The View From 1776

Many commentators have observed that “teaching students to think” is little more than brain-washing them to hate America by inculcating the atheistic, and materialistic religion of socialism.  That program, also known as diversity, brooks no questioning and no opposition.

At a wedding reception dinner some years ago, for example, I was seated next to Thomas Roos, chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Dartmouth.  Dartmouth’s hostility to the conservative views editorialized by the Dartmouth Review was then much in the news.  In answer to my question, Professor Roos stated simply that the opinions of the Review editors didn’t deserve to be heard in a liberal democracy.

American so-called higher education is following the path defined by Vladimir Lenin, who told the Soviet commissars of education that their job was to teach students to hate their parents and any non-liberal-progressive beliefs held by their parents.  Only communist doctrine deserved to be heard in a “good socialist society.”

For a bizarre example of this genre of “education,” read Dartmouth’s ‘Hostile’ Environment.




Dismal K-12 Education Makes Colleges Look Good

A lack of competition among primary and secondary schools permits poor performance.


By Jane Shaw
March 10, 2008

The nonprofit organization that I head, the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, frequently criticizes North Carolina’s colleges and universities. But as many North Carolina parents know, higher education problems are small when compared to the failings of elementary and secondary education.



With all its faults, the U.S. system of higher education is still the envy of the world. Foreign students flock to our universities for high-quality training.



In contrast, our K-12 system is famous for poor performance. While some public K-12 schools teach effectively, many others offer little of value, as evidenced by high dropout rates, poor test scores, and the growing demand for remedial instruction in universities and community colleges.



U.S. elementary and high school students consistently score below their peers in international skill tests, particularly in science and math. In the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment, for example, the U.S. ranked 17th in science and 24th in math out of 30 countries.



Why the contrast between the two sectors of education? There is one big difference: competition. The higher education system has it, and K-12, for the most part, does not.



Any economist will tell you that competition spurs improvement. Competition in education means that providers of goods and services (schools) try to attract customers (students) by making their wares more attractive than others’.



Now, some faculty members at universities cringe at cringe at calling students “customers,” as if it belittles their teaching. College administrators, however, accept the fact. They compete for students. They must offer something of value to students at a cost that students can afford. When schools stop doing that, they come close to bankruptcy, as Antioch College and the New College of California recently did.



That is not the case with K-12 education.



First of all, attendance is compulsory. Second, the government can mandate which schools children attend. Families may try to exercise some choice by moving to neighborhoods with good schools, but their school district can assign their children to another location. This is an emotionally charged issue in Wake County right now. In Cary there is even grumbling about “seceding” from the county school system among parents who wish their children to attend the local schools instead of being bused elsewhere.



“Magnet” schools offer some choice, but, as the Raleigh News and Observer has pointed out, “It’s a lottery, more or less.”



A long-term effort to offer real choice resulted in the creation of charter schools (public schools that operate with some independence). But the state legislature has severely limited their number. Franklin Academy, a charter school in Wake Forest, had 1,860 applications for its 93 openings next fall. Politics is keeping the supply of charter schools from rising to meet demand.



Private elementary and secondary schools do have to compete, of course, and they do so in a market distorted against them by “free” public schools. Essentially, tax-paying families must pay twice if they send their children to private schools. As a result, only about 11 percent of all K-12 students are taught in private schools. That figure does not include the 1 million–plus homeschoolers in the country, however.



American higher education, on the other hand, is all about choice. The sheer number of institutions—2500 four-year schools and a total of more than 4,000 postsecondary schools—has no peer in any other country. These institutions fill a diverse array of niches, from traditional religion-based education to curricula emphasizing liberal activism, from majors in gender studies to genetics, and with vocational choices from golf course management to nuclear medicine technology.



These schools seek out students because (unlike K-12 students) they pay tuition. Even though taxpayers subsidize tuition at public universities, tuition is a critical funding source at schools both public and private. Students with federal financial aid carry it with them and use it like a voucher. (In K-12, additional students simply mean additional burdens on the community’s tax base.)



In sum, colleges and universities have the key ingredient that could transform K-12 education: competition. Bringing in choice would do a world of good for North Carolina’s children.



Jane S. Shaw is the executive vice president of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

My wife is a teacher in Lowell MA, 7&8 Math. She is not the typical teacher. Degrees in chemistry, biology, laboratory science and a master in education. Before teaching she was a laboratory microbiologist.  She has been teaching for 8 years now, 5 in Boston and 3 in Lowell.

While the teachers union does block efforts to improve education, the entitlement mentality bred into generations of minorities has resulted in parents who do not care. Of course, this is exactly the result the liberal left wanted. But great teachers like my wife who don’t give a hoot about political correctness end up burned out early because the administration blames them for failing students when the students won’t make even the slightest effort to do the work.

When my wife meets the parents, if they even bother to come in, she usually sees within minutes where the student’s attitude comes from. The bureaucrats don’t help because they believe the false idea that a teacher can “inspire” any student to learn. I believe that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.

The end result is that my wife spends 4 to 5 hours every night at home working. She spends most of the weekend working. Then she gets mad at me for doing stuff with the kids and leaving her home alone. Our “together” time is often both of us on the couch with our laptops on and working.

The educrats push “new” programs based on biased pseudo studies that are designed only to sell a new system and force the purchase of yet more useless crap.

Bush did not help when he sided with FAT TED on NCLB. That FAT TED was for it should have told President Bush that it was a really bad idea. NCLB sets up a complete federal government takeover of all public schools in 2014. It does this by setting a mandate that for anyone with an IQ above 70 is not achievable. NCLB requires that all (100%, no exception) public school students achieve proficiency or higher by 2014.

It has already been shown that districts across the country are dumbing down tests to inflate the rate of improvement. The proof is that these district show flat SAT score at the same time their “state” scores are improving. There has never been a valid test given with 100% of takers scoring B+ or higher. It would be the same as requiring all students to make the varsity basketball team. It just won’t happen.

One thing has been proven many times over. If you want to screw something up have the government fix it. 

The Washington Times reports the latest liberal-progressive-socialist curtailment of personal freedom. 

“California courts have held that under provisions in the Education Code, parents do not have a constitutional right to educate their children in their own home,” said the Feb. 28 ruling by the California Appellate Court for the second district.

When they wish to overrule long-standing political liberties, liberals look to precedents of so-called international law and other nations’ customs.  The socialist European Union, and Germany specifically, provide ammunition for abrogating educational liberties.

Why the animus of liberal courts and teachers’ unions against home schooling?

The obvious answer is that home schooling does a better job, revealing the poor quality of public education.  Less obvious is the desire of home-schooling parents to teach Judeo-Christian moral principles, which directly conflicts with the public school aim of teaching the secular religion of liberal-progressive-socialism.  Propagating that mind-set necessitates identifying as ignorance all ideas of fixed and timeless moral principles.

Such was the work primarily of John Dewey, the leading liberal-progressive theoretician of the early 1900s.  He taught Columbia University students that Darwinian evolution had proved that everything, including morality, was continually evolving.  In such a world there can be no timeless principles of morality.  Rules for social behavior are simply whatever intellectuals think they ought to be in matters of sexual orientation, sexual promiscuity, and every sort of sensual gratification. 

Under the impact of such schooling, the traditional family unit is no longer the bedrock of society.  The norm tends toward single-parent units.  Home-schooling by parents in traditional families is, to that style of moral relativism, a direct affront.

There is now abundant evidence, in all parts of the nation, that public-education students are inculcated with anti-Americanism and a moral relativism that will not even condemn the Nazi Holocaust.  Liberal-progressivism teaches students that there are no real differences among nations, races, and cultures, even sexes.  We are all homogeneous and ready for a single world government that will end wars and guarantee harmony and economic plenty, equally for all.  In such a world, callow students must be conditioned to see every atrocity from the other guy’s view point and to avoid all judgments of right or wrong.

Liberal-progressives, it will be remembered, sympathized with Al Queda and blamed 9/11 on the capitalist greed of the United States.

The recent death of William F. Buckley, Jr. reminds us that, by the late 1940s, this disintegration of historical education was well established.  Ivy League universities such as Yale had long since abandoned their founding mission of educating Puritan ministers.  They had, as Buckley documented in “God and Man at Yale,” become overwhelmingly slanted toward liberal-progressivism.

Liberal-progressive-socialism is a world paradigm in which greedy capitalists become rich by grinding workers down to bare-subsistence levels of income, while forcing the workers to buy whatever products they produce, at whatever prices they elect to charge.  Hence the endless harping in the New York Times about income inequality.

In that paradigm, social justice demands that the undeservedly rich capitalists be expropriated, either by seizing their property and placing it under collective ownership, or by imposing a multitude of regulations that convey the rights of ownership to the political state.  This is known as socialization.

The most important element of liberal-progressive-socialism, however, is control of the educational system.  Henri de Saint-Simon, who systematically conceptualized socialism in the first decades of the 19th century, wrote that the educational system must be controlled by the highest level of the political state’s intellectual councils, so that nothing other than the doctrine of socialism may be taught.

For a discouraging assessment of the outlook for improving education, read Sol Stern’s City Journal essay School Choice Isn’t Enough, published in today’s Wall Street Journal online op-ed page.

Where school-choice voucher programs have been used, educational results have improved.  But the Catholic parochial schools, which in many cities became the schools of choice, are under intense financial pressure.  Local dioceses are closing many of them to cut operating costs.  From now on, there will be fewer effective alternative spots for getting a good education, even if school-choice programs are enacted more widely.

New York City’s much bruited reforms under Mayor Michael Bloomberg have given school administrators more latitude to hire, promote, and compensate teachers on the basis of performance, rather than union-shop seniority.  But the bottom-line results in children’s learning remain disappointing.

Mr. Stern explains why, astonishingly, socialist-to-the-core Massachusetts has produced the best record of improvement in the nation.  The key, as common sense ought to inform us, is making teachers teach basic subjects effectively, rather than corrupting students with anti-American falsehoods and feel-good nonsense such as the religion of recycling and world socialist solidarity through the UN.

Why have other states been less successful than Massachusetts? 

The impenetrable road block is the nation’s college schools of education, which remain immersed in John Dewey’s progressive education, a blend of Soviet educational doctrine and the conceptions of French Revolutionary philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau.  Only Massachusetts, to date, has been blessed with a state educational authority that understands the nature of the problem and has exercised the power to deal with it.

For additional background on Mr. Stern’s analysis, read The Corruption of Public Education: How It Happened and Education: Methadology or Content?.

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Ironically, Jean Jacques Rousseau, a liberal-progressive of the 1789 French Revolutionary era, spoke of freeing men from the chains of social custom and morality, forged, in his view, by Judeo-Christianity.  Yet it is today’s liberal-progressive educators who have assumed the role of blacksmith to hammer anew the chains of ignorance and slavery onto our children.

When the British North American colonists fought for their independence in 1776 and when they wrote the Constitution in 1787, equality meant equal economic opportunity, unfettered by government, to improve their lives and to pass along the fruit of their labors to their children and grandchildren. 

The focus was upon political and economic freedom.  Today the focus is upon imagined and undeserved rights to enjoy the fruits of others’ labors. 

Those rights exist only to the extent that government arbitrarily confiscates the property and freedoms of others and redistributes them in the name of social justice.  In short, rights, as opposed to liberties, cannot exist outside government that is to some degree tyrannical.

Today’s doctrine - liberal-progressive-socialism - is what Hilaire Belloc called The Servile State.  Today’s educational focus is what Friedrich Hayek called The Road to Serfdom.

Jane S. Shaw, Executive Vice President at the J.W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh, North Carolina, alerted me to an article titled Ignoring the Ideological Elephant in the Room.

It describes one aspect of the process by which today’s college professors, the bomb-throwing student radicals of the late 1960s and early 70s and their acolytes and progeny, fasten the chains of political and philosophical ignorance upon callow youth.

It also highlights the mischief arising from the ahistorical view that college education is little more than preparation for a high-paying job.  Unthinking voters are led to believe that the essential need in education is spending more money, without regard for the purposes to which the spending is put.

Key quotations from the article:

The state university system recently invested considerable time and money in the UNC Tomorrow Commission to see how North Carolina’s public colleges can “best meet the needs of the state and its people over the next 20 years.” The commission placed particular emphasis on how to provide for the future prosperity of North Carolina.

They traveled the state and spoke to hundreds of people from all walks of life. Yet one of the most important questions was not asked: is what we are teaching our students in the classroom going to produce a prosperous and free North Carolina?

...It wasn’t that long ago when most people understood that there was a real threat to freedom posed by the collectivist philosophy. The tendency for countries ruled by collective regimes to condemn many of their citizens to forced labor camps was well documented in books like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” an expose of the former Soviet Union’s treatment of political prisoners, and films like “The Killing Fields,” which chronicled how half of Cambodia’s population was either killed or driven into exile through a brutal system of “permanent revolution.”

Today, many people seem to feel that any danger from collectivist ideologies ended when the Berlin Wall was dismantled in 1989.  Yet Russia is returning to the more authoritarian ways of the old Soviet Union. The educational systems in the supposedly benevolent welfare-state countries of France and Germany now teach elementary and high school students “that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral”...

When children indoctrinated to such beliefs from an early age reach their majority, they are likely to produce a society where the factors that determine prosperity, such as innovation and the accumulation of capital, will be eyed with suspicion or punished. 

In the United States, these ideas have found long refuge in our universities, and their adherents are thriving. Of what value is an education, when the best that can be hoped is that the students sitting in their classrooms will ignore their lessons?

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National Journal law columnist Stuart Taylor, Jr., in The University Has No Clothes describes the latest hypocrisy emanating from Duke University.

If you want your children to be inculcated with amorality, anti-Americanism, and the secular atheism of socialism, by all means mortgage your future to pay their tuition to an elite college or university.

If you prefer the historical purpose of education – transmitting the best of Western civilization for the purpose of forming good character and civic virtue – teach your children to read the classics of Western civilization while they are in high school.  Then let them go to work until they can earn enough money to pay their own tuition in a community college.  They will learn the virtues of hard work and saving, while avoiding the pollution of character that is today’s so-called college education.

OPENING ARGUMENT
The University Has No Clothes
By Stuart Taylor Jr., National Journal


Monday, Feb. 11, 2008

When a mentally deluded stripper accused three Duke University lacrosse players of a brutal gang rape at a March 2006 off-campus team party during spring break, dozens of activist Duke professors were not content merely to give great credence to the rape charge, even as evidence of its probable fraudulence poured into the public record. They also treated the lacrosse players as pariahs for having hired strippers at all. So, too, did Duke President Richard Brodhead, Board Chairman Robert Steel, other campus administrators, many in the media, and others.

Never mind that hiring strippers violated no law or university rule. Never mind that nobody had made a fuss about the 20-plus stripper parties that other Duke athletic teams, fraternities, and sororities held that year. Brodhead and other officials and professors continued to express horror long after the supposedly “privileged” lacrosse players had abjectly apologized. To underscore its horror, the university adopted a new rule: “Strippers may not be invited or paid to perform at events sponsored by individual students, residential living groups, or cohesive units.”

So, some might be surprised to learn that on this year’s Super Bowl Sunday, Duke University played host to a group of strippers, prostitutes, phone-sex operators, and others in a “Sex Workers Art Show” to display their “creativity and genius.” The university spent $3,500 from student fees and various programs to pay the performers and cover expenses.

One account of the February 3 show in the on-campus Reynolds Theater—from which I have redacted the more repulsive particulars—was posted on the Internet by Jay Schalin, of the conservative-leaning John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

“The performers did not just take their clothes off—and the actual nudity part of the show was rather tame. But mere nudity could hardly compare with a show that began with the Art Show’s founder and director, Annie Oakley, imploring the audience to stand up and shout ‘I take it up the butt!’...

“A transvestite, naked except for some strategically placed tape, with the words ‘F___ Bush’ painted on his chest, kneeled on all fours and lit a sparkler protruding out of his rectum with ‘America the Beautiful’ playing…

“A stripper, in the guise of a U.S. flag-draped Lady Justice, ... yanked a string of dollar bills out of her posterior as the sound system played Dolly Parton’s version of ‘God Bless the U.S.A.’ She ended her act by saluting and holding up her middle finger to the crowd. The announcer referred to the performance as her ‘Infamous Patriot Act.’ Her most private area was kept covered by a small American flag…

“A dominatrix donned a large ‘strap-on’ male sex organ, and pretended to masturbate while the crowd was urged to shout ‘faster, faster,’ in Chinese.”

The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper, reported that the show “riveted a crowd of students and community members,” with “rowdy cheers and awkward silences.”

This event was sponsored by a student group called Healthy Devils, with co-sponsors including Duke’s Women’s Center, the Program for the Study of Sexualities, the Student Health Center, Students for Choice, the Campus Council, and Sexual Assault Support Services. The show has toured or will tour other campuses including Harvard University, the College of William & Mary, the University of Michigan, Wesleyan University, and the University of California (Davis).

Duke Provost Peter Lange, responding to my e-mailed questions, explained that the sponsors had followed normal procedures to get university funds and facilities. Duke “routinely hosts shows and speakers that some people find controversial or even objectionable,” he wrote, as part of its “strong commitment to free speech and academic freedom.” He added that the university takes no position on the views expressed.

Fair enough. But how can the Duke administration reconcile its solicitude for the right of some groups to pay strippers to perform with its disdain for lacrosse players who did the same?

“There is an obvious difference,” Lange responded, “between strippers performing at a private party and a group of artists touring university campuses across the country to present a show with political discussion, musical theater, and displays of sexuality.”

So people who take off their clothes and dance for money while others watch are not mere strippers, but rather “artists,” if they go on tour, call it “musical theater,” and toss in scatological and vulgar political effusions?

Another way of looking at it, Schalin’s article suggests, is that “inviting strippers to perform does not appear to be a problem as long as the intent is not to titillate men, but to shock a mixed audience with vulgarity and disparage mainstream American values.”

Kenneth Larrey, a senior who founded Duke Students for an Ethical Duke to promote fair treatment of students by the university that had so savaged its own lacrosse players, skipped the Super Bowl to document the university’s hypocrisy. The show was, he says, “far, far more grotesque than we could have imagined.”

To be sure, Annie Oakley did voice one coherent political message: Women are driven into the “sex industry” because the “only other option is working a minimum-wage job or less.” But this theme was undercut by one performer’s admission that she had left a regular job to make more money for “my extravagant partying lifestyle” and by others who described choosing sex work after college.

While the show portrayed “sex workers” as both artistic “geniuses” and victims of society, males who pay strippers to perform had better have politically correct motives. The Sex Workers Art Show passed the political correctness test because, in the words of its website, it not only “entertains, arouses, and amazes” but also offers “scathing and insightful commentary on notions of class, race, gender, labor, and sexuality.”

As if the nation’s campuses were not sufficiently steeped in such stuff already.

The lacrosse players, on the other hand, had no pretensions beyond titillation and male bonding. For this they were likened to slave masters of the Old South by many a professor and columnist. Professor Mark Anthony Neal, for one—a practitioner of what he calls “ ‘gangster’ scholarship” and “intellectual thuggery”—accused the players of “hoping to consume something that they felt a black woman uniquely possessed.” Never mind that the booking agency had told the players that one stripper would be white and one would be Hispanic.

Brodhead told the Durham Chamber of Commerce on April 20, 2006, “If our students did what is alleged, it is appalling to the worst degree. If they didn’t do it, whatever they did is bad enough.” (Emphasis added.)

This was a dagger aimed straight at the hearts of sophomores Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty, who had been arrested on rape charges two days before. In his eagerness to trash two young men in their time of direst peril for having attended a stripper party organized by their captains, Brodhead ignored the strong, by-then-public evidence that both were entirely innocent of rape.

Such smears have so far cost Duke well over $10 million to settle a threatened lawsuit by the three wrongly accused players. (The third was indicted after Brodhead’s “bad enough” gibe.) Three other players have filed a lawsuit and 30-some others are threatening to sue.

But no Duke administrator or professor has been disciplined in any way. Indeed, the only one fired at Duke as a result of the bogus rape charge was Mike Pressler, the university’s lacrosse coach for 16 years and the 2005 NCAA Coach of the Year. Brodhead fired him in April 2006 while misleadingly suggesting that his players were a bunch of racists. This at a time when rogue District Attorney Mike Nifong, who has since been disbarred, was winning an election by spreading similar smears to Durham voters and potential jurors.

Less than a month later, a faculty committee that Brodhead appointed to investigate the coach’s leadership and the players’ characters found that Pressler had been blameless. It also found that the players—although far too prone to the alcohol abuse, noisy parties, and related petty misconduct that are endemic on campus—were otherwise an admirable group of student-athletes with no history of racist talk or behavior.

Despite all of this, Steel—who is also an undersecretary of the Treasury—and Duke’s board have strongly supported Brodhead’s handling of the lacrosse case. In December 2007 a board committee voiced what its chair, and board vice chair, Daniel Blue, called “overwhelming support for the leadership that the president is providing.”

Brodhead and the board understand how the p.c. game is played. If only the lacrosse players had understood that, they could have lined up university funding to hire a better class of strippers: college-educated white people spouting vacuous political bromides and sporting dollar bills and sparklers in the right places.

-- Stuart Taylor Jr. is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal magazine, where “Opening Argument” appears. His e-mail address is staylor@nationaljournal.com

Read Ahmadinejad’s Academic Pilgrims on the FrontPage website.

Summing it up:

When Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University, Columbia’s President Lee Bollinger offered to travel to Iran himself, in the interests of promoting freedom of speech there: “Let me,” he implored Ahmadinejad, “lead a delegation of students and faculty from Columbia to address your university about free speech, with the same freedom we afford you today. Will you do that?”



Now, a delegation from Columbia is indeed planning to go to Tehran – but it isn’t quite the delegation that Bollinger had in mind. Tehran’s Mehr News Agency recently reported that a group of Columbia University professors, including faculty deans, are preparing a trip to Iran, but not to promote free speech. Instead, they’re going to present an official apology to Iran’s President, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, for the way he was treated by Columbia President Lee Bollinger when he visited the university last September.

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