"Education"---meaning...what?

I'm assuming I'm addressing the choir here. If you find yourself in serious disagreement with these conclusions, this article is not for you.

We've spent some time chattin' about how some folks substitute new words for older words that communicate non-PC information. (See earlier Front Porch conversations). We've talked about how this is nothing new. It's been done for centuries, observed by gentlemen such as William Shakespeare, one of whose pearls is "A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet." That was his nice way of saying, "You can call a turd a magnolia blossom, if you want to, but the little feller will still stink."

There's a corollary form of word perversion, where the word doesn't change, and is supposed to mean what it used to mean, only it doesn't. It's a form of intellectual counterfeiting that lets some people rob each other of things tangible and intangible, with the sleepy acquiescence of the robbed.

The word I have in mind today is "education." It is used with religious deference by folks who, consciously or not, are robbing us and our descendants blind of true and necessary real-world living information, in the form of history, basic economics, basic reasoning techniques, reading in general, literacy, and what used to fall in the general category of 'common sense.'

This isn't brand new. It's been going on for decades and decades, like slow decay of civilization's foundations.

Today, what passes for education is, to those of us courageous to note the emperor's lack of what he claims to be sportin', NOT education. It's, at best, drivel. It's at worst indoctrination. And wherever you place it on the spectrum of human mind destruction, it's costing us, billions of dollars and the most critical learning years of our lives and our children and our children's children. It is a sanctimonious fraud that is far deadlier, at multiple levels, than the Social Security Ponzi Scheme. I will wager that it makes all the raging stupidity around us possible.

It's time to confront the counterfeiters: the people who ask us to worship at the alter of today's "education" for their own enrichment, aggrandizement, and maintenance of power. Not only do they ask us to blindly accept what their idea of "education" is, they're perfectly fine with making us foot the bill. This is one of those nuclear atrocities that's so big that we don't see the magnitude of it, and get tangled up in phony issues like wind power instead.

Common sense, once upon a time, would be all we need to understand that if "wind power" were desirable by those actually supporting the rest of the world, it would be developed privately and profitably in a competitive environment and would already be found everywhere. Instead, thanks to the corruption of formal "education," half the population sees nothing at all unusual or wrong about making the other half pay for something they wouldn't voluntarily buy. But hark---this actually makes sense!!


For faux "education" to sell itself as the real thing, it has to have dumb-assed people in large enough numbers to support it, and be supported by it. I include those who get paid in some way for being part of the fraud as 'dumb-assed' because: being human, I'll bet even the inadvertent participants have lost loved ones who would have lived had resources gone, over the years, where the producers want them to go. (E.G., if you had your own druthers, would you give more to cancer research, or under highway turtle tunnels?) Of course, they'd have to have active and analytical, independent minds to comprehend what their short term gains are costing them.

I humbly submit, whisper timidly, that it's time we get actively and proportionately passionate about this issue. The next time we hear some Statist Freak extolling the virtue of his/her idea of what education is and why they should be able to extort our ability to handle this most precious treasure at our individual discretion, treat them with the humor and astonishment you'd give a burglar who, in broad daylight, tells you he's here to 'help you.'

Remember, being properly and humorously exposed as a fool is far more dreaded than insulting confrontation. You'll enjoy the immediate results!!

What say you?