Mail
Magazine 24
Is
Leftist School Indoctrination Unstoppable?
by Bruce Thornton
Rush
Limbaugh weighed in recently on the
Republicans’ on-going debate about what went wrong in November.
Elaborating on
his earlier comment that he was “ashamed of America,” Limbaugh said,
“The Left
has beaten us. They have created far more low-information, unaware,
uneducated
people than we’ve been able to keep up with . . . I’ve always had a
Civics 101
view of the country: People get what they want, they vote what they
want, and
they get the way they vote.” He added that the Democrats “control the
education
system . . . pop culture, movies, TV and books” and use that control to
create
“dependency” among voters.
Some
may think this is a dog-bites-man
observation, but it’s worth looking more closely at the most important
item in
Limbaugh’s list––the educational system. Everything else Limbaugh
mentions is
made possible because of the deep corruption in public education from
kindergarten to university.
We
often focus on the ideological biases of the
university, where the more lunatic examples of political correctness
get the
most attention. But in education as in economics, there is a
trickle-down
effect. The grandees at the elite universities train the PhD’s who go
on to
second and third tier institutions, where they in turn train the
students who
get high school and grade school teaching credentials. They also write
most of
the textbooks that end up in K-12 classrooms. Thus the progressive
ideology
metastasizes throughout the educational system, determining the
curriculum, the
textbooks, and the point of view of the teachers. At that level the
ideas may
be garbled, half-baked, incoherent, and a collection of clichés and
slogans.
But they are still toxic and effective at transmitting a world-view to
impressionable minds.
When
my kids were in public school I witnessed
this process over and over. Questionable leftist ideas I had to sit
through in
graduate seminars turned up regularly in my kids’ English and history
courses
and textbooks. In the Marxiste interpretation of history, for example,
traditional historical narratives reflect the “false consciousness” of
capitalism’s academic publicists justifying and “mystifying” a history
marked
by oppression and atrocities in service to a dehumanizing capitalist
ideology.
The
founding of the United States, then, was
not about things like freedom and inalienable rights, but instead
reflected the
economic interests and power of wealthy white property-owners. The
civil war
wasn’t about freeing the slaves or preserving the union, but about
economic
competition between the industrial north and the plantation south. The
settling
of the West was not an epic saga of hardships endured to create a
civilization
in a wilderness, but genocide of the Indians whose lands and resources
were
stolen to serve capitalist exploitation. Inherent in this sort of
history were
the assumptions of Marxist economic determinism and the primacy of
material
causes over the camouflage of ideals and principles.
In
the 60’s this narrative was married to
identity politics: the defining of ethnic minorities and Third World
peoples on
the basis of their status as victims of this capitalist hegemony and it
imperialist and colonialist mechanisms, which justified the plundering,
oppression, and exploitation of the non-white “others” with racist
notions of
their natural inferiority. Various strains of postmodernism added a
cultural
relativism that put out of bounds any judgments of a culture’s values,
since
all such standards reflect the economic needs of the dominant power.
Soon
feminism added women to the list of victims sacrificed to the
white-male power
structure. Edward Said’s historically ignorant and
tendentious Orientalism rationalized the failure of
the Muslim Arab
Middle East in the same way. Soon Said’s book expanded beyond Middle
East
studies to condition the way generations of English and history
professors
approach their traditional subjects––as narratives justifying an
unjust, racist,
exploitative Western power of which all right-thinking people should be
ashamed.
The
politicizing of the universities has led to
two ill effects. First, the Gresham’s law of education means that
adding all
this material to the curriculum necessitates the driving out of the
traditional
curriculum––based (imperfectly, to be sure) on fact and argument––that
could
provide the empirical antidote to this left-wing toxin. Second,
generations of
credential students have sat in these courses and then gone on to teach
in high
schools and grade schools, and to write the textbooks and curricula
that
propagate this ideology. The result is a student population ignorant of
the
basic facts of history, the vacuum filled with melodramas of
victimization,
racism, oppression, and violence that cast the United States as a
global
villain guilty of crimes against humanity. A mentality is fostered that
is
receptive to domestic and foreign policies predicated on American guilt
and the
need to make reparations for historical crimes, whether by foreign aid,
global
retreat, or the surrender of sovereignty to international
organizations. That’s
why a pure embodiment of the leftist historical drama like Obama’s 2009
Cairo
speech did not evoke outrage over its historical lies and slanders. It
was no
different from what most people under the age of say 50 had been
hearing in
school for years.
So
too with the movies, books, television
shows, and popular music Limbaugh identifies as vectors of this
disease. They
merely reflect what their creators absorbed in school and what their
audiences
have been programmed to uncritically accept as true. Having been
schooled in
the evil designs of oppressive, greedy corporations that abuse workers
and rape
the planet, these cultural consumers are natural audiences for the
plots of
movies and television shows that recycle these dull clichés. Having
been taught
the evils of free-market capitalism that enriches the few at the
expense of the
many, they are natural constituents of a class-envy politics demanding
the rich
“pay their fair share,” which is nothing more than property
redistribution
useful for creating a class of political clients dependent on the
federal
government. Having spent years being indoctrinated with romantic
environmentalism and Disneyfied visions of nature, they are susceptible
to an
anti-carbon politics that retards development of American oil resources
in the
name of “protecting the planet” from an apocalyptic rise in global
temperatures
caused by human and corporate misbehavior, a notion that barely
qualifies as a
hypothesis, let alone a scientific fact. But how could most products of
our
dysfunctional educational system tell the difference?
No
surprise, then, that last year Obama won the
18-44 demographic––46% of the electorate––by about 15 points. This is
the age
group that has spent its whole educational career in schools that fail
at
teaching fundamental skills and basic information, but succeed at
transmitting
the progressive ideology perfect for creating conformist dependents
like the
cartoon Julia or actress Lena Dunham, both stars of Obama campaign ads.
That so
many escape this warping influence is a testimony to parents and
independent-minded teachers who are careful to counter this ideology.
The
Jesuit educational maxim was, “Give me a
child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” Today’s
progressives get
children until they are 18 and sometimes 21. That kind of influence is
hard to
match.
Source:
FrontPageMag
Read
this and other articles at Mail Magazine
24
|