Chapter Three

Democratic education is a threat to the bureaucratic structure because teachers, as transformative intellectuals, actually challenge the system to conform to their own rhetoric. Acting as a transformative intellectual means helping students acquire knowledge about basic social structures, such as the economy, the state, the work place, and mass culture, so that such institutions can be viewed from a critical perspective.  This is not to suggest that teachers are merely acting as agents of banking education but rather, having students use new knowledge critically to transform their reality. 

Apparently this approach is disdained by the power structure because of their complicity in acknowledging the merits of banking education and support of administrators who permit,  encourage, and often demand the perpetuation of teaching practices that reflect the promotion of essentially core Euro-centric knowledge.  We are enslaved by a system that tells us that all kids can learn, but whisper in our collective ears that there are some who better than others. If we are to be a truly democratic society we must not control what people think; rather, we must try to encourage them to come to their beliefs and understanding of the world, and discuss their views with people who think differently (Miller). 

Myles Horton, founder of the Highlander School in Tennessee, espoused a philosophy that grew out of a learned realization about the inherent inequity and unjust practices in this country.  He states, “When you believe in a democratic society, you provide a setting for education that is democratic.”  On the surface, this statement seems simplistic, but when taken in the structural context of institutionalized education, Horton is threatening.  Despite the rhetoric of shared decision making and site-based management, schools are, as has been shown, not hotbeds of democracy.  Teachers, students, and parents are frequently not trusted and they are often victims of intimidation.

How then, taking into account the considerable amount of ammunition aimed against them are democratically minded teachers, parents, and administrators going to achieve desired goals?  What people need are experiences in democracy, in making democratic decisions that affect the lives of their children and the school environment.  A problem though is that the majority of us are not allowed to make decisions about most things that are important in schools.  The system has trained generations of managers for this explicit purpose and has, up to this point, been quite successful in maintaining efficient factories dominated by top-down strategies filtered through layers of loyal bureaucrats.  The bureaucratic system is an inevitable disease that afflicts all organizations and governments.  Often it is spread by good people who are made to do bad things-or less than good things-because of their separation from the people who [are] the original source of their power (Horton).

According to Marion Brady, educator, author, and frequent contributor to numerous journals and op-eds, American education suffers from system problems.  And until those system problems are fixed, even the schools that Americans point to with pride and pay big money to live near-upscale, high-tech schools with lots of accelerated courses, will continue to barely scratch the surface of student potential, continue to turn our mostly “C” students, continue to dump rejects on the street, continue to graduate people who, in a few months or years, cannot pass the exams they once aced.  Schools at all levels continue the top-down bureaucratic management system borrowed from 19th century Prussia.

What prevails is a moral belief that defines education as a tool of corporate avarice.  Responding to the needs of post-modern phallocentric corporations, state boards mandate their narrow view of the official core curricular knowledge to local school boards who comply by passing it on to individual schools and their administrative teams for their expected compliance.  Brady continues, “But the worst problems lie deeper.  There are two of them, one  dealing with WHATS taught, the other with HOW what’s taught is taught.”

Research indicates that it is what the teacher knows that is one of the primary factors in influencing the learning of our students.    This is not to dismiss myriad factors that do influence student learning such as poverty, wealth, abuse, enriching environments, marginalization, and dysfunctional as well as functional families.  However, in a 50 state study done by Linda Darling-Hammond (2000) the following items were found to be related to teacher quality and increased student achievement: verbal ability, content knowledge, using a broad repertoire of approaches skillfully that respond to students and curricular needs, ongoing voluntary professional training, flexibility, creativity, adaptability, opportunities to work with colleagues, access to curricular resources.  As a group, teachers are doing a pretty good job considering the abysmal pay and for some, terrible working conditions, lack of resources, and lack of support from parents, the district, and the state.  However, there are still instructors who need a lot of direction.  There are a number of teachers whose professional growth is so limited that they would be deemed unsuitable in many other careers.  Many of these same teachers do not do outside research of their own, do not read professional journals, and have content knowledge limited to what is in a district approved text.   One teacher in our district who has taught Advanced Placement United States History and a Differentiated United States History course took one undergraduate course in college that related to the history of this country.   He was my student teacher and I have copies of his transcript.  I fucked up with this one thinking he showed promise. Now, this does not necessarily mean that this teacher does not have a passion for history and perhaps reads volumes on the subject (which is questionable) but, we must be concerned when he tells his students that slavery was not a cause of the Civil War and that John Connelly, the governor of Texas, was killed on the same day that Kennedy was assassinated.  I am not kidding.  I absconded with a couple of copies of the test and his study guide from the building copy center. You want this person teaching your kids?

I am pretty sure that you can walk into any school and ask most teachers, under the assurance of anonymity, who in the building should not be teaching?  Face it; there are teachers who reflect the attributes I listed above.  Yet for me, as a teacher, does it go against some unwritten code of behavior to point it out?  In some professions, like police work, there seems to be an acceptance of a philosophy that you do not criticize others like you.  There is a code of silence or a reluctance to provide information about the intransigence of fellow officers.

In an article about this topic, Glenn Slacks, himself a former teacher, reveals that there are studies that estimate the number of failing teachers at between 5% and 18%.   In a similar study by California attorney Mary Jo McGrath of more than 60,000 school administrators nationwide, principals tell her about 18% of their teachers are marginal, with 3% to 5% so egregious they are harmful to children.  In a high school with one hundred and fifty certified teachers this means that there might be up to thirty or more staff who are marginal or worse. Our silence serves to keep failing teachers in the classroom, to the detriment of hundreds or thousands of students per teacher.  Cherie Allen, a veteran science teacher from Seattle, Washington says it is profoundly offensive to work side by side with a poor teacher who doesn't make the effort to improve.  But, the purpose here is not to investigate why the "dance of the lemons" is perpetuated (moving incompetent administrators and teachers from building to building because no one wants them) but rather to look at alternatives to the system I have outlined previously.

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

During the summer following my trip to New York I read constantly.  I devoured Gary Howard's book, "You Can't Teach What You Don't Know" three times.  I read bell hooks', "Teaching to Transgress."  I reread Paulo Freire's, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed."  One of the messages that I found in all of these books is that if you teach against the grain co-workers and district officials will, in many cases, resent you.  If you do not toe the line, be a "team player," do as you are told, then you will become a pariah and, in many cases, suspicious.  If you dare question authority, be prepared to face the consequences.  This is all very typical of the factory model of administration that is firmly entrenched in the public schools.  The colonial mentality dominates a large number of professional educators who have been conditioned not to question authority, to accept the oppressive nature of public schools, the perfect qualifications for a worker in the factory we call school.

Co-workers are often suspicious of other teachers with whom students long to study.  One student's reflection about being in a class where the curriculum was student initiated remarked, “We basically come up with our own curriculum for the semester.  That we are able to do projects on those topics and learn a lot more about them while we do our own research.”  Another student confessed, “You've taught us how to think critically, to challenge, and to confront, and you've encouraged us to have a voice.  But how can we go to other classrooms?  No one wants us to have a voice in those classrooms!” 

Education for democracy means that schools should provide children with the social and intellectual skills to function well as members of families and communities, as political participants, as adult learners, and as self-directed individuals.  It means educating children about the way the world works, and arming them to influence how it works.  The call is for educational values that recognize all student needs as legitimate and that prepare students for multiple roles as adults, regardless of their labor-market destinies or economic status.  The bottom line for democratic education is empowerment, not simply employment (Bastian, Fruchter, Gittel, Greer, Haskins).

Responding to the needs of corporate greed, school systems have historically incorporated a factory model of management that mirrors the workplace. Oppressed by mandated curriculums and increasingly by mandated pedagogy, not only are teachers and administrators strapped by an intimidating educational bureaucracy, but parents and students are essentially ignored and left out of any constructive governance to change an obsolete structure.  The systematic oppression that occurred in industrial America was, and to a great degree still is, present in our nations’ schools.  A multi-layered bureaucracy dictating learning and teaching pedagogy filters down from representatives duly elected by their constituents.  Education background matters little.

What we find is just exactly what the founders of our public education system said that we would find: class stratification and political indoctrination (Kozol).  This pattern has held a dominant position since the inception of public education during the Industrial Revolution.  Economic development has directed school change; economic status has determined school achievement; economic mobility has extended school opportunity.  In this country we accept a system which assumes that people’s lives, the natural resources and everything else exist for the purpose of making money (Horton).   This is nothing new.  President Woodrow Wilson suggested, we want one class of people to have a liberal education, and we want one class of persons, a very much larger class of person, of necessity, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit into specific manual tasks. (Kozol)  In this environment you only had to train a small number of people well and you could afford to train them to think of themselves as better than other people.  Educator Horace Mann, insisted that public education was the cheapest means of self-protection for the rich.  In this setting, passive school curricula help prepare students for life in undemocratic institutions.

Efforts to sharpen the definition of democracy and extend its meaning throughout society are taken by some of the more privileged people as threats to their own status and power.  To understand this view, we need only look at the startling contradiction between the movement for greater school achievement on the one hand and the resistance to equitable spending for all schools on the other.  At the heart of the conflict is a simple question:  Should rich kids be entitled to a better education than poor kids?  Lob this question into any room full of affluent parents and watch them squirm.  To keep school as they have been is to maintain societal distinctions among those who get the best and those who get the rest. (Glickman). 

Democratic schools are meant to be democratic places, so the idea of democracy also extends to the many roles that adults play in the schools.  This means that professional educators as well as parents, community activists, and other citizens have a right to fully informed and critical participation in creating school policies and programs for themselves and young people (Apple and Beane).  Democratic education is a threat to the bureaucratic structure because teachers, as transformative intellectuals, actually challenge the system to conform to their own rhetoric.  Acting as a transformative intellectual means helping students acquire knowledge about basic social structures, such as the economy, the state, the work place, and mass culture, so that such institutions can be viewed from a critical perspective.  This is not to suggest that teachers are merely acting as agents of banking education but rather, having students use new knowledge critically to transform their reality.

The goal of real change in the schools must be education for democracy.  With this goal we would encourage high expectations, cooperation, and equality rather than competition and inequality, and real commitment to our children rather than reforms that do nothing other than tinker with the system. The public school is, after all public, and everyone is part of the public-in terms of financial support, citizenship, and purpose.  Thus, if one’s own child's classrooms and school do not embrace democratic education, one can legitimately ask of educators, why not? (Glickman).  How then, taking into account the considerable amount of ammunition aimed against them are democratically minded teachers, parents, and administrators going to achieve desired goals?  

Opt Out

A few years ago, I invited Shannon Cameron, then a grad student in theater, to my School and Society class in the College of Education and Human Services at the University of Nebraska.  Tables and chairs were pushed back against the walls leaving an open area for the active participation of my students. They were put through a few warm-up exercises before Shannon began what would constitute the rest of the class, an introduction Theatre of the Oppressed, a type of theater designed as a catalyst for social change.

Theatre of the Oppressed was developed in Brazil in the early 1970s by the late Augusto Boal. He was influenced by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, author of the seminal piece, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," and Boal wanted to use theatre as a means of analyzing, discussing and increasing critical thought in order to address issues of oppression in daily life.

In the bureaucracy of institutionalized public education one of the most prevalent forms of oppression is monologue. All too often, students become passive receptors of the instructor's "knowledge" having very little, if any, opportunity to engage in questioning or challenging official curriculum and policies. Theatre of the Oppressed becomes a powerful way for students and teachers to examine myriad oppressive acts in school and how to develop strategies for solving these issues. 

Unfortunately, throughout the country, school districts are experiencing budget cuts and some of the first programs to be on the receiving end are art and music programs.  According to the Chicago Sun-Times (August 5, 2013), among nearly 1500 teachers laid off in the Chicago public schools, 105 taught music or art. The Chicago teachers union claims the number is more like 159. In the Philadelphia public schools, the entire budget for arts and music was eliminated.  Even the Obama administration cut federal funds for Arts in Education, a program in the Department of Education.  

We are in a dystopian era where student achievement is measured by standardized test scores with an emphasis on math and science matriculation.  And, dutiful school administrators often celebrate the imposition of frequent testing of our students.

As an example, one high school principal put on blue pants, a white shirt, dyed her hair blue, and sported a sandwich board exhorting students to, “Ace the Test.”  She was quoted in the local paper saying, “We needed to do a better job of getting our students excited about taking (statewide tests), about taking the opportunity to showcase their talents and skill sets.”  These students were tested for four weeks.  There are, however, resistance movements.

In Long Island, New York, where the students are being prepped to take tests aligned with Common Core Standards, parents are increasingly choosing to opt their students out.  One mother said, “The only way to stop that monster is through civil disobedience.  Standardized test prep has hijacked the classroom.”

Education historian, Diane Ravitch, formerly a supporter of No Child Left Behind and standardized testing has, in the recent past, changed course and is now advocating for parents to have their children opt out of state testing.  She writes as piece appearing on the Huffington Post website (3/31/14) in which she urges parents to stop feeding the testing machine. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-ravitch/opt-out-state-testing_b_5064455.html).  She says, “Deny the machine the data on which it feeds. There are corporations ready to mine your child's data. Don't let them have it.”

This article reminds me of something that happened in my high school classroom several years ago.

We were reading Thoreau’s, On Civil Disobedience, at the time when students were being required to take the state writing test.  The scores on the test had no meaningful impact on whether or not students would graduate or impact their GPA.  Students knew that Thoreau spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax because he did not want to support the war against Mexico.  So, I asked a question about the writing test, “What would Thoreau do?”  An overwhelming response was, “He would boycott it.”  And many did.  The story hit the front page of the local paper.  The principal, who later in 2007 kicked me out of the building, called me in to her office and inquired about what was going on in my class.  I told her that I asked the students about how might Thoreau respond to the mandated test.  Her reply, “That was not a good question.”  It is not without amazement the degree to which district administrators try to avoid controversy by purposefully marginalizing critical thought.

 In a 2006 survey by the Center on Education Policy, more than 44 percent of school districts increased time spent on math studies while decreasing time on other subjects. In another 2006 study by SRI International, 61 percent of school districts in California did not have a full-time art specialist. However, according to Tom Horne, Arizona state superintendent of public instruction, "If they're worried about their test scores and want a way to get them higher, they need to give kids more arts, not less. There's lots of evidence that kids immersed in the arts do better on their academic tests."

Despite the increased attention being given to math and science and a drop in art and music offerings nationwide, the Obama administration, at one point recognized the contribution that the arts make not just to the economy but also to the critical education of our students. In an October 2009 proclamation honoring national arts and humanities, President Obama stated, "It is the painter, the author, the musician and the historian whose work inspires us to action, drives us to contemplation, stirs joy in our hearts and calls upon us to consider our world view anew."  My, what a difference a few years make as Obama has now slashed the Arts in Education program.  Did he really mean what he said in 2009?

The February 2009 edition of Edutopia echoed Obama’s former perspective in an article titled, "Why Arts Education is Crucial, and Who's Doing it Best." According to the author, Fran Smith, "Years of research show that [arts education is] closely linked to almost everything that we as a nation say we want for our children and demand from our schools: academic achievement, social and emotional development, civic engagement and equitable opportunity."

It was precisely with this intention for students to contemplate and reconsider their world view – and to think about using Theatre of the Oppressed in their classrooms as a way to increase dialogue – that I invited Ms. Cameron to work with my class of future teachers. 

In an activity called "Colombian Hypnosis," Cameron had students actively moving around the class emulating the complex relationships in a top-down education bureaucracy. It became readily apparent to students that the role of teachers becomes less relevant to those at the top of the food chain. In turn, students and their unique needs are often disregarded as district officials are more concerned with attending to issues being passed from their superiors.

Other forms of Theatre of the Oppressed have students actively engage in identifying oppression in their lives as well as the lives of others in our society in order to critically examine possible resolutions. Should not school districts re-evaluate the importance of the arts education, and in particular theater, as a way of improving student learning and becoming better citizens?

The president of Cornell University, David Skorton, puts it this way: "If science and technology help us to answer questions of ‘what' and ‘how,' the arts and humanities give us ways to confront the intangible, to contemplate the ‘why,' to imagine, to create. If ever there were a time to nurture those skills in our young people, it is now, when our nation's future may depend on our creativity and our ability to understand and appreciate the cultures around the world as much as on our proficiency in reading and math."

There is a national movement taking place urging parents to resist the testing juggernaut.  Here is the website:

http://unitedoptout.com/

Included on the site is a state by state guide of the tests that are given and procedures for parents to opt their kids out of state testing.

Curriculum and Behavior Modification Bullies

Curriculum and Behavior Modification Bullies

When it comes to bullying in school, most people probably think about the insecure kid picking on others. But I wonder how many of us think about the administrators in a particular school building and the insulated bureaucrats in the district office whose positions of power allow them to perpetuate a model of curriculum and behavior bullying toward students, parents/guardians and the rest of the community.

Curriculum and behavior bullying? Curriculum and behavior bullying is the institutionalized policy of a school district requiring prescribed texts and pedagogy that reflect the traditions of the dominant society, homogenous teaching methodologies, set pacing guides, disconnected subject matter, compulsory dates of assessment, and student disciplinary actions that are consistently, and often arbitrarily, enforced throughout a school district. 

Essentially, it boils down to obliging all children at various grade levels to learn the common knowledge of the hegemonic culture but not the codes by which it operates. All the while, it often imposes arbitrary policies which demand teachers to use singular and forced instructional models. 

  

For example. Several years ago, Mike Riley, the superintendent of Bellevue, Wash. schools, instituted a policy of a common curriculum and prescribed lesson plans for all instructors under his charge. Lesson plans were posted on teachers' classroom computers so every instructor knew exactly what was to be done on any particular day. When some teachers questioned the policy and asked building administrators if they could deviate from the daily lesson plans, instructors were told the "judgment had already been made," and they were to follow the plans as written.

A prolonged teacher strike against Riley's oppressive policy resulted in the district relenting and disposing of the scripted lessons. Riley left and took a position with the College Board. The point, however, is that the policy was put into place and restricted teacher creativity and ingenuity in preparing lessons for their students. The policy would have likely remained, if not for the teachers' organized effort.

Ringing bells every hour is equally imposing, reminding students whatever topic they are engaged in matters little, for they are to move on an assembly line to the next room where they will be confronted with another subject completely divorced from the last.

This educational paradigm plays out daily in schools across the nation. Victimized students and teachers are bullied by district officials who demand that the teachers, now often nothing much more than textbook technicians, enable curricular apartheid in 50 minute slots of time.

John Taylor Gatto describes these phenomena in his book, "Dumbing Us Down."  He writes,

"Bells are the secret logic of school time; their logic is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, rendering every interval the same as any other, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference."

All the while, the unassuming public is lulled into passive acceptance by administrative educrats veiled as defenders of a school system allegedly designed to have all children become participating members of a democratic state. What is occurring, though, is an oppressive status quo preparing students to become obedient, noncritical thinking, willing and essential cogs in the global economy.  Driving this system of self-perpetuating academic dissonance is a betrayal of social and economic justice by those who wish to sustain the culture of power and ensure the survival of the dominant society – at the expense of our children.

Children of color and children of poverty are particularly 

disadvantaged, because they enter schools, for the most part, without the advantage of knowing the codes and rules (life skills) of the culture of power. Not only are they unequipped with this knowledge, but these children are in classrooms with some teachers who might be reluctant, unprepared, or who downright reject the notion to teach essential cultural and academic survival skills. These children are also often unaware of the existence of these codes and rules which benefit them. In her book, "Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom," author Lisa Delpit suggests that, "…while students are assisted in learning the culture of power, they must also be helped to learn about the arbitrariness of those codes and about the power relationships they represent." 

Recently, the Department of Education released a report indicating that Black children receive disproportionate disciplinary actions, even in pre-school.  In a mind boggling response to the report, the conservative National Review’s writer, Heather MacDonald, claims that Black students have “weak impulse control” compared to the more meek white students. The reason for this according to MacDonald is the “black illegitimacy rate” and the implied assumption that Blacks are just poor parents. I wonder if she ever considered that maybe white people have “impulse control” issues too considering the number of white folks who violently shoot their way through movie theatres, high schools, elementary schools, and shopping malls.

Since the rules are established by those in power, then those in charge of our public schools have a responsibility to make sure the transmission of the essential codes of the culture of power are taught to students so they may eventually become critical actors in transforming the social, economic, educational and political fabric of our society. To do otherwise, is not only bullying, but criminal.

You Wanna Be an American Idiot?

“Don't wanna be an American idiot
Don't want a nation under the new media
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mind fuck America”

          American Idiot by Green Day

In a 1964 article in Harper's Magazine, Richard Hofstadter writes, "In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated…how much political leverage can be gotten out of the animosities and passion of a small minority." Now, a half a century later, we see a similar pattern of behavior. Recently, journalist Michael Stickings remarked, "Much of the American electorate is dominated by apathy and ignorance, if not outright stupidity. Such apathy, such ignorance, and such stupidity are what allow so many voters to vote against their own self-interest, to be manipulated by right-wing propaganda, and to believe things that just aren't true."

Unfortunately, a significant number of our fellow citizens are willingly joining the ranks of the bewildered herd, as like lemmings, blindly getting ready to make that final leap over the cliff into the depths of an economic, social, educational, and political morass. Tea Party demagogues along with their neo-conservative Christian Dominionist right-wing cronies pumped millions of dollars into campaigns that lowered any standards of veracity. Followers of these political and religious zealots voraciously lapped up their untruths and mischaracterizations of the political and economic landscape. Without question, one of the reasons for this herd mentality is a growing acceptance of anti-intellectualism in this country.

Before I begin each class I teach at the community college, I share with students three premises which I colonized from Charles Pierce, author of Idiot America- How Stupidity became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.  Here they are:

1.  Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings or otherwise moves units.

2. Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.

3. Fact is that which enough people believe.  Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.

I encourage, nay, embolden students to not believe anything I say and to question everything.  This comes a shock to many of them because they have spent twelve years in public schools where critical dialogue is marginalized and Paulo Freire’s concept of banking education is the norm.

The irony is unmistakable. Spewing rhetoric extolling the merits of the founding fathers and support of the Constitution, the leaders of this right-wing train wreck have convinced the herd that relying on blind emotion is preferable to elitist Ivy League intellectualism. Let's see. 

One of the Federalist Papers writers, Alexander Hamilton, said, "The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right." When did ignorance become a virtue?  Perhaps the right has adopted the Orwellian concept that Ignorance is Strength. Shall we escort the herd to Room 101 to re-educate them into believing that 2 + 2 = 5?

The collective memory of many in this country is so short-lived that they can be led to accept policies that are, in effect, detrimental to their own well-being. With cries from right of "Take our country back," is not one prodded to politely ask the question, "Back to where?" The signpost up ahead for this episode of "The Twilight Zone" points to the Gilded Age.

In a column in truthout.org, Henry Giroux describes our current environment as one which is controlled by the unfettered power of international corporations, 21st century robber barons. "If the first rule of robber baron politics is to make power invisible, the second is to make it unaccountable and the third rule is to give as much power as possible to those who revel in barbaric greed, social irresponsibility, unconscionable economic inequity, corrupt politics, resurgent monopolies and an unapologetic racism (parading as an attack on political correctness no less)." This is the vision to which the multitudes unashamedly and religiously rejoice in the vitriolic hymns of their modern day robber baron political saviors? Is this really the nation which the right wants us to reclaim?

A nation without government regulations, without Social Security, without minimum wage laws, without unions, with lowered taxes on the rich, without any emphasis on the crumbling infrastructure, thirst for international markets, xenophobia, homophobia and institutionalized racism?  This is their vision?  A vision that is going to be more attainable thanks to a 5-4 vote in the Citizens United decision that gives more credence to this paraphrase of Marx's observation,  "The executive, judicial, and legislative branches of the modern state are but committees to manage the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."

In Thomas Frank's account of how the conservatives co-opted the middle class in "What's the Matter with Kansas," we find this passage: "All they have to show for their Republican loyalty are lower wages, more dangerous jobs, dirtier air, a new overlord class that comports itself like King Farouk — and, of course, a crap culture whose moral free fall continues, without significant interference from the grandstanding Christers whom they send triumphantly back to Washington every couple of years."

The bewildered herd, now unabashedly re-energized by the propaganda of Room 101, enters the voting booth content in the belief that 2 +2 really does equal 5, realizing that ignorance really does equal strength, war is peace, and freedom is slavery. This new millennium version of the Great Awakening has at least one thing in common with the pre-Revolutionary evangelical movement. The flock of followers is overjoyed to free themselves from the shackles of reason and instead, join the revival of emotional excess as their robber baron saviors relish a communion of unbridled avarice.