Public Education

…is prison for children and teachers:

…there are no public schools in America that I know of. They’re reeducation camps for people that weren’t educated in the first place, maybe, or little prisons, or pleasure domes for creepy teachers, or places where tubby women work out their neuroses about eating on helpless children at lunchtime — but there’s not much schooling going on in school. A public school is a really expensive, but shabby and ineffectual, private school that collects their tuition with the threat of eviction from your house.


The teachers in public school are as much at the mercy of this weird situation as the students. A teacher recently told us she has to keep a dossier on every child in the class, every day. That’s the Stasi, not Goodbye, Mr. Chips. They said that it’s not possible, really, so they have to make stuff up to finish it. All that time is subtracted from what little time they have for the kids in the first place. The teachers don’t know where all these weird directives come from any more than you do. They just don’t want to get fired for forgetting to rat out little Timmy if he chews his Pop-Tart in to a recognizable weapon-like shape. They go along to get along.

Peter Gray concurs:

Children come into the world beautifully designed to direct their own education. They are endowed by nature with powerful educative instincts, including curiosity, playfulness, sociability, attentiveness to the activities around them, desire to grow up and desire to do what older children and adults can do.

The evidence for all this as it applies to little children lies before the eyes of anyone who has watched a child grow from birth up to school age. Through their own efforts, children learn to walk, run, jump and climb. They learn from scratch their native language, and with that, they learn to assert their will, argue, amuse, annoy, befriend, charm and ask questions. Through questioning and exploring, they acquire an enormous amount of knowledge about the physical and social world around them, and in their play, they practice skills that promote their physical, intellectual, social and emotional development. They do all this before anyone, in any systematic way, tries to teach them anything.

This amazing drive and capacity to learn does not turn itself off when children turn 5 or 6. We turn it off with our coercive system of schooling. The biggest, most enduring lesson of our system of schooling is that learning is work, to be avoided when possible.

The focus of my own research has been on learning in children who are of “school age,” but who aren’t sent to school, or not to school as conventionally understood. I’ve examined how children learn in cultures that don’t have schools, especially hunter-gatherer cultures, the kinds of cultures in which our species evolved. I’ve also studied learning in our culture by children who are trusted to take charge of their own education and are provided with the opportunity and means to educate themselves. In these settings, children’s natural curiosity and zest for learning persist all the way through childhood and adolescence, and into adulthood.

It’s a century-old disaster, and one (as usual) foisted on us by the “progressives.”

Light Posting

I’ve been busy doing final editing on the book (it’s amazing the problems you see when you actually print a proof copy), and getting ready for a combination business/pleasure trip to Alaska (I leave tomorrow morning, and won’t be back until the evening of September 4th). But I’ve also had problems logging in to WordPress (it times out). It’s not a server problem — I can ssh into it, and the blog itself seems to load properly and people seem to be able to comment. I’ve heard that there are some brute-force password attacks occurring to WordPress logins, so that may be the problem. Anyway, I’ll put up a couple posts right now, because I seem to be able to (at least momentarily) get in.

Bad Customer Service?

Maybe you’re a lousy customer:

I replay this back to you because I realize you probably scream profanities at minimum wage customer service representatives every time you run an errand or grab a bite to eat, so you might not recall the specifics of this one incident. And that brings us to the possible answer to that query you posed in the midst of your ketchup rant. You asked: “Why can’t I ever f*cking get good customer service?” Well, ma’am, that might have something to do with you being a vulgar, miserable, malicious person. Maybe you get bad customer service because you’re a bad customer. Did you ever consider that possibility?

I get it. “You’re the customer so you’re always right.” They work here so they have to bend over backwards for you “because that’s their job.” Well, you’re partially correct about that. Yes, you are a customer and, yes, they do work here. But it’s actually not their job to deal with psychopaths. They aren’t hostage negotiators, they’re fast food workers. And even if the powers that be at these corporate chains push this “customer is always right” crap because they’ve decided it’s good business to placate horrible jerks, in the real world, outside the land of plastic chairs and soda fountains, adults who throw temper tantrums in public are never right about anything.

I’m sure some people might take your side. They might come to your defense by telling their own horror stories about all the times when customer service has failed to live up to their standards. Those folks are under the same delusion as you. They think their hallowed “customer” status somehow gives them the right to treat everyone with a uniform and a name tag like garbage. They think their past encounters with sub-par service makes it acceptable for them to fly off the handle about ketchup every once in a while. They think the rules of basic decency and respect come second when they are The Customer. And they’re wrong.

Do you ever wonder why we have so many atrocious politicians in Washington? Well, you shouldn’t wonder. Just look in the mirror. Bad politicians are generally bad because they can’t handle power. It goes right to their head and they become narcissistic, petty, controlling sociopaths. But at least it’s a lot of power so the temptation to be corrupted by it is almost understandable. You, on the other hand, become a maniacal tyrant when society hands you temporary and meaningless power over 17-year-old fast food cashiers. I shudder to think what you’d do if you had an army at your disposal.

No kidding.

Time To Clean House At DoD

This is idiotic. A jihadist shooting up Fort Hood is “work-place violence,” but people who believe in the Constitution are extremists. This is the worst part:

The SPLC is listed as a resource for information on hate groups and referenced several times throughout the guide.

Morris Dees and his SPLC is itself a “hate group.” Unfortunately, nothing will be done about this until we get a president who cares, instead of one who supports this Bravo Sierra.

Missing The Point

Scholars and Rogues imagine that they have a useful critique of our latest filings in the MannSuit, but they completely misunderstand the situation:

These examples demonstrate that both NR and Steyn were aware of ongoing investigations, and that NR was certainly aware of the results of at least one of those investigations. Furthermore, it is not realistic to imagine that NR cultivated a culture where authors writing about the same subject (climate change/global warming) were so isolated from each other that they never discussed the results of the various investigations among themselves. As such, it is virtually certain that NR and Steyn were aware of the investigations’ results and thus cannot credibly claim ignorance of those same results. [Emphasis in original]

This, with all respect, is stupid. Or it’s smart, but a complete straw man. None of the defendants have claimed that they were unaware of the results of the investigations. In fact, the original blog post that I wrote was all about the results of those investigations, and why we and others disagreed with them. They (and Mann) are attempting to claim that the investigations a) properly investigated all accusations of malfeasance against him and b) exonerated him of all such claims. Both are (in our opinions) untrue. The investigations, to the degree that they happened, were limited in their scope, and for the most part cursory (e.g., the Penn State “investigation” basically consisted of asking Mann if he did anything wrong, without questioning anyone else, and when he replied in the negative, “exonerated” him). That is what the entire dispute is about, so it’s obtuse and pointless to claim that we claim that we were unaware of the investigation results.

Broken Promises

Barack Obama’s long list:

I’m sure people could add to this list, but there’s enough here to establish a pattern. Even if you stipulate that politicians often make claims they can’t keep–that some are the product of cynical deception and others the product of unforeseen circumstances–Mr. Obama is in a category all his own.

Does it matter? I think so, in part because I don’t believe it’s good to have as president someone for whom words have no objective meaning and who believes he can construct his own narrative to fit his own needs. But I also think we’re seeing an accretion occur. It’s happening later than I would have hoped, but the public does seem to be tuning out the president. The latest pivot to the economy–has that pivot occurred a half-dozen or a dozen times before?–is meaningless. Nothing has happened before; why should anything happen now?

Mr. Obama talks, and he talks, and he talks. My how he loves to talk. But his words don’t translate into anything real. And eventually that does take a toll.

Actually, his words often do translate to something real — it’s just that it’s the opposite of what the words would indicate.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!