Twitter Syllogism: The Horror of Our Current Human Condition

         
         
                    21st Century Logic Concerning the Florida Murder Rampage


Thesis:   "The Adults need to pay attention to what kids say and watch for unstable behavior."

Ant-Thesis: "And then do what when they see that behavior?  That’s what’s frustrating." (these came from Twitter)

Synthesis: "Exactly"


We are punched in the spiritual solar plexus, yet again.

More young lives are ended.  Many more young lives are permanently damaged.



There is nothing more heart-breaking than looking into the eyes of young people who have been so psychologically lambasted by the deeds of a peer and one wonders just how resilient they might be.

Can these kids work back from this, given how toxic our schools and our society has become.

Knowing that a grounded individual has the capacities to withstand an existential beating is some comfort, but how many of today's young people have those capacities?

• Are they challenged enough?
• Are they centered with faith?
• Are they supported with a loving set of parents, or are they societal talking points and engineering projects meant to justify pet policies.  

Everyone wants a simple solution to a societal problem - ban all guns, lock up lunatics, more laws, more state-funding, Zero tolerance, lock-downs and fire drills. 

Yet we live in age where every human being can be brought to court for anything, let alone venturing an opinion that a youngster might be a threat to others.

Today's high school student uses a computer, but fewer students are good readers and writers: "While more words were recorded, with more precision, by laptop typists, more ended up being less: regardless of whether a quiz on the material immediately followed the lecture or took place after a week, the pen-and-paper students performed better. The act of typing effectively turns the note-taker into a transcription zombie, while the imperfect recordings of the pencil-pusher reflect and excite a process of integration, creating more textured and effective modes of recall."

In fact, Silicon Valley elites send their own children to anti-technology schools, where traditional pen and paper education frees young people to be challenged. 

Though many states, like Illinois refuse,  to mandate guidance counsellor's most schools are captive to CYA guidance mandates shielding children from challenges

• 11 percent of children aged 4-17 have been diagnosed with ADHD at some point in their lives.
• ADD, or attention deficit disorder, is a type of ADHD. Depending on symptoms, three types of ADHD have been identified: Predominantly Inattentive Type ADHD is also sometimes called attention deficit disorder (ADD). ... Hyperactivity and impulsivity are mild in this type.
• Boys are three times more likely to be diagnosed as ADD/ADHD than girls
• Guidance Councellors madate strategies like 'seating arrangemenst in classrooms, or more evidence based interventions (EBIs) and tailor-making assignmenst and tests to suit the individual student -splitting and fragmenting assignments, or eliminating them altogether. 

With all of these mandated policies, why are school shootings so monstrously common?

The only sane answer to this dilemma is to hire more grief counsellors, because until we shed our experimental notions about people and play pretend at every turn, there will be more such horrors.

We do what we want all of the time and then ring our hands.   We ban books, dumb down lessons and teach to the tests.  Moby Dick is taught via a graphic novel (comic book) in Evanston.  Why not just watch the movie version?

Kids get excused from physical education for any reason.  

Kids quit sports: "Three out of four American families with school-aged children have at least one playing an organized sport — a total of about 45 million kids. By age 15, as many as 80 percent of these youngsters have quit, according to the Open Access Journal of Sports Medicine.May 4, 2014"

To do what exactly?

Young people want to be challenged.

Young people want to believe.

Young people want to be loved, protected and challenged to be what human beings should be. 

Do our schools work for that?  This sick kid in Florida chose his school for his slaughter.  He knew school, schedule, policy and outcomes. Think about that. 

Kids want to succeed. Old teaching taught kids how to fail, do it over and achieve.  Kids can read Shakespeare, Milton, Melville and Conrad, but are given happy-meal units of instruction in English classes, like this :

 Times have changed. In sixth-grade teacher Jennifer DeFeo’s social studies class at Thomas Jefferson Middle School in Jefferson City, Missouri, the textbook is a graphic novel, the centerpiece of the Zombie-Based Learning program, in which students learn geography by tracking the undead after a zombie apocalypse. She has used graphic novels in literacy classes to build vocabulary via context clues, which can be hard for some readers using prose books.

Old school teaching worked very well - at one time. 

School: Young People Go to School and Some Make 'Mugs in the News' and Others Achieve

“I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him – rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.” – G.K. Chesterton

Wouldn't that be something?   Schools are created by people who have something to offer to younger, or less knowlegeable people.  The best schools offer something of value that honors Truth, Nature and our Creator.

Schools are formed by people who share common values and skills that converge to bring people from one place in their lives to another, be it one of the 1st Tier Elite Prep Schools that shape future Secretaries of State and Members of Secret Societies, a co-educational Chicago Public School in Auburn Gresham, Roseland, Englewood, or Garfield Park that warehouse 9-12 year so that one out of score students score above a 20 on ACT exams and less than half graduate, or a Catholic all-Male college prep high school where 90% of African-American students who begin their schooling in its halls graduate and every graduate is welcomed to four-year college or university.

Our American public schools have become places that glare Halogen lighting on politicians.  Elected officials comprise the Board of Directors to Public Schools.  Elected politicians are the Carnegie Endowments of the 50 States without whom nothing remains done.

My assertions are arguable with regard to public schooling, but the fact that everything about public schools links directly to some career political grifter.

Marcus Aurelius endowed the first school at Athens in because he believed that a good person should lead a life honed by reason. Aurelius was a Stoic by temperament and outlook; yet, he created a School for each of the Dominant Philosophies Aristotelian, Platonic, Stoic and Epicurean.  He was no Ted Turner, or Bill Gates.
By the way, Emperor Marcus Aurelius persecuted Christians as brutally as Bill Maher of HBO would love to do.

Schools operated on endowments so that scholars ( people who showed up at school to teach or learn) develop themselves through immersion in the many disciplines that merged to a core belief, or philosophy.

When Romans allowed barbarians to protect them from barbarians, schools vanished.

From the 5th Century until John Dewey, schools were centered on God.  Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Wittenburg and Escorial were Royally endowed.  John Scotus Erigena, Boethius, Augustine,  Cassidorius, Aquinas, William of Occam, Roger Bacon,  Anselm, Ignatius, Gonzaga Descrates, and Gregor Mendel managed to have great impact on human justice, human development and the humanities in spite of the fact that they were pious Christians.  Catholic schools remain, or should remain, in this tradition.

Public schools came about when Napoleon defeated the Prussians at Jena in 1806.

I could almost hear Mike Klonsky and Jesse Sharkey's noggins explode.  No, that was not a bomb planted by UICC Department of Education retiree, terrorist Emeritus and Obama sponsor Bill Ayers. That was the Battle that created a Godless school - Public Education.

The result has been Mugs in the New and a Chicago Homicide Rate that spikes each weekend - come rain or shine.

On my side of street, dominated by a four story fortress of Virtue designed by Joseph McCarthy who was Daniel Burnham's Catholic-go-to-guy when spending Cardinal Mundelein's money, a Catholic high school serves the exact same clientele as Simeon, Crane, and the former Calumet high schools - young men of African American heritage and mostly ( 80%) CPS elementary graduates.

All young men ( teenage Man Childs) are willful, proud, loud, playful, fidgety, distracted, horny as goats and in need of guidance, instruction and an occasional kind word.  Inner city black kids educated according to the secular Hegelian John Dewey constructs are exponentially more so.

Public school teachers told them "We don't do that!"  Catholic school teachers can tell, Pat Hickey to quit farting, explain is tardiness in 250 words double spaced and shape up or he will die on the gallows, IN THUNDER because Christ, His Mother, the Holy Spirit and God of Abraham expect more of him.

A Public school teacher says, ' We don't do that."  A Catholic school teacher explains why one's actions have consequences well beyond his immediate impulse to folly.

Here is a better explanation.  Yesterday, I was delighted to shake hands, fist bump and hug a seventeen year old kid who was expelled two years ago.  This young gent has had a horrific life.  He was shuttled from one foster care home to another from the time he was six years old until he turned fourteen for a total of seven placements. A relative took him in and sent him to Leo High School as a freshman.  Troubles ensued - tardy, absent, disrespectful & etc. The kid is smart, tough as algebra and has an inner sweetness that belies his troubled young life.  He is among the brawny stalwarts hugging Francis Cardinal George in 2011 in the photo that accompanies this prose. In fact, Cardinal George counseled the young man on the quiet.

For two years, this talented and handsome young guy attended a neighboring public school and went  "All Street."  He caught a beef - a serious beef.  He was arrested and sent to Juvey and eventually lawyered his way out of the Juvenile Detention Center and is in the expungement process.  More so, this young man remembered why he was expelled from Leo High School and added up the consequences trailing his will to impulse in fall of 2011.

He is working community service hours. He was delighted that I still have his size twelve Stacy Adams black dress shoes on my office book shelf.  He left them with me upon expusion.  I asked him if he'd like to put the broggans back on and finish out at Leo.  He said, " If you'll have me back."

Hell, yes! Arne Duncan and Karen Lewis have had for too long.  This is a young man who might not punch a politcal clown in the nose, but he will dispute the secular nonsense pretending to schooling.

Young people is no stroll through Winnetka. . . .well, it is if you go to New Trier.

N.B.  By the way, two of the 100 Chicago Tribune Mugs in the News were known to my young friend.

Atlantic Magazine Interview Bashing NYC Public Schools Uses Picture of Leo Catholic HS's Immaculate Halls at 7AM

Jim Young/Reuters Photo from 2012

Knowing my interest in inner city schools, a buddy of mine forwarded an interview appearing in the recent issue of The Atlantic.  The feature is an interview with a disgruntled NYC public school teacher entitled " It Feels Like Educational Malpractice." The interview is nice, but not exactly ground-breaking for anyone who has taught in a big city school.

It was a very poor neighborhood with a lot of English-language learners who knew little or no English. With poverty comes this condition called Toxic Stress. It explains why the children were so difficult to handle, needy, and so behind in learning. When your dad is in prison or your mom is on drugs, or your mom drank alcohol when you were a fetus, if you didn’t sleep the night before because you were allowed to play video games all night, or maybe there was a shooting, your cognitive ability is harmed. It rewires their brain so they’re unable to employ working memory, which is what you use when you’re learning. We’re charged with being the parents of these kids, being the friends, the mentors. Teachers are given all these social responsibility towards children that aren’t ours. It’s a failure of the system to address the poverty that creates the achievement gap.

Tell me about it.  Public schools can not do much about it. Catholic schools can and do.  I work at Leo High School in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood of Chicago.  Not NYC. What is interesting and kept my eyes darting up the page from the prose to the photo was . . .Jesus! That ain't a big Apple Public School!  That's Leo High School . . .right here on the south side!

About a year ago Reuters ( link up and enjoy the photos # 6 is the one The Atlantic features) did a very nice story written by Chicago veteran news person Mary Wizniewki. She was accompanied by a photographer and arrived at dawn of the Leo day for several days and soaked up how Catholic schools do what public schools can not and may not do.  We have a crucifix in every room of the schools, stained glass windows in the cafeteria offering a litany to Our Lady, and Catholic value based instruction.  Most students are not Roman Catholic.  All have been accepted at solid colleges and universities.

The thing that struck me most was the photo (above and linked) - that is Leo HS at about 7AM.  I am here between 4:30 and 5:00 AM daily.  Some guys arrive before I go out at 6:20 AM to pick up students in Bronzeville and Canaryville.  I open the doors, because Leo offers the most positive and safe hours of the day for our guys.

It is interesting that The Atlantic chose a photo of an inner city classroom and hall of a school built by Chicago Catholic parishioners in 1921 and opened in 1926 and still operating to help young men succeed on faith based path.

Funny no NYC public schools were featured.

The photographer must be the gent identified in The Atlantic piece. 

Power - Hegel, Fichte, Horace Mann, Compulsory Education -The Roots of Our Nanny and Ninny American Society

“Education should provide the means to destroy free will”.  -Fichte

I

Fichte and the powerful men (Emerson, Horace Mann and John Dewey) who have inherited his ideals, when they see children, think: 'Here is material that I can manipulate'... All this, to any person with natural affection for the young, is horrible; just as we teach children to avoid being destroyed by motor cars if they can, so we should teach them to avoid being destroyed by cruel fanatics... This is the task of a liberal education: to give a sense of the value of things other than domination, to help create wise citizens of a free community, and through the combination of citizenship with liberty in individual creativeness to enable men to give to human life that splendour which some few have shown that it can achieve (Russell 1938:251 - parenthetical my own).

Yesterday, a Cook County judge dismissed any and all charges against the Occupy/NATO protesters because the City of Chicago did not arrest Obama Victory Party celebrators in 2008.

If that makes perfect sense to you, then you fully understand the nature of the American Progressive Power and Education Collective.  There is no room for rugged individuals like cops in this America, this Illinois, Cook County and City of Chicago.  

The cops were praised universally in May when there was clear and present danger of great violence and mayhem resulting from the organized and orchestrated voices, fists, feet, buttocks, beer and pop bottles of the American Left starring Occupy, Anarchists International and the anti-NATO gangs.

Chicago Police under Superintendent Garry McCarthy were masterful routing the goofs and ninnies.. It is axiomatic that the American public praise not soldiers, cops, firemen and medics too long.

As in the case of the American National Memory following 9/11/01,  unified pride and determination must be extinguished in place of greater goals, agendas and satisfying outcomes - a return to the Nanny and Ninny State*
.
The Nanny State makes sure that American Individualism is shackled by governmentally legislated mandates limiting the free exercise of conscience -Gay Marriage is a natural and civil right, Abortion is Health Care, Sugar, fat and salt and is poison, obesity can be cured by law, the Middle Class must disappear, while believing that it is being strengthened, and opportunity can only come from the Federal Government.

The Ninny State complies to everything that comes from the Nanny State.

Like drunks and degenerate gamblers, we hold these truths to be self-evident, because we learned them in schools -public schools and practiced what was preached over many decades without ever challenging the roots of power itself.

Power is what it is all about.  The power to turn Labor into SEIU was exercised patiently and incrementally.  The power to eliminate individualism and piety from the culture.  America must transcend its identity and become a global component in a New World Order.

Great people must be diminished and obscured and replaced by a poster image.

 I have never met a great person, powerful, influential, celebrated and publicly recognized for achievement, who was not a very humble, grateful, giving person.   I met met many, far too many, public persons who grabbed or were handed authority, influence and celebrity, who were cowardly bullies, frauds, grifters, users and sneaks.  While they may wield power, far too long in most cases, they never do anything for anyone or anything that does not add to their personal and public agenda. For them it is all about power.

Some of the worst bullies, frauds, grifters, users and sneaks choose teaching as a path to power.    Whether it is a gym coach who flirts and eventually seduces and impregnates a cheerleader, a social science teacher who uses the essays of her students to publish her book on adolescent sexual awakenings and shares none of the royalties or credit with her 'ghost-writers,'   the unprepared lazy clown who gives silent reading periods seven preps a day,  five days a week, while taking classes for his Type-75 Certification from Big Community Mail or Phone It In University,  education, like politics, can be a very warm and welcoming home for the useless, lazy and mean. Private and Catholic schools have the luxury of getting rid of such mopes and the best of them do and quickly.

Power differs from authority.   I can fire up a boiler in the winter but I am not the best person to do so.  The custodian, or the school stationary engineer.  I 'pigeon-see-makee-workee' buttons and pumps and water tubes, it will go on, but if things go south . . .hold the  phone, Richard. In short, I am no authority. Though I am no proficient, let alone authority on boiler maintenance and operations, I was taught simple tasks necessary for a satisfying outcome.  I went to Catholic schools. My public school counterpart would have nothing to do with any task out of his  step, level and license.  Catholic educators multi-task - always have and always will. . .until outlawed by Federal Mandate.

I learned that if something needs to be done, even without full authority or license I am obligated to fire the the damn things up!  If I see an unconscious man on the sidewalk, I may not pass him by. Rather, I must apply the rudimentary CPR tasks and face the all too real possibility of having my ass sued by the person I helped.  It's that Catholic thing.  I coached, mentored, supervised and taught in Catholic schools and still do. 

I am very well schooled in the canons of British, American and some World Literatures. My areas of interest are not limited to my tastes.  I love Thackeray, admire Dickens, worship Milton and  Pope and delight in Shakespeare.  I prefer neo-classical, Augustan poetry over the much more popular Romantics; Jane Bronte over Jane Austin; Montaigne before Bacon always with essays; Seamus Heaney & Wallace Stevens top Yeats, Frost, T.S. and Chesterton is more than equal to GB Shaw.  That stuff can not unplug a sewer line, nor can it bend electrical pipe.

My authority lies solely in my study and training as a teacher.  That authority did not include offering a National Honor Society insurance policy along with the syllabus for AP English Literature.  I did not give "extra credit" and neither would set of Michelin 59/80R63 XDR tires satisfy the semester essay requirements; nor, did it include the license to organize students as an agenda collective.

The idea  that one should develop as woman or man is repellent to schools of education, especially American education. The concept of Free Will lies at the core of Catholic teaching and task of each person is to recognize obligation to family, faith and nation within the individual's cosmic duty to the Creator.  Catholic education was established in America in Baltimore during the 1850's in reaction to evangelizing of citizens under the Hegelian Prussian models advocated by the likes of  Horace Mann a Unitarian minister.  Horace Mann visited Prussia in 1843 and returned with doctrine of universal compulsory education -

It was Mann and his like-minded comrades in the Massachusetts elite, who imagined education as a tool of an emerging republic to develop its human resources and direct that development. They saw themselves as the best and the brightest, so who better than they to say what education should be for everyone else.

Thus the advent of the Nanny State and Ninny State that America has become.  Students are compelled to track into niche and absorb all manner of nonsense that has absolutely nothing to do with " the examined life."

Progressive icon Emma Goldman railed against the individual -rugged and otherwise - in favor of collectivism and Americans eat this up!

'rugged individualism'... is only a masked attempt to repress and defeat the individual and his individuality. So-called Individualism is the social and economic laissez-faire

Individualism during the harsh Medieval times turned hostelers into Archbishops, like Thomas Becket, through the scholastic gradus.


Beggers can't be kings, but under the American collectivist education, buggers can be Dads. Power and compulsory education make it so.  Social engineering comes through schools.  As always, those born to the purple have education suited to their rank and privilege.


Where gentleman farmers and leading burghers attended the American but less feudal incubators of Groton, Phillips-Andover, Trinity & Harvard and Yale elite private schools, the rustics and immigrant  huddled masses were compelled to attend government schools founded by  Unitarian established doctrines and systems to mold workers, clerks and soldiers and their places in the Unitarian scheme.  The wealthy went to the elite schools:

Tier one would be our elite private prep schools and elite private (and top public) universities that, though they are not completely limited to our society’s social elite, are still generally bastions of the most privileged in our country, including many of our top political leadership. Lefty Parent

 These private educational institutions, colloquially known as "prep schools" in the United States, can be boarding or day schools, affiliated with a particular faith or completely secular. At the high end of the spectrum, they're known for ultra-competitive admissions, high tuition and top-notch facilities. Their aim is to provide students with education that funnels them into the very best universities.. . . These institutions all offer high-caliber instruction and uniquely valuable experiences to their students. But in a world where education is so competitive and expensive, and where the name of your high school can open doors for life, it's worth measuring the best of the best. Forbes

* Tier two would be the best of our public K-12 schools, located mostly in more prosperous neighborhoods, which have the resources to assist the most academically inclined of the children of the middle class to put them on the programmed path to get their degrees and then get good jobs as doctors and lawyers and other “knowledge workers”, our contemporary “apparatchiks”. Lefty Parent

These schools are the ones like a New Trier in Winnetka - home to Mayor Rahm Emanuel and funded by a wildly affluent. They are no pay prep schools. Likewise, CPS has created Magnet Schools which operate in most exclusive manner with regard to acceptance, yet remain linked by taxes to the universal compulsory model despite all of bells and whistles found in Naperville, Winnetka and Lake Forest public schools.

Then, of course the compelled helots and huddled masses of urban and rural America - real Mike Klonsky and Bill Ayers Annenberg Challenged children are warehoused, as they always have been in the Horace Mann, John Dewey Worker Beehives of Tier Three Schools.

* Tier three would be the rest of our public schools, mainly in the inner cities and poor rural areas, generally under resourced and failing (by design as it is argued by some). Though there are the occasional exceptions of schools or individual students that rise above these circumstances into the second tier, which perpetuate the myth that anyone can succeed, many of our youth in these schools have the odds of success heavily stacked against them. From these ranks many of our lower-paid worker-bees come, including many of the enlisted soldiers in our volunteer army. Lefty Parent

The Tier Three schools are the horrific barns parents of limited income must send their children. There they are housed until such time as they may reap the benefits doled to them.  The only chance these children have of becoming rugged individuals who contribute while they save what they earn is catholic schools.  I group all denominations under this small c rubric.  Roman Catholic schools reject the Horace Mann compulsory  second and third tier models.  Catholic schools like their medieval rooted schools teach free will, humility, commitment to  God and the scholastic gradus* - One must move up the steps once one has mastered the skills and the understanding of each level of progress and proficiency.  Other Christian Faiths adopted the Catholic system of education -parochial school.

In our Nanny & Ninny State, rugged individuals need not apply until they take the required univeral and compulsory anti-individual, racist, sugar eating, carbon foot-printing, pan-homophobia, breeder happy counsel and licensing.


N.B. Much of what sparked my rather gabby post above was sparked by a posting from a blog entitled Lefty Parent which I link below. Thanks, Lefty!

*The Trivium consisted of:

• Grammar

• Rhetoric

• Logic

The Quadrivium consisted of:

• Arithmetic -- Number in itself

• Geometry -- Number in space

• Music, Harmonics, or Tuning Theory -- Number in time

• Astronomy or Cosmology -- Number in space and time

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-grant-park-arrests-judge-0928-20120928,0,3817020.story
http://www.leftyparent.com/blog/2011/10/15/napoleon-prussia-the-u-s-education-system/

Loveland say "Hey, Hey/Ho, Ho Rosary Has Gotta Go!

Colorado Gang bangers?

I firmly believe ( after the Nicean Creed and in One Holy Apostolic Church, the Communion of Saints, the Forgiveness of Sins, the Resurrection of the body and the Life of the World to Come) that the chant beginning with Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho should be punishable in the most cruel and unusual manner.  But that is for another day.  I really want to work up enough spit and bile to do that mind pummeling commie ditty the justice it warrants with my full arsenal of invective, malediction and vocabulary in my limited capacity to hurl in its direction. All in good time, Brothers and Sisters,

Rather, my topic this early Sunday morning will concern  rock-solid Progressive Public School hypocrisy and the continuing secular Fatwa leveled on American Catholics.

After chores and study, I hit Saturday 4:00 PM Mass and heard about the posted nonsense in the news pasted below from a lovely, witty, devout  and elderly woman.  We chatted about the Thug funerals plaguing my our neighborhood and the previous day's Lil JoJo Going Home Gunfire and Black Gangster Disciple Parade at Mt. Hope Cemetery.  As south side chat will do, branches segued from the root topic -sadness for the death of young person, contempt for thug culture, gang hegemony boosted by our PC media and spineless politicians, and gang culture.

The woman told me, " a public school in Colorado banned rosaries* and a boy had his rosary confiscated."  As this woman was not a City, County, or State employee afflicted with the uniquely Cook County work-place malady splenetic -dysphobia - Fear of Badness, which manifests itself in statements like, " I hear that Rahm is firing all the Croatian sounding names in the Water Department and that any one who has cable and watches Boss on Starz has his e-mails turned over to Andy Shaw of BGA."  As such, I went home  and studied up on the Rosary snatching in Loveland** ( I have heard all about Loveland . . .) Colorado

LOVELAND, Colo. — A student is questioning whether his faith or his fashion is under fire at his high school in Loveland.
Thompson Valley High School officials have confiscated his rosary beads twice since school started three weeks ago.
And he says they never told him, or his family, why.“They tell me I can’t wear them,” says Manuel Vigil, showing us an identical rosary to the one seized by his school.
The junior says he wears rosary beads to protect himself from harm.
But his school district thinks the religious necklace will harm students.
“That’s typically not what we want for a safe environment for school,” says Thompson Valley School District spokesperson Margaret Crespo.
The district says they can be affiliated with gangs, and disrupt learning.
“Are you in a gang? I ask Vigil. ‘No. I’m not in a gang,’ he says. You’re a good student?  ‘I’m a good student,’” he says.
The 16-year-old says he and his family are strong Catholics.
“I use them for prayer. I feel safe when I have them on.”
The district says it gave Vigil options before seizing the beads.
“We’ve given you two opportunities to take it off or to put it inside your shirt. That’s not something you’re interested in doing. You’re not giving us an alternative than to remove it,” Crespo says Vigil was told.
But Vigil says he only got a demand.
“If he would have given me that option, I would have put it in my shirt,” he says.

Those who can't teach, become public school Administrators, Superintendents and University Educators!!!!!!!!!!!!

Not always, but a very safe bet.

I carry the Rosary in my pocket all of the time.  Gang banger I?  I think not.

Gang members are known by their deeds more than their beads.  Some carry shiny objects -guns, rims, bling, beads, and plastic coated Nike wheels. Some openly manifest their devotion to thuggery, more do not.  Numbers, symbols, letters, colors and flash fingers, mean less than open acts of thuggery and no more so than a bead rattling Catholic is threat to Sandra Fluke's rubber supply.

The rosary comes in many forms.  My Dad gave my son Conor his oxidized- steel one decade Rosary disc which he carried all through the South Pacific and home from 1943-1945.

A principal in Washington state went to her Fox affiliate last may to justify her own ban the rosary.  Notice the local Fox logo?

Now, how about that Fox affiliate "take down the Crown!" The Crown - Symbol of the Latin Kings of People Nation?  They are "flashing the Crown Mang" all over Washington State.

Lay off the rosary.

As a special treat,  because you paid full attention all the way down here - here is Loveland by Charlie Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rythmn Band!!!




http://www.sanantonio.gov/sapd/pdf/Awareness.pdf

http://kdvr.com/2012/09/14/loveland-school-seizes-rosary-beads-to-fight-gangs/

http://www.rosaryshop.com/resources.php/request/unusual

**

• 15-Decade Rosary (15 sets of 10 beads)
• Angelic Crown in honor of St. Michael (9 sets of 3 beads with St. Michael Medal)
• Anglican Rosary (4 sets of 7 beads)
• Beads for the Dead (4 sets of 10 beads)
• Beads of the Immaculate Conception (3 sets of 4 beads)
• Beads of the Sacred Heart (5 sets of 5 beads)
• Beads of St. Anne (3 sets of 5 beads)
• Blessed Sacrament Beads (1 set of 33 beads)
• Brigittine Rosary (6 sets of 10 beads)
• Chaplet in honor of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (5 sets of 7 beads)
• Chaplet in honor of the Precious Blood (6 sets of 5 beads with Precious Blood Medal)
• Chaplet of Divine Mercy (5 sets of 10 beads)
• Chaplet of Faith (5 sets of 10 beads)
• Chaplet of Mercy (5 sets of 10 beads)
• Chaplet of St. Anthony (13 sets of 3 beads)
• Chaplet of St. Joseph (15 sets of 4 beads)
• Chaplet of St. Monica (3 sets of 4 beads)
• Chaplet of the Five Wounds (5 sets of 5 beads)
• Chaplet of the Holy Ghost (5 sets of 7 beads)
• Chaplet of Padre Pio
• Chaplet of the Way of the Cross (15 sets of 3 beads plus station medals)
• Chotki (1 set of 33, 100 or 300 beads)
• Crosier Beads (6 sets of 10 beads)
• Crown of Our Lord (3 sets of 10 beads)
• Crown of St. Philomena (3 white beads, 13 red beads, St. Philomena and St. John Vianney Medals)
• Habit Rosary
• Knotted Cord Rosary (Great for Children)
• Ladder Rosary
• Lasso Rosary
• Little Beads of Our Lady of Consolation (13 beads with St. Augustine Medal)
• Little Chaplet of the Holy Face (39 beads, Holy Face medal and cross)
• Little Chaplet of the Infant Jesus of Prague (15 beads and medal of the Infant Jesus)
• Little Flower Rosary (24 beads)
• Rosary Bracelet (10 beads, medal and crucifix)
• Rosary of the Seven Joys of the Blessed Virgin Mary (7 sets of 10 beads)
• Rosary of the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary (7 sets of 7 beads)
• Rose-petal Beads

Les Soeurs Baiser - A Tale of Halloween Deception

Men sholde nat knowe of goddes pryvetee [God's private affairs].
Ye, blessed be alwey a lewed [unlearned] man
That noght but oonly his bileve kan! [who knows nothing except the Creed]
Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales


Thanks to John Dewey, too many Americans have been duped. Lord Bertrand Russell, the father of Logical Positivism, and a celebrated agnostic, was a contemprary of the Father of American Public Education, who took a dim view of Dewey's dim philospophy of Education - Inquiry is Truth. Well it is not, Jasper.

Lord Russell tagged Dewey's will to power, via fundamentally unsound pedogogy, to be a "cosmic impiety." Because one insisits that 'it just is' does not determine an end.

Here is a seasonal object lesson that deconstructs Dewey's Inquiry, that I recently heard from Vietnam Hero and California Yeoman Iron Mike McQuade.


"A cabbie picks up a Nun. She gets into the cab, and notices that the
VERY handsome cabdriver won't stop staring at her. She asks him why he is staring..

He replies: "I have a question to ask, but I don't want to offend you"

She answers, " My son, you cannot offend me. When have been a nun as long as I have, you get a chance to see and hear just about everything. I' m sure that there's nothing you could say or ask that I would find offensive."

"Well, I've always had a fantasy to have a nun kiss me."

She responds, "Well, let's see what we can do about that -
1) you have to be single and
2) you must be Catholic."

The cab driver is very excited and says, "Yes, I'm single and Catholic!"

"OK" the nun says. "Pull into the next alley."

The nun fulfills his fantasy with a kiss that would make a hooker blush.

But when they get back on the road, the cab driver starts crying.

"My dear child," said the nun, why are you crying?"

"Forgive me but I've sinned. I lied and I must confess, I'm married and I'm a Unitarian."

The nun says, "That's OK. My name is Steve and I'm going to a Halloween party!"

Quod erat Demonstrandum.

History? Just a Bunch of Stuff That Already Happened - American Education Fails Fabulously!

Of all the studies by which men acquire citizenship of the intellectual commonwealth, no single one is so indispensable as the study of the past. Of History -Lord Bertrand Russell

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
John Dewey

Life without even a basic understanding of the past has been accomplished by John Dewey the Progressive Hegelian Father of American Public Education. Sadly, even some Catholic schools and far too many universities ape Public Education and have cashed in classical learning for Dewey's shell game.

Here are the results of Mr. Tests & Measurements' handiwork:

The overall lackluster performance is certain to revive the debate about whether history and other subjects, such as science and art, are being pushed out of the curriculum because of the focus on math and reading demanded under the No Child Left Behind federal education law. The federal law mandates that students be tested in math and reading.

Sue Blanchette, president-elect of the National Council for Social Studies, a national association of K-12 and college social-studies teachers, called the results disheartening and said history education has been marginalized in the last decade.

"Everyone is going to participate in civic life by paying taxes, protesting against paying taxes, voting, and we must teach our children how to think critically about these issues," she said. "Clearly, we are not doing that."

Click my post title for the Wall Street Journal's report on the American social studies shame.

Sue Blanchette is 'disheartened' that is Progressive speak for "more tax dollars."

Here is a critical thought, Sue, how about teaching civics and history. Here is another gem from Johnny Dewey - "Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living." John Dewey and Jane Addams and Mary McDowell and other turn of the 20th Century Hegelian's bullied educational methods into place that eroded public education and murdered America's sense of History.

The History Channel is a monument to John Dewey. History is series of Nostradamus, Ice Road Truckers, Pawn Stars, Swamp People, American Pickers ( "Fabulous Bric-a Brac!") Larry the Cable Guy and UFO's. Reality TV as History.

The American public school classroom is no different. A coach (of whatever sport is necessary) pops in a disc of Glory and accepts a paper posing the question of why they didn't use flame-throwers or call in airstrikes. No teacher would consider recording the Sunday Morning lectures from the Pritzker Military Library on every Sunday on cable, because the lectures might be too boring.

Dewey demanded that education be play! He built the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago upon that very dictum.

Education is preparation and our students are unprepared.

Teaching should be harder than learning and learning is everything that it is cracked up to be.

History was written by 'Dead White Men' we are told by Educators. White Guys like Berossus of Babylonia which is now called Iraq, St. Augustine the Bishop of Hippo, a suburb of Carthage which is in North Africa; Ban Zhao of the Han Dynasty - not the Swedish Zhaos mind you. There were a few skirts too, like Mary Bonaventure Browne, Poor Clare 16th Century Irish historian.

How many Chicagoans could tell you why Comiskey Park was built on Shields Ave*.? That is a leading question. All good teaching is leading. Education comes from a Dead Language - educere - to lead away from . . .that would be from ignorance. John Dewey encourage education to be contrarian -that is Progressive: No exceptionalism!

Here, in essence, is American Eduction ala John Dewey:


I'm not kidding.

Ignorance is temporary but stupid is forever. It seems Education in America is Dewey forever. We can do and have done much better, but that would require a sense of history and John Dewey helped kill that with a great deal of help.

* James Shields Elementary School in Chicago's Brighton Park neighborhood is named for Senator/General james J. Shields the only American to be elected a United States Senator from three states ( Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri), who nearly fought a dual with Abraham Lincoln, was a hero of the Mexican American War and the only Union General to defeat Confederate General Thomas Stonewall Jackson in the field at 1st Battle of Kernstown in 1862. Likewise Shields Ave. is named for the same man. Charles Comiskey's father served in the Union Army and prior to that was a member of the Shields Guards Militia which partly formed the 23rd Illinois Irish Brigade. History is a big deal made of very small things.

Update from Mr. Dan Kelley, historian/journalist/attorney

Honest John Comiskey was also a Chicago alderman. His son was tipped to the fact that street car lines were going to be routed towards the area where the ballpark was eventually erected (on the site of a former dump) and this was a valuable consideration for the site of the Baseball Palace of the World.

Oddly enough, the same architect worked on both Comiskey Park and Weegham Park (later remodeled and renamed Wrigley Field), but Charles Comiskey scaled back on Zachary Taylor Davis' plans and cut expenditures whereas the Northside Park was built on a more liberal basis.