Just how deeply is communism embedded in our educational system?
We all unfortunately know by now how strong the influence of Islamists in American schools is, as the pro-Hamas student riots and teacher statements have shown (this is partly due to Qatari funding). Since today is the anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Tiananmen Square massacre, however, it seems particularly appropriate to investigate another anti-American poison in our schools: Chinese Communism. The CCP has expended great effort and much money on Communist propaganda, centers, and programs within our grade schools and universities across the country.
The Epoch Times just called out one such compromised educational institution: Harvard University. The university has made partnerships with entities accused of complicity in CCP human rights abuses and crimes, and it has also accepted considerable sums of money from Chinese sources, including CCP sources, Epoch Times explained. Pictured above is a former Harvard president with CCP dictator Xi Jinping.
The oldest and wealthiest U.S. university is under increasing scrutiny for its controversial research collaboration with China, its role in educating Chinese regime officials, and providing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with a platform to spread its propaganda narratives and marginalize dissenting voices on U.S. soil…
Harvard has long been known among Chinese people for its role in educating the communist regime’s elites, including the progeny of the CCP leaders themselves. In 2014, one state-run media outlet, the Shanghai Observer, nicknamed the Ivy League university’s Kennedy School of Government an unofficial “Party school”—a reference to the institutions in China used to train and indoctrinate the regime’s cadres.
It is worth noting that as our schools have become more Marxist, they have also declined in standards and curriculum. As universities like Harvard look to appease foreign dictators and promote dictators’ propaganda, they have also dropped high-level math requirements, classic literature, honest history, and challenging grading. Marxists want a population just literate enough to be indoctrinated easily, and no more.
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I have recently been reading an old biography of Nathan Hale by Henry P. Johnston, which is relevant to this topic because it describes in some detail the expectations for and activities of Yale college students — similar to those of Harvard students — in the mid- to late-18th century. Some of the glaring differences are religious; Yale students in those days could be fined for not coming to daily prayer, for instance. But what particularly struck me is what always strikes me when reading about education of previous eras: how much higher the standards were and how much more rigorous the curriculum.
Hale and his fellow students were expected to spend whole classes discoursing in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. They were required to be dedicated readers on wide-ranging topics from science to theology to classical literature. At his commencement exercises, there was a syllogistic dispute entirely in Latin.
My college education was a good one, but even my Latin professors never expected me to debate fluently in that language. And with most of our graduates now failing to grasp even the rudiments of grammar, mathematics, and biology, it seems clear we have gone steeply downhill since Hale’s day. Children with bits of chalkboard in the one-room schoolhouses of the old frontier could run rings around many a Harvard and Yale graduate now. Whether we speak Latin or not is beside the main point, which is that we have lowered our standards and stultified our education to the point where in most cases it is mere Marxist indoctrination.
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Of course, hundreds of people have made similar points about the educational crisis that we all see, and the question is: What is the solution? But here Hale’s experience can again point us in the right direction. As we work to take back school boards, found more private classical schools, and promote homeschooling, we can look to the standards and educational models of centuries past in America. We might also take inspiration from Booker T. Washington’s model of incorporating practical manual labor skills with academics.
If we would again have a generation of students as well-educated, patriotic, and morally upright as Nathan Hale and his friends, we need to ask ourselves how their education contributed to forming them into the brave and free-thinking liberty-lovers that they were.
