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Category Archives: Education

Eager to Learn or Not – Part 7/10

18 Jul

It is a fact that my “old” friend the neoconservative, libertarian, born-again Christian (NLBC) and the authors of the No Child Left Behind ACT (NCLB) along with tens of millions of other Americans, would reject with ignorant laughter the opinion and argument that I am offering.

My old NLBC friend will claim that I have been brainwashed by the liberal media and am singing the same old arguments, which are based on my personal experience, reliable sources and facts.

However To “old” NLBC, that does not count.

In fact, instead, people such as NLBC will turn to totally biased and often-misleading conservative talk-radio hosts such Rush Limbaugh and conservative politicians that have judged public school teachers guilty, while ignoring the responsibility of students and parents in the learning process.

In addition, the authors of the NCLB Act from both major political parties had to believe that “all” children are eager to learn without any consideration that there will be students who will not cooperate or do the cass work a teacher assigns.

Eager to Learn or Not – Part 10

leading to the average American child of today spending more than 10 hours of his her daily time either watching TV, listening to music with an iPod bud plugged into ear holes, playing video games, spending time on Social Networking sites such as Facebook, and sending endless and mindless text message from one cell phone to another.

The same lack of parenting has led to an epidemic of obesity and diabetes among today’s children, which also affects the brain’s ability to function and learn.

No matter what the facts are, my “old” NLCB friend, and the elected officials that authored the NCLB Act will continue to believe that the public schools in America have failed. They will believe public education is a fraud and teachers are not teaching because that is what they keep hearing from conservative talk radio and/or conservative Blogs and Forums.  These people will never admit that too many students are like my brother Richard who refused to cooperate with his teachers to learn what the teachers taught.

To my “old’ NLCB friend, school choice and a voucher that pays private schools run by the private sector is the “magic pill” that will fix all of America’s problems and he isn’t alone. Millions agree with him such as the Walton family, the wealthiest and one of the most powerful families in America today.

Continued on July 19, 2011 in Eager to Learn or Not – Part 8 or return to Part 6

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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 July 18, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, literacy, Parenting, politics, Public School

 

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Eager to Learn or Not – Part 6/10

17 Jul

After turning 18 and gaining the freedom he wanted, my brother Richard worked long hours at low paying jobs to earn enough to pay the bills so his family could have a house in a barrio infested by street gangs, which was the best he could afford.

Without the education that Richard spurned, he could not afford a better place to live, since he could only work at unskilled jobs such as digging ditches and/or mixing concrete alongside men that spoke mostly Spanish that also did not read English.

By the ime Richard was in his fifties, his feet were ruined and he had pins holding the bones together so he could hobble about while surviving on disability from Social Security.

In his fifties, to stay out of jail after another DUI, a judge told Richard to enroll in a literacy class but my brother often fell off the wagon and skipped class to drink and chase women on the weekends while his wife stayed home to take care of their many children.

America’s community colleges offer literacy classes and American libraries offer free literacy programs but to take advantage of them, the individual must be willing to be there and learn what is taught.

In fact, finding a literacy program today is easy. All one has to do is use LINCS to find a program in his or her area or go to the nearest public library and ask for help to find the nearest literacy program.

My brother’s children, like their father, who was their role model, were not eager to learn either and mostly followed the father’s example, which helps explain one of the reasons many children and teens in America do not learn what teacher’s teach.

The reason my brother didn’t learn was because of his attitude toward work and fun and the fact that he had dyslexia, which meant Richard would have to work harder than most children. He chose to give up.

However, that is not an excuse. I also have dyslexia but that did not stop me from learning to read as it did him.

For Richard, schoolwork wasn’t fun, but drinking, hanging out in bars, smoking, and chasing women, even after he was married with children, was his “pursuit of happiness”.

The reason I am writing this series of posts is because that “old” stubborn friend that is an evangelical born again Christian that listens to too much conservative talk radio and reads too many conservative Blogs is also a neoconservative libertarian that firmly believes the public education system in the United States is corrupt, which is the reason children do not learn.

However, the truth is that between 93 to 99% of the teachers are teaching what they are supposed to teach, but too many students are not learning, and the reason these students don’t learn is because of choices made in the “pursuit of happiness”.

Continued on July 18, 2011 in Eager to Learn or Not – Part 7 or return to Part 5

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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 July 17, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, literacy, Parenting, politics, Public School

 

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Eager to Learn or Not – Part 5/10

14 Jul

An “old” friend (with a closed, rigid and voluntarily brainwashed mind) sent me a link to a post from Minding the Campus where Herbert London claimed there was fraud up and down our (public) education system.

To support his opinion, London quotes Charles Eliot, who was the president of Harvard (what London doesn’t say is that Eliot was born in 1834 and died in 1926 well before the birth of today’s modern public education system).

A lot has changed in America since Charles Eliot said, “the freshmen bring so much in and the seniors take so little out.”  Yes, this is the phrase London interpreted to mean public education is a fraud.

In fact, I am going to use sugar consumption as one example of how much has changed since Charles Eliot was born and died.

The New England Primer.com says sugar consumption in the 19th century was about 52 pounds per person a year in the UK.  In 2003, that consumption was more than 150 pounds, and we know today that too much sugar in the blood causes havoc to the brain affecting a child’s ability to learn, which will be another subject of discussion in another post at another time.

Herbert London says in Minding the Campus, “At the elementary school level it is simply embarrassing to have a large number of students leave illiterate or semi-literate.”

My response to London is to offer up my dead brother Richard as an example of one of those illiterate students.

After you get to know my brother, you will learn why he left school illiterate and stayed illiterate his entire life.  Richard died December 1999 at 64.  If he had lived, he would be 76 today.

From an early age, Richard had no desire to do the work it took to gain an education. He fought our mother, father and his teachers from kindergarten until his last year in high school.

By the time he was in high school, he cut classes as often as possible to hang out with friends and have sex with his girlfriend of the moment. He went as far as to have a friend or girlfriend forge excuse notes or to get the girl friend of the moment to call the school and pretend to be our mother, which was easy since our parents both worked and were not home to catch him in the act.

That was what Richard wanted — to have a good time and as much sex with as many female partners as possible, which led to excessive drinking, smoking and drugs and a painful death after spending 15 of his 64 years in jails or prisons.

Richard died at 64 riddled with cancer and heart disease.  While he was 64 chronologically, his biological age was more than a hundred.

My brother never had a desire to read, to do homework or to study. In that education equation I mentioned in Part 2 of this series, Richard was a “zero”. The opportunity to learn was offered to Richard, and his teachers taught what they were required to teach, but Richard was the horse that refused to drink water.

Continued on July 17, 2011 in Eager to Learn or Not – Part 6 or return to Part 4

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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 July 14, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, literacy, Parenting, Public School

 

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Eager to Learn or Not – Part 4/10

13 Jul

The first time America’s Founding Fathers used the word “equal” in the Declaration of Independence, it said, “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

The second and last time King George read the word “equal” in the Declaration of Independence was in the second paragraph where it says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Do you know what pursuit means?  It does not guarantee that the government or parents are responsible to see that every citizen and/or child is happy all of the time.

What the word “pursuit” means in the Declaration of Independence is that the common person and/or citizen has a right to seek happiness.  However, there is no guarantee that happiness will be found, and for a fact, it is not the government’s responsiblity to provide happiness as some seem to believe.

King George’s response to the Declaration of Independence was to declare the revolutionary leaders as “rebels” and to order British military and civil agents to suppress the revolt, which led to years of war and rebellion in the thirteen colonies.

In fact, The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution do not  define “equal” in any way to mean everyone is born with the same intelligence, health, wealth or ability or that the government should pass laws to make it so.

According to The Freeman – Ideas on Liberty, “What the Founding Fathers meant by equality is this: All men share a common human nature. The assertion that all men are created equal means that all persons are the same in some respect; it does not mean that all men are identical, or equally talented, wise, prudent, intelligent, or virtuous; rather, it means that all persons possess the inherent capacity to reason. ”

This also means that there are no guarantees that if a teacher teaches, the student will learn the skills and knowledge taught as if he or she were a sponge and had to do-nothing but sit there as many do.

Continued on July 14, 2011 in Eager to Learn or Not – 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 July 13, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, literacy, Parenting, Public School

 

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Eager to Learn or Not – Part 3/10

12 Jul

After the NCLB act became law while President G. W. Bush was still in the White House, teachers had to be both teacher, parent and responsible for the student to learn, while most of the nation seemed to believe a modern fable that every child is equal and has a right by law to be happy all the time.

However, the Constitution of the United States, which offers protection for American citizens from the tyranny of government, uses the word “equal” only eight times.

Only once does the word “equal” refer to common citizens when the Constitution says the people have equal protection of the laws.

The other seven times the word “equal” deals with the process of government and has nothing to do with people outside of the federal or state systems.

In fact, studies prove that teachers are teaching while there is plenty of evidence that some students are not learning what is being taught.

If you don’t remember what your teachers taught you about the meaning of the US Constitution (Whose fault is that?), then I suggest you visit the U.S. Constitution online and search for the word “equal” and read each section where the word is used in any of its forms.

If you want to know where “equal” was used differently than the U.S. Constitution, you will have to discover that from the Declaration of Independence, which is not the law of the United States.

Instead, the Declaration of Independence was a document signed by America’s Founding Fathers and sent to the king of England as a notice that thirteen colonies in North America (except Canada) were willing to fight to be free of the British Empire.

Once the thirteen colonies earned their freedom from the British Empire, the Declaration of Independence, became history and has never been (before and after the revolution) the law that guides the US government.

Continued on July 13, 2011 in Eager to Learn or Not – Part 4 or return to 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 July 12, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, literacy, Parenting, Public School

 

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Eager to Learn or Not – Part 2/10

11 Jul

After listening to the NPR.org piece about the Atlanta school scandal, I concluded that the enemies of public education (that by coincidence support the school choice voucher movement that would add billions of taxpayer dollars to the profit margins of private corporations) were at it again.

After all, the next presidential election of 2012 is starting to gather steam and the alleged failure of public education will be a topic of discussion with accusations being hurled about as if they were grenades in the hands of terrorists.

The pressure that caused these teachers and administrators in Atlanta’s public schools to cheat was due to the impossible demands set by No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which requires America’s teachers to teach as if all students are equal and eager to learn, which many are not.

An old English proverb says, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.”  This idiom means that if a teacher teaches he or she cannot force the student to learn regardless of a law written in Washington D.C. by a bunch of ignorant, elected fools.

For a child to learn, he or she must come to school motivated and ready to learn, and this is often not the case, which is the reason behind the fact that not all students are equal.

There is an equation/formula that shows what it takes for a student to learn.

This formula is as simple as 1 (teacher) + 1 (student) + 1 (parent) = 3.

1. The teacher teaches

2. The students listen/pay attention, follow directions, ask questions, study, read and learn

3, parents support both teachers and students so learning takes place

 If one or two elements of that equation are missing, the education process suffers.

Continued on July 12, 2011 in Eager to Learn or Not – 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 July 11, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, literacy, Parenting, Public School

 

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Eager to Learn or Not – Part 1/10

10 Jul

I woke up recently to read about “Cheating Investigation Focuses on Atlanta Schools”.  Then later in the morning, my wife and I walked to town to see Larry Crowne with Tom Hanks and Julie Roberts, which was a movie my wife and I enjoyed.

Since Larry Crowne also dealt with the value of earning an education to become more competitive in the workplace, it fits the goal of this Blog so I felt it was worth mentioning.

Last week, I read the review of Larry Crowne in The New York Times, which was extremely negative. Knowing how biased and wrong the New York Times critics often are, I was convinced the movie was worth seeing, which brings me back to the subject of this post.

After returning from viewing Larry Crowne, I searched the internet for a reliable source on the Atlanta schools cheating scandal and discovered a story on NPR.org dated October 12, 2010.

You may not believe this, but studies of bias in the media have demonstrated that NPR offers the most balanced news possible, which may explain why conservative Republicans want to cut federal funding from public radio. After all, well-balanced news is not the goal of conservatives.

When I saw the date of the NPR piece, I realized this was old news, so why was it being treated as if it were new again?

Continued on July 11, 2011 in Eager to Learn or Not – 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 July 10, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, literacy, Parenting, Public School

 

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The Reality of American Education – Part 3/3

05 Jul

MYTH: “American Universities Are Being Overtaken.” (concerning research and development)

Wildavsky’s ANSWER: “NOT SO FAST.

He says, Asia’s share of the world’s research and development (R&D) spending grew from 27 to 32% from 2002 to 2007, led mostly by China, India, and South Korea.

However, R&D spending worldwide massively surged in the last decade from $790 billion to $1.1 trillion, up 45 percent, and in 2007, the U.S. spent $373 billion (up from $277 billion in 2002) on R&D, which was very high by global standards totaling more than all Asian countries’ combined ($352 billion was spent on R&D in Asia).

MYTH: “THE WORLD WILL CATCH UP”

Wildavsky’s ANSWER: “Maybe, but don’t count on it anytime soon.”

While the global academic marketplace is without doubt growing more competitive, the United States doesn’t have just a few elite schools as most of its foreign competition does, and the U.S. spends about 2.9 percent of its GDP on postsecondary education, about twice the percentage spent in 2006 by China, the European Union, and Japan combined.

In fact, according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), eight of the top ten universities are in the US and so are 54 of the top 100, while the US State Department recognizes 194 independent countries around the globe.

If this three part series of posts sparked a curiosity to learn more on this topic, I urge you to take the time and click over to Foreign Policy magazine‘s Website and read all of FP’s Think Again: Education written by Ben Wildavsky.

It’s always a good idea to discover the facts before you form an opinion or believe what someone writes in a Blog. In today’s Internet dominated world, opinions without reputable and reliable facts to support them are worth as much as sterile dirt, which is why I usually link to the sources I use for facts.

After reading Wildavsky’s piece in FP, it is obvious that America’s schools are not failing and have never been failing and are actually either holding steady or slowly improving.

That DOES NOT mean the US should stop working at improving the public education system.

Considering the handicaps and competition teachers in the U.S. public schools face to gain the attention and cooperation of the average child and/or adolescent, the facts says American teachers are doing an incredible job.

Imagine what would happen if the average American parent was actually involved with his or her child’s education as much as the average Asian-American parent (such as Amy Chua of Tiger Mother fame). If you are interested in learning more of Amy Chua, I recommend reading her oldest daughter’s Blog, a new tiger in town, who is now attending Harvard — ranked number one by the ARWU.

Return to The Reality of American Education – 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 “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 July 5, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, politics, Public School

 

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The Reality of American Education — Part 2/3

04 Jul

MYTH: “The United States Used to Have the Worlds Smartest Schoolchildren.”

ANSWER: Ben Wildavsky says, “No, it didn’t. Even at the height of U.S. geopolitical dominance and economic strength, American students were never anywhere near the head of the class … the results from the first major international math test came out in 1967 … Japan took first place out of 12 countries, while the United States finished near the bottom …

“If American’s ahistorical [unconcerned with or unrelated to history or to historical development or to tradition] sense of their global decline prompts educators to come up with innovative new ideas, that’s all to the good.  But don’t expect any of them to bring the country back to its educational golden age—there wasn’t one.”

MYTH: “Chinese Students Are Eating America’s Lunch.”

Wildavsky’s ANSWER: “Only Partly True … China’s educational prowess is real. Tiger moms (such as Amy Chua, who wrote Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) are no myth — Chinese students focus intensely on their schoolwork, with strong family support (mostly missing in the U.S.), but these results don’t necessarily provide compelling evidence of U.S. inferiority.”

“Wildavsky then says that many of the students in rural China outside Shanghai (the PISA international test was conducted only in Shanghai) are poorer and less educated than ‘China’s’ coastal cities …

Wildavsky says, “(American) alarmist comparisons with other countries, whose challenges are quite different from those of the United States, don’t help.

“Americans should be less worried about how their own kids compare with kids in Helsinki (Finland) than how students in the Bronx measure up to their peers in Westchester Country.”

MYTH: “The U.S. No Longer Attracts the Best and the Brightest”

ANSWER:  “WRONG.”

While Wildavsky mentions that the U.S. should be concerned about the future, the U.S. college education system was (and still is) second to none since the United States has long been the world’s largest magnet for international students.

In fact, he says there are more foreign students in the United States today than there were a decade ago — 149,999 more in 2008 than in 2000.

For international graduate study, Wildavsky says, American universities are a particularly powerful draw in fields that may directly affect the future competitiveness of a country’s economy: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Continued on July 5, 2011 in The Reality of American Education – 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 July 4, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, media, Parenting, Public School

 

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The Reality of American Education — Part 1/3

03 Jul

Tired of reading endless criticisms of just about everything global, I dropped my weekly subscription to The Economist magazine (TE).

To me, it seemed that most of TE’s staff does not have the intellectual ability or knowledge to write with depth, which might explain why they hide behind anonymity. Over several months, I only remember reading one piece that was well researched.

Instead, I shifted to Foreign Policy (FP) magazine, which comes once every two months, and from what I’ve read so far in a few issues, the writing and ability of its staff is on a much higher level than The Economist.

Maybe that’s because FP has more lead-time to research, think, write, revise and edit before the next issue comes out.

The idea for this post came after reading FP’s Think Again: Education. The writer was Ben Wildavsky, a senior scholar in Research and Policy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the author of several scholarly books.

Knowing who wrote what you are reading is a big leap from TE, which is probably wise since what TE publishes is often insulting, biased and flawed.  In fact, writing in anonymity often leads to lazy, biased and sloppy writing littered with inaccuracies.

What Wildavsky does in FP magazine is debunk the myths about the American educational system, and he does an excellent job.

MYTH: “American Kids are Falling Behind”

ANSWER: Wildavsky says, “Not Really”, and explains, “the U.S. education system … doesn’t look to be failing so spectacularly.

“The performance of American students in science and math has actually improved modestly since the last round of the (PISA) international test in 2006 … and reading scores … are more or less unchanged since … 2003.

Continued on July 4, 2011 in The Reality of American Education – 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 July 3, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, Parenting, Public School

 

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