{"id":89686,"date":"2025-06-03T09:49:44","date_gmt":"2025-06-03T14:49:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=89686"},"modified":"2025-06-03T09:49:45","modified_gmt":"2025-06-03T14:49:45","slug":"in-defense-of-the-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=89686","title":{"rendered":"In Defense Of The Brain"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It’s not news to anyone who’s been following the subject – education is in crisis.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

And the mainstream conservative response seems to be “let it burn!”\u00a0 \u00a0If 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…<\/p>\n

And I get it; the urge to chuck a mainstream education culture that has grown to hold most of “us” in contempt is tempting.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

But there’s a catch.\u00a0 Someone’s gonna have to write the history books.\u00a0 Someone’s gonna have to tell tomorrow’s cultural narrative what today’s cultural narrative was.\u00a0 \u00a0If 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?<\/p>\n

More of what is happeninbg tioday, that’s what.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Which is what I thought when I read this piece by Joanne Jacobs<\/a>, a Brit academic critic, about today’s woke fad of only teaching kids authors that are “relatable” to people today:<\/p>\n

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There is nothing compassionate about teaching an easier, more familiar, “culturally relevant” curriculum to disadvantaged children<\/a>, writes Mark McCourt on EMaths, a British blog. It’s condescension.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019s world.”<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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.”<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Remember – “education” and schooling are very different things.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And it seems to me if you want to make a society decline and collapse, you take away its imagination.\u00a0 What could do that faster than focusing on the here and now?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s not news to anyone who’s been following the subject – education is in crisis.\u00a0\u00a0 And the mainstream conservative response seems to be “let it burn!”\u00a0 \u00a0If 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[324,10,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-education","category-education","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89686"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89687,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89686\/revisions\/89687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}