It goes beyond a failure to find ideas that increase education; many have embraced ideas that are clearly destructive. Our experts really don’t seem all that interested in education as most people understand this term. Reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography, for example, don’t seem to be priorities. What we see in education makes sense only if we assume that our educators have an agenda we don’t know about, or that they are malevolent, or both.
So what agenda, you’re wondering, are they actually focused on? What’s the answer to the mystery? Here is my deduction: that those at the top of the Education Industrial Complex, since the time of John Dewey, have been collectivists first, and educators second or third. The goal of creating an educated child was too often superceded by the goal of creating a cooperative child.
Broadly speaking, they undermined educational success in two ways. First, they found reasons to delete and dilute the curriculum. Second, the things they did teach, they often taught in confusing, unhelpful ways. I could reel off a list of 50 failed pedagogies, none of which lived up to the hype or the hope, things such as New Math, Reform Math, Constructivism, Bilingual Education, Self Esteem, et cetera.
The paradigm of bad pedagogies, of course, is Whole Word, I.E. any non-phonics way of teaching reading. Around 1931, every public school in the country was told that phonics was out, and the children should be taught by Look-Say (think Dick and Jane). This switch is one of most amazing (and revealing) events in American educational history. Try to think of another instance where a profession abruptly decided to reverse everything ordinarily done for centuries.
Once you assume that all these conclusions are true, you find there’s no mystery at all. Everything that’s happened in American education is as logical as 1 + 2 = 3. My estimation is that if we tossed out the ideological admixture, we’d see steady improvement. Don’t think we can improve things by tweaking around the edges. We need an intervention. We need surgery.
Month: June 2009 (page 4 of 4)
Had the opportunity to drive up from beautiful San Diego to Orange County today. One of the great things about Southern California is that driving 50 or 60 miles to do something or see someone (which would have driven my mom and dad nutso) is rather routine. I just cranked up some tunes, and this morning because it was misting a bit I chose Gordon Lightfoot and all that kind of folksy stuff, and away I went.
Teri Lussier always talks about her beloved Dayton, and it delights me that she takes the time to share something that suspends the day to day real estate chatter for some homespun fireside chatter. So while driving up past Camp Pendleton today I wondered aloud how many people have been so blessed to live in a place so steeped in natural beauty, just within miles reach of the whirling world of business.
Mountains to the east, Catalina silhouetted in the overcast Pacific to the west, (yeah, really 26 miles across the sea) lying low on the horizon, and no traffic to speak of. I was filled with actual joy. Now there’s a word you don’t read much of on a real estate posting these days. But there it was, palpable and real, and filling me up as I drifted up Interstate 5 at 70 miles an hour, singing along to the music.
Scott Schang is a mortgage broker, and really a remarkable guy on top of that. I already mentioned to you in a previous posting that I was able and blessed to meet Scott at the Unchained conference a couple of months ago in Phoenix. We’ve continued our relationship, and today I was driving up to solidify some of the ideas he had for helping me market my database of potential homebuyers.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I pulled into the parking lot of his business to find it amuck with “Open During Construction” signs, jackhammers, compressors, painters, welders, yellow tape, plastic and sandbags all around the whole business complex. I took out my trusty video camera and Read more
My query is sincere. But first, I want to make a distinction between a REALTOR and a licensed real estate agent. NAR tells consumers to seek the counsel of REALTOR – in fact, make sure they are working with a REALTOR, leading consumers to believe that a licensed real estate agent and REALTOR are synonymous. They are not.
A REALTOR is a licensed real estate agent who is also a member of the National Association of REALTORs, who’s mission is:
The core purpose of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® is to help its members become more profitable and successful.
Clearly absent from the mission is any reference to the consumer.
The vision of the National Association of REALTORS is equally insightful:
The NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® strives to be the collective force influencing and shaping the real estate industry. It seeks to be the leading advocate of the right to own, use, and transfer real property; the acknowledged leader in developing standards for efficient, effective, and ethical real estate business practices; and valued by highly skilled real estate professionals and viewed by them as crucial to their success.
Working on behalf of America’s property owners, the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® provides a facility for professional development, research and exchange of information among its members and to the public and government for the purpose of preserving the free enterprise system, and the right to own, use, and transfer real property.
I find NARs Vision statement to be interesting. While the concept of advocacy is referenced – It seeks to be the leading advocate of the right to own, use, and transfer real property – NARs advocacy serves first and foremost its members. Again, distinctly absent from the vision statement is a direct reference to the consumer – ultimately the guy or gal who parts with their money to own, use, and transfer real property.
As licensed real estate agents, our behavior is bound and regulated by our state laws, written in the interest of protecting the public from unscrupulous professionals. Licensing is the state’s way to insure that a minimum standard of knowledge and behavior is achieved prior Read more
Depending upon the last significant change in your life, the answer might be predictable. I remember the first time I earned six figures. I wasn’t even aware of it ’till the tax returns were finished. I was a little flummoxed when my wife asked me how I felt. About what? She thought I was kidding, but I’d only paid attention to the taxes owed. It marked a change in how I viewed not only myself, but the new frontier of what I almost immediately began perceiving as the possible.
We all have memories found on the opposite side of that same coin — financially hard times, illness, divorce, and the rest. It’s the changes precipitating sorrow, stressful times, and personal pain and suffering in whatever form that allow us the opportunity to, as Grandma used to say, stretch ourselves. With each passing year I understand more of what she meant
Who among us hasn’t felt the sting of failure smirking at us derisively? Hard times, whether personal, financial, or any of the endless combinations we’ve all experienced, come and go.
We’re the common denominators though, aren’t we? Regardless of what comes into and/or exits our lives, we remain the constant. Given that often unpleasant reality, how we respond tells much about us, doesn’t it?
Of course, there’s change and there’s Change. I wonder how many men and women in the real estate or mortgage business will respond with heroic efforts of which they never believed they were capable? I’m reminded of the much told story of the father whose son was diagnosed with hemophilia. It was before most of modern medicine’s breakthroughs, which meant the treatment was in short supply and therefore expensive — almost $20,000 a year. In the late 1950’s, early 1960’s that was three times the median income.
He was in straight commission sales, and up ’till then had done quite well, but hadn’t ever made more than $12,000 in one year. From that year forward he never made less than $40,000. He had a reason, depending upon how you look at it, to either ensure success, or avoid Read more
In one sense, it is too bad everybody doesn’t use Microsoft’s new search, since I had two of the top ten places for Chelan real estate today. That’s higher than I rank on Google. Check it out at www.bing.com.
It also has a window that opens when your cursor it to the right of each search result that gives more information. I like that feature. I wonder how many bugs they found today?
Well, here we are on the morning many people thought would never come. Many people said they never expected that GM would actually go under. Well, under they are with approximately $178 Billion in liabilities and only $82 Billion in assets (and I think the $82 Billion includes the money that you and I gave them.)
So what difference does that make for the mortgage market? A couple of things:
- It’s not a positive thing for the housing market because it “solidifies” what we all knew anyway. There are going to be additional job losses and as we all know, additional job losses equates to additional mortgage delinquencies and housing losses which is bad for the mortgage backed securities market.
- I don’t know the exact amount but there is a LOT of money out there in GM bonds. Those bonds are now essentially worthless (from what I understand, they were “exchanged” for stock – stock that’s currently trading at 75 cents per share). This is spooking the entire bond market and pushing rates higher.
- The government announced that as the “only one who would lend to GM right now” (not exactly what they said, but close) they are putting an additional $30,000,000,000 into GM. This makes the GM bailout the largest individual company bailout and increases the risk by the government going further in debt thereby pushing up on rates.
So, GM, the one company that was supposedly too big to fail, failed and failing isn’t a good thing for the mortgage rate market.
What else is happening?
- The ISM (Industrial Supply Management Index) showed that manufacturing is still contracting but once again it’s the “less bad” type of thing. It was slowing but not as rapidly in May as it did in April.
- Personal income rose and personal spending fell in May. That means that we all made a little bit more and guess what, we didn’t go out and spend it! For the long term health of the market, this is actually a good thing that we aren’t “over consuming” but short term, it’s quite painful because so much of our economy is based on consumers Read more