Category: Death by Education

On Our Modern Saints

Few things frustrate me more than attempts to leap over common sense and honest appraisal with the shorthand of collective beatification for certain classes or groups within society. For progressives, the sainthood-bound groups include teachers and “activists.” For conservatives, the saintly groups are “cops” and “our brave men in uniform.” Both sides, meanwhile, will always race to outdo each other in fawning gratitude...

Marginalizing the Will to Freedom

On Monday, a circuit judge in Oregon, responding to a lawsuit by several churches, declared the state’s lockdown order unconstitutional, effectively striking down the regulations. To no sentient being’s surprise, the Oregon supreme court has quickly reinstated totalitarianism in answer to an “emergency motion” by the governor, pending a “review” by the supreme court — i.e., until the state’s judicial lackeys can figure...

How to Squeeze Blood from a Tyrannical Turnip

Progressive globalists have found in the current Pandemic that Ate a Planet a ready-made dream come true, a real-life “anthrax bomb,” as in Huxley’s dystopian forecast of the mechanism whereby mankind’s natural freedom reflex would finally be subdued, and the World State’s quasi-benevolent totalitarian social control achieved. In keeping with the standard operating procedures for the development of state paternalism, as infamously articulated...

American Socialism Explained

For decades, conservatives, libertarians, and just plain semi-reasonable homo sapiens have returned, with a combination of wonder and incredulity, to the question of how anyone, barring outright malevolence, could possibly continue to see socialism as in any way superior to, let alone more just than, the glorious success that is the American experiment in economic freedom and constitutionally limited government. Here’s the answer:...

Reflections: Titillation as Truth; Flu Fever; Immigrant Independence

The profit motive and the news.– The non-government-owned news media (i.e., the media of a free people) is an industry in which businesses make money by selling you the information that you believe you need. The media therefore has an essential, existential motive to convince you that you do in fact need their information. Whether they will seek to convince you through reason...

Meanwhile, back in the cosmos…

Some weeks ago, a student who knows a great deal about my character and interests contacted me with the urgent advice to run outside as quickly as possible, so as not to miss the gorgeous moonrise she was witnessing from a bus across town. Yesterday, the same young woman contacted me with similar urgency, at roughly the same late afternoon hour, to ask,...

New Teacher, Old Teacher

The New Teacher is a dispenser of grades and ranks, an administrator of late modernity’s societal ordering and sorting system — essentially a bureaucrat or accountant. The Old Teacher was a guide of the soul’s desire, channeling a few young people’s restless and potentially self-devouring hunger into a happy and habit-forming quest for timeless and necessary understanding — essentially a lion tamer or...

Lessons We All Learned In School: Lesson 1

If you were educated in a modern school, public or private, secular or religious, for all or most of the period from ages four to eighteen, you learned several thought- and character-altering lessons which you have carried with you throughout your subsequent life. None of these most important lessons are directly related to “school subjects” — you have likely forgotten nearly all of...

Conservatives against private education

One little item came through the transom this week that, while not being particularly revelatory or earth-shattering in itself, was a useful reminder of the so-called American conservative movement’s wayward drift upon a sea of un-principles.  Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s secretary of education — a position conservatives used to say should not exist at all — made her semi-annual appearance to pitch for...

Limbo’s Greatest Hits: #9

Back in January 2017, when the Trump administration was shiny and new, and America seemed merely about to devolve into the death throes of unrestrained progressive demagoguery, rather than actually to have done so, one of the fanciful dreams of the cultists and their fellow travelers was that Trump’s brilliant choice for education secretary, Betsy DeVos, was about to set the school universe...