times of moral cowardice
are dominated less by evil men than enabled by silent ones
indeed, perhaps these issues raised by balloux mattered, but in the end, they were not dispositive.
the true reason this happened was that many "experts" who damn well knew better sat silent in their cowardice and allowed the lunatics run of the asylum.
it happened because the people upon whose children this was being inflicted, despite seeing this wrong, were cowed, made to feel alone in their outrage, and paid deference to groups not worthy of it.
they feared to rock the boat.
they went along to get along.
and that is everywhere and always the path to perdition and the tried and true trail to tyranny: because no movement of tyrants can proceed without the (at least tacit) agreement of the people.
evil may or may not be banal, but banality is always the carpet upon which evil strides.
there is a special circle of hell for the moralizing monday morning quarterback.
it’s easy to sit here today and accuse others of cowardice. it’s easy to forget the fear and to ignore the consequences of having your child tossed into the gears of the credentialism machine for daring to buck it.
it’s easy to ignore the price or to claim that others should pay it.
after all, being brave with the lives of others is a seductive way to draw attention away from one’s own acquiescences.
but getting kicked out of school, suspended, or whatever, is an increasingly serious thing.
they have made it this way on purpose.
education has become an intense and all encompassing credentialing factory. to reach the top universities, you need a transcript of implausible perfection and as any admissions officer will tell you, they have far more qualified applicants than spots.
the whole first pass is just looking for tiny blemishes, one eesny little bruise on the peach to justify discarding it from the bushel.
one strike and you’re out.
i doubt very much that i would have made the cut today even with near perfect SAT’s and more than enough 5’s on my AP’s to win at yahtzee because, when i was 16, i got suspended from HS for getting caught in my girlfriend’s dorm after curfew.
and that’s how narrow the margin for error is on the road to ivy now, especially if you are not “intersectionally endangered” in some fashion.
it’s how narrow the margin is for top high schools and top job offers.
it’s how hard it is to get anyplace.
and this needs to end.
much of the reason schools were able to get away with what can only be described as two years of dereliction of duty, subsumation into superstitious nonsense, and outright child abuse is that they were too powerful to challenge.
the risk to your child and their future was too great.
this is not education, it’s indoctrination. it’s obedience training and ideological purity testing and those granted this power have become increasingly unbalanced and insane, driven mad by prerogative and power.
it’s attracting all the worst sorts of people and making them ever worse.
clearly, this is not true of all teachers and educations and administrators. there are plenty of good eggs out there who really do care and who want to do it right. but they are caught in the same machine, suppressed by the same craven credentialism, and forced onto the same treadmills of obedience. if they buck, they too get the axe or get the sorts of black marks on their transcripts that stop advancement and deny access to power.
this is why authoritarian/totalitarians systems LOVE credentialism. it’s why they want everything to be about official stamps and sanction and censure. do as we tell you and get the gold stars prerequisite for a golden future. offend us, and get blackballed and banned and sit forever outside.
public schools do not serve the public.
they serve the state.
did no one else get creeped out every morning in school “pledging allegiance to the flag”?
it’s so “normal” that you sort of stop seeing it, but really step back and look at it with fresh eyes. that is NOT normal. that’s very, very dangerous.
any school that can make you swear fealty to one thing can make you wear featly to another.
and thus we run into coyote’s law: before granting any power to the state, imagine that power wielded by the politician you despise most, because on day, it will be.
and thus flag pledges turn to mandates to be allies against white privilege or to seize the means of production for the proletariat.
it’s all the same thing, the same process just with varying payloads.
and this is why public education is anathema to free society. it will always devolve into the commanding heights of societal indoctrination, domination, and control. the more the curriculum and social content are dominated by the center, the more centralized and homogeneous this domination and indoctrination will become.
and soon it gets too big to stand against.
soon, the FBI is getting called in to brand parents standing up to deranged school boards as domestic terrorists.
soon the teachers are saying out loud and proud sentiments like “parents should have no say in what is being taught here.”
stop and really think about that. that’s not america. that’s full blown soviet. it’s maoist. it’s “give your child to the system because they belong to the state and not to you” and then giving that system to the power to determine upon which set of rails your progeny’s life shall run if they do or do not obey.
demanding credentials and permissions for everything is how a state takes control of a society. it’s how they put the “right” people in the “right” jobs and grant ever more power to them to keep tightening the ratchet.
you just got a good look at how scary that is to stare down once it’s in flower. and it only gets harder from here. every click on that ratchet makes resistance more difficult.
and if the parents in a society find the schools too powerful and terrifying to speak out against, something has gone badly, terribly wrong.
and it is time this ratchet was not just reversed, but broken.
school choice and an end to public monopoly on “tax and indoctrinate” education is the issue of our time
and we’re not going to get another chance like this, another time like this, another point with wounds so fresh and memory so vivid.
so many who clamored for closure are now claiming they were on the side of keeping schools open. those who have been exposed for radicalizing children into the cults of wokedom are proclaiming it “free thought” and still seeking to claim this is the moral high ground and that this choice must reside with educations and not families.
swallow these lies now, go along to get along once more, and leave these people in power and prominence and the schools as wards of the state and this is just going to go right back to the way it was. and then it will get worse.
the true education teaches HOW to think, not WHAT to think.
education should elevate and liberate children, not shackle them. it should generate opportunity to thrive on merit and diligence, not to sort by stultifying ideological purity in service to federal diktat.
this cannot be about “putting the right people in charge” or “getting the right ideology this time.” this is not a lever that can be left around for anyone to pull. it will always be abused. the question is always “when?” not “if.”
absolute free choice for schools is the only way.
fund children, not systems; fund markets, not monopiles.
this is the achievable near term goal that starts us on the road to recovering from this excursion from our senses.
this is the time to take that stand.
all of us.
the time for going along to get along has passed.
"in the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends..."
"evil may or may not be banal, but banality is always the carpet upon which evil strides."
Puurrrrrrrfect.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." -Edmund Burke