Yahoo culture

It's a good thing I'm not a politician.  First time my opponent accused me of being out of touch with real Americans, of having ideas that are out of the mainstream, I'd sink my campaign by answering, "Damn straight!"

The mainstream in America is a raucous flood of yahoos and boobs who believe that the world was created in seven days a few thousand years after the invention of agriculture; that there are such things as ghosts and witches; that the domestic life of Britney is not only interesting but their own most pressing business; that football and NASCAR matter; that a Quarter Pounder is what a hamburger ought to taste like; that hunting is something you're meant to do drunk, ditto snowmobiling, boating, and driving all-terrain vehicles across other people's property and through national parks; that a nice mall is more important to a town than a decent park or a good school; that what comes out of Nashville these days is music; and that what's on Fox or the CW this week is the best in television; not to mention things like black people are scary, Jews are funny, Muslims are evil, and all Spanish-speaking immigrants are scary, funny, lazy, and threatening to the continued survival of the Republic.

So I can't run for office, not if my opponent is a typical Right Winger armed with the usual talking points and anti-Liberal demogoguery.  I happen to think it's good for folks in the Mainstream to be told what a collection of yahoos and boobs they are and the faster they get themselves out of the Mainstream the better for themselves and their children.

This isn't good politics.

For some reason people just aren't inclined to vote for the candidate who insults them.

I mean the one who insults them flat out, honestly.  The ones who insult their intelligence by lying to them and flattering their prejudices pile up the votes.

Anyway, there is a systematic challenge to the mainstream here; there are institutions that exist solely to fish as many young people out of the flood as possible.  Education and schools.

We send our children off to get educated in order to strip them of our prejudices, give them the facts and experience to think for themselves and teach them how to do it, to help them become their own persons, in charge of their own lives and capable of making their own way.  I called the mainstream a flood because that's what it is.  It's a rush of prejudice, unsupported opinion, and hidebound reaction that carries people along whatever course the crowd's traveling and if that's over a waterfall, well, then, tumbling over waterfalls is just fine because that's the way it's always been and God must have intended it that way, so praise the Lord as you smash on the rocks below!

Education is liberalizing, on the whole, but one of the ways it achieves this is by being conservative.  It passes along the cultural, political, and social traditions of the nation.  The trouble is that most of the mainstream that calls itself conservative is hostile to those traditions.

Not because they, the yahoos and the boobs, are Conservative, but because they are human and to be human is to be inherently reactionary, because to even be conservative, nevermind liberal, requires thought and hard work and courage and pragmatisism, but mostly thought.  People don't like to do that.

So it ought to be laughable to criticize any educational reform, any idea, any teacher, or institution for being out of the mainstream.

And it ought to rolling on the floor funny to attack colleges for having "a culture that cherishes independence and freedom." and calling that culture "seriously out of touch with much of America."

But that's what Eugene Hickock, a fellow at the Right Wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation, did in an op-ed piece in the New York Times last week.

Hickock was a deputy secretary of education during President Bush's first term and, given the Bush League's general principles regarding staffing government---for any job that requires an architect, hire a demolition expert---we can be pretty sure that his title and how he thought about his job had an oxymoronic relationship.

It may look to reasonable people, folks out of touch with America, that Hickcock is criticizing colleges for their chief virtue, if not in fact their reason for being, and that's exactly what he's doing.

The Right hates academia because it is out of their control and while their kids are in college they are out of their control too and in all likelihood aren't going to return to their control either.

Most people in the mainstream think of grade schools as cheap and safe babysitting, judge the worth of a high school by the strength of its football and basketball teams and the marching band, and see colleges as places where other people send their kids to play football and basketball on television, and this is the kind of "educational system" the Right is happy to provide them (although the Right's leaders don't want it for their own kids, of course).

The Right likes the mainstream flowing freely.  They like people to be yahoos and boobs because yahoo and boobs are easy to manipulate, fool, control, bully, and boss.  You can't be a good authoritarian, at home, in your church, or while running the government, without a large population of yahoos and boobs to push around and make like it.

It's not just college education that the Right fears and despises.

Hickock proposes a No Child Left Behind initiative for universities.  The Right loves to tout the No Child Left Behind Act as proof of its commitment to education, but besides the fact that Right Wing politicians won't put their money where their mouths are and fund their own favored initiative as fully as it needs to be, the real reason they like the No Child Left Behind Act is that it takes educating children out of the hands of teachers and puts it in the hands of the writers of standardized tests who are, the Right hopes and is working to ensure, appointed by Right Wing politicians in touch with America, politicians who will promise the yahoos and boobs that their children will get an education that won't make the yahoos and boobs feel like yahoos and boobs.

That it has the added benefit of helping their children grow up to be yahoos and boobs themselves is gravy.

Elana Levin at the DMIblog has posted a pair of fine letters to the editor responding to Hickock here.

Comments

[Jennifer]

"boobs who believe that the world was created in seven days" and they would be even bigger boobs because any regular boob knows it was created in 6 with the creation of vacation happening on the 7th... I'm just sayin' :)

Now, back to the rest of your post.

[Jennifer]

Excellent post. Education should be liberalizing and liberating.

This caught my attention: "the real reason they like the No Child Left Behind Act is that it takes educating children out of the hands of teachers and puts it in the hands of the writers of standardized tests who are, the Right hopes and is working to ensure, appointed by Right Wing politicians in touch with America..."

I have not heard one of my children's teachers speak well of NCLB. They say they feel hamstrung. They are not given the proper money or tools to teach and yet they are penalized and held responsible if they do not succeed.

[Elana]

Thanks for the link Lance! That Hikock op-ed was something else. The standardized tests will be the death of all humanities education if you ask me. If you teach kids there is only one right answer to literary interpretation you are just plain wrong.

[Savage Tan]

Generally agree. However, there's damn good music coming out of Nashville. Better than LA/NYC.

And football is pretty damn important! NASCAR does suck, though.

[Kevin Wolf]

I remember having a couple of idiots for teachers when I was growing up, but nobody accused the whole system of giving bad teachers cover, or that one bad teacher was destroying "America's future, its children."

That's what the right does: they find the one or two truly wacky left wing professors and make the accussation that this is how far America's educational system has fallen.

It's just extremist button pushing that has everything to do with idealogy and nothing to do with educating children and young adults.

[TC]

Ties in with the meme you hear from the Right occasionally, that liberals are doomed because we don't breed enough...

They'd like to believe that political and social orientation is a genetic feature; and if they can eliminate the exposure to the wider world that occurs at college, it will effectively prevent Junior from being able to leave the nest.

You can see it in the home-schooling movement, and the Liberty college types- don't let the kids have anything approaching a wide spectrum of input, it helps to keep 'em down on the farm.

[jahf]

I have not heard one of my children's teachers speak well of NCLB. They say they feel hamstrung. They are not given the proper money or tools to teach and yet they are penalized and held responsible if they do not succeed.

In other words, NCLB is a complete success.

[Gentlewoman]

For some reason people just aren't inclined to vote for the candidate who insults them.

I highly recommend that you read Buried for Pleasure by Edmund Crispin, in which his hero, Oxford don Gervase Fen runs for Parliament and does precisely that, at great length, and very amusingly. And wins the election.

[Spike]

Then why not set up an educational system out of reach of the claws of right wing government?

[mikefromtexas]

And to think some people thought 'Forrest Gump' was fiction. Looks more and more like a prediction these days.

[Fred]

Hell, after reading that, I'd vote for ya...

[Anne Laurie]

Well, HOUSE is on Fox TV -- anything that keeps Hugh Laurie working has to qualify as a good thing, irregardless.

But, to be serious, hasn't there always been a schism between the people who want their children to be educated -- to be introduced to the variety of life and thought which upholds civilization -- and those who just want their offspring baby-sat until they're mature enough to take their appointed place in the social order? I seem to remember that Socrates was sentenced to death for failing to uphold his educational contract with the cream of Athenian democracy. And as soon as the learning institutions now called "universities" emerged during the Middle Ages, both outraged parents and local worthies immediately started complaining that the young scholars were not learning anything Useful -- they were either being subsidized in Carnality 101, or were pursuing unclean esotericisms, to the severe risk of their immortal souls and their parents' purses. (You'd think the little monsters would have had to chose one or the other, to be slackers or to be radicals, but adolescents have more energy than us aged 24-hour-day people, I guess.)

Which is not to say that the current Proud-to-Know-Nothings like Hickok aren't dangerous. But they shouldn't be feared as a new invention, just as another recrudescence of a very old and dishonorable human failing.

[Kate Marie]

Bonnie Annie Laurie, where, exactly, does the editorial champion know-nothingism? In fact, doesn't it do the opposite? [Hope you don't mind my having given you a nickname . . . it's a beautiful name and a beautiful tune.]

And to Mike from Texas . . . I'm as much a scoffer at the *movie* Forrest Gump as the next guy, but what's wrong with the *character* Forrest Gump? I mean, his famous dictum -- "stupid is as stupid does" -- is essentially correct, isn't it? And anyway, Forrest Gump may be "stupid," but he's not anti-intellectual . . .

I think discussions like this veer too easily into "heh, heh, Republicans are stupid" territory, especially when there's so much uniformity of opinion on the matter. At the risk of sounding really preachy, I'll suggest that intellectual superiority is not synonymous with moral superiority . . . and that Lance's beef is not with stupidity but with anti-intellectualism. Whether Right-wingers or "mainstream Americans" have a corner on that particular trait -- or on its second cousin, pseudo-intellectualism -- is another matter entirely.

As for getting kids to "think critically" or "think for themselves," my humble opinion is that schools (elementary, high school, and university) rarely do that, and those who suggest that it's the highest purpose of every class, aren't really "thinking critically." This post at Michael Drout's blog sums it up nicely:

http://wormtalk.blogspot.com/2006/04/critical-thinking-what-piece-of-cant.html

[jillbryant]

This reminds me of something Tucker Carlson said on his show: "I learned more, you know, working at a gas station than I did in college. I hate to admit that." He also said "Why don‘t we take 80 percent of college students who don‘t really want to be in college in the first place, except to party, and send them on fully paid apprenticeships where they could learn something useful? I wish I had done that." This from the son of a former U.S. Ambassador whose stepmother is an heiress to the Swanson frozen-food fortune. They forced some prestigious schooling down his throat instead of that apprenticeship at DeVry Institute that he really wanted. But he clawed his way to the top, nonetheless.

Why don't we stop 80% of those others from getting those degrees which are fast becoming a class issue in America? And, yes, we certainly don't want to expose them to a unrestricted education which might teach them traditional values have nothing to do with shopping being patriotic or wealth equaling morality.

[Spike]

Hmm -

1. Government education system: Run by bureaucrats far removed from control by local citizens. Easily taken over by the current dogmatists to manipulate to their own ends.

2. Private schools: Dance to the tune of those paying the money. All parents who think a certain way can send their kids to the school that provides the education they want.

I choose 2, because I know that the private schools my kids go to will never, ever "teach the controversy."

In a competitive world, I don't mind if most parents send their kids to the government babysitter - public school - or to elite, know-nothing snob academies, either way, I know my kids will be much more educated and better people all around from the education they get at the private schools I have found.

Government schools can be a good thing, if parents are involved and augment (and sometimes counter) the teaching of NEA members with field trips and critical discussion of ideas. It's really up to the parents what kind of education the kids get until about age 16, then it's really up to the kids.

[jillbryant]

"Teach the controversy?"

[Spike]

jillbryant -

Are you asking what "Teach the controversy" means? If so, it is the code term that some segments of the religious right are using to try to get Biblical creationism taught as an "alternative" to the science of evolution.

It came about after the defeat of "Intelligent Design" as a previous idea (and the defeat of "Scientific Creationism" before that).