Americans have an instinctive understanding of the economic contradictions of collective farming on the Soviet or Maoist models. We understand why socialist enterprises such as Venezuela’s state-run petroleum companies are destined to failure. But we fail to recognize that many of our own systems — using central planning to implement the public provision of non-public goods — are organized along precisely the same lines. The outstanding local example of this is the American public-school system.—The aim of public education is, and has always been, to make members of the public more standardized and thus better suited for incorporation into The Plan. It is unsurprising that socialists have taken up the cause with verve.
Kevin D. Williamson, Socialism is Back, National Review Online
Tag: Education
The Comprachicos
In 1970 Ayn Rand penned one of her signature essays, The Comprachicos, beginning it with her translation of an excerpt from Victor Hugo’s 1869 The Man Who Laughs:
The comprachicos, or comprapequeños, were a strange and hideous nomadic association, famous in the seventeenth century, forgotten in the eighteenth, unknown today …
Comprachicos, as well as comprapequeños, is a compound Spanish word that means “child-buyers.” The comprachicos traded in children. They bought them and sold them.
They did not steal them. The kidnapping of children is a different industry. And what did they make of these children?
Monsters.
Why monsters?
To laugh.
The people need laughter; so do the kings. Cities require side-show freaks or clowns; palaces require jesters …
To succeed in producing a freak, one must get hold of him early. A dwarf must be started when he is small …
Hence, an art. There were educators. They took a man and turned him into a miscarriage; they took a face and made a muzzle. They stunted growth; they mangled features. This artificial production of teratological cases had its own rules. It was a whole science. Imagine an inverted orthopedics. Where God had put a straight glance, this art put a squint. Where God had put harmony, they put deformity. Where God had put perfection, they brought back a botched attempt. And, in the eyes of connoisseurs, it is the botched that was perfect …
The practice of degrading man leads one to the practice of deforming him. Deformity
completes the task of political suppression …The comprachicos had a talent, to disfigure, that made them valuable in politics. To disfigure is better than to kill. There was the iron mask, but that is an awkward means. One cannot populate Europe with iron masks; deformed mountebanks, however, run through the streets without appearing implausible; besides, an iron mask can be torn off, a mask of flesh cannot. To mask you forever by means of your own face, nothing can be more ingenious …
The comprachicos did not merely remove a child’s face, they removed his memory. At least, they removed as much of it as they could. The child was not aware of the mutilation he had suffered. This horrible surgery left traces on his face, not in his mind. He could remember at most that one day he had been seized by some men, then had fallen asleep, and later they had cured him. Cured him of what? He did not know. Of the burning by sulphur and the incisions by iron, he remembered nothing. During the operation, the comprachicos made the little patient unconscious by means of a stupefying powder that passed for magic and suppressed pain …
In China, since time immemorial, they have achieved refinement in a special art and industry: the molding of a living man. One takes a child two or three years old, one puts him into a porcelain vase, more or less grotesque in shape, without cover or bottom, so that the head and feet protrude. In the daytime, one keeps this vase standing upright; at night, one lays it down, so that the child can sleep. Thus the child expands without growing, slowly filling the contours of the vase with his compressed flesh and twisted bones. This bottled development continues for several years. At a certain point, it becomes irreparable. When one judges that this has occurred and that the monster is made, one breaks the vase, the child comes out, and one has a man in the shape of a pot.
I ran across a post at Dr. Sanity today, YA GOTTA DO WHAT YA GOTTA DO, where she expounds on the end-product of today’s “postmodern educational system,” concluding:
I think we are witnessing the consequences of having the best minds of several generations systematically hobbled and and mutilated by the gurus of political correctness and moral relativity. I think that the essential nihilism of the postmodernism intellectual craze is coming to full fruition and that the decline of leadership is just one obvious symptom. Even more insidius is a steep decline in the ability to think that is coupled with a real contempt for reason, truth and objective reality.
Joseph Stalin once pointed out that, “Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”
Our children have been deliberately targeted for decades; they have been in the crosshairs of the dead-end philosophy that drives the postmodern progressivism of today’s ‘intellectual’ elites. Sadly, those elites have scored a bullseye.
No, there are no psychological breakthroughs on the horizon for these reality-challenged minds, or for their mentors. There is only the mindless parroting of the dysfunctional ideology for which they have gladly sacrificed their souls.
I was immediately reminded of Rand’s Comprachicos.
Please, read Dr. Sanity’s post and all its related links, then read The Comprachicos. Rand called it all the way back in 1970. It had already been going on for decades (Rand blamed Kant), and she knew exactly what the outcome would be even then:
It is the educational establishment that has created this national disaster. It is philosophy that has created the educational establishment. The anti-rational philosophic trend of the past two hundred years has run its course and reached its climax. To oppose it will require a philosophical revolution or, rather, a rebirth of philosophy. Appeals to “home, church, mother and tradition” will not do; they never did. Ideas can be fought only by means of ideas. The educational establishment has to be fought—from bottom to top, from cause to consequences, from nursery schools to universities, from basic philosophy to campus riots, from without and from within.
This last is addressed to the many intelligent youths who are aware of the state of higher education and refuse to go to college or, having gone, drop out in revulsion. They are playing into the comprachicos’ hands. If the better minds desert the universities, this country will reach a situation in which the incompetent and the second-rate will carry the official badge of the intellect and there will be no place for the first-rate and independent to function or even to hide. To preserve one’s mind intact through a modern college education is a test of courage and endurance, but the battle is worth it and the stakes are the highest possible to man: the survival of reason. The time spent in college is not wasted, if one knows how to use the comprachicos against themselves: one learns in reverse—by subjecting their theories to the most rigorously critical examination and discovering what is false and why, what is true, what are the answers.
As to the drugged contingents of hippies and activists, I should like to address the following to those among them who may still be redeemable, as well as to those who may be tempted to join their hordes.
The modern comprachicos have an advantage over their ancient predecessors: when a victim was mutilated physically, he retained the capacity to discover who had done it. But when a victim is mutilated mentally, he clings to his own destroyers as his masters and his only protectors against the horror of the state which they have created; he remains as their tool and their play-thing—which is part of their racket.
It hadn’t quite “reached its climax” in 1970, but she wasn’t far off. It’s taken another generation to really play out.
Edited to add this, via Instapundit on “Tiger Mothers” and their end product (regardless of their ethnicity), the crème de la crème of Ivy League university graduates:
But here’s the thing. And here the point has been made easier to make by the curious fact that Tiger Mom is a Yale Law School professor and as Professor Bainbridge has pointed out, it seems almost an epidemic among faculty parents in New Haven. My fear is that little tiger kittens are not being groomed to make things that you and I can buy if we feel like it. I’m afraid, call me paranoid if you like, that those little achievers will want to grow up to, well, rule. . . . Then I worry that all this fierce intelligence, all this ambition, all this work are going toward the building of world in which my children will be mere, well, what do you call the people who support those who so intelligently manage things from on top. Not to mention the unbelievably well educated 35 year old who will tell me someday I didn’t score well enough in some algorithm I can’t even understand to get my arteries bypassed or my prostate cancer treated. I want to live in a world, and I want my children to as well, where we are free individuals, and geniuses can sell us stuff if we want to buy it. When I suspect the little elites of tomorrow are just being made more formidable still, it excites not my admiration as much as my anxiety.Tom Smith, The Right Coast – The last thing I have to say about Tiger Mothers I hope
Remember Stalin: “Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”
It’s no laughing matter.
Quote of the Day – Media and Education Edition
It’s not just crappy education [although that certainly contributes], it’s that most ‘reporters’ study ‘journalism’ in college, where they’re taught not to ‘report’ facts and such but to ‘describe’ and ‘explain’ ‘narratives’ and ‘messages’ to the ignorant public. They are to become ‘journalists’, which apparently means they don’t really need to know anything except how to string together words to make a sentence. And they don’t need to understand anything at all.
The journalism majors I get in my class are second worst, only better than the education majors.
Posted by: JorgXMcKie at January 6, 2011 10:21 AM
Found at Arms and the Law, Media ignores ATF internal scandals
More Balkanization
I’ve written here at TSM previously on the Tucson Unified School District’s “Ethnic Studies” program, or “Raza Studies” as it’s known hereabouts. It’s been a crusade by the current and outgoing Superintendent of Public Instruction to eliminate this program from Tucson’s schools. Said Superintendent is outgoing because he was recently elected to the position of Attorney General. And he’s serious:
In his final hours as Arizona schools chief, Tom Horne is planning to make a declaration this morning that TUSD’s ethnic studies program is in violation of state law.
For Horne, who has held the post for the last eight years and will be sworn in as the state’s attorney general at noon, the only way the district can come into compliance will be complete elimination of the Mexican American Studies program.
“In view of the long history regarding that program, the violations are deeply rooted in the program itself, and partial adjustments will not constitute compliance,” Horne wrote in a 10-page document of findings.
Failure to comply could result in the loss of up to 10 percent of the district’s budget. The Tucson Unified School District’s annual state-aid budget is more than $149 million. If a 10 percent reduction is imposed, that amounts to an annual loss of nearly $15 million, according to the Arizona Department of Education.
Note that, for the benefit of TUSD graduates and dropouts, the paper kindly did the “10% of X = Y” math for them.
At least the ones who can read.
RTWT.
THIS is How You Do It
Via Robb Allen, read the story of how Popgun took an Anti and his wife to the range. You don’t reach them by insulting them. (Something I need to work on occasionally myself.)
The New New Math
Unix-Jedi emailed me a link to this one. Sabra of Trailer Park Paradise tells the story of her third-grade daughter and the San Antonio school system’s “Strategies” method of teaching multiplication. Quote of the day:
We learned a saying in Russian…повторение мать улица. Repetition is the mother of learning. Drills don’t sound fun, but you know what? They work.
Yes, they do. But apparently they don’t build a child’s self-esteem.
Sunday Movie Reviews
I’ve seen two movies in the last three days, RED and Secretariat. Both were excellent. RED is your typical anti-gun Hollyweird crowd making big bucks using weapons we can’t have in ways only governments permit to their agents, but it’s a load of fun as a summer (now fall) blowup movie. Catch it at a matinee. It’s great.
Secretariat is what we expect from a Disney film – wholesome family entertainment. But remember when I wrote a couple of days ago about Capitalism TV? This is a capitalist movie. Rich people are not treated as evil. The “Death Tax” plays a prominent (if understated) role. And risk – real risk – is portrayed as something worth taking, not avoiding at all costs. As the main character, “housewife” Penny Chenery Tweedy says,
This is about life being ahead of you, and you run at it.
It’s the will to win, if you can, and live with it if you can’t.
It shows us what we as a nation have sacrificed over the last thirty-odd years on the altar of “self-esteem” with the abhorrence of competition. It is a very “tea-party” movie about people who are not ashamed to be bold, successful, and who are willing to take risks.
Besides that, it’s a well written, well acted, and well made film I strongly recommend.
UPDATE: Eric S. Raymond also highly recommends RED. Good review.
Clark County (NV) Kids Can’t Do Math
No matter what their grades say. Read Vin Suprynowicz on the subject. Excerpt:
Cheyenne High School, with its 2009 “Nevada state Principal of the Year,” supposedly made “Adequate Yearly Progress” in 2009-2010, according to Arne Duncan and his federal parachute team. But the main thing the numbers there show is rampant grade inflation — kids who can’t pass the test taking home misleading “passing” grades.
At Cheyenne, the Algebra I common assessment test scores held steady — from 96 percent flunking in 2007, to 96 percent flunking in 2009.After two years, the teaching staff still didn’t know they had a problem? They still want to claim the test is “unfair”?
Meantime, however, in the same years, Cheyenne parents were told 63 to 72 percent of the kids PASSED Algebra I. Similarly, while 90 to 97 percent of kids flunked the standardized geometry test each year, students carried home report cards informing parents 64 to 72 percent of kids had PASSED geometry each year.
RTWT. Ask yourself if your kids are in the same kind of “schools” these kids are.
Interesting Question
I received the following interesting question in email today:
Mr Baker:
I am doing a history paper on the Constitution and was wondering what 3 books you would recommend reading. I am looking for books meant for the average person that can discuss the history and philosophy of the constitution and our government. The paper will probably be about how a lot in government view it as a “living document” compared to how it was viewed in the past.
I have some of the brightest, best informed readers on the web. How about it? What are your suggestions?
Our Pubic Schools
I posted that (click on the pic for the backstory), because it’s a perfect lede for this:
IAmA HS teacher: This is a list of “suggestions” we got in our mailboxes today on how to dumb-down our classes even more than they already are. I’m so angry I can hardly see straight.
Of course, as in most workplaces, “suggestions” are requirements-in-waiting. I’m sure if I don’t adopt these “new methods” I’ll get a bad review come June.
They talk and talk about improving our state test grades, but once the news cameras are gone this is how they really want us to run our classes -make them so easy everyone can pass without doing any work at all. Then they blame the low test scores on “lazy teachers” and the Union. It’s beyond sick.
Here’s the list:
Multiple ChoiceConsider open book tests using page references
Limit to one word or short phrases
Provide only one choice per letter (eliminate: A and B & All of the Above)
Eliminate: None of the Above
Offer a maximum of 3 choices
Avoid using negatives in questions (Which of these is not…)
True-FalseAvoid negative or comparative wording (which is NOT, etc.)
Avoid the use of specific determiners (always, never, and no)
Balance the number of true answers to the number of false (Ex: tell the students “there are 5 true and 5 false”)
If this is impractical, at least tell the student how many of each (5 true, 7 false)
Eliminate the need to rephrase false statements to make them true
Fill-in & Completionone word answers or short phrases only
Provide a word bank and/or page number clues
Give the first letter of the answer
Limit the number of fill-in-the-blank responses to 1 per question (Ex: President [blank] was the 1st President of America, his vice president was [blank] is not recommended.)
EssaysWeigh the merit of using any essay questions at all
If you must use essay questions:
Allow students to list answers without complete sentences
Provide “answer starters” (provide the first sentence or paragraph from a well-written essay)
Consider providing open book or notebook time
There were several other references to “consider giving open book tests with page references” that I eliminated as redundant. Geez, I wonder what they want all our tests to be from now on, but can’t come right out and say it? I could never guess…
I’m proud of one of my posts drawing 571 comments. This one has (at the time of this writing) 2876.
(h/t: Unix-Jedi for the latter link.)