Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Brave New Schools: Education With Conditions
  EdukShun piece by James T. Moore

“The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.” - Bill Beattie. - I humbly admit, my “formal” education consisted of getting only grammar and high school diplomas. In grammar school I got a heavy dose of “politically incorrect” subjects such as reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, penmanship, geography, and discipline. In high school my curricula (also politically incorrect) included history, civics, math, languages, art, music, mechanical drawing, and perhaps some kind of shop work. Back in those days we didn’t automatically head off to college, we went to work; nevertheless my family and I have never missed a meal.

This is not to tout the advantages of an advanced education, or to bemoan the disadvantages of not getting one. It is, rather, a close, hard look at the differences between what we learned in school in my generation, opposed to the ideological, social and restrictive curricula now being engendered in many of today’s “brave new schools and universities.”

One disturbing example of this, reported by Bob Unruh, is a program proposed at the University of Minnesota which would require examinations of teacher-candidates on “white privilege”, as well as “remedial education” for those who hold the “wrong” views - whatever those views happen to be. This is not education, but indoctrination of the most subtle and subversive kind.

And apparently the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) thinks so too.  Adam Kissel, an officer with FIRE, tells us, “If the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group achieves its stated goals, the result will be political and ideological screening applicants, remedial re-education for those with “wrong” views and values, (and) withholding degrees from those upon whom the university’s political re-education efforts proved ineffective.”

The Minnesota plan, according to a critique by columnist Katherine Kersten, is this: “The Minnesota plan would require teachers to “embrace” - and be prepared to teach our state’s kids -the task group’s own vision of America as an oppressive hell hole: racist, sexist and homophobic. 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,” Kersten said.

Then Kersten poses a question: “What if aspiring teachers resist this effort at thought control and object to parroting back an ideological line as a condition of future employment? The task group has Orwellian plans for such rebels.” I leave the rest of her statement to your imagination of what Brave New Schools will be like.

This message should be of utmost interest to Tallahassee, since it is, among other things, a “university” town. And since the indoctrination that teachers and professors are being subjected to will ultimately influence the minds of their students, it behooves all those in the educational field to be aware of this program—-and also this, by Richard Mitchell: “There is only one Education, and it has only one goal: the freedom of the mind. Anything that needs an adjective, be it civics education, or socialist education, or Christian education, or whatever-you-like education, is not education, and it has some different goal.  The very existence of “modified” educations is testimony to the fact that their proponents cannot bring about in a mind that is free. An “education” that cannot do its work in a free mind, and so must teach by “homily” and precept in the service of these feelings and attitudes and beliefs rather than those, is pure and unmistakable tyranny.”

In this day and age, the last thing our students need is an education couched in political correctness; learning what and what not to say, who to let speak or shut out, what to believe and what not to believe. In short, programs that indoctrinate instead of inform, and are structured to make a mockery of individual thought and free speech, is a form of tyranny, pure and simple.

Finally, Mitchell’s thought bears repeating: “There is only one Education, and it has only one goal: the freedom of the mind.”

James T. Moore

Posted by James T. Moore on 12/1/09

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