Study: Liberal universities indoctrinate students before they even arrive for the fall semester

By Natalia Castro

It is no secret universities across the country are teaching America’s youth to adopt liberal ideology, but now they have taken this indoctrination a step further. Before students even enter college, university reading lists are promoting a progressive agenda. As universities continue to promote summer reading, their reading lists shed light on the liberal profit oriented agenda encompassing universities across the country.

Universities are not just picking any books for students to read, analysis from the National Association of Scholars (NAS) found that the largest genre of suggested or required readings was Civil Rights/ Racism/Slavery books. Books with a progressive angle to highlight inequality and racial division in the country. Schools also select books with environmentalist and pro-immigration angles, pushing the liberal agenda before students even begin to attend school.

More often than not these liberal books are written by exactly who you would suspect, that is, liberal activists.

One of the most common required readings before the 2016-2017 school year, according to NAS, was Between the World and Me by prominent black author Ta-Nehisi Coates. The novel explores the struggles of African Americans living in the United States; a fitting agenda for Coates as he also writes a comic book series entitled the Black Panther, the story of a radical African American superhero.

Rather than having students read information about how the United States government system works, they are being fed reasons why it supposedly works incorrectly and unfairly, before they have even developed their own ideas.

This becomes true about liberal issues across the board.

Many universities are now also pushing the book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, which explains that the world will be ending if environmental concerns are not immediately addressed. The author of this book, Elizabeth Kolbert, has built her career around being an environmentalist, even receiving an award in 2016 for Global Environmental Activism.

Meanwhile books in genres such as politics, career advice, and education are rarely selected.

Aside from being clear activist in their fields, these authors have their own financial incentive to have their books read university wide.

One commonly required book by Ivy League Universities is Our Declaration by Danielle Allen. This novel parodies the Declaration of Independence to highlight inequality that has apparently existed since our nation’s inception. Rather than an analysis of our nation’s founding document, universities are pushing students to read a mockery of it.

But Allen loves that Ivy Leagues promote her book, because she is an Ivy League professor herself. As a government professor at Harvard University, Allen and other liberal professors are making double the money; students are taking their classes and being required to buy their books.

Rather than educating children, universities and professors are making a profit from liberal indoctrination.

Before my own freshman year in college all students entering my university were required to read How Does it Feel to be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America. A book which villainized police and compares the struggles of Arab-Americans to African Americans during the slave era.

These required readings force students into a specific liberal ideology and inhibit educational growth. The NAS suggests universities assign summer writing assignments instead of reading, to force students to grow their own opinions before the university experience.

While liberal universities and professors seek profits rather than student success, they no longer fulfill the mission they are established to pursue.

A mission the taxpayer pays for. With anywhere from $8,000 to more than $100,000 in taxpayer subsidies going to most colleges and universities for each bachelor’s degree, the taxpayer is funding this liberal indoctrination.

Even private universities cannot exist without taxpayer support, so the taxpayer should be able to reject the progressive agenda these universities are forcing onto students.

Students attend college to have a balanced educational experience, yet before they even attend classes they receive the messages of environmental and race activists for their own profit. Universities must begin proving students with a balanced education that prepares them for success in the real world, not one that perpetuates a selected progressive ideology.

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What UK party policies mean for teachers and education in the General Election

With the pledges and promises for the main five UK political parties being announced through their manifestos, many will be questioning "what's in it for me?"

The policies you may really care about are often hidden deep in these documents of 50 or 60 pages, so we have done the hard work for you.

Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrats, The Green Party and UKIP have all released their manifestos but for parents, children and carers, what are they proposing for the future of education?

Conservatives:

The Tory manifesto has called for more support to be given to teachers, by offering more bursaries to attract graduates into teaching. A forgiveness will be given to teachers while they remain in the profession for their student loan repayments.(Meaning that loan repayments will be suspended while they remain in the profession)

More technology will be given to teachers to help with the process of planning lessons and marking. They have called for a balance to how funding is distributed across the country and have given a promise to increase the overall schools budget by £4 billion by 2022.

They have suggested that they "do not believe that giving school lunches to all children free of charge for the first three years of primary school – regardless of the income of their parents – is a sensible use of public money."

Instead, they have proposed that free school breakfast will be offered to every child in every year of primary school, and children from low-income families will receive free school lunches throughout both primary and secondary school.

The Conservative party is proposing to build at least a hundred new free schools a year to continue to reform of the education system they started during their current government. The ban will also be lifted on the building of new selective, grammar schools.

Labour:

The Labour party has proposed a four-point list of suggestions to improve the quality and fairness of education in the United Kingdom.

Increased investment will be offered, to make sure schools have enough resources. New buildings will be built, and asbestos will be removed from existing schools.

A heavy emphasis on quality of teaching has been placed in their manifesto, claiming that they would want to "drive up the standard across the board."

Accountability will be placed on individual schools, to ensure that requirements for the number of children expected in each class is met.

"Every child is unique", the manifesto calls for inclusion for all children, regardless of their background, and that each should have their own individual learning path, in terms of courses and qualifications.

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Survey: Just 1 in 4 say our higher ed system functioning as it should

Looking for another thing that Americans are sour about these days? How about college?

A new survey of American adults finds that we are deeply split about the USA’s higher education system and increasingly frustrated with the costs.

While most of us still believe a college degree makes it more likely that a young person will be successful, only one in four of us believe that our higher education system is functioning as it should.

And the dissatisfaction is especially keen among Millennials, the generation that came of age in the last decade. They’re also the folks who have most recently been to college, lived a post-college life and dealt with the debilitating debt that often comes with it. And they've experienced the rising dropout rates at U.S. colleges: About four in 10 students who start a four-year degree now leave college without one.

Among Millennials, just 13% believe that our higher education system works as it should. The younger generation, known sometimes as “Generation Z,” has a slightly more generous vision, on par with that of most other Americans: 27% of them think things are working well on America’s college campuses.

The survey, out Thursday from the left-leaning Washington, D.C., think tank New America, also found that nearly six in 10 of us believe that colleges put their own long-term interests ahead of those of students.

“Folks are starting to realize that while institutional and student interests may often be aligned, they’re not always aligned,”  New America’s Amy Laitinen said.

Among the bright spots: Community colleges are beginning to seem more promising to many Americans — more promising than either public or private four-year colleges: While just 61% say public four-year colleges “are worth the cost,” 82% say the same about community colleges.

That surprised the researchers, who admit that community colleges have spent the past few years sharpening their focus and taking a hard look at costs, among other factors.

“If we had done this survey 10 years ago, we would not have seen these numbers,” Laitinen said.

When it comes to public sentiment about the value of private four-year colleges, things get ugly: Just 43% say private universities are worth the cost; and just 40% say private for-profit universities are worth the cost.

Jeff Selingo, author of the 2016 book There Is Life After College, said rising costs are to blame for many of the negative findings in the New America survey.

“To me, it goes back to this idea that college for a growing number of Americans is further and further out of reach,” said Selingo, a visiting scholar at Georgia Tech's Center for 21st Century Universities.

Researchers have long noted that students in wealthier families are about eight times more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree by age 24 than kids from low-income families. But Selingo said middle-income families — those that earn too much to qualify for federal assistance such as Pell Grants — are also being squeezed by rising costs.

“Those families are struggling, and I think that is reflected in this poll,” he said. “The high negativity ratings of colleges and universities are largely around affordability and the fact that families don’t think they can afford college without either their son or daughter or themselves going deep into debt at some point.”

Median family incomes have long been relatively flat, he noted. “Meanwhile, college costs … still go up every year more than income levels. As a result, what ends up happening is that every year, more and more people fall out of that ‘I can afford college’ category.”

That’s what makes community colleges so much more attractive, he said, noting that even students from wealthier households are now turning to community colleges. Recent research shows that about one in four students at these schools now come from a family earning more than $100,000 a year.

“That’s a big change since the last decade,” Selingo said.

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