On education and the modern school system

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For many thousands of years, up until relatively recent times (the last 150 years) the masses of mankind all over the world have been illiterate. Knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic used to be pretty much a thing of a privileged class. Even today, in many countries, large portions of the population cannot read or write (especially in many Moslem countries). For the masses, an education used to be some enviable achievement acquired by relatively few people. The modern school system with its assembly line techniques for educating the masses of a country is something new in the history of man. Today in the West modern school systems teach children reading, writing, and arithmetic (which are morally neutral skills) and other subjects such as history and geography, but at the same time indoctrinate them in liberal, godless ideas and outlooks. They provide them with valuable skills and knowledge but, while doing it, also set them up with a life outlook that leads to hell.

In the past the purpose of a good education was viewed by many to be to prepare a person for a life quest for Truth and Understanding. The purpose was to train him to become a questioning, thinking person in search of truth. I think that is how the ancient Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle viewed the purpose of an education. They believed in questioning and examining life, asking questions about how we are to live life, why we are here, etc. I quote from Socrates:

I did not care for the things that most people care about – making money, having a comfortable home, high military or civil rank, and all the other activities, political appointments, secret societies, party organizations, which go on in our city . . . I set myself to do you – each one of you, individually and in private – what I hold to be the greatest possible service. I tried to persuade each one of you to concern himself less with what he has than with what he is, so as to render himself as excellent and as rational as possible.

I honor and love you: but why do you who are citizens of the great and mighty nation care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul? Are you not ashamed of these?... I do nothing but go about persuading you all, not to take thought for your persons and your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by more, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man.

These Greek philosophers were also interested in questions about natural phenomenon in the physical world we live in, questions arising in areas such as physics, mathematics, geometry, etc.. Western thinkers such as Galileo and Newton were also men in search of Truth.

Modern liberal man has, on the other hand, arrogantly come to the opinion that he has arrived at Final Truth. That truth that he has arrived at is that there is no God, no life after this one, that the whole world that we see about us “just happened”, that there is no absolute truth, that the idea of an eternal soul is just foolishness, etc.. And because modern man has come to know the final, ultimate truth, for him the function of schooling is no longer to seek Truth, but to teach children Truth (his Truth). And so children are now being indoctrinated in his Truth.

Western man has made amazing strides technically in many fields — fields like physics, chemistry, medicine, etc. Using the experimental method of modern science he has learned a lot. He has invented a lot of amazing devices — the automobile, airplane, television, telephone, computer, etc. Yet morally he has at the same time regressed to the state of an animal. What has happened?! How do you account for this?! Perhaps the following quotations give some insight as to why:

Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, and poverty of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent. Plato

On the soft bed of luxury most kingdoms have expired. Young

War destroys men, but luxury destroys mankind; at once corrupts the body and the mind. Crown

Wealth and luxury has turned the West into a modern day Sodom. Sodom was a great wealthy, wicked city. God rained fire and brimstone on Sodom in his great anger at its great wickedness (homosexuality). Will he spare the West?

Here in America there are many schools which provide good, serious, rigorous teaching. There are also many schools that are big country clubs, Mickey Mouse clubs. A degree from a Mickey Mouse club is not equivalent to a degree from a good school. A great many of our young people have Mickey Mouse educations. But that isn’t stopping them from going to college where they receive high liberal indoctrination — and they are borrowing big money to do it.

Learning and understanding is something that has to be sought after and pursued. It requires interest, desire, and effort. One cannot teach someone who is not interested in learning. I suspect that in our schools the vast majority of students are there just because they are required to be there. Most do not have a real enthusiasm for acquiring knowledge and truth. They are just unenthusiastically doing what they are told to do. How much they are learning varies greatly, but they are learning a little or a lot of what they need to function in today’s highly technical world. But they are not learning to think and question. Rather they are being taught what to think. And what they are being taught is liberal rubbish.

The road to becoming a well educated, thoughtful person (a person of understanding) is all about motivation, aspiration, ambition, diligence, perseverance, character, high personal standards, high goals, hard work, etc. Real education comes through struggle and hard work. And indeed, real education doesn’t stop with school, but continues for a lifetime. There is probably not one student in a thousand, perhaps ten thousand, that is really seriously interested in Truth. Finding Truth involves separating yourself from the crowd. The crowd always follows the path of Foolishness.

Children of the lower class didn’t used to go to school whereas children of the middle and upper classes did. Now all children are supposed to attend school. Can children of the lower class be expected to do as well in school as children of the upper class? I believe that in regard to mental ability, there is no difference between upper and lower class children. And there is probably no difference in mental ability between various minority and majority ethnic groups. Yet I believe that children of the lower class (and those of a number of different minority ethnic groups, such as the Black or Hispanic groups) can be expected to do much more poorly than children of the middle and upper classes. Why? The reason all comes down to attitudes, outlooks, values, personal standards, personal expectations, etc. It comes down to what you expect of yourself, what you want to do, believe you can do. Upper and middle class parents have higher expectations of their children than do lower class parents. People who have achieved a lot in life tend to have high expectations for their children. Upper class people think differently than lower class people. Outlooks, attitudes, values, personal standards pass from parent to child. And they pass from one child to another. If a child associates with children from low class families, the attitudes, outlooks, and values of the low class children will pass on to him just as a communicable disease passes from one person to another. Outlooks, attitudes, and values move from person to person. People of the middle and upper classes appreciate the value of education much more than do the people of lower class families. They believe in education and expect their children to study and do well. And it is also true that they are in a better position to help their children financially than are lower class people. Lower class people often may see little value in education and sometimes (as with some Appalachian hillbillies) may not even make their children go to school. People of different cultural groups have different attitudes toward education. A single-parent black child who has grown up on welfare, whose mother was on welfare, grandmother was on welfare, and great grandmother was on welfare, has a totally different mentality than the child of some high-achieving medical doctor. The parents think differently, the friends all think differently, etc. Because of the connection between educational achievement and financial success the middle and upper classes tend to perpetuate themselves and the lower classes tend to perpetuate themselves i.e. the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. And the mechanism that is responsible for it is values, outlooks and attitudes.

July 2017