I Say We Take Off and Nuke the Site from Orbit

. . . . It's the only way to be sure.

E.D. Hirsch, Jr. is, according to Wikipedia:

. . . a U.S. educator and academic literary critic. Now retired, he was until recently the University Professor of Education and Humanities and the Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Virginia. He is best known for his writings about cultural literacy.

It states further:

In 1977 Hirsch published The Philosophy of Composition, an investigation into the question of what makes prose more or less readable. His work on composition led to a major shift in his career. While giving tests of relative readability at two colleges in Virginia, he discovered that while the relative readability of a text was an important factor in determining comprehension, an even more important consideration was background knowledge. Students at the University of Virginia were able to understand a passage on Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, while students at a community college struggled with it, apparently lacking basic understanding of the American Civil War. This and related discoveries led Hirsch to formulate the concept of cultural literacy — the idea that reading comprehension requires not just formal decoding skills but also wide-ranging background knowledge. He concluded that schools should not be neutral about what is taught but should teach a highly specific curriculum that would allow children to understand things writers take for granted.

Hirsch founded the Core Knowledge Foundation in 1986, and wrote Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs To Know in 1987. He also co-wrote The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy in 1988. Cultural Literacy became a best-seller, but Hirsch's ideas were extremely controversial. Although himself a liberal, he was attacked as a neo-conservative and advocate for a conservative, lily-white curriculum, a promoter of "drill and kill" pedagogy and a reactionary force. His theories have been criticized for not addressing supposed differences in learning styles and for a lack of information about minorities.

Beginning in 1997 Hirsch began publishing books in the Core Knowledge Series. Each book focuses on the content knowledge that should be taught to each particular elementary grade level. There are different books covering kindergarten through sixth grades, plus at least one book outlining an overview of what should be covered in the whole elementary curriculum.

In 1996, Hirsch published The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them. In it, Hirsch proposed that Romanticized, anti-knowledge theories of education prevalent in America are not only the cause of America's lackluster educational performance, but also a cause of widening inequalities in class and race. Hirsch portrays the focus of American educational theory as one which attempts to give students intellectual tools such as "critical thinking skills", but which denigrates teaching any actual content, labeling it "mere rote learning". Hirsch states that it is this attitude which has failed to develop knowledgeable students.

(Bold emphasis is mine.) Professor Hirsch has a new book out, The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools, and was recently interviewed by National Review Online's John J. Miller for NRO's Between the Covers series. I've transcribed some of that interview, which largely echoes the Wikipedia entry, but here goes:

John J. Miller: Professor Hirsch, when it comes to the education of young children, from kindergarten through elementary up through middle school, what is America doing fundamentally wrong?

E.D. Hirsch, Jr.: What they're doing fundamentally wrong is not having a cumulative and sequenced curriculum. That seems unbelievable perhaps to somebody outside the education world, but for the last more than half-century there has been no definite curriculum. There has been no commonality, not just across schools, but within schools. from one classroom to another. Students will be studying different things, and that, I think, has been the chief problem both in the quality of our better students - which is not always very high - and in the great gap that has developed between blacks and Hispanics on one side and whites and Asians on the other.

JJM: Shouldn't you just focus on critical thinking skills as opposed to the memorization of names and dates?

EDH.: Thank you for asking that question. That is the current doctrine of the schools, that schools should be focusing on critical thinking skills rather than mere facts, and that idea that such a thing is possible has been exploded by cognitive science and that's basically the reason - that is the formal isolable skills that are independent of any particular domain - that idea has been shown to be wrong. And if you're operating on a wrong idea, it's a sufficient explanation as to why the school system has not been working.

But the philosophy cannot be wrong! Do it again, only HARDER!

JJM: What should the schools be doing differently?

EDH: Well, just as a general point before I mention that, ideas are so terribly important in this field. (John Maynard) Keynes once said "the world is ruled by little else." It's certainly true in our educational system. You asked what I'd do differently to overcome this incoherence of content. I would have a core curriculum in the early grades, a very specific, very definite core. Shouldn't take up more than fifty percent of the school time, but that would enable a teacher to deal constructively with a new incoming class, because the students would have a basis for the next lesson. Now teacher's jobs - people talk about teacher quality quite a lot - but the job of a teacher gets increasingly difficult, veering on impossibility as you go up the grades in an American school because of this diversity of preparation.

JJM: This core curriculum would consist of what?

EDH: Well, it should consist - first of all it should focus on content areas of the standard academic subjects. Science, history and the arts, and math. But in the language arts section - the arts include literature, of course - the language arts section has been a repository for the early grades of a lot of wasted time, and there I believe that the focus on language should be a focus on knowledge, because that's what cognitive science is saying should be happening now.

JJM: And what are we doing wrong right now? Are teachers just randomly assigning different stories with no particular rationale?

EDH: Yes, that's right. Well, there's no particular rationale for the stories. The rationale is for the idea that they are learning process skills: finding the main idea, questioning the author, learning how to squeeze meaning out of text without having the needed background knowledge and vocabulary to comprehend the text. So obviously to common sense, common sense would say that wouldn't work, and obviously it doesn't work.

And he's quite right about that. The one thing that I've noted about the really bright people on the web today is their wide-ranging knowledge and the amount of reading they've done to achieve it. This is done outside the formal education system - in spite of it, in fact.

Continuing:

JJM: In the 1980's you wrote an influential book called Cultural Literacy. What was that book about, and have Americans become more or less culturally literate since then?

EDH: Well, the trend line . . . We can judge that by the reading scores of twelfth graders in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and the trend line has been a gentle downward slope, so the implication is that we've become, we share less common knowledge among each other. And that's not surprising given the diversity of inputs since the internet developed.

JJM: And your point would be that the schools need to teach cultural literacy to children so that there are common areas of knowledge that they share as Americans.

EDH: Yes, and though I don't use that term "cultural literacy" because I found it was a hot-button term. I leave out the term "culture" now because we're talking about the "public sphere" is the term I use in this new book which is a more accurate description in a way. Cultures are what our American public sphere holds together, a lot of diverse cultures and points of view, and that was actually the Founders conception. And I like John Ralston's (sp?) description of that; this larger commonality is a social union of social unions. But this wider public sphere is held together by language, and language can only function on the basis of shared knowledge that isn't spoken, just taken for granted. That's the only way communication can occur.

And that "shared knowledge that isn't spoken, just taken for granted" IS CULTURE.

Remember that quote from Jane Jacobs?

People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes literally lost?

Every culture takes pains to educate its young so that they, in their turn, can practice and transmit it completely. Our civilization, however, is failing to do that. On the contrary, we are systematically training our young not to embrace the culture that brought us greatness.

And a civilization is truly dead, she says, when "even the memory of what has been lost is lost."

That's what Professor Hirsch is describing here, the deliberate, systematic training of our young not to embrace the culture that brought us greatness.

Continuing:

JJM: It sounds like a retreat saying we can no longer speak of "cultural literacy." Of course it was a hot-button issue, but that doesn't mean it was wrong.

EDH: Well, it depends. My general point there is you have to choose words carefully so that people don't make the wrong assumptions. "Cultural literacy," seems, people think of it as "cultural imperialism" which will get in the way of your own familial culture. There is a national culture, but it's a different - in the United States it's a different kind of culture. It's limited, it's tolerant . . . For example in France schoolgirls can't wear headscarves. That's a problem that would never arise significantly in the United States. 'No, no, that's your culture, you can come to school and wear headscarves.' It's a very accommodating public sphere, and if you want to call it a national or federal culture, that's OK, it wouldn't be inaccurate. But I think it's preferable to understand that there is this national or federal dimension in our life that we also share, and you can call it a culture if you like, but you don't have to.

". . . you have to choose words carefully so that people don't make the wrong assumptions." But what if they deliberately make those assumptions? If you challenge their worldview, they must interpret your ideas as an attack and respond accordingly. Note that Hirsch states in the opening paragraph of this interview that for more than half a century there has been no "definite curriculum" taught in the public schools, and as I have quoted John Taylor Gatto, he sets the date for the full-court press of this onslaught to 1965. I put the beginnings of it with John Dewey and the first decades of the 20th Century.

Continuing:

JJM: In this new book, The Making of Americans, you have a line I'd like to read: "One of the greatest disappointments I have felt in the twenty-five years that I have been actively engaged in education reform is the frustration of being warmly welcomed by conservatives but shunned by fellow liberals." Why has this gone on, and isn't it obvious by now that you should join us conservatives on the Right?

EDH: (laughing) Well, in one dimension I have. That is, being a social liberal is not inconsistent with being an educational conservative. And I think myself that's a very cogent position to hold. And I think in fact my complaint about my fellow democrats is that if they have equal justice or equality of opportunity in education as one of their affirmed aims, then they have to be educational conservatives because that's the only way to achieve equal educational opportunity. That's why I'm in the position I'm in.

He's ==><== this close. He can see the logical disconnect, but he cannot make the cognitive leap.

Bill Whittle did an interesting video essay recently that at the end strongly recommended his viewers to watch a three-piece series on YouTube about the Frankfurt School and "the history of political correctness." I'd heard of the Frankfurt School, but these three pieces are quite interesting, particularly when they discuss "critical theory." From Part 1:

When the First World War began in 1914 the worker's loyalty to their country proved stronger than their so-called "class consciousness." They willingly put on their uniforms, French or German, Austrian or Russian or British, and marched off by the millions to fight each other. In 1917 a Marxist revolution did occur in Russia, but it failed to spread to Western Europe, again contradicting orthodox Marxist theory. At the war's end, Marxist theorists had to confront the question, "What had gone wrong?" Antonio Gramsci of Italy and György Lukács of Hungary believed they had the answer. Gramsci and Lukács argued that Western culture had blinded the working class to its true Marxist class interests. Before a Marxist revolution could take place, Western culture had to be destroyed. In 1919 Lukács, who was considered the most brilliant Marxist theorist since Marx himself, asked "Who will save us from Western civilization?"

--

. . . in Germany a new attempt to create a Marxist critique of Western culture was taking shape. There, the wealthy young son of a millionaire grain trader, Felix Weil, wanted to establish a public policy institute, a think-tank to serve as a home for advanced Marxist thought. Modeled on the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, Weil's think-tank was originally to be named The Institute for Marxism. Martin Jay, chairman of the history department at Berkeley and author of a history of the Frankfurt School, explains why the name was changed to the Institut für Sozialforschung - the Institute for Social Research:

"I think they were very interested in trying to avoid being overly labeled, so it's a fairly bland name, "The Institute for Social Research."

The Institute was affiliated with Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany, and in time became known simply as "The Frankfurt School."

--

Following Lukács' lead, the Frankfurt school would be the vehicle that translated Marxism from economic into cultural terms, giving us what we now know as "political correctness."

And Hirsch, with his educational conservatism, his attempt to pass on to our children our national culture, "that shared knowledge that isn't spoken, just taken for granted," isn't politically correct and thus must be SHUNNED!

Remember back when I posted the 1985 video interview of former Soviet spy Yuri Bezmenov? Bezmenov stated that his job involved the implementation of "Ideological subversion," which he defined as follows (transcribed by Useless Dissident):

(Ideological subversion is) a great brainwashing process, which goes very slow[ly] and is divided [into] four basic stages. The first one being demoralization; it takes from 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which [is required] to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged, or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (American patriotism).

The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties, drop-outs, or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people... the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To [rid] society of these people, you need another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common sense people, who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society.

--

The demoralization process in [the] United States is basically completed already. For the last 25 years...(this interview occurred in 1985) actually, it's over-fulfilled because demoralization now reaches such areas where previously not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such a tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to [a] lack of moral standards.

As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his fan-bottom. When a military boot crashes his... then he will understand. But not before that. That's the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.

So basically America is stuck with demoralization and unless... even if you start right now, here, this minute, you start educating [a] new generation of American[s], it will still take you fifteen to twenty years to turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.

The conclusion of the NRO interview:

JJM: Are schools of education and the way we train teachers part of the problem here?

EDH: They're the central problem. The reason we're doing the things we do in our schools, and things that have failed like not having a coherent curriculum, are based on ideas. And those ideas are promulgated in schools of education, they're indoctrinated - teachers are indoctrinated with them, and no conflicting or contrary ideas are really entertained or promoted. In fact, other kinds of ideas which would allow for a solid curriculum are seen as immoral, inhumane, teacher-centered rather than child-centered. And yes, I think that the education schools since the, really since the early part of the twentieth century have uniformly worked against a solid curriculum in the early grades, which is the thing mostly needed by our system.

(My emphasis.) And those ideas came from Gramsci and Lukács, and were intended specifically to destroy Western culture.

Like a fish immersed, unable to notice the water in which it swims, Hirsch is unable to see that his fellow liberals cannot accept educational conservatism, because the goal is not to "achieve equal educational opportunity," but instead to demoralize the nation - to, in fact, destroy its culture, not preserve it. The end being chased is not to achieve communication, but to prevent it. As Bezmenov put it: A person who (is) demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him.

That's the GOAL.

It's been working for decades, and they're not about to stop now.

UPDATE: Isn't this an interesting coincidence? City Journal has an article out just today on Professor Hirsch, E. D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy. An excerpt:

Hirsch did his graduate studies at Yale, one of the citadels in the 1950s of the New Criticism, which argued that the intent of an author, the reader’s subjective response, and the text’s historical background were largely irrelevant to a critical analysis of the text itself.

The "New Criticism" being the outcome of the Frankfurt School's "critical theory", described as:

. . . a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to understanding or explaining it.

Well they've certainly succeeded in that.

Another excerpt:

Hirsch was at the pinnacle of the academic world, in his mid-fifties, when he was struck by an insight into how reading is taught that, he says, "changed my life." He was "feeling guilty" about the department’s inadequate freshman writing course, he recalls. Though UVA's admissions standards were as competitive as the Ivies', the reading and writing skills of many incoming students were poor, sure to handicap them in their future academic work. In trying to figure out how to close this "literacy gap," Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students. Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could.

So if the problem is that the proletariat is blinded to their Marxist class interests because of the bourgeoisie, and that the world needs to be saved from Western Civilization, wouldn't it be easier to eliminate the bourgeoisie by making them as ignorant and uneducated as the proletariat, thus destroying Western Civilization?

It certainly fits all the available evidence.

Why I Keep Marxadelphia Around

As I said in Why I Do This,

He's too perfect an example of the Left in this country not to let him illuminate their failings.

This week he provided yet another example.

In the comments to my post Critical Pedagogy, Marxadelphia responded:

It's a good thing I have the day off today. What a load of lying bullshit. And further proof of ridiculous paranoia. As usual, you start with your belief and then succumb to confirmation bias.

--

These EDU posts, Kevin, serve no purpose nor present any sort of concrete solution whatsoever. They don't even accurately address the actual problems. In essence, they sum up an emotional reaction--one that typifies the right these days--comprised solely of hate, anger and fear combined with a complete lack of factual foundation.

OK, two assertions are made here: One, the post linked is "a load of lying bullshit" and my Education posts "don't even accurately address the actual problems."

Let's investigate those claims, shall we?

The linked piece states:

The Critical Pedagogy Movement is coming to a school near you and it means to change the world.
One child at a time.
Most people have never heard the term, ‘Critical Pedagogy’. That is intentional.
Anyone not involved in the educational community would have little reason to be aware of this leftist theory of education. If it were merely a theory however, there would be little reason for concern.
The primary assumption of critical pedagogy is that disparities between individual and social group outcomes in life are due to entrenched societal oppression. So, if anyone or any group has ‘more’ than another it is because they are either oppressing others or benefiting from the ‘oppression of the masses’.
Thus, all whites benefit from an unjust social system and, as a result are inherently guilty of racism.
Advocates implicitly deny any definition of the ‘pursuit of happiness’, which does not result in equality of outcome. That necessarily limits American’s liberty and their pursuit of happiness to the politically correct calculus of Critical Pedagogy theory.
Pedagogy is defined as ‘the art or profession of teaching’. That definition is sometimes shortened by advocates into ‘the teaching’. The theory of critical pedagogy was first fully developed and then popularized in 1968 by the Brazilian educator and influential theorist Paulo Freire. His seminal work, the Pedagogy [The Teaching] of the Oppressed, was highly influential within the US leftist academic community and in 1969 Freire was offered a visiting professorship at Harvard University.
His subsequent work was highly influential with the Bill Ayers of the world. One might think of Paulo Freire as the Saul Alinsky of the US leftist educational community. Critical Pedagogy is the educational arm of the ‘social justice movement’, which is the political arm of “liberation theology”, all of which are aspects of ‘Cultural Marxism’.

OK, there's a pretty firm statement with assertions that a particular person is the focal point in pushing the "Critical Pedagogy" curriculum. A quick Google search on "Critical Pedagogy" brought up a link to the University of Colorado, Denver School of Education and professor Martin Ryder. Among the many links there, directly below one to The Frankfurt School, are several dedicated specifically to Paulo Friere. Nineteen, specifically, more than for any other topic covered on that initial page.

It would appear that the author is on to something, no?

Now, as to the assertion by that author that "The Critical Pedagogy Movement is coming to a school near you and it means to change the world," let's look at a piece I wrote in 2008, Balkanization. That piece was about a particular program that is apparently still running in the Tucson Unified School District schools called "Raza Studies." (The link to the original newspaper stories are broken, so you'll have to take my excerpts at face value.) The story indicates that the program, while "under fire" could grow, and reach younger children.

What is it? It's described as an "ethnic studies" program. "La Raza" in Spanish translates to "The Race" in English.

Raza Studies serves about 500 high school students, who take a four-course block of history, social justice and two Chicano literature classes.

--

It's the end of the school year and Raza Studies students at Tucson High Magnet School are presenting research findings to their principal.

Their PowerPoint presentation is critical of policies toward English learners; some concerns hinge on whether students are funneled to vocational tracks, and some focus on inferior equipment.

Then comes an exploration of classroom décor, with photos of classroom items students consider culturally insensitive.

First up is a baseball poster, which they say should be soccer or rugby to validate other cultures. Next up flashes the Pledge of Allegiance and a patriotic poster featuring the Statue of Liberty, the American flag and an eagle.

"Most of the kids are from a different country, and this is showing them that this is the country that's the greatest and yours doesn't matter," a student maintains.

So they're not teaching math, English, physics, chemistry, anatomy, etc., they're teaching the students to see the world through the lens of oppression, are they not?

Augustine Romero took over as head of ethnic studies two years ago, after running Raza Studies for four years. In his view, the system already divides students by ethnicity.

When he was a senior at Tucson High, his father asked school counselors to make military recruiters stop calling. His counselor couldn't believe Romero planned to go to college.

He proved the counselor wrong, and the 41-year-old just finished his doctorate. "Yes, there are examples of people who have made it, but we've made it by having to work harder than most people because we've had to endure the inequities of the system," he says.

As I said back then, anybody who gets a Ph.D has to work harder than most people, but it would appear that Mr. Romero has an ethnic chip on his shoulder. But here's the kicker:

Romero summons the work of Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire to explain the premise of the program, hauling out a dog-eared and extensively highlighted copy of "Pedagogy of the Oppressed." He points to a passage: "This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well."

(My emphasis.) I wonder where Dr. Romero got his Ph.D? Was it one of those schools of Education referred to in Critical Pedagogy, or another? And does it matter?

Here's what a participant in the program, one of the teachers, had to say:

John Ward taught in the department in the 2002-03 school year. Of Latino heritage despite his Anglo-sounding name, Ward was all for more thoroughly integrating the contributions of Mexican-Americans into U.S. history. But once he started teaching, he became concerned about the program's focus on victimization.

"They really wanted to identify the victimizer, which was the dominant group — in this case white America — and they wanted students to have a revolution against upper-class white America," says Ward, who now works as a state auditor.

"They had a clear message that political departments in the U.S. are arms of the dominant culture designed to keep minorities in the ghetto and to keep them downtrodden. They're teaching on the taxpayers' dime that police officers and teachers are trying to keep them down. What a perverse message to teach these kids."

Such messages, he says, won't be found in the program's textbooks, such as "Occupied America."

"The department doesn't look bad on paper. It's what happens verbally that moves the debate from benign to pernicious," Ward says.

The tone worried him: "The students had become very angry by the end of the year. I saw a marked change in them."

Of course this concern was played down by Romero:

Romero says anger is essential for transformation, but insists teachers work to transform that anger into something positive. "For me, there's a real fine line between anger and awareness," he says.

He chalks up the dispute with Ward to politics, saying Ward didn't fit in because he was a conservative while he and the teachers in the department are liberal.

Gee, ya THINK?

Now here's a really interesting part. In a second piece by John Ward himself, we're told:

During the 2002-2003 school year, I taught a U.S. history course with a Mexican-American perspective. The course was part of the Raza/Chicano studies department.

Within one week of the course beginning, I was told that I was a "teacher of record," meaning that I was expected only to assign grades. The Raza studies department staff would teach the class.

I was assigned to be a "teacher of record" because some members of the Raza studies staff lacked teaching certificates. It was a convenient way of circumventing the rules.

I stated that I expected to do more than assign grades. I expected to be involved in teaching the class. The department was less than enthusiastic but agreed.

Immediately it was clear that the class was not a U.S. history course, which the state of Arizona requires for graduation. The class was similar to a sociology course one expects to see at a university.

Where history was missing from the course, it was filled by controversial and biased curriculum.

The basic theme of the curriculum was that Mexican-Americans were and continue to be victims of a racist American society driven by the interests of middle and upper-class whites.

In this narrative, whites are able to maintain their influence only if minorities are held down. Thus, social, political and economic events in America must be understood through this lens.

This biased and sole paradigm justified teaching that our community police officers are an extension of the white power structure and that they are the strongmen used "to keep minorities in their ghettos."

It justified telling the class that there are fewer Mexican-Americans in Tucson Magnet High School's advanced placement courses because their "white teachers" do not believe they are capable and do not want them to get ahead.

Yes, that's right, The MAN wants to keep them DOWN!

Now, let me reiterate my point from Critical Pedagogy: Future teachers are being taught this stuff. They are coming to SCHOOLS NEAR YOU, and bringing it with them. They are INFLICTING IT ON STUDENTS in your school systems - not all schools, and not all students, but it is being spread. It is the outgrowth of the Frankfurt School, and it is part and parcel of Gramsci's plan to destroy Western culture from the inside. And it's working.

So to Marxadelphia's assertion that Critical Pedagogy was "lying bullshit" and "paranoia," I say, "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on."

I suggest, if you wish to read further, that you read the entire Balkanization post, The George Orwell Daycare Center (bring lunch, it's long), and also I Say We Take Off and Nuke the Site from Orbit . . .

Now there's a "concrete solution"!

Constructive Criticism

In the comments to Why I Keep Marxadelphia Around, reader and sometimes critic juris_imprudent argued:

Back to Gramsci again Kevin? This fellow will surely go down in history as the most influential man in Western Culture in more than a 1000 years. To a small degree I agree with Markadelphia - this is one of many theories of education. It is a crackpot one no doubt - but then what leftist dogma isn't? But I don't see evidence of growth - hell sixteen (not particularly impressive) schools 40 years after the peak of leftism in the U.S., 20 some years after the fall of communism in the West?

I remember La Raza from when I was in HS in the 70s. It was just as stupid, out of place and non mainstream then. The old radicals carved out a little niche that they still hold onto - big whoop. That does NOT explain the overall decline in education that has taken place since the 50s/early-60s. Nor do I buy into any Gramsci-rooted plot to destroy Western Civ, any more than I buy into Truther, Birther or ChemTrailer folderol.

Everyone has a favorite bogeyman in education. Once it was New Math, then whole language followed by that self-esteem stupidity. A true conservative would argue for the tried and true (all the way back to teaching Latin), but the graduate system of our universities demand new and novel ideas or you just aren't a PhD. So a lot of bad ideas end up getting floated into a lot of areas; education is not immune, and may be more susceptible than others for a number of reasons.

Others rose to my defense, but let me say it myself: Yes, I'm aware that there are many other problems going on in the public education system besides the outright Marxist brainwashing that I illustrated in The George Orwell Daycare Center and Balkanization. I've never denied that, but I've never emphasized it either.

It has been my contention, however, that the root of the decline in America's education establishment does, in fact, go back to the influence of the thoughts that propagated from the Frankfurt School and its disciples. As Unix-Jedi noted one comment further down:

Literacy rates *dropped* after "professional education" took hold. Literacy rates were steady from colonial times up to the 1940s, when they started to drop.
Gee, what changed there?

We had a system that successfully taught literacy and numeracy, and starting sometime in the 1940's our public school system went off the rails. In the 1960's the booster rockets kicked in.

Why?

What influence caused the initial changes that have brought us to where we are today, and why do those in this system fight so hard to prevent fixing the obvious problems?

Continuing my habit of letting other people say things if they can do it better than I, here's Unix-Jedi again:

The educational system as it's currently constituted, with the CLAIMED GOALS IT HAS, has utterly failed. Which means that 1) The stated goals aren't the real goals or 2) it's incapable of meeting the goals. (Conceivably, 3) the goals are unreachable, despite the fact historically they have been met.)

I rule out #3. I'm utterly convinced that at this point #2 is the case, but I'm also convinced that we've reached #2 through decades of effort by a small and ever-changing group of people that embodied #1.

Reader Jason chimed in with this criticism:

I generally like what you have to say, Kevin. But "Gramsci's plan" sounds like fear mongering (almost like the "blood in the streets" fallacies that gun banners used against ccw). I wholeheartedly agree that CP is bad and we should fight against it, but let's not blame all of education's problems on it.

Fair point. It was not my intention to lay all the blame at Gramsci's - one man's - feet, though I acknowledge I can be read that way. I will say again, however, that I do lay the blame for the overwhelming majority of the destruction of America's public education system to the founders of the Frankfurt School and "Critical Theory." It began in the universities, and it has trickled down through them, the Schools of Education, and the state school boards until we have what we've got today.

I do not believe that the people involved think that what they're doing is the deliberate destruction of the public education system, leaving our children illiterate and innumerate. I think the overwhelming majority of them - like Markadelphia, and like Dr. Augustine Romero - believe that what they're doing is truly what's best for the kids in their care.

They're simply unable to recognize that they're wrong. By now, they're the products of their own systems, and in higher academia (as several others have noted) its a self-reinforcing system, continually producing more of the same.

These people end up in charge of the school systems and the systems in charge of the school systems. Teachers who actually teach are, as John Taylor Gatto illustrated, forced out of the system or neutered. Those who contribute to mediocrity (or worse) can't be forced out with high explosives. The rest, as one teacher and fellow blogger put it a while back, are just trying to "save the ones they can."

Markadelphia complains,

These EDU posts, Kevin, serve no purpose nor present any sort of concrete solution whatsoever.

The point of the Education pieces I write is to illustrate that the system is broken beyond repair. It CAN'T. BE. FIXED. It's too entrenched, it's occupied by people who cannot be changed and can't be fired. It's unionized. It's even federally-funded now, and there's an entire Cabinet-level department that since 1980 has spent over $995 billion supposedly to better educate our kids.

Well? Why aren't we getting what we pay for? Are the stated goals the real goals?

I don't think so. Do I think it's all one grand Gramscian conspiracy to destroy Western Civilization? I think at least in part it began that way, but it's taken on a life of its own. Let me rework a classic Demotivator:


How else do you explain, for example, New York's "Rubber Rooms"?

(John Stossel has more on the topic.)

The "concrete solution?" Take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

And start over from scratch with schools paid for directly by parents. Hell, there's lots of empty commercial office space available, let's take up Tom McClintock's idea! Disconnect school funding from property values, and make education spending tax-deductible. Close the Department of Education and shut down State involvement in education with the exception (grudgingly) of standards testing.

But for $Diety's sake, don't send your kids to public schools if you can help it. They deserve better.

How We "Lost the Culture War"

It's been a pretty steady refrain, from Bill Whittle to CNN that the reelection of Barack Obama proves that the Right has "lost the culture war". There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over how this happened, but it's been apparent to me that it started in our public school system, and here's an interesting article to that point.

From City Journal, Spring of 2009 edition, Pedagogy of the Oppressor:

Like the more famous Teach for America, the New York Teaching Fellows program provides an alternate route to state certification for about 1,700 new teachers annually. When I met with a group of the fellows taking a required class at a school of education last summer, we began by discussing education reform, but the conversation soon took a turn, with many recounting one horror story after another from their rocky first year: chaotic classrooms, indifferent administrators, veteran teachers who rarely offered a helping hand. You might expect the required readings for these struggling rookies to contain good practical tips on classroom management, say, or sensible advice on teaching reading to disadvantaged students. Instead, the one book that the fellows had to read in full was Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.

For anyone familiar with American schools of education, the choice wasn't surprising. Since the publication of the English edition in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has achieved near-iconic status in America's teacher-training programs. In 2003, David Steiner and Susan Rozen published a study examining the curricula of 16 schools of education—14 of them among the top-ranked institutions in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report—and found that Pedagogy of the Oppressed was one of the most frequently assigned texts in their philosophy of education courses. These course assignments are undoubtedly part of the reason that, according to the publisher, almost 1 million copies have sold, a remarkable number for a book in the education field.

The odd thing is that Freire's magnum opus isn't, in the end, about education—certainly not the education of children. Pedagogy of the Oppressed mentions none of the issues that troubled education reformers throughout the twentieth century: testing, standards, curriculum, the role of parents, how to organize schools, what subjects should be taught in various grades, how best to train teachers, the most effective way of teaching disadvantaged students. This ed-school bestseller is, instead, a utopian political tract calling for the overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless societies. Teachers who adopt its pernicious ideas risk harming their students—and ironically, their most disadvantaged students will suffer the most.

Read the whole article. If you have children in public school, ask their teachers if they've read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and if so, what they think of it. Remember, this book was mentioned prominently in the "Raza Studies" fight here in the Tucson Unified School District.

Now, here's an interesting coincidence:

As a case in point, consider the career of Robert Peterson. Peterson started out in the 1980s as a young elementary school teacher in inner-city Milwaukee. He has described how he plumbed Pedagogy of the Oppressed, looking for some way to apply the great radical educator’s lessons to his own fourth- and fifth-grade bilingual classrooms. Peterson came to realize that he had to break away from the "banking method" of education, in which "the teacher and the curricular texts have the 'right answers' and which the students are expected to regurgitate periodically." Instead, he applied the Freirian approach, which "relies on the experience of the student. . . . It means challenging the students to reflect on the social nature of knowledge and the curriculum." Peterson would have you believe that his fourth- and fifth-graders became critical theorists, interrogating the "nature of knowledge" like junior scholars of the Frankfurt School.

What actually happened was that Peterson used the Freirian rationale to become his students' "self-appointed political conscience."

AKA, their political officer.

After one unit on U.S. intervention in Latin America, Peterson decided to take the children to a rally protesting U.S. aid to the Contras opposing the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The children stayed after school to make placards:

LET THEM RUN THEIR LAND!
HELP CENTRAL AMERICA DON'T KILL THEM
GIVE THE NICARAGUANS THEIR FREEDOM

Peterson was particularly proud of a fourth-grader who described the rally in the class magazine. "On a rainy Tuesday in April some of the students from our class went to protest against the contras," the student wrote. "The people in Central America are poor and bombed on their heads. When we went protesting it was raining and it seemed like the contras were bombing us."

These days, Peterson is the editor of Rethinking Schools, the nation's leading publication for social-justice educators. He is also the editor of a book called Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers, which provides math lessons for indoctrinating young children in the evils of racist, imperialist America.

Rethinking Schools, if you remember, was the source of the piece that inspired my education überpost The George Orwell Daycare Center.

Continuing:

Partly thanks to Peterson's efforts, the social-justice movement in math, as in other academic subjects, has fully arrived (see "The Ed Schools' Latest—and Worst—Humbug," Summer 2006). It has a foothold in just about every major ed school in the country and enjoys the support of some of the biggest names in math education, including several recent presidents of the 25,000-member American Education Research Association, the umbrella organization of the education professoriate. Its dozens of pseudo-scholarly books, journals, and conferences extol the supposed benefits to disadvantaged kids of the kind of teaching that Peterson once inflicted on his Milwaukee fourth-graders.

And now you know why schools can't teach algebra, as detailed in The George Orwell Daycare Center.

Again, read the whole piece. Do you understand now how we "lost the culture"?  And why we aren't going to get it back?

Confidence, Part IV

The worst thing about living in the declining era of a great civilization is knowing that you are. -- Robert A. Heinlein

This is the second essay by the title of Confidence that I have written, the fourth that I am aware of that has been posted to the blogosphere.  The earlier two (not written by me) are no longer available online.  My first one posted February 15 of 2009.  Not a great deal has changed since then, except for the worse.

I strongly recommend you (re-)read that previous piece, but in it I wrote:

It has been an ongoing theme here at TSM since I hit "PUBLISH" on Not with a Bang, but a Whimper? in October of 2003, that things are not going well for the Republic, and they appear to be getting worse. As Bill Whittle said, there's something very wrong with our foundation. The Left exhibits cockroach resilience, while the Right seems ever less willing to even lace up its boots.

--

What I've witnessed over half of my life (the time I've actually been paying attention) and especially the last five and a half years (the time I've been writing about it) is what appears to me to be America's inexorable slide away from our individual "pursuit of happiness" towards a pursuit of collective security in what the populace - what few of them who think about it all all - hopes will be at least a gilded cage. It's the pursuit of an illusion, but it's a pretty illusion.

--

The fault is ours. We let it happen. Too much of the population lost its abiding belief in the Constitution some time long before I was born. I put the date around the Great Depression, with FDR and the New Deal, after the country was prepped and primed by Woodrow Wilson's presidency. With the New Deal we finally reached the point that Tocqueville (maybe) warned us against:

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.

The New Deal did exactly that. But entropy can be slow, and the nation had a lot of momentum to overcome. That's been taken care of now, though. The only way to achieve high office in this country now is to be a statist willing to promise redistribution of wealth (though it is generally disguised as "earmarks" and not - usually - blatantly referred to as "spreading the wealth.")

I also quoted Bill Whittle from his piece entitled Confidence:

When all is said and done, Civilizations do not fall because of the barbarians at the gates. Nor does a great city fall from the death wish of bored and morally bankrupt stewards presumably sworn to its defense. Civilizations fall only because each citizen of the city comes to accept that nothing can be done to rally and rebuild broken walls; that ground lost may never be recovered; and that greatness lived in our grandparents but not our grandchildren. Yes, our betters tell us these things daily. But that doesn’t mean we have to believe it.

But we know from history what happens when we do.

Let me list just a few recent books - some less pessimistic than the others - all describing different aspects of the same dark future:



 
Dismantling America - Thomas Sowell, publication date 8/2010




The Secret Knowledge:  On the Dismantling of American Culture - David Mamet, publication date 6/2011




After America: Get Ready for Armageddon - Mark Steyn, publication date 8/2011




Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? - Patrick Buchanan, publication date 10/2011




Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America - Mark Levin, publication date 1/2012




Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 - Charles Murray, publication date 1/2012

A comment from Sailorcurt I saw a few days ago spurred this post. Here it is:

We’ve been on the long slide for a long time. We’re nearing the bottom. We’re WAY past the point of no return.

Romney as the "conservative" alternative demonstrates that more clearly than anything I could articulate.

Basically, our society is headed for the crash and has been for years, the only difference is how fast we get there.

I'm beginning to feel that I'd prefer to get there sooner rather than later. With every generation, our kids are being indoctrinated and brainwashed into further believing that the Government is the answer to all our ills, that human beings, when left to our own devices, will destroy ourselves and the earth, that it is more noble to be cared for and kept than to live in freedom and face all of the risks, benefits, consequences and rewards of same.

Perhaps it's better to keep the "faster" version in charge and let us rush into the void headlong, while there are still at least a few free-thinkers around to give us even a semblance of a chance of getting back on the right track after the dust settles.

Granted, the odds of that happening are extremely slim, but they're better in this generation than they will be in the next, or the next, or the next.

Everything that has a beginning has an end.

The end of our little experiment in liberty is in sight. It is unavoidable at this point IMHO, it’s only a question of how long it takes to get there.

Are we content to keep things as comfortable for ourselves as possible as we trudge slowly toward oblivion? Because that seems to me like what is being advocated by those desperate to get Obama out of office.

Be electing Romney, we'd not be averting, only kicking the can down the road and leaving our mess for someone else to try to clean up.

Again.

And in response to that, Weerd Beard replied:

I couldn’t agree more, Curt!

This kind of sentiment is getting to be more and more common on the blogs and message boards I frequent.

Shortly after reading Sailorcurt's comment, I saw this at Market-Ticker:

Our government with its present infestation of Democrats and Republicans, and the inability to find a single third party that will stand for the end of the stupid when it comes to the policies they espouse, including the one I'm currently involved in quite-heavily, means that we're going to go off the cliff Thelma and Louise style with the entirely-certain outcome.

This was in response to a speech given by Mohamed A. El-Erian, CEO and co-CIO of PIMCO, Pacific Investment Management Company. Mr. El-Erian gave his speech as the "Homer Jones Memorial Lecture" at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

That speech is rather lengthy, but here's what I (and others) think is the key excerpt:

To crystallize our conversation today, allow me to use a very – and I stress very – clumsy sentence to summarize the current state of affairs: In the last three plus years, central banks have had little choice but to do the unsustainable in order to sustain the unsustainable until others do the sustainable to restore sustainability!

(Emphasis in original.) As others have asked, what is the likelihood that our titular "leaders" are any nearer to doing "the sustainable to restore sustainability"?

Zilch, so far as I can see.

Still, there are those who hold out hope. Bill Whittle in his latest Afterburner decries the horrible quality of education our youth have received, but near the end says:

To that one in a hundred of you who's actually angry at how badly you've been ripped off by your educational system, and you're willing to face it, let me say this: It's not over. It's not too late. Our best days are still ahead of us and we're going to do great things, you mark my words. We need you, you one in a hundred.

But in counterpoint, Captain Capitalism's latest video advises How Gen Y is Completely, Hopelessly and Totally Screwed Part 1.

And he has data.

As I noted in the previous piece, I have had a consistent theme at this blog since almost the first post that what is going on, here and in the rest of Western civilization, is a war between two (now three) utterly incompatible philosophies.  Initially the two philosophies were Locke's and Rousseau's - Locke's being one of "Life, liberty, property" and Rousseau's being, not "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" but Marx's 1850 expansion from that to "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." The third incompatible philosophy that has been added to the mix is "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet," but the first two are what I will be discussing at the moment. This war has been ongoing pretty much since Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.

Lenin himself acknowledged that Communism could not succeed until the Western capitalist nations were overthrown - violently, he emphasized. It was only through violent revolution that the proletariat could bring down the bourgeois, and that is what the true believers in Marxist-Leninist ideology have sought ever since. As others have noted, when World War I did not result in such revolutions except in backwards Russia and instead the citizens of various nations put on the uniforms of their national militaries and went to war to support their governments, many adherents of Marxist-Leninist theology - unable to question the gospel - were forced to ask what caused a delay in the historically inevitable? The Frankfurt School was established to study this problem, answer the question and come up with a solution, and they did.

The problem, they concluded, was that Western capitalism made the proletariat too comfortable to revolt. In order to overcome that, it would be necessary to destroy Western capitalism from the inside. To accomplish this would require a long period of time and take several steps, but True Believers believe in long-range planning. Former soviet propagandist Yuri Bezmenov (aka Tomas Schuman ) explained those steps in 1984 thus:

The first one [is] demoralization; it takes from 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which [is required] to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged, or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (American patriotism).

The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties (drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals) are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people... the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To [rid] society of these people, you need another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common sense people, who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society.

--

The next stage is destabilization. This time [the] subverter does not care about your ideas and the patterns of your consumption; whether you eat junk food and get fat and flabby doesn't matter any more. This time—and it takes only from two to five years to destabilize a nation—what matters [are] essentials: economy, foreign relations, [and] defense systems. And you can see it quite clearly that in some areas, in such sensitive areas as defense and [the] economy, the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideas in [the] United States is absolutely fantastic. I could never believe it fourteen years ago when I landed in this part of the world that the process [would have gone] that fast.

The next stage, of course, is crisis. It may take only up to six weeks to bring a country to the verge of crisis. You can see it in Central America now.

And, after crisis, with a violent change of power, structure, and economy, you have [the so-called] period of normalization. It may last indefinitely. Normalization is a cynical expression borrowed from Soviet propaganda. When the Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in '68, Comrade Brezhnev said, 'Now the situation in brotherly Czechoslovakia is normalized.'

So the professors of the Frankfurt School wrote books explaining what needed to be done, they lectured and they spread their philosophy far and wide, and it took seed.

Not everyone believed fully in the Cause, but enough did, and enough more were blinded by the beautiful utopia promised by that philosophy to embrace enough of it make them want to spread it, too. Bezmenov said:

This was my instruction: try to get into large-circulation, established conservative media; reach filthy-rich movie makers; intellectuals, so-called 'academic' circles; cynical, egocentric people who can look into your eyes with angelic expression and tell you a lie. These are the most recruitable people: people who lack moral principles, who are either too greedy or too [much] suffer from self importance. They feel that they matter a lot. These are the people who[m] [the] KGB wanted very much to recruit.

--

They serve [a] purpose only at the stage of destabilization of a nation. For example, your leftists in [the] United States: all these professors and all these beautiful civil rights defenders. They are instrumental in the process of the subversion only to destabilize a nation.

In America his counterparts needn't have bothered. The process was self-sustaining very early on, as he noted himself:

The demoralization process in [the] United States is basically completed already. For the last 25 years... actually, it's over-fulfilled because demoralization now reaches such areas where previously not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such a tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to [a] lack of moral standards.

Socialism is extremely attractive to a certain type of intellectual. In fact, Thomas Sowell once said:

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

And they do. So that is why, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, Socialism itself is still being pushed, no matter how many people die to make the lie true.

The first two steps, demoralization and destabilization are brought about through the education system and mass media.  Each are used, as Bezmenov explained, to "change the basic perception and the logic of behavior" of a population, but it goes even further than that.  Remember, Socialism is a class struggle.  The motto of the United States is E Pluribus Unum - "Out of Many, One."  The goal of destabilization then must be balkanization.

Rules for Radicals, the last book published by the first acknowledged "community organizer,"  is the textbook on how to divide a nation, bottom up, from the inside, with the final goal being revolution. Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven developed their strategy to overwhelm the welfare system and cause its collapse. Cloward was also instrumental in the "motor voter" National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Piven has been a longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Cloward got his master's degree at Columbia University's School of Social Work - Columbia being the home of the Frankfurt School after it fled Nazi Germany, and Piven received her B.A., M.A. and PhD from the University of Chicago - the city where the Communist Party of the USA first set up its headquarters in 1919.  Saul Alinsky got his Bachelor's in Philosophy at the University of Chicago.

These two schools seem to be the epicenter of the early spread of Socialism among the intellectual elites.  William Ayers - former member of the Weather Underground, "guilty as Hell, free as a bird" in the deaths of (at a minimum) three of his compatriots, and probably of the death of a San Francisco police officer in a "successful" bombing - received his Masters and his Doctorates in Education from Columbia University, and until recently taught Education at the University of Chicago. He's one of the highest-profile Socialists in Education, but a long way from rare.  

It's still going on today.  Zombie put up an interesting piece on a lecture, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, given recently by retired professor H. Douglas Brown of San Francisco State University. You really should peruse it. These are the people, like Bill Ayers, teaching the teachers, and they have been for literally decades. From the comments comes this interesting bit:

My sister was studying to become a high school teacher a couple of years ago and looking through her text books I was amazed to see how prominently Paulo Freire and his theory of "Critical Pedagogy" was emphasized. When I asked her about it, she told me that "critical pedagogy" is the preferred way educators are expected to teach in the L.A. Unified School system. She said they're supposed to teach kids "how to think", not to stuff their heads full of facts and information. When I told her that Freire was a devout Communist she shrugged. Needless to say my sister is a Lefty, so informing her of the fact that Freire was a Communist was like telling her that he cares for humanity.

Freire was, in fact, a Christian Socialist, but a major fan of Marx. The point remains valid, though. From the Freire Project website:

Several notable twentieth century educators and activists influenced and in some cases contributed to the body of research and literature of Critical Pedagogy including John Dewey, Myles Horton, Jonathan Kozol, Michael Apple, W.E.B. Dubois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Paulo Freire, and Augusto Boal, The Frankfurt School of critical theorists developed a unified approach to cultural criticism and seminal contribution to the work of Critical Pedagogy, including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, and others.

Everyone involved in the Frankfurt School was a big "S" Socialist.

So where am I going with all this?  In 1984 Bezmenov - remember, a propaganda agent of the Soviet Union - stated that "at least three generations of American students" had been the victims of Socialist indoctrination.  We're now twenty-seven years further on - at least one and more like two generations more.  The education system we have now is an utter failure at actually producing educated thinking students, but it has become the ideal machine for producing a demoralized nation.  Our economy, and the economies of the majority of Western nations are at the very edge of destabilization - we're just waiting for the first domino to fall, the first plate to stop spinning and drop from its stick.

When that happens, there will be crisis, and as Mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel has told us "You never let a serious crisis to go to waste."  No, someone has to normalize things when that happens.

And there are probably thousands of dedicated Socialists and tens of thousands of their useful idiots out there rubbing their hands in anticipation.  They've worked independently for decades to reach this point. 

I know Louis Farrakhan is.  His is (partially) of that third incompatible philosophy, heavily influenced by the second. Then there are the Anarchists for More Government Cheese, the EarthFirst!ers, and many other groups who are willing to kill and destroy to achieve the Utopia they've been promised.  And that's just on the Left.

Let's face it, after five generations of indoctrination, even Bill Whittle admits that "one in a hundred" is about the best that have escaped, and while they understand that they've been robbed, well they've been robbed.  They realize that they don't possess what they need, but now they have to do the work that twelve years of "education" didn't provide them.  Most of the rest of the population?  They've been prepped to be reliant on the .gov: ignorant, unprepared, incapable of functioning on their own.

And the war is on the "one percenters."

I don't think "our best days are still ahead of us."  I'm in very good company.  I'm aware that Cassandras have been proclaiming the downfall of civilizations since time immemorial, but as Billy Beck once observed, "Sometimes they're right."

Sailorcurt opines:

Perhaps it's better to keep the "faster" version in charge and let us rush into the void headlong, while there are still at least a few free-thinkers around to give us even a semblance of a chance of getting back on the right track after the dust settles.

There's that hope again. Let's parse that sentence. We should "rush into the void headlong" on the off chance that, after we go smash on the bottom, some of the few survivors will be free-thinkers who might get the rest "back on the right track."  Who thinks they'll be the ones prepared for "normalization"?

Who says they won't be around if we try for the soft(er) landing? Tuesday's Quote of the Day was humorous, but it was funny because it was painfully accurate. Like Robb Allen, I'd like to postpone the crash as long as possible, but we're not voting our way out of this.

Maybe Bill Whittle's right. Perhaps the horse might learn to sing.  But the best I can honestly hold out for Billy Beck stated three years ago:

All the political initiative now is with the forces of Amsoc. Where the so-called conservatives have fought generations of piece-meal rear-guard action against the integral resolution of socialism to corrode its worst enemy -- the practical and living ideal of freedom: America -- out of existence, and as they have done so as effects of disintegrated philosophy, the socialists are assuming the commanding heights in full political battle gear.

It is important to understand that this can only and inevitably mean physical battle gear, right in front of your eyes, right here in America. The spirit of this place that was not born of the slave's obeisance will require this government to bare its fangs. I still believe that. The ways in which and the singular souls from which Americans select their values are not yet so beaten to any alien molds so well that they will peaceably stand for the conformations that this government will eventually require and demand -- not "ask".

Regardless, there's Tough History Coming.

No Change in Strategy or Tactics

In the comments to "Freudian Slip Much?" Lyle comments:

Following all your links and watching the videos, it's all "Top down, Bottom up, Inside out". They're prepping their herds for the next step, which is chaos. The people will demand that government take action to do something about it ("Bottom up") then it's "Inside out"-- totalitarian socialism will be offered as the only way out.

The socialist/eugenicists never went away. They just changed tactics.

No. No they didn't. They haven't changed tactics or the overall strategy. What we're witnessing is the culmination of ninety-plus years of ideology playing out. Remember the poster:




That lie has lodged deep in the human psyche for a very long time. Karl Marx codified it in the late 19th Century, and by the turn of the 20th, it had swept across the world.

But at the end of World War I, its adherents were straining to understand why, despite Marx's insistence on communism's historic inevitability, the Proletariat put on the uniforms of their nation's armed forces instead of rising in revolution against the bourgeoisie. In order to answer that question, a group of young Communists formed the Frankfurt School. The answer, they concluded, was that a comfortable proletariat was a non-revolutionary proletariat, and Western civilization produced material comfort. Therefore, Western civilization had to be destroyed, and the best way to do that was from the inside.

The target of this destruction was Western culture, and the vectors for this destruction would be the education system, the arts, and media, aided by the infiltration and destruction of governments. By the 1930's, the seeds were already sown. America's Great Depression had seen to that, and Marx and Engels' ideas had spread worldwide. Many were disillusioned by the perceived failures of capitalism, and the promise of socialism seemed the ideal answer. I am currently reading Dupes: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives For A Century, and even I am shocked by how prevalent the acceptance of socialism was as far back as the 20's. Some of the young converts of the 1920's and 30's became the college professors of the 40's and 50's, and by the 1960's they were turning out more converts, fellow travelers and "useful idiots" who were themselves school teachers, playwrights, actors, editors, reporters, etc.

Regardless of the source, the 1985 warning delivered by Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov rings absolutely true to me:

Ideological subversion is the process, which is legitimate, overt, and open; you can see it with your own eyes. All you have to do, all American mass media has to do, is to unplug their bananas from their ears, open up their eyes, and they can see it. There is no mystery. [It has] nothing to do with espionage. I know that espionage intelligence-gathering looks more romantic. It sells more deodorants through the advertising, probably. That’s why your Hollywood producers are so crazy about James Bond-type of thrillers.

But in reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion and [the] opinion of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower [are] spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process, which we call either ‘ideological subversion,’ or ‘active measures’—‘[?]’ in the language of the KGB—or ‘psychological warfare.’ What it basically means is, to change the perception of reality, of every American, to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.

It’s a great brainwashing process, which goes very slow[ly] and is divided [into] four basic stages. The first one [is] demoralization; it takes from 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which [is required] to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged, or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (American patriotism).

The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties (drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals) are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people... the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To [rid] society of these people, you need another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common sense people, who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society.

We now have a country in which two-thirds of the population believes that "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" is part of the Constitution. Where a majority believes "the rich don't pay their fair share" of taxes. We have a country that is progressively balkanized (pun intended) into victim groups to be exploited for political gain. And all of this traces back to the strategies and tactics that sprang from the Frankfurt School and its disciples: "Critical Theory" (Critical Race Theory, Critical Literary Theory, Critical Gender Theory), Political Correctness ("Shut up," they explained...), the Cloward-Piven strategy, etc.

Marx understood and stated plainly that Communism, historically inevitable or not, could only come about through violent revolution, so the conditions for violent revolution had to be fomented. A small, dedicated, ever-changing group of true believers has been working since the turn of the 20th Century to bring Western Civilization to its knees, and it has almost achieved it. The players have changed, but the strategy hasn't.

Critical Pedagogy

If you have school-age children, you MUST READ THIS. Excerpt:

Some of the basic tenants of critical pedagogy are:

• ALL education is inherently political…
• A social and educational vision of justice and equality should be the foundation for all education
• Race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and physical ability are important domains of oppression
• The purpose of education is the alleviation of oppression and human suffering
• Schools must not hurt students–good schools don’t blame students for their failures
• Good schools don’t judge the beliefs students have about their life’s experiences
• Part of the role of any educator involves becoming a researcher into social oppression
• Education must promote emancipatory change

Sixteen of the top educational schools in America are heavily influenced by Critical Pedagogy and are shaping the future leaders of our educational system. This belief system is now spreading out of the colleges into our K-12 systems and being promulgated by radical teachers as its ‘agents of change’. It’s a well-organized, widespread movement, firmly entrenched in many Universities and its advocates are actively seeking to spread it worldwide.

A quick Google on "critical pedagogy" brings up this link from the University of Denver School of Education. Among the "resources" listed, Rethinking Schools, the source of the article that inspired The George Orwell Daycare Center Überpost, and The Frankfurt School which I and reader Phil B. have had some things to say about.

My only quibble with the piece is that I think it's been going on longer - and more "successfully" - than the author seems to believe.

The linked piece was published in December, part II is here. Read both. Understand what it is that's going on in our public schools, and why.

RCOB™ all over again.

Thanks to Neo-neocon for the pointer.

Nuke the Site from Orbit

It's the only way to be sure.  I've said that repeatedly.

I took a couple of Quotes of the Day from Zombie's five-part piece Ideological War Spells Doom for America's Schoolkids, and now he has a follow-on that caused two readers to send me emails alerting me to its existence.

But I want to take a little different tack on Zombie's latest, How a Teacher's Rally Made Me Anti-Education.

I have stated over the life of this blog that I believe that the education system has been suborned by "true believers" in socialism, Leftism, "progressivism," Marxism, communism, call it what you will. I have stated that these people, without a need of a vast Red conspiracy with monthly planning meetings, naturally gravitate to media and education to spread their faith because they believe they know the truth and it is their self-imposed mission to spread the Gospel. Education and media provide the best path for their evangelism, and while I harp on Antonio Gramsci, I doubt seriously that most of these people have heard of him. Gramsci just wrote about the need to undermine Western culture so that socialism could triumph. He was hardly alone in reaching that conclusion. It didn't take the Frankfurt School to make people spontaneously choose to do the undermining, that group just provided, with Germanic efficiency, an organized agenda for those who were willing to do a little research.

But the amateurs have done very well all on their own.

No, what Zombie's latest photo-essay illustrates is precisely that fact - that de-moralizing indoctrination is very much alive and well in the public education system, far beyond any honest person's ability to deny. Go, look at the pictures. Read the protest signs. Tell me that Marxist ideology has faded away with the fall of the Soviet Union.

No, it still survives in academia. It may very well be taught in your child's school today. It has been going on for so long that for many parents it's the very definition of "right-thinking." Some teachers understand what's been going on, but I believe many if not most of them are among the group that just believe there's no other "right" way to think.

Regardless of whether the effort was coordinated or not, the end result (coming two decades too late for the Soviet Union) is the same - a country at the brink of catastrophe.

Should we, as Zombie says, "destroy education in order to save it"?

I'm afraid it's too late.

And Yet Another

Following up on the previous post, Instapundit links to a piece about playwright David Mamet and his new book on losing his liberal outlook.  Some choice excerpts:

Higher ed, (Mamet) said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—"Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever"—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.

"If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we're training ourselves not to see cause and effect," he said. Wasn't there, he went on, a "much more interesting .  .  . view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?"

This is the whole strategy of "critical theory" - the Frankfurt school's methodology for using the education system to de-moralize (hypen used intentionally) the population. Thomas Jefferson? He can't be a great man, he was a slave owner and adulterer! Pull the lever!  Writing an essay on economics?  The grader will be a Keynesian, so it had better slant that way!  Pull the lever!

On cognitive dissonance:

"The question occurs to me quite a lot: What do liberals do when their plans have failed? What did the writers do when their plans led to unemployment, their own and other people's? One thing they can't do is admit they failed. Why? To admit failure would endanger their position in the herd."

To admit failure would require them to question their ideology, and that loses them their position in the herd.

In the beginning of Mamet's conversion, his Rabbi sent him books:

One of the first was A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution. In it Sowell expands on the difference between the "constrained vision" of human nature—close to the tragic view that infuses Mamet's greatest plays—and the "unconstrained vision" of man's endless improvement that suffused Mamet's politics and the politics of his profession and social class.

"He came back to me stunned. He said, 'This is incredible!' He said, 'Who thinks like this? Who are these people?' I said, 'Republicans think like this.' He said, 'Amazing.' "

I didn't have to be converted by Sowell's magnum opus, but Conflict of Vision's effect on me was similar.

And, of course, the article points out the inevitable herd reaction to Mamet's conversion:

After reading The Secret Knowledge in galleys, the Fox News host and writer Greg Gutfeld invented the David Mamet Attack Countdown Clock, which “monitors the days until a once-glorified liberal artist is dismissed as an untalented buffoon.” Tick tock.

Read the whole piece.

I think I just added another book onto my pile.