Bruce Deitrick Price
Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer, was arguably more intelligent and capable than 99.9% of the population.
In a 1980 interview Jobs gave his vision for education: “I’m a very big believer in equal opportunity, as opposed to equal outcome….Equal opportunity to me more than anything means a great education….Maybe even more important than a great family life…It pains me because we do know how to provide a great education. We really do. If we got our act together, we could make sure that every young child in this country got a great education. But we fall far short of that.”
We know exactly how to do it, that’s the important news that Jobs was telling us. Meanwhile, the people who control our school system are always telling us why it can’t be done. Whom do you trust in this debate?
More crucially, how do we explain that the country’s top Educators are defeatists or dunces? Why can’t they do what Steve Jobs thinks is easily done?
To a remarkable degree, the people in charge, those I call the Education Establishment, are far-left ideologues (progressives, socialists, collectivists, communists, et al). Typically, they are contemptuous of tradition, religion, national identity, and the great majority of the public. Our top Educators worship their own beliefs; whereas your beliefs are probably labeled old-fashioned and stupid. Predictably, these ideologues create perverse, dysfunctional schools.
The Internet provides some wonderful collections of statements by these extremists, for example, Public Schools, the Humanist Conspiracy; PsychQuotes; and Dark Intentions of Public Schools. These statements let us see into the hearts and minds of the people who control our schools:
“[A] student attains ‘higher order thinking’ when he no longer believes in right or wrong….A large part of what we call teaching is a teacher’s ability to obtain affective objectives by challenging the student’s fixed beliefs…[T]he teacher should be able to use education to reorganize a child’s thoughts, attitudes, and feelings.” Benjamin Bloom, concoctor of Bloom’s Taxonomy, 1956
“To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family tradition, national patriotism, and religious dogmas.” —-Dr. G. Brock Chisholm in Psychiatry magazine, 1946
“I think that the most important factor moving us toward a secular society has been the educational factor. Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is 16 tends to lead toward the elimination of religious superstition.” Paul Blanshard, Socialist minister and editor at the Nation, 1976
“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well – by creating the international child of the future.” Dr. Chester M. Pierce, address to the Childhood International Education Seminar, 1973
“We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view….Man does not have the right to develop his own mind….We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electronic stimulation of the brain.”—-Dr. Jose M.R. Delgado, Director of Neuropsychiatry at Yale University Medical School, 1974
“The reduction of intelligence is an important factor in the curative process…The fact is that some of the very best cures that one gets are in those individuals whom one reduces almost to amentia (feeble-mindedness)…”—Dr. Abraham Myerson, Harvard Psychiatrist, 1942
“In the 14-year period between 1950 and 1964, more American deaths occurred in state and county mental institutions than in all of the nation’s armed conflicts beginning with the Revolutionary War and ending with the Persian Gulf War….Inpatient deaths topped out at 1,103,000 during this 25-year period, compared with 650,563 recorded deaths in battles.”—-Kelly Patricia O’Meara, “The Forgotten Dead of St. Elizabeth’s, Insight Magazine, 2001
These experts have ugly, shriveled souls. They are so desperately eager to be World Controllers. What wouldn’t they do to children? When Charlotte Iserbyt speaks about “the deliberate dumbing down of America,” she merely describes what these ruthless people hope they are doing.
Clearly, some of these guys would be happy if they could lobotomize little children on the way to elementary school. If they can’t get away with that, then they will concoct bad educational methods that achieve the same results. Look-say to teach reading, thereby guaranteeing a vast surge in illiteracy. Gimmicks like New Math to teach arithmetic, thereby guaranteeing that the society becomes less numerate. Gimmicks like Constructivism, thereby guaranteeing that the typical American adult knows less and less. Gimmicks like Common Core, to lock in all the bad ideas at the federal level.
If we want to improve the educational situation, the first step is to realize that the people now in charge are not our friends. It’s unlikely that Steve Jobs would have a kind word to say about any of them.
So let’s embrace the World According to Jobs: “We could make sure that every young child in this country got a great education.”