Independent Education: the crisis and the crossroad
by Jon Rappoport
December 2, 2014
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. The source could be bent, twisted, and deployed in devious ways—but then people would know that. They would be able to point out where the arguer had gone wrong.
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 mind trained no farther than rote parroting—regardless of how neat and precise it may look—is a listless mind with no center. It reaches out for vagaries and abrupt spectacular lies, hoping to find what it is missing. But the search produces nothing of value, because to discover logic, one must learn the whole subject as a branch of knowledge, not as a flicker of common sense sparking here and there in the landscape.
A society filled with people who float in the drift of non-logic is a society that declines. And in its decline, it accepts preposterous leaders and bizarre, self-sabotaging programs.
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 to rebuild that system so that 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, in a flood, every day, to people all over the world;
* 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 medical dispensaries, will not teach it, we can teach it in our homes.
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com.
I could not agree more with your premise. Lyceums are the future, and, yes, education does start at home. Every parent has the capacity to create such an environment and atmosphere that allows logic and reasoning a place to flourish. Having said this, though, I can see that this is an insurmountable task when relevant information is withheld from the public domain, and, more importantly, from the average home.
For all who wish to embark on such a profound endeavor I highly recommend the study of Astrology (be warned, though, it has been hijacked and made just as shallow as the average astrologer practicing it for profit. There are exceptions, of course, but they are few and far between )…among many other esoteric subjects….for a foundational education. From this place, evolution of consciousness and intelligence is possible.
Wow! I am now firmly & seriously convinced that Jon Rapport is a national treasure!
Wonderful piece Jon…I agree with the premise, but…I am afraid the lights are on, in the majority of American households, but nobody is home…intelligence, real intelligence is, I am sure you would agree the precursor to logic. One must be able to think clearly.
Who dear sir will teach this…logic.. in typical American home. The egocentric, one emotioned patriarch at the head of the stereotypical American household…or possibly the combined efforts of a parentage that was raised on overindulgence, and false merit.
And whom gives up their marriage and family like they are an old set of clothes. Half the children born today are born into a single parent family. And those parents are females with dreadfully high illiteracy rates, and poor economic settings…in fact, we are degenerating quickly into a third world circumstance.
One must not build logically on a foundation of sand.
And the typical American family home is sketchy and food addicted to say the very least…and needs to be qualified as per se…a home.
Firstly we need to decondition the inmates, the majority have never had a free thought. They have attached a stupid child/children to a television, and a smart phone…or some such electronic titillation.
They are living some type of post traumatic stress in a permanently induced Stockholm syndrome. Logic resides in some parallel Universe Jon…far far away from the reality that most family homes reside in…
I have just finished living with a woman/mother whom considers good parenting to be, actually answering her electronically addicted 14 year old sons’ text message pleadings from his basement bedroom, no more than a twenty-five foot walk away…that… he has no clean fucking socks…logic…well that is simply rocket science from that point, nest’-ce pas.
From the deep end of the Universe.
Michael
Michael, you are absolutely astute in your assessment. I honestly thought the same thing as well, “real intelligence is the precursor to logic”. How can we logically explore the validity of anything in our world if we have absolutely no idea who or what we are? Logic comes after understanding.
If a person has no idea that they are energy residing in a physical body how in the world can they determine logic from fallacy? The world was once “flat”, no?
Interesting… the ego reigns supreme in this society.
I have heard of the ego as analogous of a chariot pulled by five powerful horses (the human senses) racing at break neck speed, through reality, while the driver (the true self) holds fastly to his ride without a set of reins.
Logic is not egocentric, it stands next to the truth of self and is bathed in integrity. Defended with rhetoric, one must be willing to be objectify the facts. Ego is brought under the nurture of a spirit and wisdom prevails.
In a society were information is directed to the senses the soul becomes sick and spirit dies. And in the end even the nuance of expressions and emotions slips away and become just anger.
The mystery of life has become genes and nano particles…love is chemistry…spirit is the realm of the mad.
We are surrounded with clones of celebrity, and the imaginative self, the individual is lost.
What is astounding to me…and sad…is how quickly this corruption of the self is happening.
It is our job as humans to protect and to serve the natural and mystery of life.
michael
AKA the Trivium: Grammar > Logic > Rhetoric.
See: http://www.triviumeducation.com/
P.S. – Excellent and thoroughly enjoyable article, Mr. Rappoport. As always.
Good stuff-thanks for sharing.
Ironically, any true form of independence was lost when humanity became swayed to exchange their personal concept of (G)god(s) – (self identity) for the false concepts of materialism, comfort and security. Once this conversion was achieved,… the psychopaths were at liberty to run-a-muck. Passively conforming to their doctrines and laws, we have essentially adopted the identity of having been created in their image,… hence, we’ve become our own worst enemies.
(Babylonian Magic)
Based upon the higher precepts of gaining control, ‘public’ education was a key objective. By infiltrating and influencing the higher levels of academia first, virtually every other aspect of society could be, in time, dictated and ultimately controlled; Antiquitous doctrines and laws instilled with a Fabian hand.
One of the most revealing books, that does an admirable job of profiling the academic transformation in the United States Inc. and Canada Inc., is Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt’s book, “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America”.
Have read anything by John Taylor Gatto.
A truly brilliant mind, and award winning teacher. Who speaks from the point of view on how the public education matrix is put together; purposely dumbing down the herd, conditioning them to remain infantile, stuck, watching shadowed images on a cave wall their whole lives. Logic is purposely removed from education.
Right on Jon.
I was wondering when you were going to get around to this. Critical thinking is dying a fast death in our schools and, in turn, our country. Students are taught to react to problem solving on a purely emotional level. FEELINGS rule the classroom. Grade inflation is rampant. Teachers feel that they have to be “liked” by their kids (a big problem with Baby Boomers in general). Right and wrong is now measured on the sliding scale of Situational Ethics. Ideology is inserted into lesson plans. Teaching kids to be obedient to authority, as opposed to QUESTIONING authority, is turning them into good little Establishment worker bees — smart enough to do their jobs, but too dumb and misinformed to question their servitude. The Self Esteem movement in elemetary education has a lot to do with this muddled mind set. Common Core personifies everything that the Globalists have been trying to do for decades. Charlotte Iserbyte’s writings are a great insight into this freedom-killing garbage.
Of course, like everything that the Globalists get their evil mits on, it’s all about CONTROL of the individual. CONTROL for the sake of CONTROL.
Excellent article, Jon; you hit the proverbial nail squarely on the head. Our society is rapidly sliding back to the Dark Ages of a Europe following the fall of the Roman Empire, wherein superstition replaced logic and reason in public discourse. It took centuries before Europe had fully emerged from these Dark Ages – after the Crusaders returned from the Middle East with all types of written materials that were salvaged and kept in libraries and other institutions. These materials included Arabic numerals (which are used widely today), along with other mathematical and scientific data dating as far back as ancient Greece and Rome.
Yes, the Crusades did have their redeeming side, the re-introduction of ancient literature, science, and mathematics to a mostly illiterate and ignorant Europe. It took a couple of centuries for the Renaissance to blossom; and, it’s sad now to see the West – especially America – sliding back to those Dark Ages from which it took the West to emerge.
G’day Jon. Couldn’t agree more with most of what you have to say about education and the value of logic. I must say that your American education system seems to be more cactus than ours in Australia, although the same negative forces are of course present here.
I have boy/girl twins aged 11 years (year 6) and a boy aged 16 (year 11). On the way their capabilities are stretched by some of what they are taught, particularly at the younger ages, my concern is not about them – they’re capable, if they put their minds to it – but their peers who do not read as well and have been behind the eight ball educationally speaking right from the start of their lives.
I used to read books to young-age classes for a few years, having the time available and believing it was good for boys who need to see it, to see that a guy can read too, not just females in the feminised system which is the lot of primary education western-world-wide. A couple of the boys who were at the bottom as far as reading skills go struck me as potentially keen students, but they had so much ground to make up it was always going to be hard for them. I would like a system that allows them to catch up in years to come, if they develop awareness of a need in their 20s or even later.
Anyway, all that’s a bit bye the bye. I have been reading your output for some years and it is valuable. However, the thing never mentioned and that is actually central, is the role of the Chosen. How can we talk about reality without recognising that we live in a world defined not by “white” but by Jewish values.
It’s dangerous territory of course, and we all need to make a living, but if you’re going to give lessons about logic, that’s a pretty big gap.
I understand that there are different ways of tackling problems and I wish you the best of luck.
Malcolm
Forgot to include a link to a piece about Davy Crockett that I read in 2007 and is relevant to your article – enjoy: http://patriotpost.us/documents/69
What the schools are doing is pure Brainwashing.
They present themselves as the authorities.
I hate authorities… all of them. I am sort of a born rebel against authority.
Examples:
– If the government approves a product, it doesn’t reassure me at all. On the contrary, it makes me very sceptical and urges me to do some researches on the product. I ask myself: “how much money did they get to approve that product?”
– If a teacher tells me this is how it works, I never believe him, I research the thing.
– As for doctors, I believe nothing they tell me, they got their supposed science from big Pharma.
– Etc…
I’ve been listenning to the Alex Jones Show every day for ten years, and even if I like him a lot, I still research everything he says…lol
Great post Jon, but it goes deeper….
Doesn’t this social profiling also create A-streams for the “good bloodlines”?
A little, “overlooked” course contains all the requirements for that perfect job. When the fodder find out, either there are no more jobs or the course is “out of date”.
‘Tis a dreadful game they play.
Best
OT
Thank you for a truly insightful article. And the result of this bad education, as I keep telling my kids, is that people will never be in charge of their own lives and opinions, but always at the mercy of anyone who can manipulate them emotionally. I spend a lot of time fighting stupid political proposals in several arenas, especially Animal Rights. It is amazing how impossible it is to get people to THINK about politics, instead of reacting emotionally. Regarding animal rights, all they need to do is look at the big picture and ask: if all the laws and regulations that the animal rights groups want were to actually get passed, what would be the cumulative effect of all those rules? It’s easy to see that the effect would be no more pets, no more meat on the table, no more improvements in health care. And since that would also force on us a vegan diet, which is incapable of sustaining human life, the animal rights movements obviously hates humans, too! But no one seems to notice these glaring clues to their real intentions. I hope you will take on this topic, too — how can people be so oblivious to malignant intentions that are (to me) so glaringly obvious?
I would care to dispute your assumption that a vegan diet will not sustain human life. You are ignorant in this matter…for instance spirulina a sea algae has 55 grams of protein per 100 grams as compared to beef… 100 grams of 85% lean and 15% fat will yield 26 grams of protein. Also in beef you will the receive toxins and food additives, farmer brown grows his stock in… negative feedback from stockyards alone is enough to cause illness. How about that pink slime they use to glue meat together in formation of economy steaks.
Need I go on…
As for the matter of animals rights, there is not enough room here on this wonderful Web page for such a diatribe…ignorance and illogical of your kind amazes me. Educate yourself please before spouting of about subjects that would heal this broken planet rather than hurt…
Truly wishing you the best
Michael
I agree with you, I am also a vegetarian and I only eat organic foods.
Spirulina is great. I also use a lot of organic Hemp protein powder. It taste good in smoothies and soups and sauces. In fact I use it for all kinds or recipes. And of course, I also eat all sorts of nuts contains a lot of proteins.
Vegan does not mean vegetarian…there is a difference.
Sorry, I’m French, I thought “Vegan” was a short for vegetarian,
I guess I must be a Vegan since I do not eat meat and dairy products.
The reason is stranger than you might think. Michael.
This stems back to Lumerian “white light” order, which preceded the Luciferian “survival of the fittest” model. Prior to 280,000,000BC or thereabouts, there were NO meat eaters. Discarded body parts of dead animals (furs, etc.) were deemed unhygienic.
This is one of the reasons for which we decided to home-base educate our kids. Classical Conversations incorporates logic into its course curriculum, really challenging students and parents alike to truly learn how to learn and how to think. Excellent article, Jon. Keep up the great work!!
It’s worse than this. You won’t believe it until you see it. I have worked for the past 2 weeks as a cover supply teacher in inner city London. The bulk of the lesson is behaviour management. A quiet class is near impossible to achieve. You spend most of the lesson just trying to sort of bad behaviour, which takes place all over the class. Then you give up realise that it’s hopeless. You just let them carry on. These kids are not even doing ‘memorizing facts’, let alone logic and reason. They just play on their mobile phones or talk and play loudly. It’s a joke. I went to a school in the same area 20 years ago and it was never like this. There was, overall, peace and learning in the class and respect for the teachers. I think the situation was, honestly, beyond repair, in terms of the attitude of many of these kids. There was no appreciation for any kind of learning. To me, it was not a school, but a containment zone.