With our society in the unstable situation globally that it is there are problems that need to be addressed. First is the issue of the way we teach our children about our country. From the start we are taught that democracy is the ideal government and that America is always right. This is what makes our country a blind superpower; we only know about the good things that our country has done. For example in class you learn about the American Revolution and how the constitution was formed when we broke away from the evil British. The teachers tell you about how capitalist democracy is the best form of government there is. They solidify this thought by showing you how it gives people more rights. There are 2 extremes that are presented that democracy gives more rights one being anarchy and another being dictatorship. We don’t teach our children about the benefits of the ideal anarchic state or the ideals of a communist government they just tell us that democracy is the only way to go and that it provides the best and most rights to everyone. Teaching kids this in school is an oxy moron most rights that are stated in the constitution do not apply in school KIDS ARE BEING TAUGHT ABOUT HOW THEIR GOVERNMENT IS GOOD BECAUSE IT GIVES THEM FAIR RIGHTS WHEN THEY DON’T HAVE ANY IN THE PLACE THEY ARE IN!!!!!!! When kids go to school they are forced to here the pledge of elegance every day when political opinions are suppose to be left out of school. Then during the school day kids can be searched at any time anywhere in the school based on the suspicion of wrongdoing. Third when you are in class and a teacher says something that you don’t agree with and you say this you might find yourself in the office. The basic thing that school is doing for the government is getting kids onto a track. The track makes people in America accepting of their situation and less likely to oppose or otherwise dislike government action. This is clearly shown when the general public talks about certain issues such as war terrorism human rights and so on, generally you will find that most of the public will deny the need to change the way that America is on issues such as our preemptive strike bills and our patriot act. But there are some cases were this school brought brainwashing doesn’t work and the people that aren’t affected are the ones that try to change things.

So now that we have established that we are being taught that we are always right and that our government is the best lets look at the affect that this has on the world. When the America armed forces go out or when America goes out in general they act like they are the best and what they think is the way things should be. After we do things like this (for example the conflict in Israel the war in Iraq in 91 the imposition of democracy on middle Easter 3rd world countries) we wonder why the aftermath of these events happened (for example 9-11). We wonder why they attacked us, according to the general American public they have been doing nothing wrong but in truth they have. The American government has more power than any other empire ever had no denying it. This is not a problem in theory, a country with this much power should be able to keep the peace. But we (the American people) don’t, we have to use military force to impose military hot and cold wars around the globe in places that are looking a little anti democracy for example Iraq and Afghanistan although they did not have the best government attacking them brought a lot of hate to the untied states from the area around the middle east. Unless we impose drastic governmental changes that start with the way we teach our children we very well may cause a vast nuclear war (world war 3).

Thirdly we must look at ways that we can change the way we teach our nation so that we can change our countries outlook on the world witch will in turn help stop our horrible interaction with other nations around the globe. The first thing we need to do to our education system is to stop the pro democracy and pro America bias that is overwhelming what we teach. For example when we talk about the civil war we will talk about it from a general perspective or a perspective that looks at both sides equally instead of looking at America as the freedom fighters. Another example of where we could stop the glorification of America is the attack on Hiroshima. On the day that a class is learning about the attack on Pearl Harbor and Americas retaliation on Hiroshima instead of trying to justify Americas genocide of the Japanese teachers should open the class for discussion on weather or not the attack was justified. The next thing that we need to do to get rid of the pro America bias is to stop saying the pledge every morning this will stop the subconscious support that it build up for America. The next thing we need to do to solve the education problem is to offer a larger variety of classes that fit your personal viewpoint on life they can taught as an elective and will help aid what you as a person believe in giving you information to help your back up what you as a person believe in. another thing that would help the education system to stop the pro democracy views that come from it would be to stop the military from recruiting at school during school. This has always made no sense to me because number one there are no political opinions allowed in school! So in theory the military shouldn’t be allowed to recruit. Stopping this recruiting will help stop the glorification of democracy and America because when the recruiters come to schools they glorify war and military, they also make people who disagree look like they are unpatriotic.

In conclusion let me state the fact that we have a problem in our schooling system and we have to do something about it or we are going to cause major problems for ourselves. There seems to be no active effort to do something about this so the first and best thing to do about this is to raise public awareness witch will or shall I say should invoke a educational change hopefully for the better.

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but i don't think the "big bad federal gov't," or certain elements of it, don't really want to encourage free thinking. If people really knew how the gov't operates and really undertood our role in the world, the population just might rise up.
Karl Rove himself said too much education is a bad thing. Everyone knows the more educated people become, the more liberal they become, as well.

mb

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God Bless America, and No Place Else

The problem with the education system is painfully obvious. Just look around. Ignorance reigns supreme.

I'm sad to report to you that education and reforming education is not a current goal of the regime in power. It would serve the government to slowly take away funding as they have done, to ensure that the masses are not capable of arguing a point or better yet forming an independent thought. Lets look at the semi big picture here, when we look at the war on terror we are looking at tons of funding that go toward other things go directly down the global toilet (We have more people in our nation below the poverty line then Iraq has in total). If you want better education I suggest you go out there and try to get in office and see if you can't change things from the inside. Write letters to your congressmen and have all your classmates/friends do the same everyday. It would seem to me that America will soon have a slave class for it's cheap labor known as the welfare class, lets look at the new work for welfare initiative. OK first of all lets take some single mother that has a child or two on welfare, now she needs to work for welfare, so desperately needs so she can't spend the time care-taking her children. This doesn't make her much of a mother in the eyes of our government which promptly steps in and takes the child sighting the mothers neglectful mothering as the reason. Not only does this behavior go to insure that these people are to busy struggling/working to do anything but that, as well as filling government run orphanages/jails with their offspring. Lets face it orphanages don't have such a good reputation and it is only going to get worse. Not only with this in place do we have more broken families but we now have the work place flooded with cheap welfare workforce that undermines anyone who thought I'm going to be a carpenter, bricklayer etc... The point is education is the enemy of the state. They don't want you to have a well formed opinion and the don't want you to know what your potential is. Lets face it if they did they would have done something besides cut school funding year after year and then insured that teachers make little to no money thus ensuring only the bottom of their studied field for the most part take up the job, since anyone with a better understanding of their potential is out in another job making better money. So I hope something magical happens and changes it all and funding pours into school system, though if I was you I wouldn't hold my breath. I could be completely wrong, and maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about. But certain realities would have me remain on my current chain of thought.

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It's hard to be successful if you don't make something somebody doesn't want to buy.
George W. Bush

I have my own beliefs on education.

First, having elementary school age children, I have seen first hand the proliferation of perscription drugs to zone out kids. If you kid is fidgety or doesn't pay attention, the FIRST solution now seems to be to call them ADD and drug them up on Ritilin or something. My son was not doing particularly well in our local public school and was "not paying attention". The school is ranked as one of the top in the state. The teachers pushed all sorts of testing which I have come to believe were really to try to "label" him so that they could get more funds from the state. They said he had ADD. In his cub scout troop from this school over half the kids are supposidly ADD according to the school.

We did not follow what they suggested. His teacher went so far as to start writing on hsi report cards that he needed more testing and more programs. They applied a lot of pressure to get him the "help" he needed.

Instead we moved him at the end of the year to a Catholic school. In this school the kids face the front of teh class, in the last they were seated in "pods" that alll the kids faced each other, so half the kids would have their back to the teacher. In the Catholic school the kids are given good marks "stickers" for good days and with ehough stickers for a month, they get to watch a movie on afternoon. If you are not paying attention the teacher will call you on it. In the public school, the teacher just seemd to hope that the kid would pay attention. In the catholic school with uniforms and discipline, my son says everyone si sooo nice and friendly. He says the public school was mean. In the public school he always was talking about battles between kids, teasing, and alliances. The playground was run by the tough kids. The "leader" in my son's class was a kid froma diverced family, rasided by his dad, with an older brother. He was used to being given sh_t it seems was seemed pretty good at dishing it out. This was in 2nd grade. In the Catholic school they don't tolerate this BS.

Now in 3rd grade in Catholic school he is making strait A's. Has learned far more than he was learning before. Has more friends. And not once has anyone talked to us about ADD or any other problems. We told his new teacher in the beggining of the year that it had been suggested that he sit in the front of the class. After one month, he was moved to the back row, which is where the smart kids who can work on their own were seated. He just needed a school where they had high expectations and held you accountable to meet them.

Schools need to raise and enforce their expectations. The BS teasing and stuff that led to Columbine is should not be tolerated. Children should be made to work and behave. I know that the State must educate kids, while private schools can kick out the bad ones. But the state does not need to keep the bad kids in with the good. The state should run the schools like the private ones do. And then instead of expelling the problem kids, they should move them to either seperate schools or seperate classes. But it seems like the schools are letting the bad apples ruin it for everyone else. And like I said, this is in a well to do suburban district in one of the highest ranking schools in the state.

when they become teenagers, the lure of 'well'-paid service sector jobs is very tempting, and they dont spend as much time on their education, so the teacher has to basically explain everything to them, when they get their final exams, they're left none the wiser. i know this from having to educate these kids at 3rd level, they just lack the initiative now & expect everything to be handed to them!

studentmovement well said ! but society has not only abandoned reasonable
argument .In a large number of case it has given up on it's children,I take
responsibility for my kids basic knowledge and question things they are taught.Familys are the core and now apathy and not religion is the opiate of
the people,At least in most democratic societys.

And as someone who is not well educated on computers can any of you guy's
tell me how to increase the amount of space when writing a post,As at the moment as soon as i fill this box i am stuck very limiting.

yours hopefully citizen smith

in response to the post about the kids who don't care: first kids that don't care are the normal American kids that have been influenced by the American school system (not the fault of the teachers but the fault of the material that is given to them to teach). the kids are taught every day that there country is the best and that it will handle everything for them this is exactly what I am talking about. second the kids that cant get a good job because they don't care get into the military thats were all of our foreign relations problems come from!

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When did you do that?

Have you been to a public school lately? From what I've seen, the curriculum at my son's high school seems to be that the U.S. is always wrong, and that capitalism is ridiculed. And from my own college experience, the professors always seemed to have a special hatred for anyone who spoke well of the government. I only mentioned this because it is these same professors that teach our teachers.

We don't teach them to hit themselves on the head with hammers either. Go figure...

Actually, you are right about one thing. Education in this country is long overdue for reform. We spend over $6,000 a year on education, more than even Japan, and test scores are as low as ever. Meanwhile, studies show the private sector could do a better job for half the price.

Privatization would also mean no more worries about political agendas in the curriculum, since parents would choose their children's schools and be able to hold them accountable. I think that anything that takes us in this direction, vouchers included, is desirable.

honestly...and i say this for your own good, i swear. you sound like you're in your first year at hampshire college (or maybe smith) and all these new ideas are coming your way-it's great to be exposed to new ideas, but i hope that you are able to get a better filter.

The line about the ideals of an anarchic government or communism. They are exactly that-ideals. They don't work because they assume a common goodness among everyone, which, unfortunately doesn't exist. There are always those that are power hungry and will take advantage of any system, regardless of what it's "supposed" to be based on.

I've known so-called anarchists (i've made my rounds with the activists). Every single one was essentially "my way or the highway." If you don't agree, you're one of "them." It's the same thing everywhere...

I have a feeling that over the next several years, thing wil become clearer to you. Your heart seems to be in the right place, at least. But remember that everyone who fills your head with this or that has an agenda. (even me, i guess that would mean?)

MB

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God Bless America, and No Place Else