It’s true that children are our future, for good or ill, depending on their education. Ill-educate children, as we are doing in the United States and Canada, and the result will be cultural decay, social breakdown, and political decline.
We now teach our children that our country is illegitimate, based on genocide and racism, and is systemically evil. Will this lead the next generation to love or despise their country? Who will volunteer for the military, to risk their lives to protect their evil country? When generals assert that the military is racist and sexist, homophobic and transphobic, and harbors white supremacists and domestic terrorists, who will volunteer for the military, to risk their lives to protect their country? Recruitment for the military in both the United States and Canada is severely down, and no one can figure out how to increase it.
We teach our children that our society is divided between helpless victims and cruel oppressors. BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color) and females are all and everywhere oppressed, and whites and males, Christians and Jews, and (astonishingly) Asians are privileged, evil villains. Children learn to fear and hate their fellow citizens of other races, sexes, religions, and ethnicities. What kind of society will we have when we teach children that race hatred, sexism, and ethno-supremacy are justified and virtuous?
Children are taught that speaking and writing correct English is racist, and so they must not learn correct English. Math too is racist, when really, there are no correct answers, and to deny that two plus two can equal anything is oppressive. The demand for correct answers, logic, and scientific proof are sins of “whiteness” that must be eradicated from the socially just society. Thus, it isn’t a weakness that American children perform poorly on international tests of reading, math, and science, but a demonstration of virtue, of social justice.
When schools teach the counterfactual lie that police every day murder innocent black and brown people, a lie refuted by every serious study, is it a surprise that police are viewed by black and brown children with fear and hatred? The constant insults and attacks on police by BIPOC children as well as adults are a predictable result of such inculcation. So too is the low morale of police in almost all urban jurisdictions, their unwillingness to engage in proactive policing, the flood of resignations, early retirements, transfers to rural jurisdictions, and suicides, and the lack of recruits to fill the large gaps in almost every urban police force. It’s no surprise that the crime rate has shot up in every urban jurisdiction.
[Related: “Measuring the Spread of DEI”]
Race and gender disparities in academic participation and performance are explained by one and only one possible factor: racist and sexist discrimination. The other likely causes—family weakness in single-parent homes, community pathologies, and individual choices—may not be mentioned or investigated. In this way, disparities in participation or performance are deemed illegitimate, and therefore must be wiped out in order to achieve “equity,” that is, equal results among census categories of the population, and “social justice.” Thus, poor performers are “victims,” and measures must be taken to ensure that outcomes are the same. This is done by giving preferences to underperforming BIPOC pupils and students, canceling accelerated programs for which they do not qualify, canceling examinations in which they do poorly, and setting aside performance standards. Programs in which females are underrepresented must prioritize recruiting females through special preferences and benefits.
BIPOC pupils and students are taught that their academic participation and performance is not their responsibility, but the responsibility of others who victimize them, and who owe them preference, benefits, and reparations. This is the perfect pedagogical plan for destroying individual motivation and a sense of responsibility. There’s always someone else to blame.
In order to advance “equity,” based on demographic “representation” of race, sex, ethnicity, etc., alternative criteria for judgment, such as individual achievement, merit, and potential, are denounced as, you know, “racist,” and rejected. So recruitment to academia, science, media, professions, and government will be of the demographically underrepresented, not of the most capable candidates. The foundation of this plan is the racism of low expectations, assuming that people from BIPOC categories could never make it on merit. This guarantees mediocrity or complete incompetence throughout our institutions: in medical care, scholarship and teaching, engineering, the press, law, and governance. The consequent trajectory is a societal decline and decay.
Female pupils and students are taught that they are being excluded due to sexist discrimination. This counterfactual claim ignores the reality that females are the majority in universities and in most schools and programs. Those few programs where they are not, in spite of all of the heavy recruiting—physical sciences, mathematics, computer science—is a result of the choices of females who prefer to enter other fields. Yet females are continually told that they are victims of sexist discrimination. And male pupils and students are told that non-existent female victimhood is their fault.
Given the understanding that reason, logic, the search for evidence and correct answers, and science are taught as features of oppressive “whiteness,” it should come as no surprise that schools discourage students from basing their understandings on scientific facts. A particular focus of teaching from kindergarten through graduate studies is the rejection of biology and its knowledge of biological factors in human life. Biological sex is now taught to be irrelevant to human life; the only thing that counts is one’s feelings about gender.
[Related: “Defund Gender Studies”]
Children are taught that they can be any of a hundred genders that they choose. Some teachers groom children to be supporters and “allies” of LGBTQ+, and to join in wherever they choose. Some children who are uncomfortable with their sex or confused about it are in some schools recruited into the trans community. Schools funnel pupils to sex transition clinics run by people, who still call themselves doctors, where children are subjected to life-changing chemical treatments and surgical mutilation in the futile effort to transform children from their biological sex to a replica of the other.
What devious force brought all of this cultural destruction into being? Who injected this destructive poison into our educational system? The source, of course, is our universities. They were taken over by grievance studies advanced by various particular interest groups. First and most decisive were the feminists who established women’s and gender studies to advance what they defined as the narrow interests of women. They adopted the Marxist model of society divided into two warring classes; in place of the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie, they defined the conflicting classes as females versus the patriarchy, all men. The feminists inspired queer studies and LGBTQ+ activism. Black studies, Latinx studies, and Asian studies all championed their races in alleged conflict with the other races. Universities no longer were about what can we learn about the world and its people, but about what you could do through propaganda and activism to advance the narrow interests of your category.
All of these activisms were absorbed in social science and humanities programs, often by joint appointed professors with one or another grievance study. Administrators were either activists themselves or were won over and instituted “social justice” measures of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” hiring “diversity officers” to police the staff and students to ensure that no “wrong think” was allowed to flourish. Faculties of education, being weak in academic content and lax in pursuing that, adopted grievance theory with a vengeance, and trained their students, the future school administrators and teachers, in the most radical forms of grievance activism. The faculties of education have contaminated our K-12 schools and made them what they are now.
My modest suggestion would be to abolish faculties of education entirely, defund the social science and humanities, disband all grievance programs, fire all diversity officers, and ensure that, in the United States, the First Amendment, and in Canada the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, was respected in all educational institutions that receive federal funding. These measures might stem the galloping damage that is being done to our societies by our increasingly lunatic educational systems.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the Epoch Times on September 16, 2022 and is republished here with permission.
Image: Jacob Lund, Adobe Stock
Firstly, thank you for this article. I like its eloquent summary. Secondly, to counter actually, social media, googling, or your other basic internet echo-chambers designed by marketing experts fixated on curating information that a) rewards individual biases to keep you online longer, and b) is subject to individual interests funding selective ad campaigns is the perfect, tragic, and already available replacement for schools. Therefore, while I agree the schools are jeopardized in the ways listed, defunding schools would not solve the problem since the problem and indoctrinating messages still exist in this quicker, pocket-sized alternative venue. Popular websites are already behaving like schools and companies to quickly react and join bandwagons of censorship and attacks against ‘false information’, so while you can find extremism on the right online as well, it’s nowhere near the prevalence of left extremism. Just to find your article on a private browser, it took me hours of combing through liberal-biased pieces just to finally arrive at a place of dissenting, unpopular opinion where I could feel at ease that someone on this continent is not completely brainwashed with the same cool-aid. So, beware that a hard reset of one system doesn’t always fix the general error since viruses often spread and mutate even after identifying a potential source (I guess there’s a covid joke lost in here somewhere). Again thank you for this thoughtful work.
Now that we have heard the “modest suggestion,” will there be a practical suggestion forthcoming?
Not only is it a practical solution, but one that very welk may happen in the next few years.
There is no point laying out a “practical suggestion” for tactics and strategy unless you are clear on what needs to be done, such as the objectives I set out.
Can we point to any changes in woke extremism in education brought about by practical activities? Yes, we can: Appealing to parents of school children as voters flipped Virginia from Democrat to Republican, and, since then, new policies have been established to give parents more voice, as has also happened in Florida. As well, woke leftist school boards across the country have been challenged by moderate and conservative parent candidates, and a number have been flipped, e.g. San Francisco. Now there are campaigns in school board races across the country to throw out the woke radicals.
At the university level, state institutions are funded by state legislatures. They are in a position to impose conditions on state universities. The legislature of Quebec has just passed a law that academic freedom must be maintained in Quebec universities. It too controls the purse strings. So if parents form a lobby group to support reform, members of legislatures will likely listen.
There are plenty of practical steps to take. What it takes is a plan for reform and a will to engage in electoral politics to advance it.
OK, I was too mild in conveying what I think. To put it bluntly, where I work, at a university in a mostly but not entirely blue state, if you propose to “abolish faculties of education entirely, defund the social science and humanities, disband all grievance programs, fire all diversity officers,” you will eliminate about half the students, and you will be dismissed as a crank by a sizable majority of the population. Not just the students, but the general populace. I doubt that you will get very far even in a state like Oklahoma.
As to higher ed, any effective reform will have to be on the Federal level because (a) most of the money is Federal and (b) the credentials are interstate.
The latter is increasingly true as states increasingly move towards recognizing each other’s teaching licenses.
One word: Deinstitutionalisation…
19th Century reformers such as Dorethia Dix built large institutions for the mentally ill and mentally retarded. Circa 1970, these expensive institutions were considered abusive and of social concern.
……and 20 years later, they no longer existed.
History repeats itself Jonathan, it wasn’t just popular disgust (and numerous lawsuits) but the need to cut budgets in an era of stagflation.
History is repeating itself — it’s not just that half the country hates higher ed but its largess is low-hanging fruit for cash-strapped legislators to cut.
Likewise much as the development of psych drugs elimated the need of physical confinement, the internet eliminated the need for a college to be centered around a library filled with paper books.
So while all the things Jonathan predicts would happen, would anyone card?
Yeah, Doc, the situation of the severely mentally ill is great now.
Meanwhile, the students are back, it’s great to see their youthful vigor.
The mistake Reagan made was trying to shut down the US Department of Education instead of packing it with conservatives.
Writ large, the right abandoned education in the 1960s with LBJ and that’s why things are the way they are now.
Let’s not keep making the same mistake.