Confusing Education, Intelligence, and Being Smart (Updated from 9/9/2014)

 

"The difference between intelligence and education is this: Intelligence will make you a good living."

-- Charles F. Kettering

Ward LeRoy Churchill, have you seen a photo of this guy?  No?  You should look him up.  He was the University of Colorado professor terminated for an essay he wrote comparing the victims of the 9/11 attacks to the Nazi criminal, Adolf Eichmann. I wouldn't want this guy teaching my children, regardless of their age.  I wouldn't want him anywhere around children.  The Colorado Supreme Court, in a ridiculously obvious ruling, upheld the lower court decision in favor of the University terminating him for being terminally stupid, I would guess.  I hope the University reviews its criteria for any future employment, as well.

We seem to keep confusing education with intelligence, and intelligence with actually being smart.  Intelligent people make great use of higher education and then fail when it comes to life.  Why?  Well, maybe they aren’t all that smart.  I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, and I didn’t make the most out of the educational opportunities that were available to me, but I do, in all humility, consider myself to have pretty good "street" smarts. 

"Grades don't measure intelligence and age doesn't measure maturity."

-- Unknown

With our institutions of higher education continuing to be bastions of socialist dogma, I was surprised to hear the University had removed him. Hell, we have self-admitted Islamic extremists teaching at renowned universities, and vocally antisemitic politicians sitting in the U.S. Congress, so why not give this idiot a pass? What makes the other idiots so much "better" than this putz?

"What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult."

-- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), neurologist, psychoanalyst

Is the deteriorating state of our educational system in America today?  Really?  Let me take you back to late 1970, to a small town in California where I went to high school.  This was the Vietnam War era of peace marches, burning bras and draft cards, and hippies who didn't believe in bathing.  I could have been a hippie.  There were plenty of pretty "free love" hippie girls to choose from if you could stomach the hairy legs, unshaved armpits, and body odor that would be banned as a weapon of mass destruction.  I like bathing.  Patchouli oil didn't really mask the smell of body odor, especially an unwashed ass.  Most hippies I met were unwashed asses.  Most old hippies still are.  I just like smelling better than patchouli oil and a dog's butt (my apologies to dogs).

I had a female teacher I'll call "Mrs. B" to preserve anonymity.  She was fairly young; probably late twenties to early thirties, not very attractive, and extremely socialist.  I didn't know what liberal meant back then as it wasn't a term batted around by young people.  We knew them as communists or socialists.  Mrs. B was a big supporter of Angela Davis for U.S. Vice-President.  Angela Yvonne Davis was a political activist, and leader of the "Communist Party USA,"  briefly associated with the Black Panther Party (therefore, an anarchist), and an academic at the University of California (which, being an anarchist, was of no surprise).  In 1969, then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover referred to the Black Panther Party as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”  Davis was placed on the FBI Most Wanted list, and she fled back to California (again, no surprise here).  Angela Davis ran as the communist candidate for Vice-President of the United States in 1980 and 1984.  But, I digress.

It wasn't that Mrs. B was, also, a socialist/communist which concerned me.  As a young person in the 1960's and 70's I felt it beneficial to learn different political views.  What I minded was when she took the American flag down from the classroom wall, threw it to the ground, and stomped on it while spewing a political rant that many of us were too stunned to pay any attention to.  So, just what has changed in the state of our educational system today?  

Well, I'm not sure it has changed much from the state it was in 52 years ago except, and this is a big except, most children today are not brought up to think for themselves.  We send them to school for socialist education. Indoctrination, for the most part, at admittedly socialist schools, to be educated by blatantly socialist teachers that spoon-feed students an obvious socialist doctrine.  We wonder why our country is lacking pride, leadership, and children who can spell, read, and do math.  Parents allow all of this and then sit back in denial and wonder what's going wrong.  

Soon the socialists will remove the American flag, and atheists will remove God, as the anarchist extremists attempt to overthrow the very government we allowed them to infiltrate.  We'll soon be treated to young Democratic-Socialists marching goosestep through the streets, so much like Hitler Youth on parade, as their detractors are arrested en masse and forced to board trains for "reprogramming" at desert internment camps.  I recommend, at this point, not to take any offered shower when you arrive at camp and be particularly suspicious of any furnaces being built and wide trenches being dug.

Education is a good thing if our intent is to educate, not indoctrinate.  Education is a good thing if we do not substitute intelligence for education.  And, above all, we should never, ever, let intelligence and education replace our God-given, so uncommonly found, good sense; our street smarts.

"We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality."

-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955), theoretical physicist 

The Vietnam War was actually a "police action" that was followed by the "killing fields" of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or "Kampuchea" as it would later be called.  Cambodia would lose two million human souls to the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. One in five Cambodians would die under the slogan of the superior, racially pure Cambodians who would declare of these racially impure "new people" that, "To keep you is no benefit; to destroy you is no loss."  Sounds like a repeat of Nazi Germany, doesn't it?  Hitler tried to eliminate the Jewish "problem" through the deliberate killing of 12 million civilians, along with another 3 million Russian POWs.

But, before Hitler, Joseph Stalin forced a famine in Russia that eliminated 7 million people.  After Hitler, Mao Ze-Dong killed up to 78 million people in China and Tibet making Hitler look like an amateur. In the early 1990s, Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina racked up a nice tally of 800,000 and 200,000 respectively.  As of 2009, at least 2000 Falun Gong spiritual adherents have died in custody as a result of a Chinese crackdown to eliminate this peaceful religious practice.  And today we are faced with yet more horrific atrocities by the Islamic heretics of ISIS as they butcher women and children in the name of the Holy Qur'an, and Syria gassing its own people.  I'm sure Mohammad would be less than pleased at the misinterpretation of Islam by such heretics.

"The Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party, led by Xi Jinping from 2012–present, intensified antireligious campaigns in the country. In 2016, Xi called for "improved religious work" by uniting religious and non-religious people, and emphasizing that members of the Chinese Communist Party must act as "unyielding Marxist atheists".]

In September 2019, the UN Human Rights Council was told by the China Tribunal that the Government of China "is harvesting and selling organs from persecuted religious and ethnic minorities on an industrial scale". The tribunal concluded that religious and ethnic minorities are being “killed to order... cut open while still alive for their kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs, cornea, and skin to be removed and turned into commodities for sale”."

-- Wikipedia, "Antireligious campaigns of the Chinese Communist Party"

This is history.  It is the history we do not teach to our young and history we either rewrite for our students so we do not present the "ugly" side of humanity, or we blame on some innocuous event or decision to excuse ourselves from any culpability to the crime of lying about or misrepresenting historical events.  How about our culpability in compounding crime upon crime?

"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history"

-- George Orwell 

At every turn, it seems we try to deny and obliterate our understanding of history.  We intentionally set out to effectively destroy ourselves as a people.  Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), an author and visionary who foresaw much of what the future and science would have to offer, had this to say of intellectuals:

"The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred." 

 I hoped I would send my children to school for a better education than I had.  I hoped they would come away from the experience with a solid understanding of who we are and where we are going.  I wanted them to have teachers and not preachers.  I want my children to learn the truth, not someone else's version of it.  But then, even intelligent people with great educations get sucked into believing what they read in textbooks as if being called a textbook means it's been touched with the magic "truth" wand.  For instance, they've taken the history of the "war between the states" and rewritten the history of it; to the victor went the right to say what and how things happened -  truth, be damned.  I mean, for instance, does it occur to anyone that Lincoln was a Republican, or that the KKK were Southern Democrats?

In outright defiance of the Republican-led federal government, Southern Democrats formed organizations that violently intimidated blacks and Republicans who tried to win political power. The most prominent of these, the Ku Klux Klan, was formed in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865.

-- www.PBS.org, "Grant, Reconstruction, and the KKK"

Perhaps minorities would be better served to stop believing the hype fed to them by the very boot holding them down?  Following from that fudging of the facts, one might find it interesting that everyone in the U.S. thinks of Mississippi as the most racially divisive state in the country, yet racism seems to rear its ugly head everywhere but here.  In Mississippi, where 2/3 of voters are white and 1/3 are black, there are more black elected officials here than anywhere else in the nation.  Yet, here there be bigots?  The sordid racial history of the South may not be pleasant for some, especially Democrats who stoke the fire of divisiveness, but it is a history the South has learned from.  It is not some "dime novel" version of history taught in the North, but it is a history based on fact, not the victorious country's version of it.    The rest of the country seems content to suffer from the old quote, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

There will be no Ferguson, Missouri riots here.  Not if we can help it.  Perhaps we all need to take a step back and try thinking for ourselves instead of buying into books, films, mass media, and other rhetoric that fan those flames of racial strife by trying to make us all believe racism is growing and we have learned nothing.

Consider that the "practice" of medicine has been around for thousands of years.  Medical doctors still, to this day, only "practice" medicine.  Do you let them "practice" on you, or do you question what they do?  By the same token, if you hear there's an imbalance of white to black police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, do you assume the media is correct about racism running rampant, or do you see a black majority population (3 to 1), and assume someone isn't using their legal right to vote for more black officers and leadership?  Is this the fault of the country, community, or the individual?  Is this ignorance perpetrated by the leaders, the media, or by individuals who simply "go along to get along" until their own whining ignorance catches up and they have to blame the need to burn their neighborhood to the ground on racism instead of looking at history and embracing representatives that will actually, for once, try to do the right thing?  If you don't feel your community has moved forward in several decades or more, don't let a "free cell phone," or the color of a person's skin, buy your vote.  Try thinking for yourself.

Don't believe everything you read and hear just because some "learned" putz tells you to.  Try exercising your "smarts" and your uncommon good sense if your education and intelligence fail you.  Think for yourself and question the "facts" others are feeding you.  Ask yourself whose personal or political agenda you are buying into.  It seems to me, that well-educated people try to include as many others in their "tunnel vision" as possible.  It seems to give them credibility for those who don't think.  Most of us, with our uncommon good sense, tend to irritate those who think they're above us simply because they have a degree from an institution of higher education.  Maybe they don't understand that their "credibility" is so much bullshit and we want them to "put up or shut up" for us. 

Socialists keep wanting to overthrow our system of government.  I think they don't understand that socialist doctrine means so very little to patriots in this country who are actually trained to fire automatic weapons, torture and interrogate an enemy, and manage battlefield operations.  Do patriots really worry about a civil war? 

Maybe they do, but I'm betting we're all smarter than that.

"There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have."

-- Don Herold 

Note to the reader:  Here is a constant reminder to those of you who keep missing the point, even though I try to place it at the bottom of each post as shown in the "Editor's Note" below.  This post is an opinion.  It is only an opinion, it may not be even close to correct, and I may not truly believe the drivel I've written.  If you feel emotional about this post, please enlighten us with your opinion.  If you're emotional, you must have an opinion.  The fact that you disagree, agree, and have developed an opinion of your own, is exactly the point.  Without freedom of thought, constructive discussion, and debate, presented peacefully and without malice, we are doomed to anarchy -  loss of freedom, of country, and the rule of law.  You know... socialism.  Or, you can continue to buy into the League of the Perpetually Offended. It's the same thing. 

It is up to you.

Editor's Note

(Re: disclaimer cum "get out of jail free" card)

Before you go getting your panties in a bunch - it is essential to understand that this is just an opinion site and, as such, can be subjected to scrutiny by anyone with a differing opinion. It doesn't make either view any more right or wrong than the other. Opinion, presented in this context, is a way of inciting others to think and, hopefully, to form their own opinions, if they haven't already done so. This is also why, occasionally, I will present an "opinion" just to stir an emotional pot. Where it may sound like I agree with the statements made, I'm more interested in getting others to consider an alternate viewpoint.

I fervently hope that we keep open and active minds when reading opinions, and while engaging in peaceful and constructive discussion, in an arena of mutual respect, concerning those opinions offered. After twenty-three years of military intelligence, I believe that engaging each other in this manner, and in this arena, is a way we will learn tolerance and respect for differing beliefs, cultures, and viewpoints.

We all fall from grace, some more often than others; it is part of being human. God's test for us is what we learn from the experience... and what we do afterward.

Pastor Tony spent 22 years with United States Air Force Intelligence as a planner, analyst, briefer, instructor, and senior manager. Following his service career, he spent 17 years working with the premier and world-renowned Western Institutional Review Board, helping to protect the rights of human subjects involved in pharmaceutical research. He also served 8 years on the Board of Directors for the Angela J. Bowen Foundation.

Ordained 1n 2013 as an "interfaith" minister, he founded the Congregation for Religious Tolerance in response to intolerance shown by Christians toward peaceful Islam. As a weapon for his war on intolerance... he chose the pen. He wages his "battle" in the guise of the Congregation's official online blog, The Path, of which he is both author and editor. "The Path" offers a vehicle for commentary and guidance concerning one's personal, spiritual path toward peace and the final destination for us all. He resides in Pass Christian, Mississippi, where he volunteered as the lead chaplain at a regional medical center.

Feel free to contact Pastor Tony at: tolerantpastor@gmail.com