One of the easiest ways to spot bias is to listen for one side’s buzz terms. If you hear “pro-choice,” you’re listening to the pro-abortion side, and “pro-life” means one is on the anti-abortion side (unless the same speaker says both).
So, when the newscaster on CNN refers to “investment in education” instead of “expenditures on education,” you know he is so liberal he doesn’t know he’s using Libspeak.
Since only Libspeakers have been reporting the news, those for more Federal spending on education get away with a really childish trick. They know that the more years of school a person has, the more money he makes, on average. They then say that education alone has produced all that extra income.
Meanwhile, back on earth, you can do the same thing with almost any expenditure. The more expensive the car a person owns, the more money he is likely to make. The bigger the house he was raised in, the more likely he is to have gone to college and graduate school. In other words, by exactly the same statistical process by which we justify “investments in education,” we could justify an “investment” in a limousine or a home in Beverly Hills.
If your parents spend more money on education, it means that they are probably richer. If your parents spent more on their home, it probably means they were, on average, richer and just plain smarter than people who have smaller homes. Their kids will then be smarter and make more money.
It’s too bad the “investment in education” logic is so silly, because it would be wonderful if it worked. It would mean that education is magic, and that any moron could be made a brain surgeon by “investing” money in training him. It would mean you wouldn’t even have to be human to make millions. You could take a horse, a duck, or a puppy dog, give them the magic training and they would be able to make all that money.
It takes training to develop somebody’s natural talent. But you have to have the talent first, and that is what all education statistics leave out. A psychologist writing a column was recently asked if you have to be smart to be a “gifted child.” The implication was that if he said you had to be born smart to be “gifted,” he would be anaziwhowantstokillsixmilionjews.
“Oh, no!” said the good doctor, you could be born retarded and still stand just as good a chance of being “gifted” as one of those smart kids.
You can see that this sort of logic leads straight to silliness.
The fact is that education or training is used to develop the gifts you already have. You are paid not only for training, but for being trainable. Being trainable, in turn, is a matter of genetics. Hitler believed in genetics, so our entire national policy is rooted in the idea that anyone who mentions innate intelligence is anaziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.
For those who make their living in education or other supplements to genetics, this is a wonderful label. It means that those who sell social sciences, like education or psychology or sociology, can say that they can cure anything. They don’t say you can hire ducks and make them brain surgeons, but they say you can do absolutely anything else by “investing in education” or financing other social programs.
And if you disagree with them, they shriek that you are anzaiwhowantstokillsixmillionjews. All of our silliest misconceptions are defended by that label.
Until we stop screaming “HITLER!” and begin to apply logic to education policy, it is going to keep failing, no matter how much you “invest” in it.
-By Bob Whitaker
Well, notwithstanding the fact that the second sentence in that passage is bordering on the absurd on Mr. Whitaker’s part, he is neverthess right that the logic of what liberals call “investment in education” is silly and always has been. I don’t know what the date on the article is, but would venture to guess that he probably didn’t realize how very right he was nor how far back this line of reasoning among America’s “educator” class stretches. The answer is that it dates back to Horace Mann (the “Father of Pogressive Education”) and the institution of the first public schools in (Yankee) America. See here:
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moajrnl/acf2679.0014.010/603:7?page=root;rgn=full+text;size=100;view=image;q1=Horace+Mann
I won’t quote from the article’s lengthy passages, but I will summarize the relevant parts by revealing that in 1847 Mann sent out a circular to all the “test schools” in the North under his broad supervision asking of their preeminent teachers and administrators what each of them believed would be the effects of his system of progressive education (modeled after the Prussian system) would be in the way of producing good and loyal citizens, good parents, good and faithful employers and employees and, in short, paragons of moral virtue. The answers he received in return amounted to a unified chorus of, ‘under your system we can virtually guarantee that ninety-nine out of one-hundred young people so-trained, regardless of race, color, ethnicity or previous condition of servitude (or any other factor), will develop all of those virtuous and worthy characteristics and more.’
Which of course bears all the characteristics of a kind of unrealistic fanaticism, and which of course is what liberalism is when you boil it all down. Lest we forget that it was Daniel Webster himself who warned two of his Senate colleagues from the South that they should go back home and beat their ploughshares into swords at once, for Yankee schoolmarms like Harriet Beacher Stowe (trained under Mann’s system and supervision) had raised two generations of Yankee to hate the South and all her “hateful” institutions, to include, but certainly not limited to, African slave labor and the patriarchy.
“Lest we forget that it was Daniel Webster himself who warned two of his Senate colleagues from the South that they should go back home and beat their ploughshares into swords at once, for Yankee schoolmarms like Harriet Beacher Stowe (trained under Mann’s system and supervision) had raised two generations of Yankees to hate the South and all her “hateful” institutions, to include, but certainly not limited to, African slave labor and the patriarchy.”
This last point illustrates a fact that is hotly denied, and also coldly ignored, by a great many, and even by many Southrons, who through bitter experience, should know better.
The North is organised and governed as a separate nation that stands in an adversarial position vis-â-vis the rest of the “United States®.”
Until Southrons, and their fellow Americans in the Western states realise this, and accept it, they’ll never be able to improve their lives and secure their rights and liberties.
They need to give up the “we’re all one country” nonsense. Which no hard core Yankee has ever seriously believed
And they need to stop holding out hope that, no matter how terribly they act, the Yankees are still our “fellow Americans” and that somehow, they’ll eventually give up their communistic, totalitarian ways and suddenly become Jeffersonian Republicans.
The Yankees will never respect the Constitution, they’ll never respect the
republican form of government, they’ll never respect the rest of America, or their Rights and Liberties, and they’ll never give up their stranglehold on the Federal Government, even if it means death.
Right you are, Sir. Our Southron forbears understood The Northern Mind and Character (which explains why he is perpetually restless to overthrow even his own constitution [that established by the Reconstruction Amendments] much better than we! Time we re-learn it.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moajrnl/acf2679.0031.005/375
The real pisser is that even if you are progeny of a billionaire and are as intelligent as Einstein one still has to WORK to get educated. All the money in the world cannot buy a work ethic. But you know libturds just hate the idea that some people work harder and justly reap the rewards of that hard work.