Education, Child Abuse, and Aristotle

Headline:

Hamas Creates Its Own Texbooks

Any and all governmental education controllers will do this to one extent or another. The question becomes whether the governing system wants its citizens to be educated in the principles of rational thinking so that as free citizens they can help direct the governing of the culture into rational policies, or whether ideology eliminates the need for rationaliity so that dogma dominates and corrupts the thought processes of students and future citizens thereby creating malleable ideologs under the intellectual control of the elites. That was the thrust of education in the USSR, China, Cambodia, Viet Nam, Cuba, all of which are Atheist states, with elitist overlords.

In the USA, the predominance of ideology in the form of "personal self-actualization" and “tolerance of all behaviors, except for intolerance of intolerance”, is now dogmatic in many, perhaps most, government schools. This is the principle of Anything We Say Goes Except Dissent, i.e., a totalitarian declaration specifically against fixed morals and fixed principles of thought. This is maleducation in pursuit of producing the culture of ignorati which now infests the USA, a culture of credulous, low information government dependents.

That ideological pursuit in the USA goes clear back to the John Dewey influence on education over a century ago. Dewey’s contribution was to refocus education away from skill sets and into the self-actualization of students through encounters with their environment, i.e. "empirical" education by acquisition of "experiences". The resulting loss of skill sets has escalated until today, when no amount of money creates educated adults. Adult illiteracy is rampant, and a great many adults can barely pass muster for worker class jobs. (Hence the constant pressure for a “living” minimum wage). The eudaimonia (Note 1) of Dewey is similar to that of Aristotle, only without the intellectual training required to accomplish it.

This is congruent with Nietzsche’s concept of the “herd”, which is to be in service to the elites. That concept finds Atheist philosophical approval in the Virtue Ethicists, who demand Social Justice, which is the leveling of the Nietzschean herd to a common, “equality” of outcome. The Atheist Virtue Ethicist Elitists (AVEEs) would determine the actual level of that outcome for the massive “herd”, based on the AVEE concept of eudaimonia, (Note 2) or “flourishing”, a concept being redeveloped by the AVEEs – not for themselves – but for the herd.

When AVEEs such as Pigliucci and Dawkins cry out “child abuse”, they refer to deviations and/or defections from their own peculiar plans to re-educate the populace under the AVEE construct. The Christian/Pauline doctrine of “test everything” is anathema to the ideological indoctrination promoted by the egalitarians (coincidentally, Messiah Class).

Seen from a non-AVEE promontory, it is the control of education by the ideology of the Atheist Virtue Ethicist Elitists (AVEEs) which is child abuse. The AVEE ideological indoctrination denies to the child any opportunity to learn the process of rational thought, and substitutes the dogma of totalitarian doctrines instead. This is couched in “self-actualization” principles and egalitarianism: everyone gets a blue ribbon, and no one gets left behind.

It is clear that Hamas, which obviously is not an Atheist enclave, is doing the same thing, this time based on purely on an ideology of religious hate. It is thus religious abuse of the education process and the minds of its citizens which Atheists decry, and rightly so. Nonetheless, Atheists merely do the exact same thing. Internal contradiction is not an intellectual barrier for the AVEE; for ideologists, the ideological narrative demands only consequentialism for advancing its position in the populace.

Not until the secular principles of Aristotelian rational discrimination of intellectually valid concepts from intellectually non-valid concepts are taught as the primary thought process can any system be considered to be an actual education system, rather than an indoctrination system. Any other system is internally non-coherent, and fails rationally. (Note 3) The adults who are the output from ideological systems, whether Hamas or USA/AVEE systems, will be erratic, maleducated, easily led and influenced ignoranti. They will be a dangerous adjunct to the ideological push for total control.


NOTE:
Note 1. The eudaimonia of Aristotle is based on learning and intellectual contemplation, which exercises something within which, being non-physical and producing non-physical yet satisfying results, approaches the “divine” (Nicomachean Ethics). It is the virtuous pursuit of actualizing reason in the “soul”, and it is what sets humans apart and makes being human a “good”. Aristotelian eudaimonia presupposes a personal commitment within an environment of liberty in which one is free to do so… or not do so.

Note 2. The eudaimonia of modern Virtue Ethics philosophers is generally based largely on “Social Justice” (egalitarianism in the leveling of outcomes as determined by the elites, and to be applied to the Nietzschean herd). Atheist eudaimonia presupposes the need to force egalitarianism on those who reject it.

Note 3. Christianity is fully compatible with Aristotelian concepts, and the works of Thomas Aquinas include those rational precepts. The Laws of Thought are inducted for use in apologetics by Thomists and their intellectual heirs.