To Fight Marxist Education, We Need a New Kind of School

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The problem is that real teachers are just as much of a threat to any totalitarian system as real thinkers.  They are more of a threat, in fact, for great teachers produce waves of great thinkers, many of whom mature to become teachers producing even more waves of thinkers for years to come.  Just as depriving a field of its farmer deprives it of its harvest, depriving growing brains of pedagogical nourishment deprives later generations of their invaluable rewards.  The Marxists who have largely taken over the Educational Establishment don’t want wise farmers with bountiful crops; they want intellectual deserts hostile to scholarly life and unfit for its growth.

To say the teaching profession has suffered a radical transformation the last four decades is an understatement.  Gone are the days of teachers dressed in business attire being addressed with a “sir” or “ma’am” from mostly respectful students.  Gone are the days when the teacher was always right, and parents routinely took their side.  Gone are the days when education was valued as a privilege to be earned.  Gone are the days when it was once unthinkable to pass failing students from grade to grade.  Gone are the days when prayer in school was considered not only acceptable, but also crucial for ensuring that steady moral and spiritual advancement beyond the attainment of raw knowledge fortified each student’s academic journey.

Now most schools have become big daycare centers where teachers have traded sports coats, ties, and dresses for the comfort of gym clothes, and curricula have traded rudimentary knowledge for “woke” pablum.  Meaningless enrollments produce meaningless degrees conferred as meaningless “achievements.”  The privilege of learning has been sidelined because the “right” to an education is now treated as a teacher’s obligation, rather than as a student’s opportunity.

At some point during this great educational upheaval, teachers became little more than glorified babysitters expected to do the parenting that parents failed to do, simultaneously losing their authority over students, deferential respect from parents, and the professionalism once firmly established across their vocation.  If you have ever known teachers who experienced this “fundamental transformation” of the schools firsthand, then you will have heard the sadness in their words as they lament what their profession has become.

The Marxists, to be sure, got what they sought: successive generations of Americans bereft of the building blocks necessary to comprehend that they’d been cheated of basic knowledge.  Those with no understanding of history lack the acumen to steer the future.  Those deprived of great literature remain ill prepared for complex ideas or weighty emotions.  Those who don’t first train their minds with the foundations of mathematics and logic lose their potential to build anything new.  To create automatons incapable of dissent or resistance, the Marxists simply destroyed education.

The unsavory result has been that America is now a nation of people with many titles and degrees but diminished capacity for critical thought and reflection.  Just as Congress and the White House work today to disarm Americans of their constitutionally protected firearms, the successive governments behind the Department of Education’s demolition of public schooling have disarmed too many Americans of their potential for reason and rationality.  Anyone who doubts that unassailable truth need only look around to see a society unable to distinguish men from women, alleviate its existential angst over ridiculously ludicrous tales of climate apocalypse, or comprehend that the very people who speak endlessly of “saving democracy” or “fighting fascism” are the same ones destroying democratic institutions and promoting the State’s totalitarian authority.