I thought that this quote, by a commenter called “Berlinerkerl” in response to a Guardian article that really was called “Arm our children with media studies”, was too good to be left languishing in the “more than 50 comments” bilge tanks of a Comment Is Free article.
In his detailed study of Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men, Jones (2001) draws our attention to the mass of early post-modernist contradictions running throughout the series. Whilst Bill and Ben live in an idealised, hedonistic, not to say nihilistic world, they only come out to play when the Man Who Works in the Garden, the authority figure par excellence, goes to have his dinner. Whilst the Class Oppressor is therefore an absent figure, he nevertheless should not be ignored. Class Oppression is, indeed, a recurring theme, as every time Slowcoach the Tortoise appears, the Flowerpot Men dance on his back, as Marxist critics such as Stalin (1995, p786) have pointed out.
That the Flowerpot Men are invariably awoken by the Little Weed is a clear pointer to a drug-addicted subculture. The language used by the Flowerpot Men harks back to the Theatre of the Absurd – Smith (1997, pp 129-150) draws parallels with Ubu Roi.
Bee-bop-flobbalob 🙂
Another commenter called Pressman56 suggested instead that instead of arming our children with media studies we arm them with Kalashnikovs.
I would rather teach children applied physics (i.e chemistry) so that they quickly learn that schools are actually quite easy to burn down.
Admit it though, Perry. You do also support arming them with Kalashnikovs
No need to hide it.
Kalashnikovs??? Just spray and pray.
Better a SMLE No 1 Mk III*, or a No 4 Mk 2.
Cheers
Ther are times when the Yorkshire accent defeats me utterly.
Yorkshire? Yorkshire?? Them’s fighting words, Person. You shall not speak so of the glorious language of Flobadob!
Or have I just missed a joke?
I suppose for the Guardian “Media Studies” mean: lets the children know how wonderful what we say in the news is the truth and what lies the others say.
If kids were taught Literacy ( Reading, comprehending, critical reasoning, and communication/writing) then what benefit a degree. It is such a fundamental skill, yet much of my practice of this was in my Latin classes!
Last time I heard Flemish, I would swear they were saying “Obba clobba dobba dop” .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcF9JSxkUSE
Tim: funny that, despite going to a grammar school, the only grammar I learned was in German and French classes 😉
Of course, I also studied history and geography, in which i learned… socialism. It took a full 14 years to getthat out of on system!
For some time, I have been worried about the rampant speciesism of that Australian classic, ‘Skippy, the Bush kangaroo.’ You may not have thought about it before, but you will agree with me that Skippy does all the real work. She is apparently able to communicate in Morse code, and can make her wishes known, but we are supposed to believe that she doesn’t want to join a union, or go to school! She knows her place- as an uneducated toiler for mere subsistence wages! This is no longer good enough! The whole show will need to be rewritten, with humans given smaller roles. Where is charles dickens when you really need him?
It may be even worse than that for Skippy, Nuke Gray. I couldn’t swear to it being true, but I read somewhere that all those impossible seeming leaps over ravines etc. that she made actually were impossible. When one Skippy got used up they got a new one.
well, this calls for a royal Commission, to find out what happened! Skippy, our friend, was never true? They used stand-ins? Oh, woe, alas, alack! No wonder she seemed dumb- they had to retrain each new ‘skippy’! what an indictment of our uncaring, capitalist, society with its’ throw-away attitude! Bring on the revolution now, I say!
The serious point here is (of course) that “Media Studies” is yet another subject which pretends to be “critical” and even “scientific”, but is in fact full of, unchallenged, Marxist assumptions and ways of thinking.
To people who know the game the brainwashing efforts of the left are pathetic – but young people do not tend to know the game. They want to be “critical” indeed to be “rebels” – and such desires are taken advantage of, in order to lead the young people into total uncritical conformity. A state of being where every long refuted Marxist doctrine becomes a starting assumption for how they look at the world.
Of course the word “Marxist” (or even “socialist”) does not tend to be used in “Media Studies” and other such subjects at first (the ideas attacking business and other elements of civil society are first taught without their proper name) – only when the “education” process is advanced is the mask dropped.
Many people go through the education process without even knowing they have been taught Marxist doctrines (ideas that depend on Marxist assumptions – FALSE Marxist assumptions), but this lack of knowledge does not stop the education process having a negative effect, to a greater or lesser extent, on the people who are subjected to it.