In Pursuit of Cultural Hegemony
[This is Part IV of a five-part essay; if you haven't yet seen them, first read Part I, Part II, and Part III.]
While educators may be unconsciously relying on dubious theories of psychological modeling (as mentioned in yesterday’s essay) to justify the unrelenting ethnic tokenism in our nation’s schoolbooks, their official explanation revolves around the supposed need to boost students’ “self-esteem.” Those kids who do poorly in school, the theory goes, fail only because they have low self-esteem, leading to low expectations. Therefore, the best way to boost performance for struggling students is not to make their curriculum more challenging or to tailor it to their needs, but rather to use the curriculum as a mechanism to improve students’ self-image. If kids love themselves, the educational theorists claim, they’ll want to succeed, and if they want to succeed, they will succeed. Problem solved!
And so the entire educational system has systematically been re-tooled to focus on self-esteem building. In early grades this involves unsubtle classroom activities — assignments, songs, everybody-wins “contests” — directly informing each student how wonderful they are. In later grades, however, kids begin to grow more sophisticated and skeptical of such heavy-handed methods, so the curriculum designers “cleverly” embed self-esteem building hidden messages into the reading material where it can work on each student’s subconscious. Usually this involves praising and glamorizing “heroes” who just happen to share some ethnic/cultural/gender/appearance attribute with kids in the class, the assumption being that the students’ minds will internalize the message, “If this hero who looks just like me can succeed, then so can I!”
Needless to say, this is the biggest crock of baloney ever foisted on the American public. True self-esteem is not a precursor to achievement and success, it comes as the natural consequence of achievement and success. It’s something you earn, not something you’re given. And to the extent that one can artificially induce baseless self-esteem in someone who has not done anything noteworthy to earn it, one has only succeeded in creating a child with a personality disorder whose swollen ego and sense of entitlement will only later serve as a hindrance in adult real-world interactions.
All of that is brushed aside by the now-prevailing self-esteem mantra. And since statistics show that in most school districts there is a higher percentage of minority students struggling academically, the liberal curriculum designers invariably populate textbooks with inspirational minority heroes, thinking this will provide enough of a self-esteem boost to “eliminate the achievement gap.”
The end result of this self-esteem paradigm (or at least the leftist implementation of it) is a complete abandonment of any pretense of historical accuracy, as the following example illustrates.
Carver and Maxwell: a Tale of Two Scientists
Like most students in post-WWII America, throughout my schooling I was taught repeated lessons about George Washington Carver, a famed African-American agricultural scientist. My teachers always remained a little vague about what exactly his scientific achievements were, but we learned in no uncertain terms that Carver was a Great Scientist who must be respected and admired now and forever.
Years later, while taking a History of Science course in graduate school, I learned about a 19th-century Scottish physicist named James Clerk Maxwell. Prior to taking that class, I had never heard of the guy.
Now, older and wiser, looking at all this in retrospect, something uneasy dawns on me. Waaaaiiiiit a minute. What was that all about? Why was I (and just about every other kid in America) endlessly instructed on the glories of Carver, but never even apprised of Maxwell’s existence? Therein lies an instructional tale.
George Washington Carver
George Washington Carver, while perhaps being a good person, an altruistic person, and one of the first African-Americans to receive notoriety for his intellectual pursuits, was in fact not a “great scientist” nor one who made any significant scientific breakthroughs.
Just as with Roy Benavidez (the military hero mentioned in Part III of this essay), it’s not that I seek to criticize Carver. Did George Washington Carver raise himself up by his own bootstraps and intellect during an era of harsh segregation to become a respected professor and researcher? Yes. Did he strive to help his fellow man? Yes. Was he among the first black men to achieve national fame? Yes. So: Should George Washington Carver be included in textbooks? Certainly. But…not to the exclusion of more important scientists. And his importance should not be vastly over-emphasized (as it currently is).
The problem with textbooks is that they have limited space in which to convey an infinitude of knowledge. So, for example with the history of science, there should be a triage system whereby the most important scientists are the first to be assured inclusion in textbooks, followed by the slightly less important scientists, and so on. But if a personage of comparatively minor importance gets elevated to a higher position in the prioritization, that necessarily means some other scientist, whose contributions on an objective basis were more significant, must get excluded.
So, if students only have time to learn about the contributions of just one scientist, you should probably start (for example) with Isaac Newton. If the book has space for just two, then also include Albert Einstein. If three or four, you toss in James Clerk Maxwell and Galileo. And so on down the line. This is important on a meritocratic basis, and also because the students are not just learning about these scientists’ personal stories, but are in addition (hopefully) learning the fundamentals of science in the process.
Now, there have been many great scientists over the millennia. Hundreds and hundreds to choose from, in many different fields. And they are all (including George Washington Carver) worthy of admiration. Science is a noble pursuit. But, using purely objective criteria measuring the significance of what each scientist achieved or discovered, one would have to go through a thousand individuals of overwhelming historical importance before one came to George Washington Carver. He may have been a somewhat significant personage of social-historical note (i.e. as one of the first African-Americans of national stature), and he may have had good intentions, but he was not an important scientist. I fully realize that in this modern political environment it is simply not cool to point this out, but it’s an essential component of the debate which remains unspoken.
George Washington Carver’s reputation as a scientist is based on two things: advocating crop rotation, and developing alternate uses for the peanut. Let’s look at each in turn.
Carver encouraged crop rotation to replenish soils in the South after decades of cotton monoculture had depleted the land’s nutrients. Good idea, and an admirable economic suggestion — but it was not a scientific breakthrough, or even something particularly original. Many other people in Carver’s era had been recommending the same thing for quite some time. And crop rotation (as a way to replenish soils) had been standard practice in Europe, the Middle East, China, ancient Rome and even ancient Mesopotamia for thousands of years. So, while it may have been a wise policy, it was not a scientific achievement.
Carver also supposedly developed hundreds of uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes and soybeans. However, he never kept lab notes, so we have no idea what any of his formulas were. Furthermore, not a single one of his novel agricultural products turned out to be be useful:
After his death the Carver Museum, which he had helped create at Tuskegee, credited him with developing 287 peanut commodities. One hundred twenty-three were foods and beverages, 68 were paints or dyes, and the rest were livestock foods, cosmetics, medicinal preparations, and miscellaneous uncategorized items. The catalog was inflated by much near duplication: among the individual entries were bar candy, chocolate-coated peanuts, and peanut chocolate fudge; all-purpose cream, face cream, face lotion, and hand cream; thirty cloth dyes, nineteen leather dyes, and seventeen wood stains. Many items were clearly not original with Carver–even “salted peanuts” was on the list (though peanut butter was not). Nor could the efficacy of every preparation, such as a “face bleach and tan remover,” be taken for granted. Since Carver left no formulas for these products other than a single patented peanut cosmetic, later investigators were unable to evaluate or confirm his production of many of them.
Along with the peanut Carver championed the sweet potato, a nutritional complement also well suited to Southern soils. Man could live by the peanut and sweet potato alone, he asserted, for together they constituted a balanced ration. Again he publicized the crop’s potential in quantitative terms. “The sweet potato products number 107 up to date,” he told the congressional committee during his peanut presentation. “I have not finished working with them yet.”
Working almost entirely alone, Carver was uncommunicative about his laboratory procedures. A visiting chemist from nearby Auburn University found that he evaded all questions about how his products were made. G. Lake Imes recalled as “enigmatic” his replies to inquisitive visitors to his laboratory. Robert L. Vann, a black journalist, asked him if he had recorded the formulas for his many discoveries. “To my amazement,” Vann reported, “Dr. Carver looked at me and smiled and said, ‘I have all of these formulas, but I have not written them down yet.’”
What explanation of his scientific achievements Carver did offer was not calculated to satisfy other scientists. Speaking in 1924 at the Marble Collegiate Church in New York, he declared that he never used books in his work and depended on divine revelation for his product ideas and methods. In later addresses he often repeated his laboratory conversations with “Mr. Creator,” who told him what to do.
James Clerk Maxwell
Now, compare Carver’s “achievements” as a scientist with those of James Clerk Maxwell. For the purposes of this essay, I informally surveyed 20 friends and acquaintances; 19 out of the 20 had learned of George Washington Carver in school — but only 2 out of 20 had ever heard of James Clerk Maxwell. And yet, by most historical assessments, Maxwell was the third greatest scientist who ever lived, and the only one essentially on the same level as Newton and Einstein. Perhaps more than any single person, Maxwell paved the way for the modern world.
For the uninitiated: Maxwell revolutionized our understanding of the universe by discovering that electricity, magnetism and light were all manifestations of the same thing, the electromagnetic field; he was the first person to mathematically define the true nature of light itself; he overturned classical physics by finding a way to precisely describe matter (gas, in particular) using statistical models rather than individual measurements. Most of modern physics uses Maxwell as its launching pad; relativity and quantum mechanics are the direct descendants of his breakthroughs. Oh, and in his spare time, he invented color photography, among numerous other mind-boggling achievements.
Why mention Maxwell in this article? Because, despite his towering stature as one of the greatest and most influential geniuses who ever lived, he is rarely mentioned in any modern American K-12 textbooks, aside from a few Advanced Placement high school physics texts.
And yet George Washington Carver is nearly ubiquitous in schoolbooks for kids of all ages.
Now, if Carver was simply held up to students as an inspirational figure who overcame poverty and racism to achieve self-dignity, I’d have no quarrel with his ubiquity. But the problem is the endless insistence by the teachers and the books on Carver’s greatness as a scientist. Because if he was simply (but more accurately) portrayed as an underprivileged black man who rose through his own smarts and diligence to become a run-of-the-mill professor and nothing more, then the fable would not be so inspirational.
And so the story of Carver has been embroidered and exaggerated over the years, until he has become this towering untouchable genius of major historical significance. Or, as one of the innumerable online instructional materials about him puts it, “He was one of the finest scientists the world has ever known.”
Meanwhile, poor Maxwell, who really was “one of the finest scientists the world has ever known,” is totally ignored.
Why? Because education is no longer about facts. It’s about feelings. It’s about self-esteem building. It’s a group therapy session, a community-wide pep talk sprinkled with manufactured heroes and role models whose tales are carefully crafted to be uplifting, facts be damned. And since the dominant Left’s ruinous insistence on identity politics insures that our selfhood is primarily defined by our ethnicity, we end up believing that George Washington Carver really must have been a great scientist — not because of his actual discoveries, but because it serves a purpose to believe so.
The Rise of the Special Interest Groups
The battle over textbook bias and falsehoods is not limited strictly to the left-right cleavage. All sorts of special interest groups, with varying degrees of success, insist that their version of reality be included in textbooks — often at the expense of the truth. For example, an influx of strings-attached Saudi money led to textbooks which taught that Muslims discovered America before Columbus, based entirely on wishful thinking. Islamic religious indoctrination, masquerading as neutral lessons about the Middle East, have become commonplace in American schools over the last decade.
The list goes on: Environmentalists, Native Americans, feminists, Hispanics, gay activists, the disabled, and many more groups have joined the fray to ensure that American educational curriculum does not give them short shrift. The end result is that much of our classroom time is spent reciting the grievance litanies of every self-defined social subgroup in America.
Gramsci
This fracturing of education into a million useless little pieces is not a bug of the leftist agenda — it’s a feature. The goal is (and has been for years) to use the public schools to transform American culture, in order to make it ripe for a communist revolution.
That’s right: communist. No more pussyfooting around. To quote from part of a photo-essay I published two years ago,
That’s right, I said “commie.” The word usually elicits one of two reactions:
Mainstream average Americans — who have been duped into thinking that communism is a relic of the past which disappeared with the fall of the Soviet Union — feel that anyone still battling against imaginary Cold War enemies must be some sort of Dr. Strangelove-esque kook who worries about Precious Bodily Fluids and builds fallout shelters in the basement; OR…
Communists themselves — who thought it was safe to emerge from the shadows now that the world’s attention was drawn elsewhere after the fall of the Berlin Wall — react to the word with revulsion and fury, accusing anyone who says it of being a fascist McCarthyite intent on persecuting innocent Americans with hysterical witch hunts.
There’s one little detail, however, that tends to get overlooked: The communists are still here, and they’re just as dangerous as they ever were, and have not relinquished their goal of overthrowing the United States and bringing an end to the capitalist system. And the reason I’m aware of this fact perhaps more than the typical person is that I often attend anti-war rallies, which is where communists really come out of the woodwork.
And the other arena in which communist ideology never went away is academia, and in particular the educational world. The state sponsors of communism (i.e. The Soviet Union) have mostly ceased to exist, but the ideology remains as strong as ever.
Perhaps the most accurate word to describe the leftist takeover of education is Gramscianism, yet since so few people are familiar with the term, “communism” drives the point home more forcefully. But most Americans would be well-served to learn a bit about Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist philosopher whose ideas have grown to be as influential as those of Karl Marx himself.
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| Illustration by Buzzsawmonkey |
Wikipedia actually has a fairly honest encapsulation of Gramsci’s thesis, which I’ll quote here to avoid accusations that I chose a biased source:
Hegemony
Hegemony was a concept previously used by Marxists such as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin to indicate the political leadership of the working-class in a democratic revolution, but developed by Gramsci into an acute analysis to explain why the ‘inevitable’ socialist revolution predicted by orthodox Marxism had not occurred by the early 20th century. Capitalism, it seemed, was even more entrenched than ever. Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became the ‘common sense’ values of all. Thus a consensus culture developed in which people in the working-class identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.
The working class needed to develop a culture of its own, which would overthrow the notion that bourgeois values represented ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ values for society, and would attract the oppressed and intellectual classes to the cause of the proletariat. Lenin held that culture was ‘ancillary’ to political objectives but for Gramsci it was fundamental to the attainment of power that cultural hegemony be achieved first. …
Intellectuals and education
… [Gramsci] claimed that modern intellectuals were not simply talkers, but directors and organisers who helped build society and produce hegemony by means of ideological apparatuses such as education and the media. Furthermore, he distinguished between a ‘traditional’ intelligentsia which sees itself (wrongly) as a class apart from society, and the thinking groups which every class produces from its own ranks ‘organically’. Such ‘organic’ intellectuals do not simply describe social life in accordance with scientific rules, but rather articulate, through the language of culture, the feelings and experiences which the masses could not express for themselves. The need to create a working-class culture relates to Gramsci’s call for a kind of education that could develop working-class intellectuals, who would not simply introduce Marxist ideology from without the proletariat, but rather renovate and make critical of the status quo the already existing intellectual activity of the masses. His ideas about an education system for this purpose correspond with the notion of critical pedagogy and popular education as theorized and practised in later decades by Paulo Freire in Brazil, and have much in common with the thought of Frantz Fanon. For this reason, partisans of adult and popular education consider Gramsci an important voice to this day.
Translated into practical terms and updated from its early-20th-century Italian cultural setting, Gramsci’s thesis is understood by the modern left to mean:
Socialist revolution will never happen in a nation if its culture continually reaffirms and enshrines middle-class capitalist values. Thus, in order to pave the way for the arrival of a communist state, radicals must first insinuate themselves into and/or influence the media and educational system, and from these positions of influence change public attitudes about the status quo. To achieve political hegemony, you must first achieve cultural hegemony.
This was a significant change from Marx’s and Lenin’s original ideas about communist revolution, which basically involved simply seizing power, public opinion be damned, and afterward propagandizing the masses to accept the new order. Gramsci realized that Marx had it reversed, and that the propaganda and indoctrination must happen first, in order to make the populace open to the idea of revolution; otherwise, rendered complacent by middle-class values and comforts, the populace would never consent to the upheaval of a revolution.
The media and public schools were correctly identified by Gramsci as the most influential cultural institutions, and it was therefore those that the left realized must be targeted.
It is this sophisticated Gramscian plan, and not the more brutish Marxist idea of simply seizing power by force, which has guided leftist thought in America since WWII. And it is why the media and education have, over time, been slowly turned into engines of leftist propaganda. Gramscianism matured into “critical pedagogy” which is the real-world application of his educational theories, and countless left-leaning young adults have for decades been nudged toward careers in education and the media. Some time ago, we crossed a threshold in which the Gramscian infiltrators no longer had to ply their trade surreptitiously, but became the majority in the media and in education, and after that point the process accelerated rapidly as they took over both fields and turned them into ideological weapons.
(As an aside: Note also that Wikipedia correctly identifies Frantz Fanon as a Gramscian thinker. “At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.” — Barack Obama, in Dreams of My Father.)
This explains the otherwise mystifying insistence by leftist educators on ignoring facts in favor of “politically correct” ideas and frameworks. I have little doubt that the majority of teachers and educators don’t even know they’re part of a Gramscian project but still plow ahead with their ideologically driven careers anyway, unaware that they are myrmidons paving the way for revolution.
Don’t miss the final installment, with a way out of this mess:
Part V: Proposals for an Educational Renaissance
Part I: Ideological War Spells Doom for America’s Schoolkids
Part II: What’s the Matter with Texas?
Part III: Indoctrination Nation
Part IV: In Pursuit of Cultural Hegemony
Part V: Proposals for an Educational Renaissance
“A visiting chemist from nearby Auburn University found that he evaded all questions about how his products were made. G. Lake Imes recalled as “enigmatic” his replies to inquisitive visitors to his laboratory.”
Was that anything like “the science is settled”?
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
No man…the science was settled by this gem..
…“Mr. Creator,” who told him what to do.
Too bad the IPCC didn’t just use that as their defense…
HeH!
No…having “Mr. Creator” tell him what to do settled the science…..Heh!
“Why didn’t I think of that one?” – Richard Mann
I’m gonna have to disagree with your assertion that self-esteem is built through individual success and achievemnet. Self-aggrandisement might come from those things, but not- true self-esteem. Self esteem needs to be rooted in a bedrock, unshakable knowledge that you are worthy because of who you are, not because of what you’ve done. If your self-esteem is built on your achievements and successes, then when you fail to achieve something, your view of self crashes. Knowing that you are uniquely valued and valuable because of who you are will help you ride out the ups and downs of life.
Don’t think for a minute that I’m talking about some Libtardian clap-trap basis such as gender, race, sexual identity or even membership in the human “family” for the realization that you are worthy. I’m not. You are worthy because you were created in the image of God. HE makes you “worthy”. Base your idenity on that, and not on any of the other rot….personal success included, and you can begin to have true “self-esteem”.
Otherwise.. good post.
Have at it all you who would deny the truth of this simple concept…..
That’s a pretty good point — self esteem comes from more than just achievements, etc. (although they have a part in the process); it involves some sort of philosophical quest for “the life well lived”, which is irregardless of material gain.
1) don’t confuse self-respect with self-esteem
2) deriving esteem from a sense of accomplishment in life does not mean one needs a life of unbroken successes. It’s possible to put a failure in the context of other accomplishments and lessons learned from the failure (an accomplishment in itself) and not lose one’s achievement-driven self esteem even though periods of failure or “hard luck.”
> Self esteem needs to be rooted in a bedrock, unshakable knowledge that you are worthy
> because of who you are, not because of what you’ve done.
I must disagree. Who we are IS what we have done. Because what we have done shapes who we are. “Sow a thought, and you reap an act. Sow an act, and you reap a habit. Sow a habit, and you reap a character. Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.”
< Who we are IS what we have done. Because what we have done shapes who we are.
Now I need to disagree….sort of. Who we are, really are…not who we want to be, depends on what we have done in one SPECIFIC area of life. It depends on whether we have accepted the gift of the One who willingly took all of our unrighteousness on Himself. Beyond seeing ourselves from God's viewpoint, all else is pretending to be what we're not.
It has been noted that many accomplished people have “suffered” from “low self-esteem” as that term is generally defined. So who really cares about “self-esteem” except its chief proponents and hustlers?
We’ve got a nation full of people who unconsciously subscribe to one variant or another of your description of how self-esteem is arrived at, and they are narcissistic dolts who give themselves names like “The Situation.”
Selfesteem, of the permanent variety, stems from doing one’s best; whether success or failure is the result. A viable selfimage is that of one who knows he has done all he could do; and that, at the next opportunity he will again and again do his very best. Since one cannot do better than one’s best; success is so defined. If one succeeds without doing his best he feels an inherent guilt for his sloth or cowardice and sees himself as lazy and or fearful. He who gives 100% will always have a great self image.
It’s part of the fill the little heads full of mush adjenda.
If there is one thing schools should teach is that you can’t trust yourself unless you have mastered some discipline, and trusting yourself is not a discipline, it’s a resource to be earned, you can’t fake it!
The only way to get rid of the self-esteem-by-compassion fallacy is to defeat its proponents at every chance we get, and that includes the ballot. They probably sense that they have lost already, as we can see them spending whatever energy is left in rear-guard battles.
Children will apply themselves to the mastery of a discipline of their choice, after they learn respect of the most elementary disciplines of respect and patience in the first place. We can return to this. It’s a choice free people can make!
Heh. Good article. FWIW I always understood that the attention paid to Carver was because of his race. I think most students know this.
Also FWIW I’m just one physicist, and therefore have not the standing to challenge the consensus. But I wouldn’t have thought to put Maxwell at #3. Top ten, certainly, but… my vote for #3 would have gone to Richard Feynman, for his contributions to quantum electrodynamics. IMHO the theory of quantum electrodynamics, of which Feynman was the prime (albeit not lone) contributor, was the crowning intellectual achievement of the 20th century. Not just of physics, but of all intellectual achievement: better than the discovery of DNA, better than the invention of television, better than The Great Gatsby. QED is the most precisely validated physical theory ever, predicting (with standard model corrections) the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron correctly to ten decimal places. And the calculation is horrendously complicated, and it made feasible only through the use of… drumroll… Feynman diagrams. Feynman invented much of the mathematical claptrap that is elegantly encoded in his diagrams, including much of the process of renormalization. And quantum field theory is the template for the Standard Model, and is integral to string theory and indeed all the advanced theories of modern physics.
By comparison, Maxwell was a pioneer of breathtaking insight and capability, but he “only” had to invent the simplest vector field theory we know. He died before quantum mechanics was invented, so he didn’t quite have the bottom line on the “true nature of light” — it took Feynman to get us there! But still, amazing mind and contributions.
Other folks missing from the top ten, IMHO: Ludwig Boltzmann, Josiah Gibbs, William Rowan Hamilton, and Joseph Louis Lagrange. Boltzmann’s law (the one about the probability of a state being proportional to exp(-E/T)) is an amazingly deep insight into the statistical nature of many-particle systems, and is possibly the only classically derived law of physics to survive completely intact through the revolutions of relativity and quantum mechanics — as far as we know it is still an exact law. Gibbs was a co-inventor (along with Hamilton) of vector analysis, but his most significant contributions related to the connection of statistical mechanics and the phases of matter. Lagrange and Hamilton’s names are related by a Legendre transformation
— Lagrange helped to invent the calculus of variations, and invented Lagragian mechanics. Hamilton helped to invent vector analysis and invented Hamiltonian mechanics. Now, Isaac Newton was a giant, #1 or #2 in the polling, but nowadays modern physics is largely done without the help of Newtonian mechanics (because it’s not special-relativistic). But modern physics is inconceivable without Lagrangians and Hamiltonians. In my view any of these guys should knock Rutherford off the list, and maybe Dirac, maybe even Heisenberg or Schrodinger….
BBB
In his lectures, Feynman noted that Maxwell’s discovery (which is of course is to a big extent a mix of what he discovered and the laws of Faraday, Gauss, Lentz and Ampere) was far more important than US Civil War.
BTW, the Russians during Soviet times were sneakier – they just put the names of Russian scientists – for example the Gauss law became Gauss-Ostrogradskiy law.
“…I have a friend in Minsk,
Who has a friend in Pinsk,
Whose friend in Omsk
Has friend in Tomsk
With friend in Akmolinsk.
His friend in Alexandrovsk
Has friend in Petropavlovsk,
Whose friend somehow
Is solving now
The problem in Dnepropetrovsk…”
–By the way, those lines come from Tom Lehrer’s song about the great mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky. Lehrer was only joking about Lobachevsky.
It turns out that Lobachevsky really was a great mathematician; he stole from no-one. He was one of several mathematicians who independently discovered the background for the Fifth Postulate of Euclidean Geometry –and thus opened up the field of non-Euclidean space. Among other things, it lead to the study of spherical trigonometry, used by navigators world wide. It is the foundational mathematics behind GPS navigation.
As for James Maxwell, I knew who he was long before I heard about him in the classroom. I was (and still am) a ham radio enthusiast. I also knew who Carver was since third grade, though I never quite understood what all the fuss was about. Perhaps I should have asked more questions, but I was interested in other areas of science and technology.
Most of what I learned, I learned despite my schooling, not because of it.
An impressive list, and hard to argue with the choices, though I’m a little uncertain about Heisenberg.
Nobody here got it. Big surprise. I thought it was good though.
In the same vein:
Rene Descartes walks into a bar. Orders a scotch. “We only have beer and wine, sir; would you like a beer?” Descartes replies “I think not” … and promptly disappears.
Hahaha…soda out the nose. uncertin about Heisenberg
I was wondering why Niels wasn’t on bbbeard’s list. I guess it’s because Niels was such a bore. As for Schrödinger, of course, he’s on the list, he was such a cool cat, you couldn’t keep him off.
Sorry about that soda thing.
Well, truth be told, I cringe a little bit whenever I am called on to teach the Bohr model of the atom. I probably spend more time explaining why this isn’t the way quantum mechanics is done, what things it doesn’t predict, why — despite (or perhaps because of) its apparent simplicity — it represented a dead end in physics. Thing is, generations of non-physics or pre-physics students have been taught the Bohr model because the alternative requires too much math. But really it was a short-lived blind alley, despite generations of encomia. Even wave-particle duality is overblown. As some famous physicist said (I can’t remember who, and I’m paraphrasing): “There was a struggle between the wave theory and the particle theory of quantum mechanics. Waves won.” Which is to say, the particle aspect of quantum behavior is simply part of the “patter”, the tale we tell ourselves when the photomultiplier tube goes off. But if you want to calculate, say, an interaction cross-section, or a tunneling rate, or a decay width, the calculations all use wave mechanics, i.e. either Schrodinger’s equation or the fancy version of Huygens principle that Feynman et al. cooked up. So, sorry, I’m not a big fan of Niels Bohr.
“But if you want to calculate, say, an interaction cross-section, or a tunneling rate, or a decay width…”
It would probably be a good idea if I mastered balancing my checkbook, before I move on to slightly more complex mathematical exercies.
Nyuk nyuk. Yes, I got it.
But the thing is in science, everything is built upon the shoulders of giants. Without Newton, Leibnitz, Gauss, Faraday, Maxwell, Feynman wouldn’t have the base of understanding to develop his innovations. That’s the way it is and I’m sure he said it in his own time.
I think there is a sense in which one’s sense of self is enhanced by one’s awareness of significant accomplishments (self-defined, of course).
The project of rewarding all kids for the slightest thing surely backfires. The educational project really ought to be giving them the chance to learn something difficult, teaching them properly and carefully and step by step.
One problem is that teaching is hard, and as we know, the best students don’t go into teaching these days. I have witnessed a certain amount of incompetence among teachers, although they are almost always well-intentioned people.
Besides, if there’s content and skills to be learned, it’s likely that students will have different experiences–some successful, others not. A lot of people in education are made anxious by this fact.
If students never encounter difficulties–if they are bright enough that the normal school challenges (learning to read, etc.) are not difficult for them–it is likely that they will be really thrown, and confused, and tempted to give up / retire in confusion, when they do encounter something a bit harder. If they have to read an old-fashioned text of some kind (50 years old, or older), or have to do a task that hasn’t been presented to them step-by-step, for example.
They really need to be taught lots of things (languages, musical instruments, math) that you learn incrementally and build on and have to practice, to get good at.
That’s kind of the antithesis of the ‘how do you feel about X’ approach.
You are off somewhat on the self-esteem definition, self-esteem is shallow and merely means you need to be happy with yourself, so if you lose at whatever, you are crushed, and in most cases a poor sport about your failure. You’ll most likely look for someone to blame for it. It’s self respect that ballasts you for failure because self respect has to be earned, at that point you understand the deeper meaning of the concept because it involves others in the give take world of work and play, of the respect you can give and get for striving to be the best. So when you fail at something you show good sportsmanship and are ready to learn from your mistakes rather then sulk in the defeat for an enorddinet amount of time. It also give you the ability to judge others in this respect and you can build strong relationship in all aspects of life thus reaching that happy with yourself stuff.
also thought patricks oppinion on self esteeme was slightly off, your explaination fits the bill better, just a pat on back 4 u
Interesting. I’m tempted to say that those of us who were paying attention knew these things all along, but you make some interesting connections that are not readily apparent. Nor was I aware of Carver’s poor laboratory skills, low record of achievement and academic standing. And yet it does fit the pattern.
My 10th grader has an assignment to report on a prominent biological scientist from a list of 25 candidates. I am a double major in chemistry and biology, and was surprised to find that I did not recognize 3/4 of the names on his list. Mendel is there, but Lister and Pasteur are not. WTF?
Charlie
Pasteur? But he is a big reason why so many people don’t die today. A true hero of science.
As is Lister. So two people who’s efforts helped to prolong human life are not on the list. Who put together this list, Peter Singer and Donald Berwick?
A name I never heard when I was a boy was a genius called Nikolai Tesla . Years later when I studied electrical theory I discovered that Edison received a great deal of credit which belonged to Tesla.
I was in elementary school long before GW Carver was a textbook hero. But the same bias toward misinformation was incorporated even then ( 1940-1948).
Absolutely, but the problem with Tesla is that while he was a certifiable genius, his lab notes were even worse than Carver’s. Secretive to a fault.
He also really shouldn’t have invented that teleporter/duplicator machine.
Self-esteem and confidence are not unrelated. Both can change over time.
Both involve positive feedback (or reinforcement). It is not inconsequential from where this feedback comes.
One who “fails” at everything cannot be “confident” (quotes reflect alternate reality: eg Obama). One who never fails cannot know their confidence. We all fail at times though this does not diminish previous successes nor the confidence gained from them. How failure is handled depends on the individual -their heart,character, and maybe state of “self-esteem”. Overcoming failure or hardship instills another layer of confidence; confidence in self not in anyone ability or ability to please others. This, also, cannot be taken away externally.
The problem with just pampering a student’s self-esteem for the sake of it is that it doesn’t tell them why they should feel good bout themselves, other than teacher said so. Once teacher is gone and patting ceases … the vulnerability and insecurity appears. It creates inner fragility, not inner fortitude.
Character is built through adversity. Overcoming strengthens while succumbing degrades it.
Only the most fragile are shattered by single points of failure. Kids need to know “they can do it”, NOT that they will be accepted/praised regardless ( that is not reality reality – just utopian reality – ie it’s sets them, and thus our future, up for failure). Without real realistic feedback we cannot really learn or grow.
My feeling in this rambling is that parents/teachers are to assist children to “succede” (at whatever) and to cultivate sense of worth (more a parent’s job imo), as this IS how self-esteem/confidence (the unfragile kind) is built, but more importantly to teach them how to fail. Lasting Dignity/Character > Applied Confidence/Self-Esteem – indeed, they are a backing – a renewable source in the dark times everyone will experience and that no schooling or parenting can foresee.
Your whole series is excellent but I am particularly appreciative of this one because it dwells on aspects of the insidious and calculated promulgating of communism by out educational system. There are few who are willing to come out and apply the term “communism”, particularly among the conservative punditry. I believe it is a fear of being accused of McCarthyism by their “peers”. As recently as today, on Fox news, Laura Ingrham said, in effect:”surely you’re not saying that Republican candidates should go so far as accusing Obama of being a Socialist?’. The implication being that to do so would be the kiss of death for the Tea Party.
/the great exemplar of of Gramscism is Bill Ayers. His website, the last time I checked it, featured the Red Star rising over the arc of the globe. Consider his career for the cause. When he realized that his armed revolutionary bombing strategy would inevitably result in incarceration or possibly death, he shifted to education: wangled a professorship and has since won himself a high place in the hearts of Communists, such as Hugo Chavez, world-wide, published dozens of books on socialist indoctrination, primarily in elementary schools, sponsored Obama in the ill-fated Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and to this day, you can be sure, is in regular direct contact with his co-believers in the White House. And almost certainly was the ghost writer for “Dreams from my Commie Daddy”.
And still even Glen Beck and Sean Hannity are afraid to call him a Communist. Axelrod’s team counts on it. It is part of their game plan – the wimpiness of the right.
Around 50 years ago the New York Times Book Review, at that time an objective organ,m published a review of a book, the burden of which was “Why is it that the campaign that we socialist professors initiated back in the 20′s, to indoctrinate ou college students with the verities of Marx/Lenin, have failed so miserably? Where did we go wrong?” I kept the review in my files for many years, but evidently lost it in one of my several moves, and cannot recall the title or the name of the author. I don’t have the research skills to find it, but others might locate it: It was at least two full columns, and answer a lot of questions and denials.
I think our eagerness to “not adopt their tactics” -sort of like the pre-WWII british song, “Please Don’t Be Beastly To The Huns” is a seriously bad course. It is important that the electorate be aware of the scale of the threat: this is not “drifting to the left”; it is an outright, audacious seizing of what they realize is a once-in-a-life-time window of oportunity to wreak so much havoc on our capitalist nation that it will be impossible to extricate ourselves.
As for the Self-Esteem theory -it is simply an encouragement for bullies. The universal excuse for those who kill, maim,or terrify is,”I was dissed” – my self-esteem was disrespected, And it encourages victimization, unrealistic expectations, and class/racial bigotry.
Communists used to reveal themselves in this country as they do in others. They used to run for public office, from dog-catcher to President. Why are they not revealing their identities not? How and why did we permit the Communists to shed the “red” categorization and pin it on the fly-over rubes?
“Ain’t nobody here but us blue center-leftist liberals.”
Truth is – the REDS have taken over the White House. Too bad Bill Buckley isn’t still around to set them straight. I haven’t seen the words “Communist” or “Stalinist” used at The Corner. Or by PJM posters either. Not even Roger S.
Congratulations on your courage, Mr or Ms. Zombie. I hope it is catching.
That half century year old New York Times book review like Elena Kagan’s senior thesis at Princeton (titled “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City 1900-1933″).
And conservative commentators who fancy themselves too civilized to call Bill Ayers a communist stand in direct contrast to Ayers, who describes himself as a “small ‘c’ communist”:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/on_bill_ayers_and_small_c_comm.html
http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=13501
While Feynman is huge indeed, and – I would add – eminently readable even for non-physics types (ok, not the technical stuff, but in his more generalized writing/thinking), he did his work in an environment rich in like minded and (nearly) equally curious people. I’m a bit more inclined to Maxwell & Pasteur (even if Pasteur was a bit dishonest about his work…but hey, which of us doesn’t embellish a bit on grant applications?), or going back a bit more, Lavoisier (who lost his head for his elitist attitude – ah, who doesn’t long for the days when we could literally chop off our critics’ noggins?) or even Boyle? Hell, I vote for Boyle if only for putting up with @$$holes like Hobbes. I suppose it was too many John Ford movies growing up, but I tend to find the “one man against the grain” motif a bit more inspiring. But hey, I’m just one o’ them dastardly perfeshunal historians o’ science, so what does my opinion matter?
OH, and for the record (going back to some less-than-enlightened comments from day 1 of this essaypalooza) Mr. Jefferson was most certainly an Enlightenment thinker. Or, at least many of the French Revolutionaries thought him to be so…but, I’m sure any random Texan knows Mr. Jefferson better (two centuries after the fact) than any Frog (who actually knew him) knew him…
I’m an EE by trade, and I’m ashamed to say, I had to look up James Maxwell, to remember who he was.
And God Said [Maxwell's field equations] And There Was Light.
That was one of three signs on the wall above my desk in the physics lab in college.
The other two:
“We found a cure for cancer before we even knew what caused it. Imagine what we’ll find…or know…tomorrow.”
“Quick check for science: if the experiment barks, purrs or squeaks, it’s biology; if it bubbles, fizzes and smells, it’s chemistry; if it involves more than six blackboards and twelve Greek symbols, it’s mathematics; if it just plain doesn’t work, it’s physics.”
The greatest thinker of all time was Bachelier. Financial theory is the paragon, the culmination even, of all past human endeavors. All the rest is subordinate.
Some of the most ‘successful’ schools are private schools that require strict uniforms and perfect manners.
Children have gotten out of control to the point where teachers can’t rap disorderly brats on the fingers with a ruler (like the ‘old’ days). So, a teacher is left with unruly children that disrupt her/his class and he/she has no ability to deal with it but wring their hands.
Again, if a parent is willing to pop out children that they intend to feed up until the age of 18, they should also be willing to make some sacrifices and TIME for their child to LEARN something other than what the mega-dorks who write school curriculum get by with.
And, what really pisses me off is when I hear of kids being unable to do basic math or read/write? WTF? What kind of PARENT even allows that to happen AT ALL? What? The scum slime welfare POS who pop out babies for a welfare check and then send them off to welfare school and welfare lunch and welfare teacher?
You scumbags who pop out children just to suck of the gov. teat need a swift kick in the scrot/uterus.
Parents like YOU make school systems prosper under FAILURE.
FUCK YOU
Lucky for you there is no blood alcohol limit for posting on the internets, eh.
Hi D-White. Have you been de-evolving?
Remember this?
“Is it too much to ask that people respond to the specifics in the column? Yeah, I guess so.”
And -
“Read the damned article, and then cite specifics!”
So how about a lengthy post on the demographics of inner city schools and the impact of government policies during the last 87 years?
Lather was 30 years old today…
That’s all you got, fucktard?
“At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.”
Jesus Christ, that explains a lot about his attitude domestically and diplomatically. What an ass.
“Dreams From My Father” is a treasure trove of insights into who Barack Obama really is (even if it was ghost-written). Conservatives who think Obama is an incompetent, intellectual lightweight who can’t think without a teleprompter vastly underestimate him, preposterous though the media-driven “Obama-is-the-most-brilliant-man-to-ever walk-the-Earth” narrative may be. He’s a very shrewd, ruthless hard-core Leftist, whose political and intellectual moorings come from the Critical Race Theory, anti-Western Civilization, anti-capitalist academic fringe.
Worse yet, his friends, advisers and appointees come from the same ideological netherworld (e.g., David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, Quentin Young, Cass Sunstein, Elena Kagan, Donald Berwick, Anita Dunn, Samantha Power [who actually appears moderate by comparison], Van Jones, etc.).
Add Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Jeremiah Wright, Father Pfleger, Derrick Bell, Cornell West, Henry Louis Gates, etc. to that list as well.
An important and relevant point about G.W. Carver that may have been made already: in many liberal and/or predominantly black schools, I have been in classrooms where Carver is one black American of notable accomplishments who is DELIBERATELY EXCLUDED from the posters hanging on the wall, reports for black history month and what have you. Why? Because Carver – having truly pulled himself up by his own bootstraps – is exactly the kind of role model statists (black and white) do not want blacks to see.
I’m curious: if George Washington Carver is excluded from the gallery of successful blacks, who is INCLUDED? If the teachers or principals who dictate what posters go up in the classroom disparage Carver because he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, who do they show instead? Black success stories who DIDN’T pull themselves up by the bootstraps? You’d certainly have to take down posters of all of the athletes (like Jackie Robinson), all of the musicians (like Duke Ellington), all of the business leaders, etc. etc.
Pretty much the only black success stories that DIDN’T pull themselves up by the bootstraps are the Affirmative Action types like Barack Hussein Obama…..
One can argue about the relative merits of various scientists all day. Certainly, to have Carver included, but Maxwell and Feynmann not, would be bizarre (to say the least) if one were to make a list of the World’s Great Scientists. To say that he’s almost unknown outside the USA would be no exaggeration.
But is that the object of the exercise? If you were doing a course on the history of science, you’d need something like Asimov’s Biographical Dictionary on the subject, detailing not dozens, but hundreds of scientists. And even then that’s nowhere near complete, there’s always an argument for putting in more, or changing the order of precedence.
It’s a US textbook. So I’d expect rather more on US scientists than on others. Why? Identification. So young children (and I assume this is a really basic, introductory course) could more easily identify with them.
For a similar reason, I’d expect some degree of tokenism, and don’t think this is a bad thing. Yes, include an unreasonable and statistically unjustifiable number of various groups, those to whom science is often seen as a “white” or “male” or “anglo” thing. I’d like kids to have role models like that, so they don’t worry so much about being “too white”, cultural traitors, as some have been accused of being. So they can use it as ammunition against those who would drag them down.
The object is to get kids interested in science, if they want to be. Not to try to rank the 10 most influential scientists of all time. If the latter is the object, you’d need to study a list of thousands of candidates, and the opinions would vary. Euclid, Bacon, Tsiolkovsky..
I was born in the 50′s. Women were homemakers, not biologists. Nurses, but not doctors. Beauticians, not astronauts. The knowledge that it didn’t always have to be that way, that women like Amelia Earhart, and Marie Curie existed (and, had I known it, Rosamund Franklin working not that far away) was far more important to me than the relative contributions of Curie vs Schroedinger vs Dirac, or Earhart vs Lindberg vs St.Exupery. Girls back then needed role models like that, and I think they still do to a lesser extent.
It has nothing to do with “self-esteem”. It’s about stretching the boundaries of possibilities. To let kids be what they want to be, and have the talent for. Yes, some white kids have rhythm. Yes, some girls can be astronauts. Most won’t be, most won’t want to be, most won’t have the physical or mental capability to be… but it’s not absolutely precluded by sex or race or nationality or anything else. That’s the lesson, because they’re taught exactly the opposite in daily life, by peer pressure, often by their parents and society generally. There’s a whole industry of Leftist Politicians making sure that African Americans stay downtrodden “because Whitey won’t let them succeed”. Those that show an ounce of ability are often persecuted for being traitors to their race, oreos.
That has to be countered. We can’t ensure equality of outcome (assuming that’s even desirable, a very iffy assumption), but we might be able to give something closer to equality of opportunity.
At least – that’s what I hope the reason is. Certainly, if the texts are for kids younger than age 10, it should be.
I had never even heard of this Carver guy until I originally came to the US as a graduate student. You bet your life I knew who Maxwell was (and Marie Curie — there was no need to AA her in). I had even heard of Amelia Earhart.
And by the way, we weren’t taught about Maxwell as biography — we were taught Maxwell’s Laws and their application. Like we weren’t taught that Alan Turing was ghey, but it is impossible to teach the fundamentals of computer science without Turing’s name coming up.
If you teach the actual science with the biography just incidental to it, the whole issue becomes a nonissue.
BTW, I remember a professor who grew up in communist Hungary before his family fled in 1956 could still tell me the names of various Russian peasant and worker intellectuals who supposedly had discovered relativity, quantum theory,… The Soviet overlords made this part of the curriculum.
The mention of Amelia Earhart’s name reminded me that my son, then in 2nd or 3rd grade, read a little book about her at school and did a ‘unit’ involving finding her flights on maps of the world (which is fine, and sounds educational)–but, in talking with him about it, I was kind of amazed that he had never heard the name of Charles Lindbergh. Fortunately I was able to clue him in about that. But clearly there’s only one reason why children would hear exclusively about Amelia Earhart, and not at all about Charles Lindbergh. How perverse!
One of the most ridiculous things about Rumanian science under the Ceausescu regime was the notion that Elena Ceasescu, wife of the dicator and the second highest leader in the country for the last decade of their regime, was one of the world’s truly great chemists. Rumanians were bombarded with information about her great achievements in chemistry and how chemists the world over, including in the West, looked up to her as one of the great geniuses in the field.
The reality was that she never even completed high school and failed virtually every subject she took; her only “good” subject was sewing! But being the wife of a top Communist leader has its perks so they concocted a chemistry background for her, awarded her a Ph.D. for a paper she didn’t write, and set about glorifying her. Actual Rumanian chemists knew she was a fraud. She couldn’t even pronounce the names of routine chemicals properly.
The object is to get kids interested in science, if they want to be.
No, the object is to teach the kids about the history of the country and the world and how we got to where we are now. Humans have always relied on technology, but our age especially – and it will only get more so. If we want our children to remember that it is technology and not magic, then they need to understand the people that helped bring us to this point. They don’t need to understand Maxwell’s equations, but they need to know that there are equations that describe light and magnetism, and that a relative few men and women worked to discover these rules of nature. They also need to understand why this discovery took place in Europe and America and not in Africa, Arabia, or Asia (at the time).
But how are they going to learn if they get ostracised by “their peers, their parents, and society generally” every time they attempt it?
A list of Famous Scientists has nothing to do with Science as such. Facts are, no matter who discovered them, that’s immaterial. Now it can be useful studying *how* facts came to be discovered, but that’s another issue.
Such Social Re-Engineering should always be looked on with suspicion of course. It’s vital that parents be informed of what the objectives are – for they may not agree with them. And if they agree, they need to know what the objectives are for another reason: the chosen methods to implement those objectives may not actually work, and may even be counter-productive, or have unacceptable negative consequences.
For example, making a generation that feels entitled to reward without effort, and who will feel victimised if they don’t get all that they want, NOW, by virtue of their innate superiority to others, not by their efforts or achievements. That way lies the “Master Race”, or “Islamic Superiority”, or other narcissistic pathologies, that claim that their inferior position is due to some Grand Conspiracy of Jews, Freemasons etc rather than the fact that they’re lazy, ignorant, obnoxious and thick. That *can* happen if we’re not careful.
The object is to teach kids basic scientific facts. Things that will be useful to them and processes that will allow them to research and draw conclusions themselves. Not to provide ‘role models’.
We forget this–and we do so largely because Gramsci has already done his damage to us. Kids are in school to learn how to read, not what to read. How to do math, science, etc. How. What happens is that their capacity for learning is filled with useless garbage. Carver, non-entity that he was, is routinely held up as inventing the one ‘peanut product’ that was definately not on his list–peanut butter. Garbage. But he’s black–and might get some black kids–who think doing science is ‘acting white’–into science.
Do we want those types getting into science? The kind who can only do something if someone of their race has excelled at it?
And let’s look at all the postive things that are derided as ‘acting white’. Reading, mathematical skill, erudition, intelligence—what then do they leave themselves? Entrenched and deliberate ignorance? As an effective answer to acting white?
Perhaps we need to stop coddling people who embrace ignorance.
“Girls back then needed role models like that, and I think they still do to a lesser extent.”
Which brings up an interesting point. There is exactly one famous female scientist; Marie Curie. There is however a public figure who was a scientist before becoming head of the Atomic Energy Commission and eventually governor of Washington State. She’s a virtual unknown outside of Washington state, and not that remembered in the state.
She was a Democrat, but a conservative one, and famously an environmental skeptic. Suppose that has something to do with her relative obscurity?
Educators need to be re-educated comrade .
Given the critique on the inclusion of Carver and exclusion of Maxwell in science, I’m surprised by your defense of Darwin from part 1 of your essay.
Ferenc D
Thanks !! I hadn’t thought of Tom Lehrer lyrics in years !
As with all socially suicidal, leftist nonsense, the Law of Unintended Consequences looms large.
Here’s psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman, arguably as ‘left’ as most of the academia that surrounds him:
Now, take that frightening assessment and overlay it on top of the moral adolescents who never grew out of the unwarranted self-esteem that was foisted upon them through academic indoctrination, and who populate the vast majority of community activists & organizers, socialist politicians, Left Wing Media, far-left blogs, etc. Is it any wonder we see stuff like this, and worse?
Is it any wonder that, as this developmentally-challenged cohort has faced the reality that it’s not going to get all it thinks it’s entitled to, problems have ensued?
I grew up going through a lot of self esteem based education and somehow, despite the best efforts of my teachers and councilors I narrowly graduated high school. I felt the whole thing had been a 12 year long popularity contest and I didn’t care enough about it to try. A few years later when there were consequences and I was paying for it I managed a 3.5 average through college, something my primary education never suggested I was capable of. I guess I never fell for all the self esteem the system was trying to foist upon me; probably had something to do with the fact that my father and mother were actually involved and busily passing on values and ethics that would be useful later on. I love telling lefties that…headsplosions.
I feel obligated to point out, belatedly, that the BBC list linked by Zombie was of the “Top Ten Greatest Physicists” and that was the list I was tinkering with. Alas, “third greatest physicist” is not the same as “third greatest scientist”…. Presumably a list of the “Top Ten Greatest Scientists” would include people like Darwin and Pasteur.
What amazes me is that, for all the Gramscian “march through the institutions” subversion that leftist progressives have done, they’re still blind to Islamist “creeping Sharia” subversion like Feisel “Taqiyya” Rauf and his conquest mosque, the “Eurabianization” of Europe and such.
The reason for that is pretty easy to guess, I think: the psyche most easily suckered by socially suicidal, collectivist ideology is essentially a narcissistic one. Again, it comes back to the unwarranted self-esteem issue, where one who is afflicted must come to terms with the reality that “s/he’s not all that” and, worse, isn’t going to get all s/he thinks s/he’s entitled to. That overweening sense of entitlement seems to be an enormous factor in the victim mentality that drives the rank-and-file left.
As a result,even those on the left with a knowledge of history tend to revise it to fit their narcissistic, victim’s view of the world (Zinn, Said, et al.). When that mindset is focused on creeping sharia, what you get is a self-blinded leftist cohort which sees Islam as a sort of kindred victim rather than the rapacious, militant social cancer it has represented throughout all of history.
What makes you think that they’re blind to it?
Cultural hegemony is exactly it. Nothing the left/progressives hitherto have done or will do today would have been possible were it not for the hegemony they had over education. Charles Sykes wrote about it 15 years ago and others have written about it since then. The hate America left knew it needed a means of “educating” Americans into leftist dogma/marxism without being overt so it chose public education. And they were patient and persistent.
They knew that a dumbed down America would be more easily manipulated into believing what is patently false about everything the left stands for. So instead of strengthening critical thinking skills they substituted self esteem building; instead of teaching about American exceptionalism they taught multiculturalism; instead of learning right from wrong or acceptable behavior from unacceptable behavior they learned that blacks and other “protected minorities” were to be given special privilege, non-judgemental excuses for uncivil behavior and that the black/brown races are always the victims of the evil white race and that America would not have existed were it not for them. This had the effect of driving a wedge between the races now being fully enjoyed by Dear Leader and the progressives.
We’ve watched the grades and level of competence drop year after year; we’ve seen the level of behavior being called acceptable drop to tribal or jungle warfare levels; and we’ve seen what giving a special privilege to blacks/browns at the expense of white students have done to this nation, and we were silent. We’ve been PCd into submission.
What guides the children of today is their other-worldly self esteem and a sense of entitlement. And the left loves it. Spot on Goy!
Saddest of all about the dumbing-down regimen, perhaps, is the effect on the otherwise bright and able students.
Being human, they’re often only too eager / willing to settle for what’s asked of them, instead of doing the task as fully as possible.
“I’m done already–that’s all I had to do”: how many times have I heard that from my son, who’s not being challenged in high school humanities courses at remotely the level I was, 40 years ago?
It’s hard to make clear to students that they shouldn’t settle just for what’s required. At some point, all of us, as part of growing up, learn what the task really entails; the alibi, “But we weren’t supposed to be responsible for that …” isn’t going to help, outside of the classroom. (I remember seeing French second-year textbooks from the 1950s when I was in high school in the 1970s, and feeling cheated: wow, look how early they learned the subjunctive in those days!)
This would be a good time to give applause, support, hugs, etc., to any homeschooling family you may know.
Or to give a shout-out to Catholic schools – Yay, St. Francis Academy!
I don’t necessarily think it’s only about political correctness that George Washington Carver takes precedence over Maxwell in the US. Most students in the U.K. probably were taught something about Maxwell since he was Scottish and the world famous Cavendish Laboratory is located in the UK as well. Carver was an American Scientist and so American students are taught about him. How many Americans know the name of the Frenchmen Charles Cros or Marey or Lumiere? Americans are taught Edison invented the phonograph, and motion pictures while French students are taught that the French did those things.
By the way, Maxwell is also credited, rightfully, as being responsible for the first color photograph taken in 1861.
I don’t think it a good idea that chauvinism extend to scientific history. Should students outside of Greece never be taught about Aristotle because we wouldn’t want to let those damn Greeks get credit for something? Should students in Brazil never learn of Isaac Newton’s theories because he wasn’t Brazilian? Should we in the US pretend that Joe Blow of Palookaville Ohio discovered the moons around Jupiter because Galileo isn’t American enough for our tastes?
Reality is reality. The national origins or ethnicity of the people doing the discovering shouldn’t be a concern to the teachers or students.
Indeed. As I wrote earlier in the thread, the ascription of all sorts of epochal scientific discoveries to Russian worker- or peasant-intellectuals is something Soviet propaganda was into big time.
Hardly an example we would care to emulate
Funny you should mention Brazil here. Are you familiar with the story of Alberto Santos-Dumont?
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/12/10/brazil.santosdumont.reut/
Manufactured reality. Otherwise known as propaganda.
Racism, Global Warming, Green Jobs, Social Justice, Socialism, Keynsian Economics, the 2008 Presidential Campaign, moderate Islam, Affirmative Action, the Living Constitution, flexible Families, Government ‘Benefits’, Self-esteem as an educational policy, 2 America’s.
Manufactured reality.
It’s the only thing liberals produce.
How much longer will this country put up with the shams and shake-downs? Maybe you have learned to live with it, but is a fantasy world based on lies the life you want to inflict on your children?
Kids fail and are uneducated for ONE reason only.
Really, really, really BAD teachers.
No. Kids fail because parents don’t care and blame teachers. Respect for learning and education begins at home. For me, much of my learning occurred outside the classroom during grade school and high school. A bad teacher can be harmful, but this can in large part be offset by a parent.
Unfortunately not always the case.
While it is true that bad teachers in general tend to produce bad results and good teachers good ones, both are energized or handicapped by the curriculum, the subject matter of standardized testing and the availability of solid and well-written textbooks that deal with fact, not fairy tale. The best teacher in the world who is forced by curriculum standards to teach that pi equals something other than 3.141592… (yes, Indiana, I’m looking at you, even if that silly bill died in the Senate, it passed the House) is still going to have to misinform his/her students. When we step beyond the hard factual subjects (math, reading, spelling, grammar), it gets even more tricky. History is so peppered with revisions as to be hard to defend no matter what book you’re using; the rest of the social sciences are so subject to change based on new theories, new experiments and the latest claptrap from the acedemic elite as to be impossible to teach consistently from one year to the next.
As a rather glaring example of bunk taught as history: the canard about George Washington chopping down a cherry tree and then being honest (the “I cannot tell a lie” story) is repeated year after year in elementary school classrooms. What a whopper, considering that the man in question did an exceptional line in blowing smoke. He was a spymaster and propagandist of the finest order.
Additionally, the content of standardized tests largely dictates what is taught. When tests focus on whether you can add 2 + 2, and the answer to your problem doesn’t have to be 4, teachers will, in order to get the students to do well, teach to that standard. Finally, we can also lay some blame on the people in the school systems that, fearing litigation or legislation, have revised student grades, scores and scoring philosophies to avoid “bias.” When I was in school, failing a grade meant you stayed back a year. Now, it means that the teacher just wrote down the wrong grade.
If a kid fails a grade, it makes no sense for him to repeat that grade. Something is significantly wrong with the ‘fit’ between kid and instructional method; I wouldn’t think just giving him a different teacher is going to help. This kid is a candidate for a radically different type of classroom, and there has to be urgency about getting him up to a decent standard. (Have you ever seen statistics about success rates–which are very poor–for kids who are held back? And no, I don’t believe in social promotions and pretending there’s no problem here!)
What’s the big deal about the George Washington story? I’m old enough to have heard that in my childhood; I think the point of it was the importance of telling the truth, which I guess they were trying to impress on us. (Maybe already today in elementary school they get to hear that truth ‘doesn’t exist’!)Yes, I guess the story contributed to the inevitable sense about those long-ago guys, that they were made of white marble or something better than what we were made of. The ‘good news’ for you would be that kids today don’t waste their time hearing about George Washington at all! I think they’re too busy with global warming caused by humans, and the endangered animals, and feel-good talk about how we’re all members of one big global family.
When children fail to learn to read in early grade school, they are handicapped for life, even if they have excellent teachers later on.
For kids with a difficult home life, their school problems become magnified.
David Horowitz founder of The Freedom Center (formerly Center for the Study of Popular Culture) has written numerous books over the last thirty years on Education and Cultural Hegemony.
Zombie, discovering Humility-it is better to be late to the game than to never arrive at all.
Charlotte Iserbyt, the whistleblower in the Dept of Education in the 1980s (ghost writer of CHILD ABUSE IN THE CLASSROOM for Phyllis Schlafly) has made her entire research base of downloadable pdf files available for free online! Check it out!
http://www.americandeception.com/index.php?page=home
Jed Brown, 1996 candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction in Wash State
explains Behavioral Conditioning and New Curriculum in two brief video clips:
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheBloomergal#p/u/0/Cfb6yNEs8hs
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheBloomergal#p/u/1/A_51k0QfUiY
Control the stories and myths children are told.
Control the culture.
Control the nation.
God Save Our Republic!
Anyone who doesn’t know about the contributions of James Clerk Maxwell to the science of electromagnetics, even if only at the conceptual level, is unfit to live as a 21st century civilized person. I will make the same statement about Nikola Tesla. To those of you fitting that description, back to your caves and thatch huts; those are all you really understand.
Zombie, in this series you have the makings of an excellent book on the role of education in the downfall of Western civilization. I hope you will consider writing that book.
If you ask me, Carver was not a scientist at all. The scientific method requires that scientists keep rigorous records of their work, and publish those records along with their raw data so that their experiments can be analyzed and replicated by others. If Carver kept no records and his work cannot be repeated, then by definition it was not science.
Regarding Carver v.s. Maxwell: Part of the issue is that while Maxwell is unambiguously a scientist, Carver was as much an inventor as a scientist. We certainly don’t consider Edison to be great scientist, and yet, he’s still probably the greatest inventor ever. Tesla was as much inventor/engineer as scientist. Engineers and inventors are great people in their own right, but they’re not necessary scientists.
The Nobel committee blurred this distinction when they awarded the 1948 physics prize for what was a patented invention (the bipolar transistor). What isn’t widely recognized is that the bipolar transistor had been around for decades, and the invention that won the Nobel was the process to construct a monocrystalline transistor. A great step forward in technology certainly, but not a scientific discovery.
But then again, it was unrealistic to expect any cutting-edge science to come out of America in the 19th century. It was all happening in Europe. America was a technological power then, but didn’t become a scientific power until the 20th century (with the help of Herr Hitler).
IOW, it was completely unrealistic to expect an African American scientists of note until the mid-20th century, because there were no American scientists of note until then. And therein lies the real problem: there was a dearth of African American scientists at the highest levels when America took over the leadership of science in the world.
As a side note, I studied computer science before “gay” was politically special and learned about Turing, not because he was gay, but because he was great. It came as a sad shock to learn later how this great mathematician and computer scientist died. The moral of the story is that if someone’s great, they’ll eventually bubble to the top, regardless of the thumbs on the scale. Turing never needed any “help” in gaining recognition, and doesn’t now.
good job
Your post reminded me to post something I had been contemplating for day or two, to do with “self esteem” (brain child of Nathaniel Branden, former lover of Ayn Rand). It’s on my name. All I have time for now.
I guess I should feel some relief that public education is such a dismal failure. Hard to socialize, indoctrinate, simply influence students who are obviously not interested in anything.
Another largely forgotten hero in information science and much more was Dr. Emanuel Goldberg, the first Managing Director of Zeiss Ikon:
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/goldberg.html
This was an excellent read and I look forward to Zombie’s next installment. So, it would appear that, like I have been saying every chance I have gotten in the last two years, Obama and all of his handlers are communists. How is all that social justice working out for everyone? Sheesh. Is it November yet?
What would be really cool would be if they not only mentioned Maxwell but taught that he was a Darwin-doubting Evangelical Christian hee hee (really).
At the root of PC multi-cultural Marxism is a loathing of Western culture and the people who created it, Europeans. No other culture compares with Western culture in terms of scientific achievement, the arts, philosophy, government,…war, religion, and the value placed on the individual over the collective. The rest of the world and all adherents to Leftism, Marxism, Progressivism, whatever you choose to call it suffer from cultural envy and are determined to tear down that which makes them appear inferior, Western culture. There is no doubt as to the superiority of Western culture and a simple challenge to ANY Liberal who would deny that is to simply ask what countries suffer, yes suffer, from high rates of immigration and from where do these immigrants come? Everyone knows the answer, Western Europe and the US are being overrun by immigrants from the 3rd world. Why, those places are culturally inferior and thus inferior in all respects.
Proud member of Western civilization.
Me, too!
Thank you, DWEMs!
I’ll never forget coming as an undergraduate to Barnard in the 1970s, and gazing up at the facade of Butler Library across the street at Columbia; all those DWEMs’ names–HOMER VIRGIL DANTE etc.–whom I was determined to read.
Meanwhile, back on the plantation:”Reporting from Washington — Employers who hire illegal immigrants can be fined, but the Obama administration warned this week that they also can be fined for asking legal immigrants to show their green cards before hiring them.
The Justice Department’s civil rights division sued the Maricopa County Community Colleges in Arizona, seeking damages from schools for having “intentionally committed document abuse discrimination.”"
Yup, you can’t ask those foreign born ethnic study professors, trying to pass for an indian like Ward Churchill, for a green card as proof of claimed legal residence. To reduce health care premium costs for risky lifestyles, you won’t get hired in life sciences if you’re a closet smoker, but if you claim gay and look multiracial you’ll get hiring and promotion preferences, regardless of HIV status.
For many years, I taught high school history to minority kids. I can tell you that they themselves are not fooled by the false praise given to minority scientists. Among my black students, George Washington Carver and his peanut were often joked about. They saw it as an obvious absurdity that a man would be praised for inventing peanut products, and the brighter among them felt it a patronizing insult.
The irony in that is that Carver legitimately was a great man. His accomplishments just have to be understood in the proper context. His obsession with peanuts, sweet potatoes, etc. came from his determination to find crops with which poor black farmers could suppor themselves, despite their limited capital, and the marginal land they had access to.
Part of Carver’s problem is that he came from the Booker T. Washington school of self-improvement, rather than the W.E.B. du Bois school of Marxist grievance-mongering that is so much more influential today. And yet, they still use Carver’s name, they just leave out the context of up-by-the-bootstraps self-improvement.
So a noble and admiral man is reduced to a caricature. And black kids who are smart enough to know they are being patronized, fail to know what he actually accomplished.
The only teacher anybody needs is our lord and professor Jesus. (BTW, JC, thanks for sending those geese to fly over Glenn Beck’s 8/28 Celebrity Rehab Party. You still got it.) Just because there are no “facts” to offer where your divine divinity is concerned, I just feel your loving hand on me, just like when I go to confession and Father O’Hannity opens that little window thing to show me his scepter of redemption. I know that I know that I know that I know. You know? I don’t care who it is, Booker T. Carver or anybody else, they’re no substitute for Mr. Christy and his amazing gaseous lab experiments. Those other guys may be good to illustrate the newly minted racial respect of conservatives trying to cover all the bases. But anyone who takes their eyes off the good lord for even a minute is taking their eyes off America! Don’t be distracted by the earthly ways of men. Pay no heed to the secularism knowns as science. Go to the National Archives, lay your hands on Washington’s inaugural address, fall to your knees and look to the heavens. If you’re lucky, a goose may shit right in your face.
What’s the problem? The cultural hegemony has been achieved. Let’s move on.
The 20th century is fascinating to me: the Catholic Church admitted to its priesthood men not only unable to be Catholic, but actively committed to reversing Catholic sexual morality; our schools admitted as teachers education school graduates who actively worked to abolish an educated electorate; and these two examples can be multiplied in other institutions. For whatever reason, the revolution is over, the world has turned, the new system is in place and will rule for generations. Get used to it: celebrate as good all that was once thought evil, and vice versa.
” there should be a triage system whereby the most important scientists are the first to be assured inclusion in textbooks, followed by the slightly less important scientists, and so on.”
This kind of White Male, Patriarchal, Hierarchical thinking is exactly what the feminist, homosexual, deconstructionist revisions of our textbooks combat. The preceeding three things are the root of racism, classism, and capitalism. All are to be excoriated and expunged. Textbooks should serve the greater Truth, the interests of the people, not petty, factual truths.
I liked this article, Zombie, however I was disappointed that you chose to quote such a biased source as Wikipedia for the Gramsci material. I trust you as to the facts about Gramsci’s thesis, but I would have felt better had you quoted a more neutral source.
My school is requiring us to attend some healthful foods seminar. Probably a brainwashing by the Mitchel Obummer, Cass Sunstein attempt to “NUDGE” us into healthful eating. On the day I’m stuck going I plan to bring a McDonalds meal with me (I never really eat that food) If they think I’m as dumb as Homer Simpson and need to be manipulated, I plan on staging my own revolition .I’ll be damned if I’ll lay down and submit to the likes of socialist.