When the State becomes your conscience and your god, and its unionized teachers, armed with the statist’s materialist gospel and ordered to proselytize, become your priests and spiritual advisers, your role as parent is no longer truly needed, save that you are expected to raise your children with the “right” views, and with the “right diet,” and with the “right” degree of subservience to the goodness of the community, even if that means the necessity of demonizing their individuality and crushing their dissent and, in the process, intellectualism itself.
We call this progress.
A Pennsylvania father objected when his daughter’s middle-school history teacher assigned a project about a New York Times article blaming Republicans for the government shutdown. His complaint apparently made him the target of an orchestrated response by faculty at Camp Hill Middle School, and an English teacher named Cydnee Cohen left a voicemail message for one of the parent’s Facebook friends:
“We’re having some problems with a parent in our school district and on his page you are one of his friends…but I would like to know, some of it seems like he is a neo-nazi…call me…”
Bonus absurdity: The allegedly “neo-Nazi” parent, Josh Barry, is Jewish. Cohen is president of the local teachers union. Barry told the Daily Caller, “Her method is to go after the concerned parent and discredit and slander them.” He called it “big-time union thuggery on display.”
What’s happening here? Well, for one thing, we have further confirmation of what every intelligent American already knew: Public schools are staffed by Democrats, who not only vote Democrat and contribute money to Democrats through their unions, but consider it their professional duty to teach children to be Democrats, too.
But what about Cohen’s tactics? What’s up with that?
What Cohen was doing is consistent with a method of consensus building known as the “Delphi technique.” Originally developed as a way of organized discussion among experts, this method has been adapted and taught to school administrators. It is used to quell criticism of school policy by isolating and marginalizing critics, while creating the appearance of consensus in support of the policy.
Here’s what happens: You, the concerned parent, raise a question about some element of the curriculum or pedagogy. You contact the teacher who will then tell you there’s nothing to worry about, and that you’re the only parent who has complained. (Isolation.)
Suppose you’re not satisfied with the teacher’s answer, so you arrange a meeting with the principal. By the time you get that meeting, the teacher has already briefed the principal, so that he has a prepared defense of whatever it is you’re complaining about. The principal’s goal for the meeting is to placate you by convincing you that you are over-reacting because, after all, you’re the only parent who has complained.
It’s at this point that you start feeling like you’re in the Monty Python sketch, trying to get a refund for your dead parrot and being told by the pet shop owner that the Norwegian Blue is “pining for the fjords.”
You will encounter variations of this tactic no matter how far up the chain of command you take your complaint — the superintendent’s office, the PTA, the school board, etc. — and no matter what it is that you are complaining about. If you persist in your criticism, you will be labeled a troublemaker, an extremist, a kook, because the bureaucratic imperative is to marginalize critics, so that the bureaucracy can operate without scrutiny or opposition. (About 10 years ago, a slightly eccentric lady named B.K. Eakman published a book about this, How to Counter Group Manipulation Tactics: The Techniques of Unethical Consensus-Building Unmasked, which you might wish to examine.)
What every concerned parent eventually learns is this: The American public education system is profoundly undemocratic. The system is organized for the benefit of those who run the system. It’s not about teaching kids, it’s about providing lifetime employment, generous benefits and extraordinary political influence for education majors.
Keep this in mind: Whatever it is you’re complaining about — whatever specific grievance you have with the system — is merely a symptom of the disease. The problems of public education are not episodic, but systemic in nature. Public schools are not about teaching facts and skills, but rather are about teaching attitudes and beliefs, and the most important lesson they teach your kids is that you, the parent, are an ignorant idiot who should be ignored.
This, you will find, is a trickle down attitude, first coming from academia and then finding its way into government, which then uses its unionized minions to spread the gospel of anti-intellectualism under the guise of (often times) oxymorons such as “settled science” and — as I’ve shown is the case linguistically — by elevating narratival consensus over logic or rational thought, in affect creating an epistemology under which might makes right, and the ends justify the means.
Rather than bore you with yet another dissertation on how this works, let me just note here that, in the above story, we can see it at work. And yet still, many on the right refuse to fight the linguistic battles necessary to win back the easily understood and entirely coherent epistemic building blocks needed to expose this (quite intentional, ironically!) attempt to create in language yet another tool that moves us inevitably toward authoritarianism.
In fact, many on the right have insisted that such a fight is “fundamentally” unserious — that what we need to do is get out of the weeds of philosophy and concentrate on winning elections. To which I say, sure: tell that to Eric Cantor’s former chief of staff; or Richard Lugar; or the Republican Mayor of Virginia beach.
The left lays claim to appreciating science. And yet they reject its very premises. They are sophists. And they use their sneers and their degrees, coupled with the argot of leftist theory, to bully you into silence. They name drop. They evade. But they can’t do is win the argument on its merits.
Learn how language works — and in particular, how the perception people have about how language works comes to inform their very sense of what comes to count as knowledge — and you can defeat them. With ease.
But before you do that you must first understand that far from being “fundamentally unserious,” such a battle is absolutely crucial — and it must be fought, constantly, until the very obviousness of the intentionalist and originalist perspective forces us back into a paradigm of stable law and a reliable locus of meaning.
public school teachers like to touch children inappropriately
I would certainly concede that the battle is crucial. I question, however, whether in the context of public education it is winnable, absent the sort of tectonic, systemic change McCain’s commentary and yours implies. The tentacles of corruption which create a system which serves the adults in it as opposed to the children of taxpayers are so vast, that it will take years to root them out. There comes a point, especially when one contemplates his own children’s future, where one says there’s no hope of salvation other than to reject the system and pursue other alternatives.
Public school unions like to touch teachers inappropriately.
it’s stranger danger all the way down
Jeff, In the past you have concentrated on one side of the language issue. The interpretative side where the left takes what you say, assigns their own meaning to your words, and then attributes this new meaning to you.
I am interested in your thoughts on the other side where the left chooses loaded language to characterize (or label) an issue and then uses this loaded language as a cudgel to win an emotional appeal while posing as making a reasoned argument. This happens all the time and goes almost without notice for example (denier, clean resolution, credit default, neo Nazi). The scheme is characterized by the left choosing language on the basis of emotional appeal as opposed to accuracy and then driving this language into the debate. Once the language is accepted the argument is essentially over. Especially for people who make their decisions by feelings.
Any thoughts on how this works or how it can be countered?
I would start with “I dispute your right to redefine the term that way. What it actually means is…” When they start to argue, start pulling out dictionaries. Once they accept that they cannot redefine words, they are then forced to use the old words, which we already recognize. Their problem is that everyone else will remember them, too.
“I hate trashmen! They always screw things up, they’re so noisy with those trucks, and then they always dent the cans up so bad, you gotta buy a new set every few months! I HATE trash men! Don’t tell me you’re a trashman, pal!”
“No, I’m actually a Sanitation Transportation Engineer…”
“Well, I guess that’s okay…”
Examples in the past have been attempts to link Westboro Baptist and the KKK with the GOP, despite historical reality.
Surely the teacher knows that an actual Nazi would be waving from across the street and vandalizing her house and threatening arson rather than waiting to lose her as a friend on facebook. Nazi’s understand the “shut up” and “will to power impulses” just as well as a teacher’s union moop. if not better, since the wanna-be nazi’s tend to be willing to go further, sooner, and aren’t known to be frightened of being called Nazi’s since they have the shirt and the swastika tattoo and a kid named after Hitler already and sell or mule around meth.
You do this to some guy on face book and he/she might complain to Glenn Beck. You do it to an actual true believing neo-Nazi and you can expect some harassment and if you let your guard down you might have your head used as a tool to break a high ball glass. Or a curb.
You might as well ask if the parent is an outlaw biker gang member. If he was would you be stupid enough to try a campaign of shame and intimidation on him? Of course not. You only growl at the smallest dogs and expect them to bear the sins of the dire wolves you fear so you can feel powerful as you squint to keep the reality of your cowardice outside of your restricted field of view.
Shit I bet that “courageous” teacher would know better than to even pester a member of the Mulsim Brotherhood, the civilian arm of Hamas, or Hezbollah, much less an outlaw biker, or a neonazi both of whom are already acting out despite the pressure to “not visibly exist” in the modern world.
Which is why such tactics need to be exposed as often and as loudly as possible. Bring back the concept of “shame”, and the job is half done. (That was the first target of the “Me” Generation, and they’ve done a good job so far.)
Any thoughts on how this works or how it can be countered?
“You keep saying that we have to approve this operating referendum ‘for the children,’ but you and I both know that the money is going straight into the pockets of teachers and administrators. Why can’t you be honest, and just admit that you’re trying to extort $6.5 million from the hard working people of this school district, so that you and your fellow teachers will have an extra couple grand to spend during your long summers off?”
A resent example was the battle over the debt limit. The left was able to create the label “credit default” to characterize the consequences of a failure to lift the limit. Now, everyone has a negative view of a “credit default” and are automatically against such a consequence so once that label was attached the battle was over. Those who would advocate such a thing were obviously “unpatriotic” and it was their “fault” for broaching the issue.
In this case the right pushed back by claiming that the label was inaccurate and that a failure to lift the limit would not result in default unless Obama failed to properly prioritize the spending of the available funds. This argument concedes that a “credit default” could happen without a raising of the limit but it would be the other guys fault. This was intimately a very weak argument and allowed the label to stick.
Just for illustrative purpose consider how it would have worked if the label “balanced budget” were used to characterize the consequence of a fixed credit limit. Also consider how the left would have responded if that label were advanced and made some headway.
It didn’t help that Boehner early on agreed with the default meme. One way to stop what it is you and I both agree needs stopping? Find better “allies.”
It’s tougher than you might think, as my run-ins with certain right-leaning morons determined to maintain their own ignorance have made clear over the years.
Or to put it as others have: the answer is simple: tell the truth and don’t let others define the terms for you.
some of it seems like he is a neo-nazi
or a neo-National Socialist German Workers’ Party
If any of my acquaintances said something like that about another of my acquaintances, my first reaction would have been, “God, you’re a hateful, ignorant person.”
It being Facebook, my second reaction would have been to un-whatever it is people do with other people on Facebook, the hateful, ignorant person.
ot
Indiana Senate leader working toward U.S. constitutional convention
Thanks for the link to that story, NR.
Posted it at:
A Glimmer Of Hope For @MarkLevinShow’s Idea?
Better allies are always welcomed but i suspect the problem is more tactical. Just telling the truth and insisting doesn’t seem to be effective.
I think that Bill Whittle is on to something with this epiphany on air superiority:
https://www.billwhittle.com/commentary/bamboo-spears
Bill suggests a guerrilla warfare type response. I don’t know where he might be going with this thought but it sounds interesting. If we can not drive the media language machine perhaps we can at least gum up the works. My first thought is to try and understand the language dynamic the left uses and then the implementation scheme they use to drive the media.
When i think guerrilla warfare and language i naturally think…. Jeff Goldstein. Who better to reflect on this question?
language lying liars who what lie
Conn Carroll ?@conncarroll
I dont get it. Why is Obama apologizing for people losing their insurance? Last week he said they were all junk policies. Was he lying then?
link
It would be helpful to determine a means to measure the extent of the fraud in the StalingradOCare domestic policy catastrophe perpetrated on the Americans by the ClownDisaster and his MerryZeke band of deceivers. Sure, it’s by far the worst case of a domestic policy fraud perpetrated on the Americans by their own government in their nation’s history — the question is, how to take hold of the scope, so vast are the lies in their effects and disruption? Nothing else is even in the ballpark.
And all the less is anything in the ballpark as the lie is ongoing, with lies about lies about lies now piled one atop the last.