As we know, American higher education is dominated by people with a leftist cast of mind. That is particularly true in education schools, which attract liberals like a magnet attracts iron filings.
Leftists like to tell us how much they favor “diversity” and open exchange of ideas, and how much they’re against discrimination. Unfortunately, when they have the power to run institutions, it turns out that they don’t like any dissent from their ideas and attempt to discriminate against students who don’t accept all of their beliefs. As in Orwell’s Animal Farm, once the supposedly high-minded reformers have control, we find out that they’re authoritarians.
The most recent manifestation of this phenomenon is at the University of Minnesota’s education school, where administrators want to impose an ideological litmus test that will filter out students who don’t accept the prevailing leftist socio-political philosophy. The school’s “Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Force” (whose very existence tells you a lot) has recommended that the school make “cultural competence” the “overarching framework” for all its courses.
“Cultural competence” is a euphemism for saying that students must be imbued with a hypersensitivity to group identity (race, class, gender, etc.) and committed to rectifying the deep social injustices regarding oppressed groups. Toward that end, the report recommends that education students (future K-12 teachers, that is) be required to write up an “autoethnography” study in which they describe their prejudices and stereotypes. Since it’s a core tenet of leftist thinking that American society is saturated in latent racism, sexism, and other nasty isms, a student who said, “I’m not prejudiced against any group,” would be in hot water.
Lest anyone miss the point, the task force states that its objective is ensuring that future teachers “will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression.” It’s also critical, in the minds of the people on the task force, that teachers be able “to explain how institutional racism works in schools.”
What if you just want to teach students how to read, to write, to do arithmetic? You’re not the right sort, then. Teaching, leftist theorists have often said, is a “political act.” It’s far more than imparting academic skills and knowledge—it’s about shaping young minds to accept the panoply of liberal beliefs on society, economics, history, and so on.
The opposite of “cultural competence” is not “cultural incompetence” but rather the belief that schools should be places where all students are just taught the academic basics; the belief that students shouldn’t be hectored about the supposed evils of society. The kind of teacher the task force wants is one who laces her lesson on multiplication tables with illustrations of white privilege. The kind it doesn’t want is one who just teaches the multiplication tables without any overlay of social criticism.
What if students have the temerity to disagree? Not acceptable. The report specifies that the school should “develop clear steps for working with non-performing students.” Another delightful euphemism! Students who resist the ideas that they are full of latent prejudice and society is oppressive are “non-performing.” They need a “remediation plan.”
As columnist Katherine Kersten writes about this plan, “After indoctrination of this kind, who wouldn’t conclude that the American Dream of equality for all is just a cruel hoax?”
No, this is not an isolated instance. Many other education schools have been exposed as hotbeds of leftist thought control. The Pope Center’s Jay Schalin revealed that this craving for “social justice” permeates the education school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And in a Pope Center paper, retired education professor George Cunningham observed that all education schools in the UNC system tend to load their curricula with tendentious social theorizing. At the same time, they avoid mention of teaching approaches that produce good results with students of all social groups.
In her classic article “Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Teach,” Heather Mac Donald turned over a rock and found that students at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College were steeped in leftist social theory. Washington State University singled out a student who offered the politically incorrect opinions that gun control is a failure and that white male privilege is a myth and instructed him to take mandatory “diversity” training sessions. Fortunately, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) weighed in and prevailed upon Washington State to stop its harassment of the student.
It’s hard not to come away with the impression that many of those who are in charge of schools of education are more interested in political indoctrination than in preparing teachers to do a good job of teaching.