The American Educational Crisis Explained

Out with Rousseau, in with Thomas Sowell

The decline in math, reading, and writing abilities in this country was very intentional.

Educational Failures

American children face a dire challenge in achieving fluent reading skills, with approximately 40% categorized as nonreaders. By age 15, a mere 14% show proficiency in reading, while nearly 20% fail to meet any basic standards. This issue is much worse among minorities like Black and Native American children. Nearly half underperform eighth-grade reading standards.

The Terrible Mentality Behind All of This

Progressives and socialists exemplify Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s, Noble Savage Theory. They see minorities as unfortunate pawns in a savage game of monopoly. Victims of circumstance, the Rousseauian believes the “savage” lacks all ability to run their own lives and needs the guiding hand of the Leftist to prosper. Nothing is more appealing to the “Woke” than believing they are their own savior.

Remember that in the Woke Book of Genesis human beings are not sinners. It is the environment that corrupted their “noble savage” nature. Rousseau believed that if this negative environmental stimulus could be removed people could return to their primitive state as perfect beings.

This weird rationale is the basis for socialism, communism, and even fascism.

The fundamental principle of all morality, upon which I have reasoned in all my writings and which I developed with all the clarity of which I am capable is that man is a being who is naturally good, loving justice and order; that there is no original perversity in the human heart, and the first movements of nature are always good. - Rousseau

Many reject God and the afterlife in favor of the idea they can perfect humanity and create a utopia here on earth. “Original perversity” alludes to the concept of original sin.

Original sin’s punishment for man’s transgression against God was a simple one-word judgment: labor. Adam must labor by the sweat of his brow, and Eve must labor via childbirth.

He believed humans could transcend civilization to a state where taking care of basic needs like food, water, and shelter would no longer be necessary.

In the end, the socialists and the communists have gone to great lengths to create religions that justify their unwillingness to work.

Have you heard the phrase, “idle hands are the devil’s workshop”? Well, the devil was in Rousseau. He was extremely lazy. He enjoyed being spanked by his mother, even as an adult. He also left his five children to die in orphanages. Quite a sad existence for an individual socialists look up to. Karl Marx, the creator of communism, was also a lazy troglodyte who cheated on his wife and let three of his children starve to death. In some cases, Marx continued to send his children to piano lessons and tutors when there was not enough food on the table and the rent could not be paid.

Yet these two believed civilization was evil. They exemplified the malignant narcissists.

Are you noticing a pattern?

Throughout the 20th century, socialists and fascists used eugenics to push the idea they could perfect man. Progressives were some of the biggest supporters of eugenics philosophies.

Unfortunately, we are not taught where these cultish theories come from until you have spent $100K on numerous college degrees. The university system is a bit like Scientology at this point. You must pay a small fortune to receive the “true knowledge” of the universe and your place in it.

“Equity” is the rebranding of these ideas for the 21st century. So-called educators define equity as “equality of outcomes” yet lie to parents, children, and the community about what they mean. Equity is simply a woke version of socialism.

The Reading Crisis in American Education

So, what does this have to do with math and reading?

Everything.

The woke reject conventional religion. They reject the idea that there is anything intrinsically valuable within human beings.

They believe your political identity is the most important thing about you.

Anything negative about your personality is a reflection of your environment.

The wokester believes if they can remove all negative external stimuli — bad grades, challenging work, the possibility of failure — then they can help you find your true consciousness.

However, all those negative experiences help build character.

As Jonathan Haidt says students are taught three great untruths,

1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker

2. Always trust your feelings

3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

Failures are a path to success. Nothing comes easy.

“Children are anti-fragile, we are all prone to motivated reasoning and confirmation bias, and we're all prone to tribalism and black-and-white thinking’ - Haidt

This is why we must take a path towards antifragility.

Anti-fragility goes beyond robustness; it means that something does not merely withstand a shock but actually improves because of it. - Investopedia

The Woke Just Hate Work

Rousseau believed human beings came from a “state of nature” that Karl Marx would later call “proto-communism.”

In this imaginary world, human beings did not need labor, private property, or need to eat, sleep, or acquire shelter.

Somehow everything was just sort of there, ready for the taking. Then, according to Rousseau, human beings gained a sense of self, which led to greed. These humans acquired property, which he believes led to the beginning of civilization.

The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: “Do not listen to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!

Remember that socialists often believe that by eliminating capitalism they will eliminate greed. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It is interesting that he completely rejects the idea that primitive societies fought each other. One of the worst mistakes of anthropologists and archeologists of decades past was trying to convince the world that hunter-gatherers were peaceful.

In reality, primitive societies fought constantly. Some modern anthropologists believe hunter-gatherer societies had murder rates closer to 25%. We cannot know the exact number - but murder rates were certainly much higher than in the modern world. For more on this, I suggest reading the book Constant Battles.

I can’t imagine living in a world where most problems were solved by beating someone to death with a club. We live in the most peaceful times human beings have ever lived.

But, that is not a useful argument for the woke. They do not want to believe in a meritocracy or that they are responsible for their own ridiculous actions. They need to believe they are a sad product of their environment and the environment around them needs to change to create a more perfect “critically conscious” world… A world where supposedly nobody has to work anymore.

But as soon as one man needed the help of another, as soon as one man realized that it was useful for a single individual to have provisions for two, equality disappeared, property came into existence, labor became necessary. Vast forests were transformed into smiling fields which had to be watered with men’s sweat, and in which slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow with the crops.

Rousseau, like Karl Marx, believed that once “property came into existence, labor became necessary.”

Really?

Hunter-gatherers did not have to work to obtain food and shelter? I can’t imagine a job today that would require more work than simple survival thousands of years ago.

But, worry not, the wokester has a solution.

In Comes the Dictator

Who will save us from our fall from grace?

Well, the chosen one of course. A self-styled savior. Some hyper-intelligent angel who can raise us up from the troubles of living in the civilized world.

The socialist, fascist, progressive, wokester or what have you believe that the State “is the means by which the individual can be freed from the restrictive tyrannies that compose society.”

In this sense, their ideology is theocratic in a way, but also worse than that. To the woke, there is no higher power determining right and wrong than the Almighty State.

It is the “Dictatorship of the General Will” — the final determiner of ethics and morality.

The woke mind virus leads one to believe that only “The State” can save you from the troubles of your own existence.

In this way, the woke replace God with The State. In some sense, this is still believed by modern liberals.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said,

“The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.

The Rub

Although we took a roundabout wait in getting to my conclusion, I believe that the woman at the top of this article is following these ideologies. One that says, if I simply remove hardship, labor, and the potential for failure from the equation these children will reach some higher truth.

The reality is something completely different.

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