American education standards and today's electorate

art credit: giphy.com

Anyone who can stand to watch Fox’s Watter’s World on-the-street interviews with low-information voters, or those who remember similar candid camera interviews on Jay Leno’s Tonight show, are probably aghast at the dumbing down of the American culture, media, and education. We're talking about young adults who do not recognize an image of George Washington and cannot name the sitting Vice President. Who are the young voters who are part of the electorate?

This past week, I came across two opinion pieces that examined the educational decline in our country. The first was by Bruce Deitrick Price (K-12: Parent X Takes On Principal Zero) at the American Thinker blog, about a parent who had attempted on numerous occasions to register concerns with the principal of her daughter’s school:

My complaints were elevated to the new principal.  I met with him at least seven times; several times I was accompanied by a member of the school board.

Finally the principal, aggravated and arrogant, told me schools no longer believe in academic excellence because demanding subjects no longer appeal to the mainstream student or to his parents.

He proclaimed that his program, his syllabus, his teachers were all fully in compliance with local, state, and federal standards, and he wasn't going to change a single thing to accommodate me or my daughter.

He said proudly he is a "Progressive," he has a Ph.D., and he had "helped" develop and design many of those standards, and he believed in them.  He said any kid who wants a higher-level education for a professional career will have to get it somewhere else. 

He was emphatic that neither I nor the school board member could change anything.

This parent decided to home-school her daughter. But the principal’s attitude and his unashamed statement that academic excellence is a thing of the past is more than a little alarming. The rest of that short report is here.

A longer analysis of the collapse of America’s educational standards is by a Canadian contributor to PJ Media, David Solway:

What we see today, then, universities as centers of leftist indoctrination, the shutting down of intellectual debate (cf. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind), a generation of “snowflake” students who are preoccupied with frivolities like trigger warnings, microaggresssons, transgender bathrooms, and “safe spaces” where they will never be exposed to an unfamiliar or conflicting idea, and the sniveling infantilization of the entire academic cohort—flows directly from [John] Dewey and his followers. 

These pedagogical dissidents prepared the ground for the subversive agenda of the Frankfurters by engaging in an act of cerebral softening, that is, promoting the student over the teacher, the child over the man (or woman), and feeling over thought—hence the continuing prominence of the “self-esteem” movement that slashed-and-burned its way through the educational landscape.

Scary stuff. This is a much longer read and very thought-provoking, but it may be of interest to conservative voters who have an opportunity to discuss the upcoming election with family and friends. Be forewarned: the essay is rather depressing, but it does a good job of tracing the history of how we got to where we are and why it's an uphill battle. If you are interested, it’s here.

The key for me when attempting discussions on politics with liberals is that the facts and logic don’t seem to matter – at least most of the time. It’s all about feel-good emotions. If you find Mr. Solway’s observations perceptive, you might also want to take a look at Diana West’s book-length treatment, The Death of the Grown-Up. It’s available on Kindle and discounted hardcovers (as low as 1¢). It’s a good read and goes fast.

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Hillary's' basket of Deplorables' : another exploding cigar

Hillary's "basket of Deplorables": the gift that keeps on giving... this image is from today's Trump rally in Miami (via Sundance):

image by Keln

Look familiar? We posted it last week here. 

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Restatement on The Flight 93 Election

photo credit: cnn.com

A few days ago I posted a link to a think piece entitled The Flight 93 Election, along with a few extracts. The essay, originally published on The Claremont Review of Books website here, generated a significant amount of interest in the blogosphere. It also generated a boatload of responses, much of it critical, to which the author, writing under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, responded on Sept-13 here.

Like everyone else, I am trying to navigate my way through the run-up to the November election, and I highly recommend both the original think-piece and the follow-up that responds to specific criticisms. Here are a few extracts from the Restatement on Flight 93:

Some also complained about the aptness of the analogy: the plane crashed! Well, yes, and this one might too. Then again, it might not. It depends in part on what action the electorate chooses to take. The passengers of Flight 93 roused themselves. They succeeded insofar as that plane did not hit its intended target.

The temptation not to rouse oneself in a time of great peril is always strong. In another respect, the analogy is even more apt. All of the passengers on Flight 93—and all of the victims at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—died owing in part to a disastrously broken immigration system that didn’t then and still doesn’t serve the interests of the American people. Which also happens to be the core issue at stake in this election.

. . .

[another reason that some conservatives oppose Trump is that] Trump might win. He is not playing his assigned role of gentlemanly loser the way McCain and Romney did, and may well have tapped into some previously untapped sentiment that he can ride to victory. This is a problem for both the Right and the Left.

The professional Right (correctly) fears that a Trump victory will finally make their irrelevance undeniable. The Left knows that so long as Republicans kept playing by the same rules and appealing to the same dwindling base of voters, there was no danger. Even if one of the old breed had won, nothing much would have changed, since their positions on the most decisive issues were effectively the same as the Democrats and because they posed no serious challenge to the administrative state.

. . .

[T]he current governing arrangement of the United States is rule by a transnational managerial class in conjunction with the administrative state. To the extent that the parties are adversarial at the national level, it is merely to determine who gets to run the administrative state for four years. Challenging the administrative state is out of the question [my emphasis]. The Democrats are united on this point. The Republicans are at least nominally divided. But those nominally opposed (to the extent that they even understand the problem, which is: not much) are unwilling or unable to actually do anything about it. Are challenges to the administrative state allowed only if they are guaranteed to be ineffectual? If so, the current conservative movement is tailor-made for the task. Meanwhile, the much stronger Ryan wing of the Party actively abets the administrative state and works to further the managerial class agenda.

Trump is the first candidate since Reagan to threaten this arrangement. 

. . .

If Hillary wins, there will still be a country, in the sense of a geographic territory with a people, a government, and various institutions. Things will mostly look the same, just as—outwardly—Rome changed little on the ascension of Augustus. It will not be tyranny or Caesarism—not yet. But it will represent, in my view, an irreversible triumph for the administrative state. Consider that no president has been denied reelection since 1992. If we can’t beat the Democrats now, what makes anyone think we could in 2020, when they will have all the advantages of incumbency plus four more years of demographic change in their favor? And if we can’t win in 2016 or 2020, what reason is there to hope for 2024? Will the electorate be more Republican? More conservative? Will constitutional norms be stronger?

The country will go on, but it will not be a constitutional republic. It will be a blue state on a national scale. 

The entire article is here. Should be a Must Read.

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It's contagious (unlike Hillary's pneumonia)

‘Make Britain Great Again’ 

photo credit: all50flags.com

The Breitbart London report is here.

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Land of Hope and Glory: Maybe there is hope for us

The annual series of Prom concerts at Royal Albert Hall in London have traditionally closed with the audience waving flags and singing along to “Land of Hope and Glory” – lyrics set to the Edward Elgar march that Americans recognize as “Pomp and Circumstance.” That is the march often played as the processional at high school graduations (or at least it used to be in the ancient days of my youth.) This year the YouTube of the September 10, 2016 Last Night of the Proms “Land of Hope and Glory” is particularly heartening as well as entertaining.

Conducted by Sakari Oramo with the BBC Symphony Orchestra (9 minutes)

Yes, there were flags of the EU (spoilsports) and if you go through the comments section, you’ll see the pro-Brexit and anti- Brexit sentiments. But mostly you see Union Jacks galore inside Royal Albert Hall and at the sing-alongs broadcast from London’s Hyde Park and from Belfast. It was a celebration of British culture, heritage, and tradition. The Brits were out in force enthusiastically waving their flag.

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Deplorable week for Hillary

I am assuming that Tea Party people are already up to date on Hillary’s collapse yesterday in New York, the belated diagnosis of “pneumonia” -- which now seems to be afflicting her staff and Chuck Schumer as well, the possibility of a DNC fallback plan (see also here), etc. The Power Line blog has a photo essay up on Hillary’s really bad week, and here are two images:

The rest of the images/captions are here.

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They Were Deplorable

Remember the John Wayne movie, They Were Expendable? Here's a satirical poster for They Were Deplorable, from a blogger I had not heard of until today, the earl of taint:

If you cannot embiggen the image enough, go to the website here. 

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