Boris Johnson Barbara Follett Basil Venitis favors ending government involvement in education. Any influence by the state over education corrupts its goals, and therefore the ability of its graduates to think and reason. Only a full separation of education and state allows for parents to choose how best to equip their children to function in the world. Anything less is a violation of the parents', and child's, rights.
We all know men tend to be active in the analytical left brain, and women tend to be active in the right intuitive brain. Nevertheless, Fourth Reich(EU) wants the two brains to become the same! This is fighting nature, fighting God, pure and simple! The European Commission today presented a new study which examines how gender inequality in education is addressed in European countries. It shows that gender differences persist in both choice of study and outcomes.
With a few exceptions, all European countries have, or plan to have, gender equality policies in education. The primary aim is to challenge traditional gender roles and stereotypes. Other objectives include enhancing the representation of women in decision-making bodies, countering gender-based attainment patterns and combating gender-based harassment in schools. Government initiatives that aim to inform parents about gender equality issues and involve them more closely in promoting gender equality in education are rare.
Girls usually obtain higher grades and higher pass rates in school leaving examinations than boys and boys are more likely to drop out of school or repeat school years. International surveys show that boys are more likely to be poor performers in reading whereas girls are more likely to be low achievers in mathematics in around one third of European education systems. However, socio-economic background remains the most important factor.
Only a few countries address boys' underachievement as a policy priority (The Flemish Community of Belgium, Ireland and the United Kingdom). Still fewer countries have special programmes for improving boys' reading skills and girls' achievement in mathematics and science (Austria, United Kingdom).
The European Commission addresses gender inequality in education both by encouraging policy co-operation between EU countries and through its funding programmes. The fight against social exclusion and gender inequality is one of the key priorities for the financial support that the EU gives to multinational education projects and partnerships through the Lifelong Learning Programme.
Many young men and women in vocational schools and general secondary education still opt for career choices reflecting traditional gender roles. Better vocational guidance is needed to address this issue and for career advisers to be more gender aware and thus more able to challenge stereotypes.
Gender-sensitive guidance, which is currently only available in half of the European countries, is more often targeted at girls than boys and usually aims to encourage girls to choose technology and natural science careers. Although interesting individual initiatives and projects exist, overall national strategies to combat gender stereotypes in career choices and initiatives aimed at boys are lacking.
Women represent the majority of students and graduates in almost all countries and dominate in education, health and welfare, humanities and arts. Men dominate in engineering, manufacturing and construction.
Around two thirds of countries have gender equality policies in higher education. However, almost all these policies and projects target only females. On the other hand, the proportion of women among teaching staff in higher education institutions declines with every step on the academic career ladder. However, only about a third of the countries have implemented concrete policies to address this problem to target this vertical segregation. Policies targeting both issues are present in the Flemish Community of Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Norway.
The purpose of education is to train young people how to use their minds, to use their capacity to think and reason. A proper education provides students with knowledge of the facts, and more importantly, knowledge of how to gain new facts in order to live and pursue values.
Public education, by definition, cannot meet the goals of a proper education. Because the state funds public schools, it not only provides the facilities housing the students but it determines the content taught in them. As such, children in such schools learn what the state determines they should learn, with all of the ideological biases that advocates of public schooling endorse. Under state-subsidized schooling, students don't necessarily learn facts, and how to acquire new knowledge; they learn state-sanctioned facts, and state-sanctioned methods of acquiring knowledge.
Public schools are controlled by the government and subject to all the ills of government bureaucracy and power. Private and home schools are run, in varying ways, by parents. Private schools are dependent upon the satisfaction of parents in order to remain in business. They do not control the children in their care. Instead, families retain their authority and hire the schools for certain aspects of raising their children.
Government schools never sought the permission of parents to educate children. Instead, they used force to secure their audience. As is only natural, the arrogance of the state and its contempt for parents has grown with the years. So also has its power over society.
Venitis asserts the public school monopoly has to be ended, and genuine competition has to be restored. The National Education Association's #1 priority isn't quality education. It is its members' financial and political power. American Federation of Teachers President Al Shanker, who was one of this century's best labor union presidents, once openly admitted, "I will begin to care about the quality of children's education in this country when they start paying union dues." Now, this may shock you, but it really shouldn't surprise you.
Education, like any other service, is best provided by the free market, achieving greater quality and efficiency with more diversity of choice. Public schools should be managed locally to achieve greater accountability and parental involvement. Recognizing that the education of children is inextricably linked to moral values, venitists would return authority to parents to determine the education of their children, without interference from kleptocrats. In particular, parents should have responsibility for all funds expended for their children's education. Government should stay out of education.
Venitis declares Eton is the best school on Earth, a paradigm for all schools to follow. Eton, is a British private lyceum for boys. All students board. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI. Eton has a very long list of distinguished alumni, including twenty former prime ministers. Traditionally, Eton is the chief nurse of England's statesmen and the most famous school in the world. No other school can claim to have sent forth such a brigade of distinguished figures to make their mark on the world. Etonians include Premier David Cameron of UK and Mayor Boris Johnson of London.
Homeschool is a legal option in many places, for parents to provide their children with a learning environment as an alternative to school. Parents cite numerous reasons as motivations to homeschool, including better academic test results, poor school environment, improved character development, and objections to what is taught in school.
There is nothing wrong with laying out suggestions for what the average child should know by a certain grade. But most kids aren't the average child, and the Common Core State Standards Initiative is not just suggestions. All kids are different. They grow, mature, and learn at different rates, and develop different talents and interests. In light of that obvious reality, to build an education system that treats all kids as if they are the same is insanity.
Simplistic rhetoric of national-standards advocates notwithstanding, research simply does not demonstrate that national standards lead to superior educational outcomes. And, no, adopting the Common Core standards is not voluntary. With states risking billions of federal dollars if they don't adopt them, the standards are for all intents and purposes federal standards, and their adoption mandatory.
One of the greatest gifts we can give to succeeding generations is the ability to think for themselves, and that means challenging the government monopoly of thought in education directly. It will be a struggle. All it takes is a trip to the ruins of the Berlin Wall to remind us that governments never give up power voluntarily. It is up to us to reassert our rights and recover our responsibilities.
Venitis points out that half of one's knowledge is outdated within four years! Thinking should be the top priority of education. The proper goal of education is to foster the conceptual development of the child, to instill in him the knowledge and cognitive powers needed for mature life. It involves taking the whole of human knowledge, selecting that which is essential to the child's conceptual development, presenting it in a way that allows the student to clearly grasp both the material itself and its value to his life, and thereby supplying him with both crucial knowledge and the rational thinking skills that will enable him to acquire real knowledge ever after.
Unschool refers to a range of educational practices on allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including child directed play, game play, household responsibilities, and social interaction, rather than through the confines of a school. Unschool differs from school principally in that standard curricula and of school, are counterproductive to the goal of maximizing the education of each child.
Venitis asserts that public school employee unions are politically partisan and polarizing institutions. 95% of their contributions have gone to antivenitists. Not entirely coincidentally, venitists have often accused these unions of simultaneously raising the cost and lowering the quality of public schools. Many advocates of charter schools, vouchers, education tax credits, homeschoolig, and unschooling, have cited union political influence as the greatest impediment to their chosen reforms
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