In 2008, even the poorest Americans have indoor plumbing, color TVs, video game systems, iPods, more than enough to eat, and vast quantities of leisure time. We have come to this state of material wealth by the judicious application of science, technology, and capitalism, all of which rest on a foundation of reason. Human thinking is not naturally rational. Rationality is a fragile, painstakingly constructed edifice that allows us to understand the world and manipulate bits of reality in ways that pre-technological, even the most civilized of pre-technological, beings could not begin to approximate. Yet to presume that what we have is immutable and invulnerable to the ravages of irrationality is dangerous.
Ed Morrissey reported last week on a Rasmussen poll which documented that a large cohort of Americans believe that George Bush knew about 9/11 in advance:
Only four in ten Democrats will commit to the idea that George Bush did not know of the 9/11 attack in advance. Sixty-one percent of them either believe he did or are unsure. Bear in mind that no evidence exists that he knew about it in advance, and also bear in mind that Democrats have spent most of the last four years blaming him for the fact that the attack successfully surprised the US when it occurred. Now they also want to believe that Bush was in on the plan that killed almost 3,000 Americans and could easily have killed thousands more.
His conclusion?
It doesn't make a lot of sense -- but then, conspiracy theories never do. I'm honestly surprised how deep this particular bit of paranoia goes.
This kind of paranoia must be differentiated from the psychotic paranoia of a severely disturbed person with psychiatric problems. In a Paranoid Schizophrenic, for example, their ability to interpret reality is acutely disordered by their illness. The Rasmussen survey does not reflect an epidemic of psychosis but rather an epidemic of ignorance and the pervasive extent of damaged reasoning.
A week ago I had a brief discussion about Anthropogenic Global Warming with someone who used Al Gore as a scientific source. I explained that I had done some study in the area and offered a list of five or six data points that would tend to bring Gore's conclusions into question. The response I received, not unexpected, was that that was just my opinion. I explained these were not opinions but facts that were not in dispute; in turn, I was told it didn't matter, she believed Al Gore, and she didn't care what the facts were. Aside from the fact that this tends to truncate discussion, it was also disheartening to see a well educated women, who graduated from a prestigious university, show such a disdain for inconvenient facts. Unfortunately, this kind of attitude towards scientific facts, under relentless pressure from the Post-Modern Academy, is becoming more and more prevalent.
Larwyn sent me a link to a an article at Frontpage by Sol Stern, Teaching for "Social Justice": The Leftist Assault on America's Public Schools. It is an 18 page report, available as a pdf and reading it is quite dispiriting. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the emphasis on self-esteem in our pedagogy has done a great deal to impair the fundamental job of schooling, imparting a body of knowledge and some rudimentary techniques for manipulating that data in ways that can logically lead to conclusions. The Social Justice movement aims to further impair student's ability to think. The Social Justice theorists are quite up front about their goal of indoctrination:
On a Friday night in October, 2006 I attended a public meeting of a three-year old organization called the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE). About 80 public school teachers from all grades were gathered at Kimball Hall on the NYU campus in Greenwich Village to discuss current approaches to social justice teaching. One of the central motifs of this discussion was how to subvert the official curriculum mandates of New York City’s Department of Education. NYCoRE’s official slogan -- "The struggle for justice does not end when the school bell rings" – was displayed on the literature, posters and the T shirts available for sale at the meeting. Posted on the walls of the room were inspirational quotes by some of NYCoRE’s educational heroes, including Che Guevara and Marxist historian Howard Zinn. "It’s not possible to be neutral in the classroom," proclaimed the quotation from Professor Zinn. "I as a teacher don’t want to collaborate with whatever is happening in the world. I want myself as a teacher and I want you as students to intercede in whatever is happening in the world." Also distributed at the meeting was an iconic photograph from revolutionary Cuba’s mass literacy campaign, cited by one of the evening’s speakers as an exemplary progressive education program.
It is worrisome enough that teachers in the humanities, arts, and literature have taken it upon themselves to deconstruct the white male oppressive hegemony of the West, but the article documents the ongoing attempts by the radical "educators" to perform the same disservice for Math and Science.
Math, which attempts to inculcate an approach based on precise rules and measurements to arrive at logical, consistent, and rigorously understood truths, is one of the foundational intellectual exercises of our civilization. To attempt to cloud the issue by weighting it with irrelevant ephemera damages both the beauty and the functionality of Math.
In much the same fashion, attacking Science, the methodology of which is our greatest single intellectual and rational development, upon which all else that allows us to survive and thrive depends, is dangerous and promotes the kinds of illogical beliefs that Ed Morrisey documents so well.
Sadly, such Social Justice pedagogy is a greater affliction in Minority school districts, placing the graduates of those schools at a significant handicap in becoming fully functional members of the modern world.
At the same time as this non-teaching is being promoted openly in our public schools, the New York Post today has an eye-opening editorial:
When they hit the polls May 15 to decide the fate of school budgets in some 700 districts around the state, voters may be in for some nasty sticker shock.
According to last week's report from the Public Policy Institute, average spending per student is slated to soar some 6 percent, or twice the rate of inflation.
That means local property taxes will climb, too - by about 4 percent.
PPI, part of the Business Council of New York State, looked at data from some 600 districts with at least 200 kids.
The study excludes data from the "Big Five" school districts - New York City, Buffalo, Yonkers, Rochester and Syracuse - because residents in those cities don't vote on school budgets.
But, in the rest of the state, the report found that the budgets call for spending an average of $18,035 per student. [Emphasis mine-SW]
Which is mind-boggling.
What do they plan to buy with all that cash - diamond-studded chalkboards?
When our schools are using vast resources to teach that Math questions can be answered by intuition, that Science is a construct in service of the wealthy and the corporations, and that feelings are as good as facts in understanding the world, our social structure is placed under enormous pressure. Teaching children that they are "special" in order to enhance their self-esteem while neglecting to impart a common minimal body of information and the much more difficult to teach ability to reason, is a formula for disaster.
Grooming a generation of young people who combine ignorance and inflated self-esteem while lacking awareness of the depth of their own ignorance is a guarantee of a generation who will enter the real world prepared for nothing more than to be convinced they are being cheated when the world does not continue to reward them for their desires.
"Social Justice" proposes to teach our children what to think rather than how to think. Charter Schools, private schools, and home schooling advocates can be the only ones happy about this sorry development.
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