The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Quote of the Day
Don’t they get paid by the hit over at the examiner? If so, the jokes on us. – Kevin S.
They do, and it is.
Hot button issue found. Hot button issue being repeatedly and firmly mashed to death.
Of course, that is partially why I am losing interest in the whole Examiner thing – they are paid to be sensationalistic, just like every other newspaper writer in America. – Linoge
From a comment to my Marc Rubin Update
Quote of the Day
In 1920, England was the safest industrialized society on Earth. In fact, it was by far the safest society of any sort on Earth. Through a series of gun control laws, England has become by far the most violent society on Earth.
Australia’s politicians were so eager to follow England’s lead that they let a certifiably insane man loose – and gave him his guns back. When the shots stopped, 35 people were dead and 21 were wounded. Today, Oz is clearly the second most violent industrialized society on Earth.
Now, New Zealand wants to get in on the fun. Their politicians are changing the rules for firearms possession, making it harder to keep and bear arms. That will make criminals feel safer, with the inevitable increase in violent crime. Which will result in a demand for more “gun controls.” And finally New Zealand will most likely be in the same situation England and Australia were in before it.
— Extranos Alley – Defining Insanity
It’s not just the gun control laws. In the case of the Anglosphere, gun control is just one of the symptoms of a flawed philosophy that forces its people to spiral down an ever-more-dangerous path of compelled helplessness.
This philosophy was perhaps best expressed recently by James Bowman (author, I believe, of Honor: A History) in a Weekly Standard piece from April, Harm’s Way: The roads in Britain are paved with good intention, itself a review of Theodore Dalrymple’s (pen name of Anthony Daniels) latest book Not with a Bang but a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline. In it, Bowman excerpts a bit from the book, and then expands:
The many hypocrisies and deceptions on which the New Labour coalition was built are typified by the system of criminal justice with which, in his prison job, Daniels had an intimate acquaintance. Citing the work of a whistle-blowing policeman named David Fraser, he compares the British police to
a nearly defeated occupying colonial force that, while mayhem reigns everywhere else, has retreated to safe enclaves, there to shuffle paper and produce bogus information to propitiate its political masters. Their first line of defense is to refuse to record half the crime that comes to their attention, which itself is less than half the crime committed. Then they refuse to investigate recorded crime, or to arrest the culprits even when it is easy to do so and the evidence against them is overwhelming, because the prosecuting authorities will either decline to prosecute, or else the resultant sentence will be so trivial as to make the whole procedure (at least nineteen forms to fill in after a single arrest) pointless.
The real question is, why isn’t this clearly appalling state of affairs a scandal in Britain? I think the answer is that the media consensus there–and to a large extent here–includes certain core principles, such as that crime is caused by something other than criminals and that imprisonment is society’s shame, rather than that of the incarcerated, which can only be protected by maintaining these hypocrisies and deceptions, and with them, the illusion that nothing can be done about most crime. Therefore, the media are complicit in pretending that these problems don’t exist–because they shouldn’t exist.
(My emphasis.) And along with that comes the inability to differentiate between “violent and predatory” and “violent but protective.”
And that’s insanity.
Quote of the Day
Once again, a break from education quotes and a new one from House of Eratosthenes:
What is The Truth that people figure out? That some 30 percent of us already know, and that more and more of us learn as we debate back and forth on the latest “gimme”? Simply this: That the government doesn’t really have money; it spends only what it has taken from others, plus what it borrows on the credit of others. Which naturally means that one man’s “right” is another man’s burden. That when we debate these proposals, we aren’t debating how to make life more secure, we are in fact debating how to make our country less free.
Which is why there is such urgency to pass massive spending bills without debate, review, or even reading them – because they have to get it done before too many people figure out this Truth, and get massively PISSED OFF.
The religious purpose of modern schooling was announced clearly by the legendary University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward A. Ross in 1901 in his famous book, Social Control. Your librarian should be able to locate a copy for you without much trouble. In it Ed Ross wrote these words for his prominent following: “Plans are underway to replace community, family, and church with propaganda, education, and mass media….the State shakes loose from Church, reaches out to School…. People are only little plastic lumps of human dough.” Social Control revolutionized the discipline of sociology and had powerful effects on the other human sciences: in social science it guided the direction of political science, economics, and psychology; in biology it influenced genetics, eugenics, and psychobiology. It played a critical role in the conception and design of molecular biology.
There you have it in a nutshell. The whole problem with modern schooling. It rests on a nest of false premises. People are not little plastic lumps of dough. They are not blank tablets as John Locke said they were, they are not machines as de La Mettrie hoped, not vegetables as Friedrich Froebel, inventor of kindergartens, hypothesized, not organic mechanisms as Wilhelm Wundt taught every psychology department in America at the turn of the century, nor are they repertoires of behaviors as Watson and Skinner wanted. They are not, as the new crop of systems thinkers would have it, mystically harmonious microsystems interlocking with grand macrosystems in a dance of atomic forces. I don’t want to be crazy about this; locked in a lecture hall or a bull session there’s probably no more harm in these theories than reading too many Italian sonnets all at one sitting. But when each of these suppositions is sprung free to serve as a foundation for school experiments, it leads to frightfully oppressive practices.
— John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted.1 The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it didn’t worry anybody.WWII was over in 1945. Six years later another war began in Korea. Several million men were tested for military service but this time 600,000 were rejected. Literacy in the draft pool had dropped to 81 percent, even though all that was needed to classify a soldier as literate was fourth- grade reading proficiency. In the few short years from the beginning of WWII to Korea, a terrifying problem of adult illiteracy had appeared. The Korean War group received most of its schooling in the 1940s, and it had more years in school with more professionally trained personnel and more scientifically selected textbooks than the WWII men, yet it could not read, write, count, speak, or think as well as the earlier, less-schooled contingent.A third American war began in the mid-1960s. By its end in 1973 the number of men found noninductible by reason of inability to read safety instructions, interpret road signs, decipher orders, and so on—in other words, the number found illiterate—had reached 27 percent of the total pool. Vietnam-era young men had been schooled in the 1950s and the 1960s—much better schooled than either of the two earlier groups—but the 4 percent illiteracy of 1941 which had transmuted into the 19 percent illiteracy of 1952 had now had grown into the 27 percent illiteracy of 1970. Not only had the fraction of competent readers dropped to 73 percent but a substantial chunk of even those were only barely adequate; they could not keep abreast of developments by reading a newspaper, they could not read for pleasure, they could not sustain a thought or an argument, they could not write well enough to manage their own affairs without assistance.Consider how much more compelling this steady progression of intellectual blindness is when we track it through army admissions tests rather than college admissions scores and standardized reading tests, which inflate apparent proficiency by frequently changing the way the tests are scored.—
Back in 1952 the Army quietly began hiring hundreds of psychologists to find out how 600,000 high school graduates had successfully faked illiteracy. Regna Wood sums up the episode this way:
After the psychologists told the officers that the graduates weren’t faking, Defense Department administrators knew that something terrible had happened in grade school reading instruction. And they knew it had started in the thirties. Why they remained silent, no one knows. The switch back to reading instruction that worked for everyone should have been made then. But it wasn’t.
In 1882, fifth graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them. In 1995, a student teacher of fifth graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper, “I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?”
— John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
No, it’s not nuts. It’s sabotage. Deliberate, intentional sabotage.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, a small group of soon-to-be-famous academics, symbolically led by John Dewey and Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, Ellwood P. Cubberley of Stanford, G. Stanley Hall of Clark, and an ambitious handful of others, energized and financed by major corporate and financial allies like Morgan, Astor, Whitney, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, decided to bend government schooling to the service of business and the political state—as it had been done a century before in Prussia.
Cubberley delicately voiced what was happening this way: “The nature of the national need must determine the character of the education provided.” National need, of course, depends upon point of view. The NEA in 1930 sharpened our understanding by specifying in a resolution of its Department of Superintendence that what school served was an “effective use of capital” through which our “unprecedented wealth-producing power has been gained.” When you look beyond the rhetoric of Left and Right, pronouncements like this mark the degree to which the organs of schooling had been transplanted into the corporate body of the new economy.
It’s important to keep in mind that no harm was meant by any designers or managers of this great project. It was only the law of nature as they perceived it, working progressively as capitalism itself did for the ultimate good of all. The real force behind school effort came from true believers of many persuasions, linked together mainly by their belief that family and church were retrograde institutions standing in the way of progress. Far beyond the myriad practical details and economic considerations there existed a kind of grail-quest, an idea capable of catching the imagination of dreamers and firing the blood of zealots.
— John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
Back to The Underground History of American Education:
(George) Washington had no schooling until he was eleven, no classroom confinement, no blackboards. He arrived at school already knowing how to read, write, and calculate about as well as the average college student today. If that sounds outlandish, turn back to Franklin’s curriculum and compare it with the intellectual diet of a modern gifted and talented class. Full literacy wasn’t unusual in the colonies or early republic; many schools wouldn’t admit students who didn’t know reading and counting because few schoolmasters were willing to waste time teaching what was so easy to learn. It was deemed a mark of depraved character if literacy hadn’t been attained by the matriculating student. Even the many charity schools operated by churches, towns, and philanthropic associations for the poor would have been flabbergasted at the great hue and cry raised today about difficulties teaching literacy. — John Taylor Gatto
According to this source:
‘At a time when estimates of adult male literacy in England ran from 48 percent in the rural western midlands to 74 percent in the towns . . . adult male literacy in the American colonies seems to have run from 70 percent to virtually 100 percent . . . .’ (See Traditions of American Education, NY: Basic Books, 1977, and American Education: The Colonial Experience, NY: Harper & Row, 1970.)
Today? The National Assessment of Adult Literacy tests for three kinds of literacy: prose, document, and quantitative, described thus:
Prose literacy
The knowledge and skills needed to perform prose tasks, (i.e., to search, comprehend, and use continuous texts). Examples include editorials, news stories, brochures, and instructional materials.
document literacy exampleDocument literacy
The knowledge and skills needed to perform document tasks, (i.e., to search, comprehend, and use non-continuous texts in various formats). Examples include job applications, payroll forms, transportation schedules, maps, tables, and drug or food labels.
quantitative literacy exampleQuantitative literacy
The knowledge and skills required to perform quantitative tasks, (i.e., to identify and perform computations, either alone or sequentially, using numbers embedded in printed materials). Examples include balancing a checkbook, figuring out a tip, completing an order form or determining the amount.
Per their 2003 survey, the NAAL concluded that 14% of the American population tests “below basic” for comprehending prose, 12% “below basic” for document comprehension, and 22% “below basic” for quantitative reading.
Twenty-two percent – more than one in five Americans over the age of 16 – were unable to ferret out the simplest mathematics from a piece of text. And we’ve spent how much on the “Department of Education” since it was created in 1980? Yet George Washington, who by age 11 had never set foot in a classroom, could – like nearly everyone else his age, regardless their class – read and do arithmetic.
And this one’s not from John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education for a change:
I understand good manners involve one side acting completely guilty and the other side acting completely innocent. I understand the protocol expected is for the righty-tighty to leap, chest-downward, on the grenade. I understand the expectation is to repeat the scene where Tom Sawyer gets the whipping so Becky whats-her-name’s glorious butt cheeks remain unscathed. I get all that.
I’m just tired of doing it. It comes down to something very simple. ONLY LIBERALS CAN PRESENT “FACTS” WITHOUT BECOMING EVIL. — House of Eratosthenes, “Tired of the Charade, Pretending it’s My Problem”
The topic was economics rather than guns and gun laws, but the principle is precisely the same. Some more:
I’m tired of ignoring the elephant in the room, and the elephant in the room is this: The abrasive thing I did was to present factual evidence incompatible with the desirable trope. I presented some hard numbers that would compel a newcomer to at least remain open to an alternative point of view. That was my infraction. And I’m tired of pretending otherwise. Did I mention how tired I am of it?
Quote of the Day
Might there be an instructive parallel between teaching a kid to drive as my uncle taught me to do at age eleven, and the incredible opportunities working-class kids like (Benjamin) Franklin were given to develop as quickly and as far as their hearts and minds allowed? We drive, regardless of our intelligence or characters, because the economy demands it; in colonial America through the early republic, a pressing need existed to get the most from everybody. Because of that need, unusual men and unusual women appeared in great numbers to briefly give the lie to traditional social order. In that historical instant, thousands of years of orthodox suppositions were shattered. In the words of Eric Hoffer, “Only here in America were common folk given a chance to show what they could do on their own without a master to push and order them about.” Franklin and Edison, multiplied many times, were the result. — John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
Quote of the Day
Utopian schooling is never about learning in the traditional sense; it’s about the transformation of human nature. — John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
And, if you believe in the Constrained Vision of human nature, destined to fail.