Education, Ayers, Obama, and “the great march”
Commenter “Wandriann” asked recently [emphasis mine]:
How in earth is it possible that ”˜Middle America’ combined with the solid US institutions does not make this weird kind of thing [the current Democrat agenda and methods] impossible?…Is this still the bill of the sixties, the luciferic, youthful rebellion against age-old common sense and wisdom? Has the ”˜great march through the institutions’ finally succeeded?
The short answer is: yes, especially in our press and our public education system.
It’s my impression that more people are aware of the press’s Leftward drift than of the extent of the change in the schools, although I could be wrong about that. There are also alternatives readily available to the liberal/Left press, such as Fox News and periodicals such as the Weekly Standard, National Review, the Washington Examiner, and sometimes the Wall Street Journal, as well as blogs such as this and larger ones.
The takeover of the educational system has been more insidious. Yes, there are private schools that offer a more conservative option, but that requires a commitment of money and an amount of effort that most people are neither willing nor able to expend. Also, what happens in a school system not only happens to our youngest and therefore most easily molded citizens, it also occurs (at least for the most part) outside of the awareness of their parents, unless the parents happen to be monitoring what’s going on very closely by reading textbooks and assignments and quizzing their children. Even then a great deal of it can be missed.
Paradoxically, the school systems that are considered the best and most modern, with the smartest student bodies—for example, in districts near universities—are often the worst in this regard. But the problem has infected the public education system as a whole. How else could a man such as Bill Ayers become a highly regarded educator, and his curriculum one of the most popular and influential in the field?
Sol Stern, who has written extensively about Ayers and education, was on Ayers’s case on this subject even before Obama was a candidate for president and the Ayers connection became an issue for that reason. Here Stern is in 2006 on how terrorist Ayers came to see the educational system as another way to steer this country Leftwards, and an effective and legal one at that (I will quote at some length because I think it’s important, but reading the whole thing is even more informative):
Ayers’s spectacular second act began when he enrolled at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1984. Then 40, he planned to stay just to get a teaching credential. (He had taught in a “Freedom School” during his pre-underground student radical days.) But he experienced an epiphany in a course taught by Maxine Greene, a leading light of the “critical pedagogy” movement. As Ayers wrote later, he took fire from Greene’s lectures on how the “oppressive hegemony” of the capitalist social order “reproduces” itself through the traditional practice of public schooling””critical pedagogy’s fancy way of saying that the evil corporations exercise thought control through the schools…
It hadn’t occurred to Ayers that an ed-school professor could speak or write as an authentic American radical…Greene told future teachers that they could help change this bleak landscape by developing a “transformative” vision of social justice and democracy in their classrooms. Her vision, though, was a far cry from the democratic optimism of the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr., which most parents would endorse. Instead, critical pedagogy theorists nurse a rancorous view of an America in which it is always two minutes to midnight and a knock on the door by the thought police is imminent. The education professors feel themselves anointed to use the nation’s K”“12 classrooms to resist this oppressive system. Thus Maxine Greene urged teachers not to mince words with children about the evils of the existing social order. They should portray “homelessness as a consequence of the private dealings of landlords, an arms buildup as a consequence of corporate decisions, racial exclusion as a consequence of a private property-holder’s choice.”…
All music to Bill Ayers’s ears. The ex-Weatherman glimpsed a new radical vocation. He dreamed of bringing the revolution from the streets to the schools. And that’s exactly what he has managed to do.
It’s also instructive to take a look at what passed (and passes?) for a doctoral dissertation in the field of education at the prestigious Columbia Teachers College back then (and probably now as well). Stern certainly has:
In record time Ayers acquired an Ed.D. with a dissertation titled “The Discerning ”˜I’: Accounts of Teacher Self-Construction Through the Use of Co-Biography, Metaphor, and Image.” There wasn’t much biography, metaphor, or image in the 180-page text. Ayers’s research consisted solely of a few days spent interviewing and observing the classroom practices of three nursery school teachers he knew personally.
On the basis of research such as this as well as his family connections, Ayers was on his way to becoming influential not only in the field of education in the city of Chicago, but in the country as a whole [emphasis mine]:
With his Teachers College credential in hand, Ayers landed an ed-school appointment back in Chicago, where his father was CEO of Commonwealth Edison and nicely plugged in to the city’s political establishment. These days, Ayers carries the joint titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. One of his several books on the moral imperative of teaching for social justice is a bestseller in ed-school courses. Like many other tenured and well-heeled radicals, Ayers keeps hoping for a revolutionary upheaval that will finally bring down American capitalism and imperialism.
That was written in 2006; now Ayers must feel he’s finally got it, in the person of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, et. al., although you might say it’s been more of an evolution (devolution?) than a revolution. But that was exactly the aim of the Long March of Ayers and others—and he is hardly alone—through our educational system.
And if I sound like a paranoid McCarthy-esque alarmist, so be it. The evidence is in; just take a look at the reading lists of so many public schools today as well as the curricula, and you will see it. And we also see the fruits of the labors of Ayers and company in our young people’s relative ignorance of history and civics; the dwindling of the teaching of the Western canon as it has been “reframed” as the works of oppressive white men; the dominance of the tragic view of this country as a force for evil, one for which constant apologies and sacrifices are necessary; and the decline of critical thinking and the rise of moral relativism and post-modernism.
All of these trends are now amply demonstrated in our educator-in-chief, President Obama, as well as his wife Michelle, who’s only been really proud of America in her adult life since it began to take her husband’s ambitions seriously.
Whatever Obama’s direct connection to Ayers (and I continue to think it’s greater than we know), his philosophical connection is clear. The patience of the 60s radicals has been rewarded at last, and this accounts at least in part for the fact that they—and Obama—are so unwilling to compromise their radical agenda at the moment, even in the face of mounting opposition. They know best, after all; they’re our teachers, and we the students.
[NOTE: And speaking of Ayers and education, he and his cronies had big plans for our re-education back then. And if that failed, there was always murder:
And speaking of murder, yesterday was the fortieth anniversary of the Manson gang murders, a very sad chapter in American life. Let’s revisit the commentary of Ayers’s wife-to-be—and current Northwestern University law professor—on the subject.]
The patience of the 60s radicals has been rewarded at last, and this accounts at least in part for the fact that they–and Obama–are so unwilling to compromise their radical agenda at the moment, even in the face of mounting opposition. They know best, after all; they’re our teachers, and we the students.
Back when I was a 70s radical into the 80s I wouldn’t have believed that the universities, as well as the media and churches, could be so thoroughly radicalized in so little time.
I suspect that much of this is simply generational. Right now Boomers are at the peak of their power. The Greatest Generation and Silent Generation have shuffled off the stage and Boomers are enjoying their ascendancy for now.
Despite their rhetoric Boomers never were all that democratic or open-minded. They got a few things right — civil rights and feminism to an extent — and assumed that conferred to them the moral high ground forever more. They were used to getting their way by lecturing, ridicule and shouting down anyone who disagreed.
Soon the younger generations are going to realize that they are in direct conflict with Boomers and there will be a very large backlash.
So who are the people that are susceptible to having a core-belief change like me back in 1991?
When presented with an alternative viewpoint, I went searching for the truth and went through a series of logical discoveries as I went to the library 3 times a week for full year in 1991.
There are people having core-belief changes in this last decade also.
What makes us see things differently than we are taught?
Let’s accelerate that process….
Neo–I see that you have come around–as you state, “very reluctantly,” to my general view of this whole mess. I take no real pleasure in this, since I would have hoped to be wrong, but I am not, and because I am not, I fear for my country.
I very much doubt that we would have arrived at the current state of things had traditional teaching methods, used to teach traditional subjects, in the traditional ways been what our educational system had been doing in the years since, say, the 60’s; this was the glue that bound all of us together, this was the melting pot that made our nation strong and us informed, smart, gave us all a general viewpoint, and prepared us to be good citizens–the “out of many, one” thing, and that was why it was a central focus for attack by the Left.
However, during those decades, quietly and unbeknownst to most of us–certainly I had never really focused on or in any comprehensive way understood what was happening until I retired and had enough time to study, read and reflect–Antonio Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions” of our “bourgeois” society was taking place, with the result that the parasitical Left and Obama & Co. have had an infinitely easier time in establishing themselves in and compromising their host i.e. contemporary America, than they would have otherwise had, and Bill Ayers had a lot to do with that.
In the schools, one major point of contention for me is the stultification of scientific education by far right elements and some anti-globalist anti-intellectual elements of the far left, insisting that the hypothesis of creationism (masked as intelligence design) is somehow on par and deserves equal time along with the Theory of Evolution. It takes a lot to rise to the level of Scientific Theory and frankly in the court of reasonable evidence it’s overwhelmingly … evident. We don’t give equal time to those who believe the earth is flat, we don’t give equal time to those who think the earth is the center of the universe, these hypotheses were all dogmas that science bulldozed over, yet the goal post shifts and shift and shifts and shifts and … human progress and the pursuit of truth is stultified for another generation — it is so immoral and willfully ignorant.
On the far Left the weirdness is hardly surprising and so myriad to list .. from supporting teacher/juvenile relationships, to repressive speech codes, to inappropriate anti-conservative tirades, to well you name it, others may do more listing on this:
As a university press editor for more than two decades I have been warning folks for years about the sorry state of thinking in the humanities. Not just the speech codes, but the journals in which these culture critics and poststructuralists are published are ideological as well as nonanalytical. They use a coded language that only sounds like English. I’ve come to call it Manglish, the use of English to destroy the language. Very dreary. I just hope my daughter does not end up going to an ivy league school or even a big state university if she’s interested in a degree in the humanities. What a terrible waste of the mind that would be.
huxley,
I’m a boomer myself, and while I agree that the leftist Boomers did resort to the in-your-face techniques you describe, I think many just got a life and stopped thinking much about political things–at least not deeply enough to stand up to the radicals. I was a member of NOW in the early seventies, but I turned off to the group as I saw it turn into a crazed bunch of man haters. Those who hung around just got whackier and whackier.
The same thing happened with civil rights. When you knew that the Panthers were simply thugs and were actually hurting blacks with their acting white indoctrination, there was little you could do. You were up against Bernstein and all the other radical chic types. There just wasn’t a middle ground to coalesce around. We drifted back to normal life and let the crazies take over, resting on our youthful good intentions and not wanting to challenge the new status quo.
I hope you are right about the younger generation and the backlash. Too many of us Boomers have remained complacent or silent for too long. We owe the younger generation honest appraisals of where and how we went wrong. Maybe people like Bill Cosby and Sarah Palin will shake us up a bit.
You can blame the State of California for a lot of the radicalization of American textbooks. The California State Board of Education required textbooks to contain a marxist and non-historical curriculum. Since California was such a large buyer of textbooks, textbook companies went along with this curriculum, modifying it for other states as necessary.
Also, history is a difficult subject which requires a certain amount of boring information to be memorized. It cannot all be presented as a fun subject. Most teachers and students are not willing to put in the effort to learn the boring stuff, so the “narrative” becomes very important. It’s always easy to teach about “oppression,” and it’s much harder to teach about cause and effect and human nature.
Economic education? Ugh, b-o-r-i-n-g . . . Can’t be bothered to learn about it. Too much work.
We shouldn’t give time to Palin bashers either. Their rantings are over the top loony….
To give equal time to these people is like giving equal time to anybody who thought Obama had ANY experience – as in he managed a campaign so therefore he has experience…..
On the topic at hand..
After my core-belief change in 1991, I had the pleasure of going to a few colleges from 1992 – 1994. Every teacher/instructor/professor had a tilt to the left except one.
My psychology teacher for instance went on an anti-gun tangent every 6 minutes. So guess what my research paper was about in that class – guns. I got an A but a paper full of red ink. 🙂
If you control all levels of the educational system you can gradually advance your agenda. The more levels you infiltrate, the easier the process becomes. Ayers eventually understood this after he stopped making bombs.
At the university level this process was pretty much complete when I was in college 40 years ago. In my school’s history/poli-sci/econ faculty there was only one professed Republican and I have no doubt he’d have voted for Obama if he were alive today.
But education is only one aspect of advancing an agenda. Unless people stay and teach, they eventually leave school. At that point you have to control information so that the news functions as continuing education. Not everyone follows the news, so you also need to control entertainment and advance your agenda through films, television, and theater.
The left has dominated higher education since at least the 1930s. News and entertainment have fallen almost entirely into their hands since the 60s. All three industries have become more aggressive (and drifted further left) in the last decade. However, the majority of people in this country are either unaware of the trend or indifferent to it, especially country club Republicans who would vote for Obama before Palin, or even before McCain. As long as the trend continues it will be difficult to advance a conservative agenda without some sort of cataclysm.
“It’s my impression that more people are aware of the press’s Leftward drift than of the extent of the change in the schools, although I could be wrong about that.”
Speaking of the press, why is this not front page news?
“Our Unconstitutional Census”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204908604574332950796281832.html#mod=rss_opinion_main
nyomythus –
You might want to worry more about the utter lack of decent science ed, instead of worrying about disrespect of a single theory that can be well covered in a single week of biology. People are having a backlash against darwinisim because the extreme, There-Is-No-God version of it has been used against anyone who is religious for far too long.
Biggest problem with using the education system to undermine the main culture– you’re gonna get blow back.
Nyomythus: All that has been shown in an empirically verifiable way is that since a few billion years many forms of vegetative, animal and lastly human life have become manifest at this planet. We have all kinds of information of these different kind of life-forms. And, because this concerns an essentially historical proces, which means that the actual data have all vanished, it cannot be maintained that propositions in this field have the same hardness as the propositions of ordinary fysics, which are based on repeatable experiments.
So, the certainty of these propositions, can never be equated with the certainty in the really hard sciences.
However, they have a certain validity, which is difficult to precisely define.
But, there is a great but: non of the great philosophical questions of Plato: What is matter, time, what is life? What is the difference between vegetative, animal and human life , what is consciousness? Non of these questions have been resolved by these empirical investigations.
Apart from some knowledge about sequential forms of life having become manifest in time, we know nothing more than Plato. Both the strict Darwinists and the intelligent design people believe in unverifiable hypotheses without knowing it.
The whole thing is there because people think this involves the question of God. Therefore they get emotional about it, both atheists and theists.
But it is nonsense. All the empirical data produced by the research on natural history can be integrated without a problem in both atheistic and theistic philosophical theories.
The intellectual battle between atheism and theism can not be resolved by turning to these findings, so the big fraud to get people emotional about them and oneself important, should finally stop.
And, relating to the post, leftist atheists should stop lying to the young that atheism has been proven by science. It is an outrageous lie, and they should be sued for it.
As a Boomer and also as a member of academia for over 25 years, I can say without much doubt that my fellow boomers in academia have not changed a bit since their undergraduate days. Part of the appeal for them in terms of an academica career was the ability to spend their entire adult life like they were still 20 years old. You’d be surprised to find how many still revel in the 60’s, and how much they are motivated to bring all that back on campuses now.
Wandriaan… actual data have all vanished…
White-noise
Foxfier Biggest problem with using the education system to undermine the main culture— you’re gonna get blow back.
No self-repecting intelligent person should give a holy good goddamn what the majority culture thinks — do the moral thing, go with the evidence.
Leslie — As a university press editor for more than two decades I have been warning folks for years about the sorry state of thinking in the humanities.
You got that right Leslie — no segment of the university in more intellectually corrupt than the humanities.
physicsguy,
That reminds me of a protester at the G8 on Heiligendam in Germany several years ago. Allegedly protesting globalization or some other cause du jour, he told the German reporter that the protest was like the Woodstock of his generation. He obviously was carefully indoctrinated about the good old days in the age of aquarius.
Physics guy, I saw exactly the same thing while I was in academia. Many faculty, like a lot of aging Aquarians, get all misty-eyed when the Sixties are mentioned.
I also couldn’t agree more with the comments regarding the sorry intellectual state of the humanities. For my sins I once had to serve on a committee that awarded senior fellowships to postdocs across all disciplines. I was shocked at the intellectual poverty of candidates in the humanities. They couldn’t answer basic, fundamental questions about their research, such as why they were doing it, why it was worthwhile doing, what led them to choose that topic, what other topics they had considered, and the killer, under what circumstances (if any) would they conclude that further work in that field was unnecessary?
Not a single humanities candidate could answer any of those questions. I would have doubts about any second-year grad student in the physical sciences who failed to answer even one of those questions, and yet these people already had their Ph.D.s. They could blather ad nauseam about some obscure 17th Italian poet, or the frequency with which Shakespeare had said “Forsooth” in each play (they counted, to try to figure out if the same person had written all of the plays — sheesh), or interpretation of Greek pottery, but they couldn’t answer any of the questions above. Each of them looked stunned to be asked, in essence, why he was spending his life as he was. They’d obviously never given this a thought. Amazing.
As for the sorry state of the humanities, just take a look at the Sokol affair:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokol_Affair
My biggest pleasure is that it was a physicist who “dun the deed”
nyomythus –
Ah, sorry, didn’t know you were pontificating. Forget I said anything– I’ve found arguing with evangelicals of any faith is worthless when they’re sure that the only truth is what they believe, yet they can’t stand other faiths being spoken of.
Some specifics I’d like to see improved:
I know I would’ve enjoyed a decent bit of work on the various theories of gravity…. spending more than a day on relativity would’ve been nice… the two weeks on genetics were VERY fun, too. Be nice if there’d been more focus on practical implications, like selective breeding. (Lord knows my mom would’ve been delighted to come in and give a talk on breeding cattle, and some of the risks involved.)
For “social studies”– history of Europe that wasn’t focused on WWII would’ve been nice, maybe a sort of over-view?
Some poetry that was actually beautiful instead of ugly, atonal and depressing– would’ve been interesting to have Kipling, he’s got some stuff that’s good for hooking interest. Shoot, even just an over-view of famous poets and some of their works. (Never even HEARD the name Wordsworth in school.)
Writings of the Founding Fathers– besides the Declaration and Constitution!
At least a quarter of basic accounting– make it a mix of home ec and math for all I care. Make the year most kids turn 16 the same year they get driver’s ed, accounting, How To Read A Contract and…. something else, there’s gotta be a basic life skill that’d be useful. Maybe “biology of sex,” or “basic law.”
Come to think of it, cut sex ed drastically– eight years of “how to put a condom on a banana, look at the STD pictures” is rather overkill, and doesn’t seem to be working anyways. (Unless the goal is more pregnancies….)
Two anecdotes for physics guy.
The first one, re the committee mentioned above: references for one of the candidates spoke glowingly about how the “fiendish ingenuity” of her archeological research reflected her “technical background” (she’d taken a few courses in the physical sciences). My scientific colleague and I, intrigued, looked forward to a break in the monotonous pap we’d been hearing all day.
Turns out the fiendish ingenuity consisted of her use of…trigonometry! We both feigned coughing fits, and were careful to avoid catching each other’s eye to avoid starting to laugh again.
The second one: Once in a social context humanities faculty members were discussing books everyone should have read. I agreed with them (fortunately, I’d read most of them), and then added that the Feynman lectures on physics belonged on that list. They looked at me as though I were crazy, but I stand by that opinion. Needless to say, they’d never heard of the Feynman lectures, much less read them.
i will comment on other parts later since a MAJOR operation in all this that started before all that stuff mentioned, was the reason/excuse that created the conditions that moved the material to where they wanted it to be…
The takeover of the educational system has been more insidious.
As I said, and linked, read bella dodd school of darkness, its FREE online… she was the president of cpusa, AND head of the teachers union. Eventually realized what she was a part of, and like so many, told what was going on. And no matter how nasty and evil, unless someone crushes them, they never get the attributions to stick.
happens in a school system not only happens to our youngest and therefore most easily molded citizens
And the major reason for this is FEMINISM… not the I wanna vote suffragets, but modern feminists who say that they want totalitarian communism, which is the only way society will be made right (according to them)
The break down of society parallels women’s movement. They abandoned their homes, their families, and their loves, for a paycheck to be able to spend on whatever they wanted rather than ask a husband (which most in the past controlled the purse strings).
Being too busy, school, of which the first public school needed the national guard to force the children to attend since mothers didn’t want it, was a freebie baby sitter. TV was also a baby sitter. And women traded in a life of (to men) leisure, for heart disease, infertility, higher suicide rate than before, higher victim rate than in history, extinction for their posterity, STDs are in majority of the population, high crime, high drug use, low morals, broken homes, more poverty, children messed up, and lots more bad things. Things that if you told my grandparents that was the future, they would not believe you one iota. Just as most don’t believe that the past was different.
All one has to do is turn on old movies to realize the differences.
You read leftist think tank stuff and you realize that the women were selected since they rule the mating game, and men have to play whatever mating game that you can convince them to play. You make it ok to women to change society, and society will change because men will make it that way as their means to children.
The men never controlled society, they controlled its strength, structure, and how it provided things for their families and the future children, etc. how could you control things if you were away most of the time toiling to meet the needs of someone else in exchange for some money mostly for someone else?
As far as elites with money are concerned, it was nicer convincing the women of the harem to self support themselves and make good men not worth having, than it was to procure and protect a harem of your own (when procreation wasn’t the point). how else could a basketball player wrack up 10,000 partners and not have to have a harem? A harem is socially unacceptable, but having as much sex as that pascha with 10,000 women loosened up by the school system, makes it the cheapest high volume best sex you can get. Heck, today they do things ‘normally’ that you had to pay a hooker much extra in the past, and they don’t even call it sex. Outside of a whorehouse, only western women sleep with more men, with its consequences just ignored (but what can you do if that’s how they want to live. Though most would say “that’s living?” As Lenin said to the woman who invented free love when she said “all love should be free and available as water”, “who wants to drink from a dirty glass?”.
The women were targeted by Marx and Engels (want me to quote them?) and targeted by Hitler too. They were only targeted by communists as the means to subverting the culture using their natures against them while denying they had any to start with. the more we believed that the people genetically selected for their beauty, fecundity, and so forth, who selected the others for their ability to out produce their minimal needs and were willing to give that freely to the people they selected for beauty, etc… were equal. The more that and other false ideas became prevalent and stuck, the more they had a barometer as to how far gone we were.
Every thing needed to protect a country and keep it safe from ruin and then plunder was attacked and reversed. Women became men (they keep trying to make men women but that don’t seem to work as well as making more women omnisexual and accessible). The love of family became normed as hate and you became a freak for having a good family. Family values were tossed. First as their book clubs, beauty clubs, and other Fads to fill their time (before work). then womens magazines switched, and they decided lung cancer and heart desease were fashionable. They told red book and ladies home journal that if you stuck up for real women, you lost. And like aarp people are finding out, these groups never ever represented the people that they gathered power from.
In the future, history will affirm why countries in which women rule are replaced by those in which they are imprisoned. Or do you think that women in Russia are really freer than in America? How about Islam? Hey, how about in a feudal state like Elizabethan England?
In the US, they achieved their freedom WAY before they knew they had it. they didn’t know what it is. and they still fight for it, but yet they still don’t know what it is.
If they did, they would realize that they had the complete freedom to dictate societies change and its collapse from the freedom wrought and fought for and died for by men for their wives, and children, to a feudal state where they as women are so impoverished they are all whores to the lords, and wretchedly hate their men still for the society they live in, for they are never happy (as many many have written in history).
[edited for length by neo-neocon]
Foxfier — I don’t subscribe to faith, but reasonable evidence gets my attention.
nyomythus, I understand what you mean, because I come from the same place. I don’t think you should elevate the Creationist talk to be in any way comparable to the Marxist long march through elite institutions. We are talking about a handful of school districts in out-of-the way places; they have no cultural leverage. And I recall reading that these districts produce as many good biologists and other scientists as any of the surrounding districts.
The–what should we call them? Evangelicals? Fundamentalists?–understand the symbolism of Evolution very well indeed. It is an attack on religion, and the secularists (“secular humanists?”) understand this very well themselves. That is why they they put so much so much stock in the issue, to the point of describing Evolution as basic to ALL science.
So they have ginned up Intelligent Design as a symbolic riposte. I have read Biehn and others, and I offer this thought: Intelligent Design is worth some time in science class.
Not because it is good science: it isn’t, and there is a logical error at its heart. Rather, it is a marvelous topic in the Philosophy of Science.
nyomythus, if you can accept that, you can find a little charity for the poor Evangelicals without committing yourself to contempt for real science, and, by extension, to contempt for scholarship and the modern world.
lost that to the big swallow system
what we lost as illustrated by norman rockwell..
nyomythus –
Oh, you do, as per your insistence on a theory that fits the information you believe over other theories. Just because you call your faith-based belief system “science” don’t make it so….
The trouble is that the leftist thinking is in almost every school, even the private ones. The private schools recruit their teachers from the same education-degree mills that the public schools use. I sent my children to non-public schools, but the difference in the political atmosphere was not very great. Not a single teacher at my children’s Catholic high school voted for Bush, and the teachers made their views very clear. The Catholic school teachers voted for the pro-abortion candidates. So sad.
What “other theories”???????
Interesting, yesterday I was watching Cary Grant in “Mr. Blanding builds a house”. In the opening scene Cary is lamenting the progressive education of his daughter at her expensive progressive school. The daughter has been indoctrinated to have disdain for Mr. Blanding’s advertising career.
So while the Boomers were a large wave of impressionable shock troops, the real radicals have been in place since the thirties, at least. Most of the 60’s radicals weren’t boomers but born in the mid-thirties to early forties. No doubt Ayers and his ilk have moved the ball forward and assumed the mantle from their mentors. They oversaw the complete infection of the nation’s school systems with a “progressive” education.
Still I have hope that this is a last gasp as the Boomers fade into history. Every act reveals their true nature and it isn’t being bought by Americans who want a future. Also, on the bright side, under Obamacare the aging boomers will be shuffled off with end of life counseling and rationed care. Question: Should the younger tax payers pay to fend off the delayed effects of all that acid dropped during the summer of love?
I hope you are right about the younger generation and the backlash. Too many of us Boomers have remained complacent or silent for too long.
Does this mean I can go back to reflexively bashing boomers? Hope so.
I’m 41, Gen-X. I’m the youngest engineer in my large defense company. I’ll be the junior guy until I’m 70.
Do you know what it’s like to be called “kid” at 41?
JKB –
Maybe related to the big socialist stuff going around starting about that time?
Gray: Just remember I’m 100% Boomer, through and through
Nyomythus: It is not white noise that all the actual data of the research of natural history have vanished. When you study some periode in human history you have the same problem: the object to study NO LONGER exists. This is also true about everything that is studied under so called ‘evolution’. It is a historical, singular proces, every living organism is there only once, then is gone forever. The historical proces can only be studied at the hand of remaining fossils and other traces. These are the data of this research. But they are not the actual plants and animals themselves , who are no longer present and visible. This is the problem with all historical research and one of the main reasons historical research can never have the quality of hard, exact science, which is based on repeatable experiments on objects that are actually present and visible. Hitler cannot be studied directly, all the actual data about him have vanished, there remain only tokens, traces etc..And neither can dinosaurs…
Gray: Just remember I’m 100% Boomer, through and through
A younger friend of mine overlooks my Boomerhood by saying, “But you’re a traitor to your class.”
Gray,
I was thinking more in terms of helping you genXers protect your kids.
One thing that is often overlooked about the Obama-Ayers connection is the fact that, although Bill Ayers had connections in Chicago, his father Tom, former head of ConEd, headquartered in Chicago, had so much wealth and so many connections that some labeled him the “Godfather of Chicago politics,” I wonder what role he played in Obama’s rise?
There is some hope that the experience of being in office and dealing with the real world will educate Mr. Obama about the world. Probably in the 6th or 7th year of his administration. Of course, one would hope this sort of education would take place before one becomes President of the US.
A great many of the people surrounding the President are in touch with reality. The Clintons, for example, despite their hippy-ish past, showed some sophistication about foreign policy. Much better, at least, than the Marxists.
And let us not forget the ideologies on the other side. G W Bush was recently quoted as believing the war in Iraq was about Gog and Magog from the Bible; Not something he could know unless he was a true prophet.
The US will pass some sort of health care legislation. Take heart that countries from Israel to France to Norway have something similar, and it doesn’t absolutely have to lead to NHS socialism or “Serfdom”. There is a tremendous amount of damage that could be done, true, but there is a good chance of avoiding most of it.
Wandriaan,
no words will help. He is so anti-religious that a quote about money on the currency had Ny in an anti Palin all the time tizzy. Therefore, he will perpetually make the wrong choice (data will not hit him upside the head) in presidential elections voting in somebody who is economically illiterate, with zero experience, incurious, historically inaccurate at every turn, etc.
He is steeped in a way of thinking on religion that has him making extreme statements and judgments.
There will be no follow up from me on this topic today.
Off topic and interesting feminist debate:
http://chronicle.com/article/Domestic-Violence-a/47940/
I read Christina Hoff Sommers book “Who stole Feminism” back in the 90’s. She commands respect, gets shouted down at colleges however and still fights for truth in reporting and textbooks.
Fred2, I very much hope there is no 6th or 7th year of the Obama Maladministration. Or a 5th year, for that matter.
Increasingly it appears that my hopes will be fulfilled. On his current running, by 2012 Obama will be firmly in Carter country.
Occam’s Beard-
from your lips to God’s ears! (or whatever the text equiv may be)
uh oh! You mentioned God !
Baklava,
Thanks for the OT link. That is a very interesting topic.
I don’t think you need the pine tar anymore…bleachers!
Mark
At the beginning of the Won’s reign, he diagnosed our economic crisis as not being the result of the Democrat’s vote getting push for home ownership for all with a pulse, not due to the out of control actions of Fannie and Freddie, nor due to the very effective blocking of reform by Rep. Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd, but, rather, in the implausible–visible to no one except the Won–triad of the crises in our Energy, Healthcare and Educational Systems.
No doubt, after swift passage of Cap and Trade and Health Care Reform, we were supposed to be further Blitzed by a mammoth bill to “reform” and fully federalize our educational system.
If Obama & Co are still sticking to that game plan, look for any such plans for the “reform” of our education system to be heavily infused with the ideology of Bill Ayers and his fellow travelers.
well the end result of the march at least in male female relationships is here.
First dates in Sweden: sabotaged by social welfare
http://www.thelocal.se/21012/20090730/
given the ‘ladies’ attitudes and other things i guess its another case of “getting what they asked for but it isnt what they want”
i bring this up since this is the starting point in the west, and that sweden is held up as the shining example of the success of such ideological things.
remember what swedish history was like..
There’s nothing quite like the rush of sharing that first few hours together: awkwardly asking questions, selecting words ever-so-carefully to impress one other, avoiding foods with high risk of becoming lodged between teeth (broccoli is a definite no).
And all the while secretly thinking about what’s beneath each others’ clothing
i bring this up because in our large discussions about this contenent, that republic, etc.
we keep forgetting that the thing we are really protesting is not knowing what our daily lives may be like. we have been told that this is the great future, but why doesnt it feel that way? why did it feel more that way before the 60s revolution with the door to the solar system and galaxy eventually open to us.
its why i brought up those jokes and quotes, why i focused on feminism and such. it was the poison that unlocked the rest. now i am not saying that womens self determination was poison. but that knee jerk reaction should show you that feminism and womens self determination are not synonymous (quite the opposite if your smart, and self made and do your own thing).
isnt it about time that women werent being told by others how to live? that they can make up their own minds is something the feminists never concede. and that they like families and things that are not necessarilysocially acceptable in a collective. and there are a lot of things they now do that they dont like doing.
like neos other thread showing that women are a lot less happier than they were before. and all the other comments you can find where women are discovering they cant have babies, and that its too bad for them. others are finding out that their other actions deny them lots of other things.
the point is that these are all canaries in the human coal mine. how do you tell that the people as a people are healthy? you can see how their women behave, you can see what they are singing, you can watch and compare their images with the past and what they focus on.
when i was a kid, we were watching the first moon walk, and some really amazing feats. now we have documentaries that tell us what the world would be like if most humans suddenly died out.
people used to sing a little happy love song, you looked around and you would hear another song.
today they are begging someone else to somehow make them feel something.
so this article on dating is actually more relevent than most may want to consider. the changes we are seeing to the economy will make VAST changes in how we as people meet, spend time, consider others, and so forth.
our very future is wrapped up in how people date and create successful lives. that is unless you thik that they shouldnt and they should instead live their own lives, and any issuance be taken care of by the state in facilities like that and, women shouldnt have the choice (thats what Simone de Beauvoir and lots of others – some presidential advisors say).
so peer into the future… and see how men act in sweden when an american woman (as far as i can tell) is even more frustrated with the men than she is with them in the US.
My first Swedish date took place about a month after I’d moved to the nation’s capital. And about two minutes into it, I realized whatever dating ‘expertise’ I thought I had gained during my single years, was useless.
The evening felt like a cavalcade of one hopeless moment after another. The dinner went like this: I asked a question. He answered. I asked another. He answered again. Not once did a question come my way. Was I that boring, or was he just that rude?
When the bill came, I offered to help pay as I always do; a well-rehearsed token gesture of kindness, which I expected to be duly rebuffed.
Instead, my Swedish companion “allowed” me to pay for half the meal. And then left me to cover our after-dinner coffee–another sure sign in my book that things were heading in the wrong direction.
Three hours later, my stomach full of non-free food and my mind reeling from the piss-poor conversation, my first Swedish date was finally over.
she got exactly what the feminists have been fightind and deputizing her and others for. they even have the social welfare state, what they also wanted.
however note her duplicity… unlike her swedish sisters, hers is a feminism image with a duplicitous back drop where she pretends to be trendy and feminist in pc line, but then balks when the situation is no longer unequal. that is, she has learned to appear one way in western public so that she supports these goals and eveyrone else does to and also acts on them… meanwhile, behind the false image, she wants what they wont let her have. hows that for schizo as normal?
[edited for length by neo-neocon]