Progressive Nostalgia — and a Timely Summer Reading Suggestion — from Kamala Harris
For people whose education began and ended in public school, “summer reading” typically means celebrity gossip rags, romance novels, or spy thrillers. For those, however, who somehow salvaged a portion of their minds from the State’s spiritual mass production process, summer is often a great opportunity to dig into more substantial fare, such as that big “difficult” book you’ve been meaning to get to.
If you are one of those looking for an enriching intellectual challenge this summer, then I recommend that you heed the words of Kamala Harris, the California Democrat currently running for U.S. President.
No, I am not suggesting you waste time perusing anything on Senator Harris’s own personal reading list — I assume you are already sufficiently familiar with The Communist Manifesto. Rather, I am encouraging you to think seriously about Harris’ strange choice to make the revival of school busing the centerpiece of her campaign, and her even more extreme assertion that busing — i.e., decisions about where children go to school, and why — requires federal government control.
This position, on every level, highlights everything that is fundamentally wrong and tyrannical about the concept of public schooling, right down to its roots — which serves as a timely reminder that you ought to read or download my book, The Case Against Public Education, available right here in Limbo!
So to begin again, Senator Harris, a progressive authoritarian through and through, has chosen to ground her presidential campaign in a call to reinstate the outrageously paternalistic policy of forcibly “desegregating” schools that are already legally desegregated, by transporting children to schools far away from their homes, in a benighted effort to promote something progressives call “equality of opportunity,” which is their euphemistic name for government-imposed favoritism designed to fix a problem that makes progressives uncomfortable, namely the poor academic performance and terrible educational environment typical of inner-city “black schools,” while fostering the feel-good fantasy that this problem is caused by systemic unfairness, rather than social rot within the “disadvantaged community” itself — much of that rot encouraged by decades of cynical progressive exploitation of a psychological weakness of most minorities, viz., excessive identification with one’s group, i.e., collectivism.
In short, if you really wanted to improve educational outcomes in the supposed “black community,” you would merely need to stop aggrandizing gang violence, illiteracy, conscienceless sexual promiscuity, and thuggishly-masked self-pity (aka “the victim mentality”) as endemic features of “authentic black culture”; and simultaneously stop the neo-Marxist denigration of intellectual inquisitiveness, high art, the traditional family, and sexual moderation as intrinsically “white European values.”
In other words, you would have to stop American progressivism’s longstanding mental-enslavement propaganda technique of upholding grunting athletes, gun-and-cash-waving street punks, and “pop divas” (i.e., two-dimensional sex merchants) as role models for black children, while branding men of substance, character, and achievement such as Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell as “Uncle Toms.”
But none of that gets to the real crux of the issue of school busing. For if you understand what a federal busing mandate implies about the broader relationship between the government and the governed — namely that the latter are mere moving parts to be manipulated at will in the paternalistic calculations of the former — then you ought to feel squeamish and awkward about the whole concept of compulsory schooling, without which, of course, this busing issue, along with a million other social engineering experiments conducted on trapped and helpless children in the Petri dish of public school every day, would not even exist as a possibility.
Which leads me back to the wonderful summer reading idea suggested by Kamala Harris’ insistence that the coercive manipulation of children, over the heads of their parents, should be a matter of federal law.
My book has been downloaded by readers in at least sixty-two countries. (Kuwait is country number sixty-two!) Why not join all those people of good taste on their journey through the history, theory, and practice of public education? Better yet, if you know others with school-age children of their own, and believe they are still rational and conscientious enough to take a challenging thesis seriously for the sake of their children, then please download a file for them too, or at least direct them to this website.
And in case you are new to Limbo, rest assured this is not a self-serving sales pitch. I have nothing to sell in this regard. The book is free, and this site is not monetized. My self-interest in this issue is purely civilizational, which is to say that I have a deeply personal preference for education over indoctrination, and human nature over progressive collectivism. If you share my preference, then please read my book. And of course feel free to send me a comment or question about anything you read through my Contact page. Tell me Kamala sent you.