The New Class: Savages Amidst a Technology They Don't Understand

[jordan179]

From Daniel Greenfield, "Government Is Magic," Sultan Knish, October 27th, 2013:

Our technocracy is detached from competence. It's not the technocracy of engineers, but of "thinkers" who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without ever imbibing its substance.

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The ObamaCare

Comments

[kitten_goddess]

Corporations and schools do this as well. How well a job applicant fits in with the corporate culture and how good of a team player she is is deemed more important than whether she actually has the skills, intelligence, and knowledge needed to do the job.

In schools, socialization is now deemed every bit as important, if not more important, than academics. Heaven help the child who is intelligent but is not exactly like his peers. He gets thrown into special ed, where he receives an inferior education and suffers a lifetime of stigma and discrimination.

[eric_hinkle]

Heaven help the child who is intelligent but is not exactly like his peers. He gets thrown into special ed, where he receives an inferior education and suffers a lifetime of stigma and discrimination.

Special Ed seems to have come quite a ways from when I attended school, and not a good ways either.

[jordan179]

Special Ed tends to lump together all the kids who are alike only in being "non-standard," whether their non-standardness is stupidity, emotional problems, or (in some cases) intellectual superiority such that school is boring for them.

[gothelittle]

That is precisely the trap my husband fell into in elementary school, and the crux of the reason why he strongly favors and supports our decision to homeschool.

Boring = Lack of attention = Needs medication and a slower pace = more boring = more attention problems = needs harsher medication and an even slower pace.

His son, and I say "his" because our eldest shares many of his gifts and curses, is doing perfectly well in an advanced homeschool curriculum. No medication. Faster pace. No more attention problem than the average kid.

[jordan179]

People with learning disabilities tend to get tossed into Special Ed. Learning disabilities are weaknesses in specific mental aptitude, and a person who is (say) dyslexic or dysnumeric can be highly intelligent in most other aptitudes. Putting them in the same class as the mentally-retarded is cruel to both.

[gothelittle]

In his case, he isn't dyslexic or dysnumeric.. he just has an IQ somewhere well north of 135 and a tendency to have his attention drift *if* his intellect is not sufficiently challenged