The Homeschooling Threat

This from last week's Lode:

By educating the young generation along the right lines, the People's State will have to see to it that a generation of mankind is formed which will be adequate to this supreme combat that will decide the destinies of the world. - Adolf Hitler

In light of the later success of the Hitler youth in the calamitous war that soon followed, it is worth examining closely the words written by future leader of the Third Reich while imprisoned on the heels of his failed Beer Hall Putsch. For while it has become almost taboo to claim that Hitler was anything other than an inhuman monster, the aforementioned quote suggests that he was not wholly devoid of reason.

Indeed, molding the fresh minds of youth is the surest way to a revolution, as fellow humanitarian Vladimir Lenin realized when he promised, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” His statement is almost Biblical: Proverbs 22:6 reads, “Train a boy in the way he should go; even when he is old, he will not swerve from it.”

The education of children then is of utmost importance to the powers that be. Thus the federal education system; thus the opposition thereto by many parents; thus the homeschooling movement, which now stands at 2.5 million students nation-wide.

When homeschooling is discussed, one always hears that such students are improperly socialized. It is not a cheap shot to suggest that Hitler and Lenin felt the same way.

For the end to which modern education aims has little to do with the “three R's”. While literacy and basic computational skills are desirous qualities in students who have succeeded in becoming “educated”, these effects are actually secondary. The real purpose of school is to ensure proper socialization as defined by the State. It so happens that those who can read, write, and do simple math are more readily employable, and thus attainment of these skills serves the needs of the State, but only to a point. Those who read too much can be dangerous, especially to those who profit from stability.

There are three types of students in a class room. First there are the intelligent. These quickly realize that school moves far too slowly to be entertained thereby and either seek amusement elsewhere or become burnouts. Most become exceedingly docile; many are pumped full of Ritalin to combat symptoms of boredom or boyhood, I mean A.D.D. Many end up in cubes.

Second, are the lucky few who can learn the material at the pace at which the teacher is teaching. These are not torpid, but neither are they brilliant or motivated enough to threaten the status quo; nor will they be given material which will challenge their mind too seriously.

Third are the students who are either wholly ineducable or simply too slow to follow along. Occasionally someone may take an interest in one whose only fault is hereditary, but most of these students stumble along to nowhere, which serves the elites very nicely. There will always be burgers in need of flipping.

The value of homeschooling is its ability to allow students to dictate the pace of their learning. Bright children are not restrained; slower ones are not left behind. More importantly, by dealing with a child one-on-one, he learns the importance and the beauty of individuality. But this is dangerous to the State.

If mastering the “three R's” was the real purpose of education, home-schooling would be encouraged; nine years of home-schooling is equivalent to twelve years in the government-run monstrosities. Yet no matter how badly schools fail to educate students, they continue, not only to exist, but receive more and more funding.

As the power of the State continues to increase, we will shortly see the day when home-schooling is made illegal and those who are actually learning must be placed in schools wherein no learning can be had. After all, we'd hate to have people who aren't “socialized”.

Murder Not the Despot

From last week's Lode:

In what can hardly be a surprise, Saddam Hussein was recently sentenced to death by the Iraqis he once lorded over. Now defending Mr. Hussein is, in a word, indefensible. He was a cruel tyrant who killed many of his own people. That he was a light-weight by the dictatorial standards of the bloodbath that was the twentieth century is irrelevant; Saddam was guilty of crimes against humanity.

But does he deserve death? The short answer is an emphatic yes. By repeatedly and willfully taking the lives of his fellow human beings, Saddam's life ought to be forfeit. Yet more to the point, whatever his crimes, should he be hanged, that is to say murdered, by another human being, at the behest of the State? The question merits contemplation.

Representative of the natural law, which all rational people recognize as legitimate, the Fifth Commandment explicitly prohibits murder. The common translation, “Thou Shalt Not Kill”, is insufficient: killing is not immoral in cases of self-defense; murder is always so.

Now no one can, with any degree of intelligence or honesty, claim that Saddam will be hanged out of self-defense. There is no reason he cannot be kept behind bars for the rest of his miserable life. Hanging him may give closure and a superficial sense of justice, but the morality of such a decision resides on substantially shaky ground.

There is another reason to keep Hussein alive, which the poet John Milton captures nicely:

He that hath light within his own cleer brest
May sit i'th the center, and enjoy bright day
But he that hides a dark soul, and foul thoughts
Benighted walks under the mid-day Sun;
Himself is his own dungeon.”

Paradoxically, while it is is immoral to kill him, it is more just to keep him alive.

Buch's Thoughts on the Election

As usual, Buchanan finds a way to say something unique without making things up.

A rising spirit of nationalism is evident everywhere in this election, not simply in the economic realm. Americans are weary of sacrificing their soldier-sons for Iraqi democracy. They are weary of shelling out foreign aid to regimes that endlessly hector America at the United Nations. They are tired of sacrificing the interests of American workers on the altar of an abstraction called the Global Economy. They are fed up with allies long on advice and short on assistance.

Other leaders in other lands look out for what they think is best for their nations and people. Abstractions such as globalism and free trade take a back seat when national interests are involved.

China and Japan manipulate their currencies and tax polices to promote exports, cut imports and run trade surpluses at America's expense. Europeans protect their farms and farmers. Gulf Arabs and OPEC nations run an oil cartel to keep prices high and siphon off the wealth of the West. Russians have decided to look out for Mother Russia first and erect a natural gas cartel to rival OPEC. In Latin America, Bush's Free Trade Association of the Americas is dead.

We are entered upon a new era, a nationalist era, and it will not be long before the voices of that era begin to be heard.

Truth be told, I'm torn on the issue of free trade. The libertarian stance is obvious, and while the tendency to reject messing with the market is usually sound advice--if only because it refrains from handing over power to the federal government--in practice, free trade has yielded very dubious results.

And while global laissez-faire capitalism is decidely immoral, it seems less than wise to give the federal government more power as the enactment of higher tariffs will assuredly do. Still, as an almost engineer, certain tariffs would most likely benefit me personally by disuading companies from out-sourcing American jobs. Moreover, we will tariffs should reduce the trade deficit, and may help balance the budget, though the latter provision assumes, somewhat illogically, that Congress will develop something akin to restraint.

I've finished my article for next week's Lode--my apologies on not getting the new articles up, but the website is down, and the internet does not work at my house--wherein I failed to discuss the issue of free trade, but I see no reason to steal Buchanan's point, despite its accuracy. Yet this will surely be an issue to watch. A return to protectionism will almost surely help the democrats elect the Lizard Queen.

Election Results

Yesterday, the Republicans got rocked hard, losing majorities in both the House and the Senate.

US President George W. Bush took responsibility for a "thumping" by Democrats in congressional elections, and admitted the drubbing reflected frustration over a "lack of progress" in Iraq.

"I know there's a lot of speculation on what the election means for the battle we're waging in Iraq," Bush said at a White House news conference, as his Republican party digested its defeat by Democrats.

"I recognize that many Americans voted last night to register their displeasure with the lack of progress being made there," he said.

The election was not just a moratorium on the War in Iraq. The Democrats won this election because of conservative voters who had the good sense to stay home and moderates who, sensibly seeing little difference in the governing policies of either party, voted for change.

When you abdicate the principles which got you elected, don't be surprised when your base loses interest in re-electing you. It's simple, really.

When Republicans refused to address illegal immigration in any serious manner; when they refused to balance the budget; when they spent more on pork than the Democrats ever did, and didn't curtail government spending in the least, they could not have honestly been surprised when conservatives failed to re-elect them.

"She's not going to abandon her principles and I'm not going to abandon mine. I do believe we have common ground to move forward on," he said.

Seeing how Mr. Bush has already abandoned any conservative principles, I couldn't care less what he does with Pelosi. One of two things will happen: either things will continue as before--reckless spending, failure to do anything not wholly destructive, etc.--or Bush will begin to exercise his veto power. It's about damned time.

I don't feel an ounce of pity for the Republicans, and I eagerly await the Democrats turn to prove they share equally in evil.

Expect another column on this for next week's Lode. Also, I'll make sure to post this week's columns as soon as the website is back up.

Judicial Democracy

If you don't regularily read Drudge, you need to do so today. He has no less than fifteen separate articles whose headlines suggest that fishy circumstances may surround this present election. I've not read them; I truthfully don't care who wins, and can feign no interest in the "legitimacy" of an election wherein the candidates are identical.

Still, it is fascinating to observe the inability of America, international spokesnation for Democracy, to conduct an election properly. It has been said that after Bush won Florida by the slimmest of margins no one could claim that one's vote did not matter. In reality, the 2000 fiasco demonstrately this perfectly. Pretending, for the sake of the argument, that both parties are substantially different, one still has little reason to vote for one's preferred plutocrat. If the result is a victory by wide margins, one's vote was irrelevant--or superfluous, depending--if the result was close, voting irregularities will cause the "losing" candidate to sue, whereupon the courts will decide the will of the people, as they are already in the habit of doing.

When one thinks about it, the only surprise is that it took the courts this long to exercise this power. After all, they have decided all the important issues--from abortion to affirmative action, from property rights to the use of birth control--on behalf of the American people for decades. Evidently, the courts slovenly movement to fully abolish democracy, which has yet to come to full fruition, is due, not to a lack of ambition on behalf of the courts themselves, but instead due to the paltry power of the legislative branch.

But make sure you vote.

The Enstupidation that is a College Education

While I should probably be taking care of some homework, I felt compelled to make a quick post in light of a recent blurb I got from the Washington Times, courtesy of Vox Popoli:

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute recently tested 14,000 freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges with 60 questions on American history, government, market economies and U.S. foreign policy. The average "civic literacy" score for seniors was 53.2 percent, for freshman 54.7 percent. Failing grades all. The longer a student attends class, the dumber he gets. Students at the elite schools fared worse than students at some church and land-grant schools. The Ivy League school whose students ranked highest were those at Princeton, at No. 18. Harvard's students were 25th. The lowest scores were posted at such bastions of higher learning as Cornell, University of California at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins. Go figure, as some unhappy parents will no doubt do.

I find this less than surprising, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the incessant anecdotal evidence offered by some of my college friends and colleagues. Recently, one of my house mates told me that he had never heard of the Divine Comedy; a quick perusal of the campus paper will confirm that if my fellow staff writers aren't wholly ignorant of history and economics, they do a marvelous job of pretending thusly. I also routinely receive comments telling me that a reader cannot make heads or tails of my columns. And while it is true that my style is less sophomoric than some of the talking heads in the punditry, I would suggest that one should be able to read writing which is more sophisticated than the incoherent babbling that is a Bill O'Reilly column, especially if one is college-educated.

The actual study reports four findings:

1. America's colleges and universities fail to increase knowledge about America's history and institutions.

2. Prestige doesn't pay off.

3. Students don't learn what colleges don't teach.

4. Greater civic learning goes hand-in-hand with more active citizenship.

I'd like to concentrate on points one and two; the latter two findings seem obvious and would render commentary trite.

America's colleges and universities fail to increase knowledge about America's history and institution for two reasons. First, an astounding portion of the faculty is wholly ignorant of the topics themselves. I can think of three professors, Noam Chomsky, Camille Paglia and Walter Williams, who seem to have a proficient grasp on the history and institutions of America. I have read too little of Chomsky to explain our differences, but whether or not he is wrong, he is not an ignoramus; thus I include him in the list.

Yet these should not be exceptions. Well, Camille Paglia is always an exception, but our institutions of higher education should regularly be producing scholars, if not of Paglian stature, scholars nonetheless. But they are not even approximately doing so. Paglia has much to say about the degradation of higher education--see "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders" for starters--but pseudo-intellectual hacks will never be able to produce scholars. It took Socrates to give us Plato who gave us Aristotle. Anything approaching a modern day Socrates is not likely to be found in the hallowed halls of higher ed.

Second, the object of college is not to bestow knowledge upon the students. There are simply far too many people attending college for any of this nonsense, many of them torpid fools. Since the those who are either ineducable or wish to be so cannot or will not learn, neither will the professor's pretend to teach. Those who love knowledge will seek it on their own; those who care nothing for her will prefer the modern college environment: a retirement home for the perpetual adolescents of the middle and upper classes. If college becomes a perpetual party, the pupils will be more likely to stay for five or six years, spending all kinds of mom and dad's hard earned money. Tough tests and true scholarship are sure to weed out those who neither deserve nor would be capable of appreciating a real education, and the soulless administrators are unlikely to bite off the hand that feeds them.

As for point number two, one simply needs to apply all of the previous babble to schools wherein the student body is far more likely to have a larger quantity of cash. If Yale becomes competitive, the students who do not wish to work hard shall go to Princeton--or perhaps it is the other way around; it makes precious little difference. I lost all respect for Harvard when I learned that 96% of their student body graduated with honors. I reckon that's a mighty tough place to "learn".

I applied to one school, a mid-sized, moderately priced, Midwestern engineering university. And while my time here has been mixed, I have learned a fair amount. It seems that engineers, unlike government bureaucrats, cannot be wholly incompetent. Moreover, I have learned a great deal of history, and more besides, from trips to the library or the secondhand bookstore.

A reading of de Tocqueville and Gibbon will afford one a far more extensive survey of history than a degree will now give. And the price is far less dear. While there are reasons to attend a university, an "education" is near the bottom of the list.

The Hasty Rejection of Christianity

My editor subtitled this one: "Can man still have morals without its influence?" which is, I think, a terribly fair question, especially as it concerns post-Christian societies. Here goes:

Last week, Brian Sabol made the latest comments in a mild dispute which has been going on for some time in these very pages. Allow me to first quote him before throwing in my two cents.

“Furthermore, Mr. Lyrenmann’s comment that ‘atheists and agnostics are held to no moral code but the laws of the government’ is not only misguided and baseless, but completely wrong. Morality is not dependent on religion. The two are not mutually inclusive. Countless immoral acts have been committed in the name of religion, the Spanish Inquisition, for example.”

Mr. Sabol gives all appearances of being intelligent; nonetheless he stoops to hoist the ubiquitous canard that is the Spanish Inquisition. It is tiring to see how frequently this tactic is employed. Mr. Sabol is obviously unaware that the Inquisition was undertaken at the behest, not of the Church, but of the Spanish Crown; further, for all its perceived atrociousness, it resulted in a mere 2,000 casualties over a period of 349 years. It is a sure sign of the benevolence of Christianity that the most nefarious crime naysayers can point towards pales in comparison to the actions of any number of agnostics and atheists in the 20th century alone. This does not excuse the crimes of the Inquisition; nor does it propose to assert that Christians are, ipso facto, better than their pagan brethren. But it does serve to provide much needed perspective.

My point here is not to argue for the truth contained within Christianity, though I am wholly convinced of this and would gladly do thusly elsewhere. I concern myself instead with the utility thereof, which, though less important, is easier to gage.

But this is still somewhat difficult to do so. Agnostics will often note, as Mr. Sabol does, that they can be moral as well, and so long as he is guided by Plato I should think he would stand to do quite nicely. For paganism is not, as is commonly and completely inaccurately thought, wholly bad. Instead, paganism is the best man can do without Christ. Thus the Divine Comedy finds the noble pagans in Limbo, and Virgil is only allowed to accompany Dante through purgatory, symbolizing the limits of human reason.

Yet it is not, unfortunately, a choice between the goodness of paganism and the greater goodness of Christianity. Were that it were so! By utilizing human reason, the pagans have promulgated a system of ethics—also known as the natural law. This law has not been ignored by Christianity; instead, we find Augustine making countless references to Plotinus as well as Plato, especially in his “City of God.” Similarly, Thomas Aquinas uses Aristotle at great length in his equally monumental “Summa Theologica.”

In short, it is difficult to distinguish the natural law from the teachings of Christianity, and it is irresponsible to pretend that a rejection of the latter will lead to a more stringent regard to the former. Tearing down the walls of Christian discipline is one thing, but it is quite another to offer an alternative in its stead. Only time will tell if the gleeful revolutionaries halt rebellion long enough to consider this all-important point.

Partial rejection of the natural law aside, while it is quite possible for agnostics and atheists to be as moral as Christians, I consider the prospect somewhat dubious. All human beings, Christians and pagans alike, are bound by the same civil laws depending on their place of residence. Yet Christians are also called to task for their sins: those that did not love their neighbors as themselves risk eternal hellfire. Few people will be good simply for goodness’ sake. With all due respect to Mr. Sabol, removing the threat of damnation shall only prove disastrous.

Slop For The Swine

Here's article number one for the week:

Human beings have a terribly tendency to abuse things. Indeed, the greater the potentiality for good, the greater the propensity for abuse. Thus, while I find certain technological features which are designed to assist to be less than so, I find my colleagues bemoaning of such to be tiresome.

It is certainly true that some aspects of the Internet can be meddlesome. Amazon’s incessant recommendation of books and Google’s employment of the page rank algorithm can seem to render choice insignificant, and, by a dangerous corollary, render the masses devoid of taste. Yet this is a false assumption for two reasons.

First, Amazon and Google do not inhibit choice; they merely seem to serve to limit it. One is not forced to purchase a suggestion of the former anymore than one is compelled to click on the first link provided by the latter. If the material recommend is deemed insufficient, I would posit the alternative of going to a library, though perhaps the skeptical would balk at a suggestion from the kindly librarian.

Second, the mass of men is neither intelligent nor gifted in terms of taste, particularly in democratic ages, if Alexis De Tocqueville is to be believed. American Idol, Nickelback and Dan Brown are the products of the Internet age, but they are not direct results thereof. Instead, both stem from the same cause: a dying civilization embracing the shallow ethos of Epicureanism—though few know what it means.

Elimination of some of the aforementioned features will do little to abate the crisis. Is Amazon really to be feared more than, say, the vacuous programming of MTV? When it comes down to it, many Americans do lack good taste. Yet one shouldn’t blame Google. Even Christ had something to say about the wisdom of casting “pearls before swine.”

Every Vote Counts

Reason number 65 to avoid voting:

A new statewide [New York] database of registered voters contains as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and as many as 2,600 of them have cast votes from the grave, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal computer-assisted analysis.

Oh yes, every vote counts, so make sure you walk to the polls.

Because if you don't vote, dead people will.

A Brief Paglian Diversion

Camille Paglia from Vamps and Tramps:

My disaffection with American Catholicism, which began during my adolescence in the late Fifties, was due partly to its strident anti-sex rhetoric and partly to its increasing self-Protestantization and suppression of its ethnic roots. Within twenty years, Catholic churches looked like airline terminals--no statues, no stained-glass windows, no shadows or mystery or grandeur. No Latin, no litanies, no goregous jeweled-garments, no candles--so that the ordinary American church now smells like baby powder. Nothing is left to appeal to the senses. The artistic education of the eye that I received as a child in church is denied to today's young Catholics.

Her disagreement with the Church's teaching on sex is fundamental, and requires a greater mind than my own to discuss, though were I given the opportunity, I would recommend to Miss Paglia the late Pope's talks on the Thelogy of the Body.

That said, I cannot agree with her more about the second reason for her disenchancement with American Catholicism. Bring back the Latin! Bring back the candles, the stained-glass
the statues!

There is little that bothers me more than a boring church--perhaps heresy from the pulpit. I do not know if anyone really enjoys the sterility of the modern churches, but I know I am not alone in clamoring for more traditional churches. People still spend hours in the churches of Europe--though seldom to worship, and less frequently are the worshippers Europeans--for good reason.

No one is going to want to visit a mega-church in fifty years, let alone five hundred. I hope God burns every one of the monstrosities when he returns. It's not as if any of them spend a lick of time talking about his Son's death and ressurection anyway.

It's back to Wise Blood for me, in which Hazel Moates founds the "Church Without Christ". Someone should have told wayward Christians that Flannery O'Connor intended sarcasm, not a plan for action.