Death of America

[Athena]

What makes America America, or France France, or Russia Russia, or a Jew a Jew, or a native American a member of his/her tribe? These all are cultures, right? If the culture dies then there is no meaning to being a member of these groups.

Public education is like a genie in a bottle. The defined purpose is the wish and the students are the genie. In 1958 the US changed that wish, and the America that stands today, is nothing as the nation defended in two world wars. The primary purpose of public education,in the US, was to transmit a culture, until 1958. In 1958 the purpose of education was changed to preparing the young for a technological society with unknown values. Public education has taken our young down the same path of the Germany that was the first to lead to the New World Order. That is, liberal education was replaced with education for technology for military and industrial purpose, and the US is now on the brink of crisis.

The winning candidate this year, will be the man who does best job of convincing the majority that he can lead the US in a new direction. I say, unless we return to liberal education, the direction of the US will not change. Our military might is no longer in the hands of citizens, but in the hands of industrialist and capitalist, and the values behind this military might, is not the protection of human lives, but economic goals. No president can change our reality, without changing public education and our mass conscious, and then the change will take years, and may not come soon to save the America that is dying with its elderly.

[1Samuel8]

Maybe it is me but it seems like there is a lot of different discussion topics in the opening post.

First, I believe you put public education on too high of a pedestal. Education and schooling is just a glorified day care service. It gives teachers jobs and in turn, it gives parents more flexibility with their jobs.

Second, there is hope. As the baby boomers die off, people in the Western world will gradually see less financial stress.

[Peter_Kropotkin]

Athena:What makes America America, or France France, or Russia Russia, or a Jew a Jew, or a native American a member of his/her tribe? These all are cultures, right? If the culture dies then there is no meaning to being a member of these groups."

K: you have a couple of different things going on here. What is the value of and even more basic, what is a culture? and why does it matter.

A: Public education is like a genie in a bottle. The defined purpose is the wish and the students are the genie. In 1958 the US changed that wish, and the America that stands today, is nothing as the nation defended in two world wars. The primary purpose of public education,in the US, was to transmit a culture, until 1958. In 1958 the purpose of education was changed to preparing the young for a technological society with unknown values. Public education has taken our young down the same path of the Germany that was the first to lead to the New World Order. That is, liberal education was replaced with education for technology for military and industrial purpose, and the US is now on the brink of crisis.

K: I think to blame public education is fairly simplistic. You have several things you can look at
including education that can the source of our issues. My mom who is 74 blames Dr. Spock for his book which
was published in 1946 called “Baby and child care” as being the the primary cause for the downfall of western society.
It is tough to blame one or two things.

A: The winning candidate this year, will be the man who does best job of convincing the majority that he can lead the US in a new direction. I say, unless we return to liberal education, the direction of the US will not change. Our military might is no longer in the hands of citizens, but in the hands of industrialist and capitalist, and the values behind this military might, is not the protection of human lives, but economic goals. No president can change our reality, without changing public education and our mass conscious, and then the change will take years, and may not come soon to save the America that is dying with its elderly."

K: another topic. Obama will win the election if he can even half convince america he can be trusted.
this election will turn on whether america feels it can trust obama. It is his election to lose. Again education plays
a role and clearly is an issue however it is an issue among many issues and needs to take its place within those issues.

Kropotkin

[Athena]

@Peter Kropotkin

K: you have a couple of different things going on here. What is the value of and even more basic, what is a culture? and why does it matter.

I like you first question. We can think of culture as the arts, and say barbarians do not have culture. Then we could say, education for a technology society with unknown values, results a barbaric society that is smart but lacks wisdom. We could say, such a society has a different social order, from older societies, and this might make the nation more prone to war.

[Athena]

@1Samuel8

Maybe it is me but it seems like there is a lot of different discussion topics in the opening post.

First, I believe you put public education on too high of a pedestal. Education and schooling is just a glorified day care service. It gives teachers jobs and in turn, it gives parents more flexibility with their jobs.

Second, there is hope. As the baby boomers die off, people in the Western world will gradually see less financial stress.

Actually, education has everything to do with culture and this is true from the beginning of human societies. Story telling around the evening fire, as the first way people transmitted their culture from on generation to the next. Throughout the course of education, it has served different purposes. Education for technology for military and industrial purpose began in Germany and here is what William James said of it in 1899:

If we reflect upon the various ideals of education that are prevalent in the different countries, we see that what they all aim at is to organize capacities for conduct. This is most immediately obvious in Germany, where the explicitly avowed aim of the higher of the higher education is to turn the student into an instrument for advancing scientific discovery. The German universities are proud of the number of young specialists whom they turn out every year,- not necessarily men of any original force of intellect, but men so trained to research that when their professor gives them an historical or philosophical thesis to prepare, or a bit of laboratory work to do, with a general indiscation as to the best method, they can go off by themselves and use apparatus and consult sources in such a way as to grind out in the requisite number of months some little pepper-corn of new truth worthy of being added to the store of extant human information on that subject. Little else is recognized in Germany as a man’s title to academic advancement than his ability thus to show himself an efficient instrument of researach.

In England, it might seem at first as if the higher education of the university aimed at the production of sertain static types of character rather the at the development of what one may call this dynamic scientific effieciency.

I am out of time, but education for self government and liberty is different from education for technology, and there is a huge, huge cultural difference.

By the way, the get rick add at the top of this thread at this moment, is highly offensive to our older value system.

[The_Paineful_Truth]

@Athena

The winning candidate this year, will be the man who does best job of convincing the majority that he can lead the US in a new direction.

No, the winning candidate will be the one who misleads the people the best.

[old6598]

Obama will not win because he sucks, he is a terrorist, Obama Saddam Hussein Bin Laden is his full name and he will push the red button to self destroy the USA by redirecting all the USA nukes to the US itself. The guy is completely crazy, WATCH OUT.

The USA will lose the war against Iran, because Iran has thousands of crazy suicide bombers that will bomb the whole western world, the USA doesn’t have a chance to win against them, hell we couldn’t win in Vietnam after 15 years, we can’t win in Afghanistan after 7 years, in Irak we are in the dark.

Just create a new state in North America or Brazil called the Promised Land and bring all the Israeli there, so the whole middle east problem gets solved.

[Athena]

This is not a political debate thread. This is Social Sciences and the issue is the US is no longer the democracy it once was, because it has imitated Germany in every significant way and is now what it fought against. In 1917 Sinclair spoke at the Nation Education Association about the importance of imitating Germany.

"Now as to the advantage of another school-that of the trained industrial worker. The services of this man have always been at the premium in the Army and Navy. The military art embraces all other arts, and military training calls for experts in all departments of human activity. Young men who desire to fit themselves for any trade or profession can find in the Army or Navy an opportunity to learn practically the work of that trade or profession, and in the future economic advantage will be taken of this fact, in the scientific department of our military life that is bound to come, by assigning volunteers to those places in the military machine where they will recieve instruction as far as possible in the very trade or profession which they intend to practice in civil life after their training period.

In the division, the smallest unit of military organization containing all the elements of an independent military command, there is an appropriate place for every trade and profession, and the more scientifically trained in habits of thought and work the members of the unit are, the more efficient will be the command. The efficiency can be and will be in the future enmormously increast by the work of the teacher in academic and trade schools. In the Navy skilled industrial workers are particularly in demand and command the highest pay."

Some changes were made in public education in 1917 as we mobilized for WWI, but not until the military technology of the second world war, was education for citizenship replaced with education for technology for military and industrial purpose, and the culture of the US was completely changed through public education. The 1958 National Defense Education Act was to last only 4 years, replacing what Eisenhower called “domestic education”, but it didn’t end in 4 years, it became a permanent change that change our values and culture. We are no longer the democracy we defended in two world wars, but are as what we fought against. Now we are mechanized society, not the domestic one we once were. Our relationships and manners have greatly changed. We are specialized and dependent on authority or coordinate our activity. We have destroyed the family, compared to what the family once was.