Alsson At Large

These are my footnotes to the collective consciousness.

I think I'm the oldest person on Tumblr and possibly the only Conservative. My posts are mostly reblogs, often with reactions and rebuttals to Liberal nonsense I'm simply unable to ignore. Occasionally, I am moved to share something personal, often from my past. I'm just messing around here, is what it all boils down to. I had a blue-collar youth and a white-collar career, both in the midwest. I built, ran and sold a business, have stayed married to the same person since 1965 and have two children and one grandchild I adore. Life hasn't always been easy, but it has been very good overall. That's me, for now.

Also, I own almost none of the photographs or videos I post. If I've used one of yours and you want me to remove it, just ask.

When Julian Bond, the former Georgia lawmaker and civil rights activist, turned to teaching two decades ago, he often quizzed his college students to gauge their awareness of the civil rights movement. He did not want to underestimate their grasp of the topic or talk down to them, he said.

“My fears were misplaced,” Mr. Bond said. No student had heard of George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, he said. One student guessed that Mr. Wallace might have been a CBS newsman.

That ignorance by American students of the basic history of the civil rights movement has not changed — in fact, it has worsened, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, on whose board Mr. Bond sits. The report says that states’ academic standards for public schools are one major cause of the problem.

“Across the country, state educational standards virtually ignore our civil rights history,” concludes the report, which is to be released on Wednesday.

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The New York Times, “Students’ Knowledge of Civil Rights History Has Deteriorated, Study Finds.”

Shame.

(via inothernews)

I’ll bet this is not the only growing gap in the teaching of American History.

"(In) the U.S., the states spend about $500 billion every single year on the public school system. (The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is) putting in about five billion, basically, over the next few years. But all philathropic money can do is be a catalytic wedge — that is, we can look at the places where people haven’t answered the questions, or asked some of the questions, and say ‘What is it we really need to do to fix this?’ And one of the things that we’ve learned is that having an effective teacher at the front of the classroom is the single most important thing we can do in the public school system."

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MELINDA GATES, opining on what’s really needed to improve public schools — her Foundation’s generous donations notwithstanding — on The Colbert Report.

Go teachers.

(via inothernews)