My eyes on twitter, yesterday, pinged me with an interesting retweet from one of the usual suspects. You know, those people in science fiction who have been so oppressed and downtrodden and kept at arms length because we don’t like their ancestors or their color or their orientation or yes, that they’ve been living hand-to-mouth existences, oppressed by white male privilege and barely able to scrape up a few crumbs of stale bread for their dinner.

This was retweeted in fact by one of those people who continuously try to stop discussion with “Check your privilege.”

I’m just going to quote this magnificent retweet and let you stand back, take a deep breath and admire it splendid madness.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the point of education wasn’t to make a more useful workforce, but to make happy, imaginative and empathetic humans?

Stop – drop and roll – and take a deep breath.

Does anyone here remember why education was instituted among humans? I mean, I know some of you are that ancient, old enough to have fallen from the trees back in the glory days when we went from shrew to ape.

No?

Me neither, but I’ve observed training and education among all mammal species for most of my life. I was raised on what could not be considered a farm except by fiat, but we did grow most of our own food, and what we didn’t grow the neighbors did. And at least some mammals (and birds) I paid attention to because they were cute. I’ve seen mother cats train kittens to hunt, I’ve seen mother rabbits teach bunnies what is best to eat. I’ve seen chickens keep watch on their broods.

“Education” at that level has two basic functions: how to survive as an adult animal and how not to get killed (which is also survival, of course, but less proactive.)

If you go back as far as we can go on first hand accounts, human education had the same purpose, be it learning to hunt, or keep animals, or even pull your forelock to the lord, depending on where you were in the time and place.

For humans it was a little more complex, of course. One of the funniest things is to hear modern people deplore the fact that even most medieval noblemen were illiterate. But the fact is in their own complex world they had much to learn: How to manage places with almost no extra income so you could have enough to support you and not inspire assassination, for instance. Also hunting. Also a complex set of social cues that would make modern heads explode. Writing was no part of their métier. They didn’t need it to survive.

It wasn’t, in fact, until noblemen became a little richer and there was a little more disposable capital in their domains that they felt a need to read and write so they could keep an eye on the churchmen doing the accounting for them.

Nowadays reading is considered an important skill for everyone, not because we’re more enlightened or brighter or better, but simply because navigating the modern world is often a function of being able to quickly read and absorb information.

Note this might be easily superseded in the future by virtual targeted spoken messages, something that in fact already happens at some levels and probably why people at that level in society (mostly supported) have very little interest in learning to read.

The learning to read might have brought with it the ability to read for fun and happiness and to improve your morals, but that (unless you were studying to be a churchmen the later) was not the purpose.

So mostly the purpose of education in humans is to make useful and well adjusted adult humans.

It is, of course, failing at both across a vast spectrum. In the later especially, the part of the quote that goes on about:

to make happy, imaginative and empathetic humans?

The progressive comrades of the lady retweeting this piece of cluelessness have stopped us doing that. Because we can’t teach any type of morals, not even “do onto others” which is what creates empathetic humans. And we certainly can’t teach humans to be happy. “Happy” by definition is “fits well within the structures of society and follows accepted modes and morals.” Or at least that’s as close as a public institution can come to making anyone happy. (To make you INTERNALLY happy would involve a lot of soma, if you’re not disposed that way. We’re trying to do that too, of course, but apparently the chemical happy is not the same as happy-happy.) As for making humans more imaginative, we have no idea if that can be done at all, but if it could it would probably counter the “happy” and it would certainly counter most politically correct strictures on our schools. Imaginative humans can think of anything. Even the unthinkable. They might not do it, but they can think it.

The person who originated this quote (who I presume was not our SJW) seems to think of imaginative in the childish sense of “imagination is a wonderful and sunny place” but an imaginative person can think of anything. When it’s Kate’s turn maybe she’ll grace us with a post on how sometimes your imagination definitely goes where you don’t want it, and how to cope with it.

But let’s leave aside for a moment the internal contradictions in that quote. It’s difficult to do, because there are rifts between its well-meaning prescriptions that are broad enough to let entire civilizations slip through unnoticed.

Let’s instead concentrate on the beginning:

Wouldn’t it be nice if the point of education wasn’t to make a more useful workforce

Oh, yes, of course. Other things that would be nice: if ice cream grew on trees. If designer dresses grew on wild bushes. If we all had a perfect body. If there were no disease and suffering and we studied war no more.

I mean, what exactly is the point of wishing for something like that?

People, in this work-a-day (eh) world still have to make a living, right? Last I checked, just looking around, this desk I’m sitting at did not sprout fully formed from a particularly blessed acorn. The computer I’m typing at was not only designed, not only ideated but built by human beings who devoted considerable time to bringing it into existence and were paid for it, enough money to live in turn.

My fridge is full of food I did not grow, but I’m not under the impression it is created by blessed pixies. I know there’s a lot of unrelenting, unpleasant, often uninteresting work behind that food. Trust me, I know this: I grew up in a rural village.

The world and all it contains is not a sort of fairy bauble where the things we want and need just appear and where even making us pay for them is an injustice, much less making us work for them.

The world is REAL – an unforgiving place that doesn’t care anymore about your imagination and empathy and happiness than it cares about whether that storm just destroyed your crops; that hurricane just leveled your house; or that sparrow just fell.

Those of us who are religious believe there is someone behind the scenes who does care, but even He does not violate the rules of the reality He created just to be mawkish at you, much less to spoil you. (At least the He I believe in doesn’t. I realize some religious people believe in a sort of rub-the-lamp G-d which is a survival from primitive religious mentality (if you sacrifice to the tree spirit, she’ll give you oranges) and which is epitomized in an episode of my childhood which my son describes as “the miracle of the socks.” A friend I was vacationing with, who was a ah vending machine religious person was trying to go to church of a Sunday and couldn’t find her socks. She immediately became convinced the devil had hidden them. So she said the requisite prayer and the socks showed up. Perhaps, for all I know, the world really works like that. I doubt it though. And it would distract me from thinking about real cause and effect trying to figure out which lamp to rub.)

It is a characteristic of reality that it tends to smack you in the face like a three-day-old dead fish whether you want it to or not, and whether you’ve told yourself some just-so story about how it would be so much better if it didn’t.

This is why the left’s just-so story that once you stop capitalism or patriarchy or whatever their bugaboo is, humans will be perfect and loving and innocent never comes about. And also why they thereby deduce we’re still steeped in unfettered capitalism (I wish!) and patriarchy and racism and sexism and the heartbreak of psoriasis. (Okay, okay, I made up the last one. It’s actually psoriasitism.) They do this because their black and white view of the world requires they believe in a pseudo-secular version of the miracle of the socks.

Reality doesn’t care any more for their delusions than it did for my friend’s (who, should the miracle of the socks have failed to materialize would then have come up with some reason, like that she’d forgotten to say the requisite prayer before sleep or for all I knew had forgotten to bless her shoes.)

So for an adult human being (my friend, in her defense wasn’t) to believe that it would not just be lovely, but that it’s somehow possible and DESIRABLE if the point of education wasn’t to make a more useful workforce betrays where this human being stands.

This person is so unimaginably comfortable and cossetted that she believes that work is an icky necessity and that learning the skills of workaday laboring is not just unnecessary but somehow undesirable. She believes it would be best instead if schools tried to fix all sorts of metaphysical things that as far as I can tell have always been wrong with humans.

She believes, in fact, that paradise has arrived – whatever she says – and that we no longer need to spin nor sow.

She’s so far removed from every day necessities, that she thinks that learning a profession is a strange twisting of the purpose of education.

The mind boggles. There are legends of mandarins in towers, long ago, who were as insulated as this. I always assumed they were just legends, but perhaps I was wrong.

No wonder this person goes around worrying obsessively about what happened to ancestors with whom she has almost no genetic and certainly no cultural connection. (Sorry, the idea that you understand your ancestors even a century ago, even without conquest by an alien culture, is … well, an indication you haven’t read many autobiographies more than fifty years old. The idea you understand cultures that were rightly or wrongly subsumed is… a fairy dream.) No wonder she sees all sorts of micro-aggressions due to her skin tone and the fact she possesses a vagina.

Humans must, after all, worry about something. It’s an evolutionary necessity built into us. And in her mandarin-tower there is nothing else to worry about.

Downtrodden? Oppressed? Mistreated?

Is this the statement of a person who is any of those?

Wouldn’t it be nice if the point of education wasn’t to make a more useful workforce, but to make happy, imaginative and empathetic humans?

Oh, honey, check your privilege.

UPDATE: WELCOME INSTAPUNDIT READERS! And thank you to Glenn Reynolds for the link!