I remember how it was -- JR
After Texas school shooting, teachers weigh in on how to stop the violence
After a school shooting in Udvale, Texas left 19 children and two teachers dead, schools across the country ramped up security measures, and teachers weighed in on how to prevent future gun violence.
James. E. Fury, a Wisconsin public school teacher, suggested the key to generating peace is fixing the environment.
"My thoughts on school shootings in general is that people don't commit these acts when they feel like they belong, so creating environments in which everyone feels that will likely result in less shootings," Fury told Fox News Digital.
Fury also advocated for better follow through when it comes to persons who frequently find themselves in the hands of law enforcement, only to be released and commit more crime.
"It has also become apparent that many of these shooters have been engaged by law enforcement previously," he noted. "There is some sort of failure occurring between that contact and the follow through with what to do with a person who is frequently in trouble or threatening others, or acting in a disturbed manner. We don't seem to have great answers in this country for how to deal with mental health issues, and the ‘visibility’ of this mental illness hasn't done anything to slow its occurrence."
High school teacher Daniel Buck similarly told Fox News Digital that "what unites all of these mass shooters are their identities as loners."
"Their politics and self-reported justifications are all over the place," Buck said. "But each one lacks social connections, involvement in school programs, church attendance, or any other institutional involvement. It's a cultural cause that finds expression through tragic acts of gun violence."
The solutions are, he said, are "unfortunately, long-term."
"A re-emphasis on family, church, social connections, and distance from social media," Buck suggested. "These trends have been decades in the making and so will take decades to reverse."
The short-term mitigation measures, he said, should focus on enhanced security measure and spending on school safety.
Christopher Maraschiello, who has taught middle school and high school history for nearly three decades, said generally speaking his buildings are "fairly safe."
"We have a full-time school resource officer who is from the community and who knows most of our kids.," he told Fox News Digital.
"There are a lot of politicians in this country today mostly of my own party that have a lot to answer for," he said. "Texas for one thing is just the poster child for out-of-control gun rights. I am a historian, so I can tell you that gun violence in America is not a new thing at all. The problem is the internet, social media, violent video games, and a 24-hour news cycle plus all of the regular pressures and undiagnosed mental illness this is a huge problem."
Payge Guenzler, a teacher in Montana, called on parents to become more involved in their children's lives.
"What happened today in Texas was horrible," she wrote on Facebook. "As a society we can start blaming politics or being in favor of certain laws or lack of them. We can start pointing fingers and saying it's one sides fault or the other's. It seems like social media allows people to be quite the screen warrior when promoting their opinions... But here is the downright problem of society that I see as an educator... Start parenting your own d--- kids and quit relying on schools, daycares, and the rest of society to do it for you."
Rebecca Friedrichs, who was a public school teacher for 28 years and is the founder of For Kids and Country, told Fox News Digital she believes schools need to teach values and morals.
"We cannot create enough laws to stop this school shooting problem, we instead need a rebirth of the value of human life that we used to have in this country," she said. "And, beyond human life … in America's schools, we used to teach morals."
Friedrichs blamed teachers unions for the change in schools, saying they pushed curriculum that is "divisive."
"They have removed the moral compass," she said. "Thanks to the teachers unions and their policies… now you can't really discipline kids who are out of control."
https://www.foxnews.com/media/texas-school-shooting-teachers-stop-gun-violence
*********************************************Protecting kids in school must be more than 'rhetoric,' real world solutions needed: Experts
Shootings carried out in places where there are fewer security measures, known as "soft targets," have rocked America at least three times over the last 12 days. The tragedies have sparked calls to beef up security in buildings such as schools and for politicians to stop with their rhetoric immediately after the tragedies.
"There's certainly been a push by some with the woke agenda to remove police officers from schools, and I couldn't think of an actually worse idea right now," Fraternal Order of Police National Vice President Joe Gamaldi told Fox News Digital Wednesday. "Schools are a particularly soft target. They're doing the best job that they can right now,"
A shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, Tuesday left 19 children and two adults dead after suspected gunman Salvador Ramos opened fire inside. School leaders stretching from metro Atlanta, to Washington, D.C., to Central Florida have since increased police security and officers’ visibility at schools to protect children from potential threats.
Fox News Digital spoke to Robert McDonald, a former Secret Service agent and criminal justice expert at the University of New Haven, who said schools have come a long way in recent years with training and drills on how to protect against attacks. He added, however, that more safety measures need to be implemented and political rhetoric following such atrocities must end.
"We're very quick to listen to the politicians pontificate about what they feel needs to be done. Somebody needs to stand up and do something. They need to come across the aisle and get a positive direction moving here to stop this. The rhetoric needs to go away, the sound bites need to go away," McDonald told Fox News Digital Wednesday.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/texas-school-shooting-soft-targets-safety-rhetoric
********************************************Racialism, decolonisation and the revolution in NZ education
New Zealand’s constitution is currently undergoing a major heart and lung transplant via co-governance arrangements between Māori corporate tribes and the government.
It beggars belief that one of the modern world’s first democracies — founded in the fledgling 1852 Constitution Act — is descending into ethno-nationalism but the Labour Government is determined to embed racialised policies across a swathe of the nation’s laws and institutions, and not least in education.
Led by radical intellectuals of the corporate tribes and enabled by social justice warriors armed with an unassailable moral righteousness, New Zealand’s entire education system is rapidly being revolutionised.
Proposals in a recent government Green Paper for a Treaty of Waitangi-led science and research system include recognising mātauranga Māori (traditional knowledge) as equivalent to science.
The universities too are indigenising. According to the University of Auckland’s Pro-Vice Chancellor (Māori), this means “finding ways where Māori knowledge, ways of being, thinking and doing can thrive”.
Proposals to transform the university curriculum and teaching by inserting mātauranga Māori and kinship-based teaching and learning practices are now in the consultation phase.
The revolution does not stop there. The entire school sector is to be “decolonised”. The Ministry of Education’s ‘Te Hurihanganui A Blueprint for Transformative Systems Shift’ will include recognising “white privilege” and understanding racism in schools while the Ministry’s Curriculum Refresh will place ‘knowledge derived from Te Ao Māori (the Māori world)’ in the curriculum.
These initiatives, targeted at all levels of the education system will provide opportunities for an expansion of the cadre of decolonisers as ‘Māori exercise authority and agency over their mātauranga, tikanga (customs) and taonga (treasures)’.
Four strategies will ensure the revolution succeeds:
First, the opposition is being positioned as racist and reactionary, effectively silencing debate and creating self-censorship.
Second, government servants are required to accept the revisionist notion that the Treaty of Waitangi is a ‘partnership’ between two co-governing entities. Reprogramming services by government-paid consultants are on hand to encourage appropriate attitudes — signalled most obviously by insisting on using the correct language.
Third, the abandonment of universalism by the well-educated liberal-left who inhabit elevated positions in government and the caring professions will remove democracy’s very foundation. This is the principle of a shared universal humanity with the individual as the political category. It is the final point in the four decades convergence of postmodern relativism and identity politics.
The fourth strategy will be the clincher. It is the use of intellectual relativism to destroy the separation of science and culture that characterises the modern world.
Traditional cultural knowledge, including mātauranga Māori, employs supernatural explanations for natural and social phenomena. It also includes practical knowledge (proto-science or prescientific), acquired from observation, experience, and trial and error.
Such traditional knowledge has provided ways for humans to live successfully in their environment. Sometimes this has occurred in highly sophisticated ways, such as ocean navigation by the stars and currents, while efficacious medicines from plants may have helped to advance scientific or technological knowledge. Consequently, the role of traditional knowledge in humanity’s history justifies a place somewhere in the educational curriculum. But it is not science. It does not explain why such phenomena occur — just that they do.
Science provides naturalistic explanations for physical and social phenomena in the discovery of empirical, universal truths. It proceeds by conjecture and refutation. It requires doubt, challenge and critique, forever truth-seeking but with truth never fully settled.
Science’s naturalism and its self-criticism are anathema to the science-culture equivalence claim. A fundamental principle of science is that no knowledge is protected from criticism yet the Green Paper refers to protecting mātauranga Māori. Knowledge that requires protection is belief, not science. Knowledge authorised by culture is ideology, not science.
Furthermore, mātauranga Māori’s inclusion in science throughout New Zealand’s education system will place research under cultural authority. Alarmingly, that authority is to be wielded by evangelical commissars who cannot be questioned.
The outrage encountered by those foolish or brave enough to mount a defence of science shows how important science-culture co-equivalence is to the overall decolonisation strategy.
Decolonisers will not, indeed cannot, tolerate its rejection. To do so would expose the fundamental premise of a racial ideology which claims that there is no universal human being and no universal science.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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