“Crashing Fences” is from G.K. Chesterton’s The Thing. The piece presents a word of caution to reformers before they start smashing traditions, institutions, and norms.
Parents beware. The curriculum in our schools is replete with all manner of “reform”, or the crashing of fences. It’s in the Science Departments in the form of climate change and the haranguing about humanity as the pillager of nature, the eco craze. It’s in the Math Departments as new means are concocted to make girls more comfortable with numbers and to further the mania to make everyone feel better about coming up with the wrong answer. It’s in the English Departments in the attempt to erase the cultural hallmarks of western civilization. It’s in the Social Studies Departments’ staff training and textbooks as they beatify the new secular saints of “experts”, FDR, and everything that can be forced into the tent of civil rights. In short, it’s everywhere.
The kiddies are in a finishing school to manufacture Progressives. Progressivism is all about surrendering to faculty lounges and government – a ripe source for their future employment – the power to decide what is to be done. No more is life to be left to the old and “stodgy” and the “chaos” of free markets and citizen republics. Omniscient technocrats will lead the way.
Adolescents are trained to crash fences … or accept the transfer of power to those who will do the crashing.
Most bothersome is the certainty in which all this is presented. One can’t question this or that tenet of Darwin or the UN’s IPCC without being indicted for war crimes against “science”.
I’m reminded of the ideological pestering about any of the chic calls to change our ways. “Gender fluidity” is a demand to repeal chromosomes. “Climate change” is an exorcism to drive out the last vestiges of limited government. Say goodbye to the Constitution. “Social justice” is the seizure of an older term for the purposes of smashing nearly any unevenness in human relations. In an earlier time (19th century), “social justice” was the restraints exercised by civil society to control anti-social behavior. No more. The nomenclature for crashing fences is almost endless.
This isn’t education. It’s propaganda. Along the way the kiddies get a little knowledge, but it’s wrapped in the garb of a constant revolution. Few in Russia, October 1917, knew that they were embarking on the descent into death pits and concentration camps. Fewer still knew that after breaking a few eggs to make the utopian omelet the hell would persist for 80 years, and not a shining collectivist heaven at the end of the long dark tunnel.
The words attributed to Jesus on the cross in the Gospel of Luke (23:34) have much relevance for today: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
RogerG