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The aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. … Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim … is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is the aim in the United States and that is its aim everywhere else. – H. L. Mencken
All you have to do is look at what is going on at today's college campuses to realize the accuracy of Mencken's century-old observation. Conformity and obedience are what is being taught by today's educational establishment. It may not be the conformity of the "squares" that Mencken envisioned, but it is just as rigid.
That goes for our K-12 system as well. The trans madness and sexualization of children sweeping the public school system is evidence of that. One has to go no further than this last week's headlines. Five female athletes in a West Virginia public school were suspended from future athletics for refusing to compete with a boy pretending to be a girl. That is not education. It is indoctrination.
There are signs of revolt against this forced conformity to the weird ideology of the left. Not just the West Virginia schoolgirls who rebelled against competing with a boy. The fraternities are now counter-protesting the pro-terrorist activists supporting Hamas on campus. Such activities are to be encouraged.
Discussion (6)
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It's not working as well in America as it is in other Western nations:
via Visual Capitaist's Nick Routley,
Specifically, this dataset aggregates confidence in multiple national institutions, including the military, the judicial system, the national government, and the integrity of the electoral system.
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Be unique! Just like everyone else.
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I want schools to encourage normality, not necessarily conformity. At this point, many people in charge of schools seem hostile to normality.
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My wife is a parochial school teacher. She is among the last of a couple of generations of overqualified Catholic women who were largely underpaid but made the system work well. My first grade teacher was a nun and a high school pal of my mother. Mom said she was always a brilliant student (majored in math) yet here she was teaching with a lot of love and energy in elementary school. ( I recall giving her a hug on the last day of first grade saying that I did not want to go to second grade. I was right--life really was a lot less fun after Sister Merita.)
Educational bureaucrats have made hiring such people impossible. Education courses are required. And no one with any semblance of intellectual life wants that. "Standards" are mostly about uniform mediocrity. I once heard one county official say that a major goal was that every sixth grader in every school would be covering the same material on the same day every day-- and he was not North Korean.
A few years ago, the parochial school system in the DC area diocese adopted a mandatory system of gratuitous measures they borrowed from the public school system in Indiana. It was proudly announced at the time of deployment that this system was the "third-best" in the country. It was never explained (a) why opt for number three and (b) who thought that "third-best" was a great selling point. This system required teachers to spend an inordinate amount of recording which goals, fixed categories etc were involved in each of today's lessons. How this data was of any use to real teachers is a mystery. It was dropped after a couple of years due to complaints and widespread noncompliance.
Education majors are invariably a low SAT demographic and naturally among the first to decry the use of such tests. And they are the least equipped to question woke dogma. Combine that with the increased bureaucratization of every part of life and it is no surprise that our kids are increasingly illiterate, amoral, culturally empty and so devoid of substance they can be turned into Hamas cheerleaders overnight.
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Attempting to educate human beings using a proto-industrial mass production system is perverse, and leads to the perversion of the concept of “education” and the capture of the system by ideologues. Perhaps technology will soon enable it to be dismantled- or, at least, ignored - and the most vulnerable in society will be liberated from this cruelest of suppressions.
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