CALIFORNIA ROCKETS INTO MORE BIG BROTHER NUTTINESS

Well, California is once again in the lead for the kookiest state in the union, as this latest example of big brother nuttiness demonstrates:

California School District Uses GPS to Keep Students From Cutting Class

Sure, the program is "voluntary" and the devices are hand-held for now, but it won't be too long before the idiots in Sacramento decide that every student should wear an ankle bracelet or even "be chipped" so that class attendance is maintained.

This is more "patching" on the quilt of an educational system that is not only failing but that is a failure. While I certainly wouldn't maintain that all students playing hooky from school are doing so for the reasons I am about to advance, I certainly think that some of them are doing so, and that they are doing so for perfectly rational reasons: (1) they are bored in their classes and (2) they are thinking "why bother going to school to get a 'decent job' when the very businesses are outsourcing the good jobs overseas?" Rather than addressing the problem, which is the failing system itself, a system that insists on addressing its students as dumbed-down morons, rather than as intelligent people able to master a subject, the Anaheim School District has adopted a truly Disneyland "technological solution" that will fix nothing. It will only guarantee more bored students in classrooms being taught by certified mediocrities pumped out of an educational establishment intoxicated on "educational methods and pedagogy" and not focused on the content of the subjects it is supposed to be teaching.

I could go on and on, but I suspect that most people here know what I'm getting at: the American educational system is fraudulent. It is broken, and throwing more money or gizmos and gimmicks at it is not going to fix it.

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Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and "strange stuff". His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into "alternative history and science".

17 Comments

  1. Christine on February 25, 2011 at 12:15 am

    There is some truth in that, but it is not as simple as that.

    the value of a family depends on the quality of its components.
    and the traditional family here, is not the traditional family
    in other places, where several generations may live under one
    roof, or the identity is larger than just the parents of a kid or
    two. Unfortunately, a lack of virtue, a lack of wisdom, an active
    dedication to anti social values, does not render you sterile.

    Any fool can have children, and marriage and parenthood
    doesn’t make you wise, though parenthood has been known
    to get some to want to become wise for the child’s sake.

    in the old days, a good school system was the partner to
    the family, if one end of this failed the other could take up
    the slack. but both depended on something like good values
    (which does NOT include not snitching, or favoring your
    clicque or family over an outsider wronged by same) being
    present. The Bible and some ideas of justice and those
    McGuffy’s Readers, which taught some values along with
    reading skills, were a big part. There is no institution that
    will work mechanically.

    Meanwhile, traditional family values of gangsters and of
    elites continues, consisting of, predation on the outsiders.

    So in one case there is breakdown in the family, but
    society is okay because the child gets values from teachers
    and good books and stories in school. In another case
    there may be a problem in school, and the family makes
    the difference.

    But once it adds up over a few generations, and fools
    keep begetting and also getting hired as teachers, and
    the whole thing fails.



  2. Lysander on February 24, 2011 at 11:18 pm

    Tell us how you really feel Joseph 🙂 …correct as always. We appreciate your candor and honesty. The educational “system” is only a symptom of a much more basic cause and that is the failure of the basic fundamental building block of all strong and healthy societies…the traditional family.



  3. MattB on February 24, 2011 at 12:05 am

    Yes she said ‘bogited’.



  4. MattB on February 24, 2011 at 12:03 am

    Thanks America..thanks a bloody lot!.

    Now the arseholes have started here in Australia:

    http://www.aisnsw.edu.au/Main/TeacherAccreditation/ISTAA/ExperiencedTeacher/tabid/654/Default.aspx

    And have a look at the idiotic tome I have to build to get a pay rise (the pdf documents on the page). It will take me 6-9 months to put the paper work together, I have to be filmed and then a nobody who has next to no teaching experience will evaluate my material.

    I have been teaching for 7 years, have 3 degrees in Ancient History, Medieval History, Modern History (all from Sydney University-over 10 years worth of study) including a Master’s Degree and have gone through the loop to spend 3 years completing and ‘Education Degree’ online! The single most useless, boring, retarded activity I have ever undertaken.

    Included in my ‘Education degree’ were lectures who had the special experience of running their own Karate Dojo with 2 years teaching experience and a Diploma of Education, a lecturer who made 34 spelling errors in a one page hand written document and a women who believes the footnoting and reference techniques that are found in the Humanities from Oxford, Cambridge and Sydney Universities to be incorrect and ‘old fashioned’.

    This same women was an ardent feminist who hated anyone teaching in the private sector or anyone with ‘specialist’ post graduate degrees as these were, and I quote: “Snobby, segregating, bogited teaching institutions who are not relevant as they are not generalist enough’. She neglected to reference the fact that by her own admission she had left school in Year 10 and NEVER completed her Higher School Certificate.

    Thanks American ‘educationalists’, thanks a whole bloody lot!



  5. Mel on February 23, 2011 at 6:41 pm

    The greatest evaluation of the American education and political system is found in a six minute segment of a presentation by George Carlin. This man was right on. I have included a link to the short video. You should be aware he uses occasional colorful language:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jQT7_rVxAE&feature=related



    • Jon on February 23, 2011 at 11:16 pm

      Great! The truth as only Carlin can put it. Rockefeller is quoted as having said he did not want a nation of thinkers, he wanted a nation of workers.

      When his interests were “broken up,” what actually happened is that he took his control underground through various organizations and agencies over which he retained control. Bill Gates is doing the very same thing today – he did not “give away” half his fortune – he transfered it to a tax exempt organization which uses a portion of the interest off that money to push his agendas while getting a tax break to do it.



  6. Justina on February 23, 2011 at 1:37 pm

    yeah, the teachers are for profit and pursuing their individual
    goals and voting with their feet, when they pressure the unions
    to pressure the government. Get real, Vinnie.

    I agree however that the small school room with a focus on
    getting a lot done is important. As for GPS picture this one.

    Kid cuts up too much bullies or whatever. And is expelled.
    BUT the microchipped GPS is still working, so his parents
    get hauled into court at some point or other because they
    never send the kid to school or discipline him. (And laws
    preventing corporal punishment in the slightest degree
    make discipline nearly impossible.)

    Kid goes to court, gets declared emancipated, a virtual
    adult. Doesn’t have to live with parents or go to school

    Sloppy pot smoking D+ drop out clerk doesn’t put in the
    right information to the computer tracking the GPS, or
    there is some self protective thing that reverts it to the
    original information in case of hacking, and here come
    the courts after the parents AGAIN.



  7. jordan on February 23, 2011 at 12:19 pm

    So the teachers unions are not “for profit” or “self serving”? Only corporations and not unions?… and certainly not the unions in Wisconsin who walked away from the children to protest their pay cuts during a depression…?



  8. Thomas on February 23, 2011 at 12:09 pm

    John Taylor Gatto and his Underground History of American Education is the best single book I have come across on the deliberate dumbing down of our society and our school system — planned well over 100 years ago. What we don’t want are corporations running schools — privatized and for profit, dehumanizing, and serving themselves ultimately. Small single room school houses, accountable to and controlled by the local community, are the way forward!



  9. MQ on February 23, 2011 at 11:05 am

    So, wouldn’t a smart kid just put their handheld GPS in their locker? Unless they are paying for super accurate ones, I think they can be “off” by 100 yds or so.
    Anyway, the whole gimmick of making sure kids come to school is not because of any great desire to see them educated, but rather the schools are paid for each head they have in class each day.
    And I can vouch for Dr. Farrell’s disdain for the more recent batches of “teachers”. In college I found that most of those aiming for teaching were C students (and pot smokers). Others would morph into Dolores Umbridge (from Harry Potter), with large bottoms and acid tongues.



  10. Lindey on February 23, 2011 at 10:35 am

    Joseph,
    Will you please comment on the works by Charlotte Thompson Iserbyte and John Taylor Gatto? From what I understand, the American educational institutions have been brought to us by the lovely folks who gave us The Federal Reserve and Eugenics. Apparently the educational system is working perfectly for them, just as they intended.

    I have a Masters Degree in Adult Education (which I am usually loathe to reveal as it turned out to be a useless exercise). I remember all the angst in the endless discussions of “how to fix our broken education system”. But when I found the work of these two authors, it all made sense. You have to know what the goal is in order to evaluate whether you’ve achieved the goal. So once I learned about the goals of the people who socially engineered our educational institutions, I realized that they have precisely reached their goals.



    • Joseph P. Farrell on February 23, 2011 at 9:55 pm

      Hi Lindey,

      Actually I am unaware of these authors… send me an email off the contact button because if you have the time I’d like to know a little more about them! Thanks for taking the time to write!



  11. Vinnie on February 23, 2011 at 10:01 am

    You mean to say socialized education doesn’t work? What next? Will we come to question socialized health care, or any of the government programs(military and high tech spending) that redirect resources and force people to do what they wouldn’t normally do as being wasteful, wrong and criminal behavior? Will someone try to tell us that this never works and that it only leads to impoverishment by lowering the standard of living? Perish the thought.



  12. chris on February 23, 2011 at 9:58 am

    Europe is just as bad if not worse off from the so called Recession.



  13. Spirit Splice on February 23, 2011 at 9:20 am

    Well, it is at least partially about children. It is about making obedient corporate consumers who do not think or challenge, who are AFRAID to because they might lose their job, one of the few jobs that 10,000 other people are competing for, a job that does not pay a living wage. This is all intentional, to destroy America and return the power base to Europe.



  14. jordan on February 23, 2011 at 5:54 am

    * If anyone thinks this is about the children 🙂



  15. jordan on February 23, 2011 at 5:53 am

    Our government refuses to give parents vouchers to send their kids to private school because it would make the teachers union look bad… a core constituency of the democratic party.

    Its not about the children. Its about teachers who never lose their jobs and politicians who never get voted out of office.

    Check out some of the NJ Governor’s battles with the teachers union over the budget on youtube if you think this is about the children.



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