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Date: | Tue, 19 Nov 2013 08:48:38 -0800 |
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> But these self-assured graduates of schools where everyone gets at least a
> "B" and sports programs where everyone gets a trophy are not about to listen
> at all, even to constructive comments! I find myself in exactly the same
>dilemma as Branford Marsalis: http://youtube.com/watch?v=5rz2jRHA9fo
Here an excerpt from Senior Demon "Screwtape", addressing a class of graduates, and describing some of the latest initiatives being used to derail humans:
"In that promising land the spirit of I’m as good as you has
already begun something more than a generally social influence.
It
begins to work itself into their educational system. How far its
operations there have gone at the present moment, I should not like to
say with certainty. Nor does it matter. Once you have grasped the
tendency, you can easily predict its future developments; especially as
we ourselves will play our part in the developing.
The basic principle
of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be “undemocratic.”
These differences between pupils – for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences – must be disguised. This can be done at various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the
students get good marks.
Entrance examinations must be framed so that
all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have
any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not.
At schools,
the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and
mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing things that
children used to do in their spare time.
Let, them, for example, make
mud pies and call it modelling.
But all the time there must be no
faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work.
Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have – I believe the English
already use the phrase – “parity of esteem.”
An even more drastic scheme
is not possible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may
be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma — Beelzebub, what a useful word! – by being left behind. The bright
pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group
throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval’s attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT."
- C.S. Lewis: "Screwtape proposes a toast", 1959.
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