It's too late for us. Save the kids

Swear allegiance to the flag
Whatever flag they offer
Never hint at what you really feel
Teach the children quietly
For some day sons and daughters
Will rise up and fight while we stood still
Silent running, Mike + the Mechanics

As an exercise in analyzing media propaganda, I was going to comment on the spin that followed the release of a video recording the field execution of an Iraqi soldier, until I came to the conclusion that we are so far gone that at this point we need to focus on salvage operations—salvaging what was good in our culture and our people, before the people in charge destroy the rest of it and us.

With that in mind we can start by saving our children, and particularly our sons, who are draft-bait.

The vast majority of American children do not have any of the skills they will need to survive the end of this Age. Not only do they not have the skills, but they are essentially forbidden to acquire them. Federal monies for schools and federal regulations make it impossible for the states and local school districts to have any real autonomy. You could not get teacher certification without going through a training program based on the orthodoxy of Dewey and Bloom, which are also required for school accretidation.

Sad to say, the very nature of what education is or what it should be isn't clear. It's doubtful that it ever has been clear. In most civilizations including our own, formal education began among economic classes with little incentive to learn anything practical. Classical Chinese education revolved around memorizing Confusianistic texts, which left the country being run by hopelessly ineffective Mandarins who stood by paralyzed while the country was overrun by foreigners from much smaller countries.

Until relatively recent in history, education in the English-speaking countries consisted of being handed lists of books to read. You got your degree when you crossed them all off. Typically the lists covered Plato, Aristotle, a few Roman Orators, and some largely fictional English history (starting from King Arthur). Surgeons for the royal armed forces were recruited from among butchers, because educated people didn't know anything about human (much less bovine) anatomy.

So we started with a system that was wildly impractical. In the 19th century, degrees from German universities carried some prestige among Americans because you had to actually pass some exit exams to get one. From about that time until John Dewey completely took over the educational system was probably the Golden Age of American education.

Follow this link to find out what happened next.

It's hard to pull a definative quote because there are too many horrors to choose from. I'll just take the first line and leave it at that:

“I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race.”

Sorry, Mr. Dewey, but I don't want to participate in your social consciousness! John Dewey was an author and signatory of the Humanist Manifesto, a document of Anglo-marxism promoting the equality of slaves.

Dewey intentionally turned schools public and private into indoctrination camps. The marxist Benjamin Bloom furthered Dewey's work, developing the abomination currently known as “Outcome Based Education” (also known as “Mastery Learning” and “Performance-Based Education”). Students are expected to conform to certain “outcomes”, meaning they are expected to have certain state-approved behavior patterns and beliefs. Failure to demonstrate the expected behaviors and beliefs results in “remediation”, possibly followed by “interventions”. For example, students in Oregon (a major OBE hellhole) have been denied high-school diplomas for refusing to participate in marxist “education through labor” programs designed to teach the prol's their place in life.

Actual knowledge starves while attitudinal conditioning gets all the attention. Even knowing something is not enough; students should (or at least, have the potential to) not just know but know how. American students don't learn how to do anything useful (oh they learn plenty, and if their parents only knew...) in school. Europe is not much better, and Australian and Canadian schools are following the American lead down the OBE path of destruction.

Many parents are extremely confused about these issues. They see their kids doing their homework and think that everything's OK. They need to take a closer look at the homework. I'll explain why in an upcoming installment.