Maybe H.L. Mencken was onto something when he wrote the following: “The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda – a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.” I think that he must have been onto something, because lately, whenever someone in academia introduces contaminants into the echo-chamber, the rest of the institution reacts like a supercharged immune system, attacking the new and foreign idea in the hope of killing it off before it spreads, thereby purifying the sterile echo-chamber.
h/t Mike.
We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control.
Education has always been about ‘indoctrinating’ the youth. The only thing that has changed is the material being pushed. In times past the indoctrination was promoting the cultural traditions of the society now it is exactly the opposite.
Very good article, most enjoyable read. From the day the Aristocracy first decided it was expedient to educate the peasants,the object was to educate them properly,so they believed and adhered to the “right” thoughts.
They had to control us and keep us obedient,and grateful to them for their magnificence and munificence,so that when it became necessary to the survival of the aristocracy, we would gladly offer ourselves up as cannon fodder to preserve the system,their system.
I remember being taught to repeat this little litany in early grade school,”I am a proud Canadian,and a loyal British subject”. And,as I lived in a small, poverty stricken Prairie town,”there is nothing wrong with being poor,as long as you’re honest”.
No one ever mentioned that you didn’t have to be poor, just that there was nothing “wrong” with it.
Over my lifetime,I’ve seen changes I couldn’t have imagined when young, and I can’t say it’s for the better. “A smart man with a good education can be a wonderful thing,but a stupid man with a higher education is still a stupid man.”
My WW2 veteran and career Army Captain, Uncle once told me that when I was young. I didn’t believe him at the time,now I realize I was being gifted with the experience of an older and wiser man.
Apart from the real degrees,which lead to a career as a contributing person, what exactly,is the purpose of “safe spaces”, “triggering”,etc., and useless degrees in studies that the government has to invent employment opportunities to keep the graduates out of the fast food industry?
The Education system has become just another boondoggle,like the Indian industry,the Social Justice industry, the Environmental industry, all exist to maintain themselves, providing little,if any benefit to the taxpayers who are forced to support them.
Which is why I would like to see teachers executed, instead of getting a pension.
Right to die always becomes duty.
Obviously you would increase their salary while they were teaching – to make things fair.
Yes, Joe education is to some extent supposed to be “indoctrination.” But on some level isn’t everything?
But in the case of our education system, the supposed indoctrination used to be in accordance with the values of the people supporting the system, not at odds, or in fact determined to stamp out thought that makes radical idiots (usually underachievers I’ve found) “uncomfortable.”
Which you do at your own expense; then they get to make you uncomfortable at your expense. A young lady just blew a big hole in that system with her serious infraction that, though never reported or complained, required a hearing to straighten her out on pronouns and targeting words.
Mencken is a solid teacher with his warning of political hobgoblins gobbling up our money and freedom with fake fear.
Personally imho they’ve sunk lower than a con artist. Witness the latest nonsense the Dems are peddling about Trump’s tax reform. Fake news. They’re getting handed their asses because he waged the political equivalent of guerilla war against them and their establishment BS.
Of course they will act with shrillness, contempt and malevolence. They, Hillary case in point, have no comeback other than any doctrinal disagreement is racism, or sexism or whatever terrible, horrible triggering.
The key to understanding them is progressivism is simply Marxism, without the khaki; for the time being that is. The US Marxists, like any good totalitarians, believe the Democrat party and the state are one. For domestic relevance and the usual tactics, insert Liberals/CBC et al.
Trump has no right to change that, so the voters must have been fooled according to the ad nauseum Hillary temper tantrum. If you’re not a good little party player like the deep state media, reduced to headline by rumour, you don’t belong and must be removed.
The Dems still think they’re going to impeach Trump. All it will take is to recapture the House and get 2/3 of the Senate (an impossibility in 2018?). Actually what they want is what they’re doing right now; discredit and demean Trump at every turn and obfuscate and manipulate date with a compliant spitting media in tow.
Same old same old. If the US economy keeps going well, the left will resort to sputtering how they caused it all with their “open government;” to which the obvious retort would be then take the blame, instead of pinning it on Dubya, for sub 3% growth for Obama’s entire presidency.
They, like our Grits grifting for power in 2015, hope for (invent) economic decline to fuel their political prospects. Sort of says it all doesn’t it.
Oh not in for that? Better to launch an non popular insurgency? Hmm. Time to purge the entire top echelon of the deep state. “They” will shriek? Let them. Why should the Leninists have all the fun anyway?
As a former educator myself, I’m completely disgusted with the system.
My disenchantment started soon after I began grad studies. I got roped into representing my colleagues at the department meetings and that’s when I learned the meaning of the term “academic sandbox”. While I was an undergrad, I always thought of academe as a club of scholarly ladies and gentlemen. What I saw in those meetings was nothing of the sort. There were times when debates became so heated that fistfights nearly broke out.
I wrote it off as simply how things were done in that department. A few years later, I worked as a research assistant at a different university. I began thinking that what I saw earlier might be typical of the system.
Then I began teaching at a certain institution….. I left that job over 15 years ago.
I think the uncomfortable truth is that examples of idiocracy are as common in the non-STEM hallways and classrooms of higher education as they are in the shopping aisles at Walmart.
Considering what passes for university education these days – a system that leaves its students financially, emotionally and intellectually crippled – the descent of academia is actually a more shameful fall in standards. Humanities and social science graduates and professors from the past would be more shocked at the intellectual degeneration of the highly educated class than that of the lower class. See Real Peer Review or Campus Reform for examples.
The quirks and failings of the lower classes would be nearly identical now as they were 100-500 years ago. In fact, time travelers from the past might be impressed at how the lower classes are healthier, more peaceful and better fed than in their era. I’m sure they’d quickly realize that one hardworking janitor or one average IQ mechanic or plumber is far more valuable and useful to society than 100 postmodern grievance studies graduates.
The best way to prevent a postmodern idiocracy is to not argue against the “Don’t have kids!!” narrative developed by progressive activists and taught as gospel to non-STEM students.
Whenever the practitioners of any discipline become insulated from the fallout of their job performance, this sort of drift happens.
Think gov’t workers, reserve government, etc.
If you look into history (not just aristocratic Greek here, but even early prairie settlements) when a group of citizens – maybe 4-10 families – hired an individual to teach their children, if they did not like the results, they simply fired the teacher, and recruited a new one.
Too many teachers think they are the experts, who know better than the parents do what is best for their kids. And unfortunately, through relentless media propaganda, there are many parents who are onside with the teachers now.
I taught for many years. Whenever a new bozo theory came forward, the voice of “wisdom” in the staffroom intoned “Of course, the first thing we need to do is educate the parents.”
Total lack of humility, and total lack of regard for the parents, many of whom were far more intelligent and accomplished than the staffroom pundits, and many of whom simply wanted the best for their own kids, rather than using their kids as a foil so some teacher could look “progressive” and maybe get in line for the next Central Office job.
Those teachers were totally insulated from the consequences of their actions. A kid who could not read or do basic math or had no work ethic – no skin off the teacher’s teeth, so long as the kid felt good during the only year that teacher saw him or her. Parents had recourse, but the teachers knew that most would never take it.
But just in case…..
There is always the constant misinformation barrage from teacher groups leveled at private schools and home schooling.
at the risk of sounding arrogant, my peers could not be indoctrinated into anything.
“Of course, the first thing we need to do is educate the parents.”
In some cases, that’s warranted. I dealt with the results of parents who thought their kiddies were geniuses and that I, as their instructor, was denying them their bright shiny future.
No, sir, no, madame, your “genius” child comes across as a lazy, self-entitled idiot. My job is to help get him or her ready for the real world which, considering how you’ve wrapped them in cotton wool throughout their lives, will eat them alive without thinking about it.
Very true, but that line was not used (in my hearing, anyway) to justify laying a little common sense or personal discipline out there… it was always used to justify some left wing idea that the majority of caring parents would not want.
But you are right…. it is no longer a case of common sense parents vs airhead loon teachers. Many parents have now adopted those same airhead theories. With predictable results.
We only have to look at the present leaders of Canada to realize what a hopeless situation we are facing in trying to correct this problem. The ex-Minister of Education of Ontario who is now the Premier and her Deputy Minister of Education were instrumental in rewriting the Ontario Education curriculum to their advantage. They were not alone and are only an example of how widespread this ‘new’ indoctrination has become. The unrelenting claptrap that we have been exposed to everyday for the last twenty or thirty years has finally taken over. How else can you explain that there are six, eight or ten genders, that imposing a carbon tax will reduce the earth’s temperature, that if you kill your enemies they win. For too long we have sat on the side lines and allowed the so-called intelligentsia a free rein because they were the supposed experts. We are now in a very divided society because of this, and the final outcome whatever it may be is not going to be pretty.
Sadly, many parents don’t get involved with what their children are studying. Let me give you a related example.
Before I quit my teaching job, I bought a reflecting telescope from a colleague in another department. Apparently her daughter insisted that she had to have one for Christmas the year before and Mommy and Daddy granted the kid her wish.
It didn’t take long before she lost interest after she got it. I suspect that she had expected to see Hubble-quality views through it and, considering that it was only a 100 mm diameter, 400 mm focal length instrument, she didn’t see them. (It’s great for lunar astronomy plus I’ve seen the cloud bands of Jupiter and Saturn’s rings with it.)
What was disappointing that neither of her parents knew anything about astronomy and didn’t appear to want to learn anything about it. The result was that the telescope gathered dust until I bought it and took it home. It took me a while to get it re-aligned, though I’m not sure if I ever got it to work properly.
Had her parents taken an interest in what she was doing with it, she might have become an amateur astronomer by now. Sad, isn’t it? Well, at least the telescope has a good home now and I take it outside once in a while.
It’s called re-education by the biggest collectives – government and government-funded academia – the world has ever known.
Mao would be proud.
Well, yes, I’m still teaching at 70.
I was raised in situational poverty on the farm, did 18 months in Viet-Nam and Cambodia, and worked full time (double shifts on weekends) to put myself through university.
About that execution thing – you can try, skeezix. You can try.
Merry Christmas, eh.
There are two sides to this equation as most here know. Both incompetent parents as likewise incompetent teachers.
As stated above, the role of parents upon deciding a teacher’s competence has been sadly eroded to the point of failure, though the big picture tells us that the education system as stands is no more than a symptom of the failure of our social order.
The problem lies in the simple fact that we Westerners as a social construct refuse to recognize and sustain the values and therefore roles that were given us at birth and to act them out accordingly as was intended should you believe in a higher order which, to my way of thinking is an imperative to societal wellbeing.
Regardless of whether or not you believe in a god, it is imperative as a society to do so or that society’s long term survival is at stake.
Mankind as an entity is a fallible creature who suffers delusions of grandeur when left to his own devices. He is an imperfect creature who constantly harbours the distorted belief that he is the ONE in control of all he gazes upon. Therefore by that construct he delusionally eludes the system of checks and balances that belief in a higher being instill upon his psyche.
In short we are not fit to govern ourselves accordingly as we allow our emotional shortcomings to overshadow our concepts of right and wrong, just or unjust.
WE are not the GOD so many moderns fervently want to believe is the case nor is it our right as mere mortals to make the big decisions as regards the course of natural things.
Women on the whole need to be at home. Their role in the nature of things is that of the nurturer, while the man’s role should be that of the warrior and hunter.
Like it or not that is the physics of the equation and no amount of intellectualization will change that construct.
Children need mothers at home, just as women and those children need warrior husbands to act as the gatekeeper at the front door. Neither role is superior to the other and both are the glue that binds the family/society into a cohesive entity.
In our constant striving to be relevant in a world of diminishing relevancy, we have allowed ourselves to become worshippers of objects at the expense of all else.
This distraction of core values most certainly have caused us to lose sight of what is really important in a cohesive society… things such as the timely replacing of those whose lives have reached their climax, a good and meaningful understanding of contributing both monetarily and intellectually…and I might add spiritually to the collective good of the social order.
Technology (as we subscribe to it), is a two edged sword that shouldn’t be allowed to replace a ‘sense of worth’ that comes through gainful employment and its pending benefits ,both to the well being of the individual, that which leads to self esteem of achieving a worth while life contribution to both one’s self and society as a whole and to the lower social costs of a more contented society that doesn’t play the reactionary game brought on by the foibles of man’s imperfect nature.
I realize that these words can be misconstrued as a utopian dream but I have to note that we cannot go on as we are for it is plain to any looking that we will not survive much longer on this present course.
Perhaps a return to a simpler way of thinking, with a better value system based on basic Christian values is what is needed…then again perhaps it is too late.
One would hope that is not the case.
SSC
Antenor: I agree totally and we have ONE as our Canadian PM Sock Puppet, he believes the BUDGET WILL BALANCE ITSELF!!! And NO consequences will come of the LIES he and FINANCE Minster Morneau have committed. We as Canadians have to stand up and VOTE THE LIE BRALS OUT IN 2019!!
AC: I do agree but then we have had parents that don’t want THEIR child to suffer a FAILURE OF ANY KIND…whether it be in school or life. The teachers have been told to lighten up so they push the pupil through school, what do they learn from this….nothing, but I WANT. It’s all about THEM and so they go to University and the pupil learns, if I have a temper tantrum I can more of what I WANT. The pupils have never had any DISCIPLINE at home or school, so how do we expect them to do in a work environment. The sad thing about this is they think this is NORMAL…to take what they want all their lives without any recourse! This is why we need CORE VALUES in our Canadian society and at home. To have Christian values is a plus. But with the immigrants coming in and allowed to keep the core values of the country they came from will kill our Canadian core values, as well as the Christian core values. AS IS HAPPENING IN OUR SOCIETY NOW….OUR FREEDOMS BEING TAKEN AWAY BIT BY BIT!!! GOD HELP US!!!!
Mencken was a smart man but he’s being kinda silly here. A school, like any institution, can be a means of indoctrinating. Education does not imply that.
You better learn to engage the Higher Institutions because they are absolutely the commanding heights of culture. Any cultural-political force that abandons that for its enemies in favor of a Peon’s Army is doomed.
https://www.weaselzippers.us/368613-canadian-government-website-santa-is-moving-to-the-south-pole/
Does it matter. The Chinese will out do you in everything – so your children really don’t matter.
Quite a few countries will cease to matter as well.
I have noted that many young people arrive at post-secondary institutions with a bit of knowledge and a few smarts, but they graduate with none of that. The profs beat that out of them and we are left with a gaggle of leftist fools who can vote.
they graduate with none of that. The profs beat that out of them
Not all of them.
I believed in giving my students an education. Instead, I was ordered by my superiors to give them “training” or some such nonsense.
I was told to never go into first principles when presenting a new concept or equation. Instead, I was to simply “show them the formula and how to use it”. That’s not teaching–that’s programming or, as some people might put it, indoctrination.
My parents often spoke of their apprenticeships and how they learned things that often had no direct bearing on how they would practice their trades as journeymen. For example, my father often referred to his master’s ideas about what contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire (too much copper in the alloys used to make their swords, apparently). My mother learned about medieval and Renaissance fashion, which explained why modern-day clothing is designed the way it is.
As a machinist, my father likely didn’t worry about the copper content in Roman swords, but he understood that the composition of a metal was important and that changing the amount of a certain constituent could significantly alter that material’s physical characteristics.
Whenever my mother sewed something, she often made sketches of what she thought it would look like, remembering that each part of that article of clothing had a purpose, and that part may have first been used hundreds of years ago.
Similarly, I wanted my students to understand that the equations I presented didn’t come out of thin air. I often emphasized that they were often derived by people who had about the same education and abilities as they did.
Unfortunately, someone would start whining about my doing that and I’d get hauled into the department head’s office to be reprimanded for doing so. I was often reminded that my sole purpose in being there was to make my students “successful” and to “get them through” so that they could BS their way into a cushy job of their choice.
Eventually, I quit my teaching position. I simply didn’t see any point in my being there.
The Purpose of Schooling – John Taylor Gatto
https://youtu.be/eeEWPbTad_Q