McCarthy Exposes Teacher's Islamic Indoctrination

Andy McCarthy does another of his excellent turns at exposing the way Progressive 'educators' are helping the spread of Islamism in the U.S.

For those with a strong stomach, here's part of McCarthy's report:

A sixth-grade class in Wellesley, Massachusetts, was dragged by their teachers to the notorious Roxbury mosque — the $15 million Saudi-funded, minareted Islamic center started by Abdurrahman Alamoudi (now serving a 23-year terrorism sentence) and run by the Muslim American Society (the quasi-official arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States).

Capitalizing on the goo that passes for “social studied” curricula, parents were told the “field trip” was “to learn about the architecture of the mosque and observe a midday prayer service.” One parent was concerned enough to volunteer as a chaperone and bring along a camera.

The result is stunning: an unabashed exercise in Islamic dawa, the “call to Islam” and the manner by which the Brotherhood’s spiritual guide, Yusuf Qaradawi, promises that Islam will “conquer America” and “conquer Europe.” Qaradawi — wonder of wonders — is a trustee of the Roxbury mosque (although he is banned from the U.S. for sanctioning terrorism).

The indoctrination of anti-American values by teachers is now de rigeur in public schools and every single indoctrinator should be fired, post haste. That wish, of course, is sheer fantasy because those who would fire them are either utter avoid-all-controversy pragmatists or actually agree with the teachers.

The only ultimate solution to horrors like this is to eliminate the public school system, which has always been an immoral and impractical idea. That, too, is fantasizing at least for the next 20 years, probably longer. In the interim, McCarthy is doing the next best thing by exposing it to as wide an audience as possible.

The problem is, will many care? So far, the answer appears to be a resounding "No."

Article Published at Pajamas Media: Beyond Politics

My article, Beyond Politics: Removing the Progressive Drag On America has been published at Pajamas Media.

It begins:

Fighting the soul-killing, wealth-destroying acts of progressives over the long term is going to take much more than winning an election or two. It will require neutralizing their influence throughout the culture. That’s much harder, of course, but essential if we’re to have to a country that does more than seesaw between two power-hungry parties while spiraling ever downward.

The reasons that wider change is a must are not hard to find. Even where their relative numbers are low, progressives have come to dominate much more than just the Democratic Party and the major news outlets.

They control curricula for public K-12 education almost everywhere, despite the presence of a great many teachers who disagree with their views. Progressive educators’ numbers are bolstered by the roughly 70-85% of college educators and administrators who identify as liberals. They dominate credential-required education courses, and strongly influence textbook selection.

Read the rest here...

Please weigh in with your views on what it will take to restore America to individualism and freedom, here and there.

Best Friends Are Bad, Say Educators

I usually push back whenever commenters say that Ayn Rand was prescient. After all, she didn't envision the negative consequences of collectivism and socialism, she lived through them, twice.

The first time was for ten years in Soviet Russia, then again for another twenty during the Hoover and FDR administrations. So, while the episodes in 1957's Atlas Shrugged may look predictive of today's events, they're actually an abstraction of the essentials she observed first hand.

However, she was imaginative and she had a superb ability to project an idea's logical consequences. That's nowhere more evident than in 1937's Anthem. I never expected to see the events of that novella brought to literal life, though. Now, they have been.

A group of 'educators' — and here the scare quotes are well and truly deserved — argue that having a best friend is bad.

“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”
...
[S]chool officials admit they watch close friendships carefully for adverse effects. “When two children discover a special bond between them, we honor that bond, provided that neither child overtly or covertly excludes or rejects others,” said Jan Mooney, a psychologist at the Town School, a nursery through eighth grade private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

“However, the bottom line is that if we find a best friend pairing to be destructive to either child, or to others in the classroom, we will not hesitate to separate children and to work with the children and their parents to ensure healthier relationships in the future.”

I won't bother to counter their reasons; their pretense at being worried about bullying and unhealthy relationships are blatant rationalizations and not worth the bother. Their actual motives are not hard to discern, for anyone who has read Anthem. They're out to collectivize personal relationships, i.e. to make them impersonal. They are Dewey's heirs.

Choosing a close friend, someone who stands out as special, is to do just that: make that person stand out in one's hierarchy of values. To stand out is to stand apart, apart from the group, to regard one person as more important than another.

That, Progressive educators simply can not abide. It runs wholly contrary to their smothering collectivism and all-enveloping egalitarianism. To not be an interchangeable drone is to threaten the hive and to bring on the stings of the queen and her protectors.

If the parents in those school districts have a lick of sense they'll immediately withdraw their children until all those espousing such views have been completely purged. They should treat their children's exposure to that propaganda as they would an outbreak of small pox.

Sadly, that's about as likely as Obama being impeached. Even though it was a prominent story in the New York Times, most parents will read the story and shrug. Such lunacy has become so commonplace today it raises few eyebrows. When you live in the moral equivalent of the 14th century it's all too easy to get stoic about the plague.

It shouldn't be too surprising. After all, when the parents have themselves been raised by Comprachicos, the concept of a disease that destroys the soul becomes literally unthinkable.

Sweden, Coming Soon to a Country Near You

Anyone interested in realistic projections of where the U.S. is heading need only look to Europe, in this case Sweden. The government there is proposing to outlaw homeschooling on the grounds that

"…the education in school should be comprehensive and objective and thereby designed so that all pupils can participate, regardless of what religious or philosophical reasons the pupil or his or her care-takers may have."

As a result, they argue (in a giant non-sequitur): "[T]here is no need for the law to offer the possibility of homeschooling because of religious or philosophical reasons in the family."

Observe the subtle, unstated premise: your convictions are not objective, but those of the State educators necessarily are. No argument beyond pointing it out should be needed to show how false and pernicious that idea is. But that view is particularly ironic given how opposed all Dewey's descendants are, in principle, to objectivity. (It's contrary to the most basic principle of Pragmatism that there are no eternal, 'transcendent' truths.)

The various States have long forced parents to jump through hoops to remove their children from the clutches of the Progressive Comprachicos. Yet, homeschooling in America has still been on the rise (and hence under attack) for years. If current social trends continue here, expect something like this legislation to be introduced at the Federal level within the next 10 years, sooner if ObamaCare is enacted.

Progressivism Infects Mathematics Instruction

"The social life gives the unconscious unity and the background of all [the child's] efforts and of all his attainments. ... I believe, therefore, that the true centre of correlation of the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social activities.
...
I believe that the study of science is educational in so far as it brings out the materials and processes which make social life what it is."
...
I believe, finally, that the teacher is engaged, not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life. John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed (1897)

From a recent column by Michelle Malkin, we glean more of Dewey's Progressive education legacy.

[from a review by James V. Rauff of Millikin University] Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers "is divided into four parts.

The first part is devoted to a broad view of mathematics that includes historical and cultural implications.

Part Two includes nine classroom narratives in which teachers describe lessons they have used that infuse social justice issues into their mathematics curriculum. Included here … an AP calculus lesson on income distribution.

The third part contains three detailed classroom experiences/lessons. These include a physical depiction of the inequitable distribution of the world's wealth, the results of a student investigation into how many U.S. presidents owned slaves, and a wonderful classroom game called 'Transnational Capital Auction' in which students take on the role of leaders of Third World countries bidding competitively for new factories from a multinational corporation. ...

Short lessons, provocative cartoons and snippets of statistics are scattered throughout 'Rethinking Mathematics.'

A partial list of topics includes racial profiling, unemployment rate calculation, the war in Iraq, environmental racism, globalization, wealth distribution and poverty, wheelchair ramps, urban density, HIV/AIDS, deconstructing Barbie, junk food advertising to children and lotteries."

The Progressive virus has now infected even mathematics instruction and the patient is suffering from a high fever. If not reversed, and soon, permanent brain damage will inevitably result.

Progressives Take Over Education, A Late Warning

Big Hollywood has been almost floor to ceiling complaints lately about Howard Zinn's Progressive history book and the recent documentary (The People Speak) based on it. Michelle Malkin gets into the act, too.

I'm glad they're highlighting the Marxist nature of Zinn's book, and the Progressive goals of his 'students', like Matt Damon. Unfortunately, they're about 110 (or 40) years behind the curve (the number depending on where you want to start), and bearing much less firepower than is needed.

John Dewey created the philosophy – and in some cases the practical implementation – of Progressive education 110 years ago with the publication of The School and Society in 1899. He wrote extensively on the subject in later works, both philosophical and popular. He was, in a sense, the anti-Rand before she published a word.

I'll save for later a full explication of Dewey's philosophy. For now, a simple quote or four will do to convey the flavor. First, his views on morality:

"Moral and social problems, for Dewey, are concerned with the guidance of human action to the achievement of socially defined ends that are productive of a satisfying life for individuals within the social context.

Regarding the nature of what constitutes a satisfying life, Dewey was intentionally vague, out of his conviction that specific ends or goods can be defined only in particular socio-historical contexts. In the Ethics (1932) he speaks of the ends simply as the cultivation of interests in goods that recommend themselves in the light of calm reflection."

In line with Pragmatism, his ethics is essentially contentless. It's whatever 'society' decides at any given time. But the basic approach is key here and that approach is unwaveringly collectivistic. That's even clearer in statements like these:

"I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race.
...
I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs." [My Pedagogic Creed (1897)]

That translated easily into his view of the purpose of education, from a social or political standpoint:

"I believe it is the business of every one interested in education to insist upon the school as the primary and most effective instrument of social progress and reform in order that society may be awakened to realize what the school stands for, and aroused to the necessity of endowing the educator with sufficient equipment properly to perform his task." [ibid]

By the late 1960s, Progressive education (at least in public schools) was nearly the only kind there was. What we see today — with the near monopoly of the views of Greens, unionists, and other Progressive types in education — is the inevitable result.

Compared to Dewey — as measured by the standard of radical transforming destructiveness — Zinn and his followers are pikers.

So, while once again, I'm glad that BH and Malkin are exposing these clowns, I'll be much more impressed when they start attacking the root of the problem. Given the perpetual myopia of most conservatives — as well as their not-so-intellectual leaders' unfortunate tendency to populism — I'm not holding my breath.

Dewey to Obama: Progressive Education and Politics

De-Shintoizing American Culture

Michelle Malkin nails it with this comment about Progressive education:

Lost in all the chanting for change is the core commitment to impart actual knowledge. For progressives in the Age of Obama, setting high academic standards is secondary to the self-improvement of the "whole child" and "service" to the cause of social justice."

What Ms. Malkin doesn't mention — there really was no need to in the column — is that what concerns her is straight out of John Dewey's work.

It's no accident that Dewey was one of the major inventors of both Progressive education and modern liberal Fascism. He was one of the triad that invented Pragmatism. (He called his version Instrumentalism.) He was also a social democrat and a proponent of doing away with classical education. All of these are intricately linked.

Pragmatism essentially teaches that there are no eternal truths, because there are no objective natural laws. Everything is in Heraclitean flux, forever shifting. All we can do is arrive at a social consensus of what is true.

That view prepares the field for the educational agenda that Dewey advocated, one in which it would no longer consist of memorizing "dry facts" and performing boring cogitation with them. Instead, not just the child's mind but the "whole child" would be taught, chiefly by "socializing" him. I.e. what counts is not objective reality and what it requires of us to create values, but whatever others think is true and worthwhile.

The political consequences are all around us. Every single disastrous policy of Obama and the leaders of Congress is informed by the doctrines of Progressivism, virtually unchanged in the hundred years since Dewey laid them down and Wilson adopted them. (There is one exception: Wilson was much more interested in military victory, albeit for the wrong reasons.)

That's why, every time one is tempted to be puzzled by Obama's actions — whether because of his willingness to commit political suicide to push Fascist health care reform or his blatant groveling to Middle Eastern despots — one only has to remember this: Progressives are the consistent practitioners of what the Left has been preaching for three generations: social subjectivism, collectivism, and statism.

Time to run them all out of all forms of public life — education, media, and politics. It's necessary for the same reasons that no one who advocates Italian Fascism ala Mussolini should hold a public position of influence. To wit, that Progressivism - Fascism Lite - leads to Fascism Heavy.

What I'm suggesting is the complete De-Shintoizing not just of American politics, but American culture. After the end of WWII, the final series of battles against Japan took place, with the removal of the influence of State Shinto from Japanese public life. Individuals could do as they like, but no State sponsorship of the philosophy that led to Pearl Harbor and the Rape of Nanking was allowed to operate in the government, the newspapers, or the public schools.

A similar program is need to restore the American Republic today. And, it's necessary to complete it before they become literally indistinguishable from their intellectual ancestors, before the mask of Smiley Face Fascism is removed and becomes the original.

Getting Educated, So to See

There's a line in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, spoken by Roark at his trial in the novel's climax: "I'm an architect. I know what is to come by the principle on which it is based." Nowhere is that idea better shown than in the field of education.

It's with that as background that it pays to think about how the current situation in public education came about, a situation in which Johnny can't think past the upcoming Friday night. The results we live with today are the direct consequence of what John Dewey advocated over 100 years ago. In 1897, he published My Pedagogic Creed with the express purpose of making radical changes in American education.

He wrote:

I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race.
...
I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs.

It strikes many at first as innocuous. But connect the dots. What has happened in the average public school to support for individual scholastic achievement? Largely gone, replaced by teachers and administrators who follow Dewey's preference for "the welfare of the group."

But what of all the diversity of pink and blue hair, tattoos, and clothing styles? Isn't that evidence of individualism of a sort? Not really. It is merely another form of chaos, the flip side of gray-tunic collectivism.

Hayek writes in The Road to Serfdom (PDF) of the relation between increasing government control of society in every sphere and such forms of 'individualism'. He observes that the only freedom the youth of Britain were coming to have was the freedom to rebel against everything. It was the only means they had for individual expression, most others being circumscribed by the State.

Down that road lies anarchy, the mirror image of totalitarian control and an effect of the same cause. To rebel mindlessly against society is no better than to mindlessly follow its conventions. It's already an accomplished fact in Britain. It's on the rise here.

In any case, the one type of open 'diversity' we do not typically find in contemporary classrooms is a diversity of ideas. It's a rare teacher who would advocate increasing the amount of economic freedom. Very few would be so bold, even in the unlikely case they were inclined, to throw the cool water of rational suspicion on the fashionable man-made global warming hypothesis. Their students follow suit.

How could they do otherwise? Following Dewey, their teachers have taught them:

[T]he true centre of correlation of the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social activities.
...
I believe that the study of science is educational in so far as it brings out the materials and processes which make social life what it is.

It's hard to envision a better recipe for a population ill-educated in science, literature, history, and geography. Cap it off with:

I believe that at present we lose much of the value of literature and language studies because of our elimination of the social element. Language is almost always treated in the books of pedagogy simply as the expression of thought.

It is true that language is a logical instrument, but it is fundamentally and primarily a social instrument. Language is the device for communication; it is the tool through which one individual comes to share the ideas and feelings of others. When treated simply as a way of getting individual information, or as a means of showing off what one has learned, it loses its social motive and end.

Heaven forfend, we wouldn't want to use language "simply as a way of getting individual information," worse still as a "way of showing off." To acquire information and be proud of acquiring it might, well, who knows, lead to one person being better than another in some way.

At the root of that nonsense are the twin modern evils of pragmatism and egalitarianism, fancy words for "don't connect the dots" and "anybody is as good as anybody else, no matter what." Is there a public school administrator today who would say it ain't so?

What, in Dewey's view, should we use to educate, if not primarily ideas?

[T]he image is the great instrument of instruction. What a child gets out of any subject presented to him is simply the images which he himself forms with regard to it.

I believe that if nine-tenths of the energy at present directed towards making the child learn certain things, were spent in seeing to it that the child was forming proper images, the work of instruction would be indefinitely facilitated.

No wonder that the speech of so many public school students is chiefly grunts and squeals, and that they can't form an argument. The end of that road is not hard to see. The overriding goal of Progressive education, the values it aims to achieve are...

that the teacher is engaged, not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life.

I believe that every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.

Or, as Rand put it in another brilliant line in The Fountainhead: "One neck, for one leash."

So, what's to be done?

Unlike many commentators on 'the right', I don't think reform of the public school system is feasible. So long as the government (particularly the Federal government's Department of Education or State government) sets the rules, there is slim likelihood of substantial changes. All the rigorous tests in the world are not going to change what, and more importantly how, teachers are teaching. After all, there's little point in, say, arm-twisting teachers into 'improving' history instruction if the history that's taught comes from Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States.

One can, of course, dream about eliminating the Department of Education. That would save the taxpayers $50 billion per year and only result in the unemployment of a few thousand busybodies. But not even Reagan made much headway on that campaign promise and no one in government is even talking about it these days. Even that wouldn't cure the problem, though. The same local and state busybodies, not to mention the same kind of teachers, would still be in place. Above all, it leaves the same Progressive ideas in place.

Private school can compensate for some of the damage, but homeschooling is by far the best chance right now for a better future. Happily, there is still a large gulf (though narrowing by the year) between the worldview of most academic intellectuals in the humanities and the citizenry. Most parents still want their children to receive an actual education, not just an effective indoctrination.

Encouraging that option is, for the next few years, likely to be more difficult than ever. With the near-term economy in serious straits thanks to trillions in new Federal dollar commitments, most parents will find it more urgent for both to work. Still, if one's inclined to look for even tarnished silver linings, the rising unemployment will find more parents at home.

Here, as in every aspect of American society today, only an intellectual revolution that restores respect for rationality to center stage is going to make much headway against the grotesque state of American education. Where that will come from or how to build momentum for it is, like so much of what ails us, anybody's guess at this stage. It sure as hell isn't going to come from the educators.