Saturday, December 15, 2007

What a return on our "investment!"

One of our local collectivists wrote in recently, claiming to have had "a rip-roaring good laugh over the comments" of a reader who "thinks that because parents chose to have children they should be responsible for paying for the education of their kids. ... "What he needs to realize is that when he pays his share for education ... one of the children we are all educating might be the guy operating on us in 10 years, or the judge handing out a sentence to the guy who murdered your neighbor," asserts our cheerful would-be Young Pioneer. "Education has a trickle-down effect. Paying for a child's education now brings greater rewards for our society as a whole later. We can choose to educate them and give them a chance for a bright, productive future -- or we can use your tax dollars to build bigger prisons and more homeless shelters."

Look at that word "choose." Kind of makes it sound like we're being encouraged to voluntarily "choose" to contribute to the scholarship fund for poor kids at the local academy, doesn't it? In fact, school taxes are no more voluntary than meeting a holdup man in a dark alley, and such "investment" rhetoric is completely bogus. There's no "return on investment" -- that doctor isn't going to send you a share of his earnings (or even give you free or reduced-price care) because you "contributed" to his education by paying your property taxes years ago, any more than a Russian doctor today feels obliged to pay back the neighbors who were forced to finance his care and feeding after Comrade Stalin shot his parents.

That Russian doctor is now practicing in Miami, thank you very much, and quite rightly declares the "greater welfare of Soviet society" can go stuff itself. Russian collectivism meant medical students and their families didn't invest directly in their own educations, and weren't allowed to profit from their own educations, so the health care system worked about as well as our DMV. If you want to see the kind of wonderful care our current government schooling regime has in store for you in 40 years, go to Moscow, where male life expectancy is 59 and falling.

Compared with the illiterate young thugs with whom the letter-writer threatens us if we don't pay up (and there doesn't seem to be a current shortage of recruits for such duty), Alexis de Tocqueville found ours to be the most literate working class in the world in 1831 -- and crime was so rare that an un-escorted woman could travel the length of the Mississippi without locking her stateroom door. Before we had these collectivist, compulsion schools.

Care to try that now, after a century and a half of imposed pacifist enlightenment and busy kindling of the light of learning in the most profligate government youth camps in the history of the world? And why should this doctrine stop with schooling? Isn't it equally true that "feeding children has a trickle-down effect; paying for a child's food now brings greater rewards for our society as a whole later"? Why don't the collectivists require that I feed other people's children, too? Oh, wait, they do. I'm also made to fund "food stamps" and free hot breakfasts and lunches for school kids, too, whether I like it or not.

But once the complete care of offspring becomes a collective responsibility, doesn't the Great Collective have a right to step in and limit costs by restricting families to one child apiece, requiring the abortion of any further children -- the same way it can ban helmet-less motorcycle riding because it costs "us" too much in hospital bills? Of course it can. The Chinese communists do this, already. Anyone who objects is just being "selfish and greedy."

This returns us to our suggested experiment from last week. Let's poll a representative sampling of current high school upperclassmen or recent graduates, seeking to determine whether the government youth camps are surreptitiously propagandizing our kids on issues far afield from grammar and algebra: Ask our sample group whether marrying young -- at 19, say -- and starting a large family is a wise and admirable undertaking, or whether "teenage pregnancy is a dead-end behavior likely to trap you in permanent poverty" -- and please note the consistent absence of the important qualifier "unwed" before "teenage pregnancy."

I'm not saying either answer is necessarily right for every young person. But as the fertility rate of Americans descended from persons who came here legally before the Second World War falls toward the replacement rate, this country faces a demographic and cultural shift reminiscent of that now confronting large sections of Western Europe, where reproduction rates below 2.1 among the older racial and cultural group facilitates a de facto takeover by immigrants of massively different race, language and culture -- a nonviolent version of the intended conquest which Charles Martel so famously halted at Tours in 732. (Whoops, delete that "nonviolent" part. As I write this, "disenfranchised" black and Muslim immigrant youth are burning libraries and day care centers -- noted wellsprings of racial oppression -- in the suburbs of Paris.)

Because religions with substantial followings still advise their followers to "be fruitful and multiply," you'd expect the answer to our fertility question to be hotly debated. Instead, I suspect more than 90 percent of our test group will drone out the answer "dead-end behavior," almost as though it's memorized. How could this be, unless the schools have been actively propagandizing their charges on this issue?

If foreign enemy agents were sneaking into America and poisoning our water supplies with sterilizing agents, we'd consider that important. So why shouldn't there be a wide-ranging public debate about any doctrines concerning marriage, reproduction and family size, taught surreptitiously to our young by government agents, that have the same long-term effect?

The purpose of such surreptitious indoctrination of the young is to foreclose debate on these issues, with anyone who raises such questions being jeered as a racist, homophobe, child-hater or promoter of mass illiteracy before he or she can finish a sentence. But as Mark Twain warned us -- or was it Josh Billings? -- it's not the things we don't know that hurt us; it's the things we think we know that just ain't so.

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Which Came First: The Intellectual or the Leader?

There's been a lot of talk within the past, oh three election cycles, about how the "smartest" or most "intellectual" candidate would make the best president. Coincidentally, they are all Democrats:

* In 2000, Al Gore was considered more "intellectual" than George W. Bush, despite the fact that his college transcript was rife with Cs and C-minuses. He also dropped out of the Vanderbilt Divinity School after receiving a number of Fs.

* In 2004, John Kerry was touted as being "smarter" than George W. Bush, even though his undergrad GPA was one point lower than Bush's - a fact that was conveniently unavailable until after the election.

* Hillary Clinton has been anointed the best and brightest of the class of 2008, followed closely by the "clean and articulate" Barack Obama - although don't expect to see Mrs. Clinton's grades anytime soon; they likely have been sequestered like her papers from her days as First Lady.

But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the above politicians really are intellectually superior to their rivals. We can therefore ask not only why George Bush beat two "intellectuals" in their respective presidential races, but also, do intellectual types really make the best leaders? If "conventional wisdom" is correct, Al Gore didn't lose the election, it was stolen from him. Seriously, though, we must consider other factors such as personality and likability. In 2004, Bush beat Kerry in the "likability" category by large margins. Similarly, Al Gore was characterized as a "stiff campaigner," less likely to inspire that all-important likability factor.According to Richard Benedetto,

The vote for president, unlike balloting for mayor or governor, is as much a personal choice as it is an issue choice. Americans want to like their president as well as agree with him. They often will overlook differences on issues if they like or trust the person. Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower are recent cases in point. Bill Clinton's likability helped him survive the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Think about it for a moment. Political ideology aside, who would you prefer to sit down and chew the fat with? George Bush, who spends his vacations wearing jeans and wielding a shovel at his ranch in Crawford, Texas? John Kerry, who enjoys skiing at expensive resorts and slaking his thirst with bottles of vitamin-enriched water? Or Al Gore, who vacations extensively in Europe and flies around in a private jet?

Many average Americans can't afford to travel to Europe in coach, let alone private jet, nor can they enjoy pricey ski getaways. But they often can, and do, spend vacation time working around the house and yard. Yes, George Bush came from money and the size of his Texas ranch puts the modest homes of many Americans in the shade. But it's oddly comforting to see a president who isn't afraid to get his hands dirty. It gives the impression that he isn't afraid of hard work, which is important for one who seeks the highest office in both America and the world.

Now obviously George Bush is not running for office again, but I use him as an example because so much emphasis has been put on the "smart" vs. the "dumb" candidate -- "dumb" being equivalent to President Bush. When you realize that an entire industry has sprung up around Bush's "inferior" intellect, with numerous books, calendars, and other items for sale that impugn his IQ (and focusing largely on his propensity for mispronouncing words like "nuclear"), he's an obvious choice for discussion. (What will these entrepreneurs do when President Bush leaves office on January 20, 2009?) If being smart was the only qualification for being a leader, one would assume from his treatment in the media that George Bush should never have gotten near the Oval Office. But there are other qualities that people look for in a leader.....

Think back to the know-it-alls in your experience, both in school and the workplace. Just because they may have more actual knowledge than you in a particular area, does that automatically mean they are the best choice for a leadership role?

Liberals were, remember, in high dudgeon both in 2000 and 2004. They felt, by rights, that the candidate they believed to be the smartest one should have won. Those who place a high premium on intellectualism automatically assume that, as the best and the brightest, they deserve all the accolades society has to offer. But in a capitalist society like ours, this is not always the case. Robert Nozick, writing for the Cato Institute, has a hypothesis that goes back to one's schooldays

The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Those at the top of the school's hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements. The school system thereby produces anti-capitalist feeling among intellectuals. Rather, it produces anti-capitalist feeling among verbal intellectuals. Why do the numbersmiths not develop the same attitudes as these wordsmiths? I conjecture that these quantitatively bright children, although they get good grades on the relevant examinations, do not receive the same face-to-face attention and approval from the teachers as do the verbally bright children. It is the verbal skills that bring these personal rewards from the teacher, and apparently it is these rewards that especially shape the sense of entitlement.

Nozick is writing here about why intellectuals at large oppose capitalism, but his ideas about those who excelled in school expecting to excel in other areas of life (and feeling cheated when they don't) is very telling.

This brings us to the role of schools in today's leaders. I asked Dr. Candace de Russy, a nationally recognized writer and lecturer on education and cultural issues, for her thoughts on the subject:

For some decades our academic system has been indoctrinating rather than truly educating students, thus producing intellectuals whose minds are clouded with ideology and whose judgment is impaired. Given the usurpation of higher education and K-12 teacher hiring processes by the left, it is also now in the self-interest of many intellectuals to exercise poor judgment, in scholarly matters as well as in the political realm. Some of the great declinists connected weak and pusillanimous - decadent - leadership with societal affluence. Perhaps many of our intellectuals are too materialistic and self-centered to bother with the rigors of exercising leadership and wise judgment.

Rather than teaching students to think, many educators take it upon themselves to fill their students' heads with propaganda and groupthink. This explains why conservative campus clubs such as the College Republicans have relatively small memberships, while you can count on large numbers of college students to turn up at anti-war rallies sponsored by International ANSWER and other Communist front groups. Ben Shapiro, author of the bestselling book Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth, discusses the phenomenon of elitist liberal professors that seem to dominate higher education:

This [second] group [of liberals] feels that conservatism is simply dumb. Professors tend to be intellectually arrogant anyway, and liberalism by its nature is an extremely elitist ideology. Many professors feel that conservatism is too simplistic to waste time on in the classroom. I cite numerous examples of this in Brainwashed. Professors say that if you're conservative, you're unqualified to clean highways, much less teach a classroom of students. Four professors even created a fully funded study designed to conclude that conservatives are less "integratively complex." Of course, they had to lump together Stalin, Castro, Hitler, and Reagan in order to do this, but the end justifies the means.

Being spoon-fed a particular ideology (one that espouses a worldview where entitlement plays a major role), coupled with the assumption that higher education automatically confers superiority, and you have people who wonder why a "dummy" like George W. Bush could ascend to the presidency not once, but twice. And rather than take a look at the qualities and convictions that played a major role in his electoral success, they whine and cry about "stolen" and "rigged" elections - because, as Dr. de Russy says, indoctrination - not education - is the name of the game.

Intellectuals will likely always feel as though they are more deserving of leadership roles in our society. But if we take a serious look at our educational system from the bottom up and revamp it to highlight problem solving and critical thinking skills over ideological brainwashing, perhaps that group will shrink to a more manageable size. For not only do we need independent thinkers in our political class, we also need independent thinkers in the electorate. Our future as a democratic republic depends on it.

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