Hey! Teacher! Leave Those Kids Alone!

(Apologies to Pink Floyd for stealing their line, and this is an überpost. You’ve been warned. Oh, and I’ve been adding to this since originally published as I keep finding things that should be part of it.)

A few weeks ago I caught a 30-day trip to the Zulag for sharing an education meme and my comment on it:

Thirty Days in the Hole

When I wrote Those Without Swords Can Still Die Upon Them in 2004 I was still exploring this stuff, and as a Second Amendment activist, I saw the world through that lens. I wrote:

Individual, private possession of firearms isn’t the only thing that permits individual liberty, but it is one of the essential components in a society that intends to stay free. An armed, informed, reasoning people cannot be subjugated.

So what do you do if you want to fetter a free people?

1) Remove their ability to reason.

2) Constrain their ability to access and exchange information.

3) Relieve them of the means with which to defend themselves and their property.

Which of these seems easiest, and how would it be best accomplished? And best resisted?

I thought the easiest method would be disarming the public. I Was Wrong. Deeply, deeply wrong. And far too late.

He knew well before I did.

I’ve been writing essays on the deplorable American public schools since I started blogging. The first one was Our Collapsing Schools, May 21, 2003 about a straight-A student, a Junior at a “good” high school in Covina, California who was college-bound. She wasn’t capable of writing a research paper.

It has only gotten worse over time. A lot worse. She could at least read.

But perhaps we have finally reached a point where the people most responsible for children’s education – that is, parents – are beginning to realize just how bad it is. Also too late, but here’s just a couple more data points.

California, There We Went: The Golden State’s public schools are not doing their job, and parents are opting out, City Journal, April 2, 2022. Excerpt:

According to a recent report, California now leads the country in illiteracy. In fact, 23.1 percent of Californians over age 15 cannot read this sentence.

While the problem has many causes, much of the blame falls on the state’s failing public schools. The 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that just 30 percent of California eighth-graders are proficient in reading. And those numbers reflect results gathered before the Covid-19 lockdowns.

Just in case you were educated in California, a quarter of adults in that state are illiterate. A little less than a third of the upcoming generation could read this überpost and understand it. (And honestly, I doubt more than 50% (that’s “half” if you went to school in Covina) of the adult population there could.

California is the state I posted MoneyMoneyMoneyMoney about in 2009. Jonathan Kozol, according to Wikipedia, is “an American writer, progressive activist, and educator, best known for his books on public education in the United States.” Kozol blamed the failure of California’s education system on – you guessed it – insufficient spending. Then-California State Representative Tom McClintock wrote an op-ed on that topic. Go read the post.

It’s not the money.

And it’s not just California.

See why I said less than half? It isn’t book bans causing illiteracy, it’s public schooling.

Professor Cooper is correct: If you make people ignorant, they’re easier to control. And that’s what our public school system is doing – making ignoramuses. Here’s another example: Baltimore City Public Schools Promoted Student With 0.13 GPA While Spending A $1.4 Billion Budget. Key graph:

A Baltimore mom recently learned her high school senior had a 0.13 GPA yet ranked 62/120 in his class. The student had flunked all but three classes during his first three years of high school.

(My emphasis.) Yes, 58 seniors out of 120 had lower GPAs than 0.13. That’s not a typo. A minimum of half the Senior Class is ignoramuses.

I bet they all got “promoted” too. Wouldn’t want to hurt their self-esteem!

Baltimore city schools currently have a total enrollment of 77,807. That’s more than $18,000 per student.

It’s not the money.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. – Thomas Jefferson

Government-funded Public Schooling must be destroyed. Not reformed, destroyed.

“But what would you replace it with?!?” Well, we did pretty well as a nation prior to the advent of compulsory government schooling:

To find out how much better educated Americans were before compulsory attendance laws and government schools existed, all we have to do is read DuPont de Nemours fascinating little book, National Education in the United States of America, published in 1812. He writes:

“The United States are more advanced in their educational facilities than most countries.

“They have a large number of primary schools; and as their paternal affection protects children from working in the fields, it is possible to send them to the schoolmasters — a condition which does not prevail in Europe.

“Most young Americans, therefore, can read, write and cipher. Not more than four in a thousand are unable to write legibly — even neatly….

Lest you think DuPont de Nemours is some MAGA fanatic, that source was good enough for the Daily Kos.

Now even prospective teachers don’t need to be literate.

These people are supposedly “teaching” your children.

The purpose of government, according to the Founders, was to create the conditions in which individuals can pursue happiness. It is not there to deliver it to them.

The purpose of education is to impart upon individuals the tools necessary to pursue happiness.

And it fails at that. But it doesn’t do nothing, it actively makes the population ignorant and pliant.

The purpose of public schooling is not education, it is indoctrination.

“I quoted the Trilateral Commision view of the educational system, namely it’s a system for the indoctrination of the young. And I think that’s correct. It’s a system for the indoctrination of the young. That’s the way the liberal elites viewed it and they’re more or less accurate. The education system is supposed to train people to be obedient, conformist, not think too much, do what you’re told, stay passive, don’t cause any crises of democracy, don’t raise any questions and so on. That’s basically what the system is about.” Noam Chomsky.

“Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to the Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will.

1. Confusion
2. Class Position
3. Indifference
4. Emotional Dependency
5. Intellectual Dependency
6. Provisional Self-esteem
7. One Can’t Hide

John Taylor Gatto, The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher.

I edited out the examples he gave for each. RTWT. Notice he doesn’t mention reading, writing, mathematics or science.

Another:

“A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare.” – Judge H. Walter Croskey, In Re. Rachel L. (2008)

Henry Louis Mencken:

And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.

One more – Sugata Mitra from an earlier education post:

The (British) schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. They must be identical to each other. They must know three things: they must have good handwriting because the data is handwritten, they must be able to read, and they must be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head. They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand and ship them to Canada and he would be instantly functional.

The Victorians were great engineers. They engineered a system that was so robust that it is still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists.

But they don’t even do that anymore.

The judge quoted above isn’t wrong. A primary purpose of the educational system was to make good citizens. And both Chomsky and Mencken are right, too, about what the System believes a “good citizen” should be, and it uses Gatto’s seven lessons to churn out those “certain standard shapes covered from head to heels in official rubber-stamps.”

Public Education was a machine designed to produce identical little cogs that fit happily into the Great Machine, but the indoctrination has changed over time. Gatto himself noted when the current regime kicked off:

“I lived through the great transformation which turned schools from often useful places (if never the essential ones school publicists claimed) into laboratories of state experimentation. When I began teaching in 1961, the social environment of Manhattan schools was a distant cousin of the western Pennsylvania schools I attended in the 1940s, as Darwin was a distant cousin of Malthus.

Then suddenly in 1965 everything changed.

Whatever the event is that I’m actually referring to—and its full dimensions are still only partially clear to me—it was a nationwide phenomenon simultaneously arriving in all big cities coast to coast, penetrating the hinterlands afterwards. Whatever it was, it arrived all at once, the way we see national testing and other remote-control school matters like School-to-Work legislation appear in every state today at the same time. A plan was being orchestrated, the nature of which is unmasked in the upcoming chapters.”

John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling, Chapter 4 (2000)

What was the change? Well, I believe, and the evidence supports, that around that time the early products of what Rudi Dutschke called “The Long March Through the Institutions,” a march that started in the 1920’s, hit the hallowed halls of academia in a wave. The third generation of the Progressive disciples of education reformer John Dewey, a man who wrote “I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform” had taken over the public schools. They were the Progressive Professors of Education, the policy makers, the experts, and they finally had the power to change things! And they did.

Dewey was central to the introduction of compulsory State education in the Prussian style. That was deliberate, and it led to the Seven Lesson Schoolteacher Gatto wrote about, with the intent of social engineering, this time to make little cogs that fit into the Great Society.

Much of this sweeping change was the result of the Frankfurt School‘s creation of Critical Theory. and one of its greatest proponents, Herbert Marcuse. It spawned others as well, such as educational theorist Paolo Friere whose book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published in 1968, has become a common textbook in Schools of Education in the U.S. One of Friere’s best known quotes is “The educator has the duty of not being neutral.” No, they must proselytize.

The result of this is the public school system being a factory no longer for the manufacture of good citizens, but radical activists. Since 1965 we’ve had nearly three more generations indoctrinated under this system. A certain percentage of current parents are the grandchildren of the first wave, and it has had its effect.

Read my 2006 post RCOB™. Excerpt:

I cringed as my young son recited the Pledge of Allegiance. But who was I to question his innocent trust in a nation I long ago lost faith in? – Nina Burleigh, Country Boy, Salon

Ms. Burleigh was born in Chicago in 1959. When Mr. Gatto’s “great transformation” hit the Chicago public schools, she was six years old. She moved to the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco at 7, then on to Bagdad, Iraq. Her father, Robert Burleigh is an author of children’s books where he “…is noted for introducing difficult historical topics to young readers in an accessible and effective manner.” I haven’t seen any of his works, but his daughter is also the journalist who offered to give oral gratification to Bill Clinton “for keeping abortion legal.” One wonders what her father taught her. It certainly wasn’t patriotism. A Progressive product of the system, true to form she went into journalism to proselytize.

She is just one of millions. But millions more aren’t as lucky.

Despite the title of this überpost, this is not an excoriation of public school teachers. The vast majority of them are simply products of the system they now inhabit. There are occasionally some exceptional teachers who can accomplish great things in the face of vigorous opposition. Jaime Escalante is a sterling example, teaching AP calculus to students in a high school known for poor academic performance. Most teachers aren’t able, much less willing to buck the administration, and I can’t blame them. Gatto bashed his head against the NYC educational administration until he’d had enough and quit.

No, my problem is with a system captured wholly by the Woke that has produced generations of the brainwashed. From a new teacher:

Each and every parent has an outcome that they want for their kids. That desired outcome has NOTHING to do with educating their child. What they want is for their child to receive good grades, so that child can “get into a good college.” The parents don’t care if the child actually learns anything. The goal is good grades. If their child doesn’t receive high marks, then they blame the teacher for picking on the child, claiming favoritism. Even when you show them that the exams are all multiple choice, and the correct answer was not selected by the child, the parent continues blaming the teacher. I even had one parent accuse me of substituting an incorrectly marked test for their child’s test, so I could make her look bad.

Read the links. Teachers have no defense against that, especially when they aren’t backed up by the administration. And they aren’t, even if they’re the Wokest of the Woke. God help them if they’re not and don’t hide it. No one else will. Toe the line or lose your job. Don’t piss off the parent(s) or the Administration.

Just as one unruly child can wreak havoc on classroom learning, one bad parent can wreak havoc on a teacher’s career. And there’s no solution to this problem available.

This is not to say that there aren’t bad teachers.

RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH!
This obviously isn’t new.
We teach both kinds of government, Socialsm AND Communism!

The bad teachers outnumber the good, and the rest are just there to collect a paycheck and their retirement, and above all of them is an administration promulgating the policies that prevent, you know, education.

‘Once men gain power over other men’s minds, that power is never used sparingly and wisely.’ – E.B. White

The result is a population that cannot read, but can vote. That doesn’t question, just accepts. That can’t reason, but can be manipulated. And even many who can read still cannot reason. They never learned how because no one taught them, and they were unable and/or unwilling to teach themselves. They are seldom right, but always certain, and any love of learning they entered the system with has been thoroughly beaten out of them.

As I recently argued elsewhere, America’s educational system has not prepared us for the government power grab because it does not create enough Emersonian independent thinkers or, frankly, even adult thinkers. Due to the extreme Left bias of higher education, many of America’s college graduates remain intellectually infantilized to the point that they can do little more than Tweet ignorant hate at any idea that does not accord with Progressive mantras. – Robert E. Wright

The public school system cannot be reformed. I must be destroyed and the people in it must never have power over children again. It is my belief that almost all children are born with a need and an ability to learn, and that they can educate themselves given the opportunity, the tools and the encouragement. One last excerpt from my previous education überpost, again from Dr. Sugata Mitra:

I made a hole in the boundary wall of the slum next to my office, and stuck a computer inside just to see what would happen if I gave a computer to children who never would have one, didn’t know any English, didn’t know what the Internet was. The children came running in. It was three feet off the ground, and they said “What is this?” And I said “Yeah, it’s, I don’t know.” They said “Why did you put it there?” I said “Just like that.” And they said “Can we touch it?” And I said “If you wish to.” And I went away.

About eight hours later, we found them browsing, and teaching each other how to browse. So I said “That’s impossible, because- You know how is it possible? They don’t know anything.” My colleagues said “no it’s a simple solution. One of your students must have been passing by and showed them how to use the mouse.” So I said “Yeah, that’s possible.” So I repeated the experiment. I went 300 miles out of Delhi into a really remote village where the chances of a passing software development engineer was very little. I repeated the experiment there. There was no place to stay, so I stuck my computer in, I went away. I came back after a couple of months, found kids playing games on it. When they saw me they said “We want a faster processor and a better mouse.” So I said “How on Earth do you know all this?” And they said something very interesting to me. In an irritated voice they said “You’ve given us a machine that works only in English, so we had to teach ourselves English in order to use it.” That’s the first time as a teacher I’ve heard the words “teach ourselves” said so casually.

Azimov was correct. Self-education is the only real kind of education, and the only thing formal schooling is for is to make self-education possible.

So of course, home schooling must be destroyed, not the national disaster of public schooling.

Quora question: “Why is the United States so messed up right now in 2021?”

My answer:

100+ years of “public education” has produced the electorate we have today. Too many people can’t reason, have no coherent philosophy, have no knowledge of actual history (only “social justice” history), have been taught that Western Civilization is the root of all evil in the world, etc.

It started in the very early 1900’s, driven by the wealthy industrialists to set up a system that would produce a two-tiered output – the actually educated sons & daughters of the elite who would be managers, and the people who would be working in their factories and buying the resultant products. All the “Progressives” were in favor of it. They wanted obedient, unquestioning workers who could read, write, and do math, but not think for themselves.

Shortly afterward the “Progressives” suborned the system to create ever-greater numbers of “Social Justice Warriors,” culminating in what we have today. After more than five generations the population consists of essentially four groups – those that despite being in the public system still managed to get an education, those who were privately educated, those who the education system didn’t radicalize but instead made numb, and the radicals. (Note: a lot of the radicalized went back into the education system as teachers and administrators in a positive feedback loop.)

The private system has always been oriented towards the elites. The majority of the nation, I think, are the numb. Those who educated themselves are a minority and the radicals are too, but they – being radical – have influence far beyond their mere numbers.

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” – H.G. Wells, 1920

“Give me a child for his first seven years and I’ll give you the man.” – Quote attributed to the Jesuits

“All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.” – Aristotle

“A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) has footnotes explaining what words like ‘arraigned,’ ‘curried’ and ‘exculpate’ meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today’s expensively under-educated generation.

“There is really nothing very mysterious about why our public schools are failures. When you select the poorest quality college students to be public school teachers, give them iron-clad tenure, a captive audience, and pay them according to seniority rather than performance, why should the results be surprising?

“Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.

“In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.” – Thomas Sowell

“It is only from a special point of view that ‘education’ is a failure. As to its own purposes, it is an unqualified success. One of its purposes is to serve as a massive tax-supported jobs program for legions of not especially able or talented people. As social programs go, it’s a good one. The pay isn’t high, but the risk is low, the standards are lenient, entry is easy, and job security is pretty good…in fact, the system is perfect, except for one little detail. We must find a way to get the children out of it.”—Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian.

Quote of the Day – Seen @ Facebook

You’ll love this.

I’m in my masters class for education (already know where this is going) and Paulo Freire and Myles Horton are mainstays for this class with their book “We make the Road by Walking.” Here is a quote by Freire “Education is not neutral and that by claiming to be neutral, we are technically siding with the powerful.” 

Paulo Friere is best known for his book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and is the spiritual founder of “Critical Pedagogy,” which is to education what “critical race theory” is to racial healing.  Miles Horton is known for his textbook “Education for Social Change.”  As opposed to “education to learn how to read, write, do math, understand science, and think for yourself.”

Don’t #WalkAway.

A recent piece at The American Conservative by Rod Dreher, Joe Rogan World vs. NPR World contains these two quotes:

…NPR sounds like Vatican Radio from the Church of Secular Progressivism, …The New York Times reads like L’Osservatore Romano of the same pseudo-religion.

Do read the whole thing.  This is not surprising to me, but it is beautifully expressed.

Back in 2008 I wrote The Church of the MSM and the New Reformation, a review of media bias as seen through the lens of Professor of Communication Brian Anse Patrick’s (PBUH) book The National Rifle Association and the Media:  The Motivating Force of Negative Coverage.  That the media has a bias is undeniable.  Both sides of the current political conflict believe that.  But what Professor Patrick exposed was that the bias is both Left and Right (one more than the other), but it is exclusively about control:

That elite media may be biased for or against a particular issue or topic is interesting, and this knowledge may help an interest group rally indignation or manage its public relations; however it tells little about the overall functioning of media in society. This latter concern is the broader and more important idea, with larger implications.

The larger concept that lies behind the consistent ranking is a broad cultural level phenomenon that I will label an administrative control bias. It has profound implications. Administrative control in this usage means rational, scientific, objective social management by elite, symbol-manipulating classes, and subclasses, i.e., professionalized administrators or bureaucratic functionaries. The thing administered is often democracy itself, or a version of it at least. Here and throughout this chapter terms such as “rational,” “objective,” “professional,” and “scientific” should be read in the sense of the belief systems that they represent, i.e. rationalism, objectivism, professionalism, and scientism. Scientism is not the same as being scientific; the first is a matter of faith and ritualistic observance, the other is difficult creative work. William James made a similar distinction between institutional religion and being religious, the first being a smug and thoughtless undertaking on the part of most people, the second, a difficult undertaking affecting every aspect of a life. The term scientistic administration would pertain here. Note that we move here well beyond the notion of mere gun control and into the realm of general social control, management and regulation.

He explained that people who migrate into journalism believe that problems should be solved by the people already exercising the power.  That journalists see themselves as the clergy of the Church of State, acting as intermediaries between the High Church of government – Federal, state and local –  and the laypeople who make up the rest of the nation.  Which is why I found Mr. Dreher’s description of NPR and the NYT to be so poetic.

As the political divide comes to a crashing head in this country on Tuesday, November 3, I thought I’d try to pull together the various threads that have been gathering in my head and try to weave together something coherent before (maybe) this whole thing gets ripped apart.

Why are we at this point?  I have pointed at public education as the great enabler, but it goes deeper than that.  John Taylor Gatto illustrated convincingly that the public education system was initially established by the Great Industrialists (aka “Robber Barons”) of the 19th Century to create a two-tiered system: A lower tier for the workers who would labor, do what they’re told without question, and buy the products they themselves manufactured, and an upper tier for the children of the Great Men and any who showed exceptional promise.  It was, after all, only natural – “Social Darwinism” was the phrase associated with it, except that philosophy quite easily slides into racism and eugenics (which it did.)  

No, a kinder, gentler philosophy was needed, and that was Marxism – the promise that all men (they were sexists in the late 19th century) would eventually be equal, would suffer no privation, would have all they needed, but never any more or less than their neighbors.  It was a beautiful dream, but Marx insisted that it was an historical inevitability!  So a lot of people adopted that dream and began working towards achieving it, hopefully in their lifetime.

These people were better than the average Joe or Jane.  They cared more.  They took jobs in government, in education, in media, because Utopia could not be consummated with the average prole!  Regular people cared only about themselves and a few people in their close circles.  For Marxism to work, people had to care about everyone else, and that required that they be trained, (nudged in the modern vernacular) into becoming a human being that can care more for a stranger than they do for themselves.  

I believe my readers can see the flaw here.

Instead of schools churning out capitalists, they started churning out sort-of-Socialists, and among them the Scientistic Administrators referred to by Prof. Patrick.  Part of that change was the secularization of the Western world, but the human mind seems to require some sort of spirituality.  There appears to be a portion of the brain pre-wired for a belief in some higher power.  In the face of a growing secularism, that inherent need for “spirituality” still needs to be filled.

Socialism, its accompanying Scientism and the promise of Marx’s utopian vision seems to do so nicely, and generation after generation has been infected and affected by exposure to that horribly flawed idea.

From a now-banned 2017 Reddit essay:

Blue Team Progressivism is a church, offering you moral superiority and a path to spiritual enlightenment. As a church it’s got a lot going for it. It runs religious programming on television, all day every day. Every modern primetime program is like a left-wing Andy Griffith show, reinforcing lessons of inclusion, tolerance, feminism, and anti-racism.

Watching a 90-pound Sci-Fi heroine beat up a room full of giant evil men is as satisfying to the left as John Wayne westerns were for the right.

The Blue Church controls the HR department, so even if you don’t go to church, you have to act like a loyal churchgoer in every way that matters while you’re on the clock. And off the clock, on any kind of public social media platform.

Jon Stewart and John Oliver are basically TV preachers. Watching them gives the same sense of quiet superiority your grandma gets from watching The 700 Club. The messages are constantly reinforced, providing that lovely dopamine hit, like an angel’s voice whispering, “You’re right, you’re better, you’re winning.”

Hollywood award shows are like church talent shows – the skits and jokes aren’t really funny, but it’s fun to look at the pretty girls, and you’re all on the same team.

If you oppose the ideas of the Left, as I have said in this forum repeatedly, you aren’t merely wrong, misinformed, misled, ignorant or in error, you’re evil.  As Eric Hoffer explained in his 1951 book The True Believer:  Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements:

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealosies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass. (Heinrich) Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. When Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: “No…. We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.” F.A. Voigt tells of a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement. Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought of the movement. He replied: “It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can’t, because we haven’t got any Jews.”

But we have had Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and now Donald Trump, each one inspiring greater and greater derangement to the point where it’s actually been called that – [fill in the blank] Derangement Syndrome, each new mutation more virulent than the last. 

Of course, we’ve still got Jews, too

Those Presidents, and the people who voted for them, have been called deplorables, bitter clingers, racists, sexists, misogynists, homophobes, Islamophobes,  pretty much every -ist and -phobe you can think of.  But what they’re really saying is “heretic.”  Note how viciously they go after the apostates – the former members of the Left who #WalkAway.   They know better.  They’re better educated, better informed, more intelligent, and therefore should be in charge of everything.  As the quote on the masthead of this blog from Sultan Knish explains:

The cult of the left believes that it is engaged in a great apocalyptic battle with corporations and industrialists for the ownership of the unthinking masses. Its acolytes see themselves as the individuals who have been “liberated” to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it’s because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it’s because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem.

Hoffer, in a 1967 television interview with Eric Sevareid, was asked about the Intellectuals – our “betters” in society and (most importantly today) government.  He responded:

Hoffer:  I talk of a specific type of person when I talk about an intellectual. […] To me an intellectual is a man of some education who considers himself a member of the educated elite, who thinks he has a God-given right to direct affairs. To me an intellectual doesn’t even have to be intelligent in order to be an intellectual. He looked down upon the masses as if they were dirt.

Sevareid: It’s their attitude toward ordinary people that is the dividing line in your mind?

Hoffer: That’s right.

Hoffer: In this country the intellectuals aren’t in power. Mass movement hasn’t a chance for the simple reason that they aren’t started by the masses. They’re started by intellectuals.

In America the intellectual has neither status, nor prestige, nor influence. We, the common people, are not impressed by intellectuals. We have a disdain for pencil-pushers. We actually define efficiency by the small number of pencil-pushers. If you asked me what I consider an efficient society I’d say the ratio between the office personnel and the producing personnel.

The smaller the amount of supervision the better, the healthier, the more vigorous a society. The highest supervisory personnel is where the intellectuals are in power – in Communist countries. There half the population is supervising the other half. The intellectuals have a tremendous contempt for the masses. Intellectuals can’t operate unless they’re convinced that the masses are lazy, incompetent, dishonest; that you have to breathe down their necks, and you have to watch them all the time. We in America are sitting pretty because the masses perform only if we leave them alone. That’s where we are at our best.

Eric Sevareid: You seem to have a fear about the rise of intellectuals in political life and power. Why are you so frightened of them?

Eric Hoffer: First of all, I ought to tell you that I have no grievance against intellectuals. All that I know about them is what I read in history books and what I’ve observed in our time. I’m convinced that the intellectuals as a type, as a group, are more corrupted by power than any other human type. It’s disconcerting to realize that businessmen, generals, soldiers, men of action are less corrupted by power than intellectuals.

In my new book I elaborate on this and I offer an explanation why. You take a conventional man of action, and he’s satisfied if you obey, eh? But not the intellectual. He doesn’t want you just to obey. He wants you to get down on your knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever the intellectuals are in power, there’s soul-raping going on.

And here we are, 53 years later with a society full of three more generations of college-educated intellectuals.  We have a mass movement started by those intellectuals on college campuses where they teach and are taught to loathe their nation and their fellow citizens.  We’re in not a civil war over control of the government, but a RELIGIOUS war over the control of our souls.  

57 genders. Free speech is violence, but violence is speech, but silence is violence.  There should be an equal number of female Fortune 500 CEOs but not an equal number of female brick layers, roofers, plumbers, or auto mechanics.  Tear down all the statues.  Rename all the streets, schools and other public buildings.  Burn down Federal buildings, preferably with Federal agents inside.  Raise your hand and say “Black Lives Matter” or we’ll beat you.  Defund the police, but call the highway patrol when a Joe Biden campaign bus is surrounded by Trump supporters in pickup trucks, and on, and on, and on.

And so far we deplorables have acquiesced, gone along, kept our mouths shut and tried to stay out of it.

That choice is not going to be viable much longer.  The Left is like the Terminator – it doesn’t sleep, doesn’t eat, and absolutely will not stop unless it is stopped.  It’s time to stop them.  This election is only the first step.  If we don’t take it, we may not get another.  It’s time to #StandUpandFaceThem, and damn the backlash.

 

Quote of the Day – Stephen Kruiser Edition

From his daily Morning Briefing, titled:  Defund the Public Education Leftist Indoctrination Mills

While I have never been one to view anything as an existential crisis, I’ve more and more come to believe that the upcoming presidential election will be a watershed moment for the United States. If Joe Biden wins, it will be the complete triumph of decades of public education indoctrination. The drift of so many young Americans towards socialism and anti-American sentiment is the direct result not being taught real American history, but being fed a leftist line that seeks to rewrite and/or whitewash much of what made this country great.

Do read the whole thing, but seriously, Stephen?  Now?  You’re a pundit.  I’m just the average guy, and I figured that out a few years ago.  Defunding public education isn’t enough.  We need to nuke the site from orbit until the rubble bounces, and salt the Trinitite.  Public education isn’t “fixable.”  The problem isn’t the schools, its the people who run them.  We have to get them away from the children.

And for those of you who ask “Well, what do we replace them with?” please read Education, Societal Division and a Proposal

Endgame

This blog has been, for me, a seventeen-year exploration of other people’s ideas.  If you’ve been here long, you’ll know that I use short quotes and long excerpts from other people’s writings to make the points I write about.  Like most people, I am not an “original thinker.”  I try to expose myself to as much as I can, and weigh it against my experience and reason to determine truth.  Then I put it down in pixels to help me get my head around it.
Over these past seventeen years (hell, over the last 25), I have slowly come to some conclusions that I’m not happy about.

Remember that last nearly 10,000-word überpost?  I told you that so I could tell you this.  Hopefully I won’t be as long-winded this time.

In that last essay I (hopefully) illustrated that the Progressive movement was made up of people who fervently believed in the inevitable coming Utopia promised by Marx where everyone would be equal and no one would want for anything.  They were the Modernists.  Religion was mysticism.  Logic, reason, and Science! would take us there because Marx said so.  It was logically, factually inevitable.  Progressive Modernists worked hard in the early 20th Century to accelerate its arrival.  Of course, their interpretations were affected by the culture at the time, so in addition to universal public education and ending child labor they also promoted segregation and eugenics, but hey!  They meant well! 
In earlier essays I’ve written about the public education system and how it was initially set up by Progressive Modernists working with industrialists to create a two-tiered system designed to produce a lot of reliable industrial workers out of one path, and the people who were to manage them out of the other.  For the Progressive Modernists this was just part of the path to Utopia.  For the industrialists who were obviously the most fit of all it was just another part of Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest, which somehow merged with that Utopianism without conflict.  It was shortly suborned to become a factory itself whose output was activists.
The Progressive Modernists zealously moved into the industries that mold culture – education, entertainment, and media – to proselytize, and by the 1940’s were firmly embedded and doing their best to crank out new adherents.  By the early 1960’s they’d done their jobs well.  But by the early 1960’s it was apparent that something was wrong with Marx’s philosophy.
Exposed to the real world, Marxist economies failed.  Marxist governments were murderous.  Marxism didn’t work anywhere it was tried.  Capitalist economies were successful, and democratic governments protected individual rights not perfectly, but they weren’t committing genocide on their own people.  Marx was factually, demonstrably, unmistakably wrong.
What do you do?  You’ve invested 20, 30, 40, 50 years of your life working towards giving your children or your children’s children that Utopia, and the promise is false?  This is the definition of cognitive dissonance

When someone tries to use a strategy which is dictated by their ideology, and that strategy doesn’t seem to work, then they are caught in something of a cognitive bind. If they acknowledge the failure of the strategy, then they would be forced to question their ideology. If questioning the ideology is unthinkable, then the only possible conclusion is that the strategy failed because it wasn’t executed sufficiently well. They respond by turning up the power, rather than by considering alternatives. (This is sometimes referred to as “escalation of failure”.)

Or, as I’ve put it, “Do it again, only harder!”  For many of them the philosophy could not be wrong.  Its promise was too beautiful to abandon.  Facts?  Irrelevant!  Logic and reason?  Meaningless!  And so the Progressive Modernists became the Postmodernists:  Nothing can really be proven.  Everything is relative, subjective.  Feelings are more important that facts.  Everything has hidden meanings because of the inherent conscious and unconscious biases of their creators, you just have to deconstruct them to find those real meanings.  The curtains are never just blueTwo plus two doesn’t necessarily equal four.  In other words, “My mind is made up.  Don’t confuse me with the facts.”  Or, “I reject your reality and substitute my own equally valid one!”  Or “That wasn’t REAL Communism!”

They turned their belief into a faith, a religion, with a garden of Eden (pre-civilization Earth), an original sin (either capitalism or slavery, depending on who you ask), a savior (Karl Marx), and a path to righteousness that would lead back to Heaven.  They didn’t seem dangerous, after all they were college professors, teachers, journalists, managing editors, writers, producers, entertainers, et cetera, but they were in the driver’s seat when it came to affecting culture and they were by Marx going to proselytize.
And so they passed that irrational, dangerous faith on to the next generation, and that generation passed on an even more virulent version, and the current generation born near the turn of the 21st Century is the recipient of two generations of Progressive Postmodernist evangelism, expanded exponentially.  When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1989, it didn’t matter to the Progressive Postmodernists.  That wasn’t REAL Socialism.  They’d made that decision over twenty-five years previously.  Nicaragua!  It was going to work there!  Failure.  Venezuela!  THAT was going to be Real Socialism!  But it failed horribly too.  Nobody changed their minds.  It could work HERE.  It was too beautiful not to.
There were other factions.  These were the Progressive Postmodernists who rather than going into journalism, education or entertainment, instead went into politics because that’s where real change could be implemented. Finally, those who did not go into any of those careers but still absorbed the catechism became the Faithful.  A lot of Union organizers, a lot of everyday workers, a lot of businessmen, and recently a lot of unemployed college graduates up to their eyeballs in student loan debt.  Those who rejected the teachings became The Enemy.  It took less than two generations for the two major parties to stop being “the loyal opposition” and become “the other side.” 

via Gfycat

And it wasn’t that the Right went more Right (though they did slightly), it’s that the Left has been moving WAY Left:

Author Frank Herbert wrote in his Dune novels some ideas that I think are as accurate as anything I’ve ever read:

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.

And:

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class – whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.

Which is basically a slightly different take on Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.  And finally:

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong – faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it’s too late.

That elected group is what I will call the Politburo.  These are the people who believe that they are the ones who can personally lead us to Utopia – or at least lead themselves to unlimited power by manipulating the Faithful. 

There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.  — Daniel Webster.

Men and all the other genders, too.  That latter group is who ends up in charge of “Socialist” governments once the Revolution has taken place.  The True Believers in the Politburo are purged to their shock, horror and amazement.  The pragmatists are the ones who order the mass murders which are then carried out by their Red Guards who have been taught since birth of their own righteousness and the wickedness of their class enemies.  The pragmatists are the ones who have private dachas and servants because they do the crucial and difficult work of deciding who can do what, who needs what and when, and how much to skim off the top.  The pragmatists are the ones who can see the coming collapse of the Entitlement Ponzi scheme and intend to be around to sift through the wreckage for the choice bits.

These people ran for office, won, and kept moving up, elected by other Progressive Postmodernists,  their Faithful and anyone else they could convince they could benefit. 

The portion that was ideologically more pure pursued the dream of eventual Utopia – in which, of course, they would be in charge.  The less ideologically pure pushed harder for that inevitable necessary Worker’s Revolution where they could seize the reins.  Both were mostly unopposed.  In 1960 John F. Kennedy was their King Arthur.  LBJ with his Great Society was the greatest thing to happen to Progressivism since FDR.  In 1964 Ronald Reagan gave a speech at the Republican National Convention, A Time for Choosing.  You should give that a listen.  Nobody then apparently did.  The people chose LBJ.  Richard Nixon was a sterling example of the faults of Conservatism and the Republican Party.  Jimmy Carter’s malaise worked greatly in their favor.  They suffered a bit of a setback with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, but George H.W. Bush wasn’t even a bump in the road.  Bill Clinton was a disappointment to them. He still pushed the Progressive Postmodernist agenda, just not as far or as fast as desired.  Bush 43 was a speed bump, but Barack Obama was their shining star.  Utopia was just over the horizon.  (I knew the end was near when Obama won his second term with a majority of the vote.)  Hillary might not bring it to fruition, but she would be another Great Leap Forward.
And then Donald Trump won the election.
Already mentally fragile, the Faithful went clinically insane.
That insanity was fed and nurtured by the Politburo. The media, entertainers, and other Faithful stoked it.  I’m not going to list all the examples, but you’d have had to be in a coma to have missed the last four years of increasing insanity.  It’s been a positive feedback loop.  Everything not explicitly Progressive Postmodernist is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum.  Why?  Because Marx says that a revolution of the Proletariat is a necessary step for the overthrow of the Bourgeoisie, but capitalism makes people comfortable and comfortable people do not revolt.  Everyone must be made a victim, miserable and righteously angry.  The effort over the last sixty years has been to balkanize the United States.  “Strength through Diversity” has become “Tribalism.” 
Diversity” Thomas Sowell once commented, “is not strength.  The ability to deal with the problems caused by diversity is.  America’s ability to deal with these problems has been America’s greatest strength.”  “United We Stand, Divided We Fall” has never been more apparent.
The Progressive Postmodernists have identified the Bourgeoisie as anyone not explicitly a Progressive Postmodernist, but most explicitly Caucasians and mostly males.  If you are a white Progressive Postmodernist, you’re still suspect because of your inherent racism and privilege.  We’ve gone from Two Minutes Hate to non-stop hate.  The inherent contradictions in the Progressive Postmodernist platform are starting to show as they are beginning to Cancel each other, but through it all, Donald John Trump has been the catalyst to this particular reaction.
Trump has for the last four years shrugged off every attack as if he was dressed in Teflon coated Chobham armor, but now he’s up for reelection.  Another four years of Trump will further damage the advancements that the Progressive Postmodernists have made over the last thirty years.  So here’s the point (finally) of this essay:

The wheels come off the train and the train comes off the track in 2021, one way or the other.

The End of America has been predicted by many people for quite some time.  The Progressive Postmodernists appear to have decided that the time is ripe.  The national debt cannot be ignored forever.  The projected entitlement spending is unsupportable.  All their preparation of the battle space through balkanization has brought us to this point.  Black Lives Matter, itself organized and run by self-proclaimed Marxists, is the hinge on which the lid is swinging, but Pandora’s Box is certainly opening.  I don’t think we’re going to stop the greed, envy, hatred, pain, disease, hunger, poverty, war, and death that will come flooding out of it, and there most likely won’t be much around afterward to put them back in.
Here’s my prediction:  The 2020 election is going to be a clusterfuck.  The Left does not intend to lose, and will do everything in its power to ensure that. As I said in March, I don’t think Creepy Uncle Joe will be the nominee, but I could be wrong.  Honestly, I expect the October Surprise to be an accusation of Donald Trump carousing with Jeffery Epstein and underage girls.  Why else would Ghislane Maxwell  have turned up now?  She might cost them a few low-profile Faithful, maybe a Politburo member or two, but if they lose, the “peaceful protests” we’ve seen recently will seem like a walk in the park.  All those “defunded” demoralized police who are now terrified of doing their jobs, won’t.  And the Left will discover to their horror that the police aren’t there to protect the citizens from them, but to protect them from the citizens.  All those guns and all that ammunition that has been purchased since 2000?  Well, when Americans get to fuckery, it will be fuckery unlike anything seen before.  The question is, will that shock return them to sanity, or will it be all-out war?  I wouldn’t bet on sanity.  I’d bet on them doubling-down.

If the Democrats win, and they probably will since they’ll be cheating as hard as possible, they’ll take it as a mandate to really crank up the Progressive agenda, and the millions of us who haven’t swallowed that ideology will be their sworn deadly enemies.  They have already weaponized the IRS and the Justice Department against Trump supporters, expect that to be cranked to 11 because the Deep State is deeply Progressive Postmodernist.  There will be a breaking point.  It might not be in 2021, but it won’t be long thereafter.  In the mean time, our position as a World power will be greatly diminished, and other hostile nations will be taking full advantage.  China will most probably annex Taiwan.  Russia will take over Ukraine and as many of its other former satellites as it can.  China and India may exchange nukes.  Iran might nuke Israel and/or set one off in the continental U.S.  And who the fuck knows what L’il Kim in North Korea is going to do?  In short, the 2020 election could be the match that lights off the next World War.  

Either way, the United States of America as we know it will no longer exist, and I see no way to stop it.  We could have a few decades ago, but we didn’t.  We didn’t realize the opposition had gone crazy.  Well, Ayn Rand and a few others did, but nobody in a position to do anything listened.  By the time Ronald Reagan won the Presidency I think it was already too late.  He was too concentrated on defeating the Soviet Union to look into his own back yard.

As Robert Heinlein wrote some time back in the 1960’s, “The worst thing about living in the declining era of a great civilization is knowing that you are.”  As on most things, he was right.

Somebody cheer me the fuck up with cat videos.  At least this one was only 2,400 words.

Update, 8/3/2020:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN9pdj3GHWk]

This is What the Education Bureaucracy is Afraid Of

AITA for showing my 13 year old daughter footage of WW2 concentration camps? Excerpt:

Schools are shut, we’re in lockdown and I’m playing teacher. My daughter is 13 and doing a project on world war 2. It’s basically a critical thinking piece about why it is important to remember the atrocities with also room to argue that we should be able to forget about it and move on.

I feel incredibly strongly about remembering WW2, for a variety of logical reasons I won’t get into, but also I’m quite an emotional person who wants to remember. However for the purpose of this project I tried to stay unbiased.

My daughter who is generally a clever and kind person just wasn’t getting it. I looked at the reading material and it was all very… I don’t know. Dull I guess? Watered down? Far removed?

Later on she was in a video call with some school friends saying learning about ww2 was a waste of time. Essentially the gist was it’s boring, it’s in the past and we don’t have to deal with these sort of things nowadays. I heard one of her friends say “I don’t think it’s even as bad as the text books made it out to be”

In that moment I guess I decided to take a more hands on teaching approach.

RTWT.

The Eduocracy is Worried?

Harvard Magazine warns of the damage homeschooling can do to children.  Note that they used the Bible as one of the books, and that the cartoonist cannot (apparently) spell “Arithmetic” correctly.  Note that more than one critic of compulsory government schooling has pointed out that one tenet of the architects of “Public Education” was reducing the influence of parents on their own children to better condition them as good cogs for the social machine.

Education Quote of the Day

Seen at Instapundit by Robert E. Wright of the American Institute for Economic Research:

As I recently argued elsewhere, America’s educational system has not prepared us for the government power grab because it does not create enough Emersonian independent thinkers or, frankly, even adult thinkers. Due to the extreme Left bias of higher education, many of America’s college graduates remain intellectually infantilized to the point that they can do little more than Tweet ignorant hate at any idea that does not accord with Progressive mantras.

 Analysis:  True. Read the piece in that second link.