Bravo, Daniel. Our education here in the USA is similar in that the left has taken over and teaches its miserable agenda, leaving millions of children almost completely ignorant about everything but full of propaganda, and therefore easy marks for the communists. The difference is that we have more freedom to leave the public education system, with options in various places such as home schooling, private schools, and school choice.
Yeah I came to say I at least still retain SOME of my Spanish, and I can definitely solve math problems, but then again I majored in it, so I damned well ought to be able to.
My artistic skills never made it past the kindergarten level, though, and I just don't seem to have any aptitude for it at all.
The Marxist textbook said that It will take about 80 years to reach the numbing of our current state of “post-knowledge society”. Can Trump break it and reverse the pendulum? Never give up!
The School I attended from 1948 to 1958 was 'Park Modern' in Barking Essex (long before Barking became the 'Peoples Republic of Concrecia') and was a model school built just before WWII and still had brick-built bomb shelters in the grounds. It was a lavish complex of separated schooling - Nursery school, Primary school, and segregated Secondary school with 6th form for further education. The buildings were of high-quality brick construction and the two secondary schools modeled on a top public school with dedicated teacher/subject classrooms built around a verandahed quadrangle and separate buildings for science, arts, and practical skills (woodwork and metalwork) complete with a large fully equipped gymnasium and allotment for vegetable growing skills. All was within a huge area of playing fields for cricket, rugby, and athletics and large cricket pavilion. All in all, it was run like a public school with four 'houses' to which students were assigned for sporting and swimming events. During my time, we were all given a beautiful hard-bound and illustrated book on the history of Essex that celebrated that now much maligned county; I wish that I still had it. My academic interests at that time were rather limited with my mind's interests filled with exotic cars, guns, model railway etc. - I was (rightly) chided in art class for producing a very passable painting of Colt's 'Navy' model of 1851 ! I later addressed more to English literature and language but my obsession with cars and acquired tool-maker engineering skill stood me in good stead to make my own business.
So well said. I have independently thought the same thing about how frightening it is that the dumbing of Americans allows the Communist messages to seed their idiotic minds.
In enjoyed your autobiographical excursion. I'm lucky I was born 25 years sooner and in a conservative portion of the U.S. Still, I continually make the mistake of thinking that the minds and concerns of the people around me are like mine, when their thoughts are actually much truncated and shaped by youth and cultural censorship.
Fascinating. I am more and more coming to believe that self-education is the only real education nowadays.
I have read that IQ's have been going up for several decades (through the Millenials, anyway), but I don't know how to reconcile this with the degeneration you correctly described.
I am a fan of the rock music of the 60's and 70's (and a little from later eras). But it has obviously gone drastically downhill in recent decades and I wonder from time to time why that is the case.
My daughters went to grammar schools here in Kent in the brave new millenium. One had an English Lit teacher who complained that Tennyson was a coward for not going to the trenches and WH Auden was a German Jew. Grammar schools are not what they were. Independent schools aren't what they were either. Both daughters went to a fee-paying prep school (it's what you do in Kent to get into said grammars). One Christmas one of them came home with a coloured-in Christmas card they wanted me to buy to send to friends and relations. It made no mention of Christmas but had a very large swastika on it. When I fell about laughing and told the teacher what I thought of using a swastika on a Christmas card I was told, in all seriousness, that it was a Hindu symbol of peace. When I suggested it would be seen by all Europeans as a symbol of Nazism she was surprised. To this day, I don't know whether she really didn't know about the Nazis or was just too far down the rabbit hole of Wokedom to only see the ethnic element (there were no ethnic children at the prep school). My daughters can recite the Kings and Queens of England from 1066 but can also name most pre-Conquest kings. They can also play pianos and violins, read music, dance en pointe or with taps, do a spot of water coloured painting, cook real food, potter in the garden, sing in tune, read Dickens, understand Shakespeare and other Austen-type accomplishments. But that was me forcing it all on them!
ooh, I hope I didn't sound like I was boasting! It could be said that I made my children into oddballs because they didn't do what their friends did. And we had a ruler with all the Rulers from 1066 on it which they found amusing to memorise. And I really liked the Jane Austen type of accomplished young lady!!!!
The 70s (in the US) was a turning point. I was a kid in the 60s, and a teen in the 70s, when the idea that one could screw up and always get another chance kicked in. I paid not a lick of attention in high school. In college, since I worked full time, it was all about getting through the grind. Only after I started teaching did I truly start learning anything. I'd say that my professors weren't necessarily very schooled in teaching us how to write a literary analysis. They just -- talked -- and we were supposed to write a paper. I had no clue what to do.
Anyway, one thing that is truly alarming is how poorly most people's reading comprehension truly is. And how little curiosity they demonstrate. They just smugly parrot the idiotic 'beliefs' that are supposed to make them sound smart.
The other day, a female friend -- who has a master's in education mind you -- was telling me about how it had been left to her to clear out her mother's house after she died. Her brother did not show any interest. She said something along the lines that he should have known better -- it was 2015! Men and women are interchangeable! So apparently he was supposed to be interested in going through his mother's belongings because...
It was 2015.
The 14-year-old son was there. Somehow it came up that men and women are different. He was shocked by that. NO! Can't be! NOT IN THE BRAIN!
I said, Yes in the brain. Women are wired to focus on different things. There's something called a chromosome, and hormones...
NOT IN THE BRAIN! He was shouting.
Then I brought up pioneers and how strong a man had to be in order to settle in the west. The two of them gazed emptily at me as if I were inventing this to confirm a bias that they couldn't accept. I went into the Laura Ingalls Widler books and a scene from that which appeared in the TV series.
She said, But that's just TV!
This person had been educated to TEACH OTHER PEOPLE.
I suppose I am fortunate. I went to public schools in America in the 1950s and was out of high school in 1966, as lunacy and idiocy was just taking hold. College was a joke. "Wretched of the Earth" was mandated. A joke. At least my professors in law school were mostly hard taskmasters and sort of jerks. That was fine. In fact, more than fine. We, at least, learned something and were not babied.
I'm half afraid to comment for there is so much to agree with. I was fortunate to have been schooled privately, by a gaggle of the most singular of individuals that have left their mark indelibly on my noggin.
Well, forget that 'indelibly' because, for a fact I'm gradually 'losing it' in the memory department. 80 now, I fancy dementia is beckoning. However, brevity tells me to keep it brief.
I was fortunate in that my parents saw fit to populate our bookcases with the 10 volumes of Arthur Mee's Childrens Encyclopedia. First it was the pictures and later it was the text. They were sublime in every way possible. A proper education.
Secondly, Beverley Nichol's Book of Old Ballads, would mould romanticism into anybody who cared to read. As it did to me. Again, first it was the illustration - mostly by Brock (I think?)- and then it was the text. If only for Beverley Nichol's wonderful introductory prose, peerless English.
A quick survey via google tells me all we need to know. They're as attainable - and affordable, used - as they were then. Am tempted to repopulate further my own library with the aforesaid titles, what's left of it that is.
They'd be another stack on the floor for my shelves are full.
The text, the illustrations, the paper, the bindings priceless beyond avarice.
As for handwriting that's another of my pet quibbles as to where it all went wrong.
Compare and contrast the beautiful italic longhand handwriting of our victorian forebears, even those of very tender years; 8-10 year olds, say, via a flexible (vital for the majuscules!) nibbed dip pen and an ink pot. Yes, compare to the horror show that the 'educated' classes of today, our leaders (Hah!) write with. Even a Mont Blanc pen can't mask an incompetent's hand. It tells all.
This is the real crisis beneath politics. A people that does not know its history cannot defend its inheritance. A people that cannot read deeply cannot spot propaganda. A people taught only guilt cannot love its country. A people trained to sneer at ancestors will eventually worship bureaucrats, algorithms, and fashionable frauds. Technology did not cause the collapse, but it accelerated it by making ignorance feel informed. The left captured education, flattened memory, mocked excellence, and called the ruins progress. Knowledge is now rebellion. Reading is rebellion. Remembering is rebellion. Respecting civilization is rebellion. Good. Rebel.
“There is simple ignorance, which is the source of lighter offenses, and double ignorance, which is accompanied by a conceit of wisdom; and he who is under the influence of the latter fancies that he knows all about matters of which he knows nothing. This second kind of ignorance, when possessed of power and strength, will be the source of great and monstrous crimes.”
Plato, Laws (Book IX, 863c–d).
It is so sad that this is the state of education today. The intentional polluting of the mind. Dehumanizing, which is the whole point I guess. I am just old enough to have escaped it, but at the end of college, they were teaching Women's Studies and saying that if you took a baby boy & baby girl & bought gender neutral toys, they were essentially the same person. It is only society that creates boys & girls through social pressures. I thought what a crock! I didn't realize how evil this perspective was because when my advisor said that this was a new concept they were teaching, I laughed out loud. He laughed with me, but the feminists were dead serious. And I'd bet a large amount of money that many of them were either childless or lesbian, or both, and had zero experience raising children, because then they would KNOW that boys and girls are very different, even at a young age.
nicely done Daniel. Haven't read much lately, been busy with other studies, and fortunately have somehow managed to avoid the Odyssey, but it was a pleasure to sample your unique style again....
One of your best and most depressing pieces yet Daniel. I didn't know it was that bad. I'm older than you and I have often observed that my my grandparents and great grandparents were more knowledgeable having left school at twelve. I wish I were joking. You couldn't buy their independence. Making things easy has not been kind. Of course I'm sharing.
Bravo, Daniel. Our education here in the USA is similar in that the left has taken over and teaches its miserable agenda, leaving millions of children almost completely ignorant about everything but full of propaganda, and therefore easy marks for the communists. The difference is that we have more freedom to leave the public education system, with options in various places such as home schooling, private schools, and school choice.
Yeah I came to say I at least still retain SOME of my Spanish, and I can definitely solve math problems, but then again I majored in it, so I damned well ought to be able to.
My artistic skills never made it past the kindergarten level, though, and I just don't seem to have any aptitude for it at all.
The Marxist textbook said that It will take about 80 years to reach the numbing of our current state of “post-knowledge society”. Can Trump break it and reverse the pendulum? Never give up!
The School I attended from 1948 to 1958 was 'Park Modern' in Barking Essex (long before Barking became the 'Peoples Republic of Concrecia') and was a model school built just before WWII and still had brick-built bomb shelters in the grounds. It was a lavish complex of separated schooling - Nursery school, Primary school, and segregated Secondary school with 6th form for further education. The buildings were of high-quality brick construction and the two secondary schools modeled on a top public school with dedicated teacher/subject classrooms built around a verandahed quadrangle and separate buildings for science, arts, and practical skills (woodwork and metalwork) complete with a large fully equipped gymnasium and allotment for vegetable growing skills. All was within a huge area of playing fields for cricket, rugby, and athletics and large cricket pavilion. All in all, it was run like a public school with four 'houses' to which students were assigned for sporting and swimming events. During my time, we were all given a beautiful hard-bound and illustrated book on the history of Essex that celebrated that now much maligned county; I wish that I still had it. My academic interests at that time were rather limited with my mind's interests filled with exotic cars, guns, model railway etc. - I was (rightly) chided in art class for producing a very passable painting of Colt's 'Navy' model of 1851 ! I later addressed more to English literature and language but my obsession with cars and acquired tool-maker engineering skill stood me in good stead to make my own business.
So well said. I have independently thought the same thing about how frightening it is that the dumbing of Americans allows the Communist messages to seed their idiotic minds.
In enjoyed your autobiographical excursion. I'm lucky I was born 25 years sooner and in a conservative portion of the U.S. Still, I continually make the mistake of thinking that the minds and concerns of the people around me are like mine, when their thoughts are actually much truncated and shaped by youth and cultural censorship.
Fascinating. I am more and more coming to believe that self-education is the only real education nowadays.
I have read that IQ's have been going up for several decades (through the Millenials, anyway), but I don't know how to reconcile this with the degeneration you correctly described.
I am a fan of the rock music of the 60's and 70's (and a little from later eras). But it has obviously gone drastically downhill in recent decades and I wonder from time to time why that is the case.
My daughters went to grammar schools here in Kent in the brave new millenium. One had an English Lit teacher who complained that Tennyson was a coward for not going to the trenches and WH Auden was a German Jew. Grammar schools are not what they were. Independent schools aren't what they were either. Both daughters went to a fee-paying prep school (it's what you do in Kent to get into said grammars). One Christmas one of them came home with a coloured-in Christmas card they wanted me to buy to send to friends and relations. It made no mention of Christmas but had a very large swastika on it. When I fell about laughing and told the teacher what I thought of using a swastika on a Christmas card I was told, in all seriousness, that it was a Hindu symbol of peace. When I suggested it would be seen by all Europeans as a symbol of Nazism she was surprised. To this day, I don't know whether she really didn't know about the Nazis or was just too far down the rabbit hole of Wokedom to only see the ethnic element (there were no ethnic children at the prep school). My daughters can recite the Kings and Queens of England from 1066 but can also name most pre-Conquest kings. They can also play pianos and violins, read music, dance en pointe or with taps, do a spot of water coloured painting, cook real food, potter in the garden, sing in tune, read Dickens, understand Shakespeare and other Austen-type accomplishments. But that was me forcing it all on them!
Good for you!
ooh, I hope I didn't sound like I was boasting! It could be said that I made my children into oddballs because they didn't do what their friends did. And we had a ruler with all the Rulers from 1066 on it which they found amusing to memorise. And I really liked the Jane Austen type of accomplished young lady!!!!
No, I was dead serious, GOOD FOR YOU, you did a great job!The swastike on the Christmas card is hilarious!
The 70s (in the US) was a turning point. I was a kid in the 60s, and a teen in the 70s, when the idea that one could screw up and always get another chance kicked in. I paid not a lick of attention in high school. In college, since I worked full time, it was all about getting through the grind. Only after I started teaching did I truly start learning anything. I'd say that my professors weren't necessarily very schooled in teaching us how to write a literary analysis. They just -- talked -- and we were supposed to write a paper. I had no clue what to do.
Anyway, one thing that is truly alarming is how poorly most people's reading comprehension truly is. And how little curiosity they demonstrate. They just smugly parrot the idiotic 'beliefs' that are supposed to make them sound smart.
The other day, a female friend -- who has a master's in education mind you -- was telling me about how it had been left to her to clear out her mother's house after she died. Her brother did not show any interest. She said something along the lines that he should have known better -- it was 2015! Men and women are interchangeable! So apparently he was supposed to be interested in going through his mother's belongings because...
It was 2015.
The 14-year-old son was there. Somehow it came up that men and women are different. He was shocked by that. NO! Can't be! NOT IN THE BRAIN!
I said, Yes in the brain. Women are wired to focus on different things. There's something called a chromosome, and hormones...
NOT IN THE BRAIN! He was shouting.
Then I brought up pioneers and how strong a man had to be in order to settle in the west. The two of them gazed emptily at me as if I were inventing this to confirm a bias that they couldn't accept. I went into the Laura Ingalls Widler books and a scene from that which appeared in the TV series.
She said, But that's just TV!
This person had been educated to TEACH OTHER PEOPLE.
I suppose I am fortunate. I went to public schools in America in the 1950s and was out of high school in 1966, as lunacy and idiocy was just taking hold. College was a joke. "Wretched of the Earth" was mandated. A joke. At least my professors in law school were mostly hard taskmasters and sort of jerks. That was fine. In fact, more than fine. We, at least, learned something and were not babied.
I'm half afraid to comment for there is so much to agree with. I was fortunate to have been schooled privately, by a gaggle of the most singular of individuals that have left their mark indelibly on my noggin.
Well, forget that 'indelibly' because, for a fact I'm gradually 'losing it' in the memory department. 80 now, I fancy dementia is beckoning. However, brevity tells me to keep it brief.
I was fortunate in that my parents saw fit to populate our bookcases with the 10 volumes of Arthur Mee's Childrens Encyclopedia. First it was the pictures and later it was the text. They were sublime in every way possible. A proper education.
Secondly, Beverley Nichol's Book of Old Ballads, would mould romanticism into anybody who cared to read. As it did to me. Again, first it was the illustration - mostly by Brock (I think?)- and then it was the text. If only for Beverley Nichol's wonderful introductory prose, peerless English.
A quick survey via google tells me all we need to know. They're as attainable - and affordable, used - as they were then. Am tempted to repopulate further my own library with the aforesaid titles, what's left of it that is.
They'd be another stack on the floor for my shelves are full.
The text, the illustrations, the paper, the bindings priceless beyond avarice.
As for handwriting that's another of my pet quibbles as to where it all went wrong.
Compare and contrast the beautiful italic longhand handwriting of our victorian forebears, even those of very tender years; 8-10 year olds, say, via a flexible (vital for the majuscules!) nibbed dip pen and an ink pot. Yes, compare to the horror show that the 'educated' classes of today, our leaders (Hah!) write with. Even a Mont Blanc pen can't mask an incompetent's hand. It tells all.
This is the real crisis beneath politics. A people that does not know its history cannot defend its inheritance. A people that cannot read deeply cannot spot propaganda. A people taught only guilt cannot love its country. A people trained to sneer at ancestors will eventually worship bureaucrats, algorithms, and fashionable frauds. Technology did not cause the collapse, but it accelerated it by making ignorance feel informed. The left captured education, flattened memory, mocked excellence, and called the ruins progress. Knowledge is now rebellion. Reading is rebellion. Remembering is rebellion. Respecting civilization is rebellion. Good. Rebel.
“There is simple ignorance, which is the source of lighter offenses, and double ignorance, which is accompanied by a conceit of wisdom; and he who is under the influence of the latter fancies that he knows all about matters of which he knows nothing. This second kind of ignorance, when possessed of power and strength, will be the source of great and monstrous crimes.”
Plato, Laws (Book IX, 863c–d).
It is so sad that this is the state of education today. The intentional polluting of the mind. Dehumanizing, which is the whole point I guess. I am just old enough to have escaped it, but at the end of college, they were teaching Women's Studies and saying that if you took a baby boy & baby girl & bought gender neutral toys, they were essentially the same person. It is only society that creates boys & girls through social pressures. I thought what a crock! I didn't realize how evil this perspective was because when my advisor said that this was a new concept they were teaching, I laughed out loud. He laughed with me, but the feminists were dead serious. And I'd bet a large amount of money that many of them were either childless or lesbian, or both, and had zero experience raising children, because then they would KNOW that boys and girls are very different, even at a young age.
nicely done Daniel. Haven't read much lately, been busy with other studies, and fortunately have somehow managed to avoid the Odyssey, but it was a pleasure to sample your unique style again....
One of your best and most depressing pieces yet Daniel. I didn't know it was that bad. I'm older than you and I have often observed that my my grandparents and great grandparents were more knowledgeable having left school at twelve. I wish I were joking. You couldn't buy their independence. Making things easy has not been kind. Of course I'm sharing.
Dark.
We're entering one of the sparse phases of A Canticle For Liebowitz.