Poster | Thread | crsschk Member
Joined: 2003/6/11 Posts: 9192 Santa Clara, CA
| Why History Matters ~ Ted Byfield | | Quote:
There are countless perspectives that contain valid information, many of which have never been told
or have been neglected to death. The more I read about a particular group or person, look at the sources and take context into consideration, the more I realize how very little we really know.
Tremendous statement. Hearing 'both sides' of an argument is one thing, having source information another - But yes, my long running agitation is precisely there, those things never told and\or neglected to death. The amount of surprises I have met in just the many men of God mentioned within this confine here is astounding, so much so that my abeyance and 'suspicion' is that we do not know the half of it. But it is also why I have come to agree with the whole underlying premise expressed here, that [i]History Matters[/i] a great deal and as it is titled, especially [i]Christian History[/i] - That old adage about history repeating itself and being doomed to repeat it is at once both equally true and an opportunity to do something about it. I think SI as it is, is a remedy towards all this. I also was hopeful that this little treatise itself would open up and broaden that whole scope ... _________________ Mike Balog
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| 2009/1/25 11:49 | Profile | crsschk Member
Joined: 2003/6/11 Posts: 9192 Santa Clara, CA
| Why History Matters ~ Ted Byfield | | THE FOUR KEYS THAT CONTROL SOCIETY
By now however, as Dewey planned, the new order had spread from the schools to take over the whole culture, principally through the vastly expanded universities built by historys most affluent society, on the proceeds of the greatest economic advance the world had ever known. What at the beginning of the century had been the theory of a handful of academics at Chicago and Columbia by the centurys last decades had become the mindset of an entire generation of journalists, novelists, musicians, television producers, advertising executives, forward-thinking clergymen and, of course, school teachers.
In this process, however, a certain deception was worked. The Sixties Generation certainly had the numbers. Their immediate forebears, having survived the Great Depression and then fought and won the SecondWorldWar, had come home to establish the twentieth centurys highest birth rate. But it was not their numbers that achieved the victory of the revolutionaries. In fact, it later became evident that they had converted only an insignificant fraction of their own generation. However, by shrewdly concentrating themselves in the four pivotal areas of modern societythe academy, the media, the bureaucracy and the seminaries of themainline Christian denominations, including the Catholicsthey were able to misrepresent the society as having wholly changed, when most of it had not. In fact, two incompatible societies began existing side by side the minority one portrayed as a majority by the media and the advanced educators, bureaucrats and clergymen, the other by the increasingly bewildered majority.12
One area of learning, however, remained of necessity proof against the revolution, notably the physical (as distinct from the social) sciences. Here, facts had to remain facts, and rules had to remain rules. In physics and chemistry, things were either proven or they werent. Experiments could fail, and so could students. Mistakes were real. Standards must be sustained. Here, in other words, authority remained firmly in place. But the humanities, wallowing in their new boundless freedom and captive to whatever liberated interest group could gain access to them, gradually declined into practical insignificance.
Looking back on his years in high school, one male Canadian student I know sadly observed: My literature courses were courses in feminism, my social studies courses were courses in socialism, and my sciences courses were courses in environmentalism. The only thing they couldnt wreck was maths. I dont want another four years of this in university, and I dont want to take science or engineering, so why bother going?
He was not alone. Over the years of the Deweyite revolution, university registration as a whole changed from 60 percent male to 60 percent female. The female majority in the humanities alone is much higher. Meanwhile, drop-out rates in high schools run four-to-one male. Most males, one must conclude, can learn best in a world of right-wrong, true-false, good-bad, pass-fail, win-lose. The so-called alpha malesoften the ones with the liveliest imaginations, the greatest potential and therefore the hardest to control, meaning the least able to see themselves as social beingswere proving impossible to educate. Some observers saw an explanation for this. Back to the beginnings of the human race, rambunctious young males had been controlled by simply spanking them. But the new Dewey generation was the first one to discover that violence teaches violence, so they used drugs instead and sedated the obstreperous males into dazed acquiescence. In the process, they somehow managed to raise what is arguably the most violent generation of children we have ever known.
The role of drugs in the revolution was not confined to tranquilizing rambunctious little boys. The Sixties introduced youth to the world of pot, speed, crack, methadone and other chemical novelties, in the course of this wrecking the lives of hundreds of thousands of young people. Surely, one might respond, youre not blaming John Dewey for creating the drug scourge. No, not precisely for creating it, but for undermining and destroying the moral barriers that would otherwise have obstructed it. Before his progressive educators arrived, the response the pushers would have encountered among young people would have been: We dont do that kind of stuff. And by we, they would have meant their people, their crowd, their town, their country, their society, and more than anything else their parents, their family and the members of their church or synagogue. But these were the very people Dewey had diligently trained them to oppose. These were the Establishment. These were the old Authority, the people who must be superseded. So the barriers were down and the drug culture was borna multi-billion-dollar industry, both in selling the product and in coping with the massive crime it brought into being.
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[12. One figure revered in anthropological circles for much of the 20th Century was Margaret Mead. Her famous book, Coming of Age in Samoadescribing an idyllic, non-violent, free-loving Pacific island society, which encouraged pre-marital sex and recognized few restraining sexual rules at allbecame required reading in first-year anthropology courses throughout the English-speaking world. In 1983, another anthropologist, Derek Freeman, having lived on the same islands for years, published another study of the Samoans that refuted Meads book in almost every particular. She was the victim, he said, of a Samoan hoax. The Samoans were in fact an exceedingly puritanical people with rigid rules against sexual promiscuity, though they had a mischievous sense of humor. Later yet another senior anthropologist, Dr. Martin Orans, emeritus professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, apologized for the way he and his colleagues had also been drawn in by the hoax. The greatest fault lies, he writes, with those of us like myself who understood the requirements of science, but both failed to point out the deficiencies of Meads work and tacitly supported such enterprise by repeatedly assigning it to students. Mead had gone to Samoa, said Freeman, pre-eminently to affirm the social views of her beloved mentor, Dr. Franz Boas. Boass close associate at Columbia for 31 years: John Dewey.]
_________________ Mike Balog
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| 2009/1/25 11:52 | Profile | crsschk Member
Joined: 2003/6/11 Posts: 9192 Santa Clara, CA
| Re: Why History Matters ~ Ted Byfield | | THE CONSEQUENCE: AN EDUCATIONAL CATASTROPHE
Very soon came disturbing reports that kids werent actually learning much. The schools were costing more. Teacher salaries, once abysmally low, now appeared altogether adequate. But children didnt seem to read as well. Many were unquestionably illiterate and some could not add, subtract, multiply or divide.Moreover, the schools had become laboratories for esoteric experimentation. In the 1960s came new maths, which by the 1970s had been quietly dumped as a failure. Whole language reading instruction came in with the Eighties and was mostly out by the end of the Nineties. How many lives had meanwhile been ruined by this irresponsible dickering, no one cared to say.
Then in 1983, President Ronald Reagans National Commission on Education produced a report that shook the American educational establishment to the core. It was entitled A Nation At Risk. In clear terms with unassailable data, it painted the picture of an educational catastrophe, revealing that the American school system, once one of the best in the industrialized world, was now one of the worst. There had been a steady drop for some years in Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores and the American College Test (ACT). (Canadian schools had no equivalent for such tests.) There had appeared a growing need for the universities to provide remedial classes to teach what the elementary and secondary schools had failed to teach. The performance of American students on international test scores was steadily declining. Knowledge of the great works of literature had virtually disappeared and all tests showed a deepening and repulsive ignorance of historical fact. Finally, the American level of functional illiteracy was higher than that of any other industrialized nation.
Many wondered: How had this whole calamity been allowed to happen? Where were the defenders of our literary heritage when our literary heritage was being pitched out? Where indeed were the historians when their subject was being reduced to at best a dispensable adjunct of sociology? Even more astonishing: Where were the Christians when the whole premise of their teaching and theology was being rendered absurd? (How could Christ have died for our sins when there was no such thing as sinor good or evil, or right or wrong?)
It soon became evident that even Christian schools had been blind to the fact that what their teachers were being required to learn in education college to gain the indispensable government teaching certificate was fundamentally incompatible with what was being taught by the Bible and by their churches. Even most state-supported Catholic schools in Canada had so obediently embraced the new ideas that their curricula became largely indistinguishable from those of the public schools.
But why should this have been surprising? Dewey himself was an avowed atheist. He saw the traditional teachings of the churches as a delusion, which erected obstacles to a students intellectual and moral growth. Religion engendered a slave mentality. It recognized an intolerant superiority on the part of a few, while imposing an intolerable burden on the part of the many. To Dewey, Christianity was a dying myth. Christians were preoccupied with the state of their character and concerned with the purity of their motives and the goodness of their souls. All this was a form of spiritual egotism. Teachers must strive to remove the crutch of dogma and of beliefs fixed by authority. They must seek to liberate people from Christianity and teach them instead the service of the community.
Fifteen years after A Nation At Risk was published came a new report, A Nation Still At Risk. It brought the doleful news that despite supposedly herculean efforts to improve the schools nothing much had changed. Some 30 percent of freshmen entering university were in need of remedial courses in reading, writing, and mathematics, said the report. In California the figure was 50 per cent. Employers report difficulty finding people to hire who have the skills, knowledge, habits, and attitudes they require for technologically sophisticated positions. This second report found that American 12th graders scored near the bottom on the latest International Math and Science Study19th out of 21 developed nations in math, and 16th out of 21 in science. Our advanced students did even worse, scoring dead last in physics.
Why, asked the second report, had the many reforms proposed by the first report gone unfulfilled? It answered its own question: The authors of the first had underestimated the resilience of the status quo and the strength of the interests wedded to it. One of them, a former Minnesota governor, observed: At that time I had no idea that the system was so reluctant to change. Reluctant yes, but also incapable. Those who run the system were so deeply infected with the flawed philosophy lying behind it that they could comprehend no other.
So a doleful conclusion seemed inescapable: The system cannot repair itself. No significant change in the schools could occur without somehow supplanting the Dewey philosophy which continues to inhibit any serious restoration of standards. However, to say that such a sweeping change is impossible would argue against the first contention of this essay, notably that Dewey and his fellow educators in fact worked just such a transformation which in turn went on to transform the whole society. Dewey himself, that is, may have shown us the way to defeat Deweyism. But it would involve a counter-revolution in the faculties of education as convulsive as the one Dewey engineered. And even if such a phenomenon could be brought about, it would still take at least two generations to restore the effectiveness of the schools. Do we have that much time? In the competitive modern global environment, with the educational performance of other nations soaring above the North American, it seems most unlikely.
There was an even deeper problem, which Dewey himself acknowledged, and for which he offered no solution. A distinct amorality was becoming evident in society. The self, as it came to be called, was becoming the only value of the Me Generation. The Deweyite schools had successfully abolished the foundation under the old rules, but had found nothing workable to replace it.
Science, Dewey was confident, would supplant the religious and traditional basis for ethical behaviour. But this is something of which science is incapable. That is, it can exhaustively describe how human beings behave. But it cannot authoritatively assert how they should behave or ought to behave. Sociologists might draw up rules for an ideal society, but precisely what obligates the individual to respect those rules? One might reply: the general welfare of humanity. But what obligates the individual to heed this general welfare of humanity? Suppose he elects instead to look after No. 1? Is he wrong? But how can he be wrong if there was no such thing? Dewey had turned to science for an answer, and science was of necessity silent. So too, it became clear, were the educators. Only they could save the schools, and they didnt know how.
_________________ Mike Balog
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| 2009/1/28 8:55 | Profile | crsschk Member
Joined: 2003/6/11 Posts: 9192 Santa Clara, CA
| Why History Matters ~ Ted Byfield | | THE HUMAN INSTINCT DEWEY FEARED
There is, however, another option, not in itself a solution, but something that would help pave the way to the kind of educational cataclysm that salvaging the school system will require. Most people have within themselves an element that few Deweyites understand, though Dewey himself plainly understood it and feared it. He no doubt saw it as an instrument capable of powerfully reinforcing the very beliefs, attitudes, rules and values that he strove so zealously to eradicate. That instrument is history. There exists among many humans an understandable desire to discover how they got here. They know of course the biological answer, but as an account of the way in which towns, toilets, baseball, rocketry, music, fire hydrants, archbishops, fashion shows, bank robberies, traffic accidents, socialism, television and all the other zillion things they see around them came about, biology alone does not offer a satisfactory explanation. Nor do any of the other sciences.
What does offer it is history. Perhaps thats why the historical, properly presented, often has a strange effect upon the modern psyche. History can become a sort of addiction, a good addiction, afflicting people of all ages and both sexes, of widely different educational levels, of different professional backgrounds, trades or careers, nationalities or religions. Such an addiction customarily develops when someone, often with little previous exposure to history, comes upon some person or event in the past, or perhaps merely the site of such an event, and finds developing in himself a keen fascination with this person, place or thing. He yearns to know more about it. He searches libraries, lays out money to buy books, and haunts the web seeking out others with a similar interest.
It need not be some exotic figure from the past. It can be a personal ancestor, or a long-dead municipal politician, or even an abandoned railway line, or a deserted village. It holds, he realizes, a story, and he wants to know all about that story. So he pursues it, and in so doing to he begins to make a number of discoveries. His deserted village, for example, he finds was once a bustling community with a mayor and council and a school and a volunteer fire department. In an odd way, he begins to feel at home in that village. He knows some of the local people by name.
But he also discovers that almost everything that happened there was determined by events outside itby the province or state, which had a story of its own, which in turn was connected to other stories involving the whole country and a whole era in which all these things were going on. So his interest in the village carries him to things well beyond it, to a whole world of people and events, all of whom, he strangely begins to understand and somehow identify with. For he has also found out how similar they are to the people of his own day, though they lived a very long time ago. Living conditions certainly have changed, but people have not.
Then he discovers something else. He is beginning to develop a broad picture of the past. His interest in the village has served as a path leading into a great forest. He has followed the path and found that it led to other paths, which in turn led to still others, until he was able to form in his mind a map of a whole section of the forest. This in turn connected to other sections he did not know, but which would no doubt all have stories of their own. Strangest of all, the result of this experience has been to subtly change his view of the place and time in which he himself is living. He once would have called this the real world. But now he knows there are other worlds just as real as his, and that other equally real worlds would follow the one hes living in. Those past worlds had much to teach him because they enabled him to see more clearly what is going on in his own times.
He has found too that good and evil have come into sharp relief. Some individuals really did shine like a light from a hilltop, spreading joy and truth wherever they went. Others brought darkness, and in the clash between the two the fate of their society was gradually being decided. He finds that those holding the popular view were frequently deluded, where those widely regarded as deluded were in fact on the right track. Often, supposed steps forward were actually steps back, and while the majority might rule, the majority could often be dead wrong. Through it all he discovers that good and evil, far from mere matters of opinion, were the qualities upon which everything, every event, ultimately turned. And he realizes too there is one profound difference between that earlier time and his own. Dealing with the past, he knows how the story turned out, what finally happened and why. Dealing with his own time, he does not know. It is still being determined. But now he can play an informed part in the outcome. Thus history serves him.
Beyond all this, he discovers something else. He is not so afraid. He finds that the terrors of the present are not so terrible any more, because humanity has survived thembefore and he has (so to speak) watched them do it. He finds that current human attitudes and supposedly unprecedented ideas and events are often very precedented indeed and are simply coming back for the umpteenth time. He is living, he now realizes, in whats actually the latest chapter in a very long book. He knows something about the earlier chapters, and he realizes that this gives him an extraordinary advantage over those who do not. It is not an accident that most of the great leaders of the Western world were keen scholars of history. They shared the addiction.
Now such an addiction wholly defeats Deweyism and for an understandable reason. While the great philosopher claimed to set men free by liberating them from the shackles of the past, the effect was to deliver them into the bondage of the present, making them prisoners of what the Germans call the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Dewey had led them to believe that the here and now, the going thing, the current style, the acceptable view, the latest rage was the only reality that existed. Thus fashion not freedom came to determine how they lived in a world where morality was a matter of lifestyle and truth a matter of viewpoint. They could not judge the world they lived in because they had no way to get out of it to look at it. He had locked them in. One way out was that path into the forest, so he made sure that few ever found it. History, he ruled, must be confined to the relevant.
_________________ Mike Balog
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| 2009/2/7 23:19 | Profile |
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