Krauthammer mocks Obama’s universal preschool plan

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From losers, the four-year-olds of America. Here they are jumping around, laughing, screaming, having a great time and Obama wants them all to go to school. Every single one, right away. And why? To prepare them for the high-tech economy of the future. Can’t wait until the age of five – no siree.

We can’t let the Chinese four-year-olds be working on solar panels and cars that run on algae while our four-year-olds are lollying around doing nothing. We’re number one, we got to stay that way. The four-year-olds of America better shape up!

Have a good day kids.

Video at The Right Scoop

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In states that make it a priority to educate our youngest children…studies show students grow up more likely to read and do math at grade level, graduate high school, hold a job, form more stable families of their own. We know this works.

President Barack Obama, State of the Union, February 12, 20

BUT why does Obama claim ”We Know This?”
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/02/14/high-quality-early-education-all-children
According to the White House Blog:

Leading economists agree that high-quality early learning programs can help level the playing field for children from lower-income families on vocabulary, social and emotional development, while helping students to stay on track and stay engaged in the early elementary grades. [Emphasis supplied]

These are the same ”leading economists who have been surprised over and over again by the slowness of our national recovery after the 2008-June 2009 recession.

What do EDUCATION EXPERTS say about expanding Head Start into a universal program for all 4 year olds?

According to the congressionally-mandated report, Head Start has little to no impact on cognitive, social-emotional, health, or parenting practices of its participants. In fact, on a few measures, access to the program actually produced negative effects.

In other words, Head Start is just a massive babysitting service that gives welfare moms a chance to relax and watch some cable TV.

Obama wants MORE taxpayer/borrowed money per child so as to have ”higher quality” Head Start.
See.
Liberals, like Obama, never see a gov’t program as a problem……only underfunding for it is the problem.

North Carolina conducted a controlled experiment called the Carolina Abecedarian Project beginning in 1972, in an effort to determine what benefits early education might provide to children from economically and socially disadvantaged backgrounds. Followups were done into the participants’ adult years, in an effort to measure possible long-term effects.

Benefits of Early Education Persist at Age 30

At age 30, participants in the Abecedarian program:

Were four times more likely than members of the control group to have earned college degrees, with 23% of participants earning college degrees, compared with 6% of the control group;

Were five times less likely to have used public assistance, with 4% of the control group receiving benefits for at least 10% of the prior seven years, compared with 20% of the control group;

Were roughly 1½ times more likely to have been consistently employed, with 75% of Abecedarian participants working full-time for at least 16 of the prior 24 months, compared to 53% of the control group;

Tended to delay parenthood by almost two years.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that educational enrichment during a child’s preschool years has a tremendous impact on subsequent performance in school, on a person’s lifetime attitude toward learning, and on what a person ultimately achieves in life. That can certainly best be provided by intelligent, involved parents in a child’s home environment—assuming that a child has intelligent, involved parents. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. There are many adults who seem to have stopped learning at—or sometime before—they left school.

I agree that if Head Start is not producing results, a different approach is needed. I don’t accept this as evidence that no effort should made at all.

Greg and Obama clearly believe in social engineering through Outcome Based Education. They are not alone:

Professor Chester M. Pierce, M.D., Professor of Education and Psychiatry at Harvard:

“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our Founding Fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well — by creating the international child of the future.”

Brock Chislholm, 1959 Humanist of the Year and former head of World Health Organization, in the February 1946 issue of Psychiatry:

To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family tradition, national patriotism, and religious dogmas….We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests….The reinterpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for faith in the certainties of old people, these are the belated objectives…for charting the changes in human behavior.

Former Senator Paul Hoagland of Nebraska:

“The fundamentalist parents have no right to indoctrinate their children in their beliefs. We are preparing their children for the year 2000 and life in a global one-world society and those children will not fit in.”

Adolf Hitler:

“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already. You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.’”