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Sunday, November 25, 2007
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Aiken County Schools
"An organizational culture that encourages integrity, collegiality, high expectations for student success, student, parental and community engagement, and continuous improvement."
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The above is from Aiken County (SC)Schools' website. They have a bulleted list of six fundamental values, of which this is the one saved for last. The first one promotes student safety as a strategy to increase opportunity and educational outcome for students.
They then go on to state that they want "highly qualified" educators and "competent" support staff. They must "orchestrate" and "facilitate" the best educational results for kids, while also growing "professionally" and "personally". They list a nurturing facility that fosters certain "learning practices". I guess it is a way to say maintenance is important to keep district property and buildings in shape to be used to support educational goals? They value safe, efficient, accessible transportation to and from school in Aiken, too. As well as appropriate technology use that promotes learning and efficient information management.
Then the sentence that should concern us as a society. The widespread use of "expectation" to do a thing instead of that thing being mandatory.
Sure, continuous improvement is a key idea in schools, but is never truly implemented. It looks good on paper but is hard to do in reality. So they must only be "expected" and not required to do so, or they might get fired for merely not doing something that is an ideal really, not a goal to achieve... Everyone looks at themselves and says "Gee, I would like to be able to screw around and do nuthin' all day, so I shall promote and push a conduct code that only expects but does not require!" But what is the result of that? More secrecy, more stealing, more screwing around with other people's spouses and children, violence to hide crimes, despair of the soul that sees no order in the world. Armageddon.
Alan Moore is a comic book writer. He wrote some things that will be made into movies soon, but has been writing comics a while now. He theorizes that Armageddons happen when the populace accepts a common set of rules that are FUNDAMENTALLY different than the ones accepted by the people. Yes, physical destruction and war happens, but the thing that dies is really an idea. The idea that is about to expire, the Armageddon we face, is people not seeing a difference between "thou shall" and "thou really should but can wiggle out of it or get others to do it for you". Once that happens, we are cooked as a country. Freedom and Equality depend on laws that MUST be followed, not laws that SHOULD be followed.
Our language is a kludge of all the other languages that came before. Obfuscation and gerrymandering are king and queen in America, but the people forget we have no royalty except Freedom, Justice and Equality. The richness of language and the education difference between the elites and the workers made it possible for the rich to screw the poor all the time, every time in every previous dark age. This affliction of the elites, speaking with a forked tongue, has become widespread and ACCEPTED throughout the populace and is now being institutionalized and codified into conduct codes that were previously inviolate.
We are paving the way for another dark age, where kids are only expected to learn, but will most likely not. Where half the world's Muslim population, the women, are being told not to learn or grow, are encouraged NOT to so men can control them. As they are being controlled by learned men who care not for the life and blood of the poor man and his family. As despots and tyrants have throughout history in civilizations where equality and freedom and justice were only for the rich.
"He theorizes that Armageddons happen when the populace accepts a common set of rules that are FUNDAMENTALLY different than the ones accepted by the people."
Um, what's the difference between the populace and the people?
Joseph?
Michelle, sorry, I will rephrase; a mass of people who have a certain notion that is fundamental to their society's functioning (slavery, oil dependance, ethics standards, etc.) go through a forced or enlightened change in their conception of reality. Their internal idea of how the world works is changed to something different. What is socially acceptable and POSSIBLE changes, in scary or wonderful ways.
I would argue that changing from a slave based agrarian economy to a wage based system in America was an Armageddon - but a good one in the LONG run. I'm sure many elite slave owners thought that the whole world was going to end, many prejudices came to a boil, and we had a hell of a civil war over what states could decide to do within the USA. We had an Armageddon. A lot of strife and struggele and death to change something for the better in American Society.
I could be wrong, even Lincoln suspended habeus corpus in the civil war, to make sure the Union survived. Maybe only "expecting and encouraging" our educators and educatees is just good enough for government work. Maybe it will be easier for our newly underperforming and corrupt society to accept the valuelessness of individual life and rights in the upcoming dark age.
Maybe it is by design that our education system is making the masses less smart than the elites. Easier to control the hoi polloi when they are idiots. Perhaps the dumbing down of our ethical boundaries is a prelude to breaking down other previously inviolate concepts like freedom, liberty, and pursuing happiness.
Maybe the elites are "preserving the union" by making the masses into malleable sheep, to be fleeced and eaten as needed? So the kernel of rights can be protected for the FUTURE generations while the present suffers. Rich men made American governemnt for themselves in the 1700s. Women and non-whites got rights in that governemnt via a long struggle, one that can still be lost. Our government has become more fair and more just to ALL than the even the framers of the Constitution intended.
A simple thing like not being required, only expected, to provide the public with government paperwork on how money is spent for education can be the black heart of corruption, the seed that makes fraud possible. And if the Good Old Boys (and Girls) have the power to say "the public doesn't need to know" then the public has been screwed. Lets not let the Good Old Boys take us back to 1776.
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