I think propaganda and its instruments should be taught to 3rd graders across the country. American culture is a propaganda minefield . Only in America is television a totally private enterprise. (For an excellent treatise on the subject by Jerry Mander: Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television).
Then there is the smartphone. This is not strictly American, but, again children should be taught the ramifications of their mobile phone. It is a tracking device that is worth way more to marketers than consumers pay for them. And when the cultural dependency on the smartphone is viewed in the context of the consumer culture, there’s a lot to unpack.
If we want our children to learn to think, we need to impress upon them from an early age that the consumer society is predicated on selling, and selling is often a euphemism for lying.
In 1985, an American academic (Neil Postman) wrote Amusing Ourselves To Death. This and the Mander book are operating instructions for living in the consumer culture.
Social Security is retirement money that workers are required to underwrite, and Medicare is single payer healthcare that workers are required to underwrite. They are retirement programs funded by their recipients, and so could be labeled “retirement programs,” and never be threatened to be cut or terminated, but the status of these programs are never free from politicization. The very label “entitlement” is pejorative and implies that it is subject to be cut for budgetary constraints.
No public service is safe in “the land of the free.”
I don't know about the able-to-read part. I am wondering if people are still getting the basic skills in school. For instance, I was told by a headhunter that a resumé must state its case in the first 25 words or less, because the reader (a person in lower management) won't read further than that. (The old standard was 100 words; but that was a couple of generations ago.) Now, Mr. Trevelyan seems to be a snob who thinks some intellectual authority knows what is worth reading in a universal sense, but most people probably know what is worth reading _to_them_ in the immediate case, like the resumé reader trying to find the best candidate for a particular job. If they find mere reading to be laborious, they are going to have a hard time accomplishing that end. More abstract and theoretical stuff is going to be beyond them. I am not the only one who has noticed this.
Everyone can 3D render and print as many false coins as they like, naturally, and everyone will engage in such moral exhibitionism anyway.
However, the Western cultural matrix and its essential pathologies aren't going away as long as "reformers" keep worshipping the bath water and trying to filter incremental babies out of it. Indeed, without the ability to simply walk out of Mordor, the process of exiting judgment seems to depend on the same sort of duplicity that trapped us in it in the first place. Still working through the consequences of that.
My 6th grade social studies class was called "critical thinking". We deconstructed The NY Times every day. This was during the height of the Vietnam War.
Heroic societies tend to cherish lying and deception. This is why those of us who would rather have none of that have to beat down virtue hoarders and 4chan shitposters alike, *hard*, when they show up on boards like this.
I think propaganda and its instruments should be taught to 3rd graders across the country. American culture is a propaganda minefield . Only in America is television a totally private enterprise. (For an excellent treatise on the subject by Jerry Mander: Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television).
Then there is the smartphone. This is not strictly American, but, again children should be taught the ramifications of their mobile phone. It is a tracking device that is worth way more to marketers than consumers pay for them. And when the cultural dependency on the smartphone is viewed in the context of the consumer culture, there’s a lot to unpack.
If we want our children to learn to think, we need to impress upon them from an early age that the consumer society is predicated on selling, and selling is often a euphemism for lying.
In 1985, an American academic (Neil Postman) wrote Amusing Ourselves To Death. This and the Mander book are operating instructions for living in the consumer culture.
Social Security is retirement money that workers are required to underwrite, and Medicare is single payer healthcare that workers are required to underwrite. They are retirement programs funded by their recipients, and so could be labeled “retirement programs,” and never be threatened to be cut or terminated, but the status of these programs are never free from politicization. The very label “entitlement” is pejorative and implies that it is subject to be cut for budgetary constraints.
No public service is safe in “the land of the free.”
"Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading." ~George Trevelyan
I don't know about the able-to-read part. I am wondering if people are still getting the basic skills in school. For instance, I was told by a headhunter that a resumé must state its case in the first 25 words or less, because the reader (a person in lower management) won't read further than that. (The old standard was 100 words; but that was a couple of generations ago.) Now, Mr. Trevelyan seems to be a snob who thinks some intellectual authority knows what is worth reading in a universal sense, but most people probably know what is worth reading _to_them_ in the immediate case, like the resumé reader trying to find the best candidate for a particular job. If they find mere reading to be laborious, they are going to have a hard time accomplishing that end. More abstract and theoretical stuff is going to be beyond them. I am not the only one who has noticed this.
jamenta loves the British system of totalitarian slavery, remember.
No, it's just that values and virtues are lies and none of that is worth participating in or upholding.
We can't communicate about our experiences of evaluation?
Everyone can 3D render and print as many false coins as they like, naturally, and everyone will engage in such moral exhibitionism anyway.
However, the Western cultural matrix and its essential pathologies aren't going away as long as "reformers" keep worshipping the bath water and trying to filter incremental babies out of it. Indeed, without the ability to simply walk out of Mordor, the process of exiting judgment seems to depend on the same sort of duplicity that trapped us in it in the first place. Still working through the consequences of that.
My 6th grade social studies class was called "critical thinking". We deconstructed The NY Times every day. This was during the height of the Vietnam War.
That curriculum could never happen today.
Heroic societies tend to cherish lying and deception. This is why those of us who would rather have none of that have to beat down virtue hoarders and 4chan shitposters alike, *hard*, when they show up on boards like this.