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.

Marginalized or Successful Indoctrinator

Photo Credit: Marijane Green

If you’ve ever been marginalized by progressives for your conservative views, for your anti-communist teaching philosophy and other divergent opinions, you were not alone. 

If you’ve worked in highly progressive academic environments and were not re-hired as adjunct, granted tenure, or were not even considered for tenure unless you belonged to organizations such as the NEA, AFT, or other Democrat-supporting organizations, you were not alone.

If you’ve worked in secondary education and were told that your opinions did not matter because the entrenched Democrat bureaucracy did things entirely different from what you perceive as common sense and logical in supporting an American education, you were not alone.

If you taught full-time or part-time and the Dean, Director, or Principal told you that you must use a certain textbook that you found offensive, or that you must teach or grade a certain way, dumb down the curriculum in order to allow everyone to avoid failure and pass students who otherwise did not deserve to pass but their parents were threatening to sue the school, you were not alone.

This is how the politics in education work today and have worked for quite some time. Incisive parents who were involved in their children’s education understood the schemes and fads early on and took measures to protect their children by home schooling them or putting them in private schools.

Other parents who were seldom seen at school or PTA meetings were oblivious, did not care who influenced their children’s world views, or were too trusting of those empowered to shape their children’s minds eight hours a day. Television, Hollywood, violent video games, alcohol and drugs did the rest.

And a small percentage of parents were only concerned that Johnny received free tuition and free meals, thus they did not have to be responsible or participate in the education of their progeny. Why bother if the state provided free education, free meals, and paid teachers?

Everybody knows that children see teachers as the ultimate authority and respect them. Some teachers are truly exceptional, others speak with authority in their subject area, and yet others are highly respected for their scholarship or as influential role models.

But all teachers are not created equal or driven by the same desire to promote American exceptionalism and to shape tomorrow’s American leaders and thinkers. Most of the students shaped today will be America’s busy bees and compliant followers who believe everything they are told without asking pertinent questions.

Parents blame their children’s problems on teachers and administrators. Administrators blame everything on the lack of funding or the “low” teacher salaries when compared to the private sector. But the private sector does not get three-month vacations each year. Unionized teachers strike because their salaries are deemed inadequate even though they are the best paid teachers in the country.

Corrupt politicians and dishonest bureaucrats who retire from government or are fired receive cushy and well-remunerated teaching assignments in private colleges around the country, tasked with teaching ethics in general, political ropes, or social justice.

Democrats and some Republicans in higher positions of power receive millions in book advances, idolized by the press and book reviewers. Students flock to their classes so that they too can learn how to lie and cheat their way to the top in the name of social justice.

Teachers say that parents are the problem, their lack of involvement in their children’s education. Parents are not teaching their progeny manners, respect for authority, how to get along with other children without throwing a temper tantrum, lack of modesty in clothing and shoes, obscenely priced when compared to a teacher’s entire outfit, but expect teachers to provide pencils, pens, crayons, glue, scissors, writing paper, and other classroom supplies to their students.

Teachers find fault with parents who never show up at school regularly, who never help their children do homework, or check their homework every night. Some of their questions are:

-          Do parents help their children prepare for the next school day?

-          Do they punish their children for being disruptive elements in the classroom or do parents   complain to the principal that the teacher is unfairly singling out their child and thus she/he is the source of the problem?

-          Do they blame the teacher when their child cheats on a test instead of making their child responsible for their behavior?

-          Do they teach their children to listen in class and behave properly, respecting authority?

It is certainly difficult for a teacher to be both educator and parent to someone else’s child, especially when young teachers don’t have children of their own yet, are not allowed to discipline students in any way for fear of lawsuits, and must provide justification in writing for their lesson plans every day.

Using their students as pawns, public school teachers and administrators have nominated themselves the socialist political compass of our country and have allowed students to walk out of the classroom several times in order to protest the Democrat cause d’jour instead of doing the jobs they were hired to do, teach our children.

Teaching is an art and cannot be taught by the College of Education or by the latest education fad but it can be forced in a certain direction. Unfortunately, in order to keep their jobs, most teachers use all the prescribed lesson plans, worksheets, and textbooks provided by Common Core or whatever orders come down from the administration via the Department of Education which attaches their orders to school funding and grants.

Even though President Trump had expressed his intent to end Common Core in our public schools, the current Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, a wealthy business woman and educational activist with no experience in public education, has made no effort to end Common Core which is very much alive and well in most of our public and private schools.

Whether the teacher is marginalized or a successful indoctrinator protected by the teacher’s union or by tenure, at the end of the day they must do as they are told in order to stay employed.