Mutually Assured Mediocrity

A week by the seashore is amazingly rejuvenating; however, now we return to the work of encouraging rational deliberation of and dissent against the foolish, feckless, dangerous, and destructive policies and legislation created by the Obumites and their bureaucratic minions.

The bureaucrats who are harming this nation most are the government union members of the national education collective.  It might be interesting to see their reactions to the STEM programs that are being promoted.  They are resolutely opposed to the sort of competition that produces the best results in virtually every field of endeavor.

The education collective's strategies have been counterproductive for the US as a nation in competition with other countries. First among them is the deliberate dumbing down of American schools.  This is intended to provide students with ersatz self-esteem in a nobody-fails environment.  Who could benefit from preventing citizens from becoming insightful critical thinkers who recognize and criticize the inept, greedy, and destructive acts of agents of the state?

Another tactic is to divide classrooms into cells that have at least one bright and well motivated student who is responsible to teach the others and perform the work of non-producers; all cell members receive the same pay, or grade.  This scheme begins in grade K with unsuspecting children who are too young to realize that they are being subliminally indoctrinated to accept the socialist precepts of the nation's education collective.   

The author of the Bartaverse correctly notes the difficulty of getting "kids to study STEM subjects when we have teachers and students elsewhere struggling for basic literacy."  Perhaps a different point might be pondered.  Why are teachers and students struggling for basic literacy in the first place?  Children should be required to master grade K before promotion to the first grade.  When primary school students are advanced to middle school, and they are inadequately able to read, write, and perform basic math functions, they are doomed to academic, social, and economic failure.

Part of dumbing down America is to hamstring communication skills.  At the heart of this subterfuge is the virtual elimination of English grammar and usage.  Parsing sentences, proper punctuation, spelling, syntax, and consistent and concise organization are not taught.  A person who cannot identify the subject and predicate in a sentence also cannot recognize a complete sentence.  Thanks to journalism colleges and print and electronic media, pronoun and antecedent agreement are part of a bygone era.

Ineffective communication skills usually mean the difference between success and failure.  The primary goal of education's secular-socialists is mutually assured mediocrity.  What they abhor most is an open marketplace of ideas competing equally and effectively for viability and acceptance.

Punctuation often determines meaning.  Imprecise and nebulous communication such as euphemisms help collectivists avoid accurate comparisons of their constituents and others; still, the practice of devaluing grammar can hold devastating consequences.

Consider the effect of a single comma.  If a lawyer draws up a will in which an estate is divided among Linda, Imelda, and Ralph, each person receives a third.  If it is divided among Linda, Imelda and Ralph, Linda gets one-half, and Imelda and Ralph each receive a quarter of it.  Lawyers have been disbarred for less.  Dumbing down curricula by government agents is treachery.

Perhaps the one practice which most effectively ensures that significant numbers of the nation's academic underachievers will remain dependent on government is subsidizing professional sports through education funding.

All middle school, high school, and college sports programs should be intramural rather than interscholastic.  Additionally, the NFL and NBA should be required to create their own player development facilities similar to the farm clubs supported by Major League Baseball.  We need to stop funding football and basketball factories that masquerade as universities.

Far too often, former athletes leave college semi-literate and without marketable job skills.  They are physically large and muscular and have been taught how to use violence and intimidation to acquire their goals.  Faced with the humiliating prospect of lifetime underemployment or welfare dependence, they turn to violent crime.  Who could possibly benefit from creating and using these circumstances to justify ever increasing demands for more tax money to be poured down the bottomless money pit that is the mommy state?

That this situation has continued to exist and worsen since the days of Lyndon Johnson's Great Welfare Society indicates clearly that the government agents who fund it and make money from it want things this way; they are benefiting at the expense of the very nation that they are pledged to support.

May your gods be with you.