The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Biden Says What Liberals Really Think

Posted on | August 9, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

Wealthy liberals pretend to believe in “equality,” even while they scheme ways to get their kids into Harvard, knowing that attending an elite university is the only way to obtain the kind of credentials and social connections necessary to membership in their club. This is why they have such contempt for working-class people, and do everything possible to degrade and humiliate the “deplorables.” Their oft-repeated concern for “diversity” and “inclusion” reflects the liberal elite’s obsession with protecting their own status — acting as Benefactors of Brown People is their political raison d’être, and they are sure to be mortified now that Sleepy Joe Biden has let the cat out of the bag:

Gaffe-prone presidential hopeful Joe Biden put his foot in his mouth during an Iowa campaign stop on Thursday when he told a group of predominately Asian and Hispanic voters that “poor kids are just as bright, just as talented, as white kids.”
Biden committed the stunning blunder while speaking about education at a town hall with the Asian and Latino Coalition in Des Moines, where he’s campaigning and fundraising for the 2020 Democratic primary.
“We should challenge students in these schools and have advanced placement programs in these schools. We have this notion that somehow if you’re poor, you cannot do it,” Biden said at the event, according to video of his remarks.
“Poor kids are just as bright, just as talented, as white kids,” he added.
Biden almost immediately went into damage control mode, quickly adding: “wealthy kids, black kids, Asian kids, no I really mean it, but think how we think about it.”

Biden’s conflation of race and economic status — “white” as a synonym for “wealthy,” and “brown” as a synonym for “poor” — reflects a categorical error that is altogether common among wealthy liberals, who have internalized a lot of slogans about “white privilege,” etc., without bothering to analyze the relevant data. The existence of a substantial black middle class, for example, is a phenomenon no Democrat ever wishes to acknowledge, because their party’s electoral success requires persuading black voters that they are oppressed victims of racism (and making Republicans the scapegoats for racism). Persuading ordinary white voters to believe this, of course, is rather difficult, because however stupid the “deplorables” might be, we are at least close enough to the reality of life to see that it doesn’t match Democrats rhetoric.

In the uproar over this gaffe, nobody in the media will point out the other fallacies involved in Biden’s rhetoric. Why is being “smart” considered synonymous with “getting good grades in school”? Despite my prominence as a high-IQ kid who nearly flunked out, no Ph.D. researcher has ever consulted me to investigate why my intellectual potential was not manifested as outstanding scholastic achievement.

“Gee, Stacy, why did you hate school so much?”

Because school hated me, that’s why.

The Public Education Bureaucracy does not exist for the benefit of students, but rather for the benefit of the bureaucrats who operate it.

The typical teacher is a small-minded mediocrity who, when given power over a classroom of children, will use this official authority to reward some children — the unctuous teacher’s pets — and to punish any child who does not meekly comply with the bureaucratic system. Thus, from an early age, my energy and intelligence made me a target for the sadistic impulses structured into the public-education system. The authority of the bureaucrats rests upon their supposed expertise in developing children’s academic aptitude, and nobody inside the system ever questions this claim to expertise. The possibility that favoritism might cloud the judgment of teachers is not part of their calculations, yet the “good student” is always the obedient child, eager to cooperate with the system. My own teachers were shocked and embarrassed when, in fifth grade, I knocked the top off the standardized test — 99th percentile, reading at a collegiate level of comprehension — after years of being punished as a habitual discipline case. Despite being a Bad Student, I was actually one of the smartest kids in the entire state.

My outstanding test score, however, did not gain me any benefit. Nobody bothered to ask why I’d spent the idle hours of my childhood reading through the World Book Encyclopedia, nor was there any accommodation to my unusual abilities in art, music, etc. Instead, the gap between my bad grades and my spectacular standardized test performance was explained as my failure to “apply myself” in class. Yet if I had actually learned more than other children while not applying myself, what did this say about the pedagogy and curriculum? That is to say, when the Bad Student is demonstrated by objective measure to be a better student than the Teacher’s Pets, the educational bureaucrats will ignore this evidence that their system isn’t working, and instead will intensify their scapegoating of the non-conformist.

“YOU MUST COMPLY WITH THE SYSTEM!”

What is clear to me in hindsight, of course, was quite confusing to me as a 10-year-old who couldn’t understand why something that should have been a cause for celebration — 99th percentile! — was immediately turned into an excuse for further punishment and humiliation. Yet it was obvious to me that the system was a fraud, and my response to this was to become even more of a rebel than I had been by natural instinct.

Because politicians, like teachers, are part of the university-educated class, Joe Biden cannot imagine any concept of “smart” that does not translate to “make good grades and go to college.” Yet when the “check engine” light comes on in your car, shouldn’t you hope that the mechanic at the garage is smart enough to figure out what’s wrong with it and repair it correctly? The mechanic doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree from an elite university and wasn’t the high-school valedictorian, but isn’t a smart mechanic better than a dumb one? The same is true for truck drivers, construction contractors and other trades that don’t require four-year college degrees. A good electrician can make far more money than a typical sociology major, but this isn’t acknowledged in the kind of discourse where Biden speaks of (presumably poor) brown kids being “just as bright, just as talented” as (presumably rich) white kids.

Of course, as I’ve often remarked, the public school bureaucracy is an institution completely controlled by Democrats, who collect many millions of dollars in contributions annually from teachers unions, and who expect public schools to teach children to be loyal Democrat voters. No matter how badly our public schools fail, in terms of preparing children for real life, they will be judged a success by Democrats so long as the children are all indoctrinated with liberal beliefs.



 

Category: Education, Joe Biden, Racism

Comments

One Response to “Biden Says What Liberals Really Think”

  1. Autodidact Daybook. – Dark Brightness
    August 12th, 2019 @ 4:12 am

    […] The typical teacher is a small-minded mediocrity who, when given power over a classroom of children, will use this official authority to reward some children — the unctuous teacher’s pets — and to punish any child who does not meekly comply with the bureaucratic system. Thus, from an early age, my energy and intelligence made me a target for the sadistic impulses structured into the public-education system. The authority of the bureaucrats rests upon their supposed expertise in developing children’s academic aptitude, and nobody inside the system ever questions this claim to expertise. The possibility that favoritism might cloud the judgment of teachers is not part of their calculations, yet the “good student” is always the obedient child, eager to cooperate with the system. My own teachers were shocked and embarrassed when, in fifth grade, I knocked the top off the standardized test — 99th percentile, reading at a collegiate level of comprehension — after years of being punished as a habitual discipline case. Despite being a Bad Student, I was actually one of the smartest kids in the entire state. My outstanding test score, however, did not gain me any benefit. Nobody bothered to ask why I’d spent the idle hours of my childhood reading through the World Book Encyclopedia, nor was there any accommodation to my unusual abilities in art, music, etc. Instead, the gap between my bad grades and my spectacular standardized test performance was explained as my failure to “apply myself” in class. Yet if I had actually learned more than other children while not applying myself, what did this say about the pedagogy and curriculum? That is to say, when the Bad Student is demonstrated by objective measure to be a better student than the Teacher’s Pets, the educational bureaucrats will ignore this evidence that their system isn’t working, and instead will intensify their scapegoating of the non-conformist. […]