Soul Killers in the Classroom

by Selwyn Duke

There has been much talk in recent years about “misinformation” on social media. There’s relatively little focus, however, on the misinformation pumped directly into the most damaging place of all: young people’s minds. Moreover, this misinformation — or “brainwashing,” as a critic puts it — has supplanted real learning to the point where youths now lack basic skills. A major reason why, too, is that while some proclaim “wokeness’” death, it’s alive and well. And this is because, says that critic, independent journalist Emil Hasle, wokeness-mind-virus carriers pervade American education.

Publishing at Substack last Sunday, the journalist laments a decades-long ideological transformation in Western education, writing:

Conservatives have become vanishingly rare in academia, and even moderates now find themselves marginalized as a fringe group. Data on U.S. faculty ideology from 1969 to 2022 illustrates this shift dramatically: the share of liberals and far-left educators rose from 45% to 74%, while centrists declined to 15% and conservatives to just 11%.

The linked source also provides an even more striking finding. More “faculty identify as ‘far left’ or ‘very liberal,’” it relates, “than with any position right of center.”

In truth, though, even this understates the case, as the above statistics rely on self-identification. This matters because many self-proclaimed “centrists” (or “moderates”) are actually self-referential liberals who mistake their own views for consensus-opinion reality.

Moreover, “conservatives” are too often those espousing yesterday’s liberalism. For “progressives … go on making mistakes,” as G.K. Chesterton observed. Meanwhile, the “business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”

The result is an ideologically monolithic academia that delivers dark dogmas at fundamentals’ expense. This has bred students both ignorant and indoctrinated, a toxic mix.

(Apropos of this, hundreds of University of California professors have signed an open letter urging the re-embrace of standardized-testing admissions. The issue? Some STEM majors are now so unprepared that they don’t even know middle-school math.)

The Soul-stealing Process

This “higher-education” rot long ago filtered down into secondary and primary schooling as well. This manifests, Hasle tells us,

in public school curricula through programs rooted in updated Marxist frameworks. Traditional Marxism divided society by economic class into oppressors and oppressed. Contemporary versions in schools divide children by race, gender, identity, and perceived privilege. Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) initiatives, for instance, encourage students to interpret common everyday interactions, through lenses of systemic oppression and activism. Critics such as James Lindsay and Christopher Rufo have described SEL as a “Trojan horse” for these marxist [sic] theories, training children to view normal behaviors or feelings as markers of privilege or oppression and urging them toward premature political activism.

The result of this is typified by striking anecdotes courtesy of the Manhattan Institute. As the organization informed in 2021: