Bye, Abe, George and Diane!

[Jolly]

@taiwan_girl said in Bye, Abe, George and Diane!:

That is really goofy.

I was reading an article about a recent documentary about Dr. Martin Luther King and the FBI files.

It indicated that he was overall a good person, but did have some flaws (adultery, etc.). Should that be disqualifying for him?

King liked his women.

And, if you know people who knew him, you couldn't have swung a dead cat and not hit a gun in his house.

[Jolly]

@catseye3 said in Bye, Abe, George and Diane!:

Thinking about all this . . . before we (okay, me) get to squalling so hard that our heads spin around and pop off at the neck, it behooves us to remember that all actions have consequences. You do X, Y follows.

If, as it seems, the idiocracy is taking over formal education, (at all levels apparently) what will smart parents with smart kids do? How will they react? Smart parents who are not only smart, but versed in reality? Who can actually spell "common sense"? Do you think they'll send their kids to the Dimwit Academy and hope for the best? Would you?

That's all I got right now.

Private school and home school. And sometimes, home schooling with a certified (usually retired) teacher.

Already been happening in droves.

[Catseye3]

@jolly said in Bye, Abe, George and Diane!:

Private school and home school. And sometimes, home schooling with a certified (usually retired) teacher.
Already been happening in droves.

I actually am aware of that. I'm thinking of a more radical model -- much more stringent entrance requirements, including IQ, evaluation of parenting styles, without government interference having to do with "equality" standards, where equality means freedom to believe and flaunt dumbassery and reject all else because of some cockeyed notion of entitlement. All are welcome, as long as they are open-minded, open to learning, their beliefs and upbringing based in reality.

I don't know, people who know more than I could speak about this mo' better.

[Jolly]

@catseye3 said in Bye, Abe, George and Diane!:

@jolly said in Bye, Abe, George and Diane!:

Private school and home school. And sometimes, home schooling with a certified (usually retired) teacher.
Already been happening in droves.

I actually am aware of that. I'm thinking of a more radical model -- much more stringent entrance requirements, including IQ, evaluation of parenting styles, without government interference having to do with "equality" standards, where equality means freedom to believe and flaunt dumbassery and reject all else because of some cockeyed notion of entitlement. All are welcome, as long as they are open-minded, open to learning, their beliefs and upbringing based in reality.

I don't know, people who know more than I could speak about this mo' better.

Please conserve your stash. Biden clamped down on docs prescribing necessary opioids today.

[Catseye3]

@jolly said in Bye, Abe, George and Diane!:

Please conserve your stash. Biden clamped down on docs prescribing necessary opioids today.

I did not say, because I'd have thought it would be obvious, that what I was noodling around with would be something new -- something that hasn't been tried yet.

Just because a thing hasn't been done doesn't mean it can't be done.

[Jolly]

@catseye3 said in Bye, Abe, George and Diane!:

@jolly said in Bye, Abe, George and Diane!:

Please conserve your stash. Biden clamped down on docs prescribing necessary opioids today.

I did not say, because I'd have thought it would be obvious, that what I was noodling around with would be something new -- something that hasn't been tried yet.

Just because a thing hasn't been done doesn't mean it can't be done.

In this current political climate, meritocracy and pragmatism is DOA.

[Catseye3]

@jolly said in Bye, Abe, George and Diane!:

In this current political climate, meritocracy and pragmatism is DOA.

Bringing me back to my initial point -- if there is no good schooling available for my kid, then I need to invent some. Me and however many other million smart parents with smart kids there are. It wouldn't be easy, but it's not insurmountable.

Be careful not to conflate reality as presented by MSM and reality as experienced by 328 million Americans.

[Rainman]

Cats, you're on the right track. Charter schools can be very good.

I was on the School Board for 12 years, in Oregon's 5th largest district. At around the 10th year, given what I had seen force its way into the curriculum and new left-wing board members who were well-funded by the democrats -- I realized that to be honest, I would recommend home school or private school to parents.

Even if a surprising number of parents decided to home school or private school, public education is still the behemoth, so the radical leftist influence will continue as long as it continues its hold in the universities.

San Francisco will be mired in insanity, if they look to rename those schools. But, it's San Francisco so it's more the normal anyway. We had the very loud groups of certain parents that worked very hard to convince the Board to name our new schools after "appropriate" persons.

Personally, I encouraged naming schools after the local geography, or anything other than a person's name, especially an "appropriate" name. I lost. Our newest high school, after tearing the community apart, was named after the newest sitting Oregon supreme court member, even before she was seated on the court. But, she was black and female, so, more than "appropriate" for the name.

[Catseye3]

Rainman, thanks very much for this. Nothing like a contribution from someone with hands-on experience -- especially 12 years worth!

I was doing blue-sky musing with my remarks. You very obviously know a zillion times more about this.

So what's to be done? Are we doomed to launch kids into society who are dumb and getting dumber?

[Copper]

We need a simple list of approved names

I'll start

Jane Fonda
Ethel Rosenberg
Oprah
Eva Braun
Dixie Chix

[LuFins Dad]

@copper said in Bye, Abe, George and Diane!:

We need a simple list of approved names

I'll start

Jane Fonda
Ethel Rosenberg
Oprah
Eva Braun
Dixie Chix

The Che Guevara PreSchool and Kindergarten...

[Rainman]

@catseye3 said in Bye, Abe, George and Diane!:

Rainman, thanks very much for this. Nothing like a contribution from someone with hands-on experience -- especially 12 years worth!

I was doing blue-sky musing with my remarks. You very obviously know a zillion times more about this.

So what's to be done? Are we doomed to launch kids into society who are dumb and getting dumber?

Sadly, yes.
But, there are areas of the country where public ed is producing great results. It depends so much on the local community. If parents get involved and make their voices heard, it makes a difference. Unfortunately, it is the loudest woke voices that control too much, in too many communities.

And frankly, the kids aren't dumb. If they have engaged parents, they will grow to be as capable and wise as all of us brilliant public school graduates on this forum!

There is so much involved. Classroom discipline, federal mandates, leadership of the district from Superintendent including central cabinet. State legislators, dept. of education running left-wing rampant (for example, the "Dear Colleagues" letter by Obama becoming policy statewide) and on and on, and then the ACT and Coleman's new common core based SAT.

My only hope is that somehow, reasonable parents become involved, to shut down those that are trying to change the world starting with the youngest children learning "critical thinking" skills.

There are great teachers. If they become influential, that makes a tremendous difference at the building level. All schools have something akin to Site Counsels. Very powerful committee if the principal allows teachers to guide the culture of the building, from classroom discipline to choices in curriculum.

Portland Public experimented with the old K-8 model, as opposed to a middle school concept. Good idea, but they dropped it after several years. Just didn't work, for lots of reasons. I mention that only because it is often suggested that going back to that old model is perhaps a viable solution. Maybe in certain communities, but not as a district-wide model.

It is indeed complicated. And like everything else, it has been politicized at pretty much all levels.

Maybe we could all move to Boston, that would help. Concentrated higher education region, along with public schools with top test scores (as a generalization, white rich districts in Boston's suburbs are excellent), and in Virginia and until recently, California especially in higher ed.

When whites are pushed far enough, then the backlash from the whites and Asian communities in this intersectional climate will indeed be throwing around IQ stats. That will be ugly, as affirmative action grows and people are placed into positions of influence depending on skin color. Then it will be competence and merit, and IQ etc. as eventual push back agains the nonsense. The left is playing with fire in the long term.

[Catseye3]

@rainman said in Bye, Abe, George and Diane!:

Then it will be competence and merit, and IQ etc. as eventual push back agains the nonsense.

All righty then!

[George K]

https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/john-kass/ct-classics-in-schools-kass-20210130-k2uluwpt2jdtxmz7zp4hl2xz2i-story.html?fbclid=IwAR3oQFSBGHPeAPhNH544kWm7pC4NaFGS6nOuiVuAiWX-5MsiUI1D-_klDiY

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Column: Erasing classic literature for kids
John Kass

Jan 29, 2021 at 6:58 PM

When I was a boy about 11, I committed a crime that changed my life.

I stole a book. I was a book thief.

I found it in another kid’s desk and began reading, hiding it behind some boring textbook, and couldn’t give it up.

And when the last bell rang, I hid it furtively under my jacket as if it were some rare, precious and struggling bird, and walked home.

It’s still with me. I’ll never give it up.

That book that opened up the world to me.

“Odysseus the Wanderer,” written for children by the classicist Aubrey de Selincourt.

It is a version of the “Odyssey” of Homer, the greatest adventure story ever told. I’ve since read several translations of Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey.”

The crafty Odysseus, the man of wrath, was an expert trickster. He duped the Trojans with his Trojan horse, befuddled the man-eating Cyclops and withstood the deadly song of the sirens.

Though he was clearly pre-Christian, I considered the wandering King of Ithaca as a patron saint. There was no trap he couldn’t escape with his wits. His story has shaped Western literature — as well as “Star Trek” — for some 3,000 years.

But there is one thing Odysseus may not be able to withstand:

The political left and the growing #disrupttexts movement — fueled by critical race theory — in American public schools wants him gone.

Classic Western literature, from Homer to Shakespeare, Mark Twain and even Harper Lee, is now being canceled, much in the same way that the Islamic State group and early Christians destroyed ancient statues that offended them.

There is something quite barbarous about it all.

Just a few days ago, zealots in San Francisco began stripping “offensive names” from public schools. Names such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and even Democratic U.S. Sen. Diane Feinstein, who is a living witness to her own cancellation.

The stripping of names are public events. They pit aging, worried traditional liberals against a radical leftist movement that will devour them as surely as the relentless Bolsheviks devoured the more moderate Mensheviks.

But the purging of great literature often takes place quietly, among woke teachers and librarians. If the classics aren’t exactly banned outright or burned, they have another way:

To place offending literature on the back shelf, out of the reach of the young, where they’re lost to gather dust in the shadows.

Author Padma Venkatraman wrote an essay titled “Weeding Out Racism’s Invisible Roots: Rethinking Children’s Classics” in the School Library Journal. She supports this purge.

“Challenging old classics is the literary equivalent of replacing statues of racist figures,” she writes.

“… exposing young people to stories in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm may sow seeds of bias that can grow into indifference or prejudice.”

And so, the astounding complexity of great literature and great writers is now reduced, as are so many things these days, to angry zealotry and political correctness.

Shakespeare’s glaring sin is his anti-Semitic treatment of Jews in the “Merchant of Venice.” But isn’t there value in his other works? Do I really have to ask that?

Harper Lee’s sin is creating hero Atticus Finch, the white liberal savior of a Black man wrongly accused. And what is the blind poet Homer’s outrage? He didn’t think of himself as belonging to the West, the way we think of the West.

But when Odysseus enters the underworld and meets the vain and deadly killer Achilles, Odysseus is told this:

“I would rather be a slave of a landless barbarian than king of all the dead.”

A #disrupttexts leader, Lorena German, author of “The Anti-Racist Teacher,” explains her purge this way:

“So, let us be honest, the conversation really isn’t about universality … This is about an ingrained and internalized elevation of Shakespeare in a way that excludes other voices. This is about white supremacy and colonization.”

If the new test for all literature, movies, statues — anything of historic value we consume — is 100% purity, all will fail. And who would grade the test?

When I was young, there were no books that couldn’t be read. To deny classic literature was to brand yourself a barbarian.

But now those narrow minds deciding what books children will read are the dictators of the new “tolerant” culture. There is nothing delicious in the irony.

There is great value in diverse characters the young can identify with. I’m not arguing with that. Even Homer understood the multicultural world.

What’s irksome is the way offered, as ideological catechism to politically shape the minds of the young. If it meant more kids picking up books and reading, I might understand.

But kids aren’t stupid. They’re not easily led farm animals, despite what the new Napoleons believe.

If children associate literature with didactic political indoctrination, whether from right or left, the smart ones will put up a wall and shut down.

And they won’t develop the necessary skills of logic and critical thinking needed to grasp and wrestle with the great conflicting ideas offered in classic Western literature.

Perhaps that’s the real plan. Who needs to develop critical thinking when the great books are gone?

Politics is always downstream of culture. And I’m just glad I stole that book when I could.

When books weren’t placed on the back shelf, out of the reach of a child.

[Catseye3]

@george-k said in Bye, Abe, George and Diane!:

exposing young people to stories in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm may sow seeds of bias that can grow into indifference or prejudice.”

Especially when the woke are around to REMIND THEM OF IT EVERY FIVE MINUTES.

[taiwan_girl]

@george-k That article makes sense. It is important to be exposed to different ideas and views from different people.

If you see things and read things you agree with, it is easy to forget that there are different things out there.

[George K]

@taiwan_girl said in Bye, Abe, George and Diane!:

That article makes sense.

John Kass is a great columnist. He has picked up the mantle of Mike Royko in the Chicago newspaper world. Insightful, funny, and smart.

[Rainman]

I wonder how long before the author is purged.

[Catseye3]

I miss Mike Royko and Slats Grobnik.

[George K]

@rainman said in Bye, Abe, George and Diane!:

I wonder how long before the author is purged.

He won't be. He is a well-established "contrarian" on the Trib staff. Beloved by almost all Chicagoans.