VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: 'They'll break into your house ... '

Las Vegas Review Journal ^ | 9 NOV 03 | Vin Suprynowicz

[tomakaze]

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Sunday, November 09, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: 'They'll break into your house ... '

Last week, I was discussing a government-school teacher I encountered at a UNLV adult education class. She was asserting that without government schooling, the children would be illiterate.

Of course, this flies in the face of the fact that Alexis de Tocqueville found this the most literate nation on earth when he visited in the 1820s -- 30 years before Horace Mann & Co. erected their first tax-funded mandatory government schools on the Prussian model in Massachusetts in the 1850s.

It also fails to explain the fact that black literacy peaked in the 1940s in America, and has been dropping ever since -- even as we have poured vastly more billions into the ever larger and more thoroughly unionized government youth internment camps (statistic courtesy of the National Adult Literacy Survey and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, as cited by New York state [government] teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto in his fine book "The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher's Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling").

This argument also closely mimics the piteous mewlings of the Soviets -- 70-year captives of a classically dysfunctional system of socialist impoverishment -- who used to whine, "But if we allowed greedy capitalists to take over the food distribution system, they'd be able to charge any prices they liked, and the poor people would starve! Groceries are far too crucial a commodity to be handled by anyone but the wise, redistributionist state."

Guess what? Private supermarkets now prevail in the former Soviet Union, with the result that there is more and better food more readily available for all -- just as there is no starvation to speak of in the United States, despite the fact that food distribution here is almost entirely handled by the free market. (Pardon me, by the "greedy capitalists.")

Why doesn't Kroger starve the poor by raising prices to line its own pockets? Because the company has to undersell Stop & Shop, of course. It's called "competition" -- and it's precisely what our teacher's monstrously expensive government day-care monopoly lacks.

But what I find most offensive in the schoolmarm's predictable bleating was the recurrent and thinly disguised attempt at extortion: If you won't pay to educate other people's kids, they'll break into your house and steal your stuff.

Jeanne and I grew up in suburban eastern Connecticut in the 1950s. The way Jeanne's mom paid the milkman and the insurance agent was to leave cash in an envelope on the refrigerator door, labeled "Milkman," or "Insurance man." These fellows were instructed to come in the unlocked back door when no one was home and take their payments. It worked. No one even thought about locking their back doors. Everyone did it this way, yet no neighborhood kid walked in and stole that money, over a period of decades.

Here in the West, even during the rowdiest days of drunken cowboy brawling in Tombstone, no one locked their doors, and women were widely reported to feel safe on the streets at night. De Tocqueville reported unescorted women could travel the whole length of the Mississippi River without fear of an unwelcome advance.

What has changed? The answer is that our modern welfare/police state has created the very sociopathologies -- born of boredom, hopelessness, organized coercion and theft on a massive scale, the undercutting of parental authority and discretion, programmed illiteracy and innumeracy and mass dopings for "attention deficit disorder" -- which they now threaten to set loose on us unless we continue paying our "protection money"!

But I think the most pathetic thing about the very predictability of this repetitive catechism of outrage is that these schoolmarms never seem to have the slightest interest in constructing a substantial rebuttal based on fact, research and logical argument -- probably for the same reason they avoided the "harder" disciplines and took their degrees in schoolteaching in the first place.

I held up John Taylor Gatto's slim and inexpensive book "Dumbing Us Down" during my talk at UNLV, offering copies for sale.

(Gatto's books are good reads, though they can make one very sad, parents writing in about "my once happy child constantly in tears ... bit by bit she was becoming silent and fearful." Pulling her 8-year-old out of the government schools, a parent in Santa Barbara writes, "Now she laughs again. I have my laughing girl back.")

I had no takers. I've never heard back from a single one of these schoolmarms to the effect that, "I went and read those books by Gatto and de Tocqueville that you talked about. I still don't agree with all your conclusions but they were very interesting ..."

Instead, from the other side, the cry seems to be, "My beautiful euphemisms are melting, melting ... ." And the debate pretty much limited to, "The way we're doing things now makes me feel good, and listening to you talk makes me feel bad, so please shut up."

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega."

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VIN SUPRYNOWICZ
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[tomakaze]

The previous column he's referring to is here

[tomakaze]

Ye gads.. next time I'll be more careful with the source pasting

[patj]

ping

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Why doesn't Kroger starve the poor by raising prices to line its own pockets? Because the company has to undersell Stop & Shop, of course. It's called "competition" -- and it's precisely what our teacher's monstrously expensive government day-care monopoly lacks. But what I find most offensive in the schoolmarm's predictable bleating was the recurrent and thinly disguised attempt at extortion: If you won't pay to educate other people's kids, they'll break into your house and steal your stuff.

Great post!

Bump!

[stands2reason]

ping

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

SAVE THIS | EMAIL THIS | Close

Sunday, November 02, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: The difference between 'socialism,' 'sharing'

A government schoolteacher showed up at a talk I gave to an adult education class last month at the UNLV. By the time she raised her hand, she had a list. Her objections were so predictable I'm starting to wonder if there isn't a prepared script.

"When you say the government schools, do you mean the free public schools?" she asked.

I asked if the teacher worked for free. She did not. Nor do the school's librarians, administrators, bus drivers, or the carpenters and roofers who built the place. A county school system that now costs $3.3 billion per year (they always try to bury the $800 million annual interest on the construction bonds) is hardly "free."

"It's free for the children who go there," the teacher insisted.

Can anything mandatory really be called "free"? Were the prospective inmates of Sobibor glad to learn there'd be no admission charge? But even in the purely financial meaning, the parents of these children actually pay an amount in school taxes approximately equal to what they'd spend on private schooling or group home-schooling, were we to lose the mandatory government youth propaganda camps and revert to a free market in education. Total costs of any previously socialized endeavor tends to drop to about one-third when you get government out of the loop.

"I'd like to know what the difference is between what you call `socialism' and `sharing,' " the increasingly upset teacher snapped, her voice straining with emotion.

When a teacher gathers up all the children's privately purchased school supplies, pools them and announces they are now available for communal use -- as parents tell me is now routine -- coercion is in play. That teacher may not literally hold a gun to any individual child's head, but you can bet any child who "respectfully declined to participate" in this "sharing" would be disciplined, ridiculed or "written up" for failure to cooperate, follow instructions and play well with others. From day one, here we see the reproductive organ of the redistributionist state, opening like a poisoned flower to spread its heady pollen.

A person who cannot discern voluntary "sharing" and something redistributed by force or the threat of coercion -- including the taxes collected to pay her own government salary -- has no ethical compass. Such a person is at best astonishingly ignorant and unperceptive. She should not be allowed anywhere near impressionable children.

John Taylor Gatto, the 1991 New York City and State Teacher of the Year, deals with these euphemistic uses of the words "free" and "public" on pages 84-95 of his fine little 2001 book of essays, "A Different Kind of Teacher" (Berkeley Hills Books):

"It isn't hard to see that an institution designed to control people might well find it useful to advertise that its motives are public in the popular sense, and its own people over time might even come to believe that," Gatto writes.

A "public" school might be expected to reflect popular consensus in its curriculum, Gatto points out. Yet today's educrats have made a science of constantly re-naming what they do in a language of edu-babble so uninterpretable that parents now write me, asking what on earth it means when their 10-year-old gets graded not on spelling and arithmetic, but on 18 "Performance Expectancies" including "Theme Patterns in Science-Archeoastronomy," "Universal Concept-Patterns," "Theme Patterns in Nature," "Naturalistic Multiple Intelligence" and "Theme Patterns in Mathematics -- Fibonacci numbers and Mayan numbers."

(On top of that, one Las Vegas parent writes that his kid's teacher added a hand-written note that, "Abby continues to grow affectively." He commented, "Well, she can be a bit moody. But I think the word is `effectively.' Let's teach English before we spend too much time on Fibonacci numbers.")

Back at UNLV, our government-school teacher asked, "What would happen to all those children who'd be thrown out on the streets if you went to your competitive exams to get into high school, or if you closed the public schools?" Her voice rose in what sounded like a mixture of derision and panic. "Poor families wouldn't be able to afford any education at all! You can't just let children wander the streets ... unless you want them to break into your house and steal your stuff."

Ah, so it's not so much an educational as a custodial enterprise we're funding, is that it? Things gradually grow more clear. But note this palpable horror at allowing children to simply move about in adult society, observing and learning from their parents and their neighbors -- the way it was in the times that gave us Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, all the great inventors and military leaders and literary lights and captains of industry of the 19th century.

Of course, more moms were at home then -- they didn't have to go to work to help dad pay all these new school taxes.


Next time: They'll break into your house and steal your stuff.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega."

[samtheman]

"I'd like to know what the difference is between what you call `socialism' and `sharing,' " the increasingly upset teacher snapped, her voice straining with emotion.

Somebody should pull out a gun, demand her purse and her shoes, and say, "This is socialism, baby. Enjoy it."

[Holly_P]

Thank you for the post. It's a "keeper"

[Maelstrom]

Bump for Bookmarking

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

I was talking with a new P.S. teacher last night. Kid grew up next door . . .

She remarked on the lack of structure in her work--that is, she was assigned to teach a class called Computer Journalism--given a classroom full of computers and youth, and essentially was told to figure out what "computer journalism" might be. She made no representation that she knew Jack about journalism.

No matter how well she creates that course, of course, if one of her pupils moves somewhere else and is enrolled in "computer journalism" there, they would find that the course was quite different--and even the similarities would be taught in a different sequence so that some things would be skipped and others would be duplicated. Your tax dollars at work.

But of course the basic problem is to sell the course to the pupils and the parents thereof.

I suggested that "computer journalism" might very well be web logging. Web publishing is IMHO "the press" grown up--since it very economically places my thoughts and yours, as we care to publish them, in the public domain. We can't all be Jayson Blair and get paid to write fiction for the NYT, but we can all try to make cogent arguments in favor of our own opinions and post them.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Any comments on my #10?

[summer]

Re your post #10:

A+

:)

[secretagent]

Ah, so it's not so much an educational as a custodial enterprise we're funding, is that it? Things gradually grow more clear.

Prison prep schools.

[sourcery]

[philman_36]

BTTT
Back to back Suprynowicz flags ain't bad sourcery.

[tpaine]

Thanks for the readable article posting..


Interesting guy Vin mentioned:

John Taylor Gatto
Address:http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Gatto.html Changed:5:29 PM on Friday, October 3, 2003

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

Thanks for link
will read them later

[tpaine]

John Gatto:

What Really Matters
Address:http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1019643/posts

[summer]

Check this out, as I am really glad Gov Bush said this:

Statement by: Governor Jeb Bush Regarding the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Vote to Ease Cuba Travel Restriction

For Immediate Release Thursday, November 6, 2003

Contact: ALIA FARAJ (850) 488-5394

TALLAHASSEE--“As Americans we enjoy incredible freedom in this country. We have the ability to vote for our leaders and express our opinions in public forums. Sadly, the oppressive Castro regime does not offer these and many other freedoms. It is disappointing that the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee today voted to ease travel restrictions to Cuba. This travel ban to Cuba is the right foreign policy. We should not support an oppressive regime.

“ I continue to support President Bush’s effort for a free Cuba by reinforcing travel restrictions, expanding safe, legal immigration for Cubans, and planning for the future of a Cuba free of tyranny.”

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Yes. Gov. Bush is however in an interesting position; he's both a major elected public figure in his own right, and simultaneously the president's brother. As a member of the family he has a responsibility to his brother to avoid any statement which journalists could exploit to attack the president.

So I respect the limits of candor under which Jeb operates, and don't expect him to deviate from the president's line.

That's not to say that I support lifting the embargo, necessarily--I just don't know what is best in the situation. The embargo in Iraq did so much good, don't you know . . .