At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which the blood of centuries behind him had been spilled.

But then he gave up all he had won, and fell lower than his savage beginning.

What brought it to pass? What disaster took their reason away from men? What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word "We."

When men accepted that worship, the structure of centuries collapsed about them, the structure whose every beam had come from the thought of some one man, each in his day down the ages, from the depth of some one spirit, such spirit as existed but for its own sake. Those men who survived — those eager to obey, eager to live for one another, since they had nothing else to vindicate them — those men could neither carry on, nor preserve what they had received. Thus did all thought, all science, all wisdom perish on earth ...

—Ayn Rand, "Anthem," 1937

"Stupid is as stupid does."

— Tom Hanks, "Forrest Gump"

Saw a piece of an argument in an education-related news loop I've joined on the 'Net. One of my conservative colleagues sent out a message touting a skills-and-drills program which is having amazing success at teaching kids of all levels to read.

A retort came from a "class mother" who said she's volunteered in the schools for the last seven years, suggesting that repetitive skills and drills would turn the children into mindless, politically-indoctrinated drones.

Well, before we note my reply to that thought, let's review a few reports from schools around the nation about how our kids are "not" being politically indoctrinated:

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• The Associated Press reported Nov. 18 that some parents of second-graders at Star Hill Elementary in Dover, Del., were just a tad upset with their children's teacher, staged a mock marriage ceremony, pairing students with others of the same sex.

Teacher Ede Outten said the ceremony was a creative way to get pupils to promise to care for each other, comparing it to the TV character "Barney."

Several parents expressed misgivings with the touchy-feely nature and with the fact the ceremony could be misconstrued as promoting homosexuality; one mother immediately withdrew her son from the school, and now plans to home-school him.

The question went before that school district's curriculum review committee, made up of administrators and teachers, which upheld the curriculum unit by a 9-2 vote.

• A story in the Cincinnati Enquirer reports that Northern Kentucky University hopes to have a suit by a former student dismissed.

The student, Denise Pangburn, sued the school because she didn't get her degree in elementary education. She didn't get her degree because she flunked a basic math course six times.

Pangburn claims she has a disability in learning math, and although the school provided her a tutor, the school didn't provide her enough help to pass the course.

• Here's an interesting piece: 35 years after becoming the first black student at the University of Mississippi, James Meredith is creating an institute to teach black males to abandon the use of black American English, according to a Nov. 23 Associated Press story.

The institute will offer weekend, male-only classes to supplement the curriculum of regular schools, in hopes of making the black male "...as comfortable in the library as he is on the basketball court."

The goal is apparently to ensure that black males, historically the most under-educated segment of society, learn to cherish scholarship.

• Either our erstwhile local mouthpiece for edu-fascism, the Houston Chronicle, has slipped up once or twice recently, or they're actually doing a little good old-fashioned journalistic research.

Witness the Nov. 20 edition, in which a commentary by Bruce Herschensohn reviews how our children are being taught about their country: "More worrisome is that in many college and high school classrooms, students are being taught (perhaps the better word is indoctrinated) that the founding fathers were simply contemptible — racist, sexist and indifferent to the poor."

The Monday, Nov. 24 edition even carried a story about University of Virginia professor E.D. Hirsch, Jr.'s "radical" idea that teaching factual, specific knowledge — "core knowledge" — is what promotes higher learning.

Interesting is the take reporter Lydia Lum had on the story: that "many" educators in the Houston are big fans of Hirsch's, although she spent much of the story quoting those who oppose his "Eurocentric" curriculum.

Of course, the Chronicle also made a big deal about the recent awards from The Annenberg Challenge to 11 Houston-area schools.

What the Chronicle's reporters and editors failed to follow up on is that the private foundation's awards were contingent upon the schools demonstrating they were fully in compliance with the national edu-fascist agenda promoted by, among others, President Clinton, the Carnegie Foundation, the National Center on Education and the Economy, and others.

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Anyway, so our "room mother" was convinced that skills-and-drills don't work.

My input into the debate was that skills-and-drill teaching DOES work. Her recitation of words originally attributed to psychologists Benjamin Bloom and B.F. Skinner — and repeated by hundreds of thousands of sociologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, pseudo-educational "professionals" and just about every administrator in every public school district for the past 35 years — was ample evidence that is does.