Adolescents struggle with an ever-expanding mind, which can easily lead them astray to the extent that they believe everything that they think.
Hence, the important of education lies in guiding students to rely on and seek on verities more profound, more reliable than chronic cogitation, an after-thought in the grand scheme of human experience which will always be suspect.
Current schooling, however, places great value on teaching students to mouth "profound truths", i.e. ideas with lots of jargon or race-infused self-esteem.
One student was particularly proud of how bright he was, although the more I talked with him, the more that I pressed him to explain the terms that he was using and the people whose reason he was borrowing and parroting, the more apparent it became that he either did not know what he was talking about, or he assumed that he was intelligent because of his success in school and in heeding the "learned learning" of his elder cousin.
I was appalled at his unblinking arrogance, not only convinced of his own intellect, but the apparent lack among his peers. Apparently, he was convinced that he was smart because he did very well on standardized tests at his middle school.
Yes, that standardized test score, which apparently declared to him and the school that he was "a good student", one who was brighter than the bunch. . .he based his own limited self-appraisal on a test score.
The same standardized test on which he so highly prized himself, defines "proficient" at 60%, a D in most people's book, and below average to the world at large. Not a very strong foundation to say the least.
Knowledge indeed puffs up. Granted, adolescents have the inner tendency to exaggerate their abilities, to risk when it would be wise to refrain, yet the intellectual veneer to this one youth's self-promotion was troubling as well as trying.
Students who do well on a flawed test, who can mouth the strange ideas of older siblings, who in turn mouth the same pre-thought thoughts and pre-seen sights of professors who do more professing than questioning or evaluating -- this is the foundation for higher education.
And another one of this young man's (borrowed) ideas? That either the government of the future should be socialist or anarchist. As if he fully understood the implication of central planning or none at all -- which invites atavistic tyranny. Non mention of free markets, no mention of trade, catallactics, or even the Austrian School of Economics.
To top it off, he kept referring to "History" as a support. "History says. . . .History says, History says. . "
The organic personalization of history has a relatively short history, starting with the statist cheer leader George W. F. Hegel, then proceeding through Marx, Lenin, and into the Communist terrors that ravaged the globe for the greater part of the twentieth century.
When I pressed this young to explain these views, then to reconsider the outrageous abstraction of giving the record series of past events a name and mouth as somewhat disingenuous if uninformed, he slightly shrugged, then as if to agree, replied, "Yes, I know," then went on to repeated the same secular-pious blather he had been self-esteemed into believing and repeating.
Shameful all around. The state and the system betray students' trust, inducing them to believe that they are smart, when all they have done is tell Teacher what he or she wants to hear, then produce a nice score on a standardized test, a process of coding children that impoverished inner learning, human depth, and a capacity to face the world's challenges.
Not only are poor, struggling, minority, and special ed students getting a raw deal, but the monopoly of public schooling is creating a hybrid of elitist functionaries who deem themselves worthy because they have jumped through all the right scholastic hoops.
And the worst part of this tragedy? These academic arrogants become teachers and perpetuate the failing cycle of public education.
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