He's still lying, egregiously so, the orange felon.
So let's go to the crux of so many lies, so much popularity for lying. Let's go to U.S. schools.
Face it.
They reduced 100 million Americans to slogan-wielding, sensation-craving cultists. An entire major political party, same. A formerly highest court to tyrants.
He's still lying, egregiously so, the orange felon.
So let's go to the crux of so many lies, so much popularity for lying. Let's go to U.S. schools.
Face it.
They reduced 100 million Americans to slogan-wielding, sensation-craving cultists. An entire major political party, same. A formerly highest court to tyrants.
So, as answer, now: stop standardized testing. In every U.S. public school.
Not just because it reduces, and sets life to numbers.
Worse, to take over as it has, it drove out humanities, till everything those computer-graded instruments have done flies against the human, the natural.
The human and the natural spring from the odd, the unexpected, the serendipitous. The machinery of standardized testing, the opposite: props up the linear, the neutered, the abstracted and categorical – all lies to the human and the natural, so the orange felon should lie, the Clarence court be corrupt.
Throw it out. Let teachers return to humanities, with personal literacy as key.
I think the gullibility of so many Americans has multiple causes, but that they all are related, one way or another, to the class of folks who strive for absolute power, and I think school curricula have been impoverished by political forces that want to train, not educate the public.
Schools have a major role in preparing students for their working life, but there is more to life than a job, and instruction in perceptive observation, focused, disciplined thinking, and fruitful approaches to turn outside-the-box creative thoughts into useful applied ideas and products, in science and engineering or the arts; or just in navigating the varied, vicissitudes of life (adaptability and resilience) that can be usefully applied to virtually any aspect of life, and certainly the workplace.
J L, those political forces are real. So are the ones emanating from narrow minded bigots.
There is nothing wrong with training young people to become independent, successful and productive workers or entrepreneurs. Actually, too often, we have pushed kids along, sending them to college where they could "mature" and drink beer. But with no goal of employment. There are significant efforts beginning to gain steam as industries coordinate with Community Colleges - actually telling them what type of employees they are desperate for. But much more needs to be done to prepare kids for work that works for them.
If a young person is completing his/her education and has had no exposure to work environments, we have failed.
But we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Teaching civics, humanities and critical thinking skills should not be "minors". Teaching the real history of our country should be required. "Government" needs to be a required course. And I would add "World Religions" to every high school. Sociology and psychology (how politicians manipulate) would be on my list as well. Oh and how about a class on "Cultism"? And, no kid should have a diploma without a complete understanding of how the Holocaust came to be. Because some version of it just keeps happening. Field trip to Sudan, maybe?
Some schools are getting it right. Our grandson learned about the culture of Japan - last year in his first grade class. It tied in with the section on diversity - and all its benefits.
This are wonderful ideas. I am going to toot the horn of my Alma Mater, Keuka College. I graduated from there in 1969. Their curriculum includes, for many years, what is known as Field Period, a 5 week period for experiential learning, when students work in a community experience, a cultural one, and a work experience in their major field of study during their junior and senior years. Ask any student, alumni, or college staff how successful this time is or was.
I'm thinking junior year of high school could also be good for work experience.
I'd like to see several, say, six-week periods of field work. Each one of five or six hours of apprentice-style training tied to two or three hours in a work-related classroom.
Students could choose from among hospitals, restaurant kitchens, computer labs, forestry management, housing construction, auto shop, office management, and mental health clinics. All could have good classroom correlates, each with humanities reading and discussion assignments.
Slavery and holocaust, the pattern of one abusing another. One group dominating another convinced that it is their destiny and Devine right and obligation.
Gjay15, I would expand on your comment. I want to caution against looking for better methods or approaches to education that ultimately replicate an inadequate system. For example, our economy depends in large part on the extraction and consumption of finite natural resources. We should challenge the kids to look at our economic system through a moral-ethical lens with regard to future inhabitants of our world. When we have available to us multiple ways to accomplish the same task, or goal, is it morally defensible to choose to employ the method that consumes irreplaceable natural resources instead of the method that does not consume irreplaceable resources?
In the case of production of electricity, there are small quibbles about the materials that go into the production of photovoltaic solar panels, but those materials are embedded in the panels and are not actually consumed in the same sense that coal and oil are burned, with the combustion byproducts dumped into our natural environment.
Our children should be encouraged to look at the long view into the distant future, to ponder what their descendants will be left with after we, the living, have unconscionably used up irreplaceable resources unnecessarily, solely to make a few people needlessly wealthy in our lifetime.
Instead of teaching our children how to be better at doing what we have been doing, encourage them instead to think about how to build a better future that will sustain them, and their descendants, long into the distant future.
And “expand “ you did. Thank you. The pursuit of comfort , convenience and certainty are like the pursuit of happiness when it leads to motivation, inspiration, creativity and active skepticism and criticism. But when it becomes the be all and end all and entitlement, it can be dangerous.
All those facts that we spent years learning by rote in school are now available at a flick on our phones. Kids (and adults) don't need to be taught the capital cities of the world - they need to be taught how to think, research and analyse. Awards should be for those who come up with the best ideas, not the best set of facts.
The Japanese have already realised this - after years of intensive, breakdown inducing "parrot learning" they realised they were turning out idea free automatons. Not a good idea if your economy depends on innovative solutions.
People should be learning about how and why some of those cities became capitals, why and how countries have changed over time, the demographic, geographic and climate factors that drove history, how actual economics and politics works, etc.
Like how you say "The Japanese have already reali[z]ed this," Lady Emsworth.
Trouble is, the ministry of education has not. It still inflicts on schools a total tyranny of nothing other than hosts, barrages, batteries of nothing more than standardized tests.
For these tests (and thousands of expensive, private late-night cram schools in abject terror of them), schools have totally stopped reading any novels or any other decent humanities. Instead, everything gets fragmented for the tests. Meaningless fragments A), B), C), or D). No human context. The trivia of short-term memory and other corporate "rationality" triumphs to breed more living dead workaholics. (Minae Mizumura, "The Fall of Language in the Age of English," English translation by Columbia U Press, 2016.)
Very powerful insight. I have had the sensation that we are being reduced in our humanity but that most of us are too worried about the future to pay attention or to do anything about it. Messrs Vance (nom-de-semaine) and Trump (nom-de-nerd) prove how inhuman thinking starts.
As an old IT problem-solver, my instinct is that the system (Substack's machinery) sometimes gets over-burdened when many people are writing/posting at the same time in the wake of a popular topic or event - such as the debate. The last time it happened to me, I did some testing, in the form of reacting to a post, recording the time I reacted, and then watched to see how long it took for the "like" to appear. Not knowing precisely how the system works we can only guess what's actually happening. What I observed "maps over" what is often called "queuing", wherein many users are active at the same moment, clicking "like" at the same time, to the extent that the machinery cannot keep up in real time, so it stores every response in a memory "queue" and then sends it out in the order it was received, as soon as possible. The last time I studied it, the lag time varied from ten or twenty seconds, to several minutes. I never saw one disappear completely. One source reported that 67 million people watched the debate. It seems reasonable to assume that a proportionally large number of people have been using Substack at the same time, certainly more than on an average weeknight when the news of the day is the "same old, same old". My two cents.
I had a very kind reply from one Lynell yesterday. When I tried to like and reply, Substack wouldn't allow either.
Now, this edit added: hers to me came to me, but it doesn't show at all on what the Heather public sees. And, as I said above, I couldn't like or reply to her let alone the larger site.
Attacking the schools was one of the first things that Ronald Reagan, with his Stafford Report, did. Using the "why can't Johnny read" meme, he created the excuse to strip things like critical thinking from the curriculum, and reduce it to rote memorization.
Victor David Hanson is a Classicist and well respected as a scholar. Yet his political views are insane. Intelligence and learning is no guarantee - and I say this as a Classicist. Here is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison, if memory serves in 1943 or 1944 on human stupidity. You can read the whole brief one page essay in the link:
― Daniel R. DeNicola MIT ("Plato’s Cave and the Stubborn Persistence of Ignorance").
Humanities education was once seen as the foundation of character and necessary for preparing a child to take their rightful place in a free world. Now personal opinion and popular ignoration have supplanted the quest of truth and knowledge. This trend is pushed through the misuse of emergent technology. For example: Hitler used the newly invented radio to spread his "message". Nothing good will ever come of this. Instead of preparing our children to be free we are preparing them to keep their places in a future tyranny.
You might be overdoing this, Phil. What is true is that in esp southern Republican states are economic and hence social havenots in the USA. They rate lower on most social-economic indices. Standardized testing is found across the country. You might also look at how effective gerrymandering has been in what are currently Republican, even Democrat states.
Please, Frank, check Diane Ravitch's "The Language Police."
Read its many score pages of appendices detailing the corporate orthodoxies of neutering everyone.
Our worst are not the (former) working class deplorables, but today's elite law school and M.B.A. grads geared to assist in profit taking to help float our most nihilist billionaires.
I dont think this has anything to do with standardized testing, Phil, which is what i was responding to. Corporate profit maximizing is no different than what you find in Adam Smith. Modern technology though has had a huge effect on centralizing economic institutions and creating oligarchies and virtual monopolies, in fact the corporate barons justified a lot of their monopolistic behavior on just that fact. It's been on and off bouts with state regulation ever since. I guess you need to take this up with virtually every American administration since when, whether Dem or GOP. I guess you could say the Marx was right, after all. He condemned it. David Hume and many others have praised it.
". . . monopolistic behavior" has "been on and off bouts with state regulation ever since."
Nice, Frank.
I've been reading the recent book by William Hogeland, "The Hamilton Scheme." All about this founding of the U.S., with the need to placate the money connections as central.
Thank you for your comment. I would add the importance of making every public school equal in funding so every kid gets a quality education that involves active learning which goes beyond regurgitating what ever “facts “ are presented. This education would promote skepticism and critical thinking. And it is necessary to provide at least breakfast and lunch for every student even those whose families can well afford feeding their own.
I would posit that it has been the defunding more than the standardization that is responsible for the loss of intellectual rigor in younger generations. We have deprioritized education to the point where funding is almost an afterthought. When we allowed this to be done by states, the burden of funding moved to localities where that burden falls heavily on people who own real estate or have greater wealth to be taxed, while also having greater influence over tax decisions in local governments. In my state, they sold voters on the lottery, promising it would bring millions of dollars in for education. Well who doesn’t want education better funded if it’s not raising their personal property taxes? As soon as the measure passed, the state quit spending formerly allocated tax dollars on schools and let the lotteries fund it, as promised. But what was sold as additional funding turned out to only be a different way to under-fund. The education dollars mysteriously disappeared into other budget line items and our schools are no better off now than they were. Large class sizes, poor teacher pay, deferred school maintenance and development, and yes, pigeon-hole tests meant to replace real teaching all lead to poorer outcomes and higher dropout rates. Until we make education a top priority in our communities the right will continue to criticize, degrade and defund public education in service to creating a classed education hierarchy of the haves and have-nots. You think people don’t know how to think critically now; just wait til they get power! It can get worse.
Until my tax dollars no longer get siphoned to private schools run by religious hacks for indoctrinating children in authoritarianism, the concept of public education will remain a bad joke.
I rounded off. Thought of using the exact number of votes for the orange felon. Decided instead to guess also at the many abysmally educated who don't vote.
He's still lying, egregiously so, the orange felon.
So let's go to the crux of so many lies, so much popularity for lying. Let's go to U.S. schools.
Face it.
They reduced 100 million Americans to slogan-wielding, sensation-craving cultists. An entire major political party, same. A formerly highest court to tyrants.
So, as answer, now: stop standardized testing. In every U.S. public school.
Not just because it reduces, and sets life to numbers.
Worse, to take over as it has, it drove out humanities, till everything those computer-graded instruments have done flies against the human, the natural.
The human and the natural spring from the odd, the unexpected, the serendipitous. The machinery of standardized testing, the opposite: props up the linear, the neutered, the abstracted and categorical – all lies to the human and the natural, so the orange felon should lie, the Clarence court be corrupt.
Throw it out. Let teachers return to humanities, with personal literacy as key.
I think the gullibility of so many Americans has multiple causes, but that they all are related, one way or another, to the class of folks who strive for absolute power, and I think school curricula have been impoverished by political forces that want to train, not educate the public.
Train versus educate. Keen perception, J.L. Thank you.
Yes!!! and to hear anyone say that the purpose of schools is to “educate a workforce” makes my skin crawl!
Schools have a major role in preparing students for their working life, but there is more to life than a job, and instruction in perceptive observation, focused, disciplined thinking, and fruitful approaches to turn outside-the-box creative thoughts into useful applied ideas and products, in science and engineering or the arts; or just in navigating the varied, vicissitudes of life (adaptability and resilience) that can be usefully applied to virtually any aspect of life, and certainly the workplace.
J L, those political forces are real. So are the ones emanating from narrow minded bigots.
There is nothing wrong with training young people to become independent, successful and productive workers or entrepreneurs. Actually, too often, we have pushed kids along, sending them to college where they could "mature" and drink beer. But with no goal of employment. There are significant efforts beginning to gain steam as industries coordinate with Community Colleges - actually telling them what type of employees they are desperate for. But much more needs to be done to prepare kids for work that works for them.
If a young person is completing his/her education and has had no exposure to work environments, we have failed.
But we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Teaching civics, humanities and critical thinking skills should not be "minors". Teaching the real history of our country should be required. "Government" needs to be a required course. And I would add "World Religions" to every high school. Sociology and psychology (how politicians manipulate) would be on my list as well. Oh and how about a class on "Cultism"? And, no kid should have a diploma without a complete understanding of how the Holocaust came to be. Because some version of it just keeps happening. Field trip to Sudan, maybe?
Some schools are getting it right. Our grandson learned about the culture of Japan - last year in his first grade class. It tied in with the section on diversity - and all its benefits.
This are wonderful ideas. I am going to toot the horn of my Alma Mater, Keuka College. I graduated from there in 1969. Their curriculum includes, for many years, what is known as Field Period, a 5 week period for experiential learning, when students work in a community experience, a cultural one, and a work experience in their major field of study during their junior and senior years. Ask any student, alumni, or college staff how successful this time is or was.
I'm thinking junior year of high school could also be good for work experience.
I'd like to see several, say, six-week periods of field work. Each one of five or six hours of apprentice-style training tied to two or three hours in a work-related classroom.
Students could choose from among hospitals, restaurant kitchens, computer labs, forestry management, housing construction, auto shop, office management, and mental health clinics. All could have good classroom correlates, each with humanities reading and discussion assignments.
Slavery and holocaust, the pattern of one abusing another. One group dominating another convinced that it is their destiny and Devine right and obligation.
Gjay15, I would expand on your comment. I want to caution against looking for better methods or approaches to education that ultimately replicate an inadequate system. For example, our economy depends in large part on the extraction and consumption of finite natural resources. We should challenge the kids to look at our economic system through a moral-ethical lens with regard to future inhabitants of our world. When we have available to us multiple ways to accomplish the same task, or goal, is it morally defensible to choose to employ the method that consumes irreplaceable natural resources instead of the method that does not consume irreplaceable resources?
In the case of production of electricity, there are small quibbles about the materials that go into the production of photovoltaic solar panels, but those materials are embedded in the panels and are not actually consumed in the same sense that coal and oil are burned, with the combustion byproducts dumped into our natural environment.
Our children should be encouraged to look at the long view into the distant future, to ponder what their descendants will be left with after we, the living, have unconscionably used up irreplaceable resources unnecessarily, solely to make a few people needlessly wealthy in our lifetime.
Instead of teaching our children how to be better at doing what we have been doing, encourage them instead to think about how to build a better future that will sustain them, and their descendants, long into the distant future.
And “expand “ you did. Thank you. The pursuit of comfort , convenience and certainty are like the pursuit of happiness when it leads to motivation, inspiration, creativity and active skepticism and criticism. But when it becomes the be all and end all and entitlement, it can be dangerous.
Throw Rupert out would do more good than anything
Elon too.
Urgent.
Oh, indeed
agree completely
Well stated; an educated populace scares them, a trained one is easier to manipulate.
All those facts that we spent years learning by rote in school are now available at a flick on our phones. Kids (and adults) don't need to be taught the capital cities of the world - they need to be taught how to think, research and analyse. Awards should be for those who come up with the best ideas, not the best set of facts.
The Japanese have already realised this - after years of intensive, breakdown inducing "parrot learning" they realised they were turning out idea free automatons. Not a good idea if your economy depends on innovative solutions.
Doesn't hurt to learn the capitals of the world as well.
People should be learning about how and why some of those cities became capitals, why and how countries have changed over time, the demographic, geographic and climate factors that drove history, how actual economics and politics works, etc.
Exactly.
Put them in some human context, Anne-Louise, and the learning goes much faster.
That's what gives them meaning.
See Louise answer below. Totally agree. Just - don't learn the capitals to learn the capitals. Learn them for something you are actually doing.
Like how you say "The Japanese have already reali[z]ed this," Lady Emsworth.
Trouble is, the ministry of education has not. It still inflicts on schools a total tyranny of nothing other than hosts, barrages, batteries of nothing more than standardized tests.
For these tests (and thousands of expensive, private late-night cram schools in abject terror of them), schools have totally stopped reading any novels or any other decent humanities. Instead, everything gets fragmented for the tests. Meaningless fragments A), B), C), or D). No human context. The trivia of short-term memory and other corporate "rationality" triumphs to breed more living dead workaholics. (Minae Mizumura, "The Fall of Language in the Age of English," English translation by Columbia U Press, 2016.)
Very powerful insight. I have had the sensation that we are being reduced in our humanity but that most of us are too worried about the future to pay attention or to do anything about it. Messrs Vance (nom-de-semaine) and Trump (nom-de-nerd) prove how inhuman thinking starts.
Right on, Phil! (why doesn’t the like button work anymore?)
You are not alone! - mine doesn't either. HELP!
Get out and then get back in. (Mine's OK, btw)
Mine is ok too.. delete temporary internet files may help too.
It works - on my computer, but not on my tablet... Can't figure out why.
It is a recurring, intermittent glitch. Sigh.
As an old IT problem-solver, my instinct is that the system (Substack's machinery) sometimes gets over-burdened when many people are writing/posting at the same time in the wake of a popular topic or event - such as the debate. The last time it happened to me, I did some testing, in the form of reacting to a post, recording the time I reacted, and then watched to see how long it took for the "like" to appear. Not knowing precisely how the system works we can only guess what's actually happening. What I observed "maps over" what is often called "queuing", wherein many users are active at the same moment, clicking "like" at the same time, to the extent that the machinery cannot keep up in real time, so it stores every response in a memory "queue" and then sends it out in the order it was received, as soon as possible. The last time I studied it, the lag time varied from ten or twenty seconds, to several minutes. I never saw one disappear completely. One source reported that 67 million people watched the debate. It seems reasonable to assume that a proportionally large number of people have been using Substack at the same time, certainly more than on an average weeknight when the news of the day is the "same old, same old". My two cents.
I had a very kind reply from one Lynell yesterday. When I tried to like and reply, Substack wouldn't allow either.
Now, this edit added: hers to me came to me, but it doesn't show at all on what the Heather public sees. And, as I said above, I couldn't like or reply to her let alone the larger site.
Attacking the schools was one of the first things that Ronald Reagan, with his Stafford Report, did. Using the "why can't Johnny read" meme, he created the excuse to strip things like critical thinking from the curriculum, and reduce it to rote memorization.
Victor David Hanson is a Classicist and well respected as a scholar. Yet his political views are insane. Intelligence and learning is no guarantee - and I say this as a Classicist. Here is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison, if memory serves in 1943 or 1944 on human stupidity. You can read the whole brief one page essay in the link:
https://nsjonline.com/article/2021/12/bonhoeffer-on-stupidity/
“The horror of ignorance is incapacity”.
― Daniel R. DeNicola MIT ("Plato’s Cave and the Stubborn Persistence of Ignorance").
Humanities education was once seen as the foundation of character and necessary for preparing a child to take their rightful place in a free world. Now personal opinion and popular ignoration have supplanted the quest of truth and knowledge. This trend is pushed through the misuse of emergent technology. For example: Hitler used the newly invented radio to spread his "message". Nothing good will ever come of this. Instead of preparing our children to be free we are preparing them to keep their places in a future tyranny.
You might be overdoing this, Phil. What is true is that in esp southern Republican states are economic and hence social havenots in the USA. They rate lower on most social-economic indices. Standardized testing is found across the country. You might also look at how effective gerrymandering has been in what are currently Republican, even Democrat states.
Please, Frank, check Diane Ravitch's "The Language Police."
Read its many score pages of appendices detailing the corporate orthodoxies of neutering everyone.
Our worst are not the (former) working class deplorables, but today's elite law school and M.B.A. grads geared to assist in profit taking to help float our most nihilist billionaires.
I dont think this has anything to do with standardized testing, Phil, which is what i was responding to. Corporate profit maximizing is no different than what you find in Adam Smith. Modern technology though has had a huge effect on centralizing economic institutions and creating oligarchies and virtual monopolies, in fact the corporate barons justified a lot of their monopolistic behavior on just that fact. It's been on and off bouts with state regulation ever since. I guess you need to take this up with virtually every American administration since when, whether Dem or GOP. I guess you could say the Marx was right, after all. He condemned it. David Hume and many others have praised it.
". . . monopolistic behavior" has "been on and off bouts with state regulation ever since."
Nice, Frank.
I've been reading the recent book by William Hogeland, "The Hamilton Scheme." All about this founding of the U.S., with the need to placate the money connections as central.
Thank you for your comment. I would add the importance of making every public school equal in funding so every kid gets a quality education that involves active learning which goes beyond regurgitating what ever “facts “ are presented. This education would promote skepticism and critical thinking. And it is necessary to provide at least breakfast and lunch for every student even those whose families can well afford feeding their own.
Sigh, Gjay15.
A world where people care for others?
Or see them as units to be milked, exploited, raped, packaged, set in Handmaids Tales?
I would posit that it has been the defunding more than the standardization that is responsible for the loss of intellectual rigor in younger generations. We have deprioritized education to the point where funding is almost an afterthought. When we allowed this to be done by states, the burden of funding moved to localities where that burden falls heavily on people who own real estate or have greater wealth to be taxed, while also having greater influence over tax decisions in local governments. In my state, they sold voters on the lottery, promising it would bring millions of dollars in for education. Well who doesn’t want education better funded if it’s not raising their personal property taxes? As soon as the measure passed, the state quit spending formerly allocated tax dollars on schools and let the lotteries fund it, as promised. But what was sold as additional funding turned out to only be a different way to under-fund. The education dollars mysteriously disappeared into other budget line items and our schools are no better off now than they were. Large class sizes, poor teacher pay, deferred school maintenance and development, and yes, pigeon-hole tests meant to replace real teaching all lead to poorer outcomes and higher dropout rates. Until we make education a top priority in our communities the right will continue to criticize, degrade and defund public education in service to creating a classed education hierarchy of the haves and have-nots. You think people don’t know how to think critically now; just wait til they get power! It can get worse.
And by Nov
Fair enough. But not far enough.
Until my tax dollars no longer get siphoned to private schools run by religious hacks for indoctrinating children in authoritarianism, the concept of public education will remain a bad joke.
"100 million Americans "
Where did you get this number?
Trump received 74.2 million votes in the 2020 election. Where did the additional come from?
Good Q, Barbara.
I rounded off. Thought of using the exact number of votes for the orange felon. Decided instead to guess also at the many abysmally educated who don't vote.