Liberals have ruined Liberal Arts education--but they're not alone

I entered this in a conservative blog that was discussing how liberals have harmed higher ed.
The blog is http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-oprahization-of-academia/#comment-71207. -------------------------------------------

The corruption of the education process by liberal ideologues isn’t limited to colleges, of course. Participants in this blog would be well-advised to read

The Language Police: How presure groups restrict what students learn, by Diane Ravitch.

She details how liberal ideologues have ruined K-12 English and social studies textbooks, tests and curricula. But they haven’t stopped there. They’ve even forced publishers of math textbooks to inject leftist indoctrination and rewrittes of history into the math lessons.

However, unlike the contributors to this blog, Ravitch also lambastes right wing activists for the extensive damage to education that they’ve done as well.

And since the liberal/feminist failings have been detailed at length here, consider these fruits of conservative meddling in American education:

1. Evolution is no longer taught in a majority of American high schools (see the National Center for Science Education website for the details), due to Christianist pressure on individual teachers and school principals, as well as on science textbook publishers. As a consequence, a majority of American adults deny that we evolved, and many also deny that the Earth is more than 6K years old.

And of course this denial undercuts the rational, empirical base to all technical/scientific learning. You can’t be an empiricist except where it interferes with GoodThink–regardless of whether that’s Left-wing or Right-wing GoodThink.

2. All literature is vetted for themes and language conservatives object to. Since the Lefties do so as well, all that’s left is intellectual sawdust–textbooks that are almost literally unreadable by anyone whose prefrontal lobes are intact.

3. A significant proportion of American high school graduates don’t know how babies are made in enough detail to make sure they don’t make any babies inadvertently. A big plus: abstinence-only education victims are more likely to get STDs as well as unwanted pregnancies than those who’ve learned how their naughty bits work.

4. Hostility to literature that contains anything but G-rated pablum appropriate to a Disney Channel sitcom has produced several generations of adults who hate literature because they think it’s the sort of pap they were forced to read in school.

Of course in college students are given four years of leftist indoctrination in their liberal arts courses. This tends to roll off the backs of conservative students, however; the real work was done in high school by the unholy alliance of lefties and righties bent on producing students to know little but at least don’t know anything anyone doesn’t want them to know.

So yes, please struggle against leftist indoctrination in college. But how about struggling against ALL indoctination and pablumization? Then you won’t look like hypocrites.

“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” –Mathhew 7:3

Jul 8, 2008 - 1:28 am