By Erica Carle
December 28, 2010
NewsWithViews.com
Students Are Not Taught What They Must Know
Education has been defined as "learning what you MUST KNOW in order to FIND OUT what you NEED TO KNOW." Reading, writing, and arithmetic are called the education BASICS for good reason. You must have these skills to FIND OUT things you NEED TO KNOW.
How could you read a book, shop intelligently, understand road signs when driving, follow directions on household appliances, earn a living, detect lies, follow your many interests and inclinations if you could not read, write, and figure? How could you make your own decisions if you had no way to seek information, and no accumulation of knowledge against which to compare and evaluate new information?
Reading, writing, and arithmetic are the basic essentials of what you must know to FIND OUT what you NEED TO KNOW. Without these basic skills you are at the mercy of the opinions of others and without the ability to gather enough facts to verify or discard what you have been told.
If learning
what you must know to find out what you need to know is education, what
is indoctrination? Indoctrination is an emotional commitment to what others
want you to believe.
Education is based on truth. Indoctrination is based on what others hope
you will accept as truth.
Education can serve to continually expand our knowledge and understanding. Indoctrination leads to blind alleys, and to self-limitation of knowledge and understanding. Education involves the intellect. True education is based on a single emotion—LOVE OF TRUTH. If it is based on LOVE OF TRUTH, the emotions and intellect can be in harmony. If it is based on anything other than the LOVE OF TRUTH, the intellect must ultimately be sacrificed to the emotions. Emotions can limit the desire for knowledge to that which is emotionally acceptable.
Millions of Americans are so committed to philosophies, leaders, groups, and goals that they will self-censor any information that might question their devotion. Communication between friends and even between members of the same family becomes difficult, and sometimes impossible because each person seeks not the TRUTH, but whatever opinions support his own adopted philosophy. One-to-one communication is being replaced by group-against-group confrontation.
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Schooling today intentionally indoctrinates. Education policy makers frankly admit that has been their long-range goal for generations. In 1918 Benjamin Kidd wrote in his book, The Science of Power:
"Every capable editor understands that the most effective appeal to the multitude is the emotional appeal through the spirit of combativeness. An appeal to the pure instinct of the fight or to that class consciousness upon which combativeness is based, and which man shares with the animal world, is known to be the most direct and effective means of moving the general mind on public questions. P. 180
"The essential element of Power in all social heredity is the emotion of the ideal. Once effectively imposed, this idealism becomes the expression of the living soul of a people. Its influence cannot be estimated. It subordinates everything. It becomes Power incarnate."
"The will to attain to an end imposed on a people by the emotion of an ideal organized and transmitted through social heredity is the highest capacity of mind. It can only be imposed in all its strength through the young. So to impose it has become the chief end of education in the future.
"Oh, you blind leaders who seek to convert the world by laboured disputations! Step out of the way or the world must fling you aside. Give us the Young. Give us the Young and we will create a new mind and a new earth in a single generation.
"The idealism which will win out in the stress of the world is that through which Power must obtain the completest expression. Power in its highest expression is the science of organizing the individual mind in the service of the universal. NOTE: (Community Organizing?) Truth is nothing else than this science of Power. This is the test by which every religion will have to stand or fail." P. 307-309
Reading books like those of Benjamin Kidd and by other sociologists brings home to us the fact that others have been and are planning for us without our intelligent consent. We NEED TO KNOW this.
Why has education failed us in the Twentieth Century? It has failed because it adopted the goals of social scientists as they lust for power:
"A liberal education, that is, an education that qualifies for social leadership can be acquired without a foreign language; although it is highly desirable that each of the foreign languages be represented by some social leaders who can use them. Correct and elegant use of one’s mother tongue is an ornament to any personality; but it is not an absolutely indispensable equipment for intellectual leadership. It is high time for us to begin to suspect that as requirements, these subjects represent an uncriticized and indefensible tradition; in which case the arguments for them are no more than the current defense mechanisms that we have memorized.
Does it not appear that abolishing rhetoric and foreign languages, both as entrance and curricular requirements, would prove a decided promotion of the academic college’s real social function; inasmuch as that would save time for things of actual importance, instead of mere conventional prestige? . . . As a matter of tradition, that college still requires for admission those very subjects which ought, in high school, to be relegated to the limbo of election: mathematics, foreign languages, and formal English. A Sociological Philosophy of Education, Ross L. Finney, Ph.D.; Asst. Prof. of Educational Sociology, U of Minn.; The MacMillan Company, 1929; P. 354-356
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Wonder no more why 20th century education has failed. It was intended to fail. Wonder no more why Americans have been so dumbed down that the armed services must reject 23% of applicants.
School is used to mold students for social science control. Students are not taught the basics. They are trained to conform. They are not taught what they must know to find out what they need to know.
Can you believe the truth, even when it hurts?
� 2010 Erica Carle - All Rights Reserved
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Erica Carle is an independent researcher and writer. She has a B.S. degree from the University of Wisconsin. She has been involved in radio and television writing and production, and has also taught math and composition at the private school her children attended in Brookfield, Wisconsin. For ten years she wrote a weekly column, "Truth In Education" for WISCONSIN REPORT, and served as Education Editor for that publication.
Website: EricaCarle.com
E-mail: hist.detective@yahoo.com
