Teaching & Government
Where we sum up this rather long discussion of teaching and learning, spanning four articles now.
Marcus Aurelius1 on ZeroHedge:
One of the reasons I didn’t become a teacher is that as a long term substitute in an urban high school, I was appalled at how lazy the teachers were. I even stopped eating lunch in their lounge. Thankfully, I pursued a different career.
Rick's Mirrors replied:
When I was a substitute, I ate with the kids. Teacher's lounge was a clique of back-stabbing effeminates tripping over themselves to be most woke.
Why would anyone expect anything more, though, from government schooling? Lowest common denominator, and all that. How dangerous, though. How much do these bad attitudes bleed out and into the children that are supposed to be getting educated?
Here are some key ideas:
- It's naive to think that they aren't using the classrooms to perform their sociological experiments on the students. School is a tyrant's dream, a petri dish to ensure a continual crop of complacent and somewhat productive saps.
- Teachers are inhibiting our natural instinct to learn, not enabling it.
- One of the biggest stupidities today is our method of teaching and training. There is no coherent, logical "science" of teaching, nor any apparent interest in developing one.
- You may have seen the phrase, "Students fail to understand..." when we should realize that it's teaching that should be blamed.
- Ideally, teaching methods would be continually reviewed and refined for efficiency and efficacy. Constant improvement, not stagnation, nor indoctrination.
Teaching is, in fact, hated for some reason, a conclusion that is obvious by inspection. Why not, as a teacher, wake up with a smile on your face, thinking of all the important lessons your students are going to learn? Why don't teachers challenge themselves to have a particularly valuable new concept or idea they're anxious to teach their students each day? Is it because teachers know they're part of a con, that they lack this drive and enthusiasm?
Have People Proven too Dumb for Governments?
What a sad thing to contemplate. The legislature in Indiana, in 1897, almost passed a law to make Π (pi, an irrational number, 3.1415926..., the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter), equal to 3.2, supposedly "to make it easier for students to learn math." The bill was passed by the House of Representatives, almost passed the Senate, but finally got suspended indefinitely due to public ridicule.
As soon as the people heard about that travesty, they should have stormed the place and sent every legislator packing, and installed people with, at least the intelligence of a dazed cockroach. One might say the politicians actually did have some intelligence. Midwit level. That is, enough to superficially function day-to-day, and enough to worm their way into places they can cause real problems for other people.
If the Indiana legislature passed a "law" to make all people 12 feet tall so they could clean upper-story windows easier, would that make everyone 12 feet tall?
Viewed as mostly benign, this type of mischief is a fundamental betrayal. Power-hungry imbeciles with fatal flaws in their thinking and understanding get in government and truly believe they have the power to alter reality. Even the public can't seem to grasp that the role of government is not to "rule," nor "pass laws" — laws preexist any government — nor involve itself in anything but the most limited sphere of operations. It's definitely not there to play God.
Why do things like "Daylight Saving Time" exist, except in service of such megalomania? DST is very similar to trying to change pi by governmental fiat. It is a useless token effort that only serves to confuse, and to inconvenience us twice a year. We could switch to one single time, GMT (Greenwich Mean Time)/UTC (coordinated universal time), so everyone is at the same time, which would make international business and travel much simpler. Or, simply abolish the problematic DST, which serves to warp reality. 12:00 noon has a meaning, hence the term, "high noon," because it is the point in the day when the sun is the highest in the sky. A variation like DST is anti-logic, anti-scientific, and anti-social. It's a form of psychological warfare, a way of conditioning people to eschew rational thinking.
Instead of playing with the clock, just assign sensible hours for school, work and business. In northern latitudes, reduce the school hours in winter so children are neither walking in the dark to school in the morning, nor from school in the afternoon.
This fascination with government is purely because that's exactly what moves certain narcissistic proles (and those are the people that tend to run for office). They'd love to be in the position to play God themselves, and, if not, their next fondest desire is to lie belly-up and lick the hand of their masters.
The Indiana absurdity proves it. People, collectively, may be too dumb for governments, judging by the bunglers we put into official positions. One should ask, what with all those bunglers, why is government still involved in teaching?
Going forward, it would probably be best to assign teaching only to private schools, with none of those schools beholden to government (i.e.: no grants, subsidies, favors, etc.), which is the only way we can assure that education isn't tainted.
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