Education Or Jobs?

     The never-ending contentions over American education have several parts. One of them, “higher education,” is particularly significant for this reason:

Conservatives often criticize universities for failing to prepare students for jobs.

But that's like criticizing a library for failing to function as a gym.

The purpose of a university was never vocational training. It was always the pursuit and transmission of knowledge.

— Liza Libes (@pensandpoison) June 13, 2026

     That dichotomy is the secret shame of the American educational system. But it’s also a consequence, rather than a primary that can be addressed in isolation.

* * *

     The history of compulsory education in America is worthy of more attention than it gets from the typical adult. Time was – and I’m not talking about the Pleistocene Era here, but the mid-19th Century – a “grammar school” education was all that was required by law. Moreover, a student didn’t need to traverse eight grades to escape the school’s clutches. What he needed was his teacher’s endorsement of his ability to function as an adult. As the greater part of the population was engaged in agriculture or other manual labor, that didn’t demand much.

     But as John Gall told us in his classic Systemantics, every system embeds a growth dynamic. Grow or stagnate and die is the rule. “Education” proved to be no exception. Once teaching became a recognized occupation, schools ceased to be regarded as a local convenience for imparting literacy and numeracy. They fell into the hands of careerists eager to see their domain enlarge.

     That process was contemporaneous with the rise of industrial America: the transformation of our previous, family-centered agriculture-heavy economy into an urban one heavy with employers and employees. Over time, parents surrendered their part in the education of their children to the schools, while the schools came ever more completely under political authority. “High schools” were born, as were teachers’ colleges. Teaching specialties took a bit longer to emerge, but shortly after the turn of the 20th Century we no longer spoke of “teachers” as an undifferentiated mass.

     But as the system expanded, it also moved away from its previous mandate: i.e., to teach the basic skills required of an adult citizen and leave all else to the home environment. Systems do that sort of thing. Among other diversions of educational effort, we began to see “practical” courses and the “vocational” school: things previously neither required nor requested by the parents of minor children. Prior to the Civil War, the idea of classes in “Home Economics” or “Shop” never occurred to an American parent. That was what Mom and Dad were for.

     With the rise of large enterprises and the need for management came a need for “white collar” employees: persons removed from manual labor who commanded informational skills. (The occupational designation “white collar” apparently originated with writer Upton Sinclair in 1911.) By then, the fundamental skills taught by the “grammar school” had been expanded by the “high school” to include more extensive education in literature, mathematics beyond arithmetic, history and geography, and rudimentary knowledge of the sciences.

     For a while, those two segments of schooling maintained themselves and their putative duties stably and successfully. But change was coming. World wars, conscription, industrialism, unionism, state encroachments on previously local prerogatives and, eventually, federal encroachments on state prerogatives were soon to come upon the United States. All of those trends promoted giantism, the disease that anonymizes decision makers and insulates them against the choices and opinions of the common man. In unionism, teachers found a route toward increased respect and prosperity. State governments were slowly compelled to mandate union membership for teachers employed in government-run schools.

     The “educational system” expanded enormously. Property taxes intended to pay for the government-run schools swelled to such an extent that only a small minority of families could afford a private or religious school for their children. Alternatives to the government-run school system dwindled. With the dwindling of competition and the overweening authority of “departments of education” came the consequence one must always expect from a government monopoly: sharp declines in educational quality and in responsiveness to the parents of school-age children.

     There was one path left to follow.

* * *

     For parents and children who wanted a better and fuller education than was available from the government-run schools, the sole recourse was to “higher education.” That, until relatively recently, remained outside government control. And indeed, a student admitted to a college or university did still have opportunities to learn much to which he hadn’t yet been exposed. But after World War II, the returning GIs were mainly concerned with making a living. Most had had their twelve years of government schooling. They looked upon the American economy, now dominated by corporations, and sought the kind of education that would ready them for corporate employment.

     Government loan and grant programs offered the GI the possibility of free college education. They took it in large numbers. Colleges and universities sprang up like toadstools in response. And to an increasing degree, the education they provided leaned toward readiness for employment. The older goal of a college education, acquainting the student with “the best that has been thought and said,” slowly receded from the priorities of everyone involved.

     Now that governments provide by far the greater portion of funding for “higher education,” those institutions prioritize what governments want. There are still “liberal and humane arts” colleges, but in comparison to the larger number, they’re fewer than ever before. Above all, governments want money. Therefore, they want the “educational system” to produce workers, ready to earn taxable incomes. With the quality of “primary” and “secondary” education having fallen so far that even Ivy League colleges offer remedial reading and high-school mathematics courses, preparation for employment, especially in “white collar” positions, has become the province of “higher education.”

     Most of the above has come upon us so gradually as to be invisible. That’s how social and institutional transformations occur. And this one has conquered education in the United States so completely that any possibility of undoing it – returning early schooling to its original mission and “higher education” to the mission of enrichment it once pursued – is beyond my power of imagination.

Undiscussed

     I was maundering over the rising White Identity movement, and the fierce resistance to it on the Left, when a memory from long ago returned to visit.

     The year was 1967. I was a senior year in high school at the time. There was a scholarship available to seniors who’d expressed an interest in becoming teachers. My school submitted me as its contestant. The award decision would be made by a committee of three, after meeting and conversing with all the contestants as a group. The get-together was held in New Paltz, a “college town” in Ulster County, New York, on the western side of the Hudson River.

     There were a dozen contestants. There were three on the award committee. I was the only one from a “downstate” school. I was also the only male present.

     Needless to say, I found the atmosphere somewhat intimidating. What was I, a mere male, doing among all these women? Conversation among the women, young and old, continued freely for over an hour without anyone addressing or even looking at me. Finally one of the committee members turned and addressed me directly: “What about you, Fran? Don’t you have anything to say?”

     I can’t remember what I said. No doubt it was something bland. I don’t remember what followed. About fifteen minutes later I was on my way home.

     Though I didn’t participate, I do remember the thrust of the conversation. It was about dealing with “colored students.” Everyone in the room agreed that they were a taxing problem, both pedagogically and behaviorally, and were becoming ever more so.

     I suppose I should include that all of us present were White.

     Now, that was what we of today fatuously call “the Civil Rights Era.” Which is to say: We had been propagandized out of our natural rights, such as freedom of association, in favor of “civil rights” defined by legislators and courts. We didn’t grasp the implications of having politicians tell us what our “rights” would be. We would find out soon enough.

     But “civil rights” or no, the eleven “upstate” young women in that discussion group were tacitly unanimous that educational institutions’ problems with non-Whites were real and rising. They had no solutions. Their unstated premise made a solution impossible. It was just something, they quietly agreed, with which future teachers would have to cope as best they could.

     Most of that was indirectly expressed, sotto voce. Yet there could be no doubt about the consensus. It bewildered me somewhat, but then, there were only three “colored” out of the two thousand students in my high school. The problem had yet to become visible in Rockland County, New York.

* * *

     Nothing reveals group differences as effectively as forcing disparate groups together. Fifty-nine years after that group talkfest, the quiet prognostications of those young women have proved accurate. America’s “public” schools have largely been reduced to daytime housing for minors, some of whom are determined to fight with others and abuse the rest. White kids in such an environment are in peril throughout the day. Many don’t make it home unscathed.

     But let’s leave the disorder and violence problems to the side. In an attempt to achieve some education, at least, the schools have steadily “dumbed down” their curricula. What was fifth-grade material a century ago is now being taught in high schools. The scandals about schools where no student meets grade literacy or numeracy standards, and about college entrants being unable to read, write in cursive, or do simple algebra, are legion.

     The few “colored” with a real interest in learning are intimidated out of it by their fellows: “Why you actin’ White?” The important subjects are to which gang you belong, how to deal with the members of other gangs, and how to treat the White kids. Better take those subjects seriously; the tests are frequent.

     But hearken to our political class! Do any of our Establishmentarians even hint that there might be a problem with all this “diversity?” Not to my knowledge. But let anyone mention the rising White-identity movement, and the condemnations are immediate and plentiful. Apparently the worst thing one can be is White and proud of it.

     If the cries of “Racist!” and “Xenophobe!” are losing their effect, it’s not yet evident from their frequency of use. Demographic-geographic trends tell us that some Whites are “voting with their feet.” An unfortunate number of us are pinned in place by occupational or familial considerations. These must be prepared to cope with being members of a shrinking community.

     Fifty-nine years ago, a group of young women in their senior year in high school could clearly see what was coming. Their voices were soft. Their words were measured. But their opinions were unanimous and clear. They foresaw what would happen to the trade they sought to enter.

     Those that are still on the sunny side of the sod would be in their mid-seventies today. I should remember to pray for them.

Education And “The Conditioners”

     From time to time I’m struck by the extraordinary insight of the great Clive Staples Lewis:

     Where the old [education] initiated, the new merely 'conditions'. The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds— making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda. [From The Abolition Of Man]

     And so it is. The origin of education as the Western world once practiced it is in the Socratic method:

1. Select a topic: a proposition in causation perhaps focused on an important event;
2. Question the causative forces that underlie it;
   1. Confront the proposition with clarifying questions;
   2. For each further proposition introduced:
      1. Question the causative forces that underlie it;
      2. For each further proposition introduced:
         1. Confront the proposition with clarifying questions;
         2. For each further proposition introduced:
            …

     Yes, the Socratic method is recursive – and with no guaranteed exit criterion. But that is part of its effectiveness: to instill in the student the inclination to look deeper. This is how a good teacher leads his student to form the habit of thought: the determination to seek reasons and explanations.

     In a classroom setting, the honest use of the Socratic method will often cause two (or more) students to differ on the reasons for something. A really good teacher will then strive to get the students to perpetuate the method, by questioning each other’s proposed explanations. If successful, this teaches the student three things of inestimable value:

• Differences of opinion are normal and tolerable;
• He will regularly confront such differences among his peers;
• Some propositions aren’t plumbable “all the way to the bottom.”

     Clearly, the Socratic method is a lot of work. It demands patience of both the teacher and the student. It also requires “guardrails:” prohibitions on personalities and indoctrination. Yet it is the foundation for acquiring facility with the one and only tool Man possesses that the lower orders do not: reason.

     Lewis saw the acquisition of both reason and a grasp of what he called “The Tao” – i.e., those properties of existence that cannot be established irrefutably through a reasoning process – as indispensable to the formation of character. Given what’s become of both education and human character over the century behind us, I’d say he was correct.

* * *

     What our “public” schools call “education,” outside of mathematics and the sciences, bears little relation to education by the Socratic method. It comes closer to indoctrination: This is the reason! Don’t you forget it! And no questions! The late Robert M. Pirsig provides a striking demonstration of this distinction in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

     But then, below the definition on the blackboard, [Phædrus] wrote, "But even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is!"
     and the storm started all over again.      "Oh, no, we don’t!"
     "Oh, yes, you do."
     "Oh, no, we don’t!"
     "Oh, yes, you do!" he said and he had some material ready to demonstrate it to them.
     He had selected two examples of student composition. The first was a rambling, disconnected thing with interesting ideas that never built into anything. The second was a magnificent piece by a student who was mystified himself about why it had come out so well.
     Phædrus read both, then asked for a show of hands on who thought the first was best. Two hands went up. He asked how many liked the second better. Twenty-eight hands went up.
     "Whatever it is," he said, "that caused the overwhelming majority to raise their hands for the second one is what I mean by Quality. So you know what it is."
     There was a long reflective silence after this, and he just let it last.
     This was just intellectually outrageous, and he knew it. He wasn’t teaching anymore, he was indoctrinating. He had erected an imaginary entity, defined it as incapable of definition, told the students over their own protests that they knew what it was, and demonstrated this by a technique that was as confusing logically as the term itself. He was able to get away with this because logical refutation required more talent than any of the students had.

     When an “educator” does such a thing, he’s rejecting the probing, questioning approach of the Socratic method and “laying down the law.” This obviously has nothing to do with developing a habit of thought or scrutiny.

     Of course, Pirsig / Phædrus had reasons for doing what he did to that class. He was attempting to show that his conception of Quality, if it has a place in existence, must be part of Lewis’s Tao — and that his students were overwhelmingly able to perceive it as such.

     Indoctrination is never appropriate under the guise of intellectual inquiry. Indeed, it’s the diametric opposite of inquiry as we understand it. Perhaps the tensions that drove Pirsig to his mental breakdown arose from his determination to assert undefinable Quality to an intellectual audience. But I digress.

* * *

     It’s possible that schooling as practiced today is incompatible with inquiry, and therefore with the Socratic method. One instructor / many students / an established syllabus and a schedule to keep: What are we to expect from such a situation when – or perhaps if — one of the Great Questions arises in the course of events? It seems that either the Question must be tabled indefinitely, or the instructor must give “the official answer” and march on.

     That’s no way to foster a habit of thought, Rather, it suggests that Authorities have already decided once and for all Why Things Are As They Are. Further inquiry would be at best pointless, at worst subversive.

     I could go on, but I think my Gentle Readers can do so for themselves.

     If you haven’t yet, get your kids out of the “public” schools.

Traps And Swindles

     Chessplayers are familiar with the above terms. Success at laying a trap for one’s opponent, when said opponent has a superior, nominally winning position, accounts for many a famous victory. A swindle is a form of trap, less well known and less frequently celebrated, in which one lures one’s opponent into an attractive course, seemingly a straightforward march toward victory, in which he must settle for a draw.

     Politics has the equivalents, of course.

     Our favorite Graybeard recently wrote about a significant trap. On the surface it looks like one of the Left’s pseudo-“compassionate” initiatives:

     Since the first rumblings of the potential Biden administration, the idea of "forgiving" student loans has gotten talked about a lot; whether from Elizabeth Warren or AOC, we keep hearing "progressives" clamoring for the handout. Clearly the loans can't be forgiven; money is owed to some bank, (which is to say some one) and the Feds can't wave their hands and make the banks take that loss, so that will mean taking money from some taxpayers to pay other taxpayers. It takes a study from someone relatively neutral to show just how fair that is.

     The top 20% of income earners will get $192 billion in tax money; the bottom 20% will get $29 billion. The richest income earners will get over 6-1/2 times the money as the bottom 20%. Since the lowest quintile of income earners pays almost no tax and gets more in benefits than they pay, they are essentially getting a bigger tax break. The middle class and higher will pay for this program. Our tax system is highly progressive, meaning the more one earns the more tax they pay. The last numbers I can find having blogged about (using 2016 data) is that:

• The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (39.5 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (29.1 percent).
• The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 27.1 percent individual income tax rate, which is more than seven times higher than taxpayers in the bottom 50 percent (3.5 percent).

     This idea is a highly regressive tax policy in that the richer they are, the more tax payout they get.

     Please read the whole column. Graybeard’s analysis of the deception involved is eminently worth your time, and definitely worth remembering for the off chance that you’ll someday confront a dimbulb “progressive” and feel the need to box his ears – rhetorically, of course.

     By and large the people promoting this lunacy aren’t stupid. They know what they’re doing. Some hope to profit monetarily by it, though in this particular case of a proposed policy it would be hard to pull off. So we must ask, “Apart from bribing millions of college-educated Americans, what do they hope to accomplish this way?”

     Mind you, bribing millions of college-educated Americans with Treasury funds is a substantial political goal by itself. But I sense another agenda, one that hasn’t yet been widely discussed. It goes to the heart of the Left’s “long march through the institutions,” which has succeeded most visibly in its conquest of America’s educational institutions.

     The rise in the cost of government-controlled schools – and don’t kid yourself; the “public” schools in your district are as much an arm of government as any state or federal bureaucracy – has had several effects. The most obvious one is to increase the cost of living sharply, forcing many American families to send the wife to work. The next most obvious has been a continuous struggle over how all that “funding” will be used: for the “disadvantaged,” or for the “gifted,” or for “activities,” or for “social involvement,” or what have you. Before the public schools started to bloat their agendas beyond literacy, numeracy, and historical and civic awareness, the budgets were too small to attract the really big predators. Today, when even small districts’ have millions of dollars to be allocated, the struggles have become vicious and the contestants utterly ruthless.

     Just beyond those two effects lies a third one that goes unnoticed by all but the most concerned parents: the cost of the “public” schools has made it impossible for 99% of Americans to afford a private alternative.

     Significant? Think about it. The Left has achieved near-perfect control of the “public” schools. That control has allowed them to replace education with indoctrination. The sole challenge to its hegemony has always been private education, whether religious or secular. However, if parents, by reason of the enormous property tax burdens they suffer, cannot afford to send their kids to private or religious schools, the Left need not fear them. What remains is homeschooling, which most parents feel unready to attempt.

     At this time, the operating costs of institutions of higher learning are paid by a combination of student tuitions and fees and state and federal subsidies. The portion that’s defrayed by student payments is largely funded by student loans. All such loans are now administered by the federal government’s Department of Education. Simply fill out a “Free Application for Federal Student Aid” (FAFSA) form, and you’re likely to receive a substantial part of the cost of your college education as a federal or federally-brokered loan.

     It’s all very simple...and it’s the quickest route to post-college financial hell ever contrived.

     The federal government’s involvement in the financing of higher education has been the means whereby Washington has imposed massive amounts of regulation on colleges and universities. The attitude of the DoE is that if a college or any student that attends it receives even one dollar from a federal source, it thereby becomes subject to any and all regulations the DoE may choose to impose on it. To the best of my knowledge, there is no way for a college to escape that web except by refusing to accept federal money, whether as a subsidy or as part payment of a student’s tuition.

     One institution of higher education, Hillsdale College in Michigan, has chosen to forgo federal money altogether, and so has remained out of the regulatory web. There may be others, but I don’t know of them. But what would become of such colleges were it to become common practice for student borrowers to default on their loans and for the federal government to accept the obligations in their place? For such students, college would become essentially free of cost. Would colleges that put up any form of resistance to such amorality be able to attract students?

     “Student debt forgiveness” thus reveals another consequence that the Left probably slavers over: “No college shall escape our clutches!” Any alternative to federally controlled higher education would be pressed to the point of elimination, using taxpayer monies. The indoctrination of young Americans would become universal and uniform.

     Add the above to Graybeard’s thoughts. Do you see the traps? What can we do to avert them?

The Educrats Cannot Be Trusted

     Perhaps the college-level ones are the worst of all:

     I received a disturbing note from one of my radio show listeners the other day about a political science lesson that was presented to students at Appalachian State University in North Carolina.

     “The Moral Foundations” questionnaire probed student opinion on some highly charged political statements. Students were asked to either strongly agree, agree, strongly disagree or disagree.

     “If a few of the worst Republican politicians were assassinated, it wouldn’t be the end of the world,” read one of the statements. “Conservatives are morally inferior to liberals.”

     “I am in favor of allowing the government to shut down right-wing internet sites and blogs that promote nutty, hateful positions,” read another. “Political violence can be constructive when it serves the cause of social justice.”

     I reached out to the university’s media relations department as well as the chairman of the government and justice studies program. I gave them 48 hours to respond and provide some context for the lesson. So far, they have not replied to my inquiries.

     Mind you, this “Questionnaire” is being presented to political science students at a state-run, state-supported university. While it does phrase its propositions as “Agree or Disagree,” the relentlessness with which they’re phrased to make hatred and violence of conservatives and Republicans sound acceptable – even mainstream – has terrifying implications.

     Play the Turn-Around Game: Imagine that questionnaire rewritten to target Democrats and the Left. Do you find it thinkable that such a thing would receive university sanction? Do you find it plausible that there would be no outcry against it from the Left?

     I hope none of my Gentle Readers is sending a child to such a “college.”

“Forward – Into The Past!”

     Among the coloring motifs of many tales about the American past is the “one room schoolhouse,” which brought children of varying ages together under a single teacher charged with the instruction of all of them. Such institutions really existed, and not just in the small communities of the western territories, despite contemporary doubts that they could have functioned effectively. Moreover, they produced reasonably well educated young Americans. I have no doubt that a lot of those youngsters would humiliate a Twenty-First Century high school graduate in a contest of knowledge of history or civics.

     You might think that no one of today would elect to resurrect the one-room schoolhouse in preference to separation by grade, team teaching, and the modern school building with its various facilities. Yet something not entirely dissimilar is happening – and it appears to be an accelerating trend. Hearken to long-time education commentator Joanne Jacobs:

     What are you doing about school? It’s a mad scramble to figure out district’s reopening or not-reopening plans and find alternatives that enable children to interact with classmates and working parents to work. People are getting creative.

     The wealthy are hiring teachers or tutors to staff “pandemic pods,” while middle-class families are sharing homeschooling duties or hiring non-teachers (lots of young people are out of work) to supervise children’s remote learning and play.

     It’s too early in the progression to have any sense for how well these new arrangements will work. Yet they’re plainly preferable, especially in the face of teachers’ unions refusals to return to the classroom, to letting Junior sit around playing video games all day. Even if the “novel” environment and having a single teacher for all subjects might seem counter-intuitive to persons accustomed to modern school structures, it has a chance of getting the kids to learn something. After all, there are usually only a few students per pod – typically fewer than ten. They’re all likely to know one another and one another’s families. And being from comparable social and economic backgrounds, their progress is more likely to be even than in a classroom as heterogeneous as is typical in a conventional modern school.

---

     Of course, the “learning pod” approach does have its critics...and I’ll bet you could tell me what field they work in:

     It is tempting to see this resourcefulness as a triumph of DIY culture. But that requires seeing it in a vacuum. When looking at the overall affect [sic] of pods, it is hard not to see how they will exacerbate the pre-existing inequities and achievement gaps that already vex public schools.

     This is pessimistic, but hear me out: Pods are almost like a 200-year leap backward in history, delivering us into a time before public schools. The difference between a group of kids learning together with someone to guide their studies versus a lone third grader watching two hours of pre-recorded video lessons, while she sits alone at home is astronomic.

     And from Joanne Jacobs’ article:

     Worried about widening achievement gaps, Will Huntsberry called Pedro Noguera, dean of the education school at USC, he writes on Voices of San Diego. He asked “if the rise of the learning pod will make existing disparities worse.”

     “It will. Because it’s gonna be affluent parents that can afford to do it,” (Noguera) said. “Many people won’t have access to that, and won’t be able to do it.”

     “I can’t blame them,” Noguera said about parents creating learning pods. “My wife is exploring them as an option for one of our daughters.”

     What we know about distance learning’s success in the spring isn’t good, writes Huntsberry. “Los Angeles Unified released a report this week that showed Black, Latino and poor students were much less likely to be engaged with online learning than their peers, the Los Angeles Times reported.”

     “Inequities!” “Disparities!” Well, the “public” schools are familiar with those, aren’t they? Have one more set of unctuously expressed concerns:

     Tina Cheuk, an education researcher at California Polytechnic State University, said she is troubled by the trend toward learning pods and the related push to finance them with public funding that normally would go to the schools.

     “That decision has implications for public education,” she said. Not only would it defund public education but it threatens to de-professionalize teachers, who are often “replaced” in pods by college students or retirees, she said.

     “You choosing to be in a pod may seem very innocent – ‘well, of course, it makes sense. I’m looking out for my family,’” Ms. Cheuk said. “It’s these unintended consequences for public education, which we either ignore or we choose to ignore because our private interests trump the others that we don’t know.”

     “De-professionalized” teachers! Dues-paying members of the “educators’ unions” being replaced by outsiders – possibly even uncredentialed college students! Horror of horrors! What sort of monster would put the education of his children above that overwhelming concern?

     Do you sense that the “educators” feel that their rice bowls are being threatened, Gentle Reader? I do.

---

     Survey after survey tells us that the most important factor in student educational performance is parental involvement. It trumps teacher “quality,” the range of “facilities” available, the age of the textbooks used, and so forth. Parental involvement is the asset most strongly in favor of any homeschool or homeschool-like arrangement. The learning pod scheme combines the probability of high parental involvement with the employment of knowledgeable, capable instructors whom the parents can hold to account – and that threatens the “professional educators” more than any other aspect of the phenomenon:

• Parents will interview candidate instructors, choose them on the basis of the criteria that matter to the parents, and will monitor their performance.
• The best instructors will command the highest fees, regardless of whether they’d been school teachers or – God help us – members of an “educators’ union” before this.
• Capable teachers previously employed by a “public” school will be tempted out of the bureaucratic “public” school system and toward the learning pods.
• Homeschooling already threatens the “educators’” bastions. The learning pods will intensify the threat, increasing the pressure on state education departments to move toward a school choice system in which the money follows the student, rather than going invariably to his district’s “public” school.
• Learning pods will be unencumbered by the administrative overhead that “public” schools endure, making them more economical by far than the “public” schools.
• Disparities among social, ethnic, and economic strata will appear to increase. But this will merely reveal a reality the “public” schools have been doing their damnedest to conceal.
• And of course, the “educators” will fight viciously to suppress the learning pods, as they’ve been doing with homeschooling since the failure of the “public” schools became too obvious to conceal.

     Gentle Reader, this could be the start of something really big and really good. It would be one of the few really good things to come out of the pan[dem]ic. Stay tuned.

Shrunken Habitats

     First a quote whose relevance will initially seem obscure:

     “At present the universities are as uncongenial to teaching as the Mojave Desert to a clutch of Druid priests. If you want to restore a Druid priesthood, you cannot do it by offering prizes for Druid-of-the-Year. If you want Druids, you must grow forests.” – William Arrowsmith

     Arrowsmith, a learned and highly literate man, was particularly concerned with the displacement of the humanities from university environments by trivial research: what he termed “the cult of the fact.” He had good reasons to be so concerned, for the pursuit of research grants even in the Sixties and Seventies, when he was most outspoken, was already pressing Humane Studies into a constricted corner of university life. University administrations are inherently friendly toward anything that draws funds toward their institutions, which the humanities, by and large, do not. Hence we have seen the swelling of scientific and technological departments at nearly every significant university. While that hasn’t always been at the expense of the humanities departments, it has served to overshadow them ever more as time has passed.

     I became familiar with Arrowsmith’s sentiments about thirty years ago, well after my career in engineering was in flight and rising. While I loved my occupation and was known to be good at it, I sensed that my focus on it, and on the sciences generally, had left me somewhat one-dimensional. Were I to be deprived of my engineering skills, of what value would I be to anyone? Certainly I could not posture as a source of wisdom, or a guide, in Matthew Arnold’s words, to “the best that has been thought and said.”

     The recognition caused me to remember something that had been said to me as I prepared to depart for college. It was uttered by Bruce Shiegura, a graduate in the class before me, upon learning that I planned to study mathematics and physics: “Don’t go to a technical college right off the bat, Fran; get an education first.”

     Bruce, if you’re still out there somewhere, I hope you’re well and happy. Callow youth that I was, I couldn’t puzzle out what you had in mind when you said it. It took nearly twenty years.

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     William Arrowsmith was concerned with the nurturing of the humanities. His focus on the demise of teaching as a cultivated, enthusiastically practiced skill was closely related to that. For the teaching of scientific and technological subjects is rather easier than the teaching of any Humane Studies subject. The reason is simple: In the humanities, there are no prescribed right answers.

     When right answers are available, the instructor is comfortably backstopped by the subject itself. His mission is to get the student to learn the techniques that lead to those right answers. Missing the right answer provides negative feedback: an indication that one has gone wrong and must examine his methods for their inadequacies. As long as the student remains motivated, the demands on the instructor are relatively light.

     The Humane Studies teacher has no such backstop. He does not seek to coach his pupils in how to reach the right answers, for there are none. His mission is to acquaint the student with “the best that has been thought and said” – political correctness and other varieties of censorship notwithstanding – and to instill in the student the habit of thoughtful contemplation of the eternal and never definitively answerable questions with which the humanities concern themselves.

     Why was this or that statement regarded as great wisdom in its era, though no longer? What relevance does it have to the enduring nature of Man and his struggles to learn and rise? How does it illumine his path, or assist him in surmounting its obstacles? How does this book, that painting, or that sculpture tell us what art is and is not? Did this sonata widen the horizons of musical composition in acceptable manner, or was it a mere mockery of the standards?

     There are no enduring answers to such questions. The Humane Studies teacher must be satisfied with intriguing his students, getting them to think for themselves – sometimes about themselves and their preconceptions – and instilling in them a love of learning for learning’s sake, not because it can help them to find a “right answer.”

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     America has had its great men of the humanities, but for many decades they’ve been placed behind the great minds of science, technology, and industry in esteem. There’s little mystery to this. This nation prospers above all others because of its excellence in the “right answers” subjects. But over the years I’ve come to believe that we suffer a kind of poverty because we’ve forgotten the point of prosperity: what prosperity is supposed to enable us to do.

     “The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” – John Adams

     Those who are beset or impoverished have no time or resources to spend on “the finer things.” Security and prosperity must come first – but once these things are achieved, what then? More security, more prosperity? The expansion of our arsenals and fattening of our purses without limit, with no other end to be sought?

     Harry Browne doesn’t think so:

     “[B]ecause we understand money and earn a lot of it, we are rich. And do you know what that means? It means we do not have to be preoccupied with it. We are free to enjoy many things in life that you cannot enjoy because you are too absorbed trying to figure your way out of the dilemmas your primitive money system has caused….
     “Mr. Solvent here gave up the matinee at the opera this afternoon to indulge your preoccupation with money. And Mr. Solvent regrets that – not because opera is ‘culture,’ but because opera is enjoyment.”

     For nearly all of us, there comes a point where we are secure enough and prosperous enough that it’s time to turn at least some of our time and effort to other things: literature, art, music, philosophy: the subjects of the humanities. But it seems that few of us make room for those things…perhaps out of fear that they might distract us from our paying trades.

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     One of the consequences of the shrunken habitats we’ve left for the humanities is that those who dominate those fields are ever more commonly poseurs, propagandists, and second- or third-raters. Our truly able concentrate exclusively on the objective fields in which they can become richer and more influential. But the result is that what acquaintance our young have with the Humane Studies is perverted: warped in a tendentious, often outrightly deceitful fashion, with an ill-concealed sociopolitical agenda. They who eschew all contact with such things are fortunate in one sense: they avert infection by the cultural diseases that have been set loose among us by the deconstructionists and nihilists who have colonized and conquered our university humanities departments. But they are disarmed, left defenseless in ways they might never come to understand. Rare is the American who can avoid immersion in the pollution that the media call our “culture,” to nearly everyone’s detriment.

     There are consequences to the individual for being narrow of mind, shrunken of heart, and impoverished of soul.

---

     I didn’t intend to write about this when I first sat down to the computer this morning. It was a wholly spontaneous impulse. I have no idea whence it came, though I have a fair sense for what powers it. And I maintain that it is a serious matter that serious people must take seriously, for the sake of our sons and daughters and the future they will inhabit.

     We must nurture better habitats for the humanities – pipe down, Jimmy Carter; this isn’t about your grift – not only for the breadth they give to human existence but for the realignment of our national vision: specifically, why we bother to labor for anything beyond the food, clothing, and shelter required to keep body and soul together.

     It had better be for something other than the limitless increase of our bank balances, or I’ll have no justification for writing my furshlugginer novels.

Quickies: The “Educators”

     Mrs. Kimiko Komatsu, an acquaintance from USA.Life, has posted an article every mother of school-age children should read. It concerns being haled to a conference with her sons’ “educators”…because they were reading too well:

     I took my seat across from two teachers who, I noticed, were viewing me with a certain disdain. It was as if I smelled badly or was a known, convicted child molester. I could tell they didn’t approve of me, but I didn’t yet know why.

     The meeting commenced, without so much as an introduction, when one of the two women, who I suspected were the boys’ teachers said, “Mrs. Komatsu, while testing your sons we’ve discovered some highly disturbing information.” They now had my complete attention….

     “Mrs. Komatsu, we didn’t know there was a problem until we conducted a test to determine all the children’s levels of reading ability. We’ve never seen this happen before. The test evaluates performance up to the ninth-grade level and both your boys passed all elements of the test. Because of that we can’t determine how well they can read.”

     Were these “educators” implying that Sean and Mike Komatsu had cheated on the test? Apparently not:

     “Mrs. Komatsu, we need to know why your boys read as well as they do.”

     The answer was simple:

     “I invested the time in teaching them to read the way I was taught to read. I purchased a couple Phonics books, spent some time teaching them and then I made sure they always had something they wanted to read.”

     This did not please the “educators:”

     “Mrs. Komatsu, your degree is in…?”

     “I don’t have a degree. I graduated High School, that’s all.” I answered.

     “…and yet, somehow, you felt qualified to do a job best left to trained professionals with years of experience?” said teacher number one…. “Please, tell us what made you decide to teach your boys to read rather than allowing us to do it the proper way.”

     I exhort you, Gentle Reader, to read the whole thing. It casts a very harsh light on the true agenda of the “educators” who control the government-run schools. It clearly has nothing to do with teaching children to read…or anything else.

     I, who have extensive experience with the government-run schools, found the exchanges Mrs. Komatsu related in her article entirely believable. Others will undoubtedly protest that they’re “atypical” and that our “educators” are sincerely devoted to our children’s welfare. Draw your own conclusions.

Quickies: Hidden Agenda Dept.

     Every so often, one is hauled into the light:

     As the school year meanders to a close, now is a good time for education departments across the land to make policy changes for the next year. One urgent step should be ending the insane lockdown drills our kids have to practice in their schools and tightening school security instead.

     In New York City, the Department of Education implemented General Response Protocols that mandate that all public schools have four lockdown drills, in addition to fire drills, per year.

     These “soft-lockdown” drills, ostensibly to prepare kids for a potential school shooter, require kids to hide in their classroom, sometimes in a closet, and remain quiet and out of view.

     It would be one thing to prepare teachers and school staff for this kind of rare emergency. But having children hide in a closet and practice being quiet is at best a waste of time and at worst a way to emotionally scar the children we’re trying to shield.

     Karol Markowitz, who wrote the above, has a very good point. Children are impressionable, and the younger they are, the more deeply the impression strikes home. The drills contribute nothing to their safety, yet terrify them that their lives could be ended at any moment – and possibly by a classmate, at that.

     So what’s the point? Sarah Hoyt has an idea:

     BUILDING SUPPORT FOR ELIMINATING OUR 2ND AMENDMENT IS THE POINT.

     Why, yes. How did we miss that? You can’t get a job in the New York City schools if you’re known to be a gun owner or shooting enthusiast. The propaganda about “gun violence,” as if guns roam the streets on their own seeking helpless targets, is unending. And of course New York City’s laws make it impossible to own a gun of any sort unless you’re both wealthy and politically connected. Never mind that those laws have had no perceptible effect on the rate of criminal violence perpetrated with a firearm.

     But there’s a lot of pressure on American municipalities to honor the right to keep and bear arms. It started with the Heller decision and has mounted ever since. Rational minds have grasped that there’s a negative correlation between the frequency of handgun ownership and the murder rate. There’s even a case pending before the Supreme Court that specifically addresses the Big Apple’s draconian anti-firearms laws. So the anti-gunners are panicked.

     But if they could just inculcate their prejudice against personal weapons ownership in the impressionable young…and perhaps by propagandizing them, sway their parents!

     I’ve said before that sending your child to a “public” school has become an act of child abuse. This is only one aspect of the thing. Think it over, and make your decisions accordingly.

From Merit To Certification

     It becomes ever more important – nay, critical — that one who wants to grasp the reasons for the deterioration of American society and the American Republic be aware of history, including the history of major institutions.

     Not many persons are aware of the history of American higher education. (Indeed, not many are aware of the history of education period, but that’s a tirade for another day.) The institution we call a university was a rare item before 1900. They began to multiply with the blossoming of large-scale American commerce, as men who had become successful in monetary terms produced sons and sought distinctions for them other than wealth. Colleges and universities were billed as places for intellectual advancement, but on a deeper and arguably more important level they provided sheltered gathering places for the progeny of the commercial elite. They facilitated the formation of the acquaintances and relationships the sons of wealth would exploit in later life.

     A university such as Harvard or Yale served its patrons in several ways, apart from whatever actual learning it could confer upon them. For two, it provided the aforementioned watering hole for the sons of wealth, and it awarded them the distinction of association with its name (i.e., “He’s a Harvard man”). But these things had a superstitious effect upon subsequent generations. Americans of less wealth came to believe that a college degree could somehow lead them to exceptional success. The universities, while they might not have actively encouraged that notion, certainly didn’t do anything to discourage it. The demand for degrees from degree-granting institutions exploded, as did the number of such institutions.

     The postwar G.I. Bill added a huge amount of impetus to the demand. Never before had so many common citizens, persons who possess neither great wealth nor any other special status, flocked into universities seeking degrees. Because the immediate postwar period was also a time of unprecedented advancement in the sciences, much of which lent itself to commercialization through technology, for a while there appeared to be a positive correlation between material success and degreed-ness. But other things were happening as well.

     The degree came to be regarded as a credential: a ticket for admission to a new kind of elite. Whether the degree holder has anything much between his ears became secondary to the degree itself – and, of course, to the name of the institution that had granted it.

     Hearken to Arthur Herzog on this subject:

     Since a good proportion of those in college are dullards (those who weren’t to start with may have become so through education), courses must be invented that are interesting enough to keep the students awake, “relevant” enough to make them feel “involved,” and easy enough to let them pass so that they stay in school. The trivial and the obvious are elevated to the level of course requirements, and the student is taught that faking it and the real world are interchangeable. A great many fellows in fakery of one sort or another emerge.

     Herzog wrote that in 1973, Gentle Reader. It was painfully true then; it’s both tragic and incontrovertible today.

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     Via the indispensable Never Yet Melted comes this Yuval Levin observation:

     For much of American history .. [t]he apex of American political, cultural, and economic power was largely the preserve of a fairly narrow white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant near-aristocracy, centered in the Northeast and exercising power across generations. This was never an absolute barrier to others’ rising, of course, but it was a major obstacle.

     The claim to power of this WASP elite, like that of most modern aristocracies, was a mix of heritage and rearing. They possessed their privileges by virtue of their birth, but they were raised and educated in ways intended to prepare them for responsibility and authority. And they were—at least in principle though in many cases also in practice—expected to subject themselves to a code of behavior, a commitment to public service, a degree of personal reticence, a regard for the rules of fair play, and a sense of responsibility that was rooted in the implicit recognition that their power was an inherited privilege, not an earned achievement.

     This is a reasonably fair and accurate characterization of the elites of the early Twentieth Century. The sons of men who had risen strictly through commerce could elect some form of public service to make their own marks on the nation. Not all of them entered government. Many established themselves as what we would now style “public intellectuals:” persons of repute who declaimed, usually through the pages of a newspaper or other print organ, on the issues of the day. It was the case both here and in England, from which most such persons traced their heritage.

     The multiplication of colleges and universities throughout that century naturally gave rise to a stratification into more and less prestigious levels. The “Ivy League” stood at the pinnacle of the pyramid; the mostly young state universities were at the bottom; many other, mostly private institutions stood between them. The distinction attached to graduates from the upper levels of that pyramid greased their paths into the niches they sought, whether in government, opinion journalism, or at the universities themselves. Persons with degrees from less prestigious universities had to make do with the leavings.

     As the universities steadily came under the control of successive generations of their own graduates and the trend Arthur Herzog noted toward educational vapidity advanced, the college degree became commodified: a purchasable credential of a significance no greater than its price. The more prestigious ones, of course, commanded the highest prices. The recent purchased-admissions pseudo-scandal involving a couple of minor actresses should be viewed in that light. The universities, of course, would prefer otherwise.

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     Today’s “elite” has little in common with the elite of a century past. A good working definition of the new “elite” would be “those who matter to those who think they matter.” In particular, the ethic of genuine public service, understood as a responsibility to provide others with something of real value to them, is largely absent. But they wave their credentials at every opportunity. This is particularly noteworthy in the American political class.

     Consider in this connection the members of “Conservatism, Inc.:” the bastion of “NeverTrump” pseudo-conservatives such as Bill Kristol and Max Boot. To such persons, the all-important priority is to maintain their status in the “elite.” Regardless of the height of their perches or the bluster with which they orate from them, the majority of them have little of value to offer anyone. But they can brandish all the best credentials: all the right associations and associates. “They matter to those who think they matter.”

     Merit is not a term I would associate with such persons. Certified “elitists,” yes; persons with important knowledge and insights they will share with others, no. The time has come for this recognition to emerge from our national subconscious and be made explicit.

Quickies: Money, Good Intentions, And Naughty Players

This case, in which a college appears to have targeted a student for punishment specifically because he’s an outspoken conservative, drew the following comment among others:

     Conservatives MUST stop donating to colleges and universities, except maybe to the science departments. [Emphasis added by FWP]

     This obviously came from a good-hearted person with good intentions, who wouldn’t want the science departments, which are generally resistant to SJW subversion, to be penalized for sins they probably didn’t commit. However, the problem is stiffer, and the naughty types are naughtier, than the commenter’s exception allows for.

     Some years ago, I twitted a colleague who’d just bought a New York State lottery ticket. Specifically I told him that buying a ticket doesn’t materially increase his chances of winning. He defended his action by repeating the Vampire State’s Lottery Shibboleth: “The money goes to education.” An accountant friend reminded us that money is fungible -- that it can be reapportioned and redirected almost without limit. If lottery players fatten the state treasury by $X, the state can then redirect $X it would have spent on education to other uses, without decreasing education funding by a single dollar. (Let’s omit for the moment that the state has no business being involved in education at all.)

     The same is true for “higher” education: colleges and universities. I’m unsure that it’s actually possible to entail a donation so that it goes to a particular department or activity, but let’s stipulate that it’s possible. When you donate $X to the University of Podunk’s physics department, you are actually putting $X in the university's hands to do with as it pleases. The university’s budgeters, aware that $X has been donated directly to physics, can then redirect $X that it would have spent on physics to other departments and activities.

     The university has been given $X more to fund whatever it likes. The physics department might not benefit by a single dollar. And the well-intentioned donor will never know.

     It's a fairly subtle point, and one that eludes many good-hearted people. We want to believe that we can do good without doing harm...but oftentimes it's not a straightforward matter at all.

The Masks Are Off

     They who operate “our” government-run indoctrination centers for the young and helpless will have no truck with anyone turning them into adults:

     On Friday, Parkland survivor Kyle Kashuv went to a gun range to learn to fire a gun for the first time, alongside his father. He tweeted this:

     It was great learning about our inalienable right of #2A and how to properly use a gun. This was my first time ever touching a gun and it made me appreciate the #Constitution even more. My instructor was very informative; I learnt a lot. #2A is important and we need 2 preserve 2A

     There’s a bit of a surprise in there already: Kyle, who has been outspoken about the importance of the Second Amendment in absolute contrast to his rabidly anti-Constitutional classmate David Hogg, had never been to a gun range or shot a gun. I certainly wouldn’t have expected that. But Kyle’s father saw to that step in his son’s education on Friday, April 20, as a good American father should. Apparently Kyle found the experience both educational and enjoyable. So far, so good.

     But that’s not the end of the story. Here’s what happened to Kyle just yesterday:

     Near the end of third period, my teacher got a call from the office saying I need to go down and see a Mr. Greenleaf. I didn’t know Mr. Greenleaf, but it turned out that he was an armed school resource officer. I went down and found him, and he escorted me to his office. Then a second security officer walked in and sat behind me. Both began questioning me intensely. First, they began berating my tweet, although neither of them had read it; then they began aggressively asking questions about who I went to the range with, whose gun we used, about my father, etc. They were incredibly condescending and rude.

     Then a third officer from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office walked in, and began asking me the same questions again. At that point, I asked whether I could record the interview. They said no. I asked if I had done anything wrong. Again, they answered no. I asked why I was there. One said, “Don’t get snappy with me, do you not remember what happened here a few months ago?”

     They continued to question me aggressively, though they could cite nothing I had done wrong. They kept calling me “the pro-Second Amendment kid.” I was shocked and honestly, scared. It definitely felt like they were attempting to intimidate me.

     I was treated like a criminal for no reason other than having gone to the gun range and posted on social media about it.

     As no record of this interrogation exists, I cannot confirm what Kyle Kashuv asserts above. Nevertheless, the “interview” occurred; we have documentary evidence of that. And Kyle has no reason to lie. So these Broward County “armed school resource officers” and sheriff’s deputies, who hid behind their cars while Nikolas Cruz murdered 17 people, felt it was their prerogative to berate Kyle Kashuv for...what?

     I think it’s about more than just reclaiming a bit of pride for the Broward County Sheriff’s Department. Don’t you, Gentle Reader?

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     The educationist arm of the Left is absolutely determined that your children shall conform to their notions, not yours. Especially when it comes to the right to keep and bear arms and the exercise thereof. We have a previous example of this very thing:

     A New Jersey school district that allegedly suspended two high school students this week over a gun photo taken during a family visit to a private shooting range is facing community backlash and the threat of a lawsuit over district policies.

     The photo of four rifles, magazines and a gun duffel bag was shared by one of the students on the social media app Snapchat with the caption "fun day at the range," according to Lacey Township resident Amanda Buron, a family friend of one of the students.

     A screen capture of the image made the rounds among other students and later brought to the attention of Lacey Township High School officials. Buron said the students received a five-day in-school suspension for violating the school's policy on weapons possession.

     The parents in that New Jersey school district reacted as they should: with immediate outrage and promises of retribution against the school district. The district hastily made amends and changed its “policies,” which ought never to have addressed perfectly legal conduct outside of school time and off school grounds. It was heartwarming, especially as it occurred in New Jersey, which is notoriously anti-gun. But to have anything of the sort occur in Florida is doubly surprising. A few badly blistered fannies in Broward County are obviously aching for a salve for their wounded pride.

     The firearms-rights aspect of this, as important as it is, is secondary. What matters more is the attitude of the educationist establishment.

     A month ago, I wrote:

     So we have a coercively funded institution with national scope that has been fully conquered by the Left and is striving to exercise legislative, police, and judicial powers over American students – and by extension, over their parents. Moreover, I would posit that the reaction by the New Jersey parents cited above is atypical – that the usual response to an event such as the suspension of the Lacey Two is “What’s the use?” or “You can’t fight City Hall.” I’d like to be wrong about that, but I don’t think I am.

     The “public” schools must be destroyed. They must be ripped from the fabric of our communities. Their employees must be fired with prejudice: i.e., they must be excluded from any position in which they could repeat their crimes. Their physical facilities must be sold to private parties. No successor institution that shares their coercive powers can be tolerated.

     You might be asking why I consider that necessary. It’s quite simple: the “public” schools, and their ever-escalating exactions via taxation, are the major reason for the dwindling of private alternatives. Vanishingly few families can afford to pay school taxes, about which they have no choice, and the tuition at a private school as well. Moreover, the “educators’ unions” are aware of this. It’s part of the reason they demand ever more of our money. As for the few brave American families that opt for homeschooling, they’re under increasing legal pressure intended to make their choice effectively impossible, whether by expense or through intrusive monitoring that inherently makes the home school an extension of the “public” school.

     I expected a backlash over that piece, especially as it was referenced in several other places on the Web. I didn’t receive one. But here, too, there’s more than one facet to the evil gem of “public” education:

     Without the consent or knowledge of their parents, two classes of ninth-grade females at Western Albemarle High School (WAHS) in Crozet, Virginia, recently were exposed in a classroom lesson to explicit “how-to” videos on male and female sexual pleasure.

     Suggested to the school by Charlottesville’s Sexual Assault Resource Agency (SARA)—a sex education partner with several Albemarle County schools—the videos ostensibly were shown under the banner of “Family Life” education. One video, focused on “male pleasure,” and the other, on female “orgasm,” shocked and embarrassed many of the students.

     According to a knowledgeable parent, the twenty-eight girls involved, divided into two classes, saw one or the other of the videos but not both.

     The controversial exhibition was not originally included in the WAHS Family Life curriculum; however, a last minute insertion was proposed by SARA and ok’d by WAHS Physical Education Department Chair, Frank Lawson.

     In an April 2 email to Lawson, SARA representative Lexi Huston notified him of planned additions to the previously familiar curriculum, and shortly thereafter, Mr. Lawson expressed his consent:

     “Looks good – looking forward to it!”

     The Videos

     The salacious videos were produced by “sex educator and YouTube personality,” Laci Green, who frequently collaborates with Planned Parenthood. Her productions have been viewed more than 150M times, and they include such titles as:

• Is Drag OK for Kids??
• How Many Freakin Genders
• How Do Lesbians Have The Sex???
• Intersex
• Abortion Under Attack
• Condom Tips for the Ladies
• BDSM 101
• Squirting 101
• 10 Tips for Hookups
• Transgender Adventure!
• Let’s Lose “Virginity”
• Shaving Pubes
• Laci’s Guide to Butt Sex
• The Sticky on Semen!
• Trumpocalypse

     Is there any Gentle Reader who thinks such “education” is properly within the purview of a “public” school? (Jokesters who suggest that we should “just leave out the ‘l’” will be tarred, feathered, and run off the Web on a rail.) More: Is there any Gentle Reader who thinks this was conceived (pardon the term) for the children’s benefit?

     Add that parents, when they learn about such “sex education,” frequently ask that their children be excluded from those classes, only to be told that the classes are mandatory and no child may be excepted.

     Still think the “public” schools can be “reformed?”

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     I think the above incidents might have busted my outrage meter. I need no further evidence for myself – and I doubt I’d need any more to persuade any reasonably intelligent American parent of the toxicity of the “public” schools.

     The indoctrination of our kids into Leftist dogmas about things as fundamental as sex and firearms is bad enough. The use of governments’ coercive powers to deny us any alternative makes it even worse. I was tempted to repost this stunning analysis by physicist and fictioneer Hans G. Schantz, but I’ll trust you all to click the link and review it yourselves. For my part, I’ll repeat only this:

The “public” schools’ first and foremost aim is the exercise of police powers over the lives of American children.

     If there’s anyone with a counter-argument, I want to hear it now.

Institutions And Incursions

     The dark side of attempting to bypass a fortified position in the hope of striking the enemy in his vitals is that the bypassed fortress might emit troops that can threaten your rear. This is merely one case of the Evil Overlord maxim: “Never leave a live enemy behind you.”

     Today, courtesy of Mike Hendrix, we have a striking example of how this applies to contemporary institutions:

     Angered by word of the disciplining of two Lacey High School students for a gun-related social media post, 200 parents, community members and other supporters of the Second Amendment on Monday let the Board of Education know they don't want the district trampling on their rights or meddling in their home lives.

     "You guys are reaching into our private life, the private life of our children," said one parent, Lewis Fiordimondo, who has twins in pre-kindergarten and a daughter at the high school. "It's not your place. It's not the school's place."

     Another dad, Frank Horvath, whose son is a senior at Lacey High, put things in blunter terms.

     "It's none of your damn business what our children do outside of school," Horvath told the seven board members toward the end of a four-hour meeting, most of it occupied by speaker after speaker venting anger and frustration at school officials largely unable to respond due to confidentiality rules.

     The unusually large turnout for Monday night's board meeting in the high school auditorium was prompted by a five-day in-school suspension of two senior boys after one of them posted a photo of themselves with guns at a local shooting range, away from school property and not during school hours.

     The parental reaction is most gratifying. Indeed, had the outraged parents descended bodily upon the school, hauled the administrators out by their necks, and hanged them from the most convenient lampposts, I’d have applauded even more enthusiastically. It would have been no more than they deserved for what they’d attempted to do.

     What they were attempting to do, you see, is congruent with the various “school walkouts” to “protest gun violence.” That the subject was the right to keep and bear arms is secondary.

     The “public” schools no longer have education for their primary purpose...or any lesser purpose. Indeed, even indoctrination takes a back seat to their paramount mission. That mission is so greatly at odds with any and all conceptions of “school” that it must be stated in large font:

The “public” schools’ first and foremost aim is the exercise of police powers over the lives of American children.

     Moreover, the “public” schools have asserted an arbitrary power of legislation as well. Note the following report about Lacey High School’s “student handbook:”

     Before tweaking the language in the high school's student handbook, the policy said "any student who is reported to be in possession of a weapon of any type for any reason or purpose whether on or off school grounds," would be subject to penalties including up to a one-year suspension.

     It now omits any mention of possessing a weapon off school grounds and doesn't mention a specific suspension length. It also includes a note on buses.

     I added the emphasis. Give it a moment’s thought before you continue on.

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     I was once an advocate of merely bypassing the Left-conquered institutions – the educational establishments, the news media, and the entertainment complex – that have done so much damage to American life. In particular, I believed that emptying the “public” schools via private alternatives and homeschooling was the best way to neutralize their pernicious effects. The above incident, coupled to the “gun violence protests” that appear to have occurred across the length and breadth of the nation, has changed my mind.

     The “gun violence protests,” you see, were mandatory de facto. A cosmetic alternative of “opting out” was offered to students who disagreed, but those students, in every case that I know of, were herded into special rooms for the duration of the “protest.” In a stroke, they were ostracized, marginalized, and denied the learning opportunities their parents had paid for. They were not allowed to mount a counter-protest in support of the right to keep and bear arms.

     You may rest assured that their names were recorded for their brass in refusing to join the anti-gun “protests.”

     So we have a coercively funded institution with national scope that has been fully conquered by the Left and is striving to exercise legislative, police, and judicial powers over American students – and by extension, over their parents. Moreover, I would posit that the reaction by the New Jersey parents cited above is atypical – that the usual response to an event such as the suspension of the Lacey Two is “What’s the use?” or “You can’t fight City Hall.” I’d like to be wrong about that, but I don’t think I am.

     The “public” schools must be destroyed. They must be ripped from the fabric of our communities. Their employees must be fired with prejudice: i.e., they must be excluded from any position in which they could repeat their crimes. Their physical facilities must be sold to private parties. No successor institution that shares their coercive powers can be tolerated.

     You might be asking why I consider that necessary. It’s quite simple: the “public” schools, and their ever-escalating exactions via taxation, are the major reason for the dwindling of private alternatives. Vanishingly few families can afford to pay school taxes, about which they have no choice, and the tuition at a private school as well. Moreover, the “educators’ unions” are aware of this. It’s part of the reason they demand ever more of our money. As for the few brave American families that opt for homeschooling, they’re under increasing legal pressure intended to make their choice effectively impossible, whether by expense or through intrusive monitoring that inherently makes the home school an extension of the “public” school.

     Think about it.

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up Dept.

     I thought I’d seen every sort of ugly, hateful, inherently vicious lunacy the Left could concoct...but then, it’s been a long time since I was last involved with a college or university:

     Student government leaders at Loyola University Maryland faced a barrage of pressure from the university administration to change the theme of a senior class party described as “very alienating, divisive and harmful” and against the university’s “core values,” according to emails provided to The Daily Caller. The theme? America.

     The theme for Loyola’s annual “Senior 200s” party — one of four celebrations exclusive to seniors held throughout the year — was based upon a survey of Loyola seniors taken last summer. The party was held on Nov. 18 and went off without a hitch, according to students who attended, despite warnings that the administration might have to get involved if students were offended....

     The day after Trump’s victory, a handful of students messaged SGA representatives to argue that — because of Trump’s victory — an America-themed party was now inappropriate. One female student claimed she was “a victim of horrible hate words” and worried that similar mean things might be said at the party if the theme wasn’t changed.

     When the possibility of unpleasant feelings wasn’t enough to cancel a class-wide event, the administration got involved.

     The university’s executive vice president, Susan Donovan sent an email to two SGA members claiming she “talked with a number of students and heard from faculty members” about the party. “None of it is positive and it sounds very alienating, divisive and harmful.”

     “I encourage you to reconsider this plan in light of the legitimate concerns raised by so many,” Donovan went on to say. “We have made progress in providing a welcoming climate on campus and do we want to reverse that progress with a theme that divides us?”...

     [Dean of Students Sheila] Horton also said the administration would have to “deal with” any fallout from the party, which she worried would make students feel “unsafe.”

     Is America a “theme that divides us?” Is America an “alienating, divisive, and harmful” idea? Is America, the country with the Statue of Liberty in its foremost harbor, calling to the world to “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” an idea that makes us feel “unsafe?”

     Loyola University Maryland is a Catholic institution. Part of American Catholics’ annual contributions to our dioceses is put to the support of Catholic higher education. Do American Catholics consider America something that alienates, divides, or harms us? Does it make us feel “unsafe?”

     It’s become clear that there is no college or university in this country that hasn’t been colonized and conquered by the Left...and the Left doesn’t respect anything. Add this to Oleg Atbashian’s recent experiences at George Mason University, and ask yourself where you would send your bright high-school graduate.

Soft Curves And Hard Edges

     I gravitated toward the physical sciences early in life. Perhaps the biggest of my reasons, if it’s valid to say that I gave the matter conscious thought as a lad, was that in physics and chemistry all the questions have verifiable answers. Though we must grant that human limitations guarantee that the answers will remain open to subsequent modification as our powers of observation increase, nevertheless by continued observation, inductive inference, prediction, and well-designed experiment we can steadily enlarge our confidence in our knowledge about the physical world. Personalities, opinions, and emotions are utterly irrelevant.

     That doesn’t sit well with some people:

     College science classes are hostile to women and minorities because they use the scientific method, which assumes people can find reliable truths about the natural world through careful and sustained experimentation, concludes a recent dissertation by a doctoral candidate at the University of North Dakota.

     Laura Parson, a student in the university’s education department, reviewed eight science class syllabi at a “Midwest public university” and said she discovered in them a hidden hostility to women and minorities:

     Initial exploration of the STEM syllabi in this study did not reveal overt references to gender, such as through the use of gendered pronouns. However, upon deeper review, language used in the syllabi reflects institutionalized STEM teaching practices and views about knowledge that are inherently discriminatory to women and minorities by promoting a view of knowledge as static and unchanging, a view of teaching that promotes the idea of a passive student, and by promoting a chilly climate that marginalizes women.

     Miss Parson wants to be quite clear about the impact on poor, helpless, feelings-oriented women:

     Instead of promoting the idea that knowledge is constructed by the student and dynamic, subject to change as it would in a more feminist view of knowledge, the syllabi reinforce the larger male-dominant view of knowledge as one that students acquire and use make the correct decision. [Sic throughout.]

     The shorthand term for what Miss Parson advocates here is social construction of reality. No doubt you’ve encountered it in other venues, though the idea that it should influence the physical sciences is fairly new. But wait: there’s more! Parson also condemns the notion of prerequisite knowledge. The masculine notion that some knowledge must build upon prior, more fundamental knowledge is unfair too! She condemns the following statement about a geology course:

     Good algebra and trig skills are essential if you expect to be successful in this course. In addition, you are expected to have sufficiently mastered the material in Calculus I to be able to use it when needed. We will not have time in this class to devote to prerequisite materials (Lower level math).

     ...by writing that:

     While it is not unrealistic to include prerequisites in a syllabus, the language used to discuss the prerequisites indicated that students who had not learned or did not remember that knowledge would be unsuccessful because there was not support within the course or from the instructor. The language used in this corpus of syllabi created an impression of extremely difficult courses, which contributes to the chilly climate in STEM courses, and would be prohibitive for those not confident in those areas, such as women and minorities. [Emphasis added by FWP.]

     So your geology professor must be prepared to instruct in algebra! Hey, what about multiplication and division? Some “women and minorities” have a hard time with those too, you know! And aren’t the answers all a matter of how we feel about them, anyway?

     I forget who said it, but some wag said, twenty years ago, “One wonders whether feminist airplanes will stay aloft for feminist engineers.” But then, if it’s all about “feelings,” maybe the plane shouldn’t stay aloft, especially if the passengers are all those nasty, right-answer-centric white men. The fewer of those we have around, the more time and latitude we’ll have for choosing the politically correct outfits in which to spout politically correct feelings at our highly impressionable female and minority students. (What makes you think we’d be willing to educate boys? So we could have airplanes that would stay aloft, so they’d be safe for women and minorities to travel on? That’s all right, they’d only increase global warming anyway.)

     Of course, we must emphasize that the above “doctoral dissertation” comes from a woman doctoral candidate in education, beyond all question a thoroughly bogus, totally undisciplined “discipline” that promotes fads over the instruction of the young. Education majors routinely test in the bottom quintile – that’s right, the lowest 20% – of college graduates. It suggests that were an education degree not available to them, they might never earn a degree of any sort. Moreover, assessments of working “educators’” knowledge, including their knowledge in the subjects they “teach,” frequently reveals it to be deficient, inadequate even for grammar or high school instruction.

     The bell curve has long tails. Surely there are some highly intelligent “educators” in the world, capable of confronting and accepting the objective nature of reality and usable knowledge about it. However, after so many years of PC infiltration and feminist indoctrination the percentage can’t be large. (Yes, yes, our beloved Linda Fox is one such.) And when we combine an education degree with feminist convictions, the odds lengthen to the point that there’s no point in searching for one.

     Such are the creatures that claim the authority to instruct your children. Be aware. Act accordingly.

Learning

     The “education establishment” is in full revolt against education.

     What’s that, Gentle Reader? I should tell you something you don’t already know? Well, perhaps a bit later. It’s still early in the ayem, and I need a few keystrokes to warm up the old bile ducts. (Yes, they’re only as old as the rest of me, but they’ve got a lot of miles on them.)

     Education – “to lead out,” from its Latin roots – is one of the few occupational areas whose “practitioners” deliberately resist the practice thereof. We all know the horror stories: the fads and fashions that have displaced proven methods; the elevation of “fairness” and “equality” over results; the deliberate dumbing-down of course content to prevent the slightest of bruises to anyone’s “self-esteem.” We also know about the use of the government-run schools – I refuse to call them “public” schools, as they’re openly averse to any inspection or criticism by the public – as indoctrination centers and institutions by which children can be separated emotionally from their parents. It’s all deplorable, and at great cost at that.

     Trouble is, with roughly 90% of American students incarcerated in the State-run schools, the 10% of educational institutions outside the State’s direct control are nevertheless pulled along in their wake. They can’t avoid partaking of the pool of “teachers” not currently employed by the State. They can’t afford to commission special textbooks for their use. They can’t evade the “social justice” influences that have reduced State schooling to the level of day care. Only the determined parents who elect to homeschool have a chance of preserving their kids’ most precious possession: the opportunity to learn and grow.

     Homeschooling puts its practitioners under intense pressure. It requires a financial commitment that can badly strain a family. It often puts parents at odds with their kids, who frequently resent the separation from the experiences of the coevals. And of course, the educrats purely hate it for its superior performance and would love to see it made impossible. American parents that homeschool deserve profound admiration for their grit.

     But that’s all yesterday’s news. What I had in mind this morning derives from this commemoration of a remarkable educator:

     In 1990, the Navajo students of Window Rock High School in Fort Defiance, Arizona, asked the author of their calculus book, John Saxon, to be their graduation speaker. The class sponsor had suggested the governor as their speaker, but the students wanted Saxon.

     A story in The Arizona Republic explained, “At this high school, as at thousands of other schools around the country, Saxon’s name is spoken with reverence by pupils who credit him with changing completely their views about math.”

     The educrats hated John Saxon. They still do. They routinely revile his memory. (He died in 1996.) Why? Because he reintroduced old methods of mathematics instruction and proved that they outperform the fashionable fads. In doing so, he demonstrated something the educrats regard as the vilest heresy:

     In 1992, an Atlanta, Georgia, newspaper wrote about a conflict around “Saxon Math” being put on the state’s approved adoption list. They said a “heretical yearning for ‘learning by heart’ was creeping across the land…relying on old-fashioned memorization and repetition…Proponents don’t see this as a retreat into the past, but a post-modern appropriating of traditions for the effectiveness in the present.”

     The results his students achieved demonstrated that Saxon’s “old-fashioned” methods outperform the trendy ones: in other words, that we’ve known how to teach mathematics to teenagers for a long, long time.

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     Educrats have a great deal in common with art and music critics. Both groups aspire to higher status than their trades deserve. Both groups have adopted a radical technique: to disavow what works in favor of something “innovative.”

     “Modern art” – ugly crap that displays neither effort, nor skill, nor insight into the human condition, practically the antithesis of art as art was known and judged a century ago – is “popular” only with professional critics. Similarly, the methods of “modern education” are popular only with those who vend them. Educrats, and the special colleges from which they emerge, ceaselessly promote pedagogical innovations that fail in practice. The rationale for each is the failure of the previous edition: “Yes, we got it wrong last time, but we’re confident we can do it right now.”

     The kids aren’t learning. Their dismayed, frustrated parents feel powerless to compel critical examination and improvements. But the educrats are happy. They’ve created a jargon-laden priesthood that allows them to feel special, intellectually superior to the grubby groundlings whose kids are at their mercy. Better yet, by clever political maneuvering and the amassing of allies within state and federal “education” departments, they’ve succeeded in insulating themselves against correction.

     Only the emergence of a John Saxon or a Jaime Escalante, or the superior performance of homeschooled kids whose parents employ the “antiquated” methods of decades past, can threaten their bastions.

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     The entire American educational system is a failure and worse. Our kids emerge from these expensive institutions knowing very little and presuming a whole lot more. Worse, these institutions function as transmission systems for vile ideas and prejudices, including this one: that they should reject the wisdom and experience of their parents by default. Glenn Reynolds and I concur that at this time, for a parent to submit his child to an educational institution is a form of child abuse.

     But as with most State enterprises, the mandarins of the government-run schools maintain that “they’ll get it right” if only:

1. They’re given more money;
2. They’re freed from externally imposed standards;
3. They can suppress competition from homeschoolers and the remaining religious schools.

     Under no circumstances will the educrats allow into the discussion the simple fact that a century ago, the schools worked smoothly if not flawlessly. Yea verily, even the government-run schools. They avoided the “social justice” cant of our time. That allowed them to employ methods that today’s educrats will not abide:

• Drill;
• Testing;
• Correction;
• Discipline;
• And most important of all, failure.

     A child who tested poorly wouldn’t be fawned over for the sake of his “self-esteem;” his parents would be notified; they’d compel him to drill longer and harder. A child who resisted correction by his teacher would receive it from his parents, often at the end of a peach switch. A child who proved to be too unruly to teach, disruptive to his classmates’ instruction, would be expelled to make his way uneducated. And of course, a child who failed repeatedly would be examined closely to determine whether he was educable at all, and relieved of the pressures if the answer was negative.

     What worked in 1900 works equally well in the Twenty-First Century...but the educrats don’t want you to know that, nor to listen to any of the apostles of the proven methods of yesteryear.

     Which is why the name of John Saxon, may he rest forever in peace in God’s arms, is revered by those who appreciate his insight, and reviled by those whose priesthood is threatened by the success of his methods.