Enough! Enough! For months, the so-called liberal elite has been writing articles, having radio and TV discussions, giving sermons (literally) and making speeches in which it has struggled to understand those strange creatures: ordinary people.
Ah! There is a clue. That word ‘educated’. What does ‘educated’ mean today? It doesn’t mean they know a lot about the world. It means they have been injected with the views and assumptions of their teachers. They have been taught by people who themselves have little experience of the real world. They have been indoctrinated with certain ideas. Here are some key ones.
They think that because they studied English literature at Durham they understand the world better than a plumber in Croydon.
The above paragraphs are full of strawmen. There are no data showing that educators have "little experience of the real world" and it also leaves undefined "experience" and "real world." It also perpetuates the baffling logic that a plumber is more "ordinary" than a former university student (not to mention, it seems to presume plumbers don't go to Uni). There are no data suggesting that someone who studies English Lit would understand the world better than a plumber, and it is an untestable and silly statement to make anyways. But apparently a conservative London-based writer for the Spectator, who spends a lot of time traveling to Italy, and former banker has his finger on the pulse of the "ordinary people."
They have been taught that capitalism is inherently bad. It is something to be controlled at every turn by an altruistic government or else reduced to a minimum. Meanwhile the pursuit of equality is good. These are truly astonishing things for educated people to believe when the past 100 years have been a brutal lesson instructing us that the opposite is the case. The pursuit of equality brought the world terror and tens of millions of deaths along with terrible economic failure. In the past 30 years, by contrast, since China and India adopted more pro-capitalist policies, capitalism has caused the biggest reduction in poverty the world has ever known. You may know that, but it is not taught in schools. Schools actually teach that Stalin’s five-year plans were a qualified success! The academic world is overwhelmingly left-wing and the textbooks spin to the left. They distort the facts or omit them.
The five-year plan bit comes from a BBC website and nothing more. Bartholomew would be hard-pressed to point to any "liberal elite" teacher who would teach that Stalinism was a success, qualified or otherwise. He has no data that this is taught in schools, or if he does, he should say so. In fact, from the same BBC website that Bartholomew is referring to, he conveniently fails to note that the website also said, "Workers had to work very hard to meet targets. Managers and workers who failed to meet targets could be arrested and executed." This doesn't sound like a pro-five-year-plan speak. There are so many other problems with that paragraph, it is difficult to know where to begin, which I suspect is the point of the whole article--it's obfuscation by inundation of ill-formed whinges. Bartholomew is a casuist, nothing more.
I could go on and on, but it seems the general thrust of the whole essay is that schools--even primary schools and their "liberal elite" teachers--are indoctrination factories where no critical thinking is taught. This is not true and a quick look at any lesson plan or course assignments across any Western educational institution will show that critical thinking is encouraged. [Parenthetically, referring to a primary/secondary school teacher as a "liberal elite" is what one would expect from a conservative former banker--laughably out of touch.]
This entire article is full-on speciousness, but apparently I'm brainwashed (or "unwittingly defending" it) if I dare to criticize it.
