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"You can't make socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent."

-- John Dewey, Father of Modern Education

As I mentioned earlier, Zachary recently started at Cornatzer Elementary School. Thankfully he enjoys it, and he is interacting with kids of his age, which is good for his general health and social skills. Each day he brings home paperwork, consisting of forms, documents, and advertisements. They send order forms from their corporate sponsors, and operate in a way that reeks of a marketing corporation. The school employees ask for money in various ways, leading parents to believe that the school must rely on donations. Of course, this is far from the case. As a public school, they are funded by the State and county governments for everything they need. Regardless, they ask parents to collect product tokens, send in donations, and sign up for 'exclusive offers' which support the school. We already have the product catalog that we are supposed to utilize when sending five-year-old Zachary to make sales pitches door-to-door. Thus, the school is already teaching Zachary the most important lessons -- that money is what really matters, and that children like him are tools to be exploited for corporate profit maximization.

One of their corporate sponsors is Campbell, who mostly sells soups. The school asks parents to buy their products and collect purchase tokens to submit to the school for corporate rewards. Campbell products almost always contain Monosodium Glutomate (MSG), a dangerous food additive. What makes this sickening is the people most at risk are children. MSG is a synthetic excitotoxin which causes permanent damage to the brain (lowering intelligence by killing brain cells), causing seizures, ADHD/ADD, Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, obesity, migraines, weakened heart muscles, irregular heartbeat, and it hinders social interaction. While ignored by the FDA, this is only a tiny sampling of what MSG does to a person. MSG is added as a 'flavor enhancer' in processed foods, because foods become so nutritionally deficient during processing that chemical additives must be infused to return them to having acceptable flavor. In other words, your body would otherwise rightly tell you that the food is garbage. Chemicals are used to deceive a body's normal defense mechanisms -- to hide the yucky taste that God gave us to protect us from ingesting such garbage. On several levels, MSG is literally part of a cover-up for what the food industry and certain capitulating governmental agencies are trying to ram down our throats. For a school to promote a company who readily adds this additive to their products is twisted, and it is a veiled way of poisoning children to dumb-them-down, and give reasons to encourage the use of chemical straight jackets, such as Ritalin, when the intended effects occur.

Unfortunately, my distress does not end here. Throughout their lives, children develop confidence and their social interactive skills progress. They learn to make their own decisions, and lose the reliance that they once had on their parents or guardians. Teachers should foster a sense of independent free thought, but instead they obsessively try to control students in their every move. Many teachers even seem to have developed the arrogance of considering themselves to be our authority figures.

As an example, they tell children to wear their backpacks over their stomachs, rather than on their backs, as the name 'backpack' suggests. This produces exactly the opposite effect of what backpacks were designed to do. Instead of relieving pressure on the shoulders, back, arms, and in particular, the small of the back, it actually maximizes stress and pressure on all these areas. The stupidity of wearing backpacks reversed increases the chance of children developing stress injuries, scoliosis, and long term back injuries. Of course, it is also none of their business in which way a child carries his school supplies. No teacher should interfere unless the child is harming himself or others. The way they are forcing students to wear their backpacks is actually harmful, as it places stress on the weakest areas of the body. The teachers are intervening unnecessarily in a way which is harmful to the children in the long term, and it seems to be more about showing their power than anything else.

Instead of teaching children about responsible citizenship, they are teaching them lessons about obedience, and about being ruled by authoritarian controllers. The school is riddled with absurd rules whose only purpose is emphasizing the power structure -- which is not exactly the sort of thing which stimulates a future of us having a free and democratic nation. For another example, they instruct the children which corner they may touch in order to turn pages in books, as if there is only one place where the paper can be touched. Only the top corner of a book page may be touched. Touching the middle and bottom sections of a page is strictly forbidden.

Instead of allowing the children to wash their hands before eating, they force them to use chemical hand sanitizers, which is unsafe for ingestion itself. These are made from chemical-industry solvents which are intended to be at least poisonous enough to kill germs. A child's immune system would normally eliminate any long-term germ problems, and become stronger from doing so, but the same is not true for the directly ingested chemical toxins, and the ones absorbed by the skin, which may accumulate in his body for a lifetime.

The ignorance of these teachers toward the health problems that they create is astounding. All we can do is actively explain these situations to the teachers, in order to ensure that they know of the harm. With the corrupt state of things, we figure they are not likely to listen, or even believe us -- because deep-down most of them do not want to honestly know the painful truth about the system which they are actively a part of. Heroic teachers who wish to fix the corruption and stupidity of the establishment are eliminated quickly from the system for being trouble makers.

They actually told Thomas that he had to talk to the principal for being late, before telling him that he would not be allowed to send food and drinks to school for his son. To give some background, Thomas has a certain intensity to his character, and he went to a military school. It did not take long for Thomas to explain it to the teacher in a way that she could not help but understand. She does not say much anymore.

I wonder how many parents only reinforce the lessons of obedience and servitude toward so-called authorities on their children by meekly appeasing these demanding egos. A lesson that Thomas and I learned from military school, and a lesson which the schools should be teaching as they once did, is that one should always question -- especially always question authority. We owe that to our democratic heritage, and to our future generations.

Another sign of the system being totally corrupted is their Smart Boards which are replacing blackboards in every room. Along with most other so-called "smart" technologies, it is really a device intended more to dumb-down the users, or to at least insult their intelligence. These devices cost roughly $5,000 per unit, and require an additional recent model notebook computer to drive them. Therefore, when the cost of one of these is added to the cost of its driving computer, plus the cost of setup, plus the cost of all of the required software, plus the cost of training, then the price is certainly over $10,000 per classroom (and likely closer to $20,000 per room). This would place the cost for each upgrade at well over a million dollars per school every couple of years. One has to wonder to whom the kick-back checks get mailed. How many books could be purchased, new schools built, and teachers hired for what the grand total is every couple of years, whenever they purchase a "required" upgrade? If the students are really "falling behind" as the teachers recently admitted to a group of parents, then do they really need those distracting $10,000 cartoon display devices in their classes?  A look at the county's "technology plan", and the diagram of the school's network topology exposes the agenda as one of maximizing expenses. Do they really need those top tier, high priced, fiber optic cables for their e-mail? Why are they using Novell Netware servers on a mixed Apple and Windows network, unless the true goals are to increase complexity, and thereby increase the expenses? More team players will need to be hired to manage the resultant security issues from this design -- the friends of the school-board who will remain silent and pretend not to notice all the intentional incompetence. Can you smell the money? Money! Money! Money!

Do not miss your chance to take advantage of the system too with Davie County School's "Golden Opportunities Program"!  After all, you are just one check away from having the school system sell out for you too. There really is no shame for these corporate whores. I love how the flash document at the above link suggesting that Golden Opportunities Partners "Sponsor a breakfast or lunch for character education students", followed by "Donate gifts to staff members", and "Speak to classes about your work [corporation]." What kind of character education would this be? The schools are even offered for "product development" (product placement) testing, and the school system proclaims that "The possibilities are endless".

Will Zachary ever be a student at the Davie County, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, American Airlines, Pepsi-Cola High School? Will his reading and writing in English be fluent if he does, and will knowing English qualify him as multi-lingual? Will he know enough about American history to realize how far it has fallen?

Let us review what we have learned so far, before venturing into a pop quiz:  Thinking bad... obedience good... reeding, spellin, and wrightin bad... computer cartoons good... independence bad... corporate sponsorships good... hygiene bad... synthetic poisons good... backpacks bad... frontpacks good... turning the page from the top right good... turning the page elsewhere bad... respect for legitimate authority (parents) really bad...

What are the real lasting lessons that the kids are being taught? Is it that they should forgo hygiene and instead rely on the chemical companies to keep them well? Is it an allegiance to their corporate sponsors? Is it that the acquisition of wealth is of greater value than responsible independent citizenry? Is it that basic fundamental education is obsolete to "smart" education -- which is so profitable to those who have betrayed the rest of us? Is it that parents are neither worthy of the same respect, nor the obedience granted to the State's agents, stemming from thinly veiled attacks against the family unit?

It was only a matter of time before it got this bad. Whenever God is removed from a place (such as the schools), there comes another who happily takes his place. What kind of dark future are these educators creating for this nation? There is a particular irony that each day begins with reciting The Pledge Of Allegiance (to the American flag), considering what they are doing to the U.S.

Andrea and Thomas are seriously considering the home schooling option for the future. The system is so bad that on average, home schoolers have reported needing only about fifteen minutes of a day studying in order to far surpass the academic levels of the public schools. That's fifteen minutes. Sad is it not? We figure that if we spend a full hour per day on teaching Zachary, then he should be ready for college by age 10. Yes, the schools are indeed falling behind, and for good reason. Home schooling is not likely happening anytime soon, because Zachary really seems to be enjoying school more-or-less, and it is giving him a chance to meet lots of new friends. He is a really good kid. They did a great job.

Update: Zachary was removed from the public school system after spending less than a month in kindergarten.

 

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