The Easiest Answer in the World (Which Almost Everyone Avoids)
President Joe Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki, asked during an official White House propaganda session to address Senator Tom Cotton’s concerns about U.S. colleges being used to “indoctrinate” students, replied smugly — I did not hear her voice, but how else can a progressive sound when defending totalitarianism? — with the following:
“Well, without much detail on where he thinks our youth are being indoctrinated — that sounds very mysterious and dangerous [totalitarian smugness alert!] — I don’t think that we would think, believe that educating the youth and future leaders of the country on systemic racism is indoctrination,” Psaki countered. “That’s actually responsible.”
It is responsible to teach “youth,” the future leaders of your country, that the country is systemically — that is, essentially, from its foundations — immoral. If this is the responsible thing to teach them, the reason must be that it is right to dig up and replace those foundations, to displace that national essence in favor of something else. In other words, “That’s actually responsible” is an abbreviation for, “It is our intention to turn this country into a different country, from its founding principles and premises on up.”
Of course, the only reason this sort of thing can now go on in the colleges with little or no serious pushback is that the general population has been slowly tenderized to this national self-loathing for generations. Most significantly, Americans have effectively, gradually, been trained to presuppose a fundamental immorality in the American project from early childhood, in the public schools, over the course of more than a century.
University students are young adults. By the time they have reached that age, if they are still susceptible to such naked indoctrination against their own country’s principles and virtues, such as the silly “1619 Project,” it is only because they have been prepared for it for years, such that the explicit lessons in critical race theory (and its kindred Marxist offshoots, such as feminism, historicism, cultural relativism, and the like) are received as merely an elaboration or fulfillment of ideas already nascent in the students’ minds and hearts. In other words, the soil has been prepared for the latest progressive assault on rationality and individual choice, so that the new lessons may be expected to grow well and bear their poison fruit.
How could this have been prevented? How could the general susceptibility to this corruptive anti-theory have been thwarted at the earlier stages, so as to make the current degradations of university teaching practically ineffectual, and the preachers of such overtly irrational and tyrannical propaganda simply unemployable? The answer, of course, is as obvious as can be, as it has been for decades: Stop sending children to government schools. This one step would deal the deepest cut to the university indoctrination effort — in America and everywhere else where withholding the children from what I have called “the compulsory mass retardation factory” is still legal — as it would severely curtail the universal tenderizing of children that results in young adults arriving at university lacking the independence, reasoning skills, moral awareness, respect for others, and belief in individual responsibility needed to resist and dismiss the kind of transparent lies and thuggery being passed off as sophisticated theory in the humanities and social sciences today.
That is how it could have been prevented. And that is how it could be prevented now. It is that simple, although the explanation of how we arrived at this simple truth is quite complex, and forms the core of my book on the subject, The Case Against Public Education, now in its fifth year of life. I am also, however, completely certain that this simple preventive measure will never be taken — or not on a wide enough scale to make any dent in the impunity with which progressive sophists now believe, correctly, that they can get away with feeding their slavish hash to the masses as a substitute for real higher education.
Since my philosophic soul always alights on the side of valuing understanding for its own sake, rather than believing, in modern fashion, that only the practically efficacious is worthwhile, I continue to find solace in a deep knowledge of how the modern educational world became the way it is, how it operates, and why the bulk of mankind has allowed itself to be reduced so thoroughly that it no longer has even the gumption to protect its own children from tyrannical psychological manipulation by the state. Wisdom is the highest freedom, fortunately, since that it is the only kind of freedom we have left on this Earth.
