By
Investigating Journalist Jon Rappoport
December 24, 2010
NewsWithViews.com
I'm not crazy enough to suggest that mere words are driving America into a ditch, but propaganda does have a powerful effect on minds, and minds that are confused are not likely to go anywhere—except around and around in circles.
Let's start with this: NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND.
The phrase suggests it's the duty of the government to take care of every little kiddie. It resonates with people who actually believe this imperative. It seems to take the moral high ground. It's almost a religious phrase.
It also couples with another favorite homily: CHILDREN ARE OUR FUTURE. As George Carlin once pointed out, children are always the future. They grow up to become adults. Every generation works that way, biologically speaking. It's a truism.
First of all, it's impossible not to leave some kids behind. But perhaps the real meaning of the phrase is: we're going to graduate everybody. We're never going to make a kid repeat the grade he's in. We're going to rig the grading system so everybody wins. Doesn't matter if a kid can't read; he's going to advance. Right into the dumpster.
But I digress. NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND implies the government is ultimately responsible for educating the young. I dispute that. I think the parents are the ones who must see to it their kids can read, if nobody else will.
NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND lets parents off the hook. It allows them to say to the government, “You failed us. You didn't educate my boy. You let him down. It's your fault. You promised you wouldn't leave him behind, but you did. He can't read. So don't blame us.”
I'm brimming with digressions this morning—but I can't resist this one. I think a more accurate description of our education system is: NO TEACHER LEFT BEHIND. Doesn't matter how incompetent the teacher is. His union is going to protect him. He doesn't know the difference between a noun and a verb? So what? He's a member of the union.
Here's another phrase that couples with NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND: SOCIAL JUSTICE. I could write a book on that one, but suffice to say it implies the government will leave no stone unturned in fixing INEQUALITY. Problem is, the further you dig into inequality, the more you have to meddle. You eventually end up in the living room of a family. You end up trying to restructure the whole society from the ground up. You end up believing that victims are everywhere, and the overriding mission of government is to help them.
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In this enterprise, you actually encourage people to think of, and present themselves as, victims, in order to gain attention and help and freebies. In other words, you help create more victims, and the vortex sucks you in, and the whole ship goes down.
Finally, every kid believes he can't have any self-respect unless he labels himself a victim—which is, of course, a contradiction.
Under the heading of social justice, you destroy the whole society.
Big government favors that trend, because it enables them to become even bigger and more controlling, more invasive, more powerful. More needed.
Meanwhile, those of us who still believe in individual freedom need to ignore all that and create islands of effort on behalf of what the American Republic actually stands for.
You see, it turns out that every one of us, if we traced our ancestry back far enough, would come to a place where our people were, in fact, victims of some horrible crime and miscarriage of justice. I don't care who you are. You would find it. But are we all going to carry such history forward and spend all our time seeking a solution to THAT?
NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND.
NO INJUSTICE LEFT BEHIND.
NO POSSIBLE VICTIM STATUS LEFT BEHIND.
I'll close with this. An overwhelming number of college graduates, these days, are in debt to the government, because they've taken out student loans to pay for an education that keeps costing more because the government is willing to fork out those loans.
Do you get how it works? The government, in order to leave no child behind, will give out loans to pay for any kid who wants to go to college—and colleges, seeing this, will raise their fees to cash in.
This system allows all these students to think of themselves as debtors (victims) from the get-go. And the next step is, the kids will become angry at the government because, well, the loans have to be paid off—a dastardly imposition.
NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND becomes NO CHILD WHO ISN'T A RESENTFUL VICTIM.
Perfect.
The government triumphs again.
Why send a kid to college?
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I frankly think you'd be far better off if your kid, by hook or by crook, at age 21, could read and understand every single line of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, could write a long essay about the meaning of these two documents, could do algebra and geometry, could analyze written text by the rules of logic, and could understand what freedom means and implies. But that's just me.
If he could do these things, he wouldn't be left behind.
� 2010 Jon Rappoport - All Rights Reserved
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Jon Rappoport has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize early in his career, Jon has published articles on medical fraud, politics, alternative health, and sports in LA Weekly, CBS Healthwatch, Spin, Stern, and other magazines and newspapers in the US and Europe.
He is the is author of several books, including The Secret Behind Secret Societies and The Magic Agent (a novel).
Jon is the author of a new course for home schoolers, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS.
E-Mail: qjrconsulting@gmail.com
Web site, www.nomorefakenews.com
Web site, www.insolutions.info
