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.
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