Turns out that Klara already memorized the definitions of verbs, adjectives and nouns at school.
This is a good school. I have college students who have no idea what an adjective is.
Good as it is, we are skipping school again today because it’s still better to be out of if it.
That sounds lovely.
LikeLike
Why are there four downvotes to the post and one to methylethyl’s comment?
I’m a teacher of 31 years’ standing, and I can tell you that school is the most anti-educational institution in any Western society.
I only have one quibble: I have a feeling that Klara would have found out about nouns, verbs and adjectives even if left to her own devices, regardless of the fact that her school gave her grammar lessons.
LikeLike
The internet is full of angry formal-ed cultists?
LikeLike
…alternately, the neggie bots are programmed to downvote anything that presents even the slightest challenge to official dogma. Let us say that school is like brussels sprouts:
1) Brussels Sprouts are always, and in every circumstance, Good.
2) Therefore any negative comment about Brussels Sprouts whatsoever, no matter how mild, must be piled on with the downvotes, lest the plebes start to agree, and Brussels Sprouts sales falter.
3) But don’t stop and actually identify yourself or make a counter-argument. This is all about anonymous mob action. Don’t give anybody a target to fire back at. The goal is to create the illusion of “public opinion” by making it seem like way more people like Brussels Sprouts and support the eating of them, than dislike them. This will keep public-image-sensitive people in line.
Clarissa, in this post, has challenged TWO dogmatic beliefs:
1) that Brussels Sprouts are always and everywhere good, especially for children, so avoiding them even for one day cannot be tolerated.
2) that there is a quality difference between one sort of Brussels Sprouts and another, and that it matters what you’re getting out of your Brussels Sprouts (in official dogma, no inquiry can be made in this direction, because Brussels Sprouts are primarily a vehicle for propaganda, but this can’t be discussed openly, so the winning strategy is to shut down discussion any time someone asks “well, shouldn’t they at least be learning to read?)
My biggest question is: Is it a small botnet homing in on the phrase “skipping school” paired with positive descriptors, in an automated way? Or is it a woman (definitely a woman– it happens most with posts involving parenting, and it’s mostly women who get b*tchy about that) with five logins and a massive chip on her shoulder? Automated botnets usually aren’t so modest in their numbers, so I incline toward the second option. It takes some real time and effort to do that manually, which puts a cap on the sort of numbers you can rack up.
On the plus side, I think that means the blog has not been targeted by any of the pro operations. There’d be way more than five, unless somehow WP has an unusually discerning anti-bot thing going on.
LikeLike
…I don’t think you can see a user’s IP address from the console side, if they just “like” or “dislike” a post, but you can likely get that if they comment. This is another reason why you might see the “low-effort trolling” of leaving five dislikes instead of actually commenting: every level of complexity increases your chances of being ratted out by your IP info and the time/effort involved in covering your tracks. Once you start commenting, it either becomes really obvious that five commenters are all the same person with the same IP, OR you have to add a VPN to your operation to mask your address. You can keep your lowgrade trolling low-risk as long as you never do anything that attaches your username to your actions.
LikeLike
My comment was downvoted but then the angry bot / blogreader who holds formal ed sacred must have got bored with the whole exercise and left.
School was always a place of indoctrination, long before it became Superwoke. There, I’ve said it, cry me a river.
In the meanwhile, where’s Clarissa? Outside, doing lots of interesting things with her child.
When we first started the school system in the US, it was 100% about integrating immigrants. Because the English-derived bluebloods were scared to death of all the new louse-infested Irish and Italian immigrants and their dirty children. They felt it necessary to mold them into good US citizens. Reading and arithmetic were just to sell it to the parents, even then.
” the school system in the US, it was 100% about integrating immigrants”
When I went to public school (as I’ve mentioned before) no one thought two seconds about national origin. We were all American. Period. Last names were just last names which were weird in different ways.
It’s only been in the last few years that I began recognizing European sources of the last names of classmates: Oh, so that name was Czech and that one was Irish and that one… Portuguese!”
The very few exceptions included a girl whose parents had recently arrived from Yugoslavia (I don’t remember any kind of accent but we didn’t think about that kind of thing back then).
But then I’m a child of the Great Compression and don’t see the utility of weaponizing identities…
LikeLike
I’m not even saying the result was a bad thing. It’s a good thing, ultimately, to have a national identity. We’re all Americans is a good, functional thing to teach. But as we’ve all seen, a system for propagandizing everybody’s kids and socializing them away from the cultures of their parents into a big homogenous population of citizens… can be used to deliver any kind of propaganda, and needs to be carefully policed by the citizenry. It hasn’t been, with predictable results.
LikeLike
A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
Leave a comment