And, Ellie, how many people do you know who make a living keeping people in poverty?
Are you referring to social workers who work with families to help them learn marketable skills so they can get a job? Who put people up for the night so they don't freeze on the streets, so they can live to see another day, given another chance to turn their life around?
Are you referring to the church pastor who, when the homeless fella came to the drop-in center, gave the homeless guy a newspaper so he could look for a job? The teacher who worked for a year with the illiterate adult so that he could read?
Wow! Teaching someone to read is equal to giving them a crutch. And helping people get jobs is keeping them in poverty.
You see, I thought compassion was recognizing that we all make mistakes. I thought it was understanding that when someone wants to correct those mistakes, it was OK to help them, much like I've been helped.
I'm not trying to be sarcastic, but are you serious? I kinda get the impression that you say this stuff to get Dan & some of his readers riled.
Alice:"I kinda get the impression that you say this stuff to get Dan & some of his readers riled."
I do, of course. But, as we are wont to say here abouts, I'm kidding on the square. It's great fun to get the unexamined riled. Notice I didn't say 'liberal', just the unexamined of any ilk.
Let me take education as an example for brevity's sake, but I can make you a similar case for medicine, social work, and the ministry (and a number of other 'professions).
Have you ever seen the bumper sticker "If you can read this, thank a teacher." The myth is that if it weren't for teachers, we'd all be bumbling about illiterate and unable to count beyond five.
But of course it's a myth. People learn to read and write and calculate BETTER without schools and teachers. I have, let's say, a lot of children. None of them, not one of them, has ever had the first lesson in reading, writing, or math. Not one flash card, not one lesson in phonics, not one exercise in hand writing. Nothing. Yet they all read and write fluently and do complex math in their heads.
This is the norm and was the way of things before the advent of government schools. What the education "profession" does is campaign to convince people that they CAN'T read or do math. Don't even try it. Parents parrot this to their preschool children and by the time the child is old enough for academics, he's convinced he can't do it unless the mystic teacher performs a transformation on them.
Yet in every instance, every single one, where children are just left alone and not indoctrinated in the brain washing, they pick up reading effortlessly, and in fact anything else they want to learn for the rest of their lives.
The indoctrination is good, isn't it? See how quickly people respond with 'Huh?, How could a teacher be keeping children FROM learning?"
Education as a whole is a profession that takes a free flowing water hose, kinks it, and then when it lets off some of the constriction and some little bit of water flows, they claim they have created water and are the source of it.
Like educators and learning are social workers and poverty ministers and spirituality doctors and health etc.
"But of course it's a myth. People learn to read and write and calculate BETTER without schools and teachers."
Undoubtably, some of us could.
But do we think a nation with some of us educated is what we want? Or some of us pulling ourselves up out of poverty? Some of us getting adequate health care?
As you know, Dr. E, I think you make a great case that our system is corrupt and needs change. And I don't disagree with you.
I do sometimes question the process by which you'd hope to accomplish this.
Master Dan:"But do we think a nation with some of us educated is what we want? Or some of us pulling ourselves up out of poverty? Some of us getting adequate health care? .......... I do sometimes question the process by which you'd hope to accomplish this."
Of course you question it, Dan, because you are operating under unexamined hypotheses. You assume that if the educrates withdrew, only SOME of us would be educated. You assume that if the poverty-mongers withdrew, only SOME of us would prosper. And you assume that if the sickness profession were transcended only SOME of us would be healthy.
On what do you base this?
We were told by the conquistadors (who were biased) that the MesoAmericans believed that if they did not perform human sacrifice every year, the sun would fail to wax after the solstice and life would disappear. To their thinking, what fool would take a chance to test that theory! Modern "helping" [nod,nudge,wink] professions do exactly that same thing. They perform human sacrifice and any suggestion that they stop doing it is met with the hand-wringing that the fearsome Huitzilopochtli would take away the sun and the world would descend into darkness .... er ... I mean .... only SOME of us would have education, prosperity, and health.
Where is the population of people who have not been indoctrinated by Babylon on which we are to test this hypothesis?
What evidence we have is to the contrary though. We spend billions on education and yet we are as a whole functionally illiterate and woefully uninformed. We have the most extensive "health" [nod,nudge,wink] care system in history and yet we are obese, neurotic, and in disasterous health. We spend trillions on poverty programs and yet more people than ever view themselves as poor.
When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. The only reason to keep digging is in the fevered hallucination that if you stop, the fearsome Huitzilopochtli will be right over your shoulder heralding disaster.
I submit, Dan, in this your hypothesis is unexamined.
Eleutheros: "But of course it's a myth. People learn to read and write and calculate BETTER without schools and teachers."
Hmm..most of the time you make sense to me Eleutheros, but not this time. Of course my experience with this is rather limited I confess. My grandfather, born in the year 1867, never went to school and he never learned to read or write. Yet he had a farm and owned a store where he sold the fruit of his labors. He did rather well for himself until the depression. He had all his money in a bank and lost it. He signed his name with an "X" until the day he died in 1952.
So if you can learn to read and write without the aid of a teacher, how come he didn't?
Marty:"So if you can learn to read and write without the aid of a teacher, how come he didn't?}
Since he was born in 1867, he was born after the advent of compulsory attendance and the indoctrinization that if you didn't attend school, then just forget about reading. But the answer is simpler than that:
I could easily reverse your question and ask with virtually everyone having the advantage now of days of years of education at the hands of "professionals", why is the literacy rate so low? If attendng school imparts the ability to read, why aren't those people learning to read?
The answer is, some people don't learn to read for whatever reason. But take the state of Mass. for exaple where the first law for attendance at government schools was passed. The literacy rate was about 94% BEFORE the law was passed. It has never been that high again.
Oddly, 1867 was the year my great-grandmother was born and her husband as born in 1856. Neigher attened school and both read and wrote very well.
My own mother read very poorly and when I asked her why, she always explained that she only went to school through the third grade. As an older adult, I finally managed to break through the indoctrination and she reads quite fluently.
The stats are crushingly on the side of the phenomenon that if you don't indoctrinate a child, they learn to read on their own as if by osmosis. Being part of the 'unschooling' movement and having not exposed any of my own children to schooling, I can tell you in case after case, family after family, time and time again, children learn what they need to know and more just from exposure to it in the absence of indoctrination .
To refute this requires the example of people who failed to learn although there was an absence of indoctrination .
"Of course you question it, Dan, because you are operating under unexamined hypotheses. You assume that if the educrates withdrew, only SOME of us would be educated."
Would I be totally wrong in thinking that statement a load of BS?
Are you suggesting that pre-public education days, anything approaching a majority were literate? Educated?
Are you suggesting that pre-welfare days, there were no folk homeless or hungry?
I know that education (social assistance, etc) has its flaws - that there's something to be said to education that keeps one free from corporation- and gov't-dependency but some public education does just that, it would depend upon the teacher, seems to me.
Dan:"Are you suggesting that pre-public education days, anything approaching a majority were literate? Educated?"
I'm not so much as suggesting it as stating it as fact. Now of days the majority are not educated. Sure enough the majority are indoctrinated, but that's not the same as saying they are educated. And yes, before the days of public education MORE people were educated than are today.
I would point you to John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education sto set you on our journey out of the fog of educational indoctrination that produced the above retort when really, isn't it true, Dan, you are just relying on the unstated and unsubstantiated myth that public education was necessary in order to make the masses literate. Here's the entire book online:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
In it is rather conclusive proof that before the advent of government schools, the literacy rate among non-slaves was near 100% and has never approached that since.
Dan:"Are you suggesting that pre-welfare days, there were no folk homeless or hungry?"
No folk???? Being a little absolutist are we, Dan? No folk?? There were not nearly as many as there are now and the increase in homeless and poor follows a direct relationship with government spending on those programs, especially spending to pay for administrators of those programs.
I remember that in the late 50's and early 60's there was ONE family in an elementary school district of over 200 families that was so poor it relied on public and church based assistance. Just on the radio this evening was a discussion that in many of the counties here in Appalachia now of days the rate of people on disability and welfare is as high as 60% of the population. Back in those days there were no people living under bridges or flagging down cars. What happened between than and now? Mainly the rise of profession to broker poverty and the more poor the stronger the profession.
Else, Dan, how do you explain the decline in the literacy rate along with a steady increase in educational spending? How do you explain that within my lifetime we have gone from nearly no poverty to populations where more than half the people have to be on some sort of government dole?
I have no idea whether my grandfather (paternal, btw) suffered from this indoctrination that you speak of. Absolutely nothing is known about his background, his parents, or what kind of upbringing he had. The little bit of research that I've done appears he was living and working on his own by the time he was 14.
15 comments:
LOL - just when I thought you took everything too seriously, you come in with something that made me chuckle. That was funny!
That's rich, and no mistatke.
It'd be like those who make a living keeping people in poverty being nominated for a Nobel Prize in Compassion.
Burn!
Eleutheros with the quick wits!
I'll bite:
And, Ellie, how many people do you know who make a living keeping people in poverty?
Are you referring to social workers who work with families to help them learn marketable skills so they can get a job? Who put people up for the night so they don't freeze on the streets, so they can live to see another day, given another chance to turn their life around?
Are you referring to the church pastor who, when the homeless fella came to the drop-in center, gave the homeless guy a newspaper so he could look for a job? The teacher who worked for a year with the illiterate adult so that he could read?
Who exactly is keeping folk in poverty?
Yes, all of those. All those people who break the legs of the poor, give them crutches, and then take credit for their being able to walk.
Those people broke the legs of the poor? One of us is slow, eluetheros. Probably me, cuz I don't see the connection.
Wow! Teaching someone to read is equal to giving them a crutch. And helping people get jobs is keeping them in poverty.
You see, I thought compassion was recognizing that we all make mistakes. I thought it was understanding that when someone wants to correct those mistakes, it was OK to help them, much like I've been helped.
I'm not trying to be sarcastic, but are you serious? I kinda get the impression that you say this stuff to get Dan & some of his readers riled.
Alice:"I kinda get the impression that you say this stuff to get Dan & some of his readers riled."
I do, of course. But, as we are wont to say here abouts, I'm kidding on the square. It's great fun to get the unexamined riled. Notice I didn't say 'liberal', just the unexamined of any ilk.
Let me take education as an example for brevity's sake, but I can make you a similar case for medicine, social work, and the ministry (and a number of other 'professions).
Have you ever seen the bumper sticker "If you can read this, thank a teacher." The myth is that if it weren't for teachers, we'd all be bumbling about illiterate and unable to count beyond five.
But of course it's a myth. People learn to read and write and calculate BETTER without schools and teachers. I have, let's say, a lot of children. None of them, not one of them, has ever had the first lesson in reading, writing, or math. Not one flash card, not one lesson in phonics, not one exercise in hand writing. Nothing. Yet they all read and write fluently and do complex math in their heads.
This is the norm and was the way of things before the advent of government schools. What the education "profession" does is campaign to convince people that they CAN'T read or do math. Don't even try it. Parents parrot this to their preschool children and by the time the child is old enough for academics, he's convinced he can't do it unless the mystic teacher performs a transformation on them.
Yet in every instance, every single one, where children are just left alone and not indoctrinated in the brain washing, they pick up reading effortlessly, and in fact anything else they want to learn for the rest of their lives.
The indoctrination is good, isn't it? See how quickly people respond with 'Huh?, How could a teacher be keeping children FROM learning?"
Education as a whole is a profession that takes a free flowing water hose, kinks it, and then when it lets off some of the constriction and some little bit of water flows, they claim they have created water and are the source of it.
Like educators and learning
are
social workers and poverty
ministers and spirituality
doctors and health
etc.
"But of course it's a myth. People learn to read and write and calculate BETTER without schools and teachers."
Undoubtably, some of us could.
But do we think a nation with some of us educated is what we want? Or some of us pulling ourselves up out of poverty? Some of us getting adequate health care?
As you know, Dr. E, I think you make a great case that our system is corrupt and needs change. And I don't disagree with you.
I do sometimes question the process by which you'd hope to accomplish this.
Master Dan:"But do we think a nation with some of us educated is what we want? Or some of us pulling ourselves up out of poverty? Some of us getting adequate health care?
..........
I do sometimes question the process by which you'd hope to accomplish this."
Of course you question it, Dan, because you are operating under unexamined hypotheses. You assume that if the educrates withdrew, only SOME of us would be educated. You assume that if the poverty-mongers withdrew, only SOME of us would prosper. And you assume that if the sickness profession were transcended only SOME of us would be healthy.
On what do you base this?
We were told by the conquistadors (who were biased) that the MesoAmericans believed that if they did not perform human sacrifice every year, the sun would fail to wax after the solstice and life would disappear. To their thinking, what fool would take a chance to test that theory! Modern "helping" [nod,nudge,wink] professions do exactly that same thing. They perform human sacrifice and any suggestion that they stop doing it is met with the hand-wringing that the fearsome Huitzilopochtli would take away the sun and the world would descend into darkness .... er ... I mean .... only SOME of us would have education, prosperity, and health.
Where is the population of people who have not been indoctrinated by Babylon on which we are to test this hypothesis?
What evidence we have is to the contrary though. We spend billions on education and yet we are as a whole functionally illiterate and woefully uninformed. We have the most extensive "health" [nod,nudge,wink] care system in history and yet we are obese, neurotic, and in disasterous health. We spend trillions on poverty programs and yet more people than ever view themselves as poor.
When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. The only reason to keep digging is in the fevered hallucination that if you stop, the fearsome Huitzilopochtli will be right over your shoulder heralding disaster.
I submit, Dan, in this your hypothesis is unexamined.
Eleutheros: "But of course it's a myth. People learn to read and write and calculate BETTER without schools and teachers."
Hmm..most of the time you make sense to me Eleutheros, but not this time. Of course my experience with this is rather limited I confess. My grandfather, born in the year 1867, never went to school and he never learned to read or write. Yet he had a farm and owned a store where he sold the fruit of his labors. He did rather well for himself until the depression. He had all his money in a bank and lost it. He signed his name with an "X" until the day he died in 1952.
So if you can learn to read and write without the aid of a teacher, how come he didn't?
Marty:"So if you can learn to read and write without the aid of a teacher, how come he didn't?}
Since he was born in 1867, he was born after the advent of compulsory attendance and the indoctrinization that if you didn't attend school, then just forget about reading. But the answer is simpler than that:
I could easily reverse your question and ask with virtually everyone having the advantage now of days of years of education at the hands of "professionals", why is the literacy rate so low? If attendng school imparts the ability to read, why aren't those people learning to read?
The answer is, some people don't learn to read for whatever reason. But take the state of Mass. for exaple where the first law for attendance at government schools was passed. The literacy rate was about 94% BEFORE the law was passed. It has never been that high again.
Oddly, 1867 was the year my great-grandmother was born and her husband as born in 1856. Neigher attened school and both read and wrote very well.
My own mother read very poorly and when I asked her why, she always explained that she only went to school through the third grade. As an older adult, I finally managed to break through the indoctrination and she reads quite fluently.
The stats are crushingly on the side of the phenomenon that if you don't indoctrinate a child, they learn to read on their own as if by osmosis. Being part of the 'unschooling' movement and having not exposed any of my own children to schooling, I can tell you in case after case, family after family, time and time again, children learn what they need to know and more just from exposure to it in the absence of indoctrination .
To refute this requires the example of people who failed to learn although there was an absence of indoctrination .
Was this the case with your grandfather?
"Of course you question it, Dan, because you are operating under unexamined hypotheses. You assume that if the educrates withdrew, only SOME of us would be educated."
Would I be totally wrong in thinking that statement a load of BS?
Are you suggesting that pre-public education days, anything approaching a majority were literate? Educated?
Are you suggesting that pre-welfare days, there were no folk homeless or hungry?
I know that education (social assistance, etc) has its flaws - that there's something to be said to education that keeps one free from corporation- and gov't-dependency but some public education does just that, it would depend upon the teacher, seems to me.
Dan:"Are you suggesting that pre-public education days, anything approaching a majority were literate? Educated?"
I'm not so much as suggesting it as stating it as fact. Now of days the majority are not educated. Sure enough the majority are indoctrinated, but that's not the same as saying they are educated. And yes, before the days of public education MORE people were educated than are today.
I would point you to John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education sto set you on our journey out of the fog of educational indoctrination that produced the above retort when really, isn't it true, Dan, you are just relying on the unstated and unsubstantiated myth that public education was necessary in order to make the masses literate. Here's the entire book online:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
In it is rather conclusive proof that before the advent of government schools, the literacy rate among non-slaves was near 100% and has never approached that since.
Dan:"Are you suggesting that pre-welfare days, there were no folk homeless or hungry?"
No folk???? Being a little absolutist are we, Dan? No folk?? There were not nearly as many as there are now and the increase in homeless and poor follows a direct relationship with government spending on those programs, especially spending to pay for administrators of those programs.
I remember that in the late 50's and early 60's there was ONE family in an elementary school district of over 200 families that was so poor it relied on public and church based assistance. Just on the radio this evening was a discussion that in many of the counties here in Appalachia now of days the rate of people on disability and welfare is as high as 60% of the population. Back in those days there were no people living under bridges or flagging down cars. What happened between than and now? Mainly the rise of profession to broker poverty and the more poor the stronger the profession.
Else, Dan, how do you explain the decline in the literacy rate along with a steady increase in educational spending? How do you explain that within my lifetime we have gone from nearly no poverty to populations where more than half the people have to be on some sort of government dole?
Eleutheros,
I have no idea whether my grandfather (paternal, btw) suffered from this indoctrination that you speak of. Absolutely nothing is known about his background, his parents, or what kind of upbringing he had. The little bit of research that I've done appears he was living and working on his own by the time he was 14.
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