September 8. 2008 03:49

I was going to be a "devil's advocate" and state the reasons why "free" or universal public education is necessary in a free society. But when I started to list the reasons, everything came crashing down like a house of cards. There are no compelling reasons for the only publicly funded education to be "public schools."

If the voucher system was instituted, however, I believe there would need to be a great oversight of the system. I can just see the Kingston clan here in Salt Lake City--taking the vouchers, cashing them and then providing substandard (in every respect) education for the poor children born to the wives of these men. [For those not in SLC, the Kingstons are polygamists who believe that getting welfare for all their children is a right and "bleeds the beast" of the infidels who have only one wife.]

It is very true that if people had a choice, they would try to send their children to the very best schools possible--and this would create havoc for the 98% majority who would NOT want to go to the vast majority of schools available today. I believe that the private schools would have to raise their prices significantly in order to weed out children who demanded to be in their programs. Furthermore, where are you going to get teachers qualified to teach these private schools? After all, many teachers now teaching (particularly in the inner cities) are crippled from years of dealing with violence, substandard homes which harmed the children, etc).

Vouchers are not a simple solution to these problems. So, what MIGHT be a solution?

Cyn

September 9. 2008 02:09

Yes, that might eventually occur, but it would take time....and currently state law requires that a child be in a school. So those who have a bit of extra money over the voucher would most likely get preference in the good schools that existed. Also, look at what has happened with rents. Since the housing crisis, rents on apartments have risen astronomically--sometimes doubling within months. There is nothing those in the apartments can do about it....they can't build their own apartment; they have to live somewhere. It would be the same with private voucher-based schools unless someone like the Kingstons or the polygamists open "schools"...which are little more than elementary work farms.

Cyn

September 9. 2008 05:06

The prime evil of the state-sponsored monopoly on education in our country is that it is anti-innovation. The system protects mediocre teachers in mediocre schools, who churn out mediocre students. The sundry efforts to improve the system have had relatively modest results, because they all try to operate inside the system, a system that represents entrenched self-interest.

Reminds me of the Medieval Age, where a lord would sanction a single miller (for example) for a town in his demense. Villagers could not choose competing providers, and were strongly discouraged from grinding their own corn and flour. I believed that milling changed very little in 500 years because of this ossifying, chilling effect on innovation and competition.

I also notice that Cyn seems to mention polygamy in every one of her posts, regardless of the subject.

Tertium Quid

September 10. 2008 00:56

Dear Tert:

Yes, I believe I DO bring up polygamy post because it represents totalitarian evil at its worst! The subjugation of women in the name of making men gods! Denying freedom and individual choice simply due to gender. And to have it all about me in my town keeps the wound open.

Cyn

September 10. 2008 00:59

Oops, typo alert! I meant to say "I DO bring up polygamy in most of my posts because".

Sorry for any confusion.

Cyn

September 10. 2008 02:18

Dear Fidel:

You seem to have a very short memory. Don't you recall how the Soviet Union, the sine qua non of totalitarian/socialist states, diminished educational possibilities for millions of children UNLESS their parents were members of the Communist Party? In all totalitarian regimes, there are elites. As Rand so compellingly discussed in "WE THE LIVING", this kind of hierarchy based on political pull (never merit) destroys more lives than it saves. I can't help but think of the million of Kulaks in the Ukraine who were put under the Soviet boot and consigned to be peasants their whole lives. What if there had been an Einstein or a Curie amongst those Ukrainian children? At least in the American system, which is albeit inperfect, if you have a great talent, you have the ability to get further education if you desire it. In Cuba, and in what is left of the Communist world (i.e. China, North Korea, etc), very very few children born are able to receive even the "dumbed down" version of schooling you so decry.

Cyn

September 10. 2008 05:11

Why isn't Fidel just posting himself? Was he banninated?

The unspoken assertion of Fidel's argument is that the primary purpose of the socialist education he describes is to maximize the usefulness of the individual to the society, and their suitability to function inside it. By that standard, there's very little difference between the system he hates and the one he loves - just that the "Americanized" version is less efficient at exploiting native skill.

The system he describes sounds delightful - for the high fliers that are good at math, arts, and juche. Not so much for the people with "the great motor, physical, and detail technical" abilities - that would be the crane operator, ditch digger, and cigar roller. In America many of them would have been afforded the opportunity to kick around adult daycare for a few years, to see if they could find anything that interested them enough to learn.

Oh, and the high literacy in Cuba makes a lie of his point of suiting the education to the student - the schools there teach kids to read and then turn many of them out into the sugar fields. How important is literacy for a life of manual labor?

Tertium Quid

September 10. 2008 05:52

Cyn,

If the mere proximity of polygamists is painful to you, you should definitely move and save yourself that heartache. There are many great cities in our nation where tastes run more towards serial monogamy rather than "all-at-once".

Tertium Quid

September 10. 2008 07:05

Tertium, polygamy is as deeply offensive to me as racism or sexism. In my philosophical training at university, the horrors of those pathologies were logically proved...and I believe that my offense at polygamy is not just that it exists, but that MEN say that My Father in Heaven advocates it. This is blasphemous in the extreme, because it assumes that Father 1)is unable to be just and fair; 2) cares about his sons' eternal exaltation, but that his daughters are just means to that end; 3) that the sexual fantasies of human males are somehow mirrored by God, which makes me sick.

I always note that men keep bringing this horror up--whether in Gospel Doctrine, or in chat rooms, or in Conferences (of the past certainly). And they don't seem to get that it is a moral offense to the tender hearts of women. See Jacob. They seem to discuss it with relish and a metaphorical "licking of the lips". It's reprehensible....and until it's GONE from the doctrine, I cannot rest easy in the Church.

Cyn

September 10. 2008 07:25

Just to be clear. As an instructor at a community college myself, I am well-aware that most products of the American educational system believe that they must have a college education "to get ahead in life" (a Big Lie, if ever there was one). The American public school system doesn't really serve social values but nationalistic ones. Students are taught enough math to pay their taxes, enough reading to follow written directions, and enough baloney to believe that they live "in the best country on Earth"... But when they graduate they ordinarily have just enough skills to become drones in corporation work houses. I see no real difference between the goals (good citizenship/good workers) in totalitarian societies and the American corporate state. When I spoke of socialism, I am speaking specifically of libertarian socialism where the value of the educated student to the State is more than secondary to the value of the student to society (and there is a great difference) and to themselves! Why should a student who tests out with skills to be a scientist be instead trained as a finger-painter or opera lover with tax funds? To deny the various talents and interests of a multitude of students, and then to give them education as if they were all of the same mold--and should be the same--is a waste of their value to themselves and society. The same education for everyone (college, for instance) means, if you peek beneath the winding sheet of Dewyism, that the real purpose of American public education is not to benefit the students or the society they belong to but to regiment them and homogenize them into malleable national subjects for totalitarian and/or corporate control and utilization. That sugar cane workers in Cuba can read the newspaper and enjoy the Havana ballet bespeaks more that sugar cane work is seasonal more than that it is a waste of Cuban educational resources for labor grunts with machetes. What the sugar cane workers would be reading is the crucial question (i.e. are they taught to read only so that they can be better controlled?)! In America, on the other hand, they will graduate from college and work in the more proverbial cane fields of our fascist corporate economy and read nothing whatsoever, really, but instead recover their muscles while watching corporate television news... I would argue this is a waste of public educational resources unless your goal is to control them with their mass homogenized public education. Certainly, it doesn't really benefit society but instead benefits the State Elites that want students under their thumbs in debt (for their college loans) for the majority of their adult lives and completely stupid--but patriotic--by mass assimilation.

Fidel

September 10. 2008 08:32

Cyn,

"horrors of those pathologies were logically proved"

Indeed? How does one logically prove a "horror"? More generally, my own understandings narrow and my prejudices come to the fore when I allow my passions to do the thinking for me.

You do yourself a disservice by universalizing the shallow motivations of the men you interact with on the subject (not that they haven't given you plenty of material out of which to universalize). I recently submitted an essay on the guy side of polygamy to the "contact" feature on this website, hoping it would be added to the main page, but the submission was neglected. If Lisey or whomever does not see fit to give it front-page status, I will post it here.

Tertium Quid

September 10. 2008 08:43

Lisey,

"I've yet to see a group of polyandrists indoctrinate young boys that their sole purpose is to be ready for the Queen bee."

A very useful litmus test for the spiritual sincerity of proponents of "gospel polygamy" is to ask them how happy they'd be if THAT order of things was given by the prophet as revealed truth. Would they accept it? The only consistent response is, of course, "Yes."

Tertium Quid

September 10. 2008 16:14

Fidel,

Of course! I was trying to figure out whence your magnificent persona. Now knowing that you teach community college, all the pieces are falling into place. I can easily imagine a professor wearing a bandolier and chewing a fake cigar, holding forth in front of a gaggle of 13th-grade churls who are trying to decide whether they should major in gormlessness or insolence. You try to shock them out of their complacent worldviews with cheeky contrasts between their beloved nation and something that's an inscrutable black box to them: Cuba.

Hey, anything to get kids to actually think about things, but perhaps with such easy targets to fill your time your "A" game has gotten a bit rusty. By conflating the universalized primary eduacation with the elective instruction that comes later, it's hard to know exactly what you're arguing. You also bewilder me by railing against this profligate waste of taxpayer resources, but wind up your argument condemning the system for saddling kids with loans for education they didn't need, didn't benefit from and, um, didn't want? Also unclear.

College education is far from uniform, and while the products of the various disciplines may all be equally unsuited for actual thinking, they all arrived at their learned helplessness through vastly different paths. In fact, from my experience American colleges are remarkably open to the sort of opportunities and experiences that allow people to find something that really interests them, whether they take advantage of them or not. Perhaps this is the case because (like you've been arguing) for many students college is the first time they actually get to choose what they're going to study.

I am more sympathetic to your argument that colleges are forces for homogeneity, but the assertion of college as a tool for social control is thoroughly unconvincing. If it were really the case, students would learn to keep their heads down and not question authority, rather than turn into the sheltered, entitled brats that they do. If it's really a totalitarian scheme, it's a frightful piece of bungling.

I don't disagree that colleges turn out hordes of greedy, grasping materialists who think that conspicuous consumption is a mark of sophistication and virtue. But do you really think they weren't like that when the were thrown into the meat grinder? I had the privilige of attending business school at an LDS university, where I was surrounded by fresh-faced, devout boys and girls who, many of them, thought God wanted them to be richer than their neighbors. I can tell you they didn't learn that from BYU!

Rail against the business schools all you want, but the saddest of truths is that they are mostly teaching kids what they want to learn, and not what you want them to learn. Freedom means the freedom to be stupid, and many of us don't hesitate to take that opportunity.

Finally do you really sell the college experience so cheap? In High School they may learn "enough math to pay their taxes etc.", but not in college. A lot of what I learned in college wasn't very useful, to be sure, but there was a lot more of it than basic math/english/civics (and many of the ideas were a lot more challenging, subversive, and economically unviable than would befit an institution trying only to create corporate drones wholly beholden to the system). Maybe you were talking about grades 1-12, which fits the argument a lot better, but I think you've been let off the hook too easily on this front: what SHOULD people be taught when they're young? We appear to agree that literacy is a universal good regardless of the child's future, I think math is too, and the American brand of civics may appall the more "enlightened", but the inclusion of civics in a nation's primary education is a pretty global failing.

So now we have enough math to pay taxes and so forth - what else? You say that their instruction should be more in line with their aptitudes. Wow - at what age should a child's future be established? I am very grateful that I didn't have to decide my trade when I was fifteen. Or twenty. Or twenty-five. I'll go a step further and say that the very American notion that you can reinvent yourself as much as you want is a tremendous public good. It doesn't efficiently set people on the course to status and belonging, but it lets many of them crash around long enough until they find what they didn't even know they were looking for.

Tertium Quid

September 11. 2008 01:03

Mr. Quid,

Which came first? The Eagle or the eaglet? Fact of the matter is they hunt salmon and eat road-kill. Perhaps because you don't teach at a community college you haven't realized that grade #13 these American days is really just grade #9 in some other more efficient alternative universe.

Fidel

Fidel

September 11. 2008 02:59

Fidel,

That's it? Tsk tsk. I am perfectly willing to be proved wrong - really I'd love to look at the world in a truer way than I know how to right now - but bailing out with an obtuse metaphor and a restatement of the original premise (i.e. the deplorable state of primary public education in the US) is certainly not going to do it.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that I have been cast as a defender of the public school system - a position I certainly don't want. If anything, I'm probably more sympathetic than most to your belief that schools churn out ignorant, incurious, greedy wage slaves. Maybe it's because I come from a less negative universe than you do, and am able to see good aspects to otherwise struggling systems? Perhaps if I taught community college like you I would be more cynical. Additionally, if appeals to authority are the preferred logical fallacy here, well, my wife taught grade school and I believe she thinks you're up in the night on this.

Oh, and applying the metaphor to the discussion (the education experience of an American child) the eaglet certainly came first. The vast majority of college students were spit out of the US public school system. I don't know of very many kindergartners that attended college first...

Now for the nice part: I admire people who care enough about the future to teach, and am willing to view your cynicism as arising out of frustration that Americans don't take better advantage of the wonderful opportunities they've been afforded to actually learn. I really hope the Fidel schtick gets some of them to look at things in a different way (if that indeed is part of your pedagogic arsenal), and I admire you for making the effort. Have a nice day.

Tertium Quid

September 11. 2008 04:04

Tertium,

Have you ever watched this? (Not just the YouTube trailer, but the whole thing...)

I think--whatever your grade school teacher wife thinks--Dr. Chomsky nails it completely here. BTW: does your wife still teach her kids about Betsy Ross? This Prosecutor now rests (& now lights up sham cigar)!!!

http://freedocumentaries.org/film.php?id=138

Fidel

September 11. 2008 05:12

I apologize to all if my more brief comments seem cryptic when they are crystal clear to me.

Let me try to be brief and clearer at the same time.

If 20% of the U.S. are the economic and cultural managers with advanced education (above AS degrees) and who are expected to "participate" in social functions such as voting, then it follows that what is extremely important is that they be deeply indoctrinated (what Chomsky calls: "manufacturing their consent" at the ballot box).

If the other 80% of the U.S. are really meant not to think or vote but just follow orders (given by the economic and cultural managers) then it seems logical that the U.S. public education system is working perfectly in producing a bunch of mindless sheep--with the occasional prospect for manager status being eventually swept out of the flock and deeply indoctrinated rather than superficially indoctrinated as with the woolly rest of them with their "universal" public school training to enable them to follow orders, read directions, pay their taxes, kneel in their Churches and understanding--most!--all the mealy words coming from their pastors' lips.

Now, go to back to what I just hastily wrote and cross out all the words "indoctrinated" and replace them with "educated" and I think you will understand what I am trying to say about public education from kid town to adult town: it is not meant to do anything except dumb down most and promote manageable managers due to attrition.

Good soldiers are also "educated" in the sense that they are trained to do certain tasks but they are taught not to think but to dumbly follow orders instead. The same, I suggest, is the real intent of the public school system up to and including colleges, where to add insult to injury most all students are expected to pay for their own indoctrination on the mostly false lure that higher ed will provide them with higher incomes!

Good Grief! Oh, and watch Manufacturing Consent. It's free...and won't cost you a cent!

Fidel

September 11. 2008 06:09

Tertium, you certainly have livened things up around here. I can't tell whether your "William F. Buckley-esque" wit is meant to offend or enlighten.

Lisey, where is Tertium's purported post on the male point of view regarding polygamy?

Cyn

September 11. 2008 06:17

Oh no - you countered my wife and raised me Noam Chomsky! I've been out-appeal-to-authority'd! (Never mind that I only brought up my wife to illustrate the fallacy.)

I can't imagine you'd recognize any authority greater than the great Cunning Linguist himself, so I guess you win THAT rhetorical fallacy battle, but it's not over yet. I beg a mean question and my straw men are surprisingly lifelike.

(For an illustration of the chilling force toward conformity in academia we can dispense with the video and simply review Dr. Chomsky's career. The poor man, that lone persecuted voice of hostility towards "the system", gutting it out alone for decades against entrenched corporate interests, and only a secure pulpit to preach from at MIT, loads of publicity, books, speaking tours and national & international rock-star status to show for it. There but for the grace of God etc. etc.)

So. We have an interesting state of affairs. Last night I spent, oh an hour or so trying to make my ideas clear. Now today I find myself rewarded with your request that I spend an hour (or more?) watching a video to make YOUR point clear. Will all my arguments be totally destroyed if I watch that show with an open mind? Promise?

Really now. This is little different from that classic message board copout: "I'm too busy to explain it to such an idiot. Go figure it out yourself." I imagine that's pretty effective with your 13th graders. (Let me guess, do you say "Go to Cuba and you'll see"?)

I have a better idea. Why don't YOU describe what is so compelling about Dr. Chomsky's ideas, particularly as they relate to the subject at hand. Maybe try to present your ideas in an orderly and coherent manner, as convincingly as you are able. Then I or someone else can respond in kind. Then we'll have, you know, a discussion. And the discussion will remain between us and not between me and Dr. Chomsky.

If you really can't be bothered to express and defend your ideas, then there is precious little for us talk about.

(Don't get me wrong, I meant what I said about trying to see the world more truly than before, and am not wholly averse to enduring Dr. Chomsky's mundane speaking style. But my distaste for his peculiarly pessimistic brand of anarchic pedantry will put it pretty far down the list of amazing things I am trying to learn about.)

...oh, and the success of my marriage has very little to do with my keeping Noam Chomsky happy, so in the battle of authorities, Mrs. Quid will have to come first.

Tertium Quid

September 11. 2008 06:30

Ah, I see that in the time it took me to write my turgid masterpiece, Fidel has already appended to the short comment to which I was responding. I will disown the worst of the scathings I included in my latest, peruse what Fidel wrote, lather, rinse, and repeat.

Tertium Quid

September 11. 2008 07:02

Cyn,

As far as Buckley, I imagine my answer is the same he'd give if he were being candid (and not dead): From a rhetorical point of view what matters is to maintain that ambiguity, it keeps the listener off-balance.

But really it hardly matters if it was meant to offend or enlighten; what matters isn't message sent but message received. If someone can glean enlightenment from my words then so much the better for them.

But as for myself I assure you that my ambrosia is an expanded understanding and a truer vision of the world, not antagonism and alienation.

Tertium Quid

September 11. 2008 07:12

Ah, enlightened one, you absolutely MUST continue to assuage our ravaged souls with your honeyed words. Of course, the question MUST be asked: do you believe in the string field theory which indicates that at any moment, there are at least 15 dimensions, each of which is a "truth", i.e., it exists unto itself? If so, how CAN you say that yours in an expanded understanding and truer vision, when at most it might be one possible truth amongst many?

Cyn

September 11. 2008 07:24

Did I really come across so priggish? I had initially written "if someone can glean enlightenment from my PATHETIC words etc."; I should have left it in. I think that your sarcasm is a much more effective tool for dismantling the opposition than your offendedness is. Well done.

Still, I really meant what I said about finding enlightenment from all sources, even the distasteful ones. Sometimes the best gifts come in shabby wrapping paper.

Blah blah blah your mom is Betsy Ross.

Tertium Quid

September 11. 2008 07:30

Cyn,

What are you talking about and who are you addressing? String Theory is so blase and dead. Heard of Many Worlds? That's the new hottest in theories. And in one World you are not only calm and rational but liberated, too (besides which Lincoln is still President and shot John Wilkes Booth)! But I don't believe that either. Give me classic Hinduism (refined by Buddha's discoveries) to explain the Nature of Everything quantum and bigger...

Fidel

September 11. 2008 07:38

Okay, Fidel, you're ON. You remind me of those Oxford aesthetes of the '20's and '30's, who lounged about on their family trust funds, indulging in hedonistic practices while maligning anyone with a serious thought! As for the "world" where I would be calm and rational, as well as liberated, are you suggesting that I am neither calm nor rational, or liberated, here in this wonderful world?

Tertium, your name suggests that you are an intermediary between two groups, or that you belong partly to two groups but are not identified fully with either. I am very interested to know what your two groups are....and no, you didn't sound priggish. I simply reverted to my sophistic bantering level of prior years...and responded in that way.

Lisey, I am terribly afraid to give any kind of analysis of absolute vs. relative truth with Fidel, Terium Quid and yourself as readers!

Cyn

September 11. 2008 07:41

Wouldn't you know that "Heavenly Father" would quickly come into this discussion? He/She/IT usually does...

As to Tertium's response about shabby wrapping paper, I guess he now can't can't argue that Chomsky is drab and boring...especially since Manufacturing Consent is anything but!

Merry Christmas Everyone! The movie is under your tree...

Fidel

September 11. 2008 08:44

Lisey, I emailed you the polygamy thing.

As for Chomsky, I don't excuse myself from learning something just because the speaker's presentation and manner don't do the subject justice. I just wish so many academics didn't make a virtue out of being obtuse and inscrutable...

I think the world where Cyn is calm and rational would be a very boring one, unless she maintained her sarcastic abilities...

Tertium Quid

September 11. 2008 13:34

So, Fidel has acknowledged his four-sentence posts are insufficient to make his views crystal clear on these complex subjects. And also that our grades don't depend on our pretending to understand exactly what he is talking about. This is a step in the right direction!

Chomsky has a special gift for providing his assertions an atmosphere where they make perfect sense. The educational system you say he describes would be a tremendous asset to the sort of centrally directed totalitarian structure the two of you seem to believe are running things.

I don't usually find his/your arguments particularly outrageous, except that they ascribe a degree of nefariousness and control that evidence does not seem to support. I have a hard time imagining mustache-twirling villians behind the scenery, and my perceptions of "the system" is that it isn't controlled by anybody but the drunken walk of the market and the collusions of entrenched self-interest. Stable systems are ones that can protect themselves - that balance those interests well, and give the population a rationale to buy into the system. You've hinted at how willingly Americans have bought into the materialism and diploma seeking, but I take great issue with the implication that it took some sort of conspiracy to get people thinking that way.

Example: "what I am trying to say about public education from kid town to adult town: it is not meant to do anything except dumb down most and promote manageable managers due to attrition"

Oh really, how much help do people need to become dumber? I agree that the education system, the economy, and the military industrial complex are not providing much of what will really benefit souls and happiness, but how often does someone have to be forced to be exploited by the machine? The system isn't in some smoke filled room somewhere, the system is us.

The most pernicious lie of the world is that what it has to offer is worth pursuing. It doesn't take tripartite commissions or black helicopters to do that, just the pleasing dream of being rich and enjoying status.

Tertium Quid

September 11. 2008 23:00

"tripartite commissions or black helicopters"?

Not necessarily the genesis, since the United States has always been of, by and for the Elite. The Big Lie is that it has suddenly changed or "been taken over" by Elitists or conspirators, when in fact it is obvious that it has always been controlled by an elite class since the Founding Fathers objected to England's monetary demands but simultaneously were horrified by the thoughts of ordinary colonial folk (even white male ordinary folk) ever being able to vote and therefore threaten their American hegemony. You had to own property (as well as be white and male) to have political franchise right up until the 20th Century. If anything, the history of the United States is the story of the disenfranchised (unlanded white males, women, former slaves, even native Americans to a much more limited effect) seeking a say in their own political and economic futures, and the landed elitist gentry fighting back in various and sundry--even conspiratorial--ways.

Probably the most threatened the American Elite ever were was back in the tie-dyed 1960's, and that social revolution was effectively bought off by LBJ's welfare and food stamp programs and then killed outright by Nixon instituting a deliberate policy of economic scarcity. Jerry Rubin of the Chicago Eight fame, for instance, became a fucking stock broker!

So, no need for 007 villians twirling their moustaches in gated villas (although Nixon spent some in time in Key Biscayne and his other villa in California after resigning) when you have the warp and woof of our country's entire history as the patriotic story of landed elites fighting (mostly successfully) native peoples and any real democratic threat to their hegemony. Public education grew from its inception not as "an economic leveler" and democratic threat to the elite's control of the country but as a tool for controlling the horror of what they called "mobocracy".

Recently, a sociologist at Weber State University did a survey of the student body there asking them two simple questions. The first question was prefaced with the information that less than six percent of the U.S. population control over 90% of the country's wealth. The question was: how many of you think that you will become rich and join the six percent someday? A full 80% of the student responders thought so, hoped so! The second question was: are you in favor of taxing or otherwise redistributing some of the wealth of the top 6% and if not, why? The delusional students answered resoundingly: NO!!! The why was (Duh?!) because they planned to be part of that rich 6% elite themselves someday and wouldn't want a dime taken from their own pockets no matter how wadded they were...wouldn't want to lose their hegemony once they finally attained it too!

Methinks the public education system is working just great for what it was always designed to do: give the unwashed masses the illusion of a stake in what is so euphoniously called the American Dream, but which like the horizon for the majority of Americans will always be fleeing before them... The carrot, remember, is also what gets the donkey to work each day.

Fidel

September 12. 2008 04:54

Well - that laundry list of progressive talking points probably puts you on familiar ground, but it doesn't really answer my objections (though I do appreciate the pleasing image of Richard Nixon sitting awkwardly poolside at his sprawling SoCal "villa" while twirling his handlebar mustache nefariously). Once again, you provide a perfectly plausible worldview where the conspiracies you describe and the goals they achieve through public education make wonderful sense. And once again you are sharply lacking on particulars and specifics of how this power is exerted. The education-complex conspiracy you describe is well-planned, wonderfully subtle and patient, allowing decades for its goals to play out. Every conspiracy that I have any experience with or knowledge of is quite the opposite - blunt, crude, haphazard, violent and unstable, with each thief waiting for the chance to turn out his partners and keep the booty for himself.

But rather than go too far down this rabbit hole (Which would probably go the way such discussions do - three or more references to Hitler, the inevitable question of from whom the American Indians originally stole the land that we stole from them, and probably at some point the accusation that Michael Moore is fat - and I'd like to see you deny it!), I'd rather restrain my reasoning to a few questions that might put us on more interesting debating ground.

I don't disagree with you that systems are set up to be stable ones, and the ones that set them up will organize them in a way that benefits them and people like them.

Okay, so far so good. The best conspiracies are the ones out there in the open. The problem such organizers inevitably run into, as you've already alluded, is getting the ordinary folk to be okay with that state of things, as open as it is. You've provided abundant evidence that you despise Americans that buy into this raw deal so easily, but what you haven't really gone into is WHY. Remember that, at some point, you're going to have to actually give the donkey a carrot.

Manufactuing consent could be better expressed as tyranny of the majority. People tend to go along with things they perceive as benefiting them. Slick marketing and high-faluting principles are the fool's answer - nobody had nobler-sounding rhetoric than the commies (and brutal sticks to go along with the carrot), but their grand experiments keep bogging down in hopelessness and disenchantment as people stop caring enough to work at it. Once the people stop buying into the system the system has to radically change, and the poor pigs at the top have to put on suits and go into business with Farmer Jones.

Other questions:

Power tries to protect power. How many of the 50 largest companies in the US in 1950 are still among the 50 largest companies?

How oppressed are America's students when, by and large, they are able to get exactly the education they were looking for?

How important to the position of the elites is the purchasing power of the proles? (Hint: a market needs consumers.)

Tertium Quid

September 12. 2008 06:41

Maybe, but both you and Tertium ignore the conditioning that makes you (without any evidence whatsoever) believe that the top 6% somehow "earned" their wealth and what you mean by earned (Bill Gates, for instance, is a notorious thief and opportunistic braggart more than an entrepreneur) which is like saying the Pope earned his or the Queen of England earned hers or the Rockefellers and Morgans earned theirs. What a crock of conditioning! What is interesting and telling is that the kids of the top 6% almost never are sent to public schools because the conditioning they would receive there would be wholly inappropriate for elite training... And as to conspiracies, I would agree with Tertium that the most effective way to implement and sustain your class control and power is organically through social managers, such as public school teachers. No real conspiracy to it. Just "good" social policy. The paroles need to be conditioned into believing in the system "as is" (and completely frightened of other more equatable systems), and the elite heirs need to know how to manage and maintain their status in perpetuity. Revolution only comes when the lowly people finally wake up and dust off the guillotine (so to speak), completely upsetting the class applecart. But I don't believe that the American people have the tradition and intestinal fortitude for real change, real revolution. At least, they never have so far (ignoring the 1960's, perhaps, and the Haymarket riots...where they were shot dead in the streets by officers of the elites.) It is no surprise that the labor movement in the United States has been completely castrated. Social policy, again. No conspiracy to it.

Fidel

September 12. 2008 07:24

Okay, then we agree finally...

Fidel

September 12. 2008 08:56

So, Lisey, you are saying that the Robin Hood principle is justified IF ill-gotten gains were at stake? Would you return the money to those who have paid taxes for which they had no representation? Would you expropriate property of the looters and bums who live off the taxpayers while being perfectly healthy and able-bodied?

The fact is: welfare only exists in this country because some productive person was expropriated--and someone else felt it was justified.

Rand would have turned over in her grave to read your comment UNLESS you stated that the expropriation was to return the loot to those who had been actually looted.

One more comment: did you pay for your college? Or were you, like me, goofing off a lot at the expense of those who worked hard to put you there?

I am certain that a lot of this behavior can be traced to a young and immature age....but what of older people (some in their '60's) who still feel entitled to support from others for the sheer reason that they are breathing.

Cyn

September 12. 2008 09:22

Fidel,

Conditioned HOW? I'm wondering if I should I go home and look for a tape recorder under my pillow that whispers while I slumber about how I should be a good Delta? Once again, the commies have had a far freer hand in rocking the cradles of their nations and filling impressionistic young minds with their claptrap, and what did it avail them? A peasant doesn't decide if the king rules by divine right until he sees whether there is a chicken in his pot, and all the conditioning in the world won't convince a man that hunger and privation for him and his children are a good thing.

You say, "But I don't believe that the American people have the tradition and intestinal fortitude for real change, real revolution." Indeed, but there is an equally true way of stating that that doesn't make it sound like Americans are a bunch of complacent, spineless plebes:

Question - Has the ruling elite done enough to fulfill its side of the social contract and thus prevent revolution?
Answer - Well, has there been a revolution?

I am particularly fond of your hints about the threat of violence by the agents of the ruling elite. Are we really so ruled by fear? Say I not truly that (generally speaking) the worst penalty the system has in store for the socially and politically obnoxious is to be shut out of the system and lose their "chance" at getting rich? A chance that you believe is largely chimerical anyway? Let me add to that that I know of nowhere else where outsiders, misfits, and malcontents can get along as well as they do here. In America, often as not the road to Siberia leads through the Oprah studio and the nonconformists find new, profitable ways of conforming.

Find me a true nonconformist and I'll show you a man who has thrown off the trappings of materialism entirely. All these arguments end up being about money, not liberty.

Applying the educational paradigm, when I compare my bumptious, bellicose American classmates to Chinese friends who are mousily beholden to anyone with the imprimatur of "teacher" (a hard habit for them to break, by the way), I think our fascist overlords have really missed the boat on that one. And Mrs. Quid the former teacher will be surprised to learn that when she was giving her all to fire young minds with new ideas and open up a world of possibilities and potential to her students, all along she was an agent of class control, dumbing down the kids of America so they are prepared for the drudgery that awaits them.

(10 demerits to Slytherin for that argument. Aside from a few high-school-instructor cranks, I've never met a teacher that didn't want their kids to be bright, wise, and able.)

Is there a better version of life available to us? Yes, certainly. We could all be rich right now and have no poor among us, and I believe that someday things will be like that. For now, however, it is hard for me to fault our suffering "paroles" who somehow manage to remain content when they have only their ipods, opiates, and mortgages to comfort them. Regrettable, perhaps, that they don't set their sights on anything nobler, but rather understandable.

Tertium Quid

September 12. 2008 13:05

"feudal societies or even Mugabe here"

LOL!!!!!!!!!

Certainly not our resident American capitalists. Oh, NO...........

Fidel