John I found a website for the school and there is an email. Perhaps that is a way to communicate with her more personally. https://www.michaela.education/
Here is an email to contact the school from that website: info@mcsbrent.co.uk
The disease of which she speaks wasn't a spontaneous accident. It was carefully engineered over the course of the last century by Comintern. In 1928 John Dewey was so impressed by Stalin's Potemkin Villages that he set out to remake American education in the Soviet model.
In the late 1920s, Herbert Marcuse and György Lukácz pondered the question "Why has the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution not swept the world?" Their conclusion? Not enough division. So they invented Critical Theory, that is, there are reasons other than relative prosperity to hate your neighbor. Being a Communist, a socialist hyena among socialist lions in Hitler's Germany, he fled to USA and ensconced himself at Columbia, then Harvard, then Brandeis, then UC San Diego where he was Angela Davis's mentor. Angela Davis was the author of Critical Race Theory, and then Intersectionality, the principle that the more intersecting oppressions you suffer, the more authority you ought to have. As governor, Reagan convinced the UC regents to fire her because of her openly flaunted Communist party membership. Pat Brown's California Supreme Court — yes, Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown's dad — forced UCLA to reinstate her.
Joe McCarthy was right, not only about the State Department and Army labs, in broad brush and almost every detail.
Socialism of all stripes has always been a plaything of arrogant over-educated wealthy "smart stupid" people. It thrives in universities, and universities create teachers. Isaac Newton built a bridge over the River Cam without any bolts or pins or dowels. Hundreds of years later the timbers had rotted so the combined genius of Cambridge University decided to rebuild it. They removed the rotting timbers, and utterly failed to build a new bridge in the way of Newton. Yet they arrogantly claim to be able to re-engineer society, a much more complex problem than one simple bridge.
When Gus Hall, General Secretary of Communist Party USA, realized his party, as a party, wasn't gaining traction, he told his members to infiltrate the Democrat party; now they control it. Antonio Gramsci pointed the way: Infiltrate all the institutions — education, entertainment, media, journalism, arts, bureaucracy. Do it slowly so society doesn't notice until it's too late.
Van: Thank you for some interesting background. Regarding your closing question: the only people who answer yes, are those who have given up. I have not.
Have you ever heard of Marietta Johnson of Fairhope, Alabama? I believe she was a pioneer of the best form of education! I pray and hope that someday we could learn from her example of the best way to teach children. If you have never heard of her I hope you will take the time to discover what she started there many years ago. I think you might appreciate her teaching methodology.
Penny: Thank you for that info, as I was not familiar with it. Here is the link to the school <https://fairhopeorganicschool.org/about/>. A few facts: it started in 1907. Annual cost is $8000. Student ages are 3-7. In effect it seems to be a per-school to regular K-12 schooling.
Recently, I have been reading about the caliber of the teachers who are being permitted entry into classrooms. There are many mental-midgets heading classrooms today. In addition, many students are not into learning and are disruptive in the classroom My mother was a devoted teacher for 50 years who was forced out of teaching, because two of her students were not happy with the grades they received. They went into her classroom after school and beat her up; putting her into the hospital, because she would not change their grades.
This occurred in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in about 1971. They caught the two black teenagers that did it. I lived in California and did not get all the details. However, she was seriously injured. My mother loved teaching. It was her life. She told me that the children at that time were not receptive to learning like they had been in the past.. This was in the early seventies. She taught in a black community, where it had been very safe to go previously. Parents in the past had supported the teachers. They backed them up. Then, President Lyndon Johnson changed things, when he broke up the two parent homes and gave money to single mothers who didn't have a man in the home. My mother overheard young black girls at the school say that their goal was to make money by having lots of children. These uneducated young girls knew little about raising children...and had no men in the house to help them. The results: chaos in the black community.
Teachers in the US aren’t subject matter experts. If you want them to be respected then allow them to expel unruly students and require them to actually be competent in summer matter. The education departments should be shut down and colleges should limit education coursework to the very minimum of classroom prep and techniques. Otherwise all universities should abolish education departments and education degrees.
John…thanks. A powerful message that many of us know and have been shouting. Unfortunately, her message only presented the goals (fix education) but nothing on how to fix it…no mention of fixing the pedagogy and the curriculum, both of which are owned and approved by the generations in charge of education.
Don: Yes, but it was a timed talk, not a class. If we actually do understand the goals (e.g., that we need to stop framing everything as oppressor vs oppressed), that clearly is a matter of fixing subject Content, and has zero to do with pedagogy. Who is fixing K-12 Content — e.g., in US public schools?
I have a completely different approach to education. Why not teach the students how they individually fit into society and how our society has prospered for over 250 years due to the efforts of individuals just like them?
It is a math education that shows how one person working and prospering grows the entire economy. I can prove it in a 30 minute session beyond any doubt, but I have never seen it taught anywhere. It took me well over 30 years to figure it out for myself, but I know it is true.
The bottom line is you can become very rich if you just apply yourself to the talents you choose to perfect. Our system rewards excellence. It is the same design our founders devised in 1776 and Adam Smith wrote about that same year. So, it is both math and history, but you need reading and writing skills to make yourself valuable to the world.
Students need to clearly see the path to success instead of being directed onto the road to serfdom.
Katherine spoke of students' "agency" in other speeches. They can be, and ought to be, the agent of their own fitting into society and progressing through their lives.
I realized long ago that I learned critical thinking from my middle school plane geometry class. You need to organize your thoughts, and proceed from one concept to related ones. Do schools still teach Euclid's Elements in the two-column style? J. L. Heilbron published a book in 1998 entitled "Geometry Civilized: History, Culture, Technique." He explicitly links the Greek method to an "Exemplar of Rigorous Reasoning." Oddly, my excellent middle school geometry teacher, with whom I maintain contact in his 93rd year, is an ardent socialist.
The root of the problem - young people do know what is in their own self interest and see with their own eyes the ruling institutions are operating against them.
Robin: Respect should be given. Veneration, no. These days, WAY too many teachers go through getting their education degrees in Woke academic factories. No one is addressing this corruption of the system. DOEd is the most appropriate place for that to happen, but they don't seem to understand the problem.
Excellent speech about how the radical left has used the “critical but boring stuff” to subvert, indoctrinate, and advance radicalism. Ignoring her points begs to enable tyranny
Watched her at the ARC conference, and have heard her elsewhere before. Lits of wisdom there. It's a shame that nobody in the US Education Establishment will listen to her.
With the goal that perhaps someday WE will be the establishment. Can it happen by evolution? Maybe. But more likely it will take wholesale replacement by defunding it. We can socialize the cost of education without relying on the current system, which is actually socialism (government owns the means of production). Sweden defunded public schools 30 years ago and went to a voucher system. No money goes directly to any school. It was a dramatic case of self-rescue. See my latest article.
Mike: You are essentially recommending that we start over. I sympathize with that perspective, but it is simply not going to happen. We need to start by meaningfully fixing what we have — and I've spelled out how that is VERY doable.
Well, Sweden did it, but as they say - they were able to have an adult conversation about the reality of their situation, and an adult conversation is highly unlikely in the US. However, a number of states have moved in that direction. There are a number (as we say in Marine Corps Ops Planning a number of courses of action, each with multiple objectives. Our problem is to determine where to best put our resources.
The stolen land narrative in Canada is only one of the MANY purposely destructive woke-driven yarns created by the political left. This one, and others - like AGW, Fluid Gender Spectrum, DEI, History Rewrites, Victim Worship, Normalization of the Absurd, Oppressor-Oppressed Dialectic, BLM, Critical Race Theory, Immigration of Inmiscibles, are all meant to divide communities of all sizes and compositions in western world nations. All in order to make way for a Marx-inspired form of world governance. If we ever get through this attack on humanity, we might figure out just how much of an insidious cult that the WEF really is.
I am most concerned that western world democracies have been slip-sliding away into the abyss. Our post secondary students have become empty vessels ripe for any kind of ideological suggestion so long as it doesn't require any critical independent thinking on their part. Ironically, this is all because of their K-12 experience which has rendered them incapable of critical and independent thinking. The populations of our university campuses are easy pickin's for those who want to fill these vacant heads with Neo Marxist garbage that reverses the meanings of up and down, good and evil, opinions and facts, truth and fiction, right and wrong. The indoctrination is done in such a way that these students aren't even left confused, because they actually believe they have been awakened to the truth of everything and it doesn't matter that these truths don't align with reality. So they are TOLD.
It has all happened BECAUSE these same students have no tools to distinguish being taught from being indoctrinated. Throughout their lives to this point, they have been "taught" WHAT to think in place of HOW to think. Our Halls of Learning have become Halls of Indoctrination. Even many of our school teachers apparently don't know how crucial they have been in this effort to stupidize future generations. Our teachers are not bad people. It's just a matter of how cunning and sinister that the administration of school systems has become. Ignorance is not a valid excuse either though - not in the free world that has accomplished so very much for humanity over the decades and centuries in spite of inevitable spotty ignorance.
The Democrat Party in the US has been swallowed up by Neo Marxist ideologies and the Liberal Party in Canada isn't far behind, neither of which would have ever got a footing in their respective societies with such insane ideas, without the help from legacy media organizations (aka mainstream media). These Left-bent political parties are growing in numbers just as fast as the empty heads can be filled with these garbage narratives. It is just a matter of time unless we (the royal WE) wake up and turn these ships (countries) around. Already, communism has become a publicly acceptable choice of governance in the US and is no longer relegated to the waste bins of disgust and eternal failure. Figuratively speaking, these Left wing parties have us collectively eating garbage by acquiescing to these narratives, and what's worse, we're doing it willingly.
Inspired by what you’re doing John, a few days ago, I sent the following to several Canadian politicians and to many others who have much larger audiences than I do. It’s basically a re-write of an earlier reply to you. Hopefully it’s an improvement.
Katharine P. is wonderful, I recently watched a one hour interview with her on American Thought Leaders. She should be teaching teachers AND parents.
Nadia: Yes.
Katharine was recently on John Papola podcast called Dad Saves America. Together they are partnering to develop Strictly Education, a podcast resource for educators and parents and really everyone. I will link. https://dadsavesamerica.substack.com/p/we-stopped-disciplining-kids-now?r=r6ahu&utm_medium=ios
You’re welcome John. I couldn’t find email but she does have X account. https://x.com/miss_snuffy?s=11&t=OOYW6aJRyg0mgklrPp45_Q
Katharine’s YouTube channel https://youtube.com/@strictlyedpod?si=6CtB7-OAWDxZOl4t
Tina: TY. If you can find an email for her, let me know.
John I found a website for the school and there is an email. Perhaps that is a way to communicate with her more personally. https://www.michaela.education/
Here is an email to contact the school from that website: info@mcsbrent.co.uk
Thank you.
The disease of which she speaks wasn't a spontaneous accident. It was carefully engineered over the course of the last century by Comintern. In 1928 John Dewey was so impressed by Stalin's Potemkin Villages that he set out to remake American education in the Soviet model.
In the late 1920s, Herbert Marcuse and György Lukácz pondered the question "Why has the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution not swept the world?" Their conclusion? Not enough division. So they invented Critical Theory, that is, there are reasons other than relative prosperity to hate your neighbor. Being a Communist, a socialist hyena among socialist lions in Hitler's Germany, he fled to USA and ensconced himself at Columbia, then Harvard, then Brandeis, then UC San Diego where he was Angela Davis's mentor. Angela Davis was the author of Critical Race Theory, and then Intersectionality, the principle that the more intersecting oppressions you suffer, the more authority you ought to have. As governor, Reagan convinced the UC regents to fire her because of her openly flaunted Communist party membership. Pat Brown's California Supreme Court — yes, Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown's dad — forced UCLA to reinstate her.
Joe McCarthy was right, not only about the State Department and Army labs, in broad brush and almost every detail.
Socialism of all stripes has always been a plaything of arrogant over-educated wealthy "smart stupid" people. It thrives in universities, and universities create teachers. Isaac Newton built a bridge over the River Cam without any bolts or pins or dowels. Hundreds of years later the timbers had rotted so the combined genius of Cambridge University decided to rebuild it. They removed the rotting timbers, and utterly failed to build a new bridge in the way of Newton. Yet they arrogantly claim to be able to re-engineer society, a much more complex problem than one simple bridge.
When Gus Hall, General Secretary of Communist Party USA, realized his party, as a party, wasn't gaining traction, he told his members to infiltrate the Democrat party; now they control it. Antonio Gramsci pointed the way: Infiltrate all the institutions — education, entertainment, media, journalism, arts, bureaucracy. Do it slowly so society doesn't notice until it's too late.
Is it too late?
Van: Thank you for some interesting background. Regarding your closing question: the only people who answer yes, are those who have given up. I have not.
Have you ever heard of Marietta Johnson of Fairhope, Alabama? I believe she was a pioneer of the best form of education! I pray and hope that someday we could learn from her example of the best way to teach children. If you have never heard of her I hope you will take the time to discover what she started there many years ago. I think you might appreciate her teaching methodology.
Penny: Thank you for that info, as I was not familiar with it. Here is the link to the school <https://fairhopeorganicschool.org/about/>. A few facts: it started in 1907. Annual cost is $8000. Student ages are 3-7. In effect it seems to be a per-school to regular K-12 schooling.
Recently, I have been reading about the caliber of the teachers who are being permitted entry into classrooms. There are many mental-midgets heading classrooms today. In addition, many students are not into learning and are disruptive in the classroom My mother was a devoted teacher for 50 years who was forced out of teaching, because two of her students were not happy with the grades they received. They went into her classroom after school and beat her up; putting her into the hospital, because she would not change their grades.
Barbara: I'm missing something here. It sounds like your mom was assaulted — so the students should have been jailed. Were they?
This occurred in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in about 1971. They caught the two black teenagers that did it. I lived in California and did not get all the details. However, she was seriously injured. My mother loved teaching. It was her life. She told me that the children at that time were not receptive to learning like they had been in the past.. This was in the early seventies. She taught in a black community, where it had been very safe to go previously. Parents in the past had supported the teachers. They backed them up. Then, President Lyndon Johnson changed things, when he broke up the two parent homes and gave money to single mothers who didn't have a man in the home. My mother overheard young black girls at the school say that their goal was to make money by having lots of children. These uneducated young girls knew little about raising children...and had no men in the house to help them. The results: chaos in the black community.
Barbara, Ty but you didn't answer the question: what happened to the two students who assaulted your mom?
The two teenagers were caught, but I wasn't there, when this occurred.. I heard vi my brother that they were punished.
Barbara: That's good.
Teachers in the US aren’t subject matter experts. If you want them to be respected then allow them to expel unruly students and require them to actually be competent in summer matter. The education departments should be shut down and colleges should limit education coursework to the very minimum of classroom prep and techniques. Otherwise all universities should abolish education departments and education degrees.
John…thanks. A powerful message that many of us know and have been shouting. Unfortunately, her message only presented the goals (fix education) but nothing on how to fix it…no mention of fixing the pedagogy and the curriculum, both of which are owned and approved by the generations in charge of education.
Look for more of her. She's easy to find. There's even a page about her in Finnish!
Don: Yes, but it was a timed talk, not a class. If we actually do understand the goals (e.g., that we need to stop framing everything as oppressor vs oppressed), that clearly is a matter of fixing subject Content, and has zero to do with pedagogy. Who is fixing K-12 Content — e.g., in US public schools?
Unlike Europe, we do not venerate and respect schoolteachers. Remember that the American mantra is:"If you're so smart, how come you're not rich?".
I have a completely different approach to education. Why not teach the students how they individually fit into society and how our society has prospered for over 250 years due to the efforts of individuals just like them?
It is a math education that shows how one person working and prospering grows the entire economy. I can prove it in a 30 minute session beyond any doubt, but I have never seen it taught anywhere. It took me well over 30 years to figure it out for myself, but I know it is true.
The bottom line is you can become very rich if you just apply yourself to the talents you choose to perfect. Our system rewards excellence. It is the same design our founders devised in 1776 and Adam Smith wrote about that same year. So, it is both math and history, but you need reading and writing skills to make yourself valuable to the world.
Students need to clearly see the path to success instead of being directed onto the road to serfdom.
Katherine spoke of students' "agency" in other speeches. They can be, and ought to be, the agent of their own fitting into society and progressing through their lives.
I realized long ago that I learned critical thinking from my middle school plane geometry class. You need to organize your thoughts, and proceed from one concept to related ones. Do schools still teach Euclid's Elements in the two-column style? J. L. Heilbron published a book in 1998 entitled "Geometry Civilized: History, Culture, Technique." He explicitly links the Greek method to an "Exemplar of Rigorous Reasoning." Oddly, my excellent middle school geometry teacher, with whom I maintain contact in his 93rd year, is an ardent socialist.
Van: That your former teacher is an ardent Socialist doesn't seem to jive with him being a Critical Thinker...
I don't know whether he connected Euclid's Elements with critical thinking.
Jim: Yes, people (students) tend to act in their own self interest, so making it clear to them what that is, could be helpful.
The root of the problem - young people do know what is in their own self interest and see with their own eyes the ruling institutions are operating against them.
DD: Yes, but to properly understand what is in their best interest, requires some Critical Thinking...
Robin: Respect should be given. Veneration, no. These days, WAY too many teachers go through getting their education degrees in Woke academic factories. No one is addressing this corruption of the system. DOEd is the most appropriate place for that to happen, but they don't seem to understand the problem.
Excellent speech about how the radical left has used the “critical but boring stuff” to subvert, indoctrinate, and advance radicalism. Ignoring her points begs to enable tyranny
IE. Yes. just framing everything as oppressor vs oppressed is a simple, but destructive perspective.
Watched her at the ARC conference, and have heard her elsewhere before. Lits of wisdom there. It's a shame that nobody in the US Education Establishment will listen to her.
Mike: WE are listening and we should be the vehicle to pass what she is saying onto the US education establishment.
With the goal that perhaps someday WE will be the establishment. Can it happen by evolution? Maybe. But more likely it will take wholesale replacement by defunding it. We can socialize the cost of education without relying on the current system, which is actually socialism (government owns the means of production). Sweden defunded public schools 30 years ago and went to a voucher system. No money goes directly to any school. It was a dramatic case of self-rescue. See my latest article.
Mike: You are essentially recommending that we start over. I sympathize with that perspective, but it is simply not going to happen. We need to start by meaningfully fixing what we have — and I've spelled out how that is VERY doable.
Well, Sweden did it, but as they say - they were able to have an adult conversation about the reality of their situation, and an adult conversation is highly unlikely in the US. However, a number of states have moved in that direction. There are a number (as we say in Marine Corps Ops Planning a number of courses of action, each with multiple objectives. Our problem is to determine where to best put our resources.
The stolen land narrative in Canada is only one of the MANY purposely destructive woke-driven yarns created by the political left. This one, and others - like AGW, Fluid Gender Spectrum, DEI, History Rewrites, Victim Worship, Normalization of the Absurd, Oppressor-Oppressed Dialectic, BLM, Critical Race Theory, Immigration of Inmiscibles, are all meant to divide communities of all sizes and compositions in western world nations. All in order to make way for a Marx-inspired form of world governance. If we ever get through this attack on humanity, we might figure out just how much of an insidious cult that the WEF really is.
I am most concerned that western world democracies have been slip-sliding away into the abyss. Our post secondary students have become empty vessels ripe for any kind of ideological suggestion so long as it doesn't require any critical independent thinking on their part. Ironically, this is all because of their K-12 experience which has rendered them incapable of critical and independent thinking. The populations of our university campuses are easy pickin's for those who want to fill these vacant heads with Neo Marxist garbage that reverses the meanings of up and down, good and evil, opinions and facts, truth and fiction, right and wrong. The indoctrination is done in such a way that these students aren't even left confused, because they actually believe they have been awakened to the truth of everything and it doesn't matter that these truths don't align with reality. So they are TOLD.
It has all happened BECAUSE these same students have no tools to distinguish being taught from being indoctrinated. Throughout their lives to this point, they have been "taught" WHAT to think in place of HOW to think. Our Halls of Learning have become Halls of Indoctrination. Even many of our school teachers apparently don't know how crucial they have been in this effort to stupidize future generations. Our teachers are not bad people. It's just a matter of how cunning and sinister that the administration of school systems has become. Ignorance is not a valid excuse either though - not in the free world that has accomplished so very much for humanity over the decades and centuries in spite of inevitable spotty ignorance.
The Democrat Party in the US has been swallowed up by Neo Marxist ideologies and the Liberal Party in Canada isn't far behind, neither of which would have ever got a footing in their respective societies with such insane ideas, without the help from legacy media organizations (aka mainstream media). These Left-bent political parties are growing in numbers just as fast as the empty heads can be filled with these garbage narratives. It is just a matter of time unless we (the royal WE) wake up and turn these ships (countries) around. Already, communism has become a publicly acceptable choice of governance in the US and is no longer relegated to the waste bins of disgust and eternal failure. Figuratively speaking, these Left wing parties have us collectively eating garbage by acquiescing to these narratives, and what's worse, we're doing it willingly.
Russ: Excellent! I think you've got it. Now get some of your fellow citizens to also understand.
Great speech!
Inspired by what you’re doing John, a few days ago, I sent the following to several Canadian politicians and to many others who have much larger audiences than I do. It’s basically a re-write of an earlier reply to you. Hopefully it’s an improvement.
Russ: Good. Thank you for taking some action. Don't let them get off the hook!