July 22, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Public Education, Ben Shapiro, and the Trojan Horse in Our Culture
Friends,
I offer today my most recent published essay appearing at THE UNZ REVIEW (July 22, 2018):
THE UNZ REVIEW
Public Education, Ben Shapiro, and the Trojan Horse
in Our Culture
BY BOYD D. CATHEY • JULY 22, 2018
Perhaps the most successful
myth that has been foisted off on a gullible American citizenry is that the
education of our children, from kindergarten through high school, is the
responsibility of the government. And implicit in that assumption is that the
natural rights and duties of the family over the education of its offspring
must in nearly all situations take a back seat, must be diminished and not
interfere with the prior and dominant role of the state.
By and large, since the mid–20th century this
assumption has been considered undebatable truth. No one, not even the most
resolute conservatives, will question its basic veracity and the resulting need
to continue funding, to shower with taxpayer dollars what has become the most
expansive and most successful conquest of the revolutionary managerial state in
its advance to complete control over our society.
True, illegal immigration may
eventually change the cultural and ethnic make-up of America, and, yes, our
overextension in foreign military adventures may get us into unwinnable wars
and eventually wreck our economy. But none of that would be possible or
successful without the operation of the government-run “public education
system” and the ideological indoctrination that the system has progressively
engineered over the past century.
That is not to say, certainly,
that there haven’t been dedicated teachers or that there haven’t been selfless
and dedicated educators and administrators who really did concern themselves
with the proper education of our young. My mother was a public school teacher
during the 1930s (a graduate of North Carolina State University) who actually
went back in the 1960s when I was in high school to get a Master’s degree in
reading and teach several additional years. Like thousands of other dedicated
teachers, she was no apparatchik or agent of the managerial state, she was not
a revolutionary seeking to indoctrinate her students and “free them from the
tyranny of racism, sexism, and the traditional family.” She believed in
imparting the essentials of those subjects—reading, good writing, simple
arithmetic, history, and logic—the teaching of which she understood came to her
as a concession from parents. So thought most of my teachers both in grammar
and high school, as I suspect believed many, if not most of the teachers half a
century ago.
But that, you see, is the
problem. Our public education system contained in its very foundation certain
principles which would eventually bring it to where it is now. If back when my
mother was teaching, the idea that schools were an extension of the family was
still held to be true, the ineluctable basis of state/government control was
nevertheless implicit…and ever expanding in scope and authority.
How many American citizens
would—today—suggest that our public schools are “an extension of the family,”
much less really believe that?
Our public education system
has, without doubt, become increasingly the major vehicle, the major crucible,
for the creation of progressivist revolution—whether it be the very public
actions, for example, of those frenzied and unhinged students in Broward
County, Florida, reacting (on gun control) after a mass school shooting, or
less visibly, the multifaceted efforts at “socialization” of students regarding
racism and gender. After all, those rabidly radical college students at
Berkeley and other major universities did not just arrive tabula rasa—they were carefully groomed and prepared before college, in our primary and high schools.
In several published articles I
have cited and quoted the post-War Between the States Southern writer and
philosopher Robert Lewis Dabney [e.g., “Robert Lewis Dabney and His
Attack on Progressivism,” The Unz Review, October 9, 2014, , in his famous debate with Virginia’s
first Superintendent of Public Instruction William Ruffner in the 1870s. Dabney
understood where the mania for taxpayer-funded “public education” would lead,
and he warned of its consequences.
Here, summarizing Dabney’s
arguments, is what I wrote on May 13, 2018:
“…how is it possible to educate a child if the moral and ethical
values of religion are not taught but proscribed, for did not “public
education” directly imply such avoidance? Given the developing status of
relations between church and state and changing constitutional interpretations,
the state could not endorse one religious belief over another. Thus, Dabney
observed, state-sponsored education tended to become secularized. But if
education were not Christian, then it would inevitably become anti-Christian.
Could education really be education if it educated “the mind without purifying
the heart?” In Dabney’s view: “There can be no true education without moral
culture, and no true moral culture without Christianity.” The Achilles’s Heel
of state-supported public education, in addition to its assertion of state
rights over parental rights in a child’s education, was its inevitable and
systemic use by “demagogues, who are in power for a time, in the interests of
their faction.”
“Dabney and the partisans of privately-supported and
family-controlled education lost that debate, practically speaking. And with
the advent of social and political Progressivism in the early years of the 20th century,
public education was seen as a key, in many cases, the key to the future, to
better jobs, to success in life, to prosperity, in fact, to real happiness.”
Nevertheless, even with the
totem of “free public education” firmly fixed in the public mind as absolutely
essential and its centrality in any political election program or campaign—not
to mention the billions of dollars to be spent by both local and state authorities
and the Federal government—nearly every study, almost every report card on
education, both K-through Grade 12 and college, indicates an inverse proportion
of results to expenditures. It seems the more money we spend on what is called
“education,” the worse our schools and colleges become, at least in those basic
skills that the educational process is supposed to implant.
In short, we are paying much
more for far less. As Dr. Walter Williams has recently observed, less than four out of ten graduating high school seniors can
pass a simple English reading test (and only 17% of black students make the
grade). Just 25% of high school seniors are proficient in math. Nevertheless,
our high school graduation rate is 80%.
But despite that disastrously
failing academic report, for the proponents of progressive public education the
past century’s educational history has been extremely successful. For our
state-run K-12 educational system has been almost completely converted into an
ideological hot house, a Dr. Strangelove laboratory, the graduating products
from which become the willing recipients of the cultural Marxist pablum fed to
them later on the college level, and the future voters who pull the Democratic
voter lever and who militate in the growing armies of those who demand an “end
to (white) racism” and “white supremacy,” “full gender equality” (including the
full embrace of everything from transgenderism, same sex marriage, to gender
fluidity), “open borders” to all immigrants, direct action on supposed “climate
change,” and the “suppression of hate speech” (which will mean whatever the
latest dominant narrative says it is).
On the college level just in
recent months we have heard that at the University of Michigan (and on another
200 campuses), zealous “social justice warrior” students have been instructed
by university administrators to report (anonymously of course) if they overhear
another student making “racist,” “sexist,” or “homophobic” remarks, even if
those conversations are private. And correction will be meted out! Thus, those
poorly educated but richly indoctrinated high schoolers, now undergoing the
full panoply of Leftist envenomation on the collegiate level, are being turned
into newly-minted domestic informants—spies—on their fellows. How does this
differ from the worst aspects of Stalin’s Russia? And this is what we get for
$20,000 to $50,000 or so a year paid to our colleges to educate our children?
And lest we think this
contagion uniquely located just on the “academic Left,” its effects are felt
nearly as strongly in what passes for intellectual thought on the conservative
“right” among the dominant Neoconservatives, who claim to offer a “conservative
alternative” on our college campuses.
Pick just one darling of
so-called “conservative college youth,” Ben Shapiro, for example. Shapiro has
taken it upon himself to appear on dozens of college campuses where he presents
an inherently Leftist (if often disguised as conservative) narrative before
such audiences as Young Americas Foundation and
the College Republicans.
What does Shapiro offer
conservative students? First, their elders must recognize that there is a
“conservative generation gap,” and that the GOP must “come to terms” with such
things as same sex marriage and marijuana. More, while accepting the “positive”
things that President Trump has achieved, the president’s “imbecilities and
vile utterances” must be denounced. As he wrote in the Neocon Weekly Standard (May 9, 2018):
Young conservatives [as opposed to their elders], however, are
more likely to see Trump as an obstacle to progress….they see him mainly as a
club the left can wield against the right in perpetuity—a political monster
living under the bed that Democrats can dredge up every time conservatives seem
to be making headway. They cite his egregious response to the Charlottesville
alt-right march and subsequent terror attack and his willingness to wink and
nod at the alt-right during the campaign; they point to his nasty comments
regarding women, as well as his penchant for bedding porn stars; they cringe at
his reported comments about immigrants and balk at his nearly endless list of
prevarications. [“How Conservatives Can Win Back Young Americans”]
Last August 17, 2017, Shapiro
wrote that Pat Buchanan, because he did not believe the Neocon assumption that
the words in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal”
meant absolute equality in birth and opportunity (a demonstrable historical and
metaphysical falsehood that the Founders rejected), was “a white supremacist”
and racist, and, by implication, an “anti-semite” (surely the coup de grace from Shapiro, who never misses an opportunity to
ostentatiously wear his yarmulke and complain that he is, according to the
ADL, one of the nation’s top targets
of “anti-semitism”) [see: see also the excellent
critique of Shapiro at VoxDay, May 25, 2018.
Leftist Slate magazine [January 24, 2018] praises his “reasonable conservatism” and asks: “Is Ben
Shapiro a conservative liberals can count on?”
“Shapiro is among a dwindling cadre of Trump-averse conservatives
at a time when the mainstream GOP and its media apparatus are following (and
sometimes leading) our cretinous president straight into the muck. Shapiro is
ascendant, with a growing media empire and a large [youth] audience who adores
him. Should there arise a constitutional crisis in which this president
attempts to roll his tanks (metaphorical or otherwise) over the ramparts of
American democracy, I will be relying on influential right-wing figures like
Ben Shapiro to help America hold the line.”
More recently Shapiro tried his
hand at influencing the GOP Republican US senate primary in Virginia. He pulled
out all stops to defeat conservative Republican candidate Corey Stewart in June
2018. Not only did Stewart’s support for Confederate heritage become a negative
issue for Shapiro, but the fact that Stewart would have associated with a
former congressional candidate, Paul Nehlen, who later made statements that
some observers characterized as anti-Semitic, also became an issue. The
implication was that Stewart was a racist through guilt by
association, perhaps even a secret anti-semite. This is something one would
expect to hear on MSNBC but it seems Neoconservative critics are happy to do
the Left’s work for it when it comes to those who speak kindly of the Southern
heritage.
How does Shapiro’s extreme
ignorance of American history and the American Founding, and his implicit
acceptance of the Marxist template on race and gender differ from that of his
supposed opponents over on the “farther Left”?
Not much.
Yet “little Ben” has become a
major voice, an icon, for “conservative youth,” and an example of academic
outreach by the Neoconservatives. But if this is the kind of response of
mainstream conservatives to meet the multifaceted educational subversion by the
Marxist Left on our college campuses, the battle is lost.
Our current public education
system, from kindergarten to university, betrays the inheritance of our Western
culture. And the rot begins in the primary and
secondary grades, and in the unquestioning support that conservatives give to
public education and its bloated bureaucracy which continues to gnaw at the
entrails of our culture.
Ignoring this fact, just
throwing more money at it, is a recipe for continued subversion and corruption.
Heralded college campus appearances by Shapiro, Jonah Goldberg, Milo
Yiannopoulos, and others in the name of “free speech” and “presenting a
conservative voice” do little to alter the situation, other than make the
sponsors and speakers feel good, while confirming the dominant narrative: an
infected bandage on a festering cancer that begins in kindergarten and the
first grade.
The need is not for “reform,” but for a total dismantling of the system.
Things have gone too far for cosmetic applications and another appearance by
Ben Shapiro.
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