Thursday, August 7, 2008

California Uber alles

An interesting bill sb 1322 now sits on California Gov. Schwarzenegger’s desk, having already easily progressed through the state assembly and senate. This bill’s basic function is to remove all of the anti-communist regulations and restrictions on teachers in California, thus putting communism on a level playing field with the wide range of other -ism’s.

This bill is interesting to me because it's legislative success suggests one of two things... either communism is now so utterly passe in this country that no one fears it or that it’s underlying ideas are so common that no one finds explicit communism objectionable anymore.

Conservative bloggers have already started in on this topic here, and here with the slightly panicky tone that is oh-so familiar for regular readers. They fear that without authoritarian rules designed to ostracize anyone with communist ideas, then our schools will soon be turning out generation after generation of leftism indoctrinated drones. I believe this passage to be the most troubling to them:

"This bill would delete provisions that prohibit a teacher giving instruction in a school or on property belonging to an agency included in the public school system from teaching communism with the intent to indoctrinate or to inculcate in the mind of any pupil a preference for communism. The bill would also delete provisions that a teacher may be dismissed from employment if he or she teaches communism in that way."

Perhaps they have a point... but I doubt the one that they will likely think of. The problem isn't that our public schools will turn generations of kids into happy little leftists because they already do that. The problem is this bill suggests that we have completely abandoned the principle that we should be teaching people how to think, not what to think. Most people who read about this bill will worry that their children are being influenced in favor of communism when they should be concerned that their children are being indoctrinated rather than educated.

A teacher who teaches communism with the intent to indoctrinate or predispose someone to it should be fired because preaching and indoctrinating is not their job in an educational environment. Our teachers should be cultivating intellectual curiosity, sound methodology, historical context, and logical skills, etc. but not indoctrinating. It shouldn't matter what ideological predilection an academic has, he should leave it at the door and strive to sharpen the conceptual faculties of his students.

The language in this bill  flagrantly acknowledges a philosophical premise that the left has been pushing for years: that the human rational faculty (empiricism, reason, and applied logic) is useless in knowing the truth of the world and therefore educating to those ends is pointless. 

In their world, you can't teach a student to understand anything because their is nothing to understand, thus it is simply a battle of which emotional ideology is to be impressed upon the next generation, ideally theirs of course. No point in striving for impartiality because it is impossible and futile. No reason to train students minds to think logically, rationally, and efficiently because it is a lie. Just accept your base emotional whims and go with the heard.

Accepting the notion that education is simply cultural indoctrination, absent of objective value, is to completely abandon its purpose, value, and utility. Given that, what underlies the left's vigorous support of the public school system, if not to educate and enlighten?

Simply put, they believe that the purpose of education is to indoctrinate. Ultimately it is their intent to mold generation after generation into compliant, harmless, unthinking, desperately confused robots seeking some authority to submit to. That is what is scary about this bill - it is the tacit approval of this coming to pass.

Gov. Schwarzenegger should veto this bill and should follow it up with the decimation of the entire public school system in California. It is obviously horribly corrupted by irrationalism and the only thing that can fix it is nature itself.

Sir Francis Bacon once said:

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed"

The natural world is reality and it has rules. Every misstep and every violation of those rules will be mercilessly punished; the world enforces its nature absolutely and relentlessly. Those same rules, when understood and obeyed, open the door to immense human potential as well as a kind and benevolent universe. Civilization is the byproduct of a far stricter adherence to that fact than those cultures which still dwell in poverty and barbarism. Within civilization, complete liberty is man's most natural state and the free-market (i.e. capitalism) its economic expression. Only the coercive force of the state (or chaotic violence) can corrupt the market and nowhere is that corruption more apparent than the public education system.

State sponsored education attempts to violate one of natures rules: that of accountability. The state taxes the people in order to subsidize public schools. It regulates the competition and controls its curriculum. The schools are funded based on forced attendance and not on achievement or quality. Coupled with an obscenely powerful teacher's union, and meddling politicians the public schools have become ineffective bastions of irrationalism, inefficiency, and leftism. It is only their sheltered existence and the states ruthless oppression of competition that keeps them in existence. In the natural world they would have died out years ago. 

Let loose the market upon education such that it can devour the weak and irrational parts of. Force the school system to abandon it's absurdities or die as a consequence. The insipid and irrational ideologies such as communism stand little chance in the market place of ideas and a school system which accepts them will justly whither away, bested by the superior, more rational schools which will necessarily and inevitably evolve. 

In a free society, without government intrusion, it is the rational, and their institutions, that will flourish and they would have nothing to fear from any phantoms of communism. They need not worry about their culture being corrupted because the market, and nature itself will continuously cleanse such irrationality from the civilized world.

No comments: