washington and Maryland had self-esteem legislation being considered too.


John Rosemond does not like the Self Esteem Movement – This video is highly recommended!

The California Task Force had 25 members and not all agreed with the final report. Task-force member David Shannahoff-Khalsa of Del Mar, a yoga teacher and researcher in neuroscience, denied that self-esteem could simply be given to anyone, and due to disagreements between the task force members, no generally accepted definition of self-esteem emerged.

Vasconcellos authored AB3659, which “According to this legislation, self-esteem was the key to problems such as violence, crime, alcohol and drug abuse, welfare dependency, teenage pregnancy, academic failure, recidivism, child and spousal abuse, and the failure of responsible citizenship. Making California “a state of esteem” would solve all that, and more.”  Source: Cal Watchdog.com

However, nothing ever came of the self-esteem legislation, so what was the real reason for all of this interest by Dennis Prager?

Continued on October 18, 2011 in The Conservative Talk-Show Scapegoat for the Self-Esteem Movement – Part 3 or return to Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Posted by on October 17, 2011 in child abuse, family values, media, Parenting, politics, self-esteem, self-esteem movement, student behavior

 

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The Conservative Talk-Show Scapegoat for the Self-Esteem Movement – Part 1/4

16 Oct

Now, I am no fan of the self-esteem parenting movement in America. If you read this Blog on a regular basis, you would know that I feel strongly that “IT” is the main culprit for the state of our public schools.

All one need do is read The Self-Esteem Train Wreck,  Recognizing Good Parenting,  Graffiti Nation,  Avoid the Mainstream Parent Trap,  What, Me Worry about Debt – I’ve got Self-Esteem on my side, and The Finland-Singapore Solution to Public Education in the US to discover my opinion on this issue.

However, if you were standing at the base of a snow-covered mountain in a growing blizzard and a snowball was rolling downhill toward you collecting snow, growing in mass and speed and you cheered and waved it on encouraging it to grow stronger and move faster, would you be responsible for the forces that started that snowball rolling from the top of that mountain more than a hundred years earlier?

I don’t think so, but this is exactly what conservative talk-show host Dennis Prager has done with the self-esteem movement. He has blamed “IT” all on former California Assemblyman John Vasconcellos.

While I agree with Prager in principal that the self-esteem movement is a travesty to our American culture, I cannot condone Prager turning this cultural cancer into a political issue by blaming a so-called leftist, liberal, progressive Democrat for something that he did not start.

Without telling his adoring fans (Prager’s Parrots) the history of the movement, in November 2010, Dennis wrote, “The movement was begun (he is talking about the self-esteem movement) by California Assemblyman John Vasconcellos. As The New York Times reported, “Mr. Vasconcellos, a 53-year-old Democrat, is described by an aide as ‘the most radical humanist in the Legislature.'”

In an interview at the time (1986), Vasconcellos told Prager he had personally benefited from therapy. It enabled him to improve the poor self-esteem he had inherited from his childhood. He therefore concluded that improving other people’s self-esteem would greatly help society.

And this was all it took for Prager to claim the self-esteem movement in America started with John Vasconcellos, whose only crime was being a Democrat as you will discover.

Continued on October 17, 2011 in The Conservative Talk-Show Scapegoat for the Self-Esteem Movement – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Posted by on October 16, 2011 in child abuse, family values, Parenting, self-esteem movement, student behavior

 

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The importance of Diet, Vitamin D and a Child Ready to Learn – Part 3/3

13 Oct

What I discovered about Vitamin D deficiency may explain one of the reasons why so many school children age 6 to 18 in the US perform poorly in school and on standardized tests.

In November 2009, Scientific American asked an important question and then provided the answer.

The question was, “Does Vitamin D. Improve Brain Function?”

The answer, “The first study, led by neuroscientist David Llewellyn of the University of Cambridge, assessed vitamin D levels in more than 1,700 men and women from England, aged 65 or older…

“The scientists found that the lower the subjects’ vitamin D levels, the more negatively impacted was their perform­ance on a battery of mental tests. Compared with people with optimum vitamin D levels, those in the lowest quartile were more than twice as likely to be cognitively impaired.”

“A second study,” Scientific American reported, “led by scientists at the University of Manchester in England and published online this past May, looked at vitamin D levels and cognitive performance in more than 3,100 men aged 40 to 79 in eight different countries across Europe. The data show that those people with lower vitamin D levels exhibited slower information-processing speed.

In addition, Science Daily says, “Doctors McCann & Ames point out that evidence for vitamin D’s involvement in brain function includes the wide distribution of vitamin D receptors throughout the brain. They also discuss vitamin D’s ability to affect proteins in the brain known to be directly involved in learning and memory, motor control, and possibly even maternal and social behavior.”

But how much sun should be absorbed to create adequate levels of Vitamin D?

U. S. News.com says, “If you’re fair skinned, experts say going outside for 10 minutes in the midday sun—in shorts and a tank top with no sunscreen—will produce about 10,000 international units of the vitamin.

“If you’re already tan or of Hispanic (Latino) origin, you need maybe 15 to 20 minutes, and black skin may require six times the sun exposure to make the same vitamin D levels as a very fair-skinned person…”

So, next time you hear someone criticize teachers when children are not learning, say there’s more to educating a child than a teacher teaching. A vital aspect of education has to do with what parents feed their children and how much time a child spends outdoors absorbing sunlight.

In fact, Shine.com offers 7 Ways to Increase Your Child’s Success in School and says, “A recent study by Columbia University showed that kids whose families eat regular, relaxed meals together are not only less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol and develop eating disorders-they are also more likely to achieve higher grades.”

Return to The importance of Diet, Vitamin D and a Child Ready to Learn – Part 2 or start with Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column, click it and then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on October 13, 2011 in child abuse, Education, family values, Parenting, Public School, student behavior, Teaching

 

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The importance of Diet, Vitamin D and a Child Ready to Learn – Part 2/3

12 Oct

As discovered in Part 1, the diets of most American children are horrible and this has a BIG impact on a child’s ability to function as a student.

In addition, most children do not spend enough time outside to absorb adequate Vitamin D from sunlight—no eating required and it is FREE!

Although the development of young minds and bodies requires more than one nutrient, knowing what the lack of one nutrient, such as Vitamin D, does to a child’s cognitive ability and mood is a dramatic way to discover how important a balanced diet is from breakfast to dinner.

If the lack of one vitamin from sunlight has a dramatic impact on a child’s ability to learn, imagine what happens when most of the important nutrients for cognitive and mental function are missing.

If you are a parent and you are reading this, what does your child eat, and does he or she spend about a half hour a day between 10 AM and 3 PM outside in the sunlight soaking up vitamin D with the sun’s help?

The odds are that you don’t know the answer.

A recent study published in Environmental Health Perspectives found that many American children are not getting enough vitamin D from sun exposure alone…

In fact, Essentials of Health reported about a new study in the journal of Pediatrics in August 2009, that “Over 60 percent of the children studied had vitamin D levels defined as insufficient. Outright deficiency occurred in nine percent of the subjects. If applied to the U.S. population, these percentages would be equivalent to nearly 51 million children with insufficient vitamin D levels, and 7.6 million children with vitamin D deficiency.

Curious, I wanted to know if vitamin D deficiency affected mental function.

Continued on October 13, 2011 in The importance of Diet, Vitamin D and a Child Ready to Learn – Part 3 or return to Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column, click it and then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on October 12, 2011 in child abuse, family values, Parenting, Public School, student behavior, Teaching

 

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The importance of Diet, Vitamin D and a Child Ready to Learn – Part 1/3

11 Oct

When I was still teaching (1975-2005), I often started the school year by asking my students about breakfast and discovered that most didn’t eat it. When I asked what they did eat, the average answer was a bag of French fries or a slice of cheese pizza (and maybe both), and a 60-ounce Coke or Pepsi, which was usually for lunch.

And let me tell you, fifth period was my first class after lunch and that was the class with the most behavior problems. First period and sixth were usually the classes with the least behavior problems since too many students do not eat breakfast and by sixth period the sugar crash has arrived and energy levels among many students is unusually low.

It’s like teaching a room full of zombies.

In fact, USDA.gov reports that 88% of children ages 7 to 9 are not eating a good diet and most diets do not improve as children age. In a classroom of 36 students, that means about 32 arrive in class without the adequate nutrition to feed the brain where learning takes place.

The news gets worse when the diet includes too much sugar, which also comes from consuming too much grain products since these complex carbohydrates also break down in the liver to form sugar.

Brain Health and Puzzles.com says, “Another connection between sugar and brain function concerns dysfunction. These people often have dwindling mental capabilities. They are more at risk to develop depression and different cognitive problems with memory, processing information and recognizing spatial patterns. It can even lead to dementia.”

In addition, Grist.org reported that most Americans eat 30% more grain (which converts to sugar)  than they should and 20% too much meat, while eating just 80% of the recommended daily servings of vegetables (French fried potatoes or chips usually represent all vegetable consumption) and 40% of fruit–mostly apples and bananas. Did you know that the apples you buy from the store could be more than a year old?

Continued on October 12, 2011 in The importance of Diet, Vitamin D and a Child Ready to Learn – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column, click it and then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on October 11, 2011 in child abuse, Education, family values, Parenting, Public School, Teaching

 

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Needs versus Education – What comes first? – Part 5/5

18 Aug

Child Help.org says, “Over 3 million reports of child abuse are made every year in the United States; however, those reports can include multiple children. In 2009, approximately 3.3 million child abuse reports and allegations were made involving an estimated 6 million children.”

Child abuse occurs at every socioeconomic level, across ethnic and cultural lines, within all religions and at all levels of education.

RAINN.org says, “Fifteen percent of sexual assault and rape victims are under age 12 and 29% are age 12 – 17. Three percent of boys grades 5 to 8 and 5% of boys in grades 9 to 12 said they have been sexually abused.

“Children that are victims of sexual assault are three times more likely to suffer from depression, six times more likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, 13 times more likely to abuse alcohol, 26 times more likely to abuse drugs and 4 times more likely to contemplate suicide.”

The No Child Left Behind Act mandates (without directly saying so) that teachers are to overcome all of these challenges without any changes taking place outside the public schools when hunger, homelessness, gang and crime statistics, child abuse, etc. impact a child’s life.

However, when survival comes first in a child’s life, and other essential needs are not met, education takes a back seat and teachers in the public schools will not overcome these challenges no matter what mandate the federal government votes into law or how many critics claim America’s public school teachers are failing.

With these challenges, it is amazing that teachers have accomplished what they have.

For example, in California, 53.9% of Black or African American students in the public schools have met the English Language Arts Target while 56.3% have met the Mathematics Target.

Yet, in the United States, sixty-seven percent (67%) of Black-African American children live in single-family homes.  In addition, more than 35% live in poverty.

Among Hispanic/Latino children, more than 33% live in poverty, while less than 12% of white children do and about 13% of Asians.

The numbers of students that fail or succeed in school is easily explained by the numbers of those living in poverty, in communities dominated by youth gangs, and those that live in single parent homes.

Asking America’s public school teachers to overcome these obstacles is the same as telling someone to climb Mount Everest nude and without any climbing gear.  Only ignorant fools or people with political agendas based on greed or ideology would make such accusations.

The facts say, when a child’s basic needs are met, that child is ready to learn and not until then and the complexity of what it means to make sure every child’s basic needs are met is difficult to identify and achieve.  We cannot expect the government or teachers to solve everything for everyone. Individuals must take responsiblity for their lives and that means parents too.

Teacher’s cannot push these child to the next level in literacy or math even with the threat of lost jobs and closed schools.

Return to Needs versus Education – What comes first? – Part 4 or start with Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on August 18, 2011 in American Public Schools, American Street Gangs, child abuse, Education, family values, Parenting, politics, Public School

 

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Needs versus Education – What comes first? – Part 4/5

17 Aug

The National Center for Children in Poverty says, “Nearly 15 million children in the United States – 21% of all children – live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level – $22,050 a year for a family of four. Research shows that, on average, families need an income of about twice that level to cover basic expenses. Using this standard, 42% of children live in low-income families.

“Most of these children have parents who work,” NCCP.org says, “but low wages and unstable employment leave their families struggling to make ends meet. Poverty can impede children’s ability to learn and contribute to social, emotional, and behavioral problems.”

However, poverty is not the only challenge to overcome. Being loved and belonging to a family was on the third step in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs blocking a child’s need to earn an education, which was on step four and five.

In fact, the Heritage Foundation reports, “How Broken Families Rob Children of Their Chances for Future Prosperity”. The growth in the number of children born into broken families in America—from 12  of every 100 born in 1950 to 58 of every 100 born in 1992, has become a seemingly unbreakable cycle that the federal government not only continues to ignore, but even promotes through some of its policies.

Statistics and studies show that children who grow up in a stable, two-parent family have the best prospects for achieving income security as adults,” and today only 47% of children live with both of their original parents.

Then there is child abuse, which sabotages a child ability to leave the second level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs where it clearly says safety of health, body, morality and of the family must be satisfied before an individual’s needs change.

Continued on August 18, 2011, in Needs versus Education – What comes first? – Part 5 or return to Part 3

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions

 
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Posted by on August 17, 2011 in American Public Schools, American Street Gangs, child abuse, Education, family values, government, Parenting, politics, Public School

 

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Needs versus Education – What comes first? – Part 3/5

16 Aug

Hunger is not the only factor that must be dealt with before a child is ready to cooperate with his teachers and learn.

According to Hope for the Homeless, 1.5 million children in America go to sleep without a home each year, and says, “Children without homes are twice as likely to experience hunger as other children. Two-thirds worry they will not have enough to eat. More than one-third of homeless children report being forced to skip meals,” and “Homelessness makes children sick. Children who experience homelessness are more than twice as likely as middle class children to have moderate to severe acute and chronic health problems.”

In addition, USA Today reports that the FBI says, “Criminal gangs in the US have swelled to an estimated 1 million members responsible for up to 80% of crimes in communities across the nation, according to a gang threat assessment compiled by federal officials… The report says about 900,000 gang members live “within local communities across the country,” and about 147,000 are in U.S. prisons or jails.

One example is Detroit Michigan, which is consistently ranked as the most dangerous city in the United States with high violent and property crime rates every year.

In addition, forty-four percent (44%) of youth gang membership are Hispanic-Latino while thirty-five percent (35%) are Black-African American youths.  Only 14% are Caucasian and 5% Asian. Source: OJJDP.gov

This may help explain why Caucasions and Asian students have achieved the NCLB benchmarks while Hispanic-Latino and Black-African American youths have not.

Membership in these street gangs is highest in Los Angeles, California with more than 100,000 youth gang members. When other children that do not belong in streets gangs live in the same area, life is not safe for anyone.

However, poverty also plays a significant role in holding children back.

Continued on August 17, 2011, in Needs versus Education – What comes first? – Part 4 or return to Part 2

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on August 16, 2011 in American Public Schools, American Street Gangs, child abuse, Education, family values, government, Parenting, politics, Public School

 

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Needs versus Education – What comes first? – Part 2/5

15 Aug

On August 8, 2011, the U.S. Department of Education posted a press release saying, Obama Administration Proceeds with Reform of No Child Left Behind Failing Congressional Inaction.

“With the new school year fast approaching and still no bill to reform the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind, the Obama administration will provide a process for states to seek relief from key provisions of the law, provided that they are willing to embrace education reform.

“The administration’s proposal for fixing NCLB calls for college-and career-ready standards, more great teachers and principals, robust use of data, and a more flexible and targeted accountability system based on measuring annual student growth.”

However, the causes of many students not achieving benchmarks set by the NCLB Act have not been recognized yet.  The last time the federal government attempted to address these problems was President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, which failed because you cannot engineer utopia, and it cannot be ordered into existence either.

 

In fact, Sheldon Danziger, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, says, “the poverty rate has remained steady since the 1970s and today, Americans have allowed poverty to fall off the national agenda.”

In fact, LBJ’s War on Poverty cost $6.6 trillion over a thirty-year period ($220 billion per year avg) and much of the effort was wasteful and corrupt.” Source: In These Times

What LBJ attempted to do with his War On Poverty was no different than what President G. W. Bush did when he signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, which is another impossible attempt to engineer society, but this time the public school and teachers are being held responsible.

According to World Hunger.org, “36.3 million people (in the United States)—including 13 million children—live in households that experience hunger or the risk of hunger; some people in these households frequently skip meals or eat too little, sometimes going without food for a whole day and 9.6 million people, including 3 million children, live in these homes.”

Are America’s public school teachers supposed to feed these children too?

Continued on August 16, 2011, in Needs versus Education – What comes first? – Part 3 or return to Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on August 15, 2011 in American Public Schools, American Street Gangs, child abuse, family values, government, NCLB, Parenting, politics, Public School

 

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Needs versus Education – What comes first? – Part 1/5

14 Aug

Time for Change has a post of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The theory that Abraham Maslow proposed in 1943 contends that as humans meet “basic needs”, they seek to satisfy successively ‘higher needs’ that occupy a set hierarchy or order, which means an individual must satisfy one set of basic needs before moving on to achieve the next level of needs.

I was introduced to Maslow’s theory of needs sometime during the nine years I spent in college, and it applies to education since learning is a need but where does this sit in the hierarchy?

If you were to click on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, you would discover that the first order of needs that must be met are breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, excretion.

The second most important set of needs is security of body, of employment, of resources, of morality, of family, of health, and of property.

If level one and two are met, then friendship, family and sexual intimacy become the number one priority an individual needs at level three, which is labeled love and/or belonging.

Have you seen education or learning yet?

If you check out the five different levels of needs that must be satisfied before the next level becomes important to an individial, you will discover that achievement is on the fourth level and problem solving and creativity are on the fifth level.

It is obvious that survival comes first before an individual is ready to focus on what it takes to earn an education, which is linked to achievement.

If a child is hungry, doesn’t feel secure, has poor health and lives in a dysfunctional family, then she is not going to make education a priority, and it doesn’t matter how great the teacher is.

Continued on August 15, 2011, in Needs versus Education – What comes first? – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on August 14, 2011 in American Public Schools, child abuse, Education, family values, government, Parenting, politics, Public School, student behavior

 

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