The past couple of days I have been hearing reports about proposals from the Obama administration on how the school year and school day need to be lengthened. As a teacher, those ideas caught my attention. I do teach at the Community College level so these proposals do not directly impact me. They undoubtedly would impact me in the long run if they ever got implemented.

The education secretary for the Obama administration has suggested that schools need to be the center of the community. To fulfill that function, they need to be open more. When asked what he meant by being open more, he replied that they should be open for twelve or more hours a day and 6-7 days a week. He did add that this extra time would be filled with all sorts of educational activities and physical education.

From what I know of the educational system in this country, I highly doubt that twelve months of school will produce better students than nine months. I also think that 6 or 7 days of school would produce the same level of student as the current 5 day system. The reason for my optimism is my great respect for the teacher’s union, the NEA.

In my opinion, the reason the Obama administration wants to have schools open longer each day and longer during the year is not to produce better students. Their goal would be to produce better Obamabots. Since a student has the potential to think for him/herself, they can be dangerous. That is because they spend so much time with their parents. Taking them away for twelve hours a day would remove much of the parental attraction. Then, you could indoctrinate the students into whatever you wanted without the influence of the parents.

Parents have the nasty habit of knowing things about the past. Since they have knowledge of the way things used to be, they tend to teach that to their children. That way they pass the knowledge from generation to generation. That is how it has been since time began. The way to break that cycle is to remove the impressionable children from the home and teach them what you want them to believe. Since children tend to believe all that adults in authority say, that would work wonders.

Right now, I only have one ten year old granddaughter at home. We talk about history, culture and our responsibility in that universe. That periodically conflicts with what she is taught at school. But, because I taught her at home, she can withstand the false teachings. What she tries to do is reconcile the differences between the two camps. Generally she sides with my camp, because we have a closer relationship than she does with teachers. It is interesting to see what she comes up with. We talk about her ideas and the pros and cons of her positions. It is interesting to see her grow because of these discussions. I think that is how it is supposed to work in all families. Parents teaching children at home one set of values. Students getting a second set of values presented at school. If you are doing your job as a parent, you will talk to your children about culture and reconcile those issues.

I can’t claim that I am the best father in the world and that all my children are wonderful perfect children. I have children that have made serious mistakes. But, when they do make those mistakes I am there to help them understand what went wrong in a loving way. It has taken some time for some to come around and others are still wandering, but eventually I believe that my children will see that the culture they were raised with is the best one for them. At least that is the father in me talking. Whether my belief that they will come back to the fold will ever happen is something that only time will tell. I hope I am still alive to see it happen.

On the way to work today, I listened to Dennis Prager on KKNT 960 AM. The main topic he was talking about was higher education and a study done by UCLA on the top ten issues that are important to college professors.

The top two issues were to make the students do community service and to make the students honor other races. As Dennis Prager said, if you wanted to do community service to help the “Mormon” Church, would the college professors think that was community service? The answer is obvious, college professors mean leftist community service like feeding the homeless, not things that would build up the community.

The second issue is race. Liberals see race in everything they do. Conservatives do not see race, unless it is brought to their attention. I am particularly color blind when it comes to racial issues. I have children or in-laws or nephews that are of every racial group. As a result, I generally do not even know what a person’s race is until they bring it to my attention. If they are a different color, I just use that as one of their identifying marks like a scar or hair color. As a scientist, I know that each of us are generally alike when it comes to our genes. Our DNA is so similar that, except for sex, it would be difficult to tell which sample was which from my class of students of different races. There are markers that can tell where your DNA originated, but generally we are genetically alike regardless of what color we happen to be. The differences between races are cultural, not genetic.

Dennis Prager said that teaching students comes in tenth of the top ten things that college professors are concerned with. As an aside, he said that he has heard that community college teachers are generally better than university teachers. That is because community college teachers are there to teach and university professors are there to do research, not teach. University professors do not get promoted on the basis of how well they teach. They get promoted on how much money they can bring in to the university in the form of grants or on how much they get published. Teaching is a low priority at universities when it comes to professors. Community college teachers are there because they like to teach. They get promoted on how well they teach, not on how much money they bring in. For that reason, you will get better teachers in a community college than in any 4-year college or university. There are exceptions to that rule. There are excellent university professors, but they are rare.

Most of higher education is little more than indoctrination into liberal groupthink. The exceptions to that statement generally come in the sciences. In English, History and the humanities in general, liberal groupthink is the norm. In the sciences, you cannot generally teach the liberal claptrap and be looked at as a serious scientist. The exception to that is global warming. You can believe in global warming and be promoted, but that is disappearing as the evidence is mounting against global warming. Most serious scientists have rejected global warming as an ideology and are sticking to the facts. That is the best way for any true scientist to follow.

As Dennis Prager said, never has so much been spent to teach your children things you do not believe. Many universities are concerned with turning out good liberals, not educated citizens. I know at my school, in the sciences you get a real education. In the liberal arts, you get liberalism 101. That is why our students complain about having to think in our classes. They say that they do not have to think in their other classes. That is a real shame.

Barack Obama has picked the head of the Chicago public schools to head the Department of Education. That is a real bad choice. I just read that only 17% of Chicago school kids can read at or above grade level by the 8^th grade. That is a terrible record. With a record like that the person should be fired, not promoted to a higher position.

The person to head the Department of Education should be a person that has promoted excellence in education, not failure. Of course, the Department of Education is an unnecessary federal department that has no usefulness, but that is another story for another day. Whoever heads the department should at least have led a successful education department somewhere in the United States. There must be someone in the United States who has led a successful education department somewhere. I am sure that Obama’s team could find that person if they tried hard enough.

One reason that Obama might have tapped the Chicago schools leader is that Obama and Ayers introduced their Fabian Socialism into the schools through the Chicago/Annenberg Challenge period. That means that the Chicago schools have been teaching socialism in their schools for about 15 years. That is plenty of time to have raised a generation of socialists. Obama probably would like to do the same for the rest of the United States. Unfortunately, there are plenty of teachers that think that socialism is the way the United States should go.

The problem with most of the major inner city schools is that they are failing. This includes: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, Atlanta & Philadelphia. There are others, but those are the largest and they are all terrible at best. To choose one of the leaders from one of those places is a bad choice. When the schools are falling apart and the students not being taught at grade level, there is a problem. The person in charge should have identified that problem and be working to solve those problems. The problem is that no school administrator, except for Washington, D.C., is trying to actually solve the problems. They are all just going along to get along and Obama selects one of them. That says a lot about the priority that Obama will put on education during the next four years.

To give Obama an opportunity to make amends, I will assume that in making this selection, he was distracted by the Blagojevich situation. If that is the case, I would expect him to pull this selection back in the next few days and replace this bad selection with one that reflects a desire to see excellence in education instead of failure in education that he has endorsed. But, Democrats usually do not want excellence in education. An educated population will never pick socialism. An educated population will never go for the things that Democrats usually want to do. So, that is usually why Democrats are against improving education. They are always for spending more on education. They just do not want to improve what education we have. They just want to spend more to get more of what we already get. I know that makes no sense. But if you are reading this, you are educated and are probably not a Democrat.

As an educator, I try hard to provide my students with an excellent education. I will be the first to admit that I am not perfect. I make mistakes. I sometimes do or say things that in retrospect I wish I had not said or done. But, overall, I try hard to give my students the best education I can provide in the time they are with me. I am a science teacher and concentrate on the science. I sometimes get worried about the poor quality of work that my students turn in for research papers. The English is frequently bad. The sourcing of articles is done poorly. The citations in the back of the paper are done wrong. The citations in the back can be done with a website that will do it in the proper format for you. There is no reason to do it wrong. We have a learning center on campus that will go over their papers with them and almost write it for them when it is all said and done. Yet, I get terribly written papers all the time. That is a product of the poor education that they received before they came to my class.

I can say with satisfaction that students that succeed with me will also succeed in the courses that follow my course. Those that get an A or a B with me will usually get an A or a B all the way through the next three courses. Those courses are much more difficult than my introductory course. But, I think that it is because I prepared them well that the students do so well in the later classes.