Transforming K-12 Education Via Multi-Programming Efforts in the New Salem Educational Initiative

In the course of the past 18 months, I have moved to expand the New Salem Educational Initiative from a program already directly transforming the lives of 125 participants into a full-throttle effort to overhaul K-12 Education.


With the latter goal in view, I have created numerous venues for the advocacy of knowledge-intensive K-12 education, delivered by retrained teachers of genuine knowledge and the ability to impart that knowledge to all students.


The New Salem Educational Initiative includes most especially the longstanding programs reaching 125 people who are served in the seven-day-a-week small group academic program, the Tuesday Tutoring Program, and the multi-service program that offers continuing academic assistance and mentoring to university students and adults, those requiring immediate response to critical situations, and people seeking social service resource referral.


In addition, I now advance the ideas that I put into everyday operation in those just-noted efforts via several venues created over the course of the last 18 months: the academic periodical Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota; my television show (Minneapolis Telecommunications Network [MTN] Channel 17, Wednesdays at 6:00 PM), The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison; my new book (Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education), featuring ten already completed chapters in a projected fourteen to include economics, political science, psychology, world religions, world history, American history, African American history, literature, fine arts, English usage, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics; and articles posted with great frequency on this blog, now totaling well over 250.


I do all of this through the New Salem Educational Initiative with the goal of making of this nation the democracy that it imagines itself to be.


The purposes of an excellent K-12 education are to culturally enrich, civically engage, and professionally satisfy all of our people through the power of knowledge.


To accomplish this, we must counter an education establishment that has been intellectually corrupted by education professors: In the course of at least four decades, these university professorial lightweights have attempted to veil their own thin knowledge base by defining the purposes of education as the development of critical thinking and the habits of lifelong learning; they decry systematically and sequentially accumulated knowledge as unimportant.


In fact, the power of an abundant and deep knowledge base must undergird all critical analysis and the ability to embark on lifelong learning; shallow in their knowledge base, always avoiding any critical analysis of their own slim ideas, education professors use critical thinking and lifelong learning as semantic screens behind which they cowardly crouch, launching verbal missiles at those who revel in the world of knowledge that defines excellent education.


Through my various venues for advocacy of truly excellent, knowledge-intensive education, I seek to transform K-12 education at the level of the central school district. I would prefer to agitate for curricular overhaul and standards for teacher quality set at the national level, in the manner of the best education systems of the world (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Germany, Finland); but the mantra of local control in the United States moves the locus of change to the locally centralized school district, which in this nation must serve as the surrogate and model for change at the national level.


Shakespeare strums the vocal cords of Brutus in Julius Caesar for the delivery of an eloquent message urging response to opportunities and exigencies of the moment:


There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyages of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.


Now is the time to overhaul K-12 education.


Accomplishment of this objective is the paramount domestic issue of our time. Attaining this goal will end decades and in some cases centuries of familial poverty and dysfunction. Through the power of an excellent, knowledge-intensive education, we can become the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.


Now is the time.


I must not fail.


You must not fail.


We must not fail.


We must not lose our ventures.


We are afloat on a sea of opportunity and must take the current where it serves, riding those waves of hope for full claim on our intellectual inheritance and the creation of better people, greater justice, more satisfying lives.