Why I Am the Guy That Officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools Will Never Fool
Students of
the Minneapolis Pubic Schools are academically abused by their teachers and
administrators every day their feet hit the ground.
In this
respect, they are typical victims of our wretched public schools in the United
States, which leave a few people able to survive, whether because of
extraordinary personal dedication and study, by gaining access to the few
teachers capable of teaching Advanced Placement courses, or by having the
financial wherewithal to hire personal tutors or attend private schools with
the curricular focus and the connections to send students forth to
well-regarded college and university experiences.
But few
people in the United States are broadly or deeply educated across the natural
sciences and the liberal arts. Even
those students who go forth to the colleges and universities of best reputation
maintain major gaps in their knowledge that are not rectified at the
post-secondary level. Students may
dabble in other fields during their first and second years of a four-year
college experience, but then the focus is trained on a major and a minor field
or two of study. They then may go on to
even narrower training in graduate or professional schools.
Thus do we
have a nation of citizens who know little of the United States Constitution,
how the electoral system works, any sense of the history of the nation or of
the world. Their reading in fictional
and nonfictional works tends to be slim or trivial. Citizen grasp of the details of climate
science, the functioning of liberal capitalist and democratic socialist and
state capitalist economies, or international trade dynamics tends toward
zero. Most people live out their earthly
sojourns devoid of knowledge of and appreciation for multiple musical genres or
the visual art of the West or Asia or Africa.
They have little idea of how the food that they eat is produced, the
nutritional content of their diet, or the most healthful maintenance of the
bodies that must carry them forth throughout their earthly sojourn. Very few citizens have broad knowledge of
world systems of religions or, most importantly, ethics, from which to forge
their own meaning and sense of purpose.
Many people,
so devoid of knowledge and ethics and purpose, give themselves to various forms
and levels of violence, to destructive pharmaceuticals, and to behaviors that
may end their lives before any adult consciousness has been attained and in any
case well short of their possible life span.
Most abused
are young people living at the urban core who must attend schools at which the
knowledge and skills imparted are minimal, the atmosphere is intimidating and
abusive, and the prospects for a fulfilling life are dim. Thus do cycles of familial poverty
continue. Thus are the urban poor
entrapped. Entrapment is also witnessed
in the rural poor and those for whom a vision of a soul-enriching contemporary
life is not found on the reservations and territories of indigenous peoples.
…………………………………………………………………………………………….
I am blessed
in the New Salem Educational Initiative to be able to provide to my students
the education that they do not get in the Minneapolis Public Schools, nor in
institutions to which some of them flee in their unfulfilled search for a
decent school-based education. But I
cannot teach everybody, and thus do I press on with the K-12 Revolution.
Through my
experiences with my students, the frustrations conveyed to me by them and their
families, and the factual data of my exhaustive research, I know the
deficiencies of education in the United States as does no one else on the
planet.
As the articles
in this series have made clear,
I am the guy
that officials of the Minneapolis Public Schools will never fool.
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