It is only decency that prevents me from using colorful metaphors to describe our state legislature’s assault on education and the environment while having the audacity to give themselves some hefty pay raises!
Despite the veto of the recent budget proposal by the governor, the Republican-run legislature (along with some foolish Democrats) has succeeded in spinning back the clock on education and the environment in this beautiful state.
There seems to be a one-track consensus at both the federal and state levels among the GOP to bring down the president and the United States along with him. They seem hell-bent on attacking anything that is good for society, [and appear] obsessed with cutting education, jobs and services for the less privileged, while putting the extra cash in the hands of the wealthy. If they really wanted to bring down expenses, they would start with axing their own jobs and salaries!
Despite the rhetoric of less government by the newly elected officials, they are imposing more government. What we need is constructive action, not ideological stances that mess with our lives. I hope the people of America and this state recognize the extreme nature of these elected officials and throw the jokers out of power come the next election.
— Rudranath Beharrysingh
Asheville
Public Education is broken and needs a complete overhaul. Thank-you, God, that my kids are no longer in the system.
What is extreme about citizens seeking to take back control of the government and local education? If the government is extreme, it is a reflection of both the citizenry that put them there and your rather myopic vantage point.
Education is “hell-bent on attacking anything that is good for society” by assaulting family values in the classroom. As much as I dislike Big Gubment, I have no sympathy when they target the abusive and mismanaged education beauracracy.
Big Al, how is it that public education attacks family values? I attended and graduated from public school, and must have missed that class. I think the system can be improved, but defunding it cannot possibly make it better. The assault on education and social services, by teabaggers who call them entilements, is appalling. I’ve got a family value for you ideologues : Do unto others as you would have them do to you.
Ashevegasjoe,
As soon as you polluted your comment with the pejorative “teabagger”, you ruined any credibility you might have had. Obviously, that high education you received lacked a foundation in rhetoric.
It is not education that is assaulted. For that matter, nothing is being assaulted, that being another poor choice of words.
Containing costs that have far exceeded demographic justifications is not “defunding” education. It is focusing expenditures on those areas that offer a greater benefit for those dollars. Reducing administrative overhead and scaling back “social engineering” initiatives e.g. explosive growth in “counselor” positions and non teaching roles is a reasonable effort by some to return the focus of grade school and secondary school to providing for the curriculum based education of students.
As for “social services”, I see nothing in Big Al’s comments that should have spurred such a linkage. In fact, there is little linkage if any between improving the standards of education through properly targeted spending and addressing wildly out of control social services entitlements. By setting broad and inclusive qualifications for beneficiaries, the term “entitlement” is perhaps the best term available to describe the social effect of such policies.
Neither issue is defined by the “middle America” reaction to spending and Government intrusion that “Progressive liberals” denigrate with a homosexual slur. Incidentally, the “family value” you promoted is a Christian teaching contained in the following passage. The vitriolic Progressive liberals among us would do well to subscribe to it, especially with the “teabagger” comments. (Of course, I bear my own guilt in a similar regard)
“But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. And unto him that smiteth thee on the [one] cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not [to take thy] coat also. Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask [them] not again. And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. For if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that love them. And if ye do good to them which do good to you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same. And if ye lend [to them] of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye? for sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and [to] the evil. 36 Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.” (Lu 6:27-36 AV)
Nice letter and I agree … I am sorry for all teachers that have to make amends due to the budget cuts. We need to educate our young and public schools are needed for this.
Schools are a frivolous bourgeois extravagance of indoctrination. Did you know Nazi’s used schools?
The only way to ensure our children is learning is to turn over our schools to the free market, where knowledge can flourish in a neutral, clean, friendly, corporate sponsored environment, with the finest educational facilitators the market can bare!
bear
PUBLIC schools were a late 1880s “progressive” reform whose primary purpose was to integrate and indoctrinate the huge wave of new immigrants’ children (80% of Americans ancestors entered this country after 1880) to values considered uniquely American, which included the promotion of Protestant Judeo-Christanity and open discrimination against Catholics. The original Pledge of Allegience was part of this integration and indoctrination. By the 1950s, this had morphed into the promotion of Christian Capitalism and open discrimination against Socialism/Communism, its’ accompanying atheism, and the concurrent revision of the Pledge to include “Under God”. In the wake of the 1960s civil rights movement, the American Liberal movement infiltrated and usurped the education beauracracy and began an organized assault on any religious expression in public schools on the principle that such expression was a form of discrimination against non-believers. The Pledge of Allegience is deliberately suppressed in many school systems, students are discouraged from any expression of any political and religious beliefs, and some are openly discriminated against for expressing beliefs which conflict with those of the educators’ vision of civil rights, whether that vision is shared by the community or not.
My point is that, whether by the Right or the Left, Public education has ALWAYS been a tool of indoctrination, discrimination and persecution by the empowered agianst the disempowered. It was wrong when public education slurred Catholics in the 1880s, atheists and Jews in the 1950s, and Judeo-Christian evangelists today.
The difference is that most of us were either not born or in the minority for the first two examples, but now we CLAIM to live in a society that opposes discrimination, while actually promoting discrimination of a sizable, possibly a majority, of our population, all in the name of social engineering and “justice” (which belongs in the courts, not the schoolroom).
Our drive to promote “diversity” has made cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all public school models obsolete and even counter-productive. Taxpayer-funded, mandatory public education should be dismantled and replaced with a universal private system which would allow school choice, paid for by tax credits or vouchers. We have already done this with health care (assuming it is not struck down as unconstitutional), so it is not such a stretch.
Until this happens, and so long as education beauracrats and union leeches from federal down to local level continue to demand that our children be forcefully corraled into a system where their dissenting beliefs and values can be openly abused and assaulted, I will withhold my sympathy for the offending crybabies and applaud when the electorate strikes back via the voting booth.
Big Al
Can you cite any instances where “education bureaucrats and union leeches” forcefully corralled children into a system where dissenting beliefs an values are openly abused and assaulted? I mean, those are pretty strong words, and if it’s truly the case I’d be surprised.
Also, can you point to any other country in the world that has had success with the model you espouse?
And finally, can you cite instances that show how our society promotes discrimination against a sizable majority – in this case, I assume you mean that sizable majority to be white, evangelical Christians? Are Christians somehow treated differently than everyone else?
Big Al, you’ve got a lot of rhetoric but precious little information. If you truly believe a private education is within the reach of most Americans, you’re mistaken. If you truly believe that getting to know and deal with people from different socioeconomic backgrounds isn’t useful in the most diverse nation on earth, well, you’re … you.
It’s all true – our public schools have socialized and educated a polyglot human tide from the world over into a pretty cohesive, productive and powerful nation. You’re no Emma Lazarus, is what I’m saying.