Back to school means back to indoctrination, to America’s detriment

Back to school means back to indoctrination, to America’s detriment

By: Rachel Marsden

PARIS — As kids across the U.S. head back to school, they face a new year of politisation. And the results for American society in general are devastating. The most recent U.S. government assessment, not even a quarter of graduating grade 12 students are considered proficient in math or science, and a dismal 12 percent of students are competent in U.S. history.

If kids aren’t learning history, then it has to make you wonder what they’re actually learning in history class, because clearly there’s a discrepancy between what students are being exposed to and absorbing in class and what the government includes in its testing and deems important to have learned. Either students are incapable of learning or they’re being taught the wrong things. And if they’re being taught something other than what the government considers important, then what exactly are they spending their time on in the classroom?

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has provided a big hint as to the underlying dysfunction. Not mincing words, he literally calls his new education agenda the “Stop Woke” act. The new measures, which have come into effect at the beginning of this new school year, include the removal of critical race theory and “social emotional learning” — which aims to infuse hard science with social and emotional elements — from math textbooks.

One example taken from a textbook and highlighted last spring by Florida education officials consists of a graph titled, “Measuring racial prejudice, by age,” that’s short on actual mathematical challenge and big on demonstrating that after age 44, racial prejudice increases drastically.

Florida’s new laws allow for parents to sue teachers and to question learning materials. They also include the introduction of anti-communism lessons and the observance of a “Victims of Communism Day.”

While one could argue that two wrongs don’t make a right, and that imposing anti-communist propaganda on kids is as much of a detour from the educational basics as leftist politisation, it nonetheless serves to raise general awareness and draw attention to the problem. In other words, maybe it’s best to just stick to the facts and leave actual promotion or favoritism toward any particular ideology out of education.

The new rules place the onus back on teachers to educate rather than to propagandize — lest an angry parent get an earful from their kid when he comes home and tells mom and dad that the teacher was badmouthing a certain politician or political party. It also liberates teachers who are strictly interested in educating and not brainwashing their students from any pressure from their colleagues or hierarchy of having to do so.

Although academic institutions have always served as incubators and testing sites for innovative thought, it has been limited to the level of higher education for good reason. People should generally learn how to properly think and reason before being bombarded by propaganda. No one wants to hear hot takes on the world’s most pressing problems from a child who can’t do basic math, can’t read, can’t write, and has no sense of history — but who has learned to parrot the talking points downloaded onto him and his classmates.

The political polarization in the U.S., which starts in classrooms, has been ripping at the country’s fabric for the past couple of decades and is exacerbated through politisation that encourages further divisiveness through ideological radicalism. If the rational center ceases to hold in a tug of war between the extremes, the ultimate beneficiaries are America’s global competitors.

The latest Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) standardized global Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test results rank U.S. students in math, science, and reading 22nd worldwide, behind much of Western Europe, and well behind Canada at sixth place. With China ranked first, it doesn’t bode well for the future of American competitiveness.

What could explain the massive discrepancy between the results in the U.S. compared to even other Western nations? Well, one clue could be that none of the Western nations ranked ahead of the U.S. are anywhere near as internally divided, suggesting that perhaps the educational system still actually serves primarily to educate. Tellingly, France, which ranks just after the U.S., is more politically polarized than other Western nations, with increased balkanization of society between both the right and the left, as well as between globalists and populists. And it’s likely no coincidence that the French education minister sounded the alarm last year on the need to combat “wokeism” — radical leftist theories imported from the U.S. and viewed by French officials as a growing plague on the country’s educational system.

The bottom line is that there appears to be a correlation between America’s fading global competitiveness to the benefit of China, and the exposure of American kids to divisive political propaganda diffused into their learning curriculum to the detriment of the basics before they’re even able to think for themselves. And time is running out to reverse course.