Only 48% of California high schools meet federal standards, even with easier measure

Only 48% of California high schools meet federal standards, even with easier measure: "Results released this morning show that about 500 high schools reported meeting federal goals only because their passing marks were based on much higher exit exam scores.

At least 500 California high schools met this year's federal academic targets that were released this morning only because the state uses easier standards for high schools than for elementary and middle schools, a Times analysis has found."

(Via Los Angeles Times - Top News.)

Shouldn't we expect more from the state who is one of the most populous, taxing and controlling in the Union?

Nevertheless, I'm not surprised. The failure of our school systems is a prime example of the "Dumbing down of America".

Not that this has anything to do with our government (or whoever is running the country) *COUGH* *COUGH* but let's stop and look at what is traditionally the biggest threat to a tyrannical government.

The biggest threat is:

"An educated, armed and mobile populace."

An educated populace is harder to fool or be distracted with smoke and mirrors. A dumb populace can be kept down. Year after year, our students fair worse in comparison to students from many other countries. Year after year we produce high school graduates who are close to being functionally illiterate, suitable only for a job where they ask "Would you like fries with that?" Moreover, where they can only operate a cash register by having the keys labeled with pictures of the food items.

By Federal decree, all children must undergo twelve years of "education" at Youth Indoctrination Facilities. (Elementary, Middle and High Schools.) This was literally enforced at gun point originally. Most any child can learn the three Rs in three to six years. So why twelve? Because we/they were/are being trained to be good little consumers and to blindly follow our government.

An armed populace has an increased ability to remove a tyrannical government. If you go back and study the period of the American Revolution and the founding of this nation as a Republic, you'll see that having just used arms to overthrow the tyrannical government of King George, our founding fathers wanted to ensure that the citizens could repeat that in the future. So they gave us two methods in the U.S. Constitution: Via our elected representatives and separation of powers, and via armed action (the 2nd Amendment.)

The first thing a tyrant does (read up on Hitler and Nazi Germany for instance) is to remove firearms from the populace.

For almost 100 years, the Federal Government has imposed more and more restrictions on the private ownership of firearms. Starting with the exorbitant Federal tax on full automatic weapons and short barreled shotguns in 1934 through the Gun Control act of 1968 to the Brady Bill and "Assault Weapons Ban" of 1994, our Federal Government has continued to infringe on the 2nd Amendment rights of our citizens.

"The right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

And finally, a mobile populace is much harder to control. When the citizens have free movement between cities, states and nations, they have the ultimate in liberty. This mobile population is what also spread new ideas (that might not be popular at the government level) prior to the Internet Age.

Our mobility has been increasingly limited over the years, especially in recent ones. Currently, thousands of law abiding U.S. Citizens are forbidden from traveling via commercial airline because they (or someone with a name similar to theirs) has been placed on a secret watch list.

Hillary Clinton had a "great" idea right after she moved into the White House. She wanted to make it a felony to travel to another state if you owed child support. Oh yes... protect the children, down with deadbeat dads, etc. Forget that perhaps the parent is unemployed and might have a job offer in another state as just one possible reason this is "A bad thing". To enforce this, she wanted state border crossings to have inspection stations similar to the ones that California and some other states use for agriculture. Want to drive from L.A. to Las Vegas for the weekend? Stop at the border station first and get permission.

Combine that with the watch lists and you can see where suddenly you couldn't travel at all because someone's similar name was on the list.

Affecting even more people is the price of fuel. No matter who is at the root of the cause, with the soaring cost of fuel, more and more people are staying close to home.

Whether our government is really doing the above isn't debatable, they are.

Whether they are doing it as a concerted effort to keep us "scared, broke and working" as the phrase in business goes is up in the air. This might just all be a coincidence and stupidity on the part of the Federal government that we're increasingly becoming good, little, defenseless consumer sheep.

However, the result is that America is rapidly becoming more uneducated, unarmed and less mobile making us much less of a threat to the Federal Government.

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