Sabbath Message 21/2/31/120

 

 

Dear Friends,

 

This week, The New York Times published an article by Bob Herbert under the title Clueless in America (April 22, 2008). What Bob says is not exclusive to the US and applies right across the world.

 

Bob Herbert says: “We don’t hear a great deal about education in the presidential campaign. It’s much too serious a topic to compete with such fun stuff as Hillary tossing back a shot of whiskey or Barack rolling a gutter ball.” He is correct. Obama is in the serious position of actually being seen as elitist because he has a university degree and Clinton actually plays up to this redneck yobbo nonsense to run spoiler in the campaign. Bush plays the idiot and gets away with it and has wrecked the economy, the education system, the health care and welfare system, and all under orders from the Globalists and the lobbyists, particularly the oil lobby.  Reagan, Bush Snr., Clinton and Bush all are to blame and this dynasty rubbish is being pushed again in 2008.

 

Bob Herbert makes what should seem to most rational and sane people to be a glimpse of the obvious. He says: “The nation’s future may depend on how well we educate the current and future generations, but (like the renovation of the nation’s infrastructure, or a serious search for better sources of energy) that can wait. At the moment no one seems to have the will to engage any of the most serious challenges facing the US.”

 

An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for the largely clueless youngsters, in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of life – and for the country as a whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.

 

He says: “Ignorance in the US is not just bliss, it’s widespread”.

 

The results of the education advocacy group common core found that a quarter of US teenagers could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.

 

The president of the US program of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Alan Golston, was alarmed that the US had such a high dropout rate. He said: “We have one of the highest dropout rates in the industrialised world”. Bob Herbert reported him as saying that was pretty scary and alarming.

 

The alarming statistics are that roughly a third of all high school students drop out and another third graduate but are not prepared for the logical progression to the next stage in life; either to engage in productive work or go on to post-secondary or tertiary education.

 

Herbert observes – and correctly so – that: “When two-thirds of all teenagers old enough to graduate from high school are incapable of mastering college level work, the nation is doing something awfully wrong.”

 

Mr. Galston was reported as noting that the performance of US students, when compared with their peers in other countries, tends to grow increasingly dismal as they move through the higher grades. In maths and science US students in fourth grade are among the top students globally. By the eighth grade they are in the middle of the pack and by 12^th grade the US students are scoring near the bottom of the industrialised countries.

 

The well educated in the public schools represent too small a fraction to make a difference.

 

This problem is not new. It is getting worse and Bill Gates observed the problem years ago when he described the US school system as “obsolete”. They were below standard years ago and over the administrations of the last two presidents they have just collapsed. It is not a Republican-Democrat issue. Both were and are at fault and the collapse of the system is aided and abetted by an incompetent media controlled by elitists who know nothing of the rise of the industrialised system and the maintenance of an educated workforce.

 

The definition of “obsolete” Bill Gates was using was not that they were broken, flawed or under-funded, although they may be all of those things. He meant that: “even when they were working as designed they cannot teach all our students what they need to know today.”

 

The Educational Testing Services, in its report, America’s Perfect Storm, is reported as citing three powerful factors that are affecting the quality of life for millions of Americans and already shaping the nation’s future.

 

These forces are:

1. The wide disparity of the literacy and math skills which despite being so important to the lives of individuals and families vary widely across racial, ethnic, and socio-economic groups.
2. The “seismic changes” to the US economy caused by globalisation and technological advances, and shifts in the relationship of labour and capital, among other developments.
3. Sweeping demographic changes such that by 2030 the US population is expected to reach 360 million and be older and substantially more diverse, with immigration affecting both the population and the work force.

 

The nation is under-equipped to cope with these challenges and is becoming increasingly undereducated in order to compete with world standards.

 

Bob Herbert said that the US is effectively standing in place while other nations are catching up and passing the US in educational achievement.

 

He says that you would have to be pretty dopey not to see that, but adds the observation that some of the US is pretty dopey. In the Common Core Survey, it was reported that nearly 20% did not know who the US fought in WWII. Eleven per cent thought that Dwight Eisenhower was the president forced from office by the Watergate scandal and another 11% thought it was Harry Truman. He is right: ”We have work to do.”

 

However, it is not all in the US. Australasia under the Howard administration let the University and school system downgrade. Prior to them the Labor people allowed the teachers’ union to remove accountability standards, as did the Liberal and Labor regimes before them. The Liberals, under Menzies, wrecked Australian development and squandered the economic advantages Australia had post-1945. The US and British Commonwealth had a responsibility to re-educate the world post-1945 and yet they blew it through elitist idiots with no vision and no social responsibility. The world bankers and the Globalists need to be removed from power and their resources taken from them and redistributed. The Federal Banking system needs to be smashed and responsibility put back in the hands of the Parliament. The media needs to be broken up and the media empires of the oligopolists broken up and confined to one nation only and in the hands of the many and not the few.

 

Our whole system of education needs to be reorganised. After World War II, with the psychological testing of so many men, it was realised that a vast array of intelligent men were available and not qualified. They were given the opportunity for re-education and sent back to college and university and became more qualified.

 

That needs to be done in all nations, and the more intelligent identified and educated. The medical system needs to be taken out of the hands of the doctors and more people given access to a medical education. Australia and the US are not educating their own doctors but poaching them from third world countries that desperately need them. The governments are allowing it because the quota system is in the hands of the doctors and the only way it can be broken is to allow more doctors in the country, thereby diminishing the standard of health of the third world.

 

The re-organisation of the US and Australia and New Zealand and Canada seems beyond the men in power at present. They don’t seem to have the vision for it all either in government or in opposition. Africa is simply a joke.

 

The population needs to be assessed and helped to work to its potential and education has to be reorganised.

 

In the end of the 19^th century, we realised that to make a sound and balanced society based on sound principles and equality we had to have a universal and sound system of education. The sacrifices were made and the nations were educated. We helped developing countries to reach those goals also.

 

The Globalists have wrecked that vision, and the social elite created by the sacrifice of the many has been taken by the elite as a right it alone holds, and the education of the masses is being deliberately written off. The health system is being let fall into the hands of the Roman Catholic Churches and other churches in the US. The families of those who died in war are let fall behind because of the advantage and self-interest of the elitists.

 

This has to be stopped and re-organised. If it is not done now it will be done soon under Jesus Christ, and those who should have done it now will be rebuked and their positions taken from them.

 

The Church of God has a responsibility to ensure its people are educated and given as much opportunity as possible.

 

 

Wade Cox

Coordinator General