“BRAVE NEW WORLD”
by Tom DeWeese, ©2017, American Policy Center
(Jul. 10, 2017) — The barbarians have finally broken down the school doors and are now plundering knowledge. Books are their target. Banning them is the goal.
In New York City, administrators at the Life Sciences Secondary School have ordered all textbooks rounded up and removed. Books, they say, are antiquated. Instead, technology is to be the new god of learning.
Of course the excuse is that books are expensive. The schools complain that the kids lose the books or that they wear out and there is no budget to replace them. And more importantly, using iPads means they can be automatically updated with the latest information, scientific discovery and technology. So the schools need to keep up with all the latest developments to keep the kids on top, they say. It’s a wide, wonderful brave new world! Aren’t our children lucky to live in these times? Everything in today’s school house is apparently designed for the comfort and ease of the children. No stress. No demands. No expectations.
And so the books were piled up in the hallway of the school. Next stop – the trash bin. Most were in good condition, including hundreds of math, algebra, geometry and various English literature textbooks. Also strewn around the floor were copies of Romeo and Juliet and A Street Car named Desire.
The technocrats will argue that the World Wide Web contains vast knowledge for the taking with the right tools. They argue that printed books are limited. That printed text books soon become antiquated. And so the future of learning is achieved by opening up this super highway of knowledge in the class rooms so every child has access. Thus, throw away the books and unchain their minds.
The incident at the middle school in New York is not isolated. It’s a growing trend. Cushing Academy, a private prep school in Massachusetts, just dumped its 20,000 library books. Instead, the library has been revamped into pseudo Internet café. Here the students can watch the three television flat screens or just sit and talk.
Say schools officials, “The library is trading its 20,000-volume collection for a database of millions of digital books. All of the students can read any of the books, either through the 68 Amazon Kindles cycling around the campus or in the laptop that each of the school’s 450 students is provided.”
Said Headmaster James Tracy, “If I look outside my window and I see my student reading Chaucer under a tree, it is utterly immaterial to me whether they’re doing so by way of a Kindler or by way of a paperback.”
Actually it does matter. First, traditional libraries were always ordered to be quiet areas because students were absorbing information, researching or writing papers. The atmosphere now is loud with lots of talking taking place. That doesn’t provide a learning atmosphere. Second, printed books cannot be changed. The content in iPads can be changed and controlled by outside forces. In short, one can’t trust the content to be accurate. Third, those same outside forces can actually control what information is available. They can control knowledge.
Today we are a divided society. Freedom versus control. Can anyone deny that there are powerful forces that seek to change how we think in order to fulfill a revolution to literally change our entire society? We have observed massive changes in our culture over the past ten years. Free enterprise is racist and evil. Private property ownership is a social injustice. Individual thought is dangerous. Marriage and sexual orientation are in great turmoil. Free speech is a threat. The mere mention of a certain presidential candidate can send college students into turmoil requiring therapy and major thumb sucking.
Do you think these changes are just happenstance? No, they are the result of a carefully orchestrated takeover of the public education system with the specific purpose of creating a new kind of citizen for the future. One that doesn’t challenge authority and official dictates. How do you create such a product? Keep them ignorant of history, philosophy and contrary ideas. If you don’t know there is even a question then you will never ask it.
Printed books can be dangerous as they can’t be changed. If allowed to remain they can be discovered by future generations. In printed version, their message remains intact, ready to spark questions to a hungry mind.
Read the rest here.
Fahrenheit 451
So the year was 1972, at the library at FAU, and as I was walking in carts and carts of perfectly good books were being carted out.
No, they weren’t textbooks; they were “FICTION”: novels.
After a somewhat rude and truly obnoxious inquiry (by Yours Truly), I learned that the books were not to be donated to poor school districts in, say, the Appalachian Mountains, but rather burned in the school’s incendiary forthwith and, no, I couldn’t take any since they were all accounted for: “the list came down from Washington, D.C.”
End of Story