Tag: Tough History Coming

Quote of the Day – Taki’s Mag Edition

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Wherein the editors tell us how they really feel:

Trying to rein in Leviathan is somehow depicted as “obstructionist.” One must never obstruct the bloody beast. One must continue tossing raw meat into its maw. Anyone who stands in the beast’s way is full of “hate” and “anger.” We know who the problem is here, right? It’s those Tea Party redneck rural paint-huffing Bible-thumping cousin-humping bigots who aren’t like we are and whose chief sin is that they don’t like people who are different than they are. We all know it’s a scientific fact that those people are only against abortion because they prefer the taste of newborn babies.

The average naïve and uninformed American seems to believe that a politician’s main role is to care about his or her feelings. As long as the words sound vaguely compassionate and the soundtrack is uplifting, they’ll swallow whatever ball of honey-coated dung that politicians feed them. In truth, politicians care about us so much, they even indenture the unborn to lifetime financial servitude.

If you oppose taxing the lifeblood out of the people until their bodies are dried-up like beef jerky, well, you’re obviously a racist. Not that there’s any correlation. There doesn’t need to be a correlation in a world where feelings trump facts.

Mutually Exclusive

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I saw a car today with an “I ♥ OBAMACARE” bumpersticker on it.  It took me a minute, however, to read the one below that:


(Click for full size)
My immediate reaction:

Like HELL you are!

So I dragged out the camera and snapped that shot just to show you.

When I got home and looked at the full-sized image, I noted that the lower bumpersticker is from ACLU.org.  Well, that explains it.  The ACLU is a supporter of the “living Constitution” idea, so for the woman in this Civic, obviously whatever she thinks is Constitutional is – by definition – Constitutional!

And people who think like that outvote those of us who don’t.

And people who think like that are likely to think like this:

http://static.photobucket.com/player.swf

Remind you of anyone?  Want to know where that video originated?  The California Federation of Teachers union.  But teachers don’t indoctrinate our youth, right? 

How We “Lost the Culture War”

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It’s been a pretty steady refrain, from Bill Whittle to CNN that the reelection of Barack Obama proves that the Right has “lost the culture war”. There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over how this happened, but it’s been apparent to me that it started in our public school system, and here’s an interesting article to that point.

From City Journal, Spring of 2009 edition, Pedagogy of the Oppressor:

Like the more famous Teach for America, the New York Teaching Fellows program provides an alternate route to state certification for about 1,700 new teachers annually. When I met with a group of the fellows taking a required class at a school of education last summer, we began by discussing education reform, but the conversation soon took a turn, with many recounting one horror story after another from their rocky first year: chaotic classrooms, indifferent administrators, veteran teachers who rarely offered a helping hand. You might expect the required readings for these struggling rookies to contain good practical tips on classroom management, say, or sensible advice on teaching reading to disadvantaged students. Instead, the one book that the fellows had to read in full was Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.

For anyone familiar with American schools of education, the choice wasn’t surprising. Since the publication of the English edition in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has achieved near-iconic status in America’s teacher-training programs. In 2003, David Steiner and Susan Rozen published a study examining the curricula of 16 schools of education—14 of them among the top-ranked institutions in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report—and found that Pedagogy of the Oppressed was one of the most frequently assigned texts in their philosophy of education courses. These course assignments are undoubtedly part of the reason that, according to the publisher, almost 1 million copies have sold, a remarkable number for a book in the education field.

The odd thing is that Freire’s magnum opus isn’t, in the end, about education—certainly not the education of children. Pedagogy of the Oppressed mentions none of the issues that troubled education reformers throughout the twentieth century: testing, standards, curriculum, the role of parents, how to organize schools, what subjects should be taught in various grades, how best to train teachers, the most effective way of teaching disadvantaged students. This ed-school bestseller is, instead, a utopian political tract calling for the overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless societies. Teachers who adopt its pernicious ideas risk harming their students—and ironically, their most disadvantaged students will suffer the most.

Read the whole article. If you have children in public school, ask their teachers if they’ve read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and if so, what they think of it. Remember, this book was mentioned prominently in the “Raza Studies” fight here in the Tucson Unified School District.

Now, here’s an interesting coincidence:

As a case in point, consider the career of Robert Peterson. Peterson started out in the 1980s as a young elementary school teacher in inner-city Milwaukee. He has described how he plumbed Pedagogy of the Oppressed, looking for some way to apply the great radical educator’s lessons to his own fourth- and fifth-grade bilingual classrooms. Peterson came to realize that he had to break away from the “banking method” of education, in which “the teacher and the curricular texts have the ‘right answers’ and which the students are expected to regurgitate periodically.” Instead, he applied the Freirian approach, which “relies on the experience of the student. . . . It means challenging the students to reflect on the social nature of knowledge and the curriculum.” Peterson would have you believe that his fourth- and fifth-graders became critical theorists, interrogating the “nature of knowledge” like junior scholars of the Frankfurt School.

What actually happened was that Peterson used the Freirian rationale to become his students’ “self-appointed political conscience.”

AKA, their political officer.

After one unit on U.S. intervention in Latin America, Peterson decided to take the children to a rally protesting U.S. aid to the Contras opposing the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The children stayed after school to make placards:

LET THEM RUN THEIR LAND!
HELP CENTRAL AMERICA DON’T KILL THEM
GIVE THE NICARAGUANS THEIR FREEDOM

Peterson was particularly proud of a fourth-grader who described the rally in the class magazine. “On a rainy Tuesday in April some of the students from our class went to protest against the contras,” the student wrote. “The people in Central America are poor and bombed on their heads. When we went protesting it was raining and it seemed like the contras were bombing us.”

These days, Peterson is the editor of Rethinking Schools, the nation’s leading publication for social-justice educators. He is also the editor of a book called Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers, which provides math lessons for indoctrinating young children in the evils of racist, imperialist America.

Rethinking Schools, if you remember, was the source of the piece that inspired my education überpost The George Orwell Daycare Center.

Continuing:

Partly thanks to Peterson’s efforts, the social-justice movement in math, as in other academic subjects, has fully arrived (see “The Ed Schools’ Latest—and Worst—Humbug,” Summer 2006). It has a foothold in just about every major ed school in the country and enjoys the support of some of the biggest names in math education, including several recent presidents of the 25,000-member American Education Research Association, the umbrella organization of the education professoriate. Its dozens of pseudo-scholarly books, journals, and conferences extol the supposed benefits to disadvantaged kids of the kind of teaching that Peterson once inflicted on his Milwaukee fourth-graders.

And now you know why schools can’t teach algebra, as detailed in The George Orwell Daycare Center.

Again, read the whole piece. Do you understand now how we “lost the culture”?  And why we aren’t going to get it back?

Bug-Out Vehicle

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aka: The Earthfucker.

Added a new vehicle to the stable, something more suitable for going to the range or out in the sticks hunting, or – in the extreme – bugging out of Dodge with the family than the ’11 GT Mustang:


It’s a 2005 F250 Crewcab SuperDuty 4×4 with a 6.0L turbodiesel and a 5-speed automatic. Gotta put nerf bars on it, or my 5’0″ wife will NEVER be able to climb into it. It’s a bit of a stretch for me.

The (factory) color is “Screaming Yellow.” I call it “The Tonka Toy.”

I figure when the Zombie Apocalypse hits, I can run over anything I can’t outrun. An in-bed auxiliary fuel tank is high on the list of accessories for this thing.

UPDATE: Oh well, I guess not.

Tribalism

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Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address – November 19, 1863

It took another hundred and fifty years, but that nation, so conceived and so dedicated, no longer endures.

UPDATE:  Victor Davis Hanson, Too Few Oppressors, Too Many Victims – Excerpt:

Since the election, some fatalistic Washington conservative elites have accepted — and Obama operatives have rejoiced in — a supposedly new and non-white-male ethnic electorate: Americans will be categorized, and collectively so, on the basis of largely how they look and, to a lesser extent, how they sound. Republicans, then, better get with the new tribalism and remarket themselves to address the new minority monolith.

Accordingly, the enlightened and redeemable liberal elements of the otherwise now played-out old white majority, when combined with the new ethnic minorities, will result in a permanent progressive majority — one that rejects the archaic, if not toxic, racialist values that have been in the past so injurious to the idea of what the United States might have otherwise become. Just imagine a better world with no more required reading of white male Greeks, no more inordinate focus on Shakespeare’s Shylock, no need to suffer through Twain’s N-word or Tolkien’s stereotypical dark-skinned orcs — or indeed, the one-dimensional and boring world we inherited from a Jefferson, Madison, Melville, Lincoln, Grant, Edison, Bell, TR, Salk, Nimitz, and Ike.

You Are a Nobody without Your Tribe

Yet the new emphasis on tribe is not necessarily a liberal vision. It ignores all human individuality and assumes that friendships, marriages, and alliances will not dare trump racial and ethic solidarity. Ours is now instead a Galadriel’s mirror of the Balkans, of India’s castes, of Rwanda, but no longer of a multiracial melting-pot America, where our allegiances were to be political, economic, and cultural and not necessarily synonymous with how we looked.

RTWT.