I remember as an elementary school student attending PTA - Parent-Teachers Association meetings in my elementary school.  The Teachers reported on realistic and practical activities, the children performed skits and provided entertainment, the parents gave their input and that input was respected and acted on by the principal and teachers.

Today, it is not Parent-Teachers meetings, but Parents-Teacher "conference" where the parents meet one pair (or half a divorced pair) at a time with their child's teacher(s).  The teacher gives overly detailed analysis of the child's work.  The OBE system is cumbersome and NOT INFORMATIVE. 

The teachers do not know how to respond to the questions and demands of the parents who are more aware of how schools operate and how they SHOULD operate.

Attempts by parents to give meaningful, tradition-bucking input or to demand specific accountability and to request or demand specific changes in curriculum, in group meetings of teachers and parents, are side-tracked or ignored.

Growing up, I saw the changes.  As a parent myself, I saw things becoming even worse.  Lack of EFFECTIVE discipline, students' disrespect for teachers' authority, principals' and teachers' disrespect for the parents' authority, intelligence, and desires.  I saw the teachers give up under the weight of laws written with distorted views of childhood development and of learning processes.  I saw the unions step in to insure continuity despite incompetence, raises despite failures, promotions despite ignorance.  I saw the people who graduated from these institutions of lower learning become parents too ignorant of pedagogy, psychology, sociology, childhood development, and a lot more, yielding to the union-controlled schools.

We homeschooled our children.  They did well enough to be accepted into four top universities and graduate with honors.  It is easier, safer, and gives better results for parents who have no teaching certificate to teach their children, than to have a person with a teaching certificate teach their children in a public school.

Thank you very much Senator DeMint!

Thank you for your Conservative Response and Compliment to the State of the Union address of 28 January 2008, by President George W. Bush:  "Real Change Requires Principled Conservative Leadership" at http://www.townhall.com/columnists/SenJimDeMint/2008/01/29/real_change_requires_principled_conservative_leadership
I can't tell you how much I have abhorred, over the years, the nonsense of a "response" to State of the Union addresses, by whichever party.  Talk about destructive partisan politics!

If there's something a politician wants in the State of the Union, he can suggest it to the President, not make a competing speech.

The State of Union addresses always have a strongly positive note (with the exception of one, possibly two, during my life-time).  The wretched responses are devoid of any constructive remarks, in my opinion.  Those that are constructive on that outside have always seemed to me to have as their actual purpose the destruction of the President or his program.

If there is something a politician does not like in a State of the Union address, he should act grown up, bite his tongue, let the President have his say, and later, if it is still important to him, talk with his colleagues, come up with legislation if that's what he wants, or start a food drive, or denounce his citizenship, or something like that that would help both the President and the country.

_Every_ President does things that could be done better, and even does things that should not be done, as well as doesn't do things that should be done.  If it is important, the next President will fix it.  If the next President does not fix it, or if it is important enough to rush (like Congress knows how to rush at anything!), then make some laws, start a movement. 

But for the sake of the nation, for national unity (remember how important that was during World Wars I and II; it's still important!), for a united populace, for progress (even if intermittent and sometimes taking one step back for two steps forwards - it will always be that way), please stop whining about rival parties' State of the Union addresses.

As a citizen, I want to hear the President give the State of the Union address.  I don't want to hear the carping and whining of frowning sore losers.

If I want to hear Congressmen who lack both the prestige and the dignity of the Presidency, I will tune in to CSPAN.

My heart goes out to the good and well-meaning people who, when they express their honest and sincere opinion, because it is not what someone else wants to think, read, hear, or believe, are castigated and demonized by les gauches misérables and the pulp-masters of the media.

Phyllis Shlafly always writes well and incisively.  She is honest, she is sincere, she is decent, she promotes civility and good morals.  But when her political opinion differs from someone else', critics come out and treat her in a manner that if their mothers were treated that way, the critics would probably end up in jail for public brawling or worse. 

Phyllis Shlafly's essay on the honesty of Joseph McCarthy and the validity of his charges can be read
at http://www.townhall.com/columnists/PhyllisSchlafly/2008/01/28/history_shows_joe_mccarthys_reputation_is_undeserved.  She begins with the observation that Ronald Reagan did indeed write at least some of his own speeches. It is unfortunate that the media is so negative towards conservatives, moralists, and religion that hard evidence had to be found to convince them.  Oh, wait, even that doesn't convince them.

The media has never been one to apologize for their errors, some of which have caused untold suffering and even brought about the deaths of people.  As long as it wasn't media people, they were acceptable losses.  When it was finally revealed that Ronald Reagan had Alzheimer's, nobody I was reading ever apologized for their disgraceful mocking of his frequent slips of memory or misspeaking.  As the media loves to make fun of conservative presidents' foibles, such as by their film loops of Gerald Ford tripping descending steps from a plane, entering an office, or walking on the street, so too it loves to "protect the public" from similar loops of anti-conservatives bulling, threatening and swearing (Lyndon Johnson), or falling asleep in top level economic meetings (Bill Clinton).  If the exception proves the rule, there are the many gaffs of Jimmy Carter which the media enjoyed, but which they balanced with praise for his political and economic disasters. 

Phyllis Shlafly, I apologize . . .

... that some people, ill-cultured as well as ill-educated, respond to your and other thoughtful essays with knee-jerk opprobria.  Never thinking, never digesting, always stuck with their initial opinion no matter what new evidence comes to life, and no matter how much the rest of society progresses.  Politics brings out the worst in the worst people.

What successful politician has not used props - or anti-props (the removal of a negative symbol)?  Dole carried a pencil, FDR was shown without his wheelchair.  I've seen plenty of people hold up sheets of paper or a book or an empty camera and say "the documentation," "books have been written," and "has taken photos of it".  They've held unused, unnecessary pencils, keys, envelopes, and who knows what else.  It's what we call "for effect".  It is neither a sin against God, nor a crime against humanity, nor dishonest, nor evil, nor fascist.  It's just one of the many factors many people use in communication.  It is . . . normal. 

I, too, grew up, despising McCarthy.  The more I read into primary sources and secondary sources other than newspapers and partisan books, the more I discovered he was a better man than I had been led to believe, and that there was substance in what he was saying.  To the point that even if he had exaggerated, that's all it was, exaggeration.    An honest criticism would have said that: "he exaggerated."  But the criticisms said: "he lied."  Thus, Joseph McCarthy either exaggerated (or not) for effect, but his critics are the ones who lied.

Who else, I found myself wondering, were dishonestly condemned by partisans and newspapers, since that time?  And why that time?  Why?:  for exactly the same thing that McCarthy was concerned about:  the meddling influence of seditious aliens, namely, in raw, colorful terms: "The Reds", the "Stalinists", the "dialectical materialists," "historical materialists," and "atheist materialists" as they called themselves; "communists" and "commies" as they were commonly known.

And who would they have tried to tarnish in the newspapers with charges of "extremism," "fascism," "lies," "promoting himself," and "doing it for money"?  That would be each and every person who was having a degree of success at revealing WHO the communists were, HOW they infiltrated and HOW they influenced and directed even those groups in which they had no leadership role (Stalin started as the party secretary for example, and through that office influenced everything, condemning his rivals and promoting himself). 

So when you see newspapers or individuals condemning someone as "fascist," "scheming," "lying," "imperialistic," "anti-democratic," take a second look.  You might find those people were not as bad as the 20th century "running dog lackey" newspapers, professors, and politicians have painted them.