The hellish and failed public schools sometimes spout drivel about the importance of teaching critical thinking skills. They never deliver and, in fact, move hell and earth to prevent intelligent discourse. Vox Day and a reader have articulated (very well) why that is: a passage from The Ethics of Rhetoric by Richard Weaver:
Examples of this kind of contrivance occur on every hand in the impassioned language of journalism and political pleading. In the world of affairs which these seek to influence, the many are kept in a state of pupillage so that they will be most docile to their “lovers.” The techniques of the base lover, especially as exemplified in modern journalism, would make a long catalogue, but in general it is accurate to say that he seeks to keep the understanding in a passive state by never permitting an honest examination of the alternatives. Nothing is more feared by him than a true dialectic, for this not only endangers his favored alternative, but also gives the “beloved”…some training in intellectual independence.
What he does therefore is dress up one alternative in all the cheap finery of immediate hopes and fears, knowing that if he can thus prevent a masculine exercise of imagination and will he can have his way. By discussing only one side of an issue, by mentioning cause without consequence or consequence without cause, acts without agents or agents without agency, he often successfully blocks definition and cause-and-effect reasoning. In this way his choices are arrayed in such meretricious images that one can quickly infer the juvenile mind which they would attract. Of course the base rhetorician today, with his vastly augmented power of propagation, has means of deluding which no ancient rhetor in forum or marketplace could have imagined.
Reading the subtext closely, one finds that Weaver is describing mental rape, in the case of the schools, of children. Vox is dead-on accurate when he says a competent mind must be trained in both rhetoric and dialectic so that one may see and defeat the lies. No government administrator wants and most teachers do not want that as they see it as both an affront to their precious authority over the “beloveds” and a direct challenge to the narrative their masters have scripted for them to deliver.
How does it work in practice? An example: A likely CIA front company runs a reading tutorial program that practically ensures reading is not learned. It is geared towards middle and high school students. One of their recent lessons was on the great sodomite hero Harvey Milk. That’s how the demon-possessed freak is presented – as a hero. They end with Milk’s execution, a grand tragedy as they see it. They expect the kids to go along. This sort of evil is pushed at all levels, including the elementary. What they purposefully omit is that Milk was a child rapist and that many of his victims went on to become child rapists or commit suicide or to do both. A discerning mind might rebel and ask questions, which would defeat the point of the indoctrination.
This is also the reason why it has become next to impossible to carry on a conversation with the average person. Beyond their declining innate mental faculties, they are untrained in the art of thinking.
It’s not “homeschool or die,” it’s homeschool or watch civilization die.
