Increasingly, America is ruled by two tribes of lunatics,
snapping their fingers, ready to break into a dance fight at any moment. While Trump
has indeed cranked it to 11, he is but the cherry on top of the banana split. How
did we go so wrong?
West Side Story
American education was once the best in the world but as
early as 1948, Richard Weaver wrote “…we have lost our grasp of the nature of
knowledge...” Schools have become “social centers…where teachers, living in
fear of constituents, dare not enforce scholarship, and endeavor to turn
classes into democratic forums…” And, while knowledge alone will not make
citizens more moral or kind or refined, a nation cannot be great without great
schools. The 2015 ranking from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development, which includes countries like Tunisia and Kazakhstan, puts the
U.S. at #39 in math, 24 in reading, and 25 in science.
One problem is the deep resistance to reform embedded in
teachers’ unions. Unions tell us that teachers are the bedrock of society. But
if that’s true, wouldn’t it be important to have good teachers? And to have good teachers, shouldn’t we be able to
fire bad ones? In California, where fruit and common sense are stopped at the
border, one teacher fed semen-laced cookies to his students. Several victims now have eating
disorders but the district had to pay him $40,000 to quit due to the arcane
steps required to fire someone. In 2014, a California judge ruled the state’s
lax teacher tenure violated
students’ civil rights. He was overturned.
Yet, dangerous as general mediocrity is, perhaps the bigger
danger to the republic is the pervasive indoctrination that saturates
everything from English to Home Economics. “Ohhh, Omnipotentblog. Isn’t that
just another whiny conservative trope disproved by this Huffpo piece I read the
other day?” asked a friend, a professor at an elite university while sipping
cherry Kool-Aid. (True story.) Well, the liberal Atlantic disagrees. In “Admit It, American Colleges Do Indoctrinate Students”, Conor Friedersdorf
argues that it does happen but it’s generally a good thing.
Gresham’s law in education states that content that leads to
credentials more easily will replace that which is more difficult but has
higher intrinsic value. With the advent of Gender, Ethnic and other
grievance-oriented programs as well as the infiltration of those values in most
other subjects, the bad replaces the good. This material naturally displaces
traditional education not only because it is favored by instructors but because
time and resources are limited. And when you have a society to indoctrinate,
American History and Shakespeare must go.
If you approach two random professors sipping lattes while complaining
about the Nixonian conservatism of that imperialist dog Leon Trotsky,
they would likely have difficulty naming a Republican colleague. According to one
recent study, the ratio of liberal to conservative professors is almost 12
to 1. Economics, the most conservative profession is a mere 4.5 to 1 but in history,
the ratio is over 33 to 1. What’s shocking is how these numbers have shifted in
the last 50 years. A 1968 study put the ratio in history departments at just 2.7
to 1. As recent as 2004, liberal history professors outnumbered conservatives
by as little as 9 to 1. One recent study from Stanford found that conservative-leaning law professors
face overt discrimination in promotions and hiring. Another study
of social psychology professors noted 37% would not hire a conservative and 44%
thought their peers would not. 37% also believed their peers would discriminate
on a grant review. My defensive friend points out that STEM
professors are generally not communists. While true, STEM students are less
than 40% of all graduates, which means the overall ratio for non-STEM fields is
far higher than 12 to 1. Primary and secondary education are no better as 85%
of elementary and 87% of High School teachers identify as
liberal.
Is there evidence students are brainwashed? In a slightly
dated study,
two researchers found only “slight shifts” in ideology.
But when analyzing the numbers,
the “slight shifts” are rather striking. “Far left” students more than doubled
while the “far right” cohort dropped nearly a third. Conservatives dropped by
10% while liberals enjoyed a 25% bump. This is hardly insignificant.
How did education drift so far
from the broader culture? The social ferment of the 60’s did lasting damage to
the nation and education was not spared. In 1969, armed, militant black students,
angry over Cornell University’s pervasive “racist attitudes” and “irrelevant
curriculum”, seized control of a dormitory. Death threats were phoned to
professors who had previously opposed them. Thomas Sowell, a black economist
and Cornell professor until 1968, did not experience the alleged mass racism on
campus but he did have harsh words for the president at the time, James
Perkins, whom he described as “a veritable weathervane, following the shifting
cross-current of campus politics…the quintessential appeaser and dispenser of
pious rhetoric”. With their demands happily met, the militants walked free.
Another Cornell professor at the
time, Allan Bloom, wrote in “The Closing of the American Mind”, that “universities
gave way under the pressure of mass movements and did so in large measure
because they thought those measures possessed a moral truth...” Perkins “had a mixture of cowardice and
moralism not uncommon at the time…(he) thought he was engaged in a great moral
work.”
In 2018, on American campuses, leftists
now feel empowered to threaten violence, physically assault conservatives and
journalists, rip posters out of teenaged hands, shout down speeches, riot, and
commit an extraordinary number of other fascist and violent acts. This happens
because the ideological progeny of James Perkins support it.
Jonah Goldberg describes the
1930’s as a “fascist moment”. A world-wide depression had shaken confidence
that democracy could solve problems and there was great affection, fawning in
fact, over movers and shakers like Mussolini and Hitler. WWII changed this, of
course, but that doesn’t erase the fact that there was a time when many viewed
the Bill of Rights as crusty and stale. Is Western Civilization having another
“fascist moment”? The left has made serious attacks on the 1st, 2nd,
4th, and 10th amendments and many on the right embrace a
president that, while unfairly slandered as fascist, appears thoroughly
annoyed he has any restraints at all.
When an entire generation expresses
fondness for socialism but can’t even define it, it’s time to admit our schools
have failed. Fixing education would be a daunting task. Perhaps when Millenials
start running everything and really making a mess of it, panic will ensue and a
correction will begin. When that time comes, God willing, maybe we should start
with the teachers and school books first.
