EDUCATE, DON'T INDOCTRINATE

The Collins Report ^ | 2/28/10 | Suzanne Eovaldi

[brucek43]

EDUCATE, DON'T INDOCTRINATE "I thought she was a Communist," my friend said about her daughter home on break from a university near Chicago. My friend said her daughter's political and social attitudes now were very different than those of her and her husband. After sepending at least 30 years around the higher education crowd, I've done a lot of thinking about what happens to our kids. Only after I retired was I able to put into perspective what I went through and then to try to figure out what was causing so many conservative middle class kids from typically conservative families to become so radicalized. The stealth cause lies in the academic hiring committees in the departments of our colleges and universities. These hiring committees are made up of senior department members very steeped in the "60's if it feels good, do it," ideology. These committees have instinctive antennae that pick up on any conservative themes, phrases, or beliefs of prospective new department members they interview in the "soft" subjects such as English, journalism, history, literature, philosophy, social and political sciences. These hiring committees often are comprised of 60's males who entered and stayed in college to avoid "Nam," and of uber feminists so committed to their feminist creed that any conservative threat in their midst quickly is disqualified as a prospective hire. Our higher education is turning out young grads who know how to be very multicultural and ethnically diverse but not evenly balanced in terms of America's vision, history, cultural and religious history. The America...

[metesky]

One would think that an article on education would at least have paragraphs...

[Jabba the Nutt]

The traditionalist teachers, who fought Horace Mann back in the 1830’s said exactly the same thing. Acquiring an education is a tough slog, there are no shortcuts to the hard work.

[Ayn And Milton]

Thanks for your comment. I will seek out the story on Horace Mann (seems like an interesting American precedent).

[Jabba the Nutt]

Horace Mann and the Boston Schoolmasters had a back and forth and back and forth on Mann's theories of teaching and the nature of man. I found out about this from Samuel Blumenfeld's book Is Public Education Necessary? This book gives you the history of the imposition of Prussian education on America. All for a progressive purpose of course.

[Ayn And Milton]

Great! Thanks for the info, I will look it up soonish. I want to know more about all those nutty ideas on ‘counterintuitive’ education schemes. They’re a bit like denying that men and women are different.

BTW there’s a good case to be made for Nazism being the result of the mad ideas of one dr. Schreber, an ‘educator’ who was reponsible for inhuman, pathological school training at the end of the 19th century; many high ranking officials in Hitler’s reign of terror had been educated along these lines.

I have little doubt that it wasn’t much different re: Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, and other butchers.