We Don’t Want No Education

{My plan had been to present next what Dr. Theodore Dalrymple says about those who caused the disaster of the British underclass, which has spread ante-grade and retrograde into the middle and upper classes. However, British education just screams for presentation first. This includes the mind-sets of those who created British education.}

(See Lessons from Life at the Bottom and The British Underclass: The Effect and America Follows UK , our previous articles about Life at the Bottom, the brilliant book by Dr. Theodore Dalrymple.)

One of the most chilling chapters in Life at the Bottom is the chapter about secondary public education in England. Dr. Dalrymple introduces the topic this way:

Education has always been a minority interest in England…In the past…[the lack of interest]…was purely passive: the mere absence of knowledge. Of late, however, it has taken on a more positive and malign quality: a profound aversion to anything that smacks of intelligence, education, or culture. (P. 68)

He goes on to state that "…it is impossible to overstate the abysmal educational depths to which a large proportion of the English have now sunk, boding ill for the country's future in the global market."

For example, few of the 16 year olds whom he treated could read and write with any facility. Three syllables defeated almost all of them. Not a single youth he met could multiply nine by seven. He relates that one boy when asked to multiply three by seven said, "We didn't get that far." And, this lad meant by "that far" as after twelve years of compulsory education.

That their ignorance is profound hardly states the problem. They do not know writers, a single line of poetry, simple dates such as those for World War II. They know as little about Stalin as they do about Shakespeare. "To them, 1066 is more likely to mean a price than a date."

One of the first sequelae of such a malignant system is that "…the young [are] condemned to live in an eternal present, a present that merely exists, without connection to a past that might explain it or to a future that might develop from it." (P. 70) Their only standards for evaluation of anything come from advertisements and television.

Some of this is not the fault of the youth. The betrayal of England by its intellectuals has been profound, and is the same that our intellectuals are doing to our country. For example, failure is no longer permitted in the English educational system. Why? Failure might damage a youth's self-esteem. Everyone must get a graduate certificate. Attention to syntax and orthography are eschewed because they inhibit children's creativity and powers of self-expression. Knowing that they got something wrong induces a debilitating sense of inferiority from which they can never recover, so say those in charge of British compulsory education.

Dr. Dalrymple writes of meeting now and then teachers who try to teach properly, but they live in fear "…rather reminiscent of the atmosphere that surrounded those who secretly tried to propagate truth behind the late Iron Curtain." It is with good reason that these "renegade" teachers are afraid. Their jobs are under continuous scrutiny by administrators, who are part of the problem. For example, most schools will allow only five corrections per any piece of student work.

What is happening in the schools is an extension of progressive child-rearing: "laissez faire tempered with insensate rage." No child learns any form of discipline or any other meaning for consistency. He learns to react only to moods of parents and teachers, which are almost always inconsistent.

Beyond, however, "[t]he ground is laid for a bloody-minded intolerance of any authority whatever, even should that authority be based upon patently superior and benevolent knowledge and wisdom." Authority has gone from being suspect to being totally disrespected. These children learn to exist totally on impulse gratification, including doing only what they feel like doing, not doing anything anyone in authority presents.

Progressivism has contaminated British schools as much or more than in America. Children are groupies. They are taught in groups, and they are expected to learn cognitive materials and their use through accidental discovery and play. The group is all; the individual has been totally devalued.

Later in their lives, when Dr. Dalrymple sees them in his capacity as psychiatrist, he finds the best of them asking how they can get interested in something, anything. They have no interests, and no clues about how to acquire any. This means, simply but tragically, that nothing has any importance, i.e., any value, to them. This illustrates the destructiveness of modern nihilism. They have learned nothing, including how to learn. They are totally deficient in materials of mental life and in the methods of using these materials. They have no autonomy or self-direction to their minds. Add to that their complete indoctrination against effort and a complete dedication to immediate gratification of basal impulses. They would have to improve substantially just to be called "shallow."

The biggest obstacle to improvement in English primary and secondary compulsory education comes from within the education establishment itself. This is exactly the situation in America, where the same suffocation is also imposed by the teacher unions. The government and unions fusion is an abominable monster destroying the minds of English children; add to that the abysmal inferiority of their teacher colleges, which seem to be as bad as ours.

The intellectuals who produced the travesty of British education are part and parcel of the intellectuals who bear sole responsibility for the freakish contemporary British underclass and for the near intellectual disintegration of the U.K.

It does not help that the English people in general have blatantly disvalued education for decades. Not everyone does, of course, but so many are simply unaware of the need for education, as odd as that might seem. Their progeny see nothing of value to be obtained from education, not even for getting jobs.

There is a hidden "benefit," however:

"There is one great psychological advantage to the white underclass in their disdain for education: it enables them to maintain the fiction that the society around them is grossly, even grotesquely, unjust, and that they themselves are the victims of this injustice. (P. 76)

The other side of that double-edged sword is equally destructive to the underclass. They routinely have a profound resentment of achievement, and doing well in school is one of their greatest resentments. Being smart and learned threatens their entire Weltanschauung. "The success of one is a reproach to all." One who improves himself threatens all and threatens the comfort zone of a truly dissipated life style.

Where these of the underclass got such notions in the first place and why these notions have become a complete Weltanschauung are not to be found among the underclass. They come from British intellectuals who are as refractory to examining their ideas critically as are American intellectuals; all are of the left. These intellectuals and their ideas we take up next.

Comments

[Dave]

I'm a Brit - and a socialist. I completely agree that my country is going to shit and - unfortunately - this seem irreversible (in that any policy designed to halt the slide would be unacceptable to media, public and politicians themselves in that it would involve pointing out the existence of a few "elephants in the room"). However, it is erroneous to blame this on "socialism". It is the result of wishy-washy, hand-wringing wet liberalism. As a left-winger, I place great value on society and on its network of mutual obligations & duties: this is what sets us apart from the "devil-take-the-hindmost" individualism of the right. It follows from this that I detest the feckless culture of our underclass - and not least because it degrades what was once a strong working-class ethic of collectivism & self-improvement.

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It’s a great post Man, you really are a good writer! I’m so glad someone like you have the time, efforts and dedication writing, for this kind of article… Helpful, Useful, and Charitable.. Very nice post!

[tanstaafl]

This is also occurring in the USA. I'm not too sure you can always blame the teachers, as education is not something that happens to you. It requires a student's active participation. It also requires an adult at home who is interested in the student's progress at school.

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Great info, i glad to see this blog, such an informative article, Thanks for share this.

[clavier]

Excellent. This situation was created back in the 70's when the Feds decided that employer tests for jobs were discriminatory. The employers said "Fine" and decided that instead of testing they would make a college degree the standard for hiring. Now when you buy a cell phone, you get to have a recent college graduate set it up. How's that working for you. The WSJ, I think Taranto, had an article on it or included it in one of his blog.