In Defense Of The Brain
By Mitch Berg
It’s not news to anyone who’s been following the subject – education is in crisis.
And the mainstream conservative response seems to be “let it burn!” If you talk with a lot of mainstream conservatives, the kids should be heading straight out into apprenticeship programs and becoming electricians, HVAC techs, plumbers, truckers…
And I get it; the urge to chuck a mainstream education culture that has grown to hold most of “us” in contempt is tempting.
But there’s a catch. Someone’s gonna have to write the history books. Someone’s gonna have to tell tomorrow’s cultural narrative what today’s cultural narrative was. If politics is downstream of culture, and conservatives are doing the flooring and concrete finishing for the people that pass that information along, what do you think happens to culture in the future?
More of what is happeninbg tioday, that’s what.
Which is what I thought when I read this piece by Joanne Jacobs, a Brit academic critic, about today’s woke fad of only teaching kids authors that are “relatable” to people today:
There is nothing compassionate about teaching an easier, more familiar, “culturally relevant” curriculum to disadvantaged children, writes Mark McCourt on EMaths, a British blog. It’s condescension.
Speaking the language of care, some argue that children in poverty “should be shielded from the rigour of canonical texts, or complex scientific ideas, or abstract mathematics, he writes. “That Shakespeare is beyond them. That Bach is meaningless to them. That the laws of thermodynamics belong to someone else’s world.”
School “is meant to offer new worlds,” writes McCourt. “It is meant to take the child by the hand and lead them to places they never knew existed, places beyond their post code, places they have every right to belong.”
Remember – “education” and schooling are very different things.
And it seems to me if you want to make a society decline and collapse, you take away its imagination. What could do that faster than focusing on the here and now?
June 3rd, 2025 at 11:07 am
We might joke that the next set of history books will be written by ChatGPT or such, and the rest of us will be unable to figure out where the hallucinations are. Paging George Orwell, your services are needed!
Regarding schooling, I’m reminded of two things. First, in the aftermath of slavery, Booker T. Washington established Tuskegee first as more or less a trade school, realizing that freed slaves had been impoverished to the point of not putting salt in their cornbread (real, infuriating, example from his books). So they learned to cook, make bricks, mill lumber, and that’s where the old buildings at Tuskegee, including Booker’s home, come from. Latin and literature came later.
Closer to home, I remember seeing a news blurb when I was a kid about a woman who started a tiny private school in Chicago’s “hood” where kids learned the Bard at incredibly young ages, as well as of course guys like John Taylor Gatto and Jaime Escalante.
So there is a point to “working with what you have”, but that’s tempered with “you’d be surprised what people can appreciate when it’s offered.”
June 3rd, 2025 at 12:08 pm
So if I understand this post there is no way to fix or mitigate “Woke” education (and the attendant sophisticated brainwashing it engenders), people should just submit to it and hope to come out the other end unscathed and capable of rational thought?
June 4th, 2025 at 5:54 am
Either I didn’t express myself clearly, or you misunderstood something.
Either is likely. Maybe both.
June 4th, 2025 at 10:49 am
I took a liberal arts degree. Didn’t hurt me much but didn’t help much, either. It’s sometimes frustrating to be the only person in the room who understands a cultural reference but hey, it goes both ways. I didn’t know who the Superbowl halftime act was. I didn’t care about him, as my in-laws don’t care about Chaucer.
So I’ve got nothing against liberal arts degrees but a degree in English Lit isn’t going to be much use in a world where the computer can read the book faster than you, can spit out commentary from multiple sources, and which low-information voters won’t even realize is wrong or made-up. All that for $100,000 in loans?
A better investment in our nation’s future would be to recognize that not every job requires an expensive piece of paper. My insurance guy, for instance. Or my tax preparer. Or anybody at the DMV. They could do their jobs with a high school education – even as poor as that is nowadays – supplemented by on-the-job-training.
And my son-in-law, who never went to college, runs his own shop as an electrical contractor. He’s got more work than he can handle, has to fight to get time off for family vacations, makes a very good living. There is a place in the world for people like him.
As for “culturally relevant” education for “disadvantaged” kids, that’s just “the soft bigotry of low expectations” talking.