The Politically Incorrect Show - 18/01/2001

[Music - Die Fledermaus]

Good afternoon, Kaya Oraaa & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Thursday January 18, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd., the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit, & excellence, against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.

[Music up, music down!]

The cover of the new issue of North & South magazine touts an article on "The Lost Generation - why your children can't read, write, or count." The article, by Deborah Coddington, is about teacher training in New Zealand. I commend it to your attention.

One of the teacher-training institutions Deborah spotlights is the Auckland College of Education. Here's an extract she quotes from one of the College's year-one texts on education called "The Teacher's Role":

"Professional practice is conceived as a complex & holistic interweaving of a number of elements representative of intelligent performance in relation to specific situations. The demonstration of individual components within a domain or competence do [sic] not necessarily serve as valid indicators or predictors of adequate practice. Teaching performance is anchored to a conceptualisation of competence which is holistic rather than tied to a never-ending spiral or specification ..." Deborah then comments, "And so on,
in a never-ending spiral of bovine manure."

Bovine manure it is, to be sure, & Deborah's article exposes lots of it - a chronicle of "abuse" by those I have long called "child-molesters of the
mind."

Deborah concludes that New Zealand needs "a Minister of Education not captured by the ministry, the unions, or the academics who jump on the bandwagon of nonsense in teaching fads. A minister who gives choice back to parents; more power to schools to dump inferior teachers & reward great teachers; who introduces a training system where providers compete for excellence in academic rigour, not taxpayers' funds. A Minister of EDUCATION, not a Minister FOR Teachers."

Well, all of that would be helpful, but in the long run - indeed in as short a run as possible - we need to get the state right out of education altogether ... not (if I may now quote from my own editorial in Issue 20 of The Free Radical) "just because it doesn't work, not just because one 6-year-old in four requires remedial reading courses, not just because 90% of a recent intake of law students at Auckland University required remedial reading courses, not just because we confronted with an entire generation of semi-zombies with a vocabulary extending barely beyond 'cool' & 'awesome' but because coercive state involvement by definition is a violation of individual rights. It is a violation of the rights of parents to educate their children as, when, where & how they see fit; it is a violation of the rights of those whose money is expropriated for the 'education' of OTHERS' children."

I concluded that editorial with a quotation from Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine. I do so again now:

"There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, & expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure ... Every politically-controlled education system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later. Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property & mind in its clutches from infancy. An octopus would sooner release its prey. A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state."

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