Two people with two messages – different words, but the music is the same. And it’s creepy, conspiratorial music.
Seth Godin
First up, Seth Godin:
The reason you feel most comfortable with a job … is that you’ve been brainwashed by many years of school …
If you’re a boss, you need applicants, lots of them, to keep the wages you have to pay nice and low. And so the more people who believe they need a job, the better it is for you.
This has been a bit of a theme with Seth lately:
Schools like teaching compliance. They’re pretty good at it.
To top it off, until recently the customers of a school or training program (the companies that hire workers) were buying compliance by the bushel. Initiative was a red flag, not an asset.
George Will
Next up, George Will:
Only two things are infinite — the expanding universe and Democrats’ hostility to the District of Columbia’s school choice program. Killing this small program, which benefits 1,300 mostly poor and minority children, is odious and indicative. It is a small piece of something large — the Democrats’ dependency agenda, which aims to multiply the ways Americans are dependent on government.
…
For congressional Democrats … expanding dependency on government is an end in itself. … The aim [is] to swell the number of people who grow up assuming that dependency on government health care is normal.
…
A century ago, Herbert Croly published “The Promise of American Life,” a book — still in print — that was prophetic about today’s progressives. Contemplating with distaste America’s “unregenerate citizens,” he said that “the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities.” Therefore, Croly said, national life should be a “school” taught by the government: “The exigencies of such schooling frequently demand severe coercive measures, but what schooling does not?” Unregenerate Americans would be “saved many costly perversions” if “the official schoolmasters are wise, and the pupils neither truant nor insubordinate.”
Subordination is dependency seen from above. Today, it is seen approvingly by progressives imposing, from above, their dependency agenda.
Paranoia
This stuff seems slightly bonkers to me. And not to personalize too much, but I think it worth pointing out that I am broadly sympathetic to elements of the preceding statements: I don’t think much of our education system, believe that society does (perhaps overly) value and encourage conformity, and believe that leftists both encourage and profit from dependence on government.
However, I do not buy into the idea that our society is being knowingly corrupted by those with unworthy motives. I don’t believe our education system is designed by and for the benefit of industry, and I don’t believe that Democrats are consciously undertaking the destruction of the self-reliance of an independent people. For a variety of reasons, does the education system tend to produce the sort of people who can find employment? Sure. Do leftists tend to undermine individualism? Yep. Is it all a conspiracy? I don’t think so.
Confidential to GM, GE, and the DNC: Please make the usual deposits to my Bermuda account, instead of the Swiss.
