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Just add another drop in the bucket of examples on how our public school system has been invaded by hard-left radicals that wish to brainwash your children into believing racist concepts that paint America in a horrible light, this new story from the Young American’s Foundation shows an elementary school principal’s disgusting response to parents who spoke out against the critical race theory-focused education the school was forcing on their children.
An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.
-- Anatole France
French novelist (1844 - 1924)
States With Active Legislation to Fund Students Instead of Systems
And the rise of UX writing“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” — Mark Twain
Today, the anatomy of a digital experience includes images, shapes and words. These three are the equivalent of the 7 musical notes which can be combined in infinte number of permutations & combinations to craft a musical or digital experience. In the nascent stages of the UX industry, a UX designer was largely responsible for the ‘Shapes’ only. Shapes essentially relate to the navigation, interaction & layout elements of a digital interface such as tabs, cards, links, buttons, etc. Images and words were other people’s responsibility which was an extremely siloed and fragmented way of approaching UX design.
Experience is a seamless amalgamation of all three elements working together as a harmonious whole to create a desired feeling. As the UX industry matured, the UX designers role evolved as a result of this need for a more holistic approach to experience design.
Move over navigation…content is the new king.
Navigation used to be the most important pillar of UX design but it has gradually become less and less important. Navigation in the traditional sense means moving between screens. However, users today are not really moving between screens. Are they? Think about your content consumption behaviour on mobile phones… facebook for example…what percentage of using facebook involves ‘navigation’. You open the app and then basically just scroll. Mobile interfaces and the need to keep users hooked have ensured that infinite scrolls have replaced traditional navigation elements such as tabs, links, buttons, etc.
With Navigation out of the way, Content has emerged as the differentiator. If finding content is just as easy everywhere, what creates real digital differentiation today how the content is written.
What all does ‘content’ include on a digital interface…?
Below are a few examples/areas where words can play an important role...
Remote learning programmes have been crucial to reach populations in underserved communities. One of the most effective channels is the use of radio and audio lessons. An innovative partnership with the Ministry of Education and Street Child in Liberia, has enabled Bridge Liberia to use audio lessons to reach thousands of children across 5 counties in the country.
Street Child has been delivering radios to communities and has so far delivered 1,500 radios to 1,500 ‘households’; meaning a group of 4 children. The radios are distributed alongside timetables showing when parents and students should tune in to hear a daily lesson designed for each age group. In addition school members are constantly engaging the community to remind them of when the lessons are taking place and follow up to see how they go.
Students at The Piney Woods School study a challenging and rigorous college preparatory curriculum designed with the mastery of content and skills anchored in project-based learning. Students take ownership of their own learning with the support of face- to- face instruction and our online learning platform. These two learning approaches allow our students to determine when, where, and how they learn. Our small class sizes empower students to explore and deepen their learning capacity. Students are encouraged to take risks and develop their own unique intellectual curiosity.
It is our desire to facilitate our students to become critical thinkers. We also assist them with goal setting, post-secondary plans, test preparation, and decision-making process.
Our academic village takes a student-centered approach to learning. Learning occurs within and beyond the classroom walls. Students are urged to be creators with highly developed research and self-reflective skills. Our curriculum is guided by The Piney Woods School’s core values, our honor code, and respect for self & others. We want our students to:
Practice living lives of purpose.
Feel empowered to make confident and constructive decisions.
Think creatively and leverage their talents, skills, and accomplishments.
Practice empathy, valuing the thoughts and ideas of others as well as themselves.
ACADEMIC COURSE OUTLINE
The Piney Woods School offers an academic program which reflects a general college-preparatory curriculum. The core courses of social studies, mathematics, science, English, and foreign language, along with a diversity of electives, are delineated to afford each student a solid educational structure.
One of the tenets of the pseudo-political religious cult that is Marxism is that capitalism is doomed by its own “internal contradictions.”
Why do I call Marxism a religion? If you look at Marxism through the lens of comparative religion, what do you have? A creation myth. A fall from grace. Redemption. End times. Salvation. It has its own sacred texts and sacraments. Tell a Marxist that Marxism is fake and doesn’t work and what will xir tell you?
In the view of Marx, eventually, a tiny number of people would someday own everything, and this will lead to the final uprising by the oppressed and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
It is beginning to look like the peculiar variety of woke Marxism that has held sway in US educational institutions since the late 1960s is also susceptible to its own internal contradictions. Those contradictions are acquiring the velocity of a Himalayan avalanche. //
Higher education is on its own Long March, but this one has no destination. The irony of the institution that is most hostile to the American experiment being devastated by the very thing its Marxist leadership has been hoping happens to our nation is nearly too much to bear without a cigarette.
By refusing to go back to work in the classroom and insisting on non-education items to be inserted in the Wuhan China virus relief bill, Teachers Unions are forcing parents to look elsewhere. Wherever the parents end up, education dollars should end up there with them.
Public universities could lose federal funding should they fail to give religious student groups the same rights as other campus organizations.
How to LEARN faster with the Feynman technique:
Pick a topic you wanna understand and start studying it
Pretend to teach the topic to a classroom
Go back to the books when you get stuck
Simplify and use analogies!
Teaching a powerful tool for learning.
Brain
Government schools are a terrible idea.
In fact, they are the biggest mistake America ever made.
As longtime radio talk show host Neal Boortz rightly noted:
“If you go to a Catholic school – you get a pro-Catholic education.
“If you go to an Episcopalian school – you get a pro-Episcopalian education.
“If you go to a government school – you get a pro-government education.”
Our Declaration of Independence, the Revolution to create this country and the Constitution we thereafter wrote – are one long, unbroken push for less government.
We the People established a very limited government – responsible and subservient to We the People.
But we then relied on government schools – to teach our less government history. Oops.
It was inevitable that government would begin warping the things it teaches – to dishonestly justify government’s mass and never-ending expansion.
It is important, therefore, that we work together in combating organized crime in all its forms. We must use our courts and our law enforcement agencies, and the moral forces of our people, to put down organized crime wherever it appears.
At the same time, we must aid and encourage gentler forces to do their work of prevention and cure. These forces include education, religion, and home training, family and child guidance, and wholesome recreation.
The most important business in this Nation--or any other nation, for that matter-is raising and training children. If those children have the proper environment at home, and educationally, very, very few of them ever turn out wrong. I don't think we put enough stress on the necessity of implanting in the child's mind the moral code under which we live.
The fundamental basis of this Nation's law was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings which we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul. I don't think we emphasize that enough these days.
If we don't have the proper fundamental moral background, we will finally wind up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the state.
Above all, we must recognize that human misery breeds most of our crime. We must wipe out our slums, improve the health of our citizens, and eliminate the inequalities of opportunity which embitter men and women and turn them toward lawlessness. In the long run, these programs represent the greatest of all anticrime measures.
And I want to emphasize, particularly, equality of opportunity. I think every child in the Nation, regardless of his race, creed, or color, should have the right to a proper education. And when he has finished that education, he ought to have the right in industry to fair treatment in employment. If he is able and willing to do the job, he ought to be given a chance to do that job, no matter what his religious connections are, or what his color is.
I am particularly anxious that we should do everything within our power to protect the minds and hearts of our children from the moral corruption that accompanies organized crime. Our children are our greatest resource, and our greatest asset--the hope of our future, and the future of the world. We must not permit the existence of conditions which cause our children to believe that crime is inevitable and normal. We must teach idealism--honor, ethics, decency, the moral law. We must teach that we should do right because it is right, and not in the hope of any material reward. That is what our moral code is based on: do to the other fellow as you would have him do to you. If we would continue that all through our lives, we wouldn't have organized crime--if everybody would do that.
Our local, State, and Federal law enforcement agencies have a major role to play in this whole task of crime suppression.
As law enforcement officers you have great powers. At the same time you must never forget that hand in hand with those powers go great responsibilities. You must make certain that these powers are not used for personal gain, or from any personal motive. Too often organized crime is made possible by corruption of law enforcement officials.
But, far more than that, we must always remember that you are officers of the law in a great democratic nation which owes its birth to the indignation of its citizens against the encroachment of police and governmental powers against their individual freedoms.
Now there isn't any difference, so far as I can see, in the manner in which totalitarian states treat individuals than there is in the racketeers' handling of these lawless rackets with which we are sometimes faced. And the reason that our Government is strong, and the greatest democracy in the world, is because we have a Bill of Rights.
Betsy DeVos: If Schools Won’t Reopen Then Perhaps Families Should Get Those Education Funds Directly
Maybe it's time for the funds to follow the students
School Choice Scores Major SCOTUS Win as John Roberts Finally Finds a Conservative Issue He Supports
Today, by 5-to-4, with John Roberts shockingly joining the four conservatives on that court, the US Supreme Court ruled that blocking state aid to religious schools, if such aid was available to private schools, in general, was unconstitutional. This is from Roberts’s opinion:
A state need not subsidize private education, but once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.
That was 100% good news.
A myth has grown up that providing an education to children must be done by the government via a system of government owned and operated schools. Along with that myth a corollary has developed that any use of state revenue to support non-government schools deprives government schools of resources. This is patent nonsense. Tax dollars for education are to educate children and it doesn’t matter where that education takes place or who does it so long as it happens. If a child goes to a private school, the government school reaps a windfall. They not only don’t have to teach a child, they get to keep the taxes that child’s parents pay while the parent have to tuition in addition to the taxes.
This case, however, tends to have greater import.
Justice Neil Gorsuch went out of his way to demolish the idea that ‘free exercise of religion’ was the same as the Obama-esque ‘freedom of worship.’
Most importantly, though, it is not as if the First Amendment cares. The Constitution forbids laws that prohibit the free exercise of religion. That guarantee protects not just the right to be a religious person, holding beliefs inwardlyand secretly; it also protects the right to act on those beliefs outwardly and publicly. //
Even today, in fiefdoms small and large, people of faith are made to choose between receiving the protection of the State and living lives true to their religious convictions.
Of course, in public benefits cases like the one before us the stakes are not so dramatic. Individuals are forced only to choose between forgoing state aid or pursuing some aspect of their faith. The government does not put a gun to the head, only a thumb on the scale. But, as so many of our cases explain, the Free Exercise Clause doesn’t easily tolerate either; any discrimination against religious exercise must meet the demands of strict scrutiny. In this way, the Clause seeks to ensure that religion remains “a matter of voluntary choice by individuals and their associations, [where] each sect ‘flourish[es] according to the zeal of its adherents and the appeal of its dogma,’” influenced by neither where the government points its gun nor where it places its thumb. McDaniel, 435 U. S., at 640 (opinion of Brennan J.) (quoting Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U. S. 306, 313 (1952)).
Montana’s Supreme Court disregarded these foundational principles. Effectively, the court told the state legislature and parents of Montana like Ms. Espinoza: You can have school choice, but if anyone dares to choose to send a child to an accredited religious school, the program will be shuttered. That condition on a public benefit discriminates against the free exercise of religion. Calling it discrimination on the basis of religious status or religious activity makes no difference: It is unconstitutional all the same.
Do you want to help your children develop sharp minds, robust hearts, and a strong character? One of the best ways to do that is reading them good books. But how do you find good books? This list of more than 400 children's classics offers a place to start...
By the time Milton Friedman wrote “The Role of Government in Education,” state governments essentially had developed monopolies on education.
European-style tuition-free higher education has proved one thing beyond the shadow of a doubt: Free college is actually wildly expensive. //
England had a free-college policy between the 1960s and the 1990s. Enrollment soared, straining government revenues. Ultimately, England had to lower resources by 39% per student.
Ultimately, England’s free college policy wound up hurting low-income students the most, as schools were forced to cap the number of students admitted.
In fact, according to researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research, “the gap in degree attainment between high- and low-income families more than doubled.”
European countries that offer tuition-free higher education also struggle with the issue of completion. Finland, for example, ranks first among all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries in terms of subsidies for higher education, with 96% of all higher education funding coming from public sources. However, Finland ranks 25th among OECD countries for degree attainment.
France famously touts its tuition-free university system. Seldom, however, do its boasts note that almost 50% of French students drop out or fail out after just their first year.
It is clear that transferring the entire cost of higher education from students to taxpayers is fraught with unintended consequences. //
Countries such as England and Poland actually saw significant increases in higher education quality and access after reinstating private tuition payments in their countries. It appears that there is some value in requiring students to invest in their own education.
Or, "how to make our kids better citizens in one simple class." //
I do believe in the social snowball effect, where little things become major social issues. I find it impossible to believe that the growing number of young men and women who can’t cook for themselves and can’t take care of their own finances and clothing is unrelated to the decreasing academic performance of our students and, on a larger scale, the general apathy toward work in our society. Ignorance of these skills is the biggest barrier to being able to carry oneself as an adult, and we should be doing what we can both in school and out to make sure they have those skills.
So, yeah, make home economics a bigger part of the high school experience again. Give kids the opportunity to learn basic life skills, rather than equations they’ll never use and how to write fictional stories for three weeks and never do again. Give them something they need. Make them better citizens by the end of the year, rather, than drones who can recite something that only fits in that one class.
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