"In that promising land (England) the spirit of 'I’m as good as you' has already begun something more than a generally social influence. It begins to work itself into their educational system. How far its operations there have gone at the present moment, I should not like to say with certainty. Nor does it matter. Once you have grasped the tendency, you can easily predict its future developments; especially as we ourselves will play our part in the developing. The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.' These differences between pupils – for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences – must be disguised. This can be done at various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing things that children used to do in their spare time. Let, them, for example, make mud pies and call it modelling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have – I believe the English already use the phrase – 'parity of esteem.' An even more drastic scheme is not possible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma — Beelzebub, what a useful word! – by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval’s attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT.
In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when 'I’m as good as you' has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers – or should I say, nurses? – will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men. The little vermin themselves will do it for us.
Of course, this would not follow unless all education became state education. But it will. That is part of the same movement. Penal taxes, designed for that purpose, are liquidating the Middle Class, the class who were prepared to save and spend and make sacrifices in order to have their children privately educated. The removal of this class, besides linking up with the abolition of education, is, fortunately, an inevitable effect of the spirit that says 'I’m as good as you.' This was, after all, the social group which gave to the humans the overwhelming majority of their scientists, physicians, philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, composers, architects, jurists, and administrators. If ever there were a bunch of stalks that needed their tops knocked off, it was surely they. As an English politician remarked not long ago, 'A democracy does not want great men.'” - C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape Proposes a Toast
C.S. Lewis published these words on December 19, 1959. He foresaw the state of state education. "I'm as good as you" reduces the goal of education from setting minds free (liberal arts) to enslaving whole persons (indentured servitude).
While God would use education to help His people appreciate their freedom (Galatians 5:1), Satan would twist it to help people despise the freedom they're rejecting. Education energized by "I'm as good as you" produces disciples oriented in egalitarian nothingness. Egalitarianism seeks to remake the world in its own image -- without form and void, shapeless and substance-free. Rather than affirming the value of different shapes, they force everyone into one shape. The trick of diversity training is its insistence on sameness. God loves diversity and made two sexes, Satan hates diversity and seeks to eliminate their distinctions by insisting "one is as good as the other."
But this is obviously untrue. Men are better than women... at being men and women are better than men... at being women. It's always as if they were born with an advantage of sorts. Call it gender privilege. And that, as we all know and have been relentlessly told in our time, this unacceptable and intolerable. We are told that if were more tolerant, we would not be so insistent. But therein lies the snooker. In order to be considered tolerant by their standard, we must stop tolerating such insistent distinction and get with the uniformity program. Because if we don't, we're narrow-minded.
Poppycock!!!
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