Michael Hiltzik, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, finds a pattern in the Republican attacks on the schools and universities. Their hostility to teaching Black history, their encouragement of book banning, their strategic defunding of higher education, their treatment of teaching about race, gender, and climate change as “indoctrination”—together point to a goal: the dumbing down of American young people.
Republicans say they want to get rid of “indoctrination” but they are busily erasing free inquiry and critical thinking. What do they actually want? Indoctrination.
He reminds us of the immortal words of former President Donald J. Trump: “I love the uneducated.” Republicans do not want students to think critically about racism or the past. They do not want them to reflect on anything that makes them “uncomfortable.” They want to shield them from “divisive concerns.” They want them to imbibe a candy-coated version of the past, not wrestle with hard truths.
He writes:
For reasons that may not be too hard to understand, Republicans and conservatives seem to be intent on turning their K-12 schools, colleges and universities into plantations for raising a crop of ignorant and unthinking students.
Donald Trump set forth the principle during his 2016 primary campaign, when he declared, “I love the poorly educated.”
In recent months, the right-wing attack on public education has intensified. The epicenter of the movement is Florida under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, where the faculty and course offerings of one of America’s leading liberal arts colleges, New College, have been eviscerated purportedly to wipe out what DeSantis calls “ideological indoctrination.”
The state’s K-12 schools have been authorized to supplement their curricula with animated cartoons developed by the far-right Prager University Foundation that flagrantly distort climate science and America’s racial history, the better to promote fossil fuels, undermine the use of renewable energy and paint a lily-white picture of America’s past.
Then there’s West Virginia, which is proposing to shut down nearly 10% of its academic offerings, including all its foreign language programs. The supposed reason is a huge budget deficit, the harvest of a systematic cutback in state funding.
In Texas, the State Library and Archives Commission is quitting the American Library Assn., after a complaint by a Republican state legislator accusing the association of pushing “socialism and Marxist ideology.”
In Arkansas, state education officials told schools that they may not award credit for the Advanced Placement course in African American history. (Several school districts said they’d offer students the course anyway.) This is the course that Florida forced the College Board to water down earlier this year by alleging, falsely, that it promoted “critical race theory.”
I must interject here that I’m of two minds about this effort. On the one hand, an ignorant young electorate can’t be good for the republic; on the other, filling the workforce with graduates incapable of critical thinking and weighed down by a distorted conception of the real world will reduce competition for my kids and grandkids for jobs that require knowledge and brains.
Let’s examine some of these cases in greater depth.
Prager University, or PragerU, isn’t an accredited institution of higher learning. It’s a dispenser of right-wing charlatanism founded by Dennis Prager, a right-wing radio host. The material approved for use in the schools includes a series of five- to 10-minute animated videos featuring the fictional Leo and Layla, school-age siblings who travel back in time to meet historical figures.
One encounter is with Frederick Douglass, the Black abolitionist. The goal of the video is to depict “Black lives matter” demonstrations as unrestrained and violent — “Why are they burning a car?” Leo asks while viewing a televised news report. The animated Douglass speaks up for change achieved through “patience and compromise.”
This depiction of Douglass leaves experts in his life and times aghast. Douglass consistently railed against such counsel. Of the Compromise of 1850, which brought California into the union but strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act — arguably the most detested federal law in American history — he stated that it illustrated how “slavery has shot its leprous distillment through the life blood of the nation.” In 1861, he thundered that “all compromises now are but as new wine to old bottles, new cloth to old garments. To attempt them as a means of peace between freedom and slavery, is as to attempt to reverse irreversible law.”
Patience? The video depicts Douglass quoting from an 1852 speech to a Rochester anti-slavery society in which he said “great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages.”
But it doesn’t include lines from later in the speech, reproaching his audience for prematurely celebrating the progress of abolition: “Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; … all your religious parade and solemnity, … mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”
Another video in the series parrots the fossil fuel industry’s talking points against wind and solar power: Standing over the corpse of a bird supposedly slain by flying into a wind turbine, the schoolkids’ interlocutor states, “Like many people … you’ve been misled about renewable energy, and their impact on the environment…. Windmills kill so many birds, it’s hard to track how many…. Wind farms and solar farms disrupt huge amounts of natural habitat.”
Acid rain, pollution, global warming — those consequences of fossil fuel energy aren’t mentioned. The video ends with a pitch for nuclear power, never mind the unsolved question of what to do with its radioactive waste products.
PragerU’s sedulous attack on renewables perhaps shouldn’t be much a surprise: Among its big donors is the Wilks family, which derives its fortune from fracking and which approved “future payment” of $6.25 million to PragerU in 2013.
As for New College, its travails under the DeSantis regime have been documented by my colleague Jenny Jarvie, among many others.
In a nutshell, the Sarasota institution possessed a well-deserved reputation as one of the nation’s outstanding havens for talented, independent-minded students. Then came DeSantis. He summarily replaced its board of trustees with a clutch of right-wing stooges including Christopher Rufo, known for having concocted the panic over critical race theory out of thin air and then marketed it as a useful culture war weapon to unscrupulous conservative politicians, including DeSantis.
Rufo and his fellows fired the university president and installed a sub-replacement-level GOP timeserver, Richard Corcoran, in her place. Faculty and students have fled. Students who stayed behind and were in the process of assembling their course schedules for the coming year are discovering at the last minute that the courses are no longer offered because their teachers have been fired or quit.
Instead of ambitious scholars committed to open inquiry, Corcoran has recruited athletes to fill out the student body, even though the college has no athletic fields for many of them to play on. According to USA Today, New College now has 70 baseball players, nearly twice as many as the University of Florida’s Division I NCAA team.
More to the point, the average SAT and ACT scores and high-school grade point averages have fallen from the pre-Corcoran level, while most of the school’s merit-based scholarships have gone to athletes. New College, in other words, has transitioned from a top liberal arts institution into a school that places muscle-bound underachievers on a pedestal. DeSantis calls this “succeeding in its mission to eliminate indoctrination and re-focus higher education on its classical mission.”
Finally, West Virginia University. Under its president, Gordon Gee — who previously worked his dubious magic at Brown Universityand Ohio State University, among other places — the school built lavish facilities despite declining enrollments. The construction program at the land grant university contributed to a $45-million deficit for the coming year, with expectations that it would rise to $75 million by 2028.
But the main problem was one shared by many other public universities — the erosion of public funding. As the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy points out, “if West Virginia lawmakers had simply kept higher education funding at the same levels as a decade ago, West Virginia University would have an estimated additional $37.6 million in state funding for [fiscal year] 2024, closing the majority of this year’s budget gap.”
The decision on which programs to shutter at WVU points to a shift in how public university trustees see the purpose of their schools, trying to align them more with economic goals set by local industries rather than the goal of providing a well-rounded education to a state’s students. Trustees in some states, including North Carolina and Texas, have injected themselves into academic decisions traditionally left to administrators, often for partisan political reasons.
When it comes to interference in educational policies by conservatives, such as what’s happened in Florida, Texas and Arkansas, there’s no justification for taking these measures at face value — that is, as efforts to remove “indoctrination” from the schools. The truth is that the right-wing effort serves the purposes of white supremacists and advocates of anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination — they’re moving to inject indoctrination that conforms more to their own ideologies.
Take the attack on critical race theory, or at least the version retailed by Rufo and his ilk. “The right has reduced CRT to an incendiary dog whistle,” the Black scholar Robin D.G. Kelley of UCLA has observed, by caricaturing a four-decade-long scholarly effort to analyze “why antidiscrimination law not only fails to remedy structural racism but further entrenches racial inequality” into “a racist plot to teach white children to hate themselves, their country, and their ‘race.’”
(The inclusion of Kelley’s work in the AP African American Studies course was cited as a “concern” by Florida officials in their rationale for rejecting the course; Kelley’s work was suppressed by the College Board in its effort to make the course more acceptable to the state Department of Education.)
These attacks are couched in the vocabulary of “parents’ rights” and student freedom, but they don’t serve the students at all, nor do they advance the rights of parents interested in a good, comprehensive education for their children, as opposed to one dictated by the most narrow-minded ideologues in their state.
Where will it end? Florida’s ham-fisted educational policies won’t produce graduates with the intellectual equipment to succeed in legitimate universities, much less in the world at large. The only university many will be qualified to attend will be Prager U, and that won’t be good for anyone.
Re “For reasons that may not be too hard to understand, Republicans and conservatives seem to be intent on turning their K-12 schools, colleges and universities into plantations for raising a crop of ignorant and unthinking students.”
The end goal is to create a generation od pliable employees, who do what they are told, don’t complain, don’t join unions and certainly do not go on strike.
They don’t give a rat’s ass about “students,” because they don’t vote.
Here’s what I know…over the years (32+ in teaching) I saw program after program start replacing REAL learning and natural inquiry. Just kept chipping away all the way back to the “Texas Taliban School Board” this was years ago. You know if we change things to the way we like it, then how will anyone know the truth? WE will make our own truth. And as someone said along the line, “…yes, they all will make good little factory workers…”
Former President Donald J. Trump said, “I love the uneducated.” Fascist loving Republicans across the country are doing all they can to make sure Traitor Trump gets more uneducated voters to love.
No matter how hard they try, they can’t bring the youth down to their level.
Why? Because
a) the cultural change we are going through is NOT primarily driven by teachers or schools but by the culture at large and
b) it takes a lot of willful disregard of the facts to become an idiot on the level of Ron DeSantis or Vivek Ramaswamy.
cx:
b) it takes a lot of cruelty and willful disregard of the obvious to become an idiot on the level of Ron DeSantis or Vivek Ramaswamy.
I don’t know if this has been mentioned, but Vivek has said he will fire 70% of federal government employees, abolish a long list of federal agencies, and make friends with Putin. He believes in conspiracy theories, e.g., 9/11 was an ”inside job,” the Maui fires were set by government agencies, Jan 6 was a government plot. Etc.
Yup. A total nutcase
Hey, at least Ramasmarmy didn’t say he would cut their throats. Guess DeSantis had already staked out that position.
And clearly these morons who are trying to make this happen have never taught high-school kids. They lived their lives online. They are exposed to everything. Having a few teachers cowed into silence is not going to make much difference.
The Republican Party needs to change its mascot to the preying mantis.
the praying preying mantis
“the far-right Prager University Foundation”
It is PragerU, one word. It is not a university. Let’s not glorify Prager by calling his reich wing xtian nonsense a university.
lol!!!!! Diane omg 9/11 was an inside job!!! You will never guess who evil moron Bush appointed 2 weeks before it happened, good old Robert Mueller. Maui happened with an energy weapon absolutely, fedsurrection is what happened, omg you are so lost sweet old lady Conspiracy theories are 45-0 so I think they are the smart ones.
I am pissing my pantssssss 95% schools, universities, and unions are all liberal and you all suck at educating kids hahah how can you not blame anyone else but your stupid party!!!
Richie,
I live in Brooklyn. I watched the second plane, under the command of a Saudi national, crash into the second tower of the Workd Trade Center. You don’t know what you are talking about. Please don’t display your stupidity.
Diane it was set up by our own government you are 20 years late to this. Passports survived the wreckage? The third tower mysteriously collapsed like a demolition. The trade center went down with a demolition. They then used this horrific attack to attack middle east, get oil, and use the patriot act to us to invade our privacy.
Hey Richie Rusky: I’m assuming you are either
(A) paid in nearly worthless rubles.
Or
(B) sending all your money to your unelectable Putin puppet.
Either way, you have a long cold winter ahead….
Maui happened with an energy weapon absolutely
George Soros’s space laser, Richie? Or Darth Vader’s Death Star?
Tony Stark’s Proton Cannon? His Helios Laser?
Too bad other people aren’t smart enough, like you, to figure this stuff out, Richie! Keep it coming!!!
And have you heard, Richie, about how the Obama administration stole Wonder Woman’s invisible airplane and used it to spread Chemtrails that turned high-school kids transgender? Devious, these evil-doers.
Spread the news!
Richie,
You are proof of the failure of American education.
My twins started college in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. One attended the University of New Hampshire; the other went to the University of Vermont. The New Hampshire legislature reduced spending by 30% for its university, on the basis that they were spending too much in the face of economic uncertainty. The Vermont legislature decided that families would be struggling in the aftermath of the crisis and so increased funding for the university by 30%.
A tale of two states; one that values “rugged individualism” and another that values the common good.
The kiddo at UNH transferred, by the way, because that disregard for the well being of all permeated the culture of both classes and extra-curriculars.
Wow. Fascinating, Christine!!!