Huxley predicted a cold technological future: “’And this,’ said the Director, ‘is the Fertilising Room....After which they are sent down to the Embryo Store...We decant our babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas, or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or....future world controllers....Nothing like oxygen-shortage for keeping an embryo below par.’ Again he rubbed his hands.”
Oxygen-shortage? Now that is subtle. You never know it happened. If you do, you don’t care.
(With Controllers and Directors, we’re talking about the people at the very top, the most powerful commissars, the elite educators. Not teachers, of course; they have little power. On an internet forum, I noticed people arguing about the propriety of a state superintendent receiving a salary of $300,000. A minor administrative position, you might suppose; one that could be eliminated with scant loss to students or society. But perhaps you need to pay people $300,000 if their main duty is limiting oxygen.)
The “oxygen,” in our case, is the ability to read, write and do simple arithmetic, skills which must be diminished. “Oxygen” is knowledge and information, assets which must be kept rudimentary. “Oxygen” is tradition and character, intangibles which must be diluted and drained away until they are no longer recognizable. “Oxygen” is everything that, in 1900, was accepted as defining human-ness. That “everything” is the target of our new barbarians.
In 1983, A Nation At Risk (a prestigious government report) concluded that public schools seemed to have been designed by an unfriendly foreign power. Note: Unfriendly. Foreign. Power. See, the barbarians had already arrived more than 30 years ago. They hid among us, pretending to be engaged in education but chiefly concerned with conquest, subduing us with social engineering and spirit-warping sophistries, producing ever more faux-education and anti-intellectualism, rendering the country dumb and dumber.
Their tactics were civilized and refined. And so silent. They know which is the superior race. They are. They know we are the barbarians in our own land. And thus they should inherit the earth, our earth. It’s only fair.
Why else would we yield without a fight? Everyone knows the dirge of decline: 50 million functional illiterates, a million dyslexics, falling SAT scores, the Jaywalking people who seem to know nothing, falling national competitiveness, high school graduates who can’t read the diploma. Our brains must have been starved.
“The Russians are coming!” We get used to this phrase. We think that the barbarians are outside and will some day invade. No, our barbarians invaded long ago and live right here...
Or so you might suppose if you study the public schools.
(For related analysis, see 38: Saving Public Schools and 41: Educators, O. J. Simpson, and Guilt, on Improve-Education.org.)"
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END OF ARTICLE AS IT APPEARS ON CANADAFREEPRESS. TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, THIS MIGHT BE CALLED LITERARY SATIRE. MY OWN SENSE IS THAT IT'S CLOSER TO THE TRUTH THAN WHAT WE READ IN THE NEWSPAPERS.
Nice article, although educrats might be more appropriate.