“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” - Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs, true life hero of millennials, made this comment as part of his 2005 Stanford Commencement address. He advised the newly minted grads to pay attention to their intuition, pursue their passion, and use both to discover what they were good at. Unfortunately by 2005 college grads were ill-equipped to understand his fairly simple message. They got the part about following their heart – they’d been told that from the time they were in pre-school. What they didn’t get was the “work really, really hard” part and the “pick yourself up after you’ve failed and try again” part. By 2005 the education system had already been demolished and was no longer even pretending to teach people how to think but rather what to think. And since what they were to think was proscribed this critical piece of advice from Job’s speech also fell on deaf ears:
Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice.
Dogma was all they’d ever learned. Fifteen years later and things have only gotten worse; dogma has completely replaced truth in the realm of ‘education’.
Daniel Henninger discusses this exact thing in his column this week.
How did the capitulation happen so fast? In fact, it was a long time coming. It is hardly an insight by now to blame this on the schools. But revisiting 30 years of educational irresponsibility seems necessary, insofar as the reality of the moment represents an erasure of history. If U.S. Grant, just toppled in San Francisco, was a racist, American history has indeed ceased to exist. History has a way of returning, and some day it will record how a generation of university presidents produced this result.
In the 1980s and early ’90s, when the notion of speech-codes emerged with formal restrictions on words and speech, the seeds of today’s cancel culture were planted with the acquiescence of university leaders.
When liberal professors embarked on tenure denials for conservative colleagues, who were important ballast to the growing groupthink, campus administrators caved.
Then when the students turned on some of these same liberal professors, with accusations of racism, they caved again.
I take umbrage with his referring to this moral failing as “education irresponsibility” however. It was a carefully calculated inculcation of Marxist principles into every step of education. Quite simply it was the lifework of people like Bill Ayers - an American hating communist -
and his cronies. We let them take over and run all the country’s major education schools, write all the country’s text books, rewrite all the country’s history: and then we wonder why they want to tear down statues of old white men like Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln.
And we’re shocked when an anti-white racist like Nikole Hannah-Jones heads up the despicable New York Times 1619 Project.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is simply following her passion, her truth. That’s what happens when the education system eliminates “truth” and replaces it with relativity.
“Connecting the dots” means to understand one’s past, and to know how to put past decisions into context. When you change history, when you cancel the past, nobody learns nuthin’. And that’s just the way the Progressives like it.
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