James Fox

Recently I had a conversation with a young friend–not a callow youth but a father of two–who, while running his own business, was taking a course in psychology for credit toward his degree.

He was both frustrated and discouraged by the reality that his teacher constantly was straying from the course parameters by coloring and injecting her own bias and beliefs into course definitions and conclusions.

Our conversation turned to questioning whether teachers should be allowed to interject their own opinions or beliefs into courses such as psychology, political science, history or literature?

Actually this practice is anti-everything our democracy stands for, and amounts to indoctrination or brainwashing. I believe they should be punished for the practice. Here is why, by example:

On Foxnews.com Wednesday, May 9,
America's Re-Education Camps,
by Wendy McElroy

This fall, tens of thousands of bright-eyed and malleable young men and women will descend on American campuses to begin their academic careers in earnest. Most of them will face what we used to call freshman orientation. More than anything, though, it's looking more and more like indoctrination.

One of the main components of many of these orientations is diversity, or sensitivity training. Attendance is usually mandatory and often tax-funded. Students will watch films and participate in exercises designed to shake the values they acquired from their culture and families. Two of the most popular diversity-training films are Blue Eyed and Skin Deep.

The 90-minute Blue Eyed documents an experiment conducted by Jane Elliott, a $6,000-a-day sensitivity trainer. In it, a group of 40 people are divided into blue-eyed and brown-eyed people. The former are psychologically brutalized; the latter are psychologically empowered as a lesson in white racism.

Hugh Vasquez's Skin Deep documents a workshop on race. One section of the accompanying study guide–entitled White Privilege–declares that white privilege controls all power in society and that whites must assume their guilt.

Requiring sensitivity training attendance has caused some critics to make comparisons to Soviet psychiatry and the reeducation camps of some Communist countries, such as Maoist China. There, reeducation attempted to replace "bad" personal attitudes with ones that served the purpose of the state.

In an article entitled "Thought Reform 101" (Reason, March 2000) Alan Charles Kors, the cofounder of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, explicitly compares this diversity training to Communist reeducation camps. It is a comparison worth pursuing.

This indoctrination process has evolved into an organized effort on the university level, and backed by the state to control how and what we think; and it is prevalent to a minor degree in our K-12 environment; maybe not organized, but consciously or unconsciously introduced by every teacher that voices a view or opinion about curriculum content or current events.

So you see, It's not just the individual teacher using bad judgment in the course of doing his or her job, It is an organized effort in social engineering at work in our educational systems. It's no wonder they have little or no time for the 3 "Rs."