WHAT IS THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT?

#184

Bill Gates and others like him are technocrats; they are not so much interested in education as they are interested in the power of technology. They see technology to influence people’s opinions about such things as fairness and the environment they want to shape the world by their beliefs. The purpose of present-day education is to replace cognitive thinking with sociology and ideology under social justice. When the Gates Foundation hired lobbyists in Washington, the lobbyists convinced politicians to overreach into the area of public education. Events have moved us from a knowledge-based mastery achievement system to a system that demands uniformity—the system teaches students to fear descent from the mainstream narrative and be intolerant of opposing viewpoints. Moreover, because Christianity is opposed to the expansion of state power over people’s lives and supports the concept of the individual, which is the smallest minority, rather than the collective, it is a prime target of the modern-day progressive movement. The idea that the government would mandate schools to teach things like transsexuality and homosexual marriage would have been inconceivable years ago. Now not only is it accepted but it is encouraged. The Every Student Succeeds Act weaves sex education into every subject; even math uses story problems dealing with sexual topics! The classics are mostly gone in the humanities to be replaced by social issues with a liberal bias.

Rachel Carson Middle School in Herndon, Virginia, is full of winners. The school won a governor’s award for teaching excellence from 2007 to 2011, and the national forum for middle-school improvement cited Rachel Carson as a school to watch. However, the federal government considers Rachel Carson a failure because it does not fit its definition of success as an improvement in test scores of different groups. Rachel Carson has high average scores but fails because it has achievement gaps when it breaks out test results by such categories as race, gender, and income. Corinthian College was a college with more than 100 campuses. Private colleges, like Corinthian, specialize in training students for blue-collar jobs, jobs like driving big commercial trucks, nursing, cloud computing, web development, database programming, software development, and network security, offering degrees in healthcare, business, criminal justice, transportation technology, construction trades, and information technology. Corinthian College was a for-profit college and one of the largest for-profit post-secondary education companies in North America. Because the college failed to meet government mandates promptly, the Department of Education put it out of business.

Another casualty for the same reasons was the ITT Technical Institute. ITT was a technical institute that operated for a profit with 130 campuses in 38 states and was operational for 50 years. On September 26, 2016, ITT Tech abruptly shut down, leaving 35,000 students without a degree and 8,000 employees without a job. The reasons for the closure are the same as with Corinthian College, financial sanctions by the U.S. Department of Education. The Department of Education claimed that ITT was charging tens of thousands of dollars in tuition but failing to provide valuable education to its students. A third casualty occurred in June 2016 when the Department of Education forced the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS) shutdown. ACICS accredited 245 colleges that enrolled 800,000 students. The Department of Education officially stripped the ACICS of its authority, handing down the final blow in a long controversy over the council’s ability to be an effective watchdog for students and billions of taxpayer dollars. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines progressive as “making use of or interested in new ideas, findings, or opportunities while placing emphasis on the individual child and encouraging self-expression.” The progressive movement intends to replace God, history, Judeo-Christian values, and individual thought with a collective mindset.

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