Our public and many private schools are a mess, but the vast majority of the blame shouldn’t be directed at the teachers. The onus should be shouldered by an intellectually bankrupted overclass that sits atop a sprawling education industry from coast to coast, much like the Janissaries of the old Ottoman Empire or the self-indulgent and self-serving aristocracy in 18th-century Versailles. Unexamined and unaware, its members reside in a world apart from the rest of society. It’s an isolated existence with its own values and assumptions about the workings of the world. Born of 19th century progressivism and its administrative state, their zeal for “reform” has bred a missionary class of consultants, hyped in the latest fads of thought driven by a near uniform set of ideological sympathies. Duly papered in now-devalued credentials and degrees, they descend upon the schools and make a real hash of things.
Parents might be waking up. Zooming to their children during the pandemic by means of the family computer, right in front of them, was the chic radicalism from a world apart where lefty radicalism is assumed to be a virtue. The veil of secrecy was blown off. The fashionable neo-Marxist theory of systemic group oppression and guilt flashed before their eyes. Racism was mangled into a public good as a means to fight purely hypothetical but politically useful villains. They saw how adolescent feelings of gender confusion became the rigid theory of transgender ideology. Now, their daughters are no longer safe in the bathroom or locker room.
Other fancies were exposed such as the religion of environmentalism, a mystical faith masquerading as a not-to-be-challenged scientific fact. The crooked timber of humanity was somehow, magically straightened depending on your self-professed identity. Bankers bad, workers always and forever angelic. Whenever a woman or racial, sexual, or ethnic minority graces the page, it’s always in the context of exploitation. Tradition is lambasted and morality is fashioned to serve the interests of the latest chic reform. America is evil and in need of a revolution. That’s what they’re attempting to groom: little revolutionaries.
As a teacher in the public schools for almost 30 years, I’ve witnessed it firsthand. Teachers are forced through “professional growth” mandates to be constantly exposed to the latest in stylish radicalism emanating from the academic bubble. School districts regularly take their teachers away from their students for multiple days of the school year – sometimes called “inservice days” – to get steady doses of the latest in leftist dogma. Students lose a few days of learning so their teachers can be indoctrinated. The result is almost always a few steps backward for both the students and teachers.
To boot, many of the presenters don’t know the radical philosophical roots of what they’re presenting. It says volumes about the academic preparation and forethought of those pretending to be Zeus on Mt. Olympus. Two incidents stand out in my long career. In one, a richly paid consultant was brought in to instruct us on his favorite pedological pet, “cooperative learning”. Midway through the presentation I got the drift of where this was heading. I politely asked him if the basis for his approach was “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” If you’re wondering, it’s straight out of Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”. He said, “Yes”, apparently unaware, or maybe quite aware, of his idea’s ideological parentage. Shortly after that, I quietly slipped away to my classroom to grade papers and prepare instruction for the week, a much better use of the time.
Another example came about as a result of administrative pressure to attend a paid training session on a Saturday, which I was reluctantly to do for certain reasons. Well, this session just so happened to be founded on the theory of multiple intelligences, a highly contestable notion for which the presenter was unfamiliar with the debate. Common sense tells us that kids can have excellences in different skill and knowledge areas. But these aren’t “intelligences”. They are talents. In contrast, intelligence is a unique measure of cognitive ability that is innate to a person for various biological and social reasons. The interplay of the two is open to much debate.
All of this is glossed over to get to the hidden purpose of this questionable idea: everyone gets a trophy, which is born of Marx’s obsession with equality of result. For people following in the footsteps of Karl Marx, a society of goodness and light can only be achieved if everyone is equal in everything from intelligence to possessions, just institutionally redefine intelligence in a multitude of ways for instance. Without saying it, but following the logic, unequal performances among students in the form of grades or scores is automatically and morally suspect. So, classrooms and instruction must be refashioned to make them more equal. How? Design and implement multifarious instructional approaches to access the hard to determine but assumed to be numerous “intelligences” in the classroom. If the task is too cumbersome or inequalities persist, the burden is on the teacher to make things equal. Marx blames the social system, the educrats blame classroom teaching, i.e., the teacher. Thus, the schools engage in the perpetual search to weed out systemic oppression in the form of inequalities through incessant “training”. No time here for placing responsibility on the student or home life.
The Marxian equality of result permeates everywhere in the school. Merit – a sense of deserving through hard work – is disparaged and replaced with racial, gender, and sexual orientational reparatory contrivances in discipline, instruction, management, and grading (or no grades). As a teacher scrambles to devise an ever-increasing number of pedagogies for an ever-increasing number of “intelligences” in the classroom, if hell busts loose, punishment is made to adhere to the god of equality of result like everything else. If someone tallies the expulsions and discovers a “protected-class” excess beyond its demographic proportion, the school is turned upside down by conforming to the newest euphemism to downgrade the effectiveness of a school: restorative justice. Watch the ratio of non-teachers to teachers explode. The biggest building in the school will no longer be the one for Language Arts but the sprawling one housing the army of functionaries of the social services for the multitude of interventions required to create the illusion of identity-group equality.
If you think it’s such a great idea, this thing called “restorative justice”, then move to LA, SF, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York City, or any place suffering under permissive Soros-backed DA’s. They’re all into “restorative justice” and all that goes with it. You’ve just endorsed the transplanting of the chaos of San Francisco streets to your kids’ classrooms.
Nothing escapes the Marxist obsession with equality of result. It’s embedded in your teacher’s training in college, and it’s constantly dragged before staffs every school year by an army of consultants. It’s a very lucrative flim-flam as CRT evangelists like Ibram X. Kendi can attest. He got $20,000 from Fairfax County taxpayers for a 45-minute virtual training video for the Virginia county’s public schools. His fellow grifter, Robin DeAngelo, author of “White Fragility”, rakes in $14,000 per event earning a lusty $700,000 a year. It’s a sweet gig if you can get it. (See the column below by the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick M. Hess.)
What do they really have to offer? Nothing good, and everything deeply troublesome. If you think that statue-toppling or joining the ranks of the militant wings of the Democratic Party is not an appropriate career path for your children, it is incumbent on parents to help bring to heel this wayward mass of detached educrats by electing state and local public officials who’ll clean house at the governing boards and make our colleges accountable for the undermining of our way of life.
There, we have our task.
RogerG
Sources:
* “Defund the Teacher-Trainers”, Frederick M. Hess, Aug. 11, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/08/29/defund-the-teacher-trainers/?fbclid=IwAR10uTGkoMNTRebq74lRN6aC2638Z8-Mhw_rhuuJpzbnVSysv8ciOB6LHHg