Education, NOT Indoctrination

This is, as I'm sure you know Bill Ayers. He's an alleged confidant of Barack Obama (some say he authored one of Obama's many autobiographies) and is currently a professor of education at the University of Illinois. In a previous life he was fond of pyrotechnics in the service of the anti-war left (you all know the story). He escaped lifetime incarceration on a technicality but in truth his father was a well connected member of the Chicago establishment and arranged a pass for Ayers and his equally radical nutcase of a wife Bernardine Dohrn (presumably so she could resume her career as a tenured law professor at Northwestern). Now most of us know about these two killers and their criminal past with the SDS and Weather Underground. And most of us are appalled they are walking the streets rather than enjoying the hospitality of a Federal SuperMax. But what is particularly galling is these two cowards are well paid, well respected members of academia. And that kind reader is the problem.

The American education establishment has failed us. It has failed to convey our values. It has failed to teach the benefits of liberal (lowercase) democratic capitalism. It has failed to teach civic responsibility. It has failed to teach that freedom is just and good. Instead it has taught a mish-mash of pseudoscience and moral relativism. It has taught a deconstruction of the standards of truth and replaced it with a skepticism of Western values and traditions. It has failed to pass along our Judeo-Christian ethic and has been openly hostile to religion. As a consequence of the academy's failures, it has created a void into which any demagogue, any cult, any hateful ideologue may step in and corrupt the minds of vulnerable and inexperienced young people. This situation is unacceptable.

Our next President must confront the American education establishment and demand a complete reformation from top to bottom. A monolithic, liberal/leftist faculty at any institution will no longer be tolerated. Academic hostility towards conservatives (or any political persuasion for that matter) will no longer be accepted. Indoctrination is not the goal, critical thinking is. I do not advocate a political litmus test for any teacher at any lever be it primary, secondary or higher education, but when just about any school just about anywhere has a faculty that self-describes at 90% liberal, there is clearly discrimination.

The benefits of a diversity of views in teaching are apparent and the lack thereof equally apparent. In the interest of fairness, in the interest of a well educated populous, in the interest of the republic itself the "education" of our youth has to change.