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The Forum > Article Comments > There is too much edu-babble > Comments

There is too much edu-babble : Comments

By Michael Zwaagstra, published 14/9/2010

Definition of 'edu-babble': the use of a term that alone puts its advocates on the side of the angels.

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What an interesting choice of name: The Frontier Institute.

The inevitable result of the frontier world-view that energizes the USA (in particular) was portrayed in the recent Avatar film. Never-ending imperial conquests.

One of the Navi said of the (frontier) techno-barbarian invaders. "It is almost impossible to cure you of your insanity"

I had a conventional old-time "fact"-based education in the 50's and 60's. Learning to think and critically examine any and every thing was NOT part of the program. We were essentially empty vessels to be filled with the contents of the then curriculum.

It turns out that most of what I was taught just plain old aint true, or at best only partially true.

It was all taught within the rigidly reductionist frame-work that was an extension of the then, and now, dominant scientific-materialist world-view of father-knows-best white western northern European males.

You know the white-man was born to rule with our christian "religion", culture, and civilization being the epitome of human achievement up until then.
Posted by Ho Hum, Tuesday, 14 September 2010 11:24:18 AM
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I was at school in the 1950s and 1060s, too. No one every taught me that
>> the white-man was born to rule with our christian "religion", culture, and civilization being the epitome of human achievement up until then.

Since your credibility is on the line, HoHum, nominate five other things you were taught that
>> just plain old aint true, or at best only partially true.

Anyone who thinks watching Avatar is an educational experience really does need to be challenged.
Posted by KenH, Tuesday, 14 September 2010 11:41:25 AM
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Not much interested who the author writes. I too never had an education like Hos. Thank God for reductionism and empiricism.

The author pretty much sums up the ideology that underpins much of the modern secondary curriculum - especially in the 'humanities'. I use the term humanities loosely as reading, writing and critical thinking still plays a part, although it is couched in political terms such as 'See Nip deny Fluff's reality because she is a girl.'

Q. Why did Nip do that?
A. Because he is an imperialist, mysogonist who has an unreconstructed conciousness.

Gee, that's even before they read Lady Chat's Lover.

'Self directed' learning is a euphenism for talk amongst yourselves as the teacher hasn't done the reading or is on strike.
Posted by Cheryl, Tuesday, 14 September 2010 12:22:47 PM
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I was a bit over the top in my statement re what I was taught in school.

All films, even the most inane, are essentially propaganda for a particular world-view. Hollywood played an important role in producing films in support of World War II. As did the Nazis in Germany, and the communists via their dreadful "social-realism" films, posters and art. All of which promoted a "world"-view in the image of the machine.

ALL films without exception are also a projection, commentary, and in some cases a critique of the zeitgeist of the times. Such was the case with the Avatar film. And why do you think that art in all of its various manifestations is so important to the powers that be.

It was no accident that those on the right-side of the culture wars divide were uniformly, in a predictable group-think response, horrified by the Avatar film, and its critique of our techno-barbarian civilization.

All cultures make institutions in their own likeness.

Our "culture" is based on the principle of the separate and separative grossly bound individual. Our "education" system is purposed to create unconscious clones to fit into the system. Back in the "good-old-days" it was purposed to create obedient factory-fodder and when necessary canon-fodder for the inevitable imperial wars. Such was essentially the content and purpose of mass-education when it was introduced in the late 1850's.

Such is still the case.

Various USA father-knows-best "conservatives" for instance lament the fact that the USA "education" system no longer produces masses of young clones who are prepared to be turned into mince-meat, or smithereened, in service of the now ruling permanent warfare state.

All of our institutions, including religion, are now patterned by scientific materialism, which has inevitably grossly bound separate and separative individual.

In the present-time world education has been reduced to a propaganda industry that is purposed only to produce the next generation of social and political clones in a programmed life dictated by government, corporations, and economic interests. Thus, such so-called "education" is merely about producing a compliant work force.
Posted by Ho Hum, Tuesday, 14 September 2010 1:52:45 PM
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Real education is the process of getting to the root of what human existence is about. In the present time world there is no such education.

All of the conventions of education are derived from, and reinforce the now pervasive grossly bound model of human existence which produces the dreadfully sane normal individual who is effectively an unconscious robot -- a sleep-walker in an unconscious collective hive.
Nobody has a clue as to what is really going on, and EVERY-thing that we do is pre-programmed and patterned by the system itself.

Ours is a completely unconscious "culture" and civilization. This is the name of a book by John Ralston Saul.

Such grossly bound "education" inevitably leads to divisiveness, competitiveness, and competing group identities. Which in the case of the archaic Semitic political religions of the Middle-East, and their association with powerful nation states (and collections of states) are now waging global warfare for global rulership.

We now "live" in the nightmare world described both in Brave New World AND 1984.
Posted by Ho Hum, Tuesday, 14 September 2010 2:06:30 PM
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One can only lament the coming of conveyor belt factory style education.
Alvin Toffler in "Future Shock" outlined well the factory-like nature of "school" as we know it in industrialised countries: "Young people passing through this educational machine merged into an adult society whose structure of jobs, roles and institutions resembled that of school itself. The school child did not simply learn facts that he could use later on; he lived as well as learned a way of life modelled after the one he would lead in the future."

In traditional societies, a child was mindful of the ancestral ways and links that connected him to his instruction. He instinctively knew the importance of watching, learning and emulating the grown-ups around him.
We have veered a long way from those times in the western world, and now seek to fill small heads with things with which they have little or no innate connection. Is it any wonder that modern children have no instinctive need to submit to whole-class direct instruction? They are subtly relieved of the ability over time to "think for themselves". This wonderful mode of operation called self-directed learning that served them well in infancy simply does not fit into the artificial and disconnected world of school.
Posted by Poirot, Tuesday, 14 September 2010 2:36:50 PM
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