Sunday, February 20, 2011

• The Great Void In Education

Watching teachers lead young children by the hand to demonstrate on the streets of Wisconsin, educating them on the finer art of union bargaining methodology, it becomes abundantly clear that great voids exist in the educational continuum. The void becomes even more obvious when the Oval office, and possibly the Democratic Party, meddle with the State leadership by championing Union actions such as shutting down schools.

As we set out on our paths through life, we come to recognize that students graduating from High School, University or College, are lacking some necessary tools and percepts critical to all endeavors, personal or business, which academia could have provided. Union tactics are not among them.

Evidently, too many voters during the last Presidential elections forgot that a community organizer gains power and influence by making chimerical promises to susceptible listeners. He assures them that government controlled economic activity will lead to redistribution of wealth, . . . “You’re being oppressed so that you can’t get what’s yours, . . . I’ll get it for you through government.”

The community organizer Does Not imbue the community with personal motivation, or any sense of individual purpose. The Community organizer is incapable of distinguishing the difference between controlling the game and its players, from the enforcement of laws that shape how honestly the game is played, particularly by its biggest players. He also confuses Wall Street and Banking, with the business and corporate sectors of the Nation’s economic engines.

Although we are social beings, our greatest learning and our deepest satisfaction come from within and these are energized through accomplishment. The good and the bad of all our experiences, big and small, are positive as long as they are ours, . . . ours without blame, or deflection, or passing the buck.

Those who would stifle such energy are hypocritical, self-serving charlatans. This type of leadership does not honestly promote challenging of the mind, or invigorating the spirit, or animating innovation, or even hard work, but instead seeks to covertly suppress them.

America holds a unique body of work that rests at its foundation, produced by an exceptional group of men, but it may be less commonly known in its classrooms than the sayings of Confucius. I refer to the ample documentation such as The Federalist Papers, and the letters and speeches provided for future generations by the sages who were principally responsible for the Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America, the Founding Fathers.

I don’t infer that these men were the epitome of wisdom, since they were human after all, nevertheless they were wise enough to create the foundation for an environment the world admires and wishes to emigrate to, 222 years after the first adoption and ratification of its framework.

When John Adams wrote, “Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom,” he did not mean that the country’s youth should be instructed in ideology. As individual freedom remains a most aspired-to circumstance in any society, the thinking of those who produced its best configuration, should, as has been proposed by many for two centuries, become very common knowledge and should be intrinsically incorporated into the fabric of the educational system.

As teachers march out of the schools of Wisconsin, we are reminded of what has been gravely omitted from their place of work.

.... Read more!