George Rebane
When seeking solutions to society's problems, always hold government guilty until proven innocent.
Modern progressivism is the most cynically named socio-political ideology since the world of Orwell’s 1984. Evidence abounds that there is literally nothing progressive for organizing human society in the (niggardly revealed) tenets and expanding practice of progressivism – it gives rise to arguably the most regressive politics in the so-called free world. Thomas Sowell, celebrated social theorist, economist, political philosopher, and senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute, argues convincingly that “growing evidence suggests that we are living in a post-thinking era.”
He joins many learned observers of the human condition to conclude that in America we are wallowing in a rising mire of dumbth in which main street is no longer capable of thinking through even the most basic concepts that ultimately impact their lives. This deficit is the visible preamble to not being able to reason about simple decisions from what they read, see, and experience. Progressives throughout the land are uniformly blind to that state of affairs and continue promoting programs and public policies guaranteed to remove the last vestiges of independent and critical thought from the public forum. (In this context consider the online outpourings of local progressives.)
Dr Sowell gives examples to underline his assertion in ‘If people would just think things through …’. When we focus on the particulars presented it is simply mind boggling that an advanced society like ours can be induced to regress as rapidly as we have witnessed in the past decades of impeccably regulated politically correct thought, speech, and conduct. None of this should be a surprise for RR readers; we review it here because the speed of our downward spiral is picking up.
To underline this trail of tears for those who still can and do think, I draw your attention again to the Common Core education standard much covered and discussed in these pages. UC Berkeley professor emerita and honored mathematician Dr Marina Ratner recently examined Common Core’s math standards and the curricula that it has inspired across the land. She presents a summary of her analysis and professional conclusions in ‘Making Math Education Even Worse’.
There she begins by joining many of us in amazement that we have ignored the successful instruction methodologies and texts used in advanced countries that regularly beat America's youth in international math ratings, and instead have spent almost $16B in devising a new standard that is “several years behind old standards, especially in the higher grades”, and specifically “vastly inferior to the old California standards in rigor, depth and the scope of topics.”
Common Core is so flawed that even one of its authors, Jason Zimba, admits “that the new standards wouldn’t prepare students for colleges to which ‘most parents aspire’ to send their children.” To this the good professor gives sufficient examples and details to make your eyes roll and heads spin (assuming you are not among the sad cohort described by Thomas Sowell).
Dr Ratner concludes that “American students are already struggling against the competition. The Common Core won’t help them succeed”, but instead “will move the US even closer to the bottom in international ranking.”
My point here is that this may well be the progressives’ long sought coup de grace to take America down from its position of world greatness and leadership. As pointed out here and by noted national thinkers over the last years, there is a definite agenda being followed by collectivists to bring the US to heel in the community of nations. Dinesh D’souza takes his readers through an expanded trail of evidence for this assertion in his recent America: Imagine a World without her. Saddened I continue to observe how willingly and without whimper we travel this path to oblivion from the pages of post-tipping point history now being written. And yes, it is all due to the spread of the stifling and diseased memes of progressive thought already metastisized in America. We should think about it while we still can.
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