All Your Schools Are Belong to Us

"That is an alarming prospect to some on the left," writes David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times. It "scares me to death," exclaims "Nancy Keenan, the education policy director at People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group, and a former Montana state superintendent of public education."

What are "some on the left" so apprehensive of, according to the New York Times article cited above? Homeschooling. More particularly, conservative evangelican Christian home schoolers who want their children to run for public office and aspire to serve in the judiciary.

Wait, that doesn't sound right. Don't most on the left believe that young people should be encouraged to participate in public life, and take a keen interest in our nation's legal and political institutions? How can we explain this startling discrepancy?

The obvious, and unflattering, explanation is that some "liberal" Americans only want citizens who agree with them to become active in law and politics. As a result, they are aghast at the prospect that Christian conservatives are making a concerted effort get involved.

Why are they so alarmed about home schoolers in particular? Because home schooling allows families to circumvent the public schools over which the left exerts considerable influence. To work in public schools, virtually all would-be teachers must attend multi-year programs at colleges of education, and these ed. colleges are dominated by some of the most liberal professors in academia. To get a feel for this, see Rita Kramer's book Ed School Follies. For a more recent and dispassionate academic study that also found that colleges of education disproportionately promote a left-of-center ideology, click on the link at the bottom of this blog entry.

Accustomed to generations of All Your Schools Are Belong to Us, the left is fearful of any educational practice--whether home schooling or school choice--that will let families escape the public school system over which they have achieved dominance.

The left needs to go back to its roots, start celebrating liberty, diversity, and public involvement for all Americans again, not just those who agree with them. If they don't like the thought of a Supreme court peopled only by conservatives (and I don't blame them) they need to support a system of educational choice that ensures all children have access to a good education.

The following excerpt is from Preparing Teachers: Are American Schools of Education Up to the Task? by David Steiner of Boston University. Remarks in square brackets [] are mine.

We reviewed 45 foundations courses for elementary and secondary schoolteachers drawn from 15 Schools of Education.... In seven schools, students were required to study psychology and multiculturalism, but nothing else.... Finally, in all but three Schools of Education, all student teachers are taught a course focused on cultural diversity or multiculturalism.
An overview of the required and recommended readings showed that the most popular texts were Annita Woolfolk’s Educational Psychology, and [far-left] Jonathan Kozol’s indictment of inner-city schooling in Savage Inequalities [scroll to bottom of linked page]. Each one of these texts is used in at least six programs we reviewed. The next most popular authors (each found in at least four programs) were Henry Giroux (a neo-Marxist educational theorist), Paulo Freire (an [far-left] advocate of using education to achieve political liberation), Joel Spring (an educational historian and author of works on educational multiculturalism), Howard Gardner (a proponent of multiple intelligences, portfolio-based learning, and an opponent of standardized high-stakes testing), and Lev Vigotsky, the Russian psychologist who focused on the social/cultural context of childrens’ development and associated learning. Taken as a whole, however, the most frequently used material comes from a group of authors who champion a form of multiculturalist education. We found that fourteen of the courses in ten different schools that we reviewed used at least of the following: Ladson-Billings (Dream Keepers), V. Paley (White Teacher), L. Neito (Affirming Diversity and and Light of Their Eyes), J. McLeod, (ain’t no making it), L. Olson (Made in America), b. hooks (sic.), (Teaching to Transgress), and Joel Spring (Decultturalization and the Struggle for Equality). Often powerful, provocative, and rightly disturbing, these texts largely share and promote a very particular argument about education: teachers should champion the particular voices and experience of repressed minorities, engaging in what Ladson-Billings calls “Culturally Relevant Teaching.” As Publishers Weekly says of Teaching to Transgress, hooks (an African American feminist Marxist) criticizes “the teaching establishment for employing over-factualized knowledge to deny and suppress diversity.” There is another view, namely that teaching should dwell not on the individual differences of students, but rather treat all as equals and equally deserving of mastering universally valuable knowledge. We found only one course syllabus, in one program, which offered any readings that presented this counter-view.