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Post by Barrigard on Sept 12, 2006 12:51:58 GMT -6
I've had it up to here with our school systems social structure and their academic philosophy. I've began to write up this, there will be much more to come..... Consider it a sneak preview.
The Vanguard Manifesto
In days like these it is better to work then to learn. Better to bite the bullet then to find the root of your own problem. As I write this there is no intellectual spirit among the youth of today, only children who are forced into mental labor camps in physical prisons. As a result the establishment has had no reason to consider its students a threat or a force for change, the schools play their tune and young people dance with their minds in a stupor, supported by a modern materialistic culture. It’s no wonder that such a society as ours, in the throws of a commercial and industrial renaissance would begin farming children in the soil of materialism and nourished with the rain of competition. Our nation’s public educational facilities have produced by high school the intellectual equivalent of a gladiator out of the vast majority of students. They have been trained since day one with fine information and honing their skills of projective vomiting equations, names, and facts in the most pleasing pattern on the test sheet in false competition. Our grade school children have been on an increasingly tight leash of standards, only to be met with poorer and poorer results on standardized tests, and of course the only cry we hear from these education professionals is higher standards, only increasing the noose on our 8-year-old’s necks. Education and the spirit of learning are not under attack ladies and gentlemen, they have been utterly defeated years and years ago. They died at Kent State, in Tianamin Square, and all that is left of their legacy is facts and statistics left for memorization by their inheritors. Grunt work is all that remains and has increased by leaps and bounds over the last 20 years, more and more often schools feel the pressure of their own politics and the self defeating standardized testing philosophy to increase curriculum standards and the workload on children earlier and earlier, and as their own test will reveal it is not enough and so more weights will be added to the student’s back. It only is fitting that coming to the inexperienced students rescue is the modern mass media culture, which has thrived on the stress and pressures of school life. Television, the Internet, sports, designer clothes, video games, musical subcultures and radio, tobacco, beauty products and services, drugs and alcohol are all extreme luxuries that have been deemed a necessity by young people in the last 50 years since society had to deal with teenagers in mandatory public schools. These “necessities” have not only a wide array of functions but correlate to many different aspects of school life but to outside life as well. There is little doubt however that the continuing popularity of these luxuries must be somehow connected to the continuing force that dominates children’s life just as long as these necessities have, schooling. Over the course of these years school has become the babysitter, the parents, and the discipline in students lives, these stress relieving and standard meeting necessities are the most instantaneously gratifying and have been imbedded into the student culture longer then the seniors of today’s parents have been alive. These students have learned by successful experimentation from an early age that such activities are the most gratifying and therefore mach the magnitude of pressure then the many aspects of school place upon their shoulders. So it may appear that necessity has brought us a solution, a solution that has been embraced by society long ago; the students can handle schooling as long as they have their highly stimulating recreation to balance it out. And for a while maybe, it seemed to work. Unfortunately for all of us, this was not a true solution because not only did it not directly tackle the problems students faced in school but it in turn wrought its own inherit difficulties that in fact have made the academic situation at school much worse. This is because students are not thinking. They are not embracing education because their material culture of pleasure reinforces the idea that school is a bad place where you have to work instead of play. This same concept is seen even in today’s workplace where the products of this educational system have found their place in the economy, as the phrase “Monday blues” and other negative attitudes regarding returning to work after a pleasurable and intense recreational period permeate today’s office jargon. Intense highs will always make the lows seem lower and therefore creating a sour outlook and attitude regarding work or school. It is these bad attitudes that began to slow down GPA’s, causing a backlash of higher educational standards and more rigorous courses which as we have discussed leads to bogged down students who perform poorer the before and are only replied with higher standards once again. As we can see the once deadly circle of motivation and standards creates deeper grooves with a higher causality rate. I speak however of the normal students, the average mildly apathetic teenager. There are however two other extreme classes of students we find that the school divides their populations into; the high academic achievers and low performing often times disabled underachievers. Their stereotyped definitions are not a result of their true nature but are a result of the role both school officials and their peers force upon them from their early age.
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Post by San on Sept 12, 2006 17:42:51 GMT -6
I think you need to sum it up. We are trying to gather followers. This is ok to keep online for people to read on thier own time. People these days want instant gradification. We can't have something 8 pages long. Also, it kind of drags on, and I am finding it hard to read.
"Our grade school children have been on an increasingly tight leash of standards, only to be met with poorer and poorer results on standardized tests, and of course the only cry we hear from these education professionals is higher standards, only increasing the noose on our 8-year-old’s necks. "
"Grunt work is all that remains and has increased by leaps and bounds over the last 20 years, more and more often schools feel the pressure of their own politics and the self defeating standardized testing philosophy to increase curriculum standards and the workload on children earlier and earlier, and as their own test will reveal it is not enough and so more weights will be added to the student’s back." Examples above^. One more thing, to many run ons. I find them very irritating to try to read. It makes it seem like you are just rambling. Spice it up man. I know you can.
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Post by Philbert on Sept 12, 2006 18:44:22 GMT -6
And you have just served to prove Barrigard's point. You don't have the patience to get it completely. You want it NOW! It's all about instant gratification.
The school system does serve one useful, functional purpose. You are more liable to meet a wide variety of people at school than you'd meet normally. Think about it: The entirety of Noblesville township all go to Noblesville High School for high schoool. There are 3000+ high school students for the Noblesville area. Only about 50 or so are in reasonable distance of Philbert.
School serves, or at least used to serve, the important function of introducing diversity into our peer base. Had it not been for HSE school system, I'd have never even met you guys. You guys would be without a (somewhat shakey) server to host images, executables, and such.
So yes, school is rapidly failing in its primary function of providing sound, useful instruction to allow students to lead productive lives. However, it DOES provide the secondary function of allowing people to increase their networks. It allows people to meet other people with a diverse array of intrests and allow you to, should you choose, broaden your own horizons. For example, two people with different ideologies meet. They discuss. They both end up better for the encounter.
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Post by Barrigard on Dec 4, 2006 20:56:48 GMT -6
Here is an updated version of the manifesto. Unfotunatly I kind of neglected it for a few weeks but here is all the work I have, including notes and things I want to incorperate into the paper later.
The Vanguard Manifesto In days like these it is better to work then to learn. Better to bite the bullet then to find the root of your own problem. As I write this there is no intellectual spirit among the youth of today, only children who are forced into mental labor camps in physical prisons. As a result the establishment has had no reason to consider its students a threat or a force for change, the schools play their tune and young people dance with their minds in a stupor, supported by a modern materialistic culture. It’s no wonder that such a society as ours, in the throes of a commercial and industrial renaissance would begin farming children in the soil of competition and nourished with the rain of materialism. Our nation’s public educational facilities have produced by high school the intellectual equivalent of a gladiator out of the vast majority of students. They have been trained since day one with fine information and honing their skills of projectile vomiting equations, names, and facts in the most pleasing pattern on the test sheet. Our grade school children have been on an increasingly tight leash of standards, only to be met with poorer and poorer results on standardized tests, and of course the only cry we hear from these education professionals is higher standards, only tightening the noose on our 8-year-old’s necks. Education and the spirit of learning are not under attack ladies and gentlemen, they have been utterly defeated years and years ago. They died in Kent State, in Tieanammen Square, and all that is left of their legacy is facts and statistics left for memorization by their inheritors. Grunt work is all that remains and has increased by leaps and bounds over the last 20 years, more and more often schools feel the pressure of their own politics and the self defeating standardized testing philosophy to increase curriculum standards and the workload on children earlier and earlier, and as their own test will reveal it is not enough and so more weights will be added to the student’s back. It only is fitting that coming to the inexperienced students rescue is the modern mass media culture, which has thrived on the stress and pressures of school life. Television, the Internet, sports, designer clothes, video games, musical subcultures, radio, tobacco, beauty products and services, drugs, and alcohol are all extreme luxuries that have been deemed a necessity by young people in the last 50 years since society had to deal with teenagers in mandatory public schools. These “necessities” have not only a wide array of functions but correlate to many different aspects of school life but to outside life as well. There is little doubt however that the continuing popularity of these luxuries must be somehow connected to the continuing force that dominates children’s life just as long as these necessities have, schooling. Over the course of these years school has become the babysitter, the parents, and the discipline in students lives, these stress relieving and standard meeting necessities are the most instantly gratifying and have been imbedded into the student culture longer then the seniors of today’s parents have been alive. These students have learned by successful experimentation from an early age that such activities are the most gratifying and therefore mach the magnitude of pressure then the many aspects of school place upon their shoulders. So it may appear that necessity has brought us a solution, a solution that has been embraced by society long ago; the students can handle schooling as long as they have their highly stimulating recreation to balance it out. And for a while maybe, it seemed to work. Unfortunately for all of us, this was not a true solution because not only did it not directly tackle the problems students faced in school but it in turn wrought its own inherent difficulties that in fact have made the academic situation at school much worse. This is because students are not thinking. They are not embracing education because their material culture of pleasure reinforces the idea that school is a bad place where you have to work instead of play. This same concept is seen even in today’s workplace where the products of this educational system have found their place in the economy, as the phrase “Monday blues” and other negative attitudes regarding returning to work after a pleasurable and intense recreational period permeate today’s office jargon. Intense highs will always make the lows seem lower and therefore creating a sour outlook and attitude regarding work or school. It is these bad attitudes that began to slow down GPA’s, causing a backlash of higher educational standards and more rigorous courses which as we have discussed leads to bogged down students who perform poorer the before and are only replied with higher standards once again. As we can see the once deadly circle of motivation and standards creates deeper grooves with a higher causality rate. I speak however of the normal students, the average mildly apathetic teenager. There are however two other extreme classes of students we find that the school divides their populations into; the high academic achievers and low performing, often times disabled, underachievers. Their stereotyped definitions are not a result of their true nature but are a result of the role both school officials and their peers force upon them in elementary and middle school. On the first day of kindergarten everyone was equal, everyone was the same, all new to this large place and surrounded by strangers everyone had a clean slate and an equal opportunity. That would soon change faster then it would have naturally. By the third grade the first indicators of who is best fit in the school environment is brought to the teachers attention. And so those students whose cerebral landscape can cope with the highly repetitive and rigid structure of elementary school classes. Which may be the most important point that will be raised here: The vast majority of students future success is decided in their formative elementary school years. Students, like people, respond positively to positive reinforcement, and react negatively to negative reinforcement. Children love to be praised and dislike disappointment. This would allow us to believe that children who receive good grades will continue to try and get them, and students who receive poor grades will try hard to not get them. Why then do schools have failure students? These failure students are not stupid, they are not radically different; they are a product of an environment that is not designed for their minds. The elementary school environment is extremely rigid, extremely tight, and worst of all extremely simple. If a student has difficulty adjusting to this environment that is so against their nature as children they immediately loose out on educational opportunities, but that’s not the big thing these kids need to worry about missing out on. These kids miss out on opportunities to build their self esteem, a sense of purpose in school, and a hierarchical identity. If grades are touted as the goal of school, or more accurately put grades are the path to adult acceptance and praise, then those students who earn good grades develop a sense of pride and an attainable goal. Those who do not feel that they are not adequate, develop low self-esteem, and must find a new purpose for being in school everyday. Sadly this is where the cultural divide between children begins to develop. The three areas children need recognition in; family, peers, and non-family adults will respond in varying, yet all negative ways to the children’s efforts. First is the family, which includes parents or guardian, and family peers. Depending upon the children place in the house, they may feel they must compete with siblings, who may receive better grades then them. Parents, especially if the child is the eldest, are a vital source of recognition for the child. If the first grader brings home poor marks, and mind you no matter what system is used, whether they be checks or letters, there will always be a best mark and a worst mark, the parents, no matter how nicely worded the response, will not react positively to bad grades. While taking a blow at home the young student also takes a hit with other adults in their lives, mainly the ones they encounter at school, their teacher. The teacher will have to give direct criticism of a students efforts that just didn’t make the cut. Finally the peer isolation sets in as the student may be called “dumb” as other young children start to compare each other by their own scale. This brings us back to our original question; why are some students not achieving despite incentives to do otherwise? In the early years the answer to this question may be that the young student does not understand that the path to acceptance and validation is not improving their grades. It is important to remember that to young students school is still a very new concept and all the mechanics may not be fully understood by the child, so they may begin to act out in class, focus on hobbies, focus on friends, or focus on the media. However these things will never fill the hole in the students self esteem. They will bring temporary fulfillment, and many times the same kind of self confidence that is received by over achieving students, it will not however, change the fact that for the next twelve years the requirement of school performance will still be there, and unless better grades are achieved there will still be a reoccurring sense of uselessness every report card. Students will be in the elementary school system for at least four years, if not six. To children this is a radically long time. Long enough to create a distinct class system based on grades and an even more complex social web. When students begin to feel self-conscious of their own inadequacy, it will begin to effect other areas of their life as low self esteem can lead to poor social skills and an inability to rise to the challenge of the caste system rising around. As citizens of the lower castes they will develop disdain for school and their peers. They may be punished for their grades, punished by their peers for not meeting their standard, punished for being a product of the defining moment that separates all students; the first few opportunities to develop sense of accomplishment in school. These children will eventually end up later in their education as the lowest of the low, as all three of their sources of validation work against them. But it only gets worse, at this stage in the game we see the two classes, those who feel validated and those who feel inadequate are divided into three new permanent classes; The high overachievers, the main populous, and the low under achievers. How did they do it? Through both direct and indirect methods the students we’re
So at what point is the student responsible for their own rehabilitation? The answer is that they should never have to be rehabilitated in the first place, they did not bring themselves down as children, the system did.
School isolates and seperates these two classes (the size of either of these classes is not determinable as the defining moment is based on the individuals reaction to the school environment)
What a horrible and ineffective way to pick who should receive validation that will continue
They shove these good smart kids into classes that only expose them earlier, proof that anyone else can handle it as well I know third graders who can do algebra, third graders who are actually bad at math and still can do algebra at age 9. If the modern school board were to look at this they would say “aha! There is a smart one, let us validate him and raise him up for he is obviously gifted.” This same child would have never made his presence known to the school administration if he had never been given the algebra problems to begin with. After all, he had a tough time adjusting to second grade and missed that train.
Middle schools go as far as to demote students, jeopardizing their GQE scores.
There is no such thing as a self-fulfilling prophecy, the prophecy was always there; some students never got a chance to hear it.
Children bring each other down, and we do nothing to stop it. What we can do however, is reverse what has happened by the time the student enters high school. I will do it myself if I have to but someone has to tell these children that their worth something, to tell them that this isn’t the end, that your rank in school is meaningless. Or for some we must motivate them to perform at all, so many students are discouraged and still are in high school though they would never admit to feeling that way.
To say that a student’s performance is a measure of his intelligence and his worth is just as wrong as saying that Europe became a world power because they were inherently a superior people. Sure it was the people who built the great nations but they could never have done it without tools taken from other lands, a fertile environment, and of course an emerging culture of discovery, which too, was a result of foreign intervention. It is my intention to give these students all these tools for building guns and ships, and an environment
It is obvious that not all people are born equal, some are more creative, other are more athletic, others can compute large equations in their head, and others can read a page instantly, schools look for this and
Students who are not ‘smart’ never learn the definition of it at all, to them it seems like a far off concept, because they are not in the upper classes then therefore they are not smart or have the ability as well. After all, what did they do to get in before me? They would think.
Subcultures are succeeding where schools have failed. This is not an attempt to villanize anyone, and I hope that this cause will not be opposed by the schools. We will answer the plight of the oppressed student who calls upon us.
The first signs of this ideology emerged when I returned to public schools in 8th grade, as I noticed for the first time that validation and glory went to those who were best fit, not to those who tried the hardest. The victors write history and they glorify them selves. If I were to ask a man who was the good force in word war two they would tell me the allies, it seems that the allies have actually forgot Poland, who charged into the Blitzkrieg on horseback. They were not well equipped, they were not successful, and therefore they are not important to society. Trying means nothing to them, society wants success. They don’t care what you are on the inside, they want to know what you are successful at and only for the reason that they may somehow benefit from your strengths. We do not value the spirit of sacrifice in our animals, we value the meat.
Not qualified to be students The teacher’s responsibility is to teach the students and facilitate the classroom. It is the students responsibility to follow classroom procedures, learn the material and apply it to the assignments and exams, the teacher can lead the horse to water but the student must ultimately drink. If the teacher is facing difficulty answering the question of a student they must if need be set the student’s question aside for the remainder of the class period as to not allow the class to fall behind. It is then the teacher’s responsibility to exhaust their resources in finding a way to allow the student to understand the concept being taught. If the teacher cannot or will not bring the student to a basic understanding of the principle being taught then he or she is no longer qualified to be a teacher and will be fired. The question now is; are students subject to the same consequences as teachers? Can it be possible for a student to not be qualified to be a student? The unfortunate answer is yes, as we see today those students who have chronic inability to even arrive at water and learn are removed from the classroom and unable teachers are allowed to continue on in their positions.
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Post by Philbert on Dec 5, 2006 22:08:43 GMT -6
Slightly off-topic here, but I noticed a few their/there/they're errors in your document.
Also slightly unrelated, Society as a whole automagically villanizes a small portion of its population. Since time immemorial, a certain percentage of the population has been found to be jailed in some manner, being labeled deviant. This number has always hovered around 3-4% of the population. This group is labeled deviant simply to outline what the rest of the population should not be. In fact, if you were to go and "fix" all the things that make these people deviant, society would find some fault with another 3-4% - perhaps declaring that a certain style of clothing is illegal or something.
Further, I think that government bureaucracies could be reduced if some laws are removed from the books. For example, in Indiana, it is considered statutory rape if a female under 18 removes socks and shoes while in a vehicle with a male over the age of 18. Would never get enforced, but it still clutters the law books. Another such law is that (and I forget the city) but it is illegal to detonate a nuclear device within city limits. No fine is imposed. Another state placed the death penalty on any suicide attempt involving jumping off a building.
Of course, in addition to removing the laws like those, there are a few other laws which can only detract from a free society... such as the Patriot Act, practically an invitation for the Government to go to town on your civil liberties. Or the "No Child Left Behind" act, which should be named the "Every Child Held Back" act.
These are merely tangents I offer, many of which may or may not be related to the actual topic. Sleep deprivation and all that making my memory not as good as it used to be. What were we talking about again.
Also, I would like to formally alter a previous statement. If you aren't going to at least provide a summary, so that I have something to reference whilst reading, could you at least break it up into more logical sections. A blank line between paragraphs would do wonders...
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