Tag: Education

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil. — John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart, but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness. It’s a religious idea gone out of control. You don’t have to accept that, though, to realize this kind of economy would be jeopardized by too many smart people who understand too much. I won’t ask you to take that on faith. Be patient. I’ll let a famous American publisher explain to you the secret of our global financial success in just a little while. Be patient. — John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education

Quote of the Day

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Exactly what John Dewey heralded at the onset of the twentieth century has indeed happened. Our once highly individualized nation has evolved into a centrally managed village, an agora made up of huge special interests which regard individual voices as irrelevant. The masquerade is managed by having collective agencies speak through particular human beings. Dewey said this would mark a great advance in human affairs, but the net effect is to reduce men and women to the status of functions in whatever subsystem they are placed. Public opinion is turned on and off in laboratory fashion. All this in the name of social efficiency, one of the two main goals of forced schooling. — John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education

I can see I’m going to get a LOT of Quotes of the Day out of this book.

Quote of the Day – Day Late and Dollar Short Edition

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If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you’d think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?

I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive.

—

Before you hire a company to build a house, you would, I expect, insist on detailed plans showing what the finished structure was going to look like. Building a child’s mind and character is what public schools do, their justification for prematurely breaking family and neighborhood learning. Where is documentary evidence to prove this assumption that trained and certified professionals do it better than people who know and love them can? There isn’t any.

The cost in New York State for building a well-schooled child in the year 2000 is $200,000 per body when lost interest is calculated. That capital sum invested in the child’s name over the past twelve years would have delivered a million dollars to each kid as a nest egg to compensate for having no school. The original $200,000 is more than the average home in New York costs. You wouldn’t build a home without some idea what it would look like when finished, but you are compelled to let a corps of perfect strangers tinker with your child’s mind and personality without the foggiest idea what they want to do with it.

Law courts and legislatures have totally absolved school people from liability. You can sue a doctor for malpractice, not a schoolteacher. Every homebuilder is accountable to customers years after the home is built; not schoolteachers, though. You can’t sue a priest, minister, or rabbi either; that should be a clue.

If you can’t be guaranteed even minimal results by these institutions, not even physical safety; if you can’t be guaranteed anything except that you’ll be arrested if you fail to surrender your kid, just what does the public in public schools mean?

What exactly is public about public schools? That’s a question to take seriously. If schools were public as libraries, parks, and swimming pools are public, as highways and sidewalks are public, then the public would be satisfied with them most of the time. Instead, a situation of constant dissatisfaction has spanned many decades. Only in Orwell’s Newspeak, as perfected by legendary spin doctors of the twentieth century such as Ed Bernays or Ivy Lee or great advertising combines, is there anything public about public schools.

— John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education

I’m looking forward to reading all of this.

Wherein Kevin Channels Al Qaeda

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Having been recently accused of harboring commenters “little different” from Al Qaeda members, particularly on the topic of homosexuality, I thought I’d offer a preliminary brief comment on something I found via AR15.com today. (I fully intend to crank out an Überpost on the subject, hopefully this weekend.)

It would seem that two University of Michigan sociologists, Karin A. Martin and Emily Kazyak, have authored a paper, published in Gender & Society, entitled “Hetero-Romantic Love and Heterosexiness in Children’s G-Rated Films” (available as a PDF file.) Ms. Martin is an associate professor of sociology, and Ms. Kazyak is a doctoral candidate whose “research interests include gender, sexuality, social theory, and social psychology.”

The link that brought me to the paper came from the decidedly right-wing site LifeSiteNews.com in a piece entitled “Team of Researchers Blames Children’s Films for Perpetuating ‘Heteronormativity'”. I’ll admit, my initial response to the piece was that I thought it had to be satire.

Sadly, no.

I Googled “Sociologists for Women in Society,” which is a real organization, and from there it was a pretty simple couple of steps to find and download the source document. Now, I haven’t finished reading it yet, but in the first couple of pages I found some eminently quotable stuff that I just had to share. In fact, the paper opens with a quote from another sociologist, Henry A. Giroux:

The role that Disney plays in shaping individual identities and controlling fields of social meaning through which children negotiate the world is far too complex to be simply set aside as a form of reactionary politics. If educators and other cultural workers are to include the culture of children as an important site of contestation and struggle, then it becomes imperative to analyze how Disney’s animated films powerfully influence the way America’s cultural landscape is imagined.

(Emphasis mine.)

I thought educators were supposed to educate. Here we have a sociologist telling us explicitly (with the implicit approval of the authors of the paper in question, since they chose the quote) that the job of “educators and other cultural workers” is to use the “culture of children as an important site of contestation and struggle.” How Marxist that sounds, doesn’t it? The pertinent question would be “contestation and struggle” against what? This reminds me very much of the daycare teachers that inspired my essay The George Orwell Daycare Center who wanted to use their position as educators to teach children that “a class-based capitalistic society” is “unjust and oppressive.”

But this isn’t a paper about economics, it’s about sociology and sexuality. The next quote illustrates the authors’ position:

Heteronormativity includes the multiple, often mundane ways through which heterosexuality overwhelmingly structures and “pervasively and insidiously” orders “everyday existence”.

(Reference omitted.)

Checking my dictionary for the word “insidious,” I find this definition:

1. intended to entrap or beguile: an insidious plan.
2. stealthily treacherous or deceitful: an insidious enemy.
3. operating or proceeding in an inconspicuous or seemingly harmless way but actually with grave effect: an insidious disease.

So “heteronormativity” is “insidious.”

Here’s where I go all Al Qaeda on you. Now, one of my absolute favorite quotes comes from Teresa Nielson Hayden, wherein she says:

Basically, I figure guns are like gays: They seem a lot more sinister and threatening until you get to know a few; and once you have one in the house, you can get downright defensive about them.

(Hey, this is a gun blog.) But one thing homosexuals are not is normal, in the original definition of the term as “approximately average.” They are outside the norm. They’ve even adopted for themselves the word “queer,” which is defined as “strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint; unusually different.” But here we have a paper that seems to open with the statement that “heteronormativity” is “insidious,” (when, in fact, it’s “normal” – by definition) and it’s the job of “educators and other cultural workers” to “contest and struggle” with this insidiousness, starting with our CHILDREN.

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

(*Ahem*) Excuse me, but fuck THAT noise.

More (much more) to follow, hopefully this weekend, but we’ll see how long it takes for THIS Überpost to spring forth fully formed from my sweat-beaded forehead. Oh, and I’d very much like to hear from the GLBT audience on this. I know for sure that at least two gunbloggers are open and read this blog at least occasionally, Jeff at Alphecca and Zendo Deb of TFS Magnum. Comments?

Quote of the Day – Primary Source

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From a post at Samizdata:

At 47, I lament how today’s America is far less free than the country of my youth. Replacing it is not a 1984ish totalitarian dictatorship, but what Alexis de Tocqueville called the ‘soft tyranny’ of what Mark Levin sees as a 21st century ‘nanny state’. We so feared a Stalin or Hitler that we ignored endless assaults on our liberty by idealistic home-grown statists and the seductive narcotic of ever more government goodies buying our acquiescence. What makes Americans’ surrender to statism so shameful is that we freely chose this course in direct contravention of our founding principles.

Nowhere have we seen such an accelerating atrophy of our freedom as in K-12 public schools where recent decades have witnessed far more books banned, and not some print version of Debbie Does Dallas. No, literary classics like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain’s Huck Finn are verboten – required reading in those decadent days of my 1970s high school. But educrats with the backbone of a large worm now avoid anything controversial.

Students have far less choice of classes in high school, and often teachers can not make their own lessons since they must teach the test so schools can make “adequate yearly progress”. Only about 40 percent of my college students say they ever discussed any controversial issues in high school. My high school classes revelled in such debate.

The author is Douglas Young, Professor of Political Science & History at Gainesville State College in Gainesville, GA.

RTWT. And note the title of his piece.

What Your Kids are Actually Learning in School

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What Your Kids are Actually Learning in School

Quote of the Day:

If you want to understand how that leftist tactic has penetrated deeply into the culture, let me tell you a personal story. Recently, I was involved in an animated discussion with my daughter about her schoolwork. Things got a little heated, and in typical teenage fashion she became flustered when I pointed out some facts about her study habits that she did not like.

“Yeah?” she yelled, “Well you’re a….racist!”

Somewhat taken aback at this insertion of this word into our conversation, I must have momentarily appeared deeply shocked, because she abruptly started laughing and the tension was broken. Which, of course, made me laugh too at the ridiculousness of her words.

Still laughing, she said that she had learned at school that the best way to end a discussion you did not like was to accuse the other person of being a ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ or ‘homophobe.’ “Calling someone one of those names is a sure way to end the discussion,” she explained with a smile. “Kids at school use it all the time.”

Dr. Sanity, Like His Grandmother, Perhaps?

Oh, and check the cartoon at the link. Classic!

Communism as the Default State?

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Communism as the Default State?

A few days ago, reader Mastiff left this in a comment:

I would argue that the Enlightenment was flawed from the beginning.

That did not make it a bad thing; the Enlightenment contributed a vast amount to human reason and welfare. But no system of social order is complete that cannot see to its own perpetuation, and clearly the Enlightenment has failed to do so.

Dr. Sanity points today to a post at One Cosmos, Stone Age Economics of the Left: Who Would Jesus Bail Out?, and this interesting excerpt:

But one of the things that never changes is the hysteria of the left. The hysteria results from the conflation of existential and economic realities. In other words, when it comes to existence, there is always something to bitch about. But if you shift this to the plane of economics, then you can imagine that otherwise insoluble existential problems are susceptible to solutions.

For example, you can give “free college” to everyone, but this won’t alter the fact that 50% of human beings are of below average intelligence. In fact, you’ll only end up diluting education, so that if someone wants to be educated, they will have to do so outside of college. With the exception of the hard sciences, we’re pretty much at that point now. Once college is universal, it becomes worthless. And if Obama has his way, the same thing will occur in medicine: everyone will be entitled to their government-rationed portion of mediocre healthcare.

Now, when Marx was writing his critique of industrial capitalism in the mid 19th century, living standards were finally rising after hundreds, and even thousands, of years of stagnation. Workers were just finally rising above subsistence levels and beginning to be able to purchase necessities and eventually luxuries that would have been completely unavailable to them in the past. Pockets of Slack were starting to break out everywhere, instead of just being available to the upper-upper classes.

In short, the means of creating unlimited wealth weren’t really stumbled upon by human beings until the rise of industrial capitalism. Human beings had finally discovered the key to economic growth, which came down to the magical combination of individual liberty, free markets, strong private property rights, sound money, and the rule of law. And then get the hell out of the way.

And even then, it took several hundred more years to tame the “boom or bust” cycle [oops!], to the point that people no longer expect economic recessions, much less, depressions. It is now as if people imagine that unlimited economic growth and prosperity are the norm instead of an extraordinary deviation from the past. And with that, a sense of entitlement is nurtured, which in turn is rooted in what the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein called constitutional envy.

As I have written before, I believe envy must have had some evolutionary utility, or else it wouldn’t have survived the process of natural selection. Since 99% of human evolution took place in small bands of hunter-gatherers, my view is that envy must have ultimately served the purpose of group cohesiveness.

Human beings couldn’t possibly have survived as individuals, but only as part of a tightly bonded group. Therefore, anything that promoted the fitness of the group is likely to have been strongly reinforced. In a small group, it would have obviously been detrimental for one member to horde all of the resources, so we might say that envy is a mechanism that is actually selected by evolution in order to maintain our intrinsic communism.

In other words, communism is our default state (as seen in our immediate families), whereas certain traits and habits of mind associated with capitalism must be learned, among them, trust of the stranger, the tamping down of envy, a focus on the future instead of the present, and an understanding that economic exchange isn’t a zero-sum game.

Please, go read the rest. It’s worth your time.

One more, very short excerpt:

Liberty is not a built in — much less universal — value, and I think you can see how this is a major part of understanding the motivations — or shall we say, the deep structure — of leftism. Classical liberals wonder why leftists don’t value freedom, but they shouldn’t.

Quote of the Day

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With the election of Barack Obama as president, the liberals have launched a massive, two-front offensive they believe will end in victory. They have judged that our public education system is so degraded that only a few Americans are left who even understand what a democracy is, and how the free market actually works. They are convinced that the majority of Americans are too frightened by the current recession to care about preserving the principles that made us the most powerful, productive and innovative country the world has ever known. In short, the liberals are reaching for victory because they believe that history now is on their side.

The speed of their offensive is breathtaking.

At the core of democracy is the rule of law, and we have already lost it. The liberals lecture us incessantly that everything is “relative,” but that’s not true; some things are absolutes. You cannot claim to be faithful to your spouse because you never cheat on her — except when you’re in London on business. And you cannot claim to have the rule of law if the government can set aside the rule of law when it decides that “special circumstances” have arisen that warrant illegality. When the President and his aides handed ownership of Chrysler Corp. to the United Auto Workers union, they tried to avoid sending that beleaguered company into bankruptcy by muscling its bondholders into accepting less money for their assets than the law entitled them to collect. These contracts, and the law under which they were signed, were mere obstacles to a thuggish President bent on paying off his political supporters.

It’s going to get much worse, fast.

American Thinker, Revolution by Herbert Meyer

Via Mostly Cajun.

As always, RTWT.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

The GeekWithA.45:

Even Justice David Souter…

Who, among many other things, could not see a protection for the individual right of arms in the plain language of the second amendment (Heller v. D.C.), who did not see any problem with the use of government force for the taking for private gain (Kelo v. New London) and could not see how the first amendment protected people’s rights to Assemble for the purpose of disseminating political messages 60 days before an election (The fraud of McCain-Feingold) actually can see the Endarkenment slouching towards us…

Quote:
—————-
In a speech at Georgetown University Law Center today, retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter made a powerful plea for re-educating the American public about the fundamentals of how government works.

The republic, Souter said, “can be lost, it is being lost, it is lost, if it is not understood.” He cited surveys showing large majorities of the public cannot name the three branches of government, something he said would have been unheard of when he was growing up in rural Weare, N.H. What is needed, Souter said, is nothing less than “the restoration of the self-identity of the American people.”
—————-

Perhaps, as he enters retirement, he can meditate on his own contributions to the matter to arrive at some understanding of just what that identity of the American people actually is. Perhaps then he will understand that he should beg the American people for forgiveness.

That snarkily being said, the man is right.

And too late.