Every once in a while, I come across something that I find almost
impossible to believe. Somebody sends me a document or a link to an article,
and I am stunned.
VICTORY
I'm not saying that we are winning this ideologically. I am saying
that we are winning it institutionally and administratively.
The institutions are moving towards decentralization. This is
anathema to the welfare-warfare statists. They are literally losing control,
even if Salman Khan is not radically challenging the content of humanistic
education. He is certainly no radical. He is a graduate of the Harvard Business
School. His outlook and his teaching methods are going to shape the minds of
tens of millions of students around the world. More important, they are going
to shape the learning environments of these students. He is pulling them out of
state-run classrooms.
The children who are coming up through the Khan Academy today go
at their own pace. Nobody tells them what to do and when to do it. They take
exams, and if they pass the exams, they go on to the next level. There is no
one nagging them. There is no one telling them that class is over because a
bell has rung. They are not being regimented.
If you have read the great book
by John Taylor Gatto, The
Underground History of American Education, you understand that the
regimentation of the American school system was at the heart of it. I think he
exaggerated form over content. Read Rushdoony's Messianic Character American
Education to understand the underlying
worldview of the educators: salvation by public education. But because of these
two foundations -- ideological and institutional -- the state was the big
winner.
Now the state is losing the
institutional environment. A generation of students will grow up who will not
respond effectively to the institutional controls that their parents,
grandparents, and great grandparents learned to accept during 12 or 13 years of
classroom education.
Ideas have consequences. So do environments. The state is losing
control over the environments. Decentralization is undermining anyone's control
over the flow of ideas. The gatekeepers have been routed. As I've said many
times, the symbolic, representative example was Matt Drudge's exposé of Newsweek's spiking of the Lewinsky
story. That was in 1998.
We are winning this war. Our primary enemies are in retreat.
They talk about victory, but they don't have many.
The heart of the state's control system is the public school
system. Take away this, and liberalism goes into full-scale retreat. In the
United States, we are beyond the tipping point now. The big city public school
systems are going to be outflanked by rival programs within 20 years, and this
will be visible within 10 years. I didn't think this was possible. I now think
it's inevitable.
Full text at: http://www.garynorth.com/public/14715.cfm
