"Education" in America (and the West)

Book Reports:

I'm reading The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom, and just finished The Graves of Academe, by Richard Mitchell.

I recommend these books urgently. They are both indictments of the shallow propaganda currently called "education" in America.

Mitchell, in The Graves of Academe takes the "educationist" bureaucracy to task, arguing that there is no hope for a decent education in current government schools, since most of our teachers are illiterate products of the touchy-feely, content-free "teachers' colleges" that require courses in "how to teach", but none at all in "what to teach".

He makes the simple point that the people who teach our children English (or History, or Mathematics, or Science) are not actually educated in English (or History, or Mathematics, or Science), but have taken a plethora of classes in the mechanics of teaching; most of said mechanics being based on hair-brained notions of people with too much time on their hands, and an insufficient command of any actual subject-matter...but have to justify their cushy positions as Deans of Education for their fat paychecks.

There is little to argue with if you have ever had a conversation with an American High School student who cannot distinguish the Revolutionary War from the Civil War; believes that slavery was a uniquely American institution; and thinks the Inquisition was just as bad as the Jihadi menace.

Children are not taught history because their teachers do not know history; they were "educated" by the same system. It's a downward spiral into functional, cultural illiteracy...and until we do something, it will continue.

It is surely depressing and frightening. But it does have one benefit: it helps explain the idiocy that surrounds us. Many people are effectively illiterate. They have not read any of the great books, learned the ideas of the great thinkers. They have not been taught how to think, but what to believe. They cannot distinguish between an emotional response and a reasoned analysis, and are thus swayed by the emotional rhetoric of the cynical and corrupt mountebanks we call politicians.

They know about feelings and self-esteem. But they know nothing about reason and self-respect. And they are easily led by appealing to their lowest impulses, while being told it is to their higher selves...because they can't tell the difference.

Tell me if that doesn't describe most of the Liberals you know? And it also explains why there are so damn MANY of them. They're pumped out our schools in the millions. Some, if they are lucky, will figure this out, and educate themselves. But most will not, and being deprived of the education that would have helped them grow into wise and thoughtful people, they spend their lives stunted and stupid, confused by the complexities of the world, clinging to comforting illusions sold by the liars, and led by the nose to opinions that are false and decisions that only benefit their manipulators.

Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind addresses the shallowness of our understanding of the nature of what we think, and why. It is less delightfully written, but an incisive analysis of how current "education" is undermining democracy, and "impoverishing the souls of today's students". It is a more difficult read, but gives anyone reading it guidance on what we need to know. You'll find yourself making a reading list!

Reading these books has convinced me that the first thing we need to do is fix the schools...or abandon them. With our children (and too many of ourselves) being so poorly educated, we cannot hope to survive as a culture. When people are too ignorant to distinguish quality from trash, good from evil, eternal truth from current fashion, how can they build or maintain a culture...or summon the courage to defend it?

Unless we teach people what they need to know to be fully human, they will remain, like current popular idols, Paris Hilton and Michael Jackson, grotesque parodies of human beings whose only whiney and infantile thoughts are of immediate gratification and a distorted obsession with physical appearances.

Rome was not invulnerable to disintegration when her people became so degenerated...and neither are we.

What our leaders are pleased to call "education" is cutom-made for creating bleating sheep for the shepherds to herd and control. The shepherds, unfortunately, are in league with the wolves.

It's time we sheep grow teeth and take back our pasture.

The Gunslinger