For an Education to be meaningful, its books must be more than 'just books'

"...As for literature--to introduce children to literature is to install them in a very rich and glorious kingdom, to bring a continual holiday to their doors, to lay before them a feast exquisitely served. But they must learn to know literature by being familiar with it from the very first. A child's intercourse must always be with good books, the best that we can find..."
-- Charlotte Mason - CHAPTER III - The Good and Evil Nature of a Child

The question of 'What do you mean by an education?', is one that's too rarely asked, and yet asked or not, it still shapes the answer to that question which is causing such an uproar today - what does and does not belong in a school library, and why (see previous post). When the question is asked, it's usually asked as you'd ask a baker about a cake - what ingredients were used and how was it prepared - which makes sense if the samples were tasty (and if not?). If we proposed that ingredients and preparation approach to education, to a schoolmaster like George Turnbull, it's unlikely that he'd permit the crude & pornographic ingredients found in many of our school libraries today, into his own, since as he put it in the overview to what his opening chapter of 'An Essay on Liberal Education'(1742)', would cover:

"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."

, he'd surely see such materials as those to be in conflict with the 'art of right living' and would be more likely to view them as the stuff of false learning, than as somehow being able to contribute to an actual education. But as we'll see, we don't have to travel all the way back to the 1700s to find that treating the nature, quality and content of books as if 'They're just books', as far too many librarians, educators and trolls do today, would have gotten you laughed out of school, and out of any & all polite conversations about them.

Unfortunately, that common sensibility began to change for far too many of us, as the understanding which our Founders' era had benefitted from, began to change, and changed further still, until ever more radical changes have brought us into such a state of flux that many community leaders and parents today, are eager to expose young children to the detritus of every momentary fad... for 'the greater good'... or at least to make a politically woke point.

The changes to how Americans educate themselves have taken us from being one of, if not the most literate and educated people at the opening of the 19th Century (with no official educational system); a people for whom Thomas Jefferson had earlier written the Declaration of Independence less as a means to instigate a revolution than to briefly state what was "...an expression of the American mind...", whose,

"... authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c..."

; a people for whom a couple of decades later The Federalist Papers would be written to inform and persuade the common farmer and 'man in the street' on the finer points of applying political philosophy and law to their own lives and to that of their posterity... to a people whose 'graduates' since the 20th Century have been mostly unwilling or unable to comprehend, or even to read, those works and ideas that were once the common fund of American thought, and many of whom are unaware of who our Founders even were, or have an understanding of what America is. 

All over the course of little more than a century - now that's revolutionary.

Because pulling weeds is a waste of time if you don't get at the roots, it's important to note that this didn't happen as a result of CRT or SEL, or Common Core, or the 1960s, and the fact that its roots run much deeper than that becomes self-evident with a comment made by Albert Jay Nock in the lectures he gave in 1931 at the University of Virginia ("The Theory of Education in the United States"), in relating what an Italian nobleman had told him of "a curious experience" that he had in our country, that:

"...He said he had been in America several times, and had met some very well-educated men, as an Italian would understand the term; but they were all in the neighborhood of sixty years old. Under that age, he said, he had happened upon no one who impressed him as at all well-educated..."

, in other words, whatever the ingredients that were used or how they were prepared, or how highly rated their educational baked goods were, when he sampled the results of our new educational recipe, he found it wanting and wondered what on earth had happened in our kitchens. Knock replied to him dryly, that the reason why was,

"... that our educational system had been thoroughly reorganized, both in spirit and structure, about thirty-five years ago, and that his well-educated men of sixty or so were merely holdovers from what we now put down, by general consent, as the times of ignorance..."

Two points to make on that: 

• First, the time period of 'thirty-five years ago' which Knock mentioned, roughly 1895, was the height of the era of 'Progressive Education' sweeping through the classrooms of America, and while it may have taken decades more to complete the counter-revolution, the outcome of it was by 1931 already beyond question.
• The second point is that most of those concerned about our schools today, would look at my grandpa's social studies textbook of 1902, and find it to be admirably full of facts to be memorized, 'rigorous' even, and would probably gladly trade my daughter's vapid and graphics laden social studies textbook of 2017 which also contains facts to be memorized, for it - and yet those of my grandfather's day were what had produced those which Knock's Italian friend had found to be so educationally wanting, and both of which led to the 1619 Project textbook which also contains facts to be memorized.

Facts aren't the issue... but facts alone and without a story to understand them within, might be
Those textbooks we utilize today may have fewer facts than those of a century ago, but facts aren't the issue with textbooks, though as facts alone are soon forgotten, that gets a bit closer to it (the details of that in the next post). Those textbooks which are our educational poison of choice today, may be less diluted with 'facts' than those of a century ago, but their function and form are the very same poison, and if we want to escape its ill effects, what we need is not a less potent form of the same poison that we're already poisoning ourselves with, but something that's different enough to actually contribute to our health, rather than assail it.

The questions we should be asking ourselves, are what it is that we mean by Education, and how to tell it from its counterfeit, and how an educated people permitted that revolution to be waged upon themselves? Answer those, and we'll begin to see how to rectify matters. Don't however, allow yourself to be misled by the answers that are typically given, that we needed to create an educational system (and political controls over the public) so that 'all Americans would have the same understanding of America' - that was and is more of a useful pretext, than a true reason for them. After all, if that had been their true motivation, then they would have simply used the public trough to fund teachers and the materials they preferred to teach from, so that they could continue to teach what they had been teaching so successfully, to any of the public that was missing out on being taught.

That could easily have been accomplished without having to change everything about how Americans had already made America the most literate nation in history.

But where's the fun in that, eh?

In this post I want to focus on what is meant by an Education, so I'll leave the details of who, how, and why we ended up with the educational system we have for the next post, but as it did help redefine what we mean by getting an education, two points need to be noted about the new system:

• First, that the new system's signature intention was to focus students on learning more 'practical' skills - accounting skills, agricultural skills, etc. - as useful for more quickly entering into the economy (the 19th Century version of "gotta learn the skills of the 21st century!"), which progressively took more & more attention off of those 'harmonizing sentiments' which had earlier been generated by the integrated focus of a traditional education.
• Second, the new system was sold as being more efficient and was to be proven effective through 'measurable testing' of how many facts a student retained within their head, which was to both enable schools to scientifically certify a student's 'level of education', and to help businesses with picking its employees, and improving the economy (ever wonder where quizzes, tests and grades came from?). Doing that required our dis-integrating the materials of education into discrete subjects that would be taught and measured separately - mathematics taught without relation to Music; something called 'English' to be taught separately from History; History to be replaced by the new 'science' of 'Social Studies', and so on - for both students and teachers.

What was not pointed out, except by those who were mostly ignored, was that the integrated understanding of self and society which had for so long been understood as a central purpose of education, was being abandoned for the economic 'greater good', though with the very best of intentions, of course.

And of course, the answer to whether or not our new system of education, was successful at educating either students or teachers, or if it achieved anything like 'a greater good', was, IMHO, best given by Knock's Italian nobleman. But answering the question well for us today, requires considering not just what is meant by getting a good education, but about what an education - good, bad or indifferent - is, and then how to know if one has one, or not.

What do you mean by an Education?
If we look to our dictionaries for help in defining 'Education', they are helpful only in pointing out the differences that it seems we're already aware of and divided over. Webster's Dictionary of 1828 (the irony will be noticeable in the next post) defined 'Education' as:

EDUCA'TION, noun [Latin educatio.] The bringing up, as of a child, instruction; formation of manners. education comprehends all that series of instruction and discipline which is intended to enlighten the understanding, correct the temper, and form the manners and habits of youth, and fit them for usefulness in their future stations. To give children a good education in manners, arts and science, is important; to give them a religious education is indispensable; and an immense responsibility rests on parents and guardians who neglect these duties.

, while Merriam-Webster's definition today, is more reflective of... today:

1a: the action or process of educating or of being educated
b: the knowledge and development resulting from the process of being educated
2: the field of study that deals mainly with methods of teaching and learning in schools

So we need to dig a little deeper.

Our word 'Education' comes to us by way of several Latin words: educere, educare, and educatus, meaning “to learn”, “to know” and “bring out, lead forth”. That is what Frederick Douglass was speaking of in 1894 as being the "Blessings of Liberty and Education", noting that those who lacked an education, learning only those skills that were useful to their masters, lived "... within the narrow, dark and grimy walls of ignorance. He is a poor prisoner without hope...", but that:

"...Education, on the other hand, means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men can be free. To deny education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature. It is to deny them the means of freedom and the rightful pursuit of happiness, and to defeat the very end of their being..."

For clarity's sake, we should first separate what an Education is, from its quality - good, bad, or indifferent - and that is to inform and lead students into paths and patterns of thought and behavior for life. One implication of this is that what paths and patterns of thought and behavior that a school exposes a student to, whether in the classroom, or library, playground, etc., is educating them - and of course what the student engages in outside of school, also contributes to the education that they are receiving.

A Good education, such as what Fredrick Douglass was speaking of, is one that has a specific purpose that is in accordance with what is real and true, and utilizes materials that are suited to that purpose without at the same time detracting from it (which as Turnbull noted above, would justly be called 'false learning'). Those works then that are suited to leading the student up and out of darkness and into the light, by methodical attention to what is good, beautiful, and true, are going to be well suited to facilitating a good education, and those that do not, are not. Similarly with the character of their teacher and school staff.

An indifferent education will differ from a good one, by having no definite purpose or attention in its actions and probably makes little distinction between the materials it uses or provides (very much like the 'read any books, they're just books' attitude that satisfies so many of our librarians, educators and trolls today) to lead its students' thinking, behavior, and lives with; less interested in dispelling the dark, than in compensating for it by focusing on external conditions and pleasures. Very likely it also employs teachers and staff whose character fails to reinforce, or even undermines, what goals it may claim to have for their learning.

And a bad education, whether out of ignorance or deliberate design, will use those materials that treat the light of truth as being a threat to those shadows it prizes above all else (hello '1619 Project'), leaving its students in the dark about their own nature, and of any reality that conflicts with the pursuit of power over others and the trappings of that (hello SEL & CRT).

The materials that Frederick Douglass used to become one of America's greatest essayists and orators (and he was largely self-taught), was a collection of plays, speeches, poems, and other examples of quality literature, called 'The Columbian Orator', which Douglass called his 'rich treasure' and 'noble acquisition'.

What Douglass himself valued, was a product of a couple of thousand years of educational experience in the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West, had shown that a good education was best provided to students by leading them through the best stories, inquiries (History), and orderly thought in action (geometry, music, poetry, philosophy, science,) - which broadly speaking all falls under the heading of Literature - and that guiding students through that literature had been the primary means of putting the student's thoughts and actions on the path towards becoming what Frederick Douglass spoke of and became, a person whose knowledge of what is true and worth knowing for living a good life, ran at least as deep as it did wide; someone marked by orderly thinking that was reflected in their admirable manners and actions; someone far seeing in their thoughts across time, and able to organize and express them clearly and persuasively.

Such a person as that, showed themselves in their manner and speech to be free - or at least freer - of the shadow of unexamined thoughts, ignorance and prejudice about them, which, as Knock's Italian Nobleman noted, is detectable from meeting with them. One question for us is, how likely is it that those qualities of purpose, wisdom, and virtue, can be detected by having them fill out a multiple-choice test?

What the Italian Nobleman's 60+ yr old acquaintances knew, that we've forgotten
Someone who still had one foot firmly enough in that older ideal of education, to be alarmed by the steps he could see being taken into that ideological future which has become our present day, was an essayist I first ran across about a decade ago, named Charles Dudley Warner, who, BTW, would have been roughly amongst those over 60 yr old educated gentlemen which Knock's Italian nobleman was speaking of. Warner is someone who had a good deal of sense to say upon the subject of education, and especially about the use/misuse of Textbooks, which today are questioned only in terms of whether a particular one is, euphemistically speaking, 'good' or 'bad', while few bother questioning whether or not that very modern technology known as 'Textbooks', are a value at all, or an insidious danger, to a good education.

One particular essay which Warner wrote in 1890, "The Novel and the Common School", conveyed the alarm he felt over the direction that education was heading in, and there's one particular paragraph of it which I think gives the gist of the problem he saw and tried to warn his fellows about, that I want to walk us through in this post, noting the landmarks and paying attention to the lay of the land that we are in the midst of today.

What I take to be Warner's key paragraph, begins:

"The notion that literature can be taken up as a branch of education, and learned at the proper time and when studies permit, is one of the most farcical in our scheme of education..."

One thing to note about that, is that the notion that an education can be had without the works and stories - literature - which convey it, is a novel and foolish practice that's barely a century old... and it has become the norm today. Another, is that the notion that what a literature transmits can be thought of as being only a 'branch' of education, rather than the soil, root and trunk of what an education is developed through, is, and was once widely understood to be, absurd. And that has absolutely become the norm today.

Of course if that's true, as noted, then the answer to the question of 'What do you mean by an education?', was once understood to be very different from our claim today that it can be defined by the memorization of facts & algorithms and certified by taking standardized tests upon them - and not just a little different, but entirely different - and why that is, is worth thinking about.

Warner expands on that in the next line of his essay:

" It is only matched in absurdity by the other current idea, that literature is something separate and apart from general knowledge. Here is the whole body of accumulated thought and experience of all the ages, which indeed forms our present life and explains it, existing partly in tradition and training, but more largely in books; and most teachers think, and most pupils are led to believe, that this most important former of the mind, maker of character, and guide to action can be acquired in a certain number of lessons out of a textbook!"

However alien it might seem to us today, and whether or not it results in a good, bad, or indifferent education, the stories, inquiries, and scientific observations which make up the literature that a child is 'exposed to' (or that is absent from it), are what forms the basis of their education. An exceptional British teacher of Warner's time, Charlotte Mason (whose works reflected what was once good teaching and has shaped homeschooling for a century), held a view of education which I very much like, as 'The science of relations', which an examined reading of discloses to the student the interrelatedness of grammar, history, rhetoric, science, in all of literature, and that is exactly what our segmented class & course structure of modern education was designed to explode. Deliberately or not, and no matter what quality or coherence those stories may or may not have, and whether engaged through books, movies or tweet-streams - that 'literature' forms the nature of the education which those students' hearts and minds are being led through, and whether of mountains or molehills, that shapes the perspective from which they view our world through. For more on that, I highly recommend 'The Story Killers', by former Marine, classical school founder, and Hillsdale College Professor, Terrence O. Moore.

If you take a look at the quote by Charlotte Mason at the opening of this post, it's clear that what she and Warner were focused on wasn't instilling students with 'skills' or using them as activists to create an ideal new society. An education was to educate, to 'educare', to lead you out, and literature, broadly speaking, provides the mental landscapes that you might otherwise never have imagined or realized were already surrounding you; it orients your thinking towards important landmarks, and reveals those paths that the best minds have found worth travelling upon, and thinking through, and guided by the light of truth's correspondence to reality, it reveals how to separate substance from shadows, and enables a person to live in liberty, no matter their material circumstances or station in life.

One thing Warner and Mason agreed upon, was that their understanding of Education was worlds away from what could be provided through one of the earliest and most destructive of our 'education reforms', which was the modern technology of the Textbook. We'll return to this most destructive of modern technologies in the next post, but what was originally conceived of as 'brief essays of fact' were to teach 'the facts' of important historic, scientific, or 'culturally relevant events', to memorized so that students could be tested to ensure they knew what was important to *know* - but in what way could they 'know' such... facts? Facts shorn of what gave rise to them, carry no real knowledge or understanding of what it was that was considered to be important enough for them to know, and such rootless facts blow quickly away from our memory... leaving only the impression that something is known of them, or how they relate to the rest of what might have been known. As Mason put it - the textbook passes on 'pre-digested' intellectual food, its nutrients gone, leaving only the gristle of it behind.

Back to Warner's essay, picking back up where we left off:

" Because this is so, young men and young women come up to college almost absolutely ignorant of the history of their race and of the ideas that have made our civilization. Some of them have never read a book, except the text-books on the specialties in which they have prepared themselves for examination."

Keep in mind that Warner's not complaining that college students aren't learning these stories in college, but that these stories which once were and should still be familiar to all Americans and Westerners, regardless of their schooling, were unfamiliar to many of those even before entering college (BTW, if you became stuck on the word 'race', you are an example of the failure of modern education. You should learn how to overcome that). Again, this was in 1890, a time where the average college student, even grammar student, had orders of magnitude more familiarity with the 'literature' which Western Civilization was formed through, than we do today. Going back another hundred years would present you with an example of a very different college experience, which was commonly had in our Founders' era, see the “Education of the Founding Fathers of the Republic”, by James J. Walsh, 1933', where one of the things that might catch your attention, is that the college spectator sport of the day, was professors, students, and townspeople gathering to watch students make and support an argument before their professors and peers.

How we went from that understanding, to thinking that test scores and diplomas could certify that a person's useful skills meant that they were educated, is something we'll get into in the next posts. Continuing on with Warner's paragraph:

" We have a saying concerning people whose minds appear to be made up of dry, isolated facts, that they have no atmosphere. Well, literature is the atmosphere. In it we live, and move, and have our being, intellectually."

We are suffocating from the absence of that atmosphere today. Take a moment and read Terrence O. Moore's essay on Classical Education, where he notes that Grammar is being taught to students today, the question is why it is being taught as it is, and with the poor materials used to teach it with.

A classical education requires more than functional literacy, however. It teaches students from an early age high standards of grammar, precision in word choice, and an eloquence that can emanate only from a love of the language. Throughout his education, the student will be exposed to the highest examples of eloquence attained by the greatest writers and speakers of the language.

“. . . I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” — Shakespeare
“There is a tide in the affairs of men . . .” — Shakespeare
“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” — Shakespeare
“These are the times that try men’s souls.” — Paine
“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” — Churchill

These sentences are entirely grammatical. They could just as easily be used to teach grammar as “Bob is a big boy.” By preferring Shakespeare to an anonymous “See Bob” sentence (usually not well written) we teach three things rather than just one. We teach grammar. We teach cultural literacy. We also teach beauty. Our purpose is to introduce young people to the masters of the language so they themselves learn to employ force and beauty in their deployment of the spoken and written word.

Understand that whatever you might think of what Warner is referring to as literature that a child is being 'exposed to' today, the fact is that a child's mind is being formed from, and educated through, whatever 'literature', be it good, bad (or pornographic) - that is happening, the only question is about the nature of what it is that their minds are being formed from.

It's also worth noting that despite having problematized, decentered or otherwise done away with the stories of the West, even the *Woke* rely upon stories - the ideological fabrications which they call 'lived experiences', are what they view as being central to teaching how Critical Theory, CRT, SEL & DEI will transmit their anti-Western bigotry into the next generation. They know what they're doing. The truth is that our trolls, librarians & educators prefer the worthlessness of worksheets, textbooks, 'lived experiences', pap, sleaze and even porn, for conveying the education which they intend your kids to swallow, digest, and so become reflected in their thinking, manners and actions. Why they choose that, over the literature that Warner referred to... is well worth your giving some serious consideration to.

Elaborating on lessons, Warner continues:

" The first lesson read to, or read by, the child should begin to put him in relation with the world and the thought of the world. This cannot be done except by the living teacher. No text-book, no one reading-book or series of reading-books, will do it. If the teacher is only the text-book orally delivered, the teacher is an uninspired machine."

Psst! Teachers: They want
more than virtual classrooms

The idea of a teacher as an uninspiring machine, distasteful and even horrific as it was to Warner, was (and still is) the ideal that was being aimed at by 'progressive reformers' who'd swallowed whole the swill of behaviorists such as Wilhelm Wundt (see 'The Leipzig Connection'), and as a result of their 'following the science!', the old expectations and requirements that teachers should actually know the subjects they were teaching, were dropped, and they were instead taught (programmed) in their new Teachers Colleges, on how to use acting techniques to present 'texts' as if they knew what they were saying, and how to prompt the desired questions from students, so as to parrot back the answers found in the back of the teacher's version of the textbook. The Pro-Regressive view of education, is less about education, than one of a grand and uniform national stimulus/response experiment in the laboratory that was and is our 'public education system' (and it shouldn't be too tough to guess what role that puts your kids into).

The goal of having teachers as uninformed automatons of a 'reading-book or series of reading-books' was an ideal they dreamed of someday achieving (hey teachers, care to guess why computers have become so popular in our schools today? Or what use that pedagogists will have for living breathing teachers, once they can get away with (you know, like how they 'get away with' porn in the library) programming a bot or avatar to do what you do transmit their material exactly as they intend them, in their 'virtual classes'?). Students are shaped by their lessons, and the shapes that emerge from lessons taken from the better stories of literature, is going to differ greatly from what emerges from lessons taken from textbooks, worksheets, games, movies, twitter threads, etc.,. Add to that the fact that the teachers who teach them, are rarely at liberty to teach as they might choose to teach (policies & program dictate their actions and responses), they are being transformed into that long desired 'content delivery system' for transmitting the school system's approved lesson plans, for what is an unworthy education, into your child, and into our future.

Continuing:

" We must revise our notions of the function of the teacher for the beginners. The teacher is to present evidence of truth, beauty, art. Where will he or she find it? Why, in experimental science, if you please, in history, but, in short, in good literature, using the word in its broadest sense. The object in selecting reading for children is to make it impossible for them to see any evidence except the best. That is the teacher's business, and how few understand their business! How few are educated!"[emphasis mine]

How impossibly far away does what Warner is recalling from the vantage point of 1890, seem in comparison with the Nikole Hannah-Jones's 2021 perspectives that we are surrounded with today? What you will not find in today's 'Lived Experiences', is "truth, beauty, art", which is a natural consequence of both the *Woke*'s rejection of 'objective truth', and the moderate's pragmatic indifference to it. Continuing:

" In the best literature we find truth about the world, about human nature; and hence, if children read that, they read what their experience will verify. I am told that publishers are largely at fault for the quality of the reading used in schools—that schools would gladly receive the good literature if they could get it. But I do not know, in this case, how much the demand has to do with the supply."

It is critically important to keep in mind that 'the best' (horrific, but popular) pedagogists of today (those who teach your teachers what and how and why to teach your children what they'll learn), openly state that Truth - usually enclosed by them in scare quotes as 'objective truth' - is impossible to attain, and that all 'truths' are subjective, and that power is alone worthy of their grasping for and pursuing. Keeping in line with understanding that purpose, means that lies and lying are sometimes necessary and useful tools for gaining power over others and over society (for 'the greater good', of course), and they have grade-level expectations for transforming it (and your child, and you) into being a means for their ends.

And here, in the last part of Warner's paragraph, we see the action of the would-be defender of Education, from Webster (next post), to Warner, and into our day, in that they step into the error that unknowingly to them has enabled our world to become what it has become today, and that foot which Warner had in the Education which our Founders' generation had formed themselves from, is betrayed and left behind, with the step which he advises (unaware of its implications) our taking into line with our world of today,

"I am certain, however, that educated teachers would use only the best means for forming the minds and enlightening the understanding of their pupils. It must be kept in mind that reading, silent reading done by the scholar, is not learning signs and calling words; it is getting thought. If children are to get thought, they should be served with the best—that which will not only be true, but appeal so naturally to their minds that they will prefer it to all meaner stuff. If it is true that children cannot acquire this taste at home—and it is true for the vast majority of American children—then it must be given in the public schools. To give it is not to interrupt the acquisition of other knowledge; it is literally to open the door to all knowledge...."[emphasis mine] 

How our understanding of Education became what it is today, began with the good intentions of people who looked into the immediate future, without carefully considering what kind of future might be had from breaking with their own past, and that break resulted in our original Semantic Deception, whereby the same word 'Education', came to mean two very different meanings, one of which was useful in gaining public support, to implement still other very different meanings and purposes, through educational experiments that were to create a system to nudge, ensnare, and conform its student's minds to whatever ideological issue which 'those who know best' had concluded was for the 'greater good'. That latter meaning never had any interest whatsoever in carrying forward the original idea of education which Warner still had one foot in, and instead were and are intent upon first ignoring it, then vilifying and condemning every aspect of it, and eventually eliminating all memory of that understanding, in order to 'remake the world anew', in their own idealized view of how you should be compelled to live, or as Godfather Rousseau put it: "They must be forced to be free. "

What Warner failed to realize, as has nearly everyone who's succeeded him on down to today, is that what was once meant by the word Education, was being gradually altered, from what was taken for granted, such as 'To John Adams from Samuel Adams, Sr., 25 November 1790',

"...Should we not, my friend, bear a gratefull remembrance of our pious and benevolent Ancestors, who early laid plans of Education; by which means Wisdom, Knowledge, and Virtue have been generally diffused among the body of the people, and they have been enabled to form and establish a civil constitution calculated for the preservation of their rights, and liberties..."

, where Education was understood as a means to the light of truth which set a person free and enabled them to discover how best to live in liberty. That understanding was unintentionally in the process of being reversed - the turn away from an ideal of what is right and true, towards what is useful, had gotten that ball rolling, and from there it became a simple matter of course before it became the political plaything of the 'progressive' educationistas who intended it to be used as a political tool of and means to power to reform the people into the ideal of 'those who know best', as the 'Father of Critical Pedagogy', Henry Giroux, acknowledged in an interview, that:

"...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..."

The purpose of a mandatory public school system was from the very beginning, to establish political controls over those same people that it would be instructing in what and how to think, the fact that it began with better purposes, in no way deterred it from quickly tending towards worse ones.

To answer how these changes came about, and why, we need to get at the roots so that we aren't surprised by those same weeds growing back yet again, and that requires looking at the role that some of our most respected Founding Fathers played in them. How their good intentions played into the hands of those with the worst of intentions, in the next post.

The Tragic Libraries of Education: 'They're just books'

What should, and should not be, in a school library? Who decides that? Do school libraries serve different purposes than public libraries? Is removing books from a school library the same thing as banning or censoring books? Questions like these have been swirling around and heating up the controversy between parents, librarians, educators (and trolls), in our schooling debates, though the first one is usually the only one that's asked openly (and answered as superficially as possible). While dealing with some trolls recently, it struck me as interesting, and not a little bit concerning, that there are similarities in how both trolls and many conservative parents 'pragmatically' approach these questions of what should be done about such books, and I think something needs to be done about that, ASAP.

The trolls had pounced upon a parent's group that dared show an interest in a handful of biographies for kids, from Mark Twain to Ronald Reagan & Justice Scalia, which the trolls - literally judging the books by their covers - condemned as being propaganda, because, obviously, a publisher that'd publish books 'exclusively about right wing figures!' (Mark Twain?), could only be peddling propaganda, and misinformation and that "shouldn't be allowed around inquiring young minds". And of course, being trolls, and *woke* ones at that, they were quick to dismiss any concerns about conservative books being removed, decentered or discarded from school libraries, as being no more than hysterical rants over 'objective truths' that do not apply or exist, because, after all:

'They're just books'

Naturally, if those books concerned leftist themes and heroes (one troll had helpfully suggested a nice bio of Ruth Bader Ginsberg would be more appropriate for students than one on Scalia), or even porn, well then... obviously, as 'every librarian, and educator' (and troll) understands all too well, 'every student needs to have free and unfettered access to all such materials', and it's nothing short of a fascistic assault upon liberty itself, for any such books to be withheld from those same inquiring young minds. That completely ignores, of course, the Left's recent efforts (and successes) to have Dr. Suess books and 'To Kill a Mockingbird', 'Huckleberry Finn', and more, removed from school libraries... but focusing too much on their inconsistency, leads you to assume that they care about either reality, truth, or consistency between the two (that'd be 'epistemic adequacy'), which in fact is what they not only fundamentally deny, but is the central focus of all of the *Woke*'s attacks (their efforts to replace 'epistemic adequacy' with 'social epistemology', amounts to replacing objective truth with polling those who know best). Don't let yourself get sidetracked by that, you only aid them. Worry about your own inconsistencies, which is what I want to focus on here.

Clearly the actions of such trolls, librarians, and educators, show that they are fully aware that books are much more than 'just books', and that they understand that there's a larger issue involved here, than only the particular books that are present in, or purposefully absent from, a school's library. What is concerning to me though, is that too many conservative parents act towards those books as if they do believe that:

'They're just books'

What I mean by that is that although parents are rightly appalled that their children are being exposed to overly crude, age inappropriate, and even pornographic materials (from bizarre fetishes, to rape, and incest) in their school libraries, they rarely pursue matters beyond having those particular books physically removed, as if the only problem is the physical or virtual presence of those objects, which will somehow be resolved by removing them, but how and why those books got there in the first place too often gets no more than a 'tsk-tsk' of attention (if a baby-sitter in your neighborhood left porn out for your kids and began chatting them up about it, would you send your kids back to be watched by them if they promised to remove it? Hello?). Such pragmatic behavior by parents is a tacit admission that in their minds,

'They're just books'

If you don't see the issue here, you may rest assured that the trolls, librarians, and educators who selected the books you despise, and rejected the books you love, do, because how those particular books 'somehow got there', wasn't due to any one person's error in judgement, they were chosen, and chosen for a purpose, and chosen to further that purpose. Parents and anyone else with an interest in how students are educated at their expense (that'd be everyone), need to learn to push a bit past the superficial thinking which those same schools once taught them to settle for, and begin recognizing that such books as those are there for a purpose, and that purpose actively guides what is stocked in their library, it informs your schools' lesson plans, assemblies, activities, and even the posters that are put up (or not) on classroom walls. That purpose is actively driving those messages which your child's thinking is expected to conform to, and those who believe in it will fight tooth and nail to see to it that those ideas and messages - which the particular books in question are only the more visible carriers of - will continue to be felt in as many student's heads as possible, through every meaningful aspect of their school.

Having spent a few decades digging into the ideas and intentions behind those purposes, I'm no longer surprised by the actions and comments of such trolls, librarians, and educators, but it baffles the hell out of me that the parents who in fact do love their children, and do want the best for them, behave as if removing a few particular books, is somehow going to sanitize and neutralize the ideology which is using that school to occupy its students thoughts with.

IOW: The books found in the school's library are an effect of what causes them to be selected. Removing some effects (the books) isn't going to alter or remove their cause (the ideology that drives such choices).

Which brings me to the question that usually goes unasked: Do school libraries serve different purposes than public libraries? Short answer: Yes. Do most school libraries understand (or admit) that? As 'mission statements' of school libraries typically say:

"to learn and appreciate the power of information "

, and the fact that the attitude typically expressed by most school libraries is that

'it doesn't matter what you read, as long as you read!'

, which is as inexcusable as a dietician saying 'It doesn't matter what you eat, so long as you eat - veggies, or twinkies, or sweetened carcinogens, makes no difference, just eat and keep on eating!', I think it's safe to say that the answer to that is: No.

But the reality is that a public library provides the widest possible selection of materials to serve whatever purposes that its patrons might seek to pursue. A school's library, OTOH, has, or should have, a very different purpose:

• To serve and support the education which that school is providing to its students.

It is neither banning nor censoring, to remove books that do not align with, or support, or that runs contrary to the education which that a school library is there to support, but it is negligence, at best, to add or retain books that run contrary to the education which that library's school is supposed to be providing.

The real question to be asked is what is the nature of the education which that school is providing, and how one book or another helps with that (and very likely reveals it), because whether they admit that to be their mission or not, a school library's books are not selected (or rejected) haphazardly on the basis of,

'They're just books'

, but because their meaning and presence (or absence) is serving and supporting what that school wants its students to learn, value, and become.

Rumor has it that a local school district is about to overrule parents' objections to books they consider to be inappropriate because there are no psychological studies proving that they're harmful. Is that the standard of what books your kids can be exposed to in school?

Those who stock a school library's shelves with selections such as 'Crank', Gender Queer', 'All boys aren't blue', and the like, do so because in their judgement, those materials align with their pedagogical beliefs about what education should instill into their students, those books conform with their ideals. Those are the materials which they want shaping your kids hearts and minds, and right now they are winning them. And those materials which do not conform with their ideals, such as the central works of Western Civilization, are 'decentered', discarded, and excluded, in favor of whatever pulp is most popular in the latest fads they're promoting under 'read anything, just read! (as long as it isn't 'western-centric)'.

Make no mistake: Students are receiving exactly the education that these educators, librarians and trolls want them to receive, and those who treat effects as causes, and expect that removing a book will lead to fewer effects, without dealing with what caused it to be chosen, are being just as foolish as those who think that:

'They're just books'

Worse, such deflections and evasions help those making such choices, to achieve their 'Brave New World'. Books about incest, rape, are not in conflict with their ideals, and those ideals are what students are being educated to value; those are the ideas and ideals that they hope will occupy your child's thoughts, because 'children are the future', and the future they are seeking, is the kind of future that can be more easily imposed upon those who dwell upon such ideas and activities. Who is surprised by this, and why? The trolls, librarians, and 'educators' who clearly understand the lie behind:

'They're just books'

, are not surprised by the lies they're telling or promoting, while too many parents still seemingly presume their deceptions to be but errors, or carelessness, and nothing more. That's a problem.

It's also a problem that the nature of the lessons which are taught (or ignored) in a school, are taught in order to affect the nature of what your future family, friends and community leaders will be shaped into - that is what drives what books will and won't be in its libraries. That purpose, that mindset, that 'Critical Pedagogy', not only preceded the placement of crude and pornographic books in their schools' libraries, but it is what led those who staff them to calculate that they could and should attempt to get away with slipping porn into students reading materials without parents noticing it, just as it has led thousands of trolls, librarians and educators to "Vow To Defy State Bans on Critical Race Theory" (hey, haven't we been told that defying 'democratic government' endangers 'democracy!'? Huh.) in support of the communist Howard Zinn Project, and it is emblematic of the thinking that will continue to operate upon those students' minds - such as encouraging students to think about their sexual preferences by comparing those to which pizza toppings they might prefer - despite any momentary inconveniences that might be encountered by the removal of a few particular books, or personnel, or classes, due to the parental complaints or legislative mandates of the moment.

A Serious Question
How compatible is the 'education' which our school systems are providing, with who you want your kids, your future family, friends and community leaders, to be? Parents, and everyone else, need to begin taking education seriously, which means realizing, as the *Woke* do, that 'getting an education' is about more than school mascots, sports, and kids marking time by memorizing facts & getting good grades to get a diploma and prove they picked up enough useful skills to get a good job (not even businesses trust in that anymore).

Rest assured that a school, especially a *Woke* one, doesn't see any book as being 'Just a book', or itself as "Just a school", or what it is delivering into students minds as being "Just an education", but they very much appreciate the lack of thought that so very many of us have given to the matter, so that they can continue doing what they've devoted their lives to doing to your kids minds, and society as a whole, which is what they believe the schools are there for.

A good education is something rather than nothing, and meaning something rather than anything, it can't be supported by just anything at all, and such efforts must make it a lesser thing. The act of teaching implies that there is a destination which the student does not yet know how to navigate to, and does not know which false trails and pitfalls to steer clear of. Once they do know the way, once they've reached adulthood, then they can go their own way and explore what, where, and how they will, but not until then, and I seriously question the wisdom and intentions of any adult who'd allow the student to make their own choices about which road to go down and how fast to travel upon them without parental supervision. If you understand that books are more than 'just books', and that discrimination and discretion are required in providing students an education, then we should give more consideration to the question of 'What do you mean by an education?', and what role it is that books play in getting one - which is what we'll start looking into in the next post.

Social Emotional Learning 101 at The Pillar Foundation

 I'll be speaking on Social Emotional Learning this Saturday morning, January 8th, from 9:30 to 11a.m. - if you're in the area, I hope to see you there.

Dear Friend,

You are invited to the Concerned Women for America of Missouri St. Louis County Prayer/Action Chapter, 2^nd Saturday in January meeting. We are excited to have Van Harvey speaking on Social Emotional Learning.

 

Here are the details:

 

When: Saturday, January 8, 9:30 to 11 a.m.

Where: The Pillar Foundation, 15820 Clayton Road, Ellisville, MO 63011

Subject: Social Emotional Learning

Who: Men, women and teens are invited

Contact: Bev Ehlen at 314-608-0168, or by email at director@missouri.cwfa.org

 

Mr. Harvey will discuss:

 

• The origins of SEL (Social and Emotional Learning)
• The Semantic Deceptions of those promoting SEL
• SEL's foundations in unsettled science
• DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) - What you are led to see vs what you get
• SEL's race to power
• How SEL uses data collection to prioritize emotional conformity over educational content
• What are SEL's 'competencies'?
• Intersectionality firmly links SEL with Social Justice Activism and Critical Theory
• How SEL is incompatible with justice
• Red Flags for which to watch
• Dangerous distinctions without a meaningful difference: SEL, DEI, CRT, CT
• Understanding what promoters of SEL would prefer you to remain ignorant of
• How to semantically strike back by reframing SEL's 'lived experiences' with reality

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:

• …kids are coming into school with poor social skills – ‘so we must teach the whole child’

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.

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.

Getting the point

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:

'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.

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. 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.
2. 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?

#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.
#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:

• 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.

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'

"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, 1984

Once 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.

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:

• 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.)

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*.

'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?

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:

“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.

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.”

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 hope you'll take that seriously.