It’s Hard To Believe It, But The French STILL Educate Their School Kids

Education, Europe, Intelligence, Kids, Political Philosophy

Still on the topic of education (previous post is “St. John’s: The Most Rigorous College In America & What Every Young Mind Needs”):

What’s of interest in the Economist article, “The End of the French Intellectual: From Zola to Houllebecq,” are these tidbits:

Attendance rose this year at the annual Paris book fair. Regional literary festivals are thriving. Philosophy is still a compulsory part of the school curriculum.
And last year the French elected a president who has a degree in philosophy and can cite Molière by heart. France may have lost its great intellectuals, but it has certainly not lost its intellectualism.

So French kids must still study philosophy. I wonder if it’s a rigorous course? And President Macaroni knows some good stuff, aside globalism and multilateralism. Molière is brilliant. So funny.

While there is pressure to dumb down, the French have not yet replaced history with social studies agitprop.

I’ll leave you with this hint at how good French schooling may be: “France is one of the countries where a pupil’s social background is one of the strongest predictors of his or her subsequent achievement.”

The French have not yet done the educational leveling we in America do to ensure that 43% of marks handed out in university are As.

Other than the educational information, the writer of “The End of the French Intellectual: From Zola to Houllebecq” disdains France’s few “reactionary essayists” and thinkers (namely right-leaning thinkers).

So much so that, having mentioned his disappointment at the rise the likes of “Éric Zemmour, a reactionary essayist, and Alain Finkielkraut, a formerly left-wing philosopher turned critic of multiculturalism”—the writer concludes that “France may have lost its great intellectuals.”

Better good schools for the kids, than the likes of that lefty degenerate, Mr. Sartre.

Alan Dershowitz Vs. The Fanatic Richard Painter

Democrats, Donald Trump, Ethics, History, Law, Morality, Neoconservatism, Republicans

He’s a sharp mind that has stood up for The Law throughout, and remained above the filthy political fray we’re in: He’s Alan Dershowitz.

Dershowitz has stood up to the shill, Sean Hannity, too.

Now, Professor Dershowitz goes up against Richard Painter, whom I’ve described as the quintessential Yankee, in a 2017 post titled “The Face of a Fanatic, Or A Modern-Day Radical Republican”:

Richard Painter, a modern-day Radical Republican by any other name, has the same crazed look worn by the original Radical Republican, the fanatic Thaddeus Stevens.

The context (as in who the Radical Republicans were) is in my column, “The Radical Republicans: The Antifa of 1865.”

UPDATED (5/8): Did You Know That ‘We Have A President Who Is … Committed To Regime Change’ In Iran?

Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Iran, Iraq, Neoconservatism

“We have a president who is as committed to regime change as we are. Confronting Iran is more important than an Israeli-Palestinian deal.”

Those were the verbatim words of Rudolph W. Giuliani, May 5, 2018.

What a gem old Rudy Giuliani is proving to be! Just as good, mind you, as all the president’s men and women are proving to be. (Not!)

I do like John Kelly, though. He seems a quality individual. Alas, he’s being threatened with termination by the Ivanka-run faction of the White House.

Giuliani said this stuff while pandering to a group of Iranian dissidents (whose aim is to Make Iran Great Again).

Iraqi dissidents—the same kind of people bending Rudy’s ear on Iran—pushed the Bush Administration to war on Iraq. Yet people kibitz only about the Israeli lobby. What about all the other lobbies?

Ultimately, remember that it’s the American government, stupid. Our representatives, over decades, are the ones who’ve capitulated to foreign interests, selling out Americans and their interests.

Where there is a forsaking of the duty to put America First—blame the US government; not the lobbyists who try and get a good deal for their people.

Failure to hold our government responsible for not putting our interests first is our fault.

UPDATE (5/8):

50 million Persians, leading a Shiite nation of Persians, Azeris, Baloch, Arabs, Kurds, are not going to control a Middle East of hundreds of millions of Arabs and Turks in an Islamic world where Shiites are outnumbered five times over by Sunnis. https://t.co/ogtUmbVYkB

— Ilana Mercer (@IlanaMercer) May 8, 2018

IAEA says Iran has no WMD. It was right about Iraq. We didn’t listen.

As did Trump's Secretary of State #MikePompeo. https://t.co/lJmr4xKiCd

— Ilana Mercer (@IlanaMercer) May 8, 2018

UPDATED (10/30/018): St. John’s: The Most Rigorous College In America & What Every Young Mind Needs

Education, Human Accomplishment, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Literature, Logic, Technology

According to data reported by Tucker, only 31 percent of Americans who graduate from college can read a complex text/book.

By the same data’s telling, American kids are the dumbest in the developed world (facts I was reporting 14 years ago, already. In addition to the two hyperlinks provided, click “Education” to go back in time).

While our kids know less and less, their grades are only getting higher. The vaunted GPA is meaningless, except to give an idea of a student’s grades in relation to the inflated marks of his peers.

The most common grade given (the statistical mode?) in American college courses is an … “A.” “Forty-three percent of all letter grades are As.”

An exception to the rule is St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico (there is a Campus in Annapolis, MD, too), whose core curriculum is centered around what we call The Western Canon:

The great books (and works of art and music) upon which nobody contemporary has improved. (Everybody needs to be humbled by these works. I recently read some Plato abbreviated, after which I felt very small indeed. It’s all been said and thought-out before by the Greats. For example, an insight articulated and carefully thought-out in Into The Cannibal’s Pot; it was there. Plato said it already. Of course I was chuffed; it felt good. But how sad that this heritage—and with it the humility that comes with a recognition of true genius—is not being handed down.)

The video begins 4:22 minutes into the Tucker segment. (Tucker is a gem. The only gem on Fox News.)

St. John’s College admits only 800 and is producing the renaissance men and women of America.

ALL “freshmen must learn ancient Greek. ALL seniors struggle with quantum physics, along the way, as do they have to grapple with calculus, learn how to do differential equations, study Hegel and Kierkegaard, Karl Marx and Adam Smith.”

“St. John’s is sailing against every trend in American higher education.”

Their “students read 200 serious books over the course of their education.”

Only 800 students qualify in admission and all must undergo this rigor.

This is the traditional liberal arts education that our greatest minds (thinkers, scientists, Founding Fathers) would have undergone 100 plus years ago. (Was not Thomas Jefferson a scientist and a philosopher and an all-round genius? Indeed he was.)

It’s an all-required curriculum. Everyone is required to take courses of equal rigor. There are no majors, no minors. No hiding. No skewing the grades Bell Curve.

Minds thus enriched can go on to become whatever they want, having been given the intellectual wherewithal to think, and the tools to both appreciate intellectual history, draw on it and from it.

American education is an exercise in egalitarian idiocy. In my opinion, educational egalitarianism and idiocy does the greatest harm to the gifted child.

And isn’t that the aim? To give all children the feeling they are equally gifted?

Ultimately, wonderful young minds should not be abandoned to the evaluation standards of what are mostly sub-intelligent, near-illiterate educrats, who’ve been disseminating dumbed-down subject matter, in institutions of “learning” in which everyone is a winner.

UPDATED (10/30/018): Rotting young minds.

And when I refused to partake in mobile-device mania I was called a Luddite (backwards). When I tell friends their kids (essentially) don’t know how to READ; I am dismissed.

See: “‘Screens are Poison’: Tech Elites Keeping Devices Out of Their Children’s Schools“