Sunday, March 04, 2007
What happened to the 3-R's???
From The Anchoress (a great blog I read several times a week):
If my kids were little and just beginning in elementary school, I would seriously consider home-schooling for a variety of reasons - mostly because now that I’ve seen how quickly it all went, I want more time with them! But I’d have considered it sooner had this been what they were taught.
“…the students had been building an elaborate “Legotown,” but it was accidentally demolished. The teachers decided its destruction was an opportunity to explore “the inequities of private ownership.” According to the teachers, “Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation.”
The children were allegedly incorporating into Legotown “their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys.” These assumptions “mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive.”
They claimed as their role shaping the children’s “social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity … from a perspective of social justice.”
So they first explored with the children the issue of ownership. Not all of the students shared the teachers’ anathema to private property ownership. “If I buy it, I own it,” one child is quoted saying. The teachers then explored with the students concepts of fairness, equity, power, and other issues over a period of several months.
At the end of that time, Legos returned to the classroom after the children agreed to several guiding principles framed by the teachers, including that “All structures are public structures” and “All structures will be standard sizes.” The teachers quote the children:
“A house is good because it is a community house.”
“We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes.”
“It’s important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building.”
Betsy Newmark writes:
How Orwellian is that lesson? It sounds like something out of Animal Farm but now it’s being taught to children as what is optimal rather than to be condemned.
These teachers are so ignorant that they don’t realize that the rights to private property are not only the essence of our democratic system as well as the best guarantee for a thriving economy. Who would want to invest and improve anything in an economy if they didn’t have guarantees that they would be able to reap the profits from their invested time and money?
This is pretty scary to me. It is funny though that many of these types of stories are coming from the west coast. Maybe CA, OR, and WA should form their own country and we can provide military protection from the Chinese/Mexican/Canadians for a nominal annual fee.
If my kids were little and just beginning in elementary school, I would seriously consider home-schooling for a variety of reasons - mostly because now that I’ve seen how quickly it all went, I want more time with them! But I’d have considered it sooner had this been what they were taught.
“…the students had been building an elaborate “Legotown,” but it was accidentally demolished. The teachers decided its destruction was an opportunity to explore “the inequities of private ownership.” According to the teachers, “Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation.”
The children were allegedly incorporating into Legotown “their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys.” These assumptions “mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive.”
They claimed as their role shaping the children’s “social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity … from a perspective of social justice.”
So they first explored with the children the issue of ownership. Not all of the students shared the teachers’ anathema to private property ownership. “If I buy it, I own it,” one child is quoted saying. The teachers then explored with the students concepts of fairness, equity, power, and other issues over a period of several months.
At the end of that time, Legos returned to the classroom after the children agreed to several guiding principles framed by the teachers, including that “All structures are public structures” and “All structures will be standard sizes.” The teachers quote the children:
“A house is good because it is a community house.”
“We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes.”
“It’s important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building.”
Betsy Newmark writes:
How Orwellian is that lesson? It sounds like something out of Animal Farm but now it’s being taught to children as what is optimal rather than to be condemned.
These teachers are so ignorant that they don’t realize that the rights to private property are not only the essence of our democratic system as well as the best guarantee for a thriving economy. Who would want to invest and improve anything in an economy if they didn’t have guarantees that they would be able to reap the profits from their invested time and money?
This is pretty scary to me. It is funny though that many of these types of stories are coming from the west coast. Maybe CA, OR, and WA should form their own country and we can provide military protection from the Chinese/Mexican/Canadians for a nominal annual fee.
Labels: Children, Education, Family
