Americans Lack Imagination For Things Like iPad Schools And Secession

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – I just think people should explore the possibilities, should not be wed to this jingoistic nationalism that we all must be wed to, and ought to think about what’s best for us and our children in your region, where it is you live, where it is that your community is.  If it’s not membership in this union that spies on you and taxes you and harasses you and undermines your moral and cultural traditions, then leave it.  What exactly is the hang-up about leaving it?  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Julian in Alabama, hello, Julian.

Caller Julian:  Good morning, how you doing?

Mike:  I’m fine, sir, thank you.

Caller Julian:  I’ve got a question for you.  With secession, instead of having single-state secession, what would be your take on regional since some places might be landlocked, like the Southeast region, Texas, the West Coast?  Would that work better to help the states that are landlocked if somebody would actually think about doing something like that?

Mike:  I don’t know.  Look at little states that are landlocked like Austria in Europe.  How do they do?  Look at states that are landlocked like Switzerland?  Germany is pretty much landlocked.  It’s surrounded on all sides last time I looked.  It seems to do okay.  I suppose it would be requisite with the statesmen of that state to be skilled and adroit enough at the state-making craft to be able to form alliances and free trade agreements and what have you with any surrounding states.  To answer the question in the abstract, I don’t have a preferential method.

Caller Julian:  I was thinking, like you were saying about Switzerland, they’ve had a lot of time to get their act together.  Some of the Americans haven’t had that much time to get their act together.

Mike:  They’ve had hundreds of years.  The American states have had hundreds of years.

Caller Julian:  A hundred years ago, I probably would have agreed exactly with that.  We have so many intelligent rectums nowadays in charge of everything.  People have been dumbed down so much, a lot of times they can’t find their butt with both hands and a roadmap.

Mike:  My question then, since I am floundering about aimlessly today without direction or guidance on this program, maybe somebody will throw me a lifeline, let me ask you a question.  Do you think there was ever a point in time in American history when there weren’t people walking around as elected rectums?

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Caller Julian:  Not as much as today.  People had more common sense.

Mike:  I’ll agree with that part.

Caller Julian:  A lot of people were self-educated and they actually believed in educating themselves.  Nowadays it’s a place to kill time, school.  Public schools are just a joke.

Mike:  Public schooling is normalized schooling.  If we don’t put all of our children into the exact same schools, then some of them might get their feelings hurt.  We can’t have children out there, even though they’re dumbasses, in their dumbassity suffering dumbassity and hurt feelings.  That just wouldn’t be right.  There’s a very thought-provoking idea that is taking root in some places in Europe.  It is based upon one of the last wishes of Steve Jobs.  It basically says — this is the way the University of Virginia was actually conceived when it first opened its doors in the 1790s.  Basically there are no grade levels.  There are levels of achievement, but you don’t have to go and you don’t have to stay for any predetermined amount of time if you don’t want to.  You’re allowed to come and go into this educational hotspot and take as much or little education as you would like and then do with it what you will.

There are going to be many people that are going to say, [mocking] “That’s just not going to work.  Come one, man.”  It’s called the iPad School, as a matter of fact.  The Dutch are going to try this.  This is from Mac Rumors…

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Last year, we reported on a Dutch proposal to launch so-called “Steve Jobs schools” for children, offering a peek at of Jobs’ vision of how the iPad could help remake the educational experience.

Spiegel now follows up (via AppleInsider) with a new report discussing the country’s plans to open 11 such schools this August.

“Some 1,000 children aged four to 12 will attend the schools, without notebooks, books or backpacks. Each of them, however, will have his or her own iPad.
There will be no blackboards, chalk or classrooms, homeroom teachers, formal classes, lesson plans, seating charts, pens, teachers teaching from the front of the room, schedules, parent-teacher meetings, grades, recess bells, fixed school days and school vacations. If a child would rather play on his or her iPad instead of learning, it’ll be okay. And the children will choose what they wish to learn based on what they happen to be curious about.”

The article highlights the flexible nature of the schools with a look at an upcoming school being prepared in the city of Breda. The school building itself will be open from 7:30 AM to 6:30 PM every day of the year except Christmas and New Year’s Day, with children free to come and go as they please as long as they are present during the core school day that runs from 10:30 AM to 3:00 PM.

Under the model of individualized instruction, students will learn through iPad apps at their own pace, with teachers serving as coaches to help them reach goals and advance to subsequent levels.

“As such, the school day never really ends. Pupils are welcome to keep working on their iPads at home, on weekends or on vacation. But as much as the program offers freedom and continuity, it also comes with a substantial monitoring component. The iPad keeps teachers and parents constantly informed about what children are doing, what they have learned and how they are progressing.”

Teachers, children, and parents meet to discuss goals for each six-week period, setting up standards to help students gain the knowledge and skills to move on to the next level.
Dutch researcher Maurice de Hond, the man behind the initiative, believes that the number of schools should grow to at least forty next year, with the schools being publicly funded and open to all children and subsidies available to families unable to afford an iPad.

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Mike:  How do you like that?  Think about that for just a moment.

Caller Julian:  It’s a kids institute for what they have a desire to learn.  They can learn faster or slower.

Mike:  That’s right.  If your kid is really an ace, he doesn’t have to suffer with the rest of the non-aces and endure twelve years of monotony.  Instead, he can be out being a Doogie Howser when he’s 13.  There’s no legality to this.  There’s no compulsion.  The State is not saying you have to go.  The State is not saying you must get this grade on that particular test.  Instead, it is left up to the needs of the free markets or the needs and desires of the parental units.  I’d like to know what is the counterpoint to that initiative?  Julian, could you give it to me?

Caller Julian:  They wouldn’t be uniform.

Mike:  We must have uniformity.  Citizen, you will obey your school overlords and be uniform, citizen.

Caller Julian:  That’s the problem with everything now.  Everybody wants to be uniform.

Mike:  Let me touch on something else here while I’m on a roll.  Do you know that when you used to go to university, for example when little Jimmy Madison trudged off to Princeton University in 1773, he didn’t go there to study mathematics.  There was no specific field of study.  What he went there for was for the religious education that the Reverend John Witherspoon, who was the headmaster of Princeton at the time, was going to deliver.  Outside of their regimen of religious instruction, which is what was mainly taught at university in those days, and I think we’d be well advised to get back to, outside of that there were other curricula.  You would learn the ways of the ancient world and the geniuses of the ancient world by doing what, Julian?  Studying and learning to read and write Latin and Greek and the ancient languages, studying the ancient history of Rome, studying the history of the Helvetic Republic, studying the history of the great works of the Medieval times.  This is how a child would become a man of the world.

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Further down the road, you could seek instruction in mathematics.  If you wanted to study law, for example, in the State of Virginia, there was only one place to go.  You’re in Alabama.  I don’t know what they had in Alabama in the 19^th century, but you would go to the College of William and Mary.  There you would find the aged yet erudite and scholarly George Wythe who taught Thomas Jefferson, who taught Edmund Randolph, who taught Patrick Henry, who taught George Mason.  If your kid was a lawyer in the 1770s and 1780s, he probably went to William and Mary and probably learned under Wythe.  There were no rote and regimen that you have to do this and that.  As a matter of fact, to get out of William and Mary, you went and took an oral exam.  You basically went and convinced Wythe that you knew enough and that you could practice the art of law and that you would continue your studies.   He’d say: Okay, you pass, and that was the end of it.

I think one of the things we suffer from, we meaning the royal we, we suffer from a serious lack of imagination.  We’re just incapable of imagining things anything outside of Harry freaking Potter or a sci-fi movie.  That’s the only thing we can imagine.  I hope I answered your question.  When you talk about secession and you talk about republicanism and republics, imagine the possibilities.  That’s why I say I don’t have a ready, steady answer that’s going to apply to every case.  I just think people should explore the possibilities, should not be wed to this jingoistic nationalism that we all must be wed to, and ought to think about what’s best for us and our children in your region, where it is you live, where it is that your community is.  If it’s not membership in this union that spies on you and taxes you and harasses you and undermines your moral and cultural traditions, then leave it.  What exactly is the hang-up about leaving it?  Every Independence Day, I still don’t get it.  I don’t understand, what is the fear?  It’s as though, [mocking] “If you do that, everyone will die!”  Really?  You really think that?  So you’re so confident in your fellow man and in what you can’t accomplish without your federal overlords doing it for you that you’re afraid to do it?

To translate, Julian, the average tea partier out there is mortified and is yelling and screaming and hopping up and down and hopping mad every day of the week at what government is doing to him or to her, yet is equally or I would say in a superior fashion mortified by leaving that government.  [mocking] “I don’t want to leave it.  I’m not leaving the umbrella of the USA.  This is as good as it gets.”  Really?  What Edward Snowden told you is as good as it gets?  What the IRS does to you, that’s as good as it gets?  Puh-freaking-lease.  Independent my behind.  All right, Julian, you dragged a monologue out of me.  I was trying not to do one today.  You dragged it out of me.

Caller Julian:  It was a good one.

Mike:  Thank you very much, brother.  Happy Independence Day, my friend.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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