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FAQ 1. In the current education system, aren't teachers merely passing
on real knowledge gained by standing on the shoulders of our intellectual predecessors? Their predecessors must have been despots and terrorists. Real knowledge... com'on! Teachers stand on the gates of a protection racket, designed to imprison our beautiful children and to twist our children's mind into robotism. Teachers falsely appropriate the inventions and artwork of others and present this as if it was theirs. Teachers exploit the privileges in copyright laws to build up a monopoly. The values associated with that system are evil. Teachers stand on a pile of horror! For starters, let's stop these guys from collecting payments for holding our kids at ransom! Let's invoke anti-racketeering laws against these practices! Let's shake up the system and don't leave anything standing. We'll have to start from scratch, because the whole system is rotten to the bone. If, after the shake-up, there are any teachers left with integrity, then they shouldn't fear the future. But the parasites who sit there in their ivory towers, designing new schemes to force honest people to give up their hard-earned cash for a load of nonsense, they deserve all that's coming to them. [source] It's no secret conspiracy. The tragedy is that it's all done openly, with the deliberate intention to add insult to injury of those who do an honest job in the hope their kids will get a good education, only to see their hard-earned money taken away by force and wasted on teachers who do the exact opposite. What values is such a system supposed to teach? [source] The education system is a predatory system that systematically forces children into the hands of those who seek to feed on this! Without these predators, society will be so much better off. Families will finally be able to live in peace as the children can finally develop their talents to their fullest extent and can reach their full potential. How exactly parents want their children educated is, first of all, in their own hands. Parents may take advice in this decision and they may make arrangements acting on this advice. But the decision how their children are to be educated remains, first of all, a decision that parents make. You may continue to insist that this decision should be taken out of the hands of parents. If so, I can only conclude and repeat that this reflects bad values, values that are the very opposite of the values we want our children to learn. This is not just a matter of opinion. We have the right and the duty to protect our children from predators and to see that our children are educated in accordance with values we believe in. [source] |
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FAQ 2. Isn't equity central in the current education system? Isn't
it - through public school - giving the poor an education that would otherwise only be
accessible for the upper class? Wouldn't such reform widen class differences? Are you saying that the education system gives everybody equal chances? What chances does a poor, black kid have to become a judge? Kids from rich families end up in far higher proportions in professions like law and medicine, while kids from a poor, black family end up in prison in far higher proportions. These poor families are forced to cough up the very taxes that pay for the rich kids to get their degrees and convict the poor. The whole system is geared towards keeping a small elite in their position of power. Don't come up with this "equity" rhetoric in a vain effort to defend a system that has class written all over it! [source] The current system institutionalizes this. Things cannot get much worse. It's an elitist system that fools some people into believing that it protected the poor. The reality is that the poor are forced into inferior public schools. The fact that public school is "free" makes it hard for commercial alternatives to compete with it. The irony is that it's not free at all, since we've all got to pay for the inferior education that public school gives. [source] |
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FAQ 3. You say that homeschooling should be better accommodated. Doesn't the
law currently allow for families to choose to homeschool, if they want to?
Doesn't the education system ensure that everyone receives the best education they could
get? Should families be forced to keep their kids home if they don't want to?
What evidence is there that homeschooling was better than school? The education system does NOT "ensure that everyone receives the best education they could get". Instead, it gives some of the worst possible outcomes that could easily have been avoided, had we not been deceived into falsely putting our trust in school. Without government control over education, we'll be better off. I never said that everyone should keep their kids at home. Homeschooling comes with many activities outside the family home, undertaken under the guidence of parents and the family in general. It's families keeping the education of their children into their own hands, where it rightfully belongs. [source] Obviously, homeschoolers are not the ones seeking to enforce their ideas about education onto others. Instead, it's those who take least part in the education of their children, who seek to force children of others into schools! They do so without even bothering to find educational arguments. They just want kids out of their way. It's the opposite of having the best future of those kids in mind. Now I ask you. Should there conduct here go unquestioned? Should the bullying, the amoral conduct and intellectual diarrhea they seek to impose on our children go unquestioned? Especially when this is supposed to be a reflection of what the education system stands for? Is a kid who is forced into such a horrific scenario not entitled to an explanation? Obviously, the onus to explain things is on those who seek to impose their nightmare upon others, not on the one who raises a finger against it the horror. [source] Such calls for evidence are even more inappropriate when matters of conscience are at stake. In this regard, people's rights are self-evident and require no prior justification. In matters of principle, calls for evidence become not just inappropriate, but outright offensive, ..they effectively constitute an attack on everyone.. [source] [Homeschooling is just one alternative to school.] Apprecticeship may be another avenue. There are many alternatives and ways to mix them. School is not the best place to learn practical skils and get practical experience. Yet, the education system falsely hangs on to school as the sole educational alternative. That in itself expresses an unacceptable message, which is made worse by the way this message is forcibly imposed upon children. I'm convinced that homeschooling works better, but I do not suggest that all families should be forced into homeschooling. Thus, the onus is not on me to justify homeschooling, since I'm not saying that everyone should be doing homeschooling. Government, on the other hand, does force children into public school and because of that, the onus is on government to justify this move by tabling unbiased research. The absence of the latter proves my point. Families who cannot afford to homeschool are forced to send their children to public schools. Government refuses to inform families of their right to homeschool. Government makes it hard for families to homeschool by taxing them to pay for the school habits of other families. Government makes it hard for homeschoolers in all kinds of ways, while instead pouring millions of our hard-earned dollars into the indoctrinary propaganda machine represented by public school. Right now, the education system forces children into public schools. The associated force, bullying, deceipt and coercion expresses and thus teaches inherently bad moral values. Vouchers would go some way to improve things, but more generally we should get rid of any government involvement in education. [source] |
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FAQ 4. Doesn't the education system give everyone the chance to
develop their talents to their full potential? Without it, what would
the chances be for a modern-day Einstein? Einstein was very unhappy at the Catholic elementary school he attended in Munchen, where discipline, obedience and conformity were preached, which was especially hard to digest for Einstein, who apparently was dyslexic. Yes, like many famous inventors (including Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell), Albert Einstein appeared to be dyslexic as a child. We will never know for sure, because deslyxia was hardly recognized in those days and Einstein, like any obedient child, was described as a good pupil at school. Yet, Einstein appeared to grow up with a "retarded" stigma. Dyslexics think more in pictures than in verbal concepts, they need to translate their "pictures" into words and vice versa, taking more time to process verbal language, especially concepts that cannot be easily put into pictures, like the words "the," "was," and "and." This makes dyslexic people appear to be "slow", especially in a school environment that seems to prepare boys only for reading bible texts. For his teachers, the young Einstein appeared slow in both literacy (reading, writing and spelling) and numeracy (math, formulas and symbols), the very two academic subjects that were regarded in such high esteem by his school. At home, at the age 10, Einstein sets into a program of self education, reading as much about science as he can. Most of his education consisted of the study and reading he undertook on his own, and under the guidance of his Uncle Jakob and the young medical student and family friend Max Talmud. Einstein subsequently dropped out of school without a degree and applied at the Zurich Polytechnic for a teacher training program, but failed the entrance examinations. His family then sent him to a Swiss secondary school, where he spent another year with the family of one of the teachers there. Away from his family, Einstein spent time writing his first scientific work, which was never published. At the age of 17, he was finally accepted for at the Zurich Polytechnic. This was not a research institute for physics. It was a four year long teacher training program. After completion, Einstein applies without success for the job of an assistant at the Polytechnic and at various universities. It was not only that he couldn't get a job in physics or that his math was too poor, there was no university that would recognize any talent in Einstein for years to come. While continuing to apply without success for a job as assistant, Einstein took up a series of posts as a teacher and tutor in Germany and Switzerland for the next two years and in 1902, he started to work in the patent office in Bern, a job a former fellow student had helped him find. To make a living he puts ads in newspapers offering private tutoring, while working a "third-class technical expert on probation" at the Patent Office in Bern. Einstein did his best work at home while he worked at the patent office and by 1905 he had completed his major work. He later received a doctorate from the University of Zurich, but no position there. Instead, he was promoted to "second-class technical expert" at the Patent Office and only in 1909 did Einstein stop working for the Patent Office. After first rejecting his application for a doctorate degree, the University of Bern eventually awarded him the doctorate and Einstein became a private college lecturer. So, what conclusion can we draw from the Einstein example? That the education system wasn't very helpful in recognizing his talents when he needed it? That the educational establishment first ignored his talents, only to give Einstein some credit years after he had completed his major work? That the current education system, with its emphasis on literacy and numeracy testing, wouldn't have acted any better? That homeschooling and doing research at home is likely to give better results than putting trust into the education system? [source] Indeed, the education system has changed little over the years. In this age of computers, the teachers are still in front of the classroom with sticks and chalk, forcing kids to be obedient and listen to their indoctrination. An Einstein born today would go through the same misery that Einstein went through when he was forced to attend schools. [source] |
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Related pages: The Trabant Model of Science - Reform of Science and the Military School Vouchers - Frequently Asked Questions Call for Open Media Direct Democracy - Three instruments for implementation Text between square brackets added for clarity. Click on source to view comments in their orginal context. |