Teaching English in North Korea
This article by Suki Kim is an excerpt from her book Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite, based on her experience teaching English in North Korea. From a review of the book in the Chicago Tribune:
Remarkable”¦A deeply unsettling book, offering a rare and disturbing inside glimpse into the strangeness, brutality and claustrophobia of North Korea”¦ Kim’s book is full of small observations that vividly evoke the paranoia and loneliness of a nation living in fear and in thrall to its ‘Great Leaders’”¦Her portraits of her students are tender and heartbreaking, highlighting the enormity of what is at stake.”
Even the small essay conveys much the same picture. It’s a depressing read, but a good description of the totality of mind control in North Korea and the way it stunts the people there.
That, of course, is the goal of the North Korean government. By completely controlling the information that comes in, the rulers are able to fashion a world in which Korea is superior to every nation on earth. We already knew that is what they try to make people think, but the essay manages to describe how it effects young people’s thought processes and makes other ideas almost literally unthinkable. It even keeps the students from understanding the basic concepts behind writing an essay, where one must prove a thesis by marshaling facts.
Read it and weep for the captive minds of North Korea, whose government has managed to realize some of the goals so well described by George Orwell when he wrote about Newspeak in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four:
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.
The Left has been experimenting with mind control in the US as well. Recall the events where people were implanted with memories of child rape by the Left, in order to better control those subjects and produce better profit. Now they are using it on the campuses to make girls into sex slaves and boys into scapegoats.
Remember, that this is the SOVIET way of communism. the idea is not to make a bunch of thinkers, but a bunch of people who think just enough to do the jobs assigned to them. only the upper levels get education that does more.
the USA is doing the SAME THING wiht common core… after all, the public school kids who are to get jobs working for wealthier business owners, have to have enough to do the work, but not enough to actually compete against the children of said management. which is why their kids go to schools like the Dalton school, of which i developed educational material at one time.
the difference between the two educational methods is like night and day. one is for people to follow the ideas of others, the other is to be broad in scope, and think with the pallet of all that is in reality to think about.
ie. they are trying to fix the game rather than play the game
so in a regular school, you will read that the leaky’s went to africa, and stayed a long time doing archeological digs and discovered various fossils in which they were able to show jumps in the development of beings who will eventually become us and others who would just die out.
but in the other schools, you get a computer program that gives you a site to look at. it gets you to come up with a plan of how you would work the site, and show how they are segmented, and how each section is dug, and that the leakys did this, and on and on…
the first educational method is just hanging information of interest in which the person has learned nothing but a bare fact and nothing operational in the world to make them able
in the second method, they did a model dig, in which there is real world methods that are used and so, they know the process the leakys followed and can apply that process to their own dig in some place
the second will tell the first what to do, and the first wont know anything more than their segmented regimented task.
ie. its a throw back to egyption times when slaves did small taska and specialities, while rulers knew more about many ways and organized their segments into working groups, and so on. (note that jewish slaves operated differently, as did chinese eunichs)
we are not that far from north korea…
common core will make the average person barely fuynctional in math, and the higher things needed to succeed or invent… while the other education will have the better methods that will allow them to succeed.
then in the future, it will be a case of the past in which slaves are beings that are lesser than elites and could never hope to do what the special people do. never knowing that one gets stunted methods, and the other doesnt…
equality means removing equality
we have a modicum of equality in ability, but not in outcome… but soon, we will have unequal ability (to the elite), and all will share the same broken outcome
without korea, we would not be able to realize the game as the people discussing the game do not want to read what is the stuff that discusses whats going on, as that is not entertaining nor enjoyable.
all one has to do to understand this is to see how to do division in common core vs long division the classic way, and realize that the common nothing man/woman gets the new math way… which is why its COMMON core, vs elite education… education to make people commoners again…
with common core math you may be able to make change… or compute how much carpet you need for your hovel… but you cant do algebra and compute how much rocket fuel you need (as the ship has to carry the fuel whose weight changes as its used), or even higher math…
Long Division using the Partial Products Method (sometimes called expanded notation)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRYAJxaCDGA
COU Mini Lession “Using The Area Model Long Division” [also called the box method or rectangle method]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7boECP9BAE
The Salley Method: A new way to do long division!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qvgsfKzA1Y
[this one says that you have to have a snack before you start!!!]
even funnier is that they mandate fuzzy math, except that its not fuzzy math… its math done in a fuzzy manner… (fuzzy math itself is a higher concept in math not what they are now using the term for)
if you have a more classic education, you wont be able to see how anyone taught this way would get a feel for math and be able to get to algebra or trigonometry…
but then again… only the elite will get trig, or algebra, what does a slave need with that?
Now they are using it on the campuses to make girls into sex slaves and boys into scapegoats.
seems like a crazy point.. that is if you didnt know the history of things and what owners of slaves did with the female slaves… now the females are communally owned and earn their own keep, which is easier on a master who traditionally had to pay for the slaves upkeep. now they upkeep themselves and their youth is spent learning how to out sex Messalina (third wife of emperor claudius who competed in sex with a prostitute as to how many men they could do)
but if you know the origins of the modern feminist movement with the satanist sex communes of Moses Harmon (i have pointed him out before) and his daughter lilian harmon, and how that would need abortion on demand, or else sex/nintendo would not bo so fun… and so is a cornerstone..
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~prael/projects/gsonnen/page4.html
to people of the time, who thoughut this was all well and good, abortion was a solution to how to have lots of fun with the lower class without social movement of the children produced by the hobby.
lots of stuff like this, but we are over 100 years past the time when the points were openly discusses. feminists dont bring up this part of the history, and all this amounts to is grooming women to be so sexual that they serve the elite as agents of release of sexual tension under the guise of liberation… note that they are also to do most of the work. taking a page out of history to avoid outcomes like spartacus…
note that promoting gays is also taking a page out of chinese history of how they organized their elite system. gay men would do what men did, but could not procreate… women were in harems for sexual use, and were put to work… the bottom where the common man who could not achieve or change station.
Hidden Power: The Palace Eunuchs of Imperial China
http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/eunuchs1.html
Eunuchs, males who have been rendered sexually impotent by mutilation or removal of the external genitals, served as palace menials, harem watch-dogs, and spies for rulers in most of the ancient world kingdoms stretching from Rome, Greece, and North Africa, through the biblical lands, and on across the Man continent
It should be pointed out that Chinese dynastic histories were all written by mandarins, the educated elite who, as a class, despised the palace eunuchs. Mandarins alone were eligible to hold office in the bureaucracy, the “Great Without.” Men qualified for coveted bureaucratic positions by passing grueling official examinations that required years of arduous study
Terrifying? In a way, I suppose. I just don’t see much difference between US and European academia and North Korea. Which is why politicians, who have all been thusly indoctrinated, can’t think themselves out of evil or stupid. Academia infects all levels of the elite and professional world, then on into typical social and civil life. Perhaps not as pervasive, yet. If that is debatable. It does stack, has stacked.
Much of the political and economic difficulty now in easily in view comes from a point where either we plow further on into what you describe, or reality intrudes and we rethink. I don’t see any rethinking, in either of the two parties, and no third party with any real revisions on offer. It’s not looking so good for the West.
North Korea is not an anomaly. It is a preview of where the left is leading us. In America, through the schools and media, the left’s propaganda has instilled indoctrination into its memes and narratives to such an extent, that those so indoctrinated are not open to reasoned persuasion.
I can partially agree with Artfldgr’s “this is the SOVIET way of communism” but it started well before Lenin. Arguably, it started with the 19th century German philosophers (Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, etc) precursors to the philosophical schools of existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism.
As evidence that the American left started before the Soviets, I offer this pertinent quote;
“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” — Woodrow Wilson – An Address to the New York City High School Teachers Association – January 9, 1909
Speaking of language and grammar, “effect” should be “affect”. It’s a common confusion.
That ‘common confusion’ happens to the best of us, including those well aware of the different meanings and proper grammatical usage. Momentarily crossed mental synapses facilitated by a limited amount of time to produce an average of three blog posts a day? My daughter’s generation even has a somewhat crude name for it; “brain fart”.
As one on the inside of the belly of the beast (academia), I say +1 to both Doom and GB.
Only those who wish to be indoctrinated fall for the sirens of the far left or far right (which is where the ends meet) . Until one is able to think clearly without blinders; one is never free. If you are not free from the coin flip of left or right you are a slave of ideology. Live free or die is a double edged sword. It cuts both ways.
Chomsky’s specialty is linguistics. Which is to say, controlling thoughts via language. Ayers’ specialty is education reform, reforming it from Good into Evil that is. Education=indoctrination camps for current Americans.
Parker,
The left and right as defined by the left. As I have said many times, the left equates Hitler with the right, Stalin on the left. Between those two poles, both of which are actually leftist, they attempt to ignore the truth, and rid people of self governance, small governments, and the rest. Get out of that loop, and realize what the right truly is, and they have no power. Don’t let them define the loop, or, as you suggested, you have squandered your ability to think freely and clearly.
Geoffrey Britain: I can partially agree with Artfldgr’s “this is the SOVIET way of communism” but it started well before Lenin.
Thanks, and your 100% correct… the idea of an administrative state has been tossed around since Plato’s Republic… And Wilson was president way after Lenin became leader of Russia and many other states they latched onto. if one wants to put most of the blame in the proper place, then one would have to fault Dewey. as its one thing to read and think about an idea, its another thing to go to the soviet union, and then copy their ideas and structure american schooling by that.
it matters not where the idea started, it matters where it was implemented, and then copied. mostly because an unimplemented idea is of no substance. I posted also the sources of the idea of the control of the people through journolism, the man who influenced Hearst from publishing the news to publishing the news in a certain way as to manipulate the readers en masse
The wiki has been scrubbed as to his soviet union stuff or russia stuff… so much for being accountable, and knowing that this USA is a republic not a democracy.
if you do a search as to dewey, who started his ideas BEFORE the russia revolution, but then went over there and admired totalitarians and copied their ideas (just as hitler did as well).
Dewey launched a frontal assault on the traditional school beginning with the publication of his persuasive dual treatise The School and Society and The Child and the Curriculum in 1899 and 1902.
5 years before the russian revolution…
Dewey’s major work Democracy and Education (1916) had a Promethean effect on educational theory and practice around the world. As far as I know, Dewey himself never crossed the border, but his ideas took our educational establishment by storm. The impact of his progressive philosophy became increasingly evident in Canada as Dewey’s disciples began to turn his ideas into a new educational orthodoxy. The progressive model of what came to be known as “active learning” or “pragmatism” captured the hearts and minds of generations of Canadian teachers, and continues to dominate the thought of most of Canada’s educational theoreticians
so it wasnt just the USA that he changed, but also Canada, and many other places using the soviets as a kind of justification… it didnt hurt that Time magazine had made Stalin, and hitler and mao men of the year… (As they are now trying to choose person of the year)
Heilbroner goes on to describe an “Ariadne’s thread” comprised of four premises common to all Marxist thought. These he summarizes as follows:
1. The dialectical approach to knowledge.
2. The materialist approach to history.
3. A general view of capitalism that starts from Marx’s socio-analysis.
4. A commitment to socialism or a belief in the unity of theory and practice.
from that you can analyse..
and further agreeing with Geofry:
His philosophical influence on socialist educators in Russia can be traced back to the 1905 revolution, but since his most prominent followers did time in Czarist prisons thereafter, his ideas were not resurrected until after 1917. Nevertheless, his early Soviet disciples said they found much value in the work of John Dewey. One prominent Soviet educator, Albert P. Pinkervich, in comparing Dewey to contemporary German educators, said “Dewey comes infinitely closer to Marx and the Russian Communists.” There is little indication that Dewey found this sort of comparison to be extreme or uncomplimentary.
though i think given the new republic magazines current fate, this next sentence would be quite interesting:
Dewey published a series of laudatory impressions of Soviet Russia in The New Republic between 1920 and 1928, most of which developed a less than cautious “new world in the making” theme for Soviet Russia. However, throughout the 1930s, Dewey’s infatuation with the Soviet state declined in direct proportion to the Central Committee of the Communist Party’s own disappointment over the debilitating effects of progressive education on Russian graduates. Apparently the products of Dewey’s “project method” were becoming increasingly illequipped to fulfil Stalin’s Five Year Plans. In light of the somewhat embarrassing suggestion that perhaps only capitalist societies had the resilience to survive Dewey’s progressive educational reforms, he may have reacted with the wrath of the scorned. In 1937 he accepted the leadership of the Trotsky inquiry which exonerated Stalin’s mortal enemy of all charges laid by the Soviet State. His involvement in The Commission of Inquiry Into the Charges Laid Against Leon Trotsky resulted in a communist campaign of personal vilification that labelled Dewey a defender of capitalism and imperialist reaction.
and
the history is very large for this area and peoples, and there is never enough space to actually cover things here…