ExtremeWisdom

More Evidence on the Stupidity that is "Public Education"

I know that when stories like the one below come across the newswires, most of you say to yourselves, "Well, that's an exception, all schools can't really be that bad."

You are wrong.  They are, and the reason you refuse to believe it is simple.  You would have to take some sort of action to stop it - and you are too comfortable to "rock the boat" or talk to your neighbors.

Allow me to make you uncomfortable.  What you read below is the RULE - NOT the exception. (via Best of the Web)

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Zero-Tolerance Watch
"Kevin Francois gave up his lunch break to talk to his mother, but it ended up costing him the rest of the school year," reports the Ledger-Enquirer of Columbus, Ga.:

Francois, a junior at Spencer High School in Columbus, was suspended for disorderly conduct Wednesday after he was told to give up his cell phone at lunch while talking to his mother who is deployed in Iraq, he said.

His mother, Sgt. 1st Class Monique Bates, left in January for a one-year tour and serves with the 203rd Forward Support Battalion, 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division. . . .

The incident happened when Francois received a call from his mother at 12:30 p.m., which he said was his lunch break. Francois said he went outside the school building to get a better reception when his mother called. A teacher who saw Francois on his phone told him to get off the phone. But he didn't. . . .

Francois said he told the teacher, "This is my mom in Iraq. I'm not about to hang up on my mom."

Francois said the teacher tried to take the phone, causing it to hang up.

The student said he then went with the teacher to the school's office where he surrendered his phone. His mother called again at 12:37 p.m. and left a message scolding her son about hanging up and telling him to answer the phone when she calls.

Assistant principal Alfred Parham says Francois could have been arrested for being defiant. He adds that students are not permitted to use cell phones "for conversating back and forth during school because if they were allowed to do that, they could be text messaging each other for test questions."

Which raises the question: Do people who think "conversating" is a word have any business administrating tests in the first place?

Ward Churchill Revisited

Here is link that will have you rolling on the floor laughing.  This Churchill idiot holds himself out as an Indian, a professor, and an artist.  Now, his signing of a picture that is an obvious rip-off of another artist exposes him as a fraud in art as well.

This is who is teaching your kids folks.  Wake up!

Original

Churchill Fake

What a joke the radical left has become.

Via BrothersJudd Blog - An Interview with GK Chesterton

This was so good that I had to copy it whole from BrothersJudd (the best blog on the web)!   GK Chesterton died long before "postmodernism." But if you know anything about Chesterton, you'd know that he predicted "postmodernism" long before some useless Ivy League professor ever thought up the term.

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INTERVIEW: with GK Chesterton: Chesterton is dismayed at the onward march of relativism and secularism. He also thinks the novel has lost its way, understands Islamic grievances against the west and is a proud mentor to satirists (Tobias Jones, January 2005, Prospect)

Tobias Jones: We'll come back to Christianity. But you mention postmodernism: what do you take it to mean?

GKC: Ha! Have you ever asked a postmodernist the meaning of postmodernism? It's all absolute hogwash, or as they would say, meta-hogwash. The whole point is that postmodernism is the negation of meaning and belief and faith. Postmoderns can't say what they mean because that would imply meaning, something they're at pains to deny. Of course, at table you can ask them to pass the mustard, and they seem perfectly able; and they know two plus two is four, even though they get very cross if you affirm your belief in objective reality. In some ways my entire oeuvre, published before and after the first world war, was dedicated to battling the nascent phenomenon of postmodernism. I described the tendency in a book called Heretics and summarised its motto with the line: "let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it." That is their ambition: to be relieved of the responsibility of deciding what is good and what evil by pretending that those concepts don't exist. As George Bernard Shaw, the first postmodernist, wrote in his The Quintessence of Ibsenism, "the golden rule is that there is no golden rule."

TJ: Might that not be sensible in a multi-faith society? The intolerance and absolutism of monotheism can be swapped for the tolerance of multiculturalism.

GKC: Dear dear, I can see that you too have been hoodwinked. That is their rhetoric: tolerance, the peaceful coexistence of competing beliefs. In reality, now that their heresy has become enshrined as orthodoxy, you're not even allowed to express a belief. Take, for example, the country which was the cradle of this silly craze: France. There, tolerance apparently implies that one isn't even allowed into school with a veil. Come come. If I may quote myself again, "the old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it." Or take the case of Rocco Buttiglione and his interrogation before joining the European commission: he expressed a personal belief about homosexuality and distinguished between a sin and a crime. That distinction is the cornerstone of a secular body politic; in a theocracy, and in liberal totalitarianism, it is non-existent. Buttiglione was displaying both sincerity and subtlety and tolerance. What could be more tolerant than a man believing that something is wrong but allowing it to happen because he accommodates other beliefs? By contrast, postmoderns believe in nothing and so countenance no dissent.

TJ: You're not seriously telling me we're less tolerant than we were, say, in the Edwardian era?

GKC: My dear boy, I think you're mistaking tolerance for relativism. If the only dogma you have is tolerance, the only thing you believe in is relativism. What nobility is there in tolerance if you don't believe in anything in the first place? You're like someone who makes a great show of denying themselves something they didn't even want anyway. It's an illusion of virtue. Your entire morality, if so it can be called, is negative: against racism and against sexism and against war and so on and so forth.

TJ: We do believe in things: democracy, freedom....

GKC: Your thinking is irredeemably muddled. Those are means, not ends. You can't say you believe in democracy per se. You would have to tell me what you believe democracy can achieve. Besides, I think you're confusing liberty with libertinism, freedom -- as Milton said -- with licence. Freedom, for your generation, implies the removal of all constraint. That's not freedom but licentiousness; from a Christian point of view, it's nothing other than the complete removal of freedom. It is slavery to sin. You see, freedom only has meaning if it is accompanied by morality, if it implies a choice between good and evil. You can hardly blame the vast majority of the Arab world if they equate your freedom with immorality because they know that you no longer believe in good and evil. A few decades into my afterlife I met Viktor Frankl, and I greatly admired his notion that if the east coast of America has a statue of liberty, the west one desperately requires a statue of responsibility. The one without the other has no meaning. Talk all you want about human rights, gay rights, women's rights, - but I insist that you tell me what you think are the complementary human responsibilities, gay responsibilities, women's responsibilities. That is why I wrote in What's Wrong With The World that: "Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities."

The Darkest Corners of the World

Soaring Words from George W. Bush...

"By our efforts, [in promoting freedom] we have lit a fire as well - a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world."

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Fine words.  Here is my question. Where are "the darkest corners of the world" in terms of lack of freedom.

We all know that places like Myanmar & the failed states of West Africa looks pretty bad in terms of individual freedom.  However, the biggest threat to freedom is not these blighted areas where freedom has yet to flourish, but here in America, where freedom once reigned, but is now being attacked from with in.

We all know the entities that attack our freedom.  Our schools have become collectivist indoctrination camps.  Once proud defenders of the Bill of Rights, such as the ACLU, are editing religious freedom out of the 1st Amendment on their website. (look for the Dowdified elipsis)

But the main weapon used by these entities is political correctness.  Though PC is a fairly new name, the practice of silencing speech through "conformity" is not new.

Our schools are silencing the discussion of ideas "for our own good" and our popular culture enforces a deadening conformity over us.

Below are some great quotes that deal with this.  The quote by C.S. Lewis is a description of the tyranny the practitioners wish to impose.

The quote by de Tocqueville is a warning (across the centuries).  He describes what he sees as America's major problem - a stifling conformity.  At the time (1835) he thought this conformity was a threat, but was balanced by our young nation's positives.

We can now see, reading his quote, that the threat is now very real. If you practice the "self-censorship" forced by political correctness, you are killing your own culture.  Speak up - before the cock crows.

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"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty

may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -CS Lewis

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"...but [enforced conformity] seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood. . . . [I]t every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. . . . [T]he supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided. . . . Such a power does not destroy, . . . but it enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.  -Alexis de Tocqueville