Friday, July 14, 2017

High Schools as Indoctrination Mills

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12 comments:

James said...

Been a problem for a long long time. They are now just getting very public about their (teachers and admint) behavior. The end answer of course is to cut the money and the libs know that and that is why they fighting so hard 1) to get as many indocced as possible before the end and 2) sort of a pre-empt campaign for the inevitable.
This really goes back to the classic problem that people who disagree face. Should I resist publicly and give heart to others and face the consequences or stay quiet and prepare for the conflict without being known and of course leaving an escape hatch if it all goes bad. I think in general the US public has for 40+yrs followed the second course. You could see hints of it here and there (home schooling, prop 13 Cali,Tea Party, etc), but then came Trump. He has given a people the courage to come out, whether it's enough now I don't know.
The Left is dying and they (at least subconsciously) know it. By constructing this huge edifice over the country and getting the tax payer to fund it they've had a 40+yr party, but it's coming to an end. The pols may not have the courage to cut the funding and the Left may be able to politically force the populace to keep funding for a while more, but we are running out of money and they are running out of time.

James said...

Oh yeah, a prediction (actually an easy one) it will be politically profitable to run against the education system for at least the next ten years.

trigger warning said...

American primary and secondary public education - and the soil in which it grows, college and university schools of education - is largely in thrall to the educational philosophies of John Dewey, a man who was greatly impresssed by late 1920s Bolshevist-run schools in the Soviet Union. The goal of those schools was indoctrination of Marxist collective ideology. The only American escape from this poisonous approach is private educatio (including homeshooling).

"The traditional customs and institutions of the peasant, his small tracts, his three-system farming, the influence of home and Church, all work automatically to create in him an individualistic ideology. In spite of the greater inclination of the city worker towards collectivism, even his social environment works adversely in many respects. Hence the great task of the school is to counteract and transform those domestic and neighborhood tendencies that are still so strong, even in a nominally collectivistic rĂ©gime.”
--- John Dewey

James said...

TW,
Was that the Dewey of the Dewey Decimal System?

trigger warning said...

J: Melville Dewey. Different guy. Anti-Semite.

sestamibi said...

I lived in the Twin Cities for eight years and working in Edina for three. It used to be a very whitebread wealthy (but corporate wealthy--the real huge money was out at Lake Minnetonka in places like Wayzata and Excelsior), but the nice apartments and homes back then are getting old and becoming occupied by illegals as well. I am not surprised to read something like this.

James said...

TW: Thanks. I always knew that decimal guy was bad business, just didn't realize how bad.

Ares Olympus said...

Edina is first ring surburb, older, and relatively small houses, but high demand among upper middle class families, and surely for their school district. Of course reputations are about what the school was like in the past rather than present.

I'm not overly convinced by the hearsay here, and as Rush Limbaugh taught me, "Never trust facts from people with causes", so we can assume some exaggerations here.

A good thing about America is school districts are very local things, and so complaining needs to be done to the school board if you want change, and if the school board isn't responsive, that's where school choice comes in.

Of course if Edina is like 90% liberal, and that's highly possible, they might be happy if the last 10% conservatives remove their kids with as little fuss as possible. Maybe liberals don't really care about diversity like they claim?

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Good to hear that the Leftist seminaries (universities and colleges) have taken their catechetics to the parish level: the local public school districts. There the more-enlightened educlergy can certainly do the most good, by rescuing all these children from their stupid parents who don't know any better... freeing them from religion, superstition and ignorance. Nice little racket, eh? And you don't have to own up to anything because you're always smarter, better and more moral than everyone else. Great game.

As I've said before, the only answer we have to this totalitarianism is our refusal. Our power lies in saying "No." we don't need a reason, we don't have to justify ourselves and play their game. A firm "No" is ample. "No" is a complete sentence.

Let color come back into the world.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

To James' point, I suspect Trump's greatest gift is going to be his giving us the permission to boldly fight back. You can't fight on their terms. No way... not the way the board is set right now. You have to take it to them in the simplest terms -- using terms everyone can understand -- in order to bring the wider population along. The elites have already been converted, and have betrayed the people they sentimentally claim to love and protect. Speak In terms the elites understand, and you will fail. They command that field of open-space, set-piece battles of logic and "reason."

Our cultural problem is not an intellectual problem. It's a spiritual problem. The rot goes deep. Engage it on a heady level no you will fail miserably. Simplify and define your terms, you're good. If they try to define or pretzel your terms, you just say "No." I know it doesn't sound intellectually delicious, but the absolute relativism of today's faux intellect is bankrupt and unworthy of engagement. Dumb it down. Fight back. Look at how they're reacting to Trump. Wouldn't you love it if they were reacting that way to you? Perhaps not, but that's why it's a time for courage.

As Aristotle said, courage is the most important of the virtues, as it makes all the others possible.

James said...

IAC,
You're right. Fight on your enemies terms and you are dead. Intellectually they will do or say anything, kinda like in Alice in Wonderland and the word means what ever I want it to mean.

HMS Defiant said...

I watched the delcine of my local high school through zillow. Watching the school's graduation numbers, test results, etc, decline rather drastically over the last 6 years was pretty easy to spot. You will never ever guess what demographic numbers changed by over 30% over those years. Not in a million years. It doesn't help that this place is still a powerful center of old America and the parents that could, took their kids out of the public high school and put them private schools for their last 4 years.

It's sad but it is also interesting to see how this kind of thing happens. On our second superiintendent and 3rd principal. Like democracy. It's not the leaders who are failing, it's the students and their parent.