Schools of Leftist Learning

An elementary school class under socialism/communism
Photo: 1965

My first encounter with the daunting public school education system was in a little town in the deep south where I applied to be a substitute. To my surprise, the principal of the local high school told me that they could not “take just anybody off the street,” one had to have a teaching license to be a substitute, just having a degree would not suffice.

As I learned much later, most substitutes were generally glorified babysitters who did not really engage the students academically. They just passed worksheets assigned by the absent teacher and tried valiantly to deal with the behavioral problems of unruly students.

Undeterred, I asked the Superintendent of the small public school system and I got the same answer. I checked to see if a teaching license was required and I got several different answers. This was 1979, the year Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education was established when our public school education began its decline, reaching bottom with Common Core.

Perhaps the administrators believed that a person coming from a communist country could not possibly teach American students any values or history worth learning and were afraid that I might warp their minds with communist indoctrination.

Since I fled communism and had not been indoctrinated at all, I resigned myself that I was not educated enough to be a substitute in their public schools. I had met some of the “licensed” teachers and I was not impressed at all with their overall knowledge and lack thereof.

A 2010 ranking by the U.S. News and World Report placed the following schools of education in the top ten of all graduate colleges of education in the U.S.:  Peabody College (Vanderbilt University), Teachers College at Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, University of Oregon, Johns Hopkins, University of California (Los Angeles), Northwestern (Chicago), University of Wisconsin-Madison, and U.C. Berkley.

In case you wondered where many public school teachers learned their “forward” methods of teaching, their “expert” craft, Marxist ideology, and where textbooks and ever-changing methodologies like Common Core came from, you get an idea from the list cited.

The schools of education around the country indoctrinate future teachers who in turn propagandize socialism and Marxism to our students and degrade the education system with the Common Core methodology and all its ancillary materials.

Then I had my first encounter with higher education in 1982 when I started taking classes at the nearby university and I was shocked to learn that many of my professors who were well prepared in their subject areas, were also not just highly liberal, but some were rabid Marxists. The administration was not yet in bed with communism as they did not give me credit for the mandatory Scientific Socialism classes I attended under the communist school system. 

I was surprised at the high concentration of liberals among academia, professors who worshipped at the foot of Marx and Lenin. The campus was pretty much a socialist enclave where English professors adored deviant behavior and discussed it at nauseam in their classes.

We could not express anti-communist opinions or anything else that was divergent from the college professor’s stated opinions. Students were bullied into submission. They knew that there would be serious consequences to grades and student standing.

Even though there is not one person who has all the right answers, college professors put themselves on narcissistic pedestals on the conference circuit around the country, awarding each other titles and meritorious plaques, letting everyone know that they are the ultimate source of suitable information and, if you have someone else’s opinion, it is not worth having.

I thought, whatever happened to the campus being a place to freely exchange ideas, for polite discourse, examination, and arriving at solutions to a problem?

The darling professors are protected by an old system of tenure which assures them that they can never be fired no matter how outrageous their behavior, what they teach, and how they teach it. The tenure system assures them that they can be activists and teach our children to hate America, its history, and even hate themselves, and still keep their jobs.

This disease called tenure began in America sometime in the late nineteenth century, modeled after a much earlier German tenure system. It was necessary then as industrialists’ ideas (they financed many universities) and the liberal and populist professors’ ideas diverged. That reality is long gone but tenure still exists today.

A professor should be free to discuss politics and philosophy at appropriate times and in appropriate places but all sides of the discussion should be allowed to interject. That is when learning occurs. Bringing up politics in classes with subject matters that do not involve politics is inappropriate.

In addition to student Marxist indoctrination, universities have become enclaves of intolerance and self-selection. Committees choose mostly applicants who believe the same as they do. Consequently, politically conservative professors seldom get hired or tenured by a committee of like-minded liberals. In Ivy league schools, a mere 13 percent of the faculty is libertarian or conservative.

There are many other important reasons why our colleges and universities have become “institutions of leftist learning.” To undo the damage done to our children, universities should end tenure, end the self-selecting committees, abolish the Department of Education, and fire teachers who discuss politics in subject areas that have nothing to do with politics.  Professors must teach students how to think objectively, not what to think, echoing the professor’s beliefs.

It is sad when a student has to agree with the professor’s social and political views in order to get a good grade in class. Students are not there to get a diploma in social justice activism. They are there to learn real American history, science, mathematics, engineering, subjects that will lead to an employable and useful profession. Otherwise, the college diploma is worthless and students are better served in a trade school.