From the Easy Chair

Education & Boredom

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 97-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BZ141

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BZ141, Education & Boredom, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 251, October the first, 1991.

This evening Otto Scott and Douglas Murray and myself are going to discuss education and boredom. Now that may seem like a curious juxtaposition of subjects. But things have happened, particularly I the lifetime of Otto and myself. I recall reading someone years ago when I was young. Otto, do you remember Harry Leone Wilson, his novels?

[ Scott ] I am to sure that I do. No. I don’t think so.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, he wrote a number of very popular novels, good stories. And I one of them which was filmed... Dorothy, what was the one about the English butler of a wealthy western family brought out?

[ D Rushdoony ] Ruggles of Redgath.

[ Scott ] Oh yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Ruggles of Redgath. Yes. That was one of his better known books.

[ Scott ] Yeah. That rings a bell.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Harry Leone Wilson wrote a book in which this young man who had just begun to rise up into the big leagues in business in New York was having dinner with a number of men who had it made. And one old man sitting next to him told him, he said, “now, you can have everything you want. And you will have melons out of season. They will be brought here especially for the kind of people you will now associate with. So there will be nothing you don’t want that won’t be supplied. There is one thing that is going to mark you life, boredom, because you are now I the world where there is no striving. You simply maintain your status.”

That may or may not be a good definition of boredom, but I never heard of children being bored when I was a boy. We had endless games that we played. Some of them I had forgotten the names of them and the rules because they have disappeared from the American scene. Games that boys played making the things with which they played, the sticks, the puck and everything else was home made.

[ Scott ] {?} Does anybody remember mumbly peg?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Yes. That is something out of the remote past, Otto. And the idea of anyone being bored was incredible. It was something that belonged, ala Harry Leone Wilson, to the very upper crust, as did charge accounts. Only the very wealthy had them. And there was not much entertainment in those days. The Saturday matinee, an lot of the boys went to that, but not regularly... that regularly. About the only thing that any of the boys listened to on radio was Amos and Andy and everybody listened to that.

[ Scott ] Well, the radio was something that I wasn’t allowed to touch.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. You didn’t touch it...

[multiple voices]

[ Scott ] That was only... that was only for your parents.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. But no one was bored. No one was bored.’

[ Scott ] Well, no boys.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, no boys were bored at any rate and the interesting thing to me was that either in the fourth or fifth grade all of the boys—I don’t remember what the girls had to write on—it was what I want to be when I grow up. You were expected to have some goal in mind.

I think it was the fourth grade and I said, since I was homesick at the time for the farm, we were in Detroit that I wanted to be a farmer and the teacher laughed. I was the best reader in the class and she said, “You will never be farmer.”

A year later I wanted to be an astronomer. But everyone in the class had some objective. First year of junior high we had to write a similar essay. Now nobody knows what they are going to be even in the university. It is a big problem on the university level of the counselors to try to direct the students into some channel for their future.

So education today not only doesn’t have the same direction, but it is accompanied by a great deal of boredom. Now my cousin with whom I grew up, Ed, was two years older than I. He went through high school. In grade school he read George Eliot and Charles Dickens and other things as a compulsory part of his course. It was a two teacher school, grades one through eight. And he was thoroughly literate and fairly well read. And he had no aspiration to be anything other than he was, a farmer. He served on various state and even national committees representing farm groups. He was never bored. Life was always interesting.

And yet today we have both a decline in the caliber of education so that we have according to federal statistics, 76 million functional illiterates and we have a vast amount of boredom. That is why I feel education and boredom are so closely related.

Otto, with that, do you want to make a general statement?

[ Scott ] Well, of course, as a boy, like you, I was a great reader. So being aloe was no problem.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] My brother was six years younger and he might just as well have been somewhere else on the planet because the distance in years was too much. But whenever I went out of the house we had lots of games. We... we kept ourselves very busy. I was only bored on Sunday when I had to stay home and that was only for brief parts of the afternoon. But there is something about being satiated with sensation. We have...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The... the kids today have got television which they begin to watch before they can talk. All these images and all the battle and sound that goes with it and then, of course, they have films and they have music which is loud for the generation of their parents. They are surrounded with a sensation to such an extent from such an early age that I am not sure that it doesn't do something destructive toward the imagination, because there is nothing that they can add to what they see. I remember that when I did reach the age where I could turn the radio on and listen to the radio, there was a great deal of your own imagination involved in what you heard. You visualized or though you could visualize. You involuntarily began to visualize people associated with a certain timber of voice and so forth. And the stories that were told compelled you to create a mental image. That is not present anymore. And I am not sure that any of the physiologists or psychologists have really paid any attention to what all this extra personal sensation is doing to the individual. But it might have something to do with the point you raise about boredom among children.

Not to say, of course, that the kind of schools and teachers they go to are inherently boring, but they are trying to tell them things which make your stomach turn over because they are so obviously impersonal and false.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They are telling you, they are telling the kids that they have to like everybody and that, of course, means that they can’t even human begins, because you have a perfect God given right to like or dislike whatever. It comes involuntarily. They are telling them all sorts of things which turn them off. And I notice when my daughter as sent to public school, when we moved out here from Kentucky, within a few months, within about three months I began to see the light go down. She began to diminish right before my eyes. I had to take her out of that and put her in a private school. They do something. They are doing something to kids in the schools we have today that is very bad.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And nobody seems to be concerned about it. They are only concerned about the grades and the examinations, but when you turn the light off for all these millions of people, you are doing something worse than betraying their educational hopes. You are doing something damaging.

[ Rushdoony ] Douglas?

[ Murray ] Well, looking at my own experience raising my own two sons, we lived down in the San Francisco bay area and one of the things that I was struck by was when the kids were in grade school they were both smart, good readers and they were taken from the rest of the group and put into what the school called a mentally gifted minor program. Now we didn’t consider that our kids were mentally gifted minors. They were simply convinced that it was necessary for them to make a real effort. We didn’t encourage them to think of themselves as different. But we had school psychologists called us in and told us that our kids were going to be social misfits, because they read, they were able to hour long dissertations on astronomy, on various subjects hat they happened to be interested in at the time. And kids go through phases as you mentioned before of interest in astronomy, interest in this, that and the other. And they latch on to something and they will stick with it for a while until they want to move on to a different subject. Our kids were no different.

But the idea of taking the kids out of the main group and holding them up as some kind of a pace horse made them feel like they were above and on the head of a pin. And I could see immediately that they wanted to hunch down in their chairs and ... because there was peer pressure there, because they were, quote, different. And...

[ Scott ] Who were they going to be misfitting with?

[ Murray ] It is... it is... misfitting probably was the school administrators because they wanted everybody to be at the same level. You know, there is a mindset... I have heard school administrators use the term in ... in describing the school as a plant, like a factory, like a manufacturing concern where they take these blobs of...

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ...protoplasm in and they form them like ....

[ Scott ] Shape them.

[ Murray ] ...like lumps of clay.

[ Scott ] Turn out widgets. Michael widge...

[ Murray ] Exactly.

[ Scott ] {?} widget.

[ Murray ] And they all come out knowing the same which is very well and unable to think of themselves and very little if any problem solving ability. And yet these same administrators get up in front of audiences and say, “We don’t have kids that can solve problems anymore.” And yet they don’t seem to be able to see the process where they are destroying this ability.

[ Scott ] Well, then Rush and I, if we had been born 50 year later, maybe more than that, would not have done so well in these schools.

[ Rushdoony ] No. No.

[ Murray ] Well it is a different thing going. You have got kids who are now spectators instead of participants in life.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] They are encouraged to be spectators, to sit in front of television sets, to go to a sports events ... they are not encouraged to participate because they might hurt themselves, but they are encouraged to go to sports events as a spectator. And this starts very early on. And the message is implanted very early.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I think I have told this story before, but it is such a telling story, I think it bears repeating. One of the closest friends I had in my ... well, the closest friends I had in my university days were Bert and Dorothy Eaves, a young couple. He became one of the co inventors or naval radar. But in the 50s when they were living on the peninsula Dorothy had a call form the school asking her to go there because there was a problem with regard to her son Daniel. He was clearly a social deviate. And she all but fell apart as she hung up and thought, maybe I should have asked for more. And she said it is a miracle that she got to the school without an accident. She was shaking so.

And she went to the principal’s office and what did Daniel’s social deviate status came from? Well, during recess, Daniel, who was a very healthy, normal, all American boy would take a book and sit on a bench rather than join in the play because he was more interested in the story than in fooling around on the playground.

Of course Dorothy exploded over that and really ticked off the counselor and the principal. But that is the kind of attitude that began in the 50s and now governs the schools and so we are turning out student rebels in the 60s who all dressed alike, talked alike and thought they were non conformists. And in some way every since then no conformity has become a student creed in... of the most rigid sort of conformity.

[ Scott ] Yeah, it is group non conformity.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Non conformity to their parents’ will.

[ Scott ] Ah, that is a big point.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That is a big point.

[ Rushdoony ] Everything else except that.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Now I am sure that boredom has occurred at other times in history. But looking back the clear cut, the very obvious example was Rome. The Roma writers, the degenerate writers were all bored people. They were people who were experimenting with every kind of sex including homosexuality, who left nothing outside the range of human experience that they didn’t toy with. And they were continually bored and whining and complaining.

[ Scott ] Well this has been true since Rome and before Rome on the top. What we are talking about is boredom on the bottom.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And that is something entirely different.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] A... a... a society can endure ridiculous behavior on the top because the bottom supports the whole thing. The infrastructure continues. Life goes on. But ordinary people who have two things. They have very busy lives and very boring lives. Going back to the ... the question of how much do you retain from your education? Now for reasons I have never been able to understand you can remember what you read.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I seem to remember...

[ Scott ] You can remember what you read. Sometimes you can remember it explicitly and... but you can’t remember a film explicitly. You can remember snatches and a few pieces of dialog, but... and the overall impression, but you can’t remember the movie. And you can’t... some people might be able to remember music. I have met a few people who could, who could hear a tune once and knew it immediately, but generally speaking you have to hear it a good... a good number of times. What I am saying is that the audio visual entertainment, the audio visuals educational method that is being used today does not leave anything permanent in the mind of the kids. They are coming out and they are coming out empty. And they are turned off on the reading as I was turned off for a great many years on poetry as a boy. They spent six months on one little short poem when I was a boy and I was ready to murder the teacher before if she didn’t stop talking about it. Every word had to be analyzed and it was an obvious word. It didn't need to be analyzed.

Well, they are doing that on a larger scale with reading across the board. They are making reading a punishment. I noticed my daughter brought home enormous amount of homework form every student and every teacher I every course, made work. By making work, the teacher elevated what he was pretending to teach. But most of the work was nonsensical work. It was detail stuff. I didn’t have that sort of homework and neither did you. I could have... I handled my homework in an hour or so in the evening at that much, no problem.

[ Murray ] Let me ask you since both you men are a generation ahead of me. Can you remember in your early years this thrill seeking syndrome of people jumping over gorges on bungee cords seeing how close they can come to the rocks and not smash themselves? Or people jumping out of airplanes in parachutes just for fun?

[ Scott ] Yes. On the...

[ Murray ] Out of a... out of a perfectly good airplane?

[ Scott ] On the top. If you had a great deal of money, if you were raised to great wealth—and I have known boys... I knew boys and young men who did. By the time you are fairly advanced in your teens you will have experienced all sorts of things. And then you look for something else. And I the final analysis if you can get everything you need and everything you want, the only thing that remains is danger. So therefore the wealthy in Venezuela would hunt jaguar with Indians. The Indians would beat the jaguar to you and you were to catch the jaguar on a spear, on a spear, not with a gun. That was considered cowardly. And I remember that John Shaheen who was in the O S S told me that there were several types of people in they O S S in World War II. There were the cryptograph types, the one who could solve puzzles and the technicians, egg heads, really. Then there were the... the ones who had actual experience in espionage and double dealing, the Communists. There were a good number of those. And then there were the wealthy like John Ringling North and others. I remember there was one in the Biddle family who was an expert in hand to hand combat. He was a man in his 60s and they didn’t believe him. So they surrounded him with some young marines and he put them all on the floor in just a few seconds, a few minutes. And so they put him in.

And so danger, yes. But what you are talking about is middle class kids who are living the way wealthy people lived a generation, to generations ago.

[ Rushdoony ] That was the same boredom. Well, I can recall that the kind of thing that exited kids was not something that was a media event which you may recall somebody going over the Niagara Falls in a barrel. I don’t remember whether he lived or died.

[ Scott ] Oh, a number of them did, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. That didn’t interest the kids. Seeing Babe Ruth hit a home run did.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And Lindbergh, of course...

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] ...being the first to fly across the Atlantic. That was exciting. Everybody read his book We.

[ Scott ] The only time newspaper was allowed in my classroom was the morning after he landed in Paris. The teacher had newspapers.

[ Murray ] These men were heroes.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes.

[ Murray ] In their own time.

[ Scott ] Oh, very definitely.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Absolutely.

[ Murray ] Today’s generation has no heroes except anti heroes.

[ Scott ] We had heroes and it was very important. And, of course, we were all going to be heroes, too.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the whole of the educational pattern was this in my day and I the schools I attended. Every classroom had its own library. You could bring your own books, put your name I them.

[ Scott ] We didn’t do that.

[ Rushdoony ] And there was... there was a period in each day when you could go and take a book off the shelf, read it during that period and take it home over night. And no one ever failed to bring the book back. Never did it happen. So we were all encouraged to read and expected to read.

These were boys’ books, girls’ books. They were all the way from Tom Swift to Louisa May Alcott and that sort of thing, Peck’s bad boy and...

[ Scott ] Peck’s bad boy and your school?

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yeah.

[ Scott ] I found that on my own. I was delighted with it. It has been banned for years. So there was a great deal of that and I was privileged in that both in grade school and I high school I had two men who taught poetry and taught it powerfully. I can still recall the one tall, lanky man in grade school reciting Shakespeare by the page. And when there would be a Shakespeare play to see groups of us from a classroom would go with him so that out of a class of 45 maybe 25 or 30 would go of us on a single occasion. Different ones in different occasions. And we relished it. In fact, I recall one man whom we went to see who dramatized Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities. He was the only actor.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Played all the parts. And to this day I can recall vividly everything. I can almost see him being executed as he put his head on an imaginary block so that I was very privileged in that regard. And in high school I had another teacher who is still living, 90 years old and a good friend. So I learned to relish poetry from them as well as reading in general.’

[ Scott ] Well, I didn’t. I had to pick it up later.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] However, I did see a lot of theater when I was young. But going back to the boredom. According to the literature of the period, there was general boredom in Europe before World War I.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Especially, say, from 1880 or so until 1914. So the war was greeted with jubilation by the young men and young women and so forth of England, Germany, France, Italy and what not. They had lived such button downed lives, such regulated lives that they thought of the war as a great adventure.

[ Murray ] Well, you know, many veterans say the same thing, that that was the high point in their life. In the sunset of their life they will look back to their war experience and everything else pales by comparison to that.

Well, I wanted to say that I think that reading leaves a deeper impression on mind, following up Otto’s previous remark. And it think it has something to do with the way brain functions physiologically. We have heard the ... the term used I describing the visual arts like television and films as being, quotes, chewing gum for the mind. In other words, it is just a pastime. It is not something that you really involve yourself in, become a part of where as you become involved in a book and you... you live in that book for the period of time that you are reading. And I think it has something to do with the fact that more faculties in the brain are involved in creating your own pictures in the mind. In other words, your imagination when you re reading the book—and this is the reason that it leaves a deeper impression.

[ Scott ] Well, there is participation. But I notice along the same lines or similar lines that young people today don’t seem to have the expressiveness that our generation had. I ... I look at them and I smile and I say hello and they give me a dead face. And very often they don’t reply. And this is true of young clerks in the stores. They don't’ say thank you. They don’t say anything. They are absolutely wooden.

[ Rushdoony ] That deadness came out last week in this city of 11,000 in Colorado near Denver, a well to do community when five high school students took exception to seeing a young soldier newly home father of twins, a year old. And they beat him to death while 30 other high school students watched.

[ Scott ] What had he done?

[ Rushdoony ] Nothing. They just decided they didn’t like the looks of his uniform, a handsome young fellow and beat him to death. And their only excuse was they were bored. All of them were bored and this was some excitement.

This is why boredom is dangerous and education today is productive of boredom because it leads to a feeling of, well, they are dead. And they can kill without feeling anything.

[ Scott ] Well, of course that even, in part, a product of the Roman game thing where they see so many imitation, clever imitation murders and so much Sadism and so forth, they reach the point where an actual person is no more than a three dimensional image. Of course, the... the whole thing of adolescent males going berserk is as old as the Bible. Who was it? One of the prophets who was pursued by such a man and then the Lord sent the bears after him.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And so even then this has been known throughout the world, throughout history that the most dangerous of all members of the population are young males.

[ Rushdoony ] And that was shortly before the fall of Israel. So it is a sign of the end.

[ Scott ] Well it is a crime. It is always a sign of a weak government and a weak society, especially brutal, sadistic crimes. These marked the Renaissance.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Yes.

[ Scott ] But going back to the boredom before World War I, now the post Victorian period is an interesting period. Or not... I wouldn’t say post. The late Victorian period, because they had lost their faith, but they had not lost the façade of the faith. So the rules were still in place, but the essence was gone.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And, of course, the is nothing more miserable than to obey the rules when you don’t believe in them. I don’t care what kind of rules.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] If you don’t believe in them, then it is real torture.

[ Rushdoony ] I recall in the mid 30s a girl at the university telling me she had gone home and told her grandmother who was English what they had been told I class in a history class about the characteristics of the Victorian era. And she laughed. She said, “Child, that was when I grew up.” And she went on to say that the 30s were a very moral era compared to the Victorian. She said people maintained a façade of morality and Christianity, but there is more real Christianity and morality today than there was then.

[ Scott ] That was in the 30s.

[ Rushdoony ] That was in the 30s and in San Francisco.

[ Murray ] So it takes adversity to bring that kind of behavior back.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Oh, that is true of all of us individually. I mean, when times are tough we behave better, yes. You have to. But the World War I collapse, the spiritual collapse before there was a physical collapse.

[ Rushdoony ] We had a delayed reaction to it. Briefly in the 20s but it was not until after World War II that we began to experience what Douglas said characterized Europe before World War I.

[ Scott ] What did he say?

[ Rushdoony ] Boredom.

[ Scott ] Boredom? I just said that.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, you said it. Yes. Well, you both said it, I think, because Douglas mentioned that the soldiers were...

[ Scott ] The soldiers were talking about the war being the high point of their lives.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Now the interesting thing is that the first word, perhaps, to express this boredom came from France, ennui, E N N U I.

[ Scott ] Well, we use it, like we adopted the word malaise.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And ennui also, because it wasn’t a common condition here.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now I will admit that I am not at all... I don’t at all understand what happened to the United States after World War II. We won the war. And we did not suffer so much in the war as any other country. Yugoslavia lost two million people. We could not have the kind of a terrible war... only a few, let’s put it that way, a minority of the American troops had a terrible war. Most terrible war we had was the troops in the Pacific. And they have never been fully credited for the terrible experiences that they had.

[ Rushdoony ] That is true.

[ Scott ] And it was a ghastly war against the Japanese. And afterwards the country instead of experiencing a big depression, there was a couple of tough years in the late 40s, but the 50s were a good generation and a good decade. I do not understand. A friend of mine told me that the Dick Van Dyke show has been revised on television and that she saw the first revival of it last night, cable television. And she said she enjoyed it. It was funny. The people were well dressed and good looking and handsome and the dialogue was ... was amusing. And that after it was finished she almost wept because she compared it with the condition of this country today. Will the filth, these obscene, blasphemous individuals who are paraded as comedians and with this horrible entertainment we have today? And she said she couldn’t... in 30 years how have we fallen.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, of course, a lot of that can be laid at the door of John Dewey and progressive education. And Eugen Rosentock Heussey and his book The Christian Future declared that John Dewey represented the Chinafication of the United States, reducing everything to relative terms just as in China the yin yang philosophy says that there is no truth. All things are relative. And it is a question of what is fitting at a particular point.

So Dewey’s pragmatism set forth the same philosophy and that is why Dewey was so immensely popular when he went to lecture in the 20s in China. And the Chinese found his thinking of indication of their own basic premises. So Dewey reduced everything to relative standards.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, what impresses me is much wider than the educational establishment. When I was a boy my teachers didn’t have total control over my mind. I didn’t always respect them and I didn’t always agree with what they told me. For one thing I did a great deal of reading outside the school. For another thing my family background was unique and we came from a broader perspective than most of the teachers. Teachers, after all, usually came from a working class group who considered white collar teaching a step up and they... outside of their subjects there really wasn’t much learned from them. But I any event I didn’t sit there like some empty vessel waiting to be filled with wisdom. And I don’t believe that even today they create children who accept everything they are told in the school. You use them, as a matte of fact, with expressions of contempt and rebellion, disorderly behavior of a sort that you and I never experienced and never dreamed would happen, but I am reminded of Dickens’ description of the young school master that Steerforth led the boys into rebelling against. Do you remember that?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes?

[ Scott ] In... in... in David Copperfield. And I remember when I read it I was shocked to think that boys would behave that way to the teacher.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Because although I didn’t always respect the teacher, I always behaved politely.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] On your remark regarding Dewey’s Chinafication, I think there is another thread there that goes to the Japanese culture. They have a saying that the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. We seem to have that working here in the United States education...’

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Because no one now is allowed to fail. Even if they are failing they are not even allowed that luxury of starting over again knowing where the point of beginning is to get up off the floor and start over again. And no one is allowed to really excel, to stand up above the crowd.

[ Scott ] It is like they are disorderly.

[ Murray ] Well...

[ Scott ] They are... they are disorderly.

[ Murray ] There is nothing else to do when they are kept in that narrow channel.

[ Scott ] So they must be bored.

[ Murray ] Exactly.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, if you have looked at any modern text books you can understand why they are bored. The modern textbook has illustrations and the use of color such as we never saw. But its contents are the most boring things imaginable.

[ Scott ] To a literary mind. Now apparently in the ... on the college level and perhaps also the high school, I don’t know, those that go into the hard sciences have a different experience. The scientific education is a specialized education so they are immediately cut off from everything else and they are taught scientific a paradigm. And within that paradigm they stay for the rest of their career, their working career.

They don’t have to read books. They don’t have to understand the history of science, because it is not taught to them. They are taught only the conclusions of science or so they bing, bing, bing. This is it. This is the state of the art. And they come out apolitical because they are unlearned in all that area. They have no loyalty to the corporation. I know this. They are only loyal to... to the particular sub specialty that they are involved in. But I notice within interest that a great many of the graduates are flocking into the churches, into the reformed churches in particular, because they are looking for something that science doesn't give them. Now we don’t see a read, at least, about disorders in the scientific schools and colleges. It is only in the humanities.

[ Murray ] Well, they want to answer that age old question like Peggy Lee’s popular song Is that all There is? They are beginning to ask themselves the question. Is this all there is? They are looking for an another answer.

[ Scott ] That is the reason they are going out of the churches.

[ Murray ] Exactly.

[ Scott ] But it is also the reason that they are tractable, because they are learning something that is immediately and specifically useful.

[ Rushdoony ] In the days of the early Church the thing that drew people into the Church was getting married and getting pregnant. And the young mother would immediately begin to say to his self, “What a horrible and depraved world to brig up a child in?” She would look around at the homosexuals, the transvestites, and so on and she would tell her husband, “There has got to be something better.” And they would get involved in a Bible study group. And this was one of the key factors. Suddenly meaning was all important for them.

[ Scott ] The recreation of the family.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] This decline in reading, I think, started back in the 50s. I know when I was... I started high school about 1950 and even during grade school, during World War II the visual arts was the big buzz word in the public school system in San Francisco. And everybody thought it was just a way for the teacher to go in the back of the class and go to sleep while the class was watching a film. But I think that was the point in my lifetime where kids became spectators instead of participants. Instead of having discussion groups...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Instead of having debating groups, there were no such things from that period of time on in the public schools.

[ Rushdoony ] That brings up an interesting point. When I was in high school in a farm town one of the big things was the debating group, the debating team.

[ Scott ] Do they still have them?

[ Rushdoony ] I don’t think so. If they do it is a relatively minor thing.

[ Scott ] It could be a big thing.

[ Rushdoony ] It used to be a big thing and to be on the debating team was a matter of prestige on campus.

[ Scott ] Sure.

[ Rushdoony ] And you had more prestige if you were a good debater than if you were a top baseball or football player.

[ Scott ] That wasn’t true at the high school I went to.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, it was because the farm families were all immigrants. There were only two or three families I knew of in the entire Kings Brook area where English was the language spoken at home. And so to be so literate that you could march off arguments, come up with responses spontaneously was highly prized and it was respected.

[ Scott ] Well, obviously it was an idyllic city and an idyllic town.

[ Rushdoony ] No. It was just a special condition because everybody wanted their children to get ahead in a particular way whereas in a more American community they wouldn’t have felt the same way.

[ Scott ] How do you know? You didn’t grow up in a typical American community.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I was in Detroit also part of the time in the 20s. But debating wasn’t anything...

[ Scott ] It was a big thing in the high school I went to...

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Scott ] ...but it wasn’t as big as football or baseball.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I played the football, tried to play baseball and I was on the debating team as a second stringer, but that was very big then, very big.

[ Murray ] Well our local high school, you take a look at the school paper and 99 percent of it is devoted to sports. About half of it is football and the rest of it is the other sports. The kids who excel in academically they are given no space at all. Of course, you know, at the end of the semester they will say, “Well, we have certain number of kids that have a 4.0 grade point average,” but they don’t say what the subjects were, what they are going to do when they get out of school, whether or not they are going to go to college. There is no background. There is no credit given them for having achieved academically. They sort of hold them out as a kewpie doll that, yes, we ca produce people that can get a 4.0 grade point average, but our... really our main interest, the message in the school paper that really our main interest is producing potential candidates for professional football teams.

[multiple voices]

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Scott ] The high school that I went to had a ... a terrible habit of putting on the bulletin board everybody’s scores, everybody’s grades. And it was an honor roll. And quite considerable, quite considerable honors were given to those who had the highest grades. So obviously all the schools have slipped in that respect.

[ Murray ] Well, the published them in the local newspapers, the grade point averages. But it is not I the school paper and there is a difference. In other words, the ... the appreciation for academic excellence is not among the peers. It is a community achievement.

[ Scott ] Oh, well, that is a different subject. As to what the other boys thought, that is entirely different.

[ Rushdoony ] Douglas, this may still have been true in your day, but in the mid 30s when I was going to Berkeley and living in San Francisco, there were sizable colonies in San Francisco of Irish and Italians. And if you had a particular grade point average you went to Lowell High School.

[ Murray ] I remember that.

[ Rushdoony ] And it was a great matte of pride with the various ethnic groups. How many boys or girls they had in Lowell High School. And the various high schools were all rated in terms of their academic standards. So you worked and you parents put pressure on you if you came from one of these minority groups to make it to Lowell. So it lasted even to the early 50s. I know I asked somebody about it in... from San Francisco a while back and they looked at me blankly.

[ Murray ] Well, it was still there, because ... and, of course, the University of California. That was the next goal.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] That was the next rung up the ladder. And I grew up I San Francisco which is probably one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. And you could ... you could... you go that message. When you went to someone’s house and they had children in school you didn’t waste that kid’s time. In other words, they weren’t ... if you were over there... weren’t over there to play, you were there to... to do homework or to do study. And it was very apparent that the parents were putting pressure on the kids to make it either into Lowell or with the idea in the future of going on to the University of California. But that is gone now.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, in those days if you were a Berkeley or a Stanford student, it was a little more important to say, “I came from Lowell.”

[ Murray ] Oh, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Just as Howard, if you were from the Boston Latin School that meant you were the cream of the cream.

[ Murray ] Well, you were a shoe in to get into Cal, because the final exam, for instance, in English at Lowell was the subject A entrance exam to the University of California. So you didn’t have to take the subject A English exam when you applied to go to Cal. You were just accepted automatically.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] They gave you credit for it.

[ Scott ] Well, New York has never been known as a non competitive place. I don’t think there is a city in the country that is as... any more competitive than New York. And in ... when I did go to school there, the regents examinations were...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...automatic college acceptance anywhere in the country.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. They were highly regarded.

[ Scott ] I passed them when I was 13.

[ Rushdoony ] From coast to coast the regents examinations of New York State were highly regarded.

[ Scott ] So...

[ Rushdoony ] But all that sort of standard is gone now...

[ Scott ] Yes it is.

[ Rushdoony ] ...in every city and state.

[ Scott ] And apparently... apparently it is gone. But we keep reading about the Asian students working hard, getting in. And I think the first generation of immigrants worked the hardest.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] After that there is no need to work hard so they ... their children don’t. And it is something like De Young when he was running Goodyear he said his... his father was a hot carrier. He was a hot carrier. His father was a... a... was a drunken superintendent. And De Young worked his way up and became CEO of Goodyear. He said he was worried about his son because his son didn’t seem to show the same kind of drive.

I said, “Well, he had a different father.”

[ Rushdoony ] Very well put, very well put. There was such a pride in San Francisco among the ethnic groups if their son or daughter made it to Lowell.

[ Scott ] But there was a need. There was a crying need. And a ... the children filled the need.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Because the children felt the need. And it really is not quite an accurate comparison or a fair comparison to compare it with families that have been in better circumstances for a longer period.

[ Rushdoony ] However, the whole point of education is changed. Then your child went to school because you expected him to get ahead in life. Now he goes to school automatically and not much attention is paid as to whether or not he does his homework.

[ Scott ] Well, that I don’t know anything about. I don’t know what these young parents today do. I... I they themselves, not having much of an education, although in many cases they have even got graduate degrees.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] You run into his paradox of an individual who has been exposed to education for a long period of time, gone to fairly prestigious schools and who can’t carry on a conversation.

But on the other hand when you interview them in specifics of their work, they very often are very intelligent.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] You... but you have got engineers who can’t write a report.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] They have to have someone assigned to them specifically to tell management what they are accomplishing with the money that they are spending.

[ Scott ] So what we are really talking about is literacy.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, today Christian schools find that as fifth, sixth, seventh graders come to them they are illiterate.

[ Scott ] How do they get to the seventh grade?

[ Murray ] Nobody fails.

[ Rushdoony ] They are automatically...

[ Scott ] Automatically...

[ Rushdoony ] ...passed. And it takes that long for the parents to find out. Now I don’t believe any foreign family or any American family 50 and 75 years ago would have ...

[ Scott ] No, they are...

[ Rushdoony ] They would have known.

[ Scott ] I have parents... I have parents around me like a couple of hornets.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, with that, with Otto’s parents on him like a couple of hornets we will have to conclude this particular session on education and boredom. Thank you all for listening.

[ Voice ] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.