The death of schools?

By Sean Gabb, a British libertarian

Since about 1980, schooling of all kinds has been made into a concerted means of indoctrination. The cultural leftists have captured both the classrooms and the curriculum. I will not elaborate on this claim. Some will argue over terminology, some over the merits of the capture, but hardly anyone denies the broad fact. One of the main functions of modern schooling is to bring about and to protect a radical departure from the old intellectual culture of this country.

Much of this departure has been achieved by preaching in the classroom. But it is supplemented by a growing bureaucracy of surveillance. The teachers themselves are watched, and they can be punished for dissenting from the established discourse. There is, for example, the Government’s Prevent strategy, which applies to the whole state machinery. Its purpose is to identify and root out anyone defined as a “political extremist.” Anyone identified as such is effectively banned from working with children and young people, and probably in the state sector as a whole.

Another feature of the Prevent strategy is that anyone working with children and young people must himself become a spy. Any student who speaks or behaves out of turn must be reported. In 2015, the Safeguarding Children Board of the London Borough of Camden published Keeping Children and Young People Safe from Radicalisation and Extremism: Advice for Parents and Carers. Its aim was to “help parents and carers recognise when their children may be at risk from radicalisation.” How to spot “radicalisation”? The signs include “showing a mistrust of mainstream media reports and belief in conspiracy theories”, “appearing angry about government policies, especially foreign policy”, and “secretive behaviour and switching screens when you come near.”

For the avoidance of doubt, I disapprove of any preaching in a classroom funded by the taxpayers. If made a head of department, I would warn my teachers against telling the students his own views on sex or politics or anything else. Again for the avoidance of doubt, if, as a teacher in any kind of school, it came to my attention that they were plotting a crime, I would report my students to the relevant authority. My objection is that the present system is both one-sided and Orwellian.

It is one-sided because only some personal views are banned from the classroom. Take the case of Robert Haye, a Seventh Day Adventist and science teacher. In 2013, he denounced homosexuality as disgusting and a sin. He was banned indefinitely from teaching. That he was black was deemed no defence. Yes, I would have dispensed with his services – though stopping him from teaching elsewhere would never be on my agenda. That I do not share his opinion is beside the point. But Mr Haye would have faced no disciplinary action had he preached instead from some approved text on sex or politics, or on “the climate emergency,” or even on the wickedness of voting Conservative. As for spying on students, I once sat in a meeting where a teacher suggested alerting the safeguarding authorities to one of his students who was outspoken in his dislike of the European Union. I do not for a moment believe this suggestion would have been made had the student’s opinion been on the other side.

The system is Orwellian because it collects and stores information that it should be no one’s business to collect and store. I do not think any specific use is made of the information – not unless it is evidence of a crime. Even then, much of it cannot be used because of the data protection laws, or is lost when hardware or software are upgraded. But the knowledge that they are, or may be, under surveillance has a chilling effect on what people say, and perhaps eventually on what they think. It makes some into hypocrites and others into sheep. And this is an evil in itself. The system would be just as objectionable if, after some populist revolution, it were made into a means of indoctrinating children with the joys of Brexit and a noninterventionist foreign policy.

A further objection is a centralised and prescriptive National Curriculum. Too many subjects are squeezed into the classroom. These are often taught – and must often be taught – as almost random collections of facts. They are then tested and ranked almost to death. Students are awash with homework and course work and long projects that leave little time for private study and reflection.

Then we have the marketising of schooling. I will be charitable to Tony Blair and his minsters. They probably believed that introducing private enterprise would improve the quality of education. I do allow that many schools, about a decent as they can be in their general circumstances, have taken advantage of academy status, and to their benefit. Turning from these, however, private enterprise, as it has been introduced, makes almost everything worse. If you come to my Centre for Ancient Studies, you are the customer. My job is to give you what you want. If I fail to deliver, or you decide that Greek or Latin as I teach it is not after all what you want, you withdraw. If you send your children to many of the new academies, you are not the customer. The State is the customer. Your children are so much material for giving the authorities what they want. If omnipresent surveillance is wanted, omnipresent surveillance will be given. If performance in league tables is required, children and their teachers will be worked like slaves, regardless of whether this contributes in any reasonable sense to education.

These academies are subject to the same corruptions as any other private business with a contract from the State. As much money as can be is concentrated at the top. Compliance is given to the letter of any requirement, the spirit forgotten. Much teaching is delivered by part-time contractors, who are managed by outside agencies – outside agencies, often with personal ties to the academies. Those teachers who are given regular contracts of employment must sign up to the usual declarations of corporate love.

On this point, I was once invited for a whole term to take the place of a classics teacher who was off sick. I had to fill in a long application form. One of the questions was:

What do you feel sets the xxx xxx apart from other schools and Academy groups?

My answer:

I am sure it is an excellent educator. After some research on the Internet, I have seen nothing negative about it that deserves attention. It is one among many of the public-private partnerships that have delivered an increasing share of England’s education since the Blair Government decided this was the best way to improve education standards.

I was told at my induction meeting that this was not the sort of answer normally welcomed from an applicant. It was an untruth even so. A minute’s research had flagged up a scandal about the fiddling of inspection data. There was another scandal about “off-rolling” – this being the deliberate exclusion of weaker students from sitting their GCSEs, thereby improving average performances. The students were made to dress in silly uniforms that got sniggers in the street. If I saw them speaking out of class, it was in hushed whispers that trailed off when I was seen to be close. The staff had to wear black at all times. They were equally scared of those above them. The lessons were as joyless as can be imagined. After a few stony silences, I gave up on my usual tendency to jokes and irrelevant digressions. I worked out my time. I took the money and left. Since I am lucky enough to offer niche subjects that allow me to pick and choose my clients, I never went back. I think of that experience as often as I hear some politician enthusing about how standards have risen.

I went to what I knew at the time was a wretchedly bad school. Scott Lidgett Comprehensive School in Rotherhithe was a place filled with a thousand violent imbeciles. I will not call the teachers the sweepings of their profession. Some were, though more had simply given up trying. I made my seven years there tolerable by playing truant for much of the three central years. When I did attend, I learned almost nothing that I could not, and did not, get for myself by reading the textbooks. The only exception was mathematics, where a teacher introduced me to geometry. I became rather good at this, and it set me on a path that eventually led to David Hume. But I remember my first day in that place, and I remember the last. I have never had any doubt which was better.

I was lucky. I spent my three years of truancy in various libraries. No child ever wastes his time in miscellaneous reading. Everything comes in useful somewhere, even if as background for something else. My focus on the Ancient World was decidedly not a waste of time. In those years of complete freedom, I gained the skills and confidence that would carry me through O-Levels and A-Levels and through university. A combination of intellectual arrogance and what I am now assured is autism may have limited my worldly success. However, I owe nearly everything I have become to my time not spent at Scott Lidgett.

The Coronavirus panic has now given to millions of children a similar opportunity. The Internet is the greatest and most democratic library that ever existed. The riches of five thousand years are heaped before anyone who will only lean forward and take them. I grant that the leaning forward is what counts the most, and not all will take, or be able to take, the opportunity. If it can be improved, though, the world cannot be perfected. There is a case for making sure that everyone can read and write and use the four functions of arithmetic. But this is something that should be achieved at primary school, and only if families do not feel able to do better themselves. After that, all children should be left in the care of their families. Children, with the guidance of their parents, should be left to make their own ways in life. This may mean continued learning – perhaps even schooling, or perhaps some mixture of schooling and other learning. It may mean some other preparation for the future. Granted a decent primary education, these other ways do not exclude a later return to learning.

Those who want one will find an education regardless of circumstances. Most schooling is an interference with their personal growth. Schooling is not the same as education. The suspension of schooling since the end of March, and its likely continued disruption for at least the next year is a liberation that all children should welcome. And it is a liberation that anyone of conservative or libertarian inclinations should welcome.

I do not imagine that state schooling will die all at once. There will be some kind of return in September. But the lawyers and insurance companies, and scared parents and teachers, will for a long time make this incomplete. Children will be called into school for a few days a week, or every second week. There will be a continued migration on-line of learning. The present chaos of provision will stabilise. The compulsory attendance laws have already been relaxed, and I do not think they will be enforced again with their old rigour.

As for surveillance and control, these have been weakened. The more the life of a nation is focussed on the home, the more opaque that nation becomes to inspection. The bureaucracies of surveillance and control will not be disbanded – not unless really big cuts are needed to state spending to compensate for the present orgy of subsidies and welfare. Every so often, they will find something to write into their performance reports. But we can hope they will soon have been crippled beyond recovery.

Now, I may seem to have wavered on the value of schooling as education. Sometimes, I denounce it. Sometimes, I admit its potential value. Here is my reasoning. I doubt the value of schooling as it has so far been provided. I see limited value in crowding several dozen children into a room and giving them something, and giving it at the same speed, that not all of them may want. This explains much of the disruption and absenteeism that is one of the excuses for those bureaucracies of surveillance and control. But let us suppose that most schooling were to remain on-line, and that it were to be voluntary. Let us further suppose that schools were no longer constrained by classroom space, and students by geographic location. Let us suppose that students could choose from a range of providers – one subject here, and delivered in this way, another subject there, and delivered in that way. Let us possibly suppose a voucher scheme, in which the State would pay for lessons from any provider meeting certain basic standards of honesty and competence. Grant all or most of this, and schooling would become more aligned with education. There would be no more boredom, no more bullying or disruption, no more surveillance, no more irrelevance. Education would become for a greater number what it has always been for a lucky few – something that turns on a light in the mind that never goes out, something that contributes to the happiness of individuals and the wealth of a nation.

I will close by repeating that the Coronavirus panic will, sooner or later, be seen as a disproportionate response that has damaged businesses and jobs and even the pretence of balanced government finances. At the same time, it is useful to look beyond the immediate costs. One of the benefits may be the accelerated decline of a schooling system that has its origins in the enlightened despotisms of the eighteenth century, and that has never been suited to the needs and wants of a free people.

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How Colleges Get Rid of Conservative Admins: An Example from UNC

When I accepted an administrative position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, friends warned me that I would not fit in as a conservative. I dismissed their concerns as hyperbole, an instance of believing universities are more politicized than they actually are.

After eight long months, however, I had to admit that they were right. The political atmosphere in the college bureaucracy does not tolerate political disagreement and is overwhelmingly left-leaning.

Administrators keep large universities running and help students access the extra services for which they pay. University staff handle finances, work in human resources, or, in my case, serve as program administrators. Most of my job was focused on marketing events and making sure vendors get paid. I would do the small behind-the-scenes work that keeps a program running.

Though those basic duties are non-political, the office environment can be anything but.

That point was brought home to me when, one day, my supervisor walked into my office and said, “I just can’t stand you anymore. You don’t fit in here and you don’t even seem to realize it.”  I was dumbfounded.

She expressed concern with my general demeanor and my desire to take classes—which is an employee benefit at all UNC system campuses. Nor was it the first time she admonished me for enrolling in classes, advising that it would be “better for the department” and those I worked with if I waited until I had more experience in my job to take classes.

She refused to cite any specific issues with my job performance, even after three meetings between herself and my program director. Additionally, she reprimanded me for attending a meal with a visiting lecturer—which the department offers as a benefit to faculty and staff—and warned me that I needed to “learn my place.”

Of greater concern, she took issue with me talking to students about my religious and political views and threatened to have me removed from my job if she got another complaint that I shared my views.

What few conversations I had with students were with friends after work or at events specifically designed to foster dialogue on campus. Just a few weeks prior to that conversation with my supervisor, the program I coordinated partnered with the Listen First Project and Living Room Conversations to host an event to encourage healthy dialogue among the campus community.  She would never specify what was said or done to cause an issue, so I am still not sure if any complaints about me were actually made.

Talking politics or religion is not generally good practice at work, especially when holding a view that contradicts majority opinion. I was always very cautious about who I would share my views with, though no one is shy about sharing their opinions and beliefs at Chapel Hill.

If a student or coworker would ask me directly, I was happy to share my beliefs with them. As a Christian and seminarian, I am very open about my faith and was approached about it twice by curious students, who spoke with other students I knew. At one point, I even had two students commend me for my neutrality on an issue.

Another flashpoint for my supervisor was offering support to a campus student group.

Having been actively involved with Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) as an undergrad, I connected with Chapel Hill YAL students and offered to be their advisor, thinking it a good way to give back and contribute to the intellectual community on campus. To my supervisor, doing so was apparently too much to tolerate. She claimed that being YAL’s advisor would cause the UnKoch My Campus movement to criticize our department.

Our program maintained a politically neutral stance and had this reputation on campus, something of which the program director and students were particularly proud. To truly remain politically neutral, however, workers need an environment where they are not pressured by supervisors to believe or not believe certain things. Political neutrality isn’t only refusing to endorse political candidates. It also involves accepting political differences and respecting others.

While at Chapel Hill, for example, my department hosted a series of speakers who shared the belief that gender does not exist. Grad students would often wear shirts expressing support for Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton when tutoring students or at events. Professors would make outlandish comments to students about how awful Republicans or conservatives are. I sat in on two sessions of a graduate course in the department and, during both of them, the professor made blatantly political asides such as “some people are just thoughtless or vile. Remember, people voted for Ben Sasse.”

Other administrators were also quick to share their political opinions. After the death of David Koch, a coworker made a joke about how they were celebrating the death of “such an evil, despicable old bastard” and invited me to join. Students walking down the hall laughed; “Hell yeah,” one student said.

A strong insistence on political neutrality while in the office would be just. Many workplaces don’t approve of political discussion during business hours, and Chapel Hill serves students and professors who shouldn’t feel pressured to think one way or another. However, Chapel Hill’s administrators do not insist on political neutrality at the university. They do not even see it as a norm that is desirable.

My problem wasn’t unique to my department. When I talked with my program director and others in the appropriate chain of authority, nobody wanted to get involved. The bureaucratic culture at Chapel Hill does not actually insist on neutrality; instead, it favors the expression of liberal and progressive views and disapproves of anything else.

I was not alone in my experiences. I heard stories from students and administrators about how they were made uncomfortable and excluded for their beliefs. One student said the journalism school staff could be just as callous, citing a time when an administrator was worried about the student’s journalistic ethics because she wanted to intern for a conservative news outlet.

We as a people are better than this—our public universities should be too.

Even with First Amendment protections guaranteed by the North Carolina Free Speech Law (State Law 2017-196), campuses can still be restrictive and harmful to intellectual pursuits on campus. As pointed out in a Martin Center article, there is still work to be done on campus.

Shortly after my conversation with my supervisor and program director, I resigned from UNC. Upon leaving, I confronted this supervisor about how her words affected me, to which she was short and vapidly apologetic. She refused to acknowledge that she was out of bounds. “We are just administration. To them [faculty], we are just holding the purse strings and in their way,” she said. “Nobody wants to hear our opinions or thoughts.”

Perhaps she is right. Yet it is clear that Chapel Hill will let some opinions be, while others will be pushed off campus.

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Rethinking College Education in America

A perfect storm has hit America’s universities. To adapt to new economic realities and to serve the needs of the American people, we need to make some dramatic changes.

By Edward Ring • May 11, 2020
In an interview last month at the Hoover Institution, the estimable Victor Davis Hanson, speaking in character, made a typically provocative comment. “For what we are paying for every provost of diversity and inclusion,” he said, “we could probably hire three professors of electrical engineering.”

That can be fact-checked. And the results are illuminating.

On the Public Records Act-enabled online database “Transparent California,” take a look at these 2018 search results for job titles that include the word  “inclusion,” or “diversity.” Note that taxpayers funded a position for Jerry Kang, UCLA’s vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion, that bestowed a total pay and benefits package worth $468,919 in 2018.

Compare that to the faculty of UCLA’s School of Engineering, where two assistant professors (Jonathan Kao and Ankur Mehta) along with an associate professor (Chi On Chui), altogether collected pay and benefits in 2018 of $564,123. That’s pretty close. At UCLA, at least, you can definitely hire two electrical engineering faculty members for the price of one diversity don, and quite nearly three.

To be fair, perhaps an apples-to-apples comparison would be to look at UCLA’s top engineering faculty member. The chairman of that department is Gregory Pottie, who made $312,027 in 2018, only two-thirds what Kang made. But Pottie is running an engineering department. That takes technical expertise and produces graduates who keep the world running. What does Kang do?

Read UCLA’s “Sample Candidate Evaluation Tool.” Or read UCLA’s “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Statement FAQs” that presumably comes from Kang’s office. It’s toxic drivel, undermining UCLA’s ability to hire the most qualified applicants for faculty positions or admit the most qualified students.

These departments of “equity, diversity, and inclusion,” now operating in every major college and university in America, and at stupefying taxpayer expense, are indoctrinating students to equate their academic failures to systemic discrimination, a preposterous lie that only serves to weaken the character of anyone who believes it, while at the same time lining the pockets of the diversity bureaucrats who spew such filth.

Experts on this topic include not only Victor Davis Hanson but Heather Mac Donald, scholars whose impeccable research drives stakes through every seductive shibboleth ever conjured by the diversity careerists who are worse than useless; they are destroying academia. In a recent column for the Wall Street Journal titled “Would You Care if a White Man Cured COVID-19,” Mac Donald wrote:

Mandatory diversity statements are now ubiquitous in hiring for science, technology, engineering and mathematics jobs. An Alzheimer’s researcher seeking a position in a neurology lab must document his contributions to ‘diversity, equity and inclusion.’ At the University of California, Berkeley, the life sciences department rejected 76% of the applications it received last year because they lacked sufficiently effusive diversity, equity and inclusion statements. The hiring committee didn’t even look at the failed applicants’ research records.

Rethinking “Diversity,” Rethinking College Education
The COVID-19 pandemic, regardless of what you may think about its origins, its lethality, or the response, has delivered a body blow to business as usual in American higher education. The economic model that operated up until a few months ago is broken forever.

During the now fatally disrupted 2019-2020 academic year, over 20 million students were enrolled in American colleges and universities. More than 1 million of them were foreigners, and nearly 370,000 were from mainland China.

Typically attending the most prestigious schools and pouring billions in tuition into them, Chinese enrollment had already begun to decline as U.S.-China relations have deteriorated. The COVID-19 pandemic has turned that trickle into a flood. It’s probably a good idea that Americans aren’t training Chinese scientists anymore, but it’s a financial disaster for many of these posh institutions.

The irony is deep: premium tuition rates paid by Chinese students have been funding, among other things, a bloated and overpaid diversity bureaucracy that bends all of its considerable powers toward undermining everything good about higher education in America, and in doing so, dangerously weakens America’s ability to hang on to its now tenuous lead in global technological innovation.

Higher education in America is at a crossroads. Foreign enrollment, with all the premium tuition rates it guaranteed, is diminishing. Meanwhile, growing numbers of Americans are realizing not only that they are never going to be able to pay off their student loans, but that the educations they received have only qualified them for “nonessential” and low-paying employment.

And through all the years leading up to this, the diversity bureaucracy successfully agitated to admit into college members of “protected status groups” and “underrepresented minorities,” despite the fact that their SAT scores and other critical indicators of academic aptitude clearly indicated they were not sufficiently qualified. Many of those who did not drop out received watered down degrees.

Data backs up these assertions. National Center for Education statistics on college enrollment show that in 1970, 31 percent of college-age Americans attended college. By 2017 (most recent data), that had risen to 45 percent. The actual number of degrees granted in 1971 was 839,000; by 2017 there were not quite 2 million college graduates. What they studied is even more revealing.

Using data from the National Center for Education, college degrees can be divided into three general categories. The first is STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—for which, in the United States, there is a chronic shortage of graduates.

Next, there are what might be termed “practical and vocational” degrees—agriculture, business, education, law enforcement, legal professions, health care, and public administration.

Finally, there are the degrees for which few good jobs exist—English literature, ethnic and gender studies, history, liberal arts, and social sciences.

America’s class of 2017 graduates earned 1.1 million practical degrees, and apart from business majors (381,000) of which there is an oversupply, most of these graduates are going to find a decent job. But the number of unmarketable degrees, 479,000, greatly exceeded the number of STEM degrees awarded, 377,000, and about 17 percent of those STEM degrees were earned by foreign students.

Keeping America’s Public Universities Financially Solvent
A perfect storm has hit America’s universities. To adapt to new economic realities and to serve the needs of the American people, dramatic changes have to be made. And in publicly funded colleges and universities, these changes could be made overnight by changing the conditions of receiving public funds. What needs to change isn’t complicated.

First, fire all diversity, equity, and inclusion employees. Nationally, this will save billions in taxpayer money. Second, remove all references to race and ethnicity on college applications; maybe even devise a way to eliminate the ability of admissions offices to know the sex of the applicant.

Next, set a ceiling on admissions and degrees awarded in English literature, ethnic and gender studies, liberal arts, and social sciences. Make this new ceiling reduce the number of degrees available in these majors by at least 50 percent.

In order to restore academic excellence to these still vital fields of study, make SAT scores the sole criteria for student applicants to compete for these limited spots. Since the faculty will also have to be reduced in these disciplines, require all faculty to reapply for their positions and evaluate them based on their knowledge of the Western Canon. Perhaps better yet, just make all of them take an SAT test, to eliminate those with marginal scholastic aptitude.

Finally, with some of the money that is saved, expand the capacity of America’s STEM departments across the nation. Admit all those students with high SAT scores who, to date, have been passed over in favor of foreign applicants or lower scoring members of protected status groups.

This is an anti-racist solution. It calls for blind college applications using objective criteria. If members of “underrepresented groups” believe their SAT performance is substandard because of discrimination, they need to understand that an entire parasitic bureaucracy has developed to nurture this useless narrative, and it hurts them more than it helps them.

Some racism no doubt remains here and there in America. But did racism stop Asian Americans from logging academic and household income achievements consistently exceeding those of white Americans? Does racism explain why Nigerian immigrants are the most successful ethnic group in the United States?

Underrepresented minorities can believe that they are victims, but perfect proportional representation in all aspects of society will never be achieved, and the harder you try to enforce it, the more tyrannical and corrupt society will become. They need to look to the things within their own communities and within their own lives that they can change, such as rates of single-parent households, which is a critical factor in predicting a child’s success later in life.

Overall, Americans are realizing that college is not necessarily a wise choice for everyone. There are trades that pay exceedingly well, yet have trouble attracting new apprentices. There is military service. And there are ways to use online resources to get educated these days that don’t require four years of college, and cost a pittance by comparison.

Near the end of his discussion at the Hoover Institution, Hanson offered a disturbing warning. He said, in reference to the American economy, “I don’t think we’re prepared yet in the areas we need to be to be autonomous from China.” He is right. Tough choices are ahead. But for those willing to work hard, it is also a tremendous opportunity.

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