Oh laugh as you might, but I am not joking. There is no more evil institution in this country than the veritable prison we condemn our children to for a mandatory 13 year sentence. Yes we all turn a blind eye claiming it for "education" and the "future" of our children. But in the end the education system's real purpose is two fold:
1. To outsource children to a large baby sitting operation so (predominantly) women can pursue a career instead of raise their children and
2. Employ generations' worth of talentless, lazy hacks who want an easy way out, 3 months a year off, and are scared stiff of real work - teachers (and the increasing number of administrators).
This is not politics.
This is not hyperbole.
This is not me angry over a lost childhood.
It is the truth.
School is nothing more than child abuse as two distinct groups of adults are using it for ulterior purposes.
Naturally there are some "good teachers," and these teachers believe in education, try their best to educate the children, and genuinely want what's best for them. However, the remaining 98% of teachers are not "good teachers" and are there first and foremost for themselves.
This results in an environment that is toxic for children, and certainly not one that can achieve education. Year after year, children are forced to leave home and sit in buildings that are architecturally similar to prisons. The teachers (who by the way have the lowest IQ's out of most majors) are not only uninspired to teach them, but really don't care. Alas, overtime this combination results in teachers who are not just incapable of teaching, educating, and inspiring the curiosity of young children, but teachers who grow to resent the children, resulting in indifference (reading from the book), if not outright petty and indiscriminate punishment. Sure enough, over time a child goes from being wide-eyed and hopeful kindergartener, to a 4th grade zombie trying to stay awake.
Of course, children may not understand the underlying political reasons why they're sent to a prison-like institution and the country's least competent or caring individuals are chartered with educating them. But they do have genetically programmed within them self-respect and intuitively know when they're getting screwed. Alas a natural animosity forms between students and their prison guard teachers. A healthy distrust between teacher and student. And soon in a very Calvin and Hobbes like way, students and teachers fall into their natural roles of sworn enemies.
Or at least that's how it was in the 80's.
For whereas back in the day this abuse galvanized us into distrusting our teachers, even hating them, the same cannot be said of young students today. For what I see now is NOT the independent minded spirit of a Calvin, questioning why he has to be in school, giving his teachers guff, fighting them at every corner, but instead mindless, conforming lemmings who have plain had the independent thought kicked out of them.
Now this could be due to any number of things.
Teachers becoming BFF's with their students instead of actually teaching (not that they could in the first place anyway)
Ritalin and other drugs destroying the Calvin's of the world making them docile and compliant.
Emasculated husbands breeding emasculated, testosterone deficient boys.
Or the forcing of young female behavior on young boys, turning today's classrooms into compliant, obedient classrooms full of sheeple (and consequently no independent, self-respecting thinkers).
But whatever the cause, there are no more Calvins. There are no more rebels. There are no more independent minded thinkers. And it is a devastation to society.
The reason can be amply seen in what I deem to be the first fully and completely brainwashed generation - The Millennials.
Nowhere can you find a group of people who adamantly insist they are independent minded, but are the epitome of conformist at the same time.
The Millennials all rush to sport hipster fashion to prove their independence...only to look like uniformly interchangeable cattle in the coffee shop.
They all claim to be smart, going to college, getting even MORE education...only to major in the same worthless liberal arts drivel, obviously unable to the 4th grade math that would have avoided this consequential financial fate of such stupidity.
Hey, those tattoos and earplugs are like TOTALLY you giving the bird to the system man! Only to sheepishly get the surgery done to remove them.
And oh yes, politics. The most "independent minded" and "educated" generation ALL, like lemmings, voted TWICE for a man who just mortgaged their futures with incredible peacetime deficit spending. And they were either too stupid, or too lazy to know it.
There are other examples (global warming, privilege, triggers, white males, and "evil corporations maaaan") and CERTAINLY the Millennials are not the only generation to be duped into conformity (grunge in the 90's anyone?), but the larger point is the one thing they claim to be is what they are precisely not.
Independent thinkers.
For while people may claim to be "rebels" or "Calvins" or "SJW/OWS Warriors" fighting against the "system" they don't realize they are 100%, completely owned, programmed, duped and operated by the system.
They actually BELIEVED their teachers.
They actually are BFF's with their teachers.
They not only have no problems going to a veritable prison from 5-18, but then are so hopelessly conformist, they consciously BORROW life-crippling levels of debt to to attend an additional 4-6 years more of the same educational-indoctrinist slop.
They swallowed whole what their government-sponsored teacher-indoctrinators told them and are just too stupid (or brainwashed) to realize it.
Sadly, this has serious costs and consequences to society because without independent thinkers, without genuine Calvins, there are no innovators. There are no creators. There are no geniuses who can look outside the box and come up the next cure for cancer. Technological advancement and economic growth will slow, resulting in lower standards of living than what we could have had. But worse, with nothing but a bunch of conforming sheeple, the "system" can easily manipulate, control, and own society. And that has always been the goal of the leftist education system.
Of course, try telling that to the "independent minded" tatted up, earloop wearing, liberal-arts-majoring "intellectual giants" who vote to mortgage their own futures while all claiming to be Calvins.
22 comments:
so true, as they confuse compulsory attendance with compulsory education.
SO Boring....it was horrible....
That Calvin and Hobbes cartoon brings back a lot of old memories of the private school I attended until high school. Only got sent to the principal's office a few times over (in my opinion) trivial stuff, but I was still a bit of a troublemaker. Spent recess with friends hitting each other with sticks, pinecones and trying out new insults and comebacks. In class, I was too busy reading Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and Howard Pyle to pay attention to a lot. Still, the school was infinitely better than the state-run institutions in the same area.
The things we did as kids back then would get us gagged, drugged, handcuffed and dragged off to jail today - one day they won't even take them to "jail," just a holding cell inside the school building.
There's a reason why the Disney show "Recess" resonated well with kids my age by playing off the World War II POW theme.
YEPPER!
Hey, Aaron,
Have you read "The Fourth Turning" book by Strauss / Howe? They argue for a circular view of history, driven by four generational archetypes, and the interplay between the generations as each moves through life. Your observation that the Millennials are not like the previous one or two generations (Gen-X, if they were in elementary school in the 80s; Boomers if earlier) is very much in line with the Fourth Turning analysis.
"Emasculated husbands breeding emasculated, testosterone deficient boys."
This. Yes.
"Or the forcing of young female behavior on young boys, turning today's classrooms into compliant, obedient classrooms full of sheeple (and consequently no independent, self-respecting thinkers)."
and this, too.
Many social commentators are noticing that more and more of the young men aren't men; they are shrunken soft boys with lumberjack beards to compensate - it is stunning to notice that they are actually shrivelled males compared to earlier generations of males, and they are everywhere.
"Education" was the first public institution to be slowly taken over by women over the last 20-30yrs.
So - how's that working out, then?
If you have kids, then figure out a way to home school them.
Sadly, Calvin is now sitting obediently at his desk with his eyes glazed over by Ritalin. I so completely regret the gulag I sent my son to for 16 years. Fortunately he has no debt, and fortunately I talked him out of grad school (would have been non-STEM).
I have a friend who was denied his BSc degree at an American public university because he wouldn't sit a first-year English composition class in which he tested perfectly, simply because of compulsory attendance rules put in place by the professor, rather than the university.
When this person demanded to know why the university would allow this to occur, he was told that the class rules were up to the professor, and that the failing grade would stand without regard to the fact that he had a perfect score on the exams.
He gave me one insight about degrees that you might appreciate.
Degrees are useful to the universities that grant them because they're a way in which successful individuals can be linked back to them, and not much more. Those who would be successful will be successful anyway, and in fact there's documented research that shows that it isn't the university of graduation that correlates with success, it's the universities such people were admitted to in the first place.
With such a thing, you could simply apply to the Ivy League and never go there to study, because if they would have you at all, you can probably make your way on your own.
Degrees are a false claim of origins: the universities that grant them believe they're the ones that actually created you.
The government schools are early conditioning to socialist living. They remove children from their parents and give them to the state where every action is regulated for peace and of ostensibly their own safety. Children are taught to submit to the government paid guards (teachers) forced to perform labor (homework) indoctrinated in socialist thinking (global warming, rainforest math, recycling, gay acceptance, etc.)and are told how the government tyranny over their young lives is for their own good. This is necessary to advance the socialist police state. Children must learn subservience that they might be easily ruled docile citizens of the totalitarian state.
Hi Cappy. I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one quite a bit. My wife is a math teacher, and for the most part she and her colleagues work quite hard at getting kids up to speed on geometry, algebra, calc and so on. I live in a suburban/rural area so it's not inner city, but I'd say the MAJORITY of teachers in my little county are competent and doing their best for the kids.
Now there was some brainwashing going on in school, especially from "government" teachers and a lot in the early grades as well. My daughter came home one day and said "violence is never the answer". I asked her about stopping hitler or a guy holding a group of kindergarteners hostage. My wife told me to stop because my 8 year old was crying. So, there is brainwashing going on and the parents must step in to stop it. My kids went technical in college, so no real brainwashing going on there.
So, my three kids are all successful products of a public school education. They all have jobs and enough skills to run a business in the future. It can be done, but you have to keep involved and be a counterinsurgency parent.
Joe
"So, my three kids are all successful products of a public school education. They all have jobs and enough skills to run a business in the future. It can be done, but you have to keep involved and be a counterinsurgency parent.
Joe"
There is no fucking way I believe you are not a completely bogus troll.
From 1886 in a book promoting the training of both the mind and hand, i.e., abstract academics as well as useful vocational manual skills:
Charles Francis Adams, Jr., remarks that the com-
mon schools of Massachusetts cost $4,000,000 a year;
and adds, "The imitative or memorizing faculties only
are cultivated, and little or no attention is paid to the
thinking or reflective powers. Indeed it may almost be
said that a child of any originality or with individual
characteristics is looked upon as wholly out of place in a
public school. ... To skate is as difficult as to write ;
probably more difficult. Yet in spite of hard teaching
in the one case and no teaching in the other, the boy can
skate -beautifully, and he cannot write his native tongue
at all."*
* "Scientific Common-school Education." Harper's Magazine,
November, 1880
From 1909, a very good book on How to Study (McMurry):
In spite of the fact that schools exist for the sake of education, there is many a school whose pupils show a peculiar "school helplessness"; that is, they are capable of less initiative in connection with their school tasks than they commonly exhibit in the accomplishment of other tasks.
How to Study and Teaching How to Study (1909) by F. M. McMurry, Professor of Elementary Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
And those were before we got to the multiple choice tests in 1914:
In 1914, a professor in Kansas invented the multiple-choice test. Yes, it’s less than a hundred years old.
There was an emergency on. World War I was ramping up, hundreds of thousands of new immigrants needed to be processed and educated, and factories were hungry for workers. The government had just made two years of high school mandatory, and we needed a temporary, high-efficiency way to sort students and quickly assign them to appropriate slots.
In the words of Professor Kelly, “This is a test of lower order thinking for the lower orders.”
A few years later, as President of the University of Idaho, Kelly disowned the idea, pointing out that it was an appropriate method to test only a tiny portion of what is actually taught and should be abandoned. The industrialists and the mass
educators revolted and he was fired.
The SAT, the single most important filtering device used to measure the effect of school on each individual, is based (almost without change) on Kelly’s lower-order thinking test. Still.
The reason is simple. Not because it works. No, we do it because it’s the easy and efficient way to keep the mass production of students moving forward.
--Seth Godin
Of course, the trick was to overcome the Protestant ethic of education that took hold. Killing schooling outright just wasn't going to work, so the alternative was to turn school into indoctrinating mush for most and instilling a hostility to learning in the underclass. We can see this as the flagship of Protestant education in America, Harvard, is now more aligned with this comment from the Royalist governor of the Virginia Colony than the Puritans of the Massachusetts Colony who founded it:
"I thank God, we have not free schools nor printing; and I hope we shall not have these hundred years. For learning has brought disobedience, and heresy and sects into the world; and printing has divulged them and libels against the government. God keep us from both!"
Sir William Berkeley
(1606-1677) Royal Governor of Virginia
Date: 1642
I hated school as a kid. I read a lot and was acutely aware from quite a yiung age that I was being tiught by people who knew little more than I did, ant that the curriculum was based on vomiting up whatever over-simplified world view the teacher gave you, as opposed to any actual thinking and insight.
University was actually a completely different experience for me though. From my experience, though a lot of the lecturers can be small minded, some of them are genuinely interested in ideas. I found that as long as you show your workings, you can write or say whatever you want and still be OK there. I've even had some interesting debates with some of my professors.
The other students are a different story though...
Hey Aaron,
While I agree that many teachers are in it for the check and benefits, you could say that for most everyone who works. I agree that there are problems with the school system, but just because stupid people get though Ed school, doesn't mean they all pass the licensure test, or all get hired to work as a teacher. There are a lot more people with Ed degrees then open teaching slots, so schools are able to pick and choose who they hire. This is for the most part good, as they can avoid hiring the stupid ones, but I could also see the administrators trying to hire the ones they think will be most conformist, those who won't rock the boat. So it is a mixed bag, but those who are hired as teachers in general are smarter then average (which isn't saying much).
I think one of the big problems is in the ever expanding number of administrators in public schools. They have many more then the private schools do, which tells me that is where a lot of the wasted money is going.
You may want to read this post from educationrealist called: "Ed Schools and Affirmative Action".
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2014/09/08/ed-schools-and-affirmative-action/
Aaron, this post and your discussion on the podcast really got me reminiscing. The best year of my life as a child was when I was home-schooled in middle school (10-11yo) and I had a job. I loved my job. It was challenging, taught me responsibility and skills, and gave me MONEY for my time! Honestly, thinking back I would rather have worked than have gone to high school. Or maybe worked full time and taken community college classes to learn Algebra and writing skills. Damn child labor laws...and parents.
I graduated from high school in 1949. I can only say that these comments are not true of the public school I attended for 12 years, nor of the college and graduate schools I attended after that.
However, I taught at the college level in the 1980s. The students in my undergraduate classes should never have been there. They couldn't write a coherent sentence, let alone a paragraph.
Something went badly wrong with our education system in the 30+ years between when I went through it and when my college students did.
You think school in the 80s allowed or produced Calvins? Try the 50s. They were "awesome." Teacher would give us shit for using words like awesome because they actually tried to teach us to use better words and phrases like "fucking awesome." No Ritalin. There was corporal punishment which was fun. The army cadet program was based on the high schools so we had guns to parade with. Guys were guys. We carried girls books to and from school for sex. There were no police stationed in the schools. Even more shocking was that most teachers actually cared about teaching rather than their union. Teachers were never BFFs. And the men wore ties! School was a sexist, macho, elitist (prizes for top marks), Calvinist institution. On net balance, a high school diploma then was better than BA or BSc now. At least we could read, write and count at the end of it. And we knew what ecology, environment, climate and weather were because we had to take physics and chemistry as well as english. One lose 5 marks on a chem exam for spelling errors.
Hmm, as a parent with students in school, the current system leaves something to be desired, the socialist march through common core or whatever they're calling their re-education program now is everywhere, you're only real option is not to play and home school. We've been there and done that, but it's not easy and it's not possible for everybody. And BTW, the left doesn't have a stranglehold on "reform", just look up No Child Left Behind. Both parties have tried to monkey with standards at the federal level. Moreover, the use of public education to control the masses wasn't invented in the USA, but it seem like the oligarchs here are intent on perfecting it.
I had the unique experience of living in a small town in the 80s for my first two years of high school and then moving to a large metropolitan one for the last two years. The first two years were the antithesis of this article, additionally there were many more male teachers in middle and high school which I believe made a difference. In fact, at my first high school all of my teachers were male both years and the social studies teachers were ALL war vets, Korea and Vietnam. At my second it was closer to 50/50 overall and about 60/40 when it came to females teaching hard sciences and math (more women than men).
At the time the distribution of gender did not seem to effect educational quality that I can remember, but the political tone was the opposite of the place I came from. Very progressive and very liberal, social studies is really where is manifested itself, socialist were everywhere and not one war vet. The last two years were a distopyian nightmare.
Can't wait until Hillary is president to see what they will come up with next. Think I'm joking?
I'm probably about 10 years older than you, Cap'n. I grew up and attended school in a town with a population of around 900 people. Most of the teachers lived there all their lives and taught the same grade for their entire careers. Of the good teachers, all but one came from families that farmed or ran small businesses — leftist BS was not in their curriculum. (The one exception was an Englishman who taught English [not "Language Arts"], and his deep love of literature and grammar more than cancelled out his somewhat-leftist political views.)
Contrast this with the teachers of today, including the ones in my circle of friends. When they are not counting the days until their retirement (and gloating over its imminence), they are complaining constantly about their work, which they are NEVER grateful to have, but consider to be their right. When students do well, they take the credit; when students do poorly, they blame the parents.
Concur with your first point.
Concur in part and dissent in part on your second point. The teachers I know are not lazy; they are hard-working and dedicated. However, they are not bright enough to realize that what they, themselves, are so busy with is just another form of busy work. Well, even that's unfair; a lot do realize it, but they're at a loss what to do about it.
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