I will read all of this but I am still stuck on the first part. Children are the responsibility of their parents. You are not compelled to have your children attend public schools. Or a particular public school. You are not hamstrung from involving your children in enlightening programs, teaching opportunities at home, counter measures to indoctrination in the class room, volunteering at the schools your children are attending. So many options. That is not the same thing as a predator kidnapping a child; therefore victim. I am not saying all parents are vigilant. But you are.

All the more reason to remind ALL Americans that it is THEIR responsibility to keep an eye on the government. It is THEIR job to KNOW and have an UNDERSTANDING of The Constitution. We've become a nation of lazies who don't make an effort in their OWN self interest, who take the coward stance that they are powerless so why bother trying. They don't ask questions, they don't seek answers, they just assume someone else will do what needs to be done to keep their life the way it is and can't fathom the change that is coming, or how negatively it will affect them. You can call them "victims" of the system if you want to.....I call them ignorant and lazy. They are playing the biggest role in their own destruction...and don't even know it (or care).

I strongly suggest you read The Fountainhead. I just finished it and THIS is explained perfectly.

"I really do not get the victim mentality."

I don't, either. But being a victim of an evil perpetrator is not the same as having a "victim mentality."

When a thief or rapist attacks a victim, they are a victim, irrespective of their thinking on the matter.

When a corrupt politician or psychobabblist tells someone they are a "victim" because society did not do enough for them, then that is a "victim mentality."

The two are nothing alike.

When I am saying the youth of today are victims, I mean of an exploitative and evil group of people who have, with passion, malice, and forethought, perpetrated a real hurt against them.

Those raised and consumed by this environment truly are little more than just lemmings -- and it is not by their choice. They just don't know any better.

Before I came to see AS1, I was only vaguely aware of Ayn and her book, I formed opinions based on my parents and my experiences. But I'm one of the small percent of the baby boomers who survived the educational system.

Thank goodness we homeschooled our kids -- they have a chance at a reasonable life. We taught them to actually bring in information, analyze it, and determine what is right.

But even in *this* group, that skill is not ubiquitous. I had a recent foray with a misogynist who continues to hammer on a socialist organization's tabloid research study like it is truth straight from god. This person cannot be convinced the study is virtually meaningless. The ability to actually process the information, and think through the data being presented is lost to them.

If someone HERE cannot make that leap, then how can we hope people who are not "up to" this level can?

hopefully, we will not get to that point. but you act as if parents are not lemmings by choice. I disagree. Parents sitting back and ignoring how their own children are taught and their neighbors' children have made an active decision. I see few productive teaching moments for teachers to weigh in on religion in the classroom. That is for the home. I will say, the public system my kids were in, there were several religious clubs involved at the school including Young Life. (But don't get me started on how they bring in millions of untaxed dollars to buy up millions of acres in Colorado.) Homeschooling. In the last decade, it's easier now than ever to home school your kids, especially K-8. Great helpful websites, entrepreneurial stores devoted to stocking materials, helpful libraries running programs geared to home schoolers. And you are credited at least some of the tax dollars back I think back to my childhood. Before daycare was a thing, both of my parents were teachers, so even though they were both busy teaching others' kids, they still made time to question me on what I was learning and encouraged me to ask questions and not accept everything taught in the classroom. I grew up in a small town though-I think the learning experience in a big city school opposed to a sleepy suburb could be vastly different.Of those I know who home schooled, most of the kids graduated at 16 and were already taking college level classes-usually through the community colleges (cheaper). There are more and more private colleges with religious foundations, created specifically as a counter balance to state universities.
I really do not get the victim mentality.

!
Ayn Rand

I think I understand what you are saying -- but, again, I don't think we can blame the kids. And by "kids," I mean those who are currently in K-12 *and* their parents, who were also taught using the same principles, just not as well.

How often do we hear children argue with their parents about what is true because their teacher told them something? I have seen families torn apart because the teacher(s) said religion was a waste of time and only for the feeble minded, while the parents were trying to teach their children to love God. Your stand on religion is your business, but when the (mis)education industry's indoctrination of children is more significant than the parent's most ardent attempts to overcome, it is impossible to "blame" the children and/or the parents.

Truly evil people run our schools today. Led by the folks at the NEA, the state and local school districts are slowly (?) destroying the minds of our youth. You want a high school student to magically become sentient and discerning? What has prepared them for that? School has gone out of their way to NOT prepare them for that stage in their life.

You only see what you look for. When the school system teaches students to look to their teachers and other similar authorities for "truth," and to reject everything else, then "what's going on beneath [their] noses" is meaningless drivel.

I see the evil busybodies from the baby boomer generation, who are now in control of virtually everything, as the cause of the problems. Their children and grand-children are true victims of this evil plot.

They will pay with their lives, unfortunately, for the "sins" of their parents. When the social order collapses, and there is nothing left for them to take, starvation and disease will become rampant. Hopefully enough sentient folks will survive to rebuild.

Lenin?

"The smallest minority on earth is the individual."
guess who said that?

;)

Is being an individual a preferred inority?

well, there are national standards set and you can only beat them if you are in a preferred minority. you have to be taught to take two tests as it were

on-line education might have a chance if. and only if, it could be run as a free-market enterprise. If the Government steps in and insists on controlling it with standards, it wont be worth a darn.

Their evil plan is to drive out the concept of the individual from the minds of every person on Earth. It was first stated, to my knownedge,by Plato in his Republic and built upon by Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto. It exisits here in the USA and internationally via UNESCO. The plan is long range and the Socialists can afford to wait for those my age and the "Greatest Genertion" to die off while they continue to churn out one stunted mind after another. I just saw World War Z. If they traded "Zombies" for "Gotpiss" (Graduates of the public idiotic school system) no one would noticed the difference.

please excuse me for not being clearer. I do not blame children, although by HS, surely kids are discerning enough to stake their claim for reason, to question textbooks and fact check. I mean the computer is at their fingertips-they don't even have to go to the library and sift through a card catalog! I am referring to adults who know better and let schools raise their children anyway. It's those of us who tuurn a blind eye in our communities knowing what's going on beneath our noses and doing nothing to stop it. It is very difficult to undo systems once in place, but not that hard to take a stake with ones own children and their friends and all the girl scouts or boy scouts in ones troop and youth church groups and sunday school classes and and number of awesome programs out there already set up to to teach children the truth. most of us just don't put on the teacher's hat when we should.

honestly, I believe the long term answer may rest in on-line education. Support your local charter schools that are advocating appropriate curriculum. Often they are receiving public funding anyway. Where I raised my family, this school set up and within 10 years, grew to include a high school and their students are receiving the top test scores in the state.
http://www.cmca12.com/

How can being brainwashed by authority figures they had no control over, made no choice for, and were compelled to deal with be expected to automagically recover from it?

If there is "no excuse," then it is we, the sentient ones left who are without excuse for helping the victims of an educational system we allowed to lord over them and damage them in the first place.

I agree there is "no excuse." I just don't agree it is the children's fault.

The intentional degree of evil design the socialists have spent the past several decades infiltrating and destroying our educational system with is beyond reasonable conversation. It smacks of the largest and most perverse "conspiracy theory" anyone can imagine -- and worse. These people know what they are doing, and they are doing it on purpose.

Doing research for a graduate sociology class, I spoke with the folks who designed NCLB (no child left behind). They thought I was "one of them," so the conversations were open and frank.

What would it take to "fix" the educational system? They know it -- perfectly. They use that information to design programs which purposefully destroy it.

In order to pull off their plans, they must have an illiterate populace -- people trained by a life-time of Pavlovian stimulus/response reinforced thought processes. These children, "properly trained" do not have to tools they need to analyze new information and come to a logical, thoughtful conclusion of their own.

They are, quite literally, brainwashed to the point where they are permanently brain damaged. They have lost the ability to take in new information.

And the folks who are designing this curriculum are so excited about what they are doing that watching them talk is frightening. I believe we have reached a point of no return where the public (mis)educational system is concerned.

The only hope a future society has is that those children who were homeschooled (by parents with a clue) or were taught how to actually think for themselves (by parents who knew how) survive to rebuild.

The "world's greatest generation" are dying by the tens-of-thousands a day, from old age and government sponsored illnesses like dementia and heart disease. The baby boomers could quickly be too old and feeble to physically rebuild a new society. What we have to have is the youth -- and too many of them have had their brains sucked out by the (mis)educational system.

Agreed! How then can we in the Gulch work together to mitigate the damage and convince these kids that it is their responsibility to Think and Learn?

I agree with you on the damage. I am reminding you it is no excuse.

I respectfully disagree with you and AR. I think you both wildly underestimate the damage inflicted on children by brainwashing and molding beginning with kindergarten wherein they are taught to depend on their emotions as primary and to treat their ability to reason as anti-social. John Dewey once intoned that individual thinking is akin to insanity. How difficult is it for anyone hammered with this crap to rebound to meet AR's standard? Don't you wonder why it's "...often too late"?

I wish we would stop blaming the low-information citizen and start blaming the Dept of Education, the Natl Education Assoc, the American Federation of Teachers, and the Public School System for producing these stunted minds.

ultimately, the low info voter must atone.
"The acceptance of full responsibility for one’s own choices and actions (and their consequences) is such a demanding moral discipline that many men seek to escape it by surrendering to what they believe is the easy, automatic, unthinking safety of a morality of “duty.” They learn better, often when it is too late."
Philosophy Who Needs It

I meant to write "Article 5" when posting the topic rather than the "5th Amendment."

Please keep in mind that Mark is not calling for a new Constitution or a Constitutional Convention at the Federal level. He is calling for state legislatures to convene conventions to propose amendments to the Constitution instead of the US Congress.