Someone who is in a state of denial regarding his mortal illness, his wife’s infidelity or his child’s delinquency will turn angrily on the one who refers to the forbidden truth. Likewise, a political culture that is in denial about a serious social problem will condemn those who seek to discuss it, and try its best to silence them. For a long time now the European political class has been in denial about the problems posed by the large-scale immigration of people who do not enter into our European way of life. It has turned angrily on those who have warned against the disruption that might follow, or who have affirmed the right of indigenous communities to refuse admission to people who cannot or will not assimilate. And one of the weapons that the élite has used, in order to ensure that it is never troubled by the truths that it denies, is to accuse those who wish to discuss the problem of ‘racism and xenophobia’.
Scruton continues -- and this is such a key point:
Now it is easy for an educated member of the liberal élite to discard his xenophobia: for the most part his contacts with foreigners help him to amplify his power, extend his knowledge and polish his social expertise. But it is not so easy for an uneducated worker to share this attitude, when the incoming foreigner takes away his job, brings strange customs and an army of dependents into the neighbourhood, and finally surrounds him with the excluding sights and sounds of a ghetto.
Again, however, there is a double standard that affects the description. Members of our liberal élite may be immune to xenophobia, but there is an equal fault which they exhibit in abundance, which is the repudiation of, and aversion to, home. Each country exhibits this vice in its own domestic version. Nobody brought up in post-war England can fail to be aware of the educated derision that has been directed at our national loyalty by those whose freedom to criticize would have been extinguished years ago, had the English not been prepared to die for their country. The loyalty that people need in their daily lives, and which they affirm in their unconsidered and spontaneous social actions, is now habitually ridiculed or even demonized by the dominant media and the education system. National history is taught as a tale of shame and degradation. The art, literature and religion of our nation have been more or less excised from the curriculum, and folkways, local traditions and national ceremonies are routinely rubbished.
This repudiation of the national idea is the result of a peculiar frame of mind that has arisen throughout the Western world since the Second World War, and which is particularly prevalent among the intellectual and political elites. No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognized: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. I call the attitude oikophobia – the aversion to home – by way of emphasizing its deep relation to xenophobia, of which it is the mirror image. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which intellectuals tend to become arrested.
It has been my impression for some time that among media types, the idea that there is anything seriously questionable about immigration, legal or illegal, is seen as evidence of moral failing, and probably bigotry. The immigrant is seen, consciously or not, as an opportunity for the media figure to demonstrate his or her own broad-mindedness and cosmopolitanism -- versus the supposed fear and loathing of the grubby Tancredist proles. It's funny, though: the media elites usually aren't the ones who are being asked to stand by while their neighborhoods and institutions are transformed in ways that make them not only unfamiliar, but even culturally hostile. And it would never occur to the media figure to make a point of insisting that the immigrant has an obligation to accustom himself to the way we do things here -- even as that person would die a thousand deaths if he were traveling as a tourist in the country from which the immigrants came, and failed to respect the local customs and folkways to the letter.
Oikophobia. Good word.
UPDATE: Sorry, but I forgot to put a link to the entire Scruton address, which really does deserve a full reading. It's more complex and searching than I've been able to indicate here.
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Per-pupil expenditure in our public school systems continue to rise- performance doesn't. E.G., one of the highest funded (and lowest performing) schools is D.C.
per-pupil expenditures are meaningless.
how about is we do a geographic breakdown - or one based on property taxes paid in an area.
Your per-pupil expenditure smokescreen is designed to obfuscate. You know the well-to-do skew the numbers.
Screw the poor, right?
Shame on you.>
gitv,
You brought up the "lack of funding" in your post. And no, the per-pupil funding is not designed to obfuscate, but rather to elucidate the ridiculousness of your argument.
More $ hasn't been the answer so far, and won't be the answer going forward.
One possible answer is the encouraging results of some charter schools.>
You brought up the "lack of funding" in your post. And no, the per-pupil funding is not designed to obfuscate, but rather to elucidate the ridiculousness of your argument.
And yet with all of the holes I just poked in that argument, you still expect it to hold water.
Cute :)>
What holes?
Your statement that "per- pupil expenditures are meaningless" is not exactly a logical counterpoint to the fact that they demonstrate the average dollars spent per pupil in a given educational system.
Geographic breakdown or property taxes in an area? Please, feel free. Show me how & where more money could & should be spent, or where it has been spent with a positive effect.>
Your statement that "per- pupil expenditures are meaningless" is not exactly a logical counterpoint to the fact that they demonstrate the average dollars spent per pupil in a given educational system.
It is *exactly* a logical counterpoint to your per-pupil expenditure. Here's how you're using your statistic to obfuscate:
Per pupil expenditure as a metric only retains meaning if it can be shown that every pupil gets the same amount of expenditure. Since property taxes in rich areas pay only into the rich schools, the per pupil expenditure in those minute areas skews the average statistic across the board.
State funding and federal funding for schools covers only the bare minimum to educate kids (and in many cases, not even that - see cases in parts of the rural Southwest where as of the year 2000, the history books were so old they didn't even mention President Bush... the *first* President Bush.) Local schools are funded past the bare minimum by property taxes.
In suburban areas where median income is proportionally higher, as is incidence of home ownership, their schools get a lot more money to spread around for fewer students than in highly populated Urban areas or poverty-stricken rural areas.
Let's say federal and state funding is $1000 per student in a state where 10% of property taxes are earmarked for education. In an urban center of say 500,000 residents, only about 20% of them will own their homes. Plus, though median income statewide is 60,000, real income is vastly different if we look at regional demographics. Say in the swankest school district, the median income is $200,000 and in the crappiest is only $35,000. Are you going to tell me that those schools will be offering equal educational opportunities based on expenditures? Average expenditure per student may be $2000 (with $1000 coming form state and federal) but in the swank district, where expenditure per student is $10,000 or more - and those types of schools are decidedly low population compared with urban schools - the urban schools' expenditure has to be proportionally lower in order to make the average $2000.
That average, therefore, is not an accurate assessment of the state of education for all kids.
Since you're an educated guy, you must understand that when income disparity is as vast as it is in the US, average expenditure can't mean the same thing for all students, then you must be feigning ignorance, in which case, yeah - I think you're obfuscating.
Now, if an equal amount was spent on every student and the system still put out as many uneducated peopel as it does, then sure - I'd say the system is broken and there's no point in throwing more money at it.
I love the pretzels of rationalization conservatives will tie themselves in to avoid paying for things...>
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