It should concern everyone that our students, and we as a society, seemingly have little choice but to accept that our schools are dominated by leftist teachers promoting their own agendas.
It is no longer a grand secret that many public and private universities are awash in military-demeaning, left-leaning, inculcating faculty and receptive students. The two factions meet daily, coagulating their inherent anti-Americanism into a deep bond. Even the staunchest naysayer would have major difficulties debating this; the facts are overwhelming. Conservative speakers like Messieurs David Horowitz and William Kristol have had pies slammed into their faces by so-called tolerant students, just for pointing out the dangers in these blatant heterodoxies.Â
As a mid-20s former public school teacher who has spent his entire life living in blue states and the "bluest" cities in these states, I encounter this unfortunate rhetoric far too often. Â I have driven cross country twice in 2005, and meandered through the most radical college campuses — from Boulder to Madison to Cambridge — and I feel dismay in reporting that some of the worst brainwashing of eager youths occurs at much younger (and doubtlessly more impressionable) ages these days.
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Teaching public school for the past two years in one of the lowest performing elementary schools in the equally inferior-performing LA Unified School District, I spent much time instructing my students' young, athirst minds as objectively as I could, and I believe they benefited from this. In comparison to many other faculty members, donning Red Union shirts each Tuesday and skipping out of work to their protests seemingly too often, I surmised I did have a very positive effect upon these low-income 4th and 5th graders.
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Disconcertingly, one of our faculty members missed the first week of last school year because she was incarcerated (with the school's video camera) while at the Republican National Convention in New York City. Â She even had to fly back to retrieve the camera, as well as for her court date. Â Dissent may be patriotic in the eyes of some, but this is hardly helping student test scores. A substitute, who was known to have elementary-aged students sign random petitions during his various stints at our school, stuffed my classroom's American flag in the closet when it accidentally fell. Can we question his patriotism? He most likely gleaned, from three quarters of our faculty's lack of saying the daily pledge, that this would not be frowned upon. Â It wasn't. These folks must have been harbingers of secular society's recent quest to abolish the pledge, or at least the "under G-d" portion.
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On Columbus Day, just about one year ago, I can vividly recall my conversation at the morning bell with a grade level colleague.
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He started, "Hey, Mr. K, happy Murdering of Indigenous people Day! I'll tell my kids the 'REAL' Columbus story today; the one NOT in the textbooks!"
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To which I replied, "Manifest Destiny, my friend! How do you think you came to be born, and are able to live here with the freedom to say inane things like that? Â I'll tell MY kids the TRUE Columbus story; the one ORIGINALLY IN the textbooks, NOT the Howard Zinn books they feed us these days in higher ed."
Indeed I may have stooped down to his level of petulance, but an observant person would be cognizant of the revisionist history now being taught throughout our school systems, in which I am sure he often partook. This fellow often mused about how he "enjoys pointing our history's little inaccuracies." Â If I could only believe his in-class actions were as innocuous as those words. I surely never did.
As a youngster gradually progresses, the teachers also get more "progressive." That adjective is most often used to depict liberal biases, but it sounds so guileless that most do not see its ulterior motives.
For every observant college student like my friend who claims, "as if I or others don't realize there are professors with agendas," there are students who spend their academic lives at college (we won't even go into social mischief) in total insouciance; and when asked which political side they stand with, ambivalence takes over. In the 2004 election, the polls showed that (mostly) apathetic college students followed the leads and recommendations of their hallowed professors to an astonishingly Democratic tune. After the election, kids were pondering suicide and "drinking heavily at eight in the morning," claiming there is "no reason to care about life anymore now that Bush won."Â This was relayed to me by friends at the University of Michigan. Personally, knowing many of these kids, I can't fathom how any president's policies could have an impact upon their upper-middle class lives on Long Island and in the Northern Chicago suburbs.
We all know Michael Moore picked up five-figure paychecks at a multitude of college campuses during the summer of 2004; my girlfriend also informed me that at her Florida college, Ashley Judd and Kirsten Dunst espoused anti-Bush balderdash to 18 year-old freshmen donning "John Kerry is my Homeboy" t-shirts. Considering this, coupled with Bruce Springsteen, Jack Black and The Dave Matthews Band playing music while preaching about politics, how could anyone not vote for John Kerry? Much as I regularly opine, "it's just more fun to be liberal when you are young. It takes maturing — and certainly isn't 'fun' — to be patriotic, have morals and fight terrorism." No fun at all.
Lastly, grad schools have now fused into this list. We all can reasonably speculate what a graduate level journalism, political science or sociology class would deduce about modern political events; however, the most fast-moving and fervent anti-Conservative, politically correct indoctrination is coming from the instructors at the teacher credential programs. If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. How else can future K-12 teachers be trained and prepared to follow the lead of their predecessors, "mobilizing" to "fight the power" after these heroes retire?
While erudite articles from Thomas Sowell and Dennis Prager, pointing out the pitfalls of the condescension with which teachers treat low-income "minorities," are available and relevant, teacher trainers (many with PhDs) balk on these pieces, in order to sell their own articles or those from colleagues of a like mindset. For one who honestly didn't notice a great deal of brainwashing when I was a pre-9/11 undergrad, my times as a grad student in education (2000-2002), engulfed me with subjective views in an overwhelmingly conspicuous fashion.
Teachers I know have discouragingly taken these balkanizing theories into the classrooms.
While learning my chosen trade, along with just 16 weeks of hands-on experience in classrooms, I was subjected to two different ESL (English as a Second Language) classes, two Special Ed classes (even though I was teaching mainstream), an "Urban Studies" class, an African American Studies class, Chicano Studies, Health Sciences, Educational Psychology and a Physical Education class. It wasn't until I was teaching full-time and voluntarily enrolled in Saturday classes on Classroom Management, that I learned more relevant methods of instruction to augment my chances for success as a teacher.
It should concern everyone — irrespective of political affiliation — that our students, and we as a society, seemingly have little choice but to accept this academic dominance by the liberal intelligentsia. We have reached the antithesis of the 1960s in some ways: a new world where the Left now curtails and quells any Conservative thoughts from their students. Hopefully, sites like "Students for Academic Freedom" can expose some of these macabre circumstances and perhaps implore congress to pass important legislation. If not, our future generations will be forced, like a reader of my website explained, to "have to listen to my professor talk about her Prius, her trips to Massachusetts, her trip to last week's big anti-war protest in Washington…"
That is just unnecessary. As someone who also taught a group of high school students in a university setting this past summer, it is appalling that educated professors don't appreciate that their objectivity is a cherished part of higher education, and all education, in general. Should students not receive the education that they paid for, and which they entrusted their university's faculty to bequeath upon them? In essence, our youth must get more than just half the story.
A public school teacher in Los Angeles for five years, Ari Kaufman is now a freelance journalist, contributing to publications such as the Baltimore Sun, LA Daily News, and Hackwriters.com travel magazine.
Read more articles by Ari J. Kaufman
Good Marks for this one. It could use some alternate sourcing to balance and support the personal nature of the material.
It is interesting that you mention Zinn. I first read his heavily biased work of "great scholarship" sometime in mid-1990. He originally wrote "A People's History of the United States" in 1980, and has felt it necessary to amend the book four times since. Apparently, he has to keep adding to it against more recent developments in order to stay relevant, including a paean to the Clinton Presidency and a denunciation of the War on Terrorism.
Zinn was (and still is) a big critic of how âhistory is misrepresented in our classroomsâ. By this, you might suppose he must be against the liberal indoctrination that has dominated our schools for about 100 years. Instead, Zinn is offended that liberal dominance is not radical enough by half. By âmisrepresentedâ, he means the teaching of âdead, white Eurocentricâ history. He is an avowed socialist, and much of the book (after telling us how badly we mistreated everyone from the ânobly savageâ Indians to black slaves, to late arriving Italians, celestials and slavs, to women and others) is dedicated to tracing the growth and ârepressionâ of socialism, unions, and harmless communists. If you read only this one book on the United States and events leading to it, you would have to believe us the most evil of nations and most rapacious of people. You would also have to believe that the whole history of the United States since the revolution is one of class struggle. Zinn totally ignores the great advances made in the social contract, the sacrifices made to great ideals, and the unmatched freedom that came about here because not all of us are evilly disposed.
The history Zinn reveals is real enough, but he has cherry-picked it to support his own view and to malign that view which credits our founders with any sort of accomplishment. Instead of seeing that, despite starting off on a rocky footing, we have created a nation to be proud of, Zinn only sees injustice. Because it is not the end result he would wish (i.e., a pure socialism), he sees our great experiment as a dismal failure. If Zinnâs objective was merely to restate our history from the viewpoint of ordinary âpeopleâ (as he suggests), he would have presented material taken from countless non-entities writing in their private journals, the margins of family bibles, news clippings of marginal events and marginal actors, and the economic and social realities of life for ordinary citizens. Instead, he writes mostly about extraordinary individuals who swam against the mainstream that most people prefer to follow. He writes mainly about his own âheroesâ, a whoâs who of socialism, unionism, pacifism, and liberal education.
The first Europeans to arrive were rapacious for gold and power, but they were not at all representative. Others were just hungry for a fresh start and an opportunity to build something better. Some few murdered or committed crimes for which they never paid, but, as the land became settled and ordered, that grew less and the society that evolved was one that held justice in high esteem. The U.S. and Canada suffered much less of the castes and hierarchies existing south of our border, and were broadly democratic from our beginnings. What there was of racial injustice was largely burned away in our Civil War and Civil Rights movement, and at considerable costs.
âClass struggleâ, where there is little in the way of classes, only serves to alienate us one from another. It is the Zinn-minded who keep the hate-rant going by instilling mistrust in successive generations. Rather than celebrate our near-fusion, they insist we haven't even begun. Zinn, along with many like-minded teachers infesting our schools, has been spreading this gospel of self-hate long enough.
A similar author is James Loewen who wrote âLies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrongâ (1995). Zinn has much praise for Loewen, enough that Loewen might be Zinnâs protĂ©gĂ©. Loewen writes accurately and convincingly about the many distortions and vacancies to be found in school room texts, and of the forces applied to bring about a kind of least-common-denominator of distilled historicity. He makes the case that: everything that may offend, everything that is not politically-correct, anything that reminds us of uncomfortable truths, and everything that stands in the way of the broadest possible marketing has been left out; and that what is put in its place is geared to stultifying the process of understanding. Then, after making his case and arguing for less editorializing in education, he calls for restoring a âtrueâ socialist teaching of history a-la Zinn.
These guys would crack me up if I didn't know how influential they've been with my own kid.
Bob S
Comment by Bob Stapler | March 19, 2006
Great comments and thoughts. Thanks, Bob. I appreciate the knowledge.
Comment by Ari Kaufman | March 20, 2006