Moral: Never talk to police

[chasfm11]

There have been countless discussions about what we should do if we are involved in a shooting. Here is another example (in my opinion) of:
- overzealous police work
- cooperation that lead to an arrest after the fact

Fox News KDVR.Com
Julie Hayden Reporter
7:50 a.m. MST, February 22, 2011
http://www.kdvr.com/news/kdvr-arvada-po ... 9823.story

[philip964]

Yeah I guess that pretty much says you should remain silent.

Reminds me of the movie, with Bruce Willis, where the little kid sees dead people.

"I only draw pictures of rainbows now, they don't have parent teacher conferences when I draw rainbows."

[WildBill]

I would think that they couldn't get that charge to stick in court. Unfortunately the parents are already spending a lot of money on attorney fees. I am sure that the whole incident is tramatic for the child. Too bad, it could have been avoided if clearer heads prevailed.

[esxmarkc]

I'm beginning to have Zero-Tolerance for this "Zero-Tolerance" garbage. Doesn't anyone prescribe to common sense anymore?

[Purplehood]

Another reason I don't live in CO anymore.

[chasfm11]

My main message out of this situation is that if the "system" can be this heartless to child, who already had a diagnosed problem, was under treatment for it and was carefully following the instructions from that treatment, just think of the possible intolerance (injustice?) that could occur with an adult.

I agree that a situation like this would seem more likely in CO (and CA, WA, etc.) than in Texas.

On a side note, I firmly believe that way too many children are treated for "problems" when the underlying issue that they are being forced in a level of conformity within the school environment that they cannot handle. Some of our most intelligent and most talented kids cannot deal with with the super regimes in some of our public schools. Not every child learns the same way, at the same pace or with the same methods. In another less rigid environment, the boy in this story may not have had ADD or ADHD in the first place. You cannot run schools like prisons and expect all kids to do well. These parents would do well to see alternative education. It will be cheaper in the long run than the legal bills.

[VMI77]

Some of our most intelligent and most talented kids cannot deal with with the super regimes in some of our public schools.

Personally, I think that is a deliberate purpose of these policies: to marginalize the threat of bright and creative students who won't conform and to scare any other bright students into conformity. The educational system likes to ruin the lives of non-conformists early, before there is any danger of them reaching positions of power and influence. The primary purpose of the public school system is to ensure conformity.

[bnc]

The public school system was intended to create a populace competent enough to hold down a job and pay taxes, but not intelligent imaginative, inquisitive, or independent enough to question the system (the Prussian system, which our public schools were directly developed from). Also, the school system was intended to "Protestantize" the large number of Catholic children who immigrated here or were born of recent immigrants during the 1800s. In fact, in the northeast there was a time were being a Protestant was required in order to be a teacher. Recently, the apparent shift in school priorities from learning to social engineering isn't really a shift at all; it is just the same machinery being used in the same way but for somewhat different ends.

[Purplehood]

IMHO, this is a violation of the child's 1st Amendment rights.

The only excusable action that I would have endorsed on the part of the school was monitoring of the child (which was already being done by his Therapist) in order to ensure that he didn't act out his Artistic freedom of expression.

[chasfm11]

Some of our most intelligent and most talented kids cannot deal with with the super regimes in some of our public schools.

Personally, I think that is a deliberate purpose of these policies: to marginalize the threat of bright and creative students who won't conform and to scare any other bright students into conformity. The educational system likes to ruin the lives of non-conformists early, before there is any danger of them reaching positions of power and influence. The primary purpose of the public school system is to ensure conformity.

Part of it is the political correctness of not recognizing success. Rewards and acknowledgments cannot be given because those that don't receive them will suffer from low self-esteem. There is an element of efficiency because it is easier to get all 30 kids in the classroom doing the same things at the same times in the lower grades. There is also the aspect that it takes extra work to figure out how to reach "different" students. While some teachers worry about this and will invest extra thought into accomplishing it, others lack the training to recognize special learning needs and the energy to pursue them. Their response to special situations is often like those who don't speak another's foreign language and think that the solution is simply to say the same thing again but louder.

The growth of ADD and ADHD in recent years is not the result of better detection, in my opinion, but of forced institutionalization. The sad use of drugs to "combat" these conditions, even marginal ones is simply a way of avoiding the underlying problems with the system.

But as you have pointed out, Purplehood, this matter goes way beyond that. I still have trouble getting to how a drawing is an arrestable offense. Without some sort of specific verbal threat, the matter doesn't seem to be LE related. A suspension from school is one thing. A ride in the squad car is another.

[VMI77]

The public school system was intended to create a populace competent enough to hold down a job and pay taxes, but not intelligent imaginative, inquisitive, or independent enough to question the system (the Prussian system, which our public schools were directly developed from). Also, the school system was intended to "Protestantize" the large number of Catholic children who immigrated here or were born of recent immigrants during the 1800s. In fact, in the northeast there was a time were being a Protestant was required in order to be a teacher. Recently, the apparent shift in school priorities from learning to social engineering isn't really a shift at all; it is just the same machinery being used in the same way but for somewhat different ends.

Reminds me of something from Albert Jay Nock. I wanted to quote his remark that the purpose of public education was to teach people just enough to read advertisements in the newspaper and follow instructions at work, but can't find the reference.


Here are a few quotes that lay out the situation, first, from some of those influential in the US public education system:

"Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual." William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education, in his 1906 book The Philosophy of Education

"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." Woodrow Wilson in a speech to businessmen, and from an address to The New York City High School Teachers Association, Jan. 9th, 1909

"In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present eduction conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people, or any of their children, into philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen – of whom we have an ample supply. The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way." John D. Rockefeller General Education Board (1906)

"Schools should be factories in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products. . . manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry." Elwood Cubberly, future Dean of education at Stanford, in his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College

"Only a system of state-controlled schools can be free to teach whatever the welfare of the State may demand." Ellwood P. Cubberley, Dean of the Stanford University School of Education

"Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role." William T. Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1889

"The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone would be interdependent." John Dewey, American educator

"Parent choice' proceeds from the belief that the purpose of education is to provide individual students with an education. In fact, educating the individual is but a means to the true end of education, which is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and by which they are sustained. "Family choice' is, therefore, basically selfish and anti-social in that it focuses on the "wants' of a single family rather than the "needs' of society. " Association of California School Administrators

Now, from those who understand the system:

"That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else." H. L. Mencken

"A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body. An education established and controlled by the State should only exist, if it exists at all, as one among many competing." John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), in The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill, ed. Edwin A. Burtt (New York: Random House, 1939), pp. 1033–34

"For what is meant by saying that a government ought to educate the people? Why should they be educated? What is the education for? Clearly, to fit the people for social life — to make them good citizens. And who is to say what are good citizens? The government: there is no other judge. And who is to say how these good citizens may be made? The government: there is no other judge. Hence the proposition is convertible into this — a government ought to mold children into good citizens, using its own discretion in settling what a good citizen is and how the child may be molded into one." Herbert Spencer, 1850

"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth." Aldous Huxley, forward to Brave New World, 1946 edition

[Purplehood]

VM177,

I wish I hadn't read that. It just reminds me that I am a nutso-conspiracy theorist that doesn't know what is good for me (i.e., good for Society).

[C-dub]

I saw this story this morning. They said the boy didn't even draw this until he was requested by a psychologist or somebody to draw what he was feeling or something like that. No one just found this drawing and then reacted.

The boy needs help, not a record!

[VMI77]

Some of our most intelligent and most talented kids cannot deal with with the super regimes in some of our public schools.

Personally, I think that is a deliberate purpose of these policies: to marginalize the threat of bright and creative students who won't conform and to scare any other bright students into conformity. The educational system likes to ruin the lives of non-conformists early, before there is any danger of them reaching positions of power and influence. The primary purpose of the public school system is to ensure conformity.

Part of it is the political correctness of not recognizing success. Rewards and acknowledgments cannot be given because those that don't receive them will suffer from low self-esteem. There is an element of efficiency because it is easier to get all 30 kids in the classroom doing the same things at the same times in the lower grades. There is also the aspect that it takes extra work to figure out how to reach "different" students. While some teachers worry about this and will invest extra thought into accomplishing it, others lack the training to recognize special learning needs and the energy to pursue them. Their response to special situations is often like those who don't speak another's foreign language and think that the solution is simply to say the same thing again but louder.

The growth of ADD and ADHD in recent years is not the result of better detection, in my opinion, but of forced institutionalization. The sad use of drugs to "combat" these conditions, even marginal ones is simply a way of avoiding the underlying problems with the system.

But as you have pointed out, Purplehood, this matter goes way beyond that. I still have trouble getting to how a drawing is an arrestable offense. Without some sort of specific verbal threat, the matter doesn't seem to be LE related. A suspension from school is one thing. A ride in the squad car is another.

For the most part I think the system is designed to be the way it is and it produces what it is designed to produce. Many of those teaching aren't even aware of how the system was designed or its true objectives and they simply do the best they can. Even if we assume the system is really intended to educate in the best sense of the word then it has to produce more failure than success for the simple reason it is designed and operated on the fundamentally false assumption that everyone is equally educable. See the quotes I provided bnc --the US school system was designed by collectivists who wanted to engineer a particular type of socialist collective, and it is under the control of collectivists today to a greater degree than ever.

From C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes a Toast

"Once you have grasped the tendency, you can easily predict its future developments; especially as we ourselves will play our part in the developing. The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be “undemocratic.” These differences between pupils – for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences – must be disguised. This can be done at various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing things that children used to do in their spare time…. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have – I believe the English already use the phrase – “parity of esteem”…. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma…by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career…."

Edited to add the following:

BTW, I have a son who works as a tutor. Many of his fellow tutors are older public school teachers and they all appear to feel that the "self-esteem" nonsense alluded to by you, and C.S. Lewis in the quote above, is very destructive to the process of educating children. That it should be so seems obvious --so obvious in fact that I have a hard time believing that those who promote this nonsense aren't out to deliberately undermine the country.

[VMI77]

VM177,

I wish I hadn't read that. It just reminds me that I am a nutso-conspiracy theorist that doesn't know what is good for me (i.e., good for Society).

I think the reason for that is found in the last part of the Huxley quote:

"The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth." Aldous Huxley, forward to Brave New World, 1946 edition

We've got a system that produces a lot of silence about the truth, so to the extent we're aware of it and happen to speak of it to others, we're telling them things they've never heard of and find incredible and unpleasant. There are two ways to deal with that feeling: learn more about what you heard, or dismiss it. Learning is hard and requires effort (and some people are simply incapable of it); dismissal is easy, and just about the easiest and laziest dismissal these days is to accuse someone of being a "conspiracy theorist."