The specter, on the nation’s campuses, of frightened, middle-aged white educators, mostly men, resigning in fear of a mob rising in rage against hurtful words and gestures—all constitutionally protected speech—is an organic extension of the American educational project, down to your child’s school.
If your kids are in the country’s educational gulag—primary, secondary or tertiary—however well they’re faring; they’re still being brainwashed and de-civilized. Most private schools are now bastions of progressivism, too. “Progressivism,” of course, does not imply progress.
The “justice” for which privileged youngsters on America’s coveted campuses are rioting—the right to silence and purge dissent and dissidents—they’ve imbibed in schools public and private, prior to arriving at the university.
On the University of Missouri campus, atavistic youth have joined against hurtful words, symbols and unsettling, unorthodox ideas, and for “safe spaces,” where these brave hearts can hideout from “racial microaggression.” Examples of “microaggression” are asking a black student for lessons in twerking, complimenting her weave, or simply being white.
But mostly, these minorities and their propagandized white patsies are campaigning for the unanimous acceptance of the following destructive, dangerous, often deadly, dictum:
“White racism is everywhere. White racism is permanent. White racism explains everything.”
The “systemic racism” meme you hear repeated by media, across the American campus, and preached from the White House is a function of “Critical Race Theory,” the sub-intelligent, purely theoretical, and logically fallacious construct, now creeping into American schools at every level.
As detailed in WND colleague Colin Flaherty’s “Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry,” America’s children, black, white and brown, are being taught, starting at a tender age, about “racial hostility and resentment.”
This racial hostility is said to be endemic and always and everywhere a white on black affair.
Ask your state representative and your school board about Glenn Singleton and his Pacific Educational Group’s curriculum, deceptively titled “Courageous Conversations.” The PEG poisonous program has been adopted by “hundreds of school districts across the US,” and foisted on millions of pupils, very possibly your child.
Beware; propaganda is process oriented, and an insidious process at that.
ITEM: Your cherub’s project receives an A. His work the teacher praises before the classroom. Yet, oddly, the child’s identity she will studiously conceal. This is in furtherance of the egalitarian idea, implemented, whereby no individual student is to be identified as having produced superior work to that of the collective.
“[U]nder the Singleton influence,” explains Flaherty, “the Seattle schools [have] defined individualism as a form of cultural racism and said that only whites can be racist.” Moreover, “emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology is a form of racism,” too.
The progressive educational project carries its anti-white bias into teaching about the Orient (East) versus the Occident (West).
ITEM: A Christian boy, placed in an academically advanced study program, is tasked with submitting a project about one of three ancient civilizations: Egypt, India and Rome.
Ancient Egypt, a big hit apparently, is spoken for. The teacher, generally “white, female, liberal,” advises the boy: “Choose India. Rome is … BORING.”
What is it that this colossal ignoramus has conveyed to her student with the words “Rome is boring”? Let us unpack the meta-message (with reference to History.org):
• Christianity, first adopted and spread by the giant empire of Rome, is BORING.
• Engineering, which the Romans perfected and excelled at like no other civilization, is BORING.
• Related in tedium and utterly BORING: The ingenious construction of roads and aqueducts.
• The Greeks, an inspiration for Rome—what little boy doesn’t love Leonidas of “300”?—BORING.
• The form of government known as “republicanism,” an inspiration for the American Founding Fathers: BORING.
• The notion of equality under the law, invented by Rome and instantiated in Rome’s Twelve Tables, 449 Before Christ: BORING.
• The intrigues of Julius Caesar’s court: BORING.
• The oh-so relevant lessons of Empire and government overreach: BORING.
• Spartacus, gladiator and rebel leader against Rome: BORING.
• “Gladiators, Chariots, and the Roman Games,” the riveting stuff of kiddie video games: BORING.
• The fine art of argument and oratory: BORING.
• Masters of literature and poetry: Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Livy: BORING!
• The greatest romance in history, Antony and Cleopatra’s: not quite on the level of a Bollywood tryst.
Rome is the foundation of our Western civilization. The boorishness of telling a Christian young boy that Rome is boring conjures a skit from the “Life of Brian,” a parody by comedic genius John Cleese about Judea under Rome:
So, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” asks Reg, a Jewish rebel against Rome. “The aqueduct,” one rebel ventures. Says a second, “Sanitation, remember what the city used to be like?” A third Jewish rebel praises the roads. A fourth, the public baths. Exacerbated by the growing list of Roman improvements, rebel-in-chief Reg responds: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
Except that what is par for the course in your children’s’ schools is no laughing matter.
Certainly, parents ought to familiarize themselves with the politicized process of textbook and course-material selection.
In Washington State, the selection of textbooks is a highly centralized affair, arrogated to a “textbook commission,” which consists of five individuals, whose liberal, labor-union credentials are guaranteed to be unimpeachable.
Put it this way, textbook selection effected by the politburo of books will ensure that your child never ever comes away believing in the immutable truth, say, of the philosophy that animated the republic’s Founding Fathers. Or in the originalist intention of the US Constitution.
Yes, your kids will learn about the Constitution and about theories of constitutional interpretation. But so will they be inculcated in the unshaken view of originalism as a quaint notion reserved for oddballs (auntie ilana’s preference for the Anti-Federalists is tantamount to a thought crime), and that “progress” demands that the Constitution be “updated.”
Your child will be taught that eternal verities—the rights of private property and self-defense—shift with the times, when in fact truth is not relative, but both knowable and immutable (also the theme of a magnificent encyclical penned by the late Pope John Paul II).
Fact: Yale and Mizzou students are oblivious to the cherished American tenets of freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion; diversity of thought, and most important: the magnificent life all people irrespective of skin color can labor to achieve in America.
These students didn’t arrive on campus with such illiberal biases. The rot didn’t start there and didn’t unfold overnight. The closing of the Millennial Minds at the University of Missouri and beyond, to yield such philosophically and ethically bereft boorishness, has happened over time. The seeds of the bizarre contagion spreading across American campuses were sown in your kids’ primary and secondary schools, public and private.
And as we speak.
–Ilana Mercer
Ilana Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the U.S. She is a contributor to Junge Freiheit, Germany’s finest weekly, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Her latest book is “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Her website iswww.IlanaMercer.com. Follow her on Twitter. “Friend” her on Facebook.