Category: Fleming

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Subsidized Illiteracy

This murder of English and logic is being practiced by academics throughout the 50 states.  It results in a professor, testifying in the Senate, who has to ask what the word “exculpatory” means.  It results in hundreds of thousands of self-styled intellectuals who ridicule a successful businessman-turned-President who has that particle of common sense they will never have

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A League of Our Own, Part One

This essay on the Lega Nord was published in February of 1993, after I spend considerable time with members of the Lega and had secured a long interview (followed by subsequent briefer meetings) with Umberto Bossi. Now that the Lega is once again in the ruling coalition and facing the wrath of the EU for cracking down on Third World immigration, it seems a good time to take a second look.

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Sweatshops of the Mind: The Rise of Bureaucracy

Community control of schools run by dedicated teachers who looked after each child individually runs counter to the modern assumption that every human endeavor can be turned into a science.  Every real “science” requires a theoretical framework, hence the need in educationism for theories of cognitive development and child psychology.   Even the acts of learning and teaching must be analyzed, broken down into their components, tested, measured, and graphed with all sorts of coefficients and Greek letters that really mean very little more than up and down, more and less.   In the years when I was reading grant proposals...

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Crazy Town

In Fear, the latest spasm of gossip and fear-mongering by the infamous (among people of sense and decency) Bob Woodward, the gullible American public is given a portrait of the Trump White House as a cross between Bedlam and the palace of Caligula.  Trump supporters are outraged.  

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Sweatshops of the Mind, Part II: The Schooling We Have Lost

During the 1990’s, in Rockford, Illinois, an appointed federal magistrate usurped the authority to  decide what schools should be opened or closed or built, how much tax money should be spent on which programs in which schools, and how many white children could be admitted to the gifted programs.  I was among those who condemned the magistrate’s power-grab as both unconstitutional and immoral, and, although the local powers-that-be–including the newspaper and big business interests–condemned the magistrate’s critics as racists, a federal judge ruled in our favor.  

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Sweatshops of the Mind: The American School Bureaucracy, Part I

The most significant conclusions of the National Education Goals Panel was the familiar complaint: Further study is needed.  More data needs to be collected in every area… and most of the panel members agreed that the main emphasis in the ongoing crusade to improve our schools should be on assembling data and devising new instruments for testing and measuring progress.  This has been the burden of that same old song that was sung before John Dewey had ever corrupted the first mind of a student.

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What Is To Be Done?

The flaws in such [conservative] strategies are pretty obvious.  Most obvious is that they are rooted only in nostalgia or folklore, not in the realities of power or the realities of human nature.  This leads to the second flaw:  They simply don’t work.  They never have, they never will.