Excommunicating Excellence

A potent weapon in the arsenal of Progressive Education has been the doctrine of raising ‘Self Esteem’ and that curriculum (and extra curricular) content & methods must be purposed to the Recreational, rather than Developmental model of engagement. This serves particular Totalitarian goals;

Attainment of Year Zero (reduction/removal of existing frameworks and bodies of knowledge)

Incorporation of and supplanting existing bodies of knowledge with Generative Themes for politicized and collectivized exploitation

Removing access to domain specific functional literacy. This results in merely an ‘experience of’ (stimulus-response), often labelled ‘cultural experience’ thereby subject to Critical Constructivist lensing - rather than an ‘education in’ (cognitive understanding, domain literacy, demonstrable practical fluency).

In this way an entire curriculum and extra curricular programs become subject to the diktats of (and mere hollowed out vessels for) Social Justice indoctrination and Activism praxis. This is how you sever one generation from the next. How accumulated knowledge canons are prevented from being transmitted and how you groom the mindset that relishes this along with the will to destroy the West from the inside out. You deploy the alchemical solvent of Selfism to all aspects of education.

Selfism is a term used by Paul C Vitz:

Echoed in this statement capturing the current zeitgeist:

(‘Neospirituality, Social Change, and the Culture of the Post-Fordist Workplace’ 2017)

Dyer-Witheford’s quote perfectly sums up the reorientation & repurposing of Perennialist Education Philosophy through Progressive & Existentialist Education Philosophy, to Social Reconstructivist Education Philosophy;

‘with the child capable of expressing himself, but in such a way as to

realize social ends’

(G Stanley Hall, John Dewey’s mentor - Wilhelm Wundt’s first American student)

Providers of Traditional and Classical Education have never been more needed, but not in the cosmetic capacity of preserving ashes, but the vital necessity of kindling fire and the transmission of a living tradition, a birthright and our only defence against the forces of Totalitarianism.