Education, politics, and lies—what’s the difference?

How charming that one of our most famous left-wing intellectuals, Noam Chomsky, provides the answer: “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the Truth and expose lies.”

Education, politics, and lies—what’s the difference?

During the past decade, I wrote mainly about education. I decided it would be good strategy to stay away from peripheral issues, especially politics. I didn’t want to confuse my readers. I wanted them to think, oh yeah, this is that guy that writes about education.

Trouble is, I found more and more that politics and education blur together these days. Here’s why. Both fields have been been commandeered by liars and sophists. Was it always like this? Or has it simply become more blatant?

Maybe I should try to describe my aha moment. Trying to explain Obama to myself (or anyone else) turns out to be difficult because he says whatever he needs to say on any particular day. Meanwhile, I found that explaining sight-words, Whole Word, and why so many children are illiterate is very difficult because the Education Establishment sells its nonsense any way it can.http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/06/reading_the_con_continues.html

A few years ago I wrote an article that basically concluded: if you can understand Obama, you can understand sight-words Similarly, if you can understand sight-words, you can understand Obama. In both cases, there’s nothing genuinely there except the deception and trickery being promoted at that moment.

That’s pretty strong but also very helpful. It may be the only way you can understand sight-words and the erroneous theories used to teach reading. (These have given us 50,000,000 functional illiterates.) Still, professors with a PhD-level vocabulary and prestige continue to browbeat average parents into accepting what doesn’t work. It’s very hard for ordinary citizens to grapple with the reality that the Education Establishment may be little more than a chorus of liars. If you examine sight-words, Reform Math, Common Core, constructivism and all the rest, you eventually realize that the lying is incessant.

Then you look at the New York Times protecting Obama at every turn. What you seem to have is another chorus of liars. And if you look back and forth from the people keeping Obama in office and the people keeping sight-words in the public schools, you are confronted by parallel choirs.

Years ago, the Left came up with the idea that journalists don’t need to tell the truth. They could tell each one’s personal subjective truth. Schools of journalism now teach their students, in so many words, that it’s okay to lie. That’s why you had contrived stories about rape at the University of Virginia; and that’s why we heard irresponsible reporting about Michael Brown and Ferguson. Journalists pick the spin that will help them advance their agenda.

So what’s the bottom line here? I suspect there are hardly any good ideas in the public schools and hardly anyone at the top of education telling us the truth.  Likewise, is there anyone in the White House telling the truth; and is there anybody in the liberal media trying to make them tell the truth? That’s pretty grim but probably closer to reality than not.

Harvard has the motto “Veritas”. Would any university pick that motto today? It’s doubtful. Harvard is probably trying to figure out a way to pretend they didn’t do it, because what most universities really believe in these days is their liberal agenda.

How can we hope to sustain a civilization based on a surfeit of dishonesty? I think it’s up to everybody to start over and do what it takes to rebuild our integrity. In the first grade insist that 2+2 = 4.  Conversely,  someone claiming in effect that 2+2 = 5 must be denounced as a liar. People promote such sophistry only if they’re planning to set up a totalitarian regime as in 1984.

There are lots of legitimately complicated things to argue about: what’s inside a black hole, the nature of reality, and why God permits evil. But if we’re talking about the capital of France, that’s merely a fact. You can’t pretend that facts are not there. Obama lives in a world where he can say anything on any given day and then contradict it on a later day. Our Education Establishment lives in a world where they can announce that any theory can achieve any results.

As Siegfried Engelmann astutely said, “Educators are fundamentally looking for magic.” Politics, education and lies have become hopelessly tangled together. Let’s untangle them. In politics, when someone lies, let’s call that person a liar. In education, if every citizen takes time to learn about different theories and methods, and why they work or don’t work, then we can start to reform the system.

How charming that one of our most famous left-wing intellectuals, Noam Chomsky, provides the answer: “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the Truth and expose lies.”

Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber- http://josephfreedomoranarchy.blogspot.com/


LAWFUL REBELLION
STAND FOR WHAT IS RIGHT
By Bruce Deitrick Price