Instead of raising up a generation of freedom fighters, however, we seem to be busy churning out newly minted citizens of the American police state who are being taught the hard way what it means to comply, fear and march in lockstep with the government's dictates.

Yeah, that not a bug, its the purpose of the program

It is the purpose of public education. Education itself is incidental, a tertiary objective to getting union members paid and creating compliant citizens.

And it is a national phenomenon. Colorado, Texas, California, Kansas. It doesn't matter where, the schools have only minor differences. This uniformity is pushed out by the department of education.

Want better schools, there is only one solution. Charter. Break the government monopoly. Reject federal funds and all the strings attached. Give choice to the parents. Otherwise our education system will continue it's slow slide into the muck.

As Reynolds said yesterday, the thugs who now run our government and our institutions feel secure enough in their power that, when they are called out on their thuggery, they feel free to double down. He also speculated -- this was interesting, because he's a law professor and I never thought I'd see him say this -- that the problem might not be solved without violence.

It really does seem to be obedience training more than anything, rather than training in how to think and be an involved citizen.

MarkD: "Education itself is incidental, a tertiary objective to getting union members paid and creating compliant citizens."

And that's true no matter which ideology dominates the system.

Amy, I'll go further and say that a primary purpose of public education is not to impart knowledge, but to limit it. How long it has been that way is hard to say. It wasn't true during the Sputnik scare of the late 1950s, but that might have been a temporary aberration in a long-term trend.

...they are indicative of a nationwide phenomenon in which children are treated like suspects and criminals, especially within the public schools.

Why should they be any different from the rest of us. Now bend over for the TSA agent and smile for the traffic camera.

It really does seem to be obedience training more than anything, rather than training in how to think and be an involved citizen. ~ Posted by: Amy Alkon at September 17, 2015 6:55 AM

Schools have always been, in part, about applying the pressure of civilization to students, teaching them the manners and comportment expected of them as adults. Along with those, they taught civics. Today, most students in any civics class in this country would have a hard time telling you how many branches of our government there are and what the functions of each branch are.

These days, we're teaching our children the worst of adult behavior - by our own actions and our schools' lessons: "Don't be responsible. Don't be decorous. Be ignorant and spiteful. Nothing else matters as long as you can be famous. Selfies rule."

I like to say that public education taught me the value of a human life. A truly magnificent and valuable lesson. Of course, the joke is on them. I was way overestimating things.

The public schools are fulfilling the plans of John Dewey and the authoritarian state. This was the intent from the beginning of state-run schools. The implementation was taken from Germany under 1880's socialism. The entire idea of "grade levels" is taken from German military tradition.

John Dewey was a social planner who was and is celebrated as a philosopher of US public education:

"Independent self-reliant people would be a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future where people will be defined by their associations (1896)."

[ Restated: The groups you belong to or are assigned to will be much more important than what you know, in the socialist, planned world of the future. ]

"The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society that is coming, where everyone would be interdependent (1899)."

[ Restated: We don't want independent thinkers. A few smart children will be needed to run the society, from the proper families and trained in the private schools. Any excess from the public schools will merely spoil social harmony by needlessly trying to change or oppose the scientific plans of the elite.]

In such a world, public school teachers need only to be supporters of the socialist good. Knowledge is a social construct. For example, it is adequate that children know about what science is and respect people with the title of Scientist. It only causes confusion to teach them the difficult details.

My five year old got a detention last week for saying the phrase, "holy shit". He had no idea that was a "bad word", he heard it on the movie Back to the Future and used it in the appropriate context as an exclamation of surprise.

Now I have to decide if I should teach my son all the curse words he doesn't know so that he knows not to say them.

I was advised by a public school teacher to look into private or charter schools if I had a problem with my son being punished for cursing even though he didn't know that he was cursing.

He started kindergarten less than a month ago, this doesn't bode well for his public school career.

Ha Tangerine. That brings back memories. In the 3rd grade I had to have a parent teacher conference involving the principal because I was 'a disruptive influence'. After all, if I wasn't there to be picked on then there would have been no problem, right? I also got a C in PE in the 6th grade. The teacher wanted to fail me but my parents argued her up to a C instead. My failing, I didn't apologize to the teacher when I accidentally stood up a girl for an after school extra circular activity (jump-a-thon). Silly me thinking it was enough to apologize to the girl I stood up. I should have know I needed to apologize to all kinds of people not even remotely related to the issue. What can I say, I was a kid.

He started kindergarten less than a month ago, this doesn't bode well for his public school career. ~ Posted by: tangerine dreamer at September 18, 2015 8:18 AM

I got spanked on my first day of Kindergarten Five years old and the teacher could find no better way to discipline me (for what I can't remember) than that.

I think my general disgust for our system of public education started that day.

I still think that public education can be the great equalizer. Last year's top high school student came from a struggling middle school and our son, from the same high school was offered a spot a Yale which we didn't accept for financial reasons.

Everyone can't go to the "best schools." We have to do the best with the resources that we have - the students, our equipment, and even (as our teacher), our own mental and physical limitations.

I had both negative and positive experiences at school from the teacher who tied my hands to my chair so that I could not read ahead of the class - (dammit - I was in second grade - there is just NO reason to be reading at an 8th grade level.) to the teacher who taught me to read and let me fly to the teacher facilitated our participation in oceanic research and archeological digs.

That said, I'm probably in the middle of those two extremes. I work with what I have which is 100 students that I work with each day. Half of those have special needs and it is my job to teach them. We have over 100 different skills that we must teach students in 180 days. Our students have skill deficits to begin with. Most struggle to multiply single digit numbers.

Next week they must learn to order fractions, decimals, and percents, both positive and negative. Today that learned what negative numbers are. Next week our 6th graders learn operations with integers (negative numbers) as well as multiplication and division of decimals and fractions both positive and negative.

I don't have time to see a home-made clock and make a decision about whether it is a bomb or not. I must assess those 100 students each day. I must plan 4 lessons for four levels of students. I must assess them on paper each day. I must grade those papers and analyze errors that students make. If students don't understand, I must tutor before school, after school, or at lunch until they do.

I don't have time for students to bring dolls, pillows, water guns, Sharpies, or Cheetos.

Bring pencils, paper, a pencil sharpener, and a couple of books. Show and Tell ends in grade school. If we are going to catch students up so they have a chance to succeed when their parents haven't, we don't have a minute to spare.

Please don't make me spend my time assessing a threat - Aint nobody got time for that!

Key phrase there Jen, 'can be'. The real issue is the nationalization of education. When we all do the same thing at the same time we also all go up together and we all go down together. Get just a few idiots in charge at the top and they can take the whole system down. And that is what happened over the last 50 years. As education became more nationally uniform and more driven by the department of education unelected ideologically driven idiots have driven down the quality of the US education system.

The only solution, regionalization. Break the monopoly. Give local people control over their local system. Will some places become uneducated hell holes, yes! But that is better than every place being an uneducated hell hole. By decentralizing you limit the damage those ideological idiots can inflict. I know the feeling 'but I know better than they do' is a powerful one. But you will get better outcomes letting people take care of them selves.