This is why the Department of Education should be completely eliminated. It is grotesquely ineffective and agenda based politically. The aim of equality so boisterously proposed by government school advocates is only a thinly veiled attempt at state-run parenting. It’s an insult to have them in charge of education. For instance, I first saw the following article from Yahoo News, and found the source article after some checking. Essentially it’s a marketing ploy advocating in favor of two progressive agenda items—one Common Core, the other Net Neutrality and using children to advance both causes. I personally find it insulting that they actually think human beings are stupid enough to believe what they are saying. While many people may be, not everyone is, and while they strive for equality of stupidity for all people, I’m not going to comply, nor will the typical reader of this site. Here is how the article read:

Overall, 63 percent of public schools don’t have access to broadband speeds needed for digital learning. The problem is particularly acute in rural and low-income districts: Only 14 percent in those areas meet high-speed internet targets.

“It’s just very uneven all over the country,” Lan Neugent, executive director of the non-profit State Educational Technology Directors Association.

The Federal Communications Commission approved a $1.5 billion spending cap increase for school broadband and Wi-Fi last year that is expected to significantly boost connectivity. State grants linked to Common Core implementation and collaborations with tech and business leaders are also bridging the gap. But those initiatives could take a year or more to connect thousands of schools and testing started in 29 states and the District of Columbia for 12 million students this year.

In the meantime, they’re resorting to alternatives: Testing students in small groups, busing them to other schools and limiting all other internet access while exams are taken.

Ideally, technology can help eliminate achievement gaps between poor and rural students and their more affluent peers. The shift to online testing, however, reveals how wide the digital divide remains. Districts like Chicago Public Schools with large numbers of low-income students have raised questions about whether their students — who often don’t have access to a computer or the Internet at home — are at a disadvantage.

“The implementation of Common Core is bringing these issues more to the forefront,” said Brian Smith, executive director of the nonprofit Education Trust-West. “But this has been an issue that has plagued communities of color and low-income communities for years.”

 

http://www.usnews.com/news/technology/articles/2015/05/11/online-common-core-testing-lays-bare-tech-divide-in-schools

Problem number one, if technology is being used in public schools to the extent that they need WI-FI internet connections, then the institution itself is not needed. I already argue that modern technology as far as teaching is far superior to an actual union member public school teacher. Teachers may have some success in helping children who have bad parents, or limited financial opportunities, but for the masses of children, public school is ineffective as an institution—other than providing day care for children while parents work. Here is the Department of Education attempting to articulate that the internet is needed to provide education in a brick and mortar school—even to the extent that they are willing to spend money to bus students to locations with better WI-FI connections. People are supposed to actually sympathize with that nonsense. It’s an insult to assume that normal people are stupid enough to not see what is going on with that ridiculous assumption.

Secondly, the Department of Education ignores completely the Vico cycle of human devolution—which is historically as reliable as sunrises and sunsets. The reason that there are different portions of the country rural and urban as well as wealthy and poor is because different factions of people depending on their values progress along the Vico cycle at rates specific to them. For instance, those in poor neighborhoods are entering the anarchy phase while those in the suburbs may be at the aristocratic. Those phases are not compatible with one another—so there will be different types of people produced by them. CLICK HERE for a contemporary understanding of the Vico cycle. It would be thought that all the supposedly smart people at the Department of Education would understand the Vico cycle—but apparently not. Loses in internet connectivity has little to do with any other factor than whether or not an area is profitable. Internet providers are willing to incur the cost of service if there is money in it for them. They are not going to do it for the fun of it.   Ironically, Richard Branson with his Virgin Galactic company is planning to put satellites up that will bring internet coverage to even the most remote portions of Africa, so a day when such connectivity problems will still be an issue are on their way out—so long as government stays out-of-the-way. If Virgin Galactic is left alone, the problems of this entire article will evaporate like a puddle of water on a hot summer day. It won’t take long for there to be no trace of anything left behind.

Then of course is the not so subtle marketing of public education services by stating that technology can help erase the gaps between poor and affluent—as if government schools were the great equalizers of society. They aren’t. You could give a poor kid in South Chicago a brand new laptop and it would likely be destroyed within a few weeks, sold for drug money, or riddled with pornography because the parents of the poor child were terrible and instilled limited values on the unfortunate sapling. I’ve known lots of people from poor neighborhoods and tried to help them all. You can’t make bad people into good just by being nice to them, or giving them a fair shake. They have to change their values. A drunk has to value soberness to want to quit. The illiterate has to value reading to break their curse. A poor person has to want to be productive; otherwise they will continue to be poor. Until you work on the core values of a society, nothing can stop their progress on the Vico cycle. Nothing—no amount of money, no feel good public education experiment—no billions of dollars spent on the internet. The internet is useless without the desire to learn something from it. The internet doesn’t just magically make everyone equal with opportunity. Stupid people will use it for porn. Smart people will use it for knowledge. In order for everyone to be equal, everyone has to either want to be stupid or smart. Public education as indicated by the Department of Education has decided that the best way to make everyone equal is to make the smart into the stupid and then hope that government can manage the chaos of the Vico cycle that follows. But they can’t, and they will never learn to. Because the phase after anarchy is always theocracy, and when that happens the Department of Education will be eliminated anyway in favor of a new god to worship and the whole mess starts over again.

Well everyone isn’t stupid, or have plans on joining the ranks. For them, the Department of Education insulted their intelligence with such a stupid release of information flowed down to the orthodox media. It shows just how astonishingly ignorant those in charge at the Department of Education really are. I mean I don’t think much of them anyway, but to not understand the basic concepts of the Vico cycle—it’s just preposterous. Sad and ignorant that such people are employed by tax payer dollars. That—is the real insult.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.