David Horowitz: Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom
and
The Anchoress: I’d seriously consider home-schooling
Jenny Hatch
IMPORTANT QUOTES:
Mr. Horowitz:
“During the last twenty years, I have spoken at more than three hundred universities, where I interviewed students and professors about the intellectual climate on their campuses. In the course of these visits I became concerned about the changes that had taken place since I attended college half a century ago. I was particularly troubled by the increasingly intolerant atmosphere of the schools I visited and by the relentless intrusion of political agendas into an academic environment where they did not belong.
As a result, in the fall of 2002 I began an effort to address these problems by reviving doctrines of academic freedom that were an integral part of university governance but had been increasingly abandoned as a practice in recent decades. I had first encountered these doctrines during my undergraduate years at Columbia College, in the McCarthy period, when they provided a bulwark against the turbulence of those troubled times.
Their origins could be traced back yet another half century to the Progressive Era, when professors had been forced to defend themselves from the meddling of benefactors who were angered by academic critiques of their business practices. The principles of academic freedom were devised at that time to insure that scholars could publish the results of their professional research without fear of reprisals from donors and politicians who lacked their academic expertise.
In recent years, by contrast, it is faculty members who have intruded a political agenda into the academic curriculum and have sought to close down intellectual discussion and prevent open-minded inquiries into “sensitive” subjects. Ideas deemed “reactionary” and “politically incorrect” are suppressed through “speech codes” and a collective disapproval that renders them verboten. Unlike previous attempts to interfere with disinterested inquiry, the new political assault comes from faculty insiders who regard their scholarship as a partisan activity and the university as a platform from which they hope to change the world.
The radical attempt to turn schools into agencies for social change is a recent development that coincides with the emergence of “political correctness” as the signature feature of a radicalized academic culture. “Political correctness” is a term that describes an orthodoxy or “party line,” in this case reflecting the agendas of the left. Ideas that oppose leftwing orthodoxy — opposition to racial preferences, belief in innate differences between men and women or, more recently, support for America’s war in Iraq — are regarded as morally unacceptable or simply indecent. The proponents of such ideas are regarded as deviants from the academic norm, to be marginalized and shunned.”
Anchoress:
“If my kids were little and just beginning in elementary school, I would seriously consider home-schooling for a variety of reasons – mostly because now that I’ve seen how quickly it all went, I want more time with them! But I’d have considered it sooner had this been what they were taught.”
Just evidence that our Marxist textbooks and indoctrination at teachers colleges have been 100% effective. How to combat this:
I’ve been wracking my brain over that one for many years. My husband and I homeschooled off and on for five years. When my fifth child was a baby I felt like I was dying, so overwhelmed with everything in my life, so we open enrolled the children in a charter school that still seems to be a good fit, even after four years of attendance.
I know for a fact that our teachers are sharing a variety of socialist views with my children every day, especially in English, History, and Social Studies classes. How can I send them to class knowing they are being propagandized in Communist thought and ideologies every single day?
For me, the benefits of daily spanish language instruction, daily music, band, chorus, and sports outweighs the risks in sending them to school. My three oldest children are at the age when just about everything we teach them is suspect to them. This is normal and healthy development in teens and I pretty much expected it to happen. They have so much regard for various teachers and teachings that Mom and Dads Passion for Conservatism and our Patriotism rings a little hallow for them.
How to keep them from becoming so educated that they don’t join the ranks of those americans who are just a little too smart to be patriotic, just a little too degreed to even think of military service as a privledge, so intellectualized that religion and moral living is passe and for the dullards of our society…..
How to do it?
Well, I think we already did it, at least with our four oldest children. We spent years teaching them daily lessons in American History, our Mormon Church history, and we taught them the scriptures (which are all about freedom – The Book of Mormon is especially eloquent in articulating what it takes for individuals, families, and nations to be free) and to love to listen to a prophets voice.
We have filled our home library with patriotic books and occasionally I will see them reading various texts as they conduct research for classes.
Will they stay true? Will they stay filled with light and hope and the promise of Celestial living?
I don’t know.
But I do know that I can look my Heavenly Father in the eye and with a heart brimming with hope and pleading for mercy, tell him that I tried my honest best to teach his little ones, these beautiful souls entrusted to Paul and I, true doctrine. They are so busy right now, it is very difficult to find time to teach them the way that we did when we lived the quiet home schooled life. We do read scriptures every morning and have a lesson once a week during Family Night.
I don’t know that home school is the be all end all hope for the world. I know many families who believe it is the answer for them, and I heartily salute them for their passion and hard work.
I do believe with all of the false marxist lies being taught to our families from preschool up to the hightest levels of our graduate programs, that the tug and pull of Socialism is eating people alive as they fill their minds up with the feel good notions of collectivism and find themselves enslaved to an ideology that has ruined the lives of millions since its inception and implementation in the various societies who have tolerated and embraced its teachings.
I wholeheartedly Salute David Horowitz for his passion, books, articles, words, activism, and EFFECTIVENESS in fighting this most important fight in our Universities. Perhaps the collective wall that currently surrounds the minds and hearts of our professors and universities will come crashing down the way the Berlin wall fell and communism crashed in the late 80’s.
My prayer is that more parents will learn what is at stake when they send their little ones to school to have their minds massaged in communist thought and activism. Perhaps that very awareness will be the antidote we need as a society. Most of my die hard home schooling friends are doing it simply to protect their children from socialist brainwashing.
Some of the best essays on this topic come from a scientist and home schooling father Art Robinson. Go Here for his web site.
If we ever go back to home school we will use the Robinson Plan for the outline for our day. It worked very well for three years and I wholeheartedly endorse and support the goals of the Robinson Plan. I think it is the most mother friendly set up out there in the overwhelming world of homeschooling curriculums.
Jenny Hatch
