Indoctrinating You and Yours

There’s a new book out which just received a good write up on Big Government, which looks as if it will be very much worth your while to read. I haven’t read the actual book myself, yet, but the blurbs and comments in the reviews of it are by turns shocking and entirely unsurprising to me. For instance, here’s one about teachers indoctrinating their grammar students in leftist ideology,

“But more and more American K-12 teachers are bringing their politics into the classroom, brazenly acknowledging their effort to indoctrinate and recruit a new generation of radical, anti-American students.

“The long period of self-censorship among educators regarding class and labor issues may no longer hold,” wrote radical educator Rob Linne in his book “Organizing the Curriculum.”
“We cannot claim to be teaching for social justice if we ignore the class warfare being waged all around us. Bringing labor into the arena of K-12 education will undoubtedly meet political resistance, but an increasing number of educators are motivated to take up the challenge.”

That frightening approach to teaching is what motivated Education Action Group to publish a new book titled “Indoctrination: How ‘Useful Idiots’ are Using Our Schools to Subvert American Exceptionalism.”

Personally I don’t find that at all surprising… do you? Really? Here’s another,

“In his foreword for the book, FOX News contributor and former Clinton advisor Dick Morris bemoans the fact that educators are willing to brainwash young minds before they have the ability to fully understand and judge issues on their own.

“We have become accustomed to hearing American history and politics misinterpreted by leftist university professors,” Morris writes. “But (now) we see the insidious indoctrination at the elementary and secondary levels. At least university students can think for themselves. (The book) explains how 7- and 8-year-olds are taught to embrace an atheistic, leftist philosophy virtually from the time they enter school.”

And one more, just for fun,

“The book also discusses Chicago teacher Kati Gilson, who taught her preschoolers about her 2011 trip to Madison to protest the collective bargaining policies of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. She also taught them new words like “strike,” “collective bargaining,” and “negotiate.”

“My preschoolers understand what a protest march is and why it is important,” Gilson wrote.
“As we gear up for what looks like a big battle it is important for us to teach our children and families why we are taking a stand.”

Is this what we pay school taxes for?”

Isn’t that special? But is it surprising?

No. Not in the least. Why do I say that?

You don’t read this blog much, do you?

A post or two ago, I mentioned a fellow I was going back and forth with on facebook, who I called “FR”, who described himself as an ‘avowed socialist’, and who proclaimed quite cooly that he did not believe in individual rights, and that he felt government using its power to create basic rights and minimum entitlements was just fine, and what it should do:

“You mistake rights without realizing that they are both means and ends.

More importantly, I think falling into this rights language lets us ignore the reality: that all of society is about coercion and force. You exercise force over people all the time. There isn’t anything particularly more remote than a government doing it, compossed of people who pass rules made by people. Government is a body we’ve agreed represents a broader consensus than most personal interactions of force.

I also think there’s a broad strawman about the government making decisions ‘for you’. Yes, the government took your tax dollars. The government then provided health care for a 12 year old child who’s family can’t afford it but wanted it. In one sense, the government did make a decision for that family. On the other hand, that government also provided them with something that they needed but couldn’t have. The reality is that when we talk about the government ‘making decisions’ for you, what really mean is that the government, as a collective action body for a society, benefits some over others and tries to control those benefits. Well, yes. It is force.

But it is only different in that it has legal force behind it. Society and living in one is about social coercion at all levels.

The federal government did have to intervene and make decisions for people in a wide array of circumstance that we certainly approve of now: forced integration of public facilities, protection of minority voters and their voting rights, etc. It’s not always the federal government that does it best, but many times, the pure scale of the effort mandates a larger response.””

I mentioned at about that point in the post, that as I was reading his answers, a sick feeling overcame me and I clicked on his profile to discover that my sinking feeling was well founded – he was a teacher. Of World History. Not in a public school, but in what most people consider to be the more ‘safe’ sort, a Charter School.

What I didn’t mention, was a very forthright equivalent of intellectual racism which he was proudly teaching to his students – this is from a comment on his facebook page, in thanks for a blog post of his that was picked up by Think Progress, In Teaching Cultural Literacy, Who Gets To Determine The Canon?, for which Ferny says:

“Thanks for the recognition! This journey I’m on with my students is going to continue and I plan on talking a lot more about the challenge of teaching students to enter a world of white cultural power, where their goal is to win and define their own cultural space for themselves and others.

I totally agree with the totalizing effect that Hirsch can have. Taken without criticism, the idea of cult…ural literacy just becomes a way to teach white trivia to our students.

I think, more importantly, this trivia needs to be taken as a reality of a culture of power and that we need to dismantle large parts of this privilege. Our goal is to empower our students so that they can do the hard work of expanding the canon for their generation and the next.”[emphasis mine]

The post by Ferny Reyes, which was picked up by Think Progress, is here:

“Since I began the blog, I’ve switched locations and employment. Currently, I’m situated in Houston, TX, working at YES Prep SW, a high-performing charter school. When I say high-performing, I mean it: our test scores are among the highest in the state, we send 100% of our students to four-year colleges, and the selectivity of the colleges our students is only increasing. I recently showed a quiz I was giving my students for Islam to a couple of friends of mine who have attended college and taken classes on Islam.

The quiz covered material they would have covered in their college classes in 3-4 weeks of class. I did it in four classes, with a bit of homework. My students did well. I can confidently say that I have great students and that they work hard. Our goal here at SW is to prepare our students not just to be college-eligible, but to be college-ready.”

Isn’t that fantastic? His students were rigorously instructed about Islam, and their scores compared favorably with those of college students. Nice.

What do you suppose his enthusiasm level is for Western Culture? Yeah… good guess; in it he notes,

“To quickly summarize before continuing: power exists. As an educator who is training students to enter a culture of power that is not theirs, I have to make it explicit and I have to teach the cultural literacy behind the institutions of power they’ll have to navigate. I cannot, in good conscience, pretend that their cultural experiences will be valued for all that they are worth and that they won’t be judged for not having those markers of cultural knowledge. I forced myself to read the ‘classics’ of Western Civilization before attending school, but I constantly felt that the philosophers and ideas that were being dropped on a regular basis completely baffled me. I still can’t exactly tell the difference between the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and other famous rock bands, though I at least know a phrase or two from popular songs.”

His students scored fantastically on Islam, but if Ferny was ‘completely baffled’ by Western philosophers… those guys who came up with ‘white cultural ideas’ like the rule of law, freedom, liberty… what do you suppose his students ‘picked up’ from him on them?

The book he is referring to, is by Ed Hirsh, an intellectually filthy barbarian, IMHO, whose idea of ‘cultural literacy’ Ferny accurately describes as:

“…If each local school system imparts the traditional reference points of literate culture, then everybody is able to communicate with strangers. That is a good definition of literacy: the ability to communicate effectively with strangers. We help people in the underclass rise economically by teaching them how to communicate effectively beyond a narrow social sphere, and that can only be accomplished by teaching them shared, traditional literacy culture. We only make social and economic progress by teaching everybody to read and communicate, which means teaching myths and facts that are predominantly traditional….”[emphasis mine]

This is what… this the ALL you can expect for those who view the purpose of ‘school’ as being to ‘teach’ socially and economically useful ‘skills’. Our Founders saw the purpose of Education as being making one self aware, able to understand your ideas and your place in the world, inclined towards being moral, virtuous and able to govern yourself, so as to be capable of living in liberty, and contributing to your life and that of your society as a result.

One of those who contributed to that idea of Education and ‘literacy’, was Aristotle, one of those ‘baffling’ old dead white guys, who said in his Nicomachean Ethics,

“…for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs…”

and from his “On Metaphysics(Book IV)”

“… for not to know of what things one should demand demonstration, and of what one should not, argues want of education. “

In the Western Cultural tradition, Eduction was to improve your ability to Reason, in order to pursue, discover, test and recognize the Truth; familiarity with the same stories your grandfather knew was a useful result, a side effect, not the purpose, of an Education. Montaigne put it as “A traditional liberal arts curriculum of history, language, and literature–the arts that liberate,” of educating one to be worthy of Liberty.

Those… are the ideas which Ferny, a World History Teacher, refers to as ‘baffling’.

Doesn’t surprise me a bit.

Why?

Do you remember my post on an earlier Cassandra, from 1920? He’d tried to warn of anti-American, socialists, communists, who were taking over the schools and colleges 90 years ago. 90 years… do you realize what can be accomplished in 90 years? Look at what Obama has done in three. Couldn’t have happened without our allowing the last ninety.

How about the post that showed that this ‘early’ Cassandra, was at the very least, 60 years late to the party? This hasn’t been going on since only the 1960′s, 50 years ago, not even 90 years ago, it’s been creeping into our national soul, through our children, for over 150 years.

If you aren’t deprogramming and correcting your kids, you’d better get them out of ‘school’ – if you don’t, don’t you dare come to me in a few years and tell me about how stunned you were to hear that your kids are full of anti-American, anti-Western ideas.

Don’t. you. dare.

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