The 5th lesson of John Taylor Gatto's "The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher":
"Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I then enforce. If I'm told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think. This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily. Successful children do the thinking I appoint them with a minimum of resistance and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to study, I decide what few we have time for, or actually it is decided by my faceless employers. The choices are theirs, why should I argue? Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
Bad kids fight this, of course, even though they lack the concepts to know what they are fighting, struggling to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn and when they will learn it. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist...Good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do...Don't be too quick to vote for radical school reform if you want to continue getting a paycheck. We've built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don't know how to tell themselves what to do. It's one of the biggest lessons I teach."

My sweet H doesn't always do what she's told when she's told. It can be frustrating, but it's who she is. It is NOT a reflection of her intelligence or her ability. Her teacher seems disinterested in her intelligence and her ability, only her obedience. Mrs. P is working hard to enlist my husband and I in breaking our daughter's spirit. What will the cost of this be?

From Stanley Milgrams "The Perils Of Obedience":
"This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority...The essence of obedience is that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred, all of the essential features of obedience follow. The most far-reaching consequence is that the person feels responsible to the authority directing him but feels no responsibility for the content of the actions that the authority prescribes. Morality does not disappear -- it acquires a radically different focus: the subordinate person feels shame or pride depending on how adequately he has performed the actions called for by authority...Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps, but he had only to sit at a desk and shuffle papers. At the same time the man in the camp who actually dropped Cyclon-b into the gas chambers was able to justify his behavior on the ground that he was only following orders from above. Thus there is a fragmentation of the total human act; no one is confronted with the consequences of his decision to carry out the evil act. The person who assumes responsibility has evaporated. Perhaps this is the most common characteristic of socially organized evil in modern society."

Two supreme court rulings against children in one week. First, the supreme court has determined that the death penalty may not be used for convicted child rapists - in short, no death for any criminal whose victim did not die.

How many ways is this wrong?
1) It only applies to criminals whose crime was against individual citizens. Traitors and spys can still be put to death even if they did not kill anyone. A ballistic missile is more highly valued than a child.
2) In saying 'death only for death', the supreme court is narrowing the definition of "proportionate" by effectively replacing it with "equivalent". The punishment for rape will never be equivalent to the crime, and I don't believe the supreme court even considered what a truly proportionate punishment would be. The majority justices in this case cannot consider a proportionate punishment unless they understand the severity of the crime, and it seems clear to me that they don't.
3) Has "cruel and unusual" been usurped by proportionate and/or equivalent? Unless the supreme court has their own private dictionary, these are not the same thing. I am not all that clear on my own position on this one, perhaps that's why I'm an engineer and not a judge or a lawyer. But these words have very different meanings, and the people who set the standards for the law in our country SHOULD be clear on what that standard is!
4) The last sentence in the second bullett deserves it's own bullett: The majority justices in this case cannot consider a proportionate punishment unless they understand the severity of the crime, and it seems clear to me that they don't. When a victim of rape commits suicide after a decade of mental anguish, then the punishment for the rape must also be adjusted.
5) The day after reducing the maximum sentence for one violent crime, the same supreme court ensured increased proliferation of primary tool of violent crime in our society - guns.

The last bullett is the second court ruling against children - no blanket bans on guns.

How many ways is this wrong?
1) The first 4 words of the second amendment are "A well regulated militia". The 'big question' is whether this amendment pertains to an indiviual's right to bear arms or the collective right to bear arms - it seems to me the 'big question' is answered in the first noun: MILITIA. But the supreme court has determined that an individual can constitute a militia.
2) This is why my children are not allowed to play with toy guns, ever - if their friends play with toy guns, they are likely to mistake the real thing for a toy when they find it in a closet or a drawer. I don't want my children in the room when that happens. I found my father's gun once, luckily I was old enough to know that it wasn't a toy.
3) The intention of the second amendment is "the security of a free State" - "self defense" is NEVER mentioned. Indeed, "self defense" is low on the totem pole in terms of ACTUAL gun use, regardless of the owners' intentions. My father took his gun out of hiding for self defense when there was an intruder one night. He got rid of the gun the next day - the intruder was me.
4) The supreme court has supplanted the definitions of "militia" with "individual" and "security of a free state" with "self defense". They have not yet redefined "well regulated", they've simply ignored it. WE HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO REGULATE GUN-OWNERSHIP AT LEAST AS MUCH AS CAR-OWNERSHIP. HOW MANY MORE VIGINIA TECH'S WILL IT TAKE FOR US TO LIVE UP TO THAT RESONSIBILITY???

The stories of my father's gun ended well. I was lucky. My husband's cousin - not so much. Our cousin's older son used his gun to kill himself when he couldn't bear the humiliation of being thrown off the football team for getting caught with a beer. Two years later our cousin's younger son killed himself because he couldn't bear his older brother's death. I believe he used the same gun. I've been told that I'm too close to such a tragedy to have an objective opinion, and that our stories are too unusual to be considered typical. Someday I'll write a more reasoned argument to that criticism, but for now, go fuck yourself. Better yet, go shoot yourself - it's your right.

It's a few days later now. Turns out I don't have to write a more reasoned response, someone else beat me to the punch! The full article is at http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-gun-deaths-suicide,0,703027.story , but here's an exerpt:

"Suicides accounted for 55 percent of the nation's nearly 31,000 firearm deaths in 2005, the most recent year for which statistics are available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There was nothing unique about that year -- gun-related suicides have outnumbered firearm homicides and accidents for 20 of the last 25 years."

When Hillary was on a losing streak, I saw emails, blogs, and articles about how this was just another example of the long history of injustices in this sexist world. These were very detailed and elaborate messages, but I couldn't understand why the authors couldn't see what seemed blatantly obvious to me - exchange race for gender, and the same could be said about Barack Obama. I wanted Hillary, or Barack, or better yet both, to remind their constituencies that yes, of course racism and sexism have existed, do exist, and will continue to exist, but the fact of this presidential race is an enormous leap forward on both fronts! We should be celebrating this, not whining about it.

Then came Reverend Wright. It broke my heart to hear his hateful words, not because I thought that didn't exist, but because I thought it meant the end of our chance for a truly great president. It may still mean that. I wanted to see Barack Obama's heart broken as mine was, but instead I heard him say he hadn't heard the Reverend speak these words - a statement that struck me as utterly ridiculous. When Obama condemned the statements without condemning the man who spoke them, I assumed he had some deep seated reason for standing by him; I needed to know what that reason was.

Three days ago he explained that reason. I didn't hear it in it's entirety until yesterday. The speech in Philadelphia was a demonstration of the kind of greatness I knew Barack Obama was capable of. I didn't expect to see it so soon, but if he does lose this race, he has already shown us what a great leader is.