Taking Back the Schools

I have already discussed school system administration as a Paraducer, but we need to do some more work in that area because kids grow up to be Paraducers or Consumers, and not Producers, either because they are taught that, or are taught nothing at all.

As Producers, we have to teach our own children those core values, and not only our own children, but the kids of others. Paraducers and Consumers actually like this because we Producers are teaching their children job skills, and no one wants an unemployable child. I have volunteered in schools doing just that, and it’s personally fun and rewarding. Job skills are not all we teach them, however, as I will explain.

Producers must take back the schools. It used to be that schooling stopped at about eighth grade, after a child had learned enough to work on the farm or become an apprentice to a craftsman. We should not turn the clock back 150 years, but that illustration of school-with-a-purpose is very instructive, and that is something we have lost in the past 50 years.

The education our children receive today could be termed lite without danger of FDA criticism. There is little meat, and what intellectual nourishment they do receive is pureed to the point that all the colors and tastes are mixed into a khaki gruel. No wonder children prefer the idiocy of television to the alternative of school: television is more interesting.

Instead of teaching our children to perform skills (even the word ‘perform’ has fallen out of favor), we teach them to pass standardized tests that assure us they can identify a verb, while not being able to formulate a coherent thought by pen or spoken word.

So, how do we take back our schools and children? The main thing we must do is teach the truth. We must teach these things to our children:

Honesty and integrity

Schools have no time in the day to teach honesty. If your child does not know that it is a sin to tell a lie by the time he or she reaches school age, you should be ashamed because your child is going to be shunned by the kids who do. Each instance of lying or deception should be met by punishment of a type to fit the child and crime.

When I was in elementary school, there were kids who could not be trusted. They would steal and lie and cheat, and we knew after the first month of school who they were. These kids knew that they were distrusted and disliked, without being told by the rest of us, and they became bullies and thugs as the years passed. Their parents did them a huge disservice by not teaching integrity, and they are likely still paying the price in low paying Consumer jobs.

These things are not taught in our schools.

There is a law of sowing and reaping that cannot be avoided

One way that society weakens our children is to teach that you can get away with anything you want to do under the right conditions. This is of course a lie, but is true often enough (10%?) that kids keep giving it a shot, and continue to work the program into adulthood. The net result is a life of pain and agony, emotionally, spiritually and financially. But people who are confused about the basics of life are easier to lead like sheep, are the not?

You must teach your kids and other parents’ kids about sowing and reaping. Keeping your word in discipline matters is the first step. If you threaten discipline and then wimp out, you are damaging your child.

Beyond that, teach your kids about sowing and reaping from and early age, literally, by describing how it works. “If you treat your friends badly, they will do the same to you.” Kids are not stupid; they will see these patterns in their lives and the lives of the kids around them. There are so many pathetic parents out there that it’s pretty obvious sowing and reaping is as pervasive as the law of gravity, sadly.

“Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.” – C.S. Lewis

This is not taught in our schools.

Self discipline

Imbue a child with an IQ of 200, innate sports ability, a great personality and sense of humor, and you’d think that’s about all he needs. He’ll be the next Albert Einstein or Schweitzer.

But there’s something important missing: Self discipline. All the talents in the world are of not much value if you cannot control your own basic urges to eat and mate! How many promising careers were ruined by marital infidelity, or an uncontrolled temper, or inability to buckle down and learn something new?

Teach a child self discipline and he will be able to make up for his shortcomings with hard work, becoming a wealthier and more powerful Producer. Life’s struggles are not so difficult if you can control your own heart and mind.

This is not taught in our schools.

Leadership

Paraducers want what type of people to populate our planet? Followers! The last thing they need is a bunch of Producers with great ideas and the energy and money to make them happen.

You can fight that by teaching your child to lead. So many situations are ripe for this. As young ones play, assign each child a leadership role at various times. For teens, do the same thing, and let the others know that graceful service is important as well, for you cannot lead if you have not followed at one time or another.

Leadership is so important because a young person who has learned to lead cannot be led around by the nose for long, by a Paraducer or even a Producer. A child who has seen both sides of the coin will not be easily deceived.

This is not taught in our schools.

Right is right and wrong is wrong

Society hates the concept of right and wrong because it is so condemning. “You are so judgmental,” they say. Without right and wrong, Paraducers can do anything they wish to reinforce their position, no matter who it hurts or what it costs.

But if we teach our kids to do right and not wrong, are we not putting them at a disadvantage to the subset of immoral Paraducers? Perhaps in the short term, but most Consumers and Producers are honest, and dishonest Paraducers wither, albeit sometimes slowly. Sowing and reaping take a while to work in certain cases, but that means on the positive side that a Producer who does right will eventually be rewarded.

"Whenever you find a man who says he doesn't believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later." – C.S. Lewis

Take two children and give one of them two cookies and the other one cookie. Favoritism, in this example, is wrong, and those kids, be they two years or twenty years of age, will tell you about it.

This is not taught in our schools.

There is a poor, good, better and excellent to every action of ours in life

Another Paraducer ploy is to remove or smear the grading scale of life. Saying that you are excellent at basketball is interpreted as an insult to short people; how insensitive. They say we must expunge all superlative references from our vocabulary.

That is the witch’s brew for mediocrity, for if you cannot know that you are less than the best, how can you improve? Without comparison of ourselves with others and with proper standards, we atrophy into excellent television viewers, and not much more.

Even if your kid’s school preaches this homogeneity, your child does not have to succumb. Challenge your child physically and intellectually. It only takes a few exercises (a long jumping contest, a memory drill, balancing a book on her head) to teach your child that there is a good, better and best, and the best thing to be is the best, no matter what the teacher says.

Once your child learns this, his road to a life as a successful Producer will be straight, though not easy (let’s hope).

This is not taught in our schools.

The term ‘fair’ does not take a modifier

How many times have you heard someone say, “that’s more fair”? We hear it all the time with affirmative action, where one group is punished for the sins of its grandparents by being forced to pay to make the system “more fair” for others. Does that make sense?

I have an analogy that will instantly crystallize my reasoning in your mind. Let’s say I sell peaches for $1 per pound. You want to buy four peaches from me, so I put them on the scale and weigh them. What if the scale is not calibrated correctly, so it reads too much weight? You will be overcharged, and of course that’s not fair. What if the scale reads too little weight? That’s not fair to me as the merchant. The only ‘fair’ calibration for the scale is one pound of peaches = one pound reading on the scale. That’s the only fair calibration.

You see, when we start shading the word ‘fair’, we open ourselves to any manner of arbitrary unfairness. If one pound of peaches = 9/10 of a pound tomorrow, then it could equal 8/10 the next day, less the next, until I am out of business. Or, I could adjust my scales daily until you could not afford even one peach.

Thousands of years ago, King Solomon wrote in the Bible’s Book of Proverbs (chapter 11, verse 1), “The LORD abhors dishonest scales, but accurate weights are his delight.” ^[34] This is not a new idea!

Regarding college admissions as an example, fair is fair and entrance test scores should be considered without any reference to an applicant’s race or gender. If the women’s rights or minority communities want more of their ranks in the best colleges, then their Producer leaders should run prep courses teaching them the material, teaching them to be excellent. It will only take one generation of such training to blow gender and racial inequities out of the water. I’m training my daughters likewise, and so should you.

But with the skewing of ‘fairness’ to include underperformers, the entire system has to be skewed, from birth to death, else the underperformers will not be able to compete with even average Producers.

I think that affirmative action is a hideous slap in the face and a racial and gender insult to its ‘beneficiaries’ because when they get into the workplace where there is only fierce competition for the best jobs, they will fail, becoming real victims of the Paraducers who designed the ‘fair’ system. And the Paraducers will be there, ready to enter into a dependency relationship with them.

Fair is fair, and anything else is unfair. Period.

This is not taught in our schools.

Regardless the grades we get in school, life grades harshly and unfairly

My oldest daughter was having a pretty easy time of it in school, A’s and B’s and not having to bring home any work because she completed it in school or on the bus. I sat her down and revealed to her that’s not reality. She thought that she had it made!

A simple diagram showed her that the A-F grading scale of life is crammed into the top few percent of the public school grading scale. The grade of B- in school is equivalent to an F in real life. I explained how I could not hire any high school graduate for any job except cleaning toilets or something mindlessly repetitive, because public education is so poor.

I told here that public education's ‘C’ work on the job is a real life F-. ‘B’ work gets you a reprimand. ‘A’ work is met by “you can do better.” It’s just not possible for you to complete a project in a business environment with factual errors and poor reasoning and get an A-. Not possible.

The light went on in her eyes. She pushed through that artificial success of public school and started doing better, which I knew she could.

If our kids go through life thinking that the public school grading scale is for real, then they will end up as nothing more than F grade Consumers. We have to teach them the true reality.

This is not taught in our schools.

Morals have value

One of my favorite authors is C.S.Lewis, as you know by now. Having read many of his works, I have found wisdom in his writings, they being seasoned by much study and much personal pain suffered in his life. He propounds a great definition of morality that can be understood by adult and child, ditch digger and theologian alike:

“Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonizing the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the conductor of the band wants to play.” ^[35]

Three spheres of relationships have to do with morality: Within us, in our neighborhood, and in society.

When it’s put that way, the Paraducer’s arguments about the restrictiveness of morality become folly. Morality is about getting along with your neighbors on all scales, and getting along with yourself, that is, being able to live with yourself regarding the things you do.

Teaching our kids this lesson will possibly do the most for them to produce well adjusted, resilient, tenacious adults who are able to understand their relationships and take a punch without collapsing into a wheedling mess on the floor.

Your children are not taught morals in school. They are taught how to protect themselves physically if they are immoral, say, with condoms. But two thousandths of an inch of latex rubber is about all the protection the Paraducers can offer your precious ones.

“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” – C.S. Lewis

Protect them yourself: Teach morals.

Aside from those basics, there are so many other things we can teach our children. I make sure to discuss my work with my kids, showing them what I do in my work little by little so they gradually get the big picture. It is amazing what a child can learn if taught in small bits.

As a Producer, you should be showing your child what you do at work, what education you have, and the benefits of your job. Show them your college textbooks and the awards you have received.

I once received a several thousand dollar bonus from a customer and showed the check to my daughters cold. Their eyes got so big it was funny. Then I told them, “You work hard in school and in life and you will get checks larger than this.” I could hear the gears grinding in their heads.

Help your child explore the Producer side of the world. We Producers are not terribly flashy or interested in publicity, and that’s why not too many of us are featured in prime time television specials. You know other Producers, and they are resources for your kids’ future decision making process, as you are for theirs. Your cell group should benefit your constellation of children as well.

So many things are taught wrongly in school, or are not taught at all. The founding documents are fascinating because the founders were excellent writers and conveyed their intentions by the volume. Do you know that the entire body of George Washington’s writings are bound and available at the local library and on the Internet? These even include his written orders for feed for his livestock.

We can not only divine their political leanings, we can touch their personalities.

Thomas Jefferson is quoted by various religious debaters from various times in his life. That’s convenient for them because Jefferson’s religious convictions underwent continuous transformation over the course of his life. One can find a Jefferson quote to support several religious traditions and beliefs, just by fishing through his writings for long enough.

Such insights about the founders are simply not taught in schools. Some teachers discourage reading the original documents because they contradict the teachers’ doctrines.

I’m resisting digressing into a religious diatribe, but you really must know (if you do not already) that religion was a major factor in the formation of our nation. Read each state constitution and you will find a confession of Christianity. Read the Presidential addresses up through perhaps JFK and you will see the same thing. Massachusetts was a state sponsor of the Congregational Church until the 1833. Patrick Henry was in favor of taxing the populace to support the church as well!

“A free and stable government cannot be sustained without the support of Christian institutions... Therefore, it is proper, for the good of the state, to require citizens of Virginia to pay a tax for support of ministers and their churches.” ^[36]

Not all these things are good, but they happened, and you should study them with your child, whether you are a fundamentalist Christian, Muslim or atheist. Beware because there is a lot of misinformation out there on web sites, both pro and con religion. It’s easy enough to read the founding father’s actual writings and see what they thought first hand. Make sure you read the Federalist Papers, free online. And please study the Constitution.

All of history is waiting for you to explore with your child, and with it so many topics. You should explain the difference between capitalism, socialism, communism and fascism, and learn it yourself if you have not already. Read Marx and Stalin and Mao and Hitler. They are all online. Reading excerpts from the fanatics and near demon possessed is an excellent way to show your child what not to become.

I took a course once on the history of women in America. As a project I went to my county courthouse and looked up some wills from the late 1700’s. The preambles to about half the wills were spirited testimonials to the power of God in the lives of the people. Conflicting with that were the clauses in some of them willing slaves as property to relatives, or granting them freedom. The point is that we have history nearby, but are too busy to notice. Notice.

Teaching from the classics is good, but also teach practicality. Every kid should know the names of the trees in your backyard. Stop at a construction site and show him or her what’s going on in there. Lift the hood of your car and point out the major parts. A child with a savings account, watching that compound interest grow, is later in life going to be a granite block on which some Paraducer car salesman stubs his toe. Ouch.

A child with knowledge of so many basics in life is much harder for the Paraducer educators to deceive or mollify. They really don’t know how to suppress a child who has positive spirit (except with drugs) because they don’t have much spirit themselves.

But you have to be careful because Paraducer school administrators have forty to sixty hours a week to plan how to handle ‘problem’ students. Drugs, intimidation, social services intervention, and ‘counseling’ your child without your knowledge are their tools. They can even use other students to pressure yours into conformance.

Keep an open dialog with your children, read their textbooks, speak with their teachers, and chat up your kid’s friends when they are over for the day. You’ll be surprised at what you hear.

I purchased a seventh grade math book last year, used, so I could help my daughter prepare for the upcoming year’s course. To my surprise, there were several political messages in the book, including a glowing biography of Henry Cisneros, a Clinton Administration official who was later fined for hiding information from law enforcement. There was an ad soliciting donations to PETA. And this was a math book! It did provide a great opportunity for us to explore those issues and discover the truth.

Not that every administrator, teacher or principal is an evil psychologist after your baby, but the bias of the system is toward making every child average, even the excellent ones. The students in the top and bottom 10% of the bell curve are ignored (as quoted to me by a public school teacher), and everyone else is forced toward the middle to get their ‘C’ (or ‘B’ in today’s schools).

You have to resist the school’s effort to make your child another average Consumer.

What about parenting as a Producer? You know that parenting is not easy, especially in today’s world. What do you do? Television? Oprah? Donahue reruns?

There are so many books on the market about parenting that you can literally pick what kind of kid you want by title. Turn to your cell group and discuss the matter. Not that you will all agree, but bouncing ideas off another Producer who shares your values is always good, though you may disagree in the details.

You are a Producer, and as such you don’t need some PhD telling you how to raise your child, and neither would I presume to do so. The points I made above, about sowing and reaping, I only made because you already know them, but they get shouted down by the world. Think, which is what you do best, and love your child as God loves him. And don’t cut him any slack on the important issues!

Let’s get back to some other actions Producers can take.