Black Student Sacked for Failing To Accept Her Lot

This is an ugly story.

Readers of this blog are all too aware that there are a number of things that get my goat. If I had to pick one thing that sits atop of my list, it is the enforced ignorance and illiteracy that our young students endure. All indicators point to an insidious intention behind this; keeping people as ignorant as possible and consequently unable to critique the political garbage that routinely gets stuffed down their throats. The table is set for a proletariat that can do little other than believe what they are told by the Left. Frightening numbers of Leftists/progressives have called for abolishing the one actual measure (Apart from Standardized Testing) of a teacher's work, grades*. I have noted on two posts that the most basic of tools for education, reading, has been effectively denied to our youth.**

I came across this story, I am ashamed to admit, only today:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/05/black_teen_run_off_the_liberal_plantation.html

A 13 year-old black female student in Rochester NY was assigned to read The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. She found  much of the verbiage difficult and often had to consult a Thesaurus and Dictionary. This is understandable for someone of her age for a few of the older words in the source but in all probability this is another solid proof that our youth have been deliberately held in ignorance; our style of writing and speaking has not changed that much since then.


Jada Williams persevered and had an epiphany:

"In her essay, Ms. Williams drew a parallel between what she saw as a group of self-satisfied "white teachers" overseeing dysfunctional students (characterized by Ms. Williams as "so-called 'unteachable'" students) who were not being properly taught, illiterate and perpetually ignorant. This she considers a form of slavery. Ms. Williams quoted an arresting passage from Douglass's description of one of his masters, a Mr. Auld, happening upon his wife instructing Douglass in basic reading:

[Quote from the narrative]
"If you teach that nigger (speaking of myself [Douglass] ) how to read, there will be no keeping him. It will forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master."
Williams wrote:

"A grand price was paid in order for us to be where we are today; but in my mind we should be a lot further, so again I encourage the white teachers to instruct and I encourage my people not to just be a student, but become a learner."

What resulted was a witch hunt for the student who dared call on the carpet the teachers who were not teaching:

"The essay that Ms. Williams wrote was never entered in the essay contest. Instead, she was harassed out of her school by the very people whose assistance she requested.

The teacher who gave Ms. Williams the original assignment was so enraged at her essay that copies were distributed to fellow teachers and the principal. Soon after, Ms. Williams' parents began receiving several phone calls from faculty claiming that their daughter was "angry." Suddenly Ms. Williams, a model student prior to the essay, began receiving low grades in her classes. In several meetings, these same teachers refused to show Ms. Williams' parents the papers and tests that garnered lower grades. During at least one such meeting, according to Mrs. Williams, a teacher union representative was present.

Her parents decided to enroll her another school in the district. They were told that that school was full and to try another school. The recommended school was full of actual unmanageable children, one of whom asked Ms. Williams if she were there because she fought too much in her old school."

While it seems that every dysfunctional person or fake victim (Sandra Fluke) gets courted by the Leftist Media and the Obama Administration, nothing of the sort happened in Jada's case. Not even an appearance on The View or a special Oprah show (I know that the show is ending or has ended).

"Happily, not everyone has ignored Ms. Williams. She was awarded the first "Spirit of Freedom" award by the Frederick Douglass Foundation* of New York on February 18, 2012. Sadly, not enough people know and celebrate her courage and thoughtfulness. No members of Congress, no former governors, and no professional basketball teams have taken the time, nor has the president, to publicly applaud Ms. Williams. Nobody dons a hoodie in support of a young black girl tossed aside like trash for daring to learn, daring to speak up, and being summarily punished for it."


I know that we parents are busy. We have a lot going on, but we have no choice but to be involved. We need to know if our children are actually learning as opposed to being trained to be helpless. To my dismay, my youngest, a High Sophomore, rarely reads on his own. I provide him with any reading material that I think may spark his interest. When he asks a question, I offer brief explanations and inform him that he needs to consult primary, or at least secondary, sources to get a more full picture. I ensure that he has access to these sources. Apart from that, I can only remind him that he has no choice but to read on his own, and critically so, if he wants to be able to discern whether or not he is being scammed once he is sitting in his seat in a college class. Fortunately, he attends a Catholic High School that has a fairly rigorous program and an American History teacher who actually teaches American History as opposed to an anti-US agenda. Most parents do not have this option.

*One from the US:
http://www.joebower.org/p/abolishing-grading.html
* And one from Sweden. Mona Sahlin, who seems to work in concert with with her garbage-spewing Norwegian counterpart, Unni Wikan in their quest to destroy these two proud and accomplished nations:
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2008/07/penalizing-incorrect-votes-in-sweden.html
“We want to do away with the grade system [in today’s schools]. Grades contribute considerably to stress and are not a fair and objective system of measuring the individual’s potential.”
**http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2012/01/common-probably-all-too-common-theme-of.html

From the link below. This was also quoted yesterday:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/05/reading_the_contempt_of_socialists.html
"So here we are in 2012, and children are still forced to memorize their Dolch words in first grade. What are Dolch words? They are the more common words, named after Edward Dolch, one of the pioneers of Whole Word. Although language and jargon have been changed, the essential gimmick does not change. Kids were made to memorize sight-words in 1935, and they are made to do the same today.

Children still end up reading less fluently, knowing less, and making for a less educated, less independent people.

So I propose that reading theory -- perhaps I should say false reading theory -- provides a miniature diorama of George Orwell's analysis. Our Middle are Socialists, and once they were on the move circa 1931, they showed, at least in education, their true colors. I think it's fair to say that Obama and his far-left friends would like to move to the top. Obviously, this is bad news for the High. But this essay is about the Low. The warning is clear. The Low should not be so foolish as to expect much of anything. The people at the bottom will be kept there, ignorant, on welfare, and for sure hardly literate.

In short, the peasants never get an even break.

In 1911, G. Stanley Hall, one of John Dewey's mentors, went so far as to extol illiteracy: "It is possible, despite the stigma our bepedagogued age puts upon this disability, for those who are under it not only to lead a useful, happy, virtuous life, but to be really well-educated in many other ways.' "

Follow up on Enforced Illiteracy In Schools -Leftist Origins

http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2012/01/common-probably-all-too-common-theme-of.html

In January of this year I wrote a post (Above) on two of the current trends in Education that seem designed to dumb-down our children. The main subject of the post was the marginalization (Actually dismissing with contempt) of the Phonics system that not only has been time-proven in teaching people to read, but is actually the only way in which a alphabetic reading system can be taught if one has any reasonable expectation of success.

The above post provides a brief history on early writing systems and describes how they lead up to the alphabets that we have today. It also explains how systems such as alphabets, as they reduce the amount of symbols from hundreds or more to just over two dozen, are far more conducive to education; they provide a means by which a student can learn all the necessary sounds in a brief period of time. Once this is accomplished, a student can learn to string the sounds together in order to learn how to read. Although I noted that, after many years of reading, people naturally being to recognize most words by sight, even adult readers still need to apply phonics to new or complicated words. Learning words before learning how to actually read them is simply putting the cart before the horse. It not only defeats the purpose of learning to read, it also does not work.

My position was that this trend was primarily the consequence of yet another attack on Western Culture, History, and its style of learning. The following post (Below) from American Thinker, though, makes a powerful argument that this tragedy, which has produced full K-12 generations of former students that have a very difficult time reading material that is far from difficult, has an even darker design. The writer theorizes that Progressives (Leftists), starting in the 1930's, had every intention of reducing people to a level of perpetual ignorance. I can't find fault with his opinion nor with the history that he cites in support. In order to be sold on the Progressive/Leftist agenda, the people not only had to be kept away from material that would give them cause to question the party line as fed to them in schools, they also needed to be unable to read it on their own. History, the ancient classics, writers such as John Locke, Tocqueville, Montesquieu, our Founding Fathers, and the similar works of others are all anathema to the Left and had to be beyond the reach of the young. 

John Henry Newmann, a Anglican Convert to Catholicism, once said that "To be deep in History is to cease to be a Protestant". Whether or not one agrees with Cardinal Newmann, the same principle applies to Marxist thought. Leftists, although they revel in their own delusions, are not ignorant of this fact. 

The people needed to be unread and unable to think critically for Leftist thought to be able to take root. It is the polar opposite of a vegetable garden. Instead of properly preparing the soil so that desirable plants can flourish, the ground is purposelessly left untilled and unfertilized,  hard-baked in the sun, and unwatered so that only junk weeds can grow. Many young people, or even those in their 20's or 30's today, not only have no knowledge whatsoever of the wide array of factors that came together to create the society in which we live, they truly cannot apply themselves to think subjects through to their logical conclusions.

Excerpts from American Thinker:

Italics are mine.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/05/reading_the_contempt_of_socialists.html

"One bit of history strikes me forcefully in this context. When the Progressives in this country took control of public education, fighting under the banner of John Dewey's socialist ideas, you might have expected -- or hoped -- that they would use their new power to lift the lower classes to some higher place. They did not.

They had power by the 1930s, and their first big move was to throw phonics out and introduce Whole Word, which requires children to memorize words as diagrams. It seems to me a particularly revealing move. From that time forward, our public schools have churned out more than 50 million functional illiterates. We have one million dyslexics, with some estimates much higher. We have a vast decline in culture, in general knowledge, and in ordinary common sense. (If people still have any of that, it's arguably because they are constantly interacting with movies and TV; most of this so-called entertainment is more sophisticated than most of the so-called education served up in our public schools.)

And all this decline was accomplished by a simple device: our collectivist educators, having climbed their way to the top, refused to let the peasants learn to read.
The reason for using Whole Word never seemed to have anything to do with helping the Low. A cursory look at literacy statistics proves that this method is a bust and generally hurts the slower students most. The real agenda always seemed to be making sure that the Low stay low, and in creating an economic and cultural disaster zone where the Middle can sign up new recruits and continue their assault on the High. Indeed, the Middle use their control of education primarily to wean the Low away from supporting the High. Education today is a war of propaganda against the status quo, until the High give up. Isn't this what we are seeing?

The Education Establishment pushed Look-say, Sight Words, Whole Language, and Balanced Literacy (all these are the same thing under different names) in an endless rolling barrage unlike anything seen since the trench warfare of World War I. Phonics had to be obliterated. Whole Word had to be enforced, by whatever claims, weird jargon, repackaging, and outright lies were necessary.
So I propose that reading theory -- perhaps I should say false reading theory -- provides a miniature diorama of George Orwell's analysis. Our Middle are Socialists, and once they were on the move circa 1931, they showed, at least in education, their true colors. I think it's fair to say that Obama and his far-left friends would like to move to the top. Obviously, this is bad news for the High. But this essay is about the Low. The warning is clear. The Low should not be so foolish as to expect much of anything. The people at the bottom will be kept there, ignorant, on welfare, and for sure hardly literate.

In short, the peasants never get an even break.

In 1911, G. Stanley Hall, one of John Dewey's mentors, went so far as to extol illiteracy: "It is possible, despite the stigma our bepedagogued age puts upon this disability, for those who are under it not only to lead a useful, happy, virtuous life, but to be really well-educated in many other ways." [And what, pray tell, are those "many other ways"? I think that I know what he means]

And so we see that in reading -- theory, methods, and results -- we can read the contempt of Socialists....."

There is more  of this incredibly insightful post on the link