vocial

I'm old enough to remember when No Child Left Behind was hyped up to this great thing. But here's the problem. No Child Left Behind has left a lot of children behind. For decades, the right wing has been trying to undermine public education because to them it goes against their agenda basically having worker drones. They just want workers to be just smart enough to operate the machines, smart enough to bag your groceries, run the cash register, well, if you've ever been in a grocery store and used cash, that's not always easy for some of the younger generation, but that's, I digress. And the numbers have steadily declined. So they want to do more standardized tests, they want to do more and more work. Here's the problem though. They don't actually talk to actual educators. They don't understand that kindergartners and first graders don't learn the way that ninth and tenth graders do. There's no one way to teach a child something. Everybody learns differently. And we don't understand that. We used to have the greatest schools in the world. Here's a fact. Fifty odd years ago, when I first got in the school system, literally this year, this coming fall, is the 50th anniversary of me going to kindergarten. Forest State Elementary School, Forest State, North Carolina. North Carolina used to have really good schools. The United States used to be number one in education. Finland learned from us. What did they do? They learned from us back then. They turned their schools into the leading school system in the entire world. Meanwhile us, we decided to take the Asian way of doing things, Japan, South Korea and such, and China. And we overstress our kids. We try to teach them way too much, way too fast. And we don't understand that kids learn differently. We're trying to have them meet certain goals, certain criteria, not realizing that there's more than one way to get there. Common core, I'm sorry, is garbage. I'm sorry it is. Now can you use that to help kids learn if there's a different way to learn it? Of course. The problem is not every kid learns the same, and we don't have a system that adapts to that. Also, our public school system has been undermined for decades, underfunded, teachers have been treated like garbage, underpaid, disrespected, and a lot of good teachers have already left. They've either retired early or they just flat out quit. We don't understand that because we're being told constantly by the right wing media, public schools are socialist, public schools are mistreating kids. If you've ever been to a public school, it's hard enough to get the kids to pay attention. If you try to teach them through Marxism, they're not going to listen to it. They're going to talk about whatever Sabrina Carpenter is doing nowadays. And yes, I know who Sabrina Carpenter is. Anyhow, the school system in this country used to be great. I went to it and I did pretty well. Our rural district was underfunded too, but we did a lot with a little less. It's a situation where it's like we used to have the greatest public education system in the world. What went wrong? Do the math. Do the history. Our school system has been chronically underfunded, has been chopped down because there's an agenda to make money off of education. Just like there's making money off prisons, just like they're making money off hospitals, just like there's making money off many other things the government used to do and more taxes to pay for it. And I had to go into healthcare one of these days. It used to be that 50 odd years ago, healthcare companies were non-profit. And then Nixon changed that. Well, guess what? Your education system's trying to be turned into a for-profit venture. And how'd that turn out for a healthcare system, by the way? Yeah, right. So yeah, if you wonder why your kids are not learning as much as you did, it's because the system, it's not the teacher's fault, it's because the system is set up for them to fail by people who want to make money off of your kids' learning.