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Huckabee lays claim to improving the education system in Arkansas, but that is a steaming pile of crap. The changes in the education system were mostly to reduce the amount of Science, Civics and secular History taught in school and to increase the amount of Religion and discipline taught in school.
There’s a small town in Arkansas, just north of Little Rock, call Jacksonville. Jacksonville is mostly a town of poor people. Most of the town is made up of small houses that were built as base housing during WWII or trailer parks. Since these houses sell for less that 40k, that brings a constant flow of poor people to town. This town was used as a model for the education reforms that are being enacted throughout the state. The main focus of the education program for the poor is discipline, blind respect for anyone in a position of authority and faith.
Discipline is instilled through putting the kids in uniform and creating massive amounts of arbitrary rules that they have to follow. For instance, the school is divided up into four sections. All of the kids are assigned to one section and all of their classes will be in that section. A child will be punished if they are found in the hallways of the wrong section. They are assigned a restroom that they can use. They will be punished if they are found in the wrong restroom. They only have three minutes to get from one class to another, so if the restroom is too far away to get to between their classes, they just have to hold it. If they take the bus to school, the busses only wait for five minutes, so they only have five minutes to get on the bus. This doesn’t leave any time to use the restroom before the bus ride. Some of the bus rides last for as much as an hour and a half.
If you’ve ever been through a military boot camp, you will recognize this treatment. Not allowing people to look after their physical needs is part of the process of breaking down the personality. And, just like in boot camp they are also not allowed to freely associate with anyone during school hours who is not assigned to their quadrant. Being caught talking to a friend from the neighborhood is a severe infraction.
Religion is insidiously injected at every level of the education process. Religion is taught in every subject except math. The history books are not the history books we all studied in school. Instead of studying the rise and fall of empires, they study Biblical history. The history books they use cover all of the Bible stories and quote the Bible as an absolute factual document. The children in Arkansas know nothing about the French Revolution or the Magna Carta. The US history that they learn is heavily biased towards the Christian history of the US and plays down the role of secularism. The choir classes sing nothing but hymns.
As if there is not enough religion taught in school, They allow church groups to stand on the sidewalk in front of the school and pass out religious literature to the kids as they arrive at school. This sets up an environment of religious zealously. Those children who do not happen to be Christians are harassed up to and including physical attack.
At the middle school level, they took two schools and make one a boy’s only school and the other a girl’s only school. They did this because they believe that boys don’t do as well in school as girls because they are distracted by sexual attraction at the onset of puberty. This allows them to dumb down the education of the girls so that they won’t out score the boys anymore.
All of this must be working because the national scores for the Arkansas schools have been increasing, right? Well, the scores are increasing because they devote one month of every semester to just teaching the tests.
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