Comment by Mr Moore
A remark in my comments box, from Joseph Moore. I want to applaud and emphasize the words:
I want to believe this, and it may be true, but: one of the greatest, if not the greatest victory of the Left is their control of the schools. I’m not even talking about Fabian curricula and textbooks and SJW teachers – those only work when the school’s *structure* allows it.
That was the victory: against all American tradition, the schools our betters designed and inflicted on us are *structured* to create, in the words of William Torry Harris, “mindless automata” who do as they’re told. He was pleased with how well it was working – back in 1906!
Unlike any other schools in history before around 1810, our schools occupy absurd amounts of our kid’s lives. Unlike the one-room schools – a truly American answer to the desire to educate children – kids are separated from from family, neighbors and friends and grouped by age – again, something new and contrary to reason and historical practice, where, if kids were grouped at all, it was by what they needed to learn.
Violating all natural relationships and ignoring what the kids currently know and need to learn, 35 strangers are grouped by age and spoon fed predigested pieces of ‘education’ and judged by how well they can regurgitate them on demand.
12 to 16 years of this, where the ‘best’ students are those who put up the least fuss, waste the most time meeting arbitrary measures, and the ‘adults’ thus created are sent out into the world to vote and govern.
Don’t mistake the Algebra or Spanish or whatever you might have learned as goals of the schools. Those sorts of things are little more than necessary evils, from the designers of the schools perspective. The real lesson, what these schools, as opposed to the myriad other ways kids have been taught over the centuries, were designed to teach, are that someone will assign you your place, you can’t be trusted, can’t be left unsupervised, can’t judge what you need to know, must have someone else determine your worth based on ‘expert’ criteria and are to be valued by your compliance with somebody else’s standards.
It wasn’t always this way. It doesn’t need to be this way. But the people buying the Left’s story have a lifetime of being judged on compliance, and – Stockholm Syndrome time – they believe their schooling makes them better, wiser, more intelligent and moral. We’re not asking them (and ourselves!) to reject some media lies – we’re asking them to reject the only self they’ve ever known! A self reinforced at every turn – college grad! Straight A student! Honor Roll! That’s a HUGE red pill, right there.
As Chesterton says, kids will forget or ignore what you tell them, but will always learn your unspoken assumptions.
I sincerely hope I’m wrong. But I don’t think I am.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
