Education American-Style

Biologically, survival and reproduction comprise success for every life-form. For humans especially, however, survival also depends upon nurturing the young via education. Ah, but how?

“The most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” -President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)

Heretofore, local governments provided most primary and secondary until the 1950s when the federal government began to intrude. The path was all downhill thereafter.

Some excerpts from the novel, Retribution Fever:

1.
“He that begetteth a fool doeth it to his sorrow;
And the father of a churl hath no joy.” -Proverbs 17:21

A churl? What is a churl?

A churl is a rude, ill-bred person. Churlishness represents a combination of biology in terms of congenital temperament and environment in terms of education formal and informal.

“It is the duty of parents to maintain their children decently and according to their circumstances; to protect them according to the dictates of prudence; and to educate them according to the suggestions of a judicious and zealous regard for their usefulness, their respectability, and happiness.” -Justice James Wilson (1742-1798)

Prevention of churlishness, as much as practicable, comes through education that begins at home with parents as the civilizing agents. It continues at school with teachers. Parenting and teaching are critical to a child’s transformation into a civilized adult.

2.
Behavior is an event the character of which varies with the biology of the individual and the environment in which that individual is operating. Research indicates that approximately 60-70% of human behavior typically is determined by biology. In order to analyze behavior more comprehensively than as emanating from a “black box”, Biobehavioral Science amalgamates Behavioral Science with Biological Science, offering Science from both perspectives combined.

The combined approaches provide the opportunity to apply them to the four, secular cornerstones of any society — government, law, education, and medical delivery — and to each person’s individual life. Doing so allows analysis of problems and descriptions thereof scientifically; thereby, enhancing our capacity to predict and to control behavior and its consequences.

3.
Almost two hundred years later during the 1960s, in the heat of the “civil rights movement” and the “anti-war movement”, had begun the beginning of the end. The most radical elements of The Left began a series of violent attacks against the foundation and framework of these United States, hoping to set the nation on fire. Radicals like the violent subversive William “Bill” Ayres (b. 1944), mentor to and alleged ghost-writer for future-President Barack Hussein Obama II. Their violence failed. Failure, however, germinated later success by their intuitively utilizing a biobehavioral procedure known as “shaping by successive approximations”.

They reörganized along the lines of quiet infiltration rather than noisy revolution. They began securing the bureaucracy of Big Government. They strengthened their grip on Big Media including entertainment. Most importantly, they captured Big Education, indoctrinating the next generation of Americans with their anti-American and anti-Western, Marxist ideology as indifferent parents concerned themselves more with themselves than with their children.

Having basked in the comfortable context of satiation after World War II, the average American Euro-Caucasian had done next to nothing to oppose the radicals of The Left. Many even supported them. Years later with the election of Obama to President, the Marxist revolutionaries successfully set the nation aflame without firing a shot!

4.
After two generations of indoctrination in the quasi-Marxist ideology infecting the American educational system, the young could not discriminate good from evil, truth from lies, sin from virtue, freedom from slavery, liberty from tyranny, debt from credit, deserving from undeserving, fact from fiction, genius from stupidity, health from illness, independence from dependence, individualism from collectivism, information from propaganda, normal from abnormal, perpetrator from victim, poverty from prosperity, republicanism from democracy, responsibility from irresponsibility, success from failure, victory from defeat. In fact, the educational system combined with the entertainment-industry had enslaved most Americans to that primitive part of their brains rightly characterized as the “alligator-brain”.
There, however, is another part of the brain, a higher part, that potentially can override the lower part — that higher part being the frontal cortex. Within the frontal cortex lies the neurological center of anticipation and social judgment.

5.
Beginning in the 1950s, the locus of control had been shifting from the local community of citizens to a distant gang of politicians and bureaucrats in the District of Columbia. Could a professional lawyer-politician and racial demagogue from urban Harlem in New York City really understand the educational needs of children in rural Kansas?
Study after study had documented that the quality of American education had declined over the decades after the end of World War II. Yet, Americans continued to throw good money after bad via a conduit known as the Department of Education — more aptly called the Department of Extortion.
Its motto? “Our way or else!”
Or else? Or else what?
“Or else we won’t give you back a dime of the money that we took from you at gunpoint in the form of taxes.”

6.
Federal intervention had failed in many contexts. In the educational context, it failed disastrously.
Its educational policies had proven themselves deleterious for both sexes but especially for boys. In schools across the nation, both public and private, soft feminine sympathy had replaced hard masculine honor. Transient, artificial self-esteem via gratuitous grade-inflation replaced lasting, genuine pride via competitive academic success. Condescending charity replaced character-building demand for self-reliance. When the Furies struck, how many teachers were admonishing their male charges towards achievement; honesty; honor; risk; self-defense; and self-reliance?

7.
The context in which American youth had been operating had been a nation suffering declining affluence as a consequence of assuming increasing debt to foreigners; thereby, diminishing control over its own destiny. A nation guided by fluid values; dominated by crass commercialization; bombarded by electronic hyper-stimulation; laboring under stifling, self-contradictory laws and their repressive regulations and rules; affrighted by lawsuits yet addicted to them; and compromising the future of its own children imprisoned in a deteriorating, self-serving educational system. It was a nation doing wrong in the guise of doing right.
In a context of declining affluence but continuing, debt-fueled self-indulgence, there had remained a social demand for schooling of the young. Unfortunately, the policies of the educational powers-that-were came under the control of adventitious reïnforcers from radical ideologues of The Left hawking their idiosyncratic brand of egalitarianism, multi-culturalism, transnationalism, licentiousness, and agnostic/atheistic secular relativism; if not outright atheistic amorality. Two consequences were increasing power and money for teachers’ unions and increasing ignorance and churlishness for their young pupils.

8.
“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.” -Yogi Berra

Adding to the educational folly had been the emphasis upon attending college, even for those ill suited, while closing trade-schools. Consequence? Young people who could have become independent and self-sufficient as carpenters, cooks, electricians, and plumbers ended their educations with no marketable skills but with plenty of debts from “student-loans”, a context for their turning to socialism..
Loaning money to students for college and graduate school had begun in 1958. Success in theory; failure in practice.

9.
In a republic, even a democratic one, not everyone is entitled to vote. A number of restrictions also is imposed. With regard to eligibility, a provision enshrined in the revised Constitution enumerates basic criteria for eligibility that are the following three:
1) Proof of citizenship such as a birth certificate and a governmentally-issued document containing a personal photograph or biological identifier personally presented. Voting is too important to be open to abuse and fraud in the name of some idiosyncratic, ideologically-based, social imperative concocted by utopian-oriented egalitarians.
2) Attainment of the age of twenty-one. Decades ago, neuro-scientists documented that the human forebrain does not mature fully until the age of twenty-two. Individuals under twenty-one years of age in military service are defending their future right to vote.
3) Educational achievement minimally to the level of the national median for tenth grade in the following five subjects: American History, Civics, English, Mathematics, and International History. Stupidity and ignorance do not lay a firm foundation for freedom and prosperity. Conversely, such achievement will function as an inducement for States to promote high quality in education.

Discussion

Fortunately, there is a better way. It is based upon the Science of Human Behavior, a branch of Biobehavioral Science. It adhere to the Scientific Method and its three guidelines of specificity, objectivity, and accountability — anathemas to power-hungry politicians and self-serving bureaucrats. Ignore it and imperil further the future of these United States of America.

Let us not forget the words of George Orwell (1903-1950) —

“He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.”

-End-