The crisis and the
crossroad, by Jon Rappoport, 12/25/18.
A hundred fifty years
ago, at least some Americans recognized that all serious discourse depended on
the use of the faculty called Reason.
Formal debate,
science, and law all flowed from that source.
A common bond existed
in some schools of the day. The student was expected to learn how Reason
operates, and for that he was taught the only subject which could lay out, as
on a long table, the visible principles: Logic. This was accepted. But now,
this bond is gone. The independence engendered by the disciplined study of
logic is no longer a desired quality in students.
The classroom, at
best, has taken on the appearance of a fact-memorization factory; and we should
express grave doubts about the relevance and truth of many of those facts.
A society filled with
people who float in the drift of non-logic is a society that declines.
Ideologies that deny
individual freedom and independence are welcomed with open arms, because they
mirror a muddled people’s desire to confirm that failure is the inevitable fate
of all of us.
When education becomes
so degraded that young students are no longer taught to reason clearly, private
citizens have the obligation rebuild that system so the great contribution to
Western civilization—logic—is reinstated in its rightful place.
Logic, the key by
which true political discourse, science, and law were, in fact, originally
developed, must be unearthed.
Logic and reasoning,
the capacity to think, the ability to analyze ideas—an ability which has been
forgotten, which has been a surpassing virtue in every shadow of a free
civilization—must be restored.
Once a vital thing has
been misplaced, buried, and covered over by mindless substitutions, people cannot
immediately recognize the original thing has any importance, meaning, or
existence.
To declare its
importance makes no sense to “the crowd.” They look bewildered and shake their
heads. They search their memories and find nothing.
They prefer to adhere
to rumor, gossip, accusation, wild speculation, and fear mongering as the
primary means of public discourse and assessment of truth.
These habits light
their paths. These reflexes give them some degree of pleasure. These idols
become their little gods.
To win out over such
attachments and superstitions is a job for the long term.
But if our labors
yield rewards, we can once again bring import to education, and to the idea of
authentic freedom that once cut a wide swathe through darkness.
A string of direct and
distracting abuses has saddled our schools. Among them:
* Teachers believe
they need to entertain children, in order to capture their attention;
* School systems have
substituted the need for public funds in the place of actually supplying a sound
education;
* Under the banner of
political correctness, school texts have been sanitized to the point of
sterility, in order to avoid the possibility of offending, to the slightest
degree, any group;
* Students rarely
confront information in the form in which it is delivered to people all over
the world—they confront substitutes;
* Students have, in
this respect, been coddled;
* Subjects such as sex
education, which belong in the family, have been delivered into the hands of
schools and teachers;
* Indeed, in certain
respects, schools are asked to substitute and stand in for parents;
* Masked as “learning
opportunities,” various political agendas have been inserted in school
curricula;
* The basis on which
every historic document establishing some degree of freedom was debated and
drafted—logical thought—has been eliminated from the curriculum as a serious
discipline;
* Students are
permitted and even encouraged to drift and grasp at superficially attractive
ideas and fads of the moment;
* In this respect,
freedom has been reinterpreted to mean “mental incapacity and wandering
thought”;
* The vast
contributions of the ancient Greek civilization, where logic as a crucial
subject was born, have been obliterated, minimized or summarized in sterile
fashion;
* Logic, the
connective tissue which binds together the progression of ideas in rational
argument, has been kept away from students;
* The result is the
production of shallow minds that cannot see the architecture of reasoning;
* Students, at sea,
begin to invent wholly insufficient standards for accepting or rejecting
various points of view and supposed authorities;
* Students lose their
true independence without ever having gained it;
* The low level of
overall literacy in our schools is matched only by the non-comprehension of
rational thought;
* In the presence of
these and other deficiencies and abuses, students are pushed through, from
grade to grade, graduation to graduation, as a bureaucratic function,
regardless of their ability.
Therefore, citizens of
good intent must offload this system. They must assume responsibility for
teaching children the missing key to education.
Logic; the capacity to
reason, to think lucidly; to separate sense from chatter; to discover deception
and avoid being influenced by it; to remain free and independent from the
shifting opinions of “the herd”; to maintain personal liberty in the face of
every spurious enticement to abandon it; to come to grips with competitive sets
of First Principles which will lead to freedom or slavery; these are the stakes
in our time.
This is the crossroad.
Choose the path that can bring us the fulfillment of a worthy goal. Choose
reason over vacuous mindlessness.
We, who still know the
power of the mind, and who understand how that power can be harnessed to shape
independence and liberty, can bring, out of the dust of recent history, an
education that truly trains the intellect.
Logic is the
foundation of such an education.
If schools, which have
become madhouses and factories and toxic medical dispensaries, will not teach
it, we can teach it.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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