I once seen and took an exam given to 8th graders in Kentucky to go on to high school in 1920 that boggled my mind? The test was given to, without telling them what it was, a bunch of educators from the various Universities throughout New England in 2020. Only 48 percent of them got a passing grade and 52 percent failed. True story. I took the test myself and barely passed it, but, I did pass it. Those 8th graders back then that got an A on this exam were much brighter than even our advanced educators today. I'm still astounded by that exam!
And is there a better explanation for all of todays idiocies than the post-Marxist ideas of the Frankfurt school, as actively promoted by Hebert Marcuse and his followers?
The Frankfurt School was very influential but they were not alone. All manner of other Marxists preceded them, joined them doing the same thing, and followed them. And the Soviet funding of anti-colonial movements in the Third World also provided a template for bringing those false arguments all the way back to the 'colonisers'. That's partly why wokeness is still couched in the language of Leninism and the terminology of colonial era rebellion (fighting 'imperialism' etc). Poststructuralism and postmodernism too. Anything that 1. attacked the traditional West and 2. fostered relativism and nihilism worked as part of the demoralization of the West.
My English born Granny who was born into an educated peerage family about 1875, told me many fascinating stories about Victorian England.
Again, the knowledge of a previous age was substantial. Her stories of the Victorian Age were anything but stuffy and staid. It was like a beautifully pieced quilt of happenings, discoveries, society tidbits and gossip, social events, political intrigues, new building and architecture, and the trend towards decorum, manners and ettiquette.
Granny was very stern about manners, decorum, disposition, education and ettiquette. How many times I had to practice walking across a room without dropping the textbook sitting on my head! Posture, Donna! Me, a girl who was born in the fifties and played cool mod chick in the modern 60's!
Now? I thank her for all that she taught me. I'd go back in time to the Victorian Age in a flash!
As ‘they’ try to rewrite history, there will be those who know better. Many of us. It is time for Grandma and Grandpa school to redress the ‘narrative’ to our children and Grandchildren
The Victorian era was about the transition from the mechanical industrial age of the printing press to the electrical industrial age of the telegraph. In essence it was about the manifestation of an exterior nervous system. In fact, you can probably recognize some of the unsettling aspects of our current dilemma in Marshall McLuhan's description of the inflection point:
<quote>In the same year, 1844, then, that men were playing chess and lotteries on the first American telegraph, Søren Kierkegaard published The Concept of Dread. The Age of Anxiety had begun. For with the telegraph, man had initiated that outering or extension of his central nervous system that is now approaching an extension of consciousness with satellite broadcasting. To put one’s nerves outside, and one’s physical organs inside the nervous system, or the brain, is to initiate a situation — if not a concept — of dread.
Having glanced at the major trauma of the telegraph on conscious life, noting that it ushers in the Age of Anxiety and of Pervasive Dread, we can turn to some specific instances of this uneasiness and growing jitters. Whenever any new medium or human extension occurs, it creates a new myth for itself, usually associated with a major figure: Aretino, the Scourge of Princes and the Puppet of Printing; Napoleon and the trauma of industrial change; Chaplin, the public conscience of the movie; Hitler, the tribal totem of radio; and Florence Nightingale, the first singer of human woe by telegraph wire....
She began to think, as well as to live, her time, and she discovered the new formula for the electronic age: Medicare. Care of the body became balm for the nerves in the age that had extended its nervous system outside itself for the first time in human history.
To put the Florence Nightingale story in new media terms is quite simple. She arrived on a distant scene where controls from the London center were of the common pre-electric hierarchical pattern. Minute division and delegation of functions and separation of powers, normal in military and industrial organization then and long afterward, created an imbecile system of waste and inefficiency which for the first time got reported daily by telegraph. The legacy of literacy and visual fragmentation came home to roost every day on the telegraph wire:
In England fury succeeded fury. A great storm of rage, humiliation, and despair had been gathering through the terrible winter of 1854–55. For the first time in history, through reading the dispatches of Russell, the public had realized “with what majesty the British soldier fights.” And these heroes were dead. The men who had stormed the heights of Alma, charged with the Light Brigade at Balaclava … had perished of hunger and neglect. Even horses which had taken part in the Charge of the Light Brigade had starved to death.</quote> -- McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (pp. 274-275).
As President Reagan once said, it’s not that the left doesn't know anything, it’s that so much of what they know is wrong. Marx made an incorrect assessment of what was going on in the UK in the 1860's. It’s true that there was terrible poverty alongside great wealth, but he ignored the fact that the first and second industrial revolutions greatly increased productivity. At the same time the population of the UK was expanding at a rapid pace, and there was an internal displacement of the population from the countryside to the cities. Obviously, there was a lag in the construction of the necessary infrastructure in the cities. Housing was a major problem, and this caused the emergence of shoddy building practices, exemplified by the epithet "Jerry built". None of these social changes were considered by Marx, who reduced it all to a simple "Capitalism is bad" narrative.
Bravo. George Santayana really meant to say, “Those who cannot remember the past should be so blessed as to be able to repeat it.”
Yes. I'd take the late 19th century back in a heartbeat.
I once seen and took an exam given to 8th graders in Kentucky to go on to high school in 1920 that boggled my mind? The test was given to, without telling them what it was, a bunch of educators from the various Universities throughout New England in 2020. Only 48 percent of them got a passing grade and 52 percent failed. True story. I took the test myself and barely passed it, but, I did pass it. Those 8th graders back then that got an A on this exam were much brighter than even our advanced educators today. I'm still astounded by that exam!
And is there a better explanation for all of todays idiocies than the post-Marxist ideas of the Frankfurt school, as actively promoted by Hebert Marcuse and his followers?
The Frankfurt School was very influential but they were not alone. All manner of other Marxists preceded them, joined them doing the same thing, and followed them. And the Soviet funding of anti-colonial movements in the Third World also provided a template for bringing those false arguments all the way back to the 'colonisers'. That's partly why wokeness is still couched in the language of Leninism and the terminology of colonial era rebellion (fighting 'imperialism' etc). Poststructuralism and postmodernism too. Anything that 1. attacked the traditional West and 2. fostered relativism and nihilism worked as part of the demoralization of the West.
My English born Granny who was born into an educated peerage family about 1875, told me many fascinating stories about Victorian England.
Again, the knowledge of a previous age was substantial. Her stories of the Victorian Age were anything but stuffy and staid. It was like a beautifully pieced quilt of happenings, discoveries, society tidbits and gossip, social events, political intrigues, new building and architecture, and the trend towards decorum, manners and ettiquette.
Granny was very stern about manners, decorum, disposition, education and ettiquette. How many times I had to practice walking across a room without dropping the textbook sitting on my head! Posture, Donna! Me, a girl who was born in the fifties and played cool mod chick in the modern 60's!
Now? I thank her for all that she taught me. I'd go back in time to the Victorian Age in a flash!
So would I, fascinating to read this reply,Manx thanks for your others too-they are all interesting and add to what I’ve said. Thank you. 😀
As ‘they’ try to rewrite history, there will be those who know better. Many of us. It is time for Grandma and Grandpa school to redress the ‘narrative’ to our children and Grandchildren
It is. Home schooling also seems more and more sensible.
EXCELLENT!!! Bravo!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bravo, Daniel!!
The Victorian era was about the transition from the mechanical industrial age of the printing press to the electrical industrial age of the telegraph. In essence it was about the manifestation of an exterior nervous system. In fact, you can probably recognize some of the unsettling aspects of our current dilemma in Marshall McLuhan's description of the inflection point:
<quote>In the same year, 1844, then, that men were playing chess and lotteries on the first American telegraph, Søren Kierkegaard published The Concept of Dread. The Age of Anxiety had begun. For with the telegraph, man had initiated that outering or extension of his central nervous system that is now approaching an extension of consciousness with satellite broadcasting. To put one’s nerves outside, and one’s physical organs inside the nervous system, or the brain, is to initiate a situation — if not a concept — of dread.
Having glanced at the major trauma of the telegraph on conscious life, noting that it ushers in the Age of Anxiety and of Pervasive Dread, we can turn to some specific instances of this uneasiness and growing jitters. Whenever any new medium or human extension occurs, it creates a new myth for itself, usually associated with a major figure: Aretino, the Scourge of Princes and the Puppet of Printing; Napoleon and the trauma of industrial change; Chaplin, the public conscience of the movie; Hitler, the tribal totem of radio; and Florence Nightingale, the first singer of human woe by telegraph wire....
She began to think, as well as to live, her time, and she discovered the new formula for the electronic age: Medicare. Care of the body became balm for the nerves in the age that had extended its nervous system outside itself for the first time in human history.
To put the Florence Nightingale story in new media terms is quite simple. She arrived on a distant scene where controls from the London center were of the common pre-electric hierarchical pattern. Minute division and delegation of functions and separation of powers, normal in military and industrial organization then and long afterward, created an imbecile system of waste and inefficiency which for the first time got reported daily by telegraph. The legacy of literacy and visual fragmentation came home to roost every day on the telegraph wire:
In England fury succeeded fury. A great storm of rage, humiliation, and despair had been gathering through the terrible winter of 1854–55. For the first time in history, through reading the dispatches of Russell, the public had realized “with what majesty the British soldier fights.” And these heroes were dead. The men who had stormed the heights of Alma, charged with the Light Brigade at Balaclava … had perished of hunger and neglect. Even horses which had taken part in the Charge of the Light Brigade had starved to death.</quote> -- McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (pp. 274-275).
Of course nihilists sneer at the past. They know the past would see and judge them for what they are.
As President Reagan once said, it’s not that the left doesn't know anything, it’s that so much of what they know is wrong. Marx made an incorrect assessment of what was going on in the UK in the 1860's. It’s true that there was terrible poverty alongside great wealth, but he ignored the fact that the first and second industrial revolutions greatly increased productivity. At the same time the population of the UK was expanding at a rapid pace, and there was an internal displacement of the population from the countryside to the cities. Obviously, there was a lag in the construction of the necessary infrastructure in the cities. Housing was a major problem, and this caused the emergence of shoddy building practices, exemplified by the epithet "Jerry built". None of these social changes were considered by Marx, who reduced it all to a simple "Capitalism is bad" narrative.