If America Spends More Than Most Countries Per Student, Then Why Are Its Schools So Bad?

Business Insider ^ | 01/07/2012 | Michael Brendan Dougherty

[Graewoulf]

Government Control of Education insures that those educated cannot not be more knowledgeable than the politicians who control financial aid to schools.

As the Government dumbs down, so do the students. It is an almost direct relationship.

BTW, with the exception of Thomas Jefferson, have we EVER has an intelligent Federal Politician? They make lifelong careers of being fed at the public trough, so surely there must be one?

[dools0007world]

I appreciate your thoughts. However, I disagree. Marxist states can and have produced great scientists and engineers. They, afterall, got into space first. Our current flawed educational systems can and does do that as well.

It is well to remember the Soviets did not start with a well educated population. Nor did they start with an entrepreneurial population. Certainly, USSR claims to improving literacy in the CCCP were ligitimate—considering the rampant lack of education among the general populace in that country that existed in 1917.

Therefore, unike the US with a fairly well educated general populace, the Soviets did not have to dumb down its population to start with. This made it relatively easy for them to control what people learned, how much they learned and what to think.

The Marxist objective in America for the past 50 or so years has been to dumb down the American population. It did this through coopting the teachers unions. The success of that effort is demonstrated by their successful usurption of the American presidency.

As for arrogation of the decline in American education to “stranger sources” I have no idea what that means. There is a clear cause and effect here. There is nothing strange or unknown about it. America is under assault by Marxism. It has cooped education, media, unions, judiciary, religeous leadership, Wall Street leadership and the GOP.

Marxism requires a marginally well (also read useful)educated and compliant population. American must be dumbed down for it to succeed.

Personally, I’m still optimistic the Marxists shot their wad too soon. That is to say there are still sufficient thinking Americans left to ultimately thwart the assault. Afterall, Marxism has failed everywhere it’s been tried. Since The Marxist Onada was elected there have been two gun buying spurts. The first began soon after his theft of the presidency and continued for almost two years. The second is occuring as I speak.

Certainly any rational person hopes for a peaceful outcome. But I don’t believe the Marxists will go quietly even after they’re beaten at the polls. I’m curious—what would your response to that be?

[buwaya]

You don’t have to go all the way to the Soviet Union for an example; East Germany and Czechoslovakia have historically had highly educated populations that had communist educational systems imposed on them. The same results apply.

For that matter, most European countries, whether officially Marxist or not, have had the same type of system forced on them to one degree or another.

The US version of educational evolution is peculiar because although it was driven by leftists it does NOT fit the very pragmatic Marxist educational model. Rather it fits a cross between the Deweyite model, which has never impressed international Marxists, even to the extent they ever heard of it they were not impressed. It is essentially a license to permit any sort of subjectivism.

The other peculiar influences are from the multicultural/racial consciousness/feminist/environmental/etc. movements. What all this is is a huge pack of fashionable cranks. George Orwell wrote in “Wigan Pier” (1937) that he objected to the tendency of the English leftist movement (he being hard left at the time) to collect and even become dominated by a multitude of cranks with all sorts of non-Marxist bees in their bonnets. The European Marxists he said were not hampered by such a swarm of the illogical, whimsical and useless. Proper Marxists had a single world-view and a single vision of the truth. Beyond this necessary kernel of blind faith they were supposed to be mechanically logical and pragmatic. Foolish fashions were mere bourgeois affectations that didn’t belong in a workers movement.

Well, thats what we have here - the American left is not really a workers movement at all, it is a loose alliance of undirected, underinformed, underemployed and illogical cranks - nearly all the cranks a society can produce. They are powerful because they dominate fashion, so all their multitude of irreconcilable ideas are fashionable. Hence the incoherence and illogic of their institutions. It seems to many like its a conspiracy. It isn’t, its just the mass stupidity caused by the whims of the over-comfortable.

[dfwgator]

“You can lead a horse to water...”

[dools0007world]

So today’s American Marxists are just a collection of harmless little cranks with no central direction? This is what you want me to believe?

Sorry, I’m not buying your bridge. Coopting America’s vital infrastructure did not happen by accident by a bunch of undirected cranks. Can’t disagree about the crank part in and of itself. I believe they are more appropriately referred to as the dedicated Marxist’s useful idiots.

For your take to be credible you must be able to explain how education, unions, media, religious leadership, Wall Street leadership and the GOP have been so severly coopted. An random event produced by a bunch of Marxist cranks doesn’t cut it.

[buwaya]

Harmless no
Central direction - neither

As to the how - Gramsci predicted it. The long march through the institutions took place precisely as he said, this was a necessary part of the revolutionary process. The idea was to change the intellectual environment so that the communist system (and their associated ideas) could gain the same lock on influential peoples minds that Christianity and tradition formerly had. To start this long march was an overt goal of many a commited revolutionary through the 1970’s.

He was a better prophet than a revolutionary. The organized communists of the day gave it a start, and their successors, and their further successors kept the march going. Along the way they forgot the organization and the concrete goals of empowering the working class, and even the party. The old believers died out, the real Marxists became just a minor academic faction.

All thats left now is a generally directionless and incoherent intellectual culture. The machine continues to run but the engineers are dead. The people who continue to staff its ranks are either complete cranks or the most hypocritical of opportunists.