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14 Wacky "Facts" Kids Will Learn in Louisiana's Voucher Schools

Peter Grimm asked
If you had a legal case, where are the lawsuits? Why hasn't the program been shut down? The proof is in the pudding.
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In reply - Don't you read or watch Louisiana news? You have claimed to live in the state.

Teachers file state lawsuits challenging Gov. Jindal's voucher, tenure laws

Parish joins lawsuit over school vouchers

The Concordia Parish School Board joined 33 other school boards and the state's two major teachers unions last week to file the lawsuit.
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Terrebonne School Board joins lawsuit against vouchers
 
I live in Chicago, so what can I tell you about Louisiana?

I can, however, take a controversial but honest stab at it.

Chicago is a tale of two cities. Northern Chicago has very low crime statistics, while the south side has exceedingly high crime rates. The south side is where the majority of the city's African American population lives, as housing studies show.

I am not going to guess WHY this is the case. Maybe it is unfair white privilege. Maybe it is the bias in the police department. There could be a lot of causes, and I'm not going to go there. However, the statistics are what they are.

Louisiana, having the second-highest percentage of African Americans in the United States, is not immune to the problems that unfortunately present themselves to African American communities around the country...whatever the unfortunate cause.


Somerville said:
I have a relative who was a teacher in Louisiana, her in-laws have children in the school system.


"Conservative Christianity" - by which I assume you mean evangelical or fundamentalist Xianity - is really a late 19th/early 20th C development. It grew originally because the established churches were seen as representing only the elite AND because the established faiths offered little in the way of an emotional connection for a populace, both black and white, that felt the old churches had become too 'rational' and distant from the day to day suffering of the working classes.


"the good people of Louisiana are more than capable of running their own state without your condescending meddling." Oh - only if it were so. Louisiana has long held a reputation for being one of the most corrupt states in the nation along with having one of the most disfunctional political systems. It also has for many years seen a cultural divide between the hedonism of the Cajuns in the southern part of the state and those "Conservative Christians" found in the northern half of the state.

Louisiana is another one of those "red states" that receives more from the federal government than it sends to DC with its taxes.

Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the world


added to that bit about keeping companies from going bankrupt, we also have just a teeny weeny possibility of corruption in the way the system is run


So, according to death-penalty advocates and those who promote ever more stringent punishment for crimes, Louisiana should be one of the more crime-free states - right?



Now - what with me being a bigoted socialist atheist and all - these data points must be nothing more than liberal lies, but a guy like me does wonder why a state (tied with Alabama) with the highest rate of church attendance in the nation is at the same time rated as the most violent and crime-ridden state in the country. If Louisianians are doing such a great job running their state - why the problems?
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Peter Grimm wrote
Do you have proof that federal funds are going to this?
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Louisiana Department of Education website
Federal funding comprises approximately 15 percent of Louisiana’s K-12 public education budget. For Fiscal Year 2011, Louisiana is receiving nearly $1.4 billion in federal funding.
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How do you separate federal funding from state?
 
MaggieD said:
I believe slave owners were kind. They had quite an investment in their slaves. They were valuable assets. I think the majority of slave owners probably did not abuse their slaves any more than they would abuse their horses.
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Keeping another human being conscripted to work for like a horse is abusive and cruel in its own right. Im sure those slaves were great once they were broken like a horse right?

Plenty of people abuse their horses I am guessing that you have not been around many horses. Horses require a lot of work to keep them healthy but most people do not put that kind of effort into their horses. That is why there are so many horse rescues all around the country.


But the bottom line is that slaves and horses have one thing in common they are captives and the property of someone they do not even belong to themselves. To pretend that slave owners were all nice and kind is revisionism bull****.



I guess in your book whipping people is a kind treatment?
 
I guess in your book whipping people is a kind treatment?
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Of course, it's just a bit of necessary training for the unruly - whether it's a horse or some darky who lives with the horses.
 
I think the writers of the Louisiana textbook in question would agree with you. All they are doing is dispelling the myth that slave owners spent night and day beating their slaves. The horse analogy is a good one.

Nobody is apologizing for slave owners. Slavery is wrong, plain and simple.

FreedomFromAll said:
Keeping another human being conscripted to work for like a horse is abusive and cruel in its own right. Im sure those slaves were great once they were broken like a horse right?

Plenty of people abuse their horses I am guessing that you have not been around many horses. Horses require a lot of work to keep them healthy but most people do not put that kind of effort into their horses. That is why there are so many horse rescues all around the country.


But the bottom line is that slaves and horses have one thing in common they are captives and the property of someone they do not even belong to themselves. To pretend that slave owners were all nice and kind is revisionism bull****.



I guess in your book whipping people is a kind treatment?
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Peter Grimm said:
I think the writers of the Louisiana textbook in question would agree with you. All they are doing is dispelling the myth that slave owners spent night and day beating their slaves. The horse analogy is a good one.

Nobody is apologizing for slave owners. Slavery is wrong, plain and simple.
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I think they were in many respects. While many did not beat their slaves, to call them kind is....look, owning other human beings is not kind. There's just no other way to say that. It is not kind to control somebody else and force them to do labor for your profit. It is not kind to deny somebody their freedom. Slavery is inherently, not kind.
 
There is a problem, however, with the complaint of the OP. "Religion" also means "metaphysics" - or beyond the preceived physical realities.

Many physicists claim that it is scientific fact there are "metaphysical" realities in many regards - then argue what that means. For example, about 80% of the known physical size/weight of reality/the universe can not be accounted for. Therefore, "science" as we know it is only figuring 20% - and then what, we all agree to declare the other 80 percent ("black matter" doesn't exist - or that it does exist BUT that it is limited to fitting within what is known? That we know what isn't known as a scientific fact? That's nonsensical.

There are all sorts of schools of thought that would contradict the absolute certainty of the OP in current scientific knowledge for in philopsophies - secular, non-secular and sociological.
 
rocket88 said:
I think they were in many respects. While many did not beat their slaves, to call them kind is....look, owning other human beings is not kind. There's just no other way to say that. It is not kind to control somebody else and force them to do labor for your profit. It is not kind to deny somebody their freedom. Slavery is inherently, not kind.
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This is like a game of telephone gone bad. Check out the quote again, from page 1 of the thread:

"A few slave holders were undeniably cruel. Examples of slaves beaten to death were not common, neither were they unknown. The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well."

First, it doesn't say slave holders were kind. It says some were cruel, and gives the example that some slave holders beat their slaves to death. It goes on to say that some slave owners treated their slaves well. Take this in context. "Well," of course is relative. They're SLAVE HOLDERS for crying out loud. The point of the passage is simply to educate schoolchildren on the treatment of the slaves.

The fact is that most were well-fed and cared for.
 
Peter Grimm said:
This is like a game of telephone gone bad. Check out the quote again, from page 1 of the thread:

"A few slave holders were undeniably cruel. Examples of slaves beaten to death were not common, neither were they unknown. The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well."

First, it doesn't say slave holders were kind. It says some were cruel, and gives the example that some slave holders beat their slaves to death. It goes on to say that some slave owners treated their slaves well. Take this in context. "Well," of course is relative. They're SLAVE HOLDERS for crying out loud. The point of the passage is simply to educate schoolchildren on the treatment of the slaves.

The fact is that most were well-fed and cared for.
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Change the adjective from "kind" to "well-treated" and I still stand behind it. Keeping people as property, in forced labor, and without freedom is not "treating them well."
 
rocket88 said:
Change the adjective from "kind" to "well-treated" and I still stand behind it. Keeping people as property, in forced labor, and without freedom is not "treating them well."
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"Well-treated"... as opposed to being beaten, sometimes to death.

Not "well-treated" as in they were treated to a spa day and an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Relative, homeboy. It's all relative. Well, good, bad, poor... these are all relative terms. Their meaning depends on the value one thing has in relation to something else.

The University of Alabama has a "good" football team. They are the defending collegiate national champions. Ask them to play a season in the NFL, and they would be a bad team. Good and bad....relative terms. All depends on what you're measuring up against.

Johnny's SAT scores might have been good for some schools, but they were poor compared to the average student at Harvard. Etc...
 
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The point of the passage is simply to educate schoolchildren on the treatment of the slaves.
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Not quite. The point of the history textbook quoted is to reduce feelings of animosity toward slave-owners in America's past by providing examples that most historians would note as exceptions rather than common behaviour in the slave-owning period. By reducing animosity toward that class, one can then claim that modern black Americans have less justification for claiming racial bigotry is an innate part of the American heritage because the "Blacks had it so good back then"
 
It can't be ruled out, but you are clearly speculating. The conclusion you draw can't be deduced from just the brief quotation given.

It could be as you say, or it could be all in your own mind.

Somerville said:
Not quite. The point of the history textbook quoted is to reduce feelings of animosity toward slave-owners in America's past by providing examples that most historians would note as exceptions rather than common behaviour in the slave-owning period. By reducing animosity toward that class, one can then claim that modern black Americans have less justification for claiming racial bigotry is an innate part of the American heritage because the "Blacks had it so good back then"
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Peter Grimm said:
I think the writers of the Louisiana textbook in question would agree with you. All they are doing is dispelling the myth that slave owners spent night and day beating their slaves. The horse analogy is a good one.

Nobody is apologizing for slave owners. Slavery is wrong, plain and simple.
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Really? No actually the text books are trying to paint a rosey picture of slavery and racism. In reality no people being held against their will are treated well.

The introduction continues that many defenders of slavery argued that
slave owners treated slaves well but that slaves were not treated well. The text lists the
following conditions of slave life, that slaves were: “fed meagerly; lived in squalid, fleainfested
shacks; were often whipped for minor ‘offenses’ by cruel overseers; were
forbidden by law to learn to read and write; were sold away from their wives, husbands,
or children; and suffered the basic indignity of continual subservience to others” (Skiba,
et al., 2005, p. 319). The text also names Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner as organizers of
slave revolts, both of whom were squelched, resulting in a number of deaths. The text
also documents the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, quoted as dictating that “’good citizens’”
(Skiba, et al., 2005, p. 320) could aid authorities in the capturing of run-away slaves and
that anyone aiding a runaway slave would be subject to fines. Also discussed is the Dred
Scott decision, which allowed a slave owner to still claim ownership of another person,
even in non-slave territory. The text cited these acts and an argument over the allowance
of slavery in the new territories as escalating arguments that led to the Civil War.

http://etd.ohiolink.edu/send-pdf.cgi/Agiro Christa Preston.pdf?ohiou1251483565
 
joko104 said:
:roll:prove it.
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Hmm. Best I could find is a book called "Southern Slavery as it Was" by Steve Wilkins and Douglas Wilson. I haven't read it, but here is a relevant citation:

“The Slave Narratives are overwhelmingly favorable in the judgment of slave masters as ‘good men.’” Out of 331 narratives that had a reference to a master, 86% suggested that their masters were “good” or “kind.”

I would expect you could form your own opinion by reading first-hand slave narratives for yourself.

To me, it's common sense. If one were to treat slaves like ****, they would revolt. If you beat them or stave them, they wouldn't have the strength to work as hard.
 
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I have learned two important facts from reading the comments from those on the Far Right of the political spectrum:

1) Slave owners were kind;

2) The KKK was a force for goodness throughout the land.

Who knew? Next, could you guys discuss the Nazis? They've been getting really bad press for years now, and they need some folks like you to point out the other side.
 
Oh save it.

I never said anything resembling that. What I said was that all slave owners didn't beat and starve their slaves.

Slavery was terrible enough on its own. We don't need to be a bunch of revisionists and make it out to be even worse than it was.

Wiggen said:
I have learned two important facts from reading the comments from those on the Far Right of the political spectrum:

1) Slave owners were kind;

2) The KKK was a force for goodness throughout the land.

Who knew? Next, could you guys discuss the Nazis? They've been getting really bad press for years now, and they need some folks like you to point out the other side.
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I know this may be difficult for you to understand, but not every single post made in this thread is in response to you. Post number 17 made the declarative statement that 'Slave owners were kind'. It is that statement that has generated much of the subsequent activity.

Subsequent posts made the point that the KKK was just a bunch of guys getting together to help keep order in the world.

You might try reading some of those posts.

I am curious as to how 'revisionists' can make slavery out to be any worse than it actually was, since what is was was pure, unadulterated evil. But I'm sure there are those of you out there that see the goodness in it and get irritated when people don't agree.
 
Peter Grimm said:
Hmm. Best I could find is a book called "Southern Slavery as it Was" by Steve Wilkins and Douglas Wilson. I haven't read it, but here is a relevant citation:

“The Slave Narratives are overwhelmingly favorable in the judgment of slave masters as ‘good men.’” Out of 331 narratives that had a reference to a master, 86% suggested that their masters were “good” or “kind.”

I would expect you could form your own opinion by reading first-hand slave narratives for yourself.

To me, it's common sense. If one were to treat slaves like ****, they would revolt. If you beat them or stave them, they wouldn't have the strength to work as hard.
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You obviously have no clue what you are talking about. Had you researched just a little bit you would have realized how far off the mark that you are.

"SLAVE LAWS PASSED IN VIRGINIA:

1640-1660: The Critical Period: Custom to Law when Status Changed to "Servant for Life"
1639/40 -- Blacks excluded from the requirement of possessing arms.
1642 -- Black women counted as tithables (taxable).
1662 -- Possibility of life servitude for Blacks.
1660-1680: Slave Laws Further Restrict Freedom of Blacks and Legalize Different Treatment for Blacks and Whites
1667 -- Baptism does not bring freedom to Blacks.
1669 -- An act about the "casual killing of slaves" establishes that "if any slave resist his master and by the extremity of the correction should chance to die, that his death not be accompted Felony."
1670 -- Servant for life: the "normal" condition judged for Blacks.
1670 -- Forbade free Blacks and Native Americans, "though baptised," to own Christian servants.
1680-1705: Slave Laws Reflect Racism and the Deliberate Separation of Blacks and Whites. Color becomes the Determining Factor. Conscious Efforts to Rigidly Police Slave Conduct.
1680 -- Prescription of thirty lashes on the bare back "if any negroe or other slave shall presume to lift up his hand against any Christian."
1680s -- Development of a separate legal code providing distinct trial procedures and harsher punishments for negroes.
1680s -- Status of the child is determined by the status or condition of the mother.
1680s -- Severe punishment prescribed for slaves who leave their master's property or for hiding or resisting capture.
1691 -- Banishment for any white person married to a negroe or mulatto and a systematic plan to capture "outlying slaves" is approved.
1705 -- All negro, mulatto, and Indian slaves are considered real estate.
1705 -- Dismemberment of unruly slaves is made legal."
Slavery and the Law in Virginia : The Colonial Williamsburg Official History Site

I wonder why they needed these laws with all of those kind slave owners running around?


Here is some historical information about slave rebelion.
Slave rebellion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Numerous black slave rebellions and insurrections took place in North America during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. There is documentary evidence of more than 250 uprisings or attempted uprisings involving ten or more slaves. Three of the best known in the United States during the 19th century are the revolts by Gabriel Prosser in Virginia in 1800, Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina in 1822, and Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831.
Slave resistance in the antebellum South did not gain the attention of academic historians until the 1940s when historian Herbert Aptheker started publishing the first serious scholarly work on the subject. Aptheker stressed how rebellions were rooted in the exploitative conditions of the Southern slave system. He traversed libraries and archives throughout the South, managing to uncover roughly 250 similar instances.'


You cannot rewrite history to fit your opinions. As the link states there is documented proof. So perhaps you should withdraw your claims?
 
A little bit more on the pro-slavery pamphlet, Southern Slavery, As It Was

Wilson's most controversial work is probably his pamphlet Southern Slavery, As It Was (ISBN 1-885767-17-X), which he wrote along with League of the South co-founder and fellow Christian minister Steve Wilkins. The pamphlet stated that "slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since." Historians such as Peter H. Wood, Clayborne Carson, and Bancroft Prize winner Ira Berlin condemned the pamphlet's arguments, with Wood calling them as spurious as holocaust denial.

Wilson held a February 2004 conference for those who supported his ideas, such as pastor George Grant, in the University of Idaho. The University published a disclaimer distancing itself from the event, and numerous anti-conference protests took place. Wilson described critical attacks as 'abolitionist propaganda'.[9] He also has repeatedly denied any racist leanings. Wilson has described his own views as 'paleo-Confederate'. He has said his "long war" is not on behalf of white supremacy; rather, Wilson seeks to revive the memory—however rose-tinted—of eras in Western history when faith and reason seemed at one, when family, church, and the organic "community of Christians" that T. S. Eliot describes in Christianity and Culture were more powerful than the state.

Canon Press ceased publication of Southern Slavery, As It Was when it became aware of serious citation errors in several passages authored by Wilkins
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and a bit more
PAGE BY PAGE: DOUG WILSON’S SUPPORT FOR RACIAL SLAVERY
 
This truly amazes me that some people are actually trying to down play slavery and the KKK and even teach it to their children. So what you are saying is that there is something to the accusations from the Left that Right wingers are racists Nazis? I mean you guys are the ones though that are actually confirming the stereotype. It is definitely an eye opener for a skeptic like myself.
 
WhiteIvy said:
So slave owners were kinder than the British Empire... And Stalin was actually worse than Hitler. What's the point?

Slavery was horrible and a terrible blemish on our American History. That's the point. Talking about how most slaves were actually treated "kind" (puke) is insulting to the millions of people who were VICTIMS of slavery.

Another example of defending the oppressors and invalidating the oppressed. How will we ever move forward?...
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Every country has a black mark somewhere on its record, and I'd argue as bad as slavery and the war crimes against the Native Americans are, not a single participant in those crimes are still alive, so the statue of limitations has passed. Sometimes moving "forward" means putting things behind you.
 
Gimmesometruth said:
LOL!

I would ask you to define what makes a "good" slave owner, but I'm sure what I would get would be ad hominems and avoidance....along with the continuing unawareness of the contradiction inherent in the term.
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Well, a good slave owner would've been someone who treated their slaves with some decency, provided adequate food, and freed them through his will after passing.
Obviously the term speaks relatively. It's not to say that being a slave owner is a good thing, but rather that at least they treated their slaves better than more abusive masters.
 
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