Vote "No" on the MPS 8 November Referendum, Then Put in Place the People and the Program That Will Inculcate Enthusiasm for Knowledge-Intensive Education

We must cultivate and inculcate an enthusiasm for knowledge-intensive education in the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS).


My investigation into the inner workings of MPS and my intnse observations of actions taken and statements made by MPS officials have given me a keen sense of the difficulty of a task that must be ultimately successful.


The harm that education professors have done, from the terrible training that they inflict upon prospective teachers, to the vapid ideology that they transmit, is grave: Superintendent Ed Graff, Chief Academic Officer Susanne Griffin, and Teaching and Learning Director Macarre Trahnham all suffer under ideations conveyed by education professors, clustered under the assertions that knowledge does not matter, that one can always look up factual content, that what we must do is to inspire critical thinking and a lifelong love of learning.


All of this, as I have detailed in depth in many articles, is hypocritical verbiage that provides cover for the most intellectually lazy and most lightly regarded professors on any college or university campus--- and the teachers and putative educational professionals whom they produce. Hiding behind the notion that knowledge does not matter relieves education professors from having to teach much at all. Designing low-knowledge, lightweight programs of teacher training routes future teachers into classes that have value trending toward zero, while providing cash cows that fill up the coffers of the deeply culpable university treasurers who in turn economically sustain the insidious education professors.


Thus do we get teachers, students, a whole society that gains little education at the K-12 level and at the collegiate and university level either wanders through unchallenging programs that earn for the student another degree that is of value only because it is tautologically a degree; or gains training in a narrow specialty without ever gaining the fulsome knowledge never attained at the K-12 level.


So it is that citizens in the United States are ignoramuses.


As George Mason researcher Rick Shenkman has meticulously recorded, just 25% of American adults can name more than one of the fundamental First Amendment freedoms; only 30% of adult citizens know that Roe v. Wade (1973) was the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal; just 25% know that the length of term for Senators is six years; only 20% know that each state has two senators for a total of 100 members in the upper chamber of the United States Congress; fewer than half (40%) can name the three branches of the federal government (executive, judicial, and legislative); a mere 49% of American adults know that the United States was the nation whose pilots dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; just 34% of American adults know that Congress is the federal governmental body with the constitutional right to declare war; only 35% know that Congress can override a presidential veto; but 60% of adult citizens think that the President can appoint federal judges without Senatorial approve--- and 45% percent of American think that revolutionary speech is punishable under the Constitution.


Our system of K-12 education, far from giving students the knowledge base that they need to be critical thinkers, or to build a base for lifelong learning, produces instead a nation that does not read very much or think very deeply:


Young people do very little reading. As revealed in a 2004 study by the National Endowment for the Arts as cited by Shenkman, only 43% of those in the 18 to 24 age group read literature (down from 60% in 1982); over 50% do not read newspapers (either physical or online), fiction, poetry, or drama.


And the data--- that is to say, that bevy of highly useful information that defines the knowledge base unappreciated by those irresponsible characters parading as university professors in departments, schools, and colleges of education--- expose the notion that people unaccustomed to accumulating knowledge are ever motivated to seek enlightening information: Only 23% of young people use the Internet to access information pertinent to issues of national or international importance.


This, of course, goes to the core of the erroneous approach to K-12 education espoused by education professors and other members of the education establishment.


In my interaction with members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education and officials in the central offices of that school district, they reveal their lack of focus on knowledge acquisition as central to K-12 education:


They themselves do not have rich knowledge bases.


They are not scholars with any academic credibility.


They are in no position to teach students how to think critically and prepare for lifelong learning.


There is danger in the situation whereby the typical American shows little interest in knowledge, and never gets around to looking up facts of any relevance to serious national or international issues:


Citizens in such a nation reveal themselves to be uninformed and gullible voters who could consider voting for a demagogue such as Donald Trump.




..............................................................


This must stop.


We can be better than this.


We can assert ourselves at the level of the locally centralized school district and exert pressure for the transformation of the personnel that we put in place to educate our children.


Many people currently inhabiting the hallways at the Davis Center, the locus of the central offices of the Minneapolis Public Schools at 1250 West Broadway in North Minneapolis, must go.   We must clean those central offices, ridding ourselves of the knowledge-deniers and filling them with many fewer but intellectually more astute scholars of genuine academic inclination.


We must insist that administrators and teaches in a redesigned system for the delivery of K-12 education themselves exhibit and in their students inculcate an enthusiasm for knowledge-intensive education.


We must do this.


There are lives in the balance--- and the future of a nation, the destiny of a world, at stake.


Vote "No" on the 8 November referendum;  then work to overhaul staff and programming at the Minneapolis Public Schools so as to deliver that knowledge-intensive education for which our precious young people have been waiting a very long time.