High School Teaches anti-Americanism

Little Green Footballs links to this Fox News story about a High School class promoting an anti-American agenda. Lets have a close look, shall we?

Tuesday, August 26, 2003
Some parents in Farmington, Mich., are crying "anti-Americanism" over a high school international affairs class.

The course is offered to juniors and seniors in the Farmington School District and focuses on America's role in the Middle East. But it's not the topic that's angered some students' parents. It's the class readings, many of which come from left-wing Web sites like Alternet.org, Indymedia.org, Progressive.org and War-times.org, that vigorously attack the Bush administration.

As LGF writes, "who’s who of the radical left." Two issues are here, one is balance, the other is the extream nature of these tests. There are two theories of education. One is that education should transfer the tradition of society to the children, so that they share the same body of knowledge and values as the previous (lets say taxpaying) generation. Another is that children should be taught to be able to correct the errors of previous generations, to overthrow their old assumptions and create progress. Such sites will strongly tend to favor the later theory. Lets call the first theory Traditional Education because its purpose is to transmit the cultural tradition, and the second theory Progressive edcuation because its purpose is human progress.

"This belief that we have to show that every concept out of that society can be understood and excused is really a problem across the country," said Farmington father Don Cohen. "We are bending over backwards and by doing so, we're misrepresenting and misinforming our children and our society." Cohen and other parents banded together to press the school board to hold off on the new elective. But the school year has officially begun and the class is on the roster. The board approved it by a narrow four-to-three vote.

I would suggest to Mr. Cohen that the question is not the coverage of a very wide range of ideas, but rather the amount of time given to them. I have, in the classroom, had to explain the rise of the New Left in terms of the anti-Vietnam war movement. My classroom would never be taught from a New Left perspective. Given a full semester in an upper level high school class, you can cover quite a lot. But, that doesn't mean you should privledge a political point of view inconsistant with community standards, that is unless you are a progressive.

Farmington superintendent of schools, Robert Maxfield, defended the course, saying high school juniors and seniors should be critical thinkers and should be exposed to many points of view.

This sounds nice, but is really an excuse to teach racism, sexism, ludditism, creationism, marxism, paganism, fascism, or whatever wacky thing you want to under the guise of exposing them to new ideas. It ignores the fact that a critical thinker first needs a critical apparatus, then afterward is capable of invalidating false ideas when exposed to many points of view. Without a critical apparatus, too much information is just bewildering. I would suggest to Mr. Maxfield that high school students do not possess a critical apparatus capable of heavy lifting. A few have a relativly strong critical apparatus, but the fact that it will develop and flurish so much in college demonstrates how undeveloped it is in high school. Part of this defect is an insufficiently broad base of study. How can one's critical faculties be prepared for any critique of economics without a full economic preperation? Part of a critical thinker is the ability to employ a wide range of tools in the service of a particular inquiry. The tool box of well prepared high school students is very shallow indeed. The best and brightest of students are only begining a process toward critical thinking with anything remotely like rigor. Too many students still form their moral reasoning by trying to please others, whether their peers, their teachers, or their families. The fact that my teacher is a socialist doesn't qualify as a reason for me to emrace socialism from a critical thinking perspective.

"You can never teach kids the facts about everything," Maxfield said. "What you can teach kids is how to recognize points of view, how to understand sources of conflict, how to understand that there are forces that have driven world affairs for hundreds of years."

This is an excuse not to do what I have just described as neccesary for critical thinking, followed by an inflated claim of what they have accomplished. What they have taught is a single theoretical approach (or maybe nothing at all). Focusing on a single theoretcial approach may really be something best left to graduate school, when hopefully so much water has passed under the bridge that students won't buy the swamp. That may not work as well as we would like, but if not graduate school, when?

And he believes kids should know about how some people feel about the U.S. "They need to understand that people hate Americans," Maxfield said. "They need to understand that sometimes there are reasons for that."

Somehow this seems like its going to be a critique of US action, not foreign reaction. I suspect that resentment of our success, hatred of our freedom, fear of our modernity, and resistance to reform of anti-democratic institutions won't get much coverage. Of course, "You can never teach kids the facts about everything."

Pro-Bush materials, such as government Web sites like WhiteHouse.gov, were added to the class' reading list — only after parents complained that the course was an exercise in political correctness. The extra sources help balance the course's curriculum and offer support to President Bush's policies and America's role in the Middle East. "That's on the media every day," said parent Susan Kahn, referring to the defense of Bush administration policies. "We hear that all the time and I think that's perfectly OK for them to hear as long as we balance it."

What this reveals is that these lefties don't even know where to look for a point of view other than the government or their own lefty circles. No libertarians, no neoconservatives, no realists? Where are sources like The Weekly Standard or The National Review? What they have set up is a target that Alternet.org and Progressive.org are going to attack. Of course no one will suggest that the official government sites don't bother attacking the radical fringe. No one will suggest the relative weight that these points of view reprsent. I very much doubt even the so-called teachers have ever done serious voting analysis with statistics. And by avoiding sites that argue different points of view ouside the Red-Green alliance, students recieve an impoverished edcuation, something that amounts to indoctrination.

Still, the school board stopped short of removing author Noam Chomsky's controversial book "9-11" — in which he writes about why he thinks the U.S. is a terrorist state — from the list of course materials. "That's the bias inbred into this curriculum," Cohen fumed.

I'm sure Ann Coulter's reply, Treason, isn't part of that reading list. Why anyone would foist Chomsky or Coulter on students I could never fathom, but Mr. Cohen is right about the fact that too many educators are too far to the left.

Too many teachers are too far to the Progressive side, thinking that the taxpayers who support them are not fit to shape policy. You see the taxpayers all generally agree with the teachers, but are duped by corporatist advertising.