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?