Woke Education

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Source; https://patriotcommandcenter.org/forum/woke-education

“The educational establishment in its highest reaches is today a cesspool, contaminating the society it had been, at great expense, a credit to nurture."-- Roger Kimball 

True education is about learning to think analytically and critically. It is about experiencing wildly different products of the human mind and spirit,  and making comparisons, recognizing affinities, and in the process, over time, refining one's own tastes. It is about encountering unfamiliar thoughts, weighing them against one another and against one's own observation so the world, figuring out what one thinks about them, and, in the process forming one's own philosophy of life. It is about building an understanding of of all of humankind, its history, art, thoughts, and its culture, and how things got the way they are. It's about learning to appreciate, cherish, and pass on to others the glories of Western Civilization. It's about learning to see the world through increasingly sophisticated eyes, and hence experiencing it in a far richer way than one could ever have imagined at the start. In short, it's learning to think to make the fullest and freest use of one's mind. Indeed it is ultimately about human freedom - the freedom of the individual intellect and thus to make its own worthy contribution to the preservation and advancement of human civilization.

We should stand on the shoulders of pioneers, soldiers, entrepreneurs, inventors, laborers and farmers, who, over the course of a few extraordinary generations, transformed a continent into the freest, most dynamic, and most prosperous nation in the history of human race. Not perfect, just better than all the rest. One of the consequences of which is that by the late 20th century virtually every young person in America had the opportunity to acquire a real higher education, not only training in some practical science or skill, but also to the contemplation of things like painting and poetry, music and architectural, the nature and meaning of life.

How fortunate they are to live in the time and place that they do, just how different their lives are from those of their predecessors, and how only a few generations ago, the lives of most human beings, even in the richest countries in the world, were poor, nasty, brutish, and short; that most people were illiterate; that there were far more teenagers working themself to exhaustion in farms and factories and sitting in classrooms. 

As Allen bloom stated, the American education system had been founded on the belief in rationality and objective truth, vigorous and free inquiry, and in the importance of encountering the great ideas and the great books for the exploration of life's mystery and meaning. 

All that, met in America before and fuller than anywhere else, however, is being replaced by identity studies that all betray, in the profoundest sense, that promise of America. Increasingly its coming under the sway of relativist thinking and rigid political ideas, ultimately becoming a menace to American democracy. Through multiculturalism, social constructionism, and all the deplorable isms that are part of the woke experiment have nothing to do whatsoever with education as previously defined.

This woke ideology’s familiarity with history, literature, philosophy, economics, science, or any other traditional field of learning is at best rudimentary. But what they have is ideology and jargon to go along with arrogance about how really little they know. And it's certainly is nothing to do with actual social or cultural analysis. They've been trying to reduce the rich complexities and ambiguities of human life to simple formulas about oppressors and oppressed. And when they encounter a reality that doesn't fit this paradigm, they don't know how to deal with it, other than to make statements that are demonstrably untrue. Most of the things they have to say only make even the remotest kind of sense within an American context and usually they are nothing more than counterfactualism, mimicking vapid rhetoric about subversion, demystification, transgression, violence, fissures, the centered subjects, fragmentation, dismantling master narratives, and so on, which doesn't require any in-depth research or critical thinking; all you need to do is to keep slinging the same rhetoric. It has come to mean just about anything it's user wants it to mean,  a cow catcher term sweeping all query and objection before it.

Where our education system once focused on introducing us to the great achievements of Western Civilization and the universal values that make it unique in human history, the goal now is to discredit the West legacy. It starts with an article of faith that all civilizations are equal - except for Western civilization, which we are told is unique only in the degree of its greed, brutality and lust for power. Every nation, ever one, has had its failure to treat its inhabitants with dignity and respect while living up to its potential. America in total has just been better than any in that regard. And left-wing collectivist systems have by far the most horrendous their track records, yet in identity studies are presented as worthy of admiration. For those with little or no knowledge of history, American or otherwise, ignorance of that is a dangerously powerful propaganda. 

The objective is to cast out of our public school monopoly and universities Western norms and principles. This caustic suspicion has gradually but decisively penetrated into the Zeitgeist of Western civilization, culminating in the amorphous yet cultural amalgam of neo-liberalism, a complete inversion of classic liberalism. It postulates that we live in a world without reliable truths or transiting possibilities, without epiphanies, without absolute values, without theology and without durable meanings. It compels one to reject the universalities of such values as individual liberty and to believe that there are no barbarians, only different forms of civilized man.

Such teachings from “identity studies” do not open the mind - they close it. They degrade and hold nothing but contempt for civilization. They are taking our hand and urging us to jump into the abyss. 

This important part of the movement known as wokeism is flagrant in our universities that foster a cultural of grievance, aka “identity studies.” It is a truism for anyone honest and in the know that any discipline that has “studies” in its name is not doing the thing it's claiming to do. These “studies” do not analyze with the use of reason or judgement according to standards that have been developed over centuries; rather, they  view through the prism of race, class, and gender, and hail or condemn in accordance with certain political checklists. The result is what John M. Ellis calls the “theory cult”, recognized not by sound, intelligent analysis but by standardized political woke attitudes du jour. Hence, these are croc non-disciplines which have metastasized into the complete inversion, among much else, of what used to be American spirit. Its only real goal is the create the most oppressed person in the room, or at least the person who claims, or pretends, to be the most oppressed person in the room. The devastation it inflicts on the individual and society is substantial. 

Students are getting turned by these identity studies into little commissars who see it as their purpose in life to be thought police. They are the philosophical progeny of the uniform thugs who led free thinking people off to the gulags of death in Russia, hitler's gas chambers and firing squads, mao’s deadly re-education camps. These products of wokeism are vastly uninformed about the history of ideas to understand that ideas to which they have pledged their loyalty are not ideas at all, in any authentic sense, but fierce, rigid, airless, totalitarian orthodoxies founded on selective censorship advocated by marxists of the past. That this ideological dogma is resulting in the soft tyranny of groupthink, unconscious bias, and a self-inflated sense of some false moral mission of demystification, merely looking for evidence, real or not, to support what it desperately wants to to believe, enforcing and condoning their process of false stereotypes, which of course is what it condemn in others. And all this deeply and deadly flawed nonsense it feels is providing some kind of ideological corrective. 

The idea that many aspects of human experience that we ordinarily think of as parts of human nature are simply human constructions, brought into being by an act of naming such, in essence exaggerates to the point of absurdity. That every person is, by virtue of accidents of sex, skin color, and sexual orientation, a member of a group for whom the rich delicate complexities of life are reduced to pseudoscientific rhetoric about oppression, collective agreements, experiences of victimhood, and hegemonic power(1) is to view and treat an abstract concept as if it were a material object, or a human creation as part of nature. 

Through identity studies one is manipulated into believing that blacks, women, gays, lesbians, and any others in the ever expanding list(2) of alleged victims du’ jour stand in need of special protections not afforded to non-members of this grouping, as if these people are too weak to live with freedom. This assignment of official group identity always worsens, not betters, human relations creating barriers and defensiveness along with injustice, the very opposite of what it promises.

When the neo-liberal looks at Western civilization, it has the sensitivity of The Princess and the pea. When it looks at anti-western civilization all those sensitivities disappear. And yet this is the only country on Earth where Hutus and Tutsis can live side by side. When you're totally oppressed, small things don't bother you. When great progress occurs, the remaining discrimination, however slight or even your own fault become unbearable. It’s an easy out to simply blame others. And the charlatans who preach this nonsense rely on their ability, when challenged, to silence others, or use thick clouds of pretentious jargon, or charges of prejudice or philistinism.

These identity studies degrade our culture, polarize our politics and coarsen public debate. They eventuate in the rejection, indeed the demonization, of the very ideas that once defined American Exceptionalism and all the benefits that provided the  entire nation, and yes, even the world. Though not perfect, it was simply better than all the alternatives tried, with the exception we’re told, by neo-liberals of course, of their promised “workers paradises” which, as that great American philosopher of the 20th century, Bullwinkle, summed up of those old utopian myths by saying: "That trick never works!"

America, unique in the world, found a way for increasingly diverse groups of people to live together not only in peace but with a strong sense of shared identity - and identity founded not on ethnicity but on a commitment to values of individual liberty, dignity, and equality articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Sweden’s Gunnar Myrdal admired the fact that Americans of every ethnicity, religion, and color shared a more explicitly expressed system of general ideals than the people of any other country in the Western world.  

And although America had not perfectly lived up to the full meaning of its Creed, that all individuals are created equal by God, endowed with certain inalienable rights, it was that Creed that was the very thing that made moral progress in America not only possible but, inevitable. It was the fuel for the Civil Rights movement, whose original goal was consistent with the aforementioned ideals. 

Unfortunately, that movement was hijacked by marxist based, hate-fueled, neo-liberalism that teaches that America is not a nation of individuals at all but a nation of groups, where the very idea of a shared identity is challenged, condemned, and dismantled and replaced by a conception, founded not an individual rights and liberties but on the claims of group identity and culture, which of course is a true betrayal of classic liberalism and a profound danger to the sense of unity that made America uniquely strong, prosperous, free and able to correct inevitable flaws.  

Arthur Schlesinger, and icon among liberals, warned his fellow neo-libs that the looming cult of victimhood, while posing as a liberal crusade, was actually an anti-liberal virus. It was nothing less than the closing of the neo-liberal mind, abandoning principles of individual equality and liberty, vulcanizing and politicizing society and culture, wrapped in flawed marx's critiques that threaten to destroy the very foundations of American democracy. It is a pathological fixation on  group identity and a strict division of humankind into oppressor and victim groups, having a preoccupation with the historical  grievances of certain groups, combined with a virulent hostility to America, which is consistently cast as the prime villain in the histories of these groups and the world at large, rewriting history and logic and abandoning truth  to fit its goals.

America has been the freest and most prosperous nation in human history and has also positively transformed much of the rest of the world, committing blood and resources against the monstrous reality of fascism, nazism, and communism totalitarianism. It's founding documents articulated ideas about individual liberty, human rights and equality that have reshaped human civilization.

The sad truth is that the triumph of identity studies – with its combination of post-truth, half-truth, and no truth dogmas on which those studies are based, while attacking Western civilization in general and America in particular, diminishes our sense of human possibility, and threatens to further impoverish, even destroy our successful though already diminished culture. The purveyors of this dangerous ideological dogma need to know that there are more people who oppose this insanity then who support it, and that those opponents can exert pressure too. There's only one way a small minority of totalitarian ideologues can win in the long term - and that's if the reasonable, common sense majority allows itself to be scared into silence. The only response is to push back.

1.      For example, even as we are demanded to accept that all white bourgeoisie heterosexual males are incapable of accepting those who are unlike him, we are expected at the same time to accept that all his opposites know how all white bourgeoisie heterosexual males think. The absurd hypocrisy is so blatant only a neoliberal could feel this way.

2. The pecking order of the oppressed was hard enough to keep track of but, with the creation of fluid intersectionality and the destruction of language it brought, its damn near impossible now