Friday, March 3, 2017

PROPER GRAMMAR IS RACIST ACCORDING TO QUACKADEMIC EXPERT

It has been a while since I've indulged in one of my rants about Amairikuhn egdykayshun and the Gramscian cultural Marxist nitwittery prevailing in Amairikuhn quackademia. While some, for example, are applauding President Trump's selection of Betsy Devos as edgykayshun sekretairee, I have my misgivings, not the least because of her apparent advocacy of vouchers and charter schools and so on. Now, just for the record once again, I'm a real radical when it comes to Amairikuhn edgykayshun and Common Core and all that: things would be far better if the federal government were not involved at all, and on this score, vouchers and so on strike me as just another form of welfare, and yet another clever way the idiots in the swamp can dictate to states and localities. I'm of the John Taylor Gatto philosophy. There's no fixing the system; the system is the problem. The key pillars of that rotting edifice, standardized computerized tests and all the testing companies, teacher licensing requirements, all of it, has to go. Out. Not a penny more on all this claptrap.
Well, the latest nitwittery is that proper English grammar is racist, and that to be compassionate, we must view corrections of grammar as condescension and inherent racism:
Here, as always, the goal of the cultural Marxist is to break down the culture so that another can be imposed, and language is always crucial to this process, for it's fundamental that there be no common ground of communication on which any cultural cohesion or institutions can be based. This leaves the raw power of the state to be exercised to settle all disputes: perpetual division, in other words, is essential to the agenda. I would go farther, and say that the same attitudes are behind the "push" of modern "art" and "music", for the goal is the same: break down anything that carries tradition, whether language, or the arts. This is the Gramscian insight into how to cause genuine and lasting revolutionary change, and the American progressives - they are no longer liberal for now they openly censor, through their corporate media organs, any opposing ideas - follow this agenda to the "t".
But there's also hope, so this is not my usual nor conventional "rant," for there is also growing resistance to the continual treadmill of testing (which, remember, is designed to reinforce the above "values" in many cases); this article was shared by many readers of this site:
Here's the crux of the article:
Indeed, PARCC, like assessments around the country, are used to measure school performance as a whole, and in some cases to also evaluate teaching performance. It’s federal law that schools must test students every year in grades 3 through 8, and then once in high school. Ninety-five percent of students must take the tests for schools not to be penalized.
Keep in mind, too, that we’re not talking about just one test. Students often must take multiple assessments several times a year in order to gauge their progress. Gone are the days when kids took one such exam per year which gave them (and their parents) a snapshot of how they were doing compared to their peers across the country.
And this is precisely why testing “opt-out” movements have been springing up all over the country: The sheer quantity of testing simply has gotten ridiculous.
Note that in the United States and several other western countries, tests are mandated by law, and that means, to put it as plainly as possible, that certain corporations which make the tests and sell the texts, are guaranteed an income at the public trough. And whenever there is guaranteed income at the public trough, standards plummet, and crud creeps in (think vaccines here, for a moment). But on optional tests, students increasingly opt out, and I suspect it's about more than just sheer exhaustion at the ridiculous numbers of tests they must take; I suspect it is also because the students themselves are not as stupid as the test-makers think they are; students increasingly, and not just intuitively, realize the system they are subjected to is both fraudulent, and a sham.
Here I have a confession: back in my public college teaching days, privately and on more than one occasion, I would tell students what they already knew: the vast majority of their education, and a significant number of their professors, were fraudulent. That is, they were being subjected to dumbed-down tasteless pudding, fraudulent assessment techniques (i.e., the standardized test), and that if they wanted an education, they'd have to read read read on their own while getting their first, second, and master mason degrees from their local lodge of quackademia.
Some are now recognizing this in yet another way: http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/31219/
Here one notes another obvious flaw of the standardized testing regime:
“Tests teach, they don’t just evaluate,” he said. “And I thought what was being taught on the SAT and ACT didn’t necessarily correspond to a Christian or Catholic worldview and in some ways, it seemed to undermine that.”
The exam’s parent company, Classic Learning Initiatives, was co-founded by Tate and David Wagner in fall 2015. They created a two-hour online test that prospective college students can take at a local testing center.
Scheduled on five dates per year, the test includes 120 questions and uses a 120-point scoring system. The test’s three sections – verbal reasoning, grammar/writing and quantitative reasoning – include 40 questions each. With an emphasis on classical education, the reading and writing sections include selections on religion and philosophy as well as historical founding documents.
Tate said the SAT and ACT’s promotion of globalization has eroded loyalty to any particular cultural or intellectual tradition. The CLT counters that. (Emphasis added)
This underscores something my co-author Gary Lawrence and I pointed out in our book Rotten to the (Common) Core, namely, that in the 1930s and 1940s - as the progressive movement captured American education and began its long and ultimately successful effort to turn it into quackademia and the breeding grounds for the shrieking and violent hysteria we see now - there were publications in the "professional education" field that explicitly stated the goal of education was socialization skills (echoing Dewey), and that students had to be trained to be good "world citizens." And that meant, of course, yet another severing of education as a means of preserving and conveying a cultural tradition, with its institutions of law and reason, its artistic and literary conventions, its philosophy and historical journey and evolution. Standardized tests are meant to convey, and enforce, a narrative approved by the corporations making and selling them, nothing more, nothing less. They are nothing but loyalty tests to that narrative.
Notably the second article implies something else, namely, that the large "big name" universities are now the laboratories of permanent revolution, offering nothing but continuous courses in how to feel (or induce) guilt, depending on one's race status. They have little to do with education in any traditional sense. Or to be more crisp about it: they are the hollowed-out husks of tradition, dedicated to the overturning of all tradition.You can tell because of their mandated courses in guilt-pandering: the courses that require them to use gender neutral language, or require them to "appreciate" other "cultures," and so on. It is the smaller, and predominantly liberal arts institutions, that are struggling to maintain the tradition of our culture and civilization.
So a word of advice: if you value your children's sanity and virtue, don't send them to institutions like Berserkley (our code name for the big American universities, state or otherwise)... they will come out knowing little of real value, and owing lots of money. They will come out mangled beyond recognition. If they are lucky, they will recognize they have been broken, and that they have been "had". Don't allow them to accept scholarships to those institutions if they are offered. They are corrupt to the core, and only offering a Faustian deal with the devil (which they can afford to do, since so many students are coming out of the public school system knowing nothing about Faust or deals with the devil, Marlowean, Goethean, or otherwise. Fewer still will have Dante's perspective about climbing out of hell on the back of the frozen devil). They will attend "schools" whose sole purpose is to desecrate and eventually destroy their soul; "schools" whose purpose is to rinse every blemish of the sublime, the good, the transcendent, the beautiful, or the divine from their memories; "schools" which will tell them it's ok to modify human DNA for the "promise of a brighter human future" while never permitting the debate to be had or aired.  I know students who have made that deal with the devil, and who have attended such quackademies, and the confusing rubble and debris of what used to be the ramparts of an individual  soul and an individual mind, is frightening, terrible, terrifying, and very, very sad.Image result for pic of head up your ass

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