The Disaster of Eddication

My Girl Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) who, you will be delighted to know is

Congressmember for WA-07 and lifelong organizer for immigrant, civil, and human rights. Progressive Caucus Chair. Bold, unafraid, and a proud mom. She/her.

recently sent out the following tweet: 

Student debt cancellation is racial justice.

Student debt cancellation is gender justice.

Student debt cancellation is economic justice.

— Pramila Jayapal (@PramilaJayapal) April 16, 2022

Isn't she special!

I suppose that in progressive LaLa-Land, this pathetic effusion is considered part of the Fight for Justice. Naturally, I have already sent her -- my congress-critter -- a slashing email, reminding her aides and staffers that they -- as Ben Rhodes well said -- "literally know nothing."

But let us work backward from the student debt cancellation demand. As in,

• Why should college be so expensive that students need to borrow money? Can you spell Injustice?
• Why does the government encourage students to borrow money against their education -- that connot be discharged in bankruptcy -- when borrowing has traditionally been collateralized, and a student, with no work experience, has no collateral? Can you spell Injustice?
• What exactly are students getting from a college degree that they couldn't get with an internship or an apprenticeship? Can you spell Injustice?
• What exactly are most youngsters getting from high school? Can you spell Injustice?
• What exactly is so vital about elementary school that the educators have time for LGBT grooming? Can you spell Injustice?
• What exactly is the whole point of our education system, besides keeping youngsters from competing in the labor market with adult workers? Can you spell Injustice?

It happens that I've been reading -- accidentally -- a lot about how education used to be in the olden time.

First of all, the education of David Copperfield. First they sent him to a school owned by a Mr. Creakle, a failed hop-dealer. Then he was sent to work in a warehouse by the River Thames in London, Then he got to go to Mr. Strong's school in Canterbury. Then he was apprenticed to a lawyer at Doctor's Commons. Presumably this education has some echoes of writer Charles Dickens' own experience.

Then the education of Tom Tulliver in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. Tom is the son of the miller Mr Tulliver, and Tulliver thinks it would be a grand thing for his son to get a real education. So he talks to a business friend, who recommends sending him to board with a curate in the country. Where he unwillingly learns Latin and Geometry.

Then the education of Benjamin Franklin. His dad sent him to grammar school (where you learn the Latin that you need for Harvard). Then changed his mind and sent him to an ordinary school for a couple of years to learn reading, writing and arithmetic. Then he apprenticed him to Ben's brother the printer for nine years. Then Benjy escaped to Philadelphia and worked for various printers before setting himself up as a printer.

Do you mind if I suggest that the brilliance of Dickens, of George Eliot, of Benjamin Franklin had nothing to do with their education?

And I wonder what education means in the lives of everyone else?

Really, what are we trying to do with schools and education? Bueller? Anyone?

Why exactly do we make such a big deal over a college education? Bueller? Anyone?

Suppose we say that the most important thing in education is to bring up the children of the poor. So why are the schools that the poor attend almost always the worst?

Why do teachers have almost lifetime employment? Shouldn't the people teaching our children be evaluated every ten minutes and fired if they don't measure up?

Why do we have government running education when government is all about fighting the enemy? What enemy?

Let us return to the empty slogans put out by the "bold, unafraid" Pramila Jayapal.

I get the vital importance of trolling indebted Twentysomethings by handing out Get Out Of Debtors Jail Free cards. But just where is your Five Point program to reform the disaster of our education system, noble Congressmember?

Starting with the question: why in the world do we prompt college students to get into debt?

Just What is a University For?

Stop Press: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is re-instituting consideration of SAT and ACT scores for its student applicants. Said Stu Schmill, MIT dean of admissions:

“We believe a [testing] requirement is more equitable and transparent than a test-optional policy.”

So that's all right.

But really, what the Sam Blazes is university for? To learn a skill? You could get that in an apprenticeship or in on-line courses.  To build character? Yes, but that is such a guy thing. Clearly, the ladies are telling us, with all the talk of micro-aggressions and lived experience, that they don't like being challenged. They want to be baby-sat.

OK, then maybe university is to learn the wisdom of the ages. Well then, of course, there would be no right or wrong. No cancel culture or lefty professors from stem to stern. That was the idea, back in the day. Oxford and Cambridge made their young ruling-class scions study the classics because they wanted them to know about all the ups and downs and ins and outs of being a ruling class. No holds barred, because for them the name of the game was that to hold onto political power as the ruling class you needed to be smarter than the other guys.

Of course, university was also where they trained the priests in the state church. That was the idea of George Eliot's Fred Vincy of Middlemarch going to Cambridge. To become a priest in the Church of England. That would be higher status than his father Mayor Vincy's status as a businessman in Middlemarch.

Then the Germans invented the research university to make Germany strong enough to deal with France.

Today, obviously, the point of the university is to churn out good little boys and girls that all know how to be activists and get into the non-profit sector in NGOs and activism. You know, I think that would be cool if such an education were an internship. But to charge $60,000 per year? I think that the ruling class should pay for the training of its shock troops and not make the shock troops pay for their training. Of course, back in the day you had to buy commissions in the army.

But then I'm just a cranky old guy that never liked school, and got the hell out of education as soon as I got me a bachelors degree in civil engineering. And then became an autodidact by reading all the thinkers on my own.

Thing is: I think that education teaches people how to fit into the existing society in a nice little salaried slot in some bureaucracy somewhere. It might be corporate or it might be government.

But what if the future is different? What if the nice assumptions of today get turned upside down and the good little boys and girls dutifully prepare for a life that is Gone with the Wind? I suppose that's what a chap like Peter Turchin is telling us with his notion of "elite overproduction." Joel Kotkin is saying the same thing with his idea of "the coming revenge of the disappointed."

The question is: will the disappointed take their revenge on the ruling class? Or on the middle-class Commoners?

The best thing would be if they all signed up as activists in movements that attacked each other rather than ordinary middle-class deplorable America. Because, you know, when people are angry, they just want to draw blood. And don't necessarily think too clearly about who is to blame for their misery.

The other interesting thing is, of course, that the overwhelming majority of disappointed college graduates are probably women. And I don't know how women -- liberal women -- act politically when they want revenge. Like I say: women expect to be protected. When they are not they attach to a new protector. But how would that work in today's world? I just don't know.

Whatabout Kids' Education?

We were dining with friends, whose daughters are both in college. And the father opined as how kids shouldn't go to college until their mid twenties. And I agreed.

But, really, when was the last time we, the American people, thought about our kids' education? Other than making sure to buy a house in a good school district and then send the kids to a good college? 

And when was the last time that our noble rulers thought seriously about kids' education?

My potted history of US education is:

Aristotle: "Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man."

Jesuits: Ditto.

Shakespeare: This son of a glovemaker in England went to the local grammar school at Stratford on Avon where he learned, among other things, Latin. In those days kids started work at age eight unless they went to grammar school.

Tocqueville: He thought American education in the 1830s was "widespread and mediocre." Your average backwoodsman had "the Bible, an axe, and a file of newspapers."

Horace Mann: Main force of the common school movement in the 1830s. The idea was for the Transcendentalists to outflank the remaining Puritans and reeducate the Catholics. His system was influenced by the Germans.

Irish Catholics: First build the school, then the church, Horace Mann.

High schools: Universal secondary education began to be widespread after the National Education Association recommended twelve years of education, with the idea that every kid should be taught the same material in the same way. And basically prepare kids for a job.

John Dewey: Believed in education as "a social institution through which social reform can and should take place."

School Choice: Advanced by economist Milton Friedman in the 1950s, it centers around "vouchers" so that parents can send kids to the school of their choice. With gubmint money.

Mega high schools: In The American High School Today in 1959 Harvard President emeritus James B. Conant recommended mega high schools so they could offer more and varied programs.

Home schooling: Began in the 1960s as a pushback against compulsory gubmint education.

School busing: A 1971 Supreme Court allowed busing of school children to "diversify the racial makeup of schools."

A Nation at Risk: This 1983 report said that American schools were failing, so reform was needed.

Charter Schools: Schools within the gubmint school system that offer alternative educational methods outside the rigid rules of the standard schools.

No Child Left Behind: This Act in 2001 proposed national standards in education.

Bill Gates: High schools are too big.

Self-education: "Given tablets but no teachers, Ethiopian children educate themselves."

Common Core: Starting in 2010 a state effort to provide nationwide common education standards.

CRT and Equity: America and schools are racist; enough of grades and math already.

COVID School Closures: Close schools during a modest epidemic. Because safety and morbidly obese women teachers.

Most people will agree that this history adds up to a total cock-up on the education front that is Making Things Worse. 

All these experts have had their turn. Now it's my turn:

I propose that nearly all education reformers are Klueless Klots that don't have a Klue.

I propose that gubmint schools should properly be called "Government Child Custodial Facilities."

I propose an end to compulsory schooling.

I propose that the standard model of childhood education should be neighborhood mothers getting together to educate their children with tablets (see above) and the mothers that don't get with the program should be named and shamed and shunned by the other mothers.

I propose that after age 11, children should be forced to crawl over broken glass if they want to go to school.

I propose that employers should offer education opportunities, as the employers of apprentices did in the olden time.

I propose that the US should pass a constitutional amendment forbidding the federal government to fund or legislate about universities.

As you can see, I am a profound moderate when it comes to education. Merry Christmas!

Yes, What Should We Do About Public Education?

The problem with government, all government, is that it comes down to loot and plunder. What supporters of government want is free stuff, whether they are Viking raiders or today's "oppressed peoples and allies." The oppressed peoples just want handouts, the allies want government grants to support their activism -- to help the oppressed peoples, dontcha know.

And the same goes for public education. What may have seemed like a good idea 150 years ago, Horace Mann, is now just another special interest group. And since gubmint employees are allowed to form labor unions, politicians are scared stiff of the women teachers.

Notice, that when Florida Gov. DeSantis called for schools to reopen he didn't criticize "teachers" or "teachers unions," but "education unions and special interests." I wonder what he meant by that?

But the question is: do we need gubmint schools at all? Read this, from the MIT Technology Review by Nicholos Negroponte about an experiment in Ethiopia with computer tablets in villages where the children "had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them[.]"

OLPC [One Laptop Per Child] workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”

Do you see the point here? If you can hack Android to re-enable the camera, you are literate. And you did it, all on your own, with the other kids in the village.

Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ tablet looked different.  We had installed software to prevent them from doing that,” McNierney said. “And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”

Remember, these are kids that were completely illiterate. Although, I suppose, if they opened the boxes, powered up the tablets, they musta heard some weird rumors about tablets and computers and stuff.

So, just what exactly is it that "our teachers" are doing for us these days?

Now I'll bet that there are some drawbacks to the tablet thingy. I'll bet that the village bullies and the kids of the village Big Man get first dibs at the tablets, and the poor kids in the village get to suck. Oh yeah. All kinds of possibilities. But the point is that it didn't take teachers, didn't take gubmint, didn't take experts. The kids took those tablets and made themselves literate.

So what do we do about education?

First of all three doses of reality:

1. All kids want to do social media, texting. You need basic literacy for that, even if you are a gangbanger. So every kid is going to get literate enough for that.
2. Most kids learn by doing.
3. Most kids want to get out in the world.

But the education system is designed by the educated Gentry for the kind of education that the educated Gentry wants for itself. And that is directed towards the credentialed, literate, top-down world that the educated Gentry lives.

Most people learn by doing. They get a job and figure: hey, if I learned this skill I could get a better job. Do they really benefit from an academic education? Remember colleges were originally designed to train state-church priests and future rulers. Today they have been adapted to train deep-state functionaries and ruling-class activists.

Certainly, gubmint schools permit parents to drop kids off at school while they do other stuff during the day. But, for that we spend a trillion dollars a year in the US?

I gotta say, I really don't know what happens next in education. I just know that the current system is rotten to the core.

The Kids Are Not All Right?

Because I have a strong animus against gubmint schools -- for many years I have called them "government child-custodial facilities" -- I am rather taken aback by the current conventional wisdom that kids are depressed and suicidal because they can't go to school.

Wat?

But here is Salena Zito writing about the travails of the daughter of a "hospitalist," Dr. Paul Carson, of Pittsburgh, who has gone from an A student to a D student, because "I have nothing to look forward to."

Wat?

So, Doctor Paul, whatabout a spot of homeschooling? Whatabout a micro-school with your Doctoral pals? Whatabout a "learning pod," whatever that is? A month or two ago, on my regular evening walk, I came upon a couple of families -- with kids roaring around before my eyes completely out of control: yay! -- who were sending their kids to a "micro school." And these were doubtless completely conventional gentry liberals of North Seattle.

Here's the problem for me. In my reading about homeschooling, I get the impression that kids that are homeschooled are streets ahead of gubmint-schooled kids when it comes to social skills and learning skills. They are self-motivated. Because, I assume, they have not been kept in gubmint child-custodial barracks during their impressionable youth where all they had to do was follow orders.

But if kids that normally go to gubmint schools go all to pieces if they can't go to their gubmint schools... Well to me it says that the problem is bigger than I thought. I mean: to me, schools with their ranks of desks and their teachers up front and their tests and their grades -- well, in my dotage, where I am always trying to think Bad Thoughts, I am coming to think that schools are military basic training for... For what? Life as a cubicle worker?

As a kid born to Brits in India, I am sensitive to what generally used to happen to Brit kids in India. They were sent home to Britland, maybe to board with a relative, and sent to boarding school.

Then there is the case of Rudyard Kipling and his sister that were sent home from India and spent years boarding at the "house of desolation." Boy, can you spell child neglect?

On the other hand, my mother, born and raised in Japan, always regretted that her parents did not send her back to Britland to go to boarding school.

Now, my parents moved from India back to Britland when I was two, and I went to private schools, going to boarding school from the age of 10, I think. It all seemed perfectly natural to me.

My only regret in my youth was that I feel that I would have preferred to be around adults more instead of around kids my own age. When you go to boarding school you are around kids your own age 24-7. See, I tended to think that kids my own age were idiots, and I might have learned a lot from being around older people. By the way, there was almost no bullying, as I would understand it.

See, I tend to think that, given how we treat kids -- following the latest religious or political fad -- it's a bloody miracle that kids grow up to have a decent adult life at all.

And then there is the curious phenomenon that IQs in the western world are going down. Whereas, earlier in the 20th century, according to the Flynn effect, IQs were going up. Until they started down.

You think that there is a problem? If so, I wonder what it is.

We Won't Fix the Federal Budget Until We Commoners Demand It

What do we do about the federal debt, the debt we have dumped on our grandchildren? G. Tracy Mehan III wrote about it ten years ago when the federal debt was 54 percent of GDP. Now it's over 100 percent. He writes

The Republicans have painted themselves into a corner with all this profligate spending. They will soon be faced with the choice, not of cutting taxes, but searching for the least damaging way to raise revenue without encumbering income and productivity. In the game of chicken, budget cuts and entitlement reform versus raising taxes, the Democrats will be hard to beat.

Don't think so. If we are in a jam it is because that's what the American people have voted for. We voted for Social Security, and we oldsters won't vote for anyone that proposes to reform it. And women all want unlimited health care and education, and they won't vote for anyone that proposes to cut Mom's Medicare.

Pensions, health care, and education are the three big government programs, amounting to an estimated $4.6 trillion out of a total of $8.1 trillion. Defense is another trillion, so the government spending on "everything else" is $2.5 trillion.

If we Commoners decide that we are fed up with the gubmint running our pensions, we could change it. We could, if you like, convert to a mandatory savings program for all workers. Or we could just trust American citizens to get on with it.

If American Commoner women decided, they could take health care out of the hands of government. They could make sure their mothers were taken care of in their End of Life, and they could make sure that their husbands earned enough for health care for them and their children. And the Karens could supervise health care for the poor.

If American Commoner women decided, they could take education out of the hands of government -- and all the lefty teachers and professors -- and do it themselves. They wouldn't do it alone, of course; they would do it as a neighborhood, with all the other mothers putting in their share, and specializing in this or that. And they'd rope in the fathers to do the boy stuff.

Gubmint education was started in the 19th century by chaps like Horace Mann when the average human was still barely literate. So it made sense to them for government to step in. Also, they didn't like the idea of the Puritans or the Catholics running the education system; they were Transcendentalists. But I say that today's American women have the chops to educate our children without the supervision of bossy Horace Manns and foolish women professors like Harvard's Elizabeth Bartholet, who thinks homeschooling is "authoritarian." She means, presumably, that parents having authority over their children's education gives them authority. And that is authoritarian. I am not making this up.

This is not that hard. If we are true Commoners and want to take responsibility for our lives and for our loved ones, then we have to tell the authoritarians that they can take their free stuff and put it where the sun don't shine. Otherwise, in the words of Shakespeare, the fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

And until that day our overlings are going to take advantage of us, and use our wages as tax money and deplete our savings with inflation to buy votes and indoctrinate our children and inflate our currency and lord it over us. Because we are underlings.

It ain't the fault of Republicans. It isn't even the fault of Democrats. They are the Inner Party and their gig is Jobs for educated Gentry -- and satisfying the Gentry lust for ambition, vanity and honor. They do it with the votes of the Clients and free stuff for underlings.

And if we don't rebel against this stitch-up, then we are underlings, and deserve what we get.

Education -- Contents

Against Government Education

1. Charter School Tipping Point?
   
   
2. Did the Profs Cry Uncle?
   
   
3. Free Education for Africa?
   
   
4. What's It Really Like in the Academy?
   
   
5. Government Guts Gifted Kids
   
   
6. Children of Nature in the Midst of Civilization
   
   
7. Get Your Education Myths Here
   
   
8. After the Left University, What Then?
   
   
9. The Global Education Mess
   
   
10. Phonics Wins in Britain
    
    
11. Who Needs Literacy
    
    
12. The Kids: Professors Worry About Right-Wing Students
    
    
13. Lefty Professors Don't Get It
    
    
14. Do Not Expect School Choice, Ever, From Left
    
    
15. Charter Schools Thrive in Minneapolis: World Doesn't Come To End
    
    
16. You Can't Do That, Say Educrats
    
    
17. Teachers' Unions Say the Darndest Things
    
    
18. School Choice: What are They Afraid Of?
    
    
19. Now It's College Graduates That Can't Write
    
    
20. John Stossel and the Teachers, contd.
    
    
21. Blacks Voting for School Choice With Their Feet
    
    
22. Gender Gap in High School
    
    
23. Education is Failing in Britain, Too
    
    
24. Little Rich Kids Now Have Tutors
    
    
25. Sneaking School Choice into New Orleans
    
    
26. Education Myths
    
    
27. New York Times Says Boys Underperforming in College!
    
    
28. Feminists Against Choice
    
    
29. How Important is a College Education?
    
    
30. Government Fails to Educate NJ Kids
    
    
31. SecEd Launches Vouchers, Bureaucrats Run Interference
    
    
32. Don't Look For Education Reform From Within
    
    
33. The Two Nations in Education
    
    
34. Two Limeys Fight Over Home Schooling
    
    
35. School Choice a Winner in Alberta
    
    
36. More Than "School Choice" Needed
    
    
37. The Long Tail in Education
    
    
38. Education Choice is Working
    
    
39. Honor Friedman With Choice in Education and Health Care
    
    
40. The Education Solution is Privatization
    
    
41. Skills Commission Wants to Centralize Education
    
    
42. Poor Kids Do Better In Selective Schools
    
    
43. Let's Not Blame Conservatives On Education
    
    
44. Do You Believe in Education Myths?
    
    
45. A Small Step towards Education Reform
    
    
46. What Should We Do About Education?
    
    
47. New Hope for School Choice
    
    
48. School Choice in Sweden: Who Knew?
    
    
49. Parents Flock to Supplementary Schools
    
    
50. How About An Apology For "Fraudulent Education?"
    
    
51. School Choice--On the Front Lines
    
    
52. The Social Work Bullies at Missouri State
    
    
53. Let's Abolish Adolescence
    
    
54. Private Education in the Slums
    
    
55. The Heart of the Education Problem
    
    
56. Let's Throw Good Money After Bad
    
    
57. Who Needs School Anyway?
    
    
58. What Do These Professors Want?
    
    
59. Can Government Deliver on Education?
    
    
60. "The Way to Stop Discrimination"
    
    
61. Mean-spirited Universities Sit on Cash
    
    
62. Education Fatties Won't Diet
    
    
63. Dem Dodges on School Choice
    
    
64. Your School Kid is "Invisible"
    
    
65. Education: What to Do?
    
    
66. Fighting for Kids in Utah
    
    
67. Politics and the Classroom
    
    
68. Coercion in the Liberal University
    
    
69. You've Got to be Kidding, Girls
    
    
70. Inventing the New Conservatism: Education
    
    
71. No Child Left Behind. End It or Mend It?
    
    
72. Throw Money at Higher Ed?
    
    
73. "Sexism" in Science
    
    
74. CA Homeschooling Decision an Opportunity
    
    
75. Education vs. Family
    
    
76. What Price Education?
    
    
77. Message to BillG: Try Freedom in Education
    
    
78. The Mess in the Academe
    
    
79. Who Cares About Inner City Schools?
    
    
80. What Ails Education?
    
    
81. Private Schools for the Poor
    
    
82. Private Schools for the Poor, Part II
    
    
83. The War on the Poor
    
    
84. Beyond School Choice
    
    
85. Gender Imbalance in Education
    
    
86. The Wages of Centralism
    
    
87. Educrats Chase Teenaged Sailor Round World
    
    
88. Are Student Loans Really Debt Slavery?
    
    
89. Critical Mass on Unschooling?
    
    
90. Government and the STEM Crisis
    
    
91. Military Socialist? Of Course It Is
    
    
92. Student Loans: Poster Child for Government Failure
    
    
93. Liberals Really are the Best People, Says NYT
    
    
94. Ben Carson, American Exceptionalism and the Huddled Masses
    
    
95. Did Anyone Ask the Poor What Education They Wanted for their Kids?
    
    
96. Despite Univ Chicago Move, College PC Will Get Worse
    
    
97. Education: What Do Mothers Want?
    
    
98. Hello Berkeley, It is Time to Check Your Privilege
    
    
99. Why are "College Educated" Whites So Liberal?
    
    
100. Universities Have Not "Drifted from their Historic Mission"
     
     
101. Supposing I Got to Set The Syllabus for AP History
     
     
102. Yes, What Is Education For?
     
     
103. Oppressions of Liberal Cultural/Political Hegemony, Pt.2
     
     
104. Education: Burn It Down
     
     
105. What If Everything We Know About Education is Wrong?
     
     
106. Why Do Millenials Like AOC Believe in Big Government?
     
     
107. Today's K-thru-grad-school Sucks. But What Do We Do About It?
     
     
108. Shakespeare and Austen: Things They Never Told Me
     
     
109. Suppose Education is All a Scam?
     
     
110. Little Girls Believe What They Are Carefully Taught
     
     
111. We Won't Fix the Federal Budget Until We Commoners Demand It
     
     
112. The Kids Are Not All Right?
     
     
113. Yes, What Should We Do About Public Education?
     

Little Girls Believe What They Are Carefully Taught

The father of St. Greta of Thun Mountain says that her climate activism is a good thing because prior to that she was depressed about climate change and refusing to eat.

And now I read of a BP executive telling how his daughter's friends are "taking anti-depressants because they are so worried about climate change."

But you see. These girls and women are not scientists. They have no independent knowledge about climate. They literally know nothing about science, which takes half a life to master. They are just responding to what they have been carefully taught.

If there was no news about climate change and how it is going to destroy human life on his planet, then Greta Thunberg wouldn't know about the Horror. And the friends of the daughter of the BP executive would not know about it. They would be taking anti-depressants because of the meanness of the other women.

Now it may be that in fact the activist-driven climate science is right, and that human action is upsetting the climate. Or it may be yet another millennarian cult predicting the end of the world.

Of course, according to science, when we descend out of the present Interglacial into the next glacial age, then things really will get pretty tight around here. Western Washington, where I live, was under ice in the last Ice Age. Our beautiful Puget Sound was ground out by glaciers! The eastern Washington landscape was formed by ice dam collapses.

As a profound sexist I am bound to say that there is a difference here between men and women. I find that women are much more likely to believe what they have been carefully taught and that men are much more likely to resist being carefully taught.

That is why, I maintain, it was boys that were first sent to school and punished if they didn't learn stuff. Girls have always dutifully learned what they were supposed to learn.

Boys and men seem to have bullshit detectors that tell them to regard all information as suspect. Or maybe they are lazy and just don't want to learn anything.

Then comes the moment when the woman feels betrayed, and Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

That's where I'd like to get in our present political situation. Nice respectable women don't like Donald Trump because he is insulting.

You'd think that, by now, they would be hopping mad because of the humiliation of the sexual revolution, the dead end of careers, the get-rid-of-it culture of abortion, the demolition of marriage.

But I think that women only "get it" when it is too late. Why? Well I think it has to do with the woman's instinct to go with the program to keep the kids alive. Because if you have kept the kids alive one more day... And the women in A Woman in Berlin kept the teenage girls safe in the attic while they submitted to the Russian soldiers in May 1945.

And so I think that, probably, women shouldn't be involved in politics, which is a game of risk to hit the other guys before they hit you.

Prediction: I think that at some point women will retreat from the public square and reestablish the old community of women where women maintain the local community of care and domesticity. Just sayin'.

You see, I experience the whole progressive project as being a War on Women.

Back in the day, men did nothing except defend the border and kill animals for meat. Men only started to work when they were needed for plowing, heavy work that tends to induce miscarriages in women.

Then came wage labor, which got men tied down working under near slave-labor discipline, and meant that women could stay home and raise the kids. Hey! What a deal for women!

But why did women decide they had to get out of the home and get jobs in the labor market? Could it be that Gentry women decided that they were special and were above mere domesticity? Or did some women decide they couldn't take the name and shame and shun culture of the community of women in the neighborhood and had to get into the more civilized male culture of the workplace? More research is needed.

See, I believe that men are expendable -- chiefly in war but also in dangerous mines and agriculture and fracking with their dangerous machines -- but we have to humor the poor stiffs to make them feel useful and wanted. I mean, if men went out on strike then women would have to pick up the slack!

I believe it is beneficial for men to think that they won't get laid unless they have a good job. I think it is good for men to battle away for market share, symbolizing in a harmless way the battles of border warfare. I believe it is good for men to believe that if you made the baby, you signed up to raise it.

So if I had the education of girls I would teach them the glory of children, the wonder of faithful husbands, the satisfaction of neighborhood cooperation, and the adequacy of the 1,000 sq ft house in the suburbs and the superfluity of marble-top counters. And for God's sake stop buying stupid electric cars!

And I think it will all come to pass once women and girls are carefully taught that progressives and lefties are the worst people in the world that have betrayed and abandoned them.

It shouldn't be too hard, surely. It has the advantage of being true.

Suppose Education is All a Scam?

A month or so I went to Stratford-on-Avon in Britland and visited the schoolroom where William Shakespare allegedly went to school.

The spiel of the guide was that, back in 1570 in Stratford at age 8, the average boy started work. Or he went to a school with 40-50 boys of all ages in one room with a single schoolmaster. And what they learned was Latin and Arithmetic by rote and recitation.

Oh No! Rote learning! But that made sense because there was only one schoolmaster and you had to pay big bucks for paper. Plus, if you had a problem you asked the older kid sitting on the next Form to help you.

But then I got to read Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt. Clearly the guide's spiel came from this book.

But Greenblatt added another wrinkle. Parents liked the idea of their kids not starting work and learning Latin because of the prestige. And the uselessness. Latin wasn't really going to give you any useful skills. But it sure proved that your parents could afford it.

So you tell me. How much of modern education is all about showing "I can afford it." I mean everything from kindergarten through grad school?

Because if we were purely trying to be practical, and save money, I reckon that the practical thing to do would be for the neighborhood women to get together and teach the kids the Three Rs: reading writing and arithmetic. And then the kids would become apprentices at some employer, that would be mandated by the ruling class to teach the kid a useful trade and extend their education, subject to the most frightful penalties for non-performance. And the employer would bear the cost of the training. Of course he would because he would be the beneficiary of the low wages paid to the apprentice and the skills evenutally acquired by the apprentice.

Hey, I think that kids should start work just about as soon as they have completed their Three Rs. Unless.

Unless your parents want to demonstrate their wealth and status and have you learn useless stuff like Latin and French and History and Music and Social Studies and Ruling Class Ideology.

I mean: that was the point of young ladies in Jane Austen novels becoming a "proficient" in the piano and in singing. They were "accomplishments" that a young lady was expected to have if she hoped to attract a husband. To say nothing of that all important dowry.

And, really, isn't that the point of sending today's Woke young activist feminists to college? Accomplisments? Maybe not. Maybe the point is the dowry, that upper-middle-class young men won't marry a woman unless she has a professional credential, worth at least $80k a year in salary. Or is the minimum level these days more like $120k?

See, I reckon that if you are the average white working-class people your goal is a job, a house, a family. But that is not enough for the upwardly bound. That is why the average selective college makes its applicants jump through all the ridiculous hoops writing essays about their experience in charitable work and basically starting their own charitable foundation and planting trees in the Himalayas. Accomplishments. Just like the young ladies of old.

Also, I suspect, it is necessary to gild the lily of the average boring jobs in the administrative bureaucracy of the ruling class -- academia, lawyering, foreign service, foundations, art -- and represent them as creative, caring, compassionate careers. Completely different from the average dead-end job of the average deplorable. Not.

And, of course, the whole point of the big-government administrative state is to provide meaning for the lives of ruling-class scions, so they have deplorable boobs to order aound and punish when they step out of line.

No really. Imagine an America without a big-government state. What would average dull scions of the nobility do then, poor things? No creative careers -- boring jobs -- for people of no particular talent. No opportunities for ordering the plebs around. It would be a very living hell. For dull scions of the ruling class.

I think the opposite is true. I think that nobody has a clue about educating children. I think that nobody has a clue about what teenagers and young adults should be doing. I think that nobody has a clue about how to organize work and career and blend it with the real work of humans, which is wiving and thriving.

But this is what I think. I think that the neighborhood women should get together and cooperate to allow the kids to learn the Three Rs. And I'll bet that the kids of literate parents would automatically learn the Three Rs without too much trouble or much educational expertise in their mothers. As for the children of the lower class, well I'd say that is the job of us, the educated class, to organize on our own without benefit of government monopoly.

I think that skills training should be done by private business, who are probably the folks most likely to know what skills we should be teaching the kids and what skills will be needed around the next corner. And let's put kids to work as soon as possible. And become Really Useful Citizens.

As for the folks wanting to display status, I'd say all power to them. Let them spend fortunes on getting their prestige kids into prestige schools to learn prestige things and accumulate prestige contacts. But hey, if there aren't prestige careers in the administrative state -- that afford the scions of the rulers plenteous opportunities to order the deplorables around and pat the ruling-class Little Darlings on the butt -- then these scions of the rulers will have to get a job and do something useful rather than something prestigious.

That would be an America worthy of the name, and worthy of the American people, and worthy of our beloved Founders.

Shakespeare and Austen: Things They Never Told Me

I am swinging through Britland with my daughter, with stops in Stratford and Bath. And I am learning things I never knew.

For instance, I now understand why the ordinary Brit Bill of Stratford could write about Julius Caesar and Troilus and Cressida. It's because of the school he attended at the Guildhall in Stratford.

See, back in the 1570s, a kid like Bill, son of the local glover, could go to work, at age 8, or he could go to the free school at the Guildhall.

Here's how the school worked. There was a master, paid 20 pounds a year, and about 40 to 60 students. These students sat on forms -- that is boxes that contained the beer they would drink during the day -- by age. The youngest boys sat on the First Form, the next youngest on the Second Form, all the way up to the Sixth Form. British schools are still organized on this model.

Back in those days the instruction was entirely verbal, because paper was so expensive. So students learned their Latin and arithmetic and multiplication tables verbally. Also, the master did not teach them all the time. How could he when there were 60 kids from 8 to 16? So most of the instruction was from the older boys to the younger boys. And if a younger boy didn't know something, he would apply to an older kid for help. Studies show that people remember 90 percent of what they teach.

Since the kids were learning Latin they were also learning Classical history.

So now I know how it was that Shakespeare, a nobody from Stratford-on-Avon, could write plays about Roman history. He had a remarkable education from the local guildhall school, and thus knew about all that stuff.

I asked the chap telling us about all this where he got his information. He said it came from a book, The Scholemaster by Roger Ascham. It is available on Google Books and elsewhere. I will be checking it out.

But I want to know: how come I didn't know this? And how come such a system worked, at such a low expense? And how the students learned all this stuff, even though there was no paper and no textbooks?

And how come our present system is a total failure even though it is drenched in money and teachers? How come a schoolmaster paid £20 per year could educate 60 boys without a scrap of paper? And how come the kids could come out with a serious knowledge of the classics? Seriously, how come?

Now, my theory of education is that kids should be chucked out of school at about 11 or 12 and told to get a job, or an apprenticeship. The ones that wanted to continue in school would have to crawl on their knees over broken glass begging to be allowed to stay in school. You can see that the system in Shakespeare's time was not all that different. Only in those days you started work at 8 unless you could get yourself enrolled in school.

The guild school had a punishment day, Friday, on which all defaulters would be "birched" or beaten with a bundle of birch twigs. But here's the thing. You could redeem yourself by good behavior in the interval between your infraction and the Friday birching ceremony. What a concept!

It's interesting that our entire knowledge about early education comes from Dickens and Dotheboys Hall and Mr. Creakle and Dr. Wackford Squeers. What if education in former times was nothing like Dickens' notions? What indeed.

Then we went on to Bath, location of Jane Austen novels like Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Jane spent several years in Bath, four years in the house of her father who had moved there after retiring as a parish priest, several more years in reducted circumstances after his death in 1805.

Here is what shocked me. The Pump Room is right next to Bath Abbey, quite an imposing church. But I never recall reading about the Abbey. Just a hundred yards away from the Pump Room and the Abbey is the river Avon. How come Jane Austen never mentioned the river? She lived in Sydney Place, just across the river from the Abbey and the Pump Room, so would have frequently crossed the bridge across the river Avon.

But another mystery was solved. Sir Walter Elliott, father of Anne Elliott the heroine of Persuasion, lived in Camden Place. There is no Camden Place in Bath, according to Google Maps. But, on a map of Bath in 1800 there is a Camden Place. It is close to what is now Camden Crescent. So we are to assume that there has been a lot of demolition and building in Bath. Which is odd, because you would think that Bath emerged complete and entire like Minerva from the forehead of Zeus and has remained pure and entire ever since. Apparently not, although the terraced houses of the Circus and the Royal Crescent are still as magnificent and entire as they ever were. Only today they are mostly broken up into flats.

I'd talk about our visit to Stonehenge, only we bailed out after we found that the entrance fee was £34. So we took off for London and took a photo from the road. Back in my day little kids could run in and out of the stones; my dad took movies of me to prove it. But now visitors are kept at a distance. Because preservation.

What a world!

Today's K-thru-grad-school Sucks. But What Do We Do About It?

Polemicist Kurt Schlichter does a grand job today reaming out our government and elite education system. Says he: "The Admissions Scam is Another Reason to Destroy Academia as We Know It."

Well, yes, Kurt. But what do we do about it? You can't beat something with nothing, old chap.

Fortunately I have been thinking about this in my usual destructive free-spirit style. Because I certainly agree with Kurt that we should burn the whole thing down.

Now I think that the answer for K-12 is pretty simple. First, the little kiddies should all go to home school, run by the neighborhood mothers, and any neighborhood woman that doesn't kick in would be named and shamed in the usual way of the community of women down the ages, featuring the eternal complaint: "I can't believe she is so stuck up that she won't help out." We could have a government program -- or better a billionaire funded program -- to school the children of pre-literate parents. But every other mother should get with the program of educating their own kids, and get the hell out of their job in corporate HR.

Then, I think that we should re-introduce child labor. Really, what is worse: having a kid help around a business or sit still drugged to the nines, because ADHD, in a government child-custodial facility?

Oh and forget the minimum wage, which is Baldrick's cunning plan to make young people unemployable.

Anyway, after age 12, kids should be allowed to work full time. Period. Maybe they start with unpaid internships. But hey, if a kid doesn't have the sense to learn to be useful and to get paid for his labor after a few months, well...

Now, in my view, schooling for a lot of teenagers is a waste of time. For them we should have a comprehensive and mandatory apprenticeship scheme. Call it Apprenticeships For All. This should appeal to our liberal friends because it would be a way to force employers to provide free services to their employees, and it could be a wonderful source of investigative reporting on employers that scam their young employees by short-changing their education obligations.

For, back in the day, the indentures for an apprenticeship usually included an obligation for the employer to pay for education for the young apprentice. I dare say that this could be done by outsourcing to community colleges or even private apprenticeship schools -- modern day mechanics institutes -- or it could be just a computer in the back room at which a kid could take on-line courses, the way they do it at Wal-mart.

Personally, I think that the government should be forbidden to run schools, except for the armed services, because no government that I know of refuses the temptation of teaching the little kiddies ruling-class ideology.

But what about universities? Really, the technical subjects: science, engineering, medicine, law, ought to be free of the university system. Abraham Lincoln learned his law by clerking in a law office. And many employers seem to be eager to help their employees increase their knowledge and skills.

But, down the ages, the university has been a device for ruling classes to teach ruling-class ideology. and to teach the scions of the ruling class how to run the government and continue the blessed rule of the enlightened and the better sort. I think this is a bad idea in the long term because it creates a deep state that knows nothing except ruling-class ideology and so sets itself up for rebellion by the disaffected plebs. When you get rulers that have half a brain -- chaps like the Duke of Wellington, Benjamin Disraeli, Bismark, Lincoln, Thatcher, Reagan -- they rose to greatness by rising above the mundane and the ordinary ruling-class ideology.

So I would argue that no university should be allowed to teach ruling-class ideology, on pain of admitting 20,000 deplorables a year and paying them to attend. The only politics and philosophy that a university should be allowed to teach should be critiques of the current system.

This means, dear liberals, that no university should be allowed to teach "activism." Activism, we know, is a conceit that the obedient scions of the ruling class are in fact root-em toot-em revolutionaries. No, chum, they ain't. Just about every activist marchin' and protestin' today is a good little boy or good little girl doing exactly what they have been carefully taught by government-paid teachers in school. Real activists get put in jail for disturbing the peace, and when did you last see that happen to a lefty protester?

Can we do without schools? I don't know.

Reading C.R. Hallpike, I realize that literate human society needs a different way of raising children from the old days of pre-literate society. Says he:

Bruning suggests that the factors in childhood experience making for difference in cognitive development are, apart form literacy itself, the extent to which children are surrounded, as in a modern urban environment, by the works of man; the degree to which they are reared apart from the rest of the community and from which their schooling is in subject matter a separate world; the degree to which children have imparted to them the rules of their society verbally and explicitly by their parents instead of learning them by participating in social life[.]

 He reports that young children in primitive society rarely ask "why" of their parents. That is because "much of their learning occurs in real situations"  in a "normal environment" whereas our way of "instructing the young [is] based heavily on telling out of context rather than showing in context."

There is an interesting consideration here. On the one hand it is clear that modern raising of the young requires getting them out of the house so they can transcend the limitations of their parents. But on the other hand children away from their parents are vulnerable to the power agenda of teachers that may have nothing to do with the welfare and the interests of the child.

So how much of a child's education should be supervised by family and neighborhood, and how much by "a separate world" of e.g. teachers and classrooms?

I don't know, but I think we need to find out.

Why Do Millenials Like AOC Believe in Big Government?

How in the world can a young woman like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believe in Medicare for all? Or her Green New Deal that would forcibly convert the US to green energy in ten years? How indeed can she possibly be a "democratic socialist" given the track record of socialism for the last 150 years?

I mean. Socialism has resulted in 100 million deaths in the last century. And the latest socialist country to show us the way, Venezuela, is in the middle of going down the tubes, with hunger and misery all around as its national oil company also goes down the tubes.

And why is Venezuela's national oil company going down the tubes? Because, dear friend, then-President Hugo Chávez replaced the oil company executives with political placemen, and the engineers that worked for the national oil company all got up and left and went to work for the oil industry in Columbia.

Why do the millennials believe such rubbish? The answer is that the millennials have all been carefully taught. Universities have always really been seminaries to teach the rising ruling class the ruling-class ideology. Back in the day, the whole point of Britain's Oxford and Cambridge was to teach "Greats," meaning Greek, Latin, and Philosophy, and "Modern Greats," meaning Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. The idea was that rising politicians needed to know the classic texts about politics, from Plato to Aristotle and the Roman writers from Seneca to Caesar to Livy to Marcus Aurelius. Because if you read those chaps then you got a feel for how to be a successful ruler. And in the modern era you needed to tack on modern political science and economics because a successful government needed to know how to manipulate those factors in order to rule successfully.

And in Germany they invented the research university in the era of German liberation during the Napoleonic Wars as a strategy to make Germany strong so that it would no longer be conquered by the French whenever the mood took them, as it did during the Thirty Years War, the Wars of the Spanish Succession, and the Napoleonic Wars. You will recall that this German national effort was remarkably successful, and the Germans beat the French in the Franco-Prussian war, World War I and World War II. Only problem was that in WWI and WWII the French got the rest of the world to help them and so the Germans got demolished in the process.

This just shows that the plans of ruling classes often go upside down. As Burns put it:

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft a-gley.

Who knew?

In our day our ruling class rules by dividing the middle class from the victim class. It teaches the victims to hate the middle class using victim politics. It teaches the latest migrants to the city that the bourgeoisie is out to get them. This worked for the working class, for the blacks, and for upscale women. Now the ruling class is teaching the young heads full of mush to advocate for poor helpless gays, transgenders, illegal aliens, and Muslims against the awful forces of white supremacy.

Who knows, it might work.

But the rise of nationalist "populism" in many western countries suggests that this ruling-class strategy may be reaching its sell-by date.

Meanwhile, well-born youngsters like AOC are being carefully taught in our universities to advocate for big government programs like one-size-fits-all government health-care systems and one-size-fits-all government higher-education systems. Oh and one-size-fits-all renewable energy systems.

It is really not surprising that these youngsters -- especially the women -- innocently believe what they have been carefully taught. Despite the notion of rebellious youth -- very popular when the left saw itself as the rebellious sector -- young people are not, in fact, very rebellious. They usually go with the zeitgeist because young people are genetically coded to go with the zeitgeist. This zeitgeist thing is especially important for the ruling class when it wants to send a whole generation of young'uns to war as in WWI and WWII.

The problem is that what the young have been carefully taught, in my view, is the orthodoxy of a reactionary movement, a movement I call the Great Reaction, that rejects the fundamental tenets of the modern age, which is to reduce political power in favor of market power, and to institute a separation of church and state, that is, religion and politics, which have usually, down the ages, been joined at the hip. In The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism author Michael Novak proposes what I call a Greater Separation of Powers between not just the branches of government but between the great sectors of society: the political, economic, and cultural/religious sectors. The idea is to prevent two sectors from ganging up on the other sector.

And I believe that this Great Reaction is not just cruel and unjust, but a strategic error that buries humans in misery and death and destruction wherever it is tried. In other words, every ruling class that tries to enact the agenda of the Great Reaction tends to walk itself and its subjects right off a cliff. You would think that ruling classes would have got the message by now. But they haven't and I think the reason why is that the temptation of temporary political power in the here and now is just too enticing for them. I mean, if you were AOC right now, you would think that everything is coming up roses.

The only question is whether the American people think so too. My guess is that they will not, because life, the universe and everything looks a lot different to an ordinary person just trying to get along with a job, a family, and a mortgaged home than it does to a well-born young person that has graduated from a selective college and has been suddenly vaulted into Congress or is otherwise advocating at some activism NGO.

But we shall see. For me, all this looks like rewind city. Back in the Sixties "the kids" thought that they were bringing in a new era. They were shocked, shocked, when Richard Nixon representing the "silent majority" won two elections in a row against them. So they decided to remove him from office.

Sound familiar?

Only this time, I feel, the Republicans are not going to let Democrats manipulate the system with phoney charges and boot the president out. Been there, done that.

But you never know.

What If Everything We Know About Education is Wrong?

We saw a kid performing handstands on the sidewalk as the bus took us to the Delhi Garden of Five Senses, and one of the women in the party mourned that the kid was not in school.

Yes, I know we are all supposed to believe that kids in government school are the best thing since sliced bread. But is it?

We know, for instance, that throughout the 19th century Europe literacy increased enormously, and it isn't clear to me that government schools were the reason. And female literacy was about a generation behind male literacy.

In addition, I understand, parents stopped sending their kids out to work once they didn't need the wages for food.

But we all believe -- and that means especially that women believe -- that all kids should be in school throughout childhood.

I don't think so. I suspect that we would do much better dumping the responsibility for their children's education on the parents.

What about this idea? We repeal all child labor laws; we close all the government schools. What would happen?

My question is this. If corporations started employing children again, would they revive the apprenticeship system? Would they educate the children in their charge?

The simple answer is: We Don't Know.

But we do know that when a foundation took computer tablets to an Ethiopian village, the kids had the tablets charged while the adults were congratulating each other, were singing the ABC song in two weeks, and had hacked the tablet to re-enable the camera within six months.

We do know that every girl in the world desperately needs to be literate enough to compete in the social media world of smartphones, and the boys need to be literate enough to master video games like Minecraft.

Maybe they can only really do this in school. But maybe not. Maybe if we evil geniuses figure out how to grab their attention, maybe we can get kids literate, numerate, market-aware, etc., without the trillion dollar a year expense of government education.

Of course, I understand the allure of free stuff. Free education: Yay! And maybe we should have a free system, just on principle, to keep the slaves to free-stuff happy

But I think the future requires getting away from the government model, and demands an education that responds to the needs of parents that want the best for their children and corporations that want good productive employees in their future.

Education: Burn It Down

A friend sent me the link to the liberal academic chaps describing how they scammed the "grievance studies" journals by getting a bunch of fake grievance studies research published in the grievance studies academic journals.

There is, I admit, an element of Animal House in this effort: rowdy guys getting a little too rowdy for the Miss Prisms of the world.

But it inspires me to say that the time has come to burn down our entire government education system from stem to stern and start over.

First, the Bill of Indictment.

1. Government schools tend to be tools of the ruling class. In Germany, the government school system was created during the Wars of German Liberation from Napoleonic France. The idea was to build a Germany that was powerful enough and united enough to keep the French on their side of the Rhine. That's where the German Realschule and Gymnasium came from. The Germans invented the research university, again, as a way to make Germany strong enough to beat the French. In the US the "common school" system was developed by chaps like Horace Mann. For chaps like Mann the idea was to defeat the Puritans; for Protestants the idea was to cure the Irish of their Catholicism.
   
   Obviously, this is worked only too well in the US where universities are now secular seminaries that churn out good little boys and good little girls that have been educated to a fare-thee-well to spout the ruling class Narrative and to sneer at deplorables as subhumans.
2. Government schools are almost impossible to reform. The K-12 system was set up a century ago, the university system has operated almost unchanged since the building boom of the 1960s. But what should education be like in the 21st century? What should university education be like? Should we all go to university? Or some of us? Or almost none of us? None of these questions are likely to get a good answer because the government education system is a $1.1 trillion a year monster. You try reforming or updating or improving it. It is impossible to reform because 1) parents of school children are getting it for "free" and nobody ever gives up on free stuff, and 2) the current incumbents, teachers, administrators, unions, and suppliers, are damned if their are going to give up a dime in their benefits.
3. Government-sponsored "research" is welfare for the educated class, and just like welfare for the poor, welfare for the educated is morally and ethically demoralizing. People should have to beg borrow and steal to get a chance to do original research. They shouldn't be on a gray train. Here is my argument, stemming from my reductive Three Peoples theory. The top dogs in my Three Peoples are the People of the Creative Self, people for whom just being responsible citizens is not enough. They long to create, to imagine and construct something original and pathbreaking. Very well. But the would-be creative folks should not be coddled and primped with government dollars and given life-time sinecures. Many all called to a creative life, but few are chosen; for most of us our creative dreams end in failure, or an acceptance of our ordinariness. Thus real creative people will be living on the border between order and chaos: the sacrificial hero. Such a person cannot be an employee of a government university.

My point is that the government education system is incapable of reform.  Indeed, the whole point of a government program is to set up something for the ages.

The only solutions is burn it down. But what will replace it?

Let us begin with education for children. In my imagination it will consist of:

1. Tony private schools for the professional classes. We have this already, only attenuated because many professional people can bend the public school system to provide them with what they want for their children at government expense, e.g., the selective high schools in New York City that are presently under attack from the left.
2. Home-schooling for the middle class. The original idea for government schools was to make the poor literate and numerate. But most moms are already literate and numerate so their children will naturally become literate and numerate because that is what kids are programmed to do: grow up to become their parents. And there is a whole universe of materials and support out there to back up the home-schooling mom, not to mention the Internet. But I do not see home-schooling as being a private thing but a neighborhood thing, with all the neighborhood moms getting together to home-school each other's children and band together for specialty items and field trips.
3. KIPP academies for the poor. What the poor need above all is to learn the cadences of middle-class life, to be responsible cooperative city people, and to "get with the program, Jenkins." That is what highly structured program like KIPP academy do. So who will pay for this? Billionaires, that's who. And I demand that they get medals and awards for their public service.
4. A whole new world of apprenticeships and internships, starting in the early teens. Yes, I believe it is time to kill the evil child-labor laws. After all, right now children are forced to attend government schools and work all day and then go home and do homework, and for this they are paid:__ Nothing! Can you spell INJUSTICE? Look, most people should not go to university. Tertiary education is the biggest scam in world history. Good little girls go to college and major in sociology and English. And then go work for Starbucks as a barista. For that they need to get $50,000 and more in debt? No. I say get kids into the workforce early and let employers pay for specialized and technical education, especially for youngsters with promise. Let there be a ton of easily obtained credentials, like the current certifications and competencies available in the tech world.

Really, how hard can this be? Burn the whole education system down and let a hundred flowers bloom.

And everybody will live happily ever after.

Oppressions of Liberal Cultural/Political Hegemony, Pt.2

Yesterday we listed four instances of the cruel domination of leftist hegemony in Socialism, in Big Government, the War on Middle-Class Culture, and the War on Religion. But how much can you get through in a single blog post? So let us continue with:

Education. The notion of child education -- extending now into young adulthood -- is so universally accepted and celebrated that you wonder what humans did before universal childhood education paid for by taxes. Clearly, the whole point of education is for adults to get a hold of children's minds. That is what is behind the alleged Jesuit claim: "Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man."

Charles Dickens famously represented the schools of his age as vile prisons of mental torture and physical abuse, for which the solution was... what, exactly?

The father of the "common school" in the United States, Horace Mann, predicted in the 1830s that the government school would reduce crime by 90 percent.

Well, we know how that worked out. In the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting in Florida we discovered that, in order to reduce crime statistics, police and education bureaucrats determined, as recommended by the Obama administration, not to put criminal-suspect children into the criminal justice system. And then one day a kid shot up the school. Way to go, bureaucrats!

What we have, in modern government education, is the elite running a system to educate children according to their model of how children should be educated. But there is not the least effort to discover how the parents of the children want their children educated, least of all poor parents.

Or even a double-blind study to compare different models of education with outcomes by race, class, and gender.

So let me ask you: what do poor and minority parents want for their children? Frankly, I haven't a clue, except that I've heard tell that many charter schools are oversubscribed, and that many minority parents like the high-discipline KIPP academies.

Look, this is not surprising. The ruling class thinks of education from inside its liberal bubble as a preparation for a creative and well-connected life, culminating in college and a master's degree and entry into government-financed education and activism. Anything else is not that interesting to the rulers.

Plus, of course, since education is a government monopoly, it is almost impossible to change it. To implement an education system that would respond to changing times and to parents you would need a fee-paying market-based education system. But any idea like that terrifies people.

My model for education would be mothers in the neighborhood getting together to teach their kids the basics and an end to child labor laws. Yep, why not get Junior running  spreadsheets at age 7? However, I would draw the line at allowing children to operate power equipment. Some fun things must be reserved for adults. For the poor? Billionaire-financed KIPP academies. Most kids would quit school at 12 or 13 and become interns and apprentices. Anyone wanting to go to college would have to crawl over broken glass to get there. And no student debt, because that just encourages colleges to jack up fees and hire administrators.

That is the only way to end the injustice of liberal-dominated education.

Welfare. The current welfare system is a pension scheme to reward supporters of the government; both the actual welfare clients and the bureaucrats and vendors that benefit from the system. That is all.

Otherwise we would have to come to the uncomfortable notion that the whole idea of government welfare is to break up the families of the poor, make sure that the poor never rise up into the working class and get a job. And certainly never rise to compete with the middle class for jobs, housing, and good schools in the tonier suburbs.

In the good old days, welfare was run by charities and by mutual-aid associations. There was a strong notion that you only helped people that helped themselves. The charities had a ABCDEFG system. A is for Affliation: who is responsible for this person? EFG is Employment, Freedom, God.

Really, what else would you expect? Government is an armed minority, using taxes to reward its supporters. What does government care of decency, responsibility, self-respect? As long as the punters are voting for our guy the system is working. That's how a politician thinks.

But here is the real injustice. Imagine what happens to the welfare recipient in a place like Venezuela, presently going down the tubes. What is life like for the welfare classes in Venezuela right now? For some reason I read nothing in the media about that. The fact is that if you repose upon your government benefices you are remarkably ill-prepared for life when the government runs out of money. And it is when the government runs out of money, dear lefties, that people turn to the Man on the White Horse, the evil fascist.

Government pensions. Half a century ago, Peter Drucker (I think) observed that defined benefit pensions (that define the income from a pension) could not work because it is impossible to predict 30 years in advance how much an employee should pay in order to enjoy a defined pension at age 65. Anyone that organizes a defined-benefit pension is allocating the risk of providing the future pension to somebody in the future. For instance just this week it was announced that in Seattle, the city employee pension funds made a series of mistakes in investing their funds. So who takes the loss? The city employees? The managers of the pension funds? The insurance companies providing liability insurance to the pension fund managers? The taxpayers?

In fact, while corporations have abandoned the defined-benefit pension plan for "defined-contribution" plans in which the employer just puts funds into an employee pension account the government is still going strong with the defined-benefit plan, all the way from Social Security to the notorious California government employee pension fund, CalPERS, that is likely to cause the State of California to go bankrupt. Actually the defined-benefit pension plan is the perfect fit for politics because it offers glorious vistas of wealth -- way off in the future when other people will have to deal with the fallout.

Obviously defined-benefit pension plans are a monstrous injustice, what I call "generational injustice." They promise a wonderful cornucopia for people now, but require somebody in the future to cough up real cash in order to make good on the promises.

OK, that's enough for now. More in the future.

Yes, What Is Education For?

I guess that my take on education is simple: "bring back child labor." Because after all, nobody is going to be sending the kiddies down the mine or tending textile machines any more. Hell no. We got adults for that.

So just what is child education for?

In The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money economics professor Bryan Caplan says that all education does it provide a signaling function. It tells an employer that here is a person that follows instructions long enough to actually graduate.

There's a good interview with Reason editor Nick Gillespie here.

What's to be done? Here's what the blurb says:

The first is educational austerity. Government needs to sharply cut education funding to curb this wasteful rat race. The second is more vocational education, because practical skills are more socially valuable than teaching students how to outshine their peers.

 Hmm. The first one will never fly because the one thing that government cannot do is cut spending. See Venezuela.

The second one will probably be useless because what does a government bureaucracy know or care about what practical skills to teach kids? Almost certainly the schools will end up teaching skills that will end up being no use in five years to job applicants. Schools are incredibly conservative. I learned Latin when I was a kid, and actually quite enjoyed it, although I never got to e.g., reading Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. The reason that Latin was still in the curriculum in the mid-20th century was that way back, at the time of Erasmus, pretty well all educated writing was done in Latin. The Bible was in Latin. Then came Luther in 1522-34 translating the Bible into a fairly colloquial German. And the King James Bible in 1611 translating the Bible into English. Newton wrote his laws of motion in 1687 in Latin: Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. But then scientists started writing papers in their native languages. David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature was published in 1740 in English.

But 300 years later private schools in England were still teaching Latin. Go figure.

Meanwhile there is the home-schooling movement. I read this movement as a typical movement of women getting together to educate their kids in common. In other words, some of home-schooling is kids working at home on basic literacy and numeracy. But another part of it is mothers getting together to provide enrichment for their kids and their friends' kids.

So my Education Plan is this:

• Bring back child labor. The reason for child labor laws is to protect adults from low-wage competition. Most kids should quit school at 12-13  and go to work.
• Force employers to subsidize skills education for their employees. This would be courses for which employees could quickly get certification in various skills.
• Allow inner-city schools to continue as dysfunctional hell-holes where the purpose of the school is to provide jobs-for-life for the employees. Until it becomes such a national scandal that Something Must Be Done.
• Create a cultural movement so that all Good Little Girl mothers will be afraid that if they don't home-school and stay home with their kids they are Bad Mothers, and that their friends will be saying nasty things about them.

Modern education started partly with the ruling class wanting to indoctrinate the kids, and partly from the workers wanting free education for their kids to learn their letters and numbers. Naturally, the whole thing just growed, so that now the only thing the schools do well is indoctrinating kids in ruling class ideology.

Way back then, say in the early to mid 19th century, this approach had a point. But now most people are functionally literate and could easily figure out how to get their kids literate. Hey! Liberals wanting to be activists could run literacy schools in the inner city. You don't need a government program to make sure kids are as literate as their parents. There is a program inside kids that wants to grow up and be independent and know everything their parents know.

And if you ask me, the last thing we need these days is to give the ruling class access to our kids and teach our kiddies the vile ruling-class ideology of neo-tribal identity politics and neo-feudal entitlement politics.

I know. You moms are all horrified at the notion of kids going out to work. Well here are a couple of counter-narratives.

First, in 1913, in "Why Children Work" schools inspector Helen Todd found that working children preferred to work rather than go to school. See, the kids reported that their employers treated them much better than the teachers at school. Of course, these were immigrant children that the teachers knew were dumb and stupid.

Second, I read a narrative by a woman years ago that recalled how she loved going to work as a kid. It was a family thing: the whole family walked to work every day. I don't recall the details of what work the kiddies did. But it seems that child labor was not the horror story that the activists like to tell.

Yes, education all comes down to the mothers. And so I have this to say to the world's mothers. 

You send your kids to school because that is what you have been taught to do. By sending your kid to the government school you get a star as a Good Mother. But suppose your kid gets damaged by school? Suppose that it is mostly a waste of time? Suppose your kid gets traumatized by the bullies and the lowlifes at school? Suppose she gets indoctrinated in ruling-class propaganda that will make her into a hopeless snowflake? Suppose she gets out of college with a useless gender studies degree and ends up working as a barista at Starbucks? Well, then I would say that you were not a Good Mother, but what the Jungians call the Terrible Mother, the one found so frequently in Grimm's fairy tales. What then?

Yep. Let's all get a clue and send the kids out to work. They might learn something.

Supposing I Got to Set The Syllabus for AP History

The chaps at Powerline are doing the dirty on the College Board's Advanced Placement courses for US and European History. They don't like the knee-jerk leftism of the curriculum.

The critics of AP History syllabi complain that the College Board rehearses the liberal line of a consistent move from superstition to "secular modernization," and leaves out stuff like the history of economic freedom and liberty. Nothing about the Soviets' Ukraine famine. Nothing about the fact that the anti-slavery movement was "inspired by religious faith" of Christians like William Wilberforce.

That set me to thinking about how I would frame European and US history.

Wait. Before framing US and European History I would be framing the human story in an overall Grand Narrative, one in which the liberal notion of "secular modernization" would be a curious millennarian cult of our time significant in its pious faith that it had escaped from the superstition of former times and oblivious to its own superstitions and naivété.

That's because my faith is that religion is a constant in all human eras, and the idea that we are now "above" religion is a pious fraud. The reason is simple. The whole question of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything," cunningly developed by Douglas Adams in his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, never goes away. The whole point of religion whether a totemic tribal religion, an Axial Age religion, or a modern secular religion like socialism or progressivism, is the eternal human need to determine the meaning of life, the universe, and everything right now as a guide for living life right now. But the truth is that we don't know the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and we are not likely to find out any time soon. Indeed, I say that the more we know about the universe, and science, and stuff, the more we realize how little we know, and the more mysterious the whole question of meaning becomes.

I suppose the liberal line is that humans were stuck in religious superstition and ignorance until the Renaissance came along and then, with the Age of Reason, humans found that they could understand the world using Science without imagining spirits in trees and God in his Heaven. What people needed was good enlightened teachers that understood the new world.

But if you ask me, Martin Luther King Jr's faith that the arc of history bends towards justice, echoed by President Obama, is just as much of a religious faith as the Christian faith in God's justice and the Last Judgement.

My theory of history, curiously, is fairly close to the Marxian theory, that the economy, the way that people get food and shelter, is the base, and religion and culture are a superstructure built upon the foundations established by the economic facts on the ground. So in my view the "progress" of recent centuries is more a reaction to economic changes than to any enlightenment.

So my Grand Narrative starts with the rise of the city in Mesopotamia (and doubtless in China and India) in the two millennia before Christ. The point of a city is that it is a place where trading and markets happen. And that is where the Axial Age religions got started. Why? Because whereas life in the country is governed by the weather and the collective defense of the border, the life of the city is an individual affair. And so you get the phenomenon recorded by preachers as late as the Great Awakening in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 18th century.

When we began to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages... they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings, and that a refusal to used the means appointed was a damning sin.

My belief is that everyone above the rank of peasant or proletarian, and anyone living in a city, needs to  learn to live life as a "responsible being," and it is my belief that the Axial Age religions are the religions of responsible beings that live in cities and need to think of God as a creator of the universe that says to his people: you figure this out and learn how to wive and thrive in a world by following rules and finding ways of serving your fellow humans. In such an economic environment humans start to need a culture of freedom and liberty because no king or government planner can have enough knowledge to tell people how to serve their fellow humans: each of us must do that for ourselves. And as the cities have gotten bigger and bigger, and more and more of the human population has come to live and work in cities, the need for people to take up the challenge of individual responsibility has grown. But as long as most people were still on the land growing food this culture did not dominate the world. Peasants lived as fatalists and the subordinate serfs of lords that provided them "protection" in its full meaning, including the notion of a protection racket. And that was good enough.

Up until about 1850 I think we can understand history as people gradually moving to the city and picking up the culture and the religion of responsibility.

But in 1850 a new world dawns, the epoch of creativity. We are now in a new Great Awakening, the awakening to creativity. So a teacher of creativity might say:

When we began to teach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages... they seemed to see for the first time that they were creative beings, and that a refusal to used the means appointed was nothing less than deplorable.

My takeup of Deirdre McCloskey's Great Enrichment partakes of this. The reason, on McCloskey's account, that per-capita income has risen by 3,000 percent in the last 200 years is innovation, innovation that has not been snuffed out by the powers that be.

So I would say that the cultural superstructure that allows innovation must be both a culture of responsibility, that has been around for the last 3,000 years in the city, and also a culture of creativity, the faith that it is possible to think new thoughts and invent new things and not have the world come to an end.

Hello. It looks like my reductive Three Peoples theory has snuck its nose in the tent again, since we are talking here about three cultures: creativity, responsibility, and subordination.

Now, in my view, this new Age of Innovation has taken us completely by surprise, and we are still trying to figure out what happened. But that also means we are in another Axial Age, in which people will be reinventing the idea of religion, trying to understand the meaning of life, the universe, and everything in light of the new facts on the ground.

Naturally, when people invent a new religion they tend to think only of their own needs and not how other people fit into their view of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Thus our liberal friends make a big deal of their culture of creativity, including demanding that Christian bakers bake cakes for gay weddings. 

Now, in my view it is great for gays to go out and get all creative about sex and get married and all. But it is grossly un-compassionate of them -- not to mention bigoted -- to demand that everyone bows the knee to their creative views on sex. For one thing, as Schopenhauer pointed out, the successful creator is one in a million. In our modern notion it means that tons of people want to be creative artists, but only a very few have the chops to make it and the luck to get the support of a Peggy Guggenheim.

Here is how I think the new religion of creativity should look. It should be first of all a religion of sacrifice. Creative artists should expect to be failures, and very humble if they get to succeed. Second, it should be a religion of compassion, meaning its believers should be compassionate for people that are not called to be creative, don't understand about creativity, and don't want to be creative.

So if I were designing the syllabus for AP history we would be looking at the past through the lens of my Three Peoples theory, and understanding how radical the new world is, and expecting that most actors in history would be complete idiots, rehearsing the old ways in a world they don't understand. We would, for instance, be very compassionate about liberal educators that don't have a clue. What could we expect? That a million educational lifers would suddenly get wisdom?