Thursday, March 24, 2005

This is NOT about academic freedom - it is about going medieval


Look at these different views on the same incident (a student expelled from Le Moyne College in upstate NY for writing a paper endorsing corporal punishment):

Paddle-NYT

Problem of Academic Freedom

NPR

Academic Freedom

CBS



Most are talking about this in terms of academic freedom. But, this is NOT at the core of the issue. This is an instance in which a thoroughly Nurturant Parent organization - the US educational system - recognizes and rejects a person whose goal is to introduce Strict Father moral system into schools. It is like rejecting foreign tissue, a bad transplant, or a cancer.

The educators, quite rightly, recognized that this guy's moral system is based in 17th century, is impossible to change in his mind by any educational effort on their part, and presents a danger to the children that he may get to teach in the future.

If you read/listen to the files linked above, you will see that corporal punishment was not something that he pulled out of the blue, as an idea to mull about, but is a component of his overal worldview, obvious from other stuff he wrote in that paper (and presumably in other papers). I bet the college administrators were uneasy with him from the start and were watching him for a while. I am guessing that the writing about corporal punishment was not the real reason he got expelled - it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, the final excuse to kick out a person who is thoroughly and unchangingly ill-suited to the profession.

This is very similar to the Horowitz assault on Academia - he is trying to get Strict Father people to infiltrate a Nurturant Parent institution with a long-term goal of bringing up new generations of Strict Fathering people. The schools are one place where Regressives do not have an upper hand and it is also a key place where they need to be in order to reproduce/replicate themselves into the next generation.

Remember, the most important goal of the Strict Father system is preservation of the Strict Father system, and they will use all means, including illegal action (see Tom DeLay for example, or attack on Iraq, or the whole Schiavo debacle), ridiculous claims (see Intelligent Design Creationism, for example), fear (see Patriot Act), and disinformation (see Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, and most of the rest of the MSM for examples), to attain that goal. No method is out of question. No sacrifice is too great, no violence unacceptable, in pursuit of this goal.

Thus, watch out - the assault on schools, from preschool to postdoc, is the next big thing for them - an essential goal if their medievalist worldview is to survive in the Age of Modernity.

See "Education" and "Understanding America" under "Archives by Categories" for more detailed explanations - sorry, every link I try to put here here means re-starting a frozen computer, so just go there, OK??

posted by Bora Zivkovic @ 6:42 PM | permalink | (0 comments) | Post a Comment | permalink