Qod Seth Godin on Schools and my response

Over on Seth Godin's blog, Seth wrote, "As we get ready for the 93rd year of universal public education, here’s the question every parent and taxpayer needs to wrestle with: Are we going to applaud, push or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable and mediocre factory-workers?"

And my answer is, "Yes. Yes, we are."

Not that I personally want to see this happen, but the politicans and general public are sure behind this idea. My proof of this is the fact that politicans want to see standardized testing be applied not only to lower education (elementary, middle and high schools), they also want to see standardized testing applied to higher education (colleges and universities).

Unfortunately, standardized testing kills all independent thought; it marginalizes all subjects that are not testable in the standardized testing envirnoment; it insures that only subjects tested on are given decent budgets; and it generally leads to standards being lowered so that students can pass the tests.

So what does this have to do with Golden Dawn? A lot actually. It ensures that we keep getting applicants who can barely spell, have no command of written grammar, who struggle to cope with the required reading and memorization work, and basically know nothing about philosophy and symbolism beyond the latest teen makeout flick.

Ok, it is great for those Orders who want brainless easy-to-control members. But for the rest of us, we better start figuring out how to teach all the subjects that Rosicrucians presumed an apprentice would have before they walked into the field of alchemy and philosophy.