My wife, with characteristic incisiveness, on reading my remarks yesterday on the role of second generation Americans in the terrorism spree killings we’ve seen lately, of which the massacre in Orlando was an instance, pointed out that the schools aren’t doing their job.
The first and original purpose of the public school system wasn’t babysitting, job training, helping people to lead richer, more fulfilling lives, or employing people with college degrees who otherwise wouldn’t be able to find jobs. It was acculturation. Read John Dewey. It was to ensure that the children of the newly arrived immigrants at the turn of the 20th century became Americans. As an example of just how successful that was, the Vatican’s consistent complaint about American Catholics isn’t that we’re too Catholic. It’s that we’re too American.
If we’ve abandoned that as the purpose of the public schools, how do we expect new immigrants to become Americans? Do we want them to? What strategy do we intend to use to secure the values we wish to preserve? Do we expect that to happen magically?
Step 1: Determine what values to preserve.
Step 2: Exterminate the other side.
Oh wait, …
I hear the anguished cries of educators disclaiming any and all responsibility for their output, whilst demanding another pay raise and more time off.
I think there is acculturation in the schools, but more along the lines of sensitivity training. Non-Christian religions are more likely to be treated as a racial category of non-white people, victims of Western imperialism given a certain pass from cultural norms.
I was looking at a poll of Islamic attitudes and in Great Britain sometime in the last ten years, zero percent of Muslims expressed the view that homosexuality is morally acceptable. Now, I don’t think moral acceptance is a reasonable standard to achieve in a diverse society; I rather simply ask that we don’t justify violence as an acceptable response to moral repulsion. But zero percent, given such a large Muslim community, evidences a fairly rigid, oppositional identity has either been maintained or worst, is being formed.
by “worst,” I of course meant “worstest” or just some totally bad stuff coming down, you know?
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/06/16/citizens-not-americans/
From the trenches, as it were.
I think, ice, that really catches the essence of it. And what I was trying to convey yesterday. Who really cares what the ethnic or religious origins are? (And I don’t think Trump does, the juvenile ranting of his critics about xenophobia side) It’s the willingness to assimilate sufficiently to maintain societal cohesiveness.
Personally, I think it’s bizarre to not understand that certain Islamic traditions are so far removed from Judaeo-Christian traditions that there is a far higher propensity for friction or bastardization then friction. Again, immigration is not a right. Why foster these problems with relatively indiscriminate immigration?
Dave, you racist. Assimilation is nothing more than a tyrannical process to turn our brothers and sisters of color and cultural diversity into white people who will continue the existing system oppression and exploitation.
We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out.