Offbeat

Rave

Education: Chariots of Lies

Posted 11 months ago|5 comments|418 views
TOTALITARIANS AGREE
VIDEOS
ADDITIONAL IMAGES
1
 
2
 
3
 
4
 
5
Written by
BruceDPrice
Virginia Beach, VA
Sorry, did I say lies? I meant fire. Chariots of fire. They sound, and look, a lot alike. Fuzziness, please remember, is as good as accuracy. For many disadvantaged children, it's better. They should not have to deal with further rejection and humiliation. You'd understand that if you weren't a capitalist stooge. This is one of our most important lies. Sorry, I meant truths. Our job is to correct the ills of society, and provide advantages to the disadvantaged. Fuzziness is an important tool in this agenda.

Let's say that A is almost as tall as B. Surely we can reasonably say that A is taller. He lacks self-esteem. You cannot possibly educate the poor minority child unless we can build up his self-esteem. If A were not the victim of institutionalized prejudice and a starvation diet, he would surely be taller. It's only because of social injustice that A might appear to be a tiny bit shorter than B. We can correct this injustice. That's the main thing. Anyone who is not a reactionary can understand this.


FUZZY IS YOUR PAL

Schools should not serve the purposes of the ruling class but of the dispossessed class. Fuzziness, as noted, is good, and lies are often more honest than truth. It is not possible to engage in serious societal transformation without their help. I should emphasize that eliminating evil is the highest priority. That A appears to be a fraction of an inch shorter than B is evil. That A cannot read as well as B is evil. That A cannot perform meaningless academic activities as well as B is evil. That is, these things are lies and they must be overcome. Fuzziness is one way to do this. Fuzzy is our friend.

We have come to a bold new era in education as chariots of lies. I mean fire. The point is, this kind of precision is a bourgeois trap. We must never fall for the trick of saying that one thing is better than another thing. That's a value judgment, and has no place in a secular humanist universe. Each person's truth is as good as the next person's truth. You are entitled to think the world is flat. In this way we gained greater social cooperation and cohesiveness. We do not waste energy on conflict and debate. Critical thinking, which we teach in our classrooms, always leads to flexibility. When I say blue, can you see red? Then you are ready to graduate. Indeed, you have graduated. You are now flying across the sky in a chariot of fire. Or lies. Whichever you prefer.

The distinguishing trait of Western imperialism was always to say that 2 + 2 equals 4. This is outrageous and bogus. 2 + 2 might be 4. But there are always other circumstances, and other values that come into play. Sometimes, for the good of the group, you need to conclude that 2 + 2 equals 5. When you can do this, you have graduated from high school. Did I say high school? I meant college. There is nothing else for you to learn.

The great genius of collectivist hegemony is that one is all and all is one and, all in all, we are lucky to be in such a wonderful society. And not in the prison known as precision.

All the differences, all the rejections, all the unfairness, have been eliminated. Social justice is not just a phrase, it is a way of life. It transcends the old religions, ensuring that the first shall be last, and the last shall be first, and all those in the middle will be one of the other, depending on their ID number. There can be no halfhearted measures, no shrinking back. On some days 2 + 2 will equal 3. But of course! Surely that is obvious to everyone. Perhaps there will always be those benighted souls who cannot see through a glass darkly. These people will need to be reeducated, until we achieve the perfect unity that everyone is entitled to.

Chariots of lies. Such an inspirational vision. I'm sorry, did I say lies instead of fire? Now, I'm teasing you. What possible difference could it make whether I say fire or lies? It's all the same as long as the right people are in charge; and they make sure the correct decisions are made. Thereby guaranteeing everyone an equal share of whatever is left after the right people have finished dividing everything up and taking their fair share. Leaders have such awesome responsibilities; they must receive proportional rewards to sustain them through their hard labors.

Personally, I have no doubt that we can expect our leaders to do exactly the right thing. Doubt is in itself an example of social injustice. There can be no doubt you embrace the totality of the New World. You love it, and you forget that you and the world were ever separate. This is peace that passes all understanding. This is the goal of K-12 education. I foresee an age when people will think and read differently, and count differently, and are not bound by the old rules, by the old limitations. They will truly be liberated. A will become B, and B will become A. And saying that one is taller than the other will be recognized as the nonsense it is.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To learn more about the novel 1984, which first introduced the idea that in totalitarian societies 2 + 2 could equal 5, read "15: 1984: The Cover Up" (www.improve-education.org/id20.html)

Knowledge is the best defense. Teach facts, then teach more facts. At some point genuine critical thinking becomes possible! See YouTube video titled "How To Teach Anything & Everything."

For more praise of a traditional approach to education, see "45: The Crusade Against Knowledge".

For advanced analysis of how 2 + 2 equals 5, read Orwell's "Ignorance Is Strength." (http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/go-goldstein.html)


EMAIL|FLAG THIS POST
COMMENTS
BadCyborg
BadCyborg
San Antonio, TX
11 months ago: Reminds me of one of Gary Trudeau's "Doonesbury" comic strips from a couple of decades back.

In that strip a college math teacher is handing out a test he had given some time before. One of the students takes exception to the professor's grading one of the student's answers as incorrect. When asked why that question was marked incorrect, the instructor replied that the student had held that 15 was the square root of 144. The student replied that the square root of 144 WAS 15 - in HIS (the student's) culture. The prof's reply was something like "And this is an enlightened culture".

Mathematics is fixed. It is an expression of how the universe works. After reading the strip, I got to wondering if it was possible for the square of 15 (read one-five) to EVER be 144 (read one-four-four) depending on the number base (we use 10 as our base). So I constructed multiplication tables for base 2 through 25 and came to the startling conclusion that the square of 1-5 is NEVER 1-4-4. And, indeed, for any number base that HAS the numeral 4 - i.e. base 5 and above - the square of 1-2 is ALWAYS 1-4-4 NO MATTER what that result of 1-4-4 equals in base 10 notation.

Certain truths are fixed and permanent. They do not depend upon one's culture or viewpoint or any suchlike. And I find that comforting. I do not think I would like to ride in an airliner designed by an engineer who believed that 2+2=5 or that the square root of 144 is 15. This is not Eurocentrism - OR ANY-centrism!! It is mathematics. It is how the universe works. I may be going out on a limb here but I can GUARANTEE that if there are other intelligent species out there, we do not have to worry about being visited by one that holds that 2+2=5 or the square root of 144 is 15.
BruceDPrice
BruceDPrice
Virginia Beach, VA
11 months ago: Thanks for the comment. My piece is literary satire aimed mainly at the thinking in 1984. But you're obviously a real mathematician, so here is an interesting tie-in, more in the real world.

Education activist Laurie Rogers has a blog called Betrayed -- Why Education Is Failing. She has recently been focused on all the dumb things the public schools in Spokane, Washington, are doing:

"I've been writing about Celesta, a high school student who was carrying a 3.6 GPA, who passed her math tests, got As in her math classes, was placed into honors pre-calculus, and who – like many of her classmates – suddenly found out she was missing multiple critical skills in elementary math. She was struggling to pass her honors math class. She also has few skills in grammar..."

Point is, they don't teach these kids the simplest stuff, what they should learn in the fourth grade. Then they play make-believe for many years, giving her A's and telling her she is ready for HONORS pre-calculus!

I just wrote a blog piece praising Laurie Rogers because she is really in the trenches. She is calling up principals and other officials, and challenging them on the bad job they are doing. Very exciting stuff.

http://betrayed-whyeducationisfailing.bl...


BadCyborg
BadCyborg
San Antonio, TX
11 months ago: LOL

Thanks for the compliment, Bruce but I am not a mathematician of any sort. Just a person in the 75th percentile of Mensa who gets curious about the oddest things.

I know what you mean about students like Celesta. My step-granddaughter seemed to be doing well in most subjects then we started doing the exercises to prep for the Texas standardized test for 3rd grade. There were HUGE (I'm talking fly a C5A through them) holes in her reading and math skills. Whole chunks of concepts and basic skill she had never mastered.

I don't know precisely WHERE the problem lies. I suspect that a good part of it is the leftist education establishment and teacher's unions. Another part is likely the whole "self-esteem" thing. Some lib got the idea in his/her head that people need to have high self esteem and that people with low SE become criminals. recent studies have shown that criminals tend to have EXTREMELY high self esteem. In fact the worse the criminal the higher his/her self-esteem. But children have had their SE artificially boosted. Or they have had their egos protected unreasonably - to the extent of not allowing children to compete for fear they might lose and thereby suffer a bruised ego.

But even when I was in college in the early 70s the brightest and best seldom became ed majors. Sad but true.
BruceDPrice
BruceDPrice
Virginia Beach, VA
11 months ago: "I suspect that a good part of it is the leftist education establishment and teacher's unions."

Yes, that's what I write about all the time.

Suppose you set for yourself the task of dumbing down the schools. It still remains a fascinating intellectual question, how would you do it??

All the tricks were there in New Math and perfected in Reform Math. 1) You omit crucial basic steps. 2) You mix in chunks of mysterious advanced stuff, from high school and college. 3) You skip about rapidly from topic to topic so that mastery is never achieved. 4) You perversely explain things in somewhat cumbersome or awkward ways, so that the idea is never really understood. 5) You continually insist that your bogus curriculum will lead to deeper understanding later, so don't be concerned if the children seem hopelessly clueless about simple arithmetic now. 6) You give every kid an A, boasting that they are learning to "think mathematically." 7) As soon as possible, give every kid a calculator while making fun of "pencil and paper computation," something these kids will never be able to do.

11 months ago: BruceDPriceless !:]

Post a Comment
Sign in or sign up to post a comment.