1.)
What is your vision of a great public
school? What are key characteristics of a great school?
Answer: My idea of a great school is
somewhere where freedom of expression is encouraged and celebrated. One of the
great points made during the movie was the fact that children are weeded out to
find those who are most suggestible and submissive to the official story of
events and the overall ideas pushed on us as students. Overwhelmingly, the school system is as such.
We are given left-brain information, told to hold onto it, and then regurgitate
that information verbatim onto an exam paper. School's train children the opposite of what happens in real life; where they are given a test then learn a lesson...in school we are given the lesson the expected to pass the test. My senior year of High School I
took an Art class at Tomball High School, I failed that Art class because the
only types of things she wanted us to draw were Vincent Van Gogh landscape
drawings. Throughout the semester my teacher used scare-tactics telling me that
I would fail her class and wouldn’t graduate. I remember looking her in the eyes
one day and asked “This is an Art class, right?”; “yes”; “Art is supposed to be
creative…”; “yes”; “what is creative
about me drawing the exact same thing as everyone else?” This was supposed to
be art, a right-brain activity, and here she is using fear-tactic
(left-brained) and trying to make everyone conform to the same hierarchy
(left-brain). Isn’t it interesting to see those schools cutting back on their
budget, the first place they cut are music programs, art classes, theatre
programs etc.; right-brain stimulation. Then generally, people who are engaged
in these programs, specifically band are labeled as nerds and geeks. My idea for reform of schools is to find
balance between left-brain and right-brain stimulation. Especially in
government, economics, history really anything other than math and science like
chemistry, and physics which are largely objective. Imagine Government classes where we are
regularly encouraging kids to debate current issues other than abortion and
immigration. Have them debate relevant issues that even mainstream media
doesn’t touch. Point out and discuss the rampant voting fraud going on during
the election; the differences, or lack thereof, between the “Republican” and
“Democratic” nominees for President. We could do this for economics as well, I
remember talking on and on in economics class my senior year about the Federal
Reserve, yet it wasn’t till after that class I learned that it was a privately
owned for-profit business enterprise, unregulated by any system of government.
As Albert Einstein once said “It is amazing that curiosity survives a formal
education.” The Orwellian term used, the “education system”, when we really dive
into it the true motives of this system becomes plainly obvious, it is an
“indoctrination system”; and will continue to be as such so long as we reward
mediocre teachers with tenure, feed our children fast-food quality lunches,
stifle independent thought while rewarding robotic regurgitation, and cut back
on artistic (right-brained) programs even more. Another great point made during
the movie was that for the price of incarcerating a person 4 years, we could
send them to a private school for 13 years. But wait, believe it or not these
Federal Prisons are also privately owned for-profit. Now what once seemed a
mystifying misplacement of funds now comes into full conscious awareness.
“Education” isn’t designed to create large groups of open-minded, critically
thinking, emotionally balanced adults. It has been used as a means to further
separate rich from the poor, to the point now where having just a high school
diploma won’t get you a decent job. Now
we look at skyrocketing prices for Colleges and the overall price of living
it’s no wonder the chasm between the rich and poor is growing on an exponential
curve while the middle-class is dying. Then we look at those who do make it
through this whole system have been in the system from age 5 to 22 and that’s
just a bachelor’s degree which now is minimal. Doctor’s, PH.Ds, Masters, and
most teachers will have been into the system till they’re almost 30, with close
to a million dollars in debt, and relatively devoid of any independent thought.
In the end my idea for a good school system is best described again by Albert
Einstein “The aim of education must be the training of independently acting and
thinking individuals who, however, can see in the service to the community
their highest life achievement.”
2.) Who is responsible for creating and
sustaining great public schools? What is your role, and what needs to happen in
your community to create more public ownership of your local public school?
Answer: I
believe it is the responsibility of the county district to create schools and
the states responsibility to provide funds for the schools. But at the core
level, it is incumbent upon the parents to cultivate their child’s mind.
Unfortunately, what we see on a growing scale is children entering schools and
daycares at younger and younger ages. Also contributing to this, is the
skyrocketing price of living; forcing both parents to work with no time to
raise the children which allows for the state to get ahold of their child’s
young mind and mold it to the official version of “education”. The challenge
for parents isn’t necessarily to control the school system, but to make it a
personal mission to push their children’s education as a continuous process not
just while at school. This isn’t to be done in the same manner that the schools
“educate”, giving children more worksheets, more deadlines, and stress would be
the last thing children need to truly educate. We need to encourage kids to
pursue right-brain activities like learning an instrument or drawing and
coloring. Get them to turn off the TV and go outside and run around with their
friends. Children get more than enough left-brain information during a school
day, what we need is to break this cycle of 24-hours of left-brain information
from Schools and TV.
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