A pleasant surprise to find myself included with a group of other writers at Sally’s place.
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A pleasant surprise to find myself included with a group of other writers at Sally’s place.
Frank Parker's author site 
Thank you for sharing Frank.
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Congrats, Frank. It’s a reminder for me to add your book to my next five-book purchase.
I was surprised to learn, on reading Jason W. Moore’s book, Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, that the Irish were also numbered among capitalism’s humans – along with indigenous peoples and African slaves – who were considered part of “Cheap Nature.”
My intuitive connection with the Irish nuns and priests with whom I had contact during my younger years had a basis in our shared human experience that I was totally unaware of.
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That’s interesting, Rosaliene. I think the whole of Western Civilisation is abut the dominance of one particular group who believed themselves, with some justification to be superior than the rest. I guess it’s the origin of what is called today ‘white privilege’. It was often accompanied by the idea that education could enable members of the under layer of society to join the ‘elite’.
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Quote: “It was often accompanied by the idea that education could enable members of the under layer of society to join the ‘elite’.”
While some were sincerely thinking that education would allow the poorer members to join up in the club, the underlying Machiavellian thought was simple enough: give them the tools to believe this and they will line up to be our hewers of wood and drawers of water, then always deny them the carrot while keeping the stick handy. There was a temporary upwardly mobile movement, but again that was not to benefit the poor but to create a mass of consumers buried in debt. Once impossibly indebted, they would be stripped of everything they owned. The intent of these long-term policies can be clearly seen today.
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Well, Sha’tara, that is certainly the cynic’s way of looking at things. But once a person has education (s)he doesn’t have to confrm to the consumerist agenda. We can win through if we stand together.
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I wonder, Frank. In a choice between cynicism and naïvety, I’ll take cynicism. I’m an observer; I have to go by what I see of the large picture. Education was taken over by the status quo long ago. Education made nuclear weapons and napalm. Education made the current military industrial complex the success that it is. Education streamlined the perversion of governments and justice systems. Education made Big Pharma and the collusion between health care and drug companies. Education didn’t have to go to serve the elites but that’s where money and success lay, so where else would the educated go but to serve their masters to get the perks from their education? Exceptions noted and accepted, they prove the rule.
When the moneyed elites created the curricula to be used in public education, and bought acquiescence or silence from universities through massive grants, that was no accident, it was, as I said before, a long term vision of what controlled education would be used for and has been used for. Unless one chooses to become self-empowered there is no way out of that controlling apparatus. How many have the vision to choose that path? Few indeed.
Public education ideally would use up perhaps 4 to 5 years of a child’s life, enough to get a grasp on reading, writing and basic arithmetic. Beyond that it would be up to parents and individual children whether to continue, to be made possible through grants for those with the inclination and abilities, or personal funding. Modern public ed was turned into a sacred cow that became a babysitting institution with vast amounts of tax money poured into a sieve of misappropriations and propagation of the corporate agenda.
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