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As government-run education prepares to launch another school year, we are reminded that public education is often more about indoctrination than education.
A University of Colorado at Colorado Springs rhetoric course, required for graduation, is requiring students read textbooks and other materials that bemoan the "Trump Effect" and describe Trump supporters as "prejudiced against immigrants, Muslims and LGBTQ+ individuals."
I've said it before. Parents and grandparents, Be informed. Beware. Be vigilant.
It's significant that the course is a "required course" for graduation.
Campus Reform says, "The course also assigns supplementary readings from liberal outlets, such as an NPR piece about 'fake news' and a New York Times op-ed questioning whether Breitbart is an ethical rhetor."
CR says, "Katherine Mack, who chairs the English department at the University of Colorado, has assigned anti-Trump material as required reading for her rhetoric class..."
They got a copy of Mack's Fall 2018 class syllabus from a student who wants to remain anonymous for obvious reasons.
They have published part of it, as well as photographs of the offending books.
Mack summarizes the purpose of her course with a question adapted from the Roman teacher of rhetoric Quintilian, asking: "What does it mean to be a good person who speaks and writes well?"
Mack also notes that the course's goal is to give the students "the tools for professional and personal success" after graduation.
If that were true she would not be teaching relativism. While a paraphrase of Quintilian's question could have had merit, it doesn't because she uses it as a launching pad to abandon reality, silence dissent, and enter the far away mythical, hypothetical land of relativism.
And for the secular progressive, this is heaven. The promised land.
Tools for personal and professional success?
Her syllabus encourages students to "speak up if you feel 'triggered' by something someone is saying or 'doing'" and admonishes them to "never demean, belittle, devalue, or otherwise put down others for their comments, questions, experiences, or ideas."
How quickly secular far Left progressives forget.
She is telling her students they must refrain from belittling others---tolerance---while requiring them to read volumes of material that paint Trump supporters and conservatives as "prejudiced," and depict those who share Trump's ideas prone to "shouting" and "inciting xenophobia."
She is also teaching that fixed, or absolute truth is not truth, it's an outdated myth.
I noticed two of the books on the required reading list is, "Post-Truth Rhetoric and Composition" by Bruce McComiske", and "The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in our Time" by Brooke Gladstone.
McComiskey argues that if the "Trump effect" is not "immediately and forcefully" challenged, students will begin "inciting xenophobia, retreating into isolationism, resorting to shouting, causing disruption, spouting insults, securing exclusion, encouraging divisiveness, spewing invective, exploiting fear, and desiring success at all costs."
Ironically, this defines the far Left tantrums seen nightly on mainstream news---shouting, breaking things, burning things, throwing things and closing streets, breaking laws without being held accountable. And this isn't unique to the Trump era. Progressives, incited by so-called public education, were doing the same things during the 1960s---was that the "Kennedy effect?" Or the "Johnson effect?"
It's the effect of stripping the moral fabric from a culture conceived in liberty, and built upon fixed, eternal principles, not "trigger emotions."
Therefore, according to this educational instruction, "a good person" will challenge Trump---or whomever else does not embrace relative values and principles---including other students.
McComiskey identifies "untrustworthiness" as Trump's "most troubling trait."
He also quotes from an article by Dan P. McAdams, a Northwestern University psychology professor, who is claiming the president's largest voting block---white Americans, including tens of millions of evangelicals--have high scores on measures of authoritarianism that "tend to be associated with 'prejudice' against a litany of minority groups, including LGBTQ+, immigrants, Muslims and African Americans."
Brooke Gladstone's book, "The Trouble with Reality", also takes on the current administration saying "Trump's campaign rhetoric pumped out endless streams of comedy and melodrama, apocalypse and deliverance, bitterness and BS."
She writes, "To some, it was enthrallingly frank. To others, Trump's victory did not merely subvert America's core values, it shattered their worldview. The codes [a phrase often used by Hillary in relation to absolute biblical truth] more than half the nation devised to interpret the world, the channels they carved to divert the flow of compatible ideas collapsed."
Later in her "required reading" book, she says she wants to help readers feel a little better, assuring those upset with Trump and his supporters that "meaningful action is a time-tested treatment for moral panic."
In her concluding comments, she says it will be very difficult to overcome the conservative cloud that is upon us---"protests are unlikely to move the needle," but she notes, "protests do raise funds" and can serve to "transform observers into activists."
Campus Reform Media Director Cabot Phillips appeared on Fox News this past weekend. This link includes video and more about this story.
Takeaway Thoughts.
- Education in public government-run schools is most often not education. It's indoctrination. There are a few exceptions. Be vigilant.
- "Moral panic" is code for people who believe in biblical eternal truth (and say so out loud), as opposed to relative truth---which isn't truth at all---and it does not free people. American Founder Patrick Henry said, "When people forget God, tyrants forge their chains." The Left's goal is to remove or forget God, removing Him from the culture and the dialog in the name of freedom. To the degree they succeed, they are forging the chains for the next generation.
- She's right. When Judeo Christian values prevail in a culture, the progressive Left experiences a profound sense of loss and anxiety. Their relativistic beliefs collapse because they are built on the sand, not the rock. Their worldview is without foundations.
- Pray for the children.
In a few days, 50.7 million kids will attend public, government-run elementary and secondary schools. Of these, 35.6 million will be kindergarten through grade 8 and 15.1 million will be in grades 9 through 12. An additional 5.2 million will attend private elementary and secondary schools.
Additionally, 14.8 million will attend public colleges and universities, 5.13 million will attend private colleges and universities.
Be Informed. Be Vigilant. Be Prayerful.