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The US of Arrogance has the most decrepit education which is basically just learn to fail. Learn helplessness. Learn to enjoy jail
I want to go back to Russia.
Maybe I can drive taxi cab in the donbass?
The solution is: stay away from political education.
As long as one has to pay for education – it is voluntarily
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/41319.John_Taylor_Gatto
read his “Underground History of American Education”.
We found it important to educate our children at home from their beginning. All of our children excelled in higher education because of that primary basic education. We count it fortunate the tradition continues with our children raising our grandchildren at home in a Godly environment.
Gatto’s book is excellent, and it’s based on his own experience teaching. Way back in the 1960’s he laid out what needed to change.
But there are two fundamental questions which Gatto did not address. First, how did the US public schools get to be so bad, and secondly, why didn’t anyone fix them after they became so bad ? In his book “The Closing of the American Mind”, Allan Bloom claims that in the mid 1920’s, Columbia University in New York City appointed itself the dean of teachers’ colleges, and proclaimed that the goal of public schooling was not the 3 R’s (reading, writing, arithmetic) nor any other skills, but that the goal should be for students to have high self-esteem. For instance, if a student hadn’t sufficiently learned the third grade material, the student should not be held back to repeat third grade, as was the former practice, but instead should be promoted to fourth grade along with the cohorts, so as to not harm the self-worth. Dr. Bloom claims this became the universal practice across all the “locally controlled” public schools in all the USA. I read the book, and most of it seemed persuasive. I knew at the time that Bloom was a conservative. Just now, I discovered his doctoral thesis adviser was the infamous Leo Strauss, which means that Bloom’s assertions must be proven to not be some Noble Lie. But he gave compelling evidence, at least I think it was from this book and not from elsewhere, that public schools became a failure which was never addressed. In WW1, the US Army gave IQ tests to all recruits. IQ in 19 year-olds is well correlated with the quality of their schools, as the tests revealed. Men from Minnesota did much better than men from Mississippi. Race didn’t matter as much. African-Americans from Minnesota averaged higher scores than whites from Mississippi, for example. So in 1919, the better public schools were doing their function in a democracy, creating graduates who tended to be uniformly high quality, regardless of race or socioeconomic class, which promoted social mobility, prosperity and democracy. Fast forward to the early 1960’s, and across the USA, public school graduate IQ scores reflected race and class, unlike in 1919. So the failure of public education as a system, was widely recognized from the 1960’s on. The 1960’s saw some books, by Gatto, Paul Goodman and others, as well as journal articles, about what needed to be done. But in fact nothing was ever done to fix the problem. Wealthier parents put their children in private schools and now also in charter schools, but there was never a serious attempt to restore public education to its important role in a democracy. It is a form of collective suicide carried out on center stage shining in the spotlight, because it affects our children and their future, which is the most precious thing in our lives.
Two obstacles should be cleared out of the road to understanding. (1) “Race relations” heat up emotions and got people to not consider the public interest as the prime directive. (2) Identity politics should not hide basic facts and analyses. Bloom, a Jew, was willing to point the finger of blame at Columbia University and I’d bet – absent hard data – that by the 1920’s it was already under Jewish influence. Bloom and Goodman were gay Jews, one on the right and one on the left, but truths come from everywhere. Anyone who expects the truth to only come from tall, attractive, well-dressed and well-mannered strangers, is headed to a downfall because that’s a form of hubris.
So we still need to fix the schools, and that starts with having national goals, and then we need a program of “What Is To Be Done”. But perhaps it starts with a decision that the nation is worth saving.
Anyone outside the US might be justified in preferring its downfall, but it’s simple-minded insanity for Americans to want a bleak future.
It may have escaped your genius of a mind, but the actual ‘book work’ learned in school is a tiny fraction of the most important lessons you learn there, if indeed you learn them at all.
You carelessly toss in the thought of moving children away from their age group as if this were a bubble merely of academic education. It is nothing of the sort, it is a 12-14 year social development process.
Children, in the main, develop best with their own peer group. It doesn’t matter if you could be four years accelerated academically: if you grow up with those whose voices break 3 years before yours does, if their female sexual characteristics are present three years before yours, I guarantee you that your social experience will be horrendous.
You don’t fit in, because you are not having the same experiences as your peer group in the main. You can’t talk about these things because they are happening to others but not to you. Being able to do maths brilliantly isn’t what bonds you into social groupings at school, other than those of the nerds.
Growing up in a constant environment of taunting and sneering doesn’t make you confident in the most important adult skill sets going: negotiation, selling, managing and leading. It makes you fit only for dead end jobs in isolation. What a waste of a human life, eh?
Quite frankly, the 3Rs are the absolutely least important lessons in school. They are but a necessity, not a selection advantage. I’ve met countless successful tradesfolk who were rubbish at maths, english and languages at school but forged a successful career and built a family based not on trotting out school work but in providing valued practical services. They earn more than many higher degree graduates in ‘professional’ jobs.
You also don’t get very far in adult life being a teacher’s pet. The adult world is a fairly viscious jungle, to be brutal. Learning to stand up for yourself is one thousand times more important than getting straight As. All that getting straight As earns you is the jealousy of the more physically violent than yourself. They’ll look to set the score straight in environments where your academics AREN’T the discriminating selection criterion….
So make sure your children are taught martial arts for self-defence. Make sure they can stand on their own two feet in the classroom and, if that’s not possible, start worrying.
Make sure that they are comfortable arguing the toss, even in unpromising circumstances. They won’t get very far without that, they’ll find traders ripping them off, they’ll be the victim of horrible office politics and they’ll be used and abused by the perennial parasites to be found all over the western world (they may exist in Russia too, for all I know).
99% of what you learn in books at school is NEVER used in adult life. NEVER. When did you last use sines and cosines in adult life (I got As all through school in maths, never used any of it in adult life)? How many of your children are actually in positions to re-enact parts of Julius Caesar, being courtiers to the national leader? Almost none. But everyone has to read it. The only relevant learning in that book is recognising Cassius figures who are on the make and on the take…..
Why is analysing the plots of foreign literature considered important for language students? Unless you are going into the diplomatic service, it’s entirely irrelevant. Living abroad and conversing effortlessly is what adds value, not arguing the toss about what Thomas Mann might have been trying to get across.
School education needs to teach all children the essentials of adult life. Eating healthily, exercising healthily, sleeping healthily, relating healthily, sensible financial planning and learning how to find an adult niche they have enjoyment of and talent for. Those are the ESSENTIALS. Everything else is an optional extra.
It does absolutely nothing of the sort right now. It’s a political football of three generations ago, entirely unfit for purpose.
«The 1960’s saw some books, by Gatto, Paul Goodman and others, as well as journal articles, about what needed to be done. […] Wealthier parents put their children in private schools and now also in charter schools, but there was never a serious attempt to restore public education to its important role in a democracy. […] we still need to fix the schools, and that starts with having national goals»
The USA upper-middle classes use private and charter schools, and any time the USA upper classes need well educated, cheaper workers for their businesses they can just get immigrants well educated at the expense of foreign taxpayers.
Why should the USA upper and upper-middle classes pay higher property taxes to educate better the children of USA “losers” better in USA public schools, when they already pay private school fees and can get any number of well educated immigrants?
And here is what Fidel Castro had to say about the U.S. “education”. From the 20 August 2010 issue of РИА НОВОСТИ:
“…
05:32 20.08.2010
Fidel Castro called the US educational system deformed
HAVANA, Aug 20-RIA Novosti, Oleg Vyazmitinov.
Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro has criticized the U.S. education system, calling it “warped and depraved” in an article published Thursday.
In a new article titled “Am I exaggerating?”, Castro uses data from a survey conducted by the American University of Beloit, Wisconsin.
The survey authors point to the low educational level of a number of US students. So, during the survey, several students expressed confidence that Michelangelo is a computer virus, Beethoven is the name of a dog from a movie, and American companies have always worked in Vietnam.
“Anyone will be discouraged when they see the extent to which education is deformed and corrupted in a country with more than 8,000 nuclear weapons,” Castro writes.
“And there are still reasonable people who can believe that my warnings are exaggerated!” – continues the leader of the Cuban revolution.
Previously, Castro in two articles cited excerpts from Daniel Estulin’s book “Secrets of the Bilderberg Club”, in which the author claims that politicians, bankers and entrepreneurs through this association determine the fate of the world and peoples. Castro particularly noted those parts of the book in which, in his words, Estulin “irrefutably talks about how… the consciousness of young people and children in the United States is being distorted by drugs and the media, ” and this is happening “with the participation of American and British intelligence agencies.”
…”
https://ria.ru/20100820/267085079.html (Yandex machine translation)
A computer virus?
Doesn’t everyone know that Michelangelo is a Ninja Turtle?
I vaguely recall what Fidel was referring to and it was this:
http://virus.wikidot.com/michelangelo
It was a warm up act for the Y2K bug hysteria which occurred 9 years later.
As for the names of the ninja turtles I thought they were the back four line up of the great AC Milan team of that era…that’s England’s education system for ya!
My brother-in-law first studied in Boston when he was very young, English was his first language, and then in Cuba he studied the first years of basic education.
Cuban quality was impressive but that was decades ago. Cuba lives on the myths of the past; With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba entered into a tremendous social crisis that took away its mythical quality education and its health system.
Fidel is the kind of person you would have a beer with 🍺 but he was a dangerous psychopath.
“a. Dangerous psychopath”‘ Dangerous to whom? I know the Yanks claimed he was dangerous to them, just like Granada.
In the Cabaña massacre, adolescents were killed under the orders of Che Guevara.
I personally met his first Minister of Tourism, D. Carlos Almoina, exiled in Spain, sentenced to death and imprisoned in an infected prison eating cockroaches, without any legal accusation. formal.
My co-worker in Madrid, Marco, cuban, an architect, couldn’t enjoy the hotels he designed in Havana because he didn’t have dollars or euros; he had to eat his passport and throw the rest of it in the plane’s bathroom to ask for asylum… Don’t talk to me about Happy Tropics
– Castro Family History
Galician, Portuguese, Italian, and Jewish (Sephardic): topographic name from castro ‘castle’, ‘fortress’ (Latin castrum ‘fort’, ‘Roman walled city’): in Galicia and also in northern Portugal a habitational name from any of various places named with this word; in Italy either a topographic name or a habitational name.
“Castro” and “Farnese” are related families.
Think Aristocrats / Royals
The smartest people here in the U.S. generally do not study STEM subjects. The money is not to be made in STEM. The smart ones go where the big money is, and that might be banking, finance, and business. There is also big money in things like diversity officer and other stuff of that ilk. If the government does not financially incentivize STEM, you will not get much of it. Except for maybe the pure nerds, the smart kids go where the money is. STEM is hard, and who wants to take the hard road and watch inferior intellects rake in the bigger bucks for much easier efforts.
So basically greed, over need. Purely materialistic existence…..yes, The Neo American Dream.
Cheers M
If that is true why is Elon a STEM graduate the wealthiest person in the world? Elon, “we have too many MBAs and not enough engineers.”
Elon Musk has a degree in commerce from Queen’s University in Canada and that’s it. It is a very basic minimal 2-year degree.
@Phil
Anyone with an engineering degree can tell you that it is laughably obvious that Elon Musk is not, and never was a STEM major. He’s always saying things that are utterly ridiculous.
The fact that you thing Musk majored in some sort of STEM field tells me that you didn’t, either.
Aaron,
Wholly agree, Musk is an idiot who doesn’t seem to understand how his own company works. To say anything of his weak descriptions of his own IP portfolio. Musk upheld by western intelligence agencies behind which the real oligarchs are located.
EM is just another western ‘product’.
Elon Musk is the only one I know who made money on Bitcoin.
– MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin-Backed Loan Risks Margin Call Amid Fall
And self declared genius Raoul Pal is hardly doing any better than MicroStrategy
Having started my STEM career 40 years ago, (and I am still active), I have seen the value of my efforts drop precipitously with the importation of and off shoring to cheap foreign labor, which has been of only average quality in most cases. There is not so much incentive any more to invest in a STEM education, only to find that one cannot support oneself on the salary,
For every Elon Musk, there is, well, everybody else who will never reach his level of success.
The international bankers who created this situation will hopefully soon be swinging from lamp posts as we enter the Greatest Depression.
Tim McVeigh Wall Street and each of the Federal Reserve buildings.
«The smartest people here in the U.S. generally do not study STEM subjects. The money is not to be made in STEM. The smart ones go where the big money is, and that might be banking, finance, and business.»
Elite STEM jobs are well paid, but most of the jobs strangely enough go to cheaper countries and most of the minority that remain in the USA mostly go to cheaper immigrants:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States
“the Asian American population, comprising 19.36 million in 2019, or 5.9% of the U.S. population”
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-06-05/tech-immigrants-a-map-of-silicon-valleys-imported-talent
“One third of the startups in Silicon Valley are founded by Indian Americans. in 2010, Asian Americans became the majority of the tech workforce in the Valley for the first time, making up 50.1% vs. 40.7% for whites. In 2012, 51 percent of the Valley’s population spoke a language other than English exclusively at home, compared with 21 percent in the U.S.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-06/why-silicon-valley-s-asian-americans-still-feel-like-a-minority
“On the other hand, there’s some basis to see Silicon Valley as a beacon of progress in the representation of Asian Americans, who account for a quarter of the population in the Bay Area. Alphabet, DoorDash, and Zoom all have Asian American CEOs. Pichai, who’s originally from southern India, leads a company where more than 40% of the U.S. workforce is Asian. At Facebook Inc., the figure is even higher, and Asian employees slightly outnumber White ones. […] At Facebook, where 46% of U.S. workers are Asian, only 26% are director-level or higher, though that number is up from 21% five years ago.”
The only argument I have with you on this is that it is actually worse than you say. I am an aerospace engineer and my kids are in an “award winning” public school. They get A’s but in my opinion are learning very little. The mathematics textbook is a cartoon filled workbook. The school avoids viewing algebra as a comprehensive subject, instead nibbling at basic operations each year. The science text is actually quite good, except that the teacher makes no demand on them to read the text! They go directly to YouTube and view lessons and examples and then somehow get through multiple choice tests, which are then graded on a curve resulting in an A when a C or D would probably fit. I can’t afford a private school, so I tutor them on my own, but they are usually exhausted from the endless busywork that pretends to be US education.
By any sane definition in a moral and ethical society, the American public education system K-12 is criminal child abuse.
So called higher education is largely indoctrination and designed to reinforce and cement the toxic mental waste instilled within the victims during K-12 programming.
The American ‘education’ system has already effectively destroyed one entire generation and is at work destroying the next as we discuss the fact.
A nation led by monsters and infested with intentionally created psych jobs….
I’ve been relatively satisfied with the education my children received in countries of the former Soviet Union. It seems far advanced beyond what I had in the USA (in California, which was considered to have the best schools in the USA at the time).
When you enslave a people like what was done to Americans. You don’t want the populace competent or educated.
Such people are afterall a threat to the hidden ruling elites. Nor are they so easily controlled (I mean people capable of self education not the parrots taught nothing more than how to recite knowledge).
But this necessity creates an interesting conundrum. The enslaved populace becomes increasingly self destructive and wholly incompetent.
So the military becomes worse at subjugation of the elites victims.
The economy tanks so less funding for elites projects. Worse funding dries up for the police needed to squash internal revolt.
And finally all those useful resources like oil or electronic chips becomes scarce.
So in short, the conquorers of America are destroying their most useful asset.
The average American.
Didn’t state sponsored education in USA appear to begin with as a Protestant way to convert Catholics?
Then it continuously updated, but so did Mainstream Protestantism. In the crypto-Calvinist theocracy the latter mutated into mostly “Immanentize Eschaton 101” (veneration of Big Brother as a substitute deity included) with the new Original Sin. Gradually.
There appears to be an unbroken continuity. So what exactly was «killed»?
No, you are diverting to a useless dead end. Public schooling was provided for in the Homestead Acts starting in 1862 at a time when the only Catholic immigrants were Irish, and about 90% of them perished in their first few years in the US, because they were starving and in poor health, because many of them went to southern cities where cholera and malaria epidemics swept the cities, and from simple over-work because the employers were of English stock and shared the English contempt for the Irish as probably not fully human.
I also can’t accept the idea that the mid 1920’s choice to ruin public schools would have somehow had an anti-immigrant goal, because in that case, there would have been a two-speed school system, and the elites would still have been required to learn real skills.
Public schools in the USA is a perfect example which shows that prosperity, happiness and good health for some people – and not for others – simply doesn’t work. Anyone with first-hand knowledge can tell you that even the most elite universities have massively suffered from grade inflation and students now think 30 hours a week, classes and homework, is too much. Rot spreads if it’s not stopped decisively, and that decision was never made.
Love this guy!
Nepotism is also one of the major factors to decline in American Universities. For example, George Bubba Bush went to Yale & Harvard. He was a C student with a grade point average of 2.35/4.00. Never any A’s in any subject.
What about the Commanders/Generals of the Armed Forces, are they chosen by MIC (Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, BAE systems, GE ) for their weapons/operations knowledge or is US Defence Sec. Lloyd Austin a good salesman/figurehead?
MI6 in the UK, guaranteed that 80% went to Ox-Bridge, yep, some of those mediocre Commanders- Generals- High Ranking Officers above. Further, you could achieve a 1st in XYZ subject from Oxford, but your background could stand in your way. Skull & Bones & Other Masonic origins a must.
The list is endless.
The Central Bankers/Establishment I expect, prefer their POTUS to be none-too bright like Bush, or ruthlessly ambitious for wealth and status like Clinton/Obama so they can push/recommend their own Special Advisors (Grey Men ) who will point them towards the correct path, their way of thinking.
There’s a reason Russia’s Defence budget is 1/10th officially, probably nearer 1/20 unofficially, that of USA’s and yet performance wise they surpass America – Education for sure and Meritocracy another.
I wonder how many of the 300 applicants who missed out on a place at Yale in class of 1964 to George Bush, would have been greater Historians or at least of some use to Society?
It’s amazing how well Russia has performed once the political power and money were recovered from the Ashkenazi community.
– The Central Bankers/Establishment I expect, prefer their POTUS to be none-too bright like Bush,
Any reason for not mentioning Joe Biden … You voted for him?
Some young people here in Europe do not think it is cool to study hard. There is a shortage of engineers which is filled with people from Eastern Europe or India in the case of IT. As for the Humanities and Social Sciences, of which one should also have some knowledge of in order to be able to communicate and even think effectively, well it’s not cool to read books except maybe some rubbish, certainly not classics from which one can learn. Also the young are addicted to computer games and social media and twitter teaches people to post cryptic short messages with no context and substance. All of this makes people in the West very stupid indeed and this goes well with the quality of their political leadership and their mainstream media. In the 1960s we had European refugees who were excellent teachers. It is high time for a multi-polar world.
Shortage of engineers in europe? have you tried finding an electrician, plumber or construction team lately?
Any good old robust job, where you have to use both your hands and your head, e.g. carpenter, is on its way to extinction.
Kids wanna be youtubers, influencers, or any other useless current fashion job, whereas hard working people look old fashioned.
When I studied, we got classes on hands on stuff like carpentry, mechanics, pottery, textile weaving, etc…
Now I wonder if any 18 year old ever did or even could do, as much as drive a nail through wood.
And whose fault is that, exactly?
Oh yeah, let’s sell our children into debt slavery, nuke the economy, the culture, the family, and society as a whole, tell them that they’re getting thrown out of the house if they don’t get a “prestigious” degree from these demented cesspools which are wrongly called “schools”. Let’s have them do unpaid internships, then hire en masse third world, immigrants, that’ll show them!
“ZOMG, why can’t they do anything? Haha! Kids nowadays, amirite”, said the deranged, senile, loser sociopaths for the nth time in the last 30+ years.
Why indeed.
Mobile phones and participation awards did not conjured magically out of the ether by children, and neither did the extreme and brutal propaganda to which they were deliberately submitted by their own parents.
Well, their parents were just smart.
School teachers in US earn $4000/mth to teach their own children liberal bs, plus there is a lot of diagnoses; school fatigue, ADHD, 7-year crisis, dysfunctional family behavior, puberty difficulties, depression, autism, extrovert and introvert dysfunction, social engineering programmes, diversity, which lower the factual learning by 50% and add extra expert salary hours on top.
School teachers in Russia, China and many third world countries earn $500-1000/mth to teach children basic gramma, math, calculo, physics, read, write, calculate, plus sundry with 0 diagnoses but with some social problems in a 25 hrs/week.
Children who are not satisfied with this agenda are advised to find some other children they can trick into some new diagnoses to get the same high salary in order to living the dream, as the society are the politicians, the democracy’s and the moslems fault. NOT their parents fault. Follow the money stupid, as always.
School teachers tend to be well paid, but you are missing the point entirely. What is it that teachers are actually incentivized to do ? It’s to not rock the boat, to turn a blind eye to children not learning because some parents fail in their responsibilities and the school administrations mostly fail in their own serious responsibilities.
As I wrote on the Vineyard years back, I was on a committee that interviewed 47 people for the job of school director. I asked every last one of them, “How do you recognize and how would you handle a teacher who is performing inadequately ?” For all 47 of them, it was a “deer in the headlights” moment. Most of the people I interviewed had 5 to 20 years experience in school administration, but yet they had never been in a situation where they needed to examine a teacher’s performance, and certainly had never had to help a teacher get more training or to be persuaded into a different career. They all wanted the job, so every one of them discussed hypotheticals in the most vague terms. If their discussions had been to prevent revealing forbidden details of real experiences, some hard edges of facts would have been visible, but no …
Public schools are a sham and their operating principle would not be possible in any real for-profit business. The ways in which public schools are dysfunctional are easy for anyone to understand – and the problem is obvious to everyone, but we have never tried to fix it.
Outstanding. Thanks Andrei
Andrei Martyanov likes to have a good rant about guys like Fukyama and that the better way is for the West to have people who can understand Russia better. Sure, but we are where we are and i have stated on this Blog in the past, that it has actually been to Russias advantage, that the USA underestimated Russian capabilites…and it is also to Russias advantage, that Russia overestimated the abilities of the USA… The process weakened the USA and strengthened Russia and the gap is widening in Russias favour…. and i mean this in military, economic, political, social, cultural, educational, moral sphere… In terms of media vilification, this hysteria has also backfired on the USA. The global population sees what it sees and it is not Russia that is evil. The quiet, calm and rational approach by Russia is a major plus in diplomatic terms, which opens many doors for Russia…
Totally agreed. I’m amazed at how so many posters around here seem to complain about US incompetence like it’s a bad thing.
Reminds me of Rickover Hall at Annapolis. We used to call it “Rick-me-over” Hall – ROTFLMAO!
Forget about American students – Most American teachers could NOT pass the Russian exam that Andrei was showing!
I was waiting for an explanation, of what he was talking about actually. Yes, Soviet education in the fundamentals, and in STEM was excellent. Yes, US education up to university level is not. Yes, Russian military engineering is obviously world class or world beating. This is very well known.
But what about civilian science?
So where is the Russian equivalent of JPL?
When is Russia going to put humans beyond low earth orbit?
Where are the Russian inter-planetary probes?
Where is the Russian scientific literature published? (Not talking about lysenko)
I was hoping to hear an answer to these things that are a genuine mystery to me: Exactly where are these things, given that Russian military engineering is world class? I dunno – I didn’t know before the video and I still don’t. Russian scientists and engineers are obviously capable of doing great things, so, I dunno, did they invent the internet protocols for example? The transistor? The integrated circuit? The light bulb? Did they sequence the first human genome? Did they invent nucleic acid sequencing? DNA cloning? Polymerase Chain Reaction? Monoclonal antibodies? Biotech in general? Nanotechnology? Large scale integration? No, as far as I can deduce, they did not. All this technology is derivative.
Is the whole issue that the US don’t actually need an education system, they just prune everybody else’s? I dunno.
Is the issue that US universities are actually quite good, unlike the US grade schools? I dunno.
All of the above: I dunno. I just know Russian military technoogy is world class.
Novosibirsk is considered the scientific capital of Russia. It has many research institutions and teaching hospitals. St. Petersburg also hosts a number of research institutions.
I think people in the West are largely ignorant of what happens in Russia, or China for that matter.
As an example, try to name three famous American, three famous Russian, and three famous Chinese in the STEM field.
That’s what I was thinking as well. Excellent comment – it saved me time writing it myself.
Well, anyone? Shyaku makes excellent points.
Maybe we should all be a bit more humble and realize the debt we owe the Germans:
Cruise missile = V1
ICBM = V2
All military jets = ME262
Rocket planes = ME163
Etc., the list goes on ..
Along the lines of what another poster previously stated, my kids go to “one of the best public school districts” in the state we live here in the USA. Parents used to drive up home values just to get into this school district in the past(I don’t know if they still do). As someone previously said in the comments, the education system is much much worse shape than what Andrei thinks it is.
I’ve watched this school district closely and what they are teaching my kids(Elementary) and have even been a member of one of their committees and have interacted with the school district leadership enough to get to know some of them. If I render my honest opinion/judgment it leaves a lot to be desired. I think my biggest complaint that I can’t get past is that they truly don’t care about the kids if you analyze their actions, although they believe they do in their heart and would probably pass a lie detector test, they believe they are doing the best for the best for the kids but in reality they are definitely hurting them in the medium to long term. In my opinion this is the real “child abuse”, this is the equivalent of slave owners prohibiting their slaves from learning how to read.
Observations:
Character/Values – Little to no teaching or exibiting of traditional character values such as honesty, hard work, independence, self reliance, grit, etc. 90%+ percent of teachers in this district are middle class raised women in their 20s and 30s who have never really struggled much beyond mental struggles so their life experience is extremely limited and it’s doubtful they could credibly exibit/teach the above traits anyway as they are traditionally the real of men. Not teaching character ultimately hurts the individual in the short/medium but it’s disastrous in the long run for the individuals life/family/culture/nation. This is slow motion cultural and national suicide.
Real Life Vs Theory Life- Schools are very hesitant to teach real life lessons these days, they don’t teach how to handle bullying, adversity, life issues, etc. Their response seems to be to get rid of these issues altogether somehow but that’s living in la la land as some of these issues are inherent in human nature. When kids transition to teenage-hood/adulthood they are not prepared for “real life” and this can have disastrous consequences at all levels, the school shooting in Texas I am convinced was a direct result of this point. The shooter was just no prepared for real life, it was too hard, he was getting bullied ,was poor, etc. I saw many kids including myself deal with the same issues when I was in high school but we all knew that was the hand we had been dealt and we all dealt with it in our own ways athletics/work/drugs/fights/confrontations/etc. very few actually hurt other people other than themselves(drugs).
Nutrition – My wife prepares my kids lunches but I have taken a look at what they serve in the cafeteria and it’s stuff like honeybuns or high sugar cereals for breakfast, lunch is stuff like hot dogs. This is frankly junk food and highly processed and it shows they really don’t care what they feed these kids. Just 20 years ago I was in public school and the lunch ladies would prepare the food from base ingredients at the small school I went to, for breakfast we might have eggs/bacon/toast and a milk and for lunch it might be beans/stew/hamburgers(sometimes) etc. Not saying it was the best nutritionally but they did their best and it was not highly processed food.
Academics – This is the one area where I do believe there may be nefarious actors/dumbing down on purpose. I notice they go out of their way not to teach any geography these days as well as the general realistic history of the state/country they live in. Kids have little understanding of other countries and cultures around the world and if you pull out a map/globe and ask them to find a specific region/country they struggle which is very very odd.
Exercise – Need I say anything here ? Very little if any physical activity is required/expected it’s all voluntary.
TLDR:
The Russian system is there to “better the society” in the “make it stronger” meaning and so personal failures in education as considered par for the course. An unavoidable indicator – which lack of indicates the system is under-utilising the abilities of the students.
So it is very good at catching talent and pushing that talent to the top. It is not very good in “producing degrees” as that is not its objective.
The US system is there to “create usable /as in literate/ workers” and beyond that it is a commercial business where the customers are the parents and students which seek a degree.
So it is very good in producing degrees. It can produce excellent talent, but it DOES NOT SUPPORT that talent – only the most determined, those who would excel even without(despite?) the schooling – are going to the top there.
———————————————-
In a way this was probably inevitable.
In the US /and UK/ the “universal” education system came to be to “improve the skills of the workers”. This happehned -after- the industrial revolution. It was NEVER meant to train the elites – those had private schooling at the time.
In the Central Europe the universal education was introduced way earlier, long -before- the industrial revolution. It was NOT reactive but pro-active. The goal was NOT to “train workers” but to raise the overall intelectual capacity of the peoples of the Habsburg Austrian Empire during the 18th century. Yes, a 100+ years before universal schooling came to the UK/US.
The Russian system is effectively the original system thought out by the J.A.Commenius in the 18th century.
Commenius system’s primary objective was NOT the creation of “literate populace that is more productive in the industry”. There was no “industry” to speak of at that time. That secondary. The primary purpose was to “school the best people” so that the Habsburg Austrian Empire – which had no prope sea access at the time and so no colonies – can out-compete the seafaring/trading nations by better using their human capital.
This is why the Comenius system always emphasized LOTs of raw knowledge AND considered school drop-outs as “desirable/expected” outcome. The school difficulty was to be designed such that 90% get through but some do drop out. That was OK, as the system was there FOR THE STATE/SOCIETY, not FOR THE /LIFE/ benefit of the individual like in the West.
Sure, the UK/US did introduce universal education eventually. But they generally did not follow the Comenius principles of “creating an educated society”. That was seen as “unnecessary” and “not cost-effective” and by some – coming from elite schools – even as dangerous.
The currect US – RU system dichotomies them from this historical background. It became only more pronounced recently as the /relative %/ inflow of educated people from Europe to US stopped after WW2 so they were free to bring their system to its “true potential”.
Now those who, leaving Rubizhne (this is a neighboring town), are sitting on the Azot, mined the chemical enterprise Zarya, which produced explosives, there. There was a wild amount of explosives, so many that you can simply demolish the city of Rubizhnoye from the face of the earth. So here you can also expect provocations at Azot plant. Ukrainians can strike with artillery from Lysichansk and it will be a humanitarian catastrophe.
It could be understood, when the German Nazis had to leave a city in WW2, they mined it — it was not in their own country, but here in the Ukraine, the Ukrainians are doing it to sort-of their own cities. Are the Ukrainian consider these cities, land as their own, or just being Nazis?
It is hard to overstate the importance of a good education.
I think Russia will carve out another big advantage for itself by abandoning the “Bologna” system.
I have witnessed the detrimental effects of the “ECTS” system myself. Students “learn” for points, not for knowledge. They do not have time for exploration. And they are driven mainly by fear, not by curiosity. I call the “Bologna” process the deintellectualization of the university.
US public school system is based on Prussian school systems. The objective is to produce
Obedient workers for the mines.
Obedient soldiers for the army.
Well-subordinated civil servants to government.
Well-subordinated clerks to industry.
Citizens who thought alike about major issues.
https://www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/archive/2012/03/14/our-prussian-model-of-public-schooling-controlling-the-masses/#.YqsKhHZByUk
https://irasocol.medium.com/the-prussian-model-and-the-failure-of-personal-ethics-83cf46602c92
The book “What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn’t” is available from libgen.
“….maybe I will buy new short with that ”
Ha ha ha, excellent piece.
The systemic failure of the west is much deeper than corruption, bad policies, runaway debt, crumbling infrastructure etc.
That’s what you get when you un-educate people.
I was a product of the 1960s education system in California. Our schools were well funded and very open-minded–in English we read both Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The pedagogy was self-limited, however, as I was intolerably bored most of the time.
I excelled as a student and SAT test-taker, and I even was a National Merit Scholar Finalist. I got into both Stanford and Berkeley with scholarships, and even for Stanford, the State offered a small scholarship. However, there was no funding for living expenses, so at Stanford I had to work for my living. That was fine when I worked for professors, but humiliating when I had to serve my fellow students in the dining hall (I ended up washing their dishes).
The Vietnam War changed my happy days as a Stanford student because I ‘went bad’ and rejected the rampant imperialism of the time. I did not accept a student deferment, then I refused the draft. The government chased me, caught me (oddly enough, five FBI agents collared me at gunpoint), and jailed me for almost a year.
I managed to get a degree in Chinese studies at Stanford, but I was not allowed to continue, I am pretty sure, because of my antiwar and civil rights activities. So I spent most of my working life as a house carpenter and a farmer, only turning to teaching language after I was 50.
I believe I would have excelled in the Soviet schools Andrei describes–my early field was marine biology. For one, as in modern China, Soviet education was fully supported–no scholarships, no student jobs. Without evidence, I feel that Soviet education, perhaps also in modern Russia, was politically unified. Perhaps I should have gone to a more egalitarian school, but it was not psychically positive to be a scholarship boy in the midst of America’s elite scions.
So, the Sardakar model (based on ancient Sparta) has more to it than just vigorous, competitive standards.
I had a first class education in England and my Cambridge scholarship exam (Mathematics) would
be hard for the best Russian students. Today the very best students in the US are still great.
Look at Putnam exam if you don’t believe me.
Many many smart immigrants to the USA, not so many to Russia.
I personally hired a number of graduates from Moscow State — superb technical education.
BUT
Antisemitism (was / is??) a major problem. Very hard for Jewish students to get into the best
Russian institutions.
Ah, antisemitism… Have you checked what universities were available for Zuckenberg, Brin, Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky, Nemtsov, Fridman, Abramovich, and a slew of other Jewish men and women who made fortunes on their superb Russian education? They all went to the leading Russian Universities (mostly in Moscow). This fact is not hard to check; a simple search would save you from being sorrowful with regard to “antisemitism as a major problem.”
It is still fashionable to talk about antisemitism in the Soviet Union and Russia. Here is another example for your attention. Lazar Kaganovich was born into a Jewish family in Ukraine. He became the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine. He was one of the main ‘activists’ of Holodomor (man-made famine) in Ukraine; some 6-8 million human being died. In 2010, the Kievan court condemned Kaganovich’s crimes against humanity during Holodomor. Lazar Kaganovich was Stalin’s brother-in-law (do you still believe in the antisemitism in the Soviet Union?), and he lived well into his 90-s in the comfort of his Moscow apartment. Despite his crimes against humanity.
If your Jewish employees from Russia continue quetching about “antisemitism as a major problem,” remind them the names of Phillip Goloshyokin (born Shaya Itsikovich, see the Goloshyokin Genocide of Kazakhs), Rozalia Zalkind (aka Zemlyachka, see the mass slaughter of Russian officer corps in Crimea), Naftali Frenkel (organizer of GULAG), and Genrich Yagoda (director of the dreadful NKVD, secret police). This is just a small sample of “sufferers from antisemitism” in the Soviet Union.
– Lazar Kaganovich was Stalin’s brother-in-law
From the net:
– The head of this cabal was Lazar Kaganovich (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazar_Kaganovich).
After Stalin’s assassination Kremlin Jews started a new purge. The ruler was a demonic Lavrentiy Beria (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria) of Gerogian-Jewish ancestry who controlled the political police in the Soviet Union. His aim was to consolidate Jewish power. Marshal Zhukov (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgy_Zhukov) had a reputation of being an “anti-Semite, he was
promoted and protected by Joseph Stalin and had reasons to expect imprisonment after Stalin’s
assassination. Marshal Zhukov and Marshal Vasilewsky (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Vasilevsky) were Politburo members and their responsibility was to knock out the heads of the Jewish cabal.
This is the version of the story reported by Marshal Viktor Kulikov (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Kulikov) who was a Red Army colonel attacking NKVD buildings.
….
Tthat was the end of the Bolsheviks = no more Jews after 1953.
Andrei
Yes has been a problem for long time not only in US but other countries.
It is deliberate.
Part of process of dumbing down the average person and keeping them away from technical knowledge. It seems to have started in ernst around 1970-75.
Things and critical learn methods were edited out of not only school texts but university ones one.
Things kids at schools should know before university entry often were not taught.
Today a lot of high school students cannot manual divide or multiply a number, nor know their 12x tables.
They simply press buttons on a calculator.
Proper places like Russia and Germany / Japan would not be in this situation.
Its time to reprint the old school text books from the pre-1960 period I think
Rickover was riding a boat. He went into the torpedo room and start banging the head of a nuclear weapon with a nightstick. The watch called a security breach and the guard subdued Rickover. Knocked down the admiral. Everyone responded, the captain started chewing out the guard, Rickover recovered his composure and promptly chewed out the captain. The guard responded perfectly, you errored to chew him out. An admiral chewing out a captain in front of many crew of all ranks, classic. Did not personally witness this but gosh heard and told the story a lot.
Rickover, after he retired, investigated and solved the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana. Design flaw with how they stored ammo, not a false flag to start the Spanish american war but same effect. How old was he when he retired? My guess 92. Quite the fella.
With our smart phones we can appear clever. Without, useless.
– not a false flag to start the Spanish american
USS Maine was presented as a Spanish attack [no false flag], and US Media used to justify a war on Spain.
Yes the bigger point being as a man of integrity, he rewrote official versions of history in a manner that did not shine a favorable view of the USN or the US. They attacked a nation innocent of the reason they used. Not the first such attack nor the last. A short Jewish geek, of course he was crazy.
Perhaps I was a totally naïve, dumb, punk but I mostly felt safe on that sub even when it almost sank for the last time. Certainly never felt the fear of those cannucks diving a used british sub after a fatal fire. Saw a video, they looked terrified.
We dove so much it was like going to the can. Here we go again.
Admiral Rickover personally interviewed every candidate for one of his nuclear babies. I worked with one such individual. He told me that Rickover did not accept ‘I don’t know’ for an answer. When he asked you a question you absolutely had to come up with an answer, no matter how bullshity. He was your quintessential ‘Tell the admiral what he wants to hear,’ type of officer.
He was also a thief. Once there was a party in a local hall in Groton, CT. The caterer brought along a crystal punch bowl that was his grandmother’s. The admiral liked it and instructed his aids to put it into his car as he left. Later, as the caterer was packing up he noticed his punch bowl was missing. “What happened to it?” he asked. “Oh, the Admiral decided that it looked better in his possession. He’ll pay you for it.” “But it’s an heirloom! It’s a hundred years old!” “Rickover will pay you in old money.”
He was really a dick.
Attended Schools 1955 to 1973, and rewarded with a well grounded Education. Spent 12 years in Catholic Schools , 6 years in private Liberal Arts Colleges where the education was Old School with many older professors . Was Excellent. Later worked at a smaller College in Admissions and part-time History Instructor. It is obvious that since at least 1978 our Education system has been dumbed down . I became aware of Public Schools poorly teaching as my children went through the system and even more now with my grand children . We need to return to the Education that made America great up until it was dumbed down after seventies . The emphasis today is on Social issues . We must return to teaching Classic Math, English, History, Geography , Writing, Reading , Literature, and Bible Morality . That is the Bedrock, Foundation of Education .
Pardon us, but citing Rickover’s understanding of the American education, is not the right way to recognie *how* the US system was created.
Let’s look who, early on, settled in “America.” Most came from England, Scotland, etc. There were very few wealthy who boarded the ships taking them to a land of virgin soil, rivers, and vast masses of land.
What developed is the sense of Manifest Destiny; aka, Every Man for Himself. From the few small colonies to the eventual pioneer days going west, all these people learned how to “survive.” There was little time to learn or become “educated” while most of Western Europe/Great Britain/Russian “thinkers” influence never reached the American shores.
It was later that small universities began to sprout on the East Coast. Wealthy patrons provided some education for established families of some means. All the rest of the citizens became farmers, small merchants and the like.
Fast forward to the 40s-late 60s, despite what Rickover said, large universities of learning emerged. Our father went to the vast university complex in California. It *was* considered a supreme accomplishment in graduating out very well educated physicians, physicists, mathematicians and teachers with PhD’s. Our father, who was taught Latin at his high school near San Francisco, was also taught French, European philosophy, science, literature, history and art.
But of that has been destroyed in the last 25-30 years because with the rise of Neo-Liberalism, private capital has invaded every university, private schools and most public schools. Thusly, you end up with astronomical costs in order to attend higher education, with 3d rate teachers, with a bare minimum license to even teach.
Oh Andrei, I beg to differ. We are taught about more important things like global warming aka climate change (whereby essential gases like CO2, which plants process and convert into oxygen) is bad. If you fail to understand this, you are just a climate denier. Think of the children, Andrei!
Sarcasm intended, btw. 😉