The Pedagogical Improvement Industry

Below is a brief excerpt from an article by Thomas Paulitz, published on December 7 by Junge Freiheit and translated by JLH. The translator includes this introductory note:

This is the beginning of an article on the attempt to “reform” spelling in Germany. The damage caused by people who have an agenda but no intelligence interfering in what was once a working system reminds me of the havoc being wrought by multiculti Common Core thinking.

The translated excerpt:

The Great Confusion

Learning to spell in spite of school

The fourth-grader wrote:

“Liebe Fata ales gute zum Fatatag. Ich hab dich lib.”

(“deer dadi, hapi dadis dai. I luv u.”)

When Brandenburg CDU representative Henryk Wichmann received these phrases from his daughter, it dawned on him that something is wrong with the teaching of spelling in our state. In many elementary schools, children first learn with the help of “sound tablets” to “write what they hear.” Thanks to the pedagogical improvement industry. So in September Wichmann queried the state government. Which found nothing to complain about.

Wichmann’s daughter now goes to a private school.

How bad does it have to be in our educational system, if parents are looking for a way to take their children out of the public school system? For decades, the ministries of culture have given in to pressure from interest groups…

JLH reports that the rest of the article is an examination of the silliness of German orthographical reform, and is probably of little interest to anyone whose native language is not German.

A further note: as far as I know, homeschooling is against the law in Germany. So for families of modest means, there is no alternative except to deliver their children to the public school system, where young minds are wiped and imprinted with Multicultural indoctrination.

The Obama administration intends to force similar rules upon the USA, if it has its way. The entire Western world will fall into the same pit unless ordinary people wake up and resist en masse.

The few remaining children we produce will be turned into mindless drones addicted to hand-held electronic devices and preoccupied with narcissistic self-gratification.

But none of them will be racists or homophobes! We can at least console ourselves with that knowledge as the curtain of darkness descends upon us.

7 thoughts on “The Pedagogical Improvement Industry

  1. I’m a teacher in the USA, and it gives me a certain amount of Schadenfreude to see that the Germans are having the same problem we’ve been wrestling with for decades–even though the spelling rules of their language are far more regular than ours!

    When I was a little guy back when Ike Eisenhower was still president, we had to copy words on paper, spell them out orally, recognize them on pages, etc. etc. etc. I understand now that such treatment was supposed to shrivel our young souls and leave us in a permanent state of low self-esteem, in which we would turn to crime, and end up generally dysfunctional. Boy, was I such a little idiot then! When the superior performance in such exercises got myself and a couple of other kids sent to the 2d grade room during reading time, we few felt so proud of ourselves, and hadn’t the foggiest we were supposed to be seething with juvenile resentment at being separated from peers we spent most of our time with. When my mother (Gud hville henne) told me to thank my teacher at the end of the year, I did so.

    Also, during those high and far off years, my second brother, who was in High School, belonged to a marskmen’s club whose members carried .22 rifles to school, put them in their lockers until meeting time, and never shot anything but the paper bull’s eyes set up for them and the high earthen bank behind the targets. Well, a few blew away some cans on fence posts in remoter parts of our area, and some even graduated to being pretty dangerous to deer in season.

    We could even be taken down to the principal’s office to be paddled in certain cases–but I don’t know anyone to whom that ever happened.

    Now, when we can’t even trust 17 year olds to be left on their own, or to be able to read, we’re supposed to believe we’ve been through a half century of progress.

    Wilkommen nach der Zeite, Deutschland! Forgive my mistakes. I’m only a learner.

  2. Come to think of it, back in those dark, repressive days, we also recited the Pledge of Allegiance, Lord’s Prayer, and Shema Yisroel (we lived in a heavily Jewish area) every morning in that order.

    Dear Progressive peers, should I feel guilty that I left school able to read, write, and cipher, when so many of you were so horribly oppressed?

    And it gets worse! I grew up and probably, on the basis of what I had back in the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, I ultimately learned to read both Modern and Classical Chinese, Ancient Hebrew, and Koine Greek as well–with people who barely read one language telling me I’m hopelessly monocultural.

  3. Being the optimist I am (when not reduced to a state of paranoia – a place I frequent more often now), I look for work-arounds to protect children and empower parents. In a former line of work, I met many underclass mothers who jumped at the chance to give their children an extra boost past the sheer boredom of govt schooling.

    Thus, Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation. His methods work and the books are fun, even for parents:

    http://www.coreknowledge.org/

    Armed with a book of information appropriate to the child’s grade level along with some guidelines from the organization, impotent, anxious parents can turn things around for their kids…

    (though I usually suggested that they tell their kids this is a “secret between you and Mommy for right now”. If you tapped into the parents’ experience with territorial teachers, they not only got that very quickly, but it lowered their anger level at the school system, which they rightly assessed as not being interested in their kids as individuals. School districts vie for good statistics so the money spigot from the state/feds will not be choked off. Kids are incidental to many of them).

    That’s not to say there aren’t dedicated teachers; lots of them still exist. But the system is rotten and their dedication works in spite of that structure. I’ve even had vice principals admit as much.

    Thus, I would usually give the parents two book titles to get from Hirsch: one on cultural literacy for kids (information they also needed, but this was about persuasion, not frontal attack for a situation they already found overwhelming) and another book written for the grade their child was in.

    At the time the Hirsch Foundation was in Charlottesville, VA. I don’t know if it still is. Having it seem ‘local’ made the whole thing less intimidating.

    The Baron and I also used the books. Our son read the Cultural Literacy Book for kids until it fell apart, at which point I got him the one for grown-ups.

    Here’s one of the versions for kids:

    The New First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Your Child Needs to Know

    Hirsch’s Core Knowledge has been used in pilot programs in some of NYC’s ghetto deserts and they not only improved the kids’ scores, the long term effect was to make the kids interested in learning. It’s also a cheap tool compared to what the professionals are doing/using.

    Hirsch isn’t the only one. We used the Saxon Math books for our son – the same books used in the barrios in LA to make kids math literate. They made a movie out of it:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_and_Deliver

    It’s a feel-good “miracle” but it shouldn’t be that rare. Teachers and principals – the ones paying attention – know how to do this. That they don’t do it more often is an indictment of the education bureaucracy, including all those ‘university’ graduate programs for teachers.

    The man who wrote the Saxon math books is a good example of what one person can do:

    The Math Warrior

    No p.c. pretty illustrations in a Saxon maths book. In fact, no pictures at all. Just endless drill to sink a solid foundation in each area before a child moves up:

    John Saxon–almost by accident, in a second career following 27 distinguished years in the Air Force–became a millionaire as writer and publisher. His books and his methods were that good.

    Oh, how the Education Establishment hated him for this. If the playing field had been level, I assure you Saxon would have been a billionaire. He would be to education and publishing what Steve Jobs is to computers.

    Makes you realize how dreary the computer biz would be if the bureaucrats had gotten a holt to it (as they say around here) first. None of us regular folk ever would have bothered becoming computer literate – or at least literate enough to think we could write comments or have email or shop online, etc.

    And now that the professional bureaucrats have spent a billion or so on a website for ObamaCare (which regular geeks say should never have cost more than a few million at most), we find ourselves lost in the thickets of that abomination…lost and, for many, without health care insurance any longer.

    The planned failure of OCare is not substantially different from the planned failure of education for the underclass. It’s a version of “barefoot and pregnant” – i.e., stuck in a windowless room with no way out.

    Lucky Mr Wichmann – he could send his daughter to a private school. The poor families I worked with didn’t have that option. But if they were willing to surmount the mind-numbing inertia of the system, I was willing to be an education guerilla.

    Come to think of it, Dr. Ben Carson’s mother did the same thing. She was illiterate, but she pushed and shoved her sons into academic excellence, like it or not…those boys didn’t want to make momma mad. Not just out of fear, but also out of the understanding that she worked two jobs to keep them going.

    Sometimes I daydream about the amazing things that can be accomplished by individuals who see their mission, or who stumble into it – e.g., Carson, Saxon, Escalante. What if each of us “adopted” a willing family – a willing mother, mostly – and gave them the tools to tunnel under the graveyard of federal education? What if we got to witness the kids standing out in the sunshine where they’ve finally realized that learning can be exciting. Not all the time – but the tedium interspersed with a genuine sense of accomplishment: it’s addictive.

    I hope Ben Carson can do that. I know he helps kids, but I don’t know if anyone is helping those mothers – as trifling as they seem to outsiders, I’ve heard a few of them talk about their dreams for their kids…

  4. In german every word is spelled as it sounds, and sounds as it is spelled, once the fairly simple rules are known. It is not like english where “phough” can sound like “fish”. That even this simplicity is left unlearned, shows that there is a deliberate dumbing down happening.

  5. Teach your children to trust nothing about the education system. Take the education they give you, but only believe the “hard” stuff like mathematics and physics. Parrot the rest back, but never believe it. Be subtle as snakes. Know that the teacher is a cop who wants to destroy you; a tyrant who wants to enslave you.

    Sorry about that, good teachers, but you have the responsibility to harangue, harass, and if necessary, terrorize the Liberal Vermin out of the system. Otherwise, you’re part of the problem, too. No prisoners. No quarter.

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