Thursday, October 07, 2021
- The Semantic Deception of SEL (Social and Emotional Learning) - Distrust and Verify - pt 1
- SEL – A foundation in unsettled science - pt 2
- Sell key feature: The 'Competencies‘ of Activism - forgetting to be gotten away with - pt 3
- Intersectionality - The Art of Gaining Power Through the Unthought 'Ohh!' - pt 4
- Dangerous Distinctions without a meaningful difference: SEL, DEI, CRT, CT - pt 5
- P.S.: Dividing the Right through the false choices of 'School Choice'
The Semantic Deception of SEL (Social and Emotional Learning) - Distrust and Verify
The problems, features and causes behind SEL (Social and Emotional Learning) run deep into our history, deeper than its promoters would like to admit, and deeper than can be covered in a brief presentation, such as this.
The first of five posts making up the substance of a presentation I gave to parents in the Lindbergh School District
That's not a problem for us though, as despite what we can't cover here, we can cover more than enough of what's needed to recognize significant key points, what patterns to look out for, and to highlight that information which you can, and should, consider more deeply for yourselves, and for your community. Neither, despite its being advertised as being exceedingly kind and well intentioned, is there any real problem in being able to point out SEL's dangers, as its troubles are numerous, alarming, not very difficult to find, and giving closer attention to them soon reveals that its apparent strengths are in fact thin cover for serious weaknesses.
The real problem we face is that people don't want to bother going beyond the surface claims made by programs such as SEL. They'll take the hurdle of one question and one answer, and go no further because they trust that the answer means what they think it means. For instance, if you tell them that one of SEL's key components DEI, (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), is smuggling Marxist concepts and worse into their kids heads, they'll check with someone at the school, but on getting what amounts to the promotional materials reply of:
, not only do they not see a problem there, but as it appears to have a very 'American' vibe to it, they wonder why you would want to argue with that? And so most people who're occupied with other matters in their lives, come away with the sense that surely ‘What we see’ must at least resemble the reality of ‘What we get’, so why argue about it?
- Diversity is presented as a place where people of diverse backgrounds will be involved, sort of a ‘Melting Pot’ without the melting.
- Equity is presented as working towards fairness for all
- Inclusion urges us that all should be made to feel included in every aspect of a community
And that's a problem. On being told that there are problems in the schools, parents will check with their kid's teacher, or their principal, their school board, the Press, or even with their governor, and on getting a reasonable sounding reply to their concerns, are deceived by the appearances they don't have time to look beyond, and write the furor off to excitable people worrying over inconsequential incidentals, and go about with getting on with their lives.
We've been deceived into believing that the surface appearances adequately reflect what lies underneath, and believing what we see, we see no need to look any deeper into what we get.
That's the problem that needs to be confronted, because it is how the systemic cancer that is our educational system has spread as deeply through our society as it has; it's how we can hear acronyms like CRT, SEL, DEI, CT... and believe that they are separate and distinct issues (they aren't) which can be carefully stepped around or avoided (they can't). And so on that note, before getting into the nature of SEL, and in order to be able to, I want to introduce you to a nifty term that I’d somehow forgotten until a friend recently reminded me of it:
- Semantic Deception: "Redefining terms to get agreement without understanding. Example: use of words that mean one thing to parents and another thing to change agents."
How Semantic Deception works in practice, is that a term or phrase is used which one or more of the parties involved are led to believe that everyone involved has the same common understanding of, such as,
, and so unaware that one or more of the parties involved have an additional and entirely different understanding of the words that they think they are communicating with, they're unaware that the assurances and agreements they're making upon that undisclosed 'misunderstanding' will be used for taking actions they'd never anticipated, and would have refused to go along with, if they had.
- "Schools should get back to teaching the basics!"
For instance, going back to the basics of education itself, the term concerned with what and how students should be taught, is called Pedagogy, which the standard dictionary definition of, is:
, which most people think of as how best to teach the Three R's: "Reading, 'Riting, 'Rithmatic". Prospective teachers, of course, go to teachers college to gain skills in "...inquiry, critical perspectives, knowledge of content and pedagogy...", etc., so that they can be state certified to teach, and of course continuing 'Professional Development' courses to keep those skills intact, and certified. The fellow often referred to as the 'Father of Critical Pedagogy', Henry Giroux, acknowledged in an interview that most people do think of pedagogy in a straight-forward "3R's" sort of way, that
- Pedagogy: "The method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept."
"...Teaching for many conservatives is often treated simply as a set of strategies and skills to use in order to teach prespecified subject matter...."Giroux however, an academic whose ideas have been deeply involved for decades in teaching our teachers how to teach our kids, and why, has been teaching them a very different understanding of what Pedagogy is, and what it is for. A very small sample of what he went on to say in that interview (you should read the full interview) about what he means by pedagogy, is:
Keep in mind that Giroux is not talking about something as controversial as Critical Race Theory, or even SEL - he's talking about the basics of teaching - you know, what academia views as 'normal' ideas of how teachers should go about teaching to your kids, and why. Are you getting that? Parents and politicians would explode if their schools told them that anyone involved in their schools had the idea that the purpose of 'teaching is to deliberately influence students political beliefs and social relations towards a leftist ideology', and so that understanding is rarely mentioned outside of wacademia, while the parents and (most) politicians are left thinking that the 3R's are still what pedagogy is all about. Unaware of what's hiding behind the semantic deception, they believe that their repeated calls of "Schools should get back to teaching the basics!" are being heeded when the leading educators (which includes administrators and bureaucracy) assure them that 'We're the experts, and we know just how to do what you ask!', leaving the parents and politicians blissfully unaware that what they thought they'd asked for and agreed to, is going to be nothing like what their kids are actually going to continue getting.
- "...On the other hand, critical pedagogy must be seen as a political and moral project and not a technique. Pedagogy is always political because it is connected to the acquisition of agency... illuminates the relationships among knowledge, authority, and power... pedagogy is a deliberate attempt on the part of educators to influence how and what knowledge and subjectivities are produced within particular sets of social relations..."
And that is how this deceptive game of semantics has played out in our schools, decade, after decade. Giroux's main work was four decades ago, and of course that pedagogical theory has been *developed* much further since then, by folks such as 'bell hooks', Joe L. Kincheloe, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and others who we'll come back to later, the result of which is that we now have schools where our students ability to read, write, calculate, and to understand why they should learn the 3R's, have been progressively exchanged for an eagerness to engage in political activism that *everyone* (of course everyone that's anyone is *woke*) agrees is 'vitally important!'.
We cannot afford another round of such semantic deceptions, where 'What we see' promised, bears no resemblance to 'What we get'. We have to take a closer look at what the words we're being told, actually mean to those who're telling them to us, and the actions that are being taken under them, to understand what we will end up getting before we get stuck with getting it, yet again.
The use of Semantic Deception has put us beyond the point of 'Trust, but verify', we need to actively 'Distrust, and verify'. With that in mind, let's take a closer look at what has been built upon those critical basics, through those features that are visibly just beneath the surface of DEI, to anyone willing to hurdle over the obstructive appearances to look:
- what we see is Diversity's promise of ‘Everyone is invited!’, but what we get, immediately, is rephrased into something like
'An open invitation to our BIPOC, non-Black POC and gender fluid, non-binary, two spirit, intersex, agender, bigender, third gender, neutrois, transsexual, and/or otherwise marginalized in terms of gender identity friends!', which is narrowly targeted towards a range of “protected marginalized classes", which we're told must be specially ‘acknowledged’ in order to promote ‘authentic' diversity. This singling out of particular 'identities' leads to ridiculous phrasings such as that above, which even one ‘queer theory’ theorist, Judith Butler, termed the politics of “the exasperated etc,”,
, and the order in which they are singled out, leaves those mentioned to take notice of who was mentioned first, and leaves everyone else to wonder why they weren't mentioned at all, leading everyone to focus on identity, race, and other grievances, in every aspect of their lives, to boost their own position in those phrasings. Diversity requires the divisiveness of looking past who individuals are, to how their collective identities can be used to get privilege's and avoid penalties.
- ...“elaborate predicates of color, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and able-bodiedness invariably close with an embarrassed "etc." at the end of the list…”
- What we see is Equity’s promise of fairness, but what we get, immediately, is a set of outcome based quotas which have and must result in the likes of school AP courses being dropped because they have too many *white*, or ‘white adjacent’ (Persons Of Color who 'think too white'), and not enough 'authentic' POC. Equity requires unequal treatment, in order to cause equal (meaning: 'equal' + penalty points) outcomes. Whether or not any 'authentic POC’ actually desired to be involved, or not, doesn’t really matter to the enforcers of DEI (and it does come with official enforcers), if outcomes are unequal, that's taken as proof of systemic oppression, and so power must be applied to 'fix' that 'systemic inequity’, even if that means depriving everyone of the class altogether. Cutting down the Tall Poppies so that all will be of equal height, is what an 'equitable solution' is all about.
- What we see is Inclusion’s promise of “Welcoming”, but what we immediately get are lists of words & actions deemed by the arbiters of authenticity to be non-inclusive and potentially offensive to some marginalized classes, and so power must be applied to fix the 'injustice'. In the name of being 'Inclusive', our ability to express our thoughts is censored in everything from replacing 'mother' with 'birthing people', to the Real Estate industry having to stop using terms such as ‘Master Bedroom’, because 'it sounds racist'; to even entertainment juggernauts like the multi-billion dollar Star Wars franchise, being made to rename a fictional spaceship from ‘Slave 1’, to... something stupid because 'slave' might be offensive to some. Not by force of law, policy, or election, or as a result of competition in the marketplace, but by the unregulated, unrestricted, power of the *Woke* mob to enforce conformity in speech and action, or IOW: ‘this is what *democracy* looks like!’.
Appearances are meant to be deceiving - and destructive
What we are led to believe by all of this, and by the media reporting on it, is that it's all about Race, all about *whiteness*, and all about *white supremacy*, but... believe it or not, it's not really about race. If your reaction is "They're talking about racism, they're calling me a racist, it feels a lot like it's about race... and I'm not going to tolerate it!", that's understandable, and you know what? They understand that that will be your reaction too. Think about that. My dear binary ladies and gents, when the enemy has gone to such great lengths to prepare the ground for you to fight them on, you’d be wise to think twice before fighting them there.
Don’t take the bait, don’t bother telling them that you’re not a racist or that they are; don’t tell them they’ve got you all wrong; because those are the very steps that they want you to take, as they will lead you smack dab into the kill zone that they’ve prepared for you.
Power feeds upon division and discord and requires the suppression of reason, and when you rush into the argument that they've prepared for you, with facts & charges locked & loaded for an argument, you're going to find that you've brought the proverbial knife to a gunfight as you are subjected to an emotional smearing with charges you won't understand and can't combat. Why? You cannot engage in an argument, and especially not a reasonable one, when the words you're using, especially words like 'Racism', 'Reason', 'Logic' & 'Education', mean one thing to you, and an entirely different thing to the person you're arguing with. For another thing, the 'moral high ground' which you think you have, is another thing that the *woke* despise and consider to be 'proof' of 'systemic racism'.
You see the problem here? As powerful as Reason is, it's powerless to persuade the person who has no intention of being reasonable, and intends only to subdue and destroy you and your position.
What that all means, is that you aren't walking into a situation where your argument can even be argued, instead your statements and charges will be dismissed with reams of ‘authentic’ studies and whitepapers of ‘laundered ideas’, followed by a barrage of insults and mockery, to condemn you as being complicit with the systemic oppression that your *whiteness* (which is not limited to white people) leaves you unable to see, and pretty quickly many if not most of the onlookers will be nodding along with them, as you're told that your failure to see racism, or worse, claiming not to be a racist, are proof of your own 'fragility' and inability to admit that you are a racist, and of the systemic racism that you are furthering, and you and your 'reasonable argument' will be left in a smoldering heap.
Of course you want to say “that makes no sense!”, and yes, you’re right, their ‘logic’ is flawed, in fact it’s not even up to the level of being flawed, but there too, if you try to ‘follow the logic’ of their trap, you'll soon learn the hard way that ‘logic’, along with math, merit, and punctuality, are deemed to be traits of ‘whiteness’ and evidence of systemic oppression.
If you are now thinking: "You say it's not about race, but everything you've said is all about race?!", you're missing the point - notice that the likes of Carol Swain, Thomas Sowell, Kash Patel, or anyone else who makes a reasonable argument against anything *wokish* - as even the likes of Nicki Minaj recently discovered - they will be instantly condemned as ‘inauthentic’. It's not about race, or gender, or anything else but being fully ideologically *woke*, which is what the very *woke* and very white author of "White Fragility", Robin DiAngelo, is.
I'm telling you, despite the obvious trappings, it's not about Race, it's about ideology, and your attempting to argue as if it is about race, empowers them, not you. James Lindsay translates *woke* as:
The name of the game is Semantic Deception, and they're using the semantics of the issue, whether of racism, or gender, or religion, etc., to deceive you into focusing upon, in this case, racism, just as they've used the semantics of Education and our calling for more of it, to reduce us to our current state of pitiful ignorance. The *Woke* ideology uses the camouflage of race (or gender, religion, etc.,), to cause division and disorder in order to acquire power. They've taken the labels of 'racist' and ‘logic’ and ‘proof’, and have changed their popular meanings, not just to entrap you, but because they despise the reality and substance of what those labels actually identify, and that's what we need to focus on.
Not walking into a trap, and not fighting back, are two very different things
What they don’t want you to do, what they are threatened by, are those who step around the trap that they've prepared, and instead require them respond with, and to, the substance of what they've attempted to re-label away into nothingness. Flush them out into the sunlight where their positions cannot survive, by using what they count on denying and evading - words and terms that are defined and understood, and formed into positions that make reasonable sense. They've changed what the labels refer to, because they fear what they refer to - asking questions can bring what they fear back out into the open, where the deception crumbles. The game of semantics is exposed and destroyed by anyone who takes the time to identify the words and terms being used, and calmly reasons their way through the statements and 'arguments' being made.
You're emotional responses fuel their attacks, don't take the bait. Respond to their outrageous charges not with counter charges, but by calmly questioning them - ask them to identify what they mean by the terms they're using, and not using; what do they mean by 'Racism', 'Reason', 'Logic', 'Education', 'Systemic', and of course what do they mean by 'Diversity', 'Equity', and 'Inclusion' - show them what they mean by what they're promoting.
Realize that the truly Woke, will not engage in this, and they’ll likely ramp up their insults about your being a racist oppressor for attempting it, but they aren't your concern, the onlookers are, and if you don't get emotional, they will gain no ground with those on the sidelines. Those who innocently bought into the semantic deception of Wokeness, will see that something's amiss, and those are the people who may still be reachable by your reasoning methodically, logically, towards what is actually true. They are who your argument is for, even if they aren't the ones that you're actually talking with.
For example, some questions to ask about what they mean by 'Diversity':
Don’t give it to them.
Next we'll look closer at SEL's origins, claims, and purposes.
Monday, October 11, 2021
SEL – A foundation in unsettled science
In the previous post, we looked at how Semantic Deception is central to the selling of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), and that's also the case with the organization most responsible for promoting it, Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), which is the consortium that was formed in 1994 to promote SEL. CASEL's 'product', SEL, and its subset of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in particular, make extensive use of semantic deceptions, carefully phrasing matters so that they seem one way to most people, while conveying an entirely different meaning to others - and justifying actions based upon that less understood meaning. That is a pattern that can be seen repeating itself throughout who they purport to be as an organization, how they portray their own history, in SEL's claims to being 'science based', and in the experimental nature of what it proposes as *education* for our students.
A good place to start looking into this, is with two points that CASEL has made about SEL, one from their About page, and another from last year's 'bold new updating' of SEL's purpose, which gives a good glimpse into the nature of who they see themselves as being, and how they intend that to impact everyone else. The first comes from a their claim that:
, the less important but more jarring thing to note, is that the statement is a bit like saying ‘Veins are the means by which blood circulates through the body”, while actively evading any mention or hint of the role that's played by the arteries, lungs or even the heart. But more to the point, that is not a policy statement of how best to go about learning - in that it’s not a “Learning is promoted by orderly classrooms” sort of statement, or even a ‘Graphics make textbooks easier to digest’ bit of foolishness - instead, it makes a broad philosophical claim about the nature of learning in general, and in that grand statement there's something of the magician’s flourish drawing our attention towards it... and away from what their statement about learning leaves out:
SEL envisions a very different sort of society, and a very different kind of world than a Western, or American, one. SEL is intended and designed as a predetermined – equitable – solution to be imposed from the outside -> in, and from the top->down, with students, and you, and me, forced to fit into the *woke* mold that 'those who know best' have prepared for us.
Their second point speaks volumes about their nature and approach towards us:
Of course you could say that sometimes traditions do need to be overturned, and it’s usually mavericks that do so, but... when that happens, they’ve usually got a surprisingly remarkable track-record that demonstrates the amazing ability and effectiveness of their insights - someone like a Marva Collins comes to mind (though sadly, not to theirs) – do the people behind SEL have that? Is the position that they arrived at, a result of solid proven results, or of arrogance, or something else?
Let’s take a look.
SEL – A foundation in unsettled science
The genesis for SEL, was a 1960’s program run under Yale University’s Child Study Center umbrella, with Dr. James Comer's "Comer School Development Program". Comer’s plan was to organize three teams within each school, made up of psychologists or certified evaluators, school staff, and parents, whose point was to get teachers & parents to be more actively involved with students in their social & educational development. A worthy ideal perhaps, though it bears pointing out that having parents and teachers involved in students' education was the norm before the progressive industrial school model was established six decades earlier, which was specifically designed to eliminate that, so... what he purports to be attempting to do, is to reinstate within the current system, a feature which the current system was, and still is, designed to eliminate, which... although apparently worthy, is hardly practical or forthright.
Not surprisingly, its results didn’t live up to its aims. One professor looking into it, commented that:
On top of that, researchers studying Comer's system, found that:
All of which indicates that there’s no sound basis for claiming a ‘scientific justification’ for the program. Nevertheless, aspects of reports on the Comer approach are cherrypicked and presented in such a way as to deceive people into believing that some substance follows from the appearances, and those deceptive 'successes', have been cited as the scientific foundation for much of the current push for SEL. Idea Laundering in action.
More 'Science!’ than Science
CASEL itself was formed years later out of the reputations of Yale programs such as Comer’s, and of W.T. Grant (with one of the Kennedy/Shriver kids), and around the growing fad of ‘Emotional Intelligence’ which hit its stride with the popularity of Daniel Goleman’s 1995 book “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ”, which argues that:
Skills, OTOH, are techniques and actions which require little or no understanding, and can be learned through periodic practice by anyone, for any purpose, good or bad. Anyone can be trained to be handle a gun, anyone can be trained in hand-to-hand combat, but not everyone has the character to be a good police officer. And the person who is so impressed with their skills that they give little thought to their character, tend to suffer from that failing that the Greeks were so concerned with: Hubris. Neither is it wise to forget the person who has developed no worthwhile character or virtue, but picks up the skills of how to ingratiate themselves to normal, unsuspecting people (Shout out to Ted Bundy).
Pretenses aside, Daniel Goleman, is not a scientist, he’s a New York Times journalist who wrote stories about science, and of course he's one of the founders of CASEL. But his articles and book on 'Emotional Intelligence' both rode and fanned the waves of similar books and articles elevating emotional skills over our traditional understanding of intelligence.
The problem is, that many if not most intelligent and informed scientists, clinicians, psychologists, have rejected those claims. From the start, Goleman’s conclusions have been disputed, and even the existence of the concept of “emotional intelligence" itself, has been extremely questionable. One particular psychologist did his best to make his opposition to the program very clear:
Yet CASEL used ideas such as those expressed in the book to justify SEL, and its baseless popularity was influential enough for SEL to become incorporated into fed & state laws, beginning with Clinton's 'GOALS 2000: Educate America Act‘, 1994.
Once again, cultivating false appearances to be used to make significant changes in peoples lives, which have little or no basis in the facts, being used to justify consequential actions in all of our lives.
The heads behind the ideals guiding CASEL
Linda Darling-Hammond was an early Board Member, and now member Emeritus, and a very influential voice in CASEL. Her ideas were such that she became the preferred DoEd nominee of 60's radical terrorist turned 'educator' - Bill Ayers. Regardless of how well they did or didn’t personally know each other, Ayers understood Darling-Hammond's ideas and agreed that they were what he found to be of ‘value’, and wished to see actively in charge of the federal Dept of Education. If that isn't worrisome to you, you've got some studying up to do on the subject.
Do these 'Mavericks' somehow have a track-record to support their ideas? It’s a natural hope, but... nope. Ayers' attempt to implement his ideas in an Annenberg Challenge, failed miserably, and Darling-Hammond's 'experimental school' had the distinction of making the 'lowest achieving 5% list in California. Go figure.
Linda Darling-Hammond is also a frequent co-author with and collaborator of, Gloria Ladson Billings, a name you might recall from the previous post, as one of those developing the 'discipline' of 'Critical Pedagogy' and "Culturally Relevant Pedagogy" into the 'normal' pedagogy that's taught to teachers in teachers colleges. Ladson-Billings was also the author of 'Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education' in 1995, which she described as being a means of injecting Critical Race Theory into the popular form of pedagogy that's been taught to waves upon waves of teachers in teachers colleges, across our nation. One of the purposes she intended that pedagogy to convey, was her own personal opposition to that understanding of property rights and individual rights which she (correctly) understood America to have been founded upon,
It’s also worth noting, that the two most assigned authors in Teachers’ Colleges, are Billings & Hammond
So basically, these people who are intent upon undermining the basis of our society and rule of law, have new theories and experiments which they are intent upon trying out upon our children, to see if the ‘outcomes’ match those outcomes which they want to lab-rat them into, even though according to every measurable outcome of the 3R's aspect of education, they repeatedly fail on every count , demonstrating that the 3R's which are what most of us still think of as being the point of education, are not the educational outcomes which they are concerned with. What they are concerned with, is how successfully the appearances of their programs goals, are at deceiving the public into tolerating more, and more, of their experiments upon us.
Transforming science into science!'
The fine folks from the DEI office of Lindbergh School District, gave a presentation on the wonders of SEL for their schools, using a couple of CASEL's selling points for SEL, to sell their program to the public. They note that:
Given the nature of CASEL, it's not surprising that the team selling SEL failed to mention these very relevant scientific facts in their presentation - the fact is that the ‘science!’ being used to sell SEL to the American public, isn’t supported by the actual science that they are using to sell it with - Semantic Deception is in their cultural DNA.
"Because, because, because, because..."
When the fine folks at CASEL say they are doing X, because of Y, you can safely assume that is as at best, a ploy. They propose to do X, because they think they can get away with X, if they tell you they're doing it because of Y. You can see this, in how they've changed their tune since CASEL's CEO, Karen Niemi, made her bold statement updating how they meant to put SEL in line with Social Justice, but... after the nationwide anti-CRT backlash from parents, CASEL has sanitized their website. A month ago this link to: "https://casel.org/research/transformative-sel/" opened to the page on the right in the picture below, on "Transformative SEL as a Lever for Equity & Social Justice", which spoke boldly of the importance of schools promoting the active pursuit of "social justice!", whereas today, that link quietly redirects to a much more sanitized "https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/how-does-sel-support-educational-equity-and-excellence/" version on "How Does SEL Support Educational Equity and Excellence?", with much happy talk and no mention of Social Justice at all.
What that all means, is that you aren't walking into a situation where your argument can even be argued, instead your statements and charges will be dismissed with reams of ‘authentic’ studies and whitepapers of ‘laundered ideas’, followed by a barrage of insults and mockery, to condemn you as being complicit with the systemic oppression that your *whiteness* (which is not limited to white people) leaves you unable to see, and pretty quickly many if not most of the onlookers will be nodding along with them, as you're told that your failure to see racism, or worse, claiming not to be a racist, are proof of your own 'fragility' and inability to admit that you are a racist, and of the systemic racism that you are furthering, and you and your 'reasonable argument' will be left in a smoldering heap.
Of course you want to say “that makes no sense!”, and yes, you’re right, their ‘logic’ is flawed, in fact it’s not even up to the level of being flawed, but there too, if you try to ‘follow the logic’ of their trap, you'll soon learn the hard way that ‘logic’, along with math, merit, and punctuality, are deemed to be traits of ‘whiteness’ and evidence of systemic oppression.
If you are now thinking: "You say it's not about race, but everything you've said is all about race?!", you're missing the point - notice that the likes of Carol Swain, Thomas Sowell, Kash Patel, or anyone else who makes a reasonable argument against anything *wokish* - as even the likes of Nicki Minaj recently discovered - they will be instantly condemned as ‘inauthentic’. It's not about race, or gender, or anything else but being fully ideologically *woke*, which is what the very *woke* and very white author of "White Fragility", Robin DiAngelo, is.
I'm telling you, despite the obvious trappings, it's not about Race, it's about ideology, and your attempting to argue as if it is about race, empowers them, not you. James Lindsay translates *woke* as:
"...In brief, “woke” means having awakened to having a particular type of “critical consciousness,” as these are understood within Critical Social Justice. To first approximation, being woke means viewing society through various critical lenses, as defined by various critical theories bent in service of an ideology most people currently call “Social Justice.” That is, being woke means having taken on the worldview of Critical Social Justice, which sees the world only in terms of unjust power dynamics and the need to dismantle problematic systems. That is, it means having adopted Theory and the worldview it conceptualizes...".Truth is not a value to the *woke*, objective reality is denied, it's all about power, and how to get it. The thing for you & me to remember, is that 'Power' is vulnerable to what is true, and being fearfully aware of that vulnerability, it hides it behind a series of deceptions which are phrased in order to seem fair and make others feel foul about questioning it.
The name of the game is Semantic Deception, and they're using the semantics of the issue, whether of racism, or gender, or religion, etc., to deceive you into focusing upon, in this case, racism, just as they've used the semantics of Education and our calling for more of it, to reduce us to our current state of pitiful ignorance. The *Woke* ideology uses the camouflage of race (or gender, religion, etc.,), to cause division and disorder in order to acquire power. They've taken the labels of 'racist' and ‘logic’ and ‘proof’, and have changed their popular meanings, not just to entrap you, but because they despise the reality and substance of what those labels actually identify, and that's what we need to focus on.
Not walking into a trap, and not fighting back, are two very different things
What they don’t want you to do, what they are threatened by, are those who step around the trap that they've prepared, and instead require them respond with, and to, the substance of what they've attempted to re-label away into nothingness. Flush them out into the sunlight where their positions cannot survive, by using what they count on denying and evading - words and terms that are defined and understood, and formed into positions that make reasonable sense. They've changed what the labels refer to, because they fear what they refer to - asking questions can bring what they fear back out into the open, where the deception crumbles. The game of semantics is exposed and destroyed by anyone who takes the time to identify the words and terms being used, and calmly reasons their way through the statements and 'arguments' being made.
You're emotional responses fuel their attacks, don't take the bait. Respond to their outrageous charges not with counter charges, but by calmly questioning them - ask them to identify what they mean by the terms they're using, and not using; what do they mean by 'Racism', 'Reason', 'Logic', 'Education', 'Systemic', and of course what do they mean by 'Diversity', 'Equity', and 'Inclusion' - show them what they mean by what they're promoting.
Realize that the truly Woke, will not engage in this, and they’ll likely ramp up their insults about your being a racist oppressor for attempting it, but they aren't your concern, the onlookers are, and if you don't get emotional, they will gain no ground with those on the sidelines. Those who innocently bought into the semantic deception of Wokeness, will see that something's amiss, and those are the people who may still be reachable by your reasoning methodically, logically, towards what is actually true. They are who your argument is for, even if they aren't the ones that you're actually talking with.
For example, some questions to ask about what they mean by 'Diversity':
Ask a question and let the discussion follow from it, keeping in mind that your opinion is of no interest to them, but theirs is - ask them what they mean by what they say. Do that calmly and with the attitude that such questions and their answers truly matter (hint: you do have to actually believe and care about that - do you?), and those who can still be reached, will begin to question their own positions. You might even wake the *woke*, or at least plant a few seeds that will sprout for them later - but if you fall into the emotional ‘racist!’ trap, you will lose, and lose them as well, which is the result that the *Woke* are hoping for.
- Does 'Diversity' only mean having people of diverse backgrounds?
- Does 'Diversity' mean that people are of less value, when not grouped with people of diverse backgrounds?
- If a minority opinion is of value to all, is it the opinion, or who said it, that makes it of value?
- Does 'Diversity' tolerate a diversity of opinions about 'Diversity'?
- Would 'Diversity' work best within a group of people who have diverse identities but are restricted to a uniform set of ideas, or would welcoming a diversity of ideas within a group of people indifferent to their identities, be more likely to reveal new and better ideas & actions for all?
- How is a value determined to be of value?
- To who?
- Based upon what?
Don’t give it to them.
Next we'll look closer at SEL's origins, claims, and purposes.
Monday, October 11, 2021
SEL – A foundation in unsettled science
In the previous post, we looked at how Semantic Deception is central to the selling of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), and that's also the case with the organization most responsible for promoting it, Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), which is the consortium that was formed in 1994 to promote SEL. CASEL's 'product', SEL, and its subset of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in particular, make extensive use of semantic deceptions, carefully phrasing matters so that they seem one way to most people, while conveying an entirely different meaning to others - and justifying actions based upon that less understood meaning. That is a pattern that can be seen repeating itself throughout who they purport to be as an organization, how they portray their own history, in SEL's claims to being 'science based', and in the experimental nature of what it proposes as *education* for our students.
The second of five posts making up the substance of a presentation I gave to parents in the Lindbergh School District
A good place to start looking into this, is with two points that CASEL has made about SEL, one from their About page, and another from last year's 'bold new updating' of SEL's purpose, which gives a good glimpse into the nature of who they see themselves as being, and how they intend that to impact everyone else. The first comes from a their claim that:
- 1)“…Social and emotional learning (SEL) is an integral part of education and human development."
The keyword in SEL is ‘Social’, and it is not a process for learning content, but for manipulating and conforming behavior to the targeted perspectives of the ‘authentic’ group (see psychological manipulations through surveys), without regard to content. They aren't seeking a society that is built from the inside out by individuals who understand what should be understood, in order to become informed and capable of living lives worth living in society with others - a society such as that, requires an education that is focused upon content, and a content carefully selected, at that.
- Content.
SEL envisions a very different sort of society, and a very different kind of world than a Western, or American, one. SEL is intended and designed as a predetermined – equitable – solution to be imposed from the outside -> in, and from the top->down, with students, and you, and me, forced to fit into the *woke* mold that 'those who know best' have prepared for us.
Their second point speaks volumes about their nature and approach towards us:
Keeping in mind that SEL is actively being injected into every subject in our schools (and more), including math & sports, we should consider what that means and requires: that educational practices that’ve been refined over millennia, are to be meddled with, corrupted, or jettisoned outright in favor of a few theoreticians newest pet theories that they've concocted in less than a few decades, and which they’d like nothing more than to experiment with upon everyone else's kids.
- 2) "In the 26 years since CASEL introduced the term “social and emotional learning,” the research and practice of SEL have grown tremendously."
Of course you could say that sometimes traditions do need to be overturned, and it’s usually mavericks that do so, but... when that happens, they’ve usually got a surprisingly remarkable track-record that demonstrates the amazing ability and effectiveness of their insights - someone like a Marva Collins comes to mind (though sadly, not to theirs) – do the people behind SEL have that? Is the position that they arrived at, a result of solid proven results, or of arrogance, or something else?
Let’s take a look.
SEL – A foundation in unsettled science
The genesis for SEL, was a 1960’s program run under Yale University’s Child Study Center umbrella, with Dr. James Comer's "Comer School Development Program". Comer’s plan was to organize three teams within each school, made up of psychologists or certified evaluators, school staff, and parents, whose point was to get teachers & parents to be more actively involved with students in their social & educational development. A worthy ideal perhaps, though it bears pointing out that having parents and teachers involved in students' education was the norm before the progressive industrial school model was established six decades earlier, which was specifically designed to eliminate that, so... what he purports to be attempting to do, is to reinstate within the current system, a feature which the current system was, and still is, designed to eliminate, which... although apparently worthy, is hardly practical or forthright.
"...The Comer Program can be very successful. However, its success relies on the enthusiasm and commitment of the people involved in the change. Teachers, administrators, and parents need to be committed to making it work, or else it will not work. Some schools even see staff turnover as a positive opportunity for new enthusiasm....“Aside from the fact that seeking to maximize ‘burnout’ is not typically seen as the sign of a sound plan, Comer claimed to have improved achievement and diminished behavioral problems in the several hundred New Haven schools he was ‘given’ to experiment upon. And yet:
- Critics note that he dropped one of the schools altogether and replaced it with another and took seven years to record any substantial improvement.
- Thirty years later, Comer himself admitted that only about a third of the 650 schools implementing his program had been able to “sustain the reforms.”
- Other researchers also studied the program’s implementation in various cities and found little benefit to either academic achievement or juvenile-justice interactions.
IOW, students figured out what the ‘teams’ wanted to hear them say and self-reported to the researchers what they wanted to hear about how much they felt they'd changed, but their actual performance and delinquent behaviors, remained unchanged.
- Quasi-experimental... psychological outcomes not achievement content
- "...assessed annually between Grades 5 and 8 using a self-report measure of acting out. The present study ... revealed no evidence favoring SDP between Grades 5 and 8, and the same was basically true during the high school years...."
All of which indicates that there’s no sound basis for claiming a ‘scientific justification’ for the program. Nevertheless, aspects of reports on the Comer approach are cherrypicked and presented in such a way as to deceive people into believing that some substance follows from the appearances, and those deceptive 'successes', have been cited as the scientific foundation for much of the current push for SEL. Idea Laundering in action.
More 'Science!’ than Science
CASEL itself was formed years later out of the reputations of Yale programs such as Comer’s, and of W.T. Grant (with one of the Kennedy/Shriver kids), and around the growing fad of ‘Emotional Intelligence’ which hit its stride with the popularity of Daniel Goleman’s 1995 book “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ”, which argues that:
'Character matters and, more significantly, the skills that build character can be taught'Someone saying that they’ve ‘discovered’ that character can be taught and how to do it, should raise a number of red flags, but more importantly than that, Character is not a skill, or even the result of skills. Character (Websters Dictionary 1828 - Webster's Dictionary 1828 - Character):
“... 1. A mark made by cutting or engraving...4. The peculiar qualities, impressed by nature or habit on a person, which distinguish him from others; these constitute real character, and the qualities which he is supposed to possess, constitute his estimated character, or reputation. Hence we say, a character is not formed, when the person has not acquired stable and distinctive qualities....”, character is the quality of engraving who you are and who you are going to be upon your soul, by your careful & continuous attention to what’s True, Right & Wrong - your character is what results from how well you've become the lessons that you've learned.
Skills, OTOH, are techniques and actions which require little or no understanding, and can be learned through periodic practice by anyone, for any purpose, good or bad. Anyone can be trained to be handle a gun, anyone can be trained in hand-to-hand combat, but not everyone has the character to be a good police officer. And the person who is so impressed with their skills that they give little thought to their character, tend to suffer from that failing that the Greeks were so concerned with: Hubris. Neither is it wise to forget the person who has developed no worthwhile character or virtue, but picks up the skills of how to ingratiate themselves to normal, unsuspecting people (Shout out to Ted Bundy).
Pretenses aside, Daniel Goleman, is not a scientist, he’s a New York Times journalist who wrote stories about science, and of course he's one of the founders of CASEL. But his articles and book on 'Emotional Intelligence' both rode and fanned the waves of similar books and articles elevating emotional skills over our traditional understanding of intelligence.
The problem is, that many if not most intelligent and informed scientists, clinicians, psychologists, have rejected those claims. From the start, Goleman’s conclusions have been disputed, and even the existence of the concept of “emotional intelligence" itself, has been extremely questionable. One particular psychologist did his best to make his opposition to the program very clear:
“Let me say it again: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS EQ. Scientifically, it’s a fraudulent concept, a fad, a convenient band-wagon, a corporate marketing scheme… “, that particular psychologist, years before he gained popularity, was Jordan Peterson.
Yet CASEL used ideas such as those expressed in the book to justify SEL, and its baseless popularity was influential enough for SEL to become incorporated into fed & state laws, beginning with Clinton's 'GOALS 2000: Educate America Act‘, 1994.
Once again, cultivating false appearances to be used to make significant changes in peoples lives, which have little or no basis in the facts, being used to justify consequential actions in all of our lives.
The heads behind the ideals guiding CASEL
Linda Darling-Hammond was an early Board Member, and now member Emeritus, and a very influential voice in CASEL. Her ideas were such that she became the preferred DoEd nominee of 60's radical terrorist turned 'educator' - Bill Ayers. Regardless of how well they did or didn’t personally know each other, Ayers understood Darling-Hammond's ideas and agreed that they were what he found to be of ‘value’, and wished to see actively in charge of the federal Dept of Education. If that isn't worrisome to you, you've got some studying up to do on the subject.
Linda Darling-Hammond is also a frequent co-author with and collaborator of, Gloria Ladson Billings, a name you might recall from the previous post, as one of those developing the 'discipline' of 'Critical Pedagogy' and "Culturally Relevant Pedagogy" into the 'normal' pedagogy that's taught to teachers in teachers colleges. Ladson-Billings was also the author of 'Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education' in 1995, which she described as being a means of injecting Critical Race Theory into the popular form of pedagogy that's been taught to waves upon waves of teachers in teachers colleges, across our nation. One of the purposes she intended that pedagogy to convey, was her own personal opposition to that understanding of property rights and individual rights which she (correctly) understood America to have been founded upon,
, and she opposes that for reasons that rest upon one of those rare points of agreement (though at cross-purposes), between the ideas of John Adams, James Madison, and Karl Marx:
- "... race is still a significant factor in determining inequity in the US and that the society is based on property rights rather than human rights..."
"Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist."
John Adams, 'Discourses on Davila', following his 'A Defense of the Constitutions of the Governments of the United States of America'
"...Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own...."
James Madison, 'Property', 29 Mar. 1792
"In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."Meaning that Linda Darling-Hammond, and other board members and staff of CASEL, echo, support, and write on, the need for CASEL & SEL to reflect those ideas which are compatible & intertwined with both CRT, and an ideology of explicitly anti-American ideas & 'values', which are seen as being very compatible with those of the very anti-American and unrepentant terrorist, Bill Ayers. One reason why that is, is that they share the same goals, reasons and purposes - ending Western Civilization in general, and America in particular.
Karl Marx, 'Communist Manifesto'
So basically, these people who are intent upon undermining the basis of our society and rule of law, have new theories and experiments which they are intent upon trying out upon our children, to see if the ‘outcomes’ match those outcomes which they want to lab-rat them into, even though according to every measurable outcome of the 3R's aspect of education, they repeatedly fail on every count , demonstrating that the 3R's which are what most of us still think of as being the point of education, are not the educational outcomes which they are concerned with. What they are concerned with, is how successfully the appearances of their programs goals, are at deceiving the public into tolerating more, and more, of their experiments upon us.
Transforming science into science!'
The fine folks from the DEI office of Lindbergh School District, gave a presentation on the wonders of SEL for their schools, using a couple of CASEL's selling points for SEL, to sell their program to the public. They note that:
The problem is that the research showing SEL improving an average achievement of 11 percentile points, increasing prosocial behaviors, improving student attitudes toward school, less depression & stress... is 'flawed'. The Durlak meta-analysis itself admitted several limitations:
- "Research shows that SEL not only improves achievement by an average of 11 percentile points, but also increases prosocial behaviors (such as kindness, sharing, empathy)..."
(Durlak et al., 2011)
But wait! There’s more 'science!' The Lindbergh SEL staff also used this slide to sell SEL to the Lindbergh School District Board of Education:
- Only 16% of the studies collected information on academic achievement at post [intervention].”
- Only 32% assessed skills as an outcome.”
- Because there is no standardized approach in measuring social and emotional skills, there is a need for theory-driven research that not only aids in the accurate assessment of various skills but also identifies how different skills are related.”
- Only a few studies tested and found a temporal relationship between skill enhancement and other positive outcomes.”
- With over half of studies based on elementary students, it’s difficult to know if the interpretations for the youngest age group are developmentally appropriate for older children and adolescents.
, and as with the other slide, the Aspen Institute itself, in (March 3, 2018), p. 12, acknowledged that legitimate assessment of such skills is 'a challenge', because despite the almost unlimited benefits claimed for SEL (from wage growth and long-term employment to reduction in violence, delinquency, and drug use), they noted that:
- "Programming in social and emotional learning across the school year drives increases in executive functioning, self-efficacy, persistence, prosocial behavior, grades, and scores on standardized tests...."
The Evidence Base for How We Learn Supporting Students’ Social, Emotional, and Academic Development. National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development. The Aspen Institute, September 2017."
,which, as CASEL Board Member Linda Darling-Hammond is also a co-chair of the Aspen Institute, CASEL is fully aware of these results, but they've in no way allowed to slow or stop them from promoting such false appearances to school districts and parents.
- “...caution is warranted in interpreting the assessment results. While learning-condition surveys are valuable in guiding next steps, they are not valid for accountability purposes.”
- Sheldon Berman, Sydney Chaffee, & Julia Sarmiento, The Practice Base for How We Learn: Supporting Students’ Social, Emotional, and Academic Development, National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development, The Aspen Institute
Given the nature of CASEL, it's not surprising that the team selling SEL failed to mention these very relevant scientific facts in their presentation - the fact is that the ‘science!’ being used to sell SEL to the American public, isn’t supported by the actual science that they are using to sell it with - Semantic Deception is in their cultural DNA.
"Because, because, because, because..."
When the fine folks at CASEL say they are doing X, because of Y, you can safely assume that is as at best, a ploy. They propose to do X, because they think they can get away with X, if they tell you they're doing it because of Y. You can see this, in how they've changed their tune since CASEL's CEO, Karen Niemi, made her bold statement updating how they meant to put SEL in line with Social Justice, but... after the nationwide anti-CRT backlash from parents, CASEL has sanitized their website. A month ago this link to: "https://casel.org/research/transformative-sel/" opened to the page on the right in the picture below, on "Transformative SEL as a Lever for Equity & Social Justice", which spoke boldly of the importance of schools promoting the active pursuit of "social justice!", whereas today, that link quietly redirects to a much more sanitized "https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/how-does-sel-support-educational-equity-and-excellence/" version on "How Does SEL Support Educational Equity and Excellence?", with much happy talk and no mention of Social Justice at all.
Rest assured, their aims have not changed, only their pretexts for them have, they are still very actively pursuing hardcore social justice... but on the bright side, it shows that the reaction of parents nationwide is one outcome that rocked them back on their heels, and it is one that they are monitoring very closely.
You can make a difference, but only if we don't continue to fall for their deceptions.
It is important for us to note that when we see a repeated pattern of such deceptions as using appearances to justify unrelated actions, over and over, as we already have, then what we are seeing is evidence that logic and reason have been abandoned, and because that is so, whenever you see the *Woke* using the word ‘because’, you need to be aware that more than likely it is being used as a means of semantic deception.
 |
| Now, vs a month ago |
You can make a difference, but only if we don't continue to fall for their deceptions.
It is important for us to note that when we see a repeated pattern of such deceptions as using appearances to justify unrelated actions, over and over, as we already have, then what we are seeing is evidence that logic and reason have been abandoned, and because that is so, whenever you see the *Woke* using the word ‘because’, you need to be aware that more than likely it is being used as a means of semantic deception.
This is not a small point, but a central one that needs to be taken to heart.
The word ‘because’ indicates and presumes a logical connection between what came before, and what follows after it, which they take full advantage of the appearances of the language they use, but their actions, their history, their 'scientific' justifications, their 'thinkers' hidden motivations, demonstrate that they have flatly rejected the reality and responsibility of making any such logical connections. That disregard for reality follows from their rejection of 'objective reality' and what their true focus is, the pursuit of power, over truth, and we'll soon begin looking at their explicitly saying just that.
In short, they use ‘because’, because you do, because you presume that it is being used to convey an effect which has logically been shown to follow from a cause. But they do not use it that way, instead they use ‘because’ as a convenient means of stringing random assertions together, a way to assert X, and then assert Y, by counting upon the strength of what YOU will assume they conveyed in their statements, and not wanting to admit that you weren't able to follow their reasoning, they count on your nodding along with them as if you were convinced by what they've said.
For them, your nodding along is power, power which they eagerly take from you, and twist to their own purposes to be used upon and against you. Whenever you hear the *Woke* say ‘because’, pay attention, because they’re hoping to slip some bit of illogical nonsense past you as if they'd just given you a logical reason that justified it.
IOW: As with that old saw about “The operation was a success… but the patient died”, the important part as SEL sees it, is not that one thing follows from or achieves another, but that you were swayed by the appearances that it had, so that for their purposes, the 'logical operation' was a success, even though the patient, Truth, died. For those behind SEL, the patient dying is of no concern - this particular doctor’s patients typically do die - yet from their perspective, the operations are all successful, and that appearance of success is what they use to continue performing their educational malpractice upon the kids in our schools.
Next, we'll get into what SEL substitutes for Character, and why.
Thursday, October 21, 2021
Sell key feature: The 'Competencies‘ of Activism - forgetting to be gotten away with
So in previous posts we've gone through how Semantic Deception is at the heart of modern education, and how that's reflected in the nature of CASEL, the organization formed to promote SEL, and now in this post we'll start looking into CASEL 5's 'Competencies', and the disturbing issues they lead us into. The more obvious issue with what they've dubbed ‘evidence-based competencies', is that when
Virtue & Character from Aristotle,
to Franklin, to the Boy Scouts
OTOH, what the practice of these 'Competencies' will engrave upon a person's soul, for reasons we'll soon see, is not something that anyone of good character would want to see embodied in anyone in their society, least of all themselves, or their children. The CASEL 5 might appear to be a nerdy attempt to restate the same general ideas as those of virtue and character, but here again, as with so many issues of semantic deception within our educational system, the similarity ends at the surface of their appearances, and below the surface, the purposes being aimed at by them are very different, both in their origins, and in their ends. SEL isn't using those ‘Competencies’ as a means towards thoughtfulness, but as givens to be accepted or imposed and reinforced with techniques for instilling them into a 'cancel' fearing public, such as by Transformative SEL's manipulative use of 'Lived Experiences':
DiAngelo's question of "...How did racism manifest in that situation?" might be thought of as the (w)academically approved form of "Have you stopped beating your wife?", and questions such as those, through endless surveys, are meant to lead students into whichever authentic position is being discussed, which in the case of the 'beating your wife' question, might be something like: "Marriage is a patriarchal institution which empowers cisgender men and oppresses women.", and any number of anecdotes from women expressing the oppression they felt as wives, would be their 'Lived Experience' of a women subjected to marriage.
To continue with that ridiculous sounding but true to life example (if you think I exaggerate, you probably haven't heard about "Identifying and Countering White Supremacy Culture in Food Systems" ), if a man were to answer "But... I'm not beating my wife", that would be seen as his being complicit with the "dominant narrative'', and be evidence of his guilt in enabling the interests and ideologies of oppression.
For those who might attempt to logically explain their position by replying with something like "The problem I have with your question, is that I never have beaten my wife, so...", the WokeFolk at the U of Michigan have helpfully identified some handy strategies for dealing with such inauthentic instances of 'wrong think':
A correct - woke - answer, depends upon which role you are expected to play - if you're a cisgender white male, then your answer must conform to the role of an oppressor, with something like "Yes, I am guilty of beating my wife - every time I expect her to make me a sandwich, that is what I'm doing.".
The wife's reply would be expected to conform to the role of the victim: "I experience an oppressive beating every time I'm expected to do laundry or prepare food! He murders my soul!". If she instead were to answer "But my husband doesn't beat me!", then she would be deemed as being complicit with oppression as well, and unless she quickly changed her tune, would be seen as being just as inauthentic as is Thomas Sowell, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or anyone else, regardless of color, gender, etc., who is not woke.
Remember, it's not really about race, or gender or anything else, it's about Power, as attained through the ideology of what is authentically woke.
Students discover what it is that they should affirm as being woke, through the leading nature of the survey questions that SEL subjects them to, which typically can include such educationally irrelevant quaint as how a student feels about their height, hair, breasts, gender, gender fluidity, sadness, anger, racial discomfort, etc., and of course whatever the current topic is, the sensitive details which the student's survey questions have exposed about themselves and shared with the class, will be used by the teacher who's been led to believe that they're competent to, to 'adjust' the classes' feelings and beliefs, until the subjects accept and align with the 'Lived Experiences' at hand.
There is to be no discussion outside of acceptance - students aren't meant to question the validity of the 'Lived Experiences', but to conform with the authentic narrative in a way that 'scaffolds' their acceptance into place without any weighing of evidence, or developing an understanding of the issue. These ‘Lived Experiences’ are pervasive and unquestionable propaganda to be asserted and reasserted wherever a question might be in danger of appearing. But propaganda for what?
What are these 'Competencies‘– competent at?
To understand what 'Competencies‘ are about, let's first look at what they are not about, what they are in fact replacing via education today, that being the Western understanding of character, morality, purpose, and virtue, which had been considered essential knowledge for the last 3,000 years, from Aristotle, up through to Ben Franklin and even the Boy Scouts. In that, the four most essential virtues were known as the Cardinal Virtues - Prudence (Wisdom in action), Justice, Fortitude (Courage), Temperance, to which the Christian age added (not re-invented, mind you, but added) three additional virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity, and those who habituated themselves to practicing these virtues could reasonably look forward to becoming people of good character - moral, self-regulating, and better able to live lives worth living because they understood what such a thing was, and why, and how to achieve it.
These timeless stories out of Western history which provided an inexhaustible source of lessons and questions, also served as the means of learning how to reason and apply logical thinking (Grammar used to be the means of studying and teaching Logic) within the reality of their own lives. For the diligent student, it became self-evident to them that becoming a person of good character made them more capable of living lives worth living, in liberty and society with others. That content, prior to 26 yrs ago, was understood to be the means for developing their character, from the inside out, by being attentive to them, by being respectful of what was objectively true, which entailed exercising their personal responsibility.
Those histories and stories, BTW, became the first targets of modernist education (see The Story Killers), beginning in the early 1800s, under the cover of adding topics that were more relevant, such as something useful for entering the workforce, or related to current events, and the old stories were gradually sidelined more and more, until now their removal, even banishment, is openly admitted to and promoted as 'decentering' literature and other fields from the oppression of 'Western dominance'.
OTOH, what the pedagogies of modern education are peddling, is something very different. With their 'competencies', aligning as they do with what teachers are taught in classes by the likes of Gloria Ladson-Billings, who is one of, if not the most referenced 'thinker' in our Teachers Colleges today (if you didn't read the paper of hers that I linked to in the last post, 'Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education' from 1995, - Read IT, you'll 'get it' in the first few paragraphs, it's short, you'll survive - no guarantees though if it continues to be ignored by parents and spread into their kids), they are taught to reject objective reality outright, and to reject individual rights in favor of collective privileges - which entails rejecting truth in favor of acquiring power. The CASEL 5 Competencies of SEL are similarly unconcerned with either content or truth (sorry, 'your truth', means no truth), and instead embrace emotional conformity to what's centered around gathering and exerting collective power for power’s sake, accordingly, its social ‘Virtues’, are:
purpose was and is to redistribute power as CASEL defines those goals as being - look back up at the outer rings of 'CASEL 5's Family, Caregivers, Community - they intend to, are, extending their reach well beyond the classroom & school, into your family, and every aspect of your life.
SEL’s ‘Competencies’ lead students in school (and increasingly adults in their workplaces) to repeatedly ‘confess your privilege’, which is part of a deliberate process for demoralizing a person and making them more malleable to influencing, further distancing, them from what was once known - 'Decentering' them away from the content, knowledge and wisdom which the West was derived from, as this example from the not-at-all-ironically-named 'American University' assures, in a course offering for its Technical Writing and Rhetoric Class:
Where sound character was once developed by a studious attention to virtue and morality, and reinforced and understood by an essential grasp of knowledge across time, SEL's competencies are focused upon the moment, the ever 'relevant!' now, which all moments are to be judged by (though without reference to other moments), so that the emotional moment becomes the justification for taking action in the moment, no matter what basis there may or may not be for those actions, AKA: Activism.
The Central Purpose of SEL is activism
SEL's 'competencies' are anti-virtues which promote envy, resentment, and hostility towards the forgiveness of others, as being desirable ‘character traits’, instilling an unquenchable thirst for political activism. That activism is encouraged not just in your student’s classrooms, but in their and your home life, and throughout your community, and in activities of businesses, community organizations, arts, sports, and other activities which its many surveys and programs are dedicated towards making happen.
However guilty Social and Emotional Learning is of promoting this ideological approach to education, it isn't the source of it, and that source is less new, than something old that's been newly revealed to the public. The collectivist mindset of modern education is and has been thoroughly embedded into academia, and through subjects such as 'Social Studies', it has instilled that framework into one generation after another, through material that has always been more concerned with the social and emotional doings of the moment, than with the meaningful content of our history.
Believe it or not, following from its roots in Rousseau and forward through Wilhelm Wundt, and John Dewey, modern educational theory has actually changed very little in substance since the late 1800's. What has changed, has been in the appearances of it, and as more has been forgotten, more has been able to be gotten away with, and so has become more clearly and openly revealed - the last forty years in particular have been a sort of macabre dance of the seven veils, slowly unveiling the monster to be what we're now able to see so clearly before us today - it was always there though, but most of us just couldn't be bothered to look. The sad fact is that our educational system has, and has had, as little to do with education (as it was once understood) as it can get away with, and as much to do with ideological activism, as it can get away with - which today is almost unlimited.
And again, if you think I'm exaggerating, take a look at what the Social Studies bible, 'C3'(College, Career, and Civic Life Framework for Social Studies), has been setting as the our schools expectations for students, from Kindergarten, to graduation: These are your school and your school district's 'Social Studies' expectations for Kindergarteners and Second Graders!:
The only way that any of that became possible, was by the knowledge that was once considered to be the norm for all to know - the knowledge that the West in general, and America in particular, were formed from and of - has been forgotten, is now unknown, and/or is now so successfully ridiculed by the 'educated' of today, that people are too embarrassed to admit to having any regard for it. And of course 'theories' like social and emotional learning, are the means by which they are able to pay as little attention to that 'decentered' content, as they can get away with, and with which they are able to get away with even less each new year, than the year before.
It is, IMHO, vitally important that we understand that this is not new, and in fact that even the substance of SEL is itself not ‘new’, and neither is what is being advanced by (C3); what is new is only how openly they are now revealing their purposes and intentions to be. The reason that's important, is that if these roots continue to remain unknown, then all that this current call for educational 'reform' will do, is pluck off the thistles and stem of the visible weed, and with its roots still securely in place, it will regrow and spread even further and more rapidly yet again, as it has done so many times in the past, as is partly noted in this:
, showing how successful the backward swing of the Pro-Regressive's 'Progress', was.
Sunday, November 14, 2021
Intersectionality - The Art of Gaining Power Through the Unthought 'Ohh!'
Previously, we've covered the Semantic Deception at the heart of modern education; how that defines the nature of SEL (Social and Emotional Learning) and its chief promoter, CASEL. The last post, looked at how the 'CASEL 5 Competencies' evades or undermines the fundamentals of sound character by teaching more
What's changed? How did the opinions of ludicrous nobodies armed only with the obscure dregs of humanities degrees, become relevant - feared even - by CEO's and Comedians, with ideas that endanger students and even threaten their parents?
Short answer: Intersectionality put the poke in woke. As James Lindsay details it, Intersectionality is the means by which academia 'Forged the Woke One Ring’, and together with SEL's tool of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), their combined power is being focused through the lens of race/gender/sexuality/etc., to decenter and consume the jewels of The West (philosophy, knowledge, virtue, justice and the Rule of Law). If you are foolish enough to laugh that off, or worse, take their bait and try and oppose them on the grounds of race/gender/sexuality/etc. - which they so desperately want you to do - you'll be consumed by them too.
Don't take the bait. Fix your Semantic Deception detection goggles securely in place, and in looking past the surfaces, you'll see that nothing *Woke* is what it appears to be, and that it endangers even those appearances of fairness and decency which are used to attract people to it. No longer a punchline, but a serious threat, you need to understand what it is, what its threat is, and understand what fear it has of you - which is what we're doing here.
What Intersectionality is
Kimberle Crenshaw, who identifies as being a black lesbian woman (in that order), is the academic that devised Intersectionality, and she's also, along with her mentor Derrick Bell, one of the co-creators of Critical Race Theory - she's the one who named it that. The Intersectionality which she devised in response to a SCOTUS discrimination case involving women and minorities, one of which, DeGraffenreid vs General Motors, concluded:
Taking a page from the *Woke* who believe that the narrative is more important than facts, I think Intersectionality's impact can first be best grasped through a visual narrative, rather than by description alone, through an old political cartoon (I couldn't find it, but this is the gist of it), which immediately conveys the sense that Crenshaw intended intersectionality to invoke:
You feel the shock of the secretary struck at the intersection of being a woman & a minority, you get that immediate 'Ohh!' which a powerful argument might argue you into, you feel as if you understand her position and the need to solve it. But the reality is that you haven't yet thought about her position at all, or how to solve it; you've heard no argument, and you have only been presented with an image of one, and those unthought feelings & assumptions, are what Intersectionality is intended to provoke in people (to begin with), with the 'Unthought 'Ohh!' of:
The 1st paper that Crenshaw wrote on it in 1989, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, made an impact, but her 1993 paper "Mapping the Margins“, unlocked the power of passionate activism which has surged well beyond any legal points it might've made. For those inclined to Marxist sentiments, it dialectically shifts the center of power from out of the narrow binary of haves vs have-nots, and expands it into a more fluid oppressor/oppressed matrix that is then easily made central to any & all relationships, and becomes a means of injecting activism into an unlimited number of social situations, each invoked with no more argument than the Unthought 'Ohh!' of framing the opposition of identities.
What Lindsay focuses on in particular, is Crenshaw's footnote #9, which might not appear to be much to look at:
Granted, it may not look like much, but in action that line formulates the philosophical napalm that's been setting our world on fire since it was introduced by linking law, and social activism, up with post-modernism. One reason that's such a flammable combination, is that a core technique of Post-Modernism is the brazen use of reframing and equivocation in order to misidentify & redefine terms into what they once were not (see Jacques Derrida "“Structure, Sign, and Play"), and then using that accompanying loss of clarity as a means of gaining power over what they're referring to (See Foucault). Interestingly, the mechanics of the process bears more than a passing resemblance to Zeno's Paradoxes from ancient Greece, as with the 'lived experience' of the fleetfooted Achilles being unable to overtake a tortoise, because:
What began with Crenshaw's intersection of race and gender', quickly "...expanded by factoring in issues such as class, sexual orientation, age, and color...", and its having been taken up by every grievance group imaginable has led to the 'exasperated etc.,' of race, religion, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, native language speaker, disabled, etc., etc., etc.,. The *Woke* disavow the concept of a person being conceived of as a single individual who possesses several identifiable traits, but prefers instead to 'think' of them as an intersectional point in the collective identities of Black, Female, Lesbian, etc., a process that has even worked its way into National Carreer Day Development:
That Intersectional calculation of DEI is the same process that is encouraged when you go along with a school's efforts to have 'equitable programs' and 'promote diversity' and to 'be more inclusive' or 'antiracist', and by which advanced classes are taken away from everyone because some aren't qualified, and it's how businesses and people are being cancelled from their jobs and from their lives, under the pressure of the impassioned activism that is provoked by the Intersectional unthought 'Ohhh!'.
SEL's Diversity Equity and Inclusion, is CRT's Intersectionality in action, and not just in academia, it's abusing people throughout all aspects of our lives. It's that ideological firehose of Intersectionality, that power-washed away the old siloed definitions and arguments of progressivism that once contained the radical left within the obscure haunts of various policy wonks and set them loose into popular opinion through the action of the unthought 'Ohh!', so that where once the Late-Night comics relentlessly and hilariously lampooned every aspect of Political Correctness, they now shudder in the fear of not appearing to be *Woke* enough.
There's an almost 'mystical' sense to the unthought 'Ohh!' of 'knowing' of identities without individuals, without logic, or judgement, or reasons for them, which only the authentically *Woke* are quickly installed as the gurus of what that 'knowing' really feels like, and all others must submit to their revealed perceptions. Towards that end, the *Woke* begin calculating a 'persons' intersectional value with the help of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion - which CASEL has injected into SEL in order to support Social Justice), splitting a 'persons' identity into a legion of oppressor/oppressed identities (People Of Color (POC), homosexual, non-binary, ‘differently abled’, non-Christian, Socialist, Trans, etc.). And like the cartoon, it requires no thought to 'get' it, and it provides a righteous, thoughtless sense of power and superiority to those who do somehow 'get' it, and act on it, absolving you of any burden of having to explain it with a simple 'you just don't get it, only the authentically oppressed [race/gender/sexuality/etc.,] can!'. Where the old 'liberal' Left required engaging in a reasonable argument, Intersectionality provides the power of 'being right' simply by being authentically *Woke*.
The conceptual vandalism that's emerged from Crenshaw's footnote #9, has disrupted our society at every turn, through something very much like what Marx had in mind when advising the use of ‘unrelenting criticism to dismantle society’, to the point that our concepts, our customs, our perceptions, are being reduced to a muddle - from 'birthing people', to toxic-masculinity, to logic & merit as signs of 'white supremacy', and 'it's only property' - so that our customs and our laws now pose neither a barrier nor a threat to their progress. Our schools which have 'legitimized' this dialectic through various '___ Studies' programs and degrees based upon them, has freed the *Woke* from our cultural constraints, and has left us without a conceptual ground to stand upon that's anymore solid than quicksand.
These are not simply word games, they particularly 'play' with the words we use to restrain power and violence with, and those lives lost through the riots of 2020, lay fully at the door of decades of this poison flowing through our schools. As will the horrors that will follow from them in the very near future, if we don't start taking it as being the lethally serious threat that it is
When challenged about the furor and backlash that intersectionality has created, Crenshaw, with the same degree of duplicity as Gloria Ladson-Billings telling NPR that 'I don't know that it [CRT] does apply to the classroom' (despite having written 'Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education' in order to import CRT into Teachers Colleges, so that all teachers would be trained to teach their students from the standpoint of Critical Race Theory), Crenshaw cheerfully feigns an 'aw shucks' face over it, as she does in this Vox article on her:
What your threat is to them - seeing through the Semantic Deception
What they do their very best to appear to not see, is the circular reasoning inherent in their positions, as the author of the Vox article seems to be oblivious to:
Yes, that is running circular rings around circular reasoning, yes it is irrational, and yes it seems insane - but there's more to it than that, and honestly, its worse than simply being insane.
They do understand that being Rational requires paying attention to facts, and drawing conclusions that are logically derivable from them. It's not that Crenshaw and her fellow woke folk don't see that, but that they won't abide by that. It's not as if they somehow lack the intellectual capacity to reason well, it's worse than that - they choose and have chosen a very different toolset to employ their intellectual capacity with, and they do so not in order to build, but in order to tear down. If you read the woke folk's articles in law reviews and in educational journals, and if you read their footnotes (which they fervently hope that you will not do) you will see a frequent, consistent, openly stated refusal to engage in, what they deride as 'epistemic adequacy' - the process of paying objective attention to what is real and true. Crenshaw's articles alone contain explicit references to such papers, including multiple references to "Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance", and the importance of society discarding the concept of objectivity and epistemic adequacy, for a 'social epistemology', in order to tear down the 'liberal order' of the West in general, and of America in particular.
Ibrahim X. Kendi famously offers 'definitions' of antiracism, and systemic racism, that are blatantly circular to the point of being ludicrous - he wrote them as headings in his book, and his editors presumably reviewed what he wrote, and they still published it, as is. He even repeated his circular definitions of racism and antiracism in an interview where the baffled interviewer repeatedly attempts to help him extricate himself from it, yet Kendi gave not an inch towards reason and 'epistemic adequacy'.
The reality is that the refusal of Crenshaw and all of the others to credit truth, and facts, is deliberate, and she and they consciously choose to lie about that. Why? Because objective truth and epistemic adequacy are viewed by them as being 'The Master's Tools', which, as activist Audre Lorde declared:
They are not trying to make a more reasonable argument, and they are not seeking to 'reveal' a hidden truth - they are forcibly asserting a statement which they expect everyone else to cower before and submit to, on the basis of appearances only (appearances which are deliberately constructed to hide the destruction they are intent upon), with the explicit message: Don't think, accept and submit.
IOW: The use of exceedingly poor reasoning which marks their endless papers, is not a sign of their incompetence at reasoning, but a demonstration of both their goal of, and of the tools they are using, for tearing down 'The Master's House' of Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian civilization.
And they would like nothing more than to draw you into their distraction of race/gender/sexuality/etc., so that your outrage can be made to aid their efforts, and man o man do they make it enticing and easy to do. Resist the temptation.
Again: It's not about race, it's not about reasoning, it is all about power, and any argument which you might make that engages with their strategy, invariably becomes distorted, as all such views formed within that frame must. Don't let yourself get sucked into arguing over the unfairness of race/gender/sexuality/etc., of individuals - their only interest in individuals and their various traits is as bait for provoking you - they're only interested in them for the power which their group identities give them access to. Unfortunately for us all, the 'tolerant right' typically do take the race bait, and they bite on it with an odd mixture of patronizing groveling, coupled with a condescending nod of granting 'some truth' to their positions, and the moment the *Woke* detect that little nibble on their line, these monstrously skillful fishers of men give a sharp flick to their woke fishing pole, and as the sharpened points formed from your own words sink into your throat, the bait falls away and reveals it to be less of a fishing hook of tolerance/militance (different sides of the same fool's gold coin), than a rhetorical grappling hook of raw power, which they use to climb up and over you and your position, to triumphantly plant their boot upon your face.
National Review author David French is one of the 'tolerant right', and he has been reeled in by the intersectional bait more times than I can count, as in this instance where the same Vox article recounts French telling the author that:
The power of the thoughtless 'Ohhh!', is the appearance of something sensible, even in its absence, which lures in those who're unwary of what the semantic deception is hiding, and those who react with a 'Well of course there are racists, but...', have unwittingly traded away reality and reason, for their framed mirror image of it. But just as a picture is not a thousand words, experiences are not reasons or reasoning, and treating them as if they had a reasonable point, is transformed into hooks and spears to impale you upon, the instant that you bite into it.
Lived Experiences aren't rational reasons, they're frames which become rough hewn bludgeons for beating you down with, and we must not forget that the moment you toss the protection of reason aside, you cannot just pick it back up. It's gone. Whether you do so through dainty tolerance as French does, or more come back with a more militant response of something like 'Look around you - all these woke people are tearing white people down to get what they want, and I'm sick of it - stop bashing white people!", they'll do a little happy dance inside in thanks for your complete and total surrender, because that is what you've done. Once you bite, they reel you in, as Crenshaw does here in response to French's comment:
Don't allow absurdities to blind you to their real intentions
If you play Crenshaw's game, you become ruled by her rules. As Crenshaw notes in a paper celebrating the twentieth anniversary of her original paper mapping the margins,
If you still have any doubts that Intersectionality is intended to undo the foundations of America in particular, and of the West in general, simply reading through her footnote references should put an end to those doubts, as they repeatedly repudiate those foundations and assert the need to eliminate those:
For those who wonder why I'm always harping on Philosophy (the love of wisdom) and metaphysics & epistemology especially, it's because those people, such as America's Founders, whose own personal operating systems were formed through their understanding of what 17th century metaphysics still understood, realized that reality exists, and that what is true, does matter, and that what is Right & Wrong has to be abided by. The *Woke* deride that period and deny them, because understanding the philosophy that preceded and led up to 17th century metaphysics, exposes the ludicrousness of the misosophy (hatred of wisdom) which came after it through the pens of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, etc. and which all of their notions depend upon.
For the woke folk like Crenshaw to make their points, they have to rid society of those Western ideas altogether, and that is the point of a paper that Crenshaw makes multiple references to, "Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance", one of its many insane (by Western standards) passages, states that:
That is their purpose, that is what they are doing, and that is why the *Woke* always target reason, reality, and true identity, and everything else that the West is founded in, through, and upon, time after time after time:
As the faux-Voltaire quipster noted: Those you aren't permitted to mock (see DEI for reference).
That is why Crenshaw and the *Woke* focus upon 'decentering' (destroying) epistemology - the science of knowing what you know (which enables you to actually know 'what the meaning of the word 'is', is), which is a direct threat to the absurdities they wish to impose upon us:
The End Game
This is where the people of The West are under the most deadly dangerous attack launched upon it since Lepanto, made even more dangerous by the fact that the barbarians aren’t invading from without the gates, but from within, and they are streaming down upon us from the perceived high ground of 'Education' and our own laws.
It is both fact, and bait, that the Wheel of Intersectionality is a pretext for extracting and turning power back upon those who have the power they desire. They don't target the White, Male, Cisgender (normal heterosexual), or Christian, who has (been disarmed by) a College Degree because of any of their identities, but because they've determined, in much the same way that a thief selects the richest and least threatening victim to mug, that people with those traits have the power they desire (Gollum), and Intersectionality, CRT, SEL, DEI, etc., etc., etc., form the 'societal narrative' which is the means they're using to flip your world with.
Don't allow yourself to be distracted into minimizing their absurd sounding tactics because they seem absurd. It's important to keep in mind a quote that actually did come from Voltaire, that "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.", and the 20th Century is a blood drenched testament to that.
It is impossible to overstate the significance of this, that deriding what is objectively true, is the strategic action that’s being employed to dismantle the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian culture of Western Civilization, and realizing Marx’s idea of ‘unrelenting criticism to dismantle society’, that is what CRT & SEL and the Praxis/Activism they promote, is all about.
And ultimately what you need to know most of all, is that what they fear most of all, is your learning what their real game is - because the power of their Semantic Deception in a snap, once you are no longer deceived by its appearances - quite literally, the truth will set you free.
Next we'll review and put all of the pieces together, and how to break them apart.
Monday, December 13, 2021
Dangerous Distinctions without a meaningful difference: SEL, DEI, CRT, CT
The proponents of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) promote it as a way of providing students with new skills for managing confusing and conflicting feelings in a difficult world. Having conveniently framed the matter in that way, it's not too surprising that many parents, and even conservative teachers - especially those with experience in trying to manage students who have issues with anger,
SEL uses the appearance of 'lived experiences' to distract from substance, uses 'Diversity' to ensure thoughtless conformity, uses Equity to force compliance upon all, and Inclusivity to restrict the freedom of speech and actions of everyone. SEL's endless surveys of students and parents are less for the benefit of the child, than for the activists, Govt, and corporations, who stand to gain in profit, power, and control of those student's future (and to some extent, even their parents'), all for the low, low price of their demoralization and corruption. The end result of all of this, is that far from helping kids to learn more 'social skills', SEL actively encourages students to deride what is real and true, in the pursuit of Social Justice ideology, while feeling empowered to bully those who don't echo their rabid virtue signaling.
If history's best advice for cultivating a sound mind and body, were to be rewritten by an Artificial Intelligence that was riddled with bugs & viruses, it could hardly turn out worse than that of our modern educational system, and the insanity and abusiveness of our current policies & programs are the culmination of those ideas that've gone into developing and driving it. As we've looked into what the nature of SEL is, and how it's been developed, and who has been promoting it, I hope you've begun to see that treating SEL and its companions as standalone programs is itself a semantic deception - the pretense that these theories are discrete objects which can be stepped between, through, and around, without being affected by them, also gives them the ability to advance under the cover of saying "Oh, you've made a mistake, we're teaching SEL, not CRT", while curtly dismissing both you and your concerns.
It is not a careless mistake to notice that SEL and DEI are related to CRT through Intersectionality, and reinforced through Culturally Relevant Pedagogy or Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, etc.. The fact is that what is truly careless, and reckless, is assuming that these different acronyms and terms somehow indicate distinctly different ideas - a minimal effort of reading through their theories and the purposes behind them, reveals the claim of separate theories to be making distinctions without a difference - not one of them is meaningfully different from the others. While CRT, SEL, Intersectionality and DEI, etc., do vary in their outward appearances, their functional differences are more akin to those of the pommel, hilt, cross guard, double-edged blade and deadly sharp point of a sword - yes, they are distinct, but no they are not separate in either structure or purpose, and are derived from a common ideology that is being wielded with deadly force at the same targets - the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian culture of Western Civilization, America, and you.
Thanks to decades of these influences, matters have progressed to the point that when parents attempt to push back against SEL & CRT at school board meetings today, they're met with everything from silence, to insult, and now even to being threatened by their govts, and with no more attempt to conceal the nature of what they're doing, than with the fig leaf of a rhetorical evasion that:
Neither are SEL's lessons and surveys simply misguided or inept, but follow from the deliberate ideological purposes that its theorists have openly stated for decades - when & where they think that 'you' won't hear them, that is. When the likes of a Gloria Ladsen-Billings ( most referenced author in teachers' colleges for decades) think that 'you' might hear them, they remark, as she said to NPR::
Amongst themselves, however, they state those things openly, they strategize how best to smuggle their theories into common practice, and how to perfect the semantic deception of leading parents to think one thing, while they teach something else to their children. The reason why they do that, is because for them, Education is not about teaching content and sound habits of character, but is what they see as being an Archimedean fulcrum that gives them the power to 'move the world' through, by changing students' beliefs, and actions, so as to alter the fundamental roots of our society, so that they can better manage our lives for our own good. Today those hopes of theirs are being realized outside the 'educational system', as can be seen in Joe Biden’s issuing of an Executive Order on his first day in office to require mandatory DEI 'professional development' programs for all federal employees.
One former teacher and author, Peter Green, in recognizing the darker potential behind these acronyms, warned of their far more probable downsides,
If you asked your child to weed your garden and they just quickly plucked the weeds off at the stems, would you congratulate them? Probably not, because the point of weeding the garden isn't just to get the weeds out of sight, but to stop them from spreading throughout your yard, right? Similarly, while it's fantastic that parents are waking up and taking action against what's happening in their schools, simply plucking the stems of an acronym or two from the school's curriculum is not weeding the garden, it's practicing a semantic self-deception upon themselves that leaves the roots to spread throughout their children's lives.
Unfortunately, generations of parents & politicians have not wanted to bother putting in the extra time and effort it takes to get at the weeds in our educational system, which is why it has become as infested as it is today - we need to put in the effort to get at the roots. On hearing the Marxist sounding rhetoric of CRT, SEL, etc., today, simply plucking what's visible from the classroom and wiping our hands of it, is losing sight of at least two important facts that helps the underlying weeds to spread:
#2 Should remind you that if there's no stem to grab the weeds by, you still need to dig into the soil to remove them.
That requires learning to identify what these ideas are and mean, and why they are a threat - simply removing them or calling them 'bad' will contribute nothing of value to their being uprooted, and so they will spread further and deeper into all of our lives.
The thing is that those 'old' ideas are at the root of what is bedeviling us today - the ideas behind the CRT & SEL programs are not new, and they didn't originate with the likes of Linda Darling-Hammond, Gloria Ladsen-Billings, Kimberle Crenshaw, Derek Bell, Giroux, or even from their predecessors in Bloom, Glazer, Gramsci, Dewey, but stretch back in an unbroken line of exasperated etceteras that continues on back even past Marx, to the misosophers of the late 17th Century, whose ideas, intentionally or not, undermined our ability to know what is real and true, and wise to do, and served to leach away the rightful power that individuals should have over their own lives, into the collective hands of 'those who know best'. If we don't put more attention on what ideas are being taught in our schools, and why, we'll continue to be poisoned with them, again, and again, and again, as we have been before, during, and after, every previous 'educational reform effort' that parents have attempted over the last 100+ years. Those poisonous 'Marxist' notions, by any other name, will continue to sicken us all the same, through our ignorance of what's behind their names - J.S. Mill is presented to us as a defender of freedom and liberty, was a socialist long before Marx became well known - and it is our ignorance of the roots of those weeds, that their power grows and spreads through our society.
I'll spare you a deep dive into the details here (while also threatening you with a future post that will), but just to indicate the problem, maybe I can give you a glimpse at the roots that are hiding just beneath the surface of our common assumptions, by poking a finger into the 'sensible sentiments' we typically hear in the good intentions of those around us:
Robespierre 'the incorruptible!', was consciously and explicitly putting Rousseau's ideas into action in the Terror of the French Revolution, which, BTW, in addition to turning the Guillotine into the first icon of 'Social Justice', turned churches into bars & brothels, made it illegal for schools to teach anything other than the party line, and initiated genocide against the populace of the Vendee who resisted the party line. And of course those heads which persisted in thinking unapproved thoughts within them, were soon separated from their bodies by the thousands, including, in the end, Robespierre's.
Although the revolution's heroic 'sans culottes!' presented liberté, égalité, fraternité, as if they meant Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood, in practice, as it always must, it meant Liberté only for the protected classes, égalité of outcomes for some at the expense of all others, and fraternité only to those who were 'right thinking', and the Guillotine for the rest. There's a famous quip that 'History may not exactly repeat, but it does rhyme', and well, I do hope that you hear the rhyming between Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and 'Liberte, Fraternity and Equalite!', for the *Woke* surely do, and have. This law journal article is from early 2000, and the author, a French-Canadian jurist, thanks the co-founder of CRT, Derek Bell, for his help in preparing his lecture on "Fraternity: The Unspoken Third Pillar of Democracy", which explains how necessarily:
Why does this digression into history apply in an examination of SEL? Because in addition to having planted the seeds of fascism, Rousseau is the one who more than anyone else, especially through his fictional novel "Emile", set the stage and direction of modern education, with his ideas on how best to raise and educate a child - this despite the fact that he himself had all six of his own newborn babies, taken from the breast of his 'significant other' of ill repute, and sent off to near certain death in a 'foundling hospital'. In addition to that, the nature of this 'educator' shines through in his 'Confessions' about what he privatly delighted in:
Rousseau was also the inspiration behind Immanuel Kant (the only decor in Kant's house was a portrait of Rousseau), whose own convoluted misosophy taught a willing world to believe that we can't ever really know what is real; a foundation which Hegel built upon by teaching that 'mere Aristotelian contradictions' were nothing to worry about (Aristotle's first law of thought is the Law of Non-Contradiction - the understanding that a thing cannot both be, and not be, in the same manner and context, at the same time), and that all we needed to do instead was to merge opposing ideas through his alchemical algorithm of dialectics, dubbed later as: "Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis", so that contradictions could, with a lot of convoluted wordage ('muddy the waters so that they appear deep'), then be transformed into something 'new'.
That deliberate practice of not only admitting contradictions into your thinking, but of embracing them, is almost impossible to overstate their dangerous significance. Whether coming at the matter from the Greco/Roman side of Aristotle’s Law of Non-Contradiction, or from the Judeo/Christian side stemming from Adam naming/identifying what exists within the creation which God said 'is Good' - that sense of identity is the root of Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian - Western - Civilization; the means of perceiving and valuing what is real and true. Embracing contradictions both deforms and destroys the 'new' thing being produced, as well as what it was produced out of, and more to the point it disintegrates your grasp of the reality they came from. That is the switch from epistemic adequacy (it is what it is) to social epistemology (something is what others say it is), and the genesis of what Orwell identified as 'Newspeak' phrases of 'War equals Peace', 'love equals hate', and 2+2=5, which makes any objective truth into the enemy of every aspect of society. Even worse than the Orwellian Newspeak, is the sense implanted in those who've learned to think emotionally, what Orwell described as 'Crimestop', where a person has become habituated to stop thinking as soon as they notice that their train of thought might lead into forbidden thinking:
There was both a European and an American 'backlash' to Hegel's means of muddying the waters, which divided into two streams of thought - not that they rejected muddying the waters, each appreciated having been 'freed' from the constraints of reality - they simply wanted to alter how the waters were to be muddied and why. One stream wanted to make the waters into an impenetrable mud, which was the path of the former Hegelian fan-boy Karl Marx's 'Dialectical Materialism'. The other stream wanted to muddy the waters so as to make them seem more like irrelevant puddles, as on the American side of the pond, with the former Hegelian fan-boy John Dewey and the misosophy of Pragmatism, which he helped formulate and spread.
Today we're being drowned by those two streams of thought having merged back together in modern wAcademia, so that now, here at the far end of 70 years of Teachers Colleges teaching the Conflict Resolution Theory of Bloom’s Taxonomy (“...a student attains 'higher order thinking' when he no longer believes in right or wrong..."), awash in theories that prefer mud to clarity, made manageable through their new mode of 'Critical Thinking' ( new, as in it only debuted in 1945... don't get me started on that. Yet) which is centered on practical power, rather than unrealistic truth.
Whether by means of Critical Theory, Conflict Resolution Theory, Critical Race Theory or Social and Emotional Learning, modern education is utilizing the Hegelian & Marxist dialectical algorithm of Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis, to give us a new ‘higher-order thinking’, actively taking and merging the morals and standards that students bring with them from home (the Thesis), with the notions of alternative lifestyles, your truth vs my truth, and so on (the Antithesis), through the ‘educational system’s dialectical process which saturates their everyday lessons and leads them to a new ‘more sensible’ and tolerant position (the Synthesis), shorn of the complications of out-moded systems of morality and reality and the objective truth of that.
Anything can dialectically 'become' its opposite by way of a philosophical spin-cycle where lies are mixed with truth to become a useful narrative like the '1619 Project', or the differences between boys and girls are waved in becoming queer or transgender, truly the meaning of Bill Clinton's 'It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is', is', means that anything can become what others what to say it is, in order to bring about a world where the only certainty is that The West must be ended and forgotten.
We’ve allowed ourselves to merely roll our eyes at what we took as simple foolishness in academia, reacting to ‘math is racist’ with a laugh, rather than reacting in horror at the type of society which must follow from such ideas gaining power within it. While most were busy laughing these ideas off, their lessons were busily poisoning the souls of Americans and doing more damage to the heart of our nation (a nation founded upon ideas), than all of our physical wars combined. And now, having injected their ideas into every level of our society, these 'fools' believe that they are in a position to end America, and to end the West, and they are using all of their power to make that so.
I trust you're seeing the problem? Parents need to understand that the moral and intellectual development of their child is not a part of the 'grade level expectations' that such educators have for them, while decolonizing their minds of any Western respect for reality and morality, is. The only way that can seem like an outrageous statement, is if by being unaware (willfully?) of what those who design what our students will be taught, have actually said, done, and are doing today.
What Red flags Should Concern You?
America's motto of 'e Pluribus Unum' - ‘out of many, One’ - is realized through the fundamental ideals that all American's inwardly share in common, and enables our outward differences of race, creed, ethnicity, etc., to be transformed into shared interests which unite us even further, becoming popularly celebrated in the likes of St. Patrick’s Day, the Italian Foods of The Hill in St. Louis, the novelties of the Chinatown’s of San Francisco, New York and L.A., and so much more.
Those fundamental American ideals are indifferent to our non-essential differences, which is what the Left fears most of all about them. Some red flags which signal that those ideals are under attack by CRT, SEL & DEI in your schools & communities, are:
'Diversity, Equity and Inclusion' dwells upon the surface differences between people, in order to submerge an individual's identity in shallow group identities that are more important than you are, inflaming and dividing people into ‘equitable’ factions with the false promise of gains in short term power.
The ideals of SEL teach conformity to the outward appearances of the group, and encourage taking action before (and without) understanding, and its preaching of virtue signaling is an unhealthy, counterproductive 'strategy', which inhibits reasoning, promotes anxiety, instills fear, hostility, and neurotic behavior, rewarding only those with no merit, and penalizes those who do. These strategies are the means of treating all Americans as 'human capital', and as a means for those in positions of power to reap capital & power from your personal information.
SEL, CRT, and the rest of the exasperated etcetera of ideologies (whose powers were once securely confined to government) are the means by which racism and bigotry are being infused into every aspect of our lives.
Why is any of this in your school? To benefit your child? To help them reason better, become more knowledgeable about important content? Reasoning is not learned or strengthened by emotional conformity, but by the clarity of content that the student is led to comprehend; identifying what is real, true, right & wrong, enables the mind, spirit and body to work in harmony - AKA: Reasoning. SEL is fundamentally opposed to all of that, focusing on falsehoods for fraudulent purposes, serves no one but those who can persuade or force your compliance.
Semantically Striking Back by Reframing Arguments with Reality
They frame matters in the way they do, in order to trip up your ability to think reasonably, and argue against them - don't help them in that. "Race" is not the proper frame for responding to their statements and charges of oppression and injustice- don't grant them the appearance of having used the logic they despise - 'Race/gender/sexuality' form the frame that they want you to be confined with - break out of their frame by focusing on the reality of Individual Rights and Law that are under attack, and refuse to accept their equivocal definitions of terms like systemic, racism, equity, inclusion, diversity, etc., which are intended to deceive you with semantics.
The best reply to the question of "Do you believe that systemic racism exists?!" is not an answer, but a question: What do you mean by racism? And if they slip into the Kendi-circularity, reject it, and if they continue doing so, reject their aping of logic, and reject the pretense that they care about what is objectively true. They do not, they cannot, and they say so. The *Woke* aren't making mistakes, they are making attacks, they know that, and what they dread most is your pointing that out for all to see.
The best reply to the question of "Do you believe that the oppression of [ race/gender/sexuality/etc.] is evil?!" is not to give an answer, but to reply with two questions of your own: What do you mean by oppression? What do you mean by Good? Pursuing those questions through to their answers, will cause their question to explode in their faces.
The best reply to "America is a racist society formed on the backs of slaves!", is not to give an answer, but to pointedly ask several questions of your own, beginning with why is slavery bad? If objective truth is irrelevant and power is what matters to the *Woke*, then clearly having slaves is great for those in power, so why would you pretend that slavery is bad? Why should some people not be enslaved for the benefit of others? Would a Govt that rejects upholding Individual Rights for all, be more or less likely to enslave its people? Would a Rule of Law that upholds and defends the individual rights of all of its people, who are all understood to be equal before the law, be more or less likely to lead to a society where all are at liberty to live their own lives in society with others?
Any reasonable answer will admit that slavery can't be right, that it is a destructive evil because it violates the very real nature and requirements of being human; that for the individual rights of all to be upheld and defended, all must be treated equally before its laws, and that the power and scope of that govt's laws must be limited by law to stringently respect those same individual rights, all of which require respecting what is objectively true.
That is the understanding which made America exceptional.
Similarly, no matter what its practitioners stated intentions might be, racism cannot somehow be made 'ok' by law to achieve 'payback', without treating some (and so all) unequally before the law, which makes a mockery of the individual rights which are only reliable basis for the Justice they supposedly seek, and for that reason alone, all such forms of 'Social Justice' must be opposed by everyone who hopes to be able to live a life worth living, in liberty and in society with others.
Because that is true, the *Woke* are unlikely to answer your questions at all, or to let others even hear them, but it is vitally important that you understand that such answers require asking those questions, and that you refuse to be framed into undermining what all that you care about, rests upon. If you've got a handle on that, here are some excellent questions to bring the *Woke* painfully face to face with the reality of what their own positions actually mean.
The greater good is not a fundamental value - don't put Descartes before the horse - it is not a cause, but a result of individuals at liberty to live in society with each other, and our own history teaches us that such a society cannot be sustained unless reality, truth, and virtue, are valued and adhered to through the habits, customs and laws of the people within that society. The reality of being human is that human beings think in order to live in reality, and the better we order our thoughts to conform to what is real and true, the more effective we are. Born from the union of a man and a woman, we become more than savages by forming families of a father, mother and child, and as they grow and develop into a community, the more that society structures itself to respect its families, and conforms to a philosophy and religion that reflects what is real and true, the more prosperous that society becomes.
No culture has conceived or achieved these ideals as effectively as have the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian culture of Western Civilization, and none of its societies have done that as well as America, because America held "these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". Striving to live up to those exceptional ideals is what made America the first society in history to realize that slavery is wrong, destructive, and evil, and ultimately to eliminate it by law (and no, Britain was not the first to do so, several American states abolished slavery decades before their estranged parent did).
There are few worse guides for a life worth living, than what being *Woke* provides, and no better guide for respecting and abiding by what is real and true than that found in the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian culture of Western Civilization in general, and of America in particular.
For all of Intersectionality's focus upon 'identities', which is the dark heart of the *Woke*, it utterly fails to identify the most basic issue of what it means and requires to be human. Its collectivist nature sees only the many sub-groups they've imagined that humanity can be divided into, to be managed by the *Woke*, for the *Woke*, unrestrained by any concern for the facts of human nature or of nature itself, and that is what a dozen decades of public education has prepared us for. As Shakespeare and a recent mini-series warned us: These violent delights have violent ends.
The claim of SEL to be 'the foundation of all learning', to be 'science based', to be effective and beneficial to every student, sounds all very fine, except that each statement and claim is at best a half-truth of lies grafted onto an out of context selection of facts, to serve falsehoods whose only value and purpose is for luring people in through their 'good intentions', to be utilized in a vile agenda of undermining the rule of law, the rights of parents, and the future soundness of mind of the students it is streamed into.
What we shouldn’t do
It is a mistake to view SEL, CRT, DEI, Critical Theory, etc., as separate objects that can somehow be safely and carefully stepped around without being contaminated or harmed by them. CRT, SEL, DEI, are less discrete objects, than the edges and point of the same sword, whose point is to subdue you, and to destroy what The West and America value.
What can we do?
The word ‘because’ indicates and presumes a logical connection between what came before, and what follows after it, which they take full advantage of the appearances of the language they use, but their actions, their history, their 'scientific' justifications, their 'thinkers' hidden motivations, demonstrate that they have flatly rejected the reality and responsibility of making any such logical connections. That disregard for reality follows from their rejection of 'objective reality' and what their true focus is, the pursuit of power, over truth, and we'll soon begin looking at their explicitly saying just that.
In short, they use ‘because’, because you do, because you presume that it is being used to convey an effect which has logically been shown to follow from a cause. But they do not use it that way, instead they use ‘because’ as a convenient means of stringing random assertions together, a way to assert X, and then assert Y, by counting upon the strength of what YOU will assume they conveyed in their statements, and not wanting to admit that you weren't able to follow their reasoning, they count on your nodding along with them as if you were convinced by what they've said.
For them, your nodding along is power, power which they eagerly take from you, and twist to their own purposes to be used upon and against you. Whenever you hear the *Woke* say ‘because’, pay attention, because they’re hoping to slip some bit of illogical nonsense past you as if they'd just given you a logical reason that justified it.
IOW: As with that old saw about “The operation was a success… but the patient died”, the important part as SEL sees it, is not that one thing follows from or achieves another, but that you were swayed by the appearances that it had, so that for their purposes, the 'logical operation' was a success, even though the patient, Truth, died. For those behind SEL, the patient dying is of no concern - this particular doctor’s patients typically do die - yet from their perspective, the operations are all successful, and that appearance of success is what they use to continue performing their educational malpractice upon the kids in our schools.
Next, we'll get into what SEL substitutes for Character, and why.
Thursday, October 21, 2021
Sell key feature: The 'Competencies‘ of Activism - forgetting to be gotten away with
So in previous posts we've gone through how Semantic Deception is at the heart of modern education, and how that's reflected in the nature of CASEL, the organization formed to promote SEL, and now in this post we'll start looking into CASEL 5's 'Competencies', and the disturbing issues they lead us into. The more obvious issue with what they've dubbed ‘evidence-based competencies', is that when
The third of five posts making up the substance of a presentation I gave to parents in the Lindbergh School District
you see ‘Evidence Based’, you need to understand that that entails data collection and the data-mining industry, which is what made SEL so integral to Common Core, and its successors - every school survey that you or your child takes, is collected into databases and monetized, with the intention of it being used towards affecting both of your futures - and, of course, the income of Atty General Garland's kids. Troublesome as that is though, the more important aspect is the Competencies themselves (don't miss those outer rings - we'll come back to those), and their intentions for them:
If you crank that glop through the ol’ disgronificator, and extract the ideology, misdirection and jargon, what you end up with are allegedly 'new & improved!' versions of courtesy & manners, morality, ethics & civic mindedness, personal integrity & friendship, and developing the ability to make prudent decisions, which were the hallmark of a person of good character. And of course it was by attending to those qualities and forming them into habits, that a person engraved their character upon their soul,
- “Social and emotional learning (SEL) is a process through which children develop in their ability to integrate thinking, feeling, and behaving to succeed at important developmental tasks. The process includes, but is not necessarily limited to, recognizing and managing emotions, caring about others, making good decisions, behaving ethically and responsibly, developing positive relationships, and avoiding negative behaviors...“
, and are divided into:- The CASEL 5 addresses five broad and interrelated areas of competence and highlights examples for each: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.
, and they and society as a whole, benefited greatly from that. In those dark ages prior to the coming of SEL 26 years ago, a person acquired those qualities of character through studying the stories, poems, songs, fables, and parables written by authors of skill and often genius - Homer, the Bible, Aesop, Plutarch, Shakespeare, and so on, which sparked private thoughtfulness and public conversations, and habitually acting on their understanding of them, which formed the popular cultural awareness of how a person should behave, and why.
- Character:
1. A mark made by cutting or engraving, as on stone, metal or other hard material; ...
4. The peculiar qualities, impressed by nature or habit on a person, which distinguish him from others; these constitute real character, and the qualities which he is supposed to possess, constitute his estimated character, or reputation. Hence we say, a character is not formed, when the person has not acquired stable and distinctive qualities...”
Virtue & Character from Aristotle,
to Franklin, to the Boy Scouts
OTOH, what the practice of these 'Competencies' will engrave upon a person's soul, for reasons we'll soon see, is not something that anyone of good character would want to see embodied in anyone in their society, least of all themselves, or their children. The CASEL 5 might appear to be a nerdy attempt to restate the same general ideas as those of virtue and character, but here again, as with so many issues of semantic deception within our educational system, the similarity ends at the surface of their appearances, and below the surface, the purposes being aimed at by them are very different, both in their origins, and in their ends. SEL isn't using those ‘Competencies’ as a means towards thoughtfulness, but as givens to be accepted or imposed and reinforced with techniques for instilling them into a 'cancel' fearing public, such as by Transformative SEL's manipulative use of 'Lived Experiences':
Your first thought might be that 'Lived Experiences' deal with experiences that people have lived through, and most of the boiler plate lets it sound something like that, but unsurprisingly that is not the case. Recall from the previous post, that CASEL's current page for "Transformative SEL", was until a couple months ago when parents began to revolt, entitled "Transformative SEL for Social Justice", which is important to keep in mind, because as James Lindsay explains, “lived experience” is interpreted through the theory of Critical Social Justice, so that:“Core features of Transformative SEL include:
- Authentic partnering among students and adults with a deep focus on sharing power and decision-making between young people, educators, families, and communities.
- Academic content that integrates issues of race, class and culture.
- Instruction that honors and makes connections to students’ lived experiences and identities, and scaffolds learning to build an understanding of others’ lived experiences…”
"... lived experience is the overwhelmingly primary way in which knowledge can be obtained. This should not be mistaken to mean one’s firsthand experience, which most of us already recognize to provide a rather weak claim upon knowledge, though it is both implied and claimed that this is what “lived experience” refers to in Critical Social Justice. Lived Experience... refers more specifically to one’s life experiences in allegedly systemic power dynamics of dominance and oppression that shape society structurally as understood with a critical consciousness and interpreted through Theory.... it is only the “lived experience of oppression,” as Theory will have it, that counts...."What that means is, that 'Lived Experiences' are contrived anecdotes that follow from assumptions such as Robin DiAngelo’s famous assertion that: "The question is not ‘Did racism occur?’ but ‘How did racism manifest in that situation?'”, which is the sort of loaded question that surveys often use to lead students toward the ''authentic *woke*" position. One such position would be like this one described in a Teacher's College Press, publication, "Is Everyone Really Equal?", for 'Systemic Racism":
"...From a critical social justice perspective, the term racism refers to this system of collective social and institutional White power and privilege...", and 'Lived Experiences' will be anecdotes, brief or extended, taken from the supposed perspectives of those who feel oppressed by that power and privilege. Here a few examples of 'Lived Experiences' that I found in 'Pioneering Research from Boston University:
"Not only am I, you know I’m rebellious to authority—that may have me biased somewhat, but, my life experiences, man, I’ve always seen police mishandling me and my people. It leaves a nasty taste in my mouth, you know?" - A middle-aged man from BaltimoreAs is typical, they are given without citation or a means of verification, but they are 'authentic', soOooo... why would you need to verify them? Right? Ahem.
"Now, you and I would say this…I tell anyone this…what restrains us African Americans is the Constitution. We wanna see—although we’re not in the Constitution—we wanna see our kids grow up. We wanna see our family members excel…" - A middle-aged man from Los Angeles
"It’s not a justice system. It’s a justice system to the point, it’s just for us—to go through. It’s nothing for us to get anything out of, but for us to go through" - A 69-year-old man from Los Angeles"
DiAngelo's question of "...How did racism manifest in that situation?" might be thought of as the (w)academically approved form of "Have you stopped beating your wife?", and questions such as those, through endless surveys, are meant to lead students into whichever authentic position is being discussed, which in the case of the 'beating your wife' question, might be something like: "Marriage is a patriarchal institution which empowers cisgender men and oppresses women.", and any number of anecdotes from women expressing the oppression they felt as wives, would be their 'Lived Experience' of a women subjected to marriage.
To continue with that ridiculous sounding but true to life example (if you think I exaggerate, you probably haven't heard about "Identifying and Countering White Supremacy Culture in Food Systems" ), if a man were to answer "But... I'm not beating my wife", that would be seen as his being complicit with the "dominant narrative'', and be evidence of his guilt in enabling the interests and ideologies of oppression.
For those who might attempt to logically explain their position by replying with something like "The problem I have with your question, is that I never have beaten my wife, so...", the WokeFolk at the U of Michigan have helpfully identified some handy strategies for dealing with such inauthentic instances of 'wrong think':
"To address the prevalence of 'Perfectly Logical Explanations' that students often bring to re-establish dominant narratives."That begins with a helpful introductory example of how to deal with other such dominant narratives as "Slavery is good for slaves", and from which it moves to another offensive example - The American Dream:
"... America is a meritocracy, and anyone can achieve their ambitions through hard work and perseverance.”, to which it provides a list of questions that the teacher should lead students through, once they've formed them into groups for considering the 'problems' with that statement. A few of those are:
"Who do you suppose would say this?...Who does this narrative benefit? Who does it harm?... What narrative is it attempting to silence?... How is participation in/belief in this narrative enforced?... How has this narrative impacted you? How do you benefit from it? How does it harm you?... How have you participated in/resisted this narrative?"Inauthentic replies are problematized before the class, and woke ones are congratulated and elaborated upon. The questions such as those above, are meant to problematize the scenario, and like the 'beating your wife' question, they first presume your guilt, and then 'explore' how that can be exposed through 'critical' questioning. Replying that "But I'm not beating my wife!", would be an inauthentic answer, and subjected to a problematizing 'critical examination', to which you either submit, or be cancelled.
A correct - woke - answer, depends upon which role you are expected to play - if you're a cisgender white male, then your answer must conform to the role of an oppressor, with something like "Yes, I am guilty of beating my wife - every time I expect her to make me a sandwich, that is what I'm doing.".
The wife's reply would be expected to conform to the role of the victim: "I experience an oppressive beating every time I'm expected to do laundry or prepare food! He murders my soul!". If she instead were to answer "But my husband doesn't beat me!", then she would be deemed as being complicit with oppression as well, and unless she quickly changed her tune, would be seen as being just as inauthentic as is Thomas Sowell, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or anyone else, regardless of color, gender, etc., who is not woke.
Remember, it's not really about race, or gender or anything else, it's about Power, as attained through the ideology of what is authentically woke.
Students discover what it is that they should affirm as being woke, through the leading nature of the survey questions that SEL subjects them to, which typically can include such educationally irrelevant quaint as how a student feels about their height, hair, breasts, gender, gender fluidity, sadness, anger, racial discomfort, etc., and of course whatever the current topic is, the sensitive details which the student's survey questions have exposed about themselves and shared with the class, will be used by the teacher who's been led to believe that they're competent to, to 'adjust' the classes' feelings and beliefs, until the subjects accept and align with the 'Lived Experiences' at hand.
There is to be no discussion outside of acceptance - students aren't meant to question the validity of the 'Lived Experiences', but to conform with the authentic narrative in a way that 'scaffolds' their acceptance into place without any weighing of evidence, or developing an understanding of the issue. These ‘Lived Experiences’ are pervasive and unquestionable propaganda to be asserted and reasserted wherever a question might be in danger of appearing. But propaganda for what?
What are these 'Competencies‘– competent at?
To understand what 'Competencies‘ are about, let's first look at what they are not about, what they are in fact replacing via education today, that being the Western understanding of character, morality, purpose, and virtue, which had been considered essential knowledge for the last 3,000 years, from Aristotle, up through to Ben Franklin and even the Boy Scouts. In that, the four most essential virtues were known as the Cardinal Virtues - Prudence (Wisdom in action), Justice, Fortitude (Courage), Temperance, to which the Christian age added (not re-invented, mind you, but added) three additional virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity, and those who habituated themselves to practicing these virtues could reasonably look forward to becoming people of good character - moral, self-regulating, and better able to live lives worth living because they understood what such a thing was, and why, and how to achieve it.
Those histories and stories, BTW, became the first targets of modernist education (see The Story Killers), beginning in the early 1800s, under the cover of adding topics that were more relevant, such as something useful for entering the workforce, or related to current events, and the old stories were gradually sidelined more and more, until now their removal, even banishment, is openly admitted to and promoted as 'decentering' literature and other fields from the oppression of 'Western dominance'.
OTOH, what the pedagogies of modern education are peddling, is something very different. With their 'competencies', aligning as they do with what teachers are taught in classes by the likes of Gloria Ladson-Billings, who is one of, if not the most referenced 'thinker' in our Teachers Colleges today (if you didn't read the paper of hers that I linked to in the last post, 'Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education' from 1995, - Read IT, you'll 'get it' in the first few paragraphs, it's short, you'll survive - no guarantees though if it continues to be ignored by parents and spread into their kids), they are taught to reject objective reality outright, and to reject individual rights in favor of collective privileges - which entails rejecting truth in favor of acquiring power. The CASEL 5 Competencies of SEL are similarly unconcerned with either content or truth (sorry, 'your truth', means no truth), and instead embrace emotional conformity to what's centered around gathering and exerting collective power for power’s sake, accordingly, its social ‘Virtues’, are:
AKA: Wokeness (the *woke* now hate the word 'woke', BTW, because... they're *woke*). The Woke-Folk of CASEL make no excuses for casting the old materials of The West aside; having replaced it with whichever scientistic jargon best excuses their experimenting on students with new theories for 'producing' more desirable behaviors - or at least the marketable appearances of them. Above all, their materials, and the data mining and monetizing of them, are utilized as tools for promoting Social Justice, as "Transformative SEL as a Lever for Equity & Social Justice" (even if they don't say it as publicly as that now), whose
- Activism,
- Social Justice,
- Cancel Culture,
SEL’s ‘Competencies’ lead students in school (and increasingly adults in their workplaces) to repeatedly ‘confess your privilege’, which is part of a deliberate process for demoralizing a person and making them more malleable to influencing, further distancing, them from what was once known - 'Decentering' them away from the content, knowledge and wisdom which the West was derived from, as this example from the not-at-all-ironically-named 'American University' assures, in a course offering for its Technical Writing and Rhetoric Class:
"...In addition, students in Technical Writing and Rhetoric will focus on issues of accessibility, equity and justice, and how they relate to modern communication, says Lacey Wootten, director of American University’s Writing Studies Program. These include human-centered design of technical materials, technical communication that accounts for people with disabilities, and decentering Western values, assumptions, and languages in technical communication...."It should be no surprise then, that as more and more of the old knowledge has become forgotten, more that more has been able to be gotten away with, in injecting ideological and politically partisan views into the unsuspecting character of those that these lessons are being taught to, and that is the nature of the character that is being engraved upon the soul of those unfortunate students whose parents are allowing them to be subjected to it.
Where sound character was once developed by a studious attention to virtue and morality, and reinforced and understood by an essential grasp of knowledge across time, SEL's competencies are focused upon the moment, the ever 'relevant!' now, which all moments are to be judged by (though without reference to other moments), so that the emotional moment becomes the justification for taking action in the moment, no matter what basis there may or may not be for those actions, AKA: Activism.
The Central Purpose of SEL is activism
SEL's 'competencies' are anti-virtues which promote envy, resentment, and hostility towards the forgiveness of others, as being desirable ‘character traits’, instilling an unquenchable thirst for political activism. That activism is encouraged not just in your student’s classrooms, but in their and your home life, and throughout your community, and in activities of businesses, community organizations, arts, sports, and other activities which its many surveys and programs are dedicated towards making happen.
Believe it or not, following from its roots in Rousseau and forward through Wilhelm Wundt, and John Dewey, modern educational theory has actually changed very little in substance since the late 1800's. What has changed, has been in the appearances of it, and as more has been forgotten, more has been able to be gotten away with, and so has become more clearly and openly revealed - the last forty years in particular have been a sort of macabre dance of the seven veils, slowly unveiling the monster to be what we're now able to see so clearly before us today - it was always there though, but most of us just couldn't be bothered to look. The sad fact is that our educational system has, and has had, as little to do with education (as it was once understood) as it can get away with, and as much to do with ideological activism, as it can get away with - which today is almost unlimited.
And again, if you think I'm exaggerating, take a look at what the Social Studies bible, 'C3'(College, Career, and Civic Life Framework for Social Studies), has been setting as the our schools expectations for students, from Kindergarten, to graduation: These are your school and your school district's 'Social Studies' expectations for Kindergarteners and Second Graders!:
, by the end of the Fifth Grade they expect your child to have been well indoctrinated enough to be able to:
- D4.6.K-2. Identify and explain a range of local, regional, and global problems, and some ways in which people are trying to address these problems.
- D4.7.K-2. Identify ways to take action to help address local, regional, and global problems.
- D4.8.K-2. Use listening, consensus-building, and voting procedures to decide on and take action in their classrooms.
, by the end of Eight Grade these emerging activists should be able to:
- D4.7.3-5. Explain different strategies and approaches students and others could take in working alone and together to address local, regional, and global problems, and predict possible results of their actions.
- D4.8.3-5. Use a range of deliberative and democratic procedures to make decisions about and act on civic problems in their classrooms and schools.
, and by the time they graduate, you will be the proud parents of full scale woketivists who will mobilize to:
- D4.7.6-8. Assess their individual and collective capacities to take action to address local, regional, and global problems, taking into account a range of possible levers of power, strategies, and potential outcomes.
- D4.8.6-8. Apply a range of deliberative and democratic procedures to make decisions and take action in their classrooms and schools, and in out-of-school civic contexts.
Note: Do not mistake "engaging in self-reflection... and complex causal reasoning", for what you naturally assume them to mean - they embody the most significant case of Semantic Deception of them all, which we'll go into in a later post.
- D4.7.9-12. Assess options for individual and collective action to address local, regional, and global problems by engaging in self-reflection, strategy identification, and complex causal reasoning.
- D4.8.9-12. Apply a range of deliberative and democratic strategies and procedures to make decisions and take action in their classrooms, schools, and out-of-school civic contexts
The only way that any of that became possible, was by the knowledge that was once considered to be the norm for all to know - the knowledge that the West in general, and America in particular, were formed from and of - has been forgotten, is now unknown, and/or is now so successfully ridiculed by the 'educated' of today, that people are too embarrassed to admit to having any regard for it. And of course 'theories' like social and emotional learning, are the means by which they are able to pay as little attention to that 'decentered' content, as they can get away with, and with which they are able to get away with even less each new year, than the year before.
It is, IMHO, vitally important that we understand that this is not new, and in fact that even the substance of SEL is itself not ‘new’, and neither is what is being advanced by (C3); what is new is only how openly they are now revealing their purposes and intentions to be. The reason that's important, is that if these roots continue to remain unknown, then all that this current call for educational 'reform' will do, is pluck off the thistles and stem of the visible weed, and with its roots still securely in place, it will regrow and spread even further and more rapidly yet again, as it has done so many times in the past, as is partly noted in this:
"...But one of the strategies the educators use to fend off the opposition is to propose educational “reform,” which requires billions of dollars to implement but never solves any of the problems that parents complain about. The teachers’ unions make sure that the legislators toe the line of phony “reform.” Indeed, in the name of “reform” the teachers’ unions have been able to get billions of dollars out of the pockets of the taxpayer, while delivering dross. The dross is celebrated as “improvements.”..."Again, I'm not exagerating. 120 yrs ago, John Dewey was making clear to his fellow academics in the teachers colleges (which, BTW, we got as a result of Republican reforms that were pushed through in the mid 1860s), what goals that the new 'Progressive' schools should be pursuing, goals which he described in detail in his collection of lectures in 'School and Society', were published in 1900(!). Among his many goals, was one for our schools to become the active arm of government in each person’s home, business, and ‘individual’’ life, so that communities would be guided by 'those who know best' - that is what was being pursued, where he said that:
, and 'actuating' the child into action,
- "...so far as possible, the child shall have the same attitude and point of view in the school as in the home;..."
And long before SEL's focus upon 'social learning' at the deliberate expense of content, virtue, morality and truth, Dewey had argued that modern education should not only not be too concerned with content, but that a student learning content on their own, was a bad thing:
- "...It is a question of the unity of the child's experience, of its actuating motives and aims, not of amusing or even interesting the child..."
Soon after that publication by Dewey, another committed 'Progressive', Elwood P. Cubberly, who was a key designer of our very modern School District/Superintendent system, the system by which schools were consolidated, and administrators and elected representatives were effectively inserted in-between parents, students & teachers (for the purposes of dividing them and making parents and teachers less relevant to what and how students were taught), boasted in 1909(!), that:
- "...The mere absorption of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat...."
Of course, there was a parental backlash then as well, as America turned away from the 'Progressives' of Teddy Roosevelt & Woodrow Wilson, and began swinging, partially, towards the constitutional conservativism of Calvin Coolidge, but... because the nature of the ideas that they'd reacted against went unidentified, the pendulum was able to swing back under the cover of 'reform'. So much so, that by 1991 our schools had sunk to the level where Rita Kramer, writing from within the Teachers Colleges, warned in her book "Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America's Teachers", that they were no longer concerned with education, but that
- “Each year the child is coming to belong more to the State and less and less to the parent.”
"...The function of the schools is to achieve educational equity as a means to social and economic equity..."
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| Ed School Follies - 1991 |
But they had a problem. As successful as their ‘progressivism’ was at gaining a controlling voice in education, in politics, in law, in entertainment, and in the business world, something was still missing from their quiver. Something was keeping them from exerting the power they had collected, upon the society that they despised.
Gramsci's 'long march through the institutions' gave them control in each realm, but solid though it was, they were effectively siloed, so that one particular directive given in one realm, couldn’t easily crossover into another - something declared to be 'problematic' by the post-modernists, had difficulty moving beyond the bounds of the openly Marxist humanities in academia, or into civic action in positivist law, or into the lessons that could be publicly voiced in school, and so had little affect upon the daily actions of private life. Some vague sense of it did, to be sure, particularly with those flush with college degrees, but they were unable to go much further - comedians still made "PC" a punchline.
What they lacked was a means of inserting and asserting their power and control, over an individual’s thoughts & actions outside of the elitist silos. And that’s where ‘Wokeness’ came in, and came in with an ability to successfully jump from the easily mocked world of Political Correctness, into the unassailable world of Wokeness of today, and that was all thanks to the concept of Intersectionality, which is what we'll go into next.
Gramsci's 'long march through the institutions' gave them control in each realm, but solid though it was, they were effectively siloed, so that one particular directive given in one realm, couldn’t easily crossover into another - something declared to be 'problematic' by the post-modernists, had difficulty moving beyond the bounds of the openly Marxist humanities in academia, or into civic action in positivist law, or into the lessons that could be publicly voiced in school, and so had little affect upon the daily actions of private life. Some vague sense of it did, to be sure, particularly with those flush with college degrees, but they were unable to go much further - comedians still made "PC" a punchline.
What they lacked was a means of inserting and asserting their power and control, over an individual’s thoughts & actions outside of the elitist silos. And that’s where ‘Wokeness’ came in, and came in with an ability to successfully jump from the easily mocked world of Political Correctness, into the unassailable world of Wokeness of today, and that was all thanks to the concept of Intersectionality, which is what we'll go into next.
Sunday, November 14, 2021
Intersectionality - The Art of Gaining Power Through the Unthought 'Ohh!'
Previously, we've covered the Semantic Deception at the heart of modern education; how that defines the nature of SEL (Social and Emotional Learning) and its chief promoter, CASEL. The last post, looked at how the 'CASEL 5 Competencies' evades or undermines the fundamentals of sound character by teaching more
The fourth of five posts making up the substance of a presentation I gave to parents in the Lindbergh School District
politically useful activities of activism. Although SEL itself is but 26yrs old, the ideals and intentions animating it have been central to modernist education for at least a dozen decades - the only thing new today is how open they've become about what their beliefs are, and that new-found openness should concern you. I find it concerning, because despite having succeeded in their long march through the institutions, the Left wasn't able to fully capitalize on the power they had - with the popular quip in mind that's fittingly misattributed to Voltaire, that: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize”, note that until very recently the Left's ideals of Political Correctness were routinely made into punchlines by late-night comedians from Johnny Carson to Jimmy Fallon, because the Left had no real power amongst the American people outside of its core institutions. And yet today, of our several late-night comedians, each one is wokier than the last, and all are visibly afraid of misspeaking themselves into the crosshairs of cancel culture.
What's changed? How did the opinions of ludicrous nobodies armed only with the obscure dregs of humanities degrees, become relevant - feared even - by CEO's and Comedians, with ideas that endanger students and even threaten their parents?
Short answer: Intersectionality put the poke in woke. As James Lindsay details it, Intersectionality is the means by which academia 'Forged the Woke One Ring’, and together with SEL's tool of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), their combined power is being focused through the lens of race/gender/sexuality/etc., to decenter and consume the jewels of The West (philosophy, knowledge, virtue, justice and the Rule of Law). If you are foolish enough to laugh that off, or worse, take their bait and try and oppose them on the grounds of race/gender/sexuality/etc. - which they so desperately want you to do - you'll be consumed by them too.
Don't take the bait. Fix your Semantic Deception detection goggles securely in place, and in looking past the surfaces, you'll see that nothing *Woke* is what it appears to be, and that it endangers even those appearances of fairness and decency which are used to attract people to it. No longer a punchline, but a serious threat, you need to understand what it is, what its threat is, and understand what fear it has of you - which is what we're doing here.
Kimberle Crenshaw, who identifies as being a black lesbian woman (in that order), is the academic that devised Intersectionality, and she's also, along with her mentor Derrick Bell, one of the co-creators of Critical Race Theory - she's the one who named it that. The Intersectionality which she devised in response to a SCOTUS discrimination case involving women and minorities, one of which, DeGraffenreid vs General Motors, concluded:
"...Title VII does not indicate that the goal of the statute was to create a new classification of "black women" who would have greater standing than, for example, a black male. The prospect of the creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora's box...", and Crenshaw, seemingly liking the idea of opening Pandora's Box, devised Intersectionality on that model of creating special classes, and it turned out to be a remarkably exploitable wedge for getting people to nod along with your position, while at the same time turning them against the essentials of their own positions.
Taking a page from the *Woke* who believe that the narrative is more important than facts, I think Intersectionality's impact can first be best grasped through a visual narrative, rather than by description alone, through an old political cartoon (I couldn't find it, but this is the gist of it), which immediately conveys the sense that Crenshaw intended intersectionality to invoke:
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| Intersectional Narrative: The Unthought 'Ohh!' |
"Clearly [...insert aggrieved group here...] is oppressed by our society and justice demands [...insert action here...] now!".Sure, just as getting struck by circumstances beyond your control would be bad enough, getting hit at the intersection of two or more circumstances of identity that're beyond your control, would be worse. That can be a valid point, but Intersectionality not only doesn't stop there - except as cover for what it hopes most people won't look past, it doesn't even start there. Intersectionality doesn't seek (or want) justice for an individual 'run over' at the intersection of the identities of being a minority, a lesbian, and a woman, etc., etc., etc., what it seeks is to stir up enough impassioned popular opinion so that those in govt can use that popular uproar as justification for exercising power on behalf of all such identities, regardless of whether or not they've actually been wronged, and it does so in full awareness that such actions are incompatible with, and directly undermine, the foundations of the Western understanding of Law and our Constitution's support for Individual Rights in general, and of Property in particular. Undermining and eliminating those foundations and features, is Intersectionality's stated purpose (you need only read her papers to see the truth of that).
The 1st paper that Crenshaw wrote on it in 1989, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, made an impact, but her 1993 paper "Mapping the Margins“, unlocked the power of passionate activism which has surged well beyond any legal points it might've made. For those inclined to Marxist sentiments, it dialectically shifts the center of power from out of the narrow binary of haves vs have-nots, and expands it into a more fluid oppressor/oppressed matrix that is then easily made central to any & all relationships, and becomes a means of injecting activism into an unlimited number of social situations, each invoked with no more argument than the Unthought 'Ohh!' of framing the opposition of identities.
What Lindsay focuses on in particular, is Crenshaw's footnote #9, which might not appear to be much to look at:
, but as that first sentence lays out the strategy for employing it, and is what Lindsay identifies as being “The birthplace of Wokeness”, it's worth taking a 2nd look at:
- "...9. I consider intersectionality a provisional concept linking contemporary politics with postmodern theory. In mapping the intersections of race and gender, the concept does engage dominant assumptions that race and gender are essentially separate categories. By tracing the categories to their intersections, I hope to suggest a methodology that will ultimately disrupt the tendencies to see race and gender as exclusive or separable. While the primary intersections that between race and gender, the concept can and should be expanded by factoring in issues such as class, sexual orientation, age, and color.”
What Intersectionality's threat is
- "I consider intersectionality a provisional concept linking contemporary politics with postmodern theory“
Granted, it may not look like much, but in action that line formulates the philosophical napalm that's been setting our world on fire since it was introduced by linking law, and social activism, up with post-modernism. One reason that's such a flammable combination, is that a core technique of Post-Modernism is the brazen use of reframing and equivocation in order to misidentify & redefine terms into what they once were not (see Jacques Derrida "“Structure, Sign, and Play"), and then using that accompanying loss of clarity as a means of gaining power over what they're referring to (See Foucault). Interestingly, the mechanics of the process bears more than a passing resemblance to Zeno's Paradoxes from ancient Greece, as with the 'lived experience' of the fleetfooted Achilles being unable to overtake a tortoise, because:
"...The tortoise has a head start, so if Achilles hopes to overtake it, he must run at least as far as the place where the tortoise presently is, but by the time he arrives there, it will have crawled to a new place, so then Achilles must run at least to this new place, but the tortoise meanwhile will have crawled on, and so forth. Achilles will never catch the tortoise...", Zeno showed how easy it is for an artful reframing (shifting your focus from a continuous race, to a division of successive halves) and equivocation (the speed which runners move through a single distance, is made equivalent with a static comparison of each runners separate progress through divided distances) can trap you with your own intellect, make you question whether running is faster than crawling, and whether or not motion itself is even possible (self-defense tip: Don't step into the frame). Similarly, Post-Modernist's use framing and equivocation to verbally blur one position into a very different position altogether, through elaborately critical descriptions which alter the meanings of key cultural terms (hello 'Birthing People', goodbye 'Mother') - Foucault once authored an article arguing that there is no such thing as an author - and then they belittle you for still believing 'the old' meaning... that's postmodernism in a nutshall, and it's not only in our schools, but is now moving rapidly through our laws, and drives those who're agitating for what both of those should be.
, and identifying the intersections of those identities, has become something like the ‘compound interest’ of *wokeness*, where the varieties of ‘oppressor/oppressed’ are compounded into a viable currency of power, first by tallying up how much less power that each of those identities have had because of our society systemically oppressing them, and then by framing all attention upon those aggrieved identities (Diversity), to transform them into tangible unit measures of how much preference & privilege that society now owes them in order to equalize their social power balance sheets (Equity), to determine how best Govt should forcibly redistribute the owed powers to the aggrieved in order to produce 'Fairness' (Inclusion).
- “…A privileged position and identity inherently benefits from oppression. Further, oppression is experienced differently depending on a person’s identities. People can simultaneously hold a privileged position and oppressed identity depending on where their identities fall on the axes of privilege….”
That Intersectional calculation of DEI is the same process that is encouraged when you go along with a school's efforts to have 'equitable programs' and 'promote diversity' and to 'be more inclusive' or 'antiracist', and by which advanced classes are taken away from everyone because some aren't qualified, and it's how businesses and people are being cancelled from their jobs and from their lives, under the pressure of the impassioned activism that is provoked by the Intersectional unthought 'Ohhh!'.
There's an almost 'mystical' sense to the unthought 'Ohh!' of 'knowing' of identities without individuals, without logic, or judgement, or reasons for them, which only the authentically *Woke* are quickly installed as the gurus of what that 'knowing' really feels like, and all others must submit to their revealed perceptions. Towards that end, the *Woke* begin calculating a 'persons' intersectional value with the help of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion - which CASEL has injected into SEL in order to support Social Justice), splitting a 'persons' identity into a legion of oppressor/oppressed identities (People Of Color (POC), homosexual, non-binary, ‘differently abled’, non-Christian, Socialist, Trans, etc.). And like the cartoon, it requires no thought to 'get' it, and it provides a righteous, thoughtless sense of power and superiority to those who do somehow 'get' it, and act on it, absolving you of any burden of having to explain it with a simple 'you just don't get it, only the authentically oppressed [race/gender/sexuality/etc.,] can!'. Where the old 'liberal' Left required engaging in a reasonable argument, Intersectionality provides the power of 'being right' simply by being authentically *Woke*.
The conceptual vandalism that's emerged from Crenshaw's footnote #9, has disrupted our society at every turn, through something very much like what Marx had in mind when advising the use of ‘unrelenting criticism to dismantle society’, to the point that our concepts, our customs, our perceptions, are being reduced to a muddle - from 'birthing people', to toxic-masculinity, to logic & merit as signs of 'white supremacy', and 'it's only property' - so that our customs and our laws now pose neither a barrier nor a threat to their progress. Our schools which have 'legitimized' this dialectic through various '___ Studies' programs and degrees based upon them, has freed the *Woke* from our cultural constraints, and has left us without a conceptual ground to stand upon that's anymore solid than quicksand.
These are not simply word games, they particularly 'play' with the words we use to restrain power and violence with, and those lives lost through the riots of 2020, lay fully at the door of decades of this poison flowing through our schools. As will the horrors that will follow from them in the very near future, if we don't start taking it as being the lethally serious threat that it is
When challenged about the furor and backlash that intersectionality has created, Crenshaw, with the same degree of duplicity as Gloria Ladson-Billings telling NPR that 'I don't know that it [CRT] does apply to the classroom' (despite having written 'Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education' in order to import CRT into Teachers Colleges, so that all teachers would be trained to teach their students from the standpoint of Critical Race Theory), Crenshaw cheerfully feigns an 'aw shucks' face over it, as she does in this Vox article on her:
"...Crenshaw has watched all this with no small measure of surprise. “This is what happens when an idea travels beyond the context and the content,” she said."..."What her idea was, she insists, was only a simple legal theory. Maybe so... but someone really ought to question what type of law that is a theory of, when those studying it, such as this former graduate student of Crenshaw's, have come to believe notions such as what Vox article notes:
"...Minofu described Crenshaw’s understanding of intersectionality as “not really concerned with shallow questions of identity and representation but ... more interested in the deep structural and systemic questions about discrimination and inequality..."Note that Identity and Representation are rather central to our society and to our system of law, and yet her student demeans identifying whether and why something is, as being 'shallow', while the perception of the thoughtless 'Ohhh! is to be treated as having real substance. It's important to realize that they think that, not because it makes sense to, but because that is how they've decided to see that, and our society, and their role in it. To them, it is the ideals of impartial justice and equality before the law, which are:
"... a delusion as comforting as it was dangerous. Crenshaw didn’t believe racism ceased to exist in 1965 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, nor that racism was a mere multi-century aberration that, once corrected through legislative action, would no longer impact the law or the people who rely upon it..."Again, she's not interested in targeting bad law, what she is targeting is the idea of a neutral, benign state, where lady Justice is expected to be blindfolded against improper influence, what she is targeting is the use of objective judgement and reasoning, which are central to our Constitutional ideal of Law - those are what is bad and unjust to the *Woke*. Her position necessarily requires exiling Justice and Truth from the legal process altogether, and reducing our understanding of the Rule of Law, to a power-based bartering of positions between the lords of various popular pressure groups. A just sense of Justice, is of no value to any flavor of Social Justice, because Social Justice requires the engine of race/gender/sexuality/etc and intersectional ideology to declare what is authentically 'fair', and the nightmarishly un-Western world that will necessarily accompany that, is what it is all about. To accomplish that, requires educating the American out of Americans, and that is the reason why CRT & SEL are in our schools. They've spent decades stating exactly that in their nauseatingly numerous policy papers and expensive gatherings, secure in the knowledge that no normal people would ever pay attention to what they said and did there, and we are paying the price for our negligence now.
What your threat is to them - seeing through the Semantic Deception
What they do their very best to appear to not see, is the circular reasoning inherent in their positions, as the author of the Vox article seems to be oblivious to:
"...There was no “rational” explanation for the racial wealth gap that existed in 1982 and persists today, or for minority underrepresentation in spaces that were purportedly based on “colorblind” standards. Rather, as Crenshaw wrote, discrimination remains because of the “stubborn endurance of the structures of white dominance” — in other words, the American legal and socioeconomic order was largely built on racism.Even as they ridicule the Right (and the old Left, as well) for living in an imaginary world, their root assumption, or the pretext for it anyway, is that the only *rational* explanation is to assume that their conclusions must be so because otherwise they wouldn't make sense, that there is a 'racial wealth gap', because there must be oppression of race/gender/sexuality/etc - or else there wouldn't be one and their ideas wouldn't work, which to them would be cra-cra-zy. So of course the American legal and 'socioeconomic order' is built upon racism - that is what 'systemic racism' means. The narrative demands that it be asserted as fact, no matter what an objective view of the facts might indicate ('narrative is more important than facts').
Before the arguments raised by the originators of critical race theory, there wasn’t much criticism describing the way structures of law and society could be intrinsically racist, rather than simply distorted by racism while otherwise untainted with its stain. So there weren’t many tools for understanding how race worked in those institutions."
Yes, that is running circular rings around circular reasoning, yes it is irrational, and yes it seems insane - but there's more to it than that, and honestly, its worse than simply being insane.
They do understand that being Rational requires paying attention to facts, and drawing conclusions that are logically derivable from them. It's not that Crenshaw and her fellow woke folk don't see that, but that they won't abide by that. It's not as if they somehow lack the intellectual capacity to reason well, it's worse than that - they choose and have chosen a very different toolset to employ their intellectual capacity with, and they do so not in order to build, but in order to tear down. If you read the woke folk's articles in law reviews and in educational journals, and if you read their footnotes (which they fervently hope that you will not do) you will see a frequent, consistent, openly stated refusal to engage in, what they deride as 'epistemic adequacy' - the process of paying objective attention to what is real and true. Crenshaw's articles alone contain explicit references to such papers, including multiple references to "Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance", and the importance of society discarding the concept of objectivity and epistemic adequacy, for a 'social epistemology', in order to tear down the 'liberal order' of the West in general, and of America in particular.
The reality is that the refusal of Crenshaw and all of the others to credit truth, and facts, is deliberate, and she and they consciously choose to lie about that. Why? Because objective truth and epistemic adequacy are viewed by them as being 'The Master's Tools', which, as activist Audre Lorde declared:
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”, and the Master's House is the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian culture of Western Civilization in general, and of America in particular, and the Master's Tools are a respect for reality, reason, logic, individual rights, property, and the Rule of Law which secures them to individuals in society. It is with that in mind, that Kendi, Crenshaw, and all of the other truly *Woke*, are using the most barbarically brutal response of unreasoning power that they can muster.
They are not trying to make a more reasonable argument, and they are not seeking to 'reveal' a hidden truth - they are forcibly asserting a statement which they expect everyone else to cower before and submit to, on the basis of appearances only (appearances which are deliberately constructed to hide the destruction they are intent upon), with the explicit message: Don't think, accept and submit.
IOW: The use of exceedingly poor reasoning which marks their endless papers, is not a sign of their incompetence at reasoning, but a demonstration of both their goal of, and of the tools they are using, for tearing down 'The Master's House' of Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian civilization.
And they would like nothing more than to draw you into their distraction of race/gender/sexuality/etc., so that your outrage can be made to aid their efforts, and man o man do they make it enticing and easy to do. Resist the temptation.
Again: It's not about race, it's not about reasoning, it is all about power, and any argument which you might make that engages with their strategy, invariably becomes distorted, as all such views formed within that frame must. Don't let yourself get sucked into arguing over the unfairness of race/gender/sexuality/etc., of individuals - their only interest in individuals and their various traits is as bait for provoking you - they're only interested in them for the power which their group identities give them access to. Unfortunately for us all, the 'tolerant right' typically do take the race bait, and they bite on it with an odd mixture of patronizing groveling, coupled with a condescending nod of granting 'some truth' to their positions, and the moment the *Woke* detect that little nibble on their line, these monstrously skillful fishers of men give a sharp flick to their woke fishing pole, and as the sharpened points formed from your own words sink into your throat, the bait falls away and reveals it to be less of a fishing hook of tolerance/militance (different sides of the same fool's gold coin), than a rhetorical grappling hook of raw power, which they use to climb up and over you and your position, to triumphantly plant their boot upon your face.
National Review author David French is one of the 'tolerant right', and he has been reeled in by the intersectional bait more times than I can count, as in this instance where the same Vox article recounts French telling the author that:
"... An African American man is going to experience the world differently than an African American woman,” French told me. “Somebody who is LGBT is going to experience the world differently than somebody who’s straight. Somebody who’s LGBT and African American is going to experience the world differently than somebody who’s LGBT and Latina. It’s sort of this commonsense notion that different categories of people have different kinds of experience.”As French bites the worm of race/gender/sexuality/etc., he's hooked and the Vox author reels him in with the very next line:
What many conservatives object to is not the term but its application on college campuses and beyond. Conservatives believe that it could be (or is being) used against them, making them the victims, in a sense, of a new form of overlapping oppression. To them, intersectionality isn’t just describing a hierarchy of oppression but, in practice, an inversion of it, such that being a white straight cisgender man is made anathema.
“Where the fight begins,” French said, “is when intersectionality moves from descriptive to prescriptive.” It is as if intersectionality were a language with which conservatives had no real problem, until it was spoken....", French is hooked, reeled in, and tossed into the bucket as the catch-of-the-day.
The power of the thoughtless 'Ohhh!', is the appearance of something sensible, even in its absence, which lures in those who're unwary of what the semantic deception is hiding, and those who react with a 'Well of course there are racists, but...', have unwittingly traded away reality and reason, for their framed mirror image of it. But just as a picture is not a thousand words, experiences are not reasons or reasoning, and treating them as if they had a reasonable point, is transformed into hooks and spears to impale you upon, the instant that you bite into it.
Lived Experiences aren't rational reasons, they're frames which become rough hewn bludgeons for beating you down with, and we must not forget that the moment you toss the protection of reason aside, you cannot just pick it back up. It's gone. Whether you do so through dainty tolerance as French does, or more come back with a more militant response of something like 'Look around you - all these woke people are tearing white people down to get what they want, and I'm sick of it - stop bashing white people!", they'll do a little happy dance inside in thanks for your complete and total surrender, because that is what you've done. Once you bite, they reel you in, as Crenshaw does here in response to French's comment:
"...When you’re going to sign on to a particular critique by rolling out your identity, exactly how was your identity politics different from what you’re trying to critique?” Crenshaw said. “It’s just a matter of who it is, that’s what you seem to be most concerned about.”The reality is that when you obligingly make the discussion into a power struggle, the more brutal party will 'win' every time. You'll probably want to reply 'That's not fair, the reason why...', but sorry, no, when you step into the frame they've arranged for you, and engaged with its mindlessness as if either their frame, or any statements within it, were or could be reasonable, then before you know it you've fallen into the old intelligence trap of thinking where Achilles is being beaten by a tortoise, and there's no ability to build a reasonable argument within that unreasonable frame.
Don't allow absurdities to blind you to their real intentions
If you play Crenshaw's game, you become ruled by her rules. As Crenshaw notes in a paper celebrating the twentieth anniversary of her original paper mapping the margins,
"...In short, the key feature of the story rests not on the uniqueness of the critiques themselves, but on the rapid unraveling of liberal reform and the rule of law as guarantor of racial progress...", and where by 'liberal', she means blindfolded justice, against which:
"...Intersectionality operates as both the observance and analysis of power imbalances, and the tool by which those power imbalances could be eliminated altogether...", and by imbalances she means what result from respecting and rewarding individual rights, ability and merit.
If you still have any doubts that Intersectionality is intended to undo the foundations of America in particular, and of the West in general, simply reading through her footnote references should put an end to those doubts, as they repeatedly repudiate those foundations and assert the need to eliminate those:
"... liberal principles, including the distinctions between law and politics, and knowledge and power...", meaning that she wants to turn our courtrooms into political theater, so that truth can be made to yeild to narrative - good lord, look at the Rittenhouse trial! That circus, and that prosecutor, are their ideal - facts be damned, long live the narrative! She repeatedly declares that the roots of our Rule of Law are:
"... flawed due to the fact that they are based on a mechanistic 17th century metaphysics ... ", and how awful even attempting to be objective is,
"...detailing how ideologies of objectivity presumed by the rule of law created a stance of “perspectivelessness” that presented students of color with particular burdens in the classroom..."By 'perspectivelessness' she means the epistemic adequacy of facts, logic, merit, an indifference to race, and all of the other symptoms of 'white supremacy'.
For those who wonder why I'm always harping on Philosophy (the love of wisdom) and metaphysics & epistemology especially, it's because those people, such as America's Founders, whose own personal operating systems were formed through their understanding of what 17th century metaphysics still understood, realized that reality exists, and that what is true, does matter, and that what is Right & Wrong has to be abided by. The *Woke* deride that period and deny them, because understanding the philosophy that preceded and led up to 17th century metaphysics, exposes the ludicrousness of the misosophy (hatred of wisdom) which came after it through the pens of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, etc. and which all of their notions depend upon.
For the woke folk like Crenshaw to make their points, they have to rid society of those Western ideas altogether, and that is the point of a paper that Crenshaw makes multiple references to, "Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance", one of its many insane (by Western standards) passages, states that:
"...Tenth, and finally, the point of trying to understand white ignorance is, of course, normative and not merely sociological—hence the emphasis on the continuity with classic epistemology—the goal of trying to reduce or eliminate it. In classic individualist epistemology, one seeks not merely to eliminate false belief but to develop an understanding, wariness, and avoidance of the cognitive processes that typically produce false belief. For a social epistemology, where the focus is on supra-individual processes, and the individual’s interaction with them, the aim is to understand how certain social structures tend to promote these crucially flawed processes, how to personally extricate oneself from them (insofar as that is possible), and to do one’s part in undermining them in the broader cognitive sphere...."That ability "... to develop an understanding, wariness, and avoidance of the cognitive processes that typically produce false belief..." is seen as 'crucially flawed processes', which are only attained through attention to the content of reality, and by reasoning towards what is true, and so respecting the rights of the individual, is the basis of Western thought, and what Education is (was) intended to develop. That content is what Social and Emotional Learning pointedly minimizes or eliminates from our classrooms, and focuses attention instead upon conforming students behavior to the social narratives of Intersectionality, CRT, and Critical Theory in general, so as to undermine, collapse, and eliminate the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian civilization of the West.
That is their purpose, that is what they are doing, and that is why the *Woke* always target reason, reality, and true identity, and everything else that the West is founded in, through, and upon, time after time after time:
"...criticizing Western philosophy for its lack of attention to issues of race and exploring the role of race in standard areas of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics...They seek to flip reality and the role of the rule of law from having to prove what is real and true, into being a means of imposing raw power, which your rulers will use to determine what will be accepted and submitted to - and who is the Ruler?
"... the failure of western philosophy to consider issues of race...
"...exploring the epistemology of white ignorance and the ways in which such ignorance—the lack of knowledge or incorrect knowledge—is maintained..."
As the faux-Voltaire quipster noted: Those you aren't permitted to mock (see DEI for reference).
That is why Crenshaw and the *Woke* focus upon 'decentering' (destroying) epistemology - the science of knowing what you know (which enables you to actually know 'what the meaning of the word 'is', is), which is a direct threat to the absurdities they wish to impose upon us:
"...Thus, the critique of the apolitical character of law merged with a concrete critique of the epistemological claims of the Enlightenment tradition more generally.177, and,
In other words, the epistemological critique was not simply a “philosophical” one, but was also a practical component to claims that no neutral concept of merit justified the lack of minority law professors at elite law schools...'Everywhere in the writings of Linda Darling-Hammond, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Dereck Bell, Crenshaw, Delgado, and others, their goal is as stated in ‘Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, first edition (2001), by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic:
By questioning the 'liberal order', they mean overturning Liberty, and the Western concepts such as Equality before the law which make that liberty possible, are to be overturned in favor of the Inequality of identities, being ‘remedied’ into ‘equitable outcomes’,
- "... critical race theory calls into question the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and the neutral principles of constitutional law.”
, but more than that, it is the means of openly denying reality. Literally. Crenshaw explicitly rejects the concept objectivity itself. And again, by 'identity' she doesn't mean an individual's identity, but only how the collective identities are represented in the oppressor/oppressed power matrix.
- "...openly advocating identity politics over liberal universalism, which had sought to remove the social significance of identity categories and treat people equally regardless of identity..."
The End Game
This is where the people of The West are under the most deadly dangerous attack launched upon it since Lepanto, made even more dangerous by the fact that the barbarians aren’t invading from without the gates, but from within, and they are streaming down upon us from the perceived high ground of 'Education' and our own laws.
It is both fact, and bait, that the Wheel of Intersectionality is a pretext for extracting and turning power back upon those who have the power they desire. They don't target the White, Male, Cisgender (normal heterosexual), or Christian, who has (been disarmed by) a College Degree because of any of their identities, but because they've determined, in much the same way that a thief selects the richest and least threatening victim to mug, that people with those traits have the power they desire (Gollum), and Intersectionality, CRT, SEL, DEI, etc., etc., etc., form the 'societal narrative' which is the means they're using to flip your world with.
Don't allow yourself to be distracted into minimizing their absurd sounding tactics because they seem absurd. It's important to keep in mind a quote that actually did come from Voltaire, that "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.", and the 20th Century is a blood drenched testament to that.
And ultimately what you need to know most of all, is that what they fear most of all, is your learning what their real game is - because the power of their Semantic Deception in a snap, once you are no longer deceived by its appearances - quite literally, the truth will set you free.
Next we'll review and put all of the pieces together, and how to break them apart.
Monday, December 13, 2021
Dangerous Distinctions without a meaningful difference: SEL, DEI, CRT, CT
The proponents of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) promote it as a way of providing students with new skills for managing confusing and conflicting feelings in a difficult world. Having conveniently framed the matter in that way, it's not too surprising that many parents, and even conservative teachers - especially those with experience in trying to manage students who have issues with anger,
The last of five posts making up the substance of a presentation I gave to parents in the Lindbergh School District
manners and trust - accept the assertion at face value, with something like:
Unfortunately, as detailed in the previous four posts (here, here, here, and here), the proponents of SEL use that face value as cover for doing whatever they feel like doing - SEL claims to be based upon science, yet it repeatedly ignores any science that conflicts with its claims; where CASEL declares that their new 'CASEL 5 Competencies’ innovatively enhances child development, the only thing new it brings to the table is an image of Character with all regard for truth, ethics, and morality, sucked out of it; as for SEL being "an integral part of education and human development", as we've seen over the previous posts, it's far more integral to a system of replacing educational content with grade level expectations for social and political activism which begin at kindergarten. In recapping some of those key points in this final post, we'll see how deeply rooted they are in issues plaguing us today, and how important it is to pull them out by those roots.
- …kids are coming into school with poor social skills – ‘so we must teach the whole child’
SEL uses the appearance of 'lived experiences' to distract from substance, uses 'Diversity' to ensure thoughtless conformity, uses Equity to force compliance upon all, and Inclusivity to restrict the freedom of speech and actions of everyone. SEL's endless surveys of students and parents are less for the benefit of the child, than for the activists, Govt, and corporations, who stand to gain in profit, power, and control of those student's future (and to some extent, even their parents'), all for the low, low price of their demoralization and corruption. The end result of all of this, is that far from helping kids to learn more 'social skills', SEL actively encourages students to deride what is real and true, in the pursuit of Social Justice ideology, while feeling empowered to bully those who don't echo their rabid virtue signaling.
If history's best advice for cultivating a sound mind and body, were to be rewritten by an Artificial Intelligence that was riddled with bugs & viruses, it could hardly turn out worse than that of our modern educational system, and the insanity and abusiveness of our current policies & programs are the culmination of those ideas that've gone into developing and driving it. As we've looked into what the nature of SEL is, and how it's been developed, and who has been promoting it, I hope you've begun to see that treating SEL and its companions as standalone programs is itself a semantic deception - the pretense that these theories are discrete objects which can be stepped between, through, and around, without being affected by them, also gives them the ability to advance under the cover of saying "Oh, you've made a mistake, we're teaching SEL, not CRT", while curtly dismissing both you and your concerns.
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| Getting the point |
Thanks to decades of these influences, matters have progressed to the point that when parents attempt to push back against SEL & CRT at school board meetings today, they're met with everything from silence, to insult, and now even to being threatened by their govts, and with no more attempt to conceal the nature of what they're doing, than with the fig leaf of a rhetorical evasion that:
'CRT is a law school class that's taught in college, not middle school!', which is itself a purely semantic deception. Once upon a time an aspiring teacher once studied rhetoric and logic in college so that no matter what subject they went on to teach, from math to art, they would teach it in a logical manner that emphasized the importance of being reasonable and methodical in thought and action, without ever teaching any college level classes in rhetoric or logic. By the same token, when the aspiring teachers of today study the many variations of CRT in Teachers Colleges, it is so that every subject they go on to teach your children will be infused with how to view everything through the lens of race and power, and how to manipulate society through social justice activism. The 'CRT is a college law course!' evasion, is a feeble attempt to distract, deceive and disarm you, and it speaks volumes about what they think of you, that they employ it. Not only is the claim worthless, but even a brief examination of the facts behind their narrative, will destroy it by revealing what their narrative depends upon remaining hidden.
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| CRT: From Art to Math |
Neither are SEL's lessons and surveys simply misguided or inept, but follow from the deliberate ideological purposes that its theorists have openly stated for decades - when & where they think that 'you' won't hear them, that is. When the likes of a Gloria Ladsen-Billings ( most referenced author in teachers' colleges for decades) think that 'you' might hear them, they remark, as she said to NPR::
'I don't know that it [CRT] does apply to the classroom...'NPR of course was fully aware that Gloria Ladsen-Billings was the author of 'Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education', which she explicitly wrote in order to inject CRT into the common pedagogy that teachers are taught to use in forming all of the lessons that they'll one day be teaching their students, and yet they allow her to evade the nature of it, with,
"...But from an educational policy standpoint, it applies to things like suspension rates, assignment to special education, testing and assessment, curricular access - you know, who gets into honors and AP, who doesn't..."How it is applied to 'access', and why someone 'gets into honors and AP, who doesn't' based upon 'the lens of race and power', is allowed to be brushed off as an unimportant technicality. Neither did NPR mention that Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, and 'Culturally Responsive Teaching', which are two of the most popular classes in Teachers Colleges, were largely derived from Ladsen-Billings' theories. IOW: They are teaching Critical Race Theory to those who are learning how to teach, in order to teach the ideas of Critical Race Theory in everything that teachers will go on to teach... they would just rather that you didn't learn that, so that they can dismiss your concerns with the "CRT is a college level class!".
Amongst themselves, however, they state those things openly, they strategize how best to smuggle their theories into common practice, and how to perfect the semantic deception of leading parents to think one thing, while they teach something else to their children. The reason why they do that, is because for them, Education is not about teaching content and sound habits of character, but is what they see as being an Archimedean fulcrum that gives them the power to 'move the world' through, by changing students' beliefs, and actions, so as to alter the fundamental roots of our society, so that they can better manage our lives for our own good. Today those hopes of theirs are being realized outside the 'educational system', as can be seen in Joe Biden’s issuing of an Executive Order on his first day in office to require mandatory DEI 'professional development' programs for all federal employees.
One former teacher and author, Peter Green, in recognizing the darker potential behind these acronyms, warned of their far more probable downsides,
"...SEL at its worst is about emotionally engineering humans. It's about imposing someone else's values on a vulnerable human being, essentially stripping that human of their autonomy and will. And worse, from re-education camps to certain cults, we know that it can be done. Because the power and wealth attached to such a massive endeavor are so great, the entire business is guaranteed to be warped and twisted by those who stand to profit. At its worst, we are talking about crafting human beings to order and harvesting both them and their data in the service of those with power. We are talking about pushing them to be the people that someone else thinks they should be. This is not just bad policy, inappropriate pedagogy, or culturally toxic-- this is evil."Reach past the stem to pull the weeds out by its roots
If you asked your child to weed your garden and they just quickly plucked the weeds off at the stems, would you congratulate them? Probably not, because the point of weeding the garden isn't just to get the weeds out of sight, but to stop them from spreading throughout your yard, right? Similarly, while it's fantastic that parents are waking up and taking action against what's happening in their schools, simply plucking the stems of an acronym or two from the school's curriculum is not weeding the garden, it's practicing a semantic self-deception upon themselves that leaves the roots to spread throughout their children's lives.
Unfortunately, generations of parents & politicians have not wanted to bother putting in the extra time and effort it takes to get at the weeds in our educational system, which is why it has become as infested as it is today - we need to put in the effort to get at the roots. On hearing the Marxist sounding rhetoric of CRT, SEL, etc., today, simply plucking what's visible from the classroom and wiping our hands of it, is losing sight of at least two important facts that helps the underlying weeds to spread:
#1 above is less an insult to Marx, than a warning to us: that banning Marx leaves the ideas and the thinkers that he swiped those ideas from, like Hegel, Kant, Babeuf, deTracy, and Rousseau, free to be taught without even the (hopefully) negative association with Marx, to be presented as bright lights of the Enlightenment, despite many having worked to put out whatever light the period actually had.
- Marx himself was a remarkably unoriginal thinker, whose true talent lay in repackaging other people's ideas into a more rhetorically effective and marketable form.
- If CRT is being taught to students in school, without their actually teaching a subject called CRT... how is banning CRT going to remove it from classrooms?
#2 Should remind you that if there's no stem to grab the weeds by, you still need to dig into the soil to remove them.
That requires learning to identify what these ideas are and mean, and why they are a threat - simply removing them or calling them 'bad' will contribute nothing of value to their being uprooted, and so they will spread further and deeper into all of our lives.
The thing is that those 'old' ideas are at the root of what is bedeviling us today - the ideas behind the CRT & SEL programs are not new, and they didn't originate with the likes of Linda Darling-Hammond, Gloria Ladsen-Billings, Kimberle Crenshaw, Derek Bell, Giroux, or even from their predecessors in Bloom, Glazer, Gramsci, Dewey, but stretch back in an unbroken line of exasperated etceteras that continues on back even past Marx, to the misosophers of the late 17th Century, whose ideas, intentionally or not, undermined our ability to know what is real and true, and wise to do, and served to leach away the rightful power that individuals should have over their own lives, into the collective hands of 'those who know best'. If we don't put more attention on what ideas are being taught in our schools, and why, we'll continue to be poisoned with them, again, and again, and again, as we have been before, during, and after, every previous 'educational reform effort' that parents have attempted over the last 100+ years. Those poisonous 'Marxist' notions, by any other name, will continue to sicken us all the same, through our ignorance of what's behind their names - J.S. Mill is presented to us as a defender of freedom and liberty, was a socialist long before Marx became well known - and it is our ignorance of the roots of those weeds, that their power grows and spreads through our society.
I'll spare you a deep dive into the details here (while also threatening you with a future post that will), but just to indicate the problem, maybe I can give you a glimpse at the roots that are hiding just beneath the surface of our common assumptions, by poking a finger into the 'sensible sentiments' we typically hear in the good intentions of those around us:
That last one, Jean Jacque Rousseau, had a talent for turning a pretty phrase, as with the one quote of his which is in everyone's Social Studies books, right next to his smiling face, is the opening line of his 'The Social Contract'
- Education should just concentrate on 'the facts' and prepare students for the workforce! - This notion comes from one of our misguided Founders', Noah Webster, the dictionary guy, who wanted to upend the form of education which had produced our Founders generation - including himself - by replacing the gems of Western Civilization - Cicero, Aristotle, Homer - with 'brief essays of fact' in the form of textbooks that key facts could be memorized from (without understanding), and tested to show they 'know the facts', and so speed those students into the workforce to 'get a good job and get a good life!'.
- Lets focus on teaching kids the STEM skills they need to know to get ahead in life! - this is drawing on Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism (as was Noah Webster), believing that it was better to focus on teaching STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) skills that would be more useful for the 'greater good'. If that seems like a 'good idea', it's due to ignorance of the fact that STEM followed, rather than preceded, that 'other' knowledge being sidelined.
1 - try defining 'good' on the basis of skills alone (spoiler alert: You can't)
2 - imagine a generation or two loaded with STEM skills and little or no understanding of the roots those stems grew from
Hint: Jeremy Bentham derided the individual rights which our constituiton preserves, as being 'nonsense upon stilts', and such useful thinking has led us to college graduates who complain that logic and math are signs of 'whiteness'. Following that line of thought is going to take us over the edge.- We need to improve our test scores! - Comes from folks like Elwood P. Cubberly, who was a key designer of our industrial school production plants, and consolidated school district designs, also had a hand in 'IQ Testing', in order to impose a standardized mediocrity, and Cubberly was so encouraged with the progress his plans had already made by 1909, that he enthusiastically wrote that 'Each year the child is coming to belong more and more to the state, and less and less to the parent.'.
- The heck with history and literature, teach kids 'how to think, not what to think!' - This is channeling the pro-regressive 'Progressive Education' of John Dewey and the misosophy of Pragmatism (which he co-founded), which ridicules the notion of Principles and principled thinking, asserts that truth is nothing more than what seems to work at the moment, and ignores content in favor of outcomes, attitudes, and social and emotional well-being (notice a whiff of SEL there?). But sound thinking does not follow from flowchart skills, but from careful consideration of quality content:
Q: What sort of thoughts do you suppose a student will think, without the content and understanding of it, to form their thoughts from?
A: Whatever 'thoughts' seem to please the teacher the most.
Not surprisingly, Mussolini and his mentors who ghost wrote his ideology of Fascism, were big fans of our '(anti-)American Philosophy' of Pragmatism.- We need to stop worrying about 'Culture War' issues and work more on bringing all sides together! This has roots in the outcome based education of Benjamin Bloom (which SEL was spawned from), and his 'Taxonomy of Educational Objectives“, which 70 years of teachers have been trained to teach from, which teaches that students can only engage in 'Critical Thinking' after "...a student attains 'higher order thinking' when he no longer believes in right or wrong", and having 'achieved' that, the amoral bartering of conflict resolution can be engaged in, trading 'an eye for an eye' for a 'a sin for a sin', which to put it bluntly, would have no problem with "In order to get along, I'll overlook your child molestation if you'll overlook my graft & corruption"
- Just 'let kids be kids' and they'll educate themselves! - This goes straight back to the root of the matter with Jean Jacque Rousseau, and his 'child centered' notions of educating the 'noble savage'. Where 'letting kids be kids' leads to, time and time again, is an absence of Education (what do you mean by that word?) and an abundance of unreasonable desires, which lead right to where we are today.
"Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains"., and for that, he's still trumpeted as a champion of 'natural rights', which pointedly requires overlooking the fact that just a few lines below that pretty phrase, he says something much uglier:
"...whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free..."The meaning of his words should have raised more eyebrows than only Voltaire's, who, almost alone saw the dangers inherent in it rather quickly. When Rousseau sent him a copy of his 'The Social Contract', Voltaire replied to him:
"I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it....", but few others saw the darkness in Rousseau's thoughts, possibly because few actually gave much thought to what they were reading, or they didn't read beyond the pretty words that seemed to support what they themselves wanted to read into them (looking at you, Thomas's Paine & Jefferson). The fact is that decades before Marx, Rousseau had declared Western Civilization to be an error, private property to be an evil, marriage and family to be a condemnable folly, emotionally passionate ('authentic') desires over methodical reason, and that the human being is a soulless machine mechanically reacting to environmental conditions. His supposed championing of 'Natural Rights!' was the origin of the fascist ideal of a will to power, where experts force entire populations into lockstep agreement with them, for the greater good.
Robespierre 'the incorruptible!', was consciously and explicitly putting Rousseau's ideas into action in the Terror of the French Revolution, which, BTW, in addition to turning the Guillotine into the first icon of 'Social Justice', turned churches into bars & brothels, made it illegal for schools to teach anything other than the party line, and initiated genocide against the populace of the Vendee who resisted the party line. And of course those heads which persisted in thinking unapproved thoughts within them, were soon separated from their bodies by the thousands, including, in the end, Robespierre's.
Although the revolution's heroic 'sans culottes!' presented liberté, égalité, fraternité, as if they meant Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood, in practice, as it always must, it meant Liberté only for the protected classes, égalité of outcomes for some at the expense of all others, and fraternité only to those who were 'right thinking', and the Guillotine for the rest. There's a famous quip that 'History may not exactly repeat, but it does rhyme', and well, I do hope that you hear the rhyming between Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and 'Liberte, Fraternity and Equalite!', for the *Woke* surely do, and have. This law journal article is from early 2000, and the author, a French-Canadian jurist, thanks the co-founder of CRT, Derek Bell, for his help in preparing his lecture on "Fraternity: The Unspoken Third Pillar of Democracy", which explains how necessarily:
"...Coupled with the concept of inclusion, this aspect of fraternity results in harsh penalties against those who hold positions of trust and yet abuse that trust. Justice, equity, fairness, and trust operate simultaneously to guarantee the smooth functioning of a community in a way that is in accordance with the community's conscience....", which is not only playing the same tune of SEL's DEI, but is playing it to the same beat of Rousseau's 'Force them to be free!'.
Why does this digression into history apply in an examination of SEL? Because in addition to having planted the seeds of fascism, Rousseau is the one who more than anyone else, especially through his fictional novel "Emile", set the stage and direction of modern education, with his ideas on how best to raise and educate a child - this despite the fact that he himself had all six of his own newborn babies, taken from the breast of his 'significant other' of ill repute, and sent off to near certain death in a 'foundling hospital'. In addition to that, the nature of this 'educator' shines through in his 'Confessions' about what he privatly delighted in:
"...My thoughts were incessantly occupied with girls and women, but in a manner peculiar to myself. These ideas kept my senses in a perpetual and disagreeable activity.... My agitation rose to the point where, unable to satisfy my desires, I inflamed them with the most extravagant maneuvers. I went about seeking dark alleys, hidden retreats, where I might expose myself at a distance to persons of the [other] sex in the state wherein I would have wished to be near them. That which they saw was not the obscene object- I did not dream of that; it was the ridiculous object [the buttocks]. The foolish pleasure which I had in displaying it before their eyes cannot be described. From this there was but a step to the desired treatment [whipping]..."The nature of his 'confession', is what many parents are discovering is not thought out of place in a modern school library, perhaps due in part to the nature of the man whose ideas can be found behind nearly every 'development' in modern educational theory.
Rousseau was also the inspiration behind Immanuel Kant (the only decor in Kant's house was a portrait of Rousseau), whose own convoluted misosophy taught a willing world to believe that we can't ever really know what is real; a foundation which Hegel built upon by teaching that 'mere Aristotelian contradictions' were nothing to worry about (Aristotle's first law of thought is the Law of Non-Contradiction - the understanding that a thing cannot both be, and not be, in the same manner and context, at the same time), and that all we needed to do instead was to merge opposing ideas through his alchemical algorithm of dialectics, dubbed later as: "Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis", so that contradictions could, with a lot of convoluted wordage ('muddy the waters so that they appear deep'), then be transformed into something 'new'.
That deliberate practice of not only admitting contradictions into your thinking, but of embracing them, is almost impossible to overstate their dangerous significance. Whether coming at the matter from the Greco/Roman side of Aristotle’s Law of Non-Contradiction, or from the Judeo/Christian side stemming from Adam naming/identifying what exists within the creation which God said 'is Good' - that sense of identity is the root of Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian - Western - Civilization; the means of perceiving and valuing what is real and true. Embracing contradictions both deforms and destroys the 'new' thing being produced, as well as what it was produced out of, and more to the point it disintegrates your grasp of the reality they came from. That is the switch from epistemic adequacy (it is what it is) to social epistemology (something is what others say it is), and the genesis of what Orwell identified as 'Newspeak' phrases of 'War equals Peace', 'love equals hate', and 2+2=5, which makes any objective truth into the enemy of every aspect of society. Even worse than the Orwellian Newspeak, is the sense implanted in those who've learned to think emotionally, what Orwell described as 'Crimestop', where a person has become habituated to stop thinking as soon as they notice that their train of thought might lead into forbidden thinking:
"Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity." - George Orwell, 1984Once that's achieved, the 'thought police' will have become privatized.
There was both a European and an American 'backlash' to Hegel's means of muddying the waters, which divided into two streams of thought - not that they rejected muddying the waters, each appreciated having been 'freed' from the constraints of reality - they simply wanted to alter how the waters were to be muddied and why. One stream wanted to make the waters into an impenetrable mud, which was the path of the former Hegelian fan-boy Karl Marx's 'Dialectical Materialism'. The other stream wanted to muddy the waters so as to make them seem more like irrelevant puddles, as on the American side of the pond, with the former Hegelian fan-boy John Dewey and the misosophy of Pragmatism, which he helped formulate and spread.
Whether by means of Critical Theory, Conflict Resolution Theory, Critical Race Theory or Social and Emotional Learning, modern education is utilizing the Hegelian & Marxist dialectical algorithm of Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis, to give us a new ‘higher-order thinking’, actively taking and merging the morals and standards that students bring with them from home (the Thesis), with the notions of alternative lifestyles, your truth vs my truth, and so on (the Antithesis), through the ‘educational system’s dialectical process which saturates their everyday lessons and leads them to a new ‘more sensible’ and tolerant position (the Synthesis), shorn of the complications of out-moded systems of morality and reality and the objective truth of that.
Anything can dialectically 'become' its opposite by way of a philosophical spin-cycle where lies are mixed with truth to become a useful narrative like the '1619 Project', or the differences between boys and girls are waved in becoming queer or transgender, truly the meaning of Bill Clinton's 'It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is', is', means that anything can become what others what to say it is, in order to bring about a world where the only certainty is that The West must be ended and forgotten.
We’ve allowed ourselves to merely roll our eyes at what we took as simple foolishness in academia, reacting to ‘math is racist’ with a laugh, rather than reacting in horror at the type of society which must follow from such ideas gaining power within it. While most were busy laughing these ideas off, their lessons were busily poisoning the souls of Americans and doing more damage to the heart of our nation (a nation founded upon ideas), than all of our physical wars combined. And now, having injected their ideas into every level of our society, these 'fools' believe that they are in a position to end America, and to end the West, and they are using all of their power to make that so.
I trust you're seeing the problem? Parents need to understand that the moral and intellectual development of their child is not a part of the 'grade level expectations' that such educators have for them, while decolonizing their minds of any Western respect for reality and morality, is. The only way that can seem like an outrageous statement, is if by being unaware (willfully?) of what those who design what our students will be taught, have actually said, done, and are doing today.
What Red flags Should Concern You?
Those fundamental American ideals are indifferent to our non-essential differences, which is what the Left fears most of all about them. Some red flags which signal that those ideals are under attack by CRT, SEL & DEI in your schools & communities, are:
These are signs that intellectual toxic waste have been buried deep within your community. Again, Equity, is not about Equality, it’s about using Power to force everything in our lives to conform to what is *Woke* enough. Inclusion doesn’t mean “Welcoming”, it means imposing ‘authentic’ restrictions upon language & action and seeing ‘language as violence’, and excuses actual violence for wrong-think (think: 'Punch a Nazi’). Diversity is not about bringing unity to a diverse people, but bitterly dividing them over their outward appearances, to the benefit of the *Woke*.
- Do you have a DEI officer - at school or in your business?
- Does your child talk of taking surveys? Are surveys coming home?
- Does your school organize students’ activities around group projects and actions?
- Is there talk of Systemic Racism & antiracism?
- Does your Governor recognize and guard against it or welcome it? (Not if you live in Missouri.)
'Diversity, Equity and Inclusion' dwells upon the surface differences between people, in order to submerge an individual's identity in shallow group identities that are more important than you are, inflaming and dividing people into ‘equitable’ factions with the false promise of gains in short term power.
The ideals of SEL teach conformity to the outward appearances of the group, and encourage taking action before (and without) understanding, and its preaching of virtue signaling is an unhealthy, counterproductive 'strategy', which inhibits reasoning, promotes anxiety, instills fear, hostility, and neurotic behavior, rewarding only those with no merit, and penalizes those who do. These strategies are the means of treating all Americans as 'human capital', and as a means for those in positions of power to reap capital & power from your personal information.
SEL, CRT, and the rest of the exasperated etcetera of ideologies (whose powers were once securely confined to government) are the means by which racism and bigotry are being infused into every aspect of our lives.
Why is any of this in your school? To benefit your child? To help them reason better, become more knowledgeable about important content? Reasoning is not learned or strengthened by emotional conformity, but by the clarity of content that the student is led to comprehend; identifying what is real, true, right & wrong, enables the mind, spirit and body to work in harmony - AKA: Reasoning. SEL is fundamentally opposed to all of that, focusing on falsehoods for fraudulent purposes, serves no one but those who can persuade or force your compliance.
Semantically Striking Back by Reframing Arguments with Reality
They frame matters in the way they do, in order to trip up your ability to think reasonably, and argue against them - don't help them in that. "Race" is not the proper frame for responding to their statements and charges of oppression and injustice- don't grant them the appearance of having used the logic they despise - 'Race/gender/sexuality' form the frame that they want you to be confined with - break out of their frame by focusing on the reality of Individual Rights and Law that are under attack, and refuse to accept their equivocal definitions of terms like systemic, racism, equity, inclusion, diversity, etc., which are intended to deceive you with semantics.
The best reply to the question of "Do you believe that systemic racism exists?!" is not an answer, but a question: What do you mean by racism? And if they slip into the Kendi-circularity, reject it, and if they continue doing so, reject their aping of logic, and reject the pretense that they care about what is objectively true. They do not, they cannot, and they say so. The *Woke* aren't making mistakes, they are making attacks, they know that, and what they dread most is your pointing that out for all to see.
The best reply to the question of "Do you believe that the oppression of [ race/gender/sexuality/etc.] is evil?!" is not to give an answer, but to reply with two questions of your own: What do you mean by oppression? What do you mean by Good? Pursuing those questions through to their answers, will cause their question to explode in their faces.
The best reply to "America is a racist society formed on the backs of slaves!", is not to give an answer, but to pointedly ask several questions of your own, beginning with why is slavery bad? If objective truth is irrelevant and power is what matters to the *Woke*, then clearly having slaves is great for those in power, so why would you pretend that slavery is bad? Why should some people not be enslaved for the benefit of others? Would a Govt that rejects upholding Individual Rights for all, be more or less likely to enslave its people? Would a Rule of Law that upholds and defends the individual rights of all of its people, who are all understood to be equal before the law, be more or less likely to lead to a society where all are at liberty to live their own lives in society with others?
Any reasonable answer will admit that slavery can't be right, that it is a destructive evil because it violates the very real nature and requirements of being human; that for the individual rights of all to be upheld and defended, all must be treated equally before its laws, and that the power and scope of that govt's laws must be limited by law to stringently respect those same individual rights, all of which require respecting what is objectively true.
That is the understanding which made America exceptional.
Similarly, no matter what its practitioners stated intentions might be, racism cannot somehow be made 'ok' by law to achieve 'payback', without treating some (and so all) unequally before the law, which makes a mockery of the individual rights which are only reliable basis for the Justice they supposedly seek, and for that reason alone, all such forms of 'Social Justice' must be opposed by everyone who hopes to be able to live a life worth living, in liberty and in society with others.
Because that is true, the *Woke* are unlikely to answer your questions at all, or to let others even hear them, but it is vitally important that you understand that such answers require asking those questions, and that you refuse to be framed into undermining what all that you care about, rests upon. If you've got a handle on that, here are some excellent questions to bring the *Woke* painfully face to face with the reality of what their own positions actually mean.
The greater good is not a fundamental value - don't put Descartes before the horse - it is not a cause, but a result of individuals at liberty to live in society with each other, and our own history teaches us that such a society cannot be sustained unless reality, truth, and virtue, are valued and adhered to through the habits, customs and laws of the people within that society. The reality of being human is that human beings think in order to live in reality, and the better we order our thoughts to conform to what is real and true, the more effective we are. Born from the union of a man and a woman, we become more than savages by forming families of a father, mother and child, and as they grow and develop into a community, the more that society structures itself to respect its families, and conforms to a philosophy and religion that reflects what is real and true, the more prosperous that society becomes.
No culture has conceived or achieved these ideals as effectively as have the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian culture of Western Civilization, and none of its societies have done that as well as America, because America held "these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". Striving to live up to those exceptional ideals is what made America the first society in history to realize that slavery is wrong, destructive, and evil, and ultimately to eliminate it by law (and no, Britain was not the first to do so, several American states abolished slavery decades before their estranged parent did).
There are few worse guides for a life worth living, than what being *Woke* provides, and no better guide for respecting and abiding by what is real and true than that found in the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian culture of Western Civilization in general, and of America in particular.
For all of Intersectionality's focus upon 'identities', which is the dark heart of the *Woke*, it utterly fails to identify the most basic issue of what it means and requires to be human. Its collectivist nature sees only the many sub-groups they've imagined that humanity can be divided into, to be managed by the *Woke*, for the *Woke*, unrestrained by any concern for the facts of human nature or of nature itself, and that is what a dozen decades of public education has prepared us for. As Shakespeare and a recent mini-series warned us: These violent delights have violent ends.
The claim of SEL to be 'the foundation of all learning', to be 'science based', to be effective and beneficial to every student, sounds all very fine, except that each statement and claim is at best a half-truth of lies grafted onto an out of context selection of facts, to serve falsehoods whose only value and purpose is for luring people in through their 'good intentions', to be utilized in a vile agenda of undermining the rule of law, the rights of parents, and the future soundness of mind of the students it is streamed into.
What we shouldn’t do
What can we do?
First remember that the priority is not to stand up to government, or to make a point, but to provide our kids with the opportunity to become educated, which more often than not, has little or even nothing to do with getting diplomas and degrees.
Best Option: Pull your kids out of the schools - the entire establishment educational system (public and most private) is infected with it - good schools do exist, but you need to be sure that they recognize and revile the nature of these programs, rather than cozying up to, and virtue signaling alongside them.
Next Best Option: Opt out of related classes, and pay very close attention to what your children are studying and discussing in class.
One last point, and it should be on the minds of every person who is witnessing what is happening in our schools and society, and it comes from Viktor Frankl, who was the author of "Man's Search for Meaning", about his time spent in a Nazi concentration camp, also wrote, something very relevant to the materialistic education our students and society are being subjected to:
I hope you'll take that seriously.
Saturday, May 11, 2024
Dividing the Right through the false choices of 'School Choice'
The politics of 'School Choice' has brought people together from all sides of the 'Right', and has gotten us to talk with each other like never before. People who’ve been acquainted for years are hailing each other with such friendly greetings as:
In pursuit of that I’ll be as fair to each side of the 'School Choice' issue (except one) as I can, which is made a little easier as ‘My Side’ has at least a little bit of an issue with all sides (if proposed 'fixes' to education involve textbooks, grades, prepared test scores, etc., that’s not my side), but because I want to focus on why 'School Choice' is dividing the 'Right', I'll resist going down the rabbit hole of arguments I've made against establishment education (public and private) over the last 20+ years (such as here), and focus instead on:
So how has the Right become so divided over something they fundamentally agree upon? The Devil, as they say, is in the details. And not just minor details such as I might pick out of the wording in that X-Tweet, or even that of each side's going down very different paths to a common goal, but instead I think it involves something more fundamental, so much so that the positions each are pushing, and objecting to in what the other favors, is steering both away from the goal they intend to pursue.
So when faced with a tangled knot of a problem to solve, and when those attempts that each side pursues is doing more to conceal rather than reveal any actual solution, it's time to pause, reassess the situation, and then, like Alexander, draw your sword and cut the Gordian Knot so that both sides can see what they'd being tying themselves to. And so now that I've taken a whack at it, the answer seems rather obvious, in that the fundamental issue behind what has enabled the Right to become so divided against itself, IMHO, springs from what rarely enters into any discussions over the issue, despite the fact that it drives the legislation and the conversation that's generated regarding it. This issue has become so accepted that it's rarely taken note of, and by failing to be included in the conversation, we too easily slip into the nearly irreconcilable differences besetting us today.
That seems worth taking a closer look.
Sometimes the 'choice' we're given, isn't actually a choice at all
Once upon a time in America it was understood that parents and other legal guardians had an unquestioned parental role and responsibility in deciding how their children would be raised, and in what they would and would not engage in. Within that view, parents were secure in their role and responsibilities as the guardians of their children, while at the same time they understood that the state would be failing in its fundamental responsibility to uphold and defend the lives and individual rights of its people, if it failed to intervene in a parent/child relationship when just cause was shown that serious instances of negligence, physical harm, or other abuses were occurring to the lives & safety of the children involved.
Both exercising our own individual rights and responsibilities in the pursuit of happiness, as well as recognizing the proper role of a just government's Rule of Law in securing them, are dependent upon our being able to make choices free from duress.
What it is that is too often missed or ignored as being 'out of sight-out of mind' by both sides, reveals itself with a look at three fundamental terms, and as we're talking about laws, we'll look at their legal definitions:
Most people realize, or at least have a vague awareness, that the first state school system implemented in America, was in Massachusetts, back in 1836. Not so many realize that within three years of that system being implemented, those same people of Massachusetts tried their best (and sadly failed) "...to abolish the Board of Education and to break up the Normal Schools..." because they realized it posed a very real threat to their lives and liberty, in that:
What caused that reversal of opinion, came at least in part from what the first head of that new system, Horace Mann, was using his powers to do; gathering data on students, teachers, and residents, and using that to manipulate popular opinion to further his ideas on how best to 'improve society', and among the tools he used to do that, were the first prepared written tests, letter grades, and curriculums that told teachers what to teach and not to teach (which are rabbit holes I've gone into here & here).
One of those 'unlooked-for' results they feared, can be seen in how our state school systems have functioned as an actual 'replacement theory', in that's been progressively replacing the education of Americans, with only those 'useful facts' that incline them towards welcoming the use of arbitrary political power, 'for the greater good'.
For that reason, and many others, the objections of those public school supporters complaining "But what about the poor &? What about those left behind in underfunded schools!", I summarily dismiss out of hand, as the plain truth is that if they truly cared about those students, and their conditions, they'd investigate the actual nature and performance of the system they're subjecting them to, and then work to extricate them from that, rather than look for ways to prop it up at everyone else's expense. Likewise, I'm not so eager to blame teachers & unions (though I fervently despise unions), as they're more like side-effects of a system that is neither educational nor just.
I will acknowledge that we can’t simply turn & walk away from the public school system as if it doesn't exist - it is operating under our political representation and taxation, and so it is our responsibility to stay engaged with it in school board elections, etc., to do what we can to keep it 'honest'. But I won't pretend to support it or imply that it's a credible system, and I sure as heck would not send a child (or a teacher, for that matter) into our public (or many private) school systems today.
Which brings us around to the real issue at the heart of how the Right has become so divided, is that our sense of being secure in our property and ability to exercise our individual rights, has been fundamentally undermined and subverted, through one central and too often ignored feature of modern American life:
Keeping in mind those terms we defined above, it should be self-evident that no parent today can be said to be free to make a 'choice' regarding their children's education.
Some might dismiss this all with a:
I'll remind people again of the father of our school district and superintendent systems, Ellwood P. Cubberly, who wrote with great satisfaction, way back in 1909, that:
These conditions are not a result of a just Rule of Law, but of the inevitable consequences of bad and unjust laws and those departments which implement them.
Just law can be applied evenly to all, and serves their common interests, 
Failing to realize that we've accepted this unjust baseline as our 'norm' - a foundation built not just upon sand, but quicksand - leads us into our constructing our own defenses around an irresolvably unjust policy as if the pretense of it were a legitimate baseline.
So long as these compulsory laws remain in our lives, no one, whether for or against 'School Choice', is able to offer a pathway towards a voluntary, unforced, choice in education. That option simply does not exist within the United States of America today, nor has it at anytime in the last hundred years, and behaving as if it is an option - or as if defeating a 'School Choice' policy will somehow safeguard or secure that option - is deceiving ourselves.
'School Choice' is not the issue, pretending that we have a choice, is, and our divisions are a result of doing so.
We need to face up to the fact that there are no actual choices that can be made and no solutions that can be offered - there are only trade-offs between options that are unavoidably bad or worse, depending upon individual circumstances. And don't forget that all such relief is temporary and lacking in substance.
We gain nothing from continuing the pretense of having a choice in the matter, and we lose a great deal by ignoring this utilitarian cancer at the heart of our society, as it implicitly gives license to the abuses of power that our governments have been enjoying over We The People for the last hundred years.
If it's not yet clear why, consider what I asked a room full of people who're involved in the 'School Choice' issue, last week:
Having ceded our rightful choice in the most important and visceral of our individual rights, we've left ourselves without the solid ground of principle to stand upon, and that has unavoidably fostered an ever growing chaos of distorted opinions and divisions amongst us. Having done so in this issue, as in many others, because all sides are focused on their own substitutes for dealing with the real issue, all sides are subtly put into opposition to what actually is real and true, and so we find ourselves righteously facing off against each other as foes, each imagining themselves to be preserving an ideal that we've allowed (and still allow) our federal, state, and local governments, to sweep aside long ago.
And those whose positions of power depend upon and require their maintaining this new illiberal system, are sucked into upholding it, encouraging it, and taking advantage of it as well.
It's not each other we should be opposing, but the system which foments that opposition, and neither side should be begrudging what little relief that others might manage to secure within it.
Our tolerating or ignoring this 'norm', leaves us all in the ridiculous position of behaving as if our tweaking a fundamentally corrupt system through every inconsequential side effect of it, from homework, to testing, to attendance and doctors' notes, could somehow produce something 'good'. OTOH, if instead we were to begin mutually identifying and calling out this shared 'norm' as an intolerable injustice that must be eliminated, it would free both sides from the exhausting effort of defending the indefensible aspects of their particular positions, and by enabling them to acknowledge what is bad and worse, in their proposals, as temporary options - some more risky than others - to provide relief to some, without taking our eye off of eventually eliminating what caused that injustice to begin with.
So the 1st step in resolving our divide is to face up to reality, accept the responsibility that involves, and focus on the only way to restore actual choices in education for all: Repealing our compulsory schooling laws, and abolishing those departments of state which enforce them.
In one of many lessons available for us to learn from the ancient Roman Republic, long before it sank into empire, it was beginning to stumble because its people wanted to avoid dealing with an issue that if ignored, would end them - the hostile empire of Carthage. There was one senator, Cato, who began ending every one of his speeches - be it about matters of security or sewage systems - with 'Carthage Delende Est' - 'Carthage must be destroyed'. Every time he spoke, he ended it with 'Carthage Delende Est', which irritated everybody. But it also made it into such an issue that they couldn't avoid dealing with it for long, and eventually they did free themselves from the threat of Carthage by destroying it (there are of course... other lessons to be learned from that, but... elsewhere).
We need to do something similar, with (Latin speakers forgive me) 'Compulsory Schooling must be destroyed!'.
Every year matters have gotten worse, and every year everyone's circumstances will continue to become progressively worse, so long as we live under these 'educational systems', no matter what 'choices' (and responsibilities) are offered or rejected today.
That is the background of what all sides of the Right to become divided against itself, within. And adding to that, both sides of the 'School Choice' divide are ignoring or evading some or all of these simple facts:
As I'm inclined to identify most with those who're opposed to the bulk of 'School Choice' policies, I'll turn to the issues I see in that side, first.
Those troublesome details that the Devil is in, are affecting all sides
Our side's opposition to 'School Choice' comes from our focus on the fundamental principles and (very real) long term dangers which the more immediate benefits of 'School Choice' obscure. But when our focus is refracted through the lens of a non-existent choice, it typically results in what most irritates the other side about us, our behaving as if we were the guardians of a higher moral ground that somehow floats above the reality which we're all mired within here and now. From that vantage point we're often quick to judge those who've 'chosen unwisely' by either having missed, ignored, or refused to see, what we imagine to be the only true 'choice' available - a 'choice' which in reality has never been on the table, and in doing so we push away those we should be aligned with.
Those parents who are caught in We The People's laws, see their options as being either to send their kids into our public schools (all of which are bad, some of which are even physically dangerous) or to get their kids out from under that system's direct influence, are parents who are on our side. What's more, we are on their side, in wanting their kids distanced from what the state intends to infuse into their mind and spirit.
But when those same parents are told that 'School Choice' can reduce the system’s influence on their kids, only to hear us label them as unprincipled 'neo-liberals!' who should 'stop sucking up to Bill Gates & the Globalists!' - what 'choice' do you think they're going to make? Telling these parents to sacrifice their children today, for the sake of preserving an imaginary choice, is pushing away those who should be aligned with us.
Don’t let the messaging become the message -no matter what truth there is behind it, ‘Stop sucking up to the Globalists!‘ is not a persuasive or informative message!
Without confusing the parent seeking options with the politicians concocting options (which I'll turn to soon enough), understand that nearly anything that lessens the injustice of the current situation upon their kids, is a defensible action - not a good action - but an action that's less worse than what they're already faced with here & now. Yes, in 'the long run' it likely will bring worse consequences, but don't forget those simple facts we just noted - in 'the long run' the unjust system is going to devour us all, and pretending that demanding some take a worse option because the bad one isn't good, within a system that permits no good options, or that we have the luxury of time to avoid dealing with the matter, is only deceiving ourselves. At best.
When you're talking with them, acknowledge the benefit to their kids of escaping out of the establishment school systems, and into the church, private, or homeschool options they prefer, and also be very clear about what is bad and worse about each particular policy. Make very clear the 'shackles for sheckles' mechanism involved in the 'choice' being offered, be sure to point out the less than obvious long-term dangers those alternatives could have for their kids, to themselves, and to their community.
And be sure to point out how the compulsory schooling system has taken the actual choices that should be theirs to make, away from them!
Those parents should be mad, but at those who're manipulating them for political gain, not at our side of the divide for slinging insults at them.
The battle for liberty is not a coin toss of yes/no options, it's a long-term struggle that requires our recognizing our own responsibilities and looking beyond the issues of the immediate moment. Note that I'm not denying that the consequences of many if not most 'School Choice' policies are awful, they are.
Full stop.
I'm saying that by accepting this false dichotomy of good and bad choices that are an Affordance Traps (see "Staying Out of Affordance Traps") which force us into positions that don't reflect reality. Refuse the false premise that 'School Choice' (for or against) is the only, or 'real' choice - it's not true. Taking a stand upon faulty ground, saps us of the full power of principled positions & ideals we do share, and leads only to deeper divisions between us.
Principles don't somehow excuse us from recognizing and dealing with reality.
Principles are intended to clarify our thinking, not to filter out uncomfortable facts.
Principles are aids to thinking, they are not substitutes for thinking.
Principles cannot come to the aid of those who're willfully blind, the principled path lies in prudently confronting the reality we do have, not the one we wish we had - so long as we have no true choice in the matter, neither side can win. Put a spotlight on both the short and long-term risks that these false 'choices' bring with them, and so enable a united and urgent focus on a worthwhile long term goal that both sides can share in, one that will enable our principles to guide us in responding to the risks and consequences we face, now and in the future.
Repeat after me: The reality is that we have no choices to choose from, we have only deeply flawed trade-offs between bad and worse conditions to select from, and a much more important battle to either win, or flee from.
The harsh truth remains that we're not going to solve any of these issues by either promoting or opposing 'School Choice' today, or even in the next few years. Pretending that either side has solutions in sight, is deluding ourselves and makes us unable to focus on what is important to us all, which benefits only those who oppose both sides of our divide and are playing both sides towards the middle, which puts us even further behind than we already are.
We all need to stop doing that.
The Bad and Worse Trade-offs on the other side of the 'School Choice' divide
So we've looked on one side of the 'school choice' divide, with those of us who want to uphold some sense of integrity within a system that does not and cannot support or permit any such a thing. On the other side of the divide, are those who're inspired by the vision of 'School Choice' being a competitive market alternative to enable our educational tax dollars to follow kids into the educational market of charter, private, or church schools, or for homeschooling expenses, sometimes called ‘backpack funding’
If nothing more was involved than that, I suspect that there'd be little or no division over the issue amongst the 'Right' today, but as the Right is clearly being divided over something, we need to look closer at the reasons for that.
On looking closer at the side of the 'School Choice' divide, it appears to me to be a target rich environment, but one that it is stratified into three intermingling layers,
Or IOWs: We divide and conquer ourselves.
The uninformed majority
Lacking a formative principle to unify around, the first layer that this side of the school choice divide is stratified into, is the first and largest group, of the mostly well-intentioned people of the uninformed majority, and the reason they follow 'School Choice' is a reason that's common to all three levels, in that they believe that 'School Choice' can provide a means to escape government schools. If you point out that their policy lacks a principle to guide it, they'll typically respond with:
But would the components of current 'School Choice' policies like Missouri's SB727, even be compatible with a principled view of liberty, if we did have one? That's what we'll start looking at here.
Of course, being uninformed is not equivalent to being unconcerned or lacking in intelligence, and if we confront their positions with disdain or putdowns, it's going to be taken by them as pure nonsense and be entirely unpersuasive. But by raising the necessary questions, and answering them factually, there's a good chance that we can help them inform themselves to the point that they'll reconsider what more there is to know, which puts what might otherwise have seemed like common sense, into a whole new light.
So let's start with its most basic presumption, the claim that:
Without diminishing the value of competition between businesses, having the liberty to produce what others might want to purchase, is a more fundamental part of that any market, than the 'competition' which results from it. And as our three definitions above pointed out, there are reasons to doubt that that more fundamental condition does or even can exist in this educational 'market'. Yet people often call for 'more competition!', as if 'more competition!' is somehow the fundamental trait of not only a 'free market', but of America itself - and that's simply not the case.
Our early American patriots weren't up in arms at the British because they lacked enough marketplaces for their tea business to compete in - competition wasn't the issue.
The Sons of Liberty threw The Boston Tea Party after Britain used regulations (certification of tax stamps) to enable the East India Tea Company to monopolize the supply of tea in the market.
Their concern wasn't with having a competitive market for their tea business, or with tax rates, but with maintaining a Rule of Law whose principles were dedicated to equally upholding & defending the individual rights/property of all, because they understood how vital that was to their liberty. Only by securing that liberty first, could free markets be formed by those who chose to produce something, which others might choose to purchase (and which competition can result from).
It was because they had that understanding and those concerns, that they were able to look into the near future and see that those encroachments the Crown was making upon their liberty, weren't going to stop with limiting competition over what, where, and how, they bought their tea! And it was with that understanding that they gave full consideration to the bad & worse options before them, and chose to take the revolutionary action of throwing all of the tea into the harbor.
In contrast, where our 'schooling market' has had its 'supply' regulated upwards of a century, through teacher certification, curriculum standards, standardized tests, taxation and more, and done so within a 'market' whose buyers - us - are compelled by law to enter into, the response of our 'liberty minded' leaders is to propose 'School Choice' to increase 'competition' by adding more schooling options, and by manipulating the 'educational' tax dollars of people who've been forced into their market. And somehow they think that will somehow transform this marketplace, into a 'Free Market'?!
A fundamental American response would be to throw our compulsory 'educational market' into the proverbial harbor, rather than to pander to a 'market' which the government has monopolized the supply, the sellers, and the buyers of, while at the same time adding even more policies for how they'll permit us to buy and sell 'education' within it. All without it doing ANYTHING to eliminate the cause of our market's failures, which they implicitly either minimizing or ignoring.
Can you find the 'free trade!' in this competition
between Hong Kong and the CCP?
It should also be kept in mind that the 'Competition leads to liberty!' claim, is the same argument that progressive Republicans like Nixon, & Libertarians like Milton Freidman used to build Red China up from a failing communist backwater, to a worldwide threat that has put the once freest city on earth, Hong Kong, into the hands of the totalitarian Chinese Communist Party. There can be no 'Free Trade!' where there is no Free Market, and there can be no Free Market, where the laws are dedicated not to upholding the individual rights of all equally before the law, but to using political power for the advantage for some, to serve 'the greater good', which results in the loss of liberty and the spread of Social Justice.
What 'School Choice' does offer, are bad & worse tradeoffs - acknowledge the 'bad' or less than worse options, and clarify the negative long-term consequences they are likely to cause. For the parent getting their kids out of public schools, it will result in less immediate government involvement in their children's lives and education, and that is a benefit for them. At the same time, it involves legislative circumstances that have the very real potential to enable or even speed up more undesirable long-term consequences for you, your child, and your community, and it does that while minimizing or ignoring the actual cause of the unjust system that's forcing to into selecting one of these options. There are a number of questions that could and should come to the mind of the uninformed, which are ideologically screened out of consideration, but raising them yourself can help to shine some further light into the shadows of 'School Choice' for them.
For instance, in regards to the mantra that:
So, in answer to "‘School Choice’ will give me my Tax dollar$ back and make them portable!":
Just make sure they know to blame the system that put them in this situation, not you for pointing it out.
How informed are they about ESA's & ESO's?
Another mantra of 'School Choice', is that:
There are however, further questions to consider:
Best Option: Pull your kids out of the schools - the entire establishment educational system (public and most private) is infected with it - good schools do exist, but you need to be sure that they recognize and revile the nature of these programs, rather than cozying up to, and virtue signaling alongside them.
Next Best Option: Opt out of related classes, and pay very close attention to what your children are studying and discussing in class.
One last point, and it should be on the minds of every person who is witnessing what is happening in our schools and society, and it comes from Viktor Frankl, who was the author of "Man's Search for Meaning", about his time spent in a Nazi concentration camp, also wrote, something very relevant to the materialistic education our students and society are being subjected to:
“If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity, and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.If he is as correct as I think he is... you should consider what that means for yourselves and for your children, and if it isn't yet clear to you, that means that their intention is to demoralize your children, and if you take that as seriously as you should, that means that their intention is to destroy your children.
I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment – or, as the Nazi like to say, of ‘Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”
I hope you'll take that seriously.
Saturday, May 11, 2024
Dividing the Right through the false choices of 'School Choice'
The politics of 'School Choice' has brought people together from all sides of the 'Right', and has gotten us to talk with each other like never before. People who’ve been acquainted for years are hailing each other with such friendly greetings as:
"Parasite!",,...etc., etc., etc. Why these shrillest of ideological responses are coming from all sides, stems from an ideological issue that most are seemingly unaware that we all share in and are implicitly divided by, which is what I want to look further into here.
"Neo-liberal!",
"Shill for monopoly schools!",
"Fake-conservative!",
"Statist!",
,and my favorite one to be called:
"Wackadoo!"
In pursuit of that I’ll be as fair to each side of the 'School Choice' issue (except one) as I can, which is made a little easier as ‘My Side’ has at least a little bit of an issue with all sides (if proposed 'fixes' to education involve textbooks, grades, prepared test scores, etc., that’s not my side), but because I want to focus on why 'School Choice' is dividing the 'Right', I'll resist going down the rabbit hole of arguments I've made against establishment education (public and private) over the last 20+ years (such as here), and focus instead on:
Leaving my main concerns about education (reluctantly) aside in order to focus on the Right's sides of the 'School Choice' issue, brings us face to face with the central irony that both sides of the divide share the same fundamental goal - at least on the face of it - in that both would generally agree with this x-tweet from an organization that's at the center of the 'School Choice' storm, Americans For Prosperity:
- the background all sides are operating within
- how what hasn’t been noticed, is affecting each side
- what those for & against ‘School Choice’ are actually for and against
- what meaningful ‘School Choice’ entails and requires
" The highest form of 'local control' is the individual. Parents should have the right to use their tax money designated for their child's education in the best way they see fit.
Fathers and mothers should not have to co-parent with the government.
Free parents to choose."
So when faced with a tangled knot of a problem to solve, and when those attempts that each side pursues is doing more to conceal rather than reveal any actual solution, it's time to pause, reassess the situation, and then, like Alexander, draw your sword and cut the Gordian Knot so that both sides can see what they'd being tying themselves to. And so now that I've taken a whack at it, the answer seems rather obvious, in that the fundamental issue behind what has enabled the Right to become so divided against itself, IMHO, springs from what rarely enters into any discussions over the issue, despite the fact that it drives the legislation and the conversation that's generated regarding it. This issue has become so accepted that it's rarely taken note of, and by failing to be included in the conversation, we too easily slip into the nearly irreconcilable differences besetting us today.
That seems worth taking a closer look.
Sometimes the 'choice' we're given, isn't actually a choice at all
Once upon a time in America it was understood that parents and other legal guardians had an unquestioned parental role and responsibility in deciding how their children would be raised, and in what they would and would not engage in. Within that view, parents were secure in their role and responsibilities as the guardians of their children, while at the same time they understood that the state would be failing in its fundamental responsibility to uphold and defend the lives and individual rights of its people, if it failed to intervene in a parent/child relationship when just cause was shown that serious instances of negligence, physical harm, or other abuses were occurring to the lives & safety of the children involved.
Both exercising our own individual rights and responsibilities in the pursuit of happiness, as well as recognizing the proper role of a just government's Rule of Law in securing them, are dependent upon our being able to make choices free from duress.
What it is that is too often missed or ignored as being 'out of sight-out of mind' by both sides, reveals itself with a look at three fundamental terms, and as we're talking about laws, we'll look at their legal definitions:
Freedom of Choice - Unfettered right to do what one wants when one wants as one wants, except where it infringes or prevents another from doing what that one wants, and do so on. Also excluded is doing something that would harm one’s self or another.Meaning that when in every day discussions we speak of making a 'choice', what we mean is voluntarily making a decision free from the threat of force, real or implied, free from any intimidation from physical or political powers, and free from any other form of duress. Conversely, when we are unjustly compelled to select from some options and no others, then the options being offered no longer involve our making a legitimate 'choice', and that has implications for both sides of the 'School Choice' issue.
Force: - Power dynamically considered, that is, in motion or in action; constraining power, compulsion; strength directed to an end. Usually the word occurs in such connections as to show that unlawful or wrongful action is meant.
Involuntary: - An involuntary act is that which is performed with constraint (q. v.) or with repugnance, or without the will to do it. An action is involuntary, then, which is performed under duress.
Most people realize, or at least have a vague awareness, that the first state school system implemented in America, was in Massachusetts, back in 1836. Not so many realize that within three years of that system being implemented, those same people of Massachusetts tried their best (and sadly failed) "...to abolish the Board of Education and to break up the Normal Schools..." because they realized it posed a very real threat to their lives and liberty, in that:
"...The establishment of the Board of Education seems to be the commencement of a system of centralization and of monopoly of power in a few hands, contrary, in every respect, to the true spirit of our democratical institutions; and which, unless speedily checked, may lead to unlooked-for and dangerous results..."
One of those 'unlooked-for' results they feared, can be seen in how our state school systems have functioned as an actual 'replacement theory', in that's been progressively replacing the education of Americans, with only those 'useful facts' that incline them towards welcoming the use of arbitrary political power, 'for the greater good'.
For that reason, and many others, the objections of those public school supporters complaining "But what about the poor &? What about those left behind in underfunded schools!", I summarily dismiss out of hand, as the plain truth is that if they truly cared about those students, and their conditions, they'd investigate the actual nature and performance of the system they're subjecting them to, and then work to extricate them from that, rather than look for ways to prop it up at everyone else's expense. Likewise, I'm not so eager to blame teachers & unions (though I fervently despise unions), as they're more like side-effects of a system that is neither educational nor just.
I will acknowledge that we can’t simply turn & walk away from the public school system as if it doesn't exist - it is operating under our political representation and taxation, and so it is our responsibility to stay engaged with it in school board elections, etc., to do what we can to keep it 'honest'. But I won't pretend to support it or imply that it's a credible system, and I sure as heck would not send a child (or a teacher, for that matter) into our public (or many private) school systems today.
Which brings us around to the real issue at the heart of how the Right has become so divided, is that our sense of being secure in our property and ability to exercise our individual rights, has been fundamentally undermined and subverted, through one central and too often ignored feature of modern American life:
Since the opening of the 20th century, the laws of every state in the union have contained these bitter fruits of the pro-regressive movement, which explicitly prejudges (without just cause) that some parents will abuse their kids by depriving them of an education, and therefore all parents must be compelled by force of law to send their children to school. And having taken that responsibility and choice away from us all, these laws then go on to specify which schools our children have to attend, how often and how long they must attend, what they must learn, and what grades and test scores the state will require as proof of their having been adequately 'educated'. Yes, they will, grudgingly, grant some exceptions, but those are then less because it is your right, than as a privilege granted to you, from the state... which is a very different thing altogether.
- Compulsory school attendance laws
Keeping in mind those terms we defined above, it should be self-evident that no parent today can be said to be free to make a 'choice' regarding their children's education.
Some might dismiss this all with a:
"Nah, you can choose to homeschool if you don't like the public schools!", and I reply:
Something else that might be less than obvious, is that being relieved of your most important responsibilities is not a kindness or in any way 'freeing', but is instead a manipulative means of binding, and entrapping your behavior. One of the more obvious examples of this, are those who've tried to move into or out of a neighborhood because of the school district its in - whether or not they have kids - that's a great deal of influence upon our lives and decisions, due to an unjust law. The fact that we've become accustomed to acting under such compulsion, doesn't change the fact that there is no 'choice', rightly defined, that a parent has or can be offered in regards to education - only bad & worse options to be selected under duress.
- Firstly, how you decide to respond to an unjust use of force is not a choice freely made - your response to a mugger demanding "Your money or your life!", is a decision made under duress, in which you calculate how best to act because you've been unjustly forced into a situation that there is no justification for.
- Secondly, while home schoolers may be outside the standard system, they are only so far out of it as is 'allowed' by that system, and they are continually having to push back against state scrutiny (and veiled threats) under the terms of state control.
I'll remind people again of the father of our school district and superintendent systems, Ellwood P. Cubberly, who wrote with great satisfaction, way back in 1909, that:
"Each year the child is coming to belong more to the State and less and less to the parent."We're in denial of the fact that when someone makes you an offer you can't refuse, they're not offering you a choice, they're making you a threat. ‘School Choice’ has so easily divided the right, because all sides are focused on their own particular evasions for dealing with the real issue they've become accustomed to ignoring, and which ultimately benefits only those who're opposed to both sides of the Right’s divide.
These conditions are not a result of a just Rule of Law, but of the inevitable consequences of bad and unjust laws and those departments which implement them.
Just law can be applied evenly to all, and serves their common interests,
“the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom” - John Locke, but it is the hallmark of an unjust system that the weight of the law will fall more heavily upon some than others, and narrows the scope of everyone's actions to their own immediate interests.
Failing to realize that we've accepted this unjust baseline as our 'norm' - a foundation built not just upon sand, but quicksand - leads us into our constructing our own defenses around an irresolvably unjust policy as if the pretense of it were a legitimate baseline.
So long as these compulsory laws remain in our lives, no one, whether for or against 'School Choice', is able to offer a pathway towards a voluntary, unforced, choice in education. That option simply does not exist within the United States of America today, nor has it at anytime in the last hundred years, and behaving as if it is an option - or as if defeating a 'School Choice' policy will somehow safeguard or secure that option - is deceiving ourselves.
'School Choice' is not the issue, pretending that we have a choice, is, and our divisions are a result of doing so.
We need to face up to the fact that there are no actual choices that can be made and no solutions that can be offered - there are only trade-offs between options that are unavoidably bad or worse, depending upon individual circumstances. And don't forget that all such relief is temporary and lacking in substance.
We gain nothing from continuing the pretense of having a choice in the matter, and we lose a great deal by ignoring this utilitarian cancer at the heart of our society, as it implicitly gives license to the abuses of power that our governments have been enjoying over We The People for the last hundred years.
If it's not yet clear why, consider what I asked a room full of people who're involved in the 'School Choice' issue, last week:
Show of hands: Who has kids?, nearly all hands went up. Then I asked:
, and as you might imagine hands went down, along with some smiles, chuckles, and not a few puzzled expressions. I continued:
- Who’d trade their kids for food?
- Who’d trade their kids for a new car?
- Who’d trade their kids for a house?
- Who’d trade their kids for a job?
- Who’d trade their kids for friends?
- Who’d give up their kids for the right speak their mind?
"So we value our kids more than our food, possessions, shelter, means of earning a living, freedom of associations, freedom of speech, even life itself... but we've quietly permitted our laws to take away our voice in and control over, how they’ll be raised & educated?They got the point.
Now ask yourself, if government can infringe upon what its citizens most value in their lives, upon the most important of individual rights - parental rights - and do so 'for the greater good' - as it has, then whatever other 'rights' we might imagine ourselves to be secure in, can be only as secure as that same government finds it convenient for us to continue imagining ourselves to be, to serve what it sees as being for 'the greater good'.
Look at that list - since the passage of compulsory schooling laws in the early 1900s, our governments - federal, state, and local - have inserted themselves through innumerable laws and regulations, that infest every single one of those issues, and enter into every single aspect of our lives, on the basis of it being for 'the greater good'."
Having ceded our rightful choice in the most important and visceral of our individual rights, we've left ourselves without the solid ground of principle to stand upon, and that has unavoidably fostered an ever growing chaos of distorted opinions and divisions amongst us. Having done so in this issue, as in many others, because all sides are focused on their own substitutes for dealing with the real issue, all sides are subtly put into opposition to what actually is real and true, and so we find ourselves righteously facing off against each other as foes, each imagining themselves to be preserving an ideal that we've allowed (and still allow) our federal, state, and local governments, to sweep aside long ago.
And those whose positions of power depend upon and require their maintaining this new illiberal system, are sucked into upholding it, encouraging it, and taking advantage of it as well.
It's not each other we should be opposing, but the system which foments that opposition, and neither side should be begrudging what little relief that others might manage to secure within it.
Our tolerating or ignoring this 'norm', leaves us all in the ridiculous position of behaving as if our tweaking a fundamentally corrupt system through every inconsequential side effect of it, from homework, to testing, to attendance and doctors' notes, could somehow produce something 'good'. OTOH, if instead we were to begin mutually identifying and calling out this shared 'norm' as an intolerable injustice that must be eliminated, it would free both sides from the exhausting effort of defending the indefensible aspects of their particular positions, and by enabling them to acknowledge what is bad and worse, in their proposals, as temporary options - some more risky than others - to provide relief to some, without taking our eye off of eventually eliminating what caused that injustice to begin with.
So the 1st step in resolving our divide is to face up to reality, accept the responsibility that involves, and focus on the only way to restore actual choices in education for all: Repealing our compulsory schooling laws, and abolishing those departments of state which enforce them.
In one of many lessons available for us to learn from the ancient Roman Republic, long before it sank into empire, it was beginning to stumble because its people wanted to avoid dealing with an issue that if ignored, would end them - the hostile empire of Carthage. There was one senator, Cato, who began ending every one of his speeches - be it about matters of security or sewage systems - with 'Carthage Delende Est' - 'Carthage must be destroyed'. Every time he spoke, he ended it with 'Carthage Delende Est', which irritated everybody. But it also made it into such an issue that they couldn't avoid dealing with it for long, and eventually they did free themselves from the threat of Carthage by destroying it (there are of course... other lessons to be learned from that, but... elsewhere).
We need to do something similar, with (Latin speakers forgive me) 'Compulsory Schooling must be destroyed!'.
Every year matters have gotten worse, and every year everyone's circumstances will continue to become progressively worse, so long as we live under these 'educational systems', no matter what 'choices' (and responsibilities) are offered or rejected today.
That is the background of what all sides of the Right to become divided against itself, within. And adding to that, both sides of the 'School Choice' divide are ignoring or evading some or all of these simple facts:
, and depending upon which approach your side takes in treating the unreal as real, leads to its own particular problems.
- To some extent everyone is co-parenting with government today and has been for over a century.
- No solutions are possible within our current legal framework, only bad and worse trade-offs.
- Our divisions benefit only those who're opposed to both sides and neither side's pretenses & narratives can slow the state's progressive domination of education - though some may speed it up.
As I'm inclined to identify most with those who're opposed to the bulk of 'School Choice' policies, I'll turn to the issues I see in that side, first.
Those troublesome details that the Devil is in, are affecting all sides
Our side's opposition to 'School Choice' comes from our focus on the fundamental principles and (very real) long term dangers which the more immediate benefits of 'School Choice' obscure. But when our focus is refracted through the lens of a non-existent choice, it typically results in what most irritates the other side about us, our behaving as if we were the guardians of a higher moral ground that somehow floats above the reality which we're all mired within here and now. From that vantage point we're often quick to judge those who've 'chosen unwisely' by either having missed, ignored, or refused to see, what we imagine to be the only true 'choice' available - a 'choice' which in reality has never been on the table, and in doing so we push away those we should be aligned with.
Those parents who are caught in We The People's laws, see their options as being either to send their kids into our public schools (all of which are bad, some of which are even physically dangerous) or to get their kids out from under that system's direct influence, are parents who are on our side. What's more, we are on their side, in wanting their kids distanced from what the state intends to infuse into their mind and spirit.
But when those same parents are told that 'School Choice' can reduce the system’s influence on their kids, only to hear us label them as unprincipled 'neo-liberals!' who should 'stop sucking up to Bill Gates & the Globalists!' - what 'choice' do you think they're going to make? Telling these parents to sacrifice their children today, for the sake of preserving an imaginary choice, is pushing away those who should be aligned with us.
Don’t let the messaging become the message -no matter what truth there is behind it, ‘Stop sucking up to the Globalists!‘ is not a persuasive or informative message!
Without confusing the parent seeking options with the politicians concocting options (which I'll turn to soon enough), understand that nearly anything that lessens the injustice of the current situation upon their kids, is a defensible action - not a good action - but an action that's less worse than what they're already faced with here & now. Yes, in 'the long run' it likely will bring worse consequences, but don't forget those simple facts we just noted - in 'the long run' the unjust system is going to devour us all, and pretending that demanding some take a worse option because the bad one isn't good, within a system that permits no good options, or that we have the luxury of time to avoid dealing with the matter, is only deceiving ourselves. At best.
When you're talking with them, acknowledge the benefit to their kids of escaping out of the establishment school systems, and into the church, private, or homeschool options they prefer, and also be very clear about what is bad and worse about each particular policy. Make very clear the 'shackles for sheckles' mechanism involved in the 'choice' being offered, be sure to point out the less than obvious long-term dangers those alternatives could have for their kids, to themselves, and to their community.
And be sure to point out how the compulsory schooling system has taken the actual choices that should be theirs to make, away from them!
Those parents should be mad, but at those who're manipulating them for political gain, not at our side of the divide for slinging insults at them.
The battle for liberty is not a coin toss of yes/no options, it's a long-term struggle that requires our recognizing our own responsibilities and looking beyond the issues of the immediate moment. Note that I'm not denying that the consequences of many if not most 'School Choice' policies are awful, they are.
Full stop.
I'm saying that by accepting this false dichotomy of good and bad choices that are an Affordance Traps (see "Staying Out of Affordance Traps") which force us into positions that don't reflect reality. Refuse the false premise that 'School Choice' (for or against) is the only, or 'real' choice - it's not true. Taking a stand upon faulty ground, saps us of the full power of principled positions & ideals we do share, and leads only to deeper divisions between us.
 |
| School Choice is a trap... but. |
Principles cannot come to the aid of those who're willfully blind, the principled path lies in prudently confronting the reality we do have, not the one we wish we had - so long as we have no true choice in the matter, neither side can win. Put a spotlight on both the short and long-term risks that these false 'choices' bring with them, and so enable a united and urgent focus on a worthwhile long term goal that both sides can share in, one that will enable our principles to guide us in responding to the risks and consequences we face, now and in the future.
Repeat after me: The reality is that we have no choices to choose from, we have only deeply flawed trade-offs between bad and worse conditions to select from, and a much more important battle to either win, or flee from.
The harsh truth remains that we're not going to solve any of these issues by either promoting or opposing 'School Choice' today, or even in the next few years. Pretending that either side has solutions in sight, is deluding ourselves and makes us unable to focus on what is important to us all, which benefits only those who oppose both sides of our divide and are playing both sides towards the middle, which puts us even further behind than we already are.
We all need to stop doing that.
The Bad and Worse Trade-offs on the other side of the 'School Choice' divide
So we've looked on one side of the 'school choice' divide, with those of us who want to uphold some sense of integrity within a system that does not and cannot support or permit any such a thing. On the other side of the divide, are those who're inspired by the vision of 'School Choice' being a competitive market alternative to enable our educational tax dollars to follow kids into the educational market of charter, private, or church schools, or for homeschooling expenses, sometimes called ‘backpack funding’
If nothing more was involved than that, I suspect that there'd be little or no division over the issue amongst the 'Right' today, but as the Right is clearly being divided over something, we need to look closer at the reasons for that.
On looking closer at the side of the 'School Choice' divide, it appears to me to be a target rich environment, but one that it is stratified into three intermingling layers,
These strata exist and persist because without a larger principle guiding our actions, such as:
- The surface layer of contains the majority of those on this side of the divide and consists of well intentioned liberty minded people who're generally uninformed about the less than obvious dangers lurking beneath what on the surface seem to be common sense issues.
- The next layer down is fewer in number, but is made up of enthusiasts, activists, and legislators, who're in a position to learn about the hidden perils involved in their plans, but are content to remain plausibly uninformed and misinformed, so long as it serves their ideological interests.
- The bottom layer has the fewest members, and is made up of those who either selectively ignore information that might trouble their plans, or cheerfully use their influence to add partial information to aid in willfully misleading those upper layers whose support they need in building and furthering their agenda.
"Demanding to restore individual rights and abolish compulsory schooling laws", we're too easily swayed this way and that by a disintegrated array of lesser advantages in,
,etc., etc., etc., unaware or unconcerned with how those smaller issues conflict with that larger principle which... we don't have in mind.
- economics,
- test scores,
- personal preferences,
- political advantage,
Or IOWs: We divide and conquer ourselves.
The uninformed majority
Lacking a formative principle to unify around, the first layer that this side of the school choice divide is stratified into, is the first and largest group, of the mostly well-intentioned people of the uninformed majority, and the reason they follow 'School Choice' is a reason that's common to all three levels, in that they believe that 'School Choice' can provide a means to escape government schools. If you point out that their policy lacks a principle to guide it, they'll typically respond with:
‘What about Choice?!’, but unfortunately, 'Choice' is an action or a policy, not a principle. To that they're likely to reply:
‘What about Liberty?!’Liberty certainly could be, and should be, our guiding principle, but as we've already pointed out, any meaningful attempt to stand for liberty, is undermined by the realities of the three definitions of 'Freedom of Choice', 'Force', & 'Involuntary', which means that our policies do not have either freedom of choice or liberty to build upon, and the 'School Choice' policies being promoted, cannot fill that void on their own.
But would the components of current 'School Choice' policies like Missouri's SB727, even be compatible with a principled view of liberty, if we did have one? That's what we'll start looking at here.
Of course, being uninformed is not equivalent to being unconcerned or lacking in intelligence, and if we confront their positions with disdain or putdowns, it's going to be taken by them as pure nonsense and be entirely unpersuasive. But by raising the necessary questions, and answering them factually, there's a good chance that we can help them inform themselves to the point that they'll reconsider what more there is to know, which puts what might otherwise have seemed like common sense, into a whole new light.
So let's start with its most basic presumption, the claim that:
, and the first question is, what do they mean by 'Free Market', is that having the conditions of liberty where people are able to engage with others as they see fit, or do they mean that fairy-dust of economic magic: 'competition!'.
- 'School Choice' is a 'Free Market' alternative
Without diminishing the value of competition between businesses, having the liberty to produce what others might want to purchase, is a more fundamental part of that any market, than the 'competition' which results from it. And as our three definitions above pointed out, there are reasons to doubt that that more fundamental condition does or even can exist in this educational 'market'. Yet people often call for 'more competition!', as if 'more competition!' is somehow the fundamental trait of not only a 'free market', but of America itself - and that's simply not the case.
Our early American patriots weren't up in arms at the British because they lacked enough marketplaces for their tea business to compete in - competition wasn't the issue.
The Sons of Liberty threw The Boston Tea Party after Britain used regulations (certification of tax stamps) to enable the East India Tea Company to monopolize the supply of tea in the market.
It was because they had that understanding and those concerns, that they were able to look into the near future and see that those encroachments the Crown was making upon their liberty, weren't going to stop with limiting competition over what, where, and how, they bought their tea! And it was with that understanding that they gave full consideration to the bad & worse options before them, and chose to take the revolutionary action of throwing all of the tea into the harbor.
In contrast, where our 'schooling market' has had its 'supply' regulated upwards of a century, through teacher certification, curriculum standards, standardized tests, taxation and more, and done so within a 'market' whose buyers - us - are compelled by law to enter into, the response of our 'liberty minded' leaders is to propose 'School Choice' to increase 'competition' by adding more schooling options, and by manipulating the 'educational' tax dollars of people who've been forced into their market. And somehow they think that will somehow transform this marketplace, into a 'Free Market'?!
A fundamental American response would be to throw our compulsory 'educational market' into the proverbial harbor, rather than to pander to a 'market' which the government has monopolized the supply, the sellers, and the buyers of, while at the same time adding even more policies for how they'll permit us to buy and sell 'education' within it. All without it doing ANYTHING to eliminate the cause of our market's failures, which they implicitly either minimizing or ignoring.
between Hong Kong and the CCP?
What 'School Choice' does offer, are bad & worse tradeoffs - acknowledge the 'bad' or less than worse options, and clarify the negative long-term consequences they are likely to cause. For the parent getting their kids out of public schools, it will result in less immediate government involvement in their children's lives and education, and that is a benefit for them. At the same time, it involves legislative circumstances that have the very real potential to enable or even speed up more undesirable long-term consequences for you, your child, and your community, and it does that while minimizing or ignoring the actual cause of the unjust system that's forcing to into selecting one of these options. There are a number of questions that could and should come to the mind of the uninformed, which are ideologically screened out of consideration, but raising them yourself can help to shine some further light into the shadows of 'School Choice' for them.
For instance, in regards to the mantra that:
"‘School Choice’ will give me my Tax dollar$ back and make them portable!", there are a few questions worth following that up with:
- Q: Are those tax dollars being returned to you through a tax exemption, a tax credit, or a voucher? A:'Huh?'
- Q: Why does that matter? A: It matters whether it's a tax exemption, a tax credit, or a voucher, because of what monitoring and/or restraints can or might accompany those dollars that may once have been yours. An exemption could conceivably involve no restraints upon you at all... and it's interesting that I don't know of any 'School Choice' proposals that propose that. The other two however, not only most likely, but will be, legally required to entail some measure of government accountability for those dollars being 'returned' to you. IOW: 'with sheckles come shackles‘.
- Q: Does the voucher/credit provide portability to any school of your choice in the amount of what parents have paid into their taxes? A - I’m not aware of any 'School Choice' policy that does that – I’d *support* the plan that did. But. Simple portability has bad or worse trade-offs in enabling your tax dollars to follow your children to a better school, and you must decide which is bad and which is worse for you:
- Public School - Your tax dollars portability enable you to spend them at what you hope will be a better school, but without your political representation, as in 'No taxation without representation!' - if that school you chose is not in your district, then that politically overseen school will be taking your tax dollars, while you will have no political voice or vote in how it is run.
- Charter School - Your tax dollars are being spent where you want them, but you no 'say' in how these politically defined and regulated schools are run. Neither can you 'sunshine request' any info you might have concerns about.
- Q: Does the amount involved entail only what a particular parent has paid into taxes (property, sales, etc.)? A: No. There is no effort to identify or approximate what you paid in towards school related taxes, but only a lump sum to be given to all who accept the voucher/credit, currently approx: $6,000.
- Q: So the tax-exemption/tax-credit/voucher will include additional financial 'help' to parents, above & beyond what they had or would've paid in taxes? A: Yes. Which has stirred up dissent amongst conservative ranks, and rightly so, for to state the obvious, as James Lindsay put it:
'Since when does Conservativism, entail Govt handouts?'
- Q: Is that voucher/credit money mine free and clear? A: No... whether directly, or indirectly through who is permitted to accept the voucher/credit money and what they are required to deliver for that, as the saying goes: 'with sheckles come shackles'.
So, in answer to "‘School Choice’ will give me my Tax dollar$ back and make them portable!":
Some parents may decide it's prudent to take advantage of 'School Choice' benefits, as a benefit to their kids – but it isn't offering you your tax money back to you, it's packaging your tax dollars with additional dollars as your 'share' of what's been taxed at the public's expense, in your name. That may be useful and convenient - even a lifesaver - but there is and can be no justice involved in that, only both bad and worse trade-offs that entail taking from some to give to others in the name of the 'greater good', which is the system that we've all become so accustomed and numbed to.
- It is not offering your tax money back to you,
- It is packaging your tax dollars with dollars taxed at the public's expense as your ‘fair share'
- It is not offering simple portability,
- It will involve government mandates and requirements of you, the school attended, and what is taught
Just make sure they know to blame the system that put them in this situation, not you for pointing it out.
How informed are they about ESA's & ESO's?
Another mantra of 'School Choice', is that:
’School Choice’ has no cost, it’s a 'Free Market' alternative that's all paid for by Tax Credits!”Some additional questions: Technically it is possible to say that the program isn't funded by government money, that it only creates a ‘Free Market’ investment opportunity where those who donate to provide Educational $, will be able to write that amount off of their taxes through tax credits.
There are however, further questions to consider:
- Q: In a Free Market, is Government supposed to be in either the investment or philanthropy business? A: Nope.
- Q: Are these government selected organizations free to supply any educational programs they might choose to offer? A: No – only those selected & approved by law and as defined through the regulatory bureaucracy.
- Q: Are any organizations free to offer educational services associated with the EAO & ESA? A: No. Currently there are only 7 ‘non-profit’ organizations that have so far been approved by government.
- Q: Does Government selecting who can & cannot do business with 'non-profit‘ organizations, and deciding what they can and cannot offer as 'education', sound like ‘free market competition' to you? A: Nope.
- Q: Can any sense of a free market exist when the terms & percentages of doing business are defined by Govt decree? A: Nope
- Q: Maybe not, but don't these tax credits for EAOs/ESAs, enable 'School Choice' to be available to everyone at no cost to us? A: As it is true that there is no such thing as a 'Free Lunch', the promise of 'free!' anything, should raise questions for you. Donors contributing to the fund, to get an equal amount back as a tax credit, is an effort made to produce a benefit... without a reward - AKA: 'Free!'. The organizations that the donations go to, are required to doll out 90% of them to 'scholarships' (... so many more questions there....), which is all very well and good. But leaving aside what's involved in that tax 'credit' going to them (From where? Where would it otherwise have gone?), where does the other 10% go? We don't know, and have no way of knowing, as what the money received by the 'non-profit' organization, through the process that our government has enabled in your name and through your political representation, is going into private hands, and we have no way of monitoring the Where's, Why's, and Whom's (WWW) involved. That's what's known as a 'Private-Public-Partnership' (PPP), and that is the very antithesis of a Free Market.
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 See MO Section: 135.714. Educational assistance organization duties — annual audit — duties of state treasurer for details. |
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The fact is that a Free Market is what results from a principle that you either abide by, or abandon. Which will you choose?
But wait, there's more!
Ask yourself this: If you accept a tax credit or ESA/voucher towards your child's education at private, church, or homeschools, what wouldn't the state be able to inspect and approve - or disapprove - of? The possible answers to that is the sort of thing that is feared will follow - eventually if not immediately - from a 'School Choice' bill proposed in Tennessee, which has provisions that, if money is taken - for private, church, or homeschool - then: a by imposing rules & requirements on the 7 providers (what a market!).
Governments have consistently used oversight of public money to extend the reach of its powers beyond that of the literal letter of the law. It also uses that to ally itself with those special interests who stand to benefit from such laws.
A Free Market is what results from those principles which you either abide by, or abandon. Being pragmatic requires dealing with everything in life piecemeal, which ultimately is exceedingly impractical and amoral if not immoral. If you want to be practical, stop being pragmatic, and start being principled.
The wackadoos of the Uninformed
In absence of that information the Uninformed have so far failed to consider, criticism of their position seems absurd to them, and they typically deride those who don't support 'School Choice' by names such as 'Wackadoos!' for their concerns over state interference in their lives, and will fire back at them that:
Perhaps they have forgotten how Hillsdale College, if they ever knew, that after having admitted students who'd privately secured 'govt assistance' for their tuition, Hillsdale became locked into a decades long legal battle with the government over the claim that the college was required to adhere to numerous Dept. of Education 'standards, practices, and guidelines' that the Dept of Education had determined that they should have complied with.
In the end, the SCOTUS determined that with 'sheckles come shackles':
Does their position sound 'wackadoo' to you? Those on the 'Right' who are opposed to 'School Choice' have good reason to be rightly fearful that once such laws are taken advantage of by some in home schooling, they'll be pushed to become the norms for all to comply with, as has happened here already, and recently in West Virginia where protections for homeschoolers were put in the laws in 2021, and repealed in 2023.
And to the 'School Choice' supporter who tells the homeschoolers "If you don't like it, don't take it!", while that might sound very common sense on the face of it, there are at least two points of failure in it.
First, it ignores the fact that when those additional requirements to be abided by, become the norm for some under 'School Choice', it will tend to become treated as the norm for all, and those who don't want them, will be forced to be mindful of their deadlines to opt out of those new norms, as well as having to file new reports to be submitted, lessons to be justified, curriculum to be approved, grades to be evaluated, hours of teaching to be tallied, penalties for not knowing every clause of the regulatory codes, all to be submitted to and ruled upon, by a governmental bureaucracy that thoroughly disapproves of them.
Second: Changing from 'We're gonna make you an offer you can't refuse' to 'We're gonna make you a number of offers you can't refuse', doesn't make it any less of a threat towards you - there is no free 'choice' being offered, only more options that you are being compelled to select from.
"Why can't you just be pragmatic about this? Be practical!"
Libertarian, conservatives, politicians, & business minded folk will sometimes say things like:
The Founders of Pragmatism:
C.S. Peirce, John Dewey, William James
You've probably heard Nietzsche's comment about those German Idealists, usually paraphrased as they're:
It's not too much to say that the pragmatists took Marx's telling comment that,
Unfortunately for us, as the idea of liberty under the rule of law is entirely incompatible with 'just experimentally doing what works', I'd advise you to make your decisions by other more principled means, especially since being uninformed will not excuse you from the consequences that will eventually follow once those in power turn their experiments in 'what works', into Law.
It is reckless to advocate for laws without regard to what those laws might 'yet' be used to enable, as once a law is on the books, a statute that is seemingly benign today, is a very short step away from being further amended, or less obviously modified through regulatory rulings that expand the state's responsibilities of oversight, to be overseen by their Dept of Education.
That has been the history in Missouri, and it will continue to do so in a manner that will only become more intrusive as time goes on, as it's being performed by people who are in virulent opposition to even the existence of non-public education.
Each opening the govt is given into our lives, it will work on expanding.
The Contentedly Misinformed
The next layer down is made up of those who also believe what the Uninformed Majority do, but though they are in positions to know better, they're content to remain as uninformed or misinformed, as suits their purposes. These people, often legislators and/or activists advising others on what to think about 'School Choice', are typically very knowledgeable about the details of the policy they are promoting, but tend to have only a shallow understanding of opponents objections to their policies (often smearing them as allied with public school supporters), and are only dimly aware of the gaps in their own knowledge, gaps which conveniently enable them to maintain a 'plausible deniability' of details which are more easily dismissed in favor of their own 'common sense' assumptions about them (read: "That seems nuts, so no need to look any further"), which in their mind's trumps their fringe concerns.
A prime example of this layer comes from a Missouri State Senator, Doug Richey. From the little I've seen of his interviews, comments, and presentations, I've seen no reason to suppose that he’s a ‘fake conservative’, or that he's shilling for 'neo-liberal' ideals, etc., he seems like a sensible, well intentioned proponent of conservative ideals... until he slides into the ideological divide of 'School Choice'. Once involved in that, he too becomes all about dismissing those who criticize his positions as being shills for the teachers unions, school monopolies, tyranny, etc. which are of course quickly met with a loud volley of epithets coming from the other side of the divide, as both sides of the 'School Choice' divide do what conservatives do best - come together to divide ourselves over what we all care the most about.
For instance, there was considerable furor over the potential of a language change from defining primary & secondary schools in general, to "for the purposes of state law, a homeschool is a school", which a reasonable reading of, could potentially open homeschoolers up to harassment or prosecution over existing laws against having firearms in 'a school‘, as well as other activist lawfare abuses, and especially so as Biden's administration has just issued a policy of accelerating Red Flag laws.
I don't believe the republican legislator's intended their language change to enable any issue of the kind, but instead of taking people's - their constituents - concerns seriously, they mostly minimized or dismissed them, and then mocked all such concerns as being 'wackadoos‘ and shills for monopoly education. As people's concerns didn't let up, they found some support from their own side, posting a legal opinion that said:
Many, including myself, urged that they
Soon after that, FHE/HSLDA withdrew their support for their bill, and only then did the legislators bother to reexamine their legislative language.
The point here is not whether or not laws can be misused, but that when lawmakers become so focused on one ideological issue, the possible ramifications it could have on other issues are put out of sight & out of mind for the sake of that agenda, as the concerns & objections of people – constituents! - are dismissed as being 'wackadoos' and paid shills for monopoly ed, even though they fundamentally share the same point of view - AKA: ideological warfare.
Even then, as Jeremy Jacobs pointed out in a well stated video, that in their hurry to fix an issue that had resulted from ill-considered changes, they hurriedly revised a separate house bill to cover those concerns, but if that bill is challenged and struck down, the current legislation flaws and all, would become the law with its ill-considered language intact.
An example of this defensive 'common sense' dismissal, comes from a clip of Sen. Richey when he stood on the senate floor to reassure those who were concerned that the programs that are deeply entwined in their 'School Choice' legislation he was promoting, had purposes he was unaware of, saying:
, and my jaw hit the floor at that. Such a comment as that might've been understandably stated as a 'common sense' position back in the early 1990s, by someone who was ignorant of the critical pedagogies it was derived from - and plenty of conservatives who knew no better were taken in by it - but it strains credulity to imagine how naive someone has to be to say that, who's lived through the experience of Outcome Based Education (and CBE is just re-branded OBE), and especially coming from someone who's served for several years on the Education Committee of a state legislature, as Sen. Richey has.
When challenged about that comment, rather than looking into why his constituents were alarmed at his 'common sense' statement, he seems to have zoomed right past the possibility that he might be unaware of an actual danger to his constituents, and doubled down on it by X-Tweating his support:
Education proposals can seem like common sense when you look no further into them than their marketing, such as the PR material of programs like The Aurora Institute, which are attached to the 2022 Ed Omnibus Bill, which are self-described as:
To be able to read past "... competency-based, personalized learning mindset..." without being thoroughly alarmed at the nature of the system being described, reveals that person to either have a critical ignorance of the issues involved in modern education, or that they are far too unimpressed by the seriousness of them, and in either case they should not be involved in managing, let alone legislating, upon education today.
Misinformed about buzzwords and 'What's not to like?'
Have conservatives already forgotten how easily they were taken in by the marketing claims for Common Core?! Do they really expect us to forget about how easily they've been misled in the past?
The meaningless marketing lingo of "personalized learning mindset ", "...the seven elements that define...." and "...an additional Real World Learning element..." are dependent upon the ignorance of decision makers, of what lies beneath the surface of the marketing's citations of 'studies say', as SEL does with the 'Durlak study' (a study funded by the Aspen Institute & CASEL, to promote SEL), which professes the claim of :
It takes bothering to look beneath the surface to see exactly 'What's not to like?' in them, but they make such patently irresponsible assertions, because they are confident that no decision maker will ever bother investigating them.
Another issue is that our SB727 'School Choice' legislation, is riddled with directives for programs and practices that DESE will '...determine policies and practices...' for - how is that possible?
Too often those on the Right give the impression that they think the real issue with DESE has more to do with which party is running it, than the programs it's facilitating. No! That is not the problem, the problem is that it exists to push critical pedagogies like SEL into kids minds & spirits of our students - how can a knowledgeable legislator not be horrified by that? By believing, and so knowing nothing more than, the corporate marketing sheets for those programs, and imagining that features such as CASEL promotes about SEL's 'Five Core Competencies', to be about new methods for enhancing the quality of character through character development.
No! Their CASEL 'Five Core Competencies' are not providing a new 'sciencey' way of talking about character, they provide a means of eradicating the traditional western understanding of character, by instilling 'psycho social skills' in manipulating yourself and others to please and align with an activist goal - the praxis of virtue signaling through activism (look at those C3 'grade level expectations' for 2nd graders!) - instead of developing their student's knowledge of what is real and true, and developing the character to respect that. And they are rapidly insinuating those beliefs and practices into every aspect of our communities (look at the outer rings of 'communities', 'families & caregivers', 'schools', 'classroom' around their 'core five' - which BTW, is the strategic goal that John Dewey laid out a century ago, and SEL simply modernized).
That is what DESE and the programs they favor, are pumping into our kids, and how anyone can manage to not be alarmed at being involved in promoting DESE and its agenda into our students?!
Our legislators should be far more inclined towards caution, than towards accepting the assurances of these corporate marketing plans. But the sad fact is that we've got activists and lawmakers campaigning on 'improving education!' while not only unaware of what is actually wrong with education (Hint: It ain't Test Scores!), but are unaware of or unimpressed by the fact that they are enabling and facilitating the implementation of Social Justice pedagogies that are designed to subvert the mind & spirt of our children.
With that point in mind, it alarms me that Sen. Richey put out a response to those who had expressed concerns about the 'School Choice' SB727 bill, which he believes to be a convincing and 'common sense' approach, at about the 17 min. mark:
But when you are talking about those methods and programs concern what will be used to instill ideas, beliefs, and patterns of thinking into the minds of children... to assume that they will be implemented in the traditional fashion that most people assume, rather than in the manner of the radicals who've reigned in our Teachers Colleges (which nearly every teacher is mandated to have graduated from), in order to advance the pernicious and stated purposes of producing social justice activists, is not only foolish, but is exactly how 'conservative' agendas have so easily been transformed into serving the radical's agenda, decade, after decade, after decade. For our legislators to assume that their support won't somehow be helping to share and promote the radicals' agenda, shows an alarming lack of respect for the power of the ideas that they are negligently playing around with.
How it is that an agenda is so easily captured and repurposed, is through the use of Semantic Deceptions as a technique that is regularly practiced in academia, and consists of:
I've posted on this elsewhere, but I think it needs to at least be pointed out here, that critical pedagogists like Henry Giroux, who's put 100s of radical faculty members into faculty positions across America, notes how they turn conservative expectations, to their own critical purposes:
Tell me again how your 'agenda is very different'? I mean, aside from one being printed on paper, and the other's being injected straight into kids heads.
Yet conservatives continue to take the *pragmatic* ‘practical’ view of management, and blame failing schools on the workers, materials, processes involved (i.e. teachers, textbooks, unions), and propose to ‘fix our schools’ with more rigor (a keyword of semantic deception), homework, and more testing, and they cling to this strategy as if it's a lifeline, rather than an albatross around their necks.
Another thing the right misses, is that they naturally take the top-down viewpoint of management (and statists, btw), as Sen. Richey expressed above, that we needn't worry, since:
Conservatives consistently do not grasp that the goals which critical pedagogies are promoting do not require coherent actions and coordinated plans in order to build anything - building is not their goal - tearing down (deconstructing) is! - they only need and desire to insert a crack here, a fracture there, to be considered a complete success. As I've repeatedly pointed out over the years, the statement of radical deconstructionist activist Audre Lorde who declared what's become something of an anthem to the radical Left:
, and The Master's House is the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian culture - Western Civilization in general, America in particular - and that The Master's Tools come from the toolbox of 'epistemic adequacy', being a respect for Reality, Truth, Reason, Logic, Individual Rights, Property, and the Rule of Law.
How that plays out in our lives and the education of our students, is that what appears to ‘The Right’ to be a failure to respect truth, facts, and logic are the deliberate efforts - ‘Praxis’ - they engage with in their ongoing effort of tearing down the Master’s House, and scattering 'The Master's Tools‘ to the winds. What appear to be ‘stupid lessons’ to the conservative eye, aren’t signs of incompetence, but demonstrations of the goals & tools that are being used to destroy the jewels of The Grecco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West:
What may be most surprising of all, is that this same Conservative Feller tweeted out a picture of CRT and his personal understanding of Woke, which included:
How do you comprehend that, and not recognize that CBE & The Aurora Institute (and numerous other programs implicitly being supported) are suffused with those same strategies of DEI/SEL/ESG? This legislation will be partnering up with organizations that are not only promoting and funding SEL, DEI, ESG, but the legislation being supported will be utilizing the expansion of the 'MO Scholarships' program to spread them with?!
That ‘School Choice’ is so easily used to help promote these agendas is an entirely unsurprising and unavoidable result of the fact that education is not a political process, and subjecting it to the actions & compromises of the political process, under the eyes of legislators who have little or no understanding of the fundamental perils inherent in what the field has become.
In addition, as legislators who are focused on writing & passing laws ('that's our job!'), instead of focusing on the fact that their purpose of writing laws is to uphold and defend the individual rights of their constituents, leaves them thoroughly focused upon making political policies ‘work’, as they become ideologically blind to those rights that are being continually infringed upon, by those compulsory schooling laws which their aid is intensifying, rather than focusing upon undoing and ending.
So long as we put our children's lives and our own individual rights into the hands of politicians unbound to a guiding principle, they're going to be used to serve political purposes, and will continue to degrade, decay, and become destroyed.
That is the history of school reform in general, and the development of Common Core, CRT, SEL, and so on. There are bad actors involved in 'School Choice', and to assume there aren't, is to be so naive as to make yourself a useful idiot to those who count on either the passive or active ignorance of those in the layers of the Right's 'School Choice' divide, so as to further mislead them all for their own purposes.
Knowingly misleading and misinforming
Which brings us around to the bottom layer of this half of the Right's 'School Choice' divide.
This layer has the fewest members, and is made up of those who are too knowledgeable of the scope of positives and negatives, and about the natures of who they're partnering with, to grant the presumption of ignorance. There is too much that they consistently ignore, downplay, or deny the negatives of, which they have to know the details of to navigate the laws and regulations that their organizations operate within. Instead, they carefully cherry-pick what information to share, what to ignore, and what to denigrate, in order to best further their 'Liberty!' agenda.
That doesn't mean they have ill-intent, it means they think and act Pragmatically! I'd be unsurprised to learn that many if not most have only the best of intentions for furthering 'liberty!'(as they understand it), but in embracing the pragmatic 'the ends justify the means' attitude of experimentally doing what works, they show themselves to be unwise and unconcerned about what is good and true. As such, they have no compunctions against deliberately engaging in misleading the Uninformed and the Misinformed, who are so critical to their furthering their agenda of 'choice & competition' for 'the greater good!'.
We The People have obligingly provided them with more than a century of legislative and systemic infrastructure to operate within, so that it's going quite a bit wide of the mark, IMHO, to say that someone on this level is either good or bad, as that presumes a system that they are operating within, which would permit something that could objectively be called 'Good'.
It does not.
To see how all of this fits together, requires a brief review of what we all have been and are involved in here, knowingly or not.
You recall Sen. Richey's remark that:
All across America, from households to corporate boardrooms, people demanded that we ‘Do Something!’. It's true that the risk was very real, but what's also true is that the response of the Reagan administration to 'fix matters',
not only reinvigorated a new wave of school reforms - which has always been the most productive means for Pro-Regressives to turn our good intentions to serving their own purposes, but as this time the reforms were coming from within the federal government - it derailed Reagan's promise to abolish the Dept. of Education.
What began under Reagan's administration, picked up speed with Bush 41's 'thousand points of light', and reached critical speed in the Clinton administration. Without going into the details, which could (and has) filled books, some of the highlights were:
Because these laws and more are still in effect, they render activists & politician's calls for 'local control!' to be nothing more than exceedingly useful, but very empty, rhetoric. And because this is the world that our legislators and activists accept working within, and probably are thinking that they're going to improve education and make our schools more free - we can and should expect that to work out every bit as well, as increasing trade with Communist China did.
From Carter, to Reagan, to Bush 41 got the 'School Reform' ball rolling for (to say nothing of Teddy Roosevelt & Woodrow Wilson), which rapidly progressed into the Clinton administration, followed by Bush 43,
These policies that began with, and have been formed upon, the violation of our individual rights for 'the greater good' in compulsory schooling laws, have become the standard model for 'effective' policies - separated from principle, but always joined with economic jargon – and so have found favor with libertarians, republicans, and the Left, as being practical *pragmatic* means to ‘make things work’. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) was decided on as early as the 1990s as being THE best template to organize the polling, testing, and data collection methods for doing so (search on CASEL, The Fetzer Institute, UNESCO, for another eye-opener), was written into Federal Law in ESSA, and which Common Core Standards could not have been conceived of without.
Through these 'new' bureaucratic '21st Century' skills, was created the first coherent high-level roadmap for the School-To-Work process, which is expected to unite every student's studies, grades, and test scores, and all of the survey data associated with them that serves the interests of corporate America's 'Human Resources' departments, and on down the line to local school district rules & regulations, all under federal 'oversight'. Through these processes, we've allowed a system to be created to evaluate & implement continually evolving (experimental) standards, which are dependent upon a constant stream of data covering every aspect of our lives, to evaluate, track, and manage their 'human resources' with.
These policies and their purposes – behind the marketing of smiling faces and effective increases in productivity skills for the 21st century – are PRIME examples of utilizing Semantic Deception on a grand scale. ‘Whole Child’ always entails a focus on a part of the child, to serve ‘the whole’, as it dupes the well intentioned into furthering the goals and actions of those who truly hate America, Americans, and the West in general, and it is a key tool for their dismantling and ending all things American.
That current system CANNOT function without infringing upon and outright violating the individual rights of some (and therefore all) people.
It CANNOT be good, as the ideology is dedicated to do what needs to be done to advance the goal. Whatever helps to move that ball forward - no matter what else it's involved in of the cost. And so long as we don't focus on the fact that it is broken, and what needs to be done to fix it - repeal compulsory schooling laws - we naturally delude ourselves into imagining that tweaking this or that policy could be good.
It cannot.
I could go on another 20 pages further into the data-mining and graft which accompanied Common Core, or SEL, and the gutting of FERPA, or the fact that it is big, Big, BIG business, which they all function as a the means of uniting Pro-Regressives of the Left & Right, Leftists, Marxists, NGOs, Govt, and Big Business, in partnership (quick, someone look up Mussolini's definition of 'Fascism'), but we probably shouldn't move on without first giving a quick shout-out to Attorney General Merrick Garland's son-in-law's business, 'Panorama' surveys.
It should go without saying, that those who are so focused on the issues that they cannot acknowledge the dangers in the system in general, and with 'School Choice's operations within it, is someone who is either deluding themselves, or you, and so you should be very hesitant to trust them, no matter how 'liberty!' oriented they otherwise seem to be. The policies of 'School Choice' are but a means to 'do what works', without reference to, or building upon, principled foundations - legal or educational.
The most obvious example of those playing the 'competition = liberty!" game, is Corey D'Angelis, who presents himself as Mr. 'School Choice', and who is currently associated with AFP, and who has and does work in concert with UNESCO - which is a despicable, evil, organization that is explicitly bent upon using SEL to transform education and indeed independent thought. To the best of my knowledge he has made no explanations, excuses, or apologies for that - and so is someone I would not want to be caught working with.
Whether he does so knowingly, naively, or ignorantly, he is not someone whose advice should be trusted.
AFP as well. I know some very good people who are heavily involved with AFP and who would never knowingly do anything to further some of the aims which they are associated with... nevertheless, they are lending their support to an organization that is furthering those goals that are antithetical to everything they believe, and like it or not, they are aiding it in doing so. Whatever its 'libertarian' aspirations and standing, AFP is playing in the policy sandbox with people and organizations it would be wiser to distance itself from, to protect that liberty they say they value so highly.
This all progresses along, not just despite their good intentions, but because of all of their good intentions, they do not and cannot make explicitly clear, all of what they are supporting and promoting, through their efforts in 'School Choice', most of which its supporters would recoil from, if it were spelled out for them.
Hence the Misinformed, and the Uninformed.
While bad & worse is something we have to contend with, we can't allow those options to become our objective - never take your eyes off the fact that no real improvement can be made while mandatory schooling laws, and the government bureaucracies that exist to enforce them upon us, remain upon the books.
Where we're at today
'School Choice' policies are going to continue to be demanded, especially by parents who are trapped in abysmal public school districts (and there are no good ones), and it's not hard to understand the motives of those who believe that they're helping to give those parents a choice of 'not co-parenting with government'. But. We sure as heck shouldn't be dissuaded from pointing out the bad and truly worse options that 'School Choice' is progressively leading us towards.
At the opening I said I wanted to cover:
Don't look to government to fix that, it's up to you. And I do mean you. Yourself. And those your example can influence from having done so.
What hasn’t been noticed, and is now affecting each side, is what I expect you're well aware of now, that which is persisted through compulsory education laws, and their inevitable and detrimental effects upon our laws and our people. Repeat after me: Compulsory schooling laws must be destroyed. Make it into a routine comment:
What those who're for & against ‘School Choice’, are actually for and against, are ideological positions bereft of the principles they've become numb to even noticing. Notice them. Apply them. Bring the discussions of 'choice' you get involved in, back to discussions of principle, and how we can return our communities back to being based upon them, to be capable of and worthy of, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
What meaningful ‘School Choice’ entails and requires, is seeking to educate ourselves and our children, for the benefit of ourselves and our children, and not to 'boost the economy!', as was one of the rallying cries that got the whole awful mess going here, back with Noah Webster's efforts to 'do good!'. It's far more good, to strive to better understand our world and our places in it, and how our ideas and actions can make each other's lives better because we are there in them.
Bev Ehlen's sweet, sweet, brownies
What we do need to do is make these facts (and the questions that will lead people to recognize them) as widely known as possible, so that people can become well enough informed of the bad and worse trade-offs facing us, and the principle goal we should be seeking after, in order to make the best decision that's possible for them, and without their being treated as if they'd willfully turned down the only good and pure 'choice' that was never an option for them at all.
Be aware that there are those who will continue to press ahead without asking and pursuing the kinds of questions raised here and elsewhere, but when those good intentions are coupled with willful ignorance, it's important to remember that it doesn’t mean that they are neo-liberals or on the take, it's only a confirmation that "Ideology produces an ‘invincible ignorance", and it's only when those good intentions are coupled with willful ignorance or deliberate deception, that they become worthy of scorn.
But even then, when we're tempted to question or insult their 'conservative credentials', recall that legendary conservative Phyllis Schlafly, in spite of years of her friend Charlotte Iserbyt's attempts to get her to see the obvious dangers of 'School Choice' (which eventually ended their friendship), it wasn't until 2012 that she began to see that 'school choice' was becoming a vehicle for how Obama was going to coopt Charter/Choice under Common Core:
The human mind is not something that operates by flowchart logic, if they haven't yet been graced to see the 'bigger picture', they can't and won't see it, and especially not with your insulting them for ignoring what they haven't yet seen. Don't lecture or try to 'educate' them (few things come off as more condescending and insulting as that), just continue to ask those question which they haven't yet seen the ends of, and raise the specter of compulsory education whenever possible.
And try not to be too shocked when their blindness leads them into the most ridiculous of positions - remember: ideology doesn't just blind you, it deludes you.
Which brings us around to one last point to illustrate what happens when you allow ideology to intrude into your thinking. During the debates over Missouri's SB727 bill, I had a 'WTH?!'moment, when I saw the flyer along with a homemade brownie attached to it that Bev Ehlen, a conservative who was already very experienced when I first began getting involved during the Tea Party, had put on legislator's desks, with the title "Poop Brownies". But within about 10 seconds of beginning to read the attached poem, the humor was obvious, and the point - how a little sin ruins what should be sweet, paired up with govt controls sullying what should have been a 'choice' - and as it drew a reaction, a response, and a question from me, it was made exceedingly well.
But someone I've known since the early Tea Party days, took one look at what a politician had posted of it, and clutched his pearls over her "putting bags of dog poop on the desks of legislators", and:
If like me, you were unfamiliar with the popular and award winning Sunday School poem that Bev was making her point with, again, it's a poem to teach children a lesson that no matter how delicious a treat might appear to be, if you understand it was made with even a little bit of dog-poop, you wouldn't want to eat it, which is a lesson that can and should be one you apply in life to the world at large, and it's delivered innocuously, and humorously.
If you're not able to see the humor in a lesson, you're probably not going to be able to pick up on a number of lessons that it would be very much worth your while to start being able to see. And if other people you know and respect are able to get the humor of it, without being offended, you should be asking yourself why you weren't able to, as retaining your sense of humor is so necessary to our being able to learn from life's little lessons. And losing that ability is a sign that you might have begun wandering down an ideological perspective that leads to ways of thinking that are lacking in light.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Right cannot continue to function under the motive power of ideology, and we can't avoid descending into ideological warfare, so long as we ignore the real state of the system we're involved in, and what it is that forbids principled behavior.
Don't take a 'for or against' position on 'School Choice' as if it offered a choice at all. Recognize that there are only bad and worse tradeoffs, and don't be lulled by your passions into pretending that 'your side' offers true solutions, or even actual choices in education. Recognize that such policies are and have been used as strategies to progressively co-opt private, church, and home school education.
Even so, it is a trade-off that may be judged worthwhile for some, depending upon their circumstances. And never forget that some might don a mask of ulterior motives, for those engaged in cross-purposes - be wise as serpents.
Likewise, those who see the dangerous traps that the supporters of 'School Choice' are missing (or ignoring), need to stop obscuring or ignoring how what seems worse to them, is in many cases far less worse than the circumstances they're faced with here and now, and they shouldn't be vilified as if they had betrayed a choice that doesn't exist.
We've all got to deal with the reality of where we are, and the real dangers we are all heading towards, without pretending that we're in or heading towards some imagined 'better place' that exists nowhere - from either perspective that is a dangerously Utopian vision.
But.
Responsibility is not encouraged by ignoring reality, only by recognizing it, warts and all. The bottom line is that the responsibility rests with us, and We The People will not again become responsible, until the ability to comfortably shirk that responsibility is eliminated. Period.
Keep that in mind, and in as many other minds as you can help influence.
But wait, there's more!
If the most probable answers to those questions don't immediately send a shudder through you, ask yourself whether govt has more often permitted unclear issues to set limits upon government's powers, or has it used those uncertainties to expand government's powers into our lives? If the answer to that isn't obvious to you, you should look into the development of the IRS, the 'Navigable Waters' acts for property owners and farmers, and of course the 'Patriot Act's affects upon everyone's communication.
- Q: Does accepting additional funds (over and above what taxes you've paid) in a tax credit or ESA/voucher, entail 'public oversight' of how that money is spent? A: Spoiler alert: Yes.
- Q: Is that oversight limited to only what money is spent, or could it extend into govt having approval over the materials and content and quality of teaching involved? A: To answer that requires asking more questions:
- Could that oversight extend to the facilities (school or home) being taught in?
- Could that oversight extend to qualifications and 'training' of those involved have or have not had?
- Could that oversight extend beyond their competence and knowledge of a subject, to their 'soft skills'?
Ask yourself this: If you accept a tax credit or ESA/voucher towards your child's education at private, church, or homeschools, what wouldn't the state be able to inspect and approve - or disapprove - of? The possible answers to that is the sort of thing that is feared will follow - eventually if not immediately - from a 'School Choice' bill proposed in Tennessee, which has provisions that, if money is taken - for private, church, or homeschool - then: a by imposing rules & requirements on the 7 providers (what a market!).
"... this bill would provide that all officials and employees who work directly with children, must receive annually, the child abuse training program..."You should ask yourself how the government would verify that such 'training' had been understood and adequately applied? If you don't see how this has the potential to go far beyond wasting time and into subjecting entire families to psychological and ideological training, you should talk with any of your family & friends who've had the misfortune to 'engage' with 'Child Protective Services' departments.
Governments have consistently used oversight of public money to extend the reach of its powers beyond that of the literal letter of the law. It also uses that to ally itself with those special interests who stand to benefit from such laws.
A Free Market is what results from those principles which you either abide by, or abandon. Being pragmatic requires dealing with everything in life piecemeal, which ultimately is exceedingly impractical and amoral if not immoral. If you want to be practical, stop being pragmatic, and start being principled.
The wackadoos of the Uninformed
In absence of that information the Uninformed have so far failed to consider, criticism of their position seems absurd to them, and they typically deride those who don't support 'School Choice' by names such as 'Wackadoos!' for their concerns over state interference in their lives, and will fire back at them that:
'There're no such provisions in our bill!', which they seemingly do so in denial or ignorance of at least one very important qualifier: Yet.
Perhaps they have forgotten how Hillsdale College, if they ever knew, that after having admitted students who'd privately secured 'govt assistance' for their tuition, Hillsdale became locked into a decades long legal battle with the government over the claim that the college was required to adhere to numerous Dept. of Education 'standards, practices, and guidelines' that the Dept of Education had determined that they should have complied with.
In the end, the SCOTUS determined that with 'sheckles come shackles':
"...In Grove City College v. Bell (1984), affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court, the federal government prevailed over Hillsdale College, asserting that when an educational institution accepts students who receive government funds, it’s subject to government regulation...", and because Hillsdale lost, they do not now engage in, or accept students who engage in, government funded tuition today.
Does their position sound 'wackadoo' to you? Those on the 'Right' who are opposed to 'School Choice' have good reason to be rightly fearful that once such laws are taken advantage of by some in home schooling, they'll be pushed to become the norms for all to comply with, as has happened here already, and recently in West Virginia where protections for homeschoolers were put in the laws in 2021, and repealed in 2023.
And to the 'School Choice' supporter who tells the homeschoolers "If you don't like it, don't take it!", while that might sound very common sense on the face of it, there are at least two points of failure in it.
First, it ignores the fact that when those additional requirements to be abided by, become the norm for some under 'School Choice', it will tend to become treated as the norm for all, and those who don't want them, will be forced to be mindful of their deadlines to opt out of those new norms, as well as having to file new reports to be submitted, lessons to be justified, curriculum to be approved, grades to be evaluated, hours of teaching to be tallied, penalties for not knowing every clause of the regulatory codes, all to be submitted to and ruled upon, by a governmental bureaucracy that thoroughly disapproves of them.
Second: Changing from 'We're gonna make you an offer you can't refuse' to 'We're gonna make you a number of offers you can't refuse', doesn't make it any less of a threat towards you - there is no free 'choice' being offered, only more options that you are being compelled to select from.
'Compulsory Schooling Delende Est!'
"Why can't you just be pragmatic about this? Be practical!"
Libertarian, conservatives, politicians, & business minded folk will sometimes say things like:
'Don't get excited, we just want to be pragmatic about this, experiment 'till we find something that works!', and I can't help but reply, that one of the three founders of Pragmatism, John Dewey, was the father of the same system of Progressive Education that we're battling with today. Dewey's and their pragmatic advice, believing as the German idealists did that we can't know reality as it actually is ('the thing-in-itself'("das Ding an sich")'), was that we should ignore principles, and experimentally do what seemed likely to produced useful results. And if and when that fails (oops! Sorry about wasting that year kids!), do something else until something works, rinse & repeat.
C.S. Peirce, John Dewey, William James
'Muddying the waters to make them appear deep'That was describing those dense idealists 'philosophies' of Kant & Hegel, and which Marx then materialized. The Pragmatists generally agreed with them - Dewey published his first four articles in the St. Louis Hegelians publication - but they wanted to make them seem a little simpler and less offputting, basically to repackage them into a more marketable format, which I like to describe as:
'Muddying the waters to make them appear shallow', meaning something to the effect of 'Oh sure, you might not understand all this stuff, but it's not really all that important, and certainly nothing to worry your pretty little head over' - or shorter still: 'Just Do It!'.
It's not too much to say that the pragmatists took Marx's telling comment that,
"Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.", and pragmatically restated it so that those deeper issues that people once concerned themselves over - reality, truth, ethics - were transformed into inconsequential shallows that needn't concern anyone. It was from perspective that they came to the Pragmatic definition of 'Truth':
'Truth is what works', and accepting those substitutes, shifts your thinking away from being concerned with qualities of what is real ('real?!') and true, and right & wrong, to a more utilitarian interest in quantifying matters for ‘the greater good’.
Unfortunately for us, as the idea of liberty under the rule of law is entirely incompatible with 'just experimentally doing what works', I'd advise you to make your decisions by other more principled means, especially since being uninformed will not excuse you from the consequences that will eventually follow once those in power turn their experiments in 'what works', into Law.
It is reckless to advocate for laws without regard to what those laws might 'yet' be used to enable, as once a law is on the books, a statute that is seemingly benign today, is a very short step away from being further amended, or less obviously modified through regulatory rulings that expand the state's responsibilities of oversight, to be overseen by their Dept of Education.
That has been the history in Missouri, and it will continue to do so in a manner that will only become more intrusive as time goes on, as it's being performed by people who are in virulent opposition to even the existence of non-public education.
Each opening the govt is given into our lives, it will work on expanding.
'Compulsory Schooling Delende Est!'
The Contentedly Misinformed
The next layer down is made up of those who also believe what the Uninformed Majority do, but though they are in positions to know better, they're content to remain as uninformed or misinformed, as suits their purposes. These people, often legislators and/or activists advising others on what to think about 'School Choice', are typically very knowledgeable about the details of the policy they are promoting, but tend to have only a shallow understanding of opponents objections to their policies (often smearing them as allied with public school supporters), and are only dimly aware of the gaps in their own knowledge, gaps which conveniently enable them to maintain a 'plausible deniability' of details which are more easily dismissed in favor of their own 'common sense' assumptions about them (read: "That seems nuts, so no need to look any further"), which in their mind's trumps their fringe concerns.
A prime example of this layer comes from a Missouri State Senator, Doug Richey. From the little I've seen of his interviews, comments, and presentations, I've seen no reason to suppose that he’s a ‘fake conservative’, or that he's shilling for 'neo-liberal' ideals, etc., he seems like a sensible, well intentioned proponent of conservative ideals... until he slides into the ideological divide of 'School Choice'. Once involved in that, he too becomes all about dismissing those who criticize his positions as being shills for the teachers unions, school monopolies, tyranny, etc. which are of course quickly met with a loud volley of epithets coming from the other side of the divide, as both sides of the 'School Choice' divide do what conservatives do best - come together to divide ourselves over what we all care the most about.
I don't believe the republican legislator's intended their language change to enable any issue of the kind, but instead of taking people's - their constituents - concerns seriously, they mostly minimized or dismissed them, and then mocked all such concerns as being 'wackadoos‘ and shills for monopoly education. As people's concerns didn't let up, they found some support from their own side, posting a legal opinion that said:
"... such actions shouldn't be possible..." and "... if they did, they'd quickly run into articles & clauses...",, and they seemed stunned that people weren't satisfied with that, as if we weren't aware that in today’s judicial climate we have had prosecuting attorneys like Kim Gardner in St. Louis who should prosecute criminals but don’t, and shouldn’t seek to prosecute people defending their homes, yet do so, and where Secretary of States in Colorado and Maine attempted to ban presidential candidates from their elections, and where people shouldn’t be imprisoned for sitting in protest outside an abortion office. Somehow to ‘School Choice’ supporters surprise, many of us weren't satisfied with staking our lives on how our judicial system 'should' behave.
Many, including myself, urged that they
"Don't be reckless with the 2nd Amdt, and with lawfare against our fellow citizens. Just revise the clause, so we can get back to arguing over 'School Choice'.", but the comments from that side of the 'School Choice' divide continued to be filled with angry dismissals, insults, and denials. Only after respected libertarians and conservatives, like activist Ron Calzone of MoFirst, and the constitutional lawyer, Dave Roland,, who's argued and won cases before the MO Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court, expressed his concerns that since the Courts were not acting on legislation as they should, legislators should not count on what 'should' be done in court.
Soon after that, FHE/HSLDA withdrew their support for their bill, and only then did the legislators bother to reexamine their legislative language.
The point here is not whether or not laws can be misused, but that when lawmakers become so focused on one ideological issue, the possible ramifications it could have on other issues are put out of sight & out of mind for the sake of that agenda, as the concerns & objections of people – constituents! - are dismissed as being 'wackadoos' and paid shills for monopoly ed, even though they fundamentally share the same point of view - AKA: ideological warfare.
Even then, as Jeremy Jacobs pointed out in a well stated video, that in their hurry to fix an issue that had resulted from ill-considered changes, they hurriedly revised a separate house bill to cover those concerns, but if that bill is challenged and struck down, the current legislation flaws and all, would become the law with its ill-considered language intact.
"...Just for clarity's sake, I think I'm fairly well known in this room, in this chamber, as a fairly conservative feller, and Competency Based Education is not a liberal effort..."
@DougRicheyMO supported the MO taxpayer funded pilot for
competency-based education (CBE)...
— MO Education Watch (@MOEdWatch) March 30, 2024
When challenged about that comment, rather than looking into why his constituents were alarmed at his 'common sense' statement, he seems to have zoomed right past the possibility that he might be unaware of an actual danger to his constituents, and doubled down on it by X-Tweating his support:
"...The core element of Competency Based Education is also present within homeschool education. Curriculum is paced by the child’s mastery of the subject at hand. The student advances as quickly or slowly as he/she reaches competency. That's why my bill created a pathway for early graduation.Such 'common sense' dismissals express an ignorance of what should be widely understood by anyone in such a position as Sen. Richey, as being less 'common sense', than an echo of corporate marketing, of the sort that Jane Robbins exposed seven years ago about "What’s not to like?" in 'Competency-Based Education', which entails:
If this is leftist, then you're suggesting that every homeschool family is using a leftist approach. CBE removes arbitrary timelines and rejects the notion that education is a manufacturing process where every student is the same..."
"...CBE is essentially the same thing as outcome-based education (OBE), which was all the rage in the 1990s until parents rebelled. OBE and now CBE posit that the government should establish outcomes it wants students to achieve and then work backwards, setting interim benchmarks along the journey to that goal. Students would work at their own pace to establish “competency” at each benchmark[...] So this is the first problem with CBE: it aims not for excellent, but for good enough....", and,
"...the vague outcomes governments established under OBE focused more on “values, attitudes and behaviors – often reflecting quasi-political and ideologically correct positions – rather than knowledge, skills and other cognitive academic outcomes.”
The goal wasn’t to instill academic knowledge, it was to train children to give responses in non-cognitive realms, to exhibit the psycho-social skills the government considers most valuable. This is what prompted opposition from parents then, and this is what CBE is trying to replicate now...."
Dr. Bruno V. Manno: Outcome-Based Education: Miracle Cure or Plague? September 1, 1995
, CBE, like OBE before it, selectively sidesteps, evades, and reduces knowledge & wisdom in favor of tallying up measurable quantities of 'questions & answers' that are useful for attaining their ideological objectives, reflecting not the quality of a student's understanding of a subject, but their ability to give those responses that their quiz & exam scores were targeted to be ingrained into students as the 'outcome' desired.
"...Third, I examine what has occurred in two states—Virginia and Minnesota—that have implemented outcomes approaches. Their experiences are similar 'to those of other states. More than anything, in these efforts we see well-intentioned elected public officials blindly handing responsibility for specifying outcomes to groups dominated by education views nearly antithetical to those the public officials thought they were mandating. The typical result is a list comprising mostly transformational outcomes that arise from the progressive idea that schools should make a "new social order." This discussion illustrates how "the devil is in the details" whenever reformers advocate an outcome-based approach to education...."
Education proposals can seem like common sense when you look no further into them than their marketing, such as the PR material of programs like The Aurora Institute, which are attached to the 2022 Ed Omnibus Bill, which are self-described as:
SRS Network Competency-Based Learning Definition, but unfortunately education is not a subject that's safe to make decisions about based upon its marketing - not if you care about education.
A competency-based, personalized learning mindset is an essential component that supports this student-centered framework and the work of the SRSN.
The Missouri framework for competency-based learning (CBL) includes the seven elements that define a competency-based education system, plus an additional Real World Learning element, for a total of eight elements....
To be able to read past "... competency-based, personalized learning mindset..." without being thoroughly alarmed at the nature of the system being described, reveals that person to either have a critical ignorance of the issues involved in modern education, or that they are far too unimpressed by the seriousness of them, and in either case they should not be involved in managing, let alone legislating, upon education today.
Misinformed about buzzwords and 'What's not to like?'
Have conservatives already forgotten how easily they were taken in by the marketing claims for Common Core?! Do they really expect us to forget about how easily they've been misled in the past?
The meaningless marketing lingo of "personalized learning mindset ", "...the seven elements that define...." and "...an additional Real World Learning element..." are dependent upon the ignorance of decision makers, of what lies beneath the surface of the marketing's citations of 'studies say', as SEL does with the 'Durlak study' (a study funded by the Aspen Institute & CASEL, to promote SEL), which professes the claim of :
'...not only improves achievement by an average of 11 percentile points, but it also increases pro-social behaviors such as kindness...', as support for SEL's claims, despite the fact that the details of the study undermine and refute that claim!
It takes bothering to look beneath the surface to see exactly 'What's not to like?' in them, but they make such patently irresponsible assertions, because they are confident that no decision maker will ever bother investigating them.
Another issue is that our SB727 'School Choice' legislation, is riddled with directives for programs and practices that DESE will '...determine policies and practices...' for - how is that possible?
Too often those on the Right give the impression that they think the real issue with DESE has more to do with which party is running it, than the programs it's facilitating. No! That is not the problem, the problem is that it exists to push critical pedagogies like SEL into kids minds & spirits of our students - how can a knowledgeable legislator not be horrified by that? By believing, and so knowing nothing more than, the corporate marketing sheets for those programs, and imagining that features such as CASEL promotes about SEL's 'Five Core Competencies', to be about new methods for enhancing the quality of character through character development.
Our legislators should be far more inclined towards caution, than towards accepting the assurances of these corporate marketing plans. But the sad fact is that we've got activists and lawmakers campaigning on 'improving education!' while not only unaware of what is actually wrong with education (Hint: It ain't Test Scores!), but are unaware of or unimpressed by the fact that they are enabling and facilitating the implementation of Social Justice pedagogies that are designed to subvert the mind & spirt of our children.
With that point in mind, it alarms me that Sen. Richey put out a response to those who had expressed concerns about the 'School Choice' SB727 bill, which he believes to be a convincing and 'common sense' approach, at about the 17 min. mark:
"... So to insinuate that because UNESCO, un, wef, talks about education, and in some way trying to, in some kind of subtle way begin to try to influence and takeover elements of private education, does not invalidate other groups and other individuals working to promote, uhm, private education, and parental rights, and parental choice, when it comes to education. We may be talking and using the same words, but the agenda is very different. So from my perspective, it is absolutely not a leftist impulse. We're talking about an effort that's been part of the rep platform for decades. This goes back to Ronald Reagan, it's a part of the Trump platform, its in the Republican platform... this is an important effort when it comes to decentralizing the influence and decision making of education regarding our kids, and if this were some UN ploy, they would not be working to decentralize, they'd be working to take over the decision making process, so no one would be able to decide outside what they determine, right? ...."To say that you are able to share in the words you're using, but not the agenda being served by them, might be possible when the legislation being proposed by democrats and republicans is for building a hospital or a freeway offramp.
But when you are talking about those methods and programs concern what will be used to instill ideas, beliefs, and patterns of thinking into the minds of children... to assume that they will be implemented in the traditional fashion that most people assume, rather than in the manner of the radicals who've reigned in our Teachers Colleges (which nearly every teacher is mandated to have graduated from), in order to advance the pernicious and stated purposes of producing social justice activists, is not only foolish, but is exactly how 'conservative' agendas have so easily been transformed into serving the radical's agenda, decade, after decade, after decade. For our legislators to assume that their support won't somehow be helping to share and promote the radicals' agenda, shows an alarming lack of respect for the power of the ideas that they are negligently playing around with.
How it is that an agenda is so easily captured and repurposed, is through the use of Semantic Deceptions as a technique that is regularly practiced in academia, and consists of:
"Redefining terms to get agreement without understanding. Example: use of words that mean one thing to parents and another thing to change agents.“This technique is particularly favored by critical pedagogists, who use words they know will be taken to mean one thing by most of the people listening to them, while understanding that their fellow travelers, academics, and Woke Folx, will understand the very different esoteric meanings that were actually intended by them, and which will be implemented in very, very, different directions than what the uninitiated listeners - parents, policy makers - had been led to expect.
I've posted on this elsewhere, but I think it needs to at least be pointed out here, that critical pedagogists like Henry Giroux, who's put 100s of radical faculty members into faculty positions across America, notes how they turn conservative expectations, to their own critical purposes:
"...Teaching for many conservatives is often treated simply as a set of strategies and skills to use in order to teach prespecified subject matter....", and that:
“...On the other hand, critical pedagogy must be seen as a political and moral project and not a technique. Pedagogy is always political because it is connected to the acquisition of agency... illuminates the relationships among knowledge, authority, and power... pedagogy is a deliberate attempt on the part of educators to influence how and what knowledge and subjectivities are produced within particular sets of social relations..."DEI uses ‘fairness’ to focus power through the lens of race/gender/sexuality/etc., to 'decenter' and undermine whoever is being targeted as having establishment privilege. An excellent example of how this 'theory' works out in practice, comes from Jennifer McWilliams, a teacher who’d had enough, told how she'd witnessed a 2nd grade math word problem, as it was passed through the lens of DEI as:
"Johnny's parents are taking him to the amusement park. If the park is fifty miles away, and they have driven 30 miles, how many more miles to go?”So while our legislators are patting themselves on the back over having accomplished their agenda of passing laws requiring more 'back to basics!', the critical pedagogists are busily turning the letter of the legislator's laws, into 20 minutes of 'math oriented' classes that've been fulfilled without any math skills having been taught (Math is racist after all), while several lessons in 'lived experiences' & social justice activism, have been.
The teacher then practices 'Culturally Responsive' teaching engagement: "Who’s been to Amusement park?"
And as some kids don't raise their hand, the teacher is able to turn the discussion: "What are some reasons someone might not have been to an amusement park?"
, and into discussing the unfairness of poverty, and shouldn't everyone have the money to go to the amusement park?
...and that some kids don’t have two parents,
...and that others have two mommies or two daddies,
...and of course into sustainability and environmental agendas of course: "should people even be driving 30 miles to an amusement park? Won't that harm the environment?"
Tell me again how your 'agenda is very different'? I mean, aside from one being printed on paper, and the other's being injected straight into kids heads.
Yet conservatives continue to take the *pragmatic* ‘practical’ view of management, and blame failing schools on the workers, materials, processes involved (i.e. teachers, textbooks, unions), and propose to ‘fix our schools’ with more rigor (a keyword of semantic deception), homework, and more testing, and they cling to this strategy as if it's a lifeline, rather than an albatross around their necks.
Another thing the right misses, is that they naturally take the top-down viewpoint of management (and statists, btw), as Sen. Richey expressed above, that we needn't worry, since:
"...if this were some UN ploy, they would not be working to decentralize, they'd be working to take over the decision making process...", doesn't understand why organizations as widely varied as the Tea Party and Antifa, were able to operate successfully without having a formal organizational structure to coordinate and give marching orders through. They are motivated by their beliefs, not by instructions given to them. They seek decentralization and are repelled by the nature of top-down organizational structures, and consequently they do not need or rely upon the type of top-down decision-making processes that people like Sen. Richey live by. IOW: It's not our laws or even our school systems that the radicals are centralized around, "it’s the pedagogy stupid!", which our mandatory schooling laws and related regulations effectively make mandatory in our Teachers Colleges, and through those 'professional workshops' that are held weekly in your friendly neighborhood schools.
Conservatives consistently do not grasp that the goals which critical pedagogies are promoting do not require coherent actions and coordinated plans in order to build anything - building is not their goal - tearing down (deconstructing) is! - they only need and desire to insert a crack here, a fracture there, to be considered a complete success. As I've repeatedly pointed out over the years, the statement of radical deconstructionist activist Audre Lorde who declared what's become something of an anthem to the radical Left:
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”,
All of which are easily presented as ‘Critical Thinking’ (much more on that in future posts) to anyone who’s not looked any further into education that its marketing.
- Religion,
- Philosophy,
- Knowledge,
- Wisdom,
- Literature, virtue, justice,
- and the Rule of Law
What may be most surprising of all, is that this same Conservative Feller tweeted out a picture of CRT and his personal understanding of Woke, which included:
"...Politically, it thrives on identity politics. Legally, it pronounces guilt without any evidence of personal wrongdoing. Religiously, it denies the basis of human dignity — the Imago Dei. Semantically, it manipulates public conversation by using broadly celebrated terms, without informing the broader audience that they’ve radically changed the definitions of those terms.
As a movement, its success is tied to divisive revolutionary strategies deployed throughout existing sectors within our public and private spheres. CRT is the ‘thought’ substructure for the public facing efforts of DEI/SEL/ESG..."[emphasis mine]
That ‘School Choice’ is so easily used to help promote these agendas is an entirely unsurprising and unavoidable result of the fact that education is not a political process, and subjecting it to the actions & compromises of the political process, under the eyes of legislators who have little or no understanding of the fundamental perils inherent in what the field has become.
In addition, as legislators who are focused on writing & passing laws ('that's our job!'), instead of focusing on the fact that their purpose of writing laws is to uphold and defend the individual rights of their constituents, leaves them thoroughly focused upon making political policies ‘work’, as they become ideologically blind to those rights that are being continually infringed upon, by those compulsory schooling laws which their aid is intensifying, rather than focusing upon undoing and ending.
So long as we put our children's lives and our own individual rights into the hands of politicians unbound to a guiding principle, they're going to be used to serve political purposes, and will continue to degrade, decay, and become destroyed.
That is the history of school reform in general, and the development of Common Core, CRT, SEL, and so on. There are bad actors involved in 'School Choice', and to assume there aren't, is to be so naive as to make yourself a useful idiot to those who count on either the passive or active ignorance of those in the layers of the Right's 'School Choice' divide, so as to further mislead them all for their own purposes.
Compulsory schooling delende est!
Knowingly misleading and misinforming
Which brings us around to the bottom layer of this half of the Right's 'School Choice' divide.
This layer has the fewest members, and is made up of those who are too knowledgeable of the scope of positives and negatives, and about the natures of who they're partnering with, to grant the presumption of ignorance. There is too much that they consistently ignore, downplay, or deny the negatives of, which they have to know the details of to navigate the laws and regulations that their organizations operate within. Instead, they carefully cherry-pick what information to share, what to ignore, and what to denigrate, in order to best further their 'Liberty!' agenda.
That doesn't mean they have ill-intent, it means they think and act Pragmatically! I'd be unsurprised to learn that many if not most have only the best of intentions for furthering 'liberty!'(as they understand it), but in embracing the pragmatic 'the ends justify the means' attitude of experimentally doing what works, they show themselves to be unwise and unconcerned about what is good and true. As such, they have no compunctions against deliberately engaging in misleading the Uninformed and the Misinformed, who are so critical to their furthering their agenda of 'choice & competition' for 'the greater good!'.
We The People have obligingly provided them with more than a century of legislative and systemic infrastructure to operate within, so that it's going quite a bit wide of the mark, IMHO, to say that someone on this level is either good or bad, as that presumes a system that they are operating within, which would permit something that could objectively be called 'Good'.
It does not.
To see how all of this fits together, requires a brief review of what we all have been and are involved in here, knowingly or not.
You recall Sen. Richey's remark that:
"...We're talking about an effort that's been part of the rep platform for decades. This goes back to Ronald Reagan, it's a part of the Trump platform, its in the Republican platform..."That is very true. I'm not questioning his intentions, or Reagan's, or Trump's. I am questioning whether the good intentions of many fine people, are enough to ensure that they aren't used in a less than good way. For instance you may all be aware of America's response to a study during the Reagan administration, called: ‘A Nation at Risk’(1983), which rightly noted that:
"...If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war...."
What began under Reagan's administration, picked up speed with Bush 41's 'thousand points of light', and reached critical speed in the Clinton administration. Without going into the details, which could (and has) filled books, some of the highlights were:
The IASA provided a blueprint that further tied federal dollars to State & Local actions, to implement federal policies at the local level (not for the first time, though the first time was also to do with education, in the mid 1800s). Missouri's SB380 (1993) provided
- Governors & Business Leaders formed non-profit ‘Achieve!’
- The Education President Bush 41’s ‘Thousand points of light’
- 1st School Voucher program: The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program - 1990 (lauded by then Gov. Bill Clinton, as well as libertarian economist Milton Freidman)
- The first law allowing the establishment of public charter schools was passed in Minnesota in 1991.
- Goals 2000 signed 3/31/1994 as public law 103.227,
- Improving America's Schools Act (IASA) 10/20/1994 public law 103-382
These plans united Govt & Business as a vehicle for implementing it all, everywhere, as with the "Missouri Community Career System - School To Work STWO", which became law on My 4, 1994 as Public Law 103-239, for
- "...Students will... [e]valuate events, issues, and systems... and predict their impact upon individuals, societies, and the environment." and that "[The student] uses data from developing countries to evaluate equity issues (...female versus male) concerning access to health care, education, and other social services."
, of which Donna Hearne noted on pg. 93 of her book 'The long war and common core':
- "Providing all students with the skills, knowledge, abilities, opportunities to be productive workers and citizens in the high performing workplace that is Missouri "
"Missouri has used this to effectively wipeout local control..."
From Carter, to Reagan, to Bush 41 got the 'School Reform' ball rolling for (to say nothing of Teddy Roosevelt & Woodrow Wilson), which rapidly progressed into the Clinton administration, followed by Bush 43,
, and put the pedal to the metal with the Obama administrations 'Race To The Top' and 'Common Core'
- No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) 2002
BTW, if you haven't heard of Marc Tucker's 'Dear Hillary' letter, you should search it up. This also marked that point where these plans first began taking on the overt attitude of using actual force against those parents who objected to it, and which has now reached the level of our Justice Dept now speaking openly of equating concerned parents with 'domestic terrorists'.
- Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) 2015
These policies that began with, and have been formed upon, the violation of our individual rights for 'the greater good' in compulsory schooling laws, have become the standard model for 'effective' policies - separated from principle, but always joined with economic jargon – and so have found favor with libertarians, republicans, and the Left, as being practical *pragmatic* means to ‘make things work’. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) was decided on as early as the 1990s as being THE best template to organize the polling, testing, and data collection methods for doing so (search on CASEL, The Fetzer Institute, UNESCO, for another eye-opener), was written into Federal Law in ESSA, and which Common Core Standards could not have been conceived of without.
Through these 'new' bureaucratic '21st Century' skills, was created the first coherent high-level roadmap for the School-To-Work process, which is expected to unite every student's studies, grades, and test scores, and all of the survey data associated with them that serves the interests of corporate America's 'Human Resources' departments, and on down the line to local school district rules & regulations, all under federal 'oversight'. Through these processes, we've allowed a system to be created to evaluate & implement continually evolving (experimental) standards, which are dependent upon a constant stream of data covering every aspect of our lives, to evaluate, track, and manage their 'human resources' with.
These policies and their purposes – behind the marketing of smiling faces and effective increases in productivity skills for the 21st century – are PRIME examples of utilizing Semantic Deception on a grand scale. ‘Whole Child’ always entails a focus on a part of the child, to serve ‘the whole’, as it dupes the well intentioned into furthering the goals and actions of those who truly hate America, Americans, and the West in general, and it is a key tool for their dismantling and ending all things American.
That current system CANNOT function without infringing upon and outright violating the individual rights of some (and therefore all) people.
It CANNOT be good, as the ideology is dedicated to do what needs to be done to advance the goal. Whatever helps to move that ball forward - no matter what else it's involved in of the cost. And so long as we don't focus on the fact that it is broken, and what needs to be done to fix it - repeal compulsory schooling laws - we naturally delude ourselves into imagining that tweaking this or that policy could be good.
It cannot.
I could go on another 20 pages further into the data-mining and graft which accompanied Common Core, or SEL, and the gutting of FERPA, or the fact that it is big, Big, BIG business, which they all function as a the means of uniting Pro-Regressives of the Left & Right, Leftists, Marxists, NGOs, Govt, and Big Business, in partnership (quick, someone look up Mussolini's definition of 'Fascism'), but we probably shouldn't move on without first giving a quick shout-out to Attorney General Merrick Garland's son-in-law's business, 'Panorama' surveys.
It should go without saying, that those who are so focused on the issues that they cannot acknowledge the dangers in the system in general, and with 'School Choice's operations within it, is someone who is either deluding themselves, or you, and so you should be very hesitant to trust them, no matter how 'liberty!' oriented they otherwise seem to be. The policies of 'School Choice' are but a means to 'do what works', without reference to, or building upon, principled foundations - legal or educational.
AFP as well. I know some very good people who are heavily involved with AFP and who would never knowingly do anything to further some of the aims which they are associated with... nevertheless, they are lending their support to an organization that is furthering those goals that are antithetical to everything they believe, and like it or not, they are aiding it in doing so. Whatever its 'libertarian' aspirations and standing, AFP is playing in the policy sandbox with people and organizations it would be wiser to distance itself from, to protect that liberty they say they value so highly.
This all progresses along, not just despite their good intentions, but because of all of their good intentions, they do not and cannot make explicitly clear, all of what they are supporting and promoting, through their efforts in 'School Choice', most of which its supporters would recoil from, if it were spelled out for them.
Hence the Misinformed, and the Uninformed.
While bad & worse is something we have to contend with, we can't allow those options to become our objective - never take your eyes off the fact that no real improvement can be made while mandatory schooling laws, and the government bureaucracies that exist to enforce them upon us, remain upon the books.
Where we're at today
'School Choice' policies are going to continue to be demanded, especially by parents who are trapped in abysmal public school districts (and there are no good ones), and it's not hard to understand the motives of those who believe that they're helping to give those parents a choice of 'not co-parenting with government'. But. We sure as heck shouldn't be dissuaded from pointing out the bad and truly worse options that 'School Choice' is progressively leading us towards.
At the opening I said I wanted to cover:
The background which makes it possible, and within which we're all operating with today, is our turning away from the traditional ideal of what education was and was for. To a schoolmaster like George Turnbull, who knew John Locke, and helped educate the philosopher of the school of Scottish Common Sense Realism, Thomas Reid, he gave an overview in the opening chapter of his 'An Essay on Liberal Education'(1742)', as being:
- the background all sides are operating within
- how what hasn’t been noticed, is affecting each side
- what those for & against ‘School Choice’ are actually for and against
- what meaningful ‘School Choice’ entails and requires
"...Instruction in the science or art of right living is the chief lesson in education, to which all others ought to be rendered subservient, and what this science is, and what may justly be called false learning.", and various works of literature had been found to be the tried-and-true means for students to receive such an education from - whether that came about through schools, or other means & sources, was incidental to its actual point. And education's actual point was and still is (IMHO):
"To equip a student to become an informed, moral and self-governing individual capable of living a life worth living in society with their fellows in liberty."Unfortunately we turned away from that ideal that formed the founders of our nation, in favor of an ever-shifting utilitarian target of 'the greater good', which has progressively enabled the political and economic takeover of our educational system, and the undermining of the foundation of our republic: We The People.
Don't look to government to fix that, it's up to you. And I do mean you. Yourself. And those your example can influence from having done so.
What hasn’t been noticed, and is now affecting each side, is what I expect you're well aware of now, that which is persisted through compulsory education laws, and their inevitable and detrimental effects upon our laws and our people. Repeat after me: Compulsory schooling laws must be destroyed. Make it into a routine comment:
"Hey, it was good getting together for lunch, and remember, Compulsory schooling laws must be destroyed, have a nice day!", the idea needs to enter into popular opinion to become a goal, and it does that through your talking about it.
What those who're for & against ‘School Choice’, are actually for and against, are ideological positions bereft of the principles they've become numb to even noticing. Notice them. Apply them. Bring the discussions of 'choice' you get involved in, back to discussions of principle, and how we can return our communities back to being based upon them, to be capable of and worthy of, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
What meaningful ‘School Choice’ entails and requires, is seeking to educate ourselves and our children, for the benefit of ourselves and our children, and not to 'boost the economy!', as was one of the rallying cries that got the whole awful mess going here, back with Noah Webster's efforts to 'do good!'. It's far more good, to strive to better understand our world and our places in it, and how our ideas and actions can make each other's lives better because we are there in them.
Bev Ehlen's sweet, sweet, brownies
What we do need to do is make these facts (and the questions that will lead people to recognize them) as widely known as possible, so that people can become well enough informed of the bad and worse trade-offs facing us, and the principle goal we should be seeking after, in order to make the best decision that's possible for them, and without their being treated as if they'd willfully turned down the only good and pure 'choice' that was never an option for them at all.
Be aware that there are those who will continue to press ahead without asking and pursuing the kinds of questions raised here and elsewhere, but when those good intentions are coupled with willful ignorance, it's important to remember that it doesn’t mean that they are neo-liberals or on the take, it's only a confirmation that "Ideology produces an ‘invincible ignorance", and it's only when those good intentions are coupled with willful ignorance or deliberate deception, that they become worthy of scorn.
But even then, when we're tempted to question or insult their 'conservative credentials', recall that legendary conservative Phyllis Schlafly, in spite of years of her friend Charlotte Iserbyt's attempts to get her to see the obvious dangers of 'School Choice' (which eventually ended their friendship), it wasn't until 2012 that she began to see that 'school choice' was becoming a vehicle for how Obama was going to coopt Charter/Choice under Common Core:
"The Obama Core advocates are even planning to impose their standards on private schools. As the school choice movement grows, the attempt will be made to force any private or charter school that accepts public funds to adopt Common Core standards and have their students take the national tests."Just because a person can't yet see the dangers that seem so obvious to you, doesn't mean that they are choosing to 'sell out' or betray the fundamentals you both share.
The human mind is not something that operates by flowchart logic, if they haven't yet been graced to see the 'bigger picture', they can't and won't see it, and especially not with your insulting them for ignoring what they haven't yet seen. Don't lecture or try to 'educate' them (few things come off as more condescending and insulting as that), just continue to ask those question which they haven't yet seen the ends of, and raise the specter of compulsory education whenever possible.
And try not to be too shocked when their blindness leads them into the most ridiculous of positions - remember: ideology doesn't just blind you, it deludes you.
Which brings us around to one last point to illustrate what happens when you allow ideology to intrude into your thinking. During the debates over Missouri's SB727 bill, I had a 'WTH?!'moment, when I saw the flyer along with a homemade brownie attached to it that Bev Ehlen, a conservative who was already very experienced when I first began getting involved during the Tea Party, had put on legislator's desks, with the title "Poop Brownies". But within about 10 seconds of beginning to read the attached poem, the humor was obvious, and the point - how a little sin ruins what should be sweet, paired up with govt controls sullying what should have been a 'choice' - and as it drew a reaction, a response, and a question from me, it was made exceedingly well.
But someone I've known since the early Tea Party days, took one look at what a politician had posted of it, and clutched his pearls over her "putting bags of dog poop on the desks of legislators", and:
"How unhinged and desperate are the anti-school choice “conservatives” getting? How far have some people fallen?", and that was the nicer part of his comments.
If like me, you were unfamiliar with the popular and award winning Sunday School poem that Bev was making her point with, again, it's a poem to teach children a lesson that no matter how delicious a treat might appear to be, if you understand it was made with even a little bit of dog-poop, you wouldn't want to eat it, which is a lesson that can and should be one you apply in life to the world at large, and it's delivered innocuously, and humorously.
If you're not able to see the humor in a lesson, you're probably not going to be able to pick up on a number of lessons that it would be very much worth your while to start being able to see. And if other people you know and respect are able to get the humor of it, without being offended, you should be asking yourself why you weren't able to, as retaining your sense of humor is so necessary to our being able to learn from life's little lessons. And losing that ability is a sign that you might have begun wandering down an ideological perspective that leads to ways of thinking that are lacking in light.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Right cannot continue to function under the motive power of ideology, and we can't avoid descending into ideological warfare, so long as we ignore the real state of the system we're involved in, and what it is that forbids principled behavior.
Don't take a 'for or against' position on 'School Choice' as if it offered a choice at all. Recognize that there are only bad and worse tradeoffs, and don't be lulled by your passions into pretending that 'your side' offers true solutions, or even actual choices in education. Recognize that such policies are and have been used as strategies to progressively co-opt private, church, and home school education.
Even so, it is a trade-off that may be judged worthwhile for some, depending upon their circumstances. And never forget that some might don a mask of ulterior motives, for those engaged in cross-purposes - be wise as serpents.
Likewise, those who see the dangerous traps that the supporters of 'School Choice' are missing (or ignoring), need to stop obscuring or ignoring how what seems worse to them, is in many cases far less worse than the circumstances they're faced with here and now, and they shouldn't be vilified as if they had betrayed a choice that doesn't exist.
We've all got to deal with the reality of where we are, and the real dangers we are all heading towards, without pretending that we're in or heading towards some imagined 'better place' that exists nowhere - from either perspective that is a dangerously Utopian vision.
But.
Responsibility is not encouraged by ignoring reality, only by recognizing it, warts and all. The bottom line is that the responsibility rests with us, and We The People will not again become responsible, until the ability to comfortably shirk that responsibility is eliminated. Period.
'Compulsory Education must be destroyed'.
Keep that in mind, and in as many other minds as you can help influence.
