Virtue or Vice? The Battle for our Children in Today’s Culture…

What is wrong with our culture?

From the Associated Press, via WEAU.com:

RACINE, Wis. (AP) –Two employees of a Racine child care center are facing felony child abuse charges.

Police say a video surfaced on social media showing three young children restraining and beating a 2-year-old boy at the Bundle of Blessings Kid Kare center last month.

Sgt. Jessie Metoyer says one of the employees, a 22-year-old Caledonia woman, is the mother of two of the children who physically assaulted the toddler. Metoyer says the three children held down the 2-year-old and punched and kicked him. Police say the video was taken by one of the two women.

The Caledonia woman and a 23-year-old Racine woman are each charged with child abuse by failing to prevent bodily harm. Both women appeared in court Friday and remain in jail.

Metoyer says the 2-year-old is doing OK.

When I first heard this, I didn’t know what to think. Punching and kicking a 2-year-old? And the daycare worker films it, and then posts it to Facebook??

Sadly, yes…

Gun Control, our Children and the State

You have likely heard of some of the more ridiculous gun-related stories from the past week:

• The kid who ate his Pop-Tart into the “shape” of a gun and was suspended;
• the 5-year old girl who was suspended for “terrorist threats” that she made with…her ‘Hello Kitty automatic Bubble Blower©’;
• and the other day the 3rd-grader who had his cupcakes confiscated due to his decorating them with little green WWII plastic soldiers.

Welcome to the new ‘tolerance’.

These events prompted Maryland state senator J. B. Jennings to introduce “Senate Bill 1058 – The Reasonable School Discipline Act of 2013″. Courtesy of the Daily Caller:

An opinion on gun control

Reblogged from Monster Hunter Nation:

I didn’t want to post about this, because frankly, it is exhausting. I’ve been having this exact same argument for my entire adult life. It is not an exaggeration when I say that I know pretty much exactly every single thing an anti-gun person can say. I’ve heard it over and over, the same old tired stuff, trotted out every single time there is a tragedy on the news that can be milked.

Read more… 10,539 more words

The attached post is by far the most complete treatment of the subject I've seen anywhere recently. Its author says that until his suggestion is honestly considered, any alleged "national conversation" isn't a debate, it's a "lecture"...and he's 100% right.

So please, take a few minutes and read it. It will either (A) change your mind completely, (B) reinforce what you already believe, or (C) leave you tremendously more informed on this subject than you were 10 minutes ago.

Did we REALLY learn everything we need to know in Kindergarten? If so, that explains why everything is so screwed up…

Saw the following article over at PJ Media, and it almost seemed like a follow-up to my post yesterday. 

Please, feel free to comment if (& where) you disagree with him. Because personally, I think he nails it beginning to end. 

–JTR

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Midnight in the KinderGarden of Eden

-by EVAN SAYET

Not all that long ago, a not wholly inarticulate gentleman wrote a book in which he declared that All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten.  Mind you, this was not a tongue-in-cheek expose on the shallowness of thought in the modern liberal era; it was a proud declaration of the fact that the author knew that had he been morally and intellectually retarded at the age of five, he’d be exactly as smart and “accomplished” as he is today.

"It is a huge supposition to think they do not feel hunger or thirst."

Reblogged from Politicaljunkie Mom:

So says Dr Laura de Rooy, a consultant neonatologist at St George’s Hospital NHS Trust in London writing in response to an article published in the British Medical Journal of the placement of disabled infants on the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP).

The LCP was developed to help push those clinging for life off the cliff, so to speak. The elderly and terminally ill.

Read more… 598 more words

Want to know what Obamacare will look like?  It's gonna look like THIS...

I needed this: the “Parent Rap” (VIDEO)

Came into the office today, and work is 3 feet high. Both of my sons have grown out of most of their cloths, even though I swear we just bought them new stuff a day or two ago. And to top it all off…..my youngest needs braces.

I am, of course, thrilled.

Just another day for us parents, right? Well, with that in mind, thought I’d share the best video I’ve seen for a very long while.

***And, for the record, if ALL hip-hop was this entertaining, I’d listen to it waaaay more often.

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(Thanks to our friend Art, over at The Peanut Gallery for finding this...)

‘Waiting For Superman’ (Watch it. Please…)

Yesterday we covered the new rules for tenure in NYC and New Jersey, and the reasons these changes were significant. We also made a pitch for everyone to watch the film ‘Waiting For Superman’, which discussed the problems of our public schools. I didn’t realize it yesterday, but the movie exists on YouTube in its entirety. It is broken up into eleven segments, but it’s there.

I had a different post for today ready to go, but this is more important than the subject I was going to address. Our children are getting an inferior education to the one we received 30 years ago. America can’t continue to be the beacon of freedom for the world if we continue to mass-produce ill-educated children. We are sentencing these kids to lives of mediocrity, and we are dooming our country in the process.

I’ve included the first three segments of ‘Waiting For Superman’ below. The others are easily found on YouTube, as well.

It doesn’t matter if you have kids in the system or not. We all pay for the public school education of our children. We owe it to them, and to ourselves, to have that education be superior, rather than substandard…or worse.

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3

Teachers, Tenure, …and our Kids

Since school is starting up again, this topic is timely ….at least in my house.

Most of us are aware of the problems inherent with public school teachers and tenure: once tenured, too many teachers are not fulfilling their basic obligations. Many need to be retrained or simply let go. However, their tenured status makes them almost impossible to fire, and the unions won’t hear of it. It’s all about power: being able to fire bad teachers could eventually lead to a merit system and once that is in place, …bye-bye union.

It’s a sad, sad state which describes our public school system, countrywide.

However, there was a recent article in the New York Times about an unusual occurrence in NYC. Seems that almost half of that city’s teachers didn’t get tenure in their first shot at it. It also appears that, amazingly, this was on purpose:

Nearly half of New York City teachers reaching the end of their probations were denied tenure this year, the Education Department said on Friday, marking the culmination of years of efforts toward Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s goal to end “tenure as we know it.”

Only 55 percent of eligible teachers, having worked for at least three years, earned tenure in 2012, …compared with 97 percent in 2007.

An additional 42 percent this year were kept on probation for another year, and 3 percent were denied tenure and fired. Of those whose probations were extended last year, fewer than half won tenure this year, a third were given yet another year to prove themselves, and 16 percent were denied tenure or resigned.

Jazz Shaw over on HotAir.com had something to say about this: 

“This is an interesting trend which may be sending a message to the teachers’ unions, but it’s not a long-term solution. Teachers failing to receive tenure are simply given another season or two to get it or they drop out. The end goal for all of them – and the unions – is still to land tenure so they can stay on indefinitely on the taxpayer dime once they get it.

It’s no surprise that unions would be pushing back against this. We’re talking about a group which also fights like the devil against the idea of things like merit pay, despite the fact that studies show that it works. It’s a culture unlike virtually any other in the nation, where outrage greets the idea that competition for a job should result in the best candidates and that pay might be linked to performance.”

Jazz is right: instead of proficiency or mastery of the job, far too many teachers have tenure as their #1 goal. It has been more of a hot-button topic for the past few years, though, helped along not insignificantly by Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey: 

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Gov. Christie just signed a teacher’s tenure reform bill into law a couple weeks back, which ended the “job-for-life” thinking he spoke of in the video. This new law is another gigantic step towards reclaiming control of our children’s education, and wresting it away from the unions. We could stand to see similar bills pop up across the country.

THE major obstacle is, of course, the teacher’s unions. Anyone who has worked for the public school system knows how they work. For everyone else, you can get the general idea by watching the film ‘Waiting For Superman’, which was released in 2010. Since it only grossed about $6 million stateside, there’s a safe bet that most folks reading this did NOT see it, though…and you need to.

‘Waiting For Superman’ was directed by admittedly left-leaning Davis Guggenheim, director of Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. However, Guggenheim is highly critical of the hundreds and hundreds of “failure factories” which dot the landscape, and he saves special disdain for the teacher’s unions themselves, which are preventing the necessary changes to be made for the betterment of the students.

Trust me: you will never again be able to hear the phrase, “It’s for the children” without thinking of this particular film.

Even though my wife and I don’t have kids in public school (we home school), we couldn’t help but be moved to tears at the plights of these families. The parents’ dogged determination to secure even a decent education for their daughters and sons, and the massive hurdles which keep being placed in their way, is heartrending. In only 90 minutes, you will possess a deeper understanding of just how important these changes in tenure in New York and New Jersey truly are, because the findings in ‘Waiting For Superman’ are being played out, right in front of our eyes.

Some Fun for your Weekend

It’s the weekend, and we thought we’d share a few more clips from (my) new discovery, The Piano Guys.

***I know that the other Head was secretly holding out on me, even though she insists that she merely “forgot” to bring this group to my attention. Yeah, sure, like I really believe THAT…***

Anyway, here are three more vids for your enjoyment. The first one is absolutely inspired, and even my two sons loved it. The other two are a little less “clever”, but are just as amazing, musically speaking.

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America’s students: even WORSE news….?

This article comes via our old friend John Galt at ‘YouViewed/Editorial’ blog.

I read it last week, but had too much else going on to address it properly. However, today is as good (or bad, I suppose) a day as any to look at the ugly truth.

The first half of the article (the BAD news) is that our unemployment is actually ….really, really bad. We’ve covered that before, and there’s not all that much new there. So, I am going to go straight to the “even WORSE” news.

By Mort Zuckerman at usnews.com:

“Bad News, or even WORSE News….?”

It’s time to adjust the gambit that people in all situations commonly use when reporting results to a supervisor: “What do you want first, the good news or the bad?” The formula that more aptly applies to the latest indicator of America’s economic predicament is: “What do you want first, the bad news or the even worse news?”

The bad news is the disappointing June unemployment numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The worse news is that we are failing to train tomorrow’s labor force for employment in a world of accelerating competition.

…..Here now is the worse news: America is adding to the length of unemployment lines in the future by falling behind today in skill areas where global competition has become so intense. Too few of our younger people are benefiting from what is called STEM education. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the human capital at the core of any productive economy.

America has long been a STEM leader. We have dominated the world in innovation over two centuries but most recently in computer and wireless power, the development of the Internet, and cellphones, and with those innovations came well-paying jobs.

But our leadership is at risk.

A stunning illustration of how far America has started to lag in training its youth is that we are only one of three countries in the 34-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development where the youngsters are not better qualified than their fathers and mothers. Men and women ages 55 to 64 have the same or better education than the 25-to-34 generation. The younger workers in most other OECD countries are much better educated than those nearing retirement.

This is an astonishing commentary on the limits of, and the deterioration of, America’s system of public education. The National Academies warned years ago that the United States would continue to lose ground to foreign economic rivals unless the quality of its science education improved. In a 2010 report by the academies, an advisory group on science and technology, the United States ranked 27th among 29 wealthy countries in the proportion of college students with degrees in science and engineering. In a larger study conducted by the OECD in 2009, American 15-year-olds were 31st in math and 23rd in science. Yet another study found American 12th graders near the bottom of students from 20 nations, and this doesn’t even focus on the achievement gap between low-income and minority students and their peers.

Again, this is just part of the first half of the article. As depressing as it is, it is a very worthy read.

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Zuckerman’s conclusions are another in a long line of indicators as to why we need to improve our children’s education. Over the years, there has been a systematic drop-off in basic scholastic ability and results in our youth, and a decent portion of the blame must be placed on the public schools. Before I generate too many angry comments, let me say that I know of some superb public school teachers, and one of my best friends is among them. However, more and more the good ones are becoming the outliers, with others just “teaching to the test” and not imparting actual, useful, memorable knowledge to their students.

When did this happen?

Prior to college, I attended parochial grade schools and a public high school, so I have a different life experience than most. However, my best teachers (in either school setting) taught me how to approach my learning; how to look at it so that I would retain the ‘how?‘ and ‘why?‘ portion of the subject, not just the factual ’what?‘ part. I can clearly recall the overwhelming majority of my grammar, as well as how to solve a polynomial equation, plus many others lessons. One of those subjects was taught by a nun, and the other by a very small town teacher.

My point being, it wasn’t money that made those lessons, learned so many years ago now, effective. It was the instructor’s method, and it was their skill.

So I ask: are our teachers today simply so less skilled than the teachers of yesteryear that they don’t have the ability to teach effectively? Somehow, I just don’t buy that.

Consider this an “open call” for any/all opinions: WHY has our education system gone to heck over the years?

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****And, please: nobody say “money”, okay? Of all the things that could be the culprit, “money” ain’t one of them.

A Modern Day warning from the Cold War era

It’s not like I wasn’t watching cartoons as a kid. Heck, I set my wind-up Baby Ben alarm clock on Saturday mornings for 5:00am so as not to miss any of ‘em. And now I am blessed with two little boys, both of whom are connoisseurs of everything from Looney Tunes and Jonny Quest, to Teen Titans and Ben 10.

That said: I have never, ever seen this.

It’s a short cartoon called “Make Mine Freedom” and according to Internet Movie Data Base is from 1948. Made during the advent of the Cold War, it warns of the dangers of Fascism, Communism and Socialism. However, it does NOT come off as dated. Far from it.

It is scarily applicable to our world today to such an extent one of the reviewers on IMDB suspected it had been recently made to LOOK old, since the ”dialogue also seems to have been crafted to meet the needs of the current political crisis“.

If it’s relevent enough to inspire its very own conspiracy theory, you may rest assured: it’s plenty darn relevent.

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A pair of credits on this: our buddy That Mr. G Guy’s Blog, as well as the impressive iowntheworld.com.

Click on the picture to watch the cartoon, or on Mr. G’s link above:

Thomas Jefferson on Obamacare: “I Told Ya’ So”

Yesterday’s SCOTUS decision was not magically undone overnight by benevolent fairies, so it looks like it’s up to us. Yes, this decision stinks on ice. And Yes, it means we have only one choice going forward: REPEAL IT.

Actions like this were anticipated over 200 years ago. It’s not as if the founding fathers didn’t have a little experience dealing with an oppressive government.

Not being a Constitutional scholar, I can’t quote chapter-and-verse from Franklin, Adams and the rest off the top of my head.  However, I wasn’t sleeping through classes (not most of them, anyway), and I do recall some of their writings. Of all of our country’s elite thinkers at our nation’s beginning, the one person who wrote most eloquently, to me, was probably Thomas Jefferson although he had some beliefs with which I do not hold. There was a reason the man wrote the Declaration, after all.

I’d ask you to recall some of those writings today, and see if they don’t apply directly to what we are currently experiencing.

• “To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”
• “Most bad government has grown out of too much government.”
• “The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.”   (***There is some disagreement on this one, regarding whether or not this can be directly attributed to Jefferson. Regardless, it is perfectly applicable, so I’m including it).
• “A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.”
• “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them. 
• “What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?” 
• “I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.” 
• “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”
• “The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits.”
• “Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add “within the limits of the law,” because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.” 
• “Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.”

These quotes (and there are numerous others) sum up what we’ve just seen: a government declaring absolute control over the will, lives and bodies of its people, all in the name of “compassion” and “fairness”. It happens with the EPA, the TSA and the rest of the government alphabet soup. Obamacare is just the coup de grâce.

It was intimated in the ruling yesterday that the “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” was enacted as the result of our duly elected leaders legislating on our behalf. Sorry, but that simply doesn’t wash. Our elected officials didn’t get elected based on a promise of the takeover of healthcare. Worse, those representatives in favor of it subsequently lied about their rationale once they introduced the topic.

Furthermore, even after 2+ years since Obamacare’s passage, most voters still would like to see the law repealed. So, how can this be the will of the people?

It can’t, because it isn’t.

This isn’t a simple policy difference which occurs in normal, day-to-day politics. This is an essential departure of our country’s founding, and it cannot be tolerated. We are being told that if we do not live in a way in which the Federal Government approves, we will be punished, and that punishment is up to them. Anyone that thinks this won’t lead to even more egregious losses of liberty is either stupid or naïve.

If we simply roll over, shrug our shoulders and say “oh, well; win some and lose some“, we won’t have lost some; we’ll have lost everything.