Guest post by Steve Witherspoon
[From your host: Something’s in the air. Today’s opening post featured a long list of “antis” and this recently submitted guest post by Steve Witherspoon also built to a similar array, with neither of us being aware of the other’s text. I almost posted on the “Is we getting dummer?’ story that triggered Steve’s essay then, like him, I decided that the revelation was superfluous.]
The first thing that popped into my mind when I read that there was a website “purporting to feature a recent ‘major study’ showing that Americans were getting dumber” was , “Someone actually thought the public needed some kind of major study to figure that out?” I wonder how many of our tax dollars were spent via federal and state grants to come up with that shocking new major study that anyone with a shred of common sense, critical thinking skills, and basic power of observation could have deduced?
Seriously, who didn’t already know that Americans were getting dumber?
Personally I think that using dumb (stupid, unwise, or lacking good judgment) and stupid (a lack of intelligence, poor judgment) have been a little overused in the 21st century. It’s not that they’re generally incorrect, I just think their overuse has undermined their cultural and literal value, much as using the word racist or fascist has over the past two decades. When words are not used as literally intended but instead become targeted insults to deflect from a specific topic(s) and shut down unwelcome discussion, their communication value is degraded. Thus we see ignorant anti-American bigots (people who are stubbornly, unreasonably, and utterly intolerant of people, beliefs, races, religions, genders, sexual orientations, or political views that differ from their own) using damning insults to crush speech and opinions that may impede their agendas.
The word we should be using to describe what’s going in our society is “ignorance,” which is lacking knowledge, education, or awareness about general topics or specific subjects. Narrowing the focus a little bit more, “willful ignorance,” exemplified by the “don’t confuse me with facts” reflex, is apt. “Indoctrinated ignorance” is better still.
We are seeing across the USA multigenerational indoctrinated ignorance that has targeted our entire system of education. Downstream from educational indoctrination are our social interactions, which infect and affect just about everything. They are like poisonous tentacles into our culture. Once, most ignorant people knew they were ignorant: they had made a choice to learn just enough to make them reasonably effective in their chosen niche in life, they put what they actually knew to some kind of productive use, and moved on with life learning what they needed as they went along. What we’re seeing now are Americans so indoctrinated into their ignorance that they don’t know they’re ignorant. They think they’re smart; they think they’re always correct, and that everyone should listen to them.
How did we get here?
Many years ago, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt warned about the impending demise of our society, both culturally and politically, in her book “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.” Iserbyt recognized the process taking place in the conglomeration of schools, the centralization of school districts, and what the Departments of Education both in the federal and state governments were likely going to do to public education and subsequently to society. She concluded that the public was willingly relinquishing the power of education to a few chosen people who were taking advantage of that power by embedding political correctness and participation trophy mentality into the minds of generations of children while intentionally lowering education standards to the lowest common denominator.
Again, until we are willing to portray the teachers who did this as bad people, none of this will change. You can’t fix the problem while portraying the people who did it as heroes.
Michael R. wrote, “until we are willing to portray the teachers who did this as bad people, none of this will change.”
Just remember that most of the teachers you’re demonizing were indoctrinated into the teaching cult and they are severely limited in what they can actually do in the classroom by their woke school boards and administrators. In many ways teachers hands have been and are tied but they’ve been so indoctrinated into the fold that many of them can’t see the chains that are binding them. Are these indoctrinated teachers bad people, not very likely.
School boards, school administrators and teachers needs to be deprogramed.
Michael R. wrote, “You can’t fix the problem while portraying the people who did it as heroes.”
As far as I know; teachers have never been considered heroes, but many have become role models which is almost equivalent.
That is garbage. All I hear is how much our schoolteachers are heroes and how much more pay they need. When anyone tries to bring up the fact that they have an 80% failure rate at teaching kids how to read, the response is that they need to pay the teachers more money, as if that will transform them into more effective teachers.
“Just remember that most of the teachers you’re demonizing were indoctrinated into the teaching cult and they are severely limited in what they can actually do in the classroom by their woke school boards and administrators. In many ways teachers hands have been and are tied but they’ve been so indoctrinated into the fold that many of them can’t see the chains that are binding them. Are these indoctrinated teachers bad people, not very likely.”
I’m sure the same can be said for Nazi concentration camp guards, but I still am going to say that they are bad people.
Michael R. wrote, “All I hear is how much our schoolteachers are heroes…”
I haven’t heard that “heroes” part even once in that context, seriously not even once; however, I have repeatedly heard teacher’s unions, protesting teachers, and politicians using words like underappreciated, neglected, undervalued, overworked, underpaid, and poor in the same context you’re describing. If you’re actually hearing what you claim then you need to forcefully state that they’re literally bastardizing the word “hero” and by doing so they are undermining the literary value of the word.
Like Michael above, I also routinely hear that teachers are heroes. That’s a very common refrain, especially said as an attack to homeschooling parents who are demonized by taking kids away from these heroes who care more for our kids than we do. I have been told that there is no one who cares more for a kid than their teacher and that even bad teachers are better than the best parents for loving and teaching children. Even outside of attacks on homeschool, in most parent groups that I have experienced, everyone holds that teachers, school administrators, and other adults in the school system are heroes.
In my experience, many of these folks, or at least the ones on the left, don’t usually think this is a misuse of the word hero, as these people are so great that they are usually considered better than any person who is considered a hero, especially in a military sense. I have actually heard arguments that using the word hero for anyone who has been in military or police service is destroying (you’d say bastardizing) the term hero which should only refer to people like teachers. Some people even say that comparing a teacher to George Washington is offensive…to the teacher. There are serious wackos out there.
Okay, okay; you, Michael, and maybe some others have heard people use heroes to describe teachers in the context that Michael presented.
I stand behind every word I wrote above including the part where I wrote that “I” have never heard people refer to teachers as heroes in the context that was presented by Michael.
I’m not going to argue this point any further.
Sarah Beth wrote, “There are serious wackos out there.”
I completely agree, the question is what are we going to do about it?
As Obama correctly stated, “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Do we, the people that are opposed to what been going on, choose to stand up and do something or do we continue to cower in our homes, safe from personal confrontation with the well organized wackos that are causing this “dumbing down”? We too can become the “change that we seek” ?
Candidate Barack Obama called the progressive left to action with his speech quoted above, it’s time we openly call the conservative right to action. In a very real way, that’s what Donald Trump has tried to do with his “Make America Great Again” campaign, but the political left has fought it tooth and nail and pushed harder and harder with their delusional views of “progress” to the point of complete absurdity and many on the conservative right have sat on their butts expecting someone else to do it for them.
For those conservatives sitting on their butts, it’s time to stand up against the delusional progressive left and take action by making our voice louder and clearer than the wackos. There is a federal election in November and the conservative need to crawl out of their homes all over the USA and vote at the polls enmasse against the wackos destroying the foundations of our great nation.
Michael R. wrote, “I’m sure the same can be said for Nazi concentration camp guards, but I still am going to say that they are bad people.”
I think your analogy is completely absurd (teachers aren’t committing murder or protecting those that are committing murder) but okay, you’ve made your choice and I’ve made mine.
And yet both guards and teachers are cogs in the machine, easily replaced and tossed aside if the job isn’t done. You can condone both, but that’s a symptom of the issue, not the cause. If you dismiss every teacher from their job, you’ll still have a group of teachers doing the same things as the old ones did.
“I’m sure the same can be said for Nazi concentration camp guards, but I still am going to say that they are bad people.“
Pulling the Nazi part is a bridge too far for me. And I am not comfortable with dividing to world in good people and bad people; I will leave that to the woke left.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”
That statement is as true today as it was in Nazi Germany. The Germans in the 1930 were not worse as human beings today. That is the scary thing; (parts of a) society can go bad anytime anywhere, simply because the “good” people are blinded, or do not enough to stop the bad developments.
And the Randy Weingarten’s of this world, they vehemently believe that they are fighting on the side of angels.
And the Randy Weingarten’s of this world, they vehemently believe that they are fighting on the side of angels.
I concur with your whole comment; regarding the above, so did the Nazis. The funniest line in “The Longest Day” is when a German General says, ruefully, “Sometimes I wonder whose side God in on!”
That is the scary thing, namely that people who do evil are actually believing that they are doing good, and are on the right side of history. This applies to the woke, the Communists, and also to religious zealots who think that they are doing the will of God.
Human nature is easy to be deceived about what is good and what is not.
Here is another nice quote, from C.S. Lewis:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
To be fair, a lot of them are victims of the same process. They think they’ve been educated but they haven’t.
First of all, nice piece, Steve. Reminds me of the old George Carlin bit: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
“There are too many ignorant citizens indoctrinated to think they’re geniuses.” Decades in the making, it started with the faux “self-esteem movement” when students/individuals would never hear the word “no” because it bruises their feelz, and end up thinking they’re always right.
Social media amped it up to warp speed, all but guaranteeing that participants will only hear algorithmically determined messaging with which they already agree. It’s powerful (READ: EVIL!) stuff to those clamoring for acceptance and a sense of belonging while their brains are still trying to sort things out.
Hey…why not give those brains some…um…direction, am I right?
Anywho, a poignant quote from I Come From Your Future: “France Didn’t Fall Off A Cliff. It Walked Down A Staircase, One Polite Step At A Time.” Brivael Le Pogam
And one nearer at hand: “In 100 Years We Have Gone From Teaching Latin And Greek In High School To Teaching Remedial English In College.” — Joseph Sobran
PWS
Jack,
Thank you for posting my “Guest Post” essay and many, many thanks for helping to clean it up with your editing to make sure the message was correctly conveyed. It truly takes a magical editor brain and fingers to clean up my messy essays!
My humble thanks.
Steve
I am just going to throw this idea out there for consideration.
Has general affluence caused people to become lazy? When the explicit opportunity costs of determining facts become too costly do we just accept what we are told from sources that mirror our initial thinking.
I don’t believe affluence is defined by whether you are rich or poor in the nation because the poorest – in terms of financial wealth- among us are relatively rich compared to others around the world. An affluent society that provides much for very little effort on the part of the recipient can make work and learning too costly if we assume humans are out to maximize personal satisfaction.
John Kenneth Galbraith looked the wealth gap and decided that we spent too much on private consumer goods and too little on public goods. His book The Affluent Society goes into great detail on why government should provide more.
So, the question is did the Great Society programs the emerged from Galbraith’s Keynesian thinking give rise to a society that waits for other to do for them? Perhaps, that is the problem and willful ignorance is the symptom.
I like Steve’s article, but it left me with one question: what is to be done? I have expressed in a previous post that the public school system ought to be nuked out of orbit, and that sending your child to a public school is a form or child abuse (OK I am willing to moderate that to parental neglect).
Many parents make home buying decisions based on the school district; the quality of the school district may add significantly to home prices in certain districts, maybe even an amount in the six figures. That means that if send you child to a “quality” public school, you are paying for it financially, and not only via property taxes.
Some states allow for vouchers, ESA programs to promote school choice. But even if there is no financial support for school choice, we need to find ways to get the children away from the public school system, and that requires financial sacrifices. These financial sacrifices will have to be made by parents by willing to send their children to non-public schools, but also by churches and other to help non-affluent parents with the financial load. In our church, the deacon’s giving schedule includes the Children Education Society (CES) in order to help parents to send children to Rochester Christian School.
I just did a Google search to see how expensive public education is compared to charter schools. I found the following numbers for Rochester NY:
Traditional Public vs. Charter Breakdown: While traditional district costs sit around $32,400 per child, state public funding allocated to local Rochester charter schools is lower, at $14,277 per student.
Here are the numbers for Rochester Christian School:
K–8th Grade Tuition (Per Student)
The amount of money spent on public education is excessive and obscene, even in bad school districts. My impression is that non-public education and home-schooling give better educational results at much lower costs. Additionally, true school choice allows parents to have much more say in what goes on at school.
So parents need to band together, be willing to make the necessary financial sacrifices, churches (including members who do not have children at school) need to chip in as well, and beautiful things can happen.
There is no need for the USA to have a public school system. Private initiative can provide for that.
CEES VAN BARNEVELDT wrote, “Traditional Public vs. Charter Breakdown: While traditional district costs sit around $32,400 per child, state public funding allocated to local Rochester charter schools is lower, at $14,277 per student.”
I don’t personally know the costs but I’m pretty sure that that doesn’t accurately reflect the real cost per student in charter schools. That data appears to be only covering how much public funding is allocated to charter schools while ignoring other funding provided to charter schools, like the dollars that churches, non-profits, and parents chip in.