End The Public Education Monopoly!

... or at least take steps to see that our children don't grow up to be insufferable ignoramuses. At a recent party, while watching Jeopardy as a group, a young family member shot out a reply to a question that the answer was "a dead, white male!" He works at SDSU and is thoroughly steeped in modern, campus thought.

I replied that he might want to show a little more respect to dead, white males as they invented everything he uses today. He replied with a very short list of things invented by others. As far as I could tell all of them were predicated on the civilization built by those dead, white males, so his list was derivative at best.

Now dig this.

Go Aztecs! #sdsu

— K T Cat (@ktcat) July 1, 2018

I'm betting my readers get the joke. Poor @Afsaneh_J appears to have missed it. At the risk of being a self-serving bore, allow me to quote myself.

I'd suggest that instead of hating slavery, racism and imperialism, we hate success. To borrow this tidbit again from Hilaire Belloc,

Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.

It's hard to imagine that the Turks, the Mongols or even the peaceful, living-in-harmony-with-nature Apache would have eschewed the use of the Maxim Gun if they'd had access to them.

Instead of getting wound up about one warlike empire among many, we might want to ask ourselves why the Europeans developed the technologies they did. And no, "Because slavery!" isn't the answer. Everyone had slaves, but only the Christian, white, Europeans developed almost all of the technologies we use today.

 My bet is that @Afsaneh_J is completely unaware of the history of the Aztecs. Or the Ottomans, the Mongols, the Ashanti, the Incas, the Caribes and all of the others. I recall my daughter being shocked to find that America's black slaves were sold into slavery by their fellow Africans. That certainly wasn't in her history textbooks!

I find it exhausting to read through tweets like the one above and the all of the derivative ones wherein dead, white males are excoriated for succeeding. I wonder if we'll ever get tired enough of it to spank the education industry into behaving. They certainly could use some firm discipline.

Here, Edmund Burke takes a switch to the backside of an SDSU professor to punish him for teaching absolute twaddle.