I have frequently mentioned the long discussion I was lucky enough to have with futurist Herman Kahn, due to a scheduling snafu at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that had us waiting for over an hour for a meeting that never occurred. One of his most vivid observations was that societies periodically forget why certain practices, traditions and policies exist because they have been around so long, so the societies temporarily abandon them, only to learn to their sorrow why the jettisoned practices had endured.

This observation led to Ethics Alarms christening the current explosion of destructive wokism “The Great Stupid.” One of its mutations, the de-fund the police fad and its attendant nonsense like “restorative justice,” decriminalization” and “anti-incarceration,” has already led to widespread crime and urban rot just as anyone would have predicted without opposition a decade ago. Now states and cities are finally turning on the equally stupid education policy, inflicted on the American mind by the Obama administration, that disruptive, misbehaving and habitually violent students need to be coddled and tolerated rather than disciplined.

Usually it is a particularly egregious incident that spurs lawmakers to action. In Kentucky, a superintendent who yielded to pressure and returned a suspended student to class who had a ‘kill list’ naming other students he was going to kill sparked the legislature to approve stricter punishments for disruptive students. The new law directs that students can be suspended or expelled from school for many kinds of misconduct, including “willful disobedience or defiance of the authority of the teachers or administrators”; using profanity; assaulting another student or a member of the school staff; threatening violence; using alcohol or drugs or defacing school property. The law also requires schools to expel students for at least a year who threaten violence or bring a weapon to school. Arizona, Florida, Nevada and West Virginia have passed similar laws, while Nebraska, North Carolina and Texas are considering them.

I know, I know: none of those states are the ones that have been totally engulfed by the Great Stupid, like poor California, Maryland, Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York and others. Well, they’re a little slow, you know, but they finally realized that civilization needs police and they are gradually learning the open borders don’t work. Right now, they are distracted by so many of their most progressive citizens advocating killing Jews. I think they’ll come around eventually.

Not that some Great Stupid purveyors aren’t incorrigible, for an astounding number are.

Opposing the overwhelming and bipartisan vote for the new Kentucky law, Louisville Metro Council member Kumar Rashad protested because—can you guess?—black students are “disproportionately” suspended. “We are disproportionately represented when it comes to disciplinary issues, and we have to be really careful,” said Rashad, who is also a public school teacher. “When we talk about expelling the student for a whole year, that’s going to send these students out on the street. You want crime to go up? Let’s do that.”

By all means, let’s keep those students in class, where the only ones they will harm by their conduct are teachers and other students. What kinds of values does this guy teach his students, I wonder?

Now, if schools really want to reverse educational and societal decay, they could return to what speech specialist John Bowe terms “An Ancient Solution to Our Current Crisis of Disconnection” in his New York Times op-ed this week. His “ancient solution” is called “learning to speak, argue, and think.” How old fashioned! He writes in part,

Invented by educators and philosophers in ancient Greece, the discipline of rhetoric — originally defined as the study of persuasion and now more commonly known as the art of public speaking — remained the cornerstone of education until the 1700s. Across Western Europe, students from about the age of 12 onward learned logic, social skills, critical thinking and speech techniques as a single, integrated discipline by means of a 14-step verbal and cognitive curriculum known as the progymnasmata.

Exercises began with simple recitations and enactments of fables and short stories. Later drills trained students to compose and deliver short speeches of praise and blame and, eventually, long discourses on complex themes. By writing with the intent of performing for others (rather than writing objectively for the page), students learned the art of blending fact with opinion. By mastering the techniques of persuasion, students became proficient at spotting others’ manipulative use of language.

Rhetorical training meant more than teaching students to declaim prettily; it meant arming them to engage as citizens in an irrational and contentious world. It was tantamount to installing the operating system for adult social life.

Imagine how helpful these skills might be today to address our current crises of trust and civility.

Imagine my surprise to learn that I was educated in the 17th Century! What he describes sounds exactly like my education in the Arlington (Mass.) public schools…long before The Great Stupid swept across the land.