The Federal Observer

The National Education Association (NEA) meets every year for a big national convention and teachers from all over the country show up for this event.

An agenda is usually presented showing all the things nationally that the NEA is either for or against. Many of the issues they choose to address have little or nothing to do with education, but everything to do with their leftist worldview.

While many have heard of the NEA, they don’t have any idea of how long it has been around or what it really does, only that many of their kids’ teachers belong to it. The compliant media, when it reports on NEA conventions, is not about to give out any more real information than it has to. In all fairness to public school teachers, there are some that are not in favor of what this “teachers union” does, but their opposition is generally ignored or ridiculed.

Samuel Blumenfeld in his informative book “NEA, Trojan Horse in American Education” has given us a view of the NEA that is seldom presented in other places.

My life began the moment I broke out of my cell of doubt created by the public school system! Every summer vacation I felt like my sentence had ended, and the only sad thought was that it would begin again, in just a few short months, when school started again. Most kids feel the same way; they hate school but they go because they are trained to believe it is the Great American Expectation. Remember, we are told time after time that if we do well in school then we will be successful. So we strive to please our parents, our teachers, the system, and ourselves. This is the secret, cruel pressure that molds our spirits.

Most schools today, both public and private have kindergartens. They have become an accepted part of educational life in this country and others as well.

This was not always so. When I first attended public school, way back in the mid-1940s, there was no kindergarten where I went. Although some schools undoubtedly had them, all schools did not. They had not become totally entrenched, although their promoters had been working on that project with much zeal. Their efforts seem to have paid off. Kindergarten is now as much a part of school life as the seventh grade.

~ Foreword ~
Thank you, Joel Turtel. This is the finest commentary on the American FED-ucation system I have ever read. Maybe the rest of us should follow this lesson. Do you want better for your children and grandchildren? Then this is one place, that YOU can make a difference! Start by going to the local school board meetings, then run for a seat on that board. Let’s take OUR schools back – then we have a chance with the country. (JB)

“Daddy?,” said the beautiful, ten-year-old girl to her father.

Her father, Josh Hanlan, sat in front of his computer, studying complex engineering designs on the screen. He didn’t seem to hear his daughter.

Mary Hanlan knew how engrossed her father got when he was working, and smiled adoringly at his handsome face peering intently at the computer, clicking his mouse furiously, while his brows furrowed in concentration. She knew she had to use her ingenuity to get his attention, and it had become a game between them on how she did this. She went alongside him and tickled his left ear lightly with the feather. Josh waved his hand next to his ear, as if swatting away an annoying fly. Mary giggled and tickled his ear again while she said “Daddy” again, this time more insistently. Finally, her father turned in his chair and noticed his daughter standing there.

“Hello, sweetheart,” he said, as he smiled with delight on seeing his daughter. I didn’t notice you. I’m working on the designs of the new engine for my company. You want to see what it looks like so far, honey?”

Mary loved that her father shared his work with her, shared his love of science and engineering. It was what got Mary fascinated with science since she was three years old, sitting on her father’s lap in front of the computer screen, while he let her click the mouse as he was designing. But she didn’t have time to do that now.

“No Daddy, I have to talk to you about something first,” she said.

“O.K. sweetheart, what is it?,” he said, as he turned around in his chair and gave her his full attention. Mary loved her father’s kind, bright, playful brown eyes. “By the way,” he said, “how come you’re home in the middle of the morning? Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“Moral courage is the courage of one’s convictions, the courage to see things through. The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age old struggle – the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other.” – Douglas MacArthur

America has become a “band aid” society. Daily we are bombarded with a vast litany of social ills. Some are critical, some are serious and some are just worrisome. Our country has been invaded by a vast army of people from other countries. They are here illegallythey are costing enormous amounts of money to provide health care, housing and education. I need not belabor the problem.

I often wonder if our neighbors to the South would be so patient, so understanding and so eager to resolve the problems created by this massive influx if the situation were reversed. This is a worrisome problem to most Americans. Our taxes increase, our wages decrease, unemployment in some sectors rises.

~ Introduction ~
“Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause “ – Clarence Darrow

William Ockham died in 1349. He was an English logician who gave the world the maxim“Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” He further amplified this in his writings. He said “It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer.” The term “Ockham’s Razor” has been used for centuries by scholars as the logical solution for complex problems. The dictionary defines “Ockham’s Razor” as: A rule of science and philosophy stating that entities should not be multiplied needlessly, which is interpreted to mean that the simplest of two competing theories is preferable and that an explanation for unknown phenomena should first be attempted by what is already known. In the vernacular of the layman, it is preferable always to use the KISS method. This means simply “keep it simple stupid.”

Politically Correct Historic Ignorance Is Not Bliss Because History Often Repeats Itself.

Children are not learning the history of their country, the school subject at which America’s young perform at their worst.

On history tests given to 31,000 pupils by the National Assessment of Education Progress, the “Nation’s Report Card,” most fourth-graders could not identify a picture of Abraham Lincoln or a reason why he was important.

If you want to fix America, you have to fix America’s broken education system; and you must start by getting rid of the one we have.

I’ve been up in front of too many classrooms in too many different schools, and had lunch in too many different teachers’ lounges, to be wrong about this. I have also sat through more school board meetings, in more towns, and pored over more school budgets, than I care to remember.

“Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” – George Washington from his Farewell Address, 1796

"My administration has been working hard..."

It’s the end of the school year, so Barack Hussein Obama is including commencement speech whistle stops on his 2012 campaign itinerary.

In Memphis, where Obama delivered one such speech to budding sycophants at Booker T. Washington high school, he asserted, “My administration has been working hard to make sure that we … encourage the kind of change that’s led not by Washington, DC, but by teachers and principals and parents…” (Notice the order in which he lists the agents of change: “teachers and principals and parents.”)

Of course, “the kind of change” led by socialist unions in government schools across the nation is already in lock step with what “Washington, DC” dictates. They’re both bent upon churning out legions of useful idiots necessary to ensure incremental implementation of Democratic Socialism. Of incremental implementation, Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev once said, “We can’t expect the American people to jump from capitalism to communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have communism.”