Sunday, May 13, 2007

"Social justice" assault

Sol Stern of City Journal wrote a lengthy and troubling report for frontpagemag.com on growing leftist indoctrination in public schools and ed schools under the "social justice" label. (Teaching for “Social Justice” -- The Leftist Assault on America’s Public Schools).

Publicly funded institutions should not be used as a vehicle for someone's political passions.

From the introduction:

Among all the ailments that America’s public schools face, one of
the least known but most menacing is the effort by the radical left
to bully present and prospective teachers into using their classrooms
to indoctrinate students in the anti-American and anti-democratic
ideology that goes under the name of “teaching for social justice.” This movement has already achieved some of its aims, as the proliferation
of social justice themed schools in many of our nation’s school districts shows. The teaching for social justice movement threatens not only the children who are targeted for leftist political brainwashing, but it undermines whatever is left of the common democratic ideal of American public education. If the social justice educators achieve their objectives, more and more parents are bound to lose confidence in the public schools. Without parental support there is no public in public education.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

While it's true that there are lots of moonbats on university campuses and that they control the administrations, and while I object as much as anyone to speech codes and groups being allowed to shut down speakers and all that, the nuttiness on campuses is overstated. A student can mostly avoid crazy Stalin apologists if he knows what departments to avoid, has a good BS meter when he's deciding what courses to take ("X Studies," for example, is always going to be some crazy left-wing course, usually taught by some aging hippie in birkenstocks and a long flowered skirt), and talking to other students or going to local or web forums to find out which professors to avoid. At the university, you have the luxury of choice. If you don't want to be hit over the head with leftist nonsense, you don't take lots of left-wing courses from left-wing faculty.

This is precisely the reason I'm much more concerned about the growing analog in the public schools. Students don't have the luxury of choice. And while few university faculty would openly state that their pedagogical goal is to teach students what to think, that seems to be the dominant view in ed schools, which percolates down to the schools.

Darren said...

I've written extensively about so-called social justice on my own blog. Please feel free to visit and click on the "social justice" label in the left column. My "Math For Social Justice" posts are among my best.