whalen wrote:
Boo hoo, Steve. The Neanderthals lost the elections in 2008, remember? Pardon our dust as we rush past the Cro-Magnon years to enact much-belated initiatives before it is too late for all of us!
Well, Whalen - the last time Progressives had such a 'Pardon Our Dust' victory was the advent of Prohibition. From 1919 until its Repeal, America was set-back on its heels, Whalen.
Sorry, I can be prickly . . .Whalen , or as some Progressive might opine. without the adverbial ending there. With John Dewey*-esque devotion to 'inquiry' over fact, a Progressive Whalen responded to Chicago Sun Times columnist Steve Huntley - The Last Man Standing - over his revelatory column on Progressive Force-feeding of the Government Goose.
John Dewey is the father of radical progressive thought in America and the beauty who's views on education slaughtered Public Education**. Let it be pointed out -Oh, do - that John Dewey established a Lab School for the elites, while the unwashed masses could serve as lab-rats in an educational philosophy that pushed Public Education to eliminate the guts of education.
The study of how the American Government ( local,state and federal) has all but vanished; the canon of American Literature and British Literature has been diluted to a watery and sugary and under-nourishing swill; that for the Dewey Public Schools "inquiry" is the ethic - child should do as opposed to learn and they do not learn. With each new Hegelian/Marxist doctoral thesis comes a further murder of thought and history.
For Dewey and Progressives 'Inquiry' upon which an a priori goal - Gay Studies, Identity Politics in general, Group Thought is achieved and put in place. If you do not know a Concordat from a Magna Carta, a Peace of Wesphalia from a Piece of the Pie, then it is a fair chance that you are Public School Alum of the last forty years.
In that case,let's take this slowly - John Dewey was a philospher of education, society, and psycholgy at the University of Chicago, who was heavily influeced by the German thinker Hegel. who is actually the granddaddy of Marxist thought. John Dewey believed that 'inquiry' is the most important thing in life so long as the outcomes agree with that inquiry. Thus, if we inquire into poverty as rooted in Racism; all poverty results from racism. If failure results from poverty. racism caused failure & etc. Progressive inquiry arrives at a Pre-Determined outcome.
Gay Marriage is good; all opposition to Gay Marriage is evil; Gay Marriage is good.
Abortion is Women's Reproductive Health, Uterine Cancer is a Woman's Reproductive Health Issue; Uterine Cancer . . . Hey, get me a good Nuancer over here!
Dewey made the Artificial, Natural.
Take a look at the Media which offers a "Let's Look at Race Relations!" series.
The outcome is fixed - Systemic Racism, Imperialism, Class ism is always the conclusion. Whites are always bad and people of color are always good. Hence, no Race Crime can be committed by a person of color. Why? Don't matter just is and that is Dewey. Dewey Agree!
Dewey had clout ( Roger Baldwin, Jane Addams, Emma Goldman,I.F.Stone W.E.B. DuBois & etc.). Radical Progressive clout saw Dewey's Philosophy as a burglar bar with which to loot American History and geld American Education. Inquiry is not method it is a goal in Dewey Education.
Steve Huntley represents a mind-set that is valued by most Americans. The old Benthamite view of 'the most good for the most people.' Common Sense.
In Steve Huntley's June 26, 2009, he outlines the Progressive Agenda and the force feeding by the Democratic Leadership in the Congress at the direction of President Obama's White House:
Congress, driven by President Obama's ambitious political agenda, is out to be a jack of all trades. Just look at its to-do list for this year -- health-care reform, clean energy legislation, overhaul of financial regulation, a rewrite of immigration law, stimulus spending to prod the economy toward recovery. Whew! And with six months left in 2009, who knows what else might be added?
That list doesn't include such major business as considering a new U.S. Supreme Court nominee or a host of less sweeping but still significant bills, like a just-passed measure giving an overburdened Food and Drug Administration the duty of regulating tobacco. . . .
With Democrats in total control of the House and close to it in the Senate, fierce partisanship, long-cherished liberal goals and the pent-up energy of the Democratic left are driving the transformational agenda. There's no argument many of the bills address problems needing a fix, but that's best achieved with at least a degree of bipartisan support. Yet we're being force-fed a liberal prescription. A crowded agenda controlled by Democrats and a White House push for quick action crowd out competing views.
Regrettably, the major national media have been compliant. For example, this week ABC News offered an hour in prime time for Obama to monopolize the national discussion on health care.
Yet polls consistently show public discomfort with the implications of greater government control of medical services, worry about the costs and a high-level of satisfaction with their current health care among the majority with insurance. Recent news reminds us a public insurance option would open a new avenue for abuse of the taxpayer. Republican Rep. Peter Roskam of the northwest suburbs has started a "medi-fraud blog" tracking corruption and waste in Medicare and Medicaid. His latest entries note that in just the last week prosecutors broke up schemes in Detroit and Miami to defraud Medicare of $150 million.
Another issue is energy. Some of us think the emphasis should be more on energy security than green goals. Yes, we all want a cleaner planet, but our national security and economic future require the exploitation of abundant fossil fuels such as domestic coal and offshore oil as well as expansion of nuclear energy while we develop solar, wind and geothermal for the long term.
Similarly, the economic meltdown naturally leads to new regulation. Yet remember the Sarbanes-Oxley Act passed in 2002, after the accounting scandals, saddled business with expensive and complex regulations making U.S. enterprises less competitive.
The focus on regulation ignores government's role in the housing collapse. The Wall Street Journal reports Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who encouraged the mortgage excesses of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is at it again, urging the agencies to lower lending standards for condo buyers. Sounds like another dose of the easy credit that wrecked home values.
Obama and Democrats insist Congress works for the good of America in taking on so many projects. But the jack of all trades, as you may recall, is the master of none. Is that how you want the future of your health care or energy supply to be determined?
Columnist Steve Huntley, investigative journalist Tim Novak and Pultizer Prize winning cartoonist Jack Higgins maintain some semblance of thoughtful inquiry for Chicago, because they know that inquiry is not a goal upon which people are forced to agree.
Winning an election is only the beginning of government. The end of government is the preservation of the American Republic. Democrats and Republicans have been doing just that, until these last few months, it seems to me. Dewey has replaced the Founders Fathers for the Progressives. For now.
History has a way of Repealing itself!
*
Dewey is “attractive to those how are more impressed by our new control over natural forces than by the limitations to which that control is subject,” finding that Dewey’s philosophy “is in harmony with the age of industrialism and collective enterprise.” But it is Dewey’s underlying hubris that Russell singles out as “the greatest danger in our time” because “it is increasing the danger of a vast social disaster,” however unintentionally.
Russell’s fears, at least in part, have been realized. There are many who would, without hesitation, describe public education, in combination with other social, economic and political forces, a “vast social disaster.” There are, of course, many more that disagree.
http://home.earthlink.net/~fheapblog/id28.html
**
I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling, and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs. Through the responses which others make to his own activities he comes to know what these mean in social terms. The value which they have is reflected back into them. For instance, through the response which is made to the child's instinctive babblings the child comes to know what those babblings mean; they are transformed into articulate language and thus the child is introduced into the consolidated wealth of ideas and emotions which are now summed up in language.
I believe that this educational process has two sides-one psychological and one sociological; and that neither can be subordinated to the other or neglected without evil results following. Of these two sides, the psychological is the basis. The child's own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education. Save as the efforts of the educator connect with some activity which the child is carrying on of his own initiative independent of the educator, education becomes reduced to a pressure from without. It may, indeed, give certain external results, but cannot truly be called educative. Without insight into the psychological structure and activities of the individual, the educative process will, therefore, be haphazard and arbitrary. If it chances to coincide with the child's activity it will get a leverage; if it does not, it will result in friction, or disintegration, or arrest of the child nature. . . I believe that the community's duty to education is, therefore, its paramount moral duty. By law and punishment, by social agitation and discussion, society can regulate and form itself in a more or less haphazard and chance way. But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move. ( emphasis my own)
I believe that when society once recognizes the possibilities in this direction, and the obligations which these possibilities impose, it is impossible to conceive of the resources of time, attention, and money which will be put at the disposal of the educator.
I believe that it is the business of every one interested in education to insist upon the school as the primary and most effective interest of social progress and reform in order that society may be awakened to realize what the school stands for, and aroused to the necessity of endowing the educator with sufficient equipment properly to perform his task.
