Posted on 12/26/2002 7:41:11 PM PST by Congressman Billybob
I think y'all will appreciate this one.
BB / JCA
They'd rather pretend that the kids are learning.
Want to be really humbled? Pick up and try to understand Steven Hawkings' book, "The Universe in a Nutshell." If you are a grad physicist, you can understand a bit of it, maybe. I was stunned.
There's no argument that a dumbing-down has taken place, and no argument that it's a serious matter. Thomas Sowell, Charles Sykes, Martin Anderson, Roger Kimball, and others have written penetratingly on it. However, any attack on the problem must confront things that no one particularly wants to grapple with: the demographics, institutions and process incentives that gave rise to this moronification of America.
You're probably thinking "why would conservatives be afraid to wrestle with the government-run school system? Isn't that one of the usual grists for our mill?" Yes, it is, but virtually no one tackles the thing around the waist. The heart of the matter, addressed directly, makes us look like hate-filled, racist, sexist conspiratorialists, so we tend to avoid it.
Instead of my usual circumlocuitous approach, I'm going to deal with the matter directly. That way, everyone can be shocked to the gills and get over it all at the same time, and we can all go back to pretending that there's nothing wrong that a few quick fixes like vouchers wouldn't cure, just in time to get smashed for the New Year.
1. The government takeover of education, which began in the 19th century, was not because traditional private American education was failing its mission, but because it was far too successful. It answered to the desires of parents that their children be taught, not indoctrinated. It produced young men and women capable of standing straight, thinking straight, and looking out for themselves. More often than not, a school was founded on a religious basis, and incorporated the tenets of that religion in its policies and curricula. Parents were likely to choose a school partly on the basis of its religious orientation.
Horace Mann and his fellows wanted a government school system as an instrument for religious culling, and for inculcating a collectivist ethic in the populace, generation by generation. (His statements about the desirability of eliminating private academies give testament to this.) The rapid emergence of "teachers' colleges" whose mission was to produce instructors for government-school classrooms was a part of this thrust.
2. The combination of compulsory attendance laws and state regulation of the schools under a facade of "local control" created an interest group -- the "educrats" -- whose major goals were, if not diametrically opposed to educating children in the traditional sense, at the best did not regard that as a high priority. Preservation of their jobs and the promotion of their status in society mattered far more, and still does. Whenever any supposed mission of government schools seems to compete with advancing their personal and occupational interests, the educrats sacrifice it without hesitation -- and that includes the interests of parents and children.
3. This created a "part filter" that acts to enhance the standing and well-being of teachers, administrators, and bureaucrats who promote the educratic agenda, while puting a definite pressure on genuinely learning-oriented persons to leave the occupation, or at least leave the system for the private alternatives.
4. The educrats quickly "discovered" -- really it was a matter of the process incentives, rather than a conscious discovery -- that they would progress faster toward their goals by concentrating their attention on politics rather than education. Political power has an innate centralizing tendency, so the notion of "local control" quickly became quite formal and meaningless. True authority over curricula, policies, spending rules, hiring and firing, and all other important aspects of the State's education system was pulled upward into the state capitals and "departments of education."
5. Imposition of ever more elaborate schooling requirements by the state capitals accelerated school spending rapidly, which served several purposes:
6. After World War II, the addition of really large-scale social engineering missions (e.g., racial integration, assimilation of immigrants, elimination of distinctions between the genders, etc.) to the schools all but destroyed the possibility that they could perform any classical educational function. How can one educate, even with the best will in the world, if half one's students don't speak English, or regard the classroom as a place of confinement rather than opportunity, or feel no obligation to maintain classroom decorum?
7. Concerning the ascendancy of educrat notions such as "self-esteem uber alles" and their pernicious effects on what remained of the educational ethic, it is unnecessary to comment.
The critical fact to keep in mind is that the educrats regard the current state of affairs as satisfactory, even excellent. It gives them what they want: cushy, high-status jobs (1200 labor hours per year, on average) at salaries well above the national average, with low or no performance expectations, and with political shielding from any adverse consequences of their decisions.
There are some blots on their triumph, of course. Some schools are dangerous to the body as well as the mind, and the educrats have taken some casualties from this. However, this also has political uses in enhancing educratic prestige, by allowing them to don the mantle of selfless warriors who'll brave shot and shell in their devotion to our children.
The part filter has grown stronger, and its pores finer, over the years. At this point, one will find essentially no good teachers or decent individuals in the system's bastions, and few even in its marches. Every government school anywhere is under the yoke, required by law to promulgate certain creeds and practices regardless of their veracity or the effects on their students (e.g., busing for racial balance, sex education, classroom inclusion even for the unfit). The supposed virtues of the school systems of well-to-do suburbs, to which better-heeled families flee, are entirely comparative, and largely cosmetic.
The above undoubtedly sounds harsh. It is, however, the truth. Worse yet is to come.
Political power has had many uses for the schools as instruments of propaganda. Mostly, the propaganda has been "to the left," as anyone who's ever had to fight a "global studies" teacher's tendentious presentation of the United States as an evil oppressor will attest. But the schools have also been indispensable in nurturing something that all rulers and would-be rulers love: a climate of fear.
Think about the number of ways in which a government school creates fear. It teaches fear: sociopolitical, economic, ecological. It encourages fear in tangential ways, by emphasizing racial, ethnic and gender conflicts rather than effacing them. It even makes us fear one another within its very walls.
Imagine this: you're a typical young American of ten years of age, confined to fifth-grade classrooms for six or seven hours per day. To get to them, you have to pass through a "combat zone" that might extend a mile or more, in which gangs and rogue elements fight a continuous battle for control of the school neighborhood. Then you have to pass through metal detectors nominally designed to screen out weaponry, but this merely reminds you that knives and guns make it into the school every day. At the end of the day, there's that combat zone to be negotiated again before you're safe at home.
Some of your classmates are several years older than you are, are much larger and stronger than you, have no interest in learning anything, and regard force and intimidation as perfectly acceptable ways to get whatever they want, from you or others. Some might not even share a language with you. They do largely as they please, which might well include the routine commission of major felonies on school grounds.
The teacher can't discipline these classmates of yours. The school and our society have policies that protect them from any serious consequences of their actions. They have a legal right to be where they are, disrupting what they like, threatening what they like, and lording it over the rest of you. Their parents, if they have any, are indisposed to take a hand in correcting them. Other forces will scream "racism," "ethnicism," or "sexism" if you even speak out against it -- and they have friends, some in high places, who can make the consequences even more unpleasant.
If you aren't gripped by fear under conditions such as these, check your pulse; it's a good bet that you're dead already.
Though the educrats themselves are probably not fond of this kind of fear -- it cuts across several of their social-engineering agendas -- other political forces love it. It helps to sustain a climate of uncertainty and conflict in which everyone looks to the State for protection. The powers that be have no real incentive to undo it, and reap several major benefits from permitting it to continue.
No one planned this aspect of the government schools, but now that it's this way, it's very useful to a number of forces that are difficult to oppose. Some of those forces are right out in the open, such as the black-separatist movement, the Hispanic-nationalist movement, and the Democratic Party.
It's not possible to reform something whose innate incentives are perverse enough to have produced this result. Nor is it possible, given the "public choice" dynamics of all political action, merely to legislate a set of curatives and consider the job done. As long as the system exists, it will be a magnet for the worst men in the world: those who seek to bend young minds to their own agendas, whether out of a misguided sense of mission, as a route to wealth and power, or from a simple pleasure in victimizing the helpless.
After a century and a half of maneuvering and the operation of inexorable incentives imbedded in the government school system, we have reached the educrats' end game. Our children leave school just as ignorant as they entered, if not worse, and sometimes morally ruined. They who are responsible for this devastation are legally untouchable, protected by a system as impervious as the civil service. Their adjuncts in the larger society will rally to their defense at the slightest hint of a threat to their standing. No politician, no matter how conservative, dares speak the truth about them -- and many politicians regard them as a useful stick with which to beat us down and keep us cowed.
We outside the educrats' circles are left with only one move. Only one "reform" can possibly work: to leave the government schools empty. Eventually, to close them down, rescuing not only our children but our money from the maw of this evil machine.
Sauve qui peut!
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason:
http://www.palaceofreason.com
Outstanding congressman! Out-'forking'-standing!
The way a writer knows that he's covered his subject well and struck a nerve, is by the responses. My editor at United Press International also thought this was my best and most provocative column to date.
It's danged near impossible to hit the mark every week. It is sufficient to try for it every week and to succeed at least once a month. Thank you for confirming by your passionate response, that this was this month's success story.
Congressman Billybob
As the man formerly known as Al Gore said, my book, "to Restore Trust in America"
Free Republic is dedicated to reversing the trend of unconstitutional government expansion and is advocating a complete restoration of our constitutional republic.
To remedy this problem, Only half would vote for Constitution - contact your U.S. House of Representatives referencing the joint resolution and request that Dr. Richard Ferrier, President of the Declaration Foundation, be included in the White House Forum on American History, Civics and Service, to be held in February 2003, which will focus on discussions of new policies to improve the teaching of history and civics in elementary and secondary schools, colleges and universities. Current and Recent News
See Administration Cites Recent Surveys Showing Lack Of Basic Knowledge Of U.S. History
WEll, we gotta get rid of the income tax and the IRS, too, if we want to Take America Back.
So many priorities,,,, So little time.
Nice work, John.
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