It will be interesting to see, in the same way it’s interesting to see a multi-car pileup on the interstate, how the next generations function on their own when their brains are filled with goo. From Jack Cashill at americanthinker.com:
In reading the “overview” of Dr. Jill Biden’s 2006 doctoral dissertation from the University of Delaware, I am reminded just how rotten, from top to bottom, are America’s schools of graduate education. That a doctor of anything could write a sentence like the one that follows speaks to the historic worthlessness of most graduate programs in education:
Three quarters of the class will be Caucasian; one quarter of the class will be African American; one seat will hold a Latino; and the remaining seats will be filled with students of Asian descent or non-resident aliens.
An advisory committee had to approve this mumbo-jumbo. Apparently, none of the committee members noticed that when you add three fourths to one fourth, you’ve pretty much exhausted all the “fourths” available — all the seats as well. Although the temptation is to write Dr. Jill’s dissertation off to the power of political pull, her dissertation, from my experience, represents something of a norm in the illiteracy, innumeracy, and race obsession of grad-level education.
My oldest brother, an exceptional high school principal, refused to pursue a doctorate in education — the key to becoming a school superintendent — because he thought the courses he took to get his Master’s a waste of everyone’s time. My middle brother became a very good high school math teacher without getting any education degrees. He simply retooled through a special quickie program after retiring as an engineer from Exxon.
On the other hand, an in-law, since deceased, did go on to get his Ed.D. As a “doctor,” he quickly climbed the ranks and became a school superintendent. Oh, one caveat: I took his Graduate Record Exams for him. He could not have passed on his own. My bad.
In the fifteen years since Jill Biden became a “doctor” — Whoopi Goldberg once pitched her to become surgeon general — the average school of education has gone from being merely a bad joke to becoming scarily woke.
If you have children in public schools, read the following and perhaps think about home schooling, if you can swing it. From Allan Stevo at lewrockwell.com:
There is a fascinating trend taking place among parents.
They are starting to realize who they are leaving their children in the hands of.
Sure there have always been PTA meetings and parent teacher conferences. There have been open houses and days for parents to come in and volunteer at school. There have been sports leagues and field trips and volunteer activities for you to see a teacher in action and to see how they are at their job and as a person. But if there wasn’t genuine philosophical conflict, there was no way to truly feel them out.
2020 and 2021 made that possible.
Suddenly you found out that if you wanted your kid to breathe freely, you were evil. If you did not want your kid to be a science experiment, you were deserving of arrest and imprisonment — not a fit parent. If you wanted your kid to have face-to-face class, rather than staring at a screen for 80% of his waking day, then you were anti-social.
Yes, I know, plenty of readers of these pages had those realizations before 2020. But for the normies among us, 2020 was a real gift, and in a lot of ways.
It suddenly became obvious to parents in the days and weeks before a Zoom-based circulum became the norm, that doing classwork at the kitchen table with your kids didn’t take 6, 7, or 8 hours, but was more like 90 or 120 or maybe 150 minutes of effort. What were the teachers doing with all the rest of the time then?
It’s not easy to take on the mob. From Mark Glennon at wirepoints.com:
Illinois’ political establishment is far out of touch with the general public on the racial dogma now forced on students from kindergarten through college. Yet a stunning two-thirds of Illinoisans say they don’t speak up, thereby ceding control to an intolerant, extremist minority.
The proof is in a poll released last month that was mostly buried and ignored by the press. It primarily addressed what schools now teach as unquestionable truth: critical race theory, also called anti-racism or wokism.
Illinoisans don’t like it. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which commissioned the poll, summarized their findings this way:
A majority of respondents favor equipping teachers to develop core skills and competencies over the encouragement of progressive political activism. Illinoisans also favor a curriculum that focuses on “American founding principles and . . . documents” over one that incorporates key tenets of the New York Times’ 1619 Project. At the post secondary level, strong majorities oppose reducing police presence on campus; support viewpoint diversity; favor a merit-based application process; and prioritize reducing the cost of tuition over expanding diversity and equity programs.
That’s completely at odds with mandates from the state’s politicians and education officials. The Illinois State Board of Education recently approved woke teaching standards with its “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning Standards” for K-12 education, and the state earlier made “implicit bias” training required by law for Illinois teachers.
You would think people would start to object to being labeled “racist” solely on the basis of skin color, to quite apologizing for crimes they never committed, and to grow disgusted with the nauseating genuflection to the new racial totems. From Andrea Widburg at americanthinker.com:
For three days, I’ve had sitting on my virtual spindle a post that Bari Weiss, formerly of the New York Times, posted on her Substack page. It’s entitled “I Refuse to Stand by while My Students Are Indoctrinated.” The author isn’t Weiss but is, instead, Paul Rossi, a math teacher at Grace Church High School in Manhattan (annual tuition: $57,330). On Friday, Weiss added another open letter, this from Andrew Gutmann, a parent who had just pulled his daughter out of Brearley, another expensive private school (annual tuition: $54,000). Both are horrifying exposés of and attacks against the woke culture saturating these institutions.
Both letters are long and don’t yield easily to a brief summary. I’ll quote a few select paragraphs from each, but you must read them to get the full flavor of the Maoist madness at these institutions.
Paul Rossi, the teacher, writes that Grace Church is focused on “‘antiracism’ training and pedagogy that I believe is deeply harmful to [my students] and to any person who seeks to nurture the virtues of curiosity, empathy and understanding.”
Rossi perfectly describes the self-hatred, mental repression, cognitive dissonance, and pure racism this training inculcates into young minds:
My school, like so many others, induces students via shame and sophistry to identify primarily with their race before their individual identities are fully formed. Students are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions. The morally compromised status of “oppressor” is assigned to one group of students based on their immutable characteristics. In the meantime, dependency, resentment and moral superiority are cultivated in students considered “oppressed.”
Rossi describes how, during a segregated “whites only” student and faculty Zoom meeting, he spoke out, inspiring the students to speak out, too. This was a bad thing.
I was informed by the head of the high school that my philosophical challenges had caused “harm” to students, given that these topics were “life and death matters, about people’s flesh and blood and bone.” I was reprimanded for “acting like an independent agent of a set of principles or ideas or beliefs.” And I was told that by doing so, I failed to serve the “greater good and the higher truth.”
He further informed me that I had created “dissonance for vulnerable and unformed thinkers” and “neurological disturbance in students’ beings and systems.” The school’s director of studies added that my remarks could even constitute harassment.
Rossi was then denounced over the school announcement system. There’s more. Read it all, because it’s important.
Whatever the most expensive public education system in the world (per capita student expenditure) is serving up, it isn’t education. From Philip Giraldi at strategic-culture.org:
It will be difficult or even impossible to go back to a system where learning is actually a discipline that requires hard work and dedication.
Public education in the United States, if measured by results, has been producing graduates that are less competent in language skills and dramatically less well taught in the sciences and mathematics since 1964, when Scholastic Aptitude Test scores peaked. The decline in science and math skills has accelerated in the past decade according to rankings of American students compared to their peers overseas. A recent assessment, from 2015, placed the U.S. at 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development OECD), the United States came in at 30th in math and 19th in science. Those poor results must be placed in a context of American taxpayers spending more money per student than any other country in the world, so the availability of resources is not necessarily a factor in most school districts.
Much of the decline is due to technical advances that level the playing field for teachers worldwide, but one must also consider changing perceptions of the role of education in a social context. In the United States in particular, political and cultural unrest certainly have been relevant factors. But all of that said and considered, the U.S. is now confronting a reassessment of values that will likely alter forever traditional education and will also make American students even more non-competitive with their foreign peers.
The difference between nurturing and stunting young minds. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:
Schoolchildren across the country recently skipped school or walked out of class to rally for new restrictions on our economic and personal liberties in the name of fighting “climate change.” Instead of punishing students for playing hooky to promote a political cause, many teachers and administrators allowed, or even encouraged, students to skip school to attend these events. Public schools have also given students the day off to attend pro-gun control rallies.
The trend toward allowing students to miss school for political protests is an example of how indoctrination in left-wing ideology and politics has replaced actual education in many government schools. Some teachers may have seen their students’ eagerness to show support for authoritarian policies like the “Green New Deal” as confirmation of the teachers’ success in convincing students that the “science is settled” regarding climate change. The truth is that science regarding the causes, extent, and effects of climate change is far from settled. But you won’t learn that in most government schools.
Keeping unwanted voices off the internet and social media serves the purposes of those who would indoctrinate. From Daisy Luther at theorganicprepper.com:
Just about every website owner I know is feeling personally victimized by the recent social media purge that has been going on. But here’s an interesting fact: it isn’t, as is widely perceived, just conservative voices that are being silenced. It is dissenting voices.
It’s the voices of critical thinkers whose ideas run the gamut of philosophies who find that they no longer have much in the way of reach.
This social media purge affects everyone, even people who are not on social media. It does so in several ways:
Dissenting information is silenced which stifles discussion
Young people who are avid consumers of social media are being literally brainwashed because they only see one side of the story – any story
The social media purge harms websites that post non-establishment information because it stamps out their ability to reach readers who would be interested in their content.
The unfairly biased search results show people who are trying to learn more about a topic only one side of the information.
You don’t have to be on a Twitter feed to see how this is an overwhelmingly anti-American problem. Like it or not, social media is a monumental source of information these days, and when it’s censored to only show one point of view, the future of our republic is in peril. We are well on our way to peak censorship and this has been carefully orchestrated.
Non-establishment websites are in trouble.
Their website traffic is plummeting because they no longer show up anywhere near the top of search results. Their posts on social media are not presented to the public – or even the people who deliberately opted to “follow” them. Here’s an example from my own page. I have more than 30K people who chose to follow my page, as you can see in the top image. But in the bottom image, you can see how many of those people were actually shown my post. And this was actually a more successful one than many.
And the same thing goes for social media like Twitter too. I have an email list and if I didn’t, I’d hardly reach anyone. (If you haven’t signed up for my newsletter, you can do so right here.) And I really have to wonder – will our “offensive” websites one day just disappear, scrubbed from the internet permanently? It’s only a matter of time until the web hosting companies are being pressured to get in on the censorship game.
For the record, I consider myself neither conservative nor liberal. I try to veer away from any form of extremism and I make an effort to think a situation through before automatically aligning myself with a “side.” If anything, I’m a small l libertarian. My core beliefs are personal autonomy and freedom of association are to be sought in all cases that are not harmful to others. And yet, somehow, that is threatening to some people.
Don’t think it’s limited to website owners. Twitter recently banned 70 million accounts, claiming they were “fake.” But there have been repeated accusations that conservative accounts have been at the very least “shadow-banned” if not all out deleted.
The most notable purge recently has been Alex Jones and Infowars.
Love Alex Jones, hate him, or feel utterly ambivalent aside from an occasional eye-roll, he has been the most notable victim to have been thoroughly erased from the public eye as far as the large social media outlets are concerned. He lost his voice on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Apple, and Google. Even his email service provider dumped him.
I’m not personally a huge fan of Jones, but I do believe what happened to him was collusion between social media giants. Big Tech got together and now Alex Jones has to find new ways to reach his very large audience. No one is going to stumble across him accidentally in a Google Search anymore. No one is going to see his videos embedded in another website anymore. Like him or not, he has the right to exist publicly.
Jones has a lot of money so this may not be the end of him, but for most website owners, this would be the absolute end of our ability to do business. And to be able to bring the information we bring, we do have to run our websites as businesses. It’s far more expensive than most people realize to run a site. I know that my own operating costs every month are more than $2000. A site as big as Jones’s would be many times that amount. When all your avenues of monetization are cut off, it wouldn’t be hard for a site – and the dissent and information they share – to cease to exist.
If it’s been a while, I’ll recap the pertinent parts of the plot from Spark Notes.
Winston Smith is a low-ranking member of the ruling Party in London, in the nation of Oceania. Everywhere Winston goes, even his own home, the Party watches him through telescreens; everywhere he looks he sees the face of the Party’s seemingly omniscient leader, a figure known only as Big Brother. The Party controls everything in Oceania, even the people’s history and language. Currently, the Party is forcing the implementation of an invented language called Newspeak, which attempts to prevent political rebellion by eliminating all words related to it. Even thinking rebellious thoughts is illegal. Such thoughtcrime is, in fact, the worst of all crimes…
…As the novel opens, Winston feels frustrated by the oppression and rigid control of the Party, which prohibits free thought, sex, and any expression of individuality. Winston dislikes the party and has illegally purchased a diary in which to write his criminal thoughts…
…Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, where he alters historical records to fit the needs of the Party. (source)
The Ministry of Truth is control of all the things from which people could garner their opinions. They provide their own twist on history, current events, entertainment, education, and the arts. The people of Oceana believe them because there isn’t enough information to believe anything else. And questioning the Ministry is a thoughtcrime, punishable by horrible torture or worse. Part of Winston’s job is to turn anyone who doesn’t follow the Ministry line into an unperson and erase them from history as though they never even existed.
So who is behind this mass purge of dissenting voices?
There’s always a money trail to follow. Any time you wonder why or how something has occurred, look for the money. In this video by Ben Swann, an independent journalist who was mysteriously silenced for quite some time, he provides some important insight.
This is happening RIGHT NOW. We are living it. We are living in the world of 1984.
Rest assured, the way things are going, it isn’t long before we will see only what “they” – the people with the power and money to make it happen – want us to see.
Social pressure is also limiting free thought.
And not only do we have organizations limiting our views of things that would broaden our minds, there’s also the rampant social pressure that we’ve seen since the last election.
When we were recently looking at rental homes, a potential landlady asked me for whom I voted in the last election. I didn’t even bother looking at the place because that is not a standard question one asks of a new tenant. It certainly has nothing to do with my ability to pay the rent. It has nothing to do with my potential for keeping things clean and in good shape. I just left because no house is worth dealing with a person who clearly let me know she was not someone with whom I wanted to do business.
And that is only my personal example. Employers check the social media accounts of prospective employees to see if they approve of how the person thinks. People who disagree publicly with powerful groups get doxxed. Dozens of stories have circulated about social pressure, lost friendships, disagreements, and mistreatment in the workplace that originated from differences in political beliefs.
How can people be expected to form accurate opinions without all the information? How can they do so when they’re under pressure for their livelihood or their ability to rent a home or when they fear for their privacy?
It’s pretty clear that there are those who don’t want people to form accurate opinions. They want to gently, quietly, insidiously get everyone on board by limiting our access to the variety of philosophies and theories that make the world go round.
I recently sat down again with Casey Research founder Doug Casey to discuss a troubling trend: the fast-rising cost of a college education.
Read our conversation below to see why Doug says relying on—and paying for—today’s educational paradigm “makes as much sense as entering a Model T Ford in the 24 Hours of Le Mans”…
Justin: Doug, I recently had an interesting conversation with my sister.
She told me that her financial advisor suggested she start setting aside $500 to $1,000 a month to pay for her son’s college education. That’s because a four-year college education is apparently going to cost between $400,000 and $500,000 18 years from now.
Her advisor clearly arrived at this figure based on how fast college tuition costs have been rising, which is about 6% per year based on my research.
But you have to wonder if the cost can keep rising at this rate. It seems to me that no one will go to college if it’s going to cost a half-million bucks.
What do you make of this trend?
Doug: Well, the first thing—my advice to your sister is to get a new financial advisor. I fear that she’s relying on a complete imbecile. She should fire him immediately, and for a number of reasons.
Number one is his assumption that the trend of higher college costs is going to continue to a totally unaffordable level. In fact, the cost/benefit ratio of going to college is already so out of whack that the whole system has to change radically. A college degree, even now, is of only marginal value; most everybody has one. And things that everybody has are devalued. You’re quite correct that colleges and universities today are dead ducks as businesses. Unless you’re going to learn a trade, like doctoring or lawyering, or you’re going for science, engineering, or math, where you need the formal discipline and where you need lab courses, it’s a total misallocation, even a waste of money to go to college today.
So I applaud the fact that all these colleges and universities are dead men walking, that they’re all going to go bankrupt. They are totally overrun and infested with cultural Marxists and progressives, militant leftists that are propagandizing kids with absolutely the wrong kind of values. It’s astonishing that parents are willing to pay even today’s prices to subject their kids to four years of indoctrination. So I’m glad that they’re all going bankrupt.
Who would ever think that government run schools would indoctrinate kids with government propaganda? From Dan Sanchez at antiwar.com:
In 2013, American and British public opinion said “hell no” to plans to bomb (and surely regime change) Syria, taking the momentum out of the march to war. This marked a peak in post-Iraq war-weariness. But then in August 2014, many hearts were touched by the plight of a group of Yazidis trapped on a mountain and besieged by ISIS. So public opinion sanctioned a humanitarian military rescue. During the operation, it was revealed that the crisis was blown way out of proportion, as excuses for war so often are.
Predictably, ISIS retaliated. The group posted snuff films depicting the beheading of western journalists. American outrage was intense enough to allow President Obama to essentially launch a new war on ISIS. And since ISIS was in Syria as well as Iraq, this provided cover for American planes to enter and bomb Syria after all. This too elicited retaliation, in the form of ISIS terror attacks against civilians on western soil: in France, the U.S., Belgium, and elsewhere.
Following these attacks, western war weariness was eclipsed by a resurgent militant hostility toward Muslim peoples. Now America is in a fighting mood, and may be one major attack away from tipping headlong into war fever again. And all it took was less than two years of escalating tit-for-tat hostilities between western militaries and ISIS, starting with the Yazidi rescue, for public sentiment to revert from “hell no” to “let’s roll.” The American war machine is primed and “Ready for Hillary” or Trump.
How did we become so manipulable and herd-like? So easily spooked into hysterical stampedes? So docile and ready to be driven by our government herders over the precipice of war?
In a word, near-universal compulsory schooling. In school, students are not so much taught as they are conditioned. Schooling deeply ingrains certain mentalities that foster militancy: timidity and tribalism, dependency and docility, conformity and credulity. And so schools sow the spiritual seeds of war.
Only a people conditioned from childhood to be easily terrorized will react to small-scale crimes with mass panic. Only a people afflicted with rank tribalism will respond to the murder of a few dozen westerners by a handful of Islamists by sanctioning mass military violence against Muslim populations. Only a people beset with learned helplessness would respond to perceived threats by reflexively offering total deference to the authorities: yielding their freedoms and totally outsourcing the responsiblity to protect themselves and their families. Only a people trained to unquestioningly trust the ordained experts would let themselves be lied into war time and again.
The dependency and docility are cultivated by placing children under constant direction and supervision by teachers and administrators, who bestow favors and inflict punishments at will. Then there is the regimentation: the prescribed classroom routines, constantly being lined up, the P.E. exercises in military drill formation, the assigned movements from cell to cell according to a Pavlovian bell. Francis Bellamy, the author of the Pledge of Allegiance, a daily ritual of professing submission to the State, originally prescribed it to be accompanied by what he termed “a military salute”: the same salute now famously associated with the Nazis.
The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it 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 its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.
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