On July 10 at Walled Lake Western High School in Michigan, popular teacher Justin Kucera who taught AP World History and coached varsity baseball and basketball and who by all accounts never brought his politics into his teaching or coaching was fired for tweeting, “I’m done being silent. Donald Trump is our president.” Meanwhile,

Paulette Loe, a now-retired Walled Lake Western teacher, encouraged students to read an article from the Atlantic about “how to beat Trump” while still employed. Nicole Estes, a kindergarten teacher in the district, called Trump a “sociopath” and a “narcissist” on Facebook in 2016 and is still employed at Keith Elementary School [also in Walled Lake Consolidated school district].

It should be unbelievable that a teacher could be fired from a government school for expressing his support for a sitting president while indoctrinators are free to bring their politics into the classroom regularly with no fear of retribution. Sadly, this is now the new normal.

Twelve years ago when I was a member of the English Department at Deerfield High School on Chicago’s North Shore working full-time in the writing center, teachers Elliott Hurtig and Jeff Berger-White were teaching the repugnant play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and Hurtig was also teaching the historically inaccurate Laramie Project, both plays of which espoused politically “progressive,” morally regressive views of homosexuality.

Setting aside the egregious obscenity in Angels in America, I discussed with a purportedly Catholic writing center colleague the ethical problem of teachers presenting resources from only one side of the debate on this most controversial cultural issue. I made the case that in an educational environment, teachers have an obligation to present resources from opposing voices as well. She responded that because she was absolutely sure opposing voices—that is, conservative voices—were wrong, they shouldn’t be allowed to be presented to students.

This is the kind of presumptuousness that has long poisoned education in America from elementary schools through colleges and universities, and has created a dissolute and destructive culture. Leftists demand absolute autonomy and arrogate to themselves the right to indoctrinate other people’s children because they have unilaterally concluded that their political and moral beliefs are objectively true, and opposing views are false. From kindergarten on up, leftists are indoctrinating other people’s children with their arguable leftist beliefs on homosexuality, opposite-sex impersonation, race, sex, American history, and presidential politics with no negative repercussions.

In his essay “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mills presciently warns about the very arrogance infecting today’s “educators” hell-bent on imposing their beliefs on vulnerable, ideologically malleable students:

The rules which obtain among themselves appear to them self-evident and self-justifying. … People are accustomed to believe, and have been encouraged in the belief …  that their feelings … are better than reasons, and render reasons unnecessary. The practical principle which guides them to their opinions on the regulation of human conduct, is the feeling in each person’s mind that everybody should be required to act as he, and those with whom he sympathises, would like them to act. No one, indeed, acknowledges to himself that his standard of judgment is his own liking; but an opinion on a point of conduct, not supported by reasons, can only count as one person’s preference; and if the reasons, when given, are a mere appeal to a similar preference felt by other people, it is still only many people’s liking instead of one. … his own preference … is not only a perfectly satisfactory reason, but the only one he generally has for any of his notions of morality, taste, or propriety.

In a recent appearance on Mark Levin’s program Life, Liberty & Levin, Dr. John Ellis, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of German Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, chairman of the California Association of Scholars, and author of Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities and The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done discussed the root cause of the cultural “shout downs” and riots:

The real problem is way behind the scenes in the classrooms, which the public never sees. … you’ve had a very long campaign of converting the universities into one party campuses. If you go back 50 years … there were 3 left-of-center professors to 2 right-of-center professors. … that’s consistent with a very healthy debate between the left and the right on campus. But by … 1999, a study shows 5 to 1. … By another five to six years later, it’s gone to 8 to 1, and the current studies … coming out now, it’s something like 13 to 1. There’s every reason to believe that that’s getting more extreme all the time because one of these studies looks to the junior ranks—assistant professors, associate professors—and found that the ratio there, left to right, is 48 to 1.  … The hiring being done now is at the rate of about 50 to 1. … So, you’re going to wind up with a complete monoculture within a short period of time. And a one-party campus is a campus that’s dysfunctional. …

The campus is so far left and so irrational now, and it’s leftism that is poisoning the culture. One profession after another is being essentially corrupted. … It’s totally poisoned journalism. It’s poisoned the teaching in the high schools because the high school teachers are all trained on college campuses

Ellis also suggests that parents who continue to send their children to colleges and universities that are in the business of poisoning culture are part of the problem:

Parents have a very fixed attitude, derived from the past, that sending their kids to college is a first rate way to launch them into a life and a career, and then there’s the fact that those great names of the institutions of higher learning of Harvard, Yale, Columbia … are very, very impressive. It casts a kind of spell over the public. They really cannot believe … that what was so glorious is now in fact no longer there.

Conservatives often ask what they can do to help restore health to our ailing culture. Here’s one thing they can do: Don’t send their children to colleges and universities that have “monocultures,” and through those monocultures, poison culture.

Stop being impressed by the worldly accolades poured on the polluted Ivies that now oppose their original mission statements, mottos, logos, and seals. Harvard long ago rejected its original mission statement:

Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.

The Princeton University shield once depicted an open Bible inscribed with “VET NOV TESTAMENTUM,” that signified the Old and New Testaments; a ribbon above the Bible that said, “VITAM MORTUIS REDDO,” which means, “I restore life to the dead”; and a ribbon below the shield with the words “DEI SUB NUMINE VIGET,” which mean, “Under God’s power she flourishes.” Such expressions today would be an embarrassment to the faculty and a trigger to most students.

Dartmouth College’s original motto was “VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO,” which is translated as “A voice crying out in the wilderness,” an allusion to Scripture about preparing the world for Christ. Ironically, Dartmouth is now a cacophonous voice creating wilderness out of the semi-tamed culture Christianity created.

When teachers and college professors preach their leftist sermons in schools, not only do they indoctrinate, but they also leave dissenters at the mercy of social tyrants. In other words, government school preachers and college professors fuel bullying. In “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mills writes,

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first … chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.”

You know there’s a problem when a left-leaning site like the satirical website the Onion skewers the close-minded propaganda that leftists identify as “education” as it did in a post titled “College Encourages Lively Exchange of Idea”:

As an institution of higher learning, we recognize that it’s inevitable that certain contentious topics will come up from time to time, and when they do, we want to create an atmosphere where both students and faculty feel comfortable voicing a single homogeneous opinion. … Whether it’s a discussion of a national political issue or a concern here on campus, an open forum in which one argument is uniformly reinforced is crucial for maintaining the exceptional learning environment we have cultivated here.(emphasis added for fun).

Leftists are fond of saying that free speech does not guarantee freedom from consequences. They fail to acknowledge that if those consequences are loss of employment, First Amendment speech protections are, in effect, nullified. And we all know, leftists couldn’t care less.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Education-in-a-Pro-Propaganda-Culture_podcast_01.mp3

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Written by Dr. Everett Piper

Once there was a prominent landowner who had a son. Even though the boy was quite well cared for and had everything he needed, he became restless. One day he approached his dad and said: “Father, I don’t want to wait for my inheritance. Frankly, I am suffocating living under your rules and your expectations. I want my freedom. I want my money. It is time for me to move out of the house, get my own place, and live as I want.”

Well, even though the father was understandably brokenhearted, he relented. He gave his son the freedom and the money he demanded. He let the boy decide how to use (or abuse) his inheritance. He permitted the prodigal to leave home. He gave his son his own way.

So, the son packed his bags and moved to the big city and rented an apartment. There, undisciplined and dissipated, he squandered everything he had. He had his freedom. He had his money, and he wasted it all by living his own way.

About the time he was spending his last few dollars of inheritance, a severe recession occurred. Having nothing left, the young man began living on the streets and scavenging in back alley dumpsters for food. He was so hungry he resorted to eating garbage to survive.

As the story goes, one day, this wayward son woke up. He came to his senses and said to all his vagabond friends: “All the ranch hands back home working for my father are much better off than we are. They, at least, sit down to three meals a day, and here I am starving to death. I am going back home.”

Reflecting on this parable of the arrogant and wayward son causes me to think of today’s colleges and universities.

I think of higher education’s “birthright and inheritance” as seen in the original mission statements of many of our nation’s seminal institutions: Of Harvard’s Christo et Ecclesia, “For Christ and the Church,” of Princeton’s Vitam Mortuis Reddo, “I restore life to the dead,” of Yale’s expressed goal for its students “to know God in Jesus Christ and … to lead a Godly, sober life.”

I think of the academy’s prodigal path, where colleges and universities, contrary to their founding creeds, now refuse even to allow traditional Judeo-Christian ideas to be openly discussed and freely debated on their respective campuses.

I think of faculty who have been denied tenure because they dared to assume they could engage in an open exchange of ideas on matters such as human origins, climate change, identity politics, intersectionality and critical race theory.

I think of the consequences of “living our own way” and eating from the “back alley dumpsters” of safe spaces, gender-neutral pronouns, trigger warnings and micro-aggressions.

I think of the routine reports of binge drinking, date rape, sexual abuse, escalating suicide rates and the pandemic reality of STDs.

But, I also think of our father and his provisions and his teachings: of Veritas; of “Truth”; of Harvard’s early affirmation on its school shield – “If you hold to my teachings you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

Finally, I think of the historical “home “of the academy and the intellectual freedom we used to have under our father’s roof as opposed to the ideological fascism we now experience at the hand of our arrogance and rebellion.

In the story of the prodigal son, Jesus tells us: “Not long after squandering his birthright, there was a bad famine in the land, and the son began to hurt. Having nothing left but his “way,” this young man began working in the fields, feeding the pigs, thinking he must do so to survive. He was so hungry he was now eating the corncobs in the pig slop.”

As a lifelong educator, I look at my academic peers in today’s colleges and universities and I can’t help but ask myself, “has our own way resulted in what we expected when we told our father we wanted to move out of his house?” Did we get what we wanted when we spent our inheritance? Is our chosen path as liberating as we hoped?

Have “our wildest dreams” led us to where we expected or have we stumbled into a nightmare, wading in fields of pig slop and eating the “corncobs” of abuse, dysfunction, selfishness and addiction? Did we get the freedom we hoped for when we left home or have we become slaves to the consequences of frivolous spending and childish irresponsibility?

One last question: Is it possible that “Dad” was smarter than we thought he was all along?

Perhaps it is time for American education to leave the corncobs behind and go home.

Dr. Everett Piper, former president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, is a columnist for The Washington Times and author of “Not A Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery 2017).

Written by Walter Williams

For many parents, August is a month of both pride and tears. Pride because their teenager is taking that big educational step and tears because for many it’s the beginning of an empty nest. Yet, there’s a going-away-to-college question that far too few parents ask or even contemplate: What will my youngster learn in college?

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni provides some answers that turn out to be quite disturbing. ACTA evaluated every four-year public university as well as hundreds of private colleges and universities. That’s more than 1,100 institutions that enroll nearly 8 million students, more than two-thirds of all students enrolled in four-year liberal arts schools nationwide. ACTA’s findings were published in their report “What Will They Learn? 2018-19.” It doesn’t look good.

The ACTA assigned grades tell some of the story. Just 23 (2%) of the over 1,100 colleges earn an A grade; 343 colleges (31%) earn a B grade; 347 (31%) get a C grade; 273 (24%) earn a D; and 134 (12%) colleges earn an F. If you’re thinking that your youngster will get a truly liberal arts education, you are sadly mistaken. It turns out that less than half of the schools studied require courses in traditional literature, foreign language, U.S. government or history and economics. At some colleges, students can fulfill their humanities requirement with a course titled “Global X: Zombies!” A U.S. cultural pluralism requirement can be fulfilled with “The Economics of ‘Star Trek.'” And an arts and Literature requirement can be fulfilled with either the “History of Comics” or “Game Design for Non-Majors.”

Colleges often do not live up to their own promises. In college mission statements, as well as their course catalogs, they frequently exalt the virtues of a “well-rounded” liberal arts education. The reality is something different with only 68% of the schools ACTA surveyed requiring three or fewer of the seven core subjects. Their curricula poorly represent critical subjects such as U.S. history, economics and foreign languages.

The list of schools that received ACTA’s “A” grades includes Pepperdine and Baylor, known for their commitment to the liberal arts and academic excellence. But there are some lesser-known colleges such as Christopher Newport University, Colorado Christian University, Kennesaw State University, Bluefield College and Regent University that deserve accolades.

ACTA’s “F” list includes prestigious names such as University of California, Berkeley, Bowdoin, Hamilton and Vassar colleges. Ivy League colleges received ACTA’s two “Bs,” four “Cs,” one “D” and one “F.” These grades reflect significant overall curricular weaknesses. For example, Yale doesn’t require college-level math courses; Harvard accepts an elementary-level foreign language study; and Brown has an “open curriculum,” which means students may take whatever classes they want, without strict requirements. Even though some of the best-known colleges earn poor marks for their general education curricula, it doesn’t necessarily mean they do all things poorly. A student can get an excellent education at these schools if classes are chosen wisely.

There’s another college-related issue not given much voice and that’s how important is a college education in the first place. That’s an issue raised by a Market Watch article, “Half of young Americans say their degree is irrelevant to their work.”

Parents think a college education is necessary for success. Their youngsters think differently. According to the TD Ameritrade study, 49% of young millennials said their degree was “very or somewhat unimportant” to their current job. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in an October 2018 report, found that many students are underemployed, filling jobs that can be done with a high school education. More than one-third of currently working college graduates are in jobs that do not require a degree, such as flight attendants, janitors and salesmen.

The bottom line for parents and their youngsters is that spending four or more years in college and accumulating tens of thousands of dollars in debt is not the only road to a successful life.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage.

By now everyone except off-the-grid cave-dwellers has heard about the student protest at University of Missouri which began when thirty black football players and other teammates, supported by the coaching staff, threatened to boycott practices and games until the university president resigned, which he did, along with the chancellor. The reason for the threatened boycott and subsequent campus protest is the belief on the parts of student protestors that the administration had not adequately addressed campus racism. I suppose the team is busy now interviewing candidates to fill those positions.

Shortly thereafter, a student journalist attempting to exercise his First Amendment rights by reporting on the campus tent city “triggered” a marauding horde of anti-microaggression protestors to commence (to quote Richard Scarry) “pushing and shoving, shrieking and shouting.” Methinks the response of the delicate orchids, deeply traumatized by a reporter reporting, veered dangerously close to ordinary run-of-the-mill aggression.

The events at Mizzou followed close on the heels of another campus brouhaha, this one at Yale where some Ivy League hackles were raised when university lecturer Erika Christakis in a carefully worded, politically correct-ish email challenged a silly administrative warning against insensitive Halloween costumes. Following Christakis’ email, her husband, Yale professor Nicholas Christakis, was accosted on campus, where a young woman of color shrieked and swore at him saying among other things, “Who the f*** hired you?” Now scores of socially-just Yalies are seeking the Christakis family’s removal from their positions and home in a Yale residential college.

All this because Christakis dared to suggest that perhaps college students should have the freedom to choose to be a bit provocative or even “transgressive” on Halloween. And by provocative she means costumes that social justice fanatics may view as “appropriative”—not inappropriate—appropriative. So, for example, no non-indigenous female should wear a Pocahontas costume because that would suggest she’s attempting to “appropriate” Native American culture. The merest hint that these hothouse flowers may see an image that sets off their finely-tuned, offense-o-meters sends them into fits of infantile pique.

The seeds for these cultural weed patches were sown years ago when campus radicals, heavily influenced by Brazilian Marxist and educator Paulo Freire, took over academia and began propagating their doctrinaire ideology about oppression. Proponents of Freire’s critical pedagogy—sometimes referred to as “teaching for social justice”—have imposed on all of society their obsession with the notion of systemic oppression, dividing society into two groups (i.e., oppressor and oppressed) and imputing guilt or victimhood respectively.

For example, colorless people, males (more precisely “cismales”), and heterosexuals are automatically oppressors regardless of whether they have engaged in any acts of oppression. “Progressives” rail against members of the purported oppressor group, telling them that the only way to expiate their imputed sins is to engage in endless self-flagellation.

Conversely, people of color, females, trans-everyone, and homosexuals belong to the oppressed group and, therefore, cannot be found guilty of, well anything, no matter how nasty and oppressive their actions. This is the ideology promoted at the annual White Privilege Conference that many educators attend.

To get a sense of how silly and doctrinaire this oppression ideology has become, look no further than Jonathan Butler, the black Mizzou student whose hunger-strike and demand that the university president “acknowledge his white male privilege” played a pivotal role in this burlesque of a civil rights protest. Jonathan Butler is the son of Eric L. Butler, an executive vice president for sales and marketing for the Union Pacific Railroad, whose 2014 compensation was $8.4 million and whose total net worth is upwards of $20 million. Clearly, Jonathan is systemically oppressed.

“Progressives” have added another layer of ideological slime to their unstable foundation. They have for decades disseminated propaganda via accommodating government schools, academia, the mainstream press, and Hollywood, brainwashing our young’uns into believing that among the gravest social injustices that plague patriarchal, colonialist America is the presence of unpleasant ideas. Oppressed peoples are entitled to be free of exposure to ideas and images they don’t like

Devotees of diversity tacitly teach children and teens that they have a right not to be offended—well, “progressives” have a right not to be offended.

Exalters of emotion extol the supreme value of subjective feelings—well, the subjective feelings of those who belong to the designated oppressed groups. It is their feelings that dictate what may or may not be seen or heard.

Teachers of tolerance tolerate only that which they approve and affirm.

Masters of moral relativism proclaim that there exist ideas so absolutely evil that they must not be spoken or heard. And they alone are the arbiters of truth. Violating their commandment to speak no evil requires prior trigger warnings to prevent oppressed victims and their genuflecting allies from being reduced to puddles of tears, or, as at Mizzou and Yale, rivers of rage.

In the service of their cultural mission to cleanse the university and universe of ideas that offend liberals, teachers help students grow tissue-paper skin in their school laboratories, which they can don whenever they may encounter a “microaggression”—you know like Romans 1:26.

Agents of change have taught their malleable changelings how to feign macro-umbrage to get their way. Now they are stupid-drunk with the power they’ve gained from the supposed “right” to be free from micro-ickiness. Students at once possess oh-so-delicate sensibilities and an incongruent lust for the freedom of others. At Mizzou and Yale, we witnessed the macro-tantrum of a macro-monster with a micro-brain.

The monster created by the Left is now a rapacious, oppressive beast, mindlessly trampling the First Amendment, intellectual diversity, and intellectual freedom. Feeding at the slop trough of narcissism and solipsism, the oppressed have become the oppressors.

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