Posted on 06/22/2020 9:00:11 AM PDT by CharlesOConnell
The discipline of critical thinking invites us to consider the origins of our knowledge and convictions. ... The natural human instinct for confirmation bias presents a further problem, one especially prominent among ideologues. Anything can be taken to support one’s position so long as it is perceived through the lens of prejudgment. We can see this most notably in the proponents of Critical Social Justice, who start from the premise that unequal outcomes—disparities in average earnings between men and women, for instance—are evidence of structural inequalities in society. They are beginning with the conclusion and working backwards, mistaking their own arguments for proof. ...Read more
(Excerpt) Read more at standpointmag.co.uk ...
In the Great Game, it turns out that schoolmaster "Hudge" (the Liberal) is merely the tool, in the long term, of "Gudge" (the Tory), living characters in What's Wrong With The World (1910) of "The Man Who Knew Too Much", G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936).
The short of the long of it, is that in itself, Compulsory Universal Education was centrally designed from its origin to systematically, effortlessly bypass your meritocratic aspirations for the educational enterprise, that students should actually be taught:
Prima facie by its front-door "education" administrators, the broad class of socialists who run the thing. But at its origin, by its proprietors, the accumulators of capital who pay the piper, the oligarchs whose primary economic motivation is to "dumb down", to suppress through "schooling", the native innovation and independence, of thought and action, of "Jones", the common man.
School is the perfect platform for doping or poisoning, in the nursery, the Deltas and Epsilons, the mass of lower workers (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World ), while allowing some technician Gammas to achieve the scant numeracy and literacy to lubricate the wheels steered by the Beta ("Socialist") administrators of the Alpha ("Capitalist") oligarchy machine.
Why don't we Betas know all this, again and already, "Deja vu all over again"? The past is alterable. The past never has been altered. Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. (Eric Blair, "George Orwell", 1984).
The memory hole is no longer needed, the history can be left plainly in view, if you know where to look, all in black and white, in the graduate theses and journal publications of the great universities. In this era, it is the recurring agenda of the great "non-profit" boards.
Students of the system long ago cast off their tinfoil hats, "conspiracy" devolving down into dry, academic history. Anyone who has an itch to understand it can get all the answers at this accidental moment of history when its centralmost operations are casually, plainly in view--not that it would matter.
Such knowledge is ultimately futile, as the more banal itches of the mass of men have been completely satisfied. ("Divertissements", Blaise Pascal Pensees.) The system's self-survival is quite assured, with the unknowing connivance of the vast majority of its subjects.
You're dealing with the confidential history of power, of which the Alpha prime interest is to dampen and, ultimately, thwart innovation and true education.
It can be told in the open, of cursory relevance, that the history runs at least from the Cecil power behind Elizabeth Regina I (Tudor), two generations after Henry VIII's moneyed friends ransacked centuries of labor value accumulated in the religious monasteries in the absence of usury (E. Michael Jones).
William Cecil, First Baron Burghley
The history rushes past the front counter of "The Circumlocution Office" which frustrated inventor and entrepreneur "Daniel Doyce" in Charles Dickens' Little Dorritt. It surges through the turn of the 20th century, Rhodes/Roundtable/Commonwealth power from the colonialization of African gold and monopolized diamonds, past the Morgan money and Rockefeller oil-railcar cartel.
As the Protestants of two centuries ago enervated their own families through Malthusian contraception, into extinction through Darwinian "racial" supremacy (The Descent of Man ), unmentionable strangers, un-named here, waiting in the wings have soundlessly taken over the mediocrity machine. They are thoroughly in command of current events. They subsidize the news media nobody believes, but who still do, quite well, their true job of getting billions of people to believe lies.
In the emerging, neXt era, the consciousness-limiting machine is thriving, well-oiled and tuned, running at peak efficiency, and will continue running on past the abolition of man himself (C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength ), digitized and perpetually stored as a memory layer in a self-generating computer algorithm. The story of your students who did manage to learn to think won't even have to be passworded.
Sorry, the author starts with a false premise. The bedrock of civilized behavior is MORALS and SELF-RESTRAINT.
Interesting post. Thanks.
If there is a philosophical Atlas who carries the whole of Western civilization on his shoulders, it is Aristotle.
Aristotle’s philosophy was the intellect’s Declaration of Independence. Aristotle, the father of logic, should be given the title of the world’s first intellectual, in the purest and noblest sense of that word.
For Aristotle, the good life is one of personal self-fulfillment. Man should enjoy the values of this world. Using his mind to the fullest, each man should work to achieve his own happiness here on earth. And in the process he should be conscious of his own value. Pride, writes Aristotle—a rational pride in oneself and in one’s moral character—is, when it is earned, the “crown of the virtues.”
A proud man does not negate his own identity. He does not sink selflessly into the community. He is not a promising subject for the Platonic state.
Throughout history the influence of Aristotle’s philosophy (particularly of his epistemology) has led in the direction of individual freedom, of man’s liberation from the power of the state . . . Aristotle (via John Locke) was the philosophical father of the Constitution of the United States and thus of capitalism . . . it is Plato and Hegel, not Aristotle, who have been the philosophical ancestors of all totalitarian and welfare states, whether Bismarck’s, Lenin’s or Hitler’s.
There is no future for the world except through a rebirth of the Aristotelian approach to philosophy. This would require an Aristotelian affirmation of the reality of existence, of the sovereignty of reason, of life on earth—and of the splendor of man.
Ayn Rand
Reason & logic. The building blocks of your mind, of your future, of civilization.
Bookmark
https://youtu.be/28uPtl5sWVI?t=4189, queued from a 5 hour interview at 1'09''49sec.
Aristotle vs. Jean Jacques Rousseau
On a related theme, Mark Levin’s “Life, Liberty and Levin” was a great show last night. The first half was an interview of Dr. John Ellis who talked about the takeover by the left of all education in the United States. His second quest was Dr. Tim Groseclose who talked about what has happened with journalism and how it got to this state.
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6166221789001#sp=show-clips This is a 10 minute clip of the interview of Dr. Ellis.
https://www.foxnews.com/shows/life-liberty-levin A 7 minute interview of Dr. Groseclose.
The stupidest ideas are believed wholeheartedly by the most intelligent, most educated people, a barbed bait on a steel piano wire swallowed wholesale, cast by an enemy who will give you 99 truths just to get you to believe 1 lie.
Takeover of higher education by cultural communist Frankfurt School, in today’s news agenda item #8 of 11, “an unreliable legal system favoring criminals & disfavoring victims”, thru “the New Left’s” Herbert Marcuse, author of “partisan tolerance” only of approved ideas, excluding the traditional western civilization lore basis of families and happy individuals in manipulation-proof human relationships. All under control of today’s Oligarchs.
To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead
Thomas Paine
America was created during the age of Enlightenment, which is a product of Aristotle, and is being ruined by Kant and the post Kantians who reject Aristotle
(The orientation towards "start of work" in late childhood, we have turned upside down: full, vigorous literacy can be conveyed in 40 hours of instruction, according to John Taylor Gatto, and full numeracy in 42 hours, easily attainable in a population with a great deal of free time in winter and spans of time between the busy seasons of the agricultural pursuit. Their actual orientation was not for independent Yankees to go to college, which was oriented toward training for Religious Minstry, but for people to be guaranteed that they would not be "employees" of a master, but Independent Business Owners.)
Thomas Paine's Common Sense is taught now in post-graduate university seminars. In that time, it sold 650,000 copies to a populace of 2.3 million, most of whom we would misjudge as "only having attended the 3rd grade". That means that the common populace were able to comprehend a politically sophisticated pamphlet, which it takes a degree in "Political Science" to understand today.
We have been brainwashed by more than a century of compulsory, universal public education. We have no idea what our true history is.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. – Aristotle
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