Category Archives: Education

Schools Of Education

They remain a disaster, that should have been abolished long ago.

BTW, I highly recommend Quillette as a web site in general. Claire and others have a lot of smart, heterodox stuff there.

The Smirking Bias Of The Media

Thoughts on language, from Howie Carr.

[Update a couple minutes later]

The media will help re-elect Trump. Which is ironic, of course.

[Update Monday morning]

Bill Maher will help Trump get re-elected. These people who hate Trump sure seem to be working a lot harder on his re-election than I am.

[Bumped]

[Update a while later]

The Left is dancing on a powder keg. This derangement is a perfect example of Haidt’s thesis that while we understand them perfectly well, they have no idea how we think.

Trump’s CPAC Speech

I listened to some of it, but I really, viscerally hate listening to Trump for long. But Nick Gillespie (!) was impressed:

All in all, it was, in the words of Daniel Dale, the Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, “one of the least-hinged speeches Trump has given in a long time.” It was indeed all over the place but like the weirdly wide-ranging and digressive speech in which he declared a national emergency, it was also an absolute tour de force, laying out every major point of disagreement between Republicans and Democrats (abortion, the Second Amendment, and taxes, among other things) while tagging the latter aggressively as socialists who will not only end the private provision of health care but take over the energy sector too. Those charges take on new life in the wake of the announcement of the GND and comments, however short-lived, by Democrats such as Kamala Harris, who at one point recently called for an end to private health care. And over 100 House Democrats have signed on to a plan that would end private health insurance in two years. For all the biting criticism and dark humor in today’s speech, Trump has mostly ditched the “American Carnage” rhetoric that marked his first Inaugural Address, pushing onto liberals and Democrats all the negativity and anger that used to surround him like the dust cloud surrounds Pigpen in the old Peanuts cartoons. “We have people in Congress right now who hate our country,” he said. “We can name every one of them. Sad, very, very sad.”

At moments, he seemed to be workshopping his themes and slogans for 2020. “We believe in the American Dream, not the socialist nightmare,” he averred at one point. “Now you have a president who finally standing up for America.” The future, he said “does not belong to those who believe in socialism. The future belongs to those who believe in freedom. I’ve said it before and will say it again: America will never be a socialist country.” That’s a line that may not work forever, but it will almost certainly get the job done in 2020.

As previously noted, the media is going to re-elect Trump. Because they still don’t understand how they got Trump.

Life Among The Wokescolds

A frightening dispatch from the educational apocalypse. One note, though.

Socialism

…as the Millennial religion:

The Millennials can’t remember very much – and they don’t learn very much either. It’s easy being hot for socialism or communism when you actually have a very little idea of what it is and what it did throughout the 20th century. And the Ys have that ignorance in spades; one third of them think that George W Bush killed more people than Stalin and 42 per cent have never heard of Mao – but over 70 per cent agree with Bernie Sanders. Some research suggests that only 15 per cent actually have a correct understanding of socialism. It’s not just politics; the Millennials are the most woefully undereducated and miseducated generation in a very long time. To be fair, that’s not strictly their fault; that attaches itself again to their Boomer grandparents who have been in charge of our failing education systems during this time. Combine the modern indoctrination-cum-dumbification taking place in schools and universities with the attention span-killing impact of information technology and social media, and you have a barely literate cohort, which is simply not equipped with the necessary mental tools to learn about the real world even if they wanted to.

Any surprises that socialism is now nearly synonymous with Gen Y?

This is a disaster.

[Late-morning update]

Socialists are parasites.

Yes.