IN LINE with the prevailing anti-intellectual childishness, public writing has turned into public advocacy. Conjure and cultivate a malady—this generally involves framing bad behavior as an organic disease. Share it with the world. And—abracadabra!—you’re a hero and an activist.

An example is the parent who declared that his “Eight-Year-Old Son’s iPad Addiction Is As Real As Alcoholism, Drug Abuse.”  The editorial so titled was published on a large website. You don’t need to read this folderol to know the following:

* It’s the fault of the parent that little snot is addicted not to books or to outdoor ball games, but to gadgets.
* Who gave sonny boy the gadget? The parent did! Take the iPad away.
* If your kid’s an iPad addict; you’re his enabler. Quit paying for your children’s hand-held devices. (It costs a fortune!)

We survived without them. If Kid needs to contact crazy-in-love parent urgently, he or she can go to the principal’s office. It’ll give Kid an opportunity to practice a few civilizing skills parents have studiously refrained from imparting, lest manners mess with their child’s élan:

Knock on the principal’s door. Enter when she says so (a school principal is seldom a guy these days). Address her as Ma’am or Mrs. Ask if you may call mom or dad. Say “please” and “thank you.”

Alternatively, parents can instruct progeny to wait on the corner to be fetched; just like he, the parent, used to do. (Remember walking a couple of kilometers home each day?)

Oh, and if a stranger sidles up to Kid … I bet he knows that protocol better than he knows the Ten Commandments.

Speaking of the Decalogue—the Fifth Commandment, in particular—notice the rise in the phenomenon of kids killing their parents, also the ultimate sin. The “trend” coincides with decades of parental and pedagogic progressivism. A lack of moral instruction early on will do that.

Alas, dare to question the cult of the kid and you get angry reactions from cult members. Once, after fielding furious “Think About The Kids” missives, I thought I’d send parents (I’m one) packing with this bit of advice:

Don’t prostrate your Adult Self before The Kids.

If you can, follows the great Florence King’s injunction that “children have no business expressing opinions on anything except, ‘Do you have enough room in the toes?'” If you can’t, try to remember that traditionalists values hierarchy. A traditional society should be a hierarchical society—one where adults guide children until they’re capable of governing themselves. (For goodness sake, the frontal cortex is not yet fully developed in young adults.)

True-blue cultural traditionalism doesn’t deify kids. Deification of The Child is the hallmark of an infantile—perhaps even an immoral—society, because inverting the natural order will often result in great social ill.

“In America,” observed Oscar Wilde, “the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.”

In China, on the other hand, they’re inclined to consider a youth-obsessed society such as ours a silly society. The standard inquiry, I am told, made by Taiwanese engineers about their American counterparts in hardware engineering is, “How many grey hairs and no-hairs are in the group?” Unlike their youth-worshiping American colleagues, these wise Confucians reason that the presence of “grey hairs and no-hairs” in the collaborating high-tech team bodes better for the project.

Adults are certainly to blame for molding kids in their image. It’s not the child’s fault that the adults in his life have conditioned him to be their miserable, sniveling clone. That kids today are a shadow of their former selves is the fault of the grown-ups.

My all-time favorite fictional kid has to be the kid in O. Henry’s (1862-1910) classic short story, “The Ransom of Red Chief.” Not only is “The Ransom of Red Chief” an American classic (written by a southerner, of course)—it hearkens back to a time when kids had character; kid character.

Whatever happened to childish mischief, whatever happened to the Authentic Child? Basically, the kidnapped kid, “Red Chief,” is so imaginatively naughty—never evil or wicked—that his traumatized kidnappers end up paying his wealthy grandad to take him back.

Kids: Reclaim your inner “Red Chief.” Return to being real children. Parents and pedagogues: Allow children to quit banging on about raising money for breast cancer or for the Shriners Hospitals for Children. It’s bloody unnatural, positively creepy. Besides, making kids beg for money is in bad form. Has no adult read “Oliver Twist” by Charles Dickens?

While you’re at it, buy your little boy “The Dangerous Book For Boys.” Oh boy, are you in for a treat!

©ILANA Mercer
The Unz Review, Quarterly Review,
The Libertarian Alliance &  Constitution.com
May 26, 2016

• Image courtesy of http://www.spoiledrottenbrats.com/

The post Making America’s Kids Great Again appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Don’t ask why the “news” is all a-flutter for Meghan McCain, but earlier in February, she issued another of her sub-intelligent messages, on a forum ─ ABC’s “The View” ─ that is a fertile seedbed for mind-sapping stupidity:

The Tea Party Movement was “innately racist,” Meghan said. This was why “young people were turned off by the movement.” And , in her most grating Valley-Girl inflection: “I’m sorry ─ revolutions start with young people, not with 65-year-old people talking about literacy tests and people who can’t say the word vote in English.” The rude reference was to Tom Tancredo’s observation that people “who cannot spell the word vote or say it in English” are determining elections in America.

The former Congressman and 2008 Republican presidential candidate was on to something. The Founding Fathers decided in their wisdom that only propertied males would vote. To justify distaff disenfranchisement look no further than “Meghaan.” As to the other limitation: The founders were not democrats; they foresaw today’s pillage politics ─ and they understood that, unchecked, overbearing majorities would be more malignant than monarchs. And all too well did the founders know that, granted a vote, the unpropertied masses would help themselves to the belongings of the propertied.

But what would “Meghaan,” a member of the millennial generation, know about a group of truly great revolutionaries whose average age, in 1776, was 44?

Millennials are a generation of youngsters that reveres only itself for no good reason. They have been unleashed on America by progressive families and educators (Democrat and Republican alike) who’ve deified their off-putting offspring and charges, and instilled in them a sense of self-worth disproportionate to their actual worth.

These “‘Trophy Kids” are entering the workforce just as America’s economic power is receding. The outcome is not nearly as positive as Wall Street Journal writer Ron Alsop would have you believe. It transpires from Mr. Alsop’s lighthearted article titled “The ‘Trophy Kids’ Go to Work” that Meghan is a member of a studied cohort, born between 1980 and 2001. They “have a stronger sense of entitlement than older workers,” and, as “some research studies indicate,” unfounded feelings of superiority that feed their great expectations.

Even more illuminating for longstanding advocates of a traditional schooling such as this writer is how uncreative this generation of youngsters truly is. Meghan and her peers are everywhere, loudly dispensing mind-numbing clichés as though they were Socratic sayings. The uniformity of opinion among these mediocre and frightfully monolithic minds is scarier than its uninformed nature.

Still scarier are their dangerously elevated self-esteems. Drumming up ignorance can be risky business. In a 1997 monograph (which I reviewed in 2000), Marilyn Bowman, a Canadian professor, forewarned that “there is a dark side to self-esteem. The prototype aggressor is an individual whose self-appraisal is unrealistically positive.”

Needy and narcissistic, these dullards were nurtured by pedagogues, parents, and politicians (again, Democrat and Republican; liberal and “conservative” alike) who were convinced that loosey-goosey schools would produce free thinkers and geniuses. Instead, attests Alsop, the “high-maintenance rookies,” dreaded by human-resource executives across America, “flounder without precise guidelines.” Millennials “want loads of attention and guidance from employers,” and they “break down in tears after a negative performance review.”

The removal of the burdens of a core curriculum, a literary canon, the hardest of sciences, discipline and moral instruction ─ this has helped to mold the penetrating intellects of The “Meghaan” Millennials. Content-based, top-down, analytical and explicit teaching was replaced with pop-culture friendly, non-hierarchically delivered flimflam. The educational emphasis has long been on cooperative experiences and groupthink over individual achievement.

Nevertheless, Hollywood and the rest of the glitterati and literati make abundantly clear in all their tired scripts and messages ─ that the older generation has nothing on the youth. Especially when it comes to technology smarts. That’s false. The electronic toys our dim, attention-deficient darlings depend on to sustain brain waves are made, for the most, by “older people.”

The hybrid, hi-tech workforce ─ comprised as it is of local and outsourced talent ─ is manned, generally, by terribly smart older people with advanced engineering degrees. Yes, the people designing gadgets for our grandiose gimps are often Asians, many of whom are older. They beaver away under fewer, also terribly smart, older Americans. The hi-tech endeavor is thus all about (older) Americans and Asians uniting to supply young, twittering twits with the playthings that keep their brainwaves from flatlining.

My source in the industry tells me that the millennial generation will be another nail in the coffin of flailing American productivity. I am told too that for every useless, self-important millennial, a respectful, bright, industrious (East) Asian, with a wicked work ethic, waits in the wings.

Let the lazy American youngster look down at his superiors, and live-off his delusions and his parents. His young Asian counterpart harbors a different sensibility and skill; he is hungrily learning from his higher-ups with a view to displacing artificially fattened geese like Meghan McCain.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
February 19, 2010

The post Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult And Dispensable appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

“The couple was in New York and could not be immediately reached for comment,” reported the Associated Press. Who do you imagine was the object of the AP’s deferential reference? Michelle and Barack Obama? Rev. and Mrs. Wright?

Wrong.

The royal “couple” is Lindsey Oliver and Andrew Psalidas. She’s 17 years old, five months pregnant, and hails from Gloucester’s Hatchery High. He’s her 20-year-old boyfriend, also from Gloucester, Mass.

The “couple” has yet to provide details about their baby shower registry. But Psalidas’s father-cum-manager told clamoring media that his son would remain mum because “he’d made an exclusive interview agreement.” In the fullness of time, pictures of Pact Baby will be peddled to the tabloids.

Before going away, the inarticulate “couple” appeared on “Good Morning America” to deny a rumor spread by that knavish principal, Joseph Sullivan. Or more like Joseph Stalin. The hapless Sullivan had implicated Oliver in a very bad deed indeed. He alleged she was part of a gaggle of girls that had conspired to fall pregnant and raise children together.

Had an alien from Deep Space dropped in on Planet America during the pregnancy-pact apoplexy, he’d have concluded this and this alone: Kids having kids is not a bad thing. Kids conspiring to have kids: now that’s wicked. It doesn’t get much worse than a principal accusing kids of conspiring to have kids.

Fortunately, “progressive” America has inverted the natural order. Disapproving adults are ousted; errant schoolgirls embraced, even venerated. It was thus Oliver who got the chance to set the record straight on national television.

“No, there was definitely no pact,” she vowed. “There was a group of girls who decided that they were going to—they were already pregnant before they decided this—that they were going to help each other with their kids so they can finish school and raise their kids together. You know, to do the right thing was their decision, not let’s get pregnant like as a group.” (The CNN transcript has been cleaned-up; insert a “like” and a gormless grin after every other syllable.)

Ah yes, “doing the right thing,” preached preggie Peggy. Right and wrong are crystal clear here. Which is why the girls are where they belong—on GMA, poised for a media blitz, or even better, a book deal. Sullivan, on the other hand, is being slandered.

The principal was “foggy in his memory,” Mayor Kirk of Gloucester hissed. (Since Imus is otherwise occupied again, I’ll answer the rhetorical question he would have posed and answered: “Yes, the mayor is a woman.”)  For his part, Superintendent Christopher Farmer went to great pains to distinguish between “a pact to become pregnant or a pact because we are pregnant.”

A pact after the fact or because of it: That is the “To Be Or Not To Be” of this vexing affair.

So why would the Zeitgeist have its metaphoric pitchforks hoisted to skewer Principal Sullivan, but shower the girls with sympathy? Do the girls not attend a school where pregnancy tests have been incorporated into the curriculum? Is it unusual to see underage girls parading their bumps or pushing prams along the hallways of Gloucester High? Does the school not provide these valedictorians with an onsite daycare center?

At the heart of this homage to the Girls Gone Bad is the confusion that comes with a dialogue devoid of values. For decades, America’s progressive schools have been conducting a sick experiment in parallel parenting. Hatchery High is the payback:

It’s Rosemary’s pedagogic Baby.

In America’s progressive schools prurience and psychobabble combine in equal measures. The “open,” indulgent, non-judgmental ethic undergirding “education” delivers a meta-message. Children are titillated indirectly —they are given permission to indulge their appetites, libidinal and other, and use and abuse their anatomy with abandon. For good measure, they are equipped with a couple of cognitive tricks: Say “No.” Postpone. Use prophylactics.

This experiment must be abandoned. Let schools stick to academics; and families to raising children. When they fail, friends, family and faith-based organizations must move in to pick up the slack.

Resurrect shame—deep, abiding disgrace. While you’re at it, whatever became of the shotgun wedding? Bring back the pejorative “bastard.” I don’t like it; it’s hurtful, but it had its uses. So does hurt. With hurt come hard-won insights. The prospect of bearing a bastard once forced a parent to think: Do I want my child to bear this burden? Do I want for myself the status of an unwed, untaught mother? Expel pregnant girls, don’t cater to them and kit them out.

And shame laissez faire parents whose kids are rutting instead of reading.

How it hurt when I found out a friend I tutored math at high school was not allowed to sleep over because her conservative parents disapproved of my permissive folks. Her parents let me know, though, that they approved of me. For that I loved them.

Rebuilding moral communities begins with shunning and shaming. These are the first baby steps. Shun and shame the libertine, “Que Sera Sera” crowd—pedagogues and parents alike.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com

   June 27, 2008

The post SILENCE; WE’RE STUDYING FOR OUR PREGNANCY TEST appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

First off, although conspicuously absent, Rep. Tom Tancredo was the unsung hero of the presidential debate that was sponsored by the Spanish-language television network, Univision.

Based in the United States, Univision is not based on English. The candidates were spoken at in Spanish, which is why Rep. Tancredo declined to participate. One of the moderators was a Mexican citizen and a strident advocate for Hispanics. The politics of special interests was yet another reason to turn-down the invitation; Tancredo declined to dignify a debate in which one of the topics was whether English ought to be America’s official language.

Rep. Tancredo made the right choice. Faces furrowed in an effort to comprehend the language, the seven dwarfs looked decidedly un-presidential during the Univision debate.

Mainstream media were agreed that for the occasion, says VDARE.com’s Allan Wall, all the presidential panderers “toned down, tempered, cooled, [and only] gingerly defended” their professed positions.

Especially conspicuous in his sappy sentimentality, syrupy sweet talk—in education he was going to “unleash weapons of mass instruction”—and statist solutions, was Mike Huckabee. I can see why media, women especially, love Big Daddy; whether he’s sermonizing about diet or the deity, Huckabee is the Oprah of the Evangelicals. 

Here’s Huckabee’s Heads-Up-for-Illegal-Aliens Plan, articulated at the Univision “panderfest”:

“When people come to this country, they shouldn’t fear. They shouldn’t live in hiding. They ought to have their heads up, because the one thing about being an American is, we believe every person ought to have his or her head up and proud, and nobody should have to be in hiding because they’re illegal when our government ought to make it so that people can reasonably come here in a legal fashion.” [Emphasis added.]

Let’s unpack Huckabee’s hucksterism: Illegal aliens in the US are hanging their heads when they ought to be holding them high. The reason for these imaginary drooping crests is illegality brought on by harsh immigration policies. The way to raise heads high is to make illegality a thing of the past.

During the nationwide illegal-alien rallies, heads were held hubristically high. Since Huckabee, it would seem, missed those halcyon days, he would like to ensure illegals are hallmark happy by removing the reason for the slumping noggins. Translated from Huckabese, that means aiming to overturn, or leave unenforced, existing immigration laws, and thus disrespecting the rights of Americans and the country’s social and economic fabric.  

What Huckabee fails to get into his head is that illegal infiltrators are demanding what they most certainly are not entitled to. All men are imbued with natural—but not necessarily political—rights. The laws of this country ought to respect the natural rights of all people, legal and illegal. Not so their demands for political and welfare privileges, which is what Huckabee would like to continue honoring.

Illegal aliens on the march for undeserved political rights—that was not the only specter to have passed Huckabee by. As any on the liberal left, the governor is also ignorant of how pedagogic pop psychology has helped lighten the cerebral load in the craniums of American schoolchildren.

Huckabee’s antidote for the bumper crops of ignoramuses being produced in public schools follows the progressive Pleasure Principle: Please the little darlings; pleasure them, Huck prated at the Republican Presidential Debate in Iowa, for they are “bored to death.” We must “make sure we build the curriculum around their interests.” [Emphasis added.]

Hackneyed Huckabee is unaware that child-centered schooling has been in place for decades. Progressive pedagogues and parents have been gratifying children’s demands for fun and frivolity for a very long time now. 

The governor should also rest assured: It’s been quite some time since America’s youth were burdened by a core curriculum or exposed to a literary canon. Content-based, top-down education has long since been supplanted by pop-culture-friendly, non-hierarchically delivered flimflam.

Huckabee’s “idea” that learning ought to flow from the child is vintage romantic nineteenth-century progressivism. In their dedicated efforts to “romance the child,” progressives—also Hillary’s preferred handle—have always insisted that learning must be made natural, organic.

Classicists, as the authentic educator E. D. Hirsch Jr. has illustrated, see effective, analytical and explicit instruction as very definitely not a natural but a highly artificial, often-unintuitive process.

In other words, genuine learning is a tough process. Nothing that’s worth learning comes easily.

I’ll spare you Huckabee’s brain bifurcation balderdash—he puts great stock in right brain/left brain discredited pop psychology. His pop pedagogy is bad enough for one day.

©2007 By Ilana Mercer

   WorldNetDaily.com

    December 14

The post More Huckabee Hokum appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

I had a house in Africa, to paraphrase Karen von Blixen, author of the autobiographical “Out of Africa.” My first home was in a small town named Henley-on-Klip, in South Africa, where Oprah Winfrey chose to build a Leadership Academy for Girls.

When I saw Oprah turning that fertile, red soil to plant a tree on the 50-acre school grounds, I thought of my plot, just around the corner. Because of drought restrictions, I watered the half acre of acacia, golden cypress, jacaranda, willow and fruit trees we had planted with buckets. My two-year-old would toddle beside me, a miniature watering can in her tiny hand.

But that was a long time ago. From my vantage point in the US, I now looked on with pride at Oprah’s endeavor. How different it was from, say, Angelina Jolie’s. Jolie now regularly slams the West for not doing enough for the world’s poor. Jolie, who carts about a color-coordinated brood of illegitimate kids, has some nerve, of course. The West has given trillions in aid to the Third World! But with that pretentious tart, it’s all about emphasizing her providential purpose in the universe. To that end, she likes to discredit the rest.

There was none of that with Oprah. Her politics may be populist; but her deeds are patrician. Dare I suggest that there was something both Randian and Jeffersonian about this particular project?

As to the Randian grandness: The petty-minded at home and abroad carped about Oprah’s opulence. They wanted to know why she needed “this kind of environment for African girls, who were coming from huts.” Indeed, the project cost over $40 million and was intended, in Oprah’s words, to create “a beautiful environment that would inspire [the students].” She fussed over the architecture, she installed an amphitheater, fabulous library with fireplace, modern marble kitchen, an audio-video center, gym, tennis courts, and spa—the scale and the splendor scream “made in America.”

As for the Jeffersonian judiciousness: Thomas Jefferson insisted that all children, even the simple ones, must know “reading, writing, common arithmetic,” and history (not “social science” or “self-esteem”). He would have abhorred America’s sclerotic public schools for teaching none of the above. Still more would he have condemned our schools for the contempt they show the gifted. Jefferson believed that geniuses ought to be “raked from the rubbish.” American schools allot the gifted two pennies out of every 100 educational dollars and work hard to integrate them with the gimps.

Oprah can protest all she wants, but, like Jefferson, her actions bespeak a belief in “a natural aristocracy among men,” which Jefferson considered “the most precious gift of nature.” In an 1813 letter to John Adams, he described this natural aristocracy as distinguished by “virtue and talents,” and disavowed “an artificial aristocracy… without either virtue or talents.” Jefferson would have thus approved of the way Oprah separated the wheat from the chaff for her school, selecting each girl for her grades and grit. The 152 girls were chosen for qualities rare everywhere (and certainly among American school kids).

By now everyone has heard what Oprah had to say about kids in American inner-city schools: “The sense that you need to learn just isn’t there. If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don’t ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms, so they can go to school.”

And it’s not just the inner-city children. Despite being the best funded school system in the world, American public schools graduate the thickest kids in the developed world. Paradoxically, while our high-school students score near the bottom in international competitions, when asked to rate themselves, they consistently give themselves top marks. But then so do their parents and teachers. Thanks to constant, unwarranted worship, and no moral or rigorous intellectual instruction, American schools are full of lame and lazy megalomaniacs.

By contrast, the lasses Oprah chose for her Academy come from poverty unimaginable in the US. Before Oprah, Mbali Meyers, for example, lived in a one-room shack with no running water or electricity and shared a water tap and outhouse with 30 neighbors. The family (which is typically matriarchal or fatherless) would often go to bed hungry. “At night,” reports CNN’s Jeff Koinange, “Mbali burns the midnight oil by candlelight, doing her homework on her knees. There’s no room here for luxuries like chairs.” Yet Mbali has consistently been at the top of her class.

Many of Oprah’s girls were also raped. South Africa has the most rapes per capita (as well as murders and assaults). African young men there consider rape a form of recreation. They even have a name for gang rape: “jackrolling.” Some of the girls are AIDS orphans. Yet despite the trammels of despair, they’ve retained a child-like innocence and sweetness, qualities unusual among jaded distaff America. One young girl said she felt like crying—but crying of happiness. The other said this was “more than a dream come true. It’s like a fairy tale.”

And the fairy godmother herself looked grand in pink taffeta. Never once did Oprah preach about how the West could cure poverty if governments gave more (one of Jolie’s idiot utterances). She simply “gave more.”

On that day, Oprah exemplified the qualities of a great American philanthropist and entrepreneur.

©2007 Ilana Mercer
   WorldNetDaily.com, Ottawa Citizen (January 26)
   & East Valley Tribune (January 22)
   January

The post Oprah’s Excellent Elitism appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Boys (and men) have been in trouble for some time, but “progressives” have only just noticed. In “The Trouble with Boys,” Newsweek, a representative of the species, articulates the problem:

By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind. In elementary school, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and twice as likely to be placed in special-education classes. High-school boys are losing ground to girls on standardized writing tests. The number of boys who said they didn’t like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001…. Nowhere is the shift more evident than on college campuses. Thirty years ago men represented 58 percent of the undergraduate student body. Now they’re a minority at 44 percent.

The magazine then implicates the perennial “progressive” bugaboo: “quantifiable and narrowly defined academic success,” for which “activist parents” are responsible. The writers blame parents for ensuring that “school performance has been measured in two simple ways: how many students are enrolled in accelerated courses and whether test scores stay high.”

Other than pushy parents, Newsweek also faults “curricula [that] have become more rigid.” Too much teaching at the expense of the cult of the “whole child” has, seemingly, caused boys to stumble. The scribes, four women and one man, must be confusing America with Singapore.

Curiously, the magazine allows that boys used to do okay at school. What happened to change that is an enigma, best left to the experts. The experts—also the people who put boys in this predicament in the first place—aver that, while a considerable investment was made to empower girls, boys were neglected.

There’s a problem with this reasoning. If boys used to do well at school, then an “investment in girls” would not explain their deterioration. Unless “investing in girls” is Orwellian for privileging girls at the expense of boys, which is precisely the impetus behind Title IX and other legislative loadstars. Presently, boys toil under elaborate affirmative action initiatives in secondary and tertiary schools that subordinate merit to the equal representation of girls in every field of endeavor, including sports.

“Experts” such as the National Education Association—the largest union in the country and the al-Qaida of education—will say we spend too little money and tolerate unacceptable teacher-student ratios. Oh, come off it. We shell out more per child than any other developed country, and at 1:16.5, the teacher-student ratio has never been lower. Soon there’ll be more adults than children in the system.

The travails of boys, moreover, need to be put in perspective. American high-school kids, boys and girls, have been crowned the cretins of the developed world, as measured by every conceivable international test. That carnivorous girls have climbed to the top of this pile is no great achievement. No, the galloping ignorance among American students is proportional to budgetary profligacy.

The problems plaguing boys are not pecuniary, but paradigmatic: the progressive, child-centered worldview and feminism.

For decades now, America’s educators have insisted that learning be made as natural and as easy as possible, when it is neither. To this end, content-based, top-down teaching was replaced with pop-culture friendly, non-hierarchically delivered flimflam. But as classicists such as E. D. Hirsch Jr. have pointed out, effective, analytical and explicit instruction is very definitely not a natural but a highly artificial, often-unintuitive process.

Evidence abounds that boys thrive in the more disciplined, structured learning environment. America’s loosey-goosey schools, however, shun discipline and moral instruction. Boys are also biologically predisposed to competition. But in the progressive school, cooperative experiences and groupthink are preferred to individual achievement.

And girls favored over boys.

When boys bubble over with unbridled testosterone, instead of challenging, disciplining, and harnessing their energies, as teachers once did, they are emasculated or medicated. The former means being made over in the image of woman; the latter entails being diagnosed as “learning disabled” and drugged with Ritalin. It is a consequence of the demonization of male biopsychology.

The school is a microcosm of society. Both have been thoroughly feminized. The false feminist narrative suffuses every aspect of a boy’s life. Women everywhere are depicted as brawny, brainy, and beautiful; men as buffoons. On celluloid, an 80-pound waif manages to wallop a 200-pound gangster with no punctures to the silicone sacks.

When male teachers manage to infiltrate the public school system, they are of the androgynous genus—and every inch as feminist as their XX-carrying colleagues. The quintessential male role models—the Founding Fathers—are persona non grata in courses, as are other so-called pale, patriarchal pigs. A boy risks purgatory and worse should he mention weaponry or female anatomy.

In addition to a core-curriculum, banished too from America’s feminized and foolish schools is the “archaic” idea of a literary canon. Not only do boys have to internalize feminism’s lumpen jargon; they must also synchronize their male brains to Oprah’s challenged synapses. English teachers expect them to study Memoirs of a Geisha and The Secret Life of Bees.

If epic literature worms its way into the school’s shopping-mall assortment of flimsy courses and frivolous subject matter, then it is duly deconstructed and shred: Boys are taught to see great works of art through feminism’s grim and distorting prism. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and T. S. Eliot were members of the ruling class of oppressors; their artistry no more than a manifestation of the alleged power relationships in society.

Progressive schools—and the feminist and feminized “education” they inflict—are ultimately extremely bad for boys and girls alike. But while they favor girls, casting them as a besieged class of helots; they are hostile to boys, who are perceived as members of a ruling elite that refuses to let go of patriarchal privilege and power.  

In an e-mail to me a young man described his daily grind under this mirthless and unmerciful ideology:

I cannot seem to escape the biases of feminism no matter where I turn. Every female teacher somehow manages to bring the argument around to point out that males overrun everything. If I produce any artwork with any sort of tall thin form in it, I’m immediately criticized for producing artwork that involves phallic symbolism. Thus meaning that I obviously am promoting male dominance in society.

He said he felt “worn down” by the experience. Others like him just walk away.

© 2006 By Ilana Mercer

    WorldNetDaily.com

    January 27

The post Shafting Boys appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

©By ILANA MERCER
  WorldNetDaily.com

  September 3, 2004

The post NEEDED: A LEAVE THE CHILDREN BEHIND ACT! appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Mention standardized testing for high-school pupils and teachers, or dare suggest that a core curriculum be enforced in the nation’s schools, and the educational establishment goes on the offensive.

There is nothing that riles these politicized special interests – led by the largest union in the country, the National Education Association – more than the threat of performance-based evaluation (testing) and compensation (merit pay). The latest muscle-flex by this mafia has come in response to the not exactly exacting requirements of Mr. Bush’s No Child Left Behind initiative.

As best-selling author Peter Brimelow points out in his pathbreaking, The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education, union officials invariably respond to the deterioration in the schools by seeking to abolish the gauges of decay: tests, for one. Another signature rejoinder is the “M-O-R-E”-money motto. So you have to know that if the rapacious educrats would sooner forego federal funds than comply with an Act, they are feeling the heat.

The point here is not to debate the dubious merits of Mr. Bush’s plan to improve accountability in the nation’s failing schools. As Brimelow proves, the perverse incentives in this socialized system don’t allow for much latitude. The thing to observe, however, is how masterful the educrats are at mounting a noisy, well-masked offensive at the slightest threat to their Soviet-style status quo.

Be they standardized tests, charter schools or vouchers – any attempt at tweaking “government schools” affects the “hydra-headed” monster that is the NEA like kryptonite affects Superman. Or so says the author of the “The Worm in the Apple,” having taken on a mighty but sinister Superman – the NEA has 2.6 million members and collects $1.25 billion in annual revenues.

Together with the smaller American Federation of Teachers, the NEA holds hostage parents who are, invariably, desperate to educate their children. Its power lies in the monopolistic nature of public education. The essence of any labor union, explains Brimelow, is the attempt to “monopolize the supply of labor in their particular industries, in order to increase its price in the form of wages.” Compulsory-attendance laws prevent parents from opting out of the system. Which is why, in a bygone and more just era, the public sector was prohibited by law from engaging in collective bargaining. Back then, the unions were mere “tea and crumpets” professional societies. They turned into rogue organizations around the time politicians allowed the public sector to unionize.

This was also when the “Great Decline” in education commenced. (Yes, “correlation is not cause,” but, as our author reminds us, it is “suggestive.”) Brimelow cites Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby’s studies on the effects of unionization on the school system. She has found that, over the decades, it “raised inflation-adjusted per pupil spending, increased dropout rates, and ensured stagnant student performance” (p. 37).

Let us count the ways, then:

The unions set rules about hiring, firing, layoffs and promotion – rules about how teachers are to be evaluated and paid, and how the evaluations are to be used; rules about the assignment of teachers to classrooms, and their non-assignment to yard duty, lunch duty, hall duty and after-school activities; rules about how much time teachers can be required to work, how much time they must get to prepare for class; rules about class schedules; rules about how students are to be disciplined; rules about homework, class size, number and use of teacher aides; rules about handling grievances, time for professional meetings, who can join the union … ad nauseam (p. 38).

Before moving on to the book’s prodigious achievement, a word about Brimelow’s stylistic panache (and, hence, punch).

The description of the National Education Association’s annual 1999 meeting or “Representative Assembly” is delicious. The attendees “wobble and waddle through the teeming crowds of teachers … thighs like tree trunks, bellies billowing, jowls jiggling,” leaving us with a lasting mental image of our children’s over-sated role models.

The exhibitors and NEA political-interest group booths are “as colorful as the hucksters and jugglers at any medieval fair.” From the Gay and Lesbian Caucus, to the Women’s Caucus, and Black Caucus, to the free-Mumia-Abu-Jamal motions, the Assembly is a veritable “coven of cranks.”

In this microcosm of American school culture, there is, tellingly, a “paucity of textbook exhibitors,” although pizza is plentiful. A delivery arrives just as the delegates “were quietly beginning to starve.” (Characteristically, some dry-as-dust reviewers took issue with Brimelow’s brimming-with-personality pizzazz.)

The teacher unions, of course, are flabby not merely in chins and bellies. Brimelow sets about assessing the effects of this politburo on pedagogy with reference to the efficiency of the education system, as expressed in its output and input. His first journalistic pincer closes in on the system’s qualitative output.

Evidence of how stupid American students (and teachers) are has been slowly amassing. The creeping cretinism is confirmed by reports like “A Nation at Risk.” Especially indicative are the below-international-average scores of 17-year-olds. One out of four children is dropping out and not graduating. High schools have been so dumbed down that even average students sit bone idle. Fully 50 percent of students with IQs that border on mental retardation manage to pass. Unlike our European counterparts, American universities, colleges and even corporations spend a fortune on teaching students elementary things they should have learned in high school. College professors attest to a decline in the quality of students entering colleges.

Fair to a fault, however, Brimelow draws surprisingly cautious conclusions. True, there are schools in Miami Dade County that make the madrasas of Indonesia, Turkey, and Tunisia look promising. But, equally, there’s a school in Illinois that outperforms the excellent schools of Taiwan and Singapore. American schools are producing very mixed results.

But don’t be fooled by Brimelow’s charitable conclusions – this is only the halftime mark. With his second pincer – assessing the input or quantitative aspects of the system – Brimelow swoops down for the kill.

The education system is a hog of huge proportions. In 1890, “annual current spending per pupil was $275.” In 1999-2000, it was $7,086. “Adjusted for inflation and expressed in year 2000 dollars,” that’s “25-fold.” If GDP has since increased on average by only 1.9 percent per year, the spending on education has outpaced it, increasing 3 percent per year (p.26).

Simultaneously, the student-to-teacher ratio has been declining – there are ever more teachers compared to the number of students. One of the union’s goals is to pile on the personnel – this means more members and more union dues. Consequently, the teacher-to-student ratio is now down to an astonishing 1:16.5. (Include non-teaching staff, and there is now one adult for every eight or nine children in government schools.)

To this end, class-size reduction initiatives have been used to defraud taxpayers of billions, even though there is no consistent relationship between smaller class size and student achievement. There is, however, a solid connection between teacher quality and student accomplishment. But the teacher unions thwart any market process that would help separate good from bad teachers and reward them differently.

So what have we so far?

From an economist’s point of view, says Brimelow, an ever-increasing number of teachers relative to the number of pupils can only mean one thing: declining productivity. “To produce at the very best, the same results, the system is consuming more and more by the year.” Since costs only ever go up, and results are at best the same, the education system is without a doubt in decline.

Case closed: By page 38, Brimelow has proven what he set out to prove, and brilliantly so.

One of Brimelow’s 24-Point, thoughtful recommendations is to use antitrust law to bust the “Teacher Trust” (monopoly). There’s poetic justice to this. Since the “Teacher Trust” is a “creature of legal privilege” – and a form of legalized thuggery – laws against a conspiracy to monopolize trade or commerce should indeed be brought to bear on the union. Giving teeth to anti-strike laws and passing more right-to-work legislation are also good ways to smash this guild of goons.

Try as I did, I could only come up with minor quibbles: I probably disagree that John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company was a monopoly. Unlike the “Teacher Trust,” it brought a cheaper, better product to market. Nor can I bring myself to think about vouchers as anything other than another distribution scheme which will thoroughly co-opt private schools. But since Brimelow is not one to plead his case without careful attention to all sides, he has this covered.

Neither is Peter Brimelow about to let us forget that, “The problem with America‘s government school system is socialism.” And the cure – as always – is capitalism and freedom.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
February 20, 2004

The post THE WORM IN THE APPLE OF AMERICAN EDUCATION appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

When the man who unleashed Colin Powell to preach affirmative action to the traditionally opposed Republicans takes a stand ostensibly against race quotas, skepticism is in order.

The president’s filing of a legal brief challenging racial preferences in student admissions at the University of Michigan warrants even more suspicion considering his conduct in the Trent Lott affair—personal loyalties didn’t prevent Mr. Bush from stabbing Lott in the back and deftly using the fracas to curry electoral favor with minorities. Since the administration has no legal involvement in the Michigan case, Mr. Bush’s intervention—let alone his position—is indeed unusual.

Anyone who suggests the Michigan undergraduate and law school programs are not racist can’t be serious, and if he is serious, should not be taken seriously. At the undergraduate level, African-American, non-white Hispanic and Native-American students receive 20 points out of 150 solely because of their race. A perfect SAT score nets a student only 12 points. It takes 100 points to gain admission, making the hue of one’s skin good for a fifth of the admission points. The law school completes the project with a relatively straightforward quota.

Michigan is not unusual. Many undergraduate institutions, and most law schools and medical schools in the U.S. practice affirmative action. Like the Constitution, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, however reprehensible, “gave the government no license to set quotas for hiring personnel by private enterprise or admitting students to institutions of higher learning, yet the federal bureaucracy acts as if it had,” confirms Harvard scholar, Richard Pipes.

The problems of affirmative action, as libertarians will point out, are the peculiar province of state-controlled schools. It goes without saying that in a free market for education, schools would be able to establish any admission criteria they like. If a school wants to give preference to African-American albinos, that’s the prerogative of private property. Predictably—although ironically—the ideology promoted in state-controlled schools is also responsible for producing a mentally monolithic population. This is to be expected when the State has the power to define and enforce politically correct diversity.

Small consolation: Any public institution practicing affirmative action does open itself up to 14th Amendment due process and equal protection claims.

Inequality under the law is of no particular consequence to Democrats. Their commitment to legally protect the febrile sensitivities of every self-styled victim group is unwavering. Why, diversity-quota devotees such as Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschele and Senator John Kerry even feign forgetfulness when it comes to the 1963 words of their hero, John F. Kennedy:

Simple justice requires that public funds, to which all taxpayers of all races [colors, and national origins] contribute, not be spent in any fashion which encourages, entrenches, subsidizes or results in racial [color or national origin] discrimination.

Close enough, considering the source of the quote, although at least one of the “simple” oversights Kennedy makes must be corrected: The nation’s personal income tax burden rests on roughly 32 million people, most of whom are white men. Affirmative action is a zero sum scheme, designed to disenfranchise the very people who foot the bill.

A closer look at the Bush brief, however, ought to quell denunciations from Democrats and minorities alike. Bush agrees that the American “Constitution makes it clear that people of all races must be treated equally under the law.” “Yet we know that our society has not fully achieved that ideal,” he equivocates. “Racial prejudice is a reality in America.”

The prevalence of deep-seated racism the president infers from the fact that African-Americans lag behind whites in academic and socio-economic achievements. This, of course, is a post hoc error, one that most Americans reject, root and branch.

Upheld by Mr. Bush, this error is the central tenet of affirmative action. According to the president’s diversity doxology, justice is achieved when racial and ethnic groups are reflected in academia and in the professions in proportion to their presence in the larger population, an impossibility considering individual and age-long inter-group differences. Absent such representation, Mr. Bush concludes that racism reigns.

This non sequitur is even harder to sustain when considering the Asian minority, a minority that has had its own historical hardships. In professions and academic pursuits where mathematical precocity is a factor, Asians are overrepresented and consistently outperform whites. If underrepresentation signals injustice, then overrepresentation must, too, reflect an unfair advantage. Surely justice demands that overrepresentation of any group, not only of white males, be similarly corrected by the State? (How about making the NBA reflect America?)

Malaysian governments certainly adopted this logic toward their Chinese population, whose starting status as indentured laborers didn’t stop them from rising to dominate business, professions and universities. To achieve “racial balance,” pro-Malaysian affirmative action laws were mandated in all government-controlled institutions.

Did not Hitler awaken to the same logic? In proportion to their numbers, Jews were also overrepresented in the economic and cultural life of Germany. In Malaysia, state ideology created a climate that was conducive to pogroms against the Chinese population; these were not looked upon unfavorably. Despite an antipathy toward the Jew—antipathy far in excess of the alleged racism African-Americans complain of nowadays—Jews remained active in German society until the State stepped in and stripped them of their rights. It’s far from hyperbolic to say that Hitler used the State apparatus to find a “Final Solution” to the Jewish advantage—that the “Final Solution” was a reductio ad inferno of state-approved affirmative action.

The U.S. federal government has gone the Malaysian route for its black minority. As syndicated columnist Paul Craig Roberts reports, “in all 22 independent federal agencies and in 16 of 17 executive departments, blacks are massively overrepresented” in proportion to their presence in the population. Understandably, the plaintiffs in the Michigan case want the State to relinquish its compelling interest in promoting whatever it construes as diversity.

Bush refuses to second this; his brief shies away from addressing “the outer bounds of the Constitution,” but only the case in its narrowest sense. Since he accepts racial discrimination as a cause for African-Americans’ lag in achievement, the president intends to reject only the methods associated with this faulty formulation. Diversity directives are to go full throttle ahead so long as they are “racially-neutral.” 

Mr. Bush’s “road map” includes encouraging schools to come up with racial cue cards such as “a statement people can make about whether they’ve overcome hardship.” Berkeley and Texas, for instance, already make unusual hardships and life experience a crucial consideration in admissions. “The kind of hardships” that’ll be given extra credit are “largely peculiar to preferred minorities such as having been shot,” notes commentator Steve Sailer, wryly. In short, the quest for diversity is unlikely to encompass the Midwestern experience.

The Condi, (Andy) Card and Karl (Rove) Crack Team has achieved a triumph of triangulation. The Bush base, of which 92 percent is white, will swallow the bait, believing, as it did after the landmark 1978 case of Bakke, that quotas had been outlawed. Despite Bakke, universities continued to take race into account. Same in this case: With presidential imprimatur, the Michigan point system will be palliated somewhat, but business as usual will see public funds diverted to other, less conspicuous, race-friendly recruiting methods, much to the glee of the ‘civil rights’ industry. The appeasement of both sides, while further entrenching the politically correct and favored side, is an example of slimy Clintonian tactics.

It is debatable whether Bush should be intervening in the admission standards of one Michigan College. But it is perfectly apparent that he should do something to restore a free market in labor in his own neck of the woods. Doing something about an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a Justice Department, which impose and enforce de facto race and gender quotas on every business in America would be a start. As might be expected, Bush intervenes where he either can’t or should not, but doesn’t intervene where he can and should.

©By ILANA MERCER
Ludwig von Mises Institute
January 24, 2003

The post BUSH’S CALL FOR QUOTAS appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

In what is surely an unusual move, given that the Bush administration had no legal involvement in the case, the president announced his intention to file a brief challenging racial preferences in student admissions at the University of Michigan.

Following Mr. Bush’s deft deployment of the Trent Lott affair to curry electoral favor with minorities, it appeared that, by taking a stand ostensibly against affirmative action, the president had done an about face. Or had he?

Anyone who suggests the Michigan undergraduate and law school programs are not racist cannot be serious, and if he is serious, should not be taken seriously. At the undergraduate level, African-American, non-white Hispanic and Native-American students receive 20 points out of 150 solely because of their race. A perfect SAT score nets a student only 12 points. It takes 100 points to gain admission, making the hue of one’s skin good for a fifth of the admission points. The law school completes the project with a relatively straightforward quota.

Michigan is not unusual. Many undergraduate institutions, and most law schools and medical schools in the U.S., practice affirmative action. Like the Constitution, “the Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the government no license to set quotas for hiring personnel by private enterprise or admitting students to institutions of higher learning, yet the federal bureaucracy acts as if it had,” affirms Harvard scholar Richard Pipes.

The problems of affirmative action, as libertarians will point out, are the peculiar province of state-controlled schools. In a free market for education, schools would be able to establish any admission criteria they like. If a school wants to give preference to African-American albinos, that’s the prerogative of private property. Predictably—although ironically—the ideology promoted in state-controlled schools is also responsible for producing a mentally monolithic population. This is to be expected when the state has the power to define and enforce politically correct diversity.

Politicking aside, a closer look at the Bush brief should quell denunciations from Democrats and minorities. Bush agrees that the American “Constitution makes it clear that people of all races must be treated equally under the law.” “Yet we know that our society has not fully achieved that ideal,” he equivocates. “Racial prejudice is a reality in America.”

The prevalence of deep-seated racism the president infers from the fact that African-Americans lag behind whites in academic and socio-economic achievements. This, of course, is a post hoc error, one that most Americans thoroughly reject.

Upheld by Mr. Bush, this error is the central tenet of affirmative action. According to the president’s diversity doxology, justice is achieved when racial and ethnic groups are reflected in academia and in the professions in proportion to their presence in the larger population, an impossibility considering individual and age-long inter-group differences. Absent such representation, Mr. Bush concludes that racism reigns.

This non sequitur is even harder to sustain when considering the Asian minority, a minority that has had its own historical hardships. In professions and academic pursuits where mathematical precocity is a factor, Asians are overrepresented and consistently outperform whites. If underrepresentation signals oppression, then overrepresentation equally must reflect an unfair advantage. Surely justice demands that overrepresentation of any group, not only of white males, be similarly corrected by the state? (How about making the NBA reflect America?)

Malaysian governments certainly adopted this logic toward their Chinese population, whose starting status as indentured laborers didn’t stop them from rising to dominate business, professions, and universities. To achieve “racial balance,” pro-Malaysian affirmative action laws were mandated in all government-controlled institutions.

Did not Hitler awaken to the same logic? In proportion to their numbers, Jews were also overrepresented in the economic and cultural life of Germany. In Malaysia, state ideology created a climate that was conducive to pogroms against the Chinese population; these were not looked upon unfavorably. Despite an antipathy toward the Jew—antipathy far in excess of the alleged racism African-Americans complain of nowadays—Jews remained active in German society until the state stepped in and stripped them of their rights. Hitler used the state apparatus to find a “Final Solution” to the Jewish advantage—the “Final Solution” was a reductio ad inferno of state-approved affirmative action.

The U.S. federal government has gone the Malaysian route for its black minority. As syndicated columnist Paul Craig Roberts reports, “In all 22 independent federal agencies and in 16 of 17 executive departments, blacks are massively overrepresented” in proportion to their presence in the population. Understandably, the plaintiffs in the Michigan case want the state to relinquish its compelling interest in promoting whatever it construes as diversity.

Bush refuses to second this; his brief shies away from addressing “the outer bounds of the Constitution,” but only the case in its narrowest sense. Since he accepts racial discrimination as a cause for African-Americans’ lag in achievement, the president intends to reject only the methods associated with this faulty formulation. Diversity directives are to go full throttle ahead so long as they are “racially-neutral.” 

Mr. Bush’s “road map” includes encouraging schools to come up with racial cue cards such as “a statement people can make about whether they’ve overcome hardship.” Berkeley and Texas, for instance, already make unusual hardships and life experience a crucial consideration in admissions. “The kind of hardships” that’ll be given extra credit are “largely peculiar to preferred minorities such as having been shot,” notes commentator Steve Sailer, wryly. In short, the quest for diversity is unlikely to encompass the Midwestern experience.

The Condi, (Andy) Card and Karl (Rove) Crack Team has achieved a triumph of triangulation. The Bush base, of which 92 percent is white, will swallow the bait, believing, as it did after the landmark 1978 case of Bakke, that quotas had been outlawed. Despite Bakke, universities continued to take race into account. Same in this case: With presidential approval, the Michigan point system will be palliated somewhat, but business as usual will see public funds diverted to other, less conspicuous, race-friendly recruiting methods, much to the glee of the “civil rights” industry. Mr. Bush’s appeasement of both sides, while further entrenching the politically correct and favored side, is a prime example of slimy Clintonian tactics.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com (Published also on Mises.org & in the GLOBE & MAIL)
January 22, 2003

The post BUSH’S AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AMBUSH appeared first on ILANA MERCER.