More on Education (Moron Education?)

It seems the educational establishment in the United States is obsessed with being listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for the deepest level of hypocrisy ever attained.  I quote from Richard Cochrane’s newsletter:  “Candidates for certification to teach in public schools in Texas are being told that they will be held accountable for any ‘heterosexist’ leanings and must become agents working to change society.”

This all comes under the heading of “multiculturalism,” in other words, relativism, pluralism, whatever.  Yet the hypocrisy meter is shattered when these people’s absolutist presuppositions are stated.  Since when, for example, is homosexuality an absolute core value that public school teachers must uphold or lose their jobs?

Debbie Ratcliffe, at the Texas Education Agency, said the state rules require teacher preparation programs to cover 17 curriculum topics, but not multiculturalism.  Apparently the threat came from the regional level.  Still, it was a threat that presumably could be enforced.

Ratcliffe did say, though, that one of the articles candidates are required to read states that there are programs that insist “on education change as part of a larger societal transformation [emphasis mine; where have we heard that one before?] in which we more closely explore and criticize the oppressive foundations of society [again, emphasis mine; have these people been channeling Karl Marx?] and how education serves to maintain the status quo—foundations such as white supremacy, CAPITALISM [emphasis mine], global socioeconomic situations, and exploitation.”

Notice how capitalism has become unquestionably evil in this scheme.

The same article states, “The underlying goal of multicultural education is to effect social change.”  In a less exacerbatedly hypocritical framework, one would expect a multicultural approach to promote openness to traditional views, including the idea that maybe capitalism has worked in the past and even established a forum for such socialist nonsense.

Again in the same article, one goal of education is proclaimed as “the transformation of society.”  Shades of Vladimir Lenin, whose self-chosen first name, incidentally, also sets off the hypocrisy meter.  It can be read as “lord of the world.”  So much for oppression and exploitation.

Another article of required reading for prospective teachers was by James A. Banks, who writes, “We’ve defined education too narrowly.  We’ve defined it as only basic skills:  reading, writing, and arithmetic.”  I don’t know which mountaintop in the Himalayas Banks has been living on, but in my schools and those of my children and grandchildren, we also learned such things as history, geography, civics, music and science.  He says we need to learn to get along.  Gee, that’s a new one.  That was emphasized in my schools, beginning in 1942, when my classes were full of African-Americans, Mexican-Americans and Anglos from all over the world, and we did learn to like and play well with each other.

More than incidentally, we were also taught to THINK for ourselves.  We were not indoctrinated.

Banks “also warned [that] instructors must lead their students in a specific social direction.”  Oh, really?  WHICH social direction?  And where does he get off his assumption that he and his teachers will know, in this PLURALISTIC situation, which one is the only right social direction?  Oh, Lenin and Stalin knew, and Fidel Castro knew, and Mao Tse-Tung knew, and woe betide anyone who dared to plead pluralism and multiculturalism in their ideal societies.

There was also quite a flap at the University of Minnesota, where school officials planned to provide “remedial education” for those who held “the wrong views.”  The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education took up the case and found that “the report from the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group apparently would involve screening teacher applicants for ‘wrong’ views and withholding their degrees if ‘the university’s political re-education efforts proved ineffective.”

Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten wrote that “the Minnesota plan would have required teachers to embrace—and be prepared to teach our state’s kids—the task force’s own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole:  racist, sexist and homophobic.”  She continued, “The first step toward ‘cultural competence,’ says the task group, is for future teachers to recognize—and confess—their own bigotry.  Anyone familiar with the re-education camps of China’s Cultural Revolution will recognize the modus operandi.”

Never mind China.  Does anyone remember those confession trials (”I have had counter-revolutionary thoughts”)  in the Soviet Union?

Oh, yes.  And then the University of Delaware Office of Residential Life was caught requiring students to participate in a program that taught “all whites are racist.”  Do you want to talk about sick discrimination?

As long as we’re speaking of blatant hypocrisy, where is the ACLU when it’s time to defend the rights of teachers who happen to think the traditional views that built this country up into the greatest ever on the face of the earth are worth saving?

I believe it was Edmund Burke who wrote, “Educate children without God and you end up with a race of clever devils.”  The same goes for educating them with the left-wing fascist values that have oppressed hundreds of millions in our time.