75 Replies to “Give Us The Child For 12 Years And They Will Be A Socialist Forever*”

  1. I thought Leftists hated morality as an inconvenience.
    But here they are teaching it.
    Double standard.
    Ok for Leftists to say profits are bad, that right-wingers are evil for making profits, but what about Paul Martin, Jean Chretien, Al Gore, the Clintons, George Soros, etc…? They make profits. Big, fat profits.
    But if you’re the right-wing Conrad Black, they’ll fabricate false charges, somehow brainwash the jury into believing something bad was in the infamous boxes without anyone ever seeing what was in them… and throw you in a gulag because they hate wealthy right-wingers who refuse to make their newspaper empire politically-correct…

  2. Teachers have gone from trying to educate children to trying to indoctrinate them. Indeed many teachers colleges say so outright in their mission statement. It no longer matters if students can’t do multiplication, so long as they have the correct attitude towards social justice and diversity.
    Here’s a great article by Stanley Fish (!) on it:
    http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/26074024.html

  3. Perhaps the teachers union should learn a lesson from refusing to “profit from it” and give 50% of their income away to charity. Oh wait, they already do, it’s called “taxes.”

  4. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was born on March 27, 1845, at Lennep in the Lower Rhine Province of Germany, as the only child of a merchant in, and manufacturer of, cloth. His mother was Charlotte Constanze Frowein of Amsterdam, a member of an old Lennep family which had settled in Amsterdam.
    When he was three years old, his family moved to Apeldoorn in The Netherlands, where he went to the Institute of Martinus Herman van Doorn, a boarding school. He did not show any special aptitude, but showed a love of nature and was fond of roaming in the open country and forests. He was especially apt at making mechanical contrivances, a characteristic which remained with him also in later life.
    In 1862 he entered a technical school at Utrecht, where he was however unfairly expelled, accused of having produced a caricature of one of the teachers, which was in fact done by someone else.
    http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1901/rontgen-bio.html

  5. The inventor of the X-Ray died from intestinal cancer. Too bad someone hadn’t decided to profit from an MRI when he was alive.
    Ah well, just think, he shortened the waiting list!

  6. It’s good to know that the taxpayers of Sask. can now be expecting the reimbursement of the wages of the perveyors of the Character Education Program.
    This will be announced when all these people of character get back from their yearly 2-3 month paid vacation.
    It’s all for the children y’know.

  7. I hope that they follow through with this thinking and ensure that Saskatchewan refuses to profit from oil, gas and potash revenue. That way they can argue that teacher’s salaries should be frozen.
    They can also turn down their thermostats to 58 degrees in the winter and grow Vladimir Lenin beards to keep warm.

  8. “Teachers have gone from trying to educate children to trying to indoctrinate them.”
    Actually, they have succeeded totally: try to find a child who doesn’t believe in Global Warming, cannot quote from the Gospel According to Saint Al, or who doesn’t think Suzuki is John The Baptist re-incarnated. Few people have an idea about what goes on in today’s classrooms. If they did, there would be a lot of fellow-traveller “teachers” looking for work. Because of the infiltration of Marxists and eco-communists into faculties of education over the last three decades, our state education system is almost Stalinist in its ideological biases. Private schools and home schooling are the only way to give children the experience of critical thinking and the time to cultivate scepticism and logic. These are sadly lacking in our classrooms, and even more sad is he fact that the majority of teachers are themselves incapable of clear thought. Instead they present simplified and uncritical versions of the latest modish ideas. Children’s minds are too precious to our future to be left to the corrupting influence of what passes for education today.

  9. Note that the sign doesn’t say anything about “good” character.
    If, in fact, this can be defined as indoctrination then how are we any better than the former Soviets. My late mother spent the first seventeen years of her life in the former USSR. You were expected to progress from Pioneer, to Commsamolitz (spelling?) to full-fledged Communist by the time you were an adult. Fortunately, being a very strong willed independent thinker she spat on her indoctrination booklets before burying them in the countryside. Brainwashing children is a contemptable practice.

  10. What a truly frightening image this sign provides. The phrase “Character Education Program” smacks of something out of Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China. That Canadian public schools have drifted so far from the three r’s into social engineering projects is one of the reasons my children will attend private school when the time comes.

  11. I have worked with many people affiliated with Universities. While comfortable accepting the “guaranteed for life” position, they are more than willing to jump the fence and set up their own private company, if and when our (taxpayer) investment in their product seems commercially viable.

  12. “Actually, they have succeeded totally: try to find a child who doesn’t believe in Global Warming, cannot quote from the Gospel According to Saint Al, or who doesn’t think Suzuki is John The Baptist re-incarnated. ”
    Posted by: Patrick B at August 15, 2008 11:32 AM
    I’m happy to report that I’ve run into quite a few kids who are not falling into line so easily. Many of my sons’ friends are either neutral, or skeptical of the Suzuki crowd. I think it’s like most other ideas we try to pound into our kids’ heads. They begin to get suspicious when the message is a bit too over the top.
    And really, do you think any kid would associate with an old fruit fly like Suzuki? And how many beer drinking hockey fans would appreciate Suzuki messing with their fridges? It’s going to backfire.

  13. Sorry I was in the wrong frame!! I just wanted to say that the reason Dr Röentgen may not have had time to file for a patent is that his hands and other parts of his body were destroyed from the rays. He did receive the Nobel Prize. (That`s what I recall of his story, AKA legend.)
    Thomas Alva Edison filed for a similar patent in or about 1903. He had developed his own X-ray tube. Edison knew the value of a solid patent. God old Yankee ingenuity.
    I can devise a machine that takes me to the moon and back in 10 minutes and for 10 bucks, if I don`t file for a patent, it`s worthless to me. Even worst scenario if no one wants to go to the moon!!

  14. Of course the only ones who should be allowed to make a profit in the socialist is world is the gov’t or themselves.
    Of course then there was also our former Premier Calvert, “The Reverend Lovejoy” who believed in “False Prophets” 😉

  15. Seems that our Public School System has an attitude problem. If they cannot accomplish their goals by presenting a quality product they will do it by indoctorination. (No better example of that than the religion of global warming)
    How could we have fallen so far, so fast ? From the early days when Canada was first settled and the public school system was given a blank cheque – a property tax dollar guarantee.
    This is what happens when you are handed dollars with no questions asked. When you allow tenure. When you eliminate competition.
    It would corrupt most of us. It will attract those so inclined.

  16. “Teachers have gone from trying to educate children to trying to indoctrinate them.”
    Some do; most, however, simply share the beliefs of the great, the good, and the Globe & Mail. Thus, they order their Grade V students to write letters for Amnesty International, collect money for Unicef,and do “service” at a variety of United Way agencies. It never occurs to them that anyone (except perhaps a fundamentalist Christian crazy) would object to these bodies that have been endorsed by our national opinion formers.
    “Because of the infiltration of Marxists and eco-communists into faculties of education …”
    There has been no “infiltration”; this suggests some hidden conspiracy. Those who run Canadian universities are, for the most part, those who were young radicals in the 1960s, and they have, like their predecessors, continue to hire people who think like them. You will find few ideological differences between the average Education professor and her counterparts in other Faculties or other urban professionals.
    “Instead [teachers] present simplified and uncritical versions of the latest modish ideas.”
    This is quite true, but it was just as true in the 1880s, 1930s, 1950s, and 1990s.
    “The phrase “Character Education Program” smacks of something out of Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China.”
    The problem with this kind of comment is that it ignores the fact that “character education” was a central goal of the people who established the public schools of Canada in the 19th century, and their aims were just as political and just as far removed from the concerns and values of most Canadians at the time.
    “… Canadian public schools have drifted so far from the three r’s into social engineering projects …”
    Sorry, but our public schools have been “social engineering” since their inception. We were encouraging children to “reform” their parents of their bad habits (drinking, selling their votes, etc.)over a century ago. David Suzuki would have been quite at home in the teachers’ colleges and ministries of education at almost any point in Canadian educational history.

  17. My children aren’t victims of this type of indoctrination because I immediately counter it with critical questions and a healthy dose of common sense.
    Parents have to remain vigilant, ask questions, and teach their children to do the same.

  19. “That’s what intellectual work is all about, the evaluation, not the celebration, of interests, beliefs, and identities; after all, interests can be base, beliefs can be wrong, and identities are often irrelevant to an inquiry.”
    Thanks for that link, one of the most enjoyable articles I’ve read in a long time.

  21. “Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.”
    ~Vladimir Lenin
    Patents were invented so that inventors could profit from their inventions and not have them stolen by people of low character.
    Some great inventions have been lost to humanity for lack of patents.
    Bessler’s Wheel for example.
    http://www.besslerwheel.com/

  22. They’ve repackaged lib-left ideology as ‘character’ and now they’re selling it in the schools. They had to. Too many parents are pulling their kids out of the public (socialist) system and the ‘educators’ needed a quasi-conservative hook to bring them back.

  23. Yeah, it’s a real shame about the “besslerwheel”, you know with the price of gas and all.

  24. The essential fallacy of the Left:
    Without the existence of great personal and corporate wealth, how exactly would a government generate any substantial revenues to fund its social programmes?*
    * Such as, for example, a “Character Education Program”?

  25. I fully belive in and support the “Character Education Program”.
    Only I like to call them Parents.

  26. It should not be the purview of the public school system to teach ‘Character’. That’s my job, as a parent. Hands off, public schools.
    We’ve allowed mission creep into public education. I draw the line at character education, and I will let every educator that reads this blog here know how much time and effort I spend unteaching their version of ‘Character’.

  27. Roseberry:
    You bring up some good points, but I don’t recall teachers ever being so blatant and overt in their quest for social engineering. Indeed some education students have been drummed out of college for not showing sufficient committment towards social justice.
    That the idea that the best thing you could do to advance social justice is to thoroughly and rigorously educate the underprivileged seems not to have occured to them.
    Here’s a site discussing problems at Columbia University:
    http://www.thefire.org/index.php/case/725.html

  30. Doug:
    Where do they get the wages in the first place? It’s called “taxes”.
    Civil servants don’t pay taxes. I pay taxes, and they just have some of my tax money clawed back into the system.

  31. Rotgen never saved a life either.
    Thankfully for mankind, his invention was further developped by capitalists, including Thomas Edison, with the aim of making profits. They have improved the technology beyond recognition, are saving thousands of lives daily and are raking in millions.
    I want schools to teach my children to care about human life.

  32. I don’t think anyone has pointed this out yet:
    How exactly do you “invent” an x-ray? That’s like inventing fire.
    You discover x-rays, like you discover fire.
    You can invent a x-ray machine, but that is totally different from what this billboard suggests.

  36. Typical collectivist revisionist hype.
    The part of this tale of mythological social altruism that was omitted is that Rontgen’s austerity in “freely giving the world the X-ray” (as if this was some selfless act of the moral superiority of collectivist thought) is that Ronthen was simply an x-ray theorist…profitability would be marginal.
    It was a capitalist profit-motivated inventor and scientist named Thomas Edison who perfected Rontgen’s ideas and created and manufactured the first practical X-ray tubes and machines…pragmatic capitalist ideals dictated that by making this technology affordable through refinement, simplification and mass production, the needs of the population for medical x-rays could be met…funny how that works…that Capitalism has made more practical life and time saving inventions available to more people than any other system of commerce from collectivist alturism to socialist austerity.
    So in objective terms the inventor of the first practical x-ray machine was Edison…who did profit from making this medical wonder affordable to many people.
    …but you won’t see these more factual complex concepts directed at the simps who fall for altruistic collectivist messaging.

  37. too bad the ten commandments are not taught. for all you anti bible people, one question. tell me which of the ten should we not follow? oh, i know, thou shalt have no god before me. of course when you delete that one you can ignore all others. idiots.

  38. djb. you are right. my wife is a swivel servant. she finally got it when i pointed out to her that my taxes were equal to her gross income. i am retired on my own dime, no gov pension except the cpp and i had to pay, so i will draw.

  39. Yes, it’s sad: like most other gullible, uninformed Canadians, most teachers are useful idiots. If the words sound “nice”, as in the “Human Rights” Commission or the Charter of “Rights and Freedoms”, with no counter weight in their lives by which to judge–no religious faith, very little to no knowledge of facts, and no critical thinking skills: what for?—teachers just take the bromides as a given. They also constantly get sucked in to these “character building” and “anti-bullying” schemes, even though the more the system has had of both, the worse the barbari . . . whoops! . . . the kids’ behaviour becomes.
    All these shallow, didactic programs (which keep changing: more $$ for bureaucrats and phony gurus) are, as David Warren notes, “ethics for [people] with no morals”, a combination that always fails. Sadly, most teachers just go with the flow: another set of scripts to use drama to “instil” better social skills? OK. Another ten character traits—one for each month—to reinforce? OK. Another Behaviour Code, based on the ten characteristics? OK. (Except that administration refuses to impose any meaningful consequences for even serious infractions, rendering the various codes null and void.) An anti-bullying community walk, with everyone wearing something pink, to . . . well, I’m not sure . . . How about a new Mission Statement that says the school is committed to making learning “fun”? (Imagine the HRC complaints if they had jurisdiction!) All these time wasting efforts have added up to minus zero: the entitled, self-referential, selfish egotism of a critical mass of our Teflon children continues to build, like a volcano.
    With all this time and energy going into a new version of alchemy—trying to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse—the real job of the schools—to educate our children—is a lost opportunity. The public education systems are diseased from top to bottom and the brainwashed results are now the younger teachers flooding the system. Although they dislike the incursions into their time to teach the (overloaded: wide and shallow) curriculum, they haven’t yet figured out that all the attempts to reform the children’s increasingly anti-social behaviours—what would one expect when they’ve all been given myriad “rights”?—with no meaningful consequences are bound to fail.
    The public school system is a mess: being “nice” to all the kids all the time is about the only behaviour that won’t get a teacher into trouble—forget all the other, nasty fallout from such a jaundiced approach (besides the teacher’s complete degradation) .
    What the kids really need—strict guidelines and stricter, even unpleasant (horrors!) consequences—is off the radar altogether. “OISE rules.” Politically correct gender, race, sexual, environmental, etc. politics trump everything else and have infected every level and every nook and cranny of the system. Administrators are legally bound to comply. This is a juggernaut, with the unions and professional organizations being fully complicit: push back at one’s own expense.
    There are a few teacher holdouts. They quietly subvert the system by doing the job of actually carrying out academic pursuits very well—parents like that. They will do a minimum of the character c**ap required, and will do it in their own way. Their main character building program will be hands-on, in the classroom: the actual running of their classes, where they set high academic and behavioural standards, and really hold the kids to account. (That’s sometimes tricky, as parents and admin. often run interference for the worst offenders. But some of those get won over and then don’t tattle on the teacher. But if they do, no matter how tarnished their reputation, the teacher’s always hauled in to explain him/herself: how counterproductive to character building is that?)
    The huge irony is that schools are now so political, it’s often a dog eat dog environment—very malicious and unpleasant. Character building? It needs to be modelled. Public schools are now about the last place one would expect that to happen.

  40. Actually if you bothered to speak with anyone who calls themselves liberal you would know that we are all probably a capitalist/socialist mix.
    Most think that everyone should have access to a free education up to grade 12, with a heavily subsidized university/college system.
    Most believe that everyone should have access to free universal healthcare. That in a civilized society we take care of our sick and injured so that they don’t have to deal with the risk of financial ruin on top of their other problems.
    Most believe that we should help mitigate the problems caused by poverty, and give kids born into poor and f*cked up families a shot at competing with kids born in privilege.
    That said and done… you can make as much effen money as you want. But a big house. Buy ten. Right around on your stupid jet ski. Who cares?
    But don’t be so greedy that you trap millions in poverty so that you can be a little bit richer.
    Finally, here is the deal… the people you think of as “leftist” almost entirely represent the political centre. We just seem left to you, because you are so far to the right.
    You are in short… rightwing nutjobs, and you share the same level of brain-funtion as the PETA folks.
    P.S. Fair is fair… Kate, that painting you lost is fantastic. Hope you get it back.

  41. The huge irony is that schools are now so political, it’s often a dog eat dog environment — very malicious and unpleasant.
    Strange that the caring sharing left can often be so vicious. In the profit-driven corporate world, toxic environments are eventually rewarded with loss and failure, as they should be. In the public world they are allowed to fester.

  42. It takes teachers for real ignorance.
    God invented Xrays. Wilhelm Roentgen discovered them.
    Presumptively Roentgen was comfortably off, probably partly from inherited money (earned in trade) and
    partly from his professorship.
    In any event he donated his Nobel prize money to charity.
    The issue of government support was raised above.
    NSERC, the principal Canadian government granting agency for the natural sciences and engineering,
    strongly encourages commercialisation of the research which it supports.
    If an NSERC-supported researcher discovers something patentable, and which then makes money
    (most patents don’t) NSERC will love him.

  43. So he didn’t take a dime… big deal.
    His machine also killed many people too. It was so misused by eveyone. Heck they even used it to x-ray for feet for shoes.
    I bet they missed that part.

  45. I thought in a free society, one can choose to be charitable or mercenary. Would you feel better if the inventor wrung every last penny out of his invention, would that be good character? Or is this just another chance to elicit knee jerk cliched responses from such wonderful people of sterling character?

  46. John – you are making typical leftist conceptual statements and they are filled with errors.
    We don’t have free public education; we are heavily taxed to pay for that education. Furthermore, this education’s curriculum is not satisfactory to a great many taxpayers, who don’t want to see their children indoctrinated into the sophistry of OISE style socialism.
    We don’t have free health care; we are heavily taxed and we are finding out that publicly funded services are inefficient and extremel costly. More than 70% of the funds of our taxes goes to salaries of bureaucrats.
    Wealth is not the opposite of poverty. A society that is unable to generate wealth cannot exist, because wealth enables the society to build infrastructures for the future. A society without wealth will only be able, possibly, to sustain day-by-day life. It will be unable to develop anything for the future – such as the long term monies required for scientific research, such as the buildings and equipment required for mass production of products. In other words, it’s just a collection of people. Not a society.
    Poverty is not a cause of asocial behaviour. Most of the immigrants at the turn of the century who came to N. America landed without a dime. They didn’t produce a generation of criminals but a generation of hardworking citizens.
    But choosing a lifestyle that rejects consideration of others, choosing to steal and rob – that’s a choice, not a result of poverty.
    No, I don’t think that the ‘left’ represents the centre; I think it represents the left. What is the left?
    A mentality that considers that people should all live in the same way, in a mode that is decided for them by the Government. This Government is an elite, akin to the Platonic rulers, who set up universal programs, who work within an enormous bureaucracy – ruling over the ‘peasants’.
    The left rejects dissent. It permits and supports diversity, because grouping people into distinct ‘blocs’ that don’t assimilate or collaborate with each other enables the govt to control the people. But the left rejects dissent and questions and criticism.
    The left has no understanding of the need for wealth production; it thinks that money should be equally spread to all. It therefore has no understanding of TIME. The fact is – that money has to be put into some production goods that take a long time to mature (industries, research) and that using it all up on day-to-day life is disastrous.
    The left is also a ‘kept’ people. By this I mean that at no time in history has a society ever been able to live within the socialist redistribution public ideologies of the left. The only people who can do this, are small bands of hunters/gatherers in groups of 30, who ‘eat their way’ out of a territory and then move on. But no large society can do that.
    That’s because no population can live without access to wealth, ie, to an ability to move into the future. So, leftist societies are always set up as totalitarian; they are maintained by force; however, economically, they either collapse, or must move into wealth inequality, or, must rely on being embedded within the might of another nation (Canada’s economy embedded within that of the US).
    Another characteristic of the left, is that they tend to insult people with whom they disagree – calling them names (nutjobs) etc.

  47. Quote: But don’t be so greedy that you trap millions in poverty so that you can be a little bit richer.
    Oh no you don’t, it wasn’t us Cons that devised a system called Multiculture. Under the guise of diversity the liberals have imprisoned hundreds of thousands of immigrants and the working poor in ethnic, racial, and religious enclaves. You Dear Liberal did that to those people, not me or the Conservative Party and you are doing everything legally possible to keep those people poor, uneducated and simmering in misery. So don’t you dare blame us, the Liberals amassed millions of dollars in surpluses in our social safty programs and they spend not one red cent (to busy diverting cash to their adscam buddies) on those living in poverty, the elderly, the sick or the mentally ill. Climb off your self righteous horse Dear, you created the mess called Multiculture and you don’t even have the guts to say the word anymore instead you fools and jackasses mewl Diversity.
    Just once take reponsibility for a social experiment that went horribly wrong, but real people are suffering for you ignorance and arrogance.

  48. I’m so dumb I thought it was saying that the inventor of the X-ray refused to profit from Saskatchewan public schools. It took me a few seconds to figure it out.. I profited from the Nova Scotian public school system. That’s why it took me so long to get it.
    D.

  49. “The phrase “Character Education Program” smacks of something out of Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China.”
    The problem with this kind of comment is that it ignores the fact that “character education” was a central goal of the people who established the public schools of Canada in the 19th century, and their aims were just as political and just as far removed from the concerns and values of most Canadians at the time.
    “… Canadian public schools have drifted so far from the three r’s into social engineering projects …”
    Sorry, but our public schools have been “social engineering” since their inception. We were encouraging children to “reform” their parents of their bad habits (drinking, selling their votes, etc.)over a century ago. David Suzuki would have been quite at home in the teachers’ colleges and ministries of education at almost any point in Canadian educational history.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Fair enough, and I’m certain there’s truth in your comments Roseberry. But I have to agree with rabbit who says, “I don’t recall teachers ever being so blatant and overt in their quest for social engineering.”
    Recalling my educational experience from the mid-70s to the late 80s, I recall learning about mathematics, the various sciences, literature, history, music, etc. Computers became big in the mid-80s so computer education was introduced at that time. I don’t recall any blatant curricula along the lines of Character Re-Education (sic).
    Historical record notwithstanding, this kind of thing makes me distinctly uncomfortable.

  50. “Would you feel better if the inventor wrung every last penny out of his invention, would that be good character?”
    jakealope, you miss the point. The implication is that it would have been unethical for him to have profited from his work.
    “Character education empowers students to become responsible members of society by encouraging ethical development” (quote)

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