The Erosion of Higher Education

This is post 2 of 6 in the series “Education in the Coronavirus age”

What Has the Coronavirus Done to Our Schools?
The Erosion of Higher Education
A Virus Worse Than Covid-19
Children: Bullseye of Comprehensive Sexuality Education
Parents or the State: Who Owns the Children?
Education in the Coronavirus: What Now?

Many fine teachers are committed to the flourishing of children. Thirty-seven percent of public school teachers are evangelical Christians^[1] who chose their vocation to engage with a nation’s most important resource. This is a sure sign of Christians’ care for children.

Fifty-eight percent of educators, and sixty-four percent of all adults, support teaching the Bible in public schools, either as a historic book that shaped the West, or as a religious text to develop character. This is good! But teaching the Bible alone is not sufficient.

Why? Because the context, not just the content, of teaching matters. Everything today is taught through the worldview of modernism (evolutionism) or postmodernism (critical theory). Even the Bible can be taught through these lens. The Bible—and every other subject—must be taught through the Judeo-Christian worldview of Moral Theism. This worldview is to be the integration point of all academic subjects and ought to displace the atheistic worldview that dominates public education today. The public, and many evangelical Christian teachers, are unaware of the atheistic foundations of modern education or the critical theory of cultural Marxism that undergird today’s philosophy, policies and practices of education.

Virtually every academic discipline in higher education, including math and the hard sciences, is built on this foundation. This is especially true of teacher training departments in colleges (even most Christian colleges) and universities. A generation of primary and secondary teachers, including Christians, are steeped in critical theory, which is why this dangerous concept is driving the outcome of today’s education systems.

The erosion of post-secondary education

Stanford University scholar Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, an iconic mix of American classicist, grape farmer and military historian, has written,

College has long ceased being a sheltered place to acquire the inductive method of thinking and disinterested empiricism, along with mastering a body of general, shared knowledge to equip the student to be aware of his past and present world. Instead, higher education seeks to teach millions of American youth how to think “correctly.”

In 21st-century America, “correctness” centers around memorizing unquestioned near-religious commandments—identity and racial politics, redistributionist government, affirmative action, abortion on demand, anti-Westernism, climate change, transgenderism, open borders, police defunding, iconoclasm, and agnosticism or atheism. All that cannot be queried without being socially ostracized, professionally hounded, or sometimes even physically threatened.

This educational tyranny has percolated through the teacher’s colleges and out to the instructors in today’s primary and secondary educational system. A generation of young radical activists is leading the ideological cultural Marxist agenda of organizations, movements and concepts including Black Lives Matter, Antifa, LGBTQ identity, gender exchange, white guilt, and all the other strange ideas unfolding before our eyes.

These leaders are often called “progressive.” But that’s a misnomer. Progress is movement toward a higher state of personal and civic flourishing. A more appropriate moniker would be “regressive,” as they are seeking to undermine the Judeo-Christian worldview that provided the foundation for the free and just societies of Western Civilization. Their ideology is regressive, leading to chaos in the mind and the resulting chaos and destruction of society.

Lots of money, few results

Alex Newman, author of Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children, is an American educator, journalist, writer and public speaker. In response to the question, “What is going on in the US educational system that we should be worried about?” Newman answered:

Well, I think we should be worried about the entire educational system …. If you look at the people who created it, they all told us what their agenda was. It was to turn the children … away from traditional American values, biblical morality, and those cornerstones of what America was founded on. And so I think the entire edifice is a threat to our freedom, to our nation, to our children, to our families.

And when you look at what’s happening there now, I think it’s becoming even more clear to people. They’re bringing in the LGBT indoctrination. They’re bringing in the drag queen story hours. The stuff that’s going on in the public schools today, I think would shock even the most liberal, progressive parent. Half of the kids graduate and can’t even read–that’s according to the government’s own data.

Newman continues by indicating the return on investment in state-sponsored education: “[Children] spend 12 years in a government school. We spend $150,000, $200,000, and these kids are graduating, and they can’t even read their high school diploma.”

During the Cold War, someone famously said if the Soviet Union did to our educational system what we ourselves have done to it, we would consider it an act of war. Decades later, we continue to spend millions on a system that does not work. In fact, it is a system that undermines the very foundations of one of the most unique countries in the world.

Down with Western Civilization

Is this result through neglect or is intentional? Newman believes (and I agree) it is intentional. The powers that be in the educational establishment are committed to the overthrow of Western Civilization and the Judeo-Christian worldview and values it is founded on. In fact, all this money has produced a cadre of leaders and followers who are looting stores, rioting on the streets, attacking police and civilians, and seeking to “burn it down.”

Do we really want to send our children back into a school system that, at best, fails to educate and instill virtue, and at worst produces anarchists seeking to tear down the very fabric of our society?

Most of the leaders of the educational establishment, including teachers’ unions, are committed to evolutionary ideology, moral relativism, and cultural Marxism.

For generations, universities were havens for the pursuit of truth, beauty and goodness. Now they are institutions of indoctrination in cultural Marxism and “social justice” action, and the hatred of everything marked by Judeo-Christian Theism.

A university brings unity to diverse people by the study of the classics and Western Civilization. Today, we mostly have “Diversities”: Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, Black Studies, Hispanic Studies and LGBTQ Studies. All these diversities separate people. We have abandoned integration for re-segregation and the production of victim classes.

Graduates of these institutions go to public, state-run schools and radicalize K-12 education, preparing future activists to destroy Western culture. These school systems are using taxpayer funds to indoctrinate the taxpayer’s children with ideas the parents would never suspect: Comprehensive Sex Education (aka pleasure-centered sex education), Gender Identity, LGBTQ promotion, abolition of the natural family and binary sexuality, Critical Race Theory, Social Justice activism and the “evil” of Judeo-Christian influence on Western Civilization.