Charter Schools: Individualism Versus the New Zealand School Curriculum.

… it became evident that the only historical revolution with any verve left in it, or any example to offer others, was the American one.

Christopher Hitchens: Hitch-22

Even if charter schools prove to produce no better educational outcomes in reading, writing and arithmetic, they are essential philosophically because they represent what is quickly becoming a revolutionary concept in the West: individual, individually tailored, free choice.

The concept of individualism, on which classical liberalism is built, can broadly be separated into two parts; constitutional-political, and creative-entrepreneurial, and traced back to two antecedents, in the form of those only two revolutions, first of the mind, and then as Hitchen’s reminds us, of the people, that left long-lasting good. From the seventeenth century that questioning by free men of every edict and every authority that is known to us as the Enlightenment, which raised man up by his reason and threw off the shackles of tyrants - albeit the French took it a tad too far; and from the eighteenth century, that remarkable good flowing from the American revolution, which President Obama is currently printing, borrowing and spending the final breath from. Both these revolutions had led to that economic system of individualism, laissez faire capitalism, that raised the living standards for those of us living in the West to such a height it appears to have produced its own demise in the form of pampered humans who are destroying every principle gained by the blood of free men to replicate the rotten principles and evil ethic of those alternate revolutions of forced altruism in Russia and China which in enforcing equality, fairness, and social justice, missed them entirely, and caused only enslavement, death, and human misery.

Over and over, the importance of individualism as the foundation of a free and peaceful society, must be reiterated against the dictates of those choice-destroyers in our mobocracy who would force us to be sacrificed to the(ir) common good: a conceptual individualism is why we once had the freedoms being daily legislated away from us in Wellingrad.

(1) Constitutional individualism in the political sphere.

I simply quote a previous post:

… the common good has been the battle cry of almost every tyrant throughout history. The common good has been so important, apparently, that hundreds of millions of individuals over the twentieth century had to be exterminated or killed by the state for it. We should have learned from the resulting bloodbath that rights cannot attach to a collective, and when you try to, you open the gates to tyranny and atrocity. That same common good is currently being used in Christchurch to usurp private property rights on a breath-taking scale. Just as the common good is used as the excuse to steal the property and effort of productive individuals while making those individuals victims to a department of state with literally the powers of the Orwellian police state. To be meaningful, and cause no harm through the fist of state, rights can and must only attach to individuals. A society must only base itself on protecting the smallest minority: the rights and property of an individual (especially from the abuse of state).

In this way we have a constitutional individualism won in the American Revolution, in contradistinction to those gulags such as the Soviets had to endure, where law-making was the legal enactment of the common good – noting that planned totalitarian menace is what our social democracies are slowly devolving down to: regulation, tax, plain packaging; the sacrifice of our liberty to the needs of complete strangers, to whom our free will is first bent, then taken from us.

(2) Individualism as Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

A laissez faire capitalist economy, and therefore our standard of living, turns on entrepreneurial innovation; the same human impulse of artistic creativity which provides a depth of meaning to our existence. By individualistic creativity I don’t mean, in this instance, wanton, emoting self-expression; many of the brats I see could do with a deal less of that, and a bit more discipline; save me from, as Harold Rosenberg aptly termed it, ‘the herd of independent minds’, but rather as George Orwell, well versed in the ways of the police state, said:

... Modern literature is essentially an individual thing. It is either the truthful expression of what one man thinks and feels, or it is nothing. As I say, we take this notion for granted, and yet as soon as one puts it into words one realizes how literature is menaced. For this is the age of the totalitarian state, which does not and probably cannot allow the individual any freedom whatever. When one mentions totalitarianism one thinks immediately of Germany, Russia, Italy, but I think one must face the risk that this phenomenon is going to be world-wide. It is obvious that the period of free capitalism is coming to an end and that one country after another is adopting a centralized economy that one can call Socialism or state capitalism according as one prefers. With that the economic liberty of the individual, and to a great extent his liberty to do what he likes, to choose his own work, to move to and fro across the surface of the earth, comes to an end. Now, till recently the implications of this were not foreseen. It was never fully realized that the disappearance of economic liberty would have any effect on intellectual liberty. Socialism was usually thought of as a sort of moralized liberalism. The state would take charge of your economic life and set you free from the fear of poverty, unemployment and so forth, but it would have no need to interfere with your private intellectual life. Art could flourish just as it had done in the liberal-capitalist age, only a little more so, because the artist would not any longer be under economic compulsions. Now, on the existing evidence, one must admit that these ideas have been falsified.

Literature and Totalitarianism.

Unfortunately all is gone. A constitutional individualism has been suffocated by bleeding heart collectivism, and creativity and innovation are being lost to a writer’s block of bureaucracy, taxation and ‘you must do this, you must wear this, you mustn’t smoke that, better tax that it’s not good for you, no don’t take that risk dear, the taxpayer shouldn’t bear the cost if it, this women with the IQ of a rabbit has ten kids you have to look after them …’

And at the root of it, explanation for why this essential, civilising ethic of individualism, and classical liberalism, have been defeated in New Zealand, as it has in the West, is that the minds of our young are captured, each generation, by those foot soldiers of bounded-liberty, teachers, 95% of whom are signed up Borg of the PPTA, impaling us all on that confounded founding document of statism, the New Zealand School Curriculum. I quote:

Values

To be encouraged, modelled, and explored

Values are deeply held beliefs about what is important or desirable. They are expressed through the ways in which people think and act.

Every decision relating to curriculum and every interaction that takes place in a school reflects the values of the individuals involved and the collective values of the institution.

[Snip]

Students will be encouraged to value:

• equity, through fairness and social justice
• community and participation for the common good.

 

There it goes: direct from the Soviet Union and into our curriculum, written in the blood of those shot trying to scale that bloodied wall between East and West Berlin, or otherwise trying to escape their grey, plain packaged lives behind the Iron Curtain. Whereas individual based law promotes a peaceful freedom and prosperity, laws around the common good always devolve to a slavery forced violently – just look at the Tax Administration Act if you want proof of this.

Too many of the Arrogance of Altruists in the Fortress of Legislation whom think they have a mob’s sanction to rule over me, of those who fill our bureaucracies, and finally the PPTA, a union conducting an all-out campaign with my tax money – because that’s where teachers wages come from -  to deny parents the choice of charter schools in order they keep their monopoly of a child’s mind, grew up with this group-think taught to them, as they now teach it: and there are not enough left questioning the evil at the heart of it, as the flame of the Enlightenment is extinguished in more complete a sense than Hitler, Stalin et al ever managed, because it’s been hard wired onto each child’s mind, and people now take sacrifice of everything good in the pursuit of happiness, to the bloodied altar of the common good, as axiomatic. Per by blog by-line, Gramsci won, and turning it back one mind at a time is not enough, the western state lurches ever more quickly toward planned lives, not free ones.

So liberty is lost in this unenlightened age, though regardless, to the PPTA I say, no one has said charter schools are to be compulsory, they will exist alongside the state school system, so if your ethic is worthy, the teachers you represent so needed and consented to by parents, then you don't need the force of government to defend yourselves against the competition of ideas represented by the choice that parents will have with charter schools. Why are you so against choice and the voluntary society?

Charter schools must exist, and only as the first rear guard action in the dismantling of the state. If I have a complaint, in every piece of literature I read on them, I keep seeing a charter school is still a partnership with the State … we need to grow up way beyond that, for as W. Hayden Boyers writes of the common good, look what we have done to ourselves (hat tip Café Hayek):

Unquestionably, simple out-and-out plunder is so clearly unjust as to be repugnant to us; but, thanks to the motto, all for one, we can allay our qualms of conscience.  We impose on others the duty of working for us.  Then, we arrogate to ourselves the right to enjoy the fruits of other men’s labor.  We call upon the state, the law, to enforce our so-called duty, to protect our so-called right, and we end in the fantastic situation of robbing one another in the name of brotherhood.  We live at other men’s expense, and then call ourselves heroically self-sacrificing for so doing.

The Media & Hekia Parata: Christchurch School Closures

This is not a post about the Christchurch school closures, indeed, because I’m against state education given the New Zealand Curriculum Document has for a long time been our founding document of statism (the middle paragraph of my blog by-line above shows the disaster of this), I don’t think we need a Minister of Education. Putting that to one side, this post concerns the infantile behaviour of the mainstream media, and how badly served we are by it.

Ele Ludemann has put a good post up about the School Closures this morning, all I want to put on this post is the comment I put on her post – well, amended to what I wished I’d said originally:

I’m growing respect for Hekia Parata ... And as for the newscasters, John Campbell last night, and I see Rachel Smalley this morning, trying to brow-beat [the Minister] to extract a ‘sorry’ from her, that’s infantile, and not the role of media, which is to extract the relevant information and present it to me. News broadcasting is not a confessional; by trying to get a sorry, you’re putting yourselves in the role of some sort of moral arbiter of morality proper: the minster is doing her job, with 95% of teachers signed up to the teacher union, she’s never going to do anything they agree with and they’ll politicise every damned thing, and you are pandering to that, giving you the look of having an agenda (the PPTA’s – so do I now need to view charter school reporting by you through a filter?); you’re newscasters, stick to reading from the prompter, and please bugger off with the emoting nonsense, or put it on your blogs.

Fran O’Sullivan, Youth Unemployment & Another War in the Pacific.

Fran O’Sullivan’s mind may well cause another war in the Pacific, and possibly a pan-European war. Fanciful? Note I’m attacking Fran’s ideas, not Fran – on Twitter she has a great sense of life, plus is something rarer and rarer these days, polite: I like her. However,  it’s ideas, philosophy, that makes a society what it is, so let me join the dots from her piece this weekend on youth unemployment, though noting the road signs first.

Other than for clarification purposes I am largely going to stop employing the Left versus Right political tagging system in this blog. A former US president, the last one that had a clue anymore, Ronald Reagan, said the health of a society did not come down so much to Left versus Right, but up versus down, or, more significantly, freedom versus statism.

And so the first dot: Fran has the mind of a statist, with all the contradictions that entails. Fresh from advocating the nationalisation of private property for the ‘common good’ of the Christchurch rebuild, now Fran is advocating we continue the nationalisation of our youth in order to solve youth unemployment.

Of course, I’ve written on how our youth are already nationalised by a state education system where the state demands it be the alpha and omega in every child’s life, despite the ideas of their parents, but the contradictions in Fran’s piece demonstrate why Western civilisation is now falling apart at the seams on its headlong rush to the statist gulag, again.

I have no dispute with the opening part of Fran’s analysis:

It is truly bizarre that the number of unfilled skilled jobs is increasing at the same time as we have record youth unemployment and many graduates find themselves working in jobs that don't pay them enough to get on top of student debt and have enough over to save for their futures.

They have been sold a pup.

Many have been brought up on a "follow your dream" diet only to find out too late that just following dreams doesn't always result in a job. An injection of realism is long overdue.

The problem, and the first contradiction, is Fran then sees realism as not coming from the free market, that real world expression of the complex needs and desires of every individual in society finding voluntary resolution without the force of the state gun; rather, she finds realism as coming from the artifice of the state gun itself:

Key could start by cancelling the top personal tax break and "reinvesting" the hundreds of millions of dollars that would otherwise have gone into Bill English's Treasury coffers into a massive state-backed scheme to train young people in the skills needed for today's workforce.

First contradiction clearly stated:

Fran rightly refers to the current disastrous state-devised bums on seats ‘follow your dream’ tertiary funding system, which in her own industry is probably turning out ten media graduates for every media job. However, her solution is to fix this by more of the same: keep higher taxes, taking away the earnings and choices of private firms, so the state can train youth in the skills required by those private firms. Well if the state couldn’t get the skills match right with the current iteration, why are they going to the next time? Evidence shows bureaucrats are the last group to be entrusted with such an important task.

The real problem with Fran’s solution is it avoids the elephant in the WINZ queue: the welfare state that is so huge it has become a cushion obstructing the view from the market signal of skills needed, to those who need the skills. And that cushion is so huge because it’s been embedded for so long, and growing every year – even in every Bill English budget, the government dollar spend has continued to increase. Indeed, I am a prime example of the long term nature of the dilemma.

I finished high school, Form 7, in the early eighties, and because I liked reading and writing, with no thoughts to a job at all - I didn’t need to, after all, because my education was ‘free’ on the effort and risk taking of businesspeople and workers who were being forced to pay for it – I went straight into an Arts degree, English language and literature, at Canterbury University. I got my degree and had a great time, on the whole, but then found first year out that with no experiences to write about, and a bestseller novel in New Zealand considered to be 5,000 copies sold, ie, a hobby, I had no way to earn money other than teaching, and I couldn’t stand children. At that stage I had the option, which I suspect is the most taken one now, to simply puddle around on welfare, ‘doing my thing’, however,  I chose, based on my upbringing, to find work, and of all things - yeah I have many regrets at the particular choice - to first work part time at IRD, then a CA firm, while gaining undergraduate and Honours degrees in Accountancy from Massey University, which Mrs H and I paid for. My point being here, that the disconnect caused by the welfare state in the market for jobs, existed way back then and if anything it’s worse now.

Fran’s miss here is shown by another of her contradictions. She says that the state needs to train our young rather than employers relying on immigration to get the right skills at the right price, using the example of our dairy industry:

… as with the dairy industry - farmers would rather import low-paid but highly skilled workers from the Philippines who will work long hours, rather than set up an optimum working environment for young Kiwis.

In an attempt to not misrepresent Fran too badly, yes, she writes that many employers complain Kiwi kids come to the job interview not wanting the job, rather just a tick to ensure the ‘WINZ cheque keeps rolling in’, and on that note she’d finally cracked the reality of it, saying families of such children needed to take responsibility, but then, when so close, took instead the road to my serfdom of saying that responsible families couldn’t be relied upon, at least that’s the inference I must draw from her recommendations, thus the state must step in with my tax money, missing the point that the welfare state is what is destroying families, self-responsibility and self-reliant communities. Youth unemployment in New Zealand and the mis-match of skills is not down to something so simple as ‘training’: it’s systemic.

To prove my point, there was a fascinating documentary on New Zealand telly last week about smart animals. The most interesting segment on it was about two birds from North America; they were the exact same breed of bird, but one was the offspring of a bird that lived in the hostile, cold, north of the continent, the other offspring of a bird from the south of the continent where food was plentiful and the weather mild. Each of the birds was given the same task of getting food out from under glass: the bird born of the harsh environment found the job easy, the bird from the soft south couldn't do it, and would’ve starved. The harsh environment had led to the bird from the north being far more innovative and intelligent, and remarkably, this was hard-wired into it.

Now, join the dots to that bird from the harsh north and ‘highly skilled workers from the Philippines who will work long hours’, and figure out why far too many Kiwi children wouldn’t have a bar of being away from their iPads to get up at four in the morning to go milking. Many of them are not employable, and that has little or nothing to do with 'skills', but attitude and what I would call 'nous'. Or put simply: the ability to get out of bed each morning, not just when you feel like it, and go to work. Surprisingly, this stuff’s not hard.

Here’s the solution of a free man. Get rid of the minimum wage, get rid of welfare outside anything other than a safety net in-extremis, get rid of the government cheque that ensures too many children are not being born of love to prudent and the sensible ‘families’, instead, get the state out of lives, stop the profligate, irresponsible spending of other peoples money by politicians so incompetent I wouldn’t trust most of them walking my dog, so we can start building responsible families, again, that will keep their youth at home if required and pay for their keep while their child transacts voluntarily with employers willing to put their own resources into training them for their jobs, including paying for any tuition needed specific to those jobs, through the trade-off of a low wage early on in order that both parties are availed of opportunity.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I can hear the bleating already at what I've just written. Before traveling to the wars this statist mindset is about to cause, let me first close off the statist complaints to what I have just said:

The statist will say this will lead to child slavery: employers will take the cheap labour, then cast them adrift? Yes, some will, but very few: most employers want to build their businesses and their profits long term, thus such bad behaviour will be counter-productive to them. More, most employers I know are simply nice people: statist’s would be surprised looking beyond their own cynicism at just how nice most people are, if left to their own pursuit of happiness.

The arty statists will say but what about culture if training and education is not paid for, planned and directed by the state? The realism of that is, despite an A+ grade average across stages two and three in my arts degree – um, stage one I’d met women for the first time after a country high school - do you know what I remember, or additional thing I have taken from it? Nothing. If I had not done that degree would I still love reading books? Yes. Would I still be doing my personal writing projects and blogs such as this? Yes. In fact, I’m just one chapter away from finishing a novel I’ve been working on for two years now in my spare time. Culture just is, and it’s a travesty to promote any other notion of it that is dependent on tax slavery of one stranger to another.

I say all the above in earnest, because looking at the world around me, with the brutal and huge Western surveillance states we’ve built, disregarding the lessons of the twentieth century, the world now teeters on the verge of violent conflagration, arising from the economic conflagration that has already occurred on the back of big-Keynesian-statism.

Japan’s economy, stifled in low growth for the last three decades by one of the biggest government debt loads in the Western world, coming in at a staggering debt-to-GDP ratio of 229% (compared to Greece on only 120%) has always been, as the phrase goes, a bumblebee in search of a windscreen: well, unfortunately it’s just found the driver, and already he’s got his foot on the accelerator to build an ever larger Keynesian hubris of debt that may well finally destroy the heroic Japanese saver, leaving no one to buy their government debt. That driver is new Prime Minster, nationalist war monger, Shinzo Abe who is right now embarked on one of the biggest government spending programs that country has seen, as well  as the type of null-minded nationalistic brinkmanship that may well see war in the Pacific again.

If you had told an European in 1935 that in just four years their world would be in a vicious war where the big state would set about the wholesale slaughter of civilisation, by which I mean, people, they would have laughed. I put it to you who’s to say Europe is not at 1935, again, with the Nazi Golden Dawn – a party up to half the Greek police force voted for - marching the saluting fist in Greece; and the far right in the Austrian parliament demanding a written register of Jews in that country. And who’s to say the Pacific at the hands of big state Abe, is not back already to 1939 waiting for its next Pearl Harbour? Hell, the ships already are on the way.

Could all of this have been avoided? Yes, by having fostered a classical liberal, individualist, based ethic, of the society that set about only protecting the rights of its smallest minority, the individual; and that ennobled the voluntary contract and the voluntary trade, rather than the big gun of state running every damned thing. Instead welfarism has become so pervasive, that well-spring of the arts, creativity, and innovation in business, individualism, is now confused by generation airhead with a selfishness that must be erased under state redistribution.

It's always about philosophy, and it’s the ideas in Fran’s mind that are the cause of all this. I’d buy Fran lunch at any winery in Marlborough, but she must not mention the state once as the solution for anything other than the means to enforce a contract, or police my personal safety.

Statism vesus freedom.

We were the free West, once; we almost had it, but look where we went instead: what were we thinking? …. Sorry, I’ve covered this already; we weren’t thinking at all, were we - that was the problem.

Right, I'm taking Daisy Dog kayaking. From pretty soon, I'm onto sixty and seventy hour working weeks, until the end of March, so until April blog entries will be thin on the ground.

Footnote: I meant to work in this important piece on Greece versus Latvia, but ran out of time. Recommended reading regardless: Latvia Gives Greece a Lesson in Austerity.