Posted on 02/04/2019 7:21:26 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
--The Left Never Knows When To Stop--
It was a shock. Jay Leno went Jaywalking and revealed the startling fact that a lot of Americans didn’t know much history, geography or anything else. Who won the Civil War? What country is Mount Rushmore located in? People didn’t know and didn’t seem to care.
Many thought that was the high watermark of dumb. What could be dumber than not knowing who won the Civil War?
Jimmy Kimmel has astonished the nation by showing that America is even dumber than we worried it is. He sent a crew out to the streets with a map of the world: outlines only, no names. The challenge was simple: pick a country and name it. Here we entered the abyss. Kimmel found people who looked at the whole map and couldn’t name a country!
Jimmy Kimmel is reputed to be a good liberal but he has done the absolute conservative thing by finding a superior way to dramatize the incompetence of our educational class, people whose most salient skill is keeping children as ignorant as the day they first walked into school. But how do our education officials work this magic?
Americans couldn't become so ignorant unless our Education Establishment laid down the law: don’t teach the traditional subjects.
That has to make us wonder. Why would anybody want to ignore geography? Or history?
I first thought this was merely the tendency of Progressive educators to teach less and less content. Now I think it’s something deeper and more sinister.
We know for sure that the bias against geography and history was there from the very beginning of the Progressive era.
John Dewey spelled it out in his rant known as My Pedagogic Creed (1897):
“I believe that we violate the child's nature… by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of reading, writing, geography, etc., out of relation to this social life. I believe, therefore, that the true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social activities.”
Look at what the man wants us to believe. Everything valued in traditional education for thousands of years is irrelevant. So how does he reach this conclusion?
We know that the prejudice against knowledge was relentless, in every year, in every subject. One of the giant steps was the introduction of the concept known as Social Studies in the early years of the 20th century. History, geography, civics, politics, government, current events— these were lumped together and studied as one subject. Was this more efficient? As a matter of fact, yes, if you’re trying to diminish and eradicate these subjects.
What a remarkable coup. The most left-wing of a left-wing profession seized control of history and geography. Once the most important subjects studied in elementary and middle school, history and geography were now kicked to the curb.
We need to understand this. What explains this almost psychotic fear of time and place?
If people don’t know where they are, geographically speaking, or what time it is, historically speaking, what roots or connections do they have? What understanding of cultural cause and effect can they have? They’re floating in a timeless void. They have no idea where they came from or where they’re going.
We need to ask why Progressives are hostile to letting people see the bigger picture and how they fit into it?
It’s fascinating that George Orwell dealt with these questions coming from the other direction, i.e. the future, the totalitarian future depicted in 1984. One of the book’s big preoccupations is manipulation of the past, which is often best accomplished by eliminating it. Orwell understood that the totalitarian mentality wants emptiness. Nihilism is totalitarianism’s evil twin.
If there are no facts, the peasants can never say their leaders are wrong about anything.
In 1984 you look out your window and see a street with traffic going by, nothing beyond that. You don’t see a bigger world, a four-dimensional universe defined by Cartesian coordinates. You don’t see past and future so you can’t discuss them. You can’t have hope. That was one of the most poignant themes in 1984. The main character finds a glass paperweight, a beautiful thing that symbolized the past and hope for the future. That’s why the regime couldn’t allow people to own such items, or even see them. One might think of freedom.
I've often written negatively about John Dewey. I thought he was a fumbling liberal wanting to embrace every blue-sky, probably counterproductive remedy. But Dewey was way past that. Somehow he grasped that his task was to prepare the world for totalitarian societies. How? Start by eliminating history and geography.
The Socialists we see on TV today could still be comfortable with history and geography. But Dewey was a big thinker. He understood that people would cling to these anchors and resist the transition into the world of 1984. He needed to clear the deck and start over.
The Party’s goal in 1984 was to control everything by making both past and future unknowable, indeed, nonexistent. Dewey didn’t seem to care that totalitarianism tends to be irreversible, because you burn so many bridges trying to achieve it.
The Party wanted everything to be untethered and disconnected from everything else. They didn’t worry about repeating the past because it doesn’t exist. The proles don’t think about freedom because the word has no meaning. All who enter the Party’s world logically abandon hope.
Finally, totalitarianism contains no stops on ruthless, aggressive personalities. That is the real killer. You get Stalin, you get Hitler, you get Pol Pot. And you always will.
Killing off history and geography makes us Displaced Persons, spiritually and intellectually. It also makes us likely victims.
Progressive educators hate geography. That’s how you know we should teach much more of it.
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©Bruce Deitrick Price
This ping list is for the other articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. This can occasionally be a fairly high volume list. Articles pinged to the Another Reason to Homeschool List will be given the keyword of ARTH. (If I remember. If I forget, please feel free to add it yourself)
The main Homeschool Ping List handles the homeschool-specific articles. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping list. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added to or removed from either list, or both.
This ping list is for the other articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. This can occasionally be a fairly high volume list. Articles pinged to the Another Reason to Homeschool List will be given the keyword of ARTH. (If I remember. If I forget, please feel free to add it yourself)
The main Homeschool Ping List handles the homeschool-specific articles. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping list. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added to or removed from either list, or both.
I use the public school as a free babysitter
Also socialization
I teach them on the side and undo crap they’re fed
Bookmark.
“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, “Your child belongs to us already... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.” Adolf Hitler, 1935
In 1982, after the State of Nebraska conducted a violent raid on a Christian church school, holding teachers and terrified kids on the floor at gun point and Pastor Everet Sileven spent 297 days in jail, Pastor Sileven appeared on TV opposite the state bureaucrat who authorized the raid. He turned to the school bureaucrat and asked the real reason why the state had such a problem with their small church school?
Without missing a beat, through a sneer anyone who has visited the DMV will recognize, the bureaucrat declared (and I’m paraphrasing):
“Because you are denying the state schools needed money. And because you are educating children outside the public school system, IN THE WORLD WE’RE DESIGNING FOR THE FUTURE, THEY WON’T FIT IN!”
Dwell on those last 4 words for a moment.
If you’re curious about just what that world they were designing might look like, LOOK AROUND.
You’re living in it.
And, if the indoctrination MY grandchildren are experiencing is any indication, it will only get worse!
We’d better get THAT problem solved or America - the IDEA - will soon be just a distant memory!
You are exactly right. And this is totally by design, totally planned.
L8r
Great article, Bruce. Thanks for writing it.
ML/NJ
My favorite response of all time: “Who knows stuff like that?”
20 years ago people would’ve been embarrassed to be so ignorant. Now they assume that knowing something is the odd behavior.
Still, Kimmel got more than 15 million views so far. That has to be a positive.
Thanks.
Wintertime, I always said that we don’t disagree all that much.
Brains flabbier than their butts!
“Fitting in” in their horrible world is what they really mean when they say you need to send your kids to public school for “socialization.”
Studies come up with the fact that homeschooled kids are more open-minded and classically tolerant, and have better measurable social skills.
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