Straitjacketing Students?

Although the National Government's introduction of new, across-the-board national standards may have some positive short term benefits, little good can come of further straitjacketing of New Zealand's educational system.

The new national standards are merely the latest in a long line of governmental reforms aimed at curbing the deteriorating quality of education in New Zealand. However well intentioned the latest reforms, the government needs to wake up and realise that the true problems lies with the continual packing of pupils into schools which merely exist for the sake of bureaucratic convenience.

The children and teenagers of New Zealand, like any nation, are an incredibly diverse group of people, with many different talents and abilities that don't reach their full potential. The only way to get pupils to shine, is to treat education as a genuine value.

Education has its greatest value at the individual level, which then rubs off on the rest of society later. How can we expect the youths of the nation to thrive, if they themselves are not taught to see it as that themselves?

The only way to do this is to, once again, get education to be a task of parents and teachers, not of bureaucrats in Wellington. In short: the government needs to butt out of educational arrangements.

So, however well intentioned and well informed National's education reform is, the government simply cannot drastically improve education levels without realising the basic truth: education, fundamentally, is a value. Until the government treats it as such, and gets its head out of bureaucrat-run doll houses known as public schools, continue to expect educational standards to fall into the abyss.

The Place of Principals

As a consequence of the National Government’s policy to publicly display school performance data, hundreds of New Zealand Primary School Principals are threatening to boycott literacy and numeracy standards.

As a Libertarian and Objectivist, of course I do not support the governmental interference with matters that rightly belong to schools, teachers, students and parents. But as it stands we are stuck with government’s foot firmly in the door, and millions of taxpayer dollars go to fund primary schools.

As a result, those principals threatening to boycott the standards are public servants –the public has the right to know how good our schools are, as we are paying for them! The taxpayer is their benefactor, so principals have a duty to release information about school performance publicly. Of course, the information doesn't tell all details about every aspect of schooling -but the use of it is at the discretion of parents, not principals.

In a free market for education, principals would reserve the right to release information about their schools. But in a competitive marketplace, it would be a wise decision to release information, to be better able to compete for students and the business they bring. But as parents are forced, through no choice of their own, to fund schooling whether they like it or not, it is their right to choose the best school for their children.

Luckily, Education Minister Anne Tolley believes that parents do have a right to know how about school performance. But principals, in a taxpayer-funded education system, need to remember their place as servants of the public, not masters of their children.

Article:http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/2564336/Principals-in-threat-to-boycott-standards

Helping Form NZ Education Policy :-)

About a week and a half ago, I received this email:

Tena koe Callum

Reading your press release I'm interested in your perspective on education. What do you see as alternative to the current system or changes that could be made to improve what we have?

Regards
Kelvin Davis MP
Associate Spokesman Education
Labour
Kelvin Davis MP
------

My reply (in a formal, rather PC tone):

Hello Kelvin,

Sorry for the delay, and thanks for your interest in my press release. Do many of your colleagues read press releases from organisations such as SOLO?

Throughout most of human history, education has been a highly personal field, built fundamentally upon the relationship between student and teacher -that the educator would take a genuine interest in what goes on inside the student's brain, adjusting curriculum and teaching methods accordingly, and the student would take an interest in what they're taught, and its application. In effect, there existed a relationship of mutual respect and cooperation between the two, education being the common value. Thus, parents and other members of the community would take an active role in the education of schoolchildren.

When this connection between pupil and educator existed most strongly, the results have been good -regardless of external conditions. A good example of this comes from 19th Century Washington D.C -less than ten years after the civil when when institutionalised racism was rampant, at a school called Paul Laurence Dunbar Senior High School. The school was an entirely black school far less resourced than the area's white schools. However, most students, after graduating, went off to Ivy-League or other top American Universities, and soon overtook the white schools of Washington in test scores. Despite being a very working class school with less than adequate facilities, it outshone the other schools of the area.*

State-run education was first introduced by Bismarck in Prussia, during its wars with France, as a means of supplying the military with plenty of new recruits.

However, schools based on the relationship between student and teacher, and one-room community schoolhouses were the norm in the early 20th Century. But as the concept of universal education by the state became common in political thinking after World War II and the development of economies-of-scale in manufacturing, schools in New Zealand (as well as around the world) became far less personalised, with the goal being to get as many children through the education system as possible with the skills needed for the new era of technology. The relationship of mutual respect and cooperation between student and teacher based on the common value of education essentially broke down, and although students and teachers could still be friends with a mutual interest in one another, there were suddenly many other children that needed to be dealt with. The value of education was replaced by the necessity of education -having an inverse effect, as 2 of every 5 NZ adults today are in fact functionally illiterate**, thanks to state curriculum.

A key argument for state education today is that only state funding can provide resources for education in the "knowledge economy". However, looking back to the industrial age when new machines required new skills, we do not see faltering economic growth because of a lack of such education.
__________________________________________________________

Based on this brief summary, three changes need to be made in regards to education:

1) education is a value -not a commodity, and educational thinking needs to be based around this. As thus, educational involvement needs to be done at an individual and community level, where education is a genuine value to all parties.
2) education is not done on a societal level -children do not belong to any one country, but their immediate surroundings and people.
3) the recognition that, therefore, that education is not the state's responsibility -that state-run education is dangerous to a nation's free speech (by having reign of what gets into a child's brain) and is often compromised by political goals, in turn undermining democracy. There is little evidence to suggest that state involvement improves the quality or quantity of education, as the fact that levels of functional literacy in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries was higher than today and people had the necessary skills to keep the economy growing.

To reinforce, the goal of these changes is to make education a value with mutual respect and cooperation as its means, as opposed to a commodity.

Thanks,
Callum McPetrie

*http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5241, "Patterns of Black Excellence in Education" by Walter Williams
**"The Free Radical" issue 76 page 19, "The Look and Guess Lady" by Graham Crawshaw

Protests and Factory Schools

At Fairfield College in Hamilton this morning, a student protest against the school's leadership made big news across the country. Concerned about the lack of any real power of decision making in the school, the students staged a protest at the school as 16 protesters swelled to 200.

It is not a surprise in the current educational environment. Over the last fifty years, every aspect of life, rather than the traditional straitjacket model, has become personalised to certain degrees. Schooling, however, sticks stubbornly to the one-size-fits all model.

Every day, thousands of students flood into the countries colleges and high schools, and go through much the same routine. Teachers have to juggle hundreds of students in a day, and class sizes are much larger in New Zealand than other countries, leaving little time to catering to student's needs. Indeed, teachers and students alike are, in their particular contexts, little more than the workers and products of factories, respectively.

The special link between student and educator which has been the heart of education for so much of human history has been replaced by economies of scale, in the interests of "universal education", ultimately serving the interests of bureaucracy.

Perhaps the students at Fairfield High should ponder that -is modern education truly about education, or political goals?

School's Out

As of today, the school year has ended for High Schools and Colleges all over the country, with Primaries and Intermediates finishing now or next week. Some kids will be out around the towns and cities, but most of them will be at home.

Just today, an article appeared in the Dominion Post warning that New Zealand's "She'll be right" attitude (what attitude? it died out years ago when, mysteriously, crime was on the rise) is to blame for fatal accidents where youths are the victims. However, would it be better to condemn those kids to a life of fear of the outside world?

While it is true that parents can take a worthy role in the education of their children about the outside world, a child must learn about it for himself. Children, more so than the rest of us, have an intrinsic desire to explore and learn about the world around them, and to have fun doing so. Education through experience best helps a child to learn about the world around them. How does preventing them from experiencing the outside world help their development?

Once again, the politically-correct cotton-wool culture of modern day New Zealand is at work, trying to protect their child -and intervening in the lives of other people's children- from the culture of self-loathing and hopelessness that they created, by changing New Zealand culture from one of self-reliance to complete reliance on others.

Perhaps removing politically correct cotton-wool culture from every facet of a child's life may help us rebuild that culture and allow our children to discover the world around them, and to build their own ideas of right and wrong, rather than having those ideas forced down their throats by a politically-correct clique.

Another Assault on Kiwi Education

Another Assault on Kiwi Education is on its way with Labour's recent legislative maneuver to raise the legal school leaving age to 18, unless the student attends Polytech or University. In response, 15 High School Principals on Auckland's North Shore have said that, should the act pass, they will deliberately violate it.

It is not hard to understand why. Why would a school principal want to keep students who have already expressed an intention to leave school -usually to go into the workforce- and who would simply cause violence if they were kept back? Why would a school want to waste money on the hiring of new teachers, adjusting wages to compensate for the extra stress put on already-existing teachers, extra school teaching material, and new classrooms for students who don't want to learn?

On top of that, keeping students in school prevents them from getting productive jobs out in the workforce, where they could truly be productive. Jobs and apprenticeships also provide the best education for more hands-on students looking for a career in the trades -which can provide an excellent source of income, but the current Labour Government believes that education can only be done in big, monotonous buildings, at little desks, subject to whatever the teachers says. It's this failure to differentiate between schooling and education where Labour fails miserably. What it all comes down to, is more resources required from a less productive economy.

As thus, the responsibility falls onto the parents and taxpayers to pay for the extra students, who don't to be there, and get no value out of the education system. Parents and taxpayers are getting more for less -and the strain on schools could jeopardise their own child(ren)'s education.

The same deluded principle has also been applied to Universities. For various reasons, the Left has taught New Zealand that everyone has a right to go to University. As a result, more people have come out of the University system with degrees which are worth nothing to an employer, thanks to everyone else having one. More money is being used to fund students who go and produce less, on the whole, and who would be more successful in the trades -where New Zealand has a major deficit.

However, University is hardly compulsory -whereas this current proposal will make school attendance compulsory.

In the end, all this stupid proposal boils down to is election-buying, and trying to pretend that education under Labour has not been pitiful. As proof, John Key is also supporting the proposal. Now try to argue that it ISN'T election buying!

The Right to Protest?

Recently in Social Studies, my class has been assigned a book called "How Many Lightbulbs does It Take to Change a Planet: 95 Ways to Save Planet Earth". The Idea is that we would chose one of the 95 different topics on all manners of leftist ideas about climate change, take notes and do a PowerPoint presentation about it.

One of the ideas in the book is "Protect the Right to Protest". Alright, but this is what the left, through its self-anointed moral supremacy over climate change, has been stifling. If you speak up against the IPCC, the climate change "consensus" or Al Gore, you are thrown out of the climate change debate in days, if not hours. Suddenly, you have all these environmental "scientists" pouncing on you, saying that you're wrong and giving no particular reason, only data that has been spewed up a million times. For proof, look at what happened to the Great Global Warming Swindle -and that's one of the nicer examples.

The right to protest hasn't been stifled directly in the political arena -indeed, it's the politcal arena that the left wants to avoid over opposition to climate change. The left, in all its talk of "tolerance" and "cultural/political/economic diversity", has to maintain a clean, public image of what it is, and what it stands for. To its credit, it has been pretty successful. You're unlikely to see quotes like this on the front cover of a newspaper:

"We have wished... for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us back into the stone age..."

or that:

"You think Hiroshima was bad, let me tell you mister, Hiroshima wasn't bad enough!"*

Admittedly, those two quotes were said a while ago. But if you were to tell any random earth-hugger on the street about those quotes, they'd just shake their head and call you a nutter. There are many more quotes like the two above, but you'd be lucky to find anyone who knows about them.

Consider this fact: the environmental movement has successfully manufactured their ideology around a natural, scientific phenomenon: human-induced climate change. To most people within and supportive of the environmental movement, it's not about the control or the end of industry, it isn't about human quality of life -it's about global warming, or climate change. These people see scientific climate change as a primary -they don't consider anything else in the ideology as a possible primary. For them, it's alright to sacrifice human industry, technology, wealth, comfort, etc to Gaia -because climate change is a primary. Even if that did nothing to the climate, it's still the primary.

It's that idea that has left possible unbiased environmentalists completely open to bombardment by the environmental movement and its theories on climate change.

Also, as it is supposedly based on scientific fact, the supposed primary of climate change is seen as an absolute -for instance, man's mind is an absolute (although his using it is not), reality is an absolute. This is how the environmental movement has made the scientists who are skeptical of climate change seem absolutely crazy. Climate change is neither a primary nor an absolute, but the marketability of it as such has been used to devastating effect.

So, the right to protest against envirofascists? Surely, it exists in the political realm. But the rather simple idea of climate change has been manipulated so much in the philosophical realm that it's crazy to challenge the idea of anthropogenic global warming. To outsiders, you're protesting against an absolute (no matter how many studies say otherwise). The environmental movement keeps its credibility by making climate change its primary -not the end of industry and commerce, and relegating productive man back into the slums.

And as I've said many times before, isn't the idea of us all pitching in to make a collective effort for the good of the planet and future generations just lovely? Perhaps not for us selfish Objectivists, or anyone else who can look behind all the environmental rhetoric, but for the common Joe New Zealander, who has already been brought up with such principles during NZ's socialist era, they sound great. After all, we will all die if we don't -climate change, according to what Joe's heard so many times before, is an absolute.

The only thing getting in the way -productive, selfish man. The man who produces instead of sacrifices himself for the "common good". Sounds like a certain book!

But this is even worse. If you think sacrifice on the altar of the "need" of other people was bad, this is sacrifice on the altar of the environment -the truly unthinking.

Luckily, as Libertarians, we have the chance to hit at (or to protest at) where it hurts. The left for decades, long before the environmental movement arrived, has been going on about the need "tolerance" and "diversity" -which developed into the ideal of "protecting the right to protest". These principles developed as a way to get leftist rhetoric into the classrooms and onto the TV screens, but they have tripped up over themselves. After all, at school, you're not going to get a flogging anymore for expressing an opinion -the teachers have to grin and bear it, at worst. After all, it is in the name of "tolerance" and "diversity" -and when opinions can be put to people so bluntly, no leftist will try to stop you.

So it's on this different set of ideals -originally enlightened ideals from the enlightenment, before having a post-modern spin put on them- that we need to protest to combat leftist ideals. Ironically, what were, and still are some of the most attractive ideals of the left can be used against them. Not just in environmentalism, but everywhere.

*Both quotes from The Free Radical no. 73, page 27.

Scary School

With my recent observations of all kinds of political correctness and post-modernism throughout school recently, I can hardly say that 2008 is shaping up to be any better a year before last. Some of my recent observations:

- John Minto (yes, John Minto) appearing on an episode of Paul Holme's show about the 1981 Springbok Tour (as we're currently doing the Treaty of Waitangi in Social Studies, and this apparently was of relevance), and the protests. To be fair, John Minto was one of the organizers of the marchs, but when you see him being flashed into the heads of teenagers, you know something is wrong. He complained about a "wave of hatred" going up the crowd, and some pictures of the pro-rugby protestors were shown after. Guess who he's talking about.

-On the subject of Social Studies, our teacher puts up supposedly inspirational quotes everyday for... no reason whatsoever. For instance, the quote on Monday was "To not decide is to decide". I don't feel I need to go into detail about exactly how stupid that quote is. Last week, one quote was "together as a class we learn." (jeez, whoever heard of individual learning?) Today, a quote was "the fastest way to do everything at once is to do them one at a time". (that means?...)

-This piece of sheer absurdity, from the English reading log:

"More than one cultural perspective: This could mean that the writer is from a different cultural background or that the text is written from a different cultural viewpoint" (a "different cultural viewpoint" to what?)

And this:

"A gender balance: You need to include a mixture of male and female writers and viewpoints. You need to nominate two such texts"

...And this.

"special notes:

4. Selection of texts
a. The concept of 'inclusiveness' is important in text selection. It includes the following principles: 'in selecting authors and texts, schools will have regard to gender balance and to the inclusion of a range of cultural perspectives... New Zealand texts, including those by Maori authors and about Maori, should form a significant part of the wide range of texts that students will explore.' (English in the New Zealand Curriculum, pp 13, 14)."

Just for those last three, I WON'T read any book by a non-white middle-class European or American. The only reason I'll still read texts by women is because Ayn Rand was one. I read books because they're GOOD, not because someone is black, white, purple or whatever.


And I thought the HOLIDAYS were bad!

The Holidays -But Political Correctness Still Abounds

For the workforce and the productive elements of society, normal schedules have resumed now that Christmas and the New Year have came around. But New Zealand's children are still at home, away from school until early February. Safe and sound from political correctness until then? Perhaps not.

Instead, we are bombarded with messages of drownings, sunburn, car crashes and general chicanery during this otherwise peaceful time of the year. We hear news of the rate of drowning going up. But is that not to be expected? January and February are the warming time of the year here in New Zealand. With all these kids out of school for 6-8 weeks, and the proximity of water for most Kiwis, the drowning rate will inevitably go up -kids still like to have fun on the water, which isn't a bad thing. Summer is out there to enjoy, not to fret over. Common sense should be the primary concern here -which is lacking, thanks to the very political correctness worrying over these deaths which it caused, for that reason.

And although political correctness isn't particularly to blame, the reporting of sharks in our waters isn't helping, despite the fact that the chances of getting mauled by a shark are extremely low.

More political correctness about the evilness of the summer holiday comes from ads. One ad, for instance (from an organization whose name escapes me), states the obvious that:

"Sunburn early in life may lead to melanoma later in life."

Which is ultimately true, but the ad leads on to say:

"Never let your child go sunburnt."

How, exactly? I don't condemn the actions of parents who take measures to keep their child(ren) safe from sunburn (providing it doesn't prevent them from enjoying their summer in the sun). But not even our best SPF 30+ treatments work incredibly well to protect against sunburn, and it's inevitable that a child spending his holiday in the sun will get sunburnt now and then. What should we do instead? Keep them locked up indoors to become fat? Then the same crowd will be whinging and moaning about a problem they started. Sunburn is a fact of summer, I'm afraid. Common sense is of use here, again.

But when all else fails, there's always the fact that we are killing each other on the roads, with all the car crashes around this time of year. Unsurprisingly, as people get away from civilization for peace and quiet, the majority of accidents shifts onto rural highways. Also, try to drive more than 30kms around Auckland any time of the working week. As people get away to vacation and to visit friends, family and the like, they use their cars. With all these people on the move, accidents will undoubtedly occur.

There have also been accidents caused by tour buses and tourists visiting New Zealand. Once, again, it's the summer, the nicest time to visit New Zealand, and it's the time most tourists are here -and who can blame them?

The Summer Holiday should be free of political correctness, as schools are shut down. So, to compensate, we instead hear about drowning, road deaths, sunburn, and about how dangerous summer is to our children. Summer is a time to enjoy life, free from the stresses of work, government and the pace of civilization. New Zealand is a great place to holiday. Of course, accidents will happen and things will go wrong -it's a fact of life. But common sense is severely lacking in today's society, and it's the basic lack of common sense which leads to many ruined holidays. Shroud the people -especially the young- with a cloak of political correctness and perceived safety, and bad things will inevitable occur when it goes away, when it can't help you. The more cautions placed on a potentially dangerous item or activity, the less cautious people will be around it. The best thing about freedom is that it forces people to think on their feet and to be sensible, and to weigh up potential risks from their activities. Take that basic common sense away, replace it with political correctness, and people start dying.

But if we take that cloak away and people are forced to think on their feet, who falsely gets the blame for the lack of ability do to so?

Brit Gets It Right!

The bumbling Brits don't usually get it right first time; but on the subject of education, this guy gets it dead spot on.

And he thinks Britain gets it bad!

Government Brainwashing in New Curriculum

Free, rational, critical thinking is a fleeting concept in today's world. And it looks like it's about to get a whole lot rarer, thanks to the NZ government's new curriculum.

The newly released curriculum has called for more focus on global warming and climate change (and, of course, the human impact); an emphasis on how much more important Maori people are than us; and of course, that notorious "tweaty" of Waitangi.

This new curriculum isn't about a dedication to true, politically neutral education in our schools. Instead, it is a PC cover-up for the government's true aspirations in our schools-the shaping of young and impressionable minds for the sole purpose of keeping the government in power, and furthering Leftist ideals in New Zealand. It's not about shaping Kiwi minds into the doctors and engineers, writers and artists, businessmen and intelligensia, "movers and shakers", of tomorrow. For instance, lets take the classic example of climate change. Instead of leaving it to the proper realm of politically neutral science, it is brought to the forefront-with all the more emphasis on human causes such as business, industry and technological development, which inevitably leads to, in their later years, these children falsely laying the blame on capitalism-and the want to slit industry by the throat, and lead us back into the Middle Ages.

No, this is not an exaggeration. This is the governments real want-control, control control over people's lives.

Another example is the emphasis on the "tweaty". The Treaty of Waitangi is the primary reason, among many, that keeps race relations so far behind in NZ. Rather than having one single Kiwi culture, where everyone makes their own contribution, the Treaty and the whole concept of race relations sorts NZ into two categories: them and us. It's the same basic problem that surrounds any ideology based on human traits, as opposed to humanity as a whole. The Treaty is used to make people today apologize for what happened 200 years ago. We have to apoloize for events that were completely out of our control-because of someone that is also out of our control-our skin colour!

Here's an idea for the curriculum: go back to tried and true methods. Abolish all the PC crap. Focus on knowledge, and its application-not just whizzing us through school in the hope that drunken teenagers will educate themselves. Bring back proper discipline-and then children will really learn!

Strike Called Off

Unfortunately for us High School students, the teacher's strike on Wednesday has been called off. There will be another one in a few years though, anyway.

Yet a mere fraction of intelligent people know what the real cause of all this mayhem is. *sigh*

Teachers' Strike

As many of you are already aware, the PPTA (Post-Primary Teachers' Association) are going out on strike on September 12th, for the usual reasons (...wages...). Apart from a day off for me and most other Secondary School students throughout New Zealand, a strike is a good example of merely one of the problems of the disastrous Public School system.

The teaching profession isn't the most rewarding career around, and it sends shivers down my spine thinking of mature adults "coming back to school" and having to deal with all the "cuzzie bros" and "homie gees" that plague the system, and everyday life in general.

Schools certainly aren't the nicest working environments. Many schools resemble landfills more than places where people send their children to be educated. Although many respectable parents do indeed want the best learning environments for their children, parents, unless they're well to do and live in some fancy area of town, get little choice, in the form of school zones. Poor parents are confined to poor schools, and continuously declining standards. Many good parents are left out.

Under a private school system, more students attending the school is a great thing for the owners, but that's another story. Under the public school system, more students are a waste, and not wanted. That's the whole idea behind school zones.

Teachers also get little say in the day-to-day running of the school. It's big government socialists who formulate the PC crap that is learnt at schools. Teachers have to abide.

Most teachers themselves are big government socialists, and don't like the notion of schools being privately owned and operated, despite great successes with private schooling elsewhere, during history. A private school system is exactly not that. Schools operate independently, depending on what forms of education are in demand.

Another reason why the Public Education system is such a failure is the market (or lack thereof within it), for skills. There's no incentive to work harder or to teach smarter than anyone else, thanks to Union regulations on teacher payment and benefits. If any school attempted to pay their teachers on a basis of their teaching ability and methods, a big uproar would be heard from the Union and the school would be punished. The classic case of the lazy workers bringing down the good ones.

Last but not least, the effect of Political Correctness on schools and a student's ability to learn, think critically and rationalize is a no-brainer.

The big-government Socialists should be pointing to their policies and their preferred economic system as the source of all this failure. The lack of personal responsibilty-what keeps society together-under the present Socialist system is the cause of the teachers' frustation, of the poor quality of schools, the lack of choice as to what is learnt by all parties involved (minus the big-government bigots), and the hopeless mentality of students, teachers and parents in regards to present-day schooling.

Something to think about on September 12, PPTA.

Simpsons 01/08/07: A Good Overview of Public Schooling

Did anyone watch The Simpsons last night at 7pm on Sky 1? If so, you just saw the future of public education.

I didn't watch the first half of the episode, but from the second half I saw that Springfield Elementary School (Bart and Lisa's school, obviously) had been split into two parts, a boys' school and a girls' school. Lisa is pleased about attending the girls' school at first as, in the episode, it was very clean and creative. But when she gets into maths, as opposed to doing actual maths, the class indulges in a whole lot of mysticist crap, like the teacher asking a student "how does a plus sign make you feel?"

Lisa asks the teacher whether they can do some actual maths problems, at which point the teacher tells her that girls' school is only about feeling good and raising the self esteem of the class. She also tells Lisa that only boys' school does any proper maths. Sure enough, Lisa escapes to boys' school, where they are doing maths problems.

However, boys' school is a violent and desolate world, with the bullies reigning supreme. Need I say more?

But Lisa, despite the fact that she gets beaten up by Nelson on her first day of pretending to be a boy, keeps on going there and eventually fits in.

The end of the year comes, and (boy) Lisa wins the prize for the best maths student in the school. To everyone's surprise (the school, segregated and sexist as it is, thinks that only boys would be able to win the prize) she reveals herself as a girl.
____________________________________________________________________

Needless to say, this is the way public schooling is going. Although, to be rational, it certainly isn't that extreme today, it is that type of school in that particular episode of The Simpsons seems to be the ideal for schools in real life.

As I've said, Lisa leaves girls' school based on the fact that it isn't based on learning, only elevating students to false heights. Once again, although public education isn't as extreme as that example, it is based on the same underlying philosophy-romanticism-that schools are based on here in Helengrad, and indeed in most of the western world.

At the other extreme, there is the "dog eats dog" world of the boys. Here, though, the writers have got it pretty close to what schools are actually like. Like on the episode, very few people actually have the idea of mutual respect and kindness to others. These important traits in humans simply don't exist through the teenage years, for the majority of people.

Public school for you in the near future though, people.

"Amazing Grace"

As part of our topic on the Industrial Revolution later on in the year (which I hope doesn't turn out to be anti-capitalist droll) two classes, on of which I am part, went to see the movie "Amazing Grace" today. For those who need a primer on the movie, it is based on the work of William Wilberforce, who ended the slave trade in Britain in the early nineteenth century.

The Good: The movie was about a very important event for Libertarians, especially in Britain, and a huge achievement for the ideals of The Enlightenment.

The Bad: Enlightenment/Libertarian ideals weren't represented very well. In the movie, William Wilberforce favoured appeasement with the French (that may be an oxymoron, but at the time the movie was set France was ruled by one Napoleon Bonaparte).

My Verdict: The movie was about an event which was important to us Libertarians, but the ideals around which the slave trade was abolished weren't portrayed too well. 8/10.

The only thing is, slavery still exists today. You may not be officially owned by anyone, but if the government takes your money-the fruits of your production-and gives it to people who d somehow don't happen to be you, is that not a form of slavery?

Bullying

Bullying (in the Schoolyard): A form of force, physical or otherwise, against another child. As thus, a violate of rights under a Libertarian or Objectivist government.

I'm sure we are all aware here of the major problem that bullying has developed into in the schools of today. The underline problem is a lack of self-confidence and self-esteem, cause by a sense of hopelessness and lack of responsibility, fueled by the welfare state and the collectivist principles of the public school system.

Although, that is not without saying that there is bullying in private schools as well. The main reason, once again, is lack of responsibility.

The Welfare State, as demonstrated many times throughout history, has lead to a "no responsibility" mentality throughout children born into it. This mentality crushes self esteem, because of the fact that without responsibility that teenagers and eventually grown men feel that they are children all their lives-after all, responsibility is really what seperates the men from the boys. Combined with the general goings-on of puberty and the "I'm invincible!" attitude of teenage boys, this process is a recipe for bullying problems in the school, and attitude problems.

This in turn leads to a lack of learning, and getting further behind in school, which fuels the low self esteem, which fuels the bullying, and the cycle starts again.

As for the bullies in private schools, the lack of responsibility is caused by rich parents who act as the private equivalent of nanny state, with the same causes and effects.

The Libertarian solution to bullying in the schoolyard is to have every family responsible for their own money and children. By progressively removing the welfare state, responsibility will take place and young men would be responsible for themselves, thus raising self-esteem and decreasing the amount of bullying.

The Scary Reality About Schools and the Learning (or Lack Thereof) of Students

George Reisman got his last article in the Free Radical very scarily right, indeed. In it he talks about how education in most schools in the West are concentrating less on actual teaching and on getting the students to supposedly learn the facts themselves-only really teaching how to get those facts. Although some teachers can prove good exceptions, it is rather remarkable how little gets done on any subject in a good one hour.

A good example of this would be our last Social Studies lesson. All we did is draw pictures-literally! How this is supposed to help with our topic (Waka and Whaler-NZ's early history) I don't know, since was no actual knowledge being learnt through the process of repeated application. However, the incident that really put the icing on the cake happened today; my English teacher made a public declaration to the class that, in English, what you learn is not important; it's how you learn it.

But how many obnoxious teenagers are really interested in learning themselves? I'm in a streamed class, and I know only a few.

Another severe problem breeding irrationality-another point in George's article-is a lack of discipline, and teachers are only so effective at combating it. Instead, teachers teach facts (although only once most of the time-never enough to have actually learnt it) that should've been taught several years ago, and with little progress to speak of. There are only a few activities to actually stretch your mind.

Indeed, many of the "dumber" children get left behind, because, as George points out only too many times, there has been no repeated application of what they're learning. Therefore, the facts have to be taught again to them. And then, of course, there are the smarter students, who then get left behind because they've already learnt what's being taught.

The Government, parents and teachers need to realize that a serious overhaul is needed in the current learning process that is dumbing down our students. Learning, not some "fun" left-of-centre activities, should be the major factor in our classrooms.

The Problems with Public Schools

All across the board, the public Education system has been a universal failure (I know I'm not the first one to say that). Grades are falling, participation levels in school activiities are falling and the level of pessimism amongst students continues to grow. What is it about public Education that turns children into drones?

Going to a Public School myself, I have witnessed first hand the results of the failing school system. Take a good look around lunchtime and it isn't hard to find teenagers smoking or partaking in some other degrading activity. The reason, as I've seen, for the low quality education of public schools is first, the lack of incentive to develop ideas, and second, the lack of initiative and responsibility of students and teachers alike to prevent problems within the school and classroom.

In most public schools, students are effectively disallowed to experiment with different concepts and ideas that they have developed. "Learning" essentially means "trying to stuff your pupils brains with a whole lot of facts and care bugger all about the students ideas, and whether they'll memorise what they've learnt". It's this environment in which students aren't allowed to experiment with their own ideas which lowers morale, self-esteem and optimism in a student, which can lead to consequences such as bullying.

The "school zone" system has, unless you have links within the school, put a serious damper on school choice, which condemns students in lower-class areas to go to lower class schools, and without the competition, schools don't need to worry about providing a good education to attract parents and caregivers.

Another issue that needs to be dealt with is most teachers ability (or lack thereof) to sort out problems and devise solutions. Indeed, most teachers act on the basis of "if you don't see it, it ain't your problem". Personally, I blame the teacher unions for this poor attitude. Although no single entity can be blamed for this problem within the Education system, the union's "as long as we get a payrise" mentality has certainly helped to worsen the problem.

A solution is for teachers to empower themselves to truly hold up the laws of the land, and make punishments for wrongdoers serious-not just a written warning. Similarly, students need to be able to experiment with the concepts they learn in class, and with any new concepts they have, with the full support of the teacher.

However, nanny state likes her children as obedient to her as possible. Don't expect any proper solutions to the problems about education until schools are truly taken out of her poisonous grip. Parents, students and teachers are the people to make decisions about education, not politicians.