GATES FOUNDATION: WE MADE MISTAKES, BUT WE STILL SUPPORT ROTTEN TO THE ...
It has been a long time since I ranted about Amairikun egdykayshun and the nitwit busybody billionaires that, since progressive education was a gleam in John D. Rockefailure's and Andrew Smarmygie's eyes, have made such a hash of it. Well, I have to rant again after reading this article shared by Mr. V.T.:
Gates Foundation chief admits Common Core mistakes
Yes, it's confession time for Bill and Melinda Gates, and for that matter, even the Los Angeles Pravda-Times:
Sue Desmond-Hellmann, foundation chief executive officer, wrote this in a newly released annual letter:
We are firm believers that education is a bridge to opportunity in America. My colleague, Allan Golston, spoke passionately about this at a gathering of education experts last year. However, we’re facing the fact that it is a real struggle to make system-wide change.
And she wrote this about the foundation’s investment in creating, implementing and promoting the Common Core State Standards:
Unfortunately, our foundation underestimated the level of resources and support required for our public education systems to be well-equipped to implement the standards. We missed an early opportunity to sufficiently engage educators – particularly teachers – but also parents and communities so that the benefits of the standards could take flight from the beginning.
This has been a challenging lesson for us to absorb, but we take it to heart. The mission of improving education in America is both vast and complicated, and the Gates Foundation doesn’t have all the answers.
That may be news only to the Gates Foundation. As this new biting editorial in the Los Angeles Times — with the headline, “Gates Foundation failures show philanthropists shouldn’t be setting America’s public school agenda” — says:
It was a remarkable admission for a foundation that had often acted as though it did have all the answers. Today, the Gates Foundation is clearly rethinking its bust-the-walls-down strategy on education — as it should. And so should the politicians and policymakers, from the federal level to the local, who have given the educational wishes of Bill and Melinda Gates and other well-meaning philanthropists and foundations too much sway in recent years over how schools are run.
Now, stay with me here, because here's where it gets really interesting, for I have made mention of Andrew Smarmygie and John D. Rockefailure in my litany of miserific millionaires and billionaire bysyboddies who've so screwed things up over the past century. But at least with Smarmygie and Rockefailure, we were dealing with people who were willing to swallow the pill they were insisting that others swallow. As my co-author Gary Lawrence and I pointed out in our book Rotten to the (Common) Core, at least Rockefailure insisted that his sons attend the progressivist schools of Abraham Flexner, where they learned to not enjoy reading and to find books tedious and unenjoyable. These patrons of Progress (Nelson Aldrich and Laurence Rockefailure) then went on to other philanthropic causes, becoming presidential advisors and and vice-presidents and what-not. In the case of Andrew Smarmygie, at least he funded actual libraries around the country that had actual books in them that one could actually read, and even learn to disagree with the progressivist nonsense he was promoting.
But Gates? What's he done? I submit the proof is in the pudding: nothing. No libraries, no actual books, no musical instruments. The bottom line here is if these billionaire busybodies really want to make a difference, then they should simply donate money and physical equipment, and demonstrate their genuineness by sponsoring schools and equipment string-free, no agenda or political agreement required, They might even consider making huge donations to independent minded colleges like Hillsdale, St. John's College, and so on.
But of course, they won't do that, because this isn't really about education at all for these people. It's about controlling information and the "narrative"(usually if not always, of a progressivist sort); it's about the furtherance of their own personal power and profits, and telling everyone else what to think and believe, and to demonstrate their loyalty to that agenda via their standardized tests.
The real bottom line here is about these billionaire busybodies themselves, who hide behind their foundations, which reveal themselves to be nothing but racketeering organizations, organized and legally-sanctioned gangs, using their money, power, and influence to press their political and ultimately anti-cultural and anti-western civilization agenda. Remember, it's not about improving education, it's about widening their power, influence, and building out the surveillance state. Remember what Dr. Lawrence and I wrote in Rotten to the Common Core: Nikola Tesla, J.S. Bach, Albert Einstein, Clara Schumann, Ayn Rand, Fanny Mendelssohn, Percy Shelley, Diego Velasquez, Alexander Hamilton, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, and a whole list of geniuses who have contributed to our art, our music, our science, our law, jurisprudence, and political institutions, our civilization, were not billionaire busybodies nor the products of standardized tests or progressivist education.
You really want to improve education, Mr. Gates? Then build libraries, fill them with books of Plato, Aristotle, literature and science books (I'll be happy to provide a list), buy the musical instruments, spend your billions on getting RID of teacher certification and making sure teachers spend more time learning the disciplines they're required to teach, and allow them to assess their students away from the prying eye of standardized tests, than they do spending time on edublihter and methodological claptrap in "education" courses. In other words, rethink your whole paradigm, and for heaven's sakes, get out of the way. Let students learn that not all information is on the internet, that some of it, most of it in fact, that is important to our civilization is in books, that genuine research knows how to look for them and read them and genuine education teachers students how to do so, teaches them to listen intelligently to a piece of music or to appreciate art and literature with the intelligence and enjoyment. But you're about none of that. You think throwing more money and technology at the current system will fix it, when that system of money technology and goofy ideas itself is responsible for producing the mess. And that means you're not about real education at all. You really want to prove your genuineness? Then visit the classrooms of teachers who really teach, who are in open disagreement with you and your whole philosophy. You might learn something.
The bottom line, if we want to improve education, then we need to rethink the whole status not only of government's role in education, but of "foundations" in our society, and the power they have. They are nothing but legalized gangs and racketeering operations. And the result of their handiwork over the last century and a half in American education is their for all to see. That result is failure, utter, total, abject failure, and nothing else.
There was another such foundation, in the middle ages, claiming similar privileges and exemptions. Philippe le Bel, anyone?
See you on the flip side.
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Measure a man by his actions, past and present, and not by his words. He also said he was against vaccines then in small print wasn’t vaccines themselves only that they should be given further apart. He said he’d spill the beans on 9-11 just as the alternative media (not necessary the good ones) were reporting that Putin would spill the bean’s on 9-11. Then Trump embraced the recent 38 page (?) report issued by the gov. that said it was the Saudi’s. He then said the elections were rigged, two days after Jon Rapport shared an article on the rigging of elections. But Trump didn’t necessarily say how they were rigged. I could go on but the jist of the matter is he repeats all the meme’s that appear in the alternative media as they are being raised. Like invitations for Russia to hack the DNC. His campaign people track the alternative media memes and repeat them establings rapport with the alternative crowd but then when you read the small print, he is either vague or supports some theme and variation of the establishment plan. This garden variety persuasion techniques to get people like us who read Farrell to join his camp. He is a shrewd cookie. And people have bought the whole non-establishment game he is putting forth. Deeper research shows he is the establishment. Don’t expect whatever change he makes to education, because he doesn’t say, to be no different than all the other things, he agrees with us on—-ALMOST.
It’s not just in The USA, but also in Australia. Our Department of Education, is run by a bunch of fat lazy autocratic people who all look the same, sound the same, and repeat the same things each year but with different jargon. We’re also fed up. We see our kids bored, stupid, delinquent and dangerous and we KNOW it’s because they can’t think anymore, but only react to whatever is infront of them.
We had a labour government give laptops to high schools a few years ago. Unfortunately my son was in the year they decided to do this and abandon books. He was hungry for knowledge and was so bored with the school system he dropped out, and enrolled into a further education course to grant him entry into Uni. He excelled because luckily he had a teacher that had been a university professor in philosophy and was extremely passionate about the ‘dropouts’ in his class. My son achieved entry into Astrophysics but within a few months was bored all over again. Most of the first year lectures had been transferred online, and his enthusiasm dimmed within months. He dropped out of Uni, dropped out of cello studies and the local orchestra, because he hated with a passion to be restricted any more. And now he’s happy living in the bush, mending fences and reading Plato, physics, and all sorts of high octane stuff. And I can tell you that he will one of the many that will seriously question and investigate whether his children should be vaccinated and autisticised by the establishment.
There’s always a way to educate. When I have grandchildren, I’ll make sure they too will be thinkers and knowledge hungry.
iZeta, a great story. Thanks. Your son sounds like a self-taught man. The future of our species…
Yes I agree, but why do parents have to hope that’luck’ will bring their children a good teacher? This is what infuriates me. I have work colleagues who’s children have not had such ‘luck’ and they themselves are too busy plugged into stupid cooking shows, facebook and office gossip to even consider alternatives to help their children. Even the older folk here have been consumed by idiocy, and not one of them brings a book to work anymore. They’ve been duped to believe that their gadgets will make them intelligent. Ugh! It disgusts me.
“They’ve been duped to believe that their gadgets will make them intelligent.”
There is the marketing aspect, of course, but your quote brought out a darker thought: What if there were something inherently vulnerable to ‘electronica’ in humanity? Not just the ‘seducement’ of easy memory, etc., but some underlying facet. Almost selected-for?
Maybe even a race-memory of earlier days?
hi Goshawks. I’m interested, but I don’t quite get what you mean ?
A big part of Bill and Melissa’s X-SELL-ant Uhdventure is simply sales. Microslop and Wopple both tie their grants to buying their own gear, and the Gates (of Hell) Foundation is no different.
I prefer Milton Hershey’s attitude to most of the rest of these elite morons who spend entirely too much time with their lapdogs, satraps, and groveling slave fanboy yes-men. Like some movie stars, they end up believing their own PR instead of being able to face reality. For the rest of us, that would create serious malfunction in our lives, but these folks can just buy their way out of trouble, even if it means killing the entire planet in the process.
Hershey used his own personal fortune to keep his employees paid and working throughout the Great Depression (1930s, for you young pups). He regarded them as his family and did great things for them – way out of keeping with the usual pseudo-royal nonsense ones gets with rich folks.
He was a ruthless competitor against other corporations (appropriate), but treated his people better than the lion’s share of businesses in the U.S.
Definitely the kind of rich person to model a life after.
I’ll be he had a classical education and read books, too.
Excellent essay in many and various ways!
Thank-you, Dr. Farrell. Education is in such a sad state I bite my knuckles about it every time I think about my future child having to one day make his way through it. …Funny, my parents were scared of drugs and whatever kookiness was around but for me its the mainstream, especially schools.
I was lucky enough to attend a small experimental school housed on top on an art-deco office building on the edge of the financial district in Toronto, Canada. It was the first and last of its kind here. Regulations and supposed lack of funding has since strangled it, even though we ran at a lower cost per pupil than regular schools.
I agree with getting rid of teacher certification. Our school was run by a coordinator who also taught along with a handful of trained teachers who couldn’t stand working in regular schools. What is key here is we also had dozens of what were called “Catalysts”, that is, professional people brought in to teach any subject from biology to political science. As a student, you could chose any subject on earth you wanted to learn, you would then rally a certain number of other students to make a class (3 or 4), then you could alone or with help go into the city and find your teacher. These catalysts taught for free, believe it or not, sometimes for just a semester and sometimes they stayed on for the pure joy of it or due to the popularity of the class. Many were university students.
For example, I was taught 11th grade biology by a 23 year old student who taught us university level-biochemistry out of pure guile. Classrooms were most all claimed by mainly one teacher/subject, and they were always covered in random and difficult books that you could borrow on the basis of a short conversation. There were also books lying around that no one claimed, legacies of past students and their mentors. Class times were collectively set but could be anytime of the day -7am or 8pm- whatever was agreed upon. Classes were lecture-style, meaning long, some going four hours, of course with a break.
If you wanted to learn about eastern philosophy for example, you could do so under the administration banner of an english credit. You could recruit a Buddhist monk from a local temple, he would be interviewed and receive an hour’s long instruction on how to structure the class by the coordinator, and you would write the school board-required essays and such towards getting your required english credit while learning something you were actually interested in. We had media studies, semiotics, our physical education could be dance or yoga, etc. The one kid who wanted advanced trigonometry got that too. I remember the trigonometry guy had his class in the art office adjoining the dark room.
People were always dropping in and looking around, no one kept track. The secretary had a four year old who would sometimes be running around and students loved teaching him big words to watch him repeat. I taught him the symbol of infinity for no reason. Students came out of their high school years there already classical painters, seasoned writers and entrepreneurs. Not only that, these catalysts were most always doing something interesting in the city so you were suddenly acting as a pillar of your community without realizing it. We were always voting on some aspect of school policy at the weekly meeting. All that time I was there, I thought I was running free. Upon entering university it felt like I had taken a step an intellectual backwards, believe it or not.
Liontree, what a wonderful story! I am glad you got to experience that. Your story should be printed-up and nailed to various schools’ doors, like Martin Luther’s famous 95 Theses…
Yeah, Hillsdale College which gets Rush Limbaugh’s constitutional approval and invites the likes of war criminals like Rumsfeld to speak, gotta be a good place to put Gates Foundation funds, /s. (Yeah, I know the war criminal Tony Blair was employed by Yale.)
As you have tangentially noted in at least one of your vid discussions, there is virtually nothing like an appreciation of music, real music of the traditional complexity, to inspire, create, and produce the kind of imaginative state that leads children to curiously explore the complexity and connections that is afforded by learning. I would submit that this medium and its appreciation is at least as important as supportive pedagogical staff in driving humans to engage their brains in learning behaviour beyond the mere trappings of social convention and explore that incredible path called “curiosity”, an often unexplored road that has continuously inspired the intellectual leaders of the world for millennia.
It is the failure to support this realm that belies the true purpose of “educational reform”, having little relevance to actually educating children and much more to do with mindless indoctrination and statist clone creation, as you note.
And I can attest to the difficulty of inculcating this curiosity essence in children that have already been exposed to the routinised mindlessness that characterises public school prisons today. I was bored in schools until I went to university, I admit it; but the kind of boredom I experienced seems, if I recollect things properly, qualitatively different from that related to me these days by my children.
When you mention Smarmygie you were referring to Carnegie I use to use his libraries when I lived in New York. That’s where I really educated my self. And that’s because I was booted out of the Catholic School and had to transfer to the Public School system and learn to use the school library there. The book vs computer ebook issue was taken up in a episode of Star Trek where Elissa Cook plays defense lawyer for William Shattner in trial for killing one of his crewmen. A prescient episode as science fiction at it’s best is. TPTB no longer want or dream they need educated subjects-citizens they’re planning Armageddon anyway they were and have been barbarians at heart.
Crocodile tears.
These billionaires represent legitimized organized crime rackets, of which the U.S. governmental division provides the necessary rubber stamps of authenticity. All this is organized by other philanthropists so they may continue paving all roads leading to hell[include the roads of education]. Although using virtual economies, sciences, media and other virtues to achieve said land of betrayal[as evidence by a surveillance landscape.
The Rockefailure types believe their own presses? I doubt it, as they owned the propaganda presses – lock stock and barrel.
Are they re-energizing the ever-ready a globalized 21st Century Hitler Youth?
Just an educated guess.
“Remember, it’s not about improving education, it’s about widening their power, influence, and building out the surveillance state.”
Your statement, Dr. Farrell, sums up everything they do in every area of human life all over the world.
Gates is himself a quant, so it is not surprising that he is enthusiastic about purely quantitative educational yardsticks.
Edukation standards in Murica = Oxymoron..
http://consumersunion.org/news/captive-kids-a-report-on-commercial-pressures-on-kids-at-schools-part-two/
http://www.boredpanda.com/americans-place-european-countries-on-map/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0TK_vk-XDM (big wink to Dr Farrel at 04:50)
and well.. there are lots of videos like this on Youtube.
But dont worry.. Americans can be trained.. https://youtu.be/7ZAeHIqcVZE?t=10 and here Im just being nasty .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcE5aDTszrY
aaww I’m in ‘awaiting moderation hell’ today..
Tell us how you really feel Joseph! Seriously, it is all about control and profits. While I don’t like The Donald (I am not registered to vote in the United States corporation’s election for CEO), he is at least saying he will get rid of Rotten to the Core. Plus he has Newt Gingrich behind him who CAF has mentioned was one of the people saying that USCORP needed to help the American people get beyond the curve to survive the coming (now here) tech revolution.