Why Are They Woke?

American Greatness ^ | June 23, 2021 | Victor Davis Hanson

[Heartlander]

Why Are They Woke?

The systemic con behind wokeism.

There are lots of reasons why wokeism spread like wildfire once America lost its collective mind during the pandemic, quarantine, self-induced recession, and rioting of 2020.

Wokeism was never really about racism, sexism, or other -isms. Instead, for some, it illustrated a psychological pathology of projection: fobbing one’s own concrete prejudices onto others in order to alleviate or mask them.

So should we laugh or cry that Black Lives Matter’s self-described Marxist co-founder turns out to be a corporate grifter? Patrisse Cullors has accumulated several upscale homes and is under investigation by the IRS for allegations of the misuse of funds from one of her foundations.

Is it the case that the more Cullors professes Marxist ideology and damns toxic whiteness, so all the more she feels at home living in a $1.4 million Topanga Canyon home, in an almost exclusively ritzy white neighborhood?

Consider outspoken liberal icon Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). He’s one of the Senate’s most woke. Yet Whitehouse turns out to be a mostly unapologetic member of a de facto all-white prestigious “beach club” of elites in Newport, Rhode Island. Is Whitehouse committed in the abstract to rooting out white privilege so he can concretely relax amid it with fellow bluebloods?

Barack and Michelle Obama occasionally venture out of either their multimillion-dollar Washington, D.C. mansion or their Martha’s Vineyard estate to lecture the country on its systemic racism. They express worry over the dangers that apparently white people pose to the very safety of their own daughters.

Does such sermonizing square the circle that the Obamas have no desire to return to their Chicago home—a city where nearly 700 African-American males were murdered in 2020, the vast majority by other black men? So far, Chicago in 2021 is on a trajectory to...

[LIConFem]

Wokeism is a disease that affects the inherently evil and/or immoral. To take hold, it requires a hateful, envious and vindictive mind.

[CharlesOConnell]

The self-induced insanity college students evince long preceded high school graduation. Higher biblical critic Adolf von Harnack first “disproved” biblical miracles in the latter half of the 19th century. Protestantism lost its faith, when people cease to believe the truth, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe anything. The founders of the deliberate dumbing down movement at the very beginning of compulsory universal schooling were socialists who believed in the perfection of the world rather than perfection in the heavenly afterlife.

The names of authors blowing the whistle on secret, Deliberate Dumbing Down, are Rudolph Flesch (Why Johnny Can’t Read), Samuel Blumenfeld (Crimes of the Educators), John Taylor Gatto (Underground History of American Education), Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt (The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America) and now John Klyczek (School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education).

The issue of deliberate dumbing down, of extensive scope, is that prior to the railroads (1840), America was an outpost of personal independence from a highly stratified class system in Europe, in which, for instance, it was illegal in the 19th century to teach what Mr. Gatto termed “the active literacies” (writing and public speaking, William Cobbett was a lower class intellectual who criticized William Wilberforce for anti-slavery hypocrisy). Americans of the Colonial-Revolutionary period had a literacy rate in the high 90 percentile, were able to understand and debate Thos. Payne, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers at level unknown even to today’s Poli-Sci graduate students. They attained their literacy in 40 hours and numeracy in 42 hours of study, after which 13 year olds were expected to be pursuing self-employment and could pursue their own education with the limited resources available to them, largely the Bible, Shakespeare and Plutarch’s Lives. There are numerous anecdotes about adult acting 13 year olds like Thos Edison (Grand Trunk Railroad Gazette, best Civil War news), David Farragut (commanded captured British prize ship at 12) and John Quincy Adams (the only member of the U.S. diplomatic mission to the court of Saint Petersburg who spoke Russian, active in diplomatic negotiations, at 14). Names today of self-employment communities are the Amish and the Basque Mondragon Commune.

Mr. Gatto related how by 1880, the titans of Wall St., Morgan, Carnegie and Rockefeller, regarded the tradition of auto-didactic, small farmers, mechanic/engineers and entrepreneurs, as a lethal threat to the accumulation of investments. They had the history of a Prussian philosopher Johann Fichte who had written Addresses to the German Nation 1808-1818 to the Prussian King laying fault for the Prussian defeat to Napoleon’s motto “every corporal with a field marshall’s baton in his rucksack” (a.k.a., countermand orders from elite officer corps when local situations change), “that’s why we lost”. Mr. Gatto charmingly terms the gist, “we have to crush children’s imagination” in universal, compulsory schooling. Failed Indiana New Harmony commune leader Robert Owen had proposed deliberate dumb down to the Prussian king around 1830.

Horace Mann had 3 years to try deliberate dumbing down on the children of Boston in the late 1840s, with whole-word/look-say vs phonics, but a general uproar ensued and it was temporarily halted. It went to Washington D.C. and NY, from 1880-1920 it became the law, with police enforcement. In 1907 there were riots in New York City against the curriculum. John Dewey was funded for his experimental Lincoln School by John D. Rockefeller II, attended by his 4 younger sons Nelson, Lauarance, David and Winthrop, some of the most powerful men in history, from which they emerged with dyslexia. Dyslexia expert Dr. Samuel Orton informed university psychology department educationists in 1931 that whole-word/look-see causes deleterious brain changes in Kindergarten-Grade 3.

Prof. Anthony Esolen has contrasting sets of textbooks between 1920-1930. The Christian acceptance of the classics of Western Civilization had been the norm, going back into the 1 room school institution where elder students instructed younger ones. By 1930, it had been purged in exchange for “See Dick Run” Dick and Jane, whole-word/look-see. Dr. Seuss was recruited with a list of 238 words for children to visually memorize without phonic deciphering ability, explicitly on the model of Chinese ideograms. Their usual comment when confronted with a new word is “I can’t read that, I’ve never seen it before”.

Mr. Gatto noted that the military tested recruits in WW2 at mid-90 percentile literacy rates, low-80 in Korea, high-60 percentile in Viet Nam, now the military has difficulty getting volunteers who can read a basic newspaper article.

Mr. Gatto notes how the structure of schooling is designed to handicap children: bells, location controls, switching from 1 disconnected subject to another while not allowing project completion or drawing higher associations between subject areas, continual invasion of privacy and lack of personal time (extended by t.v. prior to the internet on cell-phones with the result that kids are cynical, cruel and disconnected from communities), arbitrary judgment and punishment-reward system for making students dependent on teachers for what to think, now how to think on the Trivium model. Students are taught to fear and envy the upper elites and despise the lower dumb kids (in the Prussian system spread by late 19th century psychology dept. chairmen, 1 in 200 students, the Alphas, were taught to regulate the others through 6 in 200 students destined to become Beta administrators).

John Klyczek (School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education), a community college adjunct professor, takes this system using Cromebooks into the period 1960-2021 with much background from Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt (The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VdkDAP8sd0

Chromebooks are used as the vehicle for the conditioning methodology of B.F. Skinner, only to give students the bare minimum of training for them to occupy employment positions in jobs they are assigned from early K-12. The system is designed to produce legions of mindless consumers and compliant employees in gigantic corporations.