Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)
A blog in defense of western civilization by Roger Graf
Here’s a thought, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (waitress/batender/sophmore class president) makes it easy to imagine: AOC is proof of the mistake of extending the vote to 16-year-olds. With the exception of age, what’s the difference between her and Molly Ringwald’s character in “Sixteen Candles”? Answer: not much.
RogerG
Case in point: Parenting Montana.
I begin with “crowding out”. Crowding out occurs when so much money flows to one thing that other things die on the vine. It happens in venues other than those based on mammon. Big, really big question: Has the state become so huge that it’s sucking the blood out of civil society? A vampire could work as a metaphor.
Nosferatu is phlebotomizing civil society. What is the victim, civil society? Our definitions are muddled. The UN’s World Health Organization tries to pigeonhole civil society away from business and government. To them, civil society is “collective action around shared interests, purposes and values”, and the third rail of life. Sorry, that’s way too cute. Sounds too much like something out of a snooze-inducing textbook. Actually, much business is born of the interactions of those “shared interests, purposes and values”. The same could be said of government, but civil society – and business, at least pre-Sanders – is voluntary. Government isn’t about voluntary. People in power have a quiver full of carrots and sticks to make you do something they want, and behind every carrot is a big fat hand holding that big fat stick. Isolate government to itself while civil society since business share too much DNA. Thus, in actuality, 2 rails exist.
Of side note, Ocasio-Cortez and her minions would like to gene-splice business and government together. That’s the socialist thing at work. They want 2 rails with this new hybrid Leviathan attacking the neck of a remaining and wilting civil society (in keeping with same metaphor).
This came to mind while streaming Pandora. An ad for “Parenting Montana” appeared between the music, another one of those dot-org’s. What the heck is that? Smelling a rat, yep, it’s government. Go to the website and you’ll find in the fine print a scat trail to a federal block grant program to the State of Montana, CFDA 93.959. Mind you, I find not much wrong with government helping to address the deeply troubled in our neighborhoods. The fly in the ointment is that it is today’s government doing it.
Our present government isn’t a better one than great grandpa’s; it’s just bigger, way bigger, and beset by the ACLU, dominated by a narrow demographic, and addicted to fashionable causes. The result is a mess.
I’m not sure what John Dewey and the rest of the Progressive leading lights of a century back, as pushers of big government, would think of today’s Leviathan. They envisioned a government of technocratic know-it-alls guiding us to the promised land. He probably couldn’t grasp the fact that the techs could lack wisdom and are infected with their own prejudices. What they, the Prog’s, produced is a government shaped around their experience of 16-plus years sitting in a classroom receiving curriculum. Yes, curriculum. For them, curriculum is the answer. There’s nothing that couldn’t be cured by more curriculum.
Follow the steps, procedures, and factoids and you’re supposed to be a better person. It is the chosen path for the representatives who made the law and the people who passed the civil service exam to get the thing up and running. Do you get the picture? The whole outlook is based on form (curriculum), not the substance (what’s in the curriculum).
Decamp to the website, ParentingMontana.org, and you’ll find curriculum and some referrals to nonprofits in government’s gravitational pull. Watch videos, read the how-to links, and pay a visit to a counselor steeped in the curriculum – more people with degrees and certificates as Dewey preached.
Issues develop not with curriculum per se. Curriculum is only a guide for what and how to teach. The person doing the teaching most assuredly is important, but even more important is the “what”, what are they teaching? The substance mentioned before. Sadly, the spiritual is absent from the syllabus. No room here for the faith. A Bible study is replaced by your state-sponsored counseling group led by your state-approved counselor. A referral to a church would be met by the hounds of the ACLU and years in court. The experience produces a vanilla curriculum without God.
It competes with the kind offered by your priest or pastor, but with a distinct advantage. Milton Friedman had it right when he said, “Nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program”. Government draws strength from its access to everybody’s paycheck (the taxing power) and the Bureau of the Mint. And politics is the measure of success, not bottom-line metrics, so a program has life long after it became rancid (ag subsidies anyone?). Not exactly a level playing field here.
And government programs can be hip. Your local priest or pastor, in contrast, will be bound to God’s word, the Bible. Government is bound by politics, and politics is bound by money under the spell of any tight organization of commonly-oriented loud mouths. If something gets popular traction, you bet that the authorities-that-be will take it in. Consider gay marriage and transgender rights. Look at the pot craze sweeping red and blue states alike (see Forbes). The fashion-of-the-moment will find a place in government decrees on everything imaginable, including its “wisdom” on being a good mommy.
I saw the phenomena at work in a California high school. California being so chic in thought and feeling, and personally as a teacher and department chair (Social Studies), the staff and I were frequently told of a new mandate from the state to honor one of the many “marginalized” in our lessons. So, we went from unions to blacks to women to multiple ethnics to LGBTQ in its many variations, and back again. Remember, the more time devoted to balkanized America, the less time for the Constitution, the Civil War, Supply/Demand, the Great Depression, etc. “Crowding out” at work before your munchkins. Welcome to politics flummoxing your kid’s school.
It’s no less true for “Parenting Montana”. Scroll through the links. Since many problems in the home can be traced to the desire for a high, a good part of the guidance will be consumed with booze and drug abuse. Going to the links, I couldn’t find any mention of marijuana. I found heroin, meth, alcohol, but no “mary jane”. The words “abuse” and “reefer”, and its many equivalents, weren’t connected. Could it be that marijuana has a constituency? It’s fashionable whereas shooting up in a public bathroom isn’t.
But think about it: today’s THC-rich cannabis isn’t the stuff wafting through a 60’s Grateful Dead concert. It’s jam-packed with maybe 3x’s more (though potheads hotly dispute the figure). Hey, more bang for the buck, and with the “bang” comes all kinds of things attaching to your lungs as if you were lighting up a Marlborough (according to the American Lung Association). Even more disturbing are the neurological and cognitive effects (see here). It helps in germinating mental illness in the form of multiple psychoses like schizophrenia (see here). The junk should not be given a free pass as “Parenting Montana” does.
But what are you going to do when getting high becomes “medical” … and fashionable?
I can only imagine the kinds of mischief that a hotbed of a lefty dreamscape like California can put the money to. “Parenting” could be combined with “Heather Has Two Mommies” and how to teach your child to share a bathroom with someone of divergent genitalia. The possibilities are endless. If government is your mommy, you just found another way to inject politics into the family and the rest of civil society. And then is civil society all that civil? It certainly is more political. Soon, we may be down to only one rail: government. Sanders, AOC, and Marx would be smiling.
RogerG
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
Who said this? Bernie Sanders? AOC in one of her Twitter fits? Any of our “woke” college activists rampaging at a Charles Murray presentation? Good guesses, but wrong. The author is Karl Marx in his “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”.
In one sense, though, it sounds like the kind of thing they would say (maybe not AOC because that would ask too much of her facile understanding). And it sounds like the kind of thing rattling the synapses of the vast majority of those manning our broadcast studios, newsrooms, and much of the publishing industry. It’s a view of the world smothering the mental faculties of many in the chattering classes, whether chattering with the mouth or a word processor.
The notion has infected much of what we read, watch, and learn in our classrooms. It’s the idea that a hidden structure of oppression exists to ensnare us no matter what we do. For Marx, the idea justified a complete revolution in the individual’s mind to the family to social relations to government. Everything was to be managed, and that means big, really big government. Sounds like the Green New Deal?
I’m reminded of Marx’s influence, now, almost every time I pick up my National Geographic Magazine (NGM). The magazine reads like a series of op-eds in The Daily Worker. A common tactic in its articles is to quote opinionated academics to buttress an opinion. Add some stats and a few graphs, and, voilà, an opinion becomes “science”. Marx also liked to say that his opinions were “science”.
Race is a field rich with possibilities for exploitation by those inclined to see the world as Marx did. For instance, NGM’s April 2018 issue, “Black and White”, blathered about race as some “social construct” while veering off into Confederate statues and racial profiling. The opinions of opinionated profs were replete in the issue’s articles. The confusion of opinions with science has become a hallmark for the magazine, just like Marx.
Let’s examine the magazine’s treatment of racial profiling. There’s more to the story than “racist” cops, but you wouldn’t know it from the piece. Absent from the author’s angle on the issue is any recognition of something called “context” – context as in any other considerations. What about the uneven distribution of chaos in the home, the uneven distribution of violent crime on the streets, the war on drugs, the debilitating effects of made-in-America welfare, other issues like the epidemic of illegal immigration to the tune of an accumulated 11 million to 21 million “undocumented” (Who knows?), and the attendant presence of the Sureños/Norteños/MS-13 and Crips/Bloods? Circumstances exist beyond the hidden, unconscious prejudices of a police officer and the Man.
An interesting aside that’s never been adequately explained by the race hustlers: There was a time when NYC black cabbies would avoid fares from young black males. In advertising, it’s called branding. Past experience can brand an entire demographic, even among black cabbies tired of being crime victims by the very same demographic. I would think that something else is at work other than racism (hidden or otherwise) against blacks by black cab drivers.
Instead, NGM and its stable of writers traipse off into the fantasy of Marx’s world. Evil has always resided in the souls of our species. Racism and general mayhem have always been there. Marx’s non-stop revolution won’t change that fact. An ever-bigger government to police human thought and conscience won’t either. A healthy civil society – the very thing that the Left is systematically dismantling – with appropriate public sanctions is the answer.
Adopting Marx is a descent into the snake pit of totalitarian control. Bad, very bad.
RogerG
Implicit bias is all the rage in social policy circles. The rationale for the crusade is based on the assertion that we do something more than overtly act like racists (homophobes, Islamophobes, etc.). We harbor hateful prejudices deep in our subconscious. It’s not enough, it is said, to control the racist behavior. We must expunge the lurking bad thoughts swimming around in those vast unconscious reservoirs in our brains. The field is more than a rich source of consulting income for the high priests of the endeavor. The dogma branches off into innumerable calls for the checking of privilege and other forms of sloganeering. But is it true? There’s good reason to say wowwww!
This came to mind while reading in my April 2018 issue of National Geographic Magazine the article, “The Things That Divide Us” by David Berreby. A natural logic could lead one to rightly assume that evil behavior has tentacles in evil thoughts. Fair enough. The problem lies in ferreting out the purported bad biases. Further, there appears to be a tenuous connection between the lurking prejudice and behavior.
And there’s good reason to question the attempts to measure the hidden bias. Please read the following article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Can We Really Measure Implicit Bias? Maybe Not”, by Tom Bartlett, Jan. 5, 2017, https://www.chronicle.com/…/Can-We-Really-Measure-Im…/238807.
What we have in the National Geographic article is another non-scientist author claiming the certitude of a scientist with, in reality, an ideological ax to grind. Berreby has nothing but a BA in English from Yale to his credit. He uses the tendentious claims of some psychologists to support what is in essence his political crusade.
Since the 19th century, we have experienced the attempt to marry science to politics. The regions of the world laid waste by Marxism, eugenics, and National Socialism are a testament to its abject failure. Informed decisions are one thing; totalitarianism is another. It’s amazing that we have discovered a new way to construct Orwell’s Ministries of Truth and Love.
RogerG
PBS’s “Dictator’s Playbook: Mussolini”, my assessment: very misleading. If you haven’t seen it but plan to, don’t! There are better biographies out there. The thing exudes with the ideological partisanship that grips today’s academic and media hothouses. The program says more about them than Il Duce.
Politically corrupted academics littered their commentary with derogatory parallels to anyone who has serious doubts about multiculturalism, the many tentacles of political correctness, and the fantasyland socialism of the green movement. In the intro, the creators set the stage by connecting Mussolini to the modern rise of populist and nationalist parties in Europe. They couldn’t help but boil their beliefs down to “xenophobia”, as if there’s nothing to worry about in the sudden influx of millions of unassimilated immigrants. Check the crime stats and terror cells coming out of Scandinavia’s “especially vulnerable areas”.
Watch the clip of violent Muslim youth confronting Swedish police in Stockholm.
Trump illusions pervaded, like two profs’ summary of Il Duce’s program as one of “making Italy great gain”. It’s repeated often enough to make sure you get the idea. But think about it: what leader would be opposed to making their country great, from George Washington to Obama? If they weren’t about that, they would have to keep it secret or nobody would entrust them with the keys to the White House.
Mussolini’s political platform is reduced to violence, love of war, violence, nationalism … and did I say violence? One glaring plank missing from the script is summed up in the Fascist Party motto, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”. The Fascists’ love of the state was conspicuously absent from beginning to end. I suspect that modern Progressives are a bit uneasy knowing they share the same love. When you’re too busy lambasting Trump, sometimes you muff the more obvious connections.
Elizabeth Warren and Ocasio-Cortez might very well have a Mussolini problem. All you have to do to see the line of descent is substitute “free” (for all the stuff that they want to give people: healthcare, college, reparations, high wages, you name it) for “the state”. And, indeed, nothing is to be outside “the state”, as Hobby Lobby, Jack Philips, and any traditional Christian who takes 2,000 years of church history and the Bible seriously should now know. Today’s Dem-Left would be uncomfortable with the marching, uniforms, and martial vigor, but not much else.
FDR didn’t have much of a problem with Mussolini’s corporatism. He tried it in the National Industrial Recovery Act and its commissariat, the National Recovery Administration. Likewise, the Dems of today are marching toward a greater fulfillment of the motto with state-aggrandizement in the Green New Deal. Could that be the reason for the slipshod treatment of Il Duce?
RogerG
The recent teacher strikes – mostly in “red” (i.e., Conservative) states – are intriguing. What started out as a cause to boost the pay of truly underpaid teachers in West Virginia has metastasized into Occupy Wall Street, something under the rubric #redfored. In truth, I think that the lefty hive is being ginned up as the Supreme Court deliberates its decision in Janus vs. AFSCME. If Janus wins, the cushy power relationships of public employee unions will be deflated. But here’s the big scoop from the ruckus: government unions are lefty enterprises.
It’s a familiar script. Trump gets elected and hyperventilation replaces deliberation – mostly on the left but also in some extreme precincts on the right. The swarming extends everywhere the left has a stranglehold. The only surprise to me is the length of time it took for the education blob to catch on.
What has the adoption of California-style taxes to do with teacher pocketbook issues? Clearly, for the firebrands, simply raising pay is too vanilla. The slogan is bloated to include lefty planks like the adoption of the progressive tax nightmare and dolloping layers of bureaucracy on the schools. Poor pay was simply the vehicle to swarm the hive and cloak the wolf in a pleasant disguise.
Well, it took some time but the genus Ovis aries (sheep) costume was outed. Now the “#redfored” is no different from “#resist”, “Bernie Sanders for president”, or Occupy … [fill in the blank].
RogerG
* Check out “Teacher strikes morph from pocketbook clash to partisan street theater”, Frederick M. Hess, Education Next, AEI, 5/8/2018, http://www.aei.org/publication/teacher-strikes-morph-from-pocketbook-clash-to-partisan-street-theater/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT0RjM1pERXhabUZsWVRBNSIsInQiOiJzeFpQdkVWblBGaExlMGhtQnFwTFB4dEd4VmlDbFBxYWdZSVF5QXJoQVVzNDdYK3J3bDNEb0xycDBHT2dJOWUzVGI5Rjh1QTdIOU9mMWhDYllmWWFodVpneWxPNXhWSUo5T0VtWGZsK3BGSGtIV2ordDBHM0ZqcVhiVUxvSnhyYiJ9
Today, there seems to be a concerted effort to make-believe everyone is the same, not just equal: among the sexes, genders (?), racial and ethnic groups, social classes, everyone. Of course, this is a flagrant contradiction to multiculturalism’s worship of differences. But, pushing the incoherence aside is the pogrom against any real or imagined bigotries. It takes the form of a jihad to eradicate “disparate impact” – or the presence of unequal outcomes. If we are more than equal, but the same, too many of one group in an unsavory category is said to be proof of amorphous and shadowy forces of bigotry. The only problem: It’s all nonsense and, when implemented, a hot mess.
Recently, the Kern High School District in California was sued by the Dolores Huerte Foundation for a negative “disparate impact” in its discipline policies. Too many minorities were said to be kicked out of school. Now, in caving in to a judicial shakedown, the District implemented PBIS. Don’t fret over its meaning. It can be translated to mean more mothering for hellions. Too bad if you’re a good student or well-meaning teacher.
Bakersfield High School teachers expressing their fear and dismay:
Here’s a clip of fights at neighboring West High School from last year:
You see, hellions aren’t evenly distributed in a population any more than the social conditions that give to their rise.
Read the article: “‘Out of Control’: Teachers describe KHSD schools after anti-discrimination settlement”, Jeff Platt, Eyewitness News staff, BakersfieldNow.com, http://bakersfieldnow.com/…/out-of-control-teachers-describ….
RogerG
STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, Math. And, if given freedom of choice and abundant opportunities, more women prefer other fields. Conversely, straitjacketing women through poverty, and cultural and legal devices, ironically means more STEM women (More or less is a percentage of a study population). The upshot: depressed countries meet the modern feminist ideal more than free, open, and prosperous ones. So, should we adopt the Sub-Saharan African model of social and economic organization to boost our female STEM numbers? And/or, should we continue our efforts to artificially construct the new woman according to recent Hollywood stereotypes?
Check out the articles:
** “Countries with greater gender equality have lower percentages of female STEM graduates MU study finds”, News Bureau, U. of Missouri, 2/14/2018, https://munews.missouri.edu/…/0214-countries-with-greater-…/
** A good synthesis: “Gender equality paradox: fewer women in developed nations go after STEM degrees”, Philip Perry, BigThink, 3/1/2018, http://bigthink.com/…/the-downside-to-greater-gender-equali…
RogerG
For one, “free” isn’t “free”. It’s shorthand for the government making somebody else pay. For another, the whole idea is a mess. If you want to ruin college, unleash public debt, and wreck the lives of many young people, make college “free”.
Two things stand out in this latest crusade for “free”. First, the idea defiles colleges by roping into them marginal students which turns colleges into something resembling failing high schools, and lets loose a form of hyper-inflation … of degrees. It’s like the idea of making a country richer (more educated) simply by printing more dollars (degrees).
Second, it’s as if we can suspend the laws of human nature, as if there are no such laws. Economics can’t exist without them. It’s economics that is really being ridden out of the picture. “Free” means “subsidies”, and subsidies make anything more expensive. Take dairy price supports, or ethanol subsidies, and apply to college. You’ll end up with warehouses full of degrees, many of which have more to do with political activism than practicality and enlightenment. Watch costs escalate.
More troubling is the greater acceptance of the nonsense among normally conservative constituencies. The popularity of the balderdash is proof of debased education and the ascent of the juvenile love for “free” into age groups that should know better.
*”Why States Should Abandon the ‘Free College’ Movement”, Jennifer E. Walsh, NRO, 3/19/2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/…/why-states-should-abandon…/
RogerG
Unsurprisingly and generally speaking, parents strive to grease the skids for their kids’ future success. Particularly, middle class parents will drive themselves to near bankruptcy in order to guarantee their offspring’s advancement. Yet, when they buy into a nicer neighborhood to enroll junior in a “better” school, are they really getting a “better” school? There’s good reason to doubt that proposition. Much of the corruption in our schools has deep tentacles, and is no respecter of “red” vs. “blue” states, public or private schools, inner city or suburban schools, parochial or secular, and even reaches down into home-schooling. It’s equal-opportunity corruption.
I suppose that the issue hinges on what is meant by “better”.
Sure, avoidance of gang rape in the school’s bathroom, classrooms-as-battlefields, and the accidental straying beyond the school’s chain link fence into feral environs are legitimate parental concerns. Many parents would assign “better” to any school without these traits.
Under the belief that a geographic relocation might improve things for the munchkins, many parents can’t wait to hook up the U-haul and move to a richer zip code.
However, zip codes of the affluent present their own problems, leaving aside the schools. Websites catering to the school-conscious parent have sprung up in places afflicted with a cost of living commensurate with Warren Buffett’s investment portfolio but many people possessing a net worth more in line with the denizens of 1950’s Levittown. California is a hotbed for these conversations. One site for Bay Area moms and dads, berkeleyparentsnetwork.org, is filled with advice such as “Of course, if you can afford to buy in a place with good schools then by all means buy.” (12) Though for most Californios, being able to make the rent, or mortgage, hangs overhead like the sword of Damocles.
Some have opted to jump ship and leave the state. For many, housing costs are just too big an obstacle to overcome in the quest for better family environs, including schools. From 2000 to 2009, the SF Bay Area registered a net outflow of 600,000 domestic migrants (mostly citizens, not immigrants). After a 5-year pause due to falling house prices from the Great Recession, the exodus resumed as shelter resumed its eye-popping California norm (house prices returning to 6x’s income, beyond the acceptable 3x’s). The 2016 losses for the whole state were on the order of 110,000, most of it from the heavily populated but very expensive coastal enclaves. (9)
Those “domestic migrants” – residents of one state moving to another – seem to be emerging from states with uniform ID: those with the adjective “high” before cost-of-living, taxes, crime, and regulation, and “low” for upward mobility and successful business formation. The usual suspects are California, Illinois, New York, et al.
Destinations are South and West — EXCLUDING CALIFORNIA! Look at the top and bottom of the chart below. The top is reserved for the welcoming states and the bottom for states that shed people like my dog does hair. (15)
Interestingly, the combination of escalating house prices and California’s hostility to suburban living is making for a return of feudal manorialism. A fleeing middle class, sensitive to rising prices for a family hearth, in combination with foreign immigration into the state (2.7 million “undocumented” live in the state – see 13 below), is resurrecting something resembling a lord/serf society. Two researchers characterized the situation like this: “Essentially, the model [for California] is that of a gated community, with a convenient servant base nearby.” (9)
“Convenient servant base”? Sounds much like “serf”, or maybe peasant, to me. “Gated community”? Sounds like “castle”, or chateau.
For many, moving for better schools and a more affordable roof most likely means leapfrogging the state entirely. But don’t delude yourself into equating a middle or upper class student body in a new state with a high quality education. Housing is cheaper but the vast majority of schools are likely, at best, to be only marginally better. The only real difference between the middle class kid and inner-city one is the poor kid’s path to mediocrity is a lot rockier. Yes, a mediocre curriculum and poor teacher training awaits all irrespective of better cars in the student parking lot or a student enrollment that’ll do the homework.
All schools draw from the same pool of teacher candidates and curricular resources. You’ll find the same textbooks on a home-schooler’s kitchen table as you will find in a Catholic school classroom and a suburban or inner-city public school. The vast majority of teachers are given a remarkably homogeneous college education and teacher training centering on the mind-numbing writings of John Dewey. The sameness is quite remarkable.
30 years worth of experience as a public high school and community college teacher has made me aware of the phenomenal uniformity of what is taught, how it is taught, and who is teaching it.
Two textbooks that were a staple of 20 years of high school instruction and widely adopted are displayed below.
Over the years, textbooks have declined in narrative with a surge in graphics. Technical, thought-provoking theory has disappeared. Identity politics is amply displayed: for instance, out goes Henry Bessemer and in comes Mary Wollstonecraft. Much space is reserved for our historical sins as these crowd out the richness of debate over the nature of our federal system. Labor history is reduced to a Marxist distillation; excluded is the role of violent anarcho-socialists in some of that history. Immigration and immigrants, of course, are always saintly. The 1960’s reads as if it was cleansed through the censors of the radical left. I could go on.
For pedagogy, teacher trainees are immersed in the mind of John Dewey. Who’s John Dewey? He’s a turn-of-the-century socialist who wanted to turn the schools into factories for making socialists.
He’s famous for such arcane mumbo-jumbo as “constructivism” and seemingly commonsensical “child-centered learning”. The “construction” in “constructivism” is simply the matter of raising (or constructing) the child’s receptivity to socialism. “Child-centered” is an assault on the established canon of western civilization. The child’s wants are the guide to instruction, not Plato, the Apostle Paul, or the Founders. The teacher as the adult in the room is to be replaced by the chaos of adolescent urges.
On this foundation is built the everyone-wins-a-trophy philosophy of “multiple intelligences” via Howard Gardner. Everybody is assumed to be smart, but in reality nobody is smart … if you think about it. The whole thing is a levelling of all students. From this we get the dilution of the curricular core to include excursions into all the “intelligences” to the detriment of a traditional core. It’s conducive to “heterogeneity” and grouping in almost everything.
About that “grouping”, “cooperative learning” are watchwords. Kids are thrust together into groups of varying abilities – the “heterogeneity” thing – and responsibility is socialistically distributed. What better way to “construct” the new child for the socialist future? Keep this in mind as your kid comes home with stories of his or her classroom group.
Don’t think for a moment that AP courses are immune to these influences. AP Literature guidelines now reflect Dewey’s “child-centered” nonsense. AP US History deemphasizes a mastery of historical facts and their connections. They demand mature judgments from immature minds. Across the curriculum, we’re creating opinionated ignoramuses.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that our professional goal wasn’t Jefferson’s ideal of an educated citizenry. It’s about making good little Democrats — by Democrats, I mean the Democratic Party as part of the consortium of the world’s Social Democratic Parties. Read “socialist” for Social Democrat … mostly of the mild sort.
The kids’ minds have long been pried open to being college snowflakes and Antifa recruits. Intolerant and propagandized since shortly after becoming bipedal, many of them are now subjecting us to their partisan and ideologically-laced rhetoric. The rhetoric supplants mature thinking.
Listen to this exchange between a taxi driver and his youthful customer over a hula doll on his dashboard. Count the number of times political boilerplate and the word “offensive” is used by the female rider.
We are reaping the whirlwind as tantrums and thuggishness displace reasoned debate.
We are witnessing the results of 4-5 decades of a blinkered and tendentious instruction. It has penetrated nearly everywhere. Buying a home in a better neighborhood will buy you a preppy student body; it won’t guarantee you a education free of the bacillus. Fleeing a blue state to a red one won’t change the dynamic. A private or parochial school might only provide a safer and more accomplished route to mediocrity. Home schooling might be an option if the curriculum can be kept free of the college ed schools and government’s embrace of identity politics, an unlikely occurrence.
Education reformers are everywhere, and have been arising zombie-like throughout my career. Yet, reform seems to always originate from the same worn out premises. We’ve reached the point that real education reform may require us to ignore the reformers. Unless it happens, we had all better keep an eye on Tommy (see below).
RogerG
Bibliography and sources: