Who Am I?

 

The government shutdown in Canada has forced me to homeschool my kids by distance, as they are trapped in the Philippines by the dysfunction for three years of the citizenship and passport office. At the same time, I am coaching other kids after hours who are attending Canadian high schools and American universities as international students.

Interesting that they apparently had no such troubles getting their student visas. One wonders.

When I see what is on my students’ curricula, however, I begin to think it is just as well my kids are not attending. Maybe I can give them a real education instead.

Even when I went through the Ontario schools, back in the 1960s, I thought it scandalous how they wasted our time on subjects most of us would have no use for in later life—algebra, trigonometry, the sciences—while not teaching us essential skills like logic, parliamentary procedure, bookkeeping, and rhetoric.

Yes, I am saying that teaching STEM in high school is a dumb idea. It is. College is the time for such specialization.

But it has gotten worse since I went through. In literature courses, my students study no literature as such. Instead, they get excerpts, second-rate movies and recent popular novels. Rather than read them and consider them as they stand, the students are directed to issues they supposedly illustrate.

From a parent:

“They finished the discussion ‘What is identity? How is it formed?’ ‘Philosophy: What is your true identity (Perceived by self VS perceived by others)’ ‘Identity beyond one's self. What else has an identity?’ ‘Identity and location - can a city have an identity?."

The text is, literally, just a pretext.

And the discussion seems guided in a particular direction. The students are being told what to think.

For example, only two possibilities are given: either your identity is as perceived by self, or as perceived by others. Either assumes there is no external reality. Either assumes our identity is a construct. None of the world’s great philosophical systems would assert such a thing. This is postmodernism. Instead of being taught the established wisdom of our culture, of all cultures, students are being carefully led away from it. This is an anti-education.

Perhaps more sinister is the next line of questioning. What else has an identity? Can a city have an identity?

One suspects the required answer is yes; and this is the gateway into identity politics, collectivism. Blackness is an identity; indigenousness is an identity; transgenderism is an identity. 

And this is the gateway, in turn, into fascist thought. The individual no longer exists except as part of the collective.