History of Modern Schooling – Academy of Ideas Video

This is a good video. Note that it’s 6 years old, predating the Covid insanity – yet based on the premises he establishes, the official response – ‘we’ ‘experts’ hold the truth exclusively; get in line or get destroyed – are totally predictable.

As always, it’s satisfying to discover people who have reached the same conclusions I have. Nobody likes being alone, no matter how confident in conclusions. But much more important for my purposes, he points out a couple sources I wasn’t aware of. Quick overview:

• Starts with Lycurgus and the state’s presumption of the exclusive right to educate all children to the goals of the state.
• Focuses on my main man Martin Luther, and, as I believe I’ve discussed here, his insisting to the state PTB that that the state needed to impose compulsory schooling to save the little souls from the Devil, who, as anyone who has done any unstructured reading of Luther knows, has a highly personal and scatological relationship with him.
• First new source: Kaiser Wilhelm I, who started some sort of Prussian compulsory education in 1717
• second new source: Charles Sanders Peirce, with whom I was familiar from Menand’s Metaphysical Club as a sort of type specimen of the degenerate genius. He cared not about his obligations to his wife, his paid work, the morals of the universities that paid his bills – because he was simply too darn smart for all that stuff. No denying the guy was a genius. No denying he was a weasel, either. Founder of Pragmatism, he “…goes to great lengths to say Pragmatism is not merely the idea that the ends justify the means, only to have his great pragmatic successor, John Dewey, say exactly that.” Turns out he applied his vast elitist weasel intellect to defending compulsory state schooling because it renders us little people compliant and obedient. The WEF’s formulation of what life will be for those of us they allow to live could have been taken straight from Pierce.
• Last semi-new source is Ellwood Patterson Cubberley, who, as the Oracle Wikipedia would have it, was “an American educator, a eugenicist, and a pioneer in the field of education management. He spent most of his career as a professor and later served as the first dean of the Stanford University Graduate School of Education in California.” In other words, yet another elitist whack-job directing the whole compulsory school movement in America. I know I’ve got some stuff on this guy in my notes, but not as much as the video below suggests I should have.

Can’t really tell if he has the particular tidy mustache favored by a certain continental eugenicist…

Anyway, here’s the video:

He covers much of the first half of what I want to cover. But what is to me the key step is not covered: how it is the structures of compulsory state schooling that achieve Dr. Cubberley’s goals as much or more that the actual content taught. You don’t have to harp on critical race theory half so much as you would if you hadn’t already broken the students by compulsion, regimentation, bells, age segregation, contempt for their rights and wants, and just endless hours of pointless, soul-crushing drivel.

Check it out.

On Classroom Management and Not Shooting Yourself in the Foot

Couple thoughts:

Imagine a book representing a summary of all the collective wisdom of years of experience, called something like “Top Tips for Working Around a Self-Inflicted Gunshot Wound to the Foot.” This book contains a wealth of tips and tricks to help you function with that pedal wound: gadgets that help you limp around better, ways to make a game out of the inconveniences, all designed to help you be the best you you can be, given that you have a self-inflicted gunshot wound to you foot.

The one question not asked anywhere in this book, or in the vast literature on the subject- why did you shoot yourself in the foot? Maybe we should look at preventing that rather than optimizing performance given you have been made a cripple?

I’ve gotten a few books on classroom management as part of my knew career as a Headmaster. Often, the tips and strategies on how to keep the students engaged are quite good, ingenious, even. And they work! By consistently applying these tricks and strategies, a teacher can indeed maintain control of the age-segregated one-subject-at-a-time classroom for the entire period between the ringing of the bells!

But why did we shoot ourselves in the foot in the first place? What if we didn’t? If we were paying attention to our students, we might wonder why they find it so hard to sit still and focus, why they hate homework, why most studies for most kids go in one ear and out the other? Why damage the kids by segmenting their lives in a completely arbitrary way, predigesting what we want them to learn, and then grading them like lumber or eggs on how well they comply?

Versus, for example:

Or, for a more basic education, this.

One more stray thought: I am sometimes challenged to what I would do instead of the compulsory age-segregated classroom model, and have proposed a few alternatives while stating that I’d let my kids roam the streets all day rather than put them under the diabolical ministrations of the school system.

It occurred to me today: why do you ask me? Your insistence on finding another expert to tell you what to do IS THE PROBLEM. That’s the exact state of bewildered sheep-hood the schools were designed to produce: never, ever think for yourself – there are no gold stars, A+s, Honor societies, advanced placements, degrees from ‘good’ colleges, and a sinecure at a “think tank” involved for those who do not follow the herd and hate those who don’t. Instead, trust yourself enough to figure it out. People have been educating their children for as long as there have been people. There are a million ways to do it. I can make suggestions, tell you how people have done it successfully in the past, but you, a normal functioning adult, can figure it out. All that fear, uncertainty, and doubt you feel over making this kind of decision ARE WHAT YOU LEARNED IN SCHOOL.

Embrace your freedom! Recognize we have been robbed. Instead of spending our childhoods developing competence and confidence, we were systematically cowed, bullied, and patted on the head when we complied. Front-Row Kids embrace the mindless compliance, and ‘succeed’ as the sociopaths in charge define success.

The old saying applies here: The best time to plant a forest is 25 years ago; the next best time is now. Instead of living like a slave because that’s how you’ve been trained to live, say no. Right now. Get competent at something; hang out with competent people. Always ask: who benefits from expert advice? Why should I listen to them? Sometimes, in some specific situations, you will need to trust and expert – a plumber or electrician, say. Do your homework (ha! I slay me!) and then pick one. Also, the more competent you get at any area, the better judge you are likely to be about the competence of others. Over a lifetime, you grow more clear-headed and harder to fool.

But advice about life? How about asking happy people? This immediately eliminates most teachers and all but a tiny fraction of academics. Develop your pool of trusted people – these used to be known as ‘family and friends’ – and run your ideas past them. LIVE!

Choose an approach to education that helps your kids develop their relationships with their family, and take on responsibility for cultivating and supporting those relationships. Help them get competent. It can be knitting, woodworking, taking care of animals, growing plants – and Latin and Math and history. Grade-level is a fraud; getting good grades is a joke. Are your kids *competent*? A retired professor says that he could judge any of his students competence in his classes by simply talking with them over a walk across the college quad – his opinion thus formed is more grounded and valid than a letter grade. Many millions of people for whom Latin is not their native tongue have learned it, before there were any ‘classes’ in Latin – how? Can you do that?

Do not be afraid. You are already competent, at least as competent as any teacher to educate your children. You can start now getting more competent, more involved with your family, friends, church, community. Take Samwise Gamgee as your model of a properly educated man.

Sound of Freedom: The Rites of Moloch Live

Chesterton, in his masterpiece Everlasting Man:

… I have hinted at something of the psychology that lies behind a certain type of religion. There was a tendency in those hungry for practical results, apart from poetical results, to call upon spirits of terror and compulsion; to move Acheron in despair of bending the Gods. There is always a sort of dim idea that these darker powers will really do things, with no nonsense about it. In the interior psychology of the Punic peoples this strange sort of pessimistic practicality had grown to great proportions. In the New Town, which the Romans called Carthage, as in the parent cities of Phoenicia, the god who got things done bore the name of Moloch, who was perhaps identical with the other deity whom we know as Baal, the Lord. The Romans did not at first quite know what to call him or what to make of him; they had to go back to the grossest myth of Greek or Roman origins and compare him to Saturn devouring his children. But the worshippers of Moloch were not gross or primitive. They were members of a mature and polished civilization, abounding in refinements and luxuries; they were probably far more civilized than the Romans. And Moloch was not a myth; or at any rate his meal was not a myth. These highly civilized people really met together to invoke the blessing of heaven on their empire by throwing hundreds of their infants into a large furnace. We can only realize the combination by imagining a number of Manchester merchants with chimney-pot hats and mutton-chop whiskers, going to church every Sunday at eleven o’clock to see a baby roasted alive.

The trafficking of children to satisfy the perverted lusts of the rich is child sacrifice, often rather directly and literally. You think these children get to grow up and go home? Kids who have seen the inner workings of their captors and clients? If the sexual abuse of children by kidnappers doesn’t rile you enough, think child torturers and murderers. In some sense, the ancient rites of Moloch were kinder – babies were merely burned alive.

C.S. Lewis captures this same idea (although, mercifully, stopping short of depicting children as the immediate victims) in That Hideous Strength. The Inner Circle at the N.I.C.E searches for the most horrible acts to confirm their usefulness to the Macrobes – as the end approaches, these men, middle aged academics, strip naked, and then start beheading each other – all in an attempt to appease their Moloch and assume the desired spot of Last One to be Eaten.

Both Chesterton and Lewis focus on how this behavior – actively seeking the most debased and horrifying acts to compel demons to do what you want – is not the work of the ignorant masses or uncivilized barbarians, but by the elites of great civilizations.

What appears to anyone of remotely normal levels of sanity as a Good Thing – throwing some light on child trafficking – has triggered what at first seems an insane political response: that, somehow, wanting children to not be kidnapped, raped, and murdered is white supremacy or racism or alphabet-phobia, and makes the people who made or even watch this film literally Hitler. It’s insane unless you have something to hide.

We’ve hit a sore spot. We need to pound away at it.

The Reported Post Indy 5 Disney Meeting…

Not a huge movie guy, especially over the last decade. Haven’t and won’t see this movie – don’t give money to people who hate you – but I’m slightly intrigued by the thought of the current crop of Disney ‘creatives’ having to meet to discuss the cataclysmic failure of a $300M movie that might fail to earn back its catering budget. None of them can own up to the movie being:

• unnecessary – who was calling for seeing a beloved 80 year old movie icon hobble around on an ‘adventure’, especially after Indy 4?
• horrible – from every account I’ve heard, everybody whose livelihood didn’t depend on keeping Disney happy hated every single aspect of the thing.
• a giant Mary Sue thumb in the eye of all Indy fans.

Nope, it can’t be any of these things, so it’s got to be – the marketing people!

Bottom line: this meeting boils down to a bunch of sociopaths trying to see who gets frog marched in front of the firing squad, and making sure it isn’t himself. You don’t get to be a studio exec at Disney if you care about other human beings, or the truth, or long-term effects of your actions. I know almost nothing about any of these folks, except that they’ve held onto their jobs in a way that defies reason. From the little I’ve heard, sounds like that Kennedy gal has got to have serious dirt on a bunch of people to have gotten and held on to her position, given the crap she’s put out under Disney.

I’m unaware of any theories or studies of how sociopaths deal with each other. Typical behavior for a single sociopath is to come onto the scene, use his superior interpersonal skills to be a star, and then slowly start to burn it all down as he destroys the people around him. He then departs for greener pastures before his true character can be fully revealed. High functioning sociopaths are generally very intelligent, and, having no native empathy, are forced to learn how people are supposed to act solely by observation. Having no empathy, they amuse themselves by manipulating others. Some few become mass murders, but not many (and you’d be unlikely to ever catch them unless they wanted to be caught). More often, they become salesmen or politicians or CEOs. They keep one set of people completely in the dark – as far as these victims know, old Bob the Sociopath is just the nicest guy! – so that they can more effectively gaslight their true victims, and then pull a geographic before enough people can compare notes.

But what happens when several sociopaths are working the same room? It’s got to happen regularly in politics -and at Disney. I’m betting it’s happening at Disney right now.

Kennedy, who from everything I’ve heard about her, has all the signs of a high-functioning sociopath, the kind of person who can fake real emotions very, very well, and who can lie with a devilish sincerity. This meeting must be all posturing and positioning among people for whom the ultimate pay-off is getting to watch the world burn while pulling the wings off flies, fans, coworkers, etc. Generating conflict and chaos is part of the schtick; destroying more or less normal people is part of the fun. Self-inflicted crisis is almost a sure sign of sociopathy.

It has been observed by religious people over the last century that the veil is getting thinner. Satan and his minions are getting bold. Exorcists are busy and getting busier. Many people seem to be looking for horned monsters – and those are out there. But more often, it’s a smiling, charming person that’s the channel of evil. This is why discernment of spirits is a great gift.

July 4th Assorted Musings

Happy Independence Day! As I’ve reminded people over the years, the Pledge of Allegiance is almost a prayer – we pledge to the Republic for which the flag stands. That would be the Republic – the res publica, the Public Thing, that which we Americans hold (or held) in common, from which a nation arises, from which a Constitution may be generated. A Republic that contains the inviolate, non-negotiable foundational beliefs upon which any valid government must be built. That whole Christian thing is necessarily there even prior to the ‘under God’ addendum. None of the Founding Fathers would have imagined that Christianity was not a core part of the American res publica.

That is a Republic to which I will happily pledge allegiance. Necessarily implied by Franklin’s quip – “If you can keep it” – is that keeping a Republic requires some work. First and foremost to keeping it long term: raise children who love it. For now, we start by praying for our nation.

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Theological aside: if it is as absurd to you as it should be to imagine the High Priest clapping and chatting in the Holy of Holies, then don’t do those things in church.

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More 4th of July thought: I’ve written a number of times on Orestes Brownson’s views on nations and republics and constitutions. Today, my beloved forwarded on to me this excellent essay. Sample:

“Before speaking of persons (who, per the second sentence, are all “created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”), the Declaration speaks of peoples: the communities to which individuals belong. The Declaration is a statement on behalf of “one people,” arguing that that people—that nation—is entitled to its own “station” “among the powers of the earth.” This is not merely a descriptive statement; it is normative, as well: distinct nations do exist, and it’s right that they do. Natural law and divine law both affirm this principle: the independence and separation of diverse “peoples” is discoverable by human reason (the common sense of citizens and statesmen, as well as the profound reflections of historians and philosophers) and has Scriptural warrant as well (e.g., Gen. 11:8, Deut. 32:8, Job 12:23, Ps. 22:28 and 66:7, Acts 17:26, Rom. 13:1).

“Far from being an abstract statement of the rights of naturally-isolated individuals, the Declaration begins by recognizing that every individual always already belongs to a community. Our Founders, including the authors of the Declaration, were familiar with the various “state of nature” teachings of modern political philosophers. But they didn’t invoke a state of nature as a premise for the Declaration, a document that, according to Jefferson, rather than being derived from a single political philosophy was “an expression of the American mind” based on “the harmonising sentiments of the day, whether expressed, in [conversations,] in letters, printed essays or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney Etc.” When the British powers over them became tyrannical, each American colony and town fell into a “state of nature,” provoking communities to re-establish themselves as bodies politic bound together with new social contracts, that is, constitutions. None of the Founders were very taken with the idea of a historical “state of nature” of asocial individuals preceding our social and political condition. The Founders understood that we are always already social animals, and thus, always already particular—men and women of this or that nation and culture …”

Do read it all.

A Simulated Mars Habitat – FINALLY!

In my most curmudgeonly moments, I’ve long been liable to mention that all these grand plans to colonize the Moon and Mars rely on one itty-bitty assumption: that people can live indefinitely in what amounts to a giant terrarium, set up in an utterly, fatally hostile environment from weeks to years away from any spare parts or food, eating only food they can grow themselves and water they either recycle or mine in that fatally hostile environment.

Putting on my amateur science hat, I say: show, don’t tell. Don’t tell me how nice it will be – build a model, stick it at the South Pole (a tropical vacation spot compared to Mars or the Moon) and leave a few volunteers inside for, say, a few years without any outside supplies or services. If that works, THEN we can have rational discussions on colonizing Mars or the Moon.

Most times I mention this, I get a lot of dismissive handwaving from supposed sciencey folks, who like big rockets and sci-fi. But as complex and sophisticated as SpaceX’s Starship is – and I’m a big fan – human beings and human societies are orders of magnitude more complex. After centuries of scientific observation, nobody really understands how the human body, let alone the human mind, works. For every detail researchers think they’ve figured out, there are a hundred more that remain a mystery.

And all of us are designed/evolved for this one very specific environment – earth. Mars and the moon are much more like each other than they are like earth, and, in human terms, they’re not at all much like earth.

NASA is finally taking a stab at it. Here’s the CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog – catchy!)

Pics from the NASA website

Couple notes:

• Laser printed building inside a NASA warehouse? I guess OK for a first pass. Next one should be in the interior of Greenland or 10,000 feet down in the ocean – a little less accessible.
• Those furnishings don’t look like they were selected for space transport- light, sturdy, compact – but rather like somebody raided a NASA break room.

pic from AlJazeera

Here’s a game: find the farm. Rule of thumb on earth is that it takes about 1/6 acre to grow enough food for 1 person. Now, under laboratory conditions with super-duper equipment and fertilizers, I suppose it’s some fraction of that. But even if the fraction is 1/10, you’d still need about 2900 square feet to grow enough food. That is about 1200 square feet more than this entire building.

NASA isn’t testing if this habitat is self-sustaining – but is instead worrying about the psychological health of people packed together in quarters much less dense and way more comfortable than most apartments in most cities in the world.

Here’s what NASA says. (Can’t help but notice that what NASA labels “goals” is just a description of a few ‘mission parameters’.)

Goals

To obtain the most accurate data during the analog, the habitat will be as Mars-realistic as feasible, which may include environmental stressors such as resource limitations, isolation, equipment failure, and significant workloads. The major crew activities during the analog may consist of simulated spacewalks including virtual reality, communications, crop growth, meal preparation and consumption, exercise, hygiene activities, maintenance work, personal time, science work, and sleep.

Might I suggest a more succinct goal? Goal: to see if people can survive indefinitely in isolation inside a giant terrarium. Ya know?

This is not at all what needs to be tested. I would want them to up the ante. I would suppose the mental health of people freaked out about possibly starving 45 million miles from earth might not be too copacetic. NASA might want to look into that.

This ‘experiment’ will succeed, and be utterly useless. People have tried the terrarium thing, most famously in the epic fail that was Biosphere. (Side note: the linked Wikipedia article, an earlier version of which I’m pretty sure I read many years ago, has now softened the criticism such that it sounds like Bioshere-2 sorta worked. No. If what you’re talking about is a closed ecosystem that can survive indefinitely without outside supplies and aid, it failed dramatically.) I suppose getting NASA-selected astronaut grade volunteers should make success, defined as the people in the structure not dreaming of killing each other, much more likely. But it will tell you nothing about that whole self-contained and isolated terrarium thing.

Is this a start? Not sure. Someone – Musk? – needs to take the same rapid development approach as SpaceX: build the best self-contained habitat you can, throw some people in it, and see how long it lasts. As soon as problems arise, fix them in a new habitat, and start another experiment. Rince, repeat, until you get one that seems to work. THEN take what you’ve learned, and translate it into something you could build on the Moon and Mars.

As of now, it’s just fantasy to imagine ‘we’ can just throw up habitats on the Moon and Mars where people can live indefinitely without constant resupply from earth. If you disagree, show me.