To Absent Companions...

The Failure of Modern Education

We are suffering the ill effects of modern education in today's society.  The young are being destroyed by the unionized incompetents who call themselves teachers.  Learning is not important--it's all about feeling good, self esteem, and unstructured actualization leading to creativity.  Well, that's the theory, anyway.

What reality shows, though, is that today's modern educational theory is patent bullshit.  Our children are being set up for failure in life because teachers aren't interested in teaching.  No, that would require actual hard work, students failing and learning from their failures, discovering how to overcome setbacks.  Instead, our children are all taught that everyone is bright, shiny, and equal to everyone else.  It's so much easier to teach songs about how wonderful the President is vice how to reason logically.  Too bad life eventually kicks them in the face, leaving them cursing the buffoons who wasted their childhood's making them feel good about themselves rather than how to think.

Janice Flamengo in PJ Media writes about the 'unteachables,' the 'generation that cannot learn.'

The unteachable student has been told all her life that she is excellent: gifted, creative, insightful, thoughtful, able to succeed at whatever she tries, full of potential and innate ability. Pedagogical wisdom since at least the time of John Dewey — and in some form all the way back to William Wordsworth’s divinely anointed child “trailing clouds of glory” — has stressed the development of self-esteem and a sense of achievement. Education, as Dewey made clear in such works as The Child and the Curriculum (1902), was not about transferring a cultural inheritance from one generation to the next; it was about students’ self-realization. It involved liberating pupils from that stuffy, often stifling, inheritance into free and unforced learning aided by sympathy and encouragement. The teacher was not so much to teach or judge as to elicit a response, leading the student to discover for herself what she, in a sense, already knew. In the past twenty years, the well-documented phenomenon of grade inflation in humanities subjects — the awarding of high “Bs” and “As” to the vast majority of students — has increased the conviction that everyone is first-rate.

Too bad it doesn't work in the real world, where engineers are expected to know facts and how to calculate stress loads on structures, where scientists are expected to know how to conduct research, where writers are expected to know how to construct a grammatical sentence.  No, life is not the fluffy bunny that is wrapped around children by do-good teachers intent on indoctrination, not education.  Unfortunately, it isn't a new occurrence.

It sounds good. The problem, as traditionalists have argued (but without much success), is that the utopian approach hasn’t worked as intended. Rather than forming cheerful, self-directed learners, the pedagogy of self-esteem has often created disaffected, passive pupils, bored precisely because they were never forced to learn. As Hilda Neatby commented in 1953, the students she was encountering at university were “distinctly blasé” about their coursework. A professor of history, Neatby was driven to investigate progressive education after noting how ill-equipped her students were for the high-level thinking required of them; her So Little For the Mind remains well-worth reading. 

 It's the same mindset that demands that we tax the rich because they don't deserve their wealth, that we should share the wealth like "A's" for everyone.  It's why mindless youth flocked to Obama in 2008--because no one had taught them how to reason or discern between truth and propaganda.  And now they reap the whirlwind that is progressive politics, wondering where all the jobs are that were supposed to be waiting for them after graduation.  Welcome to life, suckers.  Aren't you glad now that you didn't listen to the good teachers who tried to actually make you work and learn?

What must be even worse is the feeling those good teachers have in the pits of their stomachs as they try day after day to swim against the tide of crap, only to see mediocrity rewarded because supporting the NEA is more important than building the future.  These few, these band of brothers and sisters, are the real heroes.  We desperately need more of them and much less of the leftist ideologues who use our schools to indoctrinate our children in how horrible our nation and culture are.

Read the whole article here.

November Matters

Congratulations!  Did you know that the United States was the world champion in petroleum reserves?  According to the Government Accounting Office, the oil shale formation in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming holds recoverable oil stocks the equivalent of the proven reserves of the rest of the planet combined.  Over three trillion barrels of oil in that one field alone--and it's not the only one in the U.S.  Remember ANWAR?

So in essence we have the natural resources in the U.S. to meet our energy needs for centuries.  One minor detail, though: the Federal Government owns the majority of the land where this oil is located.  And given that our current administration has spent billions of taxpayer money to prop up green energy "success" stories like Solyndra, the Chevy Volt, and the Fisker Karma, what do you think the odds are that we'll tap the energy bonanzas located within our own borders?

Yeah, me neither.  As Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit notes, " If I were the Russians and the Saudis, I’d be paying off some Green groups to block development."  Oh, wait.... never mind.

Hat tip: For the full story, go read Powerline

Real Estate Update

Hat tip: The Troglopundit

One Of The Most Important Books You Will Ever Read

Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam's Obscure Origins

This is one of the most important books of the 21st century.  Robert Spencer conducted a scholarly review of the historical Muhammad--something that scholars have been doing in Christianity and other major religions since the 19th century.  Unfortunately, rather than engendering a much needed Reformation of Islam, this book will most likely result in Spencer's death at the hands of an enraged Muslim.

Why?  Because Spencer calls into question the actual existence of Muhammad, and thus the origin of an entire religion followed by over a billion people on this planet.  As Pamela Geller notes:

Imagine if the entire premise that a comprehensive religious, legal, political, social, cultural, and dietary system was based was completely and utterly false.

Robert Spencer's groundbreaking blockbuster book, Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam's Obscure Origins is a game-changer of incomprehensible proportions. It shatters every conventional and accepted myth on the history of Muhammad and Islam. Is it any wonder that Islamic supremacists want to squash it?

The Hamas-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) already succeeded in getting his talk on the book in New York canceled, but it was held last Tuesday in another location, with four times the audience that it was projected to have before CAIR protested. It was a good sign: people are tired of CAIR's attempts to shut down free speech and quash the truth about Islam and enforce the blasphemy laws under Sharia.

They fear Spencer's new book. This is the first popular book to show all the many holes and inconsistencies and contradictions in the standard story of the life of Muhammad, the development of the Qur'an, and the early years of Islam. Did Muhammad Exist? is going to surprise a lot of people, including non-Muslims who assume that there must have been a man named Muhammad who claimed that he was a prophet of Allah, even if they don't accept his claim. But Spencer shows here that even though Muhammad is supposed to have died in 632, and the Arab conquests of the Middle East and North Africa started shortly after that - supposedly inspired by Muhammad and the Qur'an - we don't start hearing about either one, or anything about Islam at all, until much later, in the 690s. No one, not the people the Arabs conquered nor the Arabs themselves, ever mentions Muhammad or the Qur'an, or even calls the conquerors Muslims, for six decades after the conquests began.

Think about that. That would be like the Nazis overrunning Europe in the early days of World War II, but the Poles and French and the Germans themselves never mentioning Nazism or Hitler or the swastika or Jew-hatred. Or the Islamic jihadists destroying the World Trade Center towers and committing almost 20,000 jihad attacks around the world after that, and no one ever saying a word about Islam or jihad -- oh, wait, that is what's happening.

Is it possible that all of the murders and bombings have occurred because of a belief that apparently originated from a man made attempt to rationalize the tribal conquering of people and territory?  Could this explain why fundamentalist Muslims fly into rages over perceived slights to the Qur'an and Islam--because they fear the result of meaningful investigation into their faith?  

The truth may set them free, but may also result in the death of the rest of us before that happens.

(How similar, then, the reaction of the Left to any investigation of socialism and Marxism--because investigation would lead to uncovering the fascism and totalitarianism underpinning them.  Thus, the Left enforces the political correctness that attempts to keep us from daring to question Islam/global warming/wealth redistribution/ fairness/affirmative action/Occupy whatever/etc. while saying nothing about anti-Semitism, anti-Christian, anti-Caucasian, anti-not Left violence.)

You owe it to yourself and your posterity to read this book.