Teaching in 2015 - Worm Grunting Until Convicted

“The government I live under has been my enemy all my active life. When it has not been engaged in silencing me it has been engaged in robbing me. So far as I can recall I have never had any contact with it that was not an outrage on my dignity and an attack on my security.” HL Mencken

"That ability to impart knowledge . . . consists, first, of a natural talent for dealing with children, for getting into their minds, for putting things in a way that they can comprehend. And it consists, secondly, of a deep belief in the interest and importance of the thing taught, a concern about it amounting to a sort of passion. A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it—this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy. That is because there is enthusiasm in him, and because enthusiasm is almost as contagious as fear or the barber's itch." Henry Louis Mencken from  Prejudices: third series (publ. A. A. Knopf, 1922)

Henry Louis Mencken knew how to identify cant, insincerity, humbug, bigotry and sanctimony at the horizon.  He did not need to have it legislated before he could snap his galluses, gnaw on his stogy and shout to the helots, " Hey!  Rube! You're about to step in it for fair, Son!"

Being a fundamentally flawed human being, prone to vice but gifted with talents far above those of most mortals must have made the proud German American beer swilling genius feel like Casandra most days.

He could predict cultural disasters from any bar stool and, while amusing all and sundry, go unheeded.

Mencken stood at the dawn of American Progressive thought and shuddered. Research! Inquiry! Settled Science!  Foregone Conclusions and willful assumptions destroyed shared truth.

Americans ignored shared truth and swallowed data tossed by Academics whole and heartily.

From that magic  moment in 1876, Johns Hopkins University preened its purple feathers and waved proudly for inquiry over pedagogy America tumbled. The German architect of infant fascism, Alexander Humbolt, so impressed the Quaker bachelor

The University of Chicago, packed with Rockefeller spondulix, followed suit and the Academic Jackass eclipsed the pioneer, the innovator, the leader, the priest, the warrior, the athlete and genuine scholar in the America pulpit, bank line, battalion, playing field and imagination.

This past week, the United States Supreme Court wholly justified the very Germanic nonsense HL Mencken fought against his whole life.  Johns Hopskins is the core of this evil apple swallowed whole from the late 18th Century to this silly season.  Marriage ain't no more and ObamaCare is going to be as easy to avoid as taxes.

Mencken understood exactly where America was heading. As a very flawed man with some level of wit, I see the very same nightmare.

We are here, Henry!

A male and a female are matter for a court and future litigation.

A family is a group of people.

States rights are what have been agreed upon.

So teaching, especially in a Catholic school is now a dirtier job than Worm Grunting.

Two self-proclaimed American Catholics on the U.S. Supreme Court, Kennedy and Roberts, have effectively made teaching in a Catholic high school ( Catholic Universities long ago struck the flag) is about to become a very dangerous game; unless, of course,  the teacher  is cowed by the threatening realities of pitting shared truth against conveniently manufactured and very pliable doctrines.

I'll continue to grunt and sweat and dig up a few wormy triumphs in the classroom when students pick up on my enthusiasm for millennia of shared truths ( abortion is always murder, a bolt only goes into a nut, water boils at 212 and freezes at 32 degrees, Shakespeare is a genius and Toni Morrison writes stuff) - until the bracelets get slapped on.

Let's Remember Prohibtion - The Dawn of the Nanny State

If I remember correctly, yesterday January 16th is the Anniversary of Prohibition - the 18th Amendment, the Great Experiment, a Ken Burns PBS Masterpiece and the Dawn of the American Nanny State.

Americans used to remember.  To Remember is to honor.  Americans are too busy with celebrities, Twitter, IPads, and Echo Chamber thought patterns.

• Remember the Alamo?            'That was a car rental '
• Remember the Maine?            'The main what?'
• Remember Pearl Harbor?       'We dropped the Bomb there?'
• Remember Your Manners?      'Who are YOU to say? @#$% Off, Dude!

Progressives erase historical facts, persons, attitudes, words and thoughts in order to build The Right Side of History - always have and always will.  The need to forget is essential to transforming America from a capitalist, racist war-mongering land of 1%ers to a Harrison Bergeron ( Read the whole story) dystopia ruled by the less-than- 1%-ers: Color not character/Party Not/Worth.

Let's try and remember Prohibition - the 18th Amendment ratified by Utah on January 16th, 1919.

Prohibition was a disaster developed and promulgated by Progressives in the 19th Century - a broad coalition that included Frances Willard's WCTU, Jane Addams, Roger Baldwins ACLU, Methodists, United Church of Christ, Baptists, Congregationalists, the Ku Klux Klan and Planned Parenthood.   The movement to Prohibit the sale and possession of strong drink morphed from a fundamentalist evangelical religious attitude to power politics phenomenon so evident today.

The 18th Amendment was ratified by 36 States and became the law of the land and it was repealed because of the Depression in 1934.  It was a colossal exercise in human misery.  The Progressives no longer use the ballot box.  They employ legislation at the local, state and federal level and they also shop for judges.

One thing they learned from The Great Experiment was - never allow individuals to have a say about anything.

Remember Prohibition.

Remember something. 

Shakman Gave Cook County Our Gang, Abortion and SEIU Political Landscape

Thanks to Michael Shakman and the Shakman Decrees a Veteran Gangster Disciple can be an Impact Political Player! Hal Baskin with the late Judge R. Eugene Pincham and former United States Senator Roland Burris.













In 1969 Michael Shakman and other Hyde Park lawyers, along with the long-dormant Progressive political players indigenous to that Chicago community, went shopping for a judge.

The nature of that legal marketing expedition evolved from sociological laboratories around the University of Chicago sparked by John Dewey and other long haired gentlemen and short-haired females. This particular push against the Democratic Political Machine affected our political psyche once it was determined by the right judge that political hiring is an intrinsic evil.

The Shakman Decrees* did nothing to end corruption; rather, they made a transfer of power from a Political Machine to Progressive Coalition Machine. Shakman Decrees created the political landscape that elected a President. All the graveyards in Cook County could not create more votes than Shakman - SEIU, ACORN, Progressive Coalitions Universal and political power remained in the hands of the very few.

Barack Obama could not have vaulted over the political gradus to the White House without Shakman.

Like Hyde Park itself, the Shakman victory is unique. Only in Cook County and in some few Illinois towns did this Dewey shower of Inquiry is Truth blossom and grow. No where else,in America, can or will Michael Shakman Enterprises flourish. What Shakman hath wrought is this:

1. Planned Parenthood's Personal PAC Has More Money and Muscle Than the Teamsters

2. SEIU and the less Public Salary Unions are Ward Organizations

3. Gangster Disciples, Vice Lords, Latin Kings, Four Corner Hustlers, Mickey Cobras
are precinct captains

I find it . . .consistent that no newspaper, or media outlet is finding journalistic grist for the mills in Chicago Magazine's well-crafted investigation into the association of gangs and political hacks.

However, my concern lies in the authors' dismissal of gang-banger activism in Chicago as a mere homage to Bathhouse John and Hinky-Dink's high-jinks, instead of a wormy Progressive abortion of political honesty rooted in Shakman and the Shakman Decrees.

Here is Shakman's effects upon our political life in Cook County

Many forms of political corruption—taking bribes, rigging elections, engaging in pay-to-play deals—are plainly unethical, if not illegal. But forming political alliances with gangs isn’t a clear matter of right or wrong, some say. In many Chicago neighborhoods, it’s virtually impossible for elected officials and candidates for public office not to have at least some connection, even family ties, to gang members. “People try to paint this picture of bad versus good—it’s not like that,” says a veteran political organizer based in Chicago who specializes in getting out the vote in minority areas. “Everybody lives with each other, grew up with each other. Just because somebody goes this way or that way, it doesn’t mean you’re just gonna write them off automatically.”

For better or worse, gang members are constituents, the same as businesspeople in the Gold Coast. Says Aaron Patterson, an imprisoned gang member: “It ain’t like gangs come from another planet.”

For some politicians, gang members can be a source of political strength—all the more so given that the once-formidable City Hall–Cook County patronage system, the lifeblood of the old Machine, is mostly gone. In the heyday of the Machine, recalls Wallace Davis Jr., a former 27th Ward alderman, political chieftains could simply snap their fingers and marshal a large cadre of city workers to go door-to-door with “a pint of wine and a chicken” to turn out the vote.

Few politicians nowadays have such armies at their beck and call. To win elections, many officeholders and candidates—especially those who represent parts of the city with high concentrations of street gangs—turn to those gangs as their de facto political organizations. “It went from wine and a chicken to hiring a gangbanger,” says Davis, who served from 1983 to 1987. “It’s unfortunate.”

Though estimates vary, most authorities and criminologists agree that there are 70,000 to 125,000 gang members in the city. In the numbers game of Chicago politics—in which, as the old joke goes, a one-vote victory constitutes a landslide—a constituency of that size gets noticed. (Keep in mind that in Illinois convicted felons can vote once they are released from prison.)

Yet, Shakman goes unidentified.

Would that the authors went further -Inquiry is not Truth; John Dewey notwithstanding.



*

Shakman at work from todays's Chicago Tribune:. . .The concession deal was struck between the Park District and the restaurant operator under then-Mayor Richard Daley. Investors in the restaurant venture included Daley friend Fred Barbara and city contractor Raymond Chin. The city is now trying to undo the 20-year deal.

The Park Grill's lawyer, Michael Shakman, called the city's lawsuit "way off base" and said the restaurant's ownership group "was not selected through political connections."

The city's lawsuit "punishes honest people who created a restaurant that was risky and uncertain when the Park Grill agreed to go into Millennium Park," Shakman said in a statement. "Now that Millennium Park is successful, the city wants to redo the deal and wants money to which it has no right. That's not fair. A deal is a deal."

The city's Law Department is reviewing the countersuit, spokesman Roderick Drew said. The city maintains that the Park District did not have the authority to reach agreements for the use of the land, said Drew, who added that the deal was not approved by the City Council, which he said is required for approval of a concession permit.

rhaggerty@tribune.com

Twitter @RyanTHaggerty

Our Public Imagination Shakman
Shakman Decrees
In 1969, one man made his stand against the Chicago political machine. Michael Shakman, an independent candidate for delegate to the 1970 Illinois Constitutional Convention, battled against one of the most enduring traditions in Chicago's politics: political patronage, or the practice of hiring and firing government workers on the basis of political loyalty. With many behind-the-scenes supporters, Shakman's years of determination resulted in what became known as the “Shakman decrees.”

Shakman filed suit against the Democratic Organization of Cook County, arguing that the patronage system put nonorganized candidates and their supporters at an illegal and unconstitutional disadvantage. Politicians could hire, fire, promote, transfer—in essence, punish—employees for not supporting the system, or more particularly, a certain politician. The suit also argued that political patronage wasted taxpayer money because public employees, while at work, would often be forced to campaign for political candidates.

In 1972, after an exhaustive court procedure and much negotiating, the parties reached an agreement prohibiting politically motivated firings, demotions, transfers, or other punishment of government employees. A 1979 ruling led to a court order in 1983 that made it unlawful to take any political factor into account in hiring public employees (with exceptions for positions such as policy making). Those decisions along with companion consent judgments—collectively called the Shakman decrees—are binding on more than 40 city and statewide offices.

http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1138.html

The Vanishing American Middle Class

"It ain't much, but it is our's" - 1947

"Just go to the ATM" - 2011


The vanishing American Middle Class is one of the wonders of the world, or should be.

Being Middle Class was once a badge of honor. Immigrants who braved coffin ships to scratch out the American Dream, worked, saved, prayed, and most of all learned together and kicked down the walls of economic isolation and poverty. Italians worked along the Chicago River north and south of its flow cutting lumber for this growing City. The Irish largely chased cattle, pigs, and sheep into pens and up onto steep ramps to the killing floors, where Poles, Lithuanians, and Bohemians hammered America's meat to be cut and chopped and processed by more Irishmen and Germans.

The Germans arrived here already Middle Class, as did German Jews, and were skilled craftsmen and professionals - doctors and lawyers. Swedes were skilled wood workers.

African Americans, freedmen, lived among white settlers and immigrants and often were more affluent than newer arrivals all through the Civil War and for a few decades after.

The labor strikes of the late 1880's through WWI brought waves of impoverished black men and women into Chicago, as strikebreakers, forced to compete with white ethnic immigrants. Industry shaped the competition, but learning moved the poor up into the Middle Class.

A man was proud to exchange a blue shirt for a crisp starched white shirt and attachable collar. Paddy learned to do more than dig. Stash learned to do more than hammer a cow, pig. Vitas learned to cut and put pipes together, after he was black-listed by Armour, or Swift, or Cudahy. Vito watched Emerson in the lumber yard and learned how to frame. Washington learned to not cross a picket line with his friends from Georgia and earn the trust of the angry white faces calling him every color-rich sobriquet and animal metaphor imaginable.

They learned to read, write, converse and get along. They learned to save, as well as spend from the Bohemians who not only made their beer, but owned the building in which they lived. They became as respectable and dignified in a few years off of the boat, or the train from Alabama.

By the 1920's, America was rolling toward the Middle Class. A Depression nearly choked it but the lessons learned from the previous century had taken root - learn a trade, develop a skill, make yourself useful, take care of others.

Parallel to the striving wave of impoverished Americans were American born, educated, radicalized by the Hegelian university professors who dominated academia, and contemptuous of 'lesser beings.' They became the Progressives. They viewed the Middle Class with scorn and contemptuously abandoned the bourgeoisie for Artist Colonies, or subjected Italian kids to Aristophanes.

They saw the Republican and Democratic political machines who were boosting the Masses toward the Middle Class, as a threat to true Self-Fulfillment, which could only be realized through their human laboratories.

Babbitry was and remains Middle Class hypocrisy - owning a modest home, making a modest income and the value attendant upon such aspirations were subject of laughter and derision. The Great Classless Society was to be fought for with patience and cunning.

WWII accelerated the American Middle Class and the lessons learned from the 19th Century and WWI made America the Moral and Economic Power of the Free Word pitted against the great Classless Societies formed by Stalin and Chairman Mao.

War did not erode the American Middle Class. Values taken for granted at best, or dismissed as stupid infected the American soul.

Labor made a pact with the Devil, when it admitted the Progressive ideologies through the back-door. The Reuthers and John L. Lewis were replaced by a Sweeney and a Stern. Big Labor was no long the trades or the industrial unions, Big Labor was public sector labor - SEIU.

By playing ball with Progressives, Labor and the American Middle Class drugged itself.

Here we are today -

The number of middle-income neighborhoods in the United States has dwindled significantly over the past 40 years, as the rich-poor divide deepens across the country, a study released Wednesday showed.

In 2007, nearly a third of American families -- 31 percent -- lived in either an affluent neighborhood or a mainly low-income one, up from just 15 percent in 1970, according to the study conducted by Stanford University, and released in partnership with the Russell Sage Foundation and Brown University.

Meanwhile, 44 percent of American families lived in middle-class neighborhoods in 2007, down from 65 percent in 1970.

"Mixed income neighborhoods have grown rarer, while affluent and poor neighborhoods have grown much more common," the study said.

For the study, researchers used data from 117 metropolitan areas, each with more than 500,000 residents. In 2007, those areas were home to 197 million people -- or two-thirds of the US population.

The values of faith, hard work, achievement, and charity, have been replaced by a universal ethic of entitlement. Go to the ATM for more money. We are OK with abortion. Too many of us believe that sexual inclination is a Civil Right. The more the Middle Class agrees with Progressives the quicker it will vanish into the Classless Society dreamed of by John Dewey, Roger Baldwin, WEB Dubois, and George Soros.

Big Shoulders City? For now.

Soon, Progressives will be Chicago's Sole Demographic - a real celebration of Diversity.

I had a wonderful dinner conversation with friends on Saturday night. Conversation can be a 'remember when' litany of my past sins, crimes and misdeamenors; that is generally an element of family gatherings.

Good conversation and great conversation is participation of insights and observations that each member at the heaping board brings like the covered dishes, salads and desserts. I made Caldo Verde and it was SENSATIONAL! The final application of finely chopped mint and cilantro pumped up the spicy sauage chunks, pureed spuds, and minced kale. This breeder can work a skillet and sauce pan.Not much on desserts, though - I eat them like a man going to the chair, but generally louse up a recipe. Go figure.

The post-prandial chat was sweet and spicy!

My friend Elias Crim, Chicago Director of Res Publica America, an upcoming multi-disciplinary think tank, pushed the chat out of the local political sphere with his recent studies of Detroit and other American cities.

Detroit is no longer in the top 20 American cities and neither are St. Louis, Buffalo, Kansas City and Cleveland. Elias refered to a study conducted on the 2007 census by Scott Summer for Wall Street Pit - Global Market Insight.

Here is an interesting tidbit:

In addition to Detroit, here are some other cities ( here's the payoff!)where residents can enjoy more open space, uncrowded streets, nice museums and symphonies, and beautiful old homes at rock bottom prices:

St. Louis: 857,000 to 319,000, Cleveland: 915,000 to 397,000, Buffalo: 580,000 to 261,000

I was born in 1955, so to me those three will always be big cities. But they have fewer people than Mesa.

These cities are not in the top 20:

Baltimore, Boston, Seattle, Washington DC, Nashville, Denver, Milwaukee, Portland, Las Vegas, Kansas City, Atlanta, Miami, Cleveland, Oakland, Minneapolis

And these aren’t even in the top 50:

New Orleans, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Buffalo

Prediction: Austin will be the fastest growing big city in America over the next 50 years.

(emphasis my own)

Austin? That's in Texas.

On Sunday, I read that Chicgo Board of Options Exchange is planning to move from Chicago's Loop. , , to Texas! Austin, n'cest pas?

CHICAGO (AP) — Chicago-based CBOE Holdings Inc., parent of the Chicago Board Options Exchange, is holding talks with officials of several states about a possible move of its headquarters.

With its action, the CBOE joins the CME Group Inc., the world’s largest futures exchange operator, in considering relocating its headquarters because of an increase in Illinois’ tax rate to 7 percent from 4.8 percent.

CBOE chairman Bill Brodsky told the Chicago Tribune the exchange does not want to leave, but the state’s tax structure as it relates to the exchange “is virtually punitive.”

CME Group has held discussions with at least five states about moving its headquarters and several hundred staff members. However, its main trading floor and other functions would remain in Chicago.

Both exchange operators are talking with Illinois officials.

Texas for the Chicago Board of Options Exchange? What about that HUGE real estate property dominated by Trading Companies? Texas?

That's that goat-roping, Aggie Guv Rick Perry's state, is it not; the one that is called business friendly? For real?

Perhaps, this announcement is merely the fabled motor oil soaked 2 X 4 that will be brought down hard on the bridge of the nose of Governor Pat "Ralph Martire Said More Taxes" Quinn, in order to get that worthy's attention.

Perhaps it is all part of the plan to provide more open space, fewer children. sweeter police, an abscence of minority folk and white ethnic worker bees, Catholics and breeders from the City of Big Shoulders.

I think it is more the later than the former.

Evidence? Well, instead of the Virgin Mary Blue Recycling truck crews at Karin's Dunkin' Donuts at 104th & Western ( a bell weather of City employees) there was a thick squad of Waste Management gents ordering Coffee An' - Waster Management is part of the smart sizing of Chicago's Middle Class. The big Rook taking out thousands of jobs will be the Grid System, replacing the Ward City Services ( Snow Removal, Tree-trimming, Waste-Hauling & etc.).

The Middle Class will have fewer minority and white ethnic breeders able to afford life in the City of Big Shoulders.

Cops and Firemen will be asked, by the Mayor's Vox Progressive Editorial Boards and WTTW nodders - Chicago Needs Fewer of you anyway, or Freedom to live outside, this our City? After all EVERYONE knows Chicago cops are brutal, corrupt, racist and mostly breeders; firemen are racist, corrupt, breeders. Keep enough to make Block 37, Lakeview, Boystown and Loop safe and banish these children of Eve to some Rube hinterland.

Tempting? You bet, if you are single, without children, homosexual, affluent, health doctinal, secular and Progressive. Chicago would be just ducky without all those mustachioed, low-brow, beer swilling, Marlboro men and their baby machines.Museums, Planned Parenthood outlets, a Child-and Smoke Free Millenium Park, Dog Walks, Flashy Entertainment Venues, Green Open Space, River Walks, Bicycling highways to replace the Jane Addams and Dan Ryan, and organic food everywhere will replace churches, schools, office buildings, and whole neighborhoods.

Chicago commericial real estate possibilities are smaller than Congressman Mike Quigley,

There are seventy empty storefronts on Western Ave. between 87th & 155th Streets. The Loop itself is a mirror of Western Ave. - ask any commercial real estate expert about space available. There's plenty. Commercial now mean away.

It will be a Progressive Paradise enjoyed by . . .Progressives!

Pack your bags, or get serious.

We seriously discussed the future of the American City. Maybe, the worker bees and neighborhood breeders will consider the changes a'coming.
Shakman!
Privatize!
Smart Size!
Grid!
Git!







http://wallstreetpit.com/79226-shrinking-american-cities

John Dewey - The Father of Stupidity in Education

The Lab School at the University of Chicago is prestigious and pricey, but I would send my kids to Moses Montefiore, before I'd send them there. As I sent them through Catholic schools the point is as moot as it is root. Nothing against the good folks at the Lab School who come armed to instruct with degrees and certifications that would make the founder's moustache quiver with delight. More so, I would hazard a guess that most of the staff of Baronet Moses Montefiore,Kt ( British Jewish Financier.Philanthropist and Sheriff of London 1784-1885) High School on Ashland Ave. were trained in the methods and philosophy of John Dewey. That said, all American public schools are fostered in Dewey/Hegelian non-sense.

As I have posted many times, John Dewey bullied his way into American Education by dint of his intellectual gifts and membership in the American Brahmin Class. Dewey clicked with good old American contrarian ways and means. Dewey made inquiry and not the pursuit of truth the core of American public education. The Lab School at University of Chicago mandates inquiry as play and play as power. You can arrive at any pre-conceived outcome so long as that outcome fully agrees with the point that inquiry begins. e.g. All police officers are brutal agents of systemic racism - Alpha and Omega. President Obama is the greatest President Ever! Our Economy is Better Now Than Under George W. Bush. The Debt Debate is a crisis leading to the aversion of the crisis created by the the very crisis itself. A family consists of any human beings. The Act of Sex is a Civil Right. The New York Times said it and that settles it. More Tax Dollars Poured into Public Education Will Save Tax Dollars.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is sending his kids to Chicago Lab School and they will follow the intellectual and professional paths of Arne Duncan, the Obama kids, and Valerie Jarrett. They will be fine. Their self-esteem, personal growth and life-long associations will blossom.

Founded in 1896 by pre-eminent American educator John Dewey, the Lab Schools are known as one of the most diverse of the nation's elite private institutions; about 35 percent of its students are people of color. It's also known as one of the best: its high school is one of the top feeders in the country to America's elite colleges and universities, and its extracurriculars, from newspaper and yearbook to Model U.N., are regular winners of regional and national awards.

Such prestige doesn't come cheap: the lower school costs $21,060 per year, while the upper school is just shy of $25,000 annually. That means that the Emanuels will be forking over more than $60,000 each year for their three kids' tuitions.

Huffington Post - The Hollywood Squares of Journalism

Hey, Catholic schools are diverse. Leo High School for example in the heart of Gresham has 90.9% persons of color and a growing number of Mexican kids and now several white ethnic Catholics from Canaryville. There is greater diversity, to be sure, at Mount Carmel, De LaSalle, St. Rita and Marist, but Leo is a very happy campus.

One thing is certain, the kids at south side, west side and north side Catholic schools come from very homogeneous financial backgrounds - Mom, Dad, Auntie, Gramma and Alumni are President Obama's working stiffs: cops, firemen, nurses, public school teachers, skilled tradesmen, industrial workers, Unlike the Lab young 'uns, these kids will not have the path of inquiry festooned with placement, nor will they have the grease and juice backing their play necessary to waltz into Harvard, Columbia, Yale and Oberlin. Catholic kids will scratch their way into those same schools by dint of achievement. Lab School kids get cache with a diploma.

Cache is okay, but core values are much better. Here is a recent commentary by an American Academic and covert to Islam. The guy knows that Dewey is as dangerous to his Faith as it is to Jews, Catholics, Lutherans, Unitarians and Wiccans. In writing about the idiotic neologism THE ARAB SPRING coined by New York Times Dewey-boy Thomas Friedman

Truth, however, cannot exist in a culture with an educational system that denies the possibility of its very existence. Without truth and justice, there is no such thing as a moral disaster. The root cause of most of the injustices in the world, however, is the moral disaster of secular utilitarianism. The wielders of financial and political influence in America have imposed this utilitarian philosophy as a paradigmatic monopoly in the American educational system and with it infected the entire world.


In a compartmentalized system of education, where there is no coherence in anything, the products of this system necessarily are too narrow to value knowledge exogenous to their field of expertise or even to sense that a system of morality can even exist.

The spread of this moral disaster has been going on within the American educational establishment for more than a century, especially since John Dewey. Dewey was born before the American Civil War and set the standard for modern education in America and throughout the world a hundred years ago in his many books, perhaps especially in his Depression-Era book, How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process. Dewey invented the school of “philosophical pragmatism” which is associated originally with John Stuart Mill, but was further developed at Harvard by others who defined all meaning in life and all morality as the maximization of net utility based on pain versus pleasure. Avoid whatever gives one pain, and embrace whatever gives pleasure, which, in turn, is associated with the philosophy of hedonism. One can argue with this approach pro and con, but the major distinction is that in modern secular education there is no truth and no justice, because even the concepts of truth and justice are thought to restrict rather than maximize human freedom.

Dr. Robert D. Crane*

Back at you, Doc!

*DR ROBERT D. CRANE Chairman, Center for Understanding Islam, and President, The Center for Policy Research. Earned a doctorate (J.D.) at Harvard Law School (1959) in international investment and comparative legal systems. Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates (1981). Principal da’ii (religious instructor) at the Islamic Center, Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, D.C. (l983-86). Director of Publications, International Institute of Islamic Thought (1986-88). Founding member of The American Muslim Council and Director of its Legal Division, 1992-1994. He has published 10 books and 50 professional articles on comparative legal systems, global strategy, and information management. Languages include English, German, Russian, Spanish, French and Arabic.