Nanny's Child Molesters of the Mind

For nigh on a couple of decades now, the Politically Correct have had control of the state education system. Last week we were reminded of the results, with a quarter of form two pupils surveyed by Otago University researchers not knowing what or where Cook Strait is, half not knowing what "=" equals, & nearly all having great difficulty with fractions & decimals. Brace yourselves for the researchers' findings on reading & writing, to be released next year. For a sneak preview of the widespread illiteracy they will reveal (anew), just count the number of mis-spelled words & misplaced apostrophes in this magazine!

Such ignorance is symptomatic of the post-modern "philosophies" with which the Politically Correct have poisoned our classrooms — "philosophies" which say that facts don't matter at all & truth is a social construct achieved by group consensus; that the only thing worth memorising is the Treaty of Waitangi; that what the Treaty means has nothing to do with what it actually says, & everything to do with what some con-artists say they feel it means; that with all other texts, the author's stated meaning is to be discounted & his hidden sexism/classism/racism decoded; that "In selecting authors and texts, schools will have regard to gender balance & to the inclusion of a range of cultural perspectives ..." (English curriculum); etc., etc.. Thus do the child-molesters of the mind move, their dumbing-down to perform.

The teachers' union, meanwhile, wallowing wholeheartedly in this toxic mush, is determined to resist any advance toward merit pay for teachers — to the point of calling for a sports boycott of St Thomas of Canterbury College for having the temerity to accept direct funding of teachers' salaries. As usual they think the education system is being compulsorily financed by you & me for their benefit, & if they don't like some proposed change to it that might deliver better-educated pupils, they'll pocket our money & stay at home.

Perhaps it's better that they do — rather than stay in the classroom or on the sports field actively discouraging pupils from excelling. Here's the Sunday Star-Times a few weeks back, recounting how pupils are taught it's not "cool" to stand out; it is "cool" to be part of the crowd. "[Swimming coach Monica] Cooper said that at least one leading secondary school swimmer shied away from this year's Northland Secondary School Championships because she couldn't face doing well again ... Some teenagers spoken to by the SST confirmed they were put under pressure to not achieve, both in the classroom & in sport."

The philosopher Nietzsche said, accurately, that Christianity is a rebellion of everything that crawls on the ground against that which has height. He assuredly would have held our modern state education system in equal contempt for the same reason. Its implicit premise is: all men are not created equal; it's the system's mission to make them so.

Not that there's anything distinctively modern about this. The authoritarian, compulsory, state-run Prussian model that our earlier child-flogging centres were based on was set up 150 years or so before Nietzsche came along. Earlier still, Calvin & Luther were ardent advocates of the state's indoctrination of children. Much earlier again, Plato proposed the state's separating children from their parents at birth & training them up to do their duty to society. The modern switch from the tyranny of the cane to the tyranny of group feelings — feelings directed ever so unsubtly by ethno- & femi-nazis — has not altered an essential evil of state education: its drive for conformity & submission to the prevailing state orthodoxy. As H.L. Mencken so eloquently put it:

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality."

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