Enjoying the view from Limbo
A brief comment or two regarding a few stories we overlooked (i.e., happily ignored) during the Christmas holiday here in Limbo: A Texas public school teacher tried to sell her own eighth-grade female relative to a group of Moroccan men, posting photos of her online and promising the men that the girl was a virgin. Meanwhile, a popular YouTube channel aimed at children...
He will be taught how to do socially useful things, and how to accept his social role peacefully, perhaps even to like it; that will be his “adulthood.” Meanwhile, the basic emotional dependency, fear of standing alone, and need for external guidance intrinsic to childhood will become permanent conditions of his soul. It is the teacher’s role to hold the child in position,...
Government education = the state has a controlling interest in every citizen’s mental, emotional, and social development, completely overriding the principle of self-determination (i.e., the rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness). Government healthcare = the state has a controlling interest in every citizen’s physical wellbeing, and matters of life and death, completely overriding the principle of self-ownership (i.e., the rights to...
Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published August 6, 2018 · Last modified October 9, 2022
The most humbling honor of being a teacher — I mean a teacher, not just a salaried “education worker” — is earning the trust of variously perplexed, abnormal souls who have intuited that they need some extraordinary help with their self-understanding or their relationship to the world around them, and have come to believe that you might be able to provide that help....
I note with pleasure that my book, The Case Against Public Education, has now been downloaded from this website by readers in (at least) fifty-two countries. The UN officially recognizes 193 sovereign states, and that includes a lot of nations where ideas not conducive to starvation and suppression are not only banned by crackpot regimes, but despised by long-imprisoned populations with neither the...
Death by Education / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 9, 2018 · Last modified July 7, 2018
Because we live in our society, in our time, we cannot avoid exposure to the dominant moral atmosphere and the tenor of discourse around us. Growing up in a peculiar kind of social environment, the things that are considered “normal” in that environment inevitably come to feel normal to us too — and that includes the things about which we have reservations, or...
“Trump Reveals RADICAL PLAN to CUT DOWN the GOVERNMENT” shouts the headline on the usually Trump-skeptical Right Scoop. Wow, another RADICAL PLAN! Like the radical, Nobel Prize-baiting plan to beg North Korea to trade their nuclear weapons in for guarantees of perpetual security for the Kim regime, exactly the intention of the Kim family’s nuclear program. Or like promising to build a wall...
Back in the fall of 2016, I made my book, The Case Against Public Education, available for download or online reading here in Limbo. Given the current unpopularity of the principled position I was taking, and my choice to eschew the voice of populism and demagoguery in favor of a thorough philosophical investigation, I truly had no idea whether there would be any...
Public mockery is a dangerous thing. It is so easy to end up with the cream pie in your own face — especially if you are a retired school teacher with an agenda who is dumb enough to try to embarrass a sitting President of the United States to score petty political points. Yvonne Mason, 61, a former high school English teacher, sent...
The strongest proof that mankind is the plaything of Necessity may be the seemingly endless parade of blinkered idiocy or willful blindness with which civilization is currently herding itself into a pen of its own making. One particularly maddening manifestation of this idiocy is the insistence of American “conservatives” that the solution to a State-manufactured catastrophe, school shootings, is more omnipresent State power....
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