A generation ago many colleges had General Knowledge Tests, conducted when students came in and in their last year. When the latter test was taken, the person had been literate for four more years of a 22-year lifetime, so the 22-year-olds had more general knowledge than they had when they entered.
This was used as proof that Education Pays. But someone who had been out working for four years would have had more knowledge of the world in general after four years, too.
No matter what a group of people do for four years, a major portion of their literate lifetime at that age, they will know more at 22 than they did at 18.
Well, almost.
There WAS one exception to the rule. Those who had gotten an Education degree had LESS general knowledge than they did as freshmen. This didn’t really surprise anybody or impress anybody, least of all those who RAN the Schools of Education.
As you are no doubt aware, to be a teacher you need lots of courses in Education and a very few courses in whatever it is you teach.
This is the degree Bill O’Reilly has. What he says is not the liberal line, but it does sound like a grammar school teacher. He repeats ALL the lines perfectly. He will say that nothing is a problem of intelligence, it is all a matter of Bad Upbringing.
All anybody needs is Education. Once O’Reilly said, “Are you going to say that some kids are just naturally SMARTER than others? That’s absurd.”
O’Reilly’s “wisdom” is so hackneyed it isn’t him who worries me, it is his audience. But he has had the top Cable Network program for years and he deserves it. When a moron is the smartest man in the room, you really need to take a look at that room.
O’Reilly has some consistency and he takes on silly people directly. He is consistent in his Old Fashioned, Family Values, Party-Line position.
O’Reilly is such an enemy of some silliness that people don’t even notice his own. But without his own, he wouldn’t be ALLOWED on television. He represents the Old nonsense, which is less mindless than the New nonsense.
If you look at the room he is in, he really is the smartest kid there.
O’Reilly also takes feedback. I don’t mean just that he GETS feedback, but he pays attention to it. I stopped watching him regularly after he had a special on how some Georgia high school students had DARED to have a PRIVATE high school prom to which blacks were not invited.
You have to understand respectables to see why he came on so strong on this. For a respectable, there is a Glory and a Free Set of Brownie Points with the media if you denounce any form of “white racism.” So he came on the same way he would have if some terrorists had done a mass shooting.
The next day you could tell he was stunned. He hasn’t done that since. The comedian Miller started out for a cheap shot at segregationists a few days back, and O’Reilly cut him off.
I remember Ally Mac Beal was getting ready to have the standard black boyfriend show and the grassroots protest stopped it before it got all the way.
But, as I say, O’Reilly actually READS a lot of his feedback.
When you spend your entire working life among people who say “racism” is worse than terrorism, you learn to ignore any comment from anyone YOU DEFINE as a racist. So this kind of reaction comes as a total shock,
I remember reading a story about a little kid who came home from his first day of school proud as punch. He told his mother that his class was divided into the smarter kids, Table A, the regular kids, Table B, and the Dumb Table.
He announced proudly, “I’m the smartest one at the Dumb Table!”
Well, I guess Bill does have SOMETHING to be proud of.
#1 by backbaygrouch4 on 05/06/2010 - 8:04 am
As a troubled youth a kindly, concerned bishop arranged for me to be counseled by a priest in a neighboring parish. The monsignor in question was also the head of the diocesan school system. One day he had several visitors and could not see me for over an hour. To help me kill the time he gave me a text with about ten pages earmarked. He asked me to analyze it. I read it several times. When he finally could fit me in he inquired what the chapter was about. My proffered reply was to the effect that if the kids were getting fidgety because the air was stuffy, open a window. He blew up.
That was what he thought it said. “Why should I have to read this [a most unpriestly series of explicatives],” he groaned. He was an educated, intelligent man. He had a doctoral degree from a prestigious school in Rome. But the Massachusetts legislature in their infinite ignorance had decreed that in order to manage an educational system one had to have a scrap of paper from an approved institution with the word Education on it. He was in an Masters of Arts in Teaching [a bogus degree created to justify a pay boost for union members] program to meet their [*#$%^@] requirement. It was driving him nuttier than I was.
#2 by BGLass on 05/06/2010 - 9:47 am
Voices of anti-intellectualism were helpful to me as a kid, but
I wish somebody had just laid it all on the line. It was a relief to know some grownups actually agreed that teachers were dumb, (and how to recognize potential adult allies) but that didn’t solve the overall problem of how to make a living in the system, without losing your brains, and have a family, anyway.
A lot of kids do the reasonable thing and just drop out.
I evolved a dual-study method of self-education coupled with the formal schools. LOL– I thought I was learning “pc” stuff b/c I wasn’t in a “better” school (and there is always a “better” school). Then I realized my school was just fine and schools were all the same.
Anyway, overall strategies for operating the hostile school environment would have been very helpful. First, acknowledging it WAS hostile, (which many adults did not do for mysterious reasons that turned out later to be their sheer investment in the system, usually), and second, ideas about how to use the idiot-schools to best advantage, anyway.
It’s hard to imagine being back in those drone rooms, signing the endless pledge and alliance forms.
#3 by Berserker88 on 05/06/2010 - 10:14 am
I’m reminded of the end of the wizard or oz, the scene where the wizard tells the scarecrow that where he’s from men sit around all day and do nothing but think. He explains that they have no more brains the the brainless scarecrow. The only thing they have that he doesn’t is a diploma. It often amazes me the stupidity that comes out of he mouths of the “learned”. When someone begins a conversation/presentation with all the schooling, and qualifications they have I’m prepared to hear some blabbering nonsense. Prime example is how politicians endlessly speak without saying anything at all. “Skill” is what the media calls it.
#4 by Simmons on 05/06/2010 - 10:16 am
I have an example, Marine Corps field artillery schools for the gun grapes. They could take average intelligent white kids and turn them into morons in a few weeks. Then I realized that idiocy and stupidity really do pay, as in someone up the chain of command.
Actually America as a whole is the dumb table. At the oildrum.com somone linked to a CNBC Asia show and the three Asians (American educated but who escaped) were discussing the hypothesis of oil production, depletion and flow rates intelligently that informs PO.
So shocking in clarity and in intellectual discourse standards I damn near had a tear in my eye upon the realization on how far we have fallen in America. Because our talk show boobs literally are Gantrys spewing wordism of the worst sort and calling it genius. Or conspiracy theory which seems to infect everything and anything, reducing us to well fed fat headed animists.
In practical terms all is not hopeless, because it seems a new elite is forming below the present elite and because they need to generate an audience appreciation they do read the comments. They can be influenced as Bob notes.
#5 by Dave on 05/06/2010 - 11:19 am
Tyranny makes everyone ridiculous. Any officially sanctioned identity under tyranny is necessarily ersatz.
Tyrannies are dominated by bellowing (O’Reilly) accompanied by shuck and jive (Obama).
There is the endless search and need for AUTHENTICITY. That is why we live with a popular culture dominated by TALENT CONTESTS.
The institution in America that puts the most effort into creating authentic identities is the military. But, alas, it is not to be had. No matter what the military does to create the “real deal” identity it is defeated by the immovable force of the world’s true moral order.
So we have the freshly minted Marine BELEIVING, TRULY BELIEVING, his Wordist indoctrination. But at the end of the day we find him limb mutilated, suffering permanent unrelieved pain that no therapy or drugs can mitigate, receiving his BENEFIT checks. And somehow, mysteriously, there are these strange incantations floating about (in the mind of ersatz society) that make his sacrifice “worth it”. All that is required is that somehow you have just got to find a way to BELIEVE.
The central lesson of BUGS is that REAL SOCIETY can only be founded on RACIAL GROUNDS.
And AUTHENTIC IDENTITIES rise only from REAL SOCIETY.
Now herein lays the Establishment’s biggest problem: This would be one kind of a problem for the Establishment if it were true for whites only. But that is not the case. That fact that you can only acquire authenticity through racial means is true for all races.
That just does not comport with the plan of Political Correctness. Hence, Political Correctness can only be ridiculous. The world offers it NO WAY OUT.
#6 by BGLass on 05/06/2010 - 11:58 am
P.C. has so many holes in it when it comes to socializing people. The fact that it’s just brutal aside, the only thing that could even allow the contemplation of it was the underlying degradation of the goy, seems like. If one thought others to be anywhere near as grand as oneself, presuming to socialize them into the p.c. way would become impossible. At least universal Christianity let various groups honor their parents (and by extension, heritage, whatever it was), and do the natural thing after that–have kids.
#7 by Simmons on 05/07/2010 - 11:49 am
Dave at alt-right Kalb wrote a long piece that matches yours. He concludes that the white libs just end up chasing their tails in their existential search for “coolness.”
I might add that the lib/jews only have one thing to sell and that is anti-white hate and our patrimony (which we basically gave up for a credit card).
We hold the trump card via the Mantra deck and that anything “anti-white” is akin to genocide and that ain’t “cool.” We stick to our guns and our little movement grows exponentially as the left doubles down and we hold firm.