THE EDUCATION CRIME

Jonathan Rose has an amazingly extensive and detailed article which shows beyond much doubt that British working class people were much better educated 100 years ago than they are now. He also shows what an enlightening and transformative experience it was for the working people of yesteryear to read some of the famous "dead white males" for the first time. Just a tiny excerpt:

"Oral-history interviews reveal that, among British working people born between 1870 and 1908, two-thirds had unambiguously positive memories of school. And that fact inevitably raises a disturbing question: whether children today in America's inner cities would give their schools such high marks-and if not, why not? Even more impressive is a 1940 survey of reading among pupils at nonacademic high schools, where education terminated at age 14. This sample represented something less than the working-class norm: the best students had already been skimmed off and sent to academic secondary schools on scholarship. Those who remained behind were asked which books they had read over the past month, excluding required texts. Even in this below-average group, 62 percent of boys and 84 percent of girls had read some poetry: their favorites included Kipling, Longfellow, Masefield, Blake, Browning, Tennyson, and Wordsworth".

And I KNOW from personal experience how exactly right is what Rose describes. I myself was born in a small Australian country town to working class parents who read only popular novels. But there was a "School of Arts" (non-government co-operative) library in town and a secondhand bookshop. And courtesy of those I read just about all the famous literature of ancient Greece before I was 18. And I experienced exactly the excitement from my discoveries there -- I still vividly remember the enormous impression that Homer and Plato's Socratic dialogues made on me -- that Rose repeatedly documents among his British working class readers of yesteryear. For me as for them it was an immense intellectual liberation. Most of that literature was once taught in the schools. Now virtually none of it is. My son has just finished High School and until I mentioned them he had never even heard of Wordsworth or Coleridge! What a crime against ordinary people the Leftist purveyors of educational mush who infest the schools today have committed! They have replaced the glorious "dead white males" with mediocrities who inspire no-one and induce boredom instead of excitement. They have stolen from our young people their incomparable heritage.

Needless to say, the Rose article is one of the few for which I say: "Read the whole thing". (Link to Rose via Blithering Bunny)

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ELSEWHERE

The dishonesty of Leftists is truly bottomless. Taranto notes that far-Left CBS producer Mary Mapes, who has just been sacked for her use of forged documents, says that the only thing wrong with the documents was that they were photocopies. The fact that zillions of people have pointed out that the documents were clearly computer-produced when they were alleged to be typewriter-produced is just totally ignored by her in traditional Leftist fashion. Walter Duranty lives! No doubt some American university will now give her a job teaching journalistic ethics. They do that sort of thing.

Glad to hear THAT!: "The Supreme Court refused to hear a case challenging a Florida state ban on gay couples adopting children. The Court let stand a lower court ruling that upheld Florida's right to have a blanket policy prohibiting gays from adopting children....".

LOL. What a loon: "David Livingstone says the idea behind the economic boycott he's organizing is simple: If people don't show up at work or buy things, companies lose money. As he sees it, that's money the Bush administration can't tax, and can't use to run the war in Iraq, protect polluters or chip away at the Constitution. So the Detroit Democrat and a handful of other anti-Bush groups across the country are urging others of like mind to withhold their cash and labor on Inauguration Day -- from all businesses. They don't think they'll inflict a huge economic pain, but they do want to make a point."

LOL: British cuisine!: "The poll found the British were awfully patriotic: Britain was ranked among the top five nations on all 12 criteria. It was even ranked as having the world's fourth-best cuisine, behind China, India and Italy, but ahead of France. In British eyes, their country is the most democratic in the world, the best place to live and the country most deserving of international respect". [I would have said that British cuisine is the world's worst -- except for the desserts, of course. Great desserts!]

An article here points out that the principle preached by affirmative action advocates -- that people should not be represented in favoured niches of society above their proportion in the overall population -- is exactly the same rationale Hitler used to discriminate against the Jews. As they are in America today, Jews WERE over-represented in many favoured niches of German society in Hitler's day. So Hitler's desire to cut the Jews down to size was essentially the same desire as that which is seen in today's Leftists who want to cut white middle-class males down to size. Excerpt: "Thus, the victims may be different, the perpetrators may be different, but the spirit that energized Nazi race laws is clearly evident in today's America. That spirit is summarized in the view that justice requires all groups achieve and received a proportional share of wealth and power. Those groups who overachieve are seen in this theory as oppressors who must be curbed, if not eliminated. This view of justice is what links proponents of Affirmative Action to the Nazis. Thus, one may properly conclude that American liberals have created and enforced the Nazi-like race edicts that pervade America."

Interesting: "Children who are exposed to two or more cats or dogs in the first year of life have lower responses to a whole host of allergic substances when the kids are aged six or seven. This comes from an allergy study that followed hundreds of children, right from the time when their mothers were pregnant with them.

Friendly Grizzly has a good post (scroll down a bit) on why housing costs so much in California. The Greenies and the socialists between them have really shafted the little guy.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again for the best variety of reading on the net.

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Marx hated the Jews for being conservative! Looks like many of them have been dodging that risk ever since. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at some more trinitarian defences based on John 1:1.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

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