George Rebane
[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 27 February 2019.]
Many and perhaps most young people today have a very jaundiced view of America, capitalism, Christianity, and western civilization in general. Instead, all across the country and especially in the academe, they have come to embrace ideas about the benefits of collectivism – especially socialism – and societies that emphasize group identities and a world order in which group membership, especially if in one of the aggrieved groups, is paramount. Individualism, personal freedom, and entrepreneurships that promise riches are on the wane. How did we arrive at such a societal junction from which all roads lead to a fundamentally transformed America, one that will share little with what our Founders bequeathed us, and with the system that made us the envy of the world?
Political leaders, from constitutional monarchies to communism, answer that such rapid changes in outlook and attitudes can only come from the educational system governments adopt and impose – as the twig is bent, so grows the tree. And in the last half century there has been a lot of twig bending going on in America’s schools, and the clear evidence indicates that all the bending has been leftward. Let’s look at three seemingly disparate facets of such evidence.
Teacher training in the universities was co-opted by the Left starting around 1970. Today that training continues also with working teachers through programs and courses that promise to promote social justice and close the gap between white students and ‘students of color’, aka the aggrieved minorities. An example of such a program contracted by the Santa Barbara Unified School District is being adjudicated in federal court today.
A 501c3 non-profit called Fair Education claims that the school district has hired Just Communities, a leftwing educational training organization, to provide ‘anti-bias’ training to its teachers. The stated reason for letting this contract is to give teachers additional skills to close the achievement gap between Latino and white kids in their schools. However, it is hard to see how the training materials to be used will serve that purpose.
Instead of containing means and methods to address the well-documented academic gap between caucasian and minority students, the training course will instead focus on identity-centered topics such a diversity, inclusion, and equity. Fair Education’s complaint states that “Under the guise of promoting so-called ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘inclusivity’ instruction, [Just Communities’] actual curriculum and practices are overtly and intentionally anti-Caucasian, anti-male, and anti-Christian,” In place of techniques to improve the teaching of core academic subjects, the course focuses on how to inculcate in the students such divisive notions as ongoing oppression, classism, and privilege.
Today our students enthusiastically assemble to denigrate America’s past and traditions in order to purge their new world of whatever they have been taught to believe that continues to promote racism, homophobia, traditional religion, white privilege, and classism. In the name of our Constitution, the country’s historical monuments are being assaulted. A prominent matter currently before the Supreme Court involves the dust-up going on in Bladenburg, Maryland. There a WW1 memorial to the county’s fallen in the shape of a cross is now seen violating the Constitution’s Establishment Clause. And those reading the news know that this is just one of many such attempts to roll back public expressions of our Judeo-Christian heritage, expressions that in no way give evidence that our federal or state governments promote a particular state religion. They are just reminders of who we were, and most still are. (more here)
Finally, the push to make America’s educational systems even more ‘coherent’ and uniform under federal management continues to be advocated by leftwing activists and teachers’ unions. To these folks the important curriculum is not what will give students the skills to compete in the global workplace, but instead to instill a responsive mindset that is compliant to state perspectives and diktats. 19th century British prime minister Disraeli said, "Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.”, which was then refined by Lenin’s “Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world.”
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
[Addendum] To illustrate how blatantly the teachers’ course curriculum fulfills its divisive anti-American/western charter, I’ll highlight a few curriculum descriptors from the Just Communities’ presentation materials that are now public.
Oppression – A system that benefits some groups (often called ‘privileged’ groups) and disadvantages other groups (often called “target groups”). Now consider how many times you have ever heard anyone except white people, especially from northern Europe, being accused of being privileged, and the disadvantaged “target groups” being anyone besides people of color. So the teaching point here is that the privileged white oppress disadvantaged people of color. Then again, maybe you were thinking about those privileged blacks who have been oppressing disadvantaged whites?
Classism – A system of oppression based on socio-economic class that privilege people who are wealthy and target people who are poor or working class. Now consider how many times you have heard of anyone except white people, especially from northern Europe, being accused of being those privileged and wealthy, and who still in this day and age target poor and working-class people of color in order to oppress them. Or maybe you were again thinking of those privileged and wealthy Latinos continuing to target poor working-class whites?
Privilege – Unearned access to resources that enhance one’s chances of getting what one needs or influencing others in order to lead a safe, productive, fulfilling life. Now consider how many times you have heard of anyone except white people having unearned access to resources to get what’s needed to influence others so as to lead a safe, productive, fulfilling life. Or maybe you were thinking of all those people of color having such unearned access and influence to assure them a safe, productive, and fulfilling life?
Privilege Group Collusion – the things privilege groups and privileged groups do to perpetuate systems of oppression. Collusion indeed, as practiced by minorities to perpetuate systems of oppression against whites – you’ve no doubt heard a lot about that kind of social injustice. Or just perhaps you may have heard one or two reports in the media of how white privilege groups collude to perpetuate systems of oppression that continue to make life miserable for blacks and Latinos?
So now you see all the good things the teachers have been learning to teach the kids, so that the academic gap between Latinos and whites can finally be closed.
[2mar19 update] Commenter Bill Tozer (148am) directs our attention to a growing issue in education (‘Should We Lower Academic Standards?’) – how do we handle the ever larger number of students who simply can’t cut the mustard in qualifying for jobs that have historically required at a minimum a three-digit IQ? I responded to Mr Tozer in the comment stream, and then decided to also post my response as an update.
When I ran into this piece I planned to update this post to illustrate what IMHO is a ridiculous argument – ethicality(!) and reinforcing class divisions – for lowering educational standards for the professions. Unfortunately, the author uses lawyering for the basis of his arguments, and totally ignores the impact on consumers when those less-than-competent deliver life-critical services. We have discussed this situation frequently in the context of growing systemic unemployment in these pre-Singularity years.
Perhaps because law is mostly a BS profession, it may not be very impactive on the new client when he gets bad advice or incompetent promotion of his cause from a good-hearted yet less than proficient lawyer. The same can be said for the other ‘soft professions’ in the psychological and social arts, in political science and government studies, in history and language, … – all of these fields are already populated with a heavy share of bottom drawer practitioners.
But things change dramatically when such low-bar entrants are allowed into fields like healthcare and the large pantheon of intellect-demanding STEM-based professions. (The bridge will collapse, the drug goes undiscovered, the prescription is wrong, the software doesn’t work, …) There the politically promoted students can and will cause great harm to the society that implements ‘socially just’ laws and regulations that force the hiring of dummies. Our progressive overlords are forever trying to flatten nature’s bell curves into boxcar (uniform) distributions. And where they have succeeded – e.g. in government bureaucracies – pain and suffering for the rest of us is the inevitable result.
rebanesruminations.com 
Leave a comment