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.