“Teaching as a Subversive Activity”: The Theory of Political Indoctrination
Last weekend I visited the U.C. Berkeley campus and on a whim attended a lecture with the provocative title “Teaching as a Subversive Activity — Revisited.”
Because this was a presentation aimed at education insiders only, the lecturer, retired professor H. Douglas Brown from S.F. State, seemed perfectly willing to let the cat out of the bag about political indoctrination on college campuses. Fortunately, I had my trusty camera with me, so I was able not only to snap a few pictures but also record several key portions of his speech, which I found so eye-opening that I felt the general public deserved to hear it as well.
The timing couldn’t have been better: A devastating new report issued by the National Association of Scholars had just been issued a few days beforehand, which documented with exquisite and irrefutable detail the extreme liberal bias at the University of California. However, the main problem with the NAS report (which you can download in full here if you’re interested) is that it’s too overwhelming and too technical to deliver the kind of emotional impact needed to sway public opinion. To drive home the point in a more personal way, the NAS report needed an introductory companion anecdote of a professor frankly confessing the rationale behind what is essentially the “theory of indoctrination.” As if on cue, Professor Brown stepped into that role, unwitting though he may have been.
Let it be noted that Professor H. Douglas Brown is no wild-eyed extremist; in fact, he’s rather bland and respectable and not the most thrilling of speakers, as you will soon hear. But that’s what made his presentation so disturbing: radical and self-admittedly “subversive” attitudes that affect the future of society are discussed with matter-of-fact nonchalance. The main drawback of Professor Brown’s verbal style (at least from my point of view) is that he often resorts to the academics’ tried-and-true escape hatch, which is to rephrase statements as questions, so as to have plausible deniability if later confronted. Thus, for example, instead of just flatly saying something like “We should indoctrinate students with leftist ideologies,” he asks “Should we indoctrinate students with leftist ideologies?” and only after five minutes of talking in circles eventually concludes “Yes.”
The title of Brown’s lecture is taken from an influential and groundbreaking book published in 1969. Written by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, the manifesto Teaching as a Subversive Activity did not actually advocate political indoctrination in the classroom, but rather it was one of the first books to completely deconstruct the concept of education itself, and the “subversion” it advocated was much deeper and more structural: Get rid of tests, the notions of “the right answer” and “the wrong answer,” the memorization of facts, the ascendency of teachers, and so forth; instead, make education an ungraded process of learning how to think and how to criticize, respecting the opinions and ideas of the students themselves. Of course, this being 1969, it was presumed that the establishment status quo with its facts and rules was rigid and conservative, while the students were radical and transgressive, so all one had to do to foment a revolution was simply to put the kids in charge of their own education, and they’ll naturally overthrow society without even being specifically instructed to do so. (If you’re curious, the entire text of Teaching as a Subversive Activity is now available for free online as a PDF document.)
In the decades since, many of the recommendations in Teaching as a Subversive Activity and similar books were in fact implemented to various degrees, but things didn’t quite work out as the authors envisioned. Without some structure, students often flounder aimlessly. Furthermore, the “authority figures” controlling academia are no longer uptight conservatives, but are instead now liberals, progressives and radicals themselves, so when students are encouraged to ignore those in charge, then they may very well ignore the progressive messages as well.
Professor Brown’s talk focuses specifically on this problem: His basic thesis is that it is no longer sufficient to simply tell students to think for themselves, because then we lose the ability to influence them, and there’s no guarantee that the students will then develop progressive worldviews. The “Revisited” part of the lecture’s title means that these days, we must be more blunt and to the point: Since the good guys are now in charge, let’s just dispense with all the experimentation and instead directly indoctrinate the students in leftist thought and ideals.
Now, I’m sure Professor Brown, were he to ever read this essay, would take exception to my characterization of his lecture; but listen to the excerpts below and judge for yourself. Although he (and his legions of fellow educational theorists) seems partly aware of his biases, and frankly admits them, he also seems to be blithely oblivious to the depth of his political prejudices, which you’ll encounter below.
I’m not presenting this lecture in and of itself as a significant political watershed, nor as a shocking behind-the-scenes glimpse at academic bias. Rather, it’s just another random day at a random university; stuff like this goes on all the time. And it’s this normalcy of radicalism that makes it so alarming; people in the academic hothouse chat about the most disturbing ideas as if they were discussing the weather. The banality of subversion, as it were.
Below you will find six audio clips from his April 6 lecture, followed by six exact transcriptions. The sound quality of the audio is, admittedly, rather poor, so read the transcriptions as your main resource and only refer to the mp3s as proof that the transcriptions are true and accurate. The lecture was nearly two hours long in full, far too long to present in a short essay like this, plus I was only able to record segments of it, so what you see here are only excerpts; but they’re a fair representation of the overall lecture. (Portions of the transcriptions [in brackets] indicate words that are not clearly audible; Ellipses [...] indicate passages skipped because they were inaudible or were asides.)
Following each clip are brief comments and analyses by me.
Also scattered throughout the essay are photos I took of various slides in Brown’s PowerPoint presentation; if you want to see the whole thing as a PDF document, the Berkeley Language Center (which sponsored the lecture) has made it available here.
Ever wonder how “progressive” educators justify their one-sidedness? Behold:
Clip 1: “Agents for Change.”
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Host: OK, well, it’s a great pleasure to introduce Professor H. Douglas Brown — Doug Brown — who is truly an iconic figure in language acquisition and language teaching broadly, incredibly influential with many years of experience. He’s professor emeritus at San Francisco State Department of English and also director for 22 years of the American Language Institute at S.F. State.
…H. Douglas Brown: Thank you very much. …
The Postman and Weingartner book was intriguing to me because I thought, “Well, what do you mean teaching as a ‘subversive activity’? What are we talking about?” And of course what Postman and Weingartner were trying to point out, not for language teaching in particular but for education in America and the United States in general, to what extent are we shaping the lives of the children in our public schools and the kids in our high schools? To what extent are we perhaps subversively providing messages to them on: What is good? What is bad? What is right? What is wrong?
…The first observation is that our motives are rooted in our desire to help people, to communicate across national, political, and religious boundaries and our desire to be agents for change in this world.
Wonderful phrase: “Agents for change.” And it certainly fits with that whole mentality that Postman and Weingartner were talking about in their “subversive teaching”; “agents of change.”
Right from the beginning Brown is unconsciously wrestling with the distinction between the book’s publication date of 1969, when the “right” and “wrong” values which teachers were conveying to students were presumed to be old-fashioned and reactionary and thus ripe for “subversion” by new teaching methods, versus today, when educators are now motivated by all sorts of noble ideals, and thus it’s OK for modern teachers to tell students what to feel. Of course, the philosophical framework no longer makes total sense, since (as a questioner after the lecture later pointed out), if teachers still want to be “agents for change,” the old puritan society they are rebelling against no longer really exists anymore, so what are they trying to “change” now if the change they sought already happened?
Whenever you see the phrase “Critical Pedagogy,” your indoctrination alarm bells should ring.
Clip 2: “A Two-Edged Sword”
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H. Douglas Brown: Is all language teaching — does all language teaching have that same motive? Some of you may have taught at or been to the DLI, the Defense Language Institute, down in Monterey. And I would say when I was down there for several workshops that the teachers openly admitted that the reason for teaching a certain language was basically to listen to radio broadcasts and to — I mean if you want to use the word “spy,” it’s to spy on another country and figure out if they have any deep dark secrets or gonna come over our heads and annihilate the United States. So, that’s not exactly the same spirit that this particular statement is in and it’s not exactly why you teach language, in order to get people to be able to spy more easily. But it is a motive. And you and I know that there are languages being taught — perhaps in this country, in many countries of the world — where the ulterior motives are not necessarily for peace, they’re not necessarily to communicate and be nice to somebody who is of another culture, another country or another religion; so it’s a two-edged sword.
But I think most of us agree that at least in almost all of our schools and universities here in the USA, we are at the heart of the matter agents for change, for communicating across borders — and to try to bring down the barriers that lie between cultures, politics.
See, all the good teachers have pure hearts and just want peace, love and harmony; but down there at the evil Defense Language Institute, they just teach people to become spies. Boooooo! Because God forbid we take any steps to forestall our enemies by learning their languages.
In the passage above, Brown is segregating educators into two clearly distinct camps: the “good guys” like himself and the vast majority of liberal teachers who want to bring unity to the world; and the “bad guys” who use education to help the military-industrial complex. And the good guys are all “agents for change.”
Clip 3: “Refrain From Revealing Your Own Beliefs”
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H. Douglas Brown: Because if we, if we agree that we all kind of have a moral imperative as language teachers, an imperative to be someone, a teacher, not just another unit of linguistic bits and pieces. To be someone. And we’re going to have to face these questions. So can we be agents of change? And at the same time refrain from revealing our own beliefs and convictions — or should we? It’s kind of a two-pronged [...]. So, being an agent for change. But the question that I’m still leaving on this is “Can you, or can you refrain from revealing your own beliefs and convictions?” One of my teachers at the ALI says no, she would never be able to do that when it comes to hatred and prejudice. And she cited the issue of the KKK and she says, “I will NOT be balanced in my treatment of the Ku Klux Klan and what they did — and are doing — in the Southern part of the US. I will not present that other side.”
“Oh well, you know, they could be right.”
She just said, “I’m not there.”
So, is that a good place to be? Should you present both sides? All the way, even though you intensely dislike that other side? I mean, that is the question.
You can see in this passage Brown’s typical academic habit of hedging his statements by phrasing them as questions. Translated into direct speech, what he seems to be saying is: We shouldn’t even bother hiding our political agendas when we indoctrinate our students. To illustrate this point, he cites a (probably apocryphal) scenario in which a teacher was expected to present “both sides” of arguments for and against the KKK, something she refused to do, and rightly so. Using an extreme example that nobody would argue with is a good way of getting your foot in the door; from there on down it’s a slippery slope, and teachers can use the same excuse to justify one-sided discussions of all sorts of topics which they will claim also don’t merit even-handedness, a process we see being played out in classrooms constantly, with stories cropping up nearly every day of teachers exclusively presenting the liberal side of issues, or actively disparaging or misrepresenting conservative concepts.
In case you didn’t catch it, the phrase “moral imperative” means “My progressive views are so over-archingly correct that it becomes my moral duty to spread them, and a crime against the world to keep them to myself.”
Here’s the slide he was showing during the discussion above.
Clip 4: “Just a Complete Wacko”
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H. Douglas Brown: The third question: “Does our zeal for realizing our own vision of a better world stand in the way of truly equal, balanced treatment of all issues?” So in this part I want to talk a little bit about Christianity or religion in general. I had a very devout Christian ALI teacher a few years back who came to me and said that, “I’m teaching English because I really want the whole world to believe in Jesus Christ as their Lord and savior.” OK [laughs], I took a deep breath, and sat back in my chair and, y’know, made a few comments about how I appreciated anybody with zeal, but that first of all this is a state institution, and that we’re not a Christian institution, and that part of our whole ethos in the United States of America has to do with freedom of religion or — if you wish — freedom from religion, depending on what your perspective is — and that a motive like that could remain in the back of her mind, I thought, but that we weren’t going to ask her to get up and start reading John 3:16. [This is an] English class. That this was beyond the mandate and beyond the scope of what the American Language Institute was doing. Well. Was that the right thing to do? Was she just a complete wacko in saying that she wanted everybody to convert to Jesus Christ, or what? I still think y’know, I think I said the right thing. She left ALI fairly quickly [audience laughter] because she realized that we were not an institution where she could teach Jesus as The Way. And she did say Jesus was The Way, and I said that, well, y’know, “That’s, I’m sorry, but we can’t do that.” And I think she went to another place.
So that’s just one example of, y’know this balanced treatment, and how far does your zeal for a particular issue go? I mean, let’s — we can name any issue — how far does it go?
Here’s another kind of ridiculous little example, but: from an ESL textbook this dialogue came: “Why do you smoke? Because I like it. You shouldn’t smoke. Well, it makes me less nervous. But it’s not good for your health. I don’t care. Well, you will die young.” That was actually in a textbook. Well, you know, that’s sending a message. That’s not exactly balanced treatment of tobacco use. And I’m afraid I would have a hard time giving balanced treatment on an issue like that. I would tend to kind of go along with this dialogue and say, you know, “Stop smoking.” But what is our mandate? What is our moral imperative as teachers and what can we do subversively and yet maybe not so subversively that could get to be fairly overt?
…
Well, I think that’s the realistic thing when we become agents for change and when we become teachers with some sense of our moral imperative.So one of my favorite books that came out by a former ALI student, had a chapter in it on homosexuals in— I think they were just in just Any City, USA, and it was about “Daddy’s Roommate.” And do you teach this, and how do you teach it? And what do you do when students rise up in holy wrath and say, “Well, you know that’s” — whatever they’re going to say — “It’s a sin, it’s bad, or whatever, to be a homosexual?” How do you treat that? What do you do as a language teacher?
We had a unit at ALI about, it was a videotape, about My Two Mommies, a wonderful, wonderful, very sweet videotape, and kids of gay parents were being interviewed. Beautiful, beautiful tape. But some students didn’t like this, right? I mean, you can imagine. They thought, “What are you trying to teach me?” Well, we’re trying to teach English, but we’re trying to get you to think a little bit. Maybe some of them didn’t like that, and we got some controversy over that.
We had an article about burning down an abortion clinic that we also used at ALI once. Equally controversial.
This clip is truly mind-boggling. Brown first cites the example of a Christian teacher who of course is completely forbidden from discussing her crazy values with the students, something Brown recounts with pride — and then moments later he turns right around and discusses how “wonderful” and “beautiful” and thus reasonable and praiseworthy is his curriculum about homosexuality and abortion clinics and so forth. He’s not even trying to be unbiased here; he’s just presuming that his worldview is correct and superior, and the Christian’s worldview is “wacko,” and thus it is right and proper to banish her and instead promote his agenda.
(An explanatory note that applies to this clip and many of the other clips as well: Professor Brown’s specialty was teaching English as a second language to adult students, so many of the scenarios he presented involved introducing progressive American liberalism to foreign students who sometimes had brought with them conservative or old-fashioned values from their native cultures, and who were therefore affronted by his politicized language lessons. As a result, the “indoctrination” scenarios he described are somewhat different from standard public school scenarios in which teachers can manipulate the comparatively unformed psyches of young American children.)
Clip 5: “I wish that people didn’t have that freedom”
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H. Douglas Brown: So I’m kind of pushing down here toward a resolution of all this, in a way, and that is: In order to make these decisions about what you do or don’t do or what you face or don’t face in a classroom: Are there universal values? I happen to think they’re not universal, because “universal” means everybody believes in them. There’s no such thing as everyone, six and a half whatever it is billion people on earth believing the same thing.
But, I do think that within our culture, and this is speaking in the United States of America, within our culture, there is a certain given set of working moral hypotheses. One is the equality of human beings. Two is freedom of individuals to speak out, write their opinions about sensitive — that’s a double-edged sword. Sometimes I think all of us wish that people didn’t have so much freedom [audience laughter]. I don’t know how many of you listen to any syndicated morning talk shows lately, but there are some times when I wish that people didn’t have that freedom. Ultimately because they disagree with me [audience laughter]. A culture of open-mindedness. We tend to think, yeah, you know, we believe that’s basic to our ethos. We believe in nonviolent resolution of conflict and we tend to believe in responsibility as stewards of the earth, to take care of this planet.
And so some people have disagreed, of course, that we shouldn’t even be talking about this stuff, and [one] teacher said, “Your charge is to teach English or French or whatever, Finnish, or whatever language you’re teaching, and not morality. So just teach the bits and pieces and get off this, you know, sort of holier-than-thou kind of thing. Teachers should emphasize unity, not difference, so don’t do any of that controversial stuff. You get people too upset. The teacher is an authority figure. Students will believe whatever you believe in order to please you, so you should steer clear of sensitive issues. Because if you say something that is on one of these sensitive issues, the student is likely to look at the teacher and say ‘Oh yeah, well, whatever you say, teacher.‘ Or teachers will inevitably sometimes they push their own beliefs and agendas.” Yes. I think we do.
The question is: How do we do it? And the view that you don’t have to believe in a point of view, I mean, I, I — maybe, maybe if you really backed me into a corner I might sort of reluctantly respect a student’s point of view who said that, y’know, “Racial prejudice is good.” But I don’t think I’d respect it as much as respect the right of the person to believe this. And then to dialogue with the person.
I nearly fell out of my chair when he first said that he wished conservatives didn’t have freedom of speech, and then practically the very next phrase out of his mouth was that people like him believe in “a culture of open-mindedness.” I mean c’mon, does he have any self-awareness? How could someone say that with a straight face? And the audience just laughed, ha ha ha. This only confirms what I have long suspected: That liberals have banished overt conservative thought from many college campuses with “speech codes,” and that given half a chance they would implement the same thing society-wide, and feel sanctimonious and justified in doing so.
The key phrase in the passage above, which you kind of have to hear in the audio clip to fully appreciate, is when he says “Yes. I think we do.” The tone of his voice is a sort of adolescent “Duh!” Of course we’re going to push our own beliefs and agendas on our students. That’s a given. The only remaining question is: How should we indoctrinate your children? Overtly, or surreptitiously? Rigidly, with no talking back allowed; or more casually?
The key thing to remember from this passage is: Liberal teachers are so convinced of their moral superiority and pure intentions that they do not feel guilt or doubt about imposing their views on others.
The expression on his face conveys how he feels about the counter-arguments presented on the PowerPoint slide.
Clip 6: “If You Were a Republican You Had to Really Hide It”
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H. Douglas Brown: In Berkeley — um, Berzerkely, as it’s known to those of us outside of Berkeley — we live in a luxurious metropolitan area, I think. I’m now living in the [Sacramento] Valley. Uh, now, I don’t want to say anything bad about those nice folks that, y’know, that provide our strawberries and crops and everything, but I’m learning — [this is another true confession] — I’m learning to live with and make friends with Republicans [audience laughter]. Nothing wrong with Republicans, but I — at San Francisco State University I think if you were a Republican you had to really hide it, and/or if you felt that you were on the right side of the political spectrum. So, it’s actually a good lesson for me, because you know I’m hearing stuff that I wanna just — you know I want to come back at them, [completely] overcome here, I want to try to see if I can diplomatically engage with them, especially when there is a challenge. But you’re right that this area is a wonderful area to expose students to. If they were in, I don’t know, Platte, Nebraska or something [...]
Yes, sir.Questioner: With regard to that, actually when I was listening to your talk I couldn’t help but think of Rick Santorum’s recent attacks on higher education—
H. Douglas Brown: He and I are just two peas in a pod [audience laughter].
I only included this passage in case there was any doubt as to Brown’s (and the audience’s) political leanings.
Having said that about the audience’s political leanings — well, it wasn’t unanimous. After the scripted part of the lecture, there was a question-and-answer session (which I mostly didn’t record, unfortunately), and this guy pictured here emerged as the hero of the day. He was the only person to speak his mind and basically call Brown out on the carpet. I don’t have a tape of his exact words, but he basically said, “Are you nuts? My job, like yours, is to teach English to immigrants; and all they want is to learn the language. Period. Politics is completely beside the point, and the reason students get mad at you is not the specifics of your viewpoints, but because you’re wasting their time on social issues when all they want to learn is the grammar of an unfamiliar language. Get over yourself, and get back to basics.” Well, it wasn’t quite that direct, and it was said with a thick Indian accent, but that was the gist of it. I was so impressed, I later took this picture of him.
One other audience member made a good point, which I mentioned above; A guy a few rows behind me noted that since the contemporary status quo in almost all universities is liberal by default, then what is modern “subversive teaching” even being subversive against? Itself? But Brown just laughed it off and didn’t really address the question.
What did we learn from all this? Well, aside from the obvious — that the educational establishment not only indoctrinates students, but also openly discusses the best way to do it — I learned of the various code words they use to mask their discussions. Here’s a handy list: Remember these phrases, and keep an ear out for them when dealing with teachers or educators.
Code Phrases Alluding to Indoctrination
If you hear or read academics using any of these tell-tale terms, they are actually discussing how to indoctrinate students:
• Critical pedagogy
• Agent for change
• Moral imperative
• “Critical” anything
• Subversive
• Mandate
“Some of you may have taught at or been to the DLI, the Defense Language Institute, down in Monterey.”
Hahaha. H. Doug is referring to what used to be called The Army Language School when I was stationed at the old Fort Ord on Monterey Bay. Now why would the Army run a language school? Duh, duh, and duhduhduh.
H. Doug helpfully explains: “And I would say when I was down there for several workshops that the teachers openly admitted that the reason for teaching a certain language was basically to listen to radio broadcasts and to — I mean if you want to use the word “spy,” it’s to spy on another country and figure out if they have any deep dark secrets or gonna come over our heads and annihilate the United States.”
Amazing analysis by H. Doug. Hats off to him.
Many of the DLI-ALS graduates I have known for many years did spend many weary hours translating taped radio broadcasts from various East European and Russian stations. But counter to this Berkeley groupthinking peasant, their relations with their fellow world inhabitants, in their military years and since then, was worlds more open-minded than this ‘Critical Pedagogy’ dork. Unlike him and his colleagues, there was diversity in their thinking, and they were and are a hell of a lot more worthy of the title ‘citizen’ than he.
as one of the DLI student who some refer to as a spy in training. I can see that you do not understand that intelligence is designed to warn us of potential issues. 911, Pear Harbor, Prussian agent activity in Canada the U.S.A. and England. Unfortunately most developed intelligence is ignored leading to things like Viet Nam to illustrate the point. The liberal view of intelligence was developed some were in Wonderland. Alice was the indoctrinator.
Whenever you see the phrase “Critical Pedagogy,” your indoctrination alarm bells should go off.
Oh Lord, yes! “Critical” anything, since they apply it to almost any subject.
The Enlightenment conferred tools for real critical thought, but was undermined by the progressive movement that co-opted the term and turned it against ordinary people. I described that process and periodized it here: http://clarespark.com/2011/06/16/the-antiquated-melting-pot/. Also, here:http://clarespark.com/2011/08/03/jobs-program-for-education-reformers-or-the-new-prometheus/. Zombie has hit upon nearly all the blogs on my website. I know these people first hand and they are as detrimental to true critical thought as the worst tyrants of history, including those of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Soviet Russia.
““Critical” anything”
But we hear all in the liberal arts proclaim critical thinking to be the one useful skill derived from such an education. Are you saying that is just code? Of course, they are just scrambling to find something to justify keeping those tuition checks coming.
The amusing thing is, critical thinking from a college education is really just an attempt to return to students their inherent abilities “educated” out of them, in regards to classroom work, by 3rd grade. “School helplessness” is the order of the day and has been noted many times over the last 150 so years of education research.
In How to Study and Teaching How to Study (1909) by F. M. McMurry, Professor of Elementary Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, the author lays out the argument to teach students how to do their job, namely students. Oddly, some 100 years hence, such training is still not provided beyond memorization. Although as you’ll see, the factors of study have a similarity to “critical thinking”
The factors of studying:
1. Provision for Specific Purposes
2. The Supplementing of Thought
3. The Organization of Ideas
4. Judging the Soundness and General Worth of Statements
5. Memorizing
6. The Using of Ideas
7. Provision for a Tentative rather than a Fixed Attitude toward Knowledge
8. Provision for Individuality
Only McMurry argues for teaching this so that 3rd graders are proficient rather than holding off until the last years of the university.
One can only assume we don’t teach this until the end of indoctrination, I mean, education, as who wants a bunch of kids thinking for themselves, reading off the approved list, basically thinking?
If we were to do that, then Thomas Carlyle’s observation “The true university of these days is a collection of books,” might just mean the narrow-minded professor might find himself without victims, especially since that collection of books sits on just about every desk top just a click away.
This is a serious statement, which you may, of course dismiss.
If the left really, truly wants to prevent kids from developing critical thinking skills, they will keep them away from music.
You can’t learn part-singing, or playing instruments, without breaking things apart, practicing hard, studying, analyzing, and then putting it back to together again. This teaches critical thinking of the classical sort, and it rapidly applies outside music.
Dangerous stuff, if what you’re after is indoctrination.
I can’t claim to be well versed in singing or music so I will speak in generalities.
Firstly, learning thinking in one area and applying it to others seems to be much rarer than one would think. I presume it is related to the school helplessness but I’ve ran across so many who are quite good in their field but seem to react with distress when you suggest uses for their knowledge in other fields. We have far to many technicians these days who are specialized but can’t apply their techniques and knowledge outside their trained area.
Secondly, how many achieve the mastery that will allow them to judge the value of parts, place them in a hierarchy and ignore or dispose of parts that are superfluous or distracting? To be really able to think about the material instead of simply applying rote technique to memorized information.
There is blind chanting indoctrination and there is easy answer indoctrination. We get more of the later these days, a ready supplied belief that doesn’t disrupt your social standing and permits you not to think about the topic.
Considering “music” is one of the first things cut from school budgets, your point leaves me curious. But then again I live in a predominantly Republican state, one whose budget was balanced on the backs of our public schools.
Your sarcasm about red states is pathetic. In cities run by Democrats, music’s ALWAYS the first thing cut from the school budgets, but they’re STILL insolvent.
No budget can be looked at that way. “on the backs of students” is a hot, steaming load of hooey, out of context.
What is the per student spending? What is the teacher pay? What changes have there been in administrative costs? What changes have there been in total school revenue over the years?
Simplistic, smug comments are not an argument or a valid comment.
“On the backs of…” is another phrase that needs to be added to the list at the end of the article.
I live in a Democrat state, where any tax money for schools is being sucked up by government unions, a portion of which gets paid back to Democrat politicians. Every year we have more students per classroom, each parent now has to drive their kids to school, and much of the day is spent teaching left-wing “social” issues, rather than basic skills needed to excel in the real world. Our state was once the envy of the country in education, now it is 48th or 49th in reading, math, science, etc. But the cost per student is one of the highest, if not the highest, in the country.
Hey, whaddaya know! A fellow Californian!
Shack!
Bullseye!
Cigar For You!
Budgets cuts are necessary to pay off government unions. I live in a Democrat state, where any tax money for schools is being sucked up by government unions, a portion of which gets paid back to Democrat politicians. Every year we have more students per classroom, each parent now has to drive their kids to school, and much of the day is spent teaching left-wing “social” issues, rather than basic skills needed to excel in the real world. Our state was once the envy of the country in education, now it is 48th or 49th in reading, math, science, etc. But the cost per student is one of the highest, if not the highest, in the country.
Ah, modern ‘critical’ thinking at work, i.e. regurgitation.
Yeah, she’s certainly uplifting my gorge….
You could not be more correct. Although I am a tax lawyer, I studied music at the highest levels, both piano and violin. Nothing engages the brain’s various functions and abilities as does music. The physical in finding the right notes, memory in remembering what comes next, expressive in turning notes into music and expression, the ear in determining whether the playing is in tune, understanding the harmony, and rhythm; all these being done simultaneously.
But, while I believe musicians have highly developed mental abilities, music study does not immunize musicians’ minds from indoctrination.
Linking music with critical thinking skills is a fascinating and unexpected point, but it makes sense. It raises questions about the real reason behind the banishment of music instruction from public schools.
Zombie, thank you for another wonderfully subversive post. I’m an unabashed fan.
The problem in this ‘critical’ thinking is that the answer is already set in stone. There is no critical thinking going on, but the result of supposedly critical thinking someone has already done. To do otherwise might present any result and just any result is the last thing Marxist Pedagogs want.
What Critical Pedagogs want to do is parcel out morality according to race and economic status. This means continually parceling out success according to failure and failure according to success in order to stay on track – what traditionally was thought of as avenues of failure are actively pursued.
All the world of conspicuous success becomes one evil villain and failures becomes Robin Hood’s merry men, rats in the wall who are actually unlucky rocket scientists who only need to kill real rocket scientists. This is the source of the Left’s love of illegal immigration – it will either prove their theories or at least destroy the West.
But the failure is invariably found in the conspicuous success of the West. In other words, when traditional means of organization don’t work for certain groups, they simply say that success for them needs to be re-defined and other avenues pursued. Needless to say, it doesn’t work, because you can’t redefine a rock as an apple and then eat it. Short version: morons.
Another recent code phrase is “intersection.” Read through any number of curricula vitae or course descriptions and the word pops up over and over. Whatever their specialties are as professors, they are studying the “intersection” of politics and Chicano studies, the “intersection” of women’s rights and equal pay, the “intersection” of lesbian tap dancers and Mozart symphonies or some such silliness.
Yep, that’s another one. “Intersection” is useful to their purposes. And don’t even get me started on the old “unpacking the knapsack” nonsense. lol The good news is that the indoctrination can be short-circuited by simply making a new student aware of it. A student who knows what to expect and knows how to recognize the code can “fool the machine” so to speak and get through it without falling for it. The coded language is not too hard to decipher once a person realizes that it is code. Then the only challenge is to overcome the natural urge to vomit while listening to these radical subversives run their mouths. That’s assuming, of course, that the student is willing to keep his or her head down and just focus on getting an education. For those, like me, who can’t be silent in the face of the pressure to “conform or else” there is no way to avoid a certain amount of harrassment, from professors and fellow students alike. Conservatism is now the counter-culture on campus.
My granddad had a better word for guys like H. Douglas Brown: Bullsh*t artist.
Right on the money!
You’re right, Soledad O’Brian brought that word to light with her lame definition of Critical Race Theory being about the”intersection of race and law”, or some such blather. She was quoting Wikipedia and didn’t really understand what she was saying, but when has that ever stopped the media types?
My sister was studying to become a high school teacher a couple of years ago and looking through her text books I was amazed to see how prominently Paulo Freire and his theory of “Critical Pedagogy” was emphasized. When I asked her about it, she told me that “critical pedagogy” is the preferred way educators are expected to teach in the L.A. Unified School system. She said they’re supposed to teach kids “how to think”, not to stuff their heads full of facts and information. When I told her that Freire was a devout Communist she shrugged. Needless to say my sister is a Lefty, so informing her of the fact that Freire was a Communist, was like telling her that he cares for humanity.
Anyhow, great report, zombie! Thanks for your hard work.
The lecturer, Prof. Brown, went on and on about Paulo Freire in part of his lecture, but unfortunately I didn’t record that part.
The very word “Critical” is actually a Marxist concept; it doesn’t actually mean anything, or what people assume it means. The theory behind it is: Endlessly criticize and critique all existing social structures and mores, without stop, and even without reason if none can be found, until they collapse. Because that’s the only way a true revolution can occur. “Critical Theory” just means training students to criticize existing society, like critic-robots.
What Marx didn’t envision is a sort of halfway socialist society like ours, in which half the existing structures are “capitalist” and patriarchal, and the other half are socialist/progressive. In which case, one can’t simply criticize everything in sight; one must now limit one’s criticism only to certain aspects of society.
And it is this picking and choosing that reveals the hollow hypocrisy of “Critical Theory” — students can only critique politically incorrect things, not properly extant revolutionary institutions.
By now, “Critical” is just a syntactical prefix meaning “Marxist”: “Critical Theory” is really just “Marxist Theory,” “Critical Pedagogy” is just “Marxist Pedagogy”; “Critical Cornflakes” is just…well, you get the idea.
After teaching at the university level for …too many years… I know that the true definition of ‘critical thinking’ means ‘check your brains at the door, repeat what I (the leftist instructor) tell you, and if you ever say anything different your @$$ is grass and I’m the lawnmower.’
Higher education has become Lower education. Thinking with the higher brain functions is not encouraged. You must exercise the lower reptilian brain. That is, *feel* the right things.
The crimes might occur at the cadre level, that being the course instructors, but the problems go much higher. You have your political cadre, the deans and such. And of course, the Capo di tutti capi, or the prez/chancellor. All together, they train the next generation of enforcers. And most of the next-gen enforcers have degrees with *STUDIES* in the degree title.
I don’t know, Zombie. Of course your conclusions about the bias in higher education and certainly all of your proof, but it seems to me (from your transcripts) that the point of the lecture was to talk about how to teach your students about topics that are not explicitly part of the curriculum; and although he (and certainly the UC system at large) approaches this from a liberal bias, it should not preclude conservatives from doing the same.
I think there is this sense of three different ways to teach conservative ideology:
1) Not at all, in which case, nobody learns about it, and we all end up the worse through a lack of diversity of ideas that comes with freedom of expression.
2) Subversively, which is to say, indirectly or in combination with other topics, which is what the lecture can be construed to be about.
3) Directly, which is when educational sources (lectures, books, blogs, etc.) are explicitly about a specific ideology.
The point is, we obviously can’t have #1, and #3 doesn’t fit if your occupation is not being a producer of conservative thought. Dr. Brown wrestles with how to spread liberal ideology in situations when it’s not appropriate, and I think many of us can wrestle with how to spread conservative ideology when it’s not appropriate.
At best, I think we can realize that, although we hold various positions quite dear and incontrovertible, we still have to realize that they are opinions. As such, although we (as in, normal people in our day-to-day lives) can bring up these opinions when they find an entrance in conversation with colleagues, family, or friends – by the end of it we still need to say, look, this is my opinion (rather than fact, even if I feel that my opinion is solely based on fact) and if you’re interested in the other side then you can look elsewhere. Dr. Brown understands that his liberal bias means that he can’t be the most persuasive source of conservative ideology, so he isn’t even going to try to present the other side of the argument.
And so, from that sort of sense, I can see myself agreeing with Dr. Brown as long as he understands that it is his duty as a teacher to let students know where they can hear the other side of the argument (something that, regrettably, he doesn’t seem to want to do).
It’s clearly wrong for Dr. Brown to insert his “moral messages” into language instruction classes, but courses like history, political science, and social studies can all properly raise questions about moral behavior. In these instances, in addition to teaching the facts, a truly effective teacher (one who respected his students’ ability to form their own opinions and was adverse to imposing his own) would encourage his students to read, discuss and write about opposing viewpoints. Whatever happened to that useful old pedagogical device called “contrast and compare”? Dr. Brown’s view of the role of a teacher mirrors current philosophy, which is intellectually lazy, corrupt and dangerous.
Agree with your point, nicely put.
“…and was adverse to imposing his own…”
AVERSE, not adverse.
Here is a quotation from Richard Rorty which, I think, is to the point. It can be found in Wikipedia s.v. “Richard Rorty.” Comparison with the original text will show that the omissions do not change the sense.
It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of “needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions”. . . . It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own. . . . The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire “American liberal establishment” is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students. . . . When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank. . . You have to be educated in order to be . . . a participant in our conversation. . . . So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours. . . . I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents. . . . I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer ; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.
Very interesting. This guy lays it out more baldly and overtly than even Doug Brown.
It’s crazy. He sums up his lack of wisdom, lack of understanding perfectly with, “I serve a better cause”. I mean, do they believe the Nazis were like, “Wow, we are sooo evil”?
This last statement reminds me of one of my favorite Pink Floyd lyrics…
So, you think you can tell, Heaven from Hell…
Before I retired from university teaching, I trained teachers of English as a second language for over 35 years. During that time, the field moved from being a discipline-based activity to an indoctrination-based activity. You used to have to know English linguistics well in order to be a teacher of the English language. Because the field of teaching was slowly infiltrated by people who had no wish to go through the hard work of learning linguistics, the field slowly degenerated into a domain dominated by leftists who do not teach the English language to the people wanting to learn it, but who instead indoctrinate students into victim-oriented leftist thinking.
You are quite correct to point out the leftist origins of “critical thinking” and other terms related to it. There is nothing “critical” at all about such thinking; it is merely the rote parroting of certain multicultural, postmodern, and marxist doctrines.
People who immigrate to the U.S. and Canada desperately WANT to learn English. One reason they don’t learn it is simply that there are no many teachers who have no grasp of the technical aspects of the language and who therefore are incapable of providing students with the proper techniques for learning the language. Brown’s talk shows the problems clearly. Why should learners of English have to waste time in a classroom being exposed to “agents of change.” What they need are ESL teachers who have a commitment to one thing only–helping the people they teach to learn the English language as quickly as possible.
Sherry Marx is a good example. Back in 2001 she published a study that is really creepy. Mind control creepy. It was called How Whiteness Frames the Beliefs of White Female Pre-Service Teachers Working with English Language Learners of Color.
This is how she summarized it:
This paper reports on a study that attempted to make white female student teachers aware of their racism in order to improve their capacity to teach in a multicultural and antiracist classroom. Despite meaning well, many white student teachers of children of color exhibit racism, for example, in the form of low expectations, resentment, and antipathy toward their students of color. Usually this racism is invisible to the white student teacher. The study, conducted by a teacher educator, uses open interviews, observation, the journals of a group of white female pre-service teachers, and the experience of tutoring an English language learning child of color to qualitatively examine the ways in which white racism and whiteness influence participant beliefs about English language learning children of color. A group of nine white females from a second language acquisition class at a large university volunteered to participate and were interviewed about race, whiteness, and white racism. Findings revealed that all participants were influenced by whiteness and white racism in many ways, some of which proved to be detrimental to the children they tutored. Yet all participants described themselves as nonracist and non-prejudiced. The second part of the study aimed to disrupt this mindset by drawing attention to its connections to whiteness and white racism and by exploring the personal relationship of each participant to these entities. The teacher educator brought attention to the racism heard in the student participants’ comments and shared with them the transcripts of the first two interviews.
The summary in her own words is troubling enough. But reading the details confirms that it’s nothing but brainwashing in the truest sense. The only thing that is missing is the actual physical force/restraint aspect.
When I read stuff like this I am continually amazed at what morons we’ve become. Fringe lunatics are scattered throughout our bureaucracy. There is a congresswoman in Florida who dresses like a Bangkok cowgirl-hooker at a strip club and talks like Joseph Goebbels.
“There is a congresswoman in Florida who dresses like a Bangkok cowgirl-hooker at a strip club and talks like Joseph Goebbels” Nailed it!!
Not living in Florida, the only politician I know of there is Debbie Blabbermouth Schulz. If not her, who?
Yep, Rep. Frederica Wilson, Democrat from Florida. She was all over the news last week wearing a hot pink sequinned cowboy hat and screeching that Trayvon Martin was hunted down like a rabid dawg (her words). Your description is perfect.
This prefigures the massive vote for Obama among otherwise sensible whites who suspended disbelief (or “drank the Kool Aid”) in 2008. Having been indoctrinated in college classes since the late ’60s to believe that if they’re white THEY MUST BE RACISTS, they wanted a means to prove (to themselves and society at large) that they’re NOT in fact racists. In other words, they sought redemption. Hence: swallowing hope and change, we’re the people we’ve been waiting for, etc. I think a good many of them have begun to suspend suspension of disbelief after three years of the liberation presidency, but the big question is: “how many?”
The state of Maryland under the Democratic Party leadership of Martin O’Malley, has proposed that all children be forced to stay in public school till they are 18 rather than 16. This is with a 39% graduation rate in many of it’s inner city school districts.
So if you were really looking for the missing ingredient of “force” as stated above:
“confirms that it’s nothing but brainwashing in the truest sense. The only thing that is missing is the actual physical force/restraint aspect.”
Maryland public employee unions are about to give it to you. More mandatory slots means more meaningless public sector jobs which means more union dues, which means more Democratic Party contributions/bribes to be sucked up by the political hacks.
A sheltered life in academia often produces an immature worldview. These academics live isolated lives from the rest of us with perpetual paychecks. Jobs in the real world mean having to show up on time, being responsible, documenting productivity, etc. It also means losing your job or taking a pay cut, which is something the vast majority of academia are not familiar with. They live relatively easy lives, free from financial worry, and are rarely held accountable for anything. Is it any wonder then that these adults develop a mindset indistinguishable from children? I would pity them if it were not for the fact they hold so much sway over other impressionable minds. Producing adults who can’t think critically and go out into the world with an immature view is dangerous. But sadly, to these leftist academics, utopia is only an indoctrination away.
survival of the most unfit?
I’m glad several writers at PJMedia have taken up similar issues lately. I think the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci (who died in 1937, imprisoned by Mussolini’s regime), should be a required reading for every conservative. The blueprint for everything we see today was laid down by him back then – infiltrating social and political institutions, using popular culture, the media and the education system to attack the dominant culture and erode it bit by bit, gradually replacing it with a revolutionary socialist consciousness. Gramsci already belonged to a new generation of Marxists who already knew that the prediction of global proletarian revolutions has failed, so he addressed both the questions why and what can be done. You should really research it – you won’t believe the extent of correlation between Gramsci’s ideas and the current state of affairs.
That doesn’t mean every indoctrinated student or even every college professor actually know his name, but his ideas spread through his influence on more famous intellectuals, student leaders and others.
Trust me, I’ve studied Gramsci for years, and have been ranting about him since about 2002. The only reason I don’t talk about him much any more is that I’m all talked out.
But speaking of which — here’s a typical car in Berkeley I photographed a couple years ago: In Berkeley. . .the personalized license plates say “Gramsci”
Talk about brazen!
It goes back to the DaDa Movement after WW1. Communists-socialists-anarchists used the Dada Manifesto, written by Tristan Tzara to take over ART and CULTURE. http://www.marcrubin.com/dada.ivnu
Thanks for going to this lecture and posting about it. I wish you would re-post/revisit your
articles. It needs said and viewed by new readers. It is an ongoing process. The Left never tires and never seems to be “talked out”.
The generated comments alone should show our need and interest.
Zombie, thanks for going.
The question of what’s being subverted, any more, is quite interesting, and not one Professor Emeritus Brown could possibly deal with. He’s too busy brow-beating his students into submission.
There is a series of YouTube videos of Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB officer, who details that the goal of the KGB was primarily the “ideological transformation” of America’s schools, media and Hollywood. He makes the claim that only 15% of KGB resources were involved in spying; that 85% were used to transform the way students were taught. The first video of the series:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlkPkJInUmU
Ayn Rand makes many of the same observations in her 70′s book: “Return of the Primitive”. Subtitled, “The New Left, The Anti-Industrial Revolution”. Read it and weep. She especially has a critical analysis of the student “revolt” at Beserkely. Many great insights into the OWS “putsch”.
Someone should point out to this professor and to the Occupy crowd that they were educated by government schools and were brainwashed by the government into parroting the idea that more government is a good thing.
I thank my folks for never subjecting me to much public education; even though real subjects were taught there in those days. (The 50′s).
Paul R
The problem of pc/leftist indoctination of our children K to PHD has been documented, discussed and deplored since before I entered college back in the Dark Ages of the late sixties. It has continued to get progressively worse, to the point where sending a Christian, decent kid off to college almost inevitably results in the return of an arrogant, empty-headed little Marxist four or five years later. We bemoan it, cry about it and discuss it endlessly. What we don’t do is try to change it. Beyond home schooling or private schools, we’ve now abandoned even the grade schools to these critcal, would be revolutionairies (as if they’d have the guts to actually fight a revolution).
Many here at PJ Media talk about how critical this next election will be, but is it really? I’m beginning to think of it as a last, Quixotic campaign before this Nation and Western Civilization fade off into the sunset. I am afraid that even if we elected another Washington, Lincoln or Reagan with a veto-proof Congress of Rubio’s, Ryan’s and even Webster’s, we have lost. Lost because we have lost, or, rather, abandoned our children to an education system we ignored even as we noticed the poisons it was feeding them.
Short of revoking tenure and flushing the vermin off our campuses, what can we do to recover the souls of those who will succeed us before even the concept of Constitutional government and the rule of law are lost beyond redemption?
Even if we could somehow recover even a strong minority of our young folks from the mire we have have abandoned them to, as we built our McMansions and lived the good life, would we. How many parents would be willing to sacrifice their “good lives” to do what they would have to do, including kicking the Feds out and reclaiming the schools from these oh-so-good-doers? Yes, and pay for real education, and, yes again, enduring the wrath of their already so well indoctrinated little leiblings to even make a beginning at it. Lord, how many really intelligent conservatives would be able to turn their backs on their ambitions and go teach the little dears? How many Mommies will stay at home and oversee what the kids are bringing home from the little Red Schoolhouse?
I know so very many are doing the best they can. My mind says we can fix anything if we remember who we are. My heart is not convinced. I feel like the old Legionaire going out to face the barbarians one more time, knowing in his heart there will be no Republic to come home to if he survives.
And we will follow our General, who we don’t trust, because he’s the only option we’ve got besides that empty headed fool tuning up his fiddle and plotting in the People’s House. Anybody know the way to Fiddler’s Green?
The good news is that while there are lot of professors out there like H. Douglas Brown, the bulk of professors are merely liberals, who may buy into a lot of the propaganda that Brown and others promote, but are not anywhere near the ideologues that would be a hazard. It is mostly an unthinking acceptance of progressive ideas by the vast majority of liberal professors, not an intentional propagandizing of the youth.
The good news is that much of the outrageous left-wing nonsense goes in one beer-addled ear and out the other. A little may stick for a couple of years, or until they start getting a decent paycheck, and notice how much is going to taxes.
DaveJ nailed it: what are we going to DO about this? Are we going to keep whining while our country is being destroyed?
Clayton, I’m in academia, and trust me, you’re wrong. The center of gravity is radical-left – that’s where the power is – and the “libs” are happy with the radicals in control.
Yes, Dave, home schooling is necessary, or religious schooling. But to undermine and end the radical left higher ed monopoly, it’s necessary to dismantle the accreditation system, number one, and number two, convince employers to look beyond a degree from a prestigious school that’s made up of radical left indoctrination.
As I’m trying to get tenure for myself, I’ll stay anonymous.
Hah! Critical Pedagogy, right off the bat. Or, “A Failure’s Guide To Why They’re Actually A Success But For Exploitative White People.”
Is it “progressive” to continue tenure? That’s so old fashioned.
“I don’t know how many of you listen to any syndicated morning talk shows lately, but there are some times when I wish that people didn’t have that freedom. Ultimately because they disagree with me [audience laughter].”
I note that you didn’t quote the passage in full in the section heading. Frankly, you misrepresent Brown’s point here: he is clearly making an admission of personal bias, not advocating that this bias should be acted on. It’s quite closely analogous to Juan Williams’s admission that got him fired from NPR.
This is the kind of thing the left does all the time, and there is no reason to follow them. There is plenty to attack legitimately in the above; distortion does no good to anyone, us or them.
What is needed, in all cases, is a suspension of disbelief sufficient to understand what the opposition is trying to say. Your comments on this section are nothing more than a “gotcha”, and detract from rather than add to understanding.
What we need, all around, is an approach like Aquinas’s: he starts with “It seems that God does not exist…”, and then presents what, in essence, are more coherent versions Dawkins’s position. A good (and more recent) model would be Thomas Sowell’s Marxism. This article (or specifically,the section I am referring to) fails utterly to meet that standard.
Of course education is a self-consciously subversive enterprise. I teach at a so called elite liberal arts colleagues and my colleagues make no bones about it. I’ve said as much to presidents and deans of this college. When one president said that no issues were undiscussable here, the leftist position being default, I disagreed. He challenged me and I immediately named three. He had no answer. When a dean of the faculty heard me indict (with detaile) the college for just this over lunch, she paused a long minute, and then (being a decent human being–as was the president) said, “I wish I could disagree with you, but I can’t”. But for all of this, things have only gotten worse. I retire very soon and it will be an intellectual and spiritual liberation.
The IB (International Baccalaureate) Program(me), which seems to be spreading throughout the US,is all about critical thinking and “no answer is wrong” pablum. I would advise thoroughly investigating this prior to having your child enrolled in it.
“Should we indoctrinate students with leftist ideologies?” and only after five minutes of talking in circles eventually concludes “Yes.”
And this is worth well over $100,000 in college bills? Unless my kids show a talent in engineering or any science-related field, like chemistry or medicine, I’m not about to finance a degree in the humanities. They can go study Che and Marx and Virginia Wolf or Beowulf on their own dime. I will TOTALLY finance all of their expenses if they want to go to a trade school, learning a trade they could actually use and make money off of. But to me, the humanities is a total waste of time these days. Take it from a guy who majored in them roughly 30 years ago. Not much has changed since then.
I do “teach” in the old fashioned, “dame school” fashion, one or two children at a time, while teaching concepts AND skills.
I volunteer as a tutor for some of the kids in my neighborhood. We have many “latch-key” kids, and I am home and can help with homework, my specialty is mathematics, but we touch on science and stuff like history and civics.
I was going to be a “real” teacher, I took the tests to qualify entry into a ‘second career – teaching’ program that a state university offered while at the same time you earned a Masters’ degree. I even picked a great topic area as my focus, but many of the first round of classes were THIS, the lecture that Zombie wrote about.
I did not serve 20+ years in uniform to tear-down what I spent my adult life defending.
“Sustainable,” as in “sustainability studies,” is another new “critical.” Particularly creepy in the way it spreads the ideological mission into new terrain while giving ever-larger groups the crucial imprimatur of victimhood: everyone can claim official victimhood at the hands of those who created out allegedly unsustainable future.
The Brown lecture is excellent proof that in the remaining months before the Age of Obama comes to its inevitable demise assumption-ridden liberalism happily reveals one variant of itself as little more than academic basket weaving therapy. Some universities have become castles where the most out of touch leftist ideologues have holed up like intellectual Frankensteins to escape the angry pitchforks of Christians and those (shudder) intelligence gathering spies (for the purpose of good mental hygiene I suggests they shouldn’t conflate the two so seamlessly). It’s more than ironic that both legal and illegal immigrants have a better grasp on reality than people like Dr. Brown. And I’m pretty sure they don’t appreciate being told that they stumbled into a country that is worse than the one they just left, but what an assumption-ridden leftist ideologue good for?—Kudos to the Indian language instructor for pointing out this obvious no-brainer to the good professor.
Were I to teach people about the Humanities, I would start with teaching Das Kapital, Mein Kampf, and then the Federalist Papers.
Why? Critical reading of odious works such as these is in fact a great exercise. It shows what is wrong about fascism. It shows exactly what sorts of diseased evil some people can perpetrate. And then, with these critical skills, freshly taught, read what we’re founded on and discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly.
That would be real critical thinking. That would be an excellent case of teaching what one vehemently disagrees with. That would teach what liberalism SHOULD be. It is not left, right, or center teaching. It is honest, critical thinking.
Of course, I can’t imagine how many universities would be brave enough to attempt such a course.
only problem with this is the fact that many college students, if not illiterate, read at a 4th grade level (on the best of days)
Not quite fair. Even in my community college class, I assign Federalist 46, and have students write essays about it, and it is gratifying how many glean significant content from it.
“Should we indoctrinate students with leftist ideologies?” and only after five minutes of talking in circles eventually concludes “Yes.”
And this is worth well over $100,000 in college bills?
Too many majors in college are political indoctrination in failed ideologies. It’s like paying money for a Flat Earth Studies Degree.
This article is an epiphany to me. I am concluding forty years of engineering, primarily energy infrastructure, $ 2.5 Bn in nukes (24), fossil fuel power plants (48) and decades assessing advanced technologies (what is coming, the technical barriers, costs, etc.). These educational practices are alien to me in my ancient education. Engineering and hard sciences (which means truth) demands rigorous disciplined thinking. There is the right answer to the home work, and wrong answers.
Today, in climate change, nuclear safety, fracking, the current technologies controversies, I continually read many articles which can be summarized as, “Cesium 131 will kill everybody in Japan because I hate GE.” I find it irrational. So I have developed a hobby, of searching for the author’s bio, on the web. I induce that 90% of the articles on technology are authored by graduates in journalism or political science, often in the teaching fields. I can not remember one article on energy authored by an experienced engineer.
I conclude that erudite Americans form their political views based on falsehoods. It explains President Obama’s energy policies. And it explains my great fear: our grid may collapse. All of your computers rely on machinery built by your grandfathers. Our engineering colleges quit teaching course work, vital to power plant engineering, decades ago. Their students could not find work. The professors are now dead. The NRC just issued the first construction permit in 36 years. This means that everyone, from the junior draftsman, through the Chief Engineer, to the CEOs, and regulators, have never done one. Engineering is a professional practice. Why is it so difficult to accept? If Tiger Woods had not held a golf club in 36 years, he would not perform at a championship level. Yet we assume our power plants, very complex systems, are eternally sound. Is this rational?
Critical thinking and sustainability, in life sustaining technologies (pumping drinking water, flushing your toilets, and heating your home) must be reconsidered by “educated” Americans.
” I can not remember one article on energy authored by an experienced engineer.”
The press would never publish such an article, as the math and logic would be incomprehensible to a journalism major.
I teach history at a community college. I do my best to not let classes turn into indoctrination sessions, although I do warn students at the start of the semester that they should always be aware that instructors bring their own assumptions and biases to the table, as much as we are supposed to not let them take over. I also tell them as students, they need to work hard to make sure that their assumptions and biases don’t prevent them from considering alternate points of view. I also let them know that I am a conservative, and it may color my perception of the importance of various things.
I teach composition at a community college. My students have been so indoctrinated and their thinking so stunted that I promote academic freedom in the extreme. I make them choose their own writing topics–most students have had little opportunity to do this. Some are positively gleeful and run with it, but most are scared to death and have no clue where to start.
Also, I refuse to share my personal opinion on issues because I WANT students to think for themselves. However, I require them to analyze and refute another perspective, so they MUST think in more than one dimension. Last, I make every writing assignment focus on a particular audience–never me. So students have to consider what that audience might know, what they might think about a topic, etc. That forces them to apply their thinking to the real world (which most lib profs know nothing about).
Do I want to teach students to become freedom-loving conservatives? Sure, I’d love to. But I will not stoop to the liberals’ level to do it. I’m giving students the tools to think for themselves. The outcome isn’t guaranteed–but hey, that’s what freedom is all about.
If more teachers were like you our Republic would stand a fighting chance.
I, too, teach college comp. at a local community college, and attempt to do much the same. Glad someone else is in the trenches with me.
My wife came to the US from China in 2003. We went through the seemingly endless maze of hoops and barrels for her to get her Green Card and eventually her Citizenship. (she is a conservative Evangelical Christian who is looking forward to voting Republican for the first time in November, although decidedly disappointed in the current crop of RINOs.)
I remember many times going to various INS/BCIS/whatever immigration offices and sitting for (literally) hours waiting for our number to come up to file some paperwork or talk to some Immigration rep/agent. Everytime, there were multiple television set blaring propaganda from some liberal commentators to the immigrants and potential new citizens.
I remember one excruciatingly tedious session where multiple panelists spent hours totally trashing President Bush and spewing leftist ideology. I kept thinking what a captive audience they had… and how similar it was to the communist “re-education camps” we have read about. They did not choose to come to a class in leftist ideology, were not presented with alternative views and had no outlet to question or speak back. They had to sit and listen to this swill for hours in order to make the next step in the immigration process. If they got up and left, it could destroy their whole application, and if they did come back they would just get more of the same indoctrination.
And once my wife was enrolled in ESL classes, I looked over the material. It also had a decidedly “progressive” slant to everything. I had to make a point of making sure I gave her the “other” side (i.e. the “Truth”) or she would have ended up with a very warped view of American history and politics.
I will say, I have a hard time believing Prof. Brown’s anecdote about the overtly Christian teacher. I have spent a good portion of my life in academia. I hold multiple degrees; both technical and non-technical. With the obvious exception of my theological degree from a Christian seminary, I NEVER had a teacher who was overtly Christian or conservative. Either they kept their Christianity or conservativism to themselves, or else they blatantly advertised their leftist and anti-Christian views.
And we are talking about the 1970s and 1980s. From what I understand, the leftist takeover of academia is far more advanced in the last 2 decades.
Not to worry; we’re out there. Not in huge numbers, but we’re doing our best to be salt and light.
I agree. That anecdote reeked of BS.
I don’t think it’s BS. When my daughter and son-in-law were working on their MSWs, there was a student who, when the subject came up about reparative therapy for a client who wanted to be straight, this student argued that if someone wasn’t happy being gay, then reparative therapy might be an appropriate solution. She was kicked out of the MSW program for that.
this is the terrible truth about liberals: if you give them enough room, they will tell you who they are all by themselves. This professor is one example, Hillary Rosen and the leftist view of women is another. The malicious fact is that, usually, liberals are careful to NOT reveal what they really think because they know the general public finds it odious. But when in friendly fora, like lecture halls or certain cable channels, they act as they really are.
UC-Berkeley once produced the best science in the world,but now all that is gone. Now it is a academic Disneyland,full of lazy kids learning progressive fantasies.
Actually, no, that’s not true.
Although it has a single name and a single campus, “U.C. Berkeley” is in fact two completely separate schools.
On one side you have the hard sciences and engineering and business departments, which are top-notch, produce many fundamental breakthroughs, and deserve their accolades.
On the other side you have all the liberal arts departments, which are a useless stew of political correctness and intellectual gobbledygook; they coast on the reputation of the other half of the school.
An interesting side note: Math, Science and Engineering at U.C. Berkeley are about 70% Asian. Liberal Arts is about 70% white. That tells you pretty much everything you need to know. The Asians are excelling, and helping society, and the white students are wasting their academic careers learning how to be parasites.
Brilliant. Now I know why my kids know more than I do.
One thing I notice about the fellow’s talk is the impoverishment of style; he’s not overtly ungrammatical, but he talks like a 13 year old. As a teacher of language you’d think he’d be a little more fluent than that, and of course his impoverished style is commensurate with his impoverished ideas. The guy is below average in any academic or rhetorical skill and yet he’s a professor (retired) and presumes to be a teacher of teachers. In short, the guy is essentially uneducated. HIs moral arrogance is only outdone by his ignorance. The lack of qualification in itself is a distressing sign of the state of education, regardless of the nature of the ideas he’s professing. When the ideas themselves verge on a sort of soft fascism then it’s truly alarming.
Yes, I noticed that too. Brown didn’t even seem to make an effort to be a grammatical, interesting or engaging speaker. He certainly didn’t do the English language any favors. For some reason his insipidly delivered lecture made me think, by way of contrast, of Daniel Hannan, the British politician and Conservative MEP when he made his elegant and electrifying speech at the recent CPAC, explicating and praising American exceptionalism and honoring the bond between America and Britain. It’s on YouTube and is so worth watching.
Professor Brown evinced no shame in delivering a thoroughly worthless lecture and using up a chunk of the lives of his audience members for no meaningful purpose.
Ah the irony of subversion, the subversion of irony,
As a post grad in critical everything, a word in defense of the academy. It can be used to propagandize or proselytize, as in this example (Brown), it doesn’t mean the academy is a force for coercion or conversion; in fact, (IMHO) the institution subverts this “mission.”
Every Prof wants you to totally buy his stuff, from rat psychs to the anti-rat psychs, from religion profs into megalithic paganism to feminist folklorists in a herstory all their own; moralistic marxism is so old school “j’acuse” posturing, it teeters on the clownish (the last crusader rabbit). (Or the last tear of the phallocentric will against the body of desire.)(heh)
The overall effect in the academy is of a cacophony of causes that empowers the individual through the practice of self protective discrimination. Not unlike the commercial world. The open theatre subverts the closed masquerade. The medium subverts the message.
The presumptiveness of the prof is for all to see; thanks for showing it off.
But the Rorty quote was out of context. Zombie, if you haven’t you should read “consequences of pragmatism.”
It’s all about how to be principled without being absolute; or omni-critical w/o relativism.
If your own credibility is at all important to you then Richard Rorty is probably not the guy you want to defend. Seriously. His words as quoted above speak for themselves. There’s no excuse, much less a justification, for that kind of attitude in a classroom. He was nothing more than a bitter, angry old man who had no qualms about bullying students. No better than any other old crank. He cloaked his bigotry in political correctness, using it as an excuse to attack others with whom he disagreed. He operated a zero sum game in which the only thing that mattered was that he and his position win and everybody else lose. That’s intellectual dishonesty at its most egregious. He determined for himself the definition of “social justice” and anybody who didn’t adhere to his vision, therefore, was in favor of “injustice.” This would then justify in his mind the obnoxious sentiments expressed in the lengthy quote above. Classrooms transformed into a disturbing hybrid: part Inquisition, part Soviet show trial.
There is no excuse for a professor to turn his or her classroom into a trial of coerced conversion.
“The overall effect in the academy is of a cacophony of causes”
Yeah, right. The academy covers the whole spectrum from left to far left. I went to the hardware store once to buy paint. They had about a dozen shades of green. Lots of choices, but in the end it is still green. The fact that the university has a bunch of left-wingers spouting their various left-wing views doesn’t mean there is “balance” or “neutrality” by any stretch of the imagination.
When my ESL intstructor for a course called “Cultural Values” asked her class of adult teachers if any of her students had ever felt discriminated against, my hand shot up and I relayed to her how I had been harrassed by a homosexual teacher for whom I was substituting. I went into detail about how he would call me several times a day insisting on my moving in with him, but how I couldn’t tell him off because I so desperately needed the protracted job. Well, from then on, when I would raise my hand in this all-female class (except for me), she would simply ignore me. My case, of course, didn’t fit one of the approved categories of victimhood.
Heard it all from 60′s Che look-a-likes who went into teaching to carry on with the revolution.
Critical Pedagogy – maybe they really mean pedophilly after all, they are messing with children.
Good article, though not surprising. Many books and articles have discussed the lowering of education standards in the U.S. The result of this practice is that students receive a much poorer education, even at so-called elite schools. It all depends on the prof. I would suspect that a university degree today is equivalent to a High school diploma from my era (1980s). I come from both an engineering education (1980s) and then a humanities (1990s; journalism and English literature. The latter was much easier than the former. Even so, I was fortunate to have had good teachers and an independent curious mind.
Crap Detecting as a “subversive activity”:
Zombie’s characterization of Postman & Weingartner’s original 1968 book, “Teaching as a Subversive Activity” is spot-on.
Their first chapter is titled, “Crap Detecting”, a term they attribute to Ernest Hemingway in replying to an interviewer: “In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.” They add their opinion that “Hemingway identified an essential survival strategy and the essential function of the schools in today’s world. One way of looking at the history of the human group that it has been a continuing struggle against the veneration of crap… We have in mind a new education that would set out to cultivate just such people–experts at ‘crap detecting’.”
I commend Zombie’s expertise at detecting the crap venerated by this retired S.F. State “educator” who, in urging precisely the opposite of what Postman & Weingartner did, subverts one of our essential survival strategies.
And my mind went back to October 2008 when Bill Ayres was invited to speak at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, “teachers college,” now renamed the College of Education and Human Sciences (what, pray, tell, are “human sciences”?).
When word got out that Ayres was coming to share his ideas with the faculty and students of the teachers college it quickly blew up into a ground swell of opposition to Ayres doing any such thing. With political pressure coming from many directions — even the UNL president — the faculty of the teachers college backed off and disinvited Ayres.
I have no doubt that the teachers college faculty figured no one would notice, let alone care, that a self-confessed terrorist would be in their midst exchanging views on the very subject Zombie addresses.
– Go ‘Gators!
Back when I was at Santa Clara, the war cry was “Kill a Gator for Christ.”
For the particularly motivated, I would heartily suggest online education like the Khan Academy or MITx. While you may not get a credential (yet) you will actually have the chance to learn something.
Even school age children can go online and use these tools, which are useful supplements to home schooling or private school, especially for people who don’t have the time or resources to go that route. The other thing you can do is simply start your own private school. There is no need to have a massive enrollment, but every 5-20 children or young adults you take in are another group saved from indoctrination, and who should be more capable of navigating higher education without being brainwashed upon graduation.
Of course, sending your children to trade school or to study the STEM disciplines is also a useful option; there empirical evidence is king (plumbing or science only works if you have the correct tools and measurements, regardless of what “critical” theory might say), which is a useful counterweight to indoctrination.
Even pop culture is working a bit in our favour; the concept of a “zombie apocalypse” is not only a metaphor of what is happenig in the real world, but teaches (in a very visceral way) that you must be alert, equipped and prepared to deal with things on your own.
Of course, this being 1969, it was presumed that the establishment status quo with its facts and rules was rigid and conservative, while the students were radical and transgressive, so all one had to do to foment a revolution was simply to put the kids in charge of their own education, and they’ll naturally overthrow society without even being specifically instructed to do so.
That is, a clear-thinking person would have to be a leftist democrat, which might or might not comprise a revolutionary, might in fact support much of the status quo, for example where the status quo is working. This, too, turned out to be problematic in practice. It’s just the old idea that life in the state of nature is gentle and perfect, rather than nasty, brutish, and short.
Actually, the party divisions and political orientations were not yet so pure and polarized in 1969, though they were already headed that way. I got through college in the 1970s without picking up more than a wiff of post-modernism, just wasn’t avant-garde enough, apparently. Seems I got out of town just ahead of the posse.
It’s not clear to me that any of this indoctrination actually achieves the desired effect. The USSR tried it over the course of 70 years to no end. Perhaps the Browns’ of the world really aren’t doing anything other than making themselves feel noble (and wasting a whole lotta time and money).
Many interesting opinions here. However, from my perspective of forty something years in education, Adam’s point is most salient. The time, money and human potential wasted is simply pitiful. Equally as pitiful is the lost opportunities for our public and private universities and colleges to do something as worthwhile in social sciences as was accomplished prior to the take over by this leftist cult mentality. I think you had to be there to really have the full regret for what has been destroyed.
I think I started questioning programming early, as recipient of a private Catholic school education and refusing to continue in a religious High School. I questioned the education process of “programming” most of my life. It didn’t stop at education, I realized it was much more widespread and decided I needed to do my own research, to have a chance of understanding the truth, in most areas. I am still not a joiner, as in I don’t belong to any political group. I always believed things would balance out, politically in the long run. Then about 20 years ago, I realized I didn’t know enough about socialism, after traveling to socialist and communist countries. After studying Marxism and its growth from late in the 19th, through the 20th century, from a different angle, lights, bells and whistles went off. Holy crap! The only real solution is to critically analyze and rewrite the history books and all the educational materials we use today, removing all the bias, that has been compounding for over a century. Don’t burn anything, just relabel it fiction.
Even back in the late 70′s when I was working on my EE degree we had the education degrees pegged. The engineering dropouts moved to the business school. The business dropouts moved to phys ed. The phys ed dropouts moved to education. Nobody dropped out of education.
Oh yes, some did, they moved to sociology and now run all the state and federal welfare programs.
Typical about refusing to “teach the other side.” You don’t teach people about Lenin’s thought to persuade them to adopt it, but to give them the tools to recognize and fight it. This guy’s attitude reminds me of other articles I’ve seen recently about why the left doesn’t understand the right and is surprised by the strength of its ideas, but the right understands the left. The left doesn’t even want to hear the beliefs of their opposition, much — let’s pray — to their ultimate disadvantage.
I can’t blame any teacher for not promoting the KKK. But these are the same people that will bring in an anti-Semite and Israel hater to spread falsehoods and slanted info in an attempt to demonize Israel. Much Muslim writing plainly says their aim is to destroy Israel and kill all the Jewish people in the world.
They will try to promote these speakers under the guise of academic fredom or the desire to expose students to what they may characterize as”controvertial thought.”
If that is their aim they would bring KKK people on campus. The fact that they rightly refuse to pesent the KKK point of view while presenting lies and hateful speach directed against Jewish people, shows the bona fides of their announced position.
I can only HOPE that Comrade ‘Professor’ (snigger) reads each and every comment here.
Is there a way to “Deliver” them?
Please, God.
Isn’t life weird? I grew up as a “subversive” and now I teach college kids American Law and American Exceptionalism – and the kids EAT THIS UP!!!
The kids are LONGING for The Law, Americanism and western culture – true capitalism, making businesses, navigating the Constitution, paying off their student loans with a REAL job, creating niches and specialized knowledge economic abilities- they see that the Constitution and personal rights in America is UNTAPPED and just waiting for them to exercise the document and laws. I teach them HOW to make law, write legislation. Some are even proud of the Patriot Act (I try and temper that – just a bit- bring ‘em back to a “center”).
Amazing – give the kids real, scholarly American Exceptionalism and they flourish – they even look down on the OWS’ers as being whiners and inept at life!!
Go Figure! The New Revolution is ON!! winning hearts and minds for the future!
I think that you are definitely onto something here, and what you state is definitely do-able with the right people. There are two main problems:
Most conservatives don’t want to go into education and if they do, they would need TACT to get themselves into teaching positions, which suddenly are no longer easy to get. One’s “truth-telling” needs to be modulated, until one is in the right position. One can blurt liberalism and survive or advance; one cannot blurt conservatism and do likewise. That’s just the way it is, but one has to play the hand that is dealt.
I start my classes with overviews and readings of the US Constitution, Federalist Papers (Publius or Cato? Insult wha?!), and then ask: “Who wants to share their money with me? – Whatcha got in your pocket? Gimme!!” They catch on quickly. OWS suddenly sours.
Growing up on Alinsky, this is a natural – just on the side of righteousness and justice now! Semper Fi! give me that esprit de Corps! Many teachers drank the koolaid – they cannot help but sing radical chic songs in class. MY chosen job ( a chosen person!) is to enlighten the children – take off the blinders and let them see the colorful world that is. I guess the credibility factor with the kids comes from my being an apostate from the left – one who has experienced tear gas and decided that was all shit. Teaching knowing and writing legislation is where it’s at – always was – power through the law – take back politics. All kids should now learn to protect the system – that protects their rights and remidies. Not enough teach that. The revolution has begun.
Now: everyone go out and MAKE a living!!
It is easy in concept, although probably impossible in practice, to convince students that socialism won’t work. Share the wealth of their grades. Everyone gets the average grade of the class at the end of the term. The slackers will quickly dart to the bottom (why work to achieve the average grade when you’re going to get it anyway). Those above average will quickly realize that there’s no point in high achievement since they’ll only get the average grade. The only reason we haven’t collapsed economically as a society already is there are still enough people willing to work to get ahead, even though they have to carry the parasites along the way, to keep things staggering along. But this is changing, and changing fast.
I would much prefer (and tried to give) a “just the fact’s maam,” (albeit spiced up with juicy background) type of education, but there is a long tradition of indoctrination http://www.massmoments.org/moment.cfm?mid=113 and students like to have the material “personalized” which ostensibly, could be done in a down the middle type of fashion, but it tends to direct individual teachers toward the excesses of their beliefs, and professors can do it more than teachers at lower levels, but students should be older, smarter, and more independent. But youth tends liberal, because most youth believe that their new way…will change things for the better.
On a practical level, the liberals offer teachers more money and security, so as a profession, teachers swing that way for self-interest. I certainly did when it came to union rights etc., but I was fairly independent and conservative, by general education standards. There is a way to sell a more conservative balanced approach, but many righties here tend to consign them to hell and argue for blowing up the whole system, not having the patience and/or intelligence to work for the proper change. The emergence of high stakes testing actually reflects a conservative influence, but it yields another whole testing bureaucracy.
Clearly, this man would rather be teaching “newspeak”.
The sad part is that these fools don’t even realize what tools they are.
I teach adult ESOL (English as a Second Languiage) I started four years ago and understood implicitly that I had the opportunity to teach the TRUTH about our country. By choosing to do this, I know I’m being subversive, and put my job at risk, but I believe this is one part of our struggle. Right now I am explaining the Zimmerman debacle which demonstrates the political biases and ties to the media et.al. When these immigrants come here they have NO idea what freedom is supposed to mean- even the ones from Quebec.
Before I started this job I had no idea about the Clinton era green card lotteries around the world. It has been very clear to me that getting as many immigrants here as possible- as well as illegal ones- will hasten the demise of the USA as we knew it, which is exactly what has been planned. Our rights are unique in the world,so indoctrinating immigrants is extrememly easy- like indoctrinating children.
Would your “truth” happen to include both sides?
The teacher’s job is to bring forth all the points, make subtle jibes that the kids know are subtle jibes (I tell them and make “eyes”), show the sources, the biases and have the kids come to their own reasonable and logigical LAWFUL conclusions or results. They must feel their decisions are theirs, which when data and truth hit home, they truly feel. They must own the decision and thoughts and must always know it’s okay to change minds when new or dif info/data/intel comes to light. They must be given the complete free flow of info/data/inetl and, with the teacher’s gentle guidance, a bias in favor of THIS AMERICAN CAPITALIST system takes hold – we educate the kids to the point of: you HAVE the power – just exercise it WITHIN the system. They then see their own inadequate education and hopefully want to explore “the system” further – like a new world filled with endless possibilities. Everything else seems limiting -whatcha gonna relace it with that’s better? are you smarter than Jefferson? Madison? Adams? Hamilton? – once they get THAT, it’s downhill racer!! Empowerment of OWNING the system makes them want to protect it. I also use the lightswitch – it shows commerical reliability and a system that works – it’s called Constitutional Law. OWS will not make my lights work. I like my lights working. They too like their lights to work. They must learn all things flow from that set of corporate by-laws, with some lofty shit thrown in at the end – the Bill of Rights – the Founders, Enlightenment, commercial revolt against Old King George – he wanted OUR money – HE was OWS – called THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION – WE THE PEOPLE….!!
The “talking in circles” referred to at the end of the 3rd paragraph is the consensus process or dialectical process, also known as a soviet council form of government. Dialectic process is the modus operandi of marxist ideological subversion.
Click Here to Watch 18 Short Videos on Diaprax
Click Here Read to About Dialectical Process
Click Here to Read About Community Oriented Policing
Click Here to Read About the Hegelian-Dialectic
Why do you think that teachers vote with the lefty communists?… They are already living the communist mannifesto…. Just try to be employed by this leftest think tank and actually speak another opinion. Everything is rigged here if you want to be employed here or move up the commy ladder. They are pissed off that a garbage truck driver in America makes almost as much as they do…and they think that because they sat on their arses all day and read books that they are better than that man who works an honest day.
They are already living the communist dream. IF you don’t believe it… try to get a job there and be a conservative thinker!!!!!
Isn’t non-violent resolution of conflict the exact opposite of non-initiation of force?
Very good article. Thank you!
This was a great report, Zombie, but I have one reservation, one critique of a place you may have overreached:
“I nearly fell out of my chair when he first said that he wished conservatives didn’t have freedom of speech, and then practically the very next phrase out of his mouth was that people like him believe in “a culture of open-mindedness.”
I would posit that the speaker would defend himself on three grounds:
1. “I used the word ‘sometimes.’” (“Sometimes I think all of us wish that people didn’t have so much freedom…. there are some times when I wish…”)
2. “I didn’t mean to object to “conservatives”, only to the blowhards on the morning talk shows.”
3. “I WAS kind of joking, you know.”
My son graduated from an expensive East Coast private school – Endicott – in computer science. He orginally started as a media majors but right off the bat got indoctrination rather than education. Fortunately, he lived at home his first semester and we were able to sit down and together wade though the massive barrage of post-modern, neo-Marxist, “subversive” madness the school was selling as “education.” He had access to my well-stocked library of classical liberal books and authors and went to school every morning well-armed to counter the wackjob propaganda. Soon the students were questioning the profs too, at least outside the class and two profs actually layed off the “subversive” crap because it was becoming apparent to all that it was pure b.s. My son changed his major however after the first year and discovered to his joy, that the math and science departments were the last refuge of conservatives on campus – they cannot be “subversive” with math and science (not that they have not tried.) Did I mention he graduated magna cum laude?
Thank god for the women who teach graduate level mathematics. If you ever need a searing critique of the liberals arts, go find a female instructor down in the university math department. The statisticians – are so reserved and cautious, they’d duck out of any such conversation politely. “In God they trust, all other must bring data.” I saw that engineer had noticed how students were sorted out into the bins of life, and had wondered what happened to the math students.
A very interesting & informative article! Keep it up!
Barbara Morris wrote about this in 1979 in a book called Change Agents in the Schools. It was an expansion of a previous book she wrote called Why are You Losing Your Children, which you can read online for free here
“So, what are government [i.e., state, public] schools? They are administrative government agencies that exist to promote change. What kinds of change? Social change,political change, economic change, cultural change,religious change, change in our form of government. Total change. But specifically, change from what to what? Change from a Christian, sovereign nation to a Humanist/Socialist interdependent nation-state in a dictatorship euphemistically called a “global community”, with “world citizens” content with enslavement. (p. 17)”
“Another good author from the late 70s on would be Samuel Blumenfield (The NEA, Trojan Horse in American Education), and Richard Mitchell (Leaning Tower of Babel; Graves of Academe, and others, all online for free), and Charlotte Isynbyrt who wrote:
Another milestone on my journey was an in-service training session entitled “Innovations
in Education.” A retired teacher, who understood what was happening in education, paid
for me to attend. This training program developed by Professor Ronald Havelock of the
University of Michigan and funded by the United States Office of Education taught teachers
and administrators how to “sneak in” controversial methods of teaching and “innovative”
programs. These controversial, “innovative” programs included health education, sex
education, drug and alcohol education, death education, critical thinking education, etc. Since
then I have always found it interesting that the controversial school programs are the only
ones that have the word “education” attached to them! I don’t recall—until recently—”math
ed.,” “reading ed.,” “history ed.,” or “science ed.” A good rule of thumb for teachers, parents and school board members interested in academics and traditional values is to question any
subject that has the word “education” attached to it.
This in-service training literally “blew my mind.” I have never recovered from it. The
presenter (change agent) taught us how to “manipulate” the taxpayers/parents into accepting
controversial programs. He explained how to identify the “resisters” in the community and
how to get around their resistance. He instructed us in how to go to the highly respected
members of the community—those with the Chamber of Commerce, Rotary, Junior League,
Little League, YMCA, Historical Society, etc.—to manipulate them into supporting the
controversial/non-academic programs and into bad-mouthing the resisters. Advice was also
given as to how to get the media to support these programsI left this training—with my very valuable textbook, The Change Agent’s Guide to
Innovations in Education, under my arm—feeling very sick to my stomach and in complete
denial over that in which I had been involved. This was not the nation in which I grew
up; something seriously disturbing had happened between 1953 when I left the United
States and 1971 when I returned.”
The indoctrination is working, otherwise Obama would never have been elected, there would not be so much confusion about the difference between a republic and a democracy and the fact that we are supposed to be the first and not the second, and so many conservatives would not flinch when somebody talks about the gay agenda.
Your enlightening experience proves the “progressive” left knows exactly what it’s done to systematically destroy the integrity of the public education system. It also shows the stake the Obama administration has in pushing the Dream Act and why Obama preaches the “right” of everyone to attend college.
This is true even of the Community Colleges. My wife, who is Thai, enrolled in an ESL class at our local CC because she wanted to improve her reading and writing skills.
She expected things like spelling lists and grammar lessons. What she got was watching Al Gore’s movie and learning how to apply for welfare and report discrimination.
She quit before completing the class because they were wasting all their time with this crap. Most of the immigrants just shrug off this kind of teaching. They want to learn to speak, read and write.
It’s kind of funny. She was working at McDonald’s and would yell at her Mexican workers “This is American. Speak English” and they would. Of course, she could get away with it because she is an immigrant herself. But Lord help any white manager that tried it.
Want to the good professor lose it? Talk about a voucher system where the student actually gets to choose various alternative schools and means of being taught. You can’t apply subversion techniques to a totally free subject. Its why these losers never make headway outside of academia.
What an utterly incoherent view on the purposes of the DLI.
Yes, they teach people language skills so they can listen to foreign radio broadcasts.
That would be foreign MILITARY transmissions, especially in war time. That’s what Defense does. The CIA already handles foreign PUBLIC broadcasts, with FBIS, and the NSA covers the spooky stuff.
DLI training is also useful for:
Interrogating a non-English speaking prisoner.
Liaisoning with local military and civil authorities in foreign countries.
Nation-building in foreign countries, including interactions with local civilians.
Humanitarian operations in foreign countries, including treatment of non-English speaking patients.
The medevac helicopters do marvels, but it still helps to be able to say “Where does it hurt” in Farsi. Or whatever.
The pathology of the left was being displayed in full splendor in this article.
Cleon Skousen gives us a better idea of where it all originated in his book “The Naked Communist”. Well worth the read.
This interesting and important article is quoted with appreciation (and a link) here –
http://www.theatheistconservative.com/2012/04/17/universities-teach-what-to-think-not-how-to-think/
My lovely and brilliant daughter uses liberals’ attitudes and weaknesses against them. She’d ridicule the liberal professors’ opinions behind their backs, but when time came to pick an assignment, she decide, as she did for one speech class — “Hmm, this lady’s a complete liberal wing-nut. Hey, I’ll do my presentation on abused puppies! Emotionalism for the win!” Of course she got an A. Pictures of sad-faced greyhound puppies to accompany the presentation really sealed the deal. She graduated magna cum laude.
Nothing confirmed her conservatism more than the semesters she spent in an Arabic language class taught by an America-bashing Palestinian and populated by Somalian Muslims looking for easy credit.
What I found most disturning after reading the entire text is that nowhere did they mention “Constitutional Republic” every thing was “Democratic Society”. This has been creeping into the education lexicon and ideology since the 30′s and has finally reached its zenith in the late 90′s. I would love nothing more than to meet out a proper punishment for these tools (all of them). This is how they are killing our Republic, they will not identify it as such and replace it with a nice sounding catch phrase that means nothing more than “Mob Rule”. I fight with my elementary aged children’s teachers on this subject constantly and all I hear from them is their is technically no difference between the two!!! At some point we need to have a dust up to decide if we are going to remain a Republic or decend into the chaos of Democracy, I only hope the Republic does not die without firing a single shot.
Some time ago, a certain writer had Brown already pegged years before he was even born:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
56. bMoon—I read recently read a piece by someone who thought it might not be that long til we see something akin to Title IX in the STEM studiesto ensure equal representation of women in college in the the studies of math, science and engineering…wish I could remember where I saw that…