Month: January 2017

First, let me thank you all for the warm welcome. I am deeply cognizant of the fact that I am writing in the company of the first team, and I just hope that I can keep up.  I am going to try to turn up here every week or two.

In the previous installment, I mentioned that children are learning machines. If you want to raise a generation that excels, use that. They want to learn. They are desperate to learn. And if you pay enough attention to them as individual people, they will learn from you. Don’t talk down to them. Don’t plant them in front a TV that teaches them that America is evil, Whites are evil, and that males are evil and incompetent. You have to present alternate lessons.

My children are grown. I lost a son at 11 years old, but the rest have done well. My oldest daughter owns her own business with her family. My next oldest got two degrees in 5 years, the next has her degree and has run a multi-county arts council, and my son chose not to go to college but became a chef and then a master brewer for an internationally respected craft brewery [and makes more than his sisters]. They, and my nieces and nephews have all mentioned that I am different than most parents. I have always talked to them like they were people, and not “children”. I might have to explain things, but I don’t talk down to them.

Part of that is so they learn new things and expect to learn new things as part of growing up. Part of that is the respect shown to them as people. Which they will internalize. If they believe they are worthy of respect, then they will try to live up to their self image.

Children will be what they are expected to be. If you have low expectations, they will live down to those expectations. If you have high expectations, and by that I do not mean pressured, just make sure that they have access to the tools and let them use them; then they will.

My dad had a 6th Grade Chinese education in the late 1910’s, early 1920’s. He knew what he did not know. From my own 6th grade, we had to start picking our classes for the next year. He told me that he would sign whatever I chose, because he did not know what I would need. Just as I was responsible for cooking for myself when alone and taking care of myself when alone from age 9, I was responsible for directing my own schooling, with the expectation that I would choose the best course of study for the future. And I did.

I was always a reader. When I got my first library card at 10 and went to the Aurora Public Library, they kept trying to chase me into the children’s section. I wanted to be in the History section, checking out and reading the 15 volumes of Morison’s “Official History of US Naval Operations in WW-II”. I told my dad, and his response was to give me a note to take to the librarians. It said: “Reading is good. You shouldn’t have anything in the library he shouldn’t read. If he can carry it, he can check it out.”. Just in passing, I had a bike with a paperboy’s baskets. I could carry quite a lot. But the lesson there was that I was free to learn anything that interested me. Teach that lesson, and be willing to either answer any questions or refer to a reference source if you cannot answer them yourself.

What they are surrounded with at home can guide and enable that search for knowledge. If y’all remember, there was a world before the Internet. In those days, a good set of encyclopedias was the best that you could do at home. In 1963 my dad spent the equivalent of a month’s wages to get a deluxe edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica for me. And I used it.

When my kids were growing up, we had functionally a library at home. Today in my house, literally every room has walls of floor to ceiling bookcases, packed; except for the bathroom and our bedroom. For décor reasons, the bedroom bookcases are long and low. And most of what I call my “working library” of military reference books from when I was writing for military journals are packed away, because I don’t have room to have them out. I arguably have a better history collection than our local public library.

That is what my kids grew up surrounded by. Then there is the completing link for that portion.

They have to see that reading, and learning, is normal. Kids do what they see. Just as certain behaviors make you someone who can learn, you have to model them as examples for them to follow. It takes up part of the day, but one parent or another needs to read to children when they are small every day. My kids’ bedtime stories were “The Hobbit” and then “The Lord of the Rings”. Yeah, they are not pre-school books. Kids don’t care. Kids will learn, especially if mom or dad read it to them. They may [shock] end up with a wider vocabulary than their contemporaries. They may hear a story [whichever one you pick] that has good, evil, the struggle between them, honor, and good winning through perseverance and being willing to pay a cost. Nothing being free. And it may influence their outlook on life.

If they see you reading by yourself, you normalize it, and they will turn to books. They will thereby create an internal horizon that is something larger than the adventures of the latest Disney semi-slut. If they hear you and your spouse or friends discussing what you have read, if you relate what they do see on TV to history and to literature, you widen that horizon. Kids are learning machines. We, Deity help us, have being a teaching machine as part of our job description on top of being the economic support. No one says it’s easy.

When looking at widening your children’s horizons, you have to have an aim towards what you want to include within that horizon. Here is where the final piece falls into place. Your school needs to be something other than the politically correct mish-mash of Marxist theory and anarchist “fact” that makes up the public school system. Where you send your kids and what is taught will make or break them.

Except for a dismal period in high school when I was stuck in the middle of Nebraska [where the world history teacher was acclaimed as the Nebraska teacher of the year, and in whose class I got an A literally without cracking the text] I grew up in Denver and Aurora from 3rd grade on. When I was there, there were schools known for excellence. Some friends of mine went to a Denver high school where admission to MIT, or Colorado School of Mines, or Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was a common event for a graduating class. My own high school had regular admissions to service academies or to Ivy League schools before they degraded.

Now, those schools are sites of gang wars, drug emporiums, and a part of the production line of dropouts and criminals.

Looking at the school systems in Colorado, where every major system now has more administrators than teaching staff, there is very little excellence. You have to look outside the standard public schools to find such. Specifically, charter schools. And not just any charter schools. There are some whose teaching is based on the theories of E. D. Hirsch.

Hirsch wrote Cultural Literacy; What Every American Needs to Know, The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, and the series of books What Your Preschooler Needs to Know on through What Your Sixth Grader Needs to Know.  Read these.  Cultural Literacy can be defined as what you need to know to fit in to and function in a Western, Judeo-Christian based, constitutional society. It is exactly what is not only not taught, but is concealed by modern public schools.

He created and still runs the Core Knowledge Foundation. And there are a number of charter schools based on his principles. There is one in my town. There are fewer administrators. The staff gets less pay than teachers do in the rest of the district. And teachers fight to get a slot there, because they are allowed to teach. In Colorado, we have proficiency testing at regular intervals for all students. Not one of the Core Knowledge students has ever failed the proficiency tests in the over a decade they have been in existence, and most test far above their grade level.

A few years ago, our town’s high school abolished the position of Valedictorian of the graduating class. Because when students transfer from the Core Knowledge school, they are so far ahead of the regular public school students that the Valedictorian was always a Core Knowledge student. And it did not make the other schools and teachers look good, nor did the concept of someone actually excelling match modern educational theory.

Not saying that they are perfect. There are some behavioral problems. These are teenagers brought up in modern America, and in a state where marijuana is legalized, for pity’s sake. But the behavioral problems are a small fraction of the regular public school peers, and the dropout/flunkout rate is almost non-existent. By the vaporous cojones of the Holy Ghost, they are doing something very, very right with those kids.

So, finally getting around to the original question that started all this. I don’t claim this is the only way, but this is what has worked in my experience, and what books, theories, and schools I recommend.

Fair warning. Once I start writing, I AM a wordy bugger.

I have been dropping by here for some years, and have encountered some CHICAGO BOYZ elsewhere around the web. Apparently, some have not been scared off by my ramblings, so I have been offered a chance to write here sometimes. It may be that someone, somewhere is dubious about this. Before I could register with the credentials offered, my ancient [my fallback is an abacus] machine did something . . . terminal to Firefox and I lost all but email. The error message was unlike any I had ever seen, so this had to go to my boffin. Which is part of the cause of the delay.

The computer was fixable. The other part is not, completely. Let us just say that I am getting an in depth view of orthopedics. And for the last week I have been arguing with WordPress and losing until literally moments ago.

Now that I am back, let us return to the discussion that started all this some time ago. I was giving some of my family history, and was asked what I would recommend to teach “real history”; that which actually influenced the real world we have to deal with, not the Narrative which changes with the winds of political correctness and who is currently playing the part of Emmanuel Goldstein.

With all due modesty, like the rest of us here I am on the right side of the bell curve. Part of that is genetics, part of that is upbringing. I’ve mentioned my father, and his coming from China. This came about because I had a grandfather who was smarter than the average Chinese peasant. He counted acres of land, and sons, and realized that he did not have enough land to divvy up to let each son have a chance to support a family. My dad was the youngest, so he was told that he would not get land when he grew up, but that he would be sent to the United States where he would have a chance to make his fortune.

Mind you, he was 12 years old, had the Chinese equivalent of a 6th grade education [so he could read, write, and do arithmetic in Chinese], and had no family going with him. And we have already gone through the legal environment here for Chinese. But he was willing to go.

It is not often considered, but China has the concept of “pioneer stock” the same as Americans. They did not go West, they went South. Until the Chinese cut down the jungle, chased out the tigers, and planted rice; South China was the frontier. And it was the South Chinese [Cantonese] who became the commercial classes all through SE Asia. And it was the Cantonese who came to this country in search of opportunity.

As one can imagine, life was not exactly upper middle class American for him. He worked in a restaurant, starting at the bottom, slept on a pallet in the back, and along the way learned English. He became a cook, and then [largely because he spoke, read, and wrote English unlike most Chinese immigrants] after the entry of the US into WW-II, was a food service supervisor at the old Lowry Army Air Force Base in Denver, when it was located in the Park Hill neighborhood before they moved it out by Aurora.

In 1943, due to Chinese protests about the way Chinese airmen in the US being trained to fly B-24’s against the Japanese were treated by Americans [in Pueblo, Colorado]; the US became the last nation to give up Extraterritorial Status in China, and thus Chinese in this country finally became legally human beings.

Although not an American citizen, once he could my dad enlisted in the Army. Keep in mind, that 30 years old is awful late to become an infantry soldier. And he did become an infantryman. They tried to make him a cook, and he fought to become an infantryman.

He started carrying a mortar base plate, and by the end of the war was one of the first non-white squad leaders in the combat infantry. He never talked about anything after they shipped out for Europe. Most combat veterans don’t. It was only after he died, that I learned that his unit the 5th Infantry RGMT, 71st Infantry Division, had fought across Europe including breaking the Siegfried Line, took part in the Battle of the Bulge, on May 4 his company liberated the last concentration camp in German hands [Gunzkirchen sub-camp of Matthausen] and on May 8 was the farthest east of any American Army unit in Europe when they linked up with the Russians east of Linz, Austria.

For his service, he was granted his citizenship at the end of the war. I did it the easy way, being born here.

I know that I am repeating myself from earlier posts, but it is not to brag, but to point out one very key concept. I grew up hearing about his life, except for his service in Europe, over and over again as I grew up. I watched him. Keep in mind that he raised me alone until I was 16, and owned his own restaurant. And worked 12+ hours a day, 6 days a week to raise me in a middle class lifestyle.

I always knew that just below the surface was a harder life, a worse life, than we lived. And that it took a lot of work to keep that good life. Like most of our Chinese acquaintances, it was assumed that all that work had the goal that the next generation would have it better than having to work in restaurants 72 hours a week.

And the kids shared in the work. My first restaurant job involved busing tables, one plate at a time, at 4 years old. Customers thought it was cute as hell. Probably helped the waitress’s tips. Most of my contemporaries worked off the books, without pay, until age 16 when they could legally go on the books. And then we worked in the family restaurants weekends, after school, and on all school breaks until we went to college. All that work did not excuse us from having to have good grades. Indeed, the only excuse for not working was that we had too much schoolwork.

In college, by that time most of us were qualified Chinese cooks. So on summer breaks, and Christmas breaks we would cook in the family restaurants, full time for full pay. And that is how we paid for college. In college I would work 4 months a year for $600 a month Chinese [which then meant in the middle of the country to get Chinese cooks to come there, the pay was after taxes and room and board was furnished.] like every other cook in the restaurant I worked 6 days a week, 12-15 hours a day, in 109 degree temperatures in the kitchen.

This was vital. We grew up knowing that to have a good life, we would have to work hard. And we worked hard. And we developed the ability to, if necessary, outwork our competition no matter what. One of the things my dad told me was that to get the same reward as a white person in this country, you had to work three times as hard and be three times as good.

Even by the time I was growing up, it was not quite that bad, the way it was when my dad was making his way. I promise that it is getting easier and easier to work 3 times as hard and be three times as good.

Modern Americans, and Europeans, do not grow up that way. There is no real consciousness or acceptance that success requires work, sometimes hard, painful, physical work. There is no knowledge or experience that life was not always as easy as it is today, and no comprehension that it is possible that someday that life can be hard. It is expected that there is always going to be someone, or something that will take care of them.

The immigrant culture, the concept of working your way up from whatever you left to a better life for yourself and your children is gone. It is not just a Chinese or Asian culture. Germans, Irish, Scots, Jews, legal immigrants from Mexico and points south, Africans; they all had and can have it.

The first step then, if you want your children to learn “real history” is to teach them that history as they grow up. The hard times that either you or your parents or grandparents had to go through. Make sure they know by relatable stories of their own families about not only hard times [and every American family has such in their history either here or in the old country], but how they overcame it. Teach them about real life, about real suffering. Don’t sugar coat things, because the world is not sugar coated. Children are learning machines. From the moment they open their eyes and they try to make sense of what you are saying they will absorb knowledge like a sponge. Tell them the truth, tell them reality. Tell them about the heroes that they came from, because that is who they will try to be worthy of. And teach them that they CAN be worthy of those who came before.

There are other steps, but creating a culture of reality and honor [both for their past, and for them to live up to] is critical. End Part One of Two.