Utahs Republic

Posts Tagged ‘Education’

If you have never seen Agenda: Grinding America Down, it’s a fantastic look into the socialist/communist plan to take over America and a big part of it is through the education system. I borrowed this video from a friend a while back and I think you can get it through Netflix, but if not, you can pick up a copy from their website here: https://agendadocumentary.com/

Here are two trailers for the documentary. Obviously not everyone in the education system is part of some conspiracy to dumb down our children and overthrow our freedom. However, it is completely transparent what is happening from the federal Department of Education for any who take the time to actually look into it.

When John Taylor Gatto was given the teacher of the year award in New York City, the gathering got more than they bargained for in his acceptance speech. He lambasted the public education system and took it to task for destroying education in this country. Gatto’s concluding paragraph here hits the nail on the head by bringing education back to where it should be…centered in the family.

https://www.naturalchild.org/guest/john_gatto.html (read the whole excellent speech here)

“Family is the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents – and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 – we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now. The curriculum of family is at the heart of any good life, we’ve gotten away from that curriculum, time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during school time confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds. That was my real purpose in sending the girl and her mother down the Jersey coast to meet the police chief. I have many ideas to make a family curriculum and my guess is that a lot of you will have many ideas, too, once you begin to think about it. Our greatest problem in getting the kind of grass-roots thinking going that could reform schooling is that we have large vested interests pre-emptying all the air time and profiting from schooling just exactly as it is despite rhetoric to the contrary. We have to demand that new voices and new ideas get a hearing, my ideas and yours. We’ve all had a bellyful of authorized voices mediated by television and the press – a decade long free-for-all debate is what is called for now, not any more “expert” opinions. Experts in education have never been right, their “solutions” are expensive, self-serving, and always involve further centralization. Enough. Time for a return to democracy, individuality, and family. I’ve said my piece. Thank you.”

Amen. Time to decentralize and bring local control and pro-family oriented education back in vogue.

A great new website has arrived that shows the interrelated nature of all the education reforms that have come out such as NCLB, RTTT, CCSS, and other wonderful acronyms you didn’t realize were ruining your child’s education. :) I strongly encourage you to spend a little time on this site and see how Bill Gates and Pearson publishing are gearing up to produce a national curriculum to accompany the CCSS which are essentially turning into national standards.

https://truthinamericaneducation.com/

Be sure to see how the Gates Foundation has *bribed* many organizations to buy into their reforms. On the list are Achieve and Fordham, 2 organizations I previously trusted to be objective but not any more.

https://truthinamericaneducation.com/?page_id=311

I also strongly encourage you to check out their “tool kit” with important links to resources on stopping CCSS. Please use your influence with legislators and school board members to help them understand why this is a bad idea. Some think that this is all being done in a small box. It’s not. It’s vast and interconnected from many different points. The CCSS is only one part of a plan to allow the feds to control education and lose what little local control we have.

https://truthinamericaneducation.com/action-center/tool-kit/

You can also read about Race to the Cradle here as the government gets involved in Pre-K funding.

https://www.cato-at-liberty.org/race-to-the-cradle/

Now I realize this video won’t appeal to everyone, and yet everyone would probably benefit by hearing much of what Michelle has to say. The first part covers the history of compulsory education and after that is over, Michelle talks from a scriptural perspective (LDS specifically) on the topic of educating your children. It’s an excellent presentation and I know it’s long, but I believe you’ll enjoy it if you take the time to watch.

Celestial Education – Michelle Stone

This video is dedicated to the wonderful and devoted Latter-day Saint parents who are striving with all their might to raise children ‘up unto the Lord’. The Lord and His prophets have given us much revealed truth about how we, as LDS parents, should educate our children and about what our schools should be like. This DVD is an attempt to uncover those teachings, which are missing from our current education system, that we may strive for a higher, more pure and Godly way to teach our children. Some of the ideas expressed in this video are the opinion of the presenter. We ask that each viewer watch with an open heart and seek the spirit of God which will testify of those truths that will be beneficial to them and their families. – Michelle Stone

Kristen Shumway contacted me with a great idea recently. She lives in Alpine School District but the idea is worth sharing for other parents to get organized similarly. There are so many issues related to curriculum choice at our schools that having a body of local parents involved in this way makes a lot of sense especially if other parents at the school know about the group and can share concerns and ideas. These groups could easily become the “go-to” group for curriculum and activity choices as they become the involved parents who are most concerned with their children’s educational material. The Investigations math failure (click for new article from MD) and similar constructivist programs which Alpine School District and others continue to use K-12 continue to be shown an utter failure around the country. ASD has no studies to support the use of these programs and ignores the studies showing vastly superior programs such as Singapore, Saxon, and a few others. Parents need to mobilize at the local level and get the information out to parents in their own schools. I’m not sure if Kristen realizes the scope of what she’s sort of offered to do, but I’m so glad parents like her are getting involved.

Kristen mentions below that she will hold a meeting in her home, but I’m hopeful she’s overwhelmed with people like YOU :) wanting to do this at their own school and she’ll need a bigger meeting location.

Here is her email and contact information:

I would like to begin forming parents’ groups that would be associated with each high school, and the elementary and junior high schools that feed into it.  For example, my kids go and will go to PGHS.  I would like to start a group that could discuss the district issues, national tests, etc. per high school and its feeder-schools.  (According to a friend of mine, school districts on the East Coast are usually set up this way.)

I am hoping that by creating parent groups per high school we could create nascient “school board training groups” where parents could get educated, practice their skills, and exercise their voices on behalf of the people they care about most–their own children. Over time, if this idea takes off, these groups could start pushing for change on local levels, be elected to boards, and hopefully unite, creating a force that could give parents more voice in the education of our children.  Ideally, we could push for decentralized, smaller school districts.

As I see it, there is little strength among parents because there is no gathering and training place.  If parents have a problem, they have to come up with their own network.  PTA’s are really just an extention of the teachers’ interests to a large extent.  But a PACE group (Parent Alliance for their Children’s Educations) would be a group where we could disperse information and discuss goals for our own schools–tapping some of the positive energy Charter schools enjoy.  Also, parents could address problems/concerns and then prepare their solutions to be presented as powerfully and unitedly as possible.

We need a positive focus on building and improving.  Obviously there is a lot to fight against, but people are more powerful when they are fighting for something. I think these groups would be amazing training for citizenship and political activity as well.

So please send me your ideas and comments.  I would like to include them in a meeting I will be organizing at my home. Let me know (by email or phone) if you would like to be involved and how.    Anyone who would like to come help with ideas for creating a structure, defining goals, etc., is welcome.  Afterwards, I will post the results, and we will go from there.  We will need individuals who are willing to spearhead things in their schools.  This is a start-up so don’t count yourself out.  Anyone with the desire to improve their school for their children can gain experience along the way, just like the rest of us.

Kristen Shumway 801-701-0641

Sheldon Shumway 801-556-3431

kristen dot shumway at gmail dot com

Someone sent me a link to this video the other day and it’s definitely challenged my thinking. I’ve always been a “get a college degree” type of person. However, there are certainly a number of wealthy people that never got their college degree (Bill Gates jumping to mind). Are there some non-college grads here that have been successful with a career in a chosen field who can share their story?

From Glenn Beck’s show last week comes this little clip on a few things happening elsewhere in our country.

In January of this year, I presented at the Utah Eagle Forum conference along with some other participants. I’ve already posted one of the presentations that I wanted to get out as quick as I could and that was Pamela Smith’s presentation on the SHARP surveys used in our schools. If you haven’t seen that, you definitely want to be aware of what our children are being asked to consider in “harmless” surveys.

Also, when you finish watching my presentation, if you missed watching the video on the U.N.’s global communist agenda, please watch it as well and you’ll see further evidence for the deliberate dumbing down of America.

Last, and as always, another plug for Charlotte Iserbyt’s excellent documentary entitled “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America,” which is a free pdf on her website you can download and look through. She refers to John Goodlad as America’s “premier change agent.”

If you would like to download the slides from this presentation, here’s a link to the Planned Illiteracy Powerpoint slides.

This is classic. Liberal students don’t mind finding ways to put your money to better use, but when it comes to their GPA’s, “hey I worked for that.”

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOyaJ2UI7Ss[/youtube]

There has been a mixed bag of opinions ever since the common core standards have come out. Speculation continues but things do gel in small pieces. Someone sent me this article yesterday which points out that the National Education Data Model contains many of the database information attributes the feds want on our children. The NEDM “is the single, comprehensive model of education data and is prerequisite to establishing automated and comparable systems.” Now this isn’t directly tied into the Common Core State Standards by name, but what else would a national database be for but to get everyone on the same page, taking the same tests from the same curriculum and knowing everything about the students and teachers as possible.

We’re not just talking a few things that deal with student grade performance, we’re talking things like your child’s blood type, what time he/she gets on the bus, compulsory attendance status, orthodontic appliances, religious consideration, the number of decayed teeth you’ve got, etc… Hmmm, now why would the feds would want to track these things? I wonder if members of the state school board ever foresaw problems with federal standards and money? I guess not since they didn’t feel the need to have public meetings prior to their decision to adopt.

Article:

https://pajamasmedia.com/blog/arne-duncans-brave-new-world-dept-of-education-wants-your-kids-blood-type/?singlepage=true

Link to the database attributes (ie. the new master race database):

https://nces.sifinfo.org/datamodel/eiebrowser/techview.aspx?instance=studentElementarySecondary