Wednesday, July 28, 2021

Mark Levin’s Terrible Education Idea

 

Mark Levin has come up with one of his worst ideas yet:  Put cameras in all public school classrooms:

https://www.marklevinshow.com/2021/07/13/cameras-in-the-classroom/

This is supposed to prevent teachers from indoctrinating students with false history, dangerous ideologies, etc., but what it will end up doing is something just as bad as any of those evils:  making all these students comfortable with the idea of a panopticon spying apparatus that will surveille them at all times. 

Indeed, Mr Declan Leary, in his excellent piece on the pitfalls of mandatory public education, indicates that public schools have always been nothing but factory centers for the production of regimented, soulless worker drones:

 

Economically, the transition was disastrous—not necessarily quantitatively speaking, but in terms of proper economics: that is, the ordering of material conditions toward human flourishing. Following the execution of a project whose professed goal was the elevation of all to the condition worthy of citizens, human life and society have only become more systematized, and power and wealth have concentrated in the hands of a corrupt and entirely unaccountable few. It would, of course, be incorrect to speak of forced education as the cause of this disorder; it is merely a means for its preservation and a catalyst for its accelerated progress.

 

One of the most original and incisive critics of mandatory schooling was the Roman Catholic priest and anarchish social philosopher Ivan Illich. In some respects a perverse social liberal, Illich was in others a trenchant and insightful prophet against modernity, especially concerning the dehumanizing tendencies of modern institutions. A key aspect of Illich’s argument, first laid out in Deschooling Society (1971) was that the institutionalization of education aids in the institutionalization of society writ large. From the age of five through at least the age of 16, American children are systematically integrated into an order that is itself always integrating further, always expanding the bounds of its control. Progressivism, leftism, modernism—whatever word we use for it—begins in schools not because teachers happen to be liberals, but because it is in the very nature of education as we know it.

 

In addition to being dehumanizing, totalizing, and unnatural—or perhaps as a result of it—modern, institutionalized education cannot even be called a success according to its own standards. A hundred odd years on, the experiment of corralling children in the classroom is an obvious and abject failure. Especially among demographics whom government-mandated and funded schooling is most meant to aid, few positive results can be seen and a bevy of available metrics indicate that forced schooling simply doesn’t work. We have dumped billions of dollars, trillions of hours, and millions of childhoods into a system that produces employees for Jeff Bezos and voters for Joe Biden who, if they are lucky, can at least do long division.

 

--https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/let-the-children-work/

Mr Levin’s camera proposal only exacerbates these problems.  And a further thought:  How is inuring millions of children to constant, universal surveillance not a gigantic step towards the ‘American Marxism’ Mr Levin has been railing against lately?

He is profoundly wrong in his prescription for ‘fixing’ American education.  Mr Leary’s solution is far superior:  Scrap mandatory schooling altogether and replace it with apprenticeships.  Please read his whole essay; it is worth the few minutes it will take to do so.

And, please, Mr Levin, ‘Leave them kids alone!’  (Pink Floyd)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5ApYxkU-U

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

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