Tag: bias in education

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Pushing a Failed Philosophy

Throughout its existence, socialism has done little more than worsen poverty, create mass murder, and abolish freedom. The experiment has been tried—and failed– throughout the world, in every type of nation, for over a century. Even the president of the latest country destroyed by socialism, Venezuela, has admitted the reality that can no longer be hidden: his nation’s economy, despite the enormous advantage of vast deposits of oil, has collapsed.

The philosophy of the left has powerful and influential advocates within America in politics, the arts, the media, education, and especially among a certain class of billionaires who disdain the masses and seek to establish a top-down system, of course led by them. But how to sell an idea that produced only misery for over a century?  It can’t be done in open debate. It can’t be done through the normal discourse of public discussion. There are no tales of success to entice voters with.

And so, a very different course of action is followed. A relentless overpoliticization of the culture is undertaken, in which every flaw, every shortcoming, every lack of perfection is headlined and dwelled upon incessantly. Imagine a documentary about Babe Ruth that contains only descriptions of the times he struck out.  That is the intellectually dishonest tactic that Progressives adhere to.

Needless to say, the mass murders committed in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia, and by the National Socialist of Germany are largely ignored, as are comparisons between North and South Korea, or in the old East and West Europe. A recent survey by The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany  noted that two thirds of the millennials polled didn’t know about the Auschwitz concentration camp; many don’t even know that the full name of the Nazis was the National Socialist Party.   The stunning human rights violations committed by almost all socialist regimes are overlooked.

While, in the normal course, that strategy would appear paper thin, it succeeds when contrary and realistic evidence is wholly excluded. Moderate and conservative educators, speakers, and texts are diligently excluded from schools.  Courses in history and civics are essentially replaced by indoctrination and propaganda that excludes honest facts. The Communist Manifesto is a frequently prescribed text in university economics classes, and the “Peoples History of the United States” written by communist activist Howard Zinn is widely used in history courses. Those dissenting from these affronts are labelled with every pejorative available. Major newspapers and televised news shows warp the truth. Key social media sites and search engines censor, obscure or otherwise diminish non-leftist perspectives.

Whenever agonizing emotions happen they are usually buried as well as sickened, as well as have misery, deadness, generic levitra online as well as shivering as part of your midsection, fists, guitar neck, as well as mouth, avoid in addition to summon your expert right. Kenpo robertrobb.com sample viagra pills was actually introduced by Prof. This engorgement occurs when the blood vessels and pumps in more blood to the reproductive organs. viagra tablets 100mg try content now It contains active Kamagra citrate that belongs to buy levitra without rx the family of PDE-5 vasodilators that provide the cure of ED in men besides of various other physical factors. President Obama put into action leftist policies on a significant scale.  They did not produce beneficial results, as the economy stagnated, race relations deteriorated, seniors received the smallest social security cost of living increases in living memory, jobs fled overseas, and the middle class became an endangered species. Voters responded by tossing out left-leaning politicians throughout federal and state elections.

Faced with disaster at the ballot box, Progressives reacted with violence and mayhem.  When not rioting or inciting disharmony throughout the population, they sought to abuse the law to attack moderate and conservative lawmakers, think tanks, and individuals.  Obama used the IRS to attack the Tea Party. His attorney general threatened to criminally prosecute those that disagreed with him on climate change.

When the left lost the White House and access to the instruments of the federal government to harass opponents, they resorted to other tactics, some of which are only in the early stages but which will produce significant and worrisome results in the near future. Billionaires Tom Steyer and George Soros have provided extraordinary donations to progressive candidates for what should be not particularly partisan positions such as attorney general.  The reason is clear. Just as the Obama Administration unlawfully used the federal government to beat down opponents, states attorneys general could—some already have– relentlessly entangle moderate and conservative voices in endless rounds of lawsuits.  Faced with the expense and time-consuming challenge of responding, those non-progressive institutions and individuals lose even when they eventually beat the nonsense lawsuits in court.

The inappropriate use of the machinery of government to intimidate and defeat alternative voices, and attempts to prevent dissemination of differing views, are tactics universally employed in left-wing regimes. The well-practiced playbook is now being employed within America.

Illustration: Pixabay

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Illegal Diversion of Educational Assets

It doesn’t often reach the headlines, but the extent of political bias in education has reached near-catastrophic levels. Educators at university, high school, and lower levels, partially in response to the Parkland disaster, have abandoned any pretense at objectivity and openly abused their positions of trust to advance left-wing goals.

Not enough attention has been paid to acts such as that of the Baltimore public school system, which complained that it didn’t have enough funds to heat classrooms but spent $100,000 to rent buses to transport students to Washington for an anti-gun demonstration.

Some of the traits that have become more publicly noticeable are reminiscent of China’s cultural revolution. Bradford Richardson, for example, reports that Harvard has established  an effort to rid the classroom of so-called “offensive” remarks and has set up a mechanism to anonymously do so.

In North Carolina, notes the Washington Times,an eight year old student was given a handout from his school about “white privilege.” In a similar vein, notes Campus Reform,  Students at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs can earn up to 3 academic credits through a course that requires them to attend the annual White Privilege Conference. The credits can be applied toward the school’s Graduate Certificate in Diversity, Social Justice, and Inclusion, along with courses such as “Unmasking Whiteness” and “Social Health Justice.”

PJ Media reports that a teacher was placed on leave for merely asking whether students seeking to protest abortion would be given the same rights as those demonstrating against the Second Amendment. Columnist Tom Knighton reported that an educator posed the question:  if it was appropriate for the school to have been providing support for a politically motivated protest, [in this case, anti-2nd Amendment] would such support would be there for other causes. The teacher involved, Julianne Benzel, said “I just kind of used the example … [if] a group of students nationwide, or even locally, decided ‘I want to walk out of school for 17 minutes’ and go in the quad area and protest abortion, would that be allowed by our administration… When a school makes it clear that it is willing to support some political speech but not all, students are learning that some opinions can be silenced in this country. They call it progressive, but that’s regression.”

The College Fix found that an “anti-oppression guide” at  Simmons College claims that saying “God bless you” after some sneezes is considered as a microaggrerssion, because it could offend Muslims.

As the New York Analysis of Policy and Government previously reported, Walter Williams provided  a disturbing report from the University of Hawaii:
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“’We need to think very, very clearly about who the enemy is. The enemy is the United States of America and everyone who supports it.’ That’s taught to University of Hawaii students by Professor Haunani-Kay Trask. Richard Falk, professor emeritus at Princeton University and the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Palestine monitor, believes stated that President George W. Bush ordered the destruction of the twin towers.’ … Then there’s Georgetown law professor Louis Michael Seidman, who explained our national problems by saying, ‘But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.’”

The Daily Wire reports that  Karl Marx’s ‘Communist Manifesto’ has been found to be the most taught text by economists on college campuses…“’The Communist Manifesto’ was most frequently taught by economists, receiving a total count of 3189 and a ‘teaching score’ of 99.7. The overall data from all professors revealed that only ‘The Elements of Style,’ a common writing guide by William Strunk and ‘The Republic’ by Plato were more assigned than the Karl Marx classic. And if if that’s not frightening enough, per Market Watch, the Bible did not show up in the data at all but Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ received ‘a count of 697 and a score of 75.7’ and Vladimir Lenin’s ‘What Is To Be Done’ received a count of 361 and a teaching score of 45.9.”

When U.S. history is taught, even on the lower school level, it is frequently from an extreme anti-American bias. The Federalist reported that in 2014, when award-winning history professor Larry Krieger reviewed Common Core’s AP American history curriculum, he was appalled.  “Krieger… conducted a meticulous dissection of the anti-American themes and anti-knowledge gaps in the extensive new curriculum framework. These include emphasizing exploitation, racial conflict, and economic determinism, and omitting the Pilgrims, all Revolutionary War battles, Alexis de Tocqueville, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and much more. Their analysis and Wood’s also make it quite clear that the new curriculum is nowhere near objective, or even even-handed, philosophically, and is, moreover, organizationally incoherent.”

Will Grant, reporting for Times Higher Education explains that “Growing proportions of the academic workforce are employed in ever more precarious fashion; PhD graduates are produced at volumes scarcely related to academic jobs; … Among our students, we can see a growing trend of academic entitlement, …growing political demands over the shape of the curriculum and how the university should relate to them. Accusations of liberal bias among faculty are nothing new. Since before God and Man at Yale – William F. Buckley’s 1951 attack on his teachers at Yale – academics have been accused of seeking to indoctrinate students into liberal views. Yet in recent years, [ideological battles]…have taken on a new character…The tone of campus conversations has changed. Partisan divisions we see elsewhere in society seem to have made their way into the classroom…students …are …more likely to disengage from the classroom experience, or to be disingenuous and parrot the instructors’ beliefs back to them. Neither of these behaviors is, of course, conducive to either quality classroom discussion or actual learning… these trends are worsened by the system that we have helped to create…Politics may currently be an unwelcome and potentially disruptive visitor to the classroom, but it doesn’t need to be that way….”

Allowing discussions and even protests are part of the educational process. But mandating that only one side of the ideological divide has that privilege is an affront to the American concept of free speech, and represents, in essence, a theft of taxpayer dollars or parental tuition funds for purposes unrelated to education.

Photo: Baltimore Mayor Catherine Elizabeth Pugh. Did Baltimore misuse school funds to rent buses to send students on a political protest?

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Progressives Continue Campaigning Long After Elections Conclude

The New York Analysis of Policy and Government concludes its review of the differences in how Leftists vs. Centrists and Conservatives seek to influence the public. 

Hollywood has a firm ally in academia. As noted in Mark Davis’ study, “Upside Down,” “A degraded education system and a poisoned culture make millions of Americans easy targets for indoctrination by the Left. A morally and intellectually malnourished generation soaks up liberal platitudes from television, on the internet, and the classroom.”

The stunning acts of academia’s sheer outrage against the results of the 2016 election, which proved a major disappointment to Progressives, are numerous. Consider the following examples: A CBS affiliate in Boston  reports that the Hampshire College Board of Trustees made a “decision to lower the U.S. flag on campus to half-staff in the wake of the presidential election–and then decided to remove the flag entirely after a wave of backlash.”

WND  noted that the Campus Reform publication found that “Professors at the University of New Hampshire are calling for the expulsion of two students who counter protested an anti-Trump rally…”

While students were being harassed on some campuses for supporting the results of a fair election, other campuses were doubling down on their support for leftist extremism. The New York Times found that Progressive radical Cornel West is returning to teach at Harvard. West is renowned for making statements such as this quote from Open Democracy “The American Empire is more ripe for a counter-revolution …This is so primarily because of the deep xenophobic roots in the country and profound militaristic sentiments in the culture. Hence, progressive social momentums and chaotic social rebellions are more likely to reshape our priorities and gain some concessions from greedy elites and callous citizens.”
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Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has urged that “alumni and trustees of private colleges and universities…organize committees for American education. They should insist that their schools require courses be taught without the usual extreme leftist bias of most professors, and that every one of their students graduates with a firm grounding in American history.” The former speaker’s advice is worthwhile, but the reality is the bias begins even before college.

Some high school teachers have inappropriately drafted their students into left-wing causes. The New York Post found that “A group of maverick history teachers at elite Beacon HS in Manhattan let their kids skip class Tuesday to join a Trump Tower protest…Roughly 200 kids from the Hell’s Kitchen public school were granted hooky passes at 11 a.m. and joined students from across the city to disparage The Donald…Beacon parents were never alerted and only found out about the impromptu field trip from their kids, according to sources…Chancellor Carmen Fariña sent a sympathetic note to teachers and administrators Monday. ‘The outcome of the presidential election has left many youth and adult members of our community feeling confused or anxious,” Fariña said. “Undocumented immigrants and their families, LGBTQ students and staff, Muslims, and members of other religious, racial, or ethnic groups may be feeling particularly vulnerable during this time.”

Centrist and conservative Americans tend to reduce the level of their attention, time and energy directed towards political endeavors following the conclusion of the election cycle, whether they win or lose.  Their progressive counterparts, however, through popular culture and education, recognize no such cease-fire. As a result of decades of skillful manipulation of public opinion through entertainment and education, many Americans, particularly the young, have had an inadequate grounding in any opinions, arguments or facts other than what they have gleaned from left-leaning professors and performers.

The situation is growing even more one-sided as many social media giants increasingly seek to minimize any material that doesn’t subscribe to progressive orthodoxy. The opportunity to reach substantial portions of the public who have had only limited exposure to a broader range of opinion is becoming quite limited. Unless centrists and conservatives grasp that far more is required than just engaging in periodic political campaigns, the United States will become a far different nation, one with a culture and a set of beliefs substantially different from what they prefer.

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Attempts continue to impose left wing bias in education

During 2014 and 2015, numerous scholars protested the College Boards’ attempt to impose a radical new American History advanced placement curriculum. (The College Board is a private New York organization that administers advanced placement courses.) The revised coursework reflects a leftist version of American history that emphasizes a negative attitude towards the U.S. and for the most part omits major figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Martin Luther King, Jr. The material gave little recognition to America’s contributions to defeating the forces of tyranny in the World Wars, or the nation’s pivotal role in raising economic standards.

The curriculum bowed to the Progressive’s lack of belief in American exceptionalism.

The issue became so controversial and partisan that the Republican National Committee weighed in on the debate, arguing that the College Board’s new framework “deliberately distorts and/or edits out important historical events…and reflects a radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.”

Think Progress reported that a number of state legislators across the country attempted to pass laws prohibiting government funding from being used to advance the politicized course revision. Calls were also made to withhold federal funding. Critics were concerned that David Coleman, a key figure behind the Common Core standards, was involved in pushing the biased material.

Educators from the National Association of Scholars  published the following letter after the new material was released:

The teaching of American history in our schools faces a grave new risk, from an unexpected source. Half a million students each year take the Advanced Placement (AP) exam in U.S. History. The framework for that exam has been dramatically changed, in ways certain to have negative consequences.

We wish to express our opposition to these modifications. The College Board’s 2014 Advanced Placement Examination shortchanges students by imposing on them an arid, fragmentary, and misleading account of American history. We favor instead a robust, vivid, and content-rich account of our unfolding national drama, warts and all, a history that is alert to all the ways we have disagreed and fallen short of our ideals, while emphasizing the ways that we remain one nation with common ideals and a shared story.

The Advanced Placement exam has become a fixture in American education since its introduction after the Second World War, and many colleges and universities award credits based on students’ AP scores. In fact, for many American students the AP test effectively has taken the place of the formerly required U.S. history survey course in colleges and universities, making its structure and contents a matter of even greater importance from the standpoint of civic education. Many of these students will never take another American history course. So it matters greatly what they learn in their last formal encounter with the subject.

Educators and the public have been willing to trust the College Board to strike a sensible balance among different approaches to the American past. Rather than issuing detailed guidelines, the College Board has in the past furnished a brief topical outline for teachers, leaving them free to choose what to emphasize. In addition, the previous AP U.S. History course featured a strong insistence on content, i.e., on the students’ acquisition of extensive factual knowledge of American history. But with the new 2014 framework, the College Board has put forward a lengthy 134-page document which repudiates that earlier approach, centralizes control, deemphasizes content, and promotes a particular interpretation of American history.

This interpretation downplays American citizenship and American world leadership in favor of a more global and transnational perspective. The College Board has long enjoyed an effective monopoly on advanced placement testing. The changes made in the new framework expose the danger in such a monopoly. The result smacks of an “official” account of the American past. Local, state, and federal policymakers may need to explore competitive alternatives to the College Board’s current domination of advanced-placement testing.
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The new framework is organized around such abstractions as “identity,” “peopling,” “work, exchange, and technology,” and “human geography” while downplaying essential subjects, such as the sources, meaning, and development of America’s ideals and political institutions, notably the Constitution. Elections, wars, diplomacy, inventions, discoveries—all these formerly central subjects tend to dissolve into the vagaries of identity-group conflict. The new framework scrubs away all traces of what used to be the chief glory of historical writing—vivid and compelling narrative—and reduces history to an bloodless interplay of abstract and impersonal forces. Gone is the idea that history should provide a fund of compelling stories about exemplary people and events. No longer will students hear about America as a dynamic and exemplary nation, flawed in many respects, but whose citizens have striven through the years toward the more perfect realization of its professed ideals. The new version of the test will effectively marginalize important ways of teaching about the American past, and force American high schools to teach U.S. history from a perspective that self-consciously seeks to de-center American history and subordinate it to a global and heavily social-scientific perspective.

There are notable political or ideological biases inherent in the 2014 framework, and certain structural innovations that will inevitably result in imbalance in the test, and bias in the course. Chief among these is the treatment of American national identity. The 2010 framework treated national identity, including “views of the American national character and ideas about American exceptionalism” as a central theme. But the 2014 framework makes a dramatic shift away from that emphasis, choosing instead to grant far more extensive attention to “how various identities, cultures, and values have been preserved or changed in different contexts of U.S. history with special attention given to the formation of gender, class, racial and ethnic identities.” The new framework makes a shift from “identity” to “identities.” Indeed, the new framework is so populated with examples of American history as the conflict between social groups, and so inattentive to the sources of national unity and cohesion, that it is hard to see how 3 students will gain any coherent idea of what those sources might be. This does them, and us, an immense disservice.

We believe that the study of history should expose our young students to vigorous debates about the nature of American exceptionalism, American identity, and America’s role in the world. Such debates are the warp and woof of historical understanding. We do not seek to reduce the education of our young to the inculcation of fairy tales, or of a simple, whitewashed, heroic, even hagiographical nationalist narrative. Instead, we support a course that fosters informed and reflective civic awareness, while providing a vivid sense of the grandeur and drama of its subject. A formal education in American history serves young people best by equipping them for a life of deep and consequential membership in their own society. The College Board’s 2014 framework sadly neglects this essential civic purpose of education in history. We can, and must, do better.

Some revisions to the course were made in July following the protests, although critics still maintain that the curriculum continues to reflect a left-wing partisan viewpoint.

To a significant extent, the new material is an outgrowth of the use of a textbook, “A People’s History of the United States,” written by the Marxist author Howard Zinn, in many schools.

Writing for Hillsdale College’s Imprimis publication, Wilfred M. McClay discussed the controversy, placing it in the context of a much broader ideological battle:

“The audacity of this agenda could not be clearer. It is nothing less than a drive to expel the nation-state, and completely reconstitute public consciousness around a radically different idea of the purpose of history. It substitutes a whole new set of loyalties, narratives, heroes, and notable events—perhaps directed to some post-national entity, or to a mere abstraction—for the ones inhering in civic life as it now exists. It would mean a complete rupture with the past, and with all admired things that formerly associated themselves with the idea of the nation, including the sacrifices of former generations…

“It represents a lurch in the direction of more centralized control, as well as an expression of a distinct agenda—an agenda that downplays comprehensive content knowledge in favor of interpretive finesse, and that seeks to deemphasize American citizenship and American world leadership in favor of a more global and transnational perspective… It gives only the most cursory attention to traditional subjects, such as the sources, meaning, and development of America’s fundamental political institutions, notably the Constitution, and the narrative accounting of political events, such as elections, wars, and diplomacy.

“Various critics have noted the political and ideological biases inherent in the 2014 framework, as well as structural innovations that will result in imbalance in the test and bias in the course. … the new framework is so populated with examples of American history as the conflict between social groups, and so inattentive to the sources of national unity and cohesion, that it is hard to see how students will gain any coherent idea of what those sources might be. This does them, and all Americans, an immense disservice. Instead of combating fracture, it embraces it.”