For those of you who are old enough to remember the days when schools and colleges were about educating our children and preparing them for life as responsible adults, it comes as quite an eyeopener to scrutinize the current curricula of today’s places of “learning.”
While I certainly don’t want to paint with a broad brush here, it is evident schools, and unquestionably many colleges today, are more focused on social engineering and less concerned with education. Frightening is the fact that in this current climate, the true meaning of education has been suffocated by progressive political activism.
Don’t believe it? I suggest you take the time to read the National Association of Scholars (NAS) January 2017 full 523-page “Making Citizens Report” (okay, maybe not the whole report, but at least the Executive Summary: www.nas.org).
Who’s NAS? According to their statement of purpose: “The National Association of Scholars is a network of scholars and citizens united by a commitment to academic freedom, disinterested scholarship, and excellence in American higher education.
“We uphold the standards of a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual freedom, searches for the truth, and promotes virtuous citizenship.
“We expect that ideas will be judged on their merits; that scholars will engage in disinterested research; and that colleges and universities will provide for fair and judicial examination and debate of contending views.”
I would consider these noble enterprises.
While the report focuses primarily on higher education, the present educational transformation we are witnessing, is rooted in the radical program of the 1960s’ New Left, and is operating unchecked throughout much of our public education system.
As noted in the introduction to NAS’s report, “The New Civics seeks above all to make students into enthusiastic supporters of the New Left’s dream of ‘fundamentally transforming’ America. The transformation includes de-carbonizing the economy, massively redistributing wealth, intensifying identity group grievance, curtailing the free market, expanding government bureaucracy, elevating international ‘norms’ over American Constitutional law, and disparaging our common history and ideals. New Civics advocates argue among themselves which of these transformations should take precedence, but they agree that America must be transformed by ‘systemic change’ from an unjust, oppressive society to a society that embodies social justice.”
Review the workshop topics listed at this past Thursday and Friday’s “First Ever Cook County Social Justice Conference” and you will see the brazen similarities.
Dare I suggest we consider education in Nazi Germany (I know the mere mention of the word “Nazi” infuriates those who believe it is a term only available to a select few to employ)?
Hitler had very strong opinions on education and when he attained power, he immediately made changes to the school curriculum. Rather haunting that education in “racial awareness” started at school where students were continually reminded of their racial obligation to the “national community” …along with political education, which became compulsory. Children were told who to accept as “worthy” and “unworthy” races.
It was Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Russian Communist Party and architect, builder, and first head of the Soviet Union who touted, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
He was simply paraphrasing biblical King Solomon’s words declared nearly three millennium earlier, “Train children in the way they should go; when they grow old, they won’t depart from it.”
Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works.
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