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Badtux the Snarky PenguinIn a time of chimpanzees, I was a penguin. Religious fundamentalists are motivated by the sneaking suspicion that someone, somewhere, is having fun -- and that this must be stopped. |
Monday, June 27, 2005The Party's war on educationFiredogLake mentions the Party's attacks on higher education, using David Horowitz and his Orwellianly-named "Academic Freedom Act" as the latest tool. This is part and parcel of other recent Party activities, such as their current attempts to destroy PBS, the last bastion of intelligent programming on the airwaves. The goal is to render the American people literally incapable of rational thought, and thus allow the Party to use its control of the media and of the very vocabulary we use to control the populance.This is all part of a concerted effort over the past 30 years by conservatives. The first prong of this effort was to destroy K-12 education. They have largely succeeded there, having, via standardized testing, destroyed any "education" occuring at the K-12 level and instead installing obedience training that teaches that there is only one right answer for any question and that the right answer is the one that has been given to you by the authorities. The goal of suppressing any form of logical or rational thought has succeeded resoundly at the K-12 level, thus allowing the current administration to use Orwell's _1984_ as a handbook for governance without the majority of people noticing or caring, even to the point of labeling Gitmo as the 'Ministry of Love' while prisoners are tortured in its basements (dig Rummy's reference to Gitmo as a "tropical vacation" for the internees there!). Higher education has, also, been largely turned into an obedience training institution, but there are always those professors who, like, insist that their students actually *think*. For historical reasons the notion of academic freedom has been highly valued at the university level, so suppressing this last vestige of education in America has been a slow slog for the right-wing Orwellian brigades who cannot fully implement their plan to implement mind control via control of the media and control of the language until these last vestiges of logical and rational thought are eliminated. Thus Horowitz. If he can succeed in muzzling those professors who insist upon their students engaging in logic and reason, then the Party has won. It's a long-term plan that has passed under the radar of Democrats, and one that explains why the majority of Americans could vote for George W. Bush in 2004 even though all logic and reason said that Bush had fucked up big time. But logic and reason are now foreign to the majority of Americans, who have never experienced an educational system (as vs. obedience training system) and thus have never been taught how to use logic and how to reason and think for themselves. War is peace. Tyranny is freedom. Torture is love. Obedience training is education. Welcome to 1984+21. - Badtux the Orwellian Penguin Posted by: BadTux / 6/27/2005 04:41:00 PMComments:I was never in the "standardized tests are bad" camp because I aced them all back in the day (33 ACT and 1480 SAT -- that's all we had back then). But I recently sent both my all A daughters to the States because Mom & I thought it would be good for them to experience the last two years of high school there. Mind you, these girls have been educated in upper middle level international schools in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, so their credentials are impeccable. And of course, they got all As in their studies in high school in America, in fact testing out of several clsses in the core curriculum. But both failed the standardized tests (only by a slim margin, but failed still). Therefore, I am now a believer that they really are crap!# posted by : 27/6/05 7:53 PM
The fact is that every study shows that the educated vote Democratic. That's why the Republicans hate education. That and the fact that teachers vote Democratic. They hate that union. The effort is very strong now. We need to work to counteract it. The Thugs are also trying to weaken the teachers so they can privatize education so that their buddies can get richer. Plus there's a lot of Christian fundamentalism behind the privatized schools. And once you privatize them, you can force the kids to pray, ostracize the ones who don't pray, force an ideology on them. It's a nasty little move these Nazis are pulling.
Horowitz vs Mao - courtesy of the geinus of Billmon: |
About Me
I am a black and white and yellow multicolored penguin making his way as best he can in a world of monochromic monkeys. ArchivesApril 2004 / December 2004 / January 2005 / February 2005 / March 2005 / April 2005 / May 2005 / June 2005 / July 2005 / August 2005 / September 2005 / October 2005 / November 2005 / December 2005 / January 2006 / February 2006 / March 2006 / April 2006 / May 2006 / June 2006 / July 2006 / August 2006 / September 2006 / October 2006 / November 2006 / December 2006 / January 2007 / February 2007 / March 2007 / April 2007 / May 2007 / June 2007 / July 2007 / August 2007 /
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"Keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce." -- Molly Ivins, 1944-2007
"The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
-- Plato
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