Borg is the finished product of American education. Borg is the collective consciousness crowd of people who have unquestioningly adopted the prepackaged collection of values and beliefs given to them in progressive/postmodern government schools. Only through free minds engaged in critical thinking can this oppressive, diversity-intolerant ideology be replaced with a more laissez faire, live-and-let-live approach to acquiring knowledge.
The extent to which we can free our minds from the political and philosophical influences conditioned into our subconscious selves by agents of the state in government-run schools is the approximate extent to which we can become critical thinkers. Educational poseurs pay lip service to teaching critical thinking; however, this red herring merely directs attention away from their indoctrination of children through affective education.
There is only one Education, and it has only one goal: the freedom of the mind. Anything that needs an adjective, be it civics education, or socialist education, or Christian education, or whatever-you-like education, is not education, and it has some different goal. The very existence of modified "educations" is testimony to the fact that their proponents cannot bring about what they want in a mind that is free. An "education" that cannot do its work in a free mind, and so must "teach" by homily and precept in the service of these feelings and attitudes and beliefs rather than those, is pure and unmistakable tyranny. ~Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian.
Affective, or emotional, education is the antithesis of critical thinking because it forces its subjects to ratify beliefs emotionally rather than to evaluate them rationally. To think critically is to require justification as a condition of accepting as valid any proclamation, value, belief, assertion, opinion, or policy issued from agents of the state, especially in schools. The state exists to serve itself, and critical thinking allows one to recognize that people in government service serve those who govern, not the governed. The state uses schools to indoctrinate, or socialize, people into accepting normative expectations devised by those in power.
Beginning in grade K, the state assails children with Skinnerian Behavior Modification techniques, or operant conditioning. This manipulates them into actively participating in their own indoctrination. Educator/indoctrinators praise and reward children for embracing group thought and punish, reject, and ostracize those who think independently. The status quo can only remain in power if the public lacks the cognitive resources needed to question the authority of the federal Education Department and its local agents to force children to accept state-mandated values and beliefs.
To retain this power, education/indoctrination must be mandatory for everyone and begin while children are too young to think for themselves. Benjamin Bloom, the grandfather of Outcome Based Education, a form of indoctrination through affective education, said that the purpose of education is to change the thoughts, feelings, and actions of students. It is also the purpose of brainwashing. Home schooling and independent schools are mortal enemies of thought and speech police run government schools.
Today, far too many parents are unable to think critically or to choose rationally; therefore, they blindly send their children into education’s self-perpetrating loop of ignorance and obedience. To them, grades K-6 represent cost-free daycare; grades 7-12 warehouse the teenage children of uninvolved and uninterested parents. This serves the needs of the state because a critical thinker will establish an arms-length adversarial relationship with the state, one in which the state must continually prove itself worthy to govern.
This is the postmodern/progressive education state’s version of the road to serfdom. We are poorly educated and rationally challenged wage slaves incapable of extricating ourselves from the mess that we have created because we are too ignorant to recognize our plight. After all, B. F. Skinner observed that education is learning to express your ignorance in scientific terms.
May your gods be with you.