About 2500 years ago, in approximately the same historical
period of major cultural events in Europe and Asia, the Sophists emerged in
Greece.
They were the first philosophers to teach for money and foster the craft
of gain rather than knowledge, so that material advantage underrated truth and
morality.
Previously, teaching was obvious and unconditional, like parenting,
and philosophy was a search for truth and morality through the use of
investigative reasoning.
"Rationalizing", or the use (or misuse) of reasoning in the sense of giving the
appearance of truth to a falsehood or bias, became the typical method
("sophistry") attributed to the sophists. For instance, lawyers and politicians
often or typically use their rationalizing abilities to promote their own
interpretation as if it were the impartial truth.
Today’s anti-Western culture teachers resume both the venality
and sophistry in an ominous way, politically organized with periodic pedagogic
upgrades.
They are a crusading class forcing the parents to take position on the
ramparts of political warfare, just like the races, man/woman,
employee/employer.
When anti-Western-culture (or leftist "post-modern") teachers state that they need better
remuneration and working conditions to improve teaching, they degrade education
into a consequence of their welfare, not vice versa.
They join the
sophisticated primitives of anti-Western “deconstructionism” and
“multiculturalism”, who parade sophisticated articulations of their primitive
misconceptions.
They cannot overcome the virulent modern version of sophistic
philosophy, because they are trapped in the contradictions of ignoring and
“deconstructing” a Western culture they cannot absorb.
As true believers in the
new cult, they feel the missionary zeal to excommunicate those with a different
perspective: especially the bewildered parents.
We could go on and on about the malignant cultural fads.
But
what about the serious business of learning?
Children go to school to gain knowledge, but they get opinionated posturing
instead.
Today’s deconstructionist/multicultural teaching is a FORMATION
process.
Teachers are instilled a politicized pedagogy designed to influence
students with multiculturalist and relativistic fervor based on smug opinions
devoid of knowledge.
Brainwashing and formation differ only in intensity.
An
activist teacher vilifying parents who support a “parental rights amendment” and
oppose condom distribution in schools is either brainwashed or raging that
parental involvement can desecrate the teacher’s catechism.
Our children need INFORMATION, NOT FORMATION, for knowledge is
the result of information.
We form opinions, not facts. “Knowledge” from formation is
an imposture.
To overcome a “Catch 22” situation before they are hopelessly
outnumbered, the many genuine teachers who have been muzzled by the present
“multi-…“, “post-…“, and “...ism“ fads should be freed to disinfest the knowledge
establishment.
Just as Socrates and Plato killed the sophist dragons for 2400 years of
posterity.
So far.
**************
Postmodernist “anti-cultural education” is based on the dogmatic
and unscientific assumption that children are almost cultural aliens to their
parents.
The parents who raise them are “intrusive, oppressive”, if not directed
by “professionals” (that is, psychological pedagogy technicians, social workers
and bureaucrats: high priests of non-religions).
Furthermore, children should be free to develop their own
culture, removed from the “oppressive parental guidance”.
Anticulturalist educators preach that, rather than
knowledge of any subject, children only need the freedom to find out by
themselves anything they want, without guidance.
Consequently, no one needs to
introduce them to relativity, quantum physics, thermodynamics or simple
existential epistemology.
Thus, those who are raised with anti-cultural education cannot
even attempt to teach their own children, because their own education had
already deprived them
of the ability to return to content-based education, or to teach teachers the
subjects to teach.
Those who don’t know history state self-assuredly that “ we
don’t need history”; but ignoring history is to culture the same as ignoring a
person’s genes.
The events of history are like the genes of culture.
Anticultural specialists are sophisticated primitives with
refined articulation of dismally primitive notions about the culture they should
have learned in traditional schooling.
They must invent the history that
supports their political goals, since their theories are based only on
opinionated evidence.
They are experts in an oxymoronic sense (if we can figure out how
that can be): they know how to raise their children without ”traditional
teaching”.
Then, what if other parents are experts too, but in the traditional
sense?
As a scientist and businessman, should I let psychologists and
bureaucrats guide my children about a science and/or business activity?
For our survival and evolution, neither psychologists, nor teachers or bureaucrats should interfere with parents and family.
In a parent-teacher conference, two teachers told me in the
presence of my little boy that he must feel crushed by the notion that I have
learned 8 languages (which was an impressive feat in their world, but not for
those who have lived in my contingencies): “How can he compete with you?”
This
assumed as self-evident that children and parents are mutually hostile, and that
the family oppresses children.
Fortunately, my boy snickered amused: “Why, do
you mean I would love my dad more if he were dumber?”
There is one convincing
clue in favor of cultural and family continuity.
Thank you, son.
Two remarkable factors were the determinants in that situation.
First, the teachers were brought up in a John Dewey educational environment, where culture and family continuity were substituted and countered by a sort of adversary system of child independence of "intrusive" parental influence.
The second was the mixed cultural price Americans pay for the
linguistic advantage of speaking one language.
Americans are almost as many as all Europeans, but united by the English
language (just as the Europeans were once almost as united by the Roman Latin).
This, however, gives the Americans an exaggerated idea of the difficulties of speaking more than one language.
In my home, my children spoke German among themselves and with my
wife and me from Monday to Thursday, and Italian from Friday to Sunday. TV,
radio, the school, the neighbors, friends, playmates and the rest of the
environment were perfect for English, which my children spoke as naturally as
anyone else.
Given sufficient living experience in other language environments, of course, any child in the same situation would and does acquire the same or more fluency in several other languages with ease and pleasure.
The concomitant and subsequent cultural literacy, of course, should not be retarded by Dewey pedagogic contaminations.
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