A Few Shiny Pebbles

I feel a lot of sympathy for the people in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez’s rule.

In “Venezuela's Chavez May Take Over Schools”, by Ian James, he writes:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatened [. . . . that a]ll schools, public and private, must admit state inspectors and submit to the government's new educational system, or be closed and nationalized, with the state taking responsibility for the education of their children, Chavez said. [. . .] A new curriculum will be ready by the end of this school year, and new textbooks are being developed to help educate "the new citizen," said Chavez's brother and education minister Adan Chavez [. . .]

The president's opponents accuse him of aiming to indoctrinate young Venezuelans with socialist ideology. But the education minister said the aim is to develop "critical thinking," not to impose a single way of thought.

This is pretty funny, because in Intoduction to Critical Theory, by David Held, Held points out that:

The writings of what one may loosely refer to as a ‘school’ of Western Marxism—critical theory—caught the imagination of students and intellectuals in the 1960s and early 1970s. [. . . .] Critical theory became a key element in the formation and self-understanding of the New Left. Many of those committed to new radical protest movements—to the struggles against imperialism, the private appropriation of scarce resources, and the many constraints on personal initiative—found in the works of this ‘school’ an intriguing interpretation of Marxist theory and an emphasis on issues and problems (mass culture, for instance, or the family and sexuality) which had rarely been explored by more orthodox approaches to Marxism.

If you hear that something is a “Critical Study”, such as “Critical Law Theory”, you can expect that the study is one of the New Left’s extensions of Marxism into truly every aspect of existence.

Which reminds me. Dennis Prager did a funny “commercial” for the “Half-Hour News Hour”, a satirical program on the FOX News Channel. The “commercial” was based on ads by a company that sells commemorative plates for different events and occasions. The plates Prager held up were “commemorating” the defeatist attitude of Rep. Nanct Pelosi, Sen. Harry Reid, and others. Now, the ad imitates the ads of a major company that sells such plates, called the Franklin Mint. (I have a few of their plates, and I can tell you that I love them.) I heard Prager say at the end of the commercial that the fake plates were an offer of “The Frankfurt Mint” and I had to laugh. The “school of Critical Theory” described in Held’s book, is referred to as “The Frankfurt School.”

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