Parents with a traditionalist, conservative or libertarian mindset please pause to carefully consider the following: If your kids are in the country’s primary, secondary and tertiary educational gulag, however well they are doing, they are being brainwashed.
The specter of frightened white men, on the nation’s campuses, resigning in fear of a mob rising in rage against … hurtful words and gestures—all constitutionally protected speech—is an organic extension of the entire American educational ethos, down to YOUR child’s school. What these affluent kids are rioting for—to silence and purge dissent and dissidents—they were taught in varying degrees in secondary, even primary schools.
You cannot counter it by yourself; you’re too busy being productive, living a good life. Pedagogues rely on your life being too chaotic to familiarize yourself with, for instance, the politicized process of textbook and course material selection that ensures your child never ever comes away believing in the correctness of the philosophy that animated the republic’s Founding Fathers, or in the originalist intention of the US Constitution. (Don’t be gulled: Kids will learn about theories of constitutional interpretation. But they’ll also come away with the distinct belief that originalism is a quaint thing reserved for kooks.)
But in order to counter the Sovietized nature of the schooling system, a parent cannot be remiss—he must be aware of it, know he is powerless to counter its complex, systemic, enervating nature alone, and access suitable resources to supplement a child’s education.
For example: Homeschool Courses by historian Tom Woods. Or this writer’s economics and other columns, always richly sourced, to be found in the Articles Archive. (Friends of liberty, please write in, here and at Facebook, with your suggestions of scholarly material. I have opened this blog post for your Comment.)
Having a child in the public schools system comes with the responsibility to know your child is being programmed and to be prepared to deprogram or unshackle him.
Consider: The University of Missouri is one of the nation’s top-tier R1 institutions. Yale needs no introduction. There is nothing unique in Mizzou’s militant mob, now joined by Yale’s equally odious protests, as these losers unite against hurtful words and unpleasant ideas. The horrifying thing is that the histrionics at Yale are the winners of tomorrow; the people who’ll man (or woman) the human resources department of America’s companies, to enforce conformity.
Fact: Yale and Mizzou students are oblivious to the cherished American tenets of freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion; diversity of thought. Why? When Allan Bloom wrote the Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, in 1987, he addressed what he knew: the modern university.
But the rot didn’t happen there and it didn’t unfold overnight. The making of our mindless, philosophically and ethically bereft millennials happened over time.
The seeds of the bizarre contagion spreading across American campuses were sown in your kids’ schools.
UPDATE (11/14): Following the Paris attacks of 11/13, B. Hussein Obama blah-blahed about America’s flaccid affinity for liberty, equality, fraternity, the French national motto. Thanks to our public school system, your kids are none-the-wiser about the fact that America’s founding principles of life, liberty and property are the philosophical opposite of the French Revolution.
Did not the Jacobins eliminate, butcher, massacre the clergy class, to name but one kinda significant difference? Our Founders revered institutions of faith and their role in a self-governing, moral society
