I know this was addressed to Sam Stone but its something that I’ve noted in the course of my life as well. I am Liberal/Libertarian blend and I can think of no teachers I had at any level who basically showed a conservative bias or agenda; a few with what I would more call a liberal bias with the usual digs against any Republicans in power at the time. The vast majority who used their position to preach (for lack of a better word) always seemed more to be the extreme left-ists when the bias reached the level of indoctrination. I always wrote it off to the majority of teachers being Union and the majority of Unions being more from the liberal/Democrat wing but I don’t know if anyone has done any serious study of that. The only exception I have seen is within religious schools and colleges such as the standard Catholic School or say St Olaf College; and even there the serious conservatives were either on one subject (IE religion or abortion) or just pretty darn quiet about what they believed.
Bump: A charming story about a teacher who deliberately sets out to indoctrinate students.
I’m here holding my breath for conservatives to hold this up as an example of unacceptable political indoctrination in schools.
I would have noticed, because I have never been a conservative. If anyone tried to teach creationism as science, I would have jumped all over them.
I didn’t even mention all the forms of bias I have seen. For example, my kid learned about the Soviet Union, and basically what he was taught was that the Czars were evil and despotic, and so the people rose up and chose the Bolsheviks, who got rid of the old Czarist system and instituted one where class and money no longer mattered. To be sure, it didn’t have the economic growth of the U.S., but education and health care was free and women were equals. That was pretty much it. Nothing about the pograms, no mention of the Kerensky government or the violent nature of the Bolsheviks. Nothing about the hanging of Kulaks, millions dying in forced famines, the vast gulag archipelago… Marxism was taught as a good and moral philosophy which just hasn’t been implemented correctly, while Capitalism was depicted as being a system great at making money for rich people and providing material goods, but at the expense of the poor and the weak and minorities. No wonder the opinion of Marxism among the young has gone way up.
Their WWII unit focused on A) The holocaust and B) how the war opened up women’s roles in wartime manufacturing, which helped kick off the women’s movement. Nothing at all about how the war started, what the major issues were, the main battles, etc.
As for running across a conservative teacher… I’m not sure there are any left. Remember, I am in Canada, things are different here. If there are still conservatives in the school system, they keep a low profile and have to make doubly sure never to bring their politics to class. The left feels much more free to let their freak flags fly, as they are in a ‘safe space’ for their beliefs, and conservatives are not. My kid’s teacher felt completely free to put up posters of Che Guevera and Mao, and knew she wouldn’t get any backlash for it. If a teacher put up pictures of Reagan and Thatcher there would probably be a backlash. And Reagan and Thatcher didn’t execute people for fun or kill tens of millions of people for ‘the greater good’.
It depends on where you grow up, and where I was the teachers were more likely to lean left. Most didn’t get political as far as I remember.
That’s especially dumb as Nigerians are among the most educated ethnic groups in the United States. Maybe not the country as a whole (it’s a big place) but certainly those with the wherewithal to move to the US or UK.
Any time a teacher veers from the curriculum and teaches anything as fact that is a matter of opinion, it’s wrong. That’s true if it’s on the right or left.
If the teacher just has a podcast that’s not affiliated with the school, I would be fine with that. But if the teacher is bragging that he or she is teaching this material in class, and it’s not part of the curriculum, fire the teacher. Or since we can’t seem to fire teachers any more, stick him or her in some room somewhere where they can’t influence the students.
Good enough?
Why are schools indoctrinating our children?
That article has a good list of the things I’ve seen. It’s really quite relentless. My kid’s first Christmas play was ‘A Brown Christmas’, in which Santa and the Reindeer were suffering because of global warming. Instead of celebrating, you know, Christmas, the whole play was about the elves and Santa organizing to help show the world that global warming was really bad.
Even if you agree with the message, there’s no doubt that this was political bias. What would you have said if the play had been about how Santa could rely on the free market to make the toys for them, and they were better quality? That could also be a reasonable claim, but in the context of a Christmas play for children it would be seen as overt political indoctrination, right?
Oh, and when our NDP (socialist) government was elected, one of their first acts was to announce that there would be more social justice topics added to the school curriculum. Probably at the expense of the sciences, which have been watered down dramatically already. When I was in high school, you had to have six science courses to graduate, plus three math courses. Today, you need to take one full year general science course, and one more elective science, and that’t it. You need two math courses. And guess what the majority of the topics are in the general science class? If you guessed ‘global warming’, pollution, water shortages and the like, you win a kewpie doll. My kid was very excited that there was a ‘space science’ section in that class. But you know how it goes… The global warming section ran long because there was just SO much to cover. So they had a truncated space section, and the part they chose to keep and teach was, ‘does rocket exhaust hurt the environment’? Figures.
And it wasn’t a surprise to me that the majority of NDP politicians were ex teachers or leaders of the teacher’s unions. Teaching and the far left are now inextricably linked in Canada - and we will pay a steep price for it one day.
Here’s another anecdote for you. In Grade 11 the kids had to do one of those career workshop things where you sit in a group with a guidance counselor and talk about what you want to do in life. My kid came home upset because when they got to him he said he wanted to be an astrophysicist or maybe an engineer working for a space company. The response from the counselor? ‘You are such a smart kid - don’t you want to use your talents to help the world and do something socially redeeming instead?’ Apparently the next kid announced that she was going to study environmental science and be an environmentalist, to cheers from the counselor. My kid was actually worried that he was a bad person for wanting to study space rather than go out and save the world. Gah!
Combine that with the nasty teacher who told him he had ‘no talent for math’ (despite never getting less than an A in any math class) and should give up on science, and my kid had a very difficult time in school. Now he’s in 3rd year honors math at a good university and loving it, but it took the Khan Academy and a lot of support and tutoring from his parents to get him through that high school.
Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813. Victoria became queen in 1837. If you did get an A, you had a poor professor.
I don’t see the option for “Yes, but it didn’t matter.” With the caveat that a majority of my classes were about politics or philosophy, I think the answer is yes but it didn’t matter, no one really minded, and no one changed his or her mind.
For example, I had a couple left-wing political classes and did some group projects with a future tv personality who stumps for Trump on the cable networks.
I had many other classes where the professor had an obvious political bias but never let it show in class and often made a strong case for the other side when it came to debates.
In general, my education at both high school and all 8! colleges was always presented as “think about it and make up your own mind.” And liberal arts was never about being left-wing or producing SJW activists or anything but the idea of learning, debate, thinking for yourself.
If anything, even at left-leaning liberals arts colleges, I think it would have been better for the student or at least more lucrative to be conservative because all the networking stuff and internships and future jobs tend to have conservative gatekeepers. I see a lot of former classmates on LinkedIn with conservative PACs, stumping for Trump on MSNBC, etc.
Dang, that sounds bad. And I always liked Canada. Are Canadians ever going to stand up to this?
I wasn’t sure where to put this, but this thread seemed appropriate:
Middle school teacher creates white supremacist alter ego, brags about teaching those views to her 7th grade social studies class.
Naturally, when busted she denies that she taught racism, and claims that it was all satire.