Ted wrote: "Oh, come on Phil. Assigned desks is not some conformist plot. They had them on Little House in the Prairie. And do you want kids to have to fight the class bully for their desks? A desk you keep all day and all year is more like an exercise in private property. In progressive classes you put the desks in a big circle and it doesn't matter where you sit.
Puritans, Unitarians, Lincolnian neo-Fascists, the takeover of Harvard by the Bildburgers? You need to have them up the meds, you will scare away the newbie."
The Puritans and their anti-man, guilt-driven, intellectual spawn, such as the born-again cretins of today, had their own sins, to be sure. I believe that most of the little red schoolhouses taught across wide age ranges, with the older kids expected to tutor the younger, as there was typically one teacher to go around, often paid in chickens or whatever was at hand. The "desks" were more likely a single bench, and the kids probably wrote on slates with chalk, paper being somewhat pricey in those days.
There is a rather good movie, "The Learning Tree," which depicts how the educational system, even in the relatively enlightened non-segregated areas of the U.S., still assumed that if you were black, then you could hope, at best, to be a mechanic or farmer. I learned of the insidious role in promoting racism that the progressive sponsored compulsory universal state schooling (CUSS) taught more directly from a black friend whose parents were both high-school teachers in NW Georgia.
Senator Edward Kennedy, however, had his office do a study of educational performance in Massachusetts over the lifespan of the colony/state. It turned out that the evidence pointed to an actual decline in educational attainment since the early to mid 19th Century, when the compulsory public schooling was being promoted and instituted in the state. Prior to CUSS, there were all manner of educational opportunities provided by private sources, including apprenticeship programs, church schools, for-profit schools and correspondence courses, etc.
I won't bother trying to deal with the lumping of various conspiracies, real or imagined. Our newbee can sort it out herself, I'm sure. But when did I say anything about "the takeover of Harvard by the Bildburgers?" Next you'll have me promoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.... Let's try to stick to facts.
For some facts about more modern conspiracies, one can simply ask "Que Bono?", and if you look, you will likely find. The U.S. has the largest percentage of people incarcerated - and the largest total - of any nation on the planet. (Keep telling yourself, "the U.S. is a FREE country." "the U.S. is a FREE country.") It is common in the general media to mention in passing that the Prison Guards' Union is both the largest and wealthiest union in virtually every state in the U.S. and also contributes more than any other source to the campaign funding for politicians who vote for even more expansion of our prisons.
Laws that used to be local ordinances with $25 fines are bumped to misdemeanors and then to felonies. Kids are nabbed by police for talking with someone who is on a list of gang associates (meaning that they themselves have talked to someone on that list, and so on, and so on....), and then put on a list with a space for checking off how many times they are seen talking to a "suspected gang associate." That list then shows up when they are busted for defending themselves against attack at school, and suddenly they are felons.
Then we have the crews of vipers such as the thought crimes squads. The OC Register this week had a - so far - two part series on these valiant Puritans who go the extra mile to search out "kiddie porn" on someone's hard drive, even when the files have all been long deleted. No matter that the material is available freely all over the web, or that porn is still the number one use of the web. No matter whether the party actually paid for the material, thus financially supporting the porn producers, or simply downloaded free sample, which costs the porn people.
Forget the amazing percentage of people NOW incarcerated in the U.S. These goons were claiming that ~"in any tract of 100 houses, 10 of them will be hosting sexual child abusers or kiddie-porn addicts." They went on to discuss how a kiddie-porn perp could be anyone, a teacher, a fellow employee, any of your neighbors, just no way to tell. But, they're going to get them and add one more victim to our prisons.
Meanwhile, in the paper this same week, news that prisoners are now being employed to grow food for the needy. Can you spell S L A V E? This may not last, as farm prices are plummeting, but, worry not, we can take care of that, too. Farmers are organizing to demand sudsidies to keep food prices so high that poor people cannot afford to buy the food, so that we can employ the world's largest prison population to fill the gap. And the Obama administration is poised to go after the big corporate farms that are driving down the prices, using anti-trust.
It all makes sense, Ted.
Similarly, educational performance has been generally going down throughout the U.S., while spending has kept going up. Notice how powerful and wealthy the teachers' unions are. On a more related note, I was told by the head of the California Day Care Association (private schools) that the reason the day care was priced out of range for most low-income parents was precisely because of a systematic conspiracy by the teachers' union to accomplish just that.
Allegedly, the teachers union subsidized via grants professors in education departments who would then testify as experts at hearings held by Social Services as to what regulations were needed in private day care. Many of these legal requirements were meaningless but costly additions to the day care budget that forced day care facilities to jack up their rates correspondingly.
There are so many egregious real conspiracies out there flaunting themselves in the news, that I really wonder at the people who resort to illuminati's or Bilderberger's, etc.
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